Pastoralists Lost: Pioneer equine and ruminant herders of the Central Asian Steppes and their role in early horse husbandry

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

The domestication of the horse led to revolutions in transport, communications and forms of warfare, but this process involved more than one geographical region and multiple stages through time. Over five thousand years ago, in the forest steppe grasslands of modern-day Kazakhstan, the Botai Culture emerged as a hotspot of human experimentation centred around early horse husbandry, but the focus of this management seems to have centred largely around supply of food. This was initially a form of specialist equine herding, but, over the next thousand years, cattle, sheep and goats were introduced to the region causing people in this region to innovate further in a new type of mixed pastoralism. As this was happening, over 2,500km away, different cultural groups in the Pontic-Caspian region of Russia, were changing their relationship to a different lineage of horses in a way that led to genetic selection for traits that helped improve their use for riding and pulling chariots. It was this later type of domestic horse that eventually gave rise to all our modern domestic horses, but this fact tends to obscure the richly diverse nature of the full story and the people and animals involved in it.Pastoralists Lost investigates early experimentation with animal husbandry in northern and eastern Kazakhstan, a crucible of human innovation in the steppe where horses were brought under human control much earlier than elsewhere. It examines how equine-focused pastoralists restructured their human-horse relationships with the arrival of cattle, sheep and goats, and adopted 'know-how' in the form of new husbandry practices for all their animal stock. It investigates how all this changed when the new lineage of domestic horse was introduced from further west. In doing so we seek to develop a new theoretical paradigm that explicitly foregrounds understanding the diversity of past animal-use systems that fostered cultural and subsistence resilience, and will question the concepts of "success" and "failure" that are currently embedded in archaeological discourse and our wider understandings of the past.Pastoralists Lost combines new archaeological excavations of key archaeological sites with a range of cutting-edge scientific techniques that will be applied to both newly excavated materials as well as those in existing museum collections, including advanced mass spectrometry, genomic and proteomic analyses to reconstruct mobility and diet of people and animals. We will establish (1) how the relationship between humans and different domesticated horse lineages changed through time, through a focus on horse mobility and diet; (2) how the arrival of newly domesticated species (sheep, goat, cattle) changed indigenous animal management strategies. Our project also explicitly seeks to promote knowledge exchange between researchers in UK, Germany, Kazakhstan, as well as internationally.