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Abstract
Recent excavations at the prehistoric and historic encampment at Mukri, in the foothills of the Dzhungar Mountains of eastern Kazakhstan, challenge the view that it was a small, isolated pastoralist camp situated in an ecologically marginal territory. When viewed as a strategically situated node within a dynamic ecology of pastoralist activity, the site's archaeology reveals shifting patterns of land use and networks of interaction that contributed to socio-political change and material diffusion over millennia. This article draws on the granular archaeological evidence of continuity and change at Mukri to understand how pastoralist societies, in local contexts, resonated broader trends in the documentary history of Inner Eurasia. We highlight the effectiveness of pastoralists' strategies in order to reconsider common paradigms of extensive nomadic migrations and episodic conquest as appropriate explanatory models for Eurasian pastoralists throughout antiquity.
Acknowledgements
Funding for this research was provided by the National Science Foundation (USA), grant #0535341. AMS dating was conducted by the National Ocean Sciences Accelerator Mass Spectrometry Facility (NOSAMS). Special thanks to Professor Karl Baipakov of the Institute of Archaeology in Almaty Kazakhstan and to Tamara Trifonova for artifact drawings. Additional thanks to two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments. The authors are responsible for errors and omissions.
Michael D. Frachetti and Paula N. Doumani
Washington University in St. Louis
Norbert Benecke
Deutsches Archäologisches Institut, Berlin
Alexei N. Mar'yashev
Institute of Archaeology, Almaty Kazakhstan
Notes
1 Palaeoethnobotanical analysis of the Mukri samples is currently under way as part of the PhD dissertation of Robert Spengler at Washington University in St. Louis.