The distinguished Russian archeologist Aleksei P. Okladnikov's study reveals how a field archeologist goes about determining and writing prehistory. Over the course of his career, Okladnikov and his wife Vera Zaporozhskaya travelled across Siberia from the Lena River in the north to the Amur River in the south excavating archaeological sites. During that time Aleksei and Vera found and interpreted the rock art of the vast region from the Paleolithic Era to the present day. Relying on petroglyphs and pictographs left on cliffs and boulders, Okladnikov lays out in detail and straightforward language the prehistory of Siberia by "reading" these artifacts. This book permits the past to be told in its own words: the art portrayed on the cliffs of Siberia.

The Palaeolithic of Northeast Asia: The History and Results of Research in 1940-1980 combines details of discoveries of Palaeolithic sites in a vast region of Northeast Asia (covering mostly the northeastern part of modern Russia), and meticulous analysis of hypotheses, ideas, and concepts related to the Northeast Asian Palaeolithic. Written in the 1980s - 1990s, it is based on the author's own experience and analysis of published and archival sources. The volume is especially important for better understanding the development of knowledge on this subject, closely related to the issue of the peopling of the New World. The author presents details on the conceptual issues developed by Soviet archaeologists, not previously available to the international scholarly community. This book is for archaeologists, ethnographers, and historians of science in the USSR and worldwide. It has a special interest for students of the peopling of the Americas.

Both because it was a valuable commodity in many prehistoric cultures, and because almost every obsidian source has its own unique geochemical portrait, obsidian provides a useful window on mobility and exchange in Prehistory. To that end this volume gathers provenance studies on obsidian from right around the north Pacific rim including Japan, Korea, eastern Russia, north America and Mexico.

This volume makes available a vast amount of research on the Stone Age of Chukotka to a non-Russian speaking audience. Margarita Kiryak surveys the history of archaeology in the region and introduces the principal archaeological sites, before explaining her model for the periodization of the Stone Age complexes, comparative analysis of palaeolithic sites in neighbouring regions, and a discussion of problems of ethnic identification. Appendices offer illustrations of a rich variety of artefacts from the lithic assemblages.

Arranged in chronological order and by region, each of these studies is written by a specialist who has participated in some or all of the archaeological expeditions reported here. They show not just the unanticipated richness of the archaeology of the Russian Far East but, more important, the contributions these sites can make to the archaeology of the region and of the world.