In Языки и письменность народов Севера (“Languages ​​and writing of the peoples of the North”), the Sovjet ethnographer Yan Petrovich Alkor describes the Nivkh people as pre-literate. When Alkor visited the Nivkhs in 1929, he found no indications of writing apart from a system of rudimentary pictographic symbols used during their traditional “bear holidays”.Alkor, 1934. Nivkh bear hunters would carve intricate marks into wooden ladles that were used to serve bear meat. The symbols detailed specific information about the hunt.Bledsoe, n.d.