The names in the ground. What the Altai landscape remembers

The Altai Republic sits in the far south of Siberia, wedged between Russia, Mongolia, China and Kazakhstan. It is a region of mountains, high steppe and ancient pastoralism, at 92,900 square kilometers, roughly the size of Portugal, with a population of around 210,000. Most people outside Central Asia have not heard of it. In some of its southern valleys, it has sustained a way of knowing a landscape that predates Russian rule, Soviet collectivization, and satellite navigation.

The Kosh-Agach district occupies the southeastern corner of the Republic, against the Mongolian border. It covers nearly 20,000 square kilometers and has around 18,000 people, all of them rural. The terrain rises from 1,400 meters in the valley floors to over 4,000 meters on the Sailyugem ridge. In winter, temperatures can fall below minus 60 degrees Celsius. Summers are short, dry and chilly. Snow cover can persist into June on the high pastures and return in September. The window in which an animal can graze at elevation is, in some years, a matter of weeks.

The Telengit are an Indigenous Turkic people with a longstanding presence in Kosh-Agach. Russia’s 2010 national census (Federal State Statistics Service, Vserossiyskaya perepis’ naseleniya 2010) recorded 3,712 Telengit across the country; Cultural Survival reports an official estimate of 2,400 and a community estimate closer to 15,000, with the Kosh-Agach and Ulagan districts having the densest populations. Their economy has historically been built on seasonal herding of cattle, horses, sheep, and some camels in the lower steppe, moving animals between pastures at different elevations as the year turns. The knowledge required to do this safely is not written down. It lives in the routes, and the routes live in the names.

Before Aibek moves his animals, he does not ask where he is going. He knows the route. He asks when the pass will be safe, whether a south-facing slope above a Chibit tributary still holds the grass it did in his father’s time, and whether the crossing at Kara-Oyuk will hold water when the herd arrives. None of those answers is in his phone. All of them, he says, are in the names.

Aibek is from Ortolyk, a village of around 650 people in the Chuya steppe, 16 kilometers northwest of the district town of Kosh-Agach.

“My grandfather could recite the names of every crossing, every spring, every place where the snow melts first and last, from here to the Sailyugem ridge,” he says. “Not as a list. As a route. The names were in the right order. You followed them, and you arrived.”

He pauses when asked how much of that knowledge he holds. “I know the names,” he says. “I am not sure I know everything the names know.”

WHAT A NAME CONTAINS

Jacobson-Tepfer and Meacham, documenting place names in the adjacent Mongolian Altai, describe them as vital documents of cultural and social history, records of how a landscape has been inhabited, crossed and understood across generations. In Aibek’s account, their value is also practical. A printed map may identify a valley, river and peak. The oral route contains a finer grain of features: crossings, springs, slopes, grazing grounds and the order in which they are encountered.

A name does not operate as an instruction on its own. Its meaning comes from the experience attached to it — what a person has been shown, what conditions were observed there, and how one point relates to the next. Aibek uses Kara-Kul, “dark lake,” as an example. In the route tradition he learned, dark water signals depth; depth affects whether the crossing is dangerous during snowmelt or usable later in the season. Knowing the translation is not the same as knowing how to act on it.

The distinction matters. These names describe more than what is present. They help a practiced reader consider what may happen there, when conditions change and which decision follows. The landscape stores the observations; language makes them retrievable.

THE GEOGRAPHY THAT MADE IT NECESSARY

In the high Altai, a pasture may be accessible for weeks rather than months. Snowmelt does not follow a fixed date, and the timing of grass and water varies with elevation, exposure and the year’s weather. Moving too early can put animals onto snow-covered ground. Moving too late can mean arriving after a pasture has been heavily grazed.

The margin is narrow enough that a route cannot be reduced to a line. It must be read as a changing sequence of conditions. A herder who knows a slope can use its state as one indication of what may be happening higher along the route. That knowledge is tested through repetition: observing, moving and comparing the outcome with earlier seasons.

WHEN ROUTES CHANGE, MEMORY CHANGES WITH THEM

Soviet collectivization disrupted this process. Family herding systems were reorganized into collective farms, changing patterns of ownership, labor and movement. Workers could be assigned to herds rather than remain responsible for the same routes across generations. As travel continuity changed, so did opportunities to renew the knowledge attached to particular places.

Later technologies altered the calculation again. Snowmobiles, satellite phones and GPS can reduce risk and make movement faster. They also reduce the need to recall long sequences of landmarks. The names may remain, but when they are used less often, fewer journeys test the relationships they contain.

Climate change introduces another uncertainty. Ochir and colleagues, assessing pastoral livelihood vulnerability in the Altai Mountains of western Mongolia, document the combined pressure of warming temperatures, shifting precipitation, and declining pasture quality on herding communities in the range directly south of the Kosh-Agach district. For Aibek, that larger shift is felt closer to home, as a question about inherited knowledge.

“The names were right,” he says. “I do not know if they are still right. I do not have enough seasons to know.”

KNOWLEDGE THAT LIVES IN PERFORMANCE

The Telengit tradition of holding knowledge in performed language is not limited to landscape names. Elbek Kalkin — son of the renowned epic-teller Aleksei Kalkin (1925–1998) — was documented by researcher Carole Pegg in the early 2000s as the last remaining spirit epic-teller in the Altai Republic, performing heroic epics in a register that requires years of transmission and cannot be reconstructed from a written text alone.

Epic performance and route knowledge are different practices, but they share a vulnerability. Both live through repeated use with someone who already knows the form. One has received attention as cultural performance. The other can be mistaken for ordinary work because its practitioners are herders and its knowledge is expressed through decisions rather than recitation.

A LESSON FROM SÁMI MAPPING

Research with Sámi communities in northern Europe offers a careful comparison. Sámi place names provide a basis for transmitting cultural landscapes through oral mapping. A peer-reviewed study by Cogos, Roué and Roturier found that conventional maps could record names but did not reproduce the continuing process through which people renewed the names and the land features meaningful to them.

The Sámi and Telengit cases are not interchangeable. Their histories, languages, and political circumstances differ. The comparison nevertheless clarifies the problem: a name on a map preserves a label, not necessarily the knowledge required to use it.

WHAT GPS DOES NOT KNOW

A GPS receiver can tell Aibek where he is. It cannot tell him whether a crossing will be safe in three days, whether a slope has already been grazed, or how a temperature change at dusk should alter the next morning’s plan. Those judgments do not require romanticized “ancient wisdom.” They require sustained observation of specific terrain.

The question is therefore not whether Telengit herders should reject modern tools. It is whether convenience leaves enough space for older knowledge to be practiced, corrected, and passed on. Documentation can help, especially when communities control what is recorded and how it is used. Audio, route order, and seasonal context matter as much as coordinates. So does time in the landscape with an experienced knowledge holder.

Aibek expects to move his animals north toward the Sailyugem ridge, taking the route his father used and speaking the same names. What has changed is his confidence in the relationship between those names and the conditions ahead.

“The landscape is changing,” he says. “The names are not changing yet. Maybe that means I have to be more careful than my father was. Or maybe it means the names are already wrong and I have not noticed yet.”

Research published in AMBIO found that, across different parts of the Russian Altai, glacier area declined by 9 to 27 percent and volume by 12 to 24 percent from 1952 to 2008. That retreat provides a regional measure of the environmental change Aibek now reads locally. Aibek knows what the names say about the crossing. This year, as he prepares to follow them, he must also decide how far to trust what they remember.