Archaeological research in Central Eurasia is exposing unprecedented scales of trans-regional interaction and technology transfer between East Asia and southwest Asia deep into the prehistoric past. This article presents a new archaeobotanical analysis from pastoralist campsites in the mountain and desert regions of Central Eurasia that documents the oldest known evidence for domesticated grains and farming among seasonally mobile herders. Carbonized grains from the sites of Tasbas and Begash illustrate the first transmission of southwest Asian and East Asian domesticated grains into the mountains of Inner Asia in the early third millennium BC. By the middle second millennium BC, seasonal camps in the mountains and deserts illustrate that Eurasian herders incorporated the cultivation of millet, wheat, barley and legumes into their subsistence strategy. These findings push back the chronology for domesticated plant use among Central Eurasian pastoralists by approximately 2000 years. Given the geography, chronology and seed morphology of these data, we argue that mobile pastoralists were key agents in the spread of crop repertoires and the transformation of agricultural economies across Asia from the third to the second millennium BC.
a b s t r a c tThis article presents new archaeological research on the ritual and domestic life of pastoralists at the Bronze Age campsite Tasbas, Kazakhstan. We reconstruct the hitherto unrecorded economy of high mountain pastoralists who lived at the site from the mid-3rd to early 1st millennium B.C. We argue that within the broad dynamics of mountain pastoralism there is local variability as shown through multi-season residence, farming, and craft production. In bringing together multiple data sets to address how the site was used we 1) show that ceramics were locally produced with similar manufacture technology across eight centuries -which breaks significantly from the canonical cultural history and large-scale migration paradigms that have defined the regional archaeology for decades; 2) identify a new tradition of cremation ritual (3rd millennium B.C.), and; 3) present the earliest evidence (3rd millennium B.C.) for the local use of domesticated grains and then farming (2nd millennium B.C.) in northern Central Asia. We provide a unique case study to bear on debates concerning the relationship between long-term regional stability and technological innovations among early central Eurasian pastoralists.
Textiles are powerful indicators of technology and contact, as the authors show for the peoples of the Bronze Age central Asian steppes. In this case the textiles are mainly missing, but have left their imprints on the surface of the inside of pots, captured when otherwise redundant cloths were used to paddle or jacket the clay before hardening and firing. A good supply of old cloths seems to have been part of a potters' equipment and some were used several times. The authors analyse and date the fibres and weaves to give an indication of changing cultural context through the Bronze Age.
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