The history of the Russian scientific research on the types of traditional culture of peoples using the scientific concept of economic-cultural types developed in the 1940s–1950s is analysed. The main attention is given to the scientific works on the economic-cultural types of the Turkic peoples of Western and Southern Siberia — the Tuvans, the Chulyms, groups of the Siberian Tatars — Tomsk, Baraba, and Tobol-Irtysh,— mainly focused on the period of 18^th — beginning of the 20^th century. The aim of this paper is to clarify the level of knowledge of the types of traditional culture of these peoples and to determine future directions of research on the topic. The periods of the study of the economic-cultural types have been identified. These are the 1950s–1970s, when a body of work on the typology of traditional culture was carried out and B.V. Andrianov and N.N. Cheboksarov developed their classification and published a worldwide map of economic-cultural types in 1972. Further on it is the period of the 1980s–1990s when the works in this direction were reducing and almost completely stopped in the first decades of the 21^st century. However, it is at this time that the theory of integrated economic-cultural types has been formulated and tested during their study in different groups of the Siberian Tatars living predominantly in the transitional forest-steppe zone and combining components of the culture of populations with appropriative and productive types of economic activities. A task has been set to study economic complexes of the Tobol-Irtysh Tatars in the 17^th–18^th centuries aiming at the further use of obtained results in the development of an ethnographic classification of the types of traditional culture of the Turkic peoples of Western Siberia.