Anauls Uplands

These Anauls Uplands form part of the eastern Siberian world of the Yukaghir peoples. The Yukaghirs are an Indigenous group of the Russian Far East, living by the eighteenth century in the Sakha Republic and Chukotka Autonomous Okrug. Tundra communities are associated with Nizhnekolymsky District, while Taiga communities also live in Magadan's Srednekansky District. By the seventeenth century, Yukaghir groups ranged across a broad territory from the Lena River to the mouth of the Anadyr.

Within that country, the Anaouls were remembered as sedentary hunters and fishers, using rivers and upland habitats for food and travel. Their subsistence depended on reading seasonal movement and maintaining knowledge of water, game and shelter across difficult northern terrain. The Yukaghirs likely descend from the late Neolithic Ymyyakhtakh culture. Indigenous population fell sharply between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries under epidemics, internecine war and tsarist colonial policy, while some communities assimilated with Yakuts, Evens and Russians.

The uplands remain associated with a people whose traditional hunting and fishing culture survived through adaptation rather than permanent concentration in towns. The combination of river foods and upland hunting grounds made small communities resilient, but exposed them to the wider pressures brought by imperial expansion.