Pastoral Communities Thrived in a Rocky Valley of the Tian-Shan Mountains--New Survey Results of the Dense Pastoralist Sites in the Mohuchahan Valley of Xinjiang, China

Summary

Newly identified pastoral sites in the Mohuchahan Valley have the potential of preserving 3000 years of pastoral settlement history in the middle section of the Tian-Shan Mountains. Located between a rich high-elevation meadow and a low-elevation oasis, this seemly barren valley might have served as an ideal residing place for numerous generations of local nomads. The scale and density of the burials and settlements they left suggest the communities once thrived here in ancient times probably were of much larger size than the current one. Considering that many of these sites are located in an apparently harsh environment, it becomes mysterious how these communities managed to survive and thrive here. Based on my ethnographic work and survey of some of sites, I suggest the success of ancient communities in the Mohuchahan Valley may partly be attributed to their connection with the meadow area and the oasis nearby. In other words, the harsh environment of the Mohuchahan Valley probably never supported local pastoral communities alone but always together with other eco zones such as the meadow and oases.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• The Dynamism of Contact and Exchange in Early Central and East Asia

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