Hunting vs. Herding: The Eastern and Central Tibetan Plateau’s Earliest Inhabitants

Summary

This is an abstract from the "From Tangible Things to Intangible Ideas: The Context of Pan-Eurasian Exchange of Crops and Objects" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Our understanding of when and how humans settled high altitude (>3000 m.a.s.l.) regions of the Tibetan Plateau has been greatly extended in the past decade. In this paper, we shift the focus from plants to animal resources, and explore the diversity of animal-based subsistence strategies used to adapt to challenging environments in both eastern and central parts of the plateau. Our findings demonstrate that wild animal resources were a significant, and perhaps the primary, contributor to subsistence strategies utilized by people who were arguably the earliest successful year-round settlers of the eastern Tibetan Plateau. It appears that domesticated herd animals, such as sheep, goat, and cattle or yak, were indispensable to the success of early year-round settlers of the central Tibetan Plateau.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• From Tangible Things to Intangible Ideas: The Context of Pan-Eurasian Exchange of Crops and Objects   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 25943