The politics of submerged heritage: Underground worlds on the Iamal Peninsula (Siberia) and beyond

This paper builds on fieldwork, an epoch ago, in the Russian Federation together with Russian archaeologists and Nenets fishers and herders. The paper will emphasis sections of the archaeological paper which were cut from publication on the role that Sikhirtia artefacts have played in the understanding of heritage. Sikhirtia is the name that Nenets give to a group of people who purportedly live “underground” emerging sometimes at cracks between the physical world and the underworld. They are known to have advanced knowledge of metalworking. The artefacts which sometimes emerge out of windblown sand dunes are attributed to them. The site that we re-excavated, to some worry from local Nenetses, is thought to be the site of a world-changing calamity where a Sikhirtia camp was incinerated by angry gods due to moral transgression. Early Soviet archaeologists re-interpreted Sikhirtia “mythology” as being the echoes of a past material culture characterised by brass forging and a ceramic pattern. Excavations at Iarte, and in other places, in the late Soviet period linked this purported early civilisation with a form of state-building the Arctic. The paper will explore the difference between the heritage of “that which came before” and “that which is underground”. Metaphors of submerged heritage are common across the circumpolar Arctic including huldrafolke in Scandinavia, little people in the Canadian High Arctic, and underground realms in Dene cosmology. Michael Cepek has analysed how cosmologies can be harnessed for different political ends – sometimes with great violence to the original meanings. Building on the hearsay ethnographies which were excluded from our published paper, I will explore how relations with still-existing and everpresent underground cultures explore a realm of future possibilities rather than a heritage that is dead and buried.