Comparing Archaeological and Written Sources in the Study of Tym River Region As a Prospective Line of Research: The Case of Napas Yurts

The article presents research on the Tym River region (Kargasok area of Tomsk region) and history of Napas village designed to identify the local population and its composition based on civil registry books and compare this information with that on sex, age and social stratification of the paleopopulation at the Late Middle Ages and Modern Era burial sites Bederevskiy Bor I and II on the river Tym. This research may be of wider study interest and is done for the first time. The burial sites of Bederevskiy Bor are situated on the territory inhabited by Narym Selkups that belong to the Chumylkup dialect group. According to E.D. Prokofieva, Napas yurts constituted the centre of a group associated with the Hawk clan called “Mulint tamtyr”. According to A.P. Dulzon and G.I. Pelikh, this village was inhabited by the Mulin family. The research has shown that average population of Napas was equal to approximately 50 people in the 19th to the early 20th centuries. It also found that for more than a hundred years, certain population of the same ethnos with an established cultural and economic way of life had resided here. The research revealed that no natural disasters or social turmoil caused by, for example, epidemics or mass migration, had been ever experienced by this area. This allows us to hypothesize that the numerical and social composition of its population had been approximately the same under same conditions in earlier periods of time. As the civil registry books contain records for the period from 1805 to 1920, we believe that the adult population designated in the records as deceased had consisted of old settlers (starozhily) and had resided in Napas at least since the second half of the 18th century. The period of Christianization of the Tym population is not yet confirmed; however it is known that by the year 1805 it had all been Christianized, and the fact that no information on any subsequent cases of Christianization is available indicates that the one-time act of Christianization of the local population took place. The existence of a standalone cemetery near the Napas yurts is a contributing factor in the study of the Tym population burial rites. The cemetery has been in place since the second half of the 19th century or, most probably, even since an earlier time. Despite the fact that the Tym population sees the Mulin family as being local and the only one to have inhabited Napas, as early as in the beginning of the 19th century, here there had also been registered members of three families, namely, the Pozygibin family, the Pykshin family, and the Mulin family. By the late 19th century, when the male line of the Pozygibin and the Pykshin families had ceased to exist, the total population of Napas and the number of Mulin families grew. This can be accounted for by the disintegration of a large patriarchal family into smaller ones which led to the emergence of one more settlement - Novyy or Napas 2.

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