Chronology of middle Holocene hunter–gatherers in the Cis-Baikal region of Siberia: Corrections based on examination of the freshwater reservoir effect
Introduction
Middle Holocene prehistory of the Cis-Baikal region in East Siberia (Fig. 1) belongs to one of the many cases around the world where examination of materials from mortuary sites has dominated archaeological research. Grave goods and human skeletal remains have been the focus of many studies essentially since the beginning of professional archaeology in the region. Although much has been written about culture history and cultural and biological variation among these groups, many questions regarding the processes of culture change still remain unanswered (e.g., Weber and Bettinger, 2010, Weber et al., 2011). The explicit emphasis on mortuary sites also created an imbalance with regard to dating, both typological and chronometric, as well as the cultural characterization of the different periods and micro-regions. The periods with well-documented cemeteries naturally have been given much attention with many attempts to define them in cultural and chronological terms. In contrast, the periods without cemeteries (e.g., Middle Neolithic and, to a lesser extent, Late Bronze Age) have received much less attention and their cultural characteristics and temporal boundaries remain vague.
Middle Holocene prehistory of Cis-Baikal is also interesting in that it has seen a long debate about its chronology and experienced several fundamental revisions to its culture history (cf. Weber, 1995 for review). To keep the matter brief, the first relatively well-documented model of continuous progression of hunter–gatherer cultures or stages (Khin'–Isakovo–Serovo–Kitoi–Glazkovo–Shivera; Okladnikov, 1950) was criticized by many Siberian scholars and eventually fell apart under the weight of radiocarbon evidence (Konopatskii, 1982, Mamonova and Sulerzhitskii, 1989, Weber, 1995); however, the names of the relevant mortuary traditions are in use to this day without many revisions. According to the new chronological evidence, the Kitoi mortuary tradition is much older than Isakovo and Serovo, which, in turn, appear to be chronologically parallel. The Glazkovo and Shivera traditions, whose typochronological placement was based on the presence of copper and bronze objects, retain their original position at the end of the sequence. A few dates appeared to be quite old, perhaps representing the Late Mesolithic Khin' tradition in the Okladnikov model, but they were either subject to very large measurement errors or their archaeological context was compromised, thus raising doubts about the general archaeological identity of this early mortuary tradition (Weber et al., 2010).
Further reassessments of this initial radiocarbon evidence and the subsequent accumulation of a much larger set of dates by the Baikal Archaeology Project confirmed the main points of the new culture history model but also led to some revisions (Weber, 1995, Weber et al., 2002, Weber et al., 2006, Weber et al., 2010, Weber and Bettinger, 2010: Table 1). The most important of these was the identification of a roughly millennium-long period with no formal cemeteries at all, thus breaking the chronological continuity of Neolithic mortuary traditions (Weber and Bettinger, 2010, Weber et al., 2010):
Following the long-standing Russian school of archaeology, Cis-Baikal's hunter-gatherer culture history is defined on the basis of technological criteria. Thus, changes in the stone industry (i.e., mostly proliferation of the microlithic technique) define the Mesolithic, the bow and arrow, ground stone tools, and ceramics identify the Neolithic, and objects of copper and bronze the Bronze Age. Further divisions within Neolithic are based mainly on the characteristics of the mortuary protocol (see below for more detail) while within the Bronze Age on the appearance of new forms of metal artefacts. Since animal and plant domesticates were introduced into the region only during the Iron Age and historical times, respectively, subsistence of all preceding groups was based on various combinations of game and seal hunting, fishing and gathering.
The work reported in this paper represents the next step in the revisions to the middle Holocene culture history in Cis-Baikal. While the changes may at first appear as less dramatic than those associated with earlier applications of radiocarbon dating in the region, it will become evident later in the paper that they are perhaps even more important. The matter regards corrections based on the identification of a Freshwater Reservoir Effect (FRE) impacting the radiocarbon ages of human skeletal remains on which our understanding of the culture history and process of middle Holocene Cis-Baikal relies to a substantial extent.
While the marine reservoir effect has been known for some time and from many archaeological and environmental settings around the world, the importance and complexity of the FRE has been only recently recognized (e.g., Ascough et al., 2010, Cook et al., 2001, Lillie et al., 2009, Olsen et al., 2010, Higham et al., 2010, Wood et al., 2013). Its presence suspected for some time (e.g., Prokopenko et al., 1999), a FRE has also been confirmed in the aquatic system of Lake Baikal based on the comparison between dates obtained on bones from terrestrial herbivores and the Baikal seal representing the same stratigraphic units at the multilayered archaeological campsite Sagan-Zaba II on Lake Baikal (Nomokonova et al., 2013). Since the diets of middle Holocene foragers in the region included spatially and temporally variable amounts and kinds of aquatic foods (Weber et al., 2011), radiocarbon determinations made on human skeletal remains are likely to overestimate their true age to correspondingly variable degrees. To assess the extent of FRE impact on the radiocarbon age of human osteological remains, paired dating of human and animal terrestrial herbivore skeletal material from the same grave was implemented (Bronk Ramsey et al., 2014, Schulting et al., 2014, Schulting et al., 2015). Separate correction equations were developed for the entire Cis-Baikal region as well as for its constituent micro-regions: the Angara River combined with Southwest Baikal, the Little Sea area and the Upper Lena (Fig. 1).
The primary goal of this paper is a preliminary assessment of the revisions to the regional culture history resulting from the corrections to the 14C-dates available for middle Holocene hunter–gatherers from Cis–Baikal. An investigation of temporal dietary trends is our secondary goal. After these introductory notes, we present the available set of radiocarbon dates generated for Cis-Baikal and review the principles of typological dating of Cis-Baikal mortuary assemblages. We follow with the introduction of the FRE correction equations used in the paper and explain the methods of analysis. The discussion of the results is divided into two parts. Part one is an assessment of Cis-Baikal middle Holocene culture history as a whole and part two is organized by micro-regions, where more specific chronological patterns are examined. The paper ends with a summary of the findings and a number of conclusions of broader archaeological relevance.
Section snippets
Materials
The study is based on radiocarbon dates obtained for 256 individuals from the Cis-Baikal region. All dating was conducted at the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit (ORAU) at the University of Oxford, UK, with stable carbon and nitrogen isotope ratios, collagen yields and C/N ratios reported at the same time (Fig. 2, Supplement 1). Analytical precision for δ13C and δ15N is ±0.2 and ± 0.3‰, respectively. With the exception of the 48 dates included in the paired dating project (Bronk Ramsey
Typological dating
The matter of typological dating of the relevant mortuary traditions requires some attention. The substantial body of data provided by approximately 184 cemeteries, 1026 graves and 1182 individuals (Weber and Bettinger, 2010: Table 3), relatively well-documented in various publications and reports, and the equally substantial amount of regional and micro-regional variation in mortuary characteristics, make the typological classification of Baikal's middle Holocene mortuary assemblages a
Correction of the freshwater reservoir effect
As mentioned above, a substantial freshwater reservoir offset in radiocarbon age between terrestrial herbivores and aquatic fauna of Lake Baikal from the same archaeological layers has been recently identified by Nomokonova et al. (2013). In order to correct for this offset, 42 pairs of dates on human bone and terrestrial herbivore bone or tooth samples, each from the same grave, were analyzed. This dataset represents five major middle Holocene cemeteries in the Cis-Baikal region: Lokomotiv
Discussion: regional chronology
The benefit of starting the discussion with an assessment of regional chronology is that it lessens, to a certain extent, the biases resulting from the uneven representation of the various spatio-temporal units in our current dataset (Table 2). Also, examination of regional chronology permits a focus on the general picture without the need to discuss the micro-regional peculiarities for which the evidence is not yet adequate. These biases and idiosyncrasies will become more evident within each
Discussion: micro-regional patterns
In order to avoid unnecessary repetition this section focuses on detection of dietary patterns and trends that are specific to each micro-region and which might be less clearly visible on the regional scale. Consequently, the analysis is limited to those datasets that are large enough to provide meaningful insights. Transition between periods is another topic potentially suitable for examination at the micro-regional level; however, the frequently insufficient samples sizes force us to leave
Conclusion
This is another paper in the series of studies examining the FRE in the Cis-Baikal region and its impact on the chronology of the middle Holocene archaeology there. The first three demonstrated the influence of the FRE on 14C-dated human remains in the Cis-Baikal ecosystem and developed equations to correct for it (Bronk Ramsey et al., 2014, Schulting et al., 2014, Schulting et al., 2015), while in this study we make use of these new developments (see also Weber et al., n.d.). More
Acknowledgements
We owe our thanks to the members of the Baikal Archaeology Project for their enthusiastic involvement including the fieldwork in Russia and implementation of various laboratory analyses over the last 25 years, and to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for its continuous financial support (Major Collaborative Research Initiative grants Nos. 410-2000-1000, 412-2005-1004, and 412-2011-1001). Additional funding was provided by the Russian Research Foundation (grants No.
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