Sowing the Seeds of Empire: Early Statecraft and the Emergence of Indigenous Agriculture on the Mongolian Steppe (ca. 250 BC–AD 150)

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Advances in Macrobotanical and Microbotanical Archaeobotany Part 1" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The end of the first millennium BC (ca. 250 BC–AD 150) marks the genesis of Xiongnu, eastern Eurasia’s first nomadic state, which emerged from central Mongolia to successfully integrate one of the largest-scale political configurations in prehistory. This transformative period also marks the appearance of Mongolia’s earliest direct agricultural evidence. Though long assumed to be a “purely pastoral” state, scholars have recently considered connections between these phenomena. Growing evidence suggests a political culture that may have deployed novel foodways in statecraft; namely, the development of flexible indigenous agropastoral systems that integrated or intensified production of foreign cereals. Evaluation of this perspective, however, has been hindered by a historical lack of systematic archaeobotanical analysis. Here we present an overview of current evidence for eastern steppe populations’ relationships to agricultural practices and products during the first millennium BC. We then report results of the first and earliest formal macrobotanical and isotopic analyses (δ13C, δ15N, 87Sr/86Sr) of a set of locally produced crop assemblages from Iron Age northern Mongolia, including the earliest direct evidence for the presence of oats and broomcorn millet. Results are drawn together to situate agricultural trajectories in the Mongolian steppe within the broader prehistory of the trans-Eurasian crop exchange.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Advances in Macrobotanical and Microbotanical Archaeobotany Part 1   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38157.0