Revisiting the emergence of pastoralism in the Altai Mountains through interactions between local hunter-gatherer and Afanasievo communities

Abstract

The Altai Mountains represent a critical region for the earliest trans-Eurasian dispersals of bovid domesticates. However, settlement data from Altaic hunter-gatherer communities and incoming pastoralists remain rare, which precludes understanding the subsistence transitions and associated cultural dynamics underlying the spread of pastoralism to Inner Asia. Here, we report new radiocarbon dates and analysis of archaeological deposits, suggesting previously unrecognized inter-community interactions in the Altai Mountains. We have launched the Rise of Altai Mountain Pastoralism Project (RAMPP) to examine the emergence of livestock herding in the Russian Altai by focusing on new excavations and biomolecular methods on ancient faunal remains.

Introduction

One of the most important archaeological phenomena underlying the spread of domesticated sheep, goats, and cattle to Inner Asia and beyond is the Afanasievo cultural horizon (ca. 3300–2500 BCE) – believed by scholars to have emerged after “western steppe” migrants reached the Altai Mountains (Narasimhan et al., 2019; Poliakov et al., 2019; Stepanova, 2012). Newcomers to the region may have sparked complex cultural interactions and subsistence transformations, perhaps displacing hunter-gatherer societies. However, fragmentary information about ancient Altaic hunter-gatherers obscures how local groups embraced or rejected domesticates and new bio-cultural logics (e.g., dairying and wool technology). Diverse ideas from archaeologists about the emergence of the Afanasievo culture and its decline can be found in the Russian literature (e.g., Abdulganeev et al., 1982; Gryaznov and Vadetskaya, 1968; Kiryushin and Kiryushin, 2005; Molodin, 2002; Pogozheva, 2006; Tsyb, 1984; Vadetskaya, 1986), but this wide range of thinking on the topic remains relatively unknown to the global archaeological community. The possibility of indigenous Neolithic communities in the Altai influencing the development of the Afanasievo culture through social interactions with incoming “western steppe herders” remains the only plausible theory of those downplaying the migration hypothesis. Human paleogenomic research supports a substantial movement of people from the western steppes to the Altai region during the mid-late fourth millennium BCE (Allentoft et al., 2015; de Damgaard et al., 2018; Haak et al., 2015; Jeong et al., 2020; Mathieson et al., 2015; Narasimhan et al., 2019; Wang et al., 2021).

We aim to understand the cultural mosaic from which herding transitions unfolded in the Altai Mountains as local communities encountered new people and technologies. Here, we report new radiocarbon dates and analyses of material culture from the stratified Ust’-Biyke-I site to help establish the chronology and behavioral variability of mid to late Holocene Altaic hunter-gatherers (Fig. 1). We contextualize these results to our forthcoming research at the Afanasievo settlement Nizhnyaya Sooru and on the paleogenomics of domesticated sheep in the Altai and neighboring regions, under the aegis of the recently started Rise of Altai Mountain Pastoralism Project (RAMPP).