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TOPONYMS AND TRADITIONAL NATURAL RESOURCES MANAGEMENT OF THE RUSSIANS AT GORNY ALTAI // Tomsk State Pedagogical University Bulletin. 2018. Issue 2 (191). P. 34-40

The work traces the interrelation of the toponyms, which are mainly folks’ names of agricultural lands, with the specifics of agricultural exploitation of the Russian population of the territories of Gorny Altai. The author’s field materials, collected at Ust-Koksa, Shebalino, Ust-Kan Districts of the Altai Republic at different periods, as well as the archival data have comprised the basis for the research. The author’s particular attention is the specific features of land management in mountainous areas with such properties viewed as an angle of slopes, exposition of slopes and a degree of density of population. Particularly important in the farming activities are even territories with low angles of slopes, and even more they are meaningful in the valleys with higher elevations. It is stated that the natural conditions of this region influence frequent division of lands for serving various purposes. The author reveals this idea in the local names of places. The research shows how toponyms of small ravines, springs and mounts may explicit the role of the man, and even of his family in the natural resources management of the territory. Moreover, the names of natural pastures depend on the land’s properties, including such as the order of their location and size. The introduction of a new administrative order of the management of agricultural use of lands during the periods of the work of collective farms destroyed the system of the traditional natural resources management, which had became useful for the Russian peasantry as a result of their ethnic adaptation to the conditions of Gorny Altai. The characteristics of this system are the inclusion into the natural landscape, having a chief of the land and rationality of the natural resources management in accordance with their natural geographic properties, which is understood as a result of segmentation of farm lands that serve various purposes. The folk’s geographical names have become a concentrate of all these specific features of natural resources management. Therefore, a toponym is a so-called symbol-word that has a number of associations and notions about the particular properties of a definite place and about the way how people use their natural environmental space.

Keywords: toponymy, environmental management, economic development, farmland, log, polya, Uymon valley, Altai mountains