This category largely belongs to Dmitri Anuchin and those who worked with him. Primarily an anthropologist avant la lettre, Anuchin was prominet on several faculties and societies because he understood archeology to be an assimilation of the social sciences, derived from material culture. And it also refers to Alexei Uvarov’s work with tribes, especially the Meriane and Finno-Ugric. Craniology was important, too, in first congresses. Scythia and Kurgans belong as subthemes because these also prompted questions of ethnography. Folklore also belongs here, because they understood it as ethnographic.
Known Subtheme: Kurgans
This is central to Russian identity; it provides the connection to Antiquity by its interactions with Greek traders, as it also gives Russians an historical foothold on the Black Sea littoral as they began to claim Scythian ancestory.
The Caucasus became absolutely central to the Russian Imperial Imagination.