Horses for the dead: funerary foodways in Bronze Age Kazakhstan

Multiregional Emergence of Mobile Pastoralism and Nonuniform Institutional Complexity across Eurasia

“…For example, institutionally employed associations between restricted commodities and high social status appear to have structured practices across Eurasia such as interring horses or offering domesticated grains during burial rituals. Although initially a regional phenomenon, the use of domesticates as burial offerings in institutionally (or structurally) similar ways is documented widely across the steppe among a variety of societies by the mid-second millennium BC (Outram et al 2011).…”

“…Thus, there may have been a simultaneous process of economic transformation and diffusion of technologies and associated ideologies between eastern, central, and western steppe pastoralists. As a result, horses came to occupy a key ideological role in shaping social institutions and economic growth among many pastoralist communities of Eurasia during the late third and second millennia BC (Outram et al 2011). The spread of ideological associations of horses and wheeled vehicles with power and status was fostered by networks of interaction that grew along the edges of local pastoralist landscapes ranging from the western steppe to central China (Kelekna 2009;Linduff 2003).…”

“…The evidence includes mare's milk in pottery (Outram et al 2009(Outram et al , 2011, corrals, a fauna assemblage consisting of 90%-99% horse remains, heavy butchering on horse bones, significant ritual horse sacrifices (Olsen 2006a(Olsen , 2006b(Olsen , 2008, and an abundance of thong-smoothers for the probable manufacture of control devices for horses (Olsen 2001). Weighing heavily in the argument for Botai horse herding has to be the size of their villages, from 44 to 160 or more houses (Olsen et al 2006).…”

Patterns of pastoralism in later Bronze Age Kazakhstan: new evidence from faunal and lipid residue analyses

“…Hanks et al, 2007;Panyushkina et al, 2008) and other forms of previously unavailable scientific analysis (e.g. Outram et al, 2009Outram et al, , 2011Stear, 2008). Recent scholarship in the field (e.g.…”

Some like it hot: environmental determinism and the pastoral economies of the later prehistoric Eurasian steppe

“…Domestic cattle, sheep and goats do not become properly established until the early third millennium BC in the Trans-Urals steppe (Koryakova and Epimakhov 2007), and the mid-third millennium BC in the Kazakh steppe (Benecke and von den Driesch 2003;Frachetti 2008;Outram et al 2011). However, these species do make an earlier, more limited, appearance at Neolithic sites of the southern Urals (Matyushin 2003;Kosintsev 2006), the Neolithic Atabasar culture of the Kazakh steppe (Benecke and von den Driesch 2003; Kislenko and Tatarintseva 1999) and then the midfourth millennium BC Afanasievo culture of the western Altai (Anthony 2007).…”