Geographical Margins as Key to Understanding Crop Dispersal Mechanisms in Prehistory: Case Study for Kyrgyzstan

Summary

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 regions acted as geographical filters that influenced which plant species and their varieties got dispersed to more distant regions of Eurasia. The territory of Kyrgyzstan (almost 90% of the territory lies above 1900 amsl) therefore constitutes a key area for the study of crop and animal adaptation strategies, as it is in this area that the filtering effect on plant and animal selection by communities would have been the most distinctive. The archaeobotanical material presented in this talk comes from high altitude sites in Kyrgyzstan. Some elements of crop adaptation observed in the research contribute towards explaining the pattern of crop dispersal across Eurasia.

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): 22050