Archaeology, Ethnology & Anthropology of Eurasia 45 (4) 2017   DOI: 10.17746/1563-0110.2017.45.4.143-151

Annotation:  New Data on the Chronology of the Initial Neolithic Gromatukha Culture, Western Amur Region Holocene Fishing in the Big Sea Region of Lake Baikal (Based on Materials from Multilayered Habitati Comparative Characteristics of Stone Tools from the Neolithic Sites on the Upper and Middle Kama On the History of Asian Bosporus in the Early Byzantine Times: Excavations at Verkhnegostagayevskoye The Jomon Megalithic Tradition in Japan: Origins, Features, and Distribution A Morphological Analysis of Malyshevo Middle Neolithic Pottery from the Lower Amur New Absolute Dates for the Trans-Uralian and Western Siberian Neolithic Anthropomorphic Bronze Masks from the Timiryazevo-1 Burial Ground A Multidisciplinary Study of Burial Mounds and a Reconstruction of the Climate of the Turan-Uyuk De Classifi cation of 9th–13th Century Arrowheads Found in Azerbaijan Chinese Lacquerware from the Pazyryk Burial Ground Chineta II, Altai A Late 16th to Early 17th Century Mongolian Ceremonial Helmet from the Moscow Kremlin Armoury Dendrochronological Methods in the Architectural and Ethnographic Study of Russian Towns in Siberia Kinship Analysis of Human Remains from the Sargat Mounds, Baraba Forest-Steppe, Western Siberia Intragroup Variation of the Facial Skeleton in 16th–19th Century Rural Russian Populations in the W   

Intragroup Variation of the Facial Skeleton
in 16th–19th Century Rural Russian Populations in the Worldwide Context:
A Princi pal Component Analysis

A.A. Evteev¹ and O.V. Dvurechensky²

¹Anuchin Research Institute and Museum of Anthropology, Lomonosov Moscow State University, Mokhovaya 11, Moscow, 125009, Russia

²Institute of Archaeology, Russian Academy of Sciences, Dm. Ulyanova 19, Moscow, 117036, Russia

This article outlines a technique for comparing cranial samples by studying their patterns of individual variation against the background of worldwide variation, using principal component analysis (PCA). The training set consisted of 357 male crania from 27 populations of Europe, Asia, and North America. Our measurement protocol included 14 linear dimensions of the facial skeleton. As a test set, we used four recent rural Russian samples, while several series representing Finno-Ugric and Baltic populations and those of central and northern Europe were employed as reference data. The variation in the training set, assessed by PCA without any discriminant statistical methods, shows a clear pattern of between-group differences. The individual variation within the samples is very informative, revealing marked differences between the four Russian samples. While those from Nikolskoye and Staraya Ladoga are morphologically homogeneous, that from Kozino is extremely heterogeneous: its variation encompasses virtually the entire Caucasoid range. As compared to European samples, including Karelians and Finns, Russian samples, excluding Kozino, are more similar to the Mordvinian series than are other European groups, including the western Finns. This, however, refers only to intragroup variation, because at the group level the Russian samples display no Mordvinian tendency. On the other hand, we found no particular similarity between the Russians and the Saami. In general, Russians are no more “Mongoloid” than most other Europeans, but the presence of several crania evidencing a Mongoloid trait combination should be noted.

Keywords: Craniology, principal component analysis, intragroup variation, Russians