Radiocarbon dating and cultural dynamics across Mongolia’s early pastoral transition

Abstract

The emergence of mobile herding lifeways in Mongolia and eastern Eurasia was one of the most crucial economic and cultural transitions in human prehistory. Understanding the process by which this played out, however, has been impeded by the absence of a precise chronological framework for the prehistoric era in Mongolia. One rare source of empirically dateable material useful for understanding eastern Eurasia’s pastoral tradition comes from the stone burial mounds and monumental constructions that began to appear across the landscape of Mongolia and adjacent regions during the Bronze Age (ca. 3000–700 BCE). Here, along with presenting 28 new radiocarbon dates from Mongolia’s earliest pastoral monumental burials, we synthesise, critically analyse, and model existing dates to present the first precision Bayesian radiocarbon model for the emergence and geographic spread of Bronze Age monument and burial forms. Model results demonstrate a cultural succession between ambiguously dated Afanasievo, Chemurchek, and Munkhkhairkhan traditions. Geographic patterning reveals the existence of important cultural frontiers during the second millennium BCE. This work demonstrates the utility of a Bayesian approach for investigating prehistoric cultural dynamics during the emergence of pastoral economies.

A Dynamic 6,000-Year Genetic History of Eurasia’s Eastern Steppe

“…Mongolia is located in Inner Asia between Russia and China, and it encompasses most of the Eurasian Eastern Steppe (Figure 1; Figure S1A). Mongolia has 21 aimags (provinces) and can be divided into ten geographic regions ( Figure S1B) with distinct ecological ( Figure S1C) and cultural features (Taylor et al, 2019). For example, far north Mongolia borders Siberia and includes both high mountain and mountain-taiga ecological zones, and it is the only aimag where reindeer pastoralism is practiced.…”

“…To this, we added recently published genomic data for 19 Bronze Age individuals from northern Mongolia (Jeong et al, 2018), as well as datasets from neighboring ancient populations in Russia and Kazakhstan (Damgaard et al, 2018a;2018b;Narasimhan et al, 2019;Sikora et al, 2019;Unterlä nder et al, 2017) (Tables S3B and S3C), which we analyze together with worldwide modern reference populations (Table S3C). We also generated 30 new accelerator mass spectrometry dates, supplementing 74 previously published radiocarbon dates (Jeong et al, 2018;Taylor et al, 2019), for a total of 98 directly dated individuals (104 total dates) in this study (Table S4).…”

Dairy pastoralism sustained eastern Eurasian steppe populations for 5,000 years

“…As a result, archaeologists have often been forced to form conclusions about local subsistence from materials found in ritual human burials under stone monuments that dominate the Bronze Age archaeological landscape, and which occasionally include satellite animal burials. Specific features of burial mounds (stone type, shape, ringed fences) can be used to identify interred individuals into different culture groups as mound construction styles changed alongside evolving cultural traditions in Bronze Age Mongolia 15,16 . Prior to the Bronze Age, before the presence of constructed stone burial mounds, there are very few uncovered occupation or ritual sites, and pre-Bronze Age subsistence strategies are not well understood.…”

Economic Diversification Supported the Growth of Mongolia’s Nomadic Empires

“…Radiocarbon and archaeologically classified dates. AMS radiocarbon dates were conducted at the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit (ORAU), Oxford, England, UK (n = 14; bone collagen and dentine) 87 and at the University of Groningen, Faculty of Science and Engineering, Groningen, The Netherlands (n = 25; bone collagen and dentine) 88 . All pre-Xiongnu samples and 30% of the Xiongnu samples were radiocarbon dated to solidify the dating of individuals from early time periods.…”