Early Pastoral Economies and Herding Transitions in Eastern Eurasia

Abstract

While classic models for the emergence of pastoral groups in Inner Asia describe mounted, horse-borne herders sweeping across the Eurasian Steppes during the Early or Middle Bronze Age (ca. 3000-1500 BCE), the actual economic basis of many early pastoral societies in the region is poorly characterized. In this paper, we use collagen mass fingerprinting and ancient DNA analysis of some of the first stratified and directly dated archaeofaunal assemblages from Mongolia's early pastoral cultures to undertake species identifications of this rare and highly fragmented material. Our results provide evidence for livestock-based, herding subsistence in Mongolia during the late 3rd and early 2nd millennia BCE. We observe no evidence for dietary exploitation of horses prior to the late Bronze Age, ca. 1200 BCE-at which point horses come to dominate ritual assemblages, play a key role in pastoral diets, and greatly influence pastoral mobility. In combination with the broader archaeofaunal record of Inner Asia, our analysis supports models for widespread changes in herding ecology linked to the innovation of horseback riding in Central Asia in the final 2nd millennium BCE. Such a framework can explain key broad-scale patterns in the movement of people, ideas, and material culture in Eurasian prehistory. Horse domestication is widely recognized as a key transformative event in human prehistory. The initial domestication of horses has been linked to major changes in human mobility and social organization, particularly in Inner Asia 1. Horses have also been invoked to explain continent-scale population movements, such as the spread

Mapping and Damage Assessment of “Royal” Burial Mounds in the Siberian Valley of the Kings

“…This has since been scientifically confirmed by a number of radiocarbon dates [2]. Thus, first millennium horseback pastoralism was attributed to an emergence in the eastern Eurasian steppes, a hypothesis since supported by a number of studies, most recently [3]. The royal burial mound, Arzhan 1, and the archaeological landscape it was situated in thus became an important reference point for research on highly mobile nomadic pastoralists of the first millennium BCE.…”

Pastoralism at Scale on the Kazakh Rangelands: From Clans to Workers to Ranchers

“…Archaeological evidence indicates that mobile pastoralists and their livestock have occupied these lands for at least 5,000 years (Frachetti et al, 2012). The Eurasian region was the locus for the domestication of goats, sheep, horses, and Bactrian camels (Larson and Fuller, 2014;Taylor et al, 2020) between 10.5 and 4 thousand years ago. Recent interdisciplinary research by archaeologists, climate scientists and ecologists is uncovering more about the complex relationships between nomadic migrations, settled farming, climate change, and environmental conditions in the last millennia-"as scholarship focuses on the ways in which pastoralists, of various degrees of mobility, exploited geographically variable, and annually shifting climatic conditions to find pasture for their herds" (Brooke and Misa, 2020, p. 3).…”

High altitude hunting, climate change, and pastoral resilience in eastern Eurasia

“…Following this initial dispersal of domestic livestock, the mountain margins of the Altai and Khangai were occupied by semi-mobile pastoral herders of the Afanasievo and later Chemurchek cultures, who raised domestic sheep, goat, and cattle across the Altai throughout the 3rd and early 2nd millennia BCE 10 – 14 . These early herders may have been constrained from using drier intermontane desert and steppe zones by their lack of horse transport 12 . However, by the late Bronze Age, the introduction of domestic horses, which appear widely in sites of the Deer Stone-Khirigsuur Culture (ca.…”

“…1250–700 BCE) across northern and western Mongolia, brought about widespread cultural and economic transformations 15 . Based on available evidence, the turn of the first millennium BCE saw the emergence of a highly mobile, multispecies pastoral economy characteristic of East Asian pastoralism, including ephemeral habitations and the use of domestic horses for meat and dairy 10 , 12 , 16 . Across the later mid-first millennium BCE, mortuary features show that western Mongolia continued to host pastoral horse cultures like the Pazyryk (ca.…”

“…This absence of direct insights into the subsistence base of early herding societies prevents a more comprehensive assessment of the role played by wild taxa or environmental change in the transition to pastoralism. Those few faunal assemblages that have been recovered from this period 12,16 suggest a strong dietary emphasis on sheep, goat, cattle, and horse among Bronze Age herders. However, widespread iconographic depictions of wild fauna-including elaborate deer images found on many deer stones 18 imply that wild game still played a role in early eastern Eurasian pastoral culture.…”