Horses in Iron Age Steppe Burials: Their Enduring Socio-Political Role

Summary

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. Horses are regularly deposited in burials associated with the Pazyryk Culture; this practice and its socio-political function is the topic of this paper. Not only are horses the backbone of the mobile and military functioning of these communities, they probably also played a central role in displaying the centralizing power and authority of trade and emerging societal complexity across a vast area of Eastern Eurasia.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)   •
• Wheels, Horses, Babies and Bathwaters: Celebrating the Impact of David W. Anthony on the Study of Prehistory

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 24254