Shors - History and Cultural Relations

Partly because of difficulties imposed by the terrain, there has been relatively little archaeological exploration of the Kuznets Alatau as compared to the Minusinsk Basin and the Pazyryk cultures to the east and south. In the absence of systematic coverage of archaeological remains and of written records, it has been hypothesized that the peoples of the Kuznets Alatau were originally speakers of Samoyedic and Ketic languages, who, sometime in the last 2,000 years, began to speak Turkic languages following an infusion of Turkic speakers. The location of the Samoyedic and Kettic speakers lends support to this theory; as late as the eighteenth century these peoples lived to the west and east of the Altai and the Kuznets Alatau. Further, nineteenth-century Turkologist Wilhelm Radloff found that many local names of rivers and other geographic features were etymologically related to Samoyedic and Kettic terms; these place-names remained even though the local peoples themselves had assimilated to Turkic-speaking groups.

The Abas, or Abans, were themselves Turks in earlier times, rather than Samoyeds or Kets, and were probably descended from the Teleuts of the Altai region. Seventeenth-century Russian visitors described them as hunters, trappers, and metalworkers, but J. G. Georgi, who visited in the eighteenth century, reported they were cattle breeders whose practices resembled those of the Teleuts.

The Shor peoples were at various times subjects of Mongol and Turkic empires or were forced to pay tribute to them. Later the Shor region was incorporated into the Russian and then into the Soviet empire. Imperial control has subjected them to considerable acculturative pressure with respect to their ethnic identity, economy, social organization, politics, and religion. Presently, the Shors are mostly settled peasants and wage laborers who also hunt and gather nuts and honey for sale. Half of them work on collective farms and others work as miners or in factories.