Linkages between Copper and Bronze Technological Styles and Pastoral Movement in Late Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age Central Asia

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The socio-economic impact of pastoralism, particularly sheep grazing, is one of the more thoroughly investigated themes in contemporary ethnohistoric and archaeological landscape studies for Central Asia, particularly in relation to practices of vertical and horizontal transhumance. However, the cultural implications of pastoralist practices in relation to metalworking techniques of the Late Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age of Central Asia remain relatively understudied. In this paper I discuss geographical patterns in technological style, shaped by compositional and metallographic data collected from copper and bronze artefacts from different cultural contexts across Central Asia, to delineate the “metalscape” of the Late Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age. I compare these patterns to possible seasonal patterns of pasture availability I reconstructed using modern precipitation, temperature, hydrology, and vegetation data, due to the limits of the extant published palaeoecological data, to propose that pastoralists’ patterns of horizontal and vertical transhumance would have been instrumental in establishing and maintaining interactions across the steppes and mountain ranges of Central Asia, including technological knowledge and practices for metalworking.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 51956