Tungusic reindeer hunters and herders whose light tents, skis and riding-reindeer carried them over more of Siberia than any other native people — from the Yenisei taiga to the Okhotsk coast, with horse-keeping southern groups on the Amur.
Not an ending: after their first encounter with Russians in 1606 all Evenki were taxed in furs, the tsarist administration ruling them through their own clan structure as Cossacks pushed from the Yenisei to the Lena and the Okhotsk coast. Some 30,000 Evenki live in Russia, with further communities in northeast China and Mongolia; they retain an autonomous territory in Krasnoyarsk Krai.
The foundational ethnography of the Evenki (Northern Tungus) — clans, migration, and the reindeer economy, by a field researcher among them.
Used for the 17th-century Tungus yasak districts across the Yenisei, Lena and Okhotsk advances that ended Evenki independence.