Bronze Age Nomadic Pastoralism on the Mongolian Steppe

Abstract

Pastoralism has a long history in Central Asian and Mongolian society. However the origins of this mode of existence as not well understood. Due to its mobile nature, nomadic pastoral is not well recorded in the archaeological record. This makes it particularly difficult to determine the social and biological characteristics of pastoralism in the past and form it took when it emerged on the Bronze Age Mongolian steppe in the fourth century BC. The aim of this study was to employ the use of non-metric variants to assess the extent to which human remains, excavated from the Khovsgol aimag, represented a biologically and socially isolated population, through the reconstruction of familial relationships. In archaeological populations this is referred to as intracemetary biological distance analysis. Cranial non-metric data was provided for 19 Khovsgol individuals and 11 Khovd individuals. Additionally analysis was conducted on two Khovsgol individuals which potentially represented the presence of biologically unrelated individuals at the site. Dental non-metric variants were scored for nine Khovsgol individuals, however the results of this work proved inadequate for further analysis. Non-metric analysis was conducted using 38 cranial traits and 20 dental traits. The resulting cranial data was then analysed using four statistical methods to determine traits frequencies and establish a measure of relatedness. The results of this study indicate that the primary research population of Khovsgol is not, as previously thought, biologically isolated from the wider Bronze Age Mongolia population. Along with the Khovd population, comparison to existing research indicates that Khovsgol looks like surrounding Bronze Age Mongolian populations. The analysis of the two additional individuals concluded that their physical traits were not representative of underlying biological difference. The presence of cranial trauma injuries is indicative of intra-population violence and not evidence of inter-population conflict. Combined statistical analysis of individuals from Khovsgol and Khovd indicates that there is a strong possibility of social contact and biological relatedness between these two populations.