Abstract:

Andre Gunder Frank’s essay on “The Centrality of Central Asia” argues for Central Asia as the keystone of an Afro-Eurasian world system, noting that it is “where all the outlying peoples and their civilizations connected and interacted with one another.” The idea of Central Asia as a nexus of interaction is indeed well attested in prehistory and beyond. However, much of Frank’s thesis is built upon long held misconceptions about Eurasian steppe peoples (“nomads”) and the basis of their interactions with a “civilized world.” This paper, given in two parts, examines and challenges these misconceptions with new biomolecular evidence. We present a range of recent data from the Mongolian steppe that unequivocally refutes many of Frank’s assumptions, especially regarding the nature of steppe economies and their presumed dependence on the resources of “settled” neighbors for survival. The first part of the paper, introduced here, reports results of the first and earliest formal macrobotanical and isotopic analyses (δ13C, δ15N, 87Sr/86Sr) of a set of locally produced crop assemblages from Late Iron Age (or Xiongnu Period) northern Mongolia (c.300 BC - 200 AD), including the earliest direct evidence for the presence of wheat, barley, oats, and broomcorn millet. It also reports new paleoproteomic evidence from human dental calculus for long distance circulation of crop goods within the broader Mongolian steppe by Early Iron Age (c.1000-400 BC) and continuing through the Xiongnu Period, when the first nomadic state (or empire) in Central Asia formed. These data show that groups in what would become the Xiongnu heartland of northern Mongolia were likely practicing agriculture prior to the development of regional polities or formalized trade relationships with settled “cores," directly challenging the idea that steppe populations would have had to extract foodstuffs from the settled by necessity. Instead, we see evidence of a core-periphery dynamic internal to the Mongolian steppe: one which involved the circulation of steppe-derived goods to areas outside of the Xiongnu heartland.