Concealed Archaeology of Kazakhstan: An Early Neolithic Burial from Koken

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Steppe by Steppe: Advances in the Archaeology of Eastern Eurasia" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The period prior to the emergence of agriculture and pastoralism is one of the most understudied and least deciphered time periods in Eurasian steppe archaeology. A shortage of stratified or well-preserved early Holocene campsites means that our knowledge of this period heavily relies on lithic assemblages not always with associated 14C dates. Contrary to this norm, our excavations at the site of Koken in the semi-arid steppe zone of eastern Kazakhstan recently uncovered stratified Stone Age deposits underlying a Bronze Age settlement. Within these earlier layers, our team has further discovered a paired human burial dating to the mid-sixth millennium BC. The Koken burial represents the earliest known, and directly dated, human remains within all of Kazakhstan, and hence offers scholars an exclusive opportunity to examine hunter-gatherer dispersals, lifeways, and population composition prior to the appearance of food producing economies in the region. In this paper, we consider the Koken site layout and contents as well as consider its potential utilization and social networks with other hunter-gatherer complexes of Eurasian. On a preliminarily basis we position the early Neolithic burial from Koken within the thin landscape of its regional contemporaries in Baikal and Mongolia.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Steppe by Steppe: Advances in the Archaeology of Eastern Eurasia   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39932.0