Redefining Configurations of Urban Settings in Steppe Societies

Summary

Despite exciting turns in archaeological approaches to ‘urbanism’ emphasizing smaller-scale or lower-density occupations, the study of urban centers among mobile pastoral groups continues to escape notice. The development of urban centers associated with intensive production, exchange, and habitation are often deemed incompatible with societies that have mobile components, or are engaged in greater mobility related to pastoral production. Nevertheless, numerous Eurasian steppe societies have established permanent sites equivalent in investment to those associated with settled agricultural groups. This poster reexamines concepts of urbanism and urban settings in relation to societies that have mobile or semi-mobile components through regional studies of walled settlements of the Sintashta development of Bronze Age Trans-Urals and the Xiongnu phenomenon of Iron Age Mongolia. Revised considerations of the features of the walled sites as well as their greater environs yield alternative notions of urban hinterlands and extended constructs of urban settings for the earliest iterations of permanent centers of social, ritual, and/or economic activity among steppe pastoralists of Eurasia. These studies highlight the potency of urbanism for studies of societal developments in Eurasia and the potential for case studies of mobile pastoral groups to alter our understandings of the emergence and development of urban settings.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords