Competing Narratives between Nomadic People and their Sedentary Neighbours (2025)

Mongols, Turks, and others: Eurasian nomads and the sedentary world

Choice Reviews Online, 2005

Early nomads of the Eastern Steppe and their tentative connections in the West

Evolutionary Human Sciences, 2020

(The corrigendum is attached as a separate pdf file.) The origin of the Xiongnu and the Rourans, the nomadic groups that dominated the eastern Eurasian steppe in the late first millennium BC/early first millennium AD, is one of the most controversial topics in the early history of Inner Asia. As debatable is the evidence linking these two groups with the steppe nomads of early medieval Europe, i.e. the Huns and the Avars, respectively. In this paper, we address the problems of Xiongnu–Hun and Rouran–Avar connections from an interdisciplinary perspective, complementing current archaeological and historical research with a critical analysis of the available evidence from historical linguistics and population genetics. Both lines of research suggest a mixed origin of the Xiongnu population, consisting of eastern and western Eurasian substrata, and emphasize the lack of unambiguous evidence for a continuity between the Xiongnu and the European Huns. In parallel, both disciplines suggest that at least some of the European Avars were of Eastern Asian ancestry, but neither linguistic nor genetic evidence provides sufficient support for a specific connection between the Avars and the Asian Rourans.

Hinterlands, Urban Centers, and Mobile Settings: The "New" Old World Archaeology from the Eurasian Steppe

Asian Perspectives, 2007

without food there are no people" is a Mongolian proverb, the significance of which the two of us came to understand during the spring of 1993 by way of acquaintance with the herder, Tumen, of Bayankhongor Province. 1 As is common at this time of year, Tumen's sheep and goats were emerging famished from a harsh steppe winter and were dependent on the first spring grasses to replenish their strength. In the next few days, unseasonable and unpredictable snowstorms, called zud, began to blow across the southwestern provinces of Mongolia, icing and destroying the delicate new pasture. Tumen's weakest animals began dying after a day and a half without access to grazing, and by the end of the week most local herders had lost significant portions of their herds and their livelihood. This was only the first of several spring zud episodes that were to sweep through Mongolia during the 1990s and that would eventually lead to large-scale international assistance to the country in 1999 and 2000. Mongol folk sayings tend to reflect the experience of a highly specialized pastoral way of life that is still common on the Mongolian steppe today. Anatoly Khazanov (1994) has argued that groups inhabiting marginal environments and devoting a majority of subsistence effort to mobile and extensive herding are often unable to maintain a balance between available pasture, herd numbers, and human population due to unpredictable variability in the environment. Zud, epizootic diseases, steppe fires, and drought require that a system of pastoral specialization be supplemented and buffered against productive risk, and though evidence suggests that extended families might survive on herd animals alone, diversification strategies are a more plausible-and probably necessary-form of subsistence management. Archaeological studies from Mongolia and Siberia have hypothesized that early steppe economies were most likely based on multiresource nomadism (Salzman 1972: 67) during the second and first millennium B.C., including various forms of livestock herding, agricultural production, hunt

< i> Mongols, Turks, and Others: Eurasian Nomads and the Sedentary World</i>. Edited by Reuven Amitai and Michal Biran. Leiden: Brill, 2005. xx, 550 pp. $156.00 ( …

The Journal of Asian Studies, 2007

Central Asia in the Cosmography of Anonymous of Ravenna. In: COMPETING NARRATIVES BETWEEN NOMADIC PEOPLE AND THEIR SEDENTARY NEIGHBOURS. Studia uralo-altaica 53. Edited by Chen Hao

Szántó Richárd, 2019

An Imagined Past? Nomadic Narratives in Central Asian Archaeology

Current Anthropology, 62 (3), 2021

Nomads, or highly specialized mobile pastoralists, are prominent features in Central Asian archaeology, and they are often depicted in direct conflict with neighboring sedentary peoples. However, new archaeological findings are showing that the people who many scholars have called nomads engaged in a mixed economic system of farming and herding. Additionally, not all of these peoples were as mobile as previously assumed, and current data suggest that a portion of these purported mobile populations remained sedentary for much or all of the year, with localized ecological factors directing economic choices. In this article, we pull together nine complementary lines of evidence from the second through the first millennia BC to illustrate that in eastern Central Asia, a complex economy existed. While many scholars working in Eurasian archaeology now acknowledge how dynamic paleoeconomies were, broader arguments are still tied into assumptions regarding specialized economies. The formation of empires or polities, changes in social orders, greater political hierarchy, craft specialization-notably, advanced metallurgy-mobility and migration, social relations, and exchange have all been central to the often circular arguments made concerning so-called nomads in ancient Central Asia. The new interpretations of mixed and complex economies more effectively situate Central Asia into a broader global study of food production and social complexity.

Medieval Nomads – Sixth International Conference on the Medieval History of the Eurasian Steppe (Szeged, Hungary, November 23–26, 2016)

Golden Horde Review

and Serbia took part in this event. The working languages of the conference were English and Russian. Presented papers dealt with various aspects of the history of Eurasian nomads, from the Early Middle Ages up to the seventeenth century. Among them, several have been related to the history of the Golden Horde. The proceedings of the conference are planned to be published in 2017, as a separate volume of the

Nomad Vs Sedentary. Gender, Production and Social Evolution in the Eurasian Steppe Peoples of the East Eurasian Region Between Chalcolithic and Bronze Age

Journal of Ancient History and Archaeology 11(4), pp. 3-12. ISSN 2360-266X, 2025

In this paper we analyse the data collected from excavations associated with the peoples who inhabited the eastern part of the Eurasian steppe from the 6th to the 1st millennium BC, in order to study the social and cultural changes that may have influenced the emergence of communities that adopted different subsistence modes (nomadic, semi nomadic or sedentary) despite occupying the same territory at different periods of history. The results seem to indicate that there was no clear and common sequence in which a nomadic way of life would have prevailed initially until reaching a sedentary system as the only consequence of a linear and common development in ancient societies. Instead, successive peoples occupying the same territory over time adopted different modes of production depending on various factors related to climatic and demographic changes, military tensions, migrations, etc. We will also analyse the sedentary societies established in the region of northern China and their influence on the way of life of these steppe groups. Finally, we will try to show that one of the inherent characteristics of nomadic or semi nomadic production systems was to organise themselves into societies that were more egalitarian than the rest, perhaps as a response to the need to improve control over ever larger groups of individuals and also as a means of coping with possible external threats.

"The Clever and the Cunning: Finding Eurasian Nomads in Premodern History"

The Light of Discovery: Studies in Honor of Edwin M. Yamauchi, ed. John Wineland, 2007

Inner Asian Pastoralism in the Iron Age: The Talgar Case, South-Eastern Kazakhstan

Nomadic Peoples, 2017

The romantic image of the fierce Iron Age horse-riding pastoralists of the first millennium bc who roamed the Eurasian steppe has dominated our historical imagination of nomadic confederacies. The Scythians, Saka, Sarmatians, Wusun and Yuezhi, when described by ancient Greek historians and Chinese chroniclers, have been identified as the 'barbarians' (Beckwith 2009). In such accounts these nomadic barbarians occupied the 'edges' or peripheries of core agrarian states. In this article I explore how the Iron Age archaeology of settlements and burial mounds (kurgans) of a remote area along the Tian Shan Mountains of southeastern Kazakhstan provides a different picture of the so-called barbarians. In order to build an archaeological case that allows for a different interpretation of the formation and evolution of Iron Age agro-pastoralism at the southern edge of the Eurasian steppe, this story must be told through the lens of a field archaeologist.