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

对马的驯化导致了交通、通信和战争形式的革命，但这个过程涉及到不止一个地理区域和时间的多个阶段。五千多年前，在今天哈萨克斯坦的森林草原上，博泰文化作为以早期马业为中心的人类实验的热点出现，但这种管理的重点似乎主要集中在食物的供应上。这最初是一种专门的马群放牧形式，但在接下来的1000年里，牛、绵羊和山羊被引入该地区，导致该地区的人们在一种新型的混合牧业中进一步创新。当这一切发生时，在2500多公里外，俄罗斯庞蒂克-里海地区的不同文化群体正在改变他们与不同马种的关系，导致了对特征的基因选择，这有助于改善它们骑马和拉战车的使用。正是这种后来的家马最终孕育了我们所有的现代家马，但这一事实往往掩盖了整个故事以及参与其中的人和动物的丰富多样性的本质。牧民迷失调查了哈萨克斯坦北部和东部的畜牧业早期实验，这是人类在草原上创新的熔炉，那里的马比其他地方更早被人类控制。它考察了以马为重点的牧民如何随着牛、绵羊和山羊的到来而重组他们的人马关系，并以新的畜牧实践的形式为他们所有的动物种群采用技术诀窍。它调查了当新的家马谱系从更远的西部引入时，这一切是如何改变的。在这样做的过程中，我们试图开发一种新的理论范式，明确地突出理解过去促进文化和生存韧性的动物使用系统的多样性，并将质疑目前嵌入考古学话语和我们对过去更广泛理解中的“成功”和“失败”的概念。牧民迷失将对关键考古遗址的新考古发掘与一系列尖端科学技术相结合，这些技术将应用于新发掘的材料以及现有博物馆藏品中的材料，包括先进的质谱学、基因组和蛋白质组分析，以重建人和动物的流动性和饮食。我们将建立(1)通过对马的流动性和饮食的关注，人类与不同驯化马血统之间的关系如何随着时间的推移而变化；(2)新驯化物种(绵羊、山羊、牛)的到来如何改变当地动物的管理策略。我们的项目还明确寻求促进英国、德国、哈萨克斯坦以及国际上的研究人员之间的知识交流。

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.