By the fifth millennium BP, the Inner Asian steppe was characterized by substantial variation in subsistence and lifeways, from hunting-gathering-fishing groups to sedentary village communities relying primarily on domesticated grains and animals. Across this patchwork of Neolithic economies, more extensive forms of domestic animal use occurred gradually throughout the eastern steppe zone. The Eneolithic period is transitional between the Neolithic and Bronze Age. Botai, an Eneolithic site in northern Kazakhstan, provides an important window on changing relationships between human beings and animals. The
Botai culture (5600-5100 BP) developed a sedentary, village-based lifeway relying on the intensive exploitation of wild horses as game animals. Long-term use of and familiarity with horses may have resulted in both the domestication and possible riding of horses in order to track and hunt wild equids, though the evidence for this argument is still debated.
The earliest credible evidence in Inner Asia for Eneolithic food producing economies involving herd animals is found in the Yenisei region of south central Siberia. Peoples of the Afanas’evo culture were originally thought to have entered the Russian Altai Mountains and middle Yenisei river valley from regions farther west, bringing with them the first herd animals as well as mortuary rituals and ceramic styles similar to those of the western Yamnaya culture (5100-4200 BP). Ceramics and burials of this culture have also been described from western Mongolia, the Russian Altai region, and from northern Xinjiang. A series of early absolute dates from mortuary contexts in Minusinsk has recently redefined the chronology of the Afanas’evo (5500/5100-4500 BP) and now casts doubt on the migration theory, perhaps supporting instead a model for indigenous development, though this is controversial.
The economic and organizational character of Afanas’evo culture is quite different from cultures using domestic stock in western Central Eurasia. Afanas’evo peoples had an economy based primarily on hunting and the use of domestic sheep, cattle, and later on, horses, as well as simple copper industries. Only a small number of settlements are known from this period, one example being Tepsei-X. These habitations have cultural remains very similar to those recovered from Afanas’evo burial sites, such as Suchanicha, Afanas’evo Mountain, and Karasuk-III. Afanas’evo groups did not have well-developed techniques for herd exploitation and lacked many of the secondary resources that were to be used at later times, such as dairy production and animal traction. Burial inventories include artifacts with potential agricultural use, such as stone pestles and wooden mortars, though as mentioned above, such finds may also suggest increasingly specialized gathering of local grasses and plants.
Afanas’evo subsistence was primarily a huntinggathering adaptation which included the keeping of domesticated animals, and is therefore often described as transitional in character between food acquisition and food production. These patterns were continued and intensified by the subsequent Okunev culture (4600-4000 BP) of the Minusinsk basin which had a different style of ceramics, new burial practices, and more elaborate metallurgy, including the limited production of bronze implements. The Okunev period is also known for its striking repertoire of artistic iconography which appears on stone slabs used to construct tombs and on stone stelae, initiating a long tradition of standing stone monument construction across the eastern steppe.
World History
