Stratified Stone Age sites are few and hard to find: A welcome exception at the Koken site in Kazakhstan

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Advances in Stone Age Archaeology of Central Asia" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Late period hunter-gatherers of the Eurasian Steppe remain among the most understudied and least deciphered societies in the archaeology of Kazakhstan. A shortage of stratified or well-preserved late Palaeolithic and early Holocene campsites places a scholarly dependence on lithic assemblages that are often not pinned to radiometric dates. Contrary to this norm, our excavations at the site of Koken in the semi-arid steppe zone of eastern Kazakhstan have uncovered stratified Stone Age deposits of human remains, zooarchaeological data, and material assemblages underlying a Bronze Age settlement. The site opens inroads into examining human adaptations, social interactions, ritual behaviours, and food systems in the hyper-continental marginal steppe environment. In this paper, we consider the Koken site layout and contents in deep-time perspective as well as consider its potential utilization throughout periods of the Stone Age to clarify social, cultural, and technological connections among hunter-gatherer populations of the Eurasian steppe.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• Advances in Stone Age Archaeology of Central Asia

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 51355