Early agriculture and crop transmission among Bronze Age mobile pastoralists of Central Eurasia.
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.
Department of Anthropology, Washington University in St Louis, , One Brookings Drive-CB 1114, St Louis, MO 63130, USA, Dipartimento di Storia Culture Civiltà, Università degli Studi di Bologna, , Piazza S. Giovanni in Monte, 2 40124 Bologna, Italy, Institute of Archaeology, , 44 y. Dostyk, Almaty, 050010, Republic of Kazakhstan.
Robert
R
Spengler
Michael
M
Frachetti
Paula
P
Doumani
Lynne
L
Rouse
Barbara
B
Cerasetti
Elissa
E
Bullion
Alexei
A
Mar'yashev
D000383:Agriculture / Q000266:history*; D001106:Archaeology; D018556:Crops, Agricultural / Q000266:history*; D049690:History, Ancient; D007623:Kazakhstan; D055110:Radiometric Dating; D014423:Turkmenistan
Bronze Age; Central Eurasia; agriculture; archaeobotany; pastoralism