Calendar of Itelmen/Kamchadals of the Kamchatka River Valley

Traveling through Kamchatka in the 18th century, Georg Wilhelm Steller and Stepan Petrovich Krasheninnikov visited various Itelmen villages and recorded three different calendars that were compiled by the Itelmen living in the Kamchatka River valley.

Observing the environment, the indigenous peoples compiled their calendars based on various natural phenomena and the seasonality of traditional activities.

The peculiarity of traditional aboriginal calendars is that they are based on lunar cycles and do not fit our usual division into months and days of the week. One month can last three European months or just a few weeks.

At the request of Tatiana Degay, a doctoral student at the University of Arizona, within the framework of the project of the ethno-ecological information center “Lach” – “Implementation of efforts of indigenous communities to protect salmon in Kamchatka”, I modernized, drew some illustrations and designed one of these calendars.

• Format – A2.
• Tools – Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, Ink.