Sowing the Seeds of Empire: New Insights into Xiongnu Agriculture and Agronomy

Summary

This is an abstract from the "From the Altai to the Arctic: New Results and New Directions in the Archaeology of North and Inner Asia" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The Xiongnu period (ca. 250 BC–AD 150) was a particularly transformative time in the history of the eastern Eurasian steppe. Intensive study of the dimensions of sociopolitical, technological, subsistence, and material cultural transformation associated with the emergence of the Xiongnu state has thus been a focal point of Mongolian archaeological research for the past two decades. Recent research posits a complex and diversified steppe political culture whose success may have been based in flexible agropastoral practices. However, a complete picture of Xiongnu foodways and the food production practices underpinning these broad transformations remains elusive. The nature of the arrival, significance, and diversity of agricultural products—namely cereal products—in Xiongnu foodways is especially unclear. This paper presents an overview of archaeobotanical, stable isotopic, and archaeogenetic evidence for eastern steppe populations’ relationships to agricultural practices and products prior to and during the Xiongnu period. It then reports preliminary results of the first formal macrobotanical and stable isotopic analysis of an economic crop assemblage recovered from Mongolia in this period: that of Egiin Gol, a Xiongnu settlement area in northern Mongolia. These data are drawn together to temporally and spatially situate Mongolian participation within the broader history of the trans-Eurasian crop exchange.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• From the Altai to the Arctic: New Results and New Directions in the Archaeology of North and Inner Asia   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37632.0