institute in Irkutsk, majoring in history. Irktutsk was a center for Siberian studies, and Okladnikov became actively involved in archaeological-ethnographic and ethnological circles. A visit to the Lake Baikal area to survey archaeological sites and collect ethnographic material resulted in his first paper on the Neolithic period and set the direction of his future career. In 1928 he became chief of the ethnographic section of the Irkutsk Local Lore Museum, where he studied the collections and made many archaeological survey trips throughout Siberia, discovering the famous Fofanovo burial ground with its elaborate tombs from the Neolithic period and the Bronze Age.

During the 1930s, a number of hydroelectric projects resulted in a large archaeological surveys of the Angara and Lena Rivers and the Lake Baikal area, and there were many excavations of Neolithic and Bronze Age sites. Okladnikov participated in this work and was instrumental in writing the cultural history of the region from 5000 b.c. In 1934, he enrolled for further study at the State Academy in Leningrad under P. P. Yefimenko, the head of Paleolithic studies in the Soviet Union. In 1935, Okladnikov joined the Nizhne-Amur expedition, which provided evidence for the history of that western region of Siberia from early Neolithic times to the sixteenth century a.d.

From 1936 to 1940, Okladnikov researched the archaeology of the Angara River valley and discovered the famous Paleolithic site of Buret’, a complex of houses built from mammoth and rhinoceros bones, with reindeer antler roofs, containing stone and bone implements and decorative effigies carved from mammoth tusks. Together with the Mal’ta site, Buret’ represented the earliest stage of the Upper Neolithic period in eastern Siberia, dating from 2300 to 2100 b.c. In 1938 Okladnikov submitted his M.A. thesis on this research and later published it as The Neolithic and Bronze Age in the Lake Baikal Area (1955), in which he used ethnography and folklore in the interpretation of archaeological sources.

In 1938, Okladnikov took up the post of senior researcher at the Institute of the History of Material Culture at the Academy of Sciences and went to central Asia to study the Stone Age in Uzbekistan. He discovered a number of Paleolithic sites, including the famous cave site of Teshik-Tash in Tadjikistan, a multilevel Mousterian site containing the burial remains of a Neanderthal boy. This skeleton was the first Neanderthal burial to be found east of Palestine, and in 1950 Okladnikov received the Stalin Award for its discovery and excavation.

Okladnikov began to explore the archaeology and history of Yakutia—an immense and little understood part of Siberia—in 1940. Despite World War II and a lack of funds, he led a six-year expedition and amassed a huge body of data and artifacts, pushing back the known history of Yakutia by thousands of years and elucidating the ancient settlement patterns of Siberia, the origin of the Yakuts, and their relation to Turkic and Mongolian peoples. This was the basis of his Ph.D. thesis, which he completed in 1947, and his most famous book, Yakutia before Its Incorporation into the Russian State [History of Yakutia], the first volume of which was published in 1949 and published in English in 1970.

In 1946, Okladnikov took another expedition to the Okhotsk and Bering seacoast in eastern Siberia, and from 1947 to 1952, he traveled to central Asia to excavate Stone Age sites such as Djebel cave in Turkmenistan and Khodjaken cave in Uzbekistan. In 1949, he traveled to Mongolia for the first time and discovered Paleolithic sites near Uland Ude and Kharakhorin (Moiltyn-Am). From 1952 to 1962, Okladnikov was head of the Paleolithic and Neolithic section of the Leningrad branch of the Institute of Archaeology. During this time, he published extensively in scientific journals and continued to lead expeditions to Siberia and Central Asia.

He began studying the Russian Far East in 1953 and led expeditions there between 1953 and 1958, which resulted in his book The Soviet Far East in Antiquity: An Archaeological and Historical Study of the Maritime Region of the USSR, which was published in English in 1965. In 1961, Okladnikov became director of the humanities research department in Novosibirsk at the newly opened Siberian Branch of the USSR Academy of Sciences.

In 1964, he was elected member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, and in 1966, he