Tibet Before Pastoralism

Summary

The Tibetan pastoral economic system that has evolved over the last several millennia involves permanent high altitude herd management combined with mutualistic relationships with lower-elevation agricultural communities. How this traditional pastoralist system developed in the middle to late Holocene from a prior foraging lifeway remains something of a puzzle, requiring the domestication of the native high-altitude adapted yak, the establishment of sustained relationships between Tibetan foraging societies with lower elevation agricultural communities, and the possibility of conflicts between foraging and pastoralist economic strategies. Based on archaeological evidence from the northeast Tibetan Plateau, this paper hypothesizes some aspects of the economic and social transition from a pre-pastoralist Tibetan subsistence foraging lifeway to Tibetan pastoralism during the middle to late Holocene.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 20767