Asia: Central Asia (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Duo Tian. Jian Ma. Tongyuan Xi. Meng Ren. Xinyi Liu.

This is an abstract from the "From Tangible Things to Intangible Ideas: The Context of Pan-Eurasian Exchange of Crops and Objects" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The region of east Tianshan Mountains, located in east edge of Central Asia, has a diverse natural environment that is suitable for a variety of subsistence. The first millennium BC was a period with fluctuating climate and rapid cultural interactions in this region. This study conducted...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert Spengler.

This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Failure" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The origins of agriculture have long been depicted as one of the greatest innovations of humanity, a humanist approach that rose to prominence in archaeology during the latter half of the twentieth century. During this time, a wide range of push and pull models for the origins of agriculture were developed, all of which were formulated as responses to the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Catherine Klesner.

This is an abstract from the "Advances and New Perspectives in Central Asian Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper presents the results of the archaeometric analysis of 150 early Islamic style glazed ceramics from Central Asia. The glazed ceramics, introduced to the region in the ninth century CE, served as important cultural markers and demonstrated the intentional affiliation that the residents in Mā Warāʾ an-Nahr developed with...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kristen Pearson.

This is an abstract from the "New Directions in Mongolian Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In Mongolia, ethnoarchaeological methods have been applied to questions of mobility, spatial organization, site formation, and animal husbandry practices, among others. An area that remains to be explored is the application of ethnoarchaeological methods to the study of craft production, particularly as out relates to distinctive local resources,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alicia Ventresca Miller.

Ancient animal management strategies have important implications for debates on modern pastoral landscape use in Eurasia. As livestock production intensifies in in semi-arid regions there is a need to identify the diverse set of strategies employed by pastoralists. Sequential carbon (δ13C) and oxygen (δ18O) isotope analysis of teeth from domesticated sheep at Bronze Age sites in Kazakhstan exhibit varied isotopic sequences. Sheep from Kent exhibit an inverse relationship where low δ18O values...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tekla Schmaus. Bryan Hanks. David Reich. Margaret Judd. Andrei Epimakhov.

This is an abstract from the "From the Altai to the Arctic: New Results and New Directions in the Archaeology of North and Inner Asia" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ancient DNA studies have increased exponentially in recent years and have had tremendous impact on our understanding of early genomic patterning in many regions of the world. The vast Eurasian steppe zone has not been overlooked in these important breakthroughs. Several recent studies...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Masami Izuho. Nicolas Zwyns. Katsuhiro Sano. Gunchinsuren Byambaa.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. While early modern human dispersals occurred in Northern Eurasia around ~45–40ka ago, a cultural phenomenon often labeled as the Initial Upper Paleolithic (IUP) is identified in Central and Eastern Europe, but also in West, Central, and Northeast Asia. Despite significant progress in our understanding of the timing and routes of these population movements,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alisher Begmatov. Tomoyuki Usami. Husniddin Rahmonov.

This is an abstract from the "Advances and New Perspectives in Central Asian Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper presents the initial results of the excavations at Mingtepa, located ca. 20 km northeast of Samarkand, Uzbekistan. This site is presumed to be Kabudhan, a late antique and early medieval Sogdian town, attested in Chinese and Arabic sources. Mingtepa (Uzbek for “thousand hills”) covers an area of about 35 ha. On the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew O'Brien. Todd A. Surovell. Randy Haas.

This is an abstract from the "More Than Shelter from the Storm: Hunter-Gatherer Houses and the Built Environment" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Houses are common structures, and the importance and distinction of domestic space has been researched a great detail through ethnography. Yet, how these common structures shape the spatial behavior of residents is often not clearly articulated. This is a particular concern for ephemeral structures that...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Anthony. Dorcas Brown.

This is an abstract from the "Wheels, Horses, Babies and Bathwaters: Celebrating the Impact of David W. Anthony on the Study of Prehistory" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. We found our first entry into steppe archaeology in 1989-1992 through a study of microwear caused by bits on horse teeth, which we hoped would identify bitted, and therefore ridden or driven, horses. From then through to the publication of the Samara Valley Project (2016) we...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Melody Pope.

This is an abstract from the "Cordage, Yarn, and Associated Paraphernalia" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Use-wear and residue analysis draws attention to complexities of technological processes that otherwise remain out of reach archaeologically. Enigmatic wear traces described by microwear analysts as “polish 23,” “polish 10,” and “polis non familiar” occur on distinctive chipped stone tools from Late Mesolithic and Early Neolithic sites in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Vagheesh Narasimhan.

This is an abstract from the "Ancient DNA in Service of Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper serves as an example of how ancient DNA (aDNA) data can provide new insight into large-scale population transformations of archaeological cultures. The details of population transformation through time in Central and South Asia have been unclear due to the lack of aDNA. To address this gap, we generated genome-wide data from 500 ancient...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Zachary Cofran. Reed Coil. Gabriel McGuire.

Evidence for the earliest human occupation of Eastern Kazakhstan is poorly known, despite it being part one of the largest countries in the world and flanked along its borders with important paleoanthropological sites in Russia and China. We sought evidence of prehistoric sites by foot and vehicle survey around the Irtysh Basin. At each major point of interest we took photographs geotagged with geographic coordinates, and collected global positioning system (GPS) data. Although much of the area...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Giedre Motuzaite Matuzeviciute.

More than 8000 years ago, a variety of crop species began to spread across Eurasia, reaching its edges approximately 4000 years later. The chain of mountains that stretches across Central Asia constituted a geographical obstacle that slowed down the dispersal process. Special high altitude adaptive strategies were required not only by humans, but also by plants due to changes in the length of the growing season, climatic conditions, UV intensity, among other factors. Therefore, the mountain...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ann Merkle.

This is an abstract from the "Advances and New Perspectives in Central Asian Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The hand-formed, slip-painted pottery (HSP) of the Central Asian highlands is found in mountainous and early Turkic sites throughout the region. It is understudied, and the pottery appears in only a limited number of archaeological syntheses and reports. HSP spread to the Central Asian lowlands in tandem with the spread of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Natalia Égüez. Jean-Luc Houle. Oula Seitsonen. Jamsranjav Bayarshaikhan.

This is an abstract from the "New Directions in Mongolian Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Lipid biomarkers such as alkanes, fatty acids, and steroids together with their stable carbon and hydrogen isotope ratios are nowadays leading proxies for the identification of past climate variability, human activities, and animal presence in a site. These can be extracted from modern feces, desiccated dung, and soil sediments. When applied to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only William Taylor. Jamsranjav Bayarsaikhan. Isaac Hart.

This is an abstract from the "New Directions in Mongolian Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The emergence of herding economies prompted drastic changes to life in eastern Eurasia—situating the cold, arid steppes of Mongolia as a center of the ancient world. Although a growing body of evidence points to an important role for mountain zones in this transition, issues of archaeological preservation have prevented a clear understanding of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Brite.

This is an abstract from the "Empirical Approaches to Mobile Pastoralist Households" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A key feature of mobile pastoralism is the circulation of kin groups within a landscape, where movement is structured at least in part by the repeated return to places of social and ritual significance. Cultural anthropologists describe these as practices of "belonging made by moving," where notions of lineal descent, home, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katheryn Linduff. Karen Rubinson.

This is an abstract from the "Wheels, Horses, Babies and Bathwaters: Celebrating the Impact of David W. Anthony on the Study of Prehistory" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Horses have been a large part of the David Anthony’s research interests. Horses also played a significant role in the Pazyryk Culture (4th-3rd centuries BCE), a group of peoples buried in the Altai Mountains, in the region where modern Russia, Mongolia, China and Kazakhstan meet....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Karen Rubinson. Katheryn Linduff.

This is an abstract from the "Wheels, Horses, Babies and Bathwaters: Celebrating the Impact of David W. Anthony on the Study of Prehistory" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Horses have been a large part of David Anthony's research interests. Horses also played a significant role in the Pazyryk Culture (4th-3rd centuries BCE), a group of peoples buried in the Altai Mountains in the region where modern Russia, Mongolia, China and Kazakhstan meet....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Susan Pollock.

This is an abstract from the "From Households to Empires: Papers Presented in Honor of Bradley J. Parker" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The attention devoted to households and houses in archaeology over the last few decades has brought with it a welcome emphasis on small-scale domestic practices and the rhythms of daily life. But houses are not only constructed and lived in – they are also abandoned and reused in various ways. I will focus on...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bryan Miller. Jamsranjav Bayarsaikhan.

This is an abstract from the "From the Altai to the Arctic: New Results and New Directions in the Archaeology of North and Inner Asia" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper integrates survey, mortuary, and genetic research into a multidisciplinary and multiscalar consideration of the impact that large political regimes like empires have on the social landscapes of individual communities and whole regions. In the case of the first steppe empire...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Melissa Ritchey.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. When crops are spread into new landscapes, communities, and their associated subsistence practices and culinary preferences, the crops undergo substantial selective pressure. This pressure can come in the form of new environmental constraints, such as a different growing season, or cultural pressure from differences in preferred taste, productivity, or...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nikolay Kradin.

This is an abstract from the "World-Systems and Globalization in Archaeology: Assessing Models of Intersocietal Connections 50 Years since Wallerstein’s “The Modern World-System”" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. World-systems analysis was created to describe capitalism. However, in 1989, Abu-Lughod expanded the temporal boundaries. She described the world-system of the thirteenth century, and now it has become customary to talk about Mongolian...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Coco. Talgat Mamirov.

This is an abstract from the "Advances and New Perspectives in Central Asian Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The surface site complex of Semizbugu is a well-known Paleolithic site in Pribalkhash, Kazakhstan. Tens of thousands of artifacts from all Paleolithic periods have been collected from 11 different locations across this landscape between 1961 and 2013. During our 2022 field season, we conducted a new study at Semizbugu. We...