ABSTRACT
People can think about historical archaeology's goal to reconstruct ways of life as historical anthropology, which describes past lifeways in terms of foodways, settlement patterns, domestic life, economic relationships, social structures, and worldviews. The Doukhobor's archaeology raises questions about ways of life and the connection of behavior to belief. It is too simplistic to use the archaeological evidence to dismiss the sincerity of religious belief. Many utopian communities find it difficult or impossible to maintain an idealized way of life within the turbulence of the surrounding world. The Russians began to advance their eastern frontier across Siberia in the late 16th and early 17th centuries to capitalize on furs, first encountering Native Alaskans in 1741. Russia annexed Alaska and founded the Russian-American Company in 1799 to administer the territory until the United States purchased it in 1867. Native people's lives also were deeply affected by both the settlement of foreigners and the exploitation of natural resources.
