The Kurumchi culture or the "Kurumchi blacksmiths" () was the earliest Iron Age archaeological culture of Baikalia as proposed by Bernhard Petri. He also speculated that they were the progenitors of the Sakha people, a claim that didn't go unchallenged by his contemporaries. Petri assumed that the Kurumchi left Baikalia for the Middle Lena due to pressure from the ancestors of the Buryats. Alexey Okladnikov was a student of Petri who expanded scholarship on the Kurumchi. He connected them to the Kurykans, a people mentioned in Chinese historical sources. Kurumchi society was conceived as analogous to the Yenisei Kyrgyz, being composed of "simple people and the aristocrats." Starting in the 1990s scholars have begun to challenge the claims made by Petri and Okladnikov. Bair Dashibalov concluded that Petri's findings come from a wide chronological period ranging from the 9th-14th centuries C.E. Background In 1912 the Russian Committee for the Study of Central and East Asia sent Bernhard Petri to Irkutsk. He was an employee of the Kunstkamera from 1910 until 1917. Petri was directed to document the social and material culture of the Buryats along with their religious beliefs. He was also instructed to seek out and discover ancient artifacts, so he initiated archaeological digs in the Murin River valley in the contemporary Ekhirit-Bulagatsky District of the Ust-Orda Buryat Okrug. During the late Russian Empire, itas located within the Kurumchi khoshun and was sometimes called the Kurumchi Valley. Previously an educator named O. A. Monastyreva found a spindle whorl inscribed with Old Turkic script (described below) outside modern Narin-Kunta. Monastyreva assisted Petri in digging at this location, which was the primary focus of the year. Among the initial findings there were pottery shards and a small forge that Petri illustrated. In the following year he returned and expanded upon the excavation sites. In 1916 Petri explored cave systems in Olkhon Island. Their entrances were barricaded with rocks in such way to only allow movement by crawling. They were perhaps seasonally inhabited only when dry during the winter months. Among the discoveries were flat stone slabs used to create graves arranged in a row. Their appearance was compared to Buryat yurts by Petri and later by Okladnikov to also be similar to Evenki dwellings called Mikhail Ovchinnikov Mikhail P. Ovchinnikov was a self-taught archaeologist who hypothesized the predecessors of the Sakha once inhabited Baikalia. He found evidence of iron and copper