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Anthropogeographism, named after friedrich ratzel’s school of Anthropogeography, rejected the evolutionary aspects of ancient cultures and moved the center of consideration to territorial aspects—development in the space and distribution of culture complexes, which were considered as very steady and unchanging. A large role was given to the interaction of the sciences of man with geography and, in general, with the sciences of the natural environment.

In Russia, this trend developed independently of western anthropogeography and had a closer contact with evolutionism. One of the originators of this trend in Russia was Dmitriy Anuchin, a pupil of the founder of Russian physical anthropology, Anatoliy Bogdanov. Anuchin was Bogdanov’s successor and led the Institute of Anthropology at Moscow University from 1880 to 1884. Anuchin viewed anthropology as the science that embraces both the biological and the cultural sides of man, and he simultaneously created in Russia his own schools of geography and ethnology. He was busy with archaeology, too, and in his works on the history of material culture, archaeological and ethnographic data were combined as Uvarov and Zabelin had done previously. Unlike the German anthropogeographers, who were humanists, Anuchin was a naturalist, an avowed Darwinist, and consequently a partisan of the theory of evolution. He collaborated with de Mortillet in France, but Anuchin distinguished himself from the evolutionist approach by his attention to the diversity of cultural phenomena and to the estimation of geographical factors.

One of Anuchin’s pupils at the Institute of Anthropology, Bunak, continued the tradition in physical anthropology; another, Kuftin, worked in ethnography, later transferring to archaeology; and Zhukov became the head of the Moscow paleoethnological school of archaeology. The name of the school itself shows that its adherents considered archaeology to be a continuation of ethnology into the depths of time. Paleoethnologists tried to differentiate particular groups of peoples, to distinguish them in antiquity, and therefore they paid special attention to the formal and technological analysis of pottery. They conducted interdisciplinary (“complex”) expeditions and aimed to complete the survey of a territory. In a cultural complex (the combination of elements in a culture), they stressed correlation, and correlation in dynamics, in development. In Russian archaeology, paleoethnologists were the first to implement statistics and correlation. In 1930, Zhukov was arrested and died, and the school fell to pieces.

If one searched in the West for a most likely analogy to the Moscow paleoethnological school, it would appear to be not the French archaeologists but the Americanist archaeologists, dubbed “taxonomists” by critic walter taylor in the 1960s and described by Bruce Trigger as followers of an American culture-historical approach. They shared with the Russians a discontent with the indeterminacy of the concept of “archaeological culture,” a stress on the formal classification of ceramics, and emphasis on the survey of entire regions. However, the Americans developed their approach approximately at the same time (1924–1939) without hindrance.

The paleoethnological trend existed in Leningrad, too. As in Moscow, it developed there under French influence and was characterized by an approach to archaeology as a natural discipline—as part of a broadly understood anthropology and also as a continuation of ethnology into the depth of time. This trend was connected to a strong interest in ethnic problems—identifying ethnic peoples in the past and revealing the roots of contemporary peoples.

Although in Moscow at least the founder of the trend was friendly with de Mortillet, not all of the main figures of Saint Petersburg/ Leningrad were so immediately connected with the evolutionists. The leader of the Leningrad trend was Fedor Volkov (his Ukrainian name was Khvedor Vovk). He was a contemporary of Anuchin’s, the discoverer of the Paleolithic site of Mezin, and a believer in the evolutionist ideas of de Mortillet. Volkov’s pupils included the Leningrad Ukrainians Petr Efimenko and Sergey Rudenko. Efimenko was one of the first to work on correlation, applying it to the Ryazan Slavic-Russian barrows and the Russian Paleolithic from a remnant evolutionist position using the theory of stadial development. Still later, he became the director of the Kievan Institute of Archaeology. Rudenko discovered the permanently frozen Pazyryk graves before he was politically repressed and deported to the extreme North. After liberation, he studied the impact of nature on culture and welcomed the geographical approach of English archaeologist o. g. s. crawford, writing a laudatory preface to the translation of Crawford’s book. His pupil Lev Gumilev, the son of glorified Russian poets, continued this tradition and became more and more interested in biological determinism.
The other influential figure among the Leningrad paleoethnologists was Alexandr Miller, who studied in the École Anthropologique in Paris after the death of de Mortillet and was friendly with Breuil and hugo obermaier grad. Miller published very little but trained very strong pupils—Artamonov, Piotrovskiy, Iessen, Passek, Latynin, Kruglov, Podgaecky, and Krichevsky. Miller was also arrested in the 1930s, and his pupils were encouraged to maintain an interest in ethnic problems rather than any paleoethnological directions.

This trend in Russia was strangely unlucky, but there was a logic to its bad luck. During the time of the czars, in the 1880s, the Department of Anthropology at Moscow University was closed and what survived was transferred as the Department of Ethnography from the historical-philological faculty to the natural sciences faculty in order to hinder the intrusion of naturalist scientific ideas into humanist studies. During Soviet times, it was dangerous for social scientists to look for explanations in natural factors instead of socioeconomic ones or (in the early period) to have an interest in ethnic problems. The attitude of paleoethnologists, whether consciously or not, was opposed to the historicizing and politizing of archaeology and to its Marxist directions. Thus, the heads of both schools of paleoethnology—Moscow and Leningrad—were arrested and annihilated, and some members of the schools also “visited” prisons and camps. Paleoethnology remained disorganized and broken.

After interests in ethnogenesis were allowed, and even encouraged, again in the USSR, the pupils of paleoethnologists who had survived started to research ethnogenetic questions. The leading figures in this respect were Artamonov, the pupil of Miller; Tretyakov, the pupil of Efimenko; and Tolstov, the pupil of Zhukov.