Pastoralists Lost: Pioneer equine and ruminant herders of the Central Asian Steppes and their role in early horse husbandry

迷失的牧民：中亚草原的先锋马和反刍牧民及其在早期马畜牧业中的作用

• 批准号: AH/Y007484/1
• 负责人: Alan Outram
• 金额: $ 44.12万
• 依托单位: UNIVERSITY OF EXETER
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Research Grant
• 财政年份: 2024
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2024 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=AH%2FY007484%2F1
• 关键词: Pastoralists; Lost; Pioneer; equine; ruminant

The domestication of the horse led to revolutions in transport, communications and forms of warfare, but this process involved more than one geographical region and multiple stages through time. Over five thousand years ago, in the forest steppe grasslands of modern-day Kazakhstan, the Botai Culture emerged as a hotspot of human experimentation centred around early horse husbandry, but the focus of this management seems to have centred largely around supply of food. This was initially a form of specialist equine herding, but, over the next thousand years, cattle, sheep and goats were introduced to the region causing people in this region to innovate further in a new type of mixed pastoralism. As this was happening, over 2,500km away, different cultural groups in the Pontic-Caspian region of Russia, were changing their relationship to a different lineage of horses in a way that led to genetic selection for traits that helped improve their use for riding and pulling chariots. It was this later type of domestic horse that eventually gave rise to all our modern domestic horses, but this fact tends to obscure the richly diverse nature of the full story and the people and animals involved in it.Pastoralists Lost investigates early experimentation with animal husbandry in northern and eastern Kazakhstan, a crucible of human innovation in the steppe where horses were brought under human control much earlier than elsewhere. It examines how equine-focused pastoralists restructured their human-horse relationships with the arrival of cattle, sheep and goats, and adopted 'know-how' in the form of new husbandry practices for all their animal stock. It investigates how all this changed when the new lineage of domestic horse was introduced from further west. In doing so we seek to develop a new theoretical paradigm that explicitly foregrounds understanding the diversity of past animal-use systems that fostered cultural and subsistence resilience, and will question the concepts of "success" and "failure" that are currently embedded in archaeological discourse and our wider understandings of the past.Pastoralists Lost combines new archaeological excavations of key archaeological sites with a range of cutting-edge scientific techniques that will be applied to both newly excavated materials as well as those in existing museum collections, including advanced mass spectrometry, genomic and proteomic analyses to reconstruct mobility and diet of people and animals. We will establish (1) how the relationship between humans and different domesticated horse lineages changed through time, through a focus on horse mobility and diet; (2) how the arrival of newly domesticated species (sheep, goat, cattle) changed indigenous animal management strategies. Our project also explicitly seeks to promote knowledge exchange between researchers in UK, Germany, Kazakhstan, as well as internationally.

马的驯化导致了运输、通讯和战争形式的革命，但这一过程涉及多个地理区域和多个时间阶段。五千多年前，在现代哈萨克斯坦的森林草原上，博泰文化成为以早期养马为中心的人类实验的热点，但这种管理的重点似乎主要集中在食物供应上。这最初是一种专业的马匹放牧形式，但在接下来的一千年里，牛、绵羊和山羊被引入该地区，导致该地区的人们在新型混合畜牧业中进一步创新。当这种情况发生时，2500多公里之外的俄罗斯东海-里海地区的不同文化群体正在改变他们与不同马系血统的关系，从而导致对特征进行基因选择，从而有助于改善它们在骑马和骑乘方面的用途。拉战车。正是这种后来的家马类型最终产生了我们所有的现代家马，但这一事实往往掩盖了整个故事以及其中涉及的人和动物的丰富多样性。《迷失的牧民》调查了早期的畜牧业实验在哈萨克斯坦北部和东部，草原上是人类创新的熔炉，那里的马匹比其他地方更早受到人类控制。它探讨了以马为中心的牧民如何随着牛、绵羊和山羊的到来而重建人与马的关系，并以新的畜牧方式的形式为所有牲畜采用“专有技术”。它调查了当新的家马血统从更远的西方引入时，这一切发生了怎样的变化。在此过程中，我们寻求发展一种新的理论范式，明确地理解过去动物使用系统的多样性，从而培养文化和生存弹性，并对目前嵌入考古学话语中的“成功”和“失败”概念提出质疑以及我们对过去的更广泛的理解。《迷失的牧民》将关键考古遗址的新考古发掘与一系列尖端科学技术相结合，这些技术将应用于新挖掘的材料以及那些现有的博物馆藏品中，包括先进的质谱分析、基因组和蛋白质组分析，以重建人和动物的流动性和饮食。我们将通过关注马的流动性和饮食，确定（1）人类与不同驯养马谱系之间的关系如何随着时间的推移而变化； (2) 新驯化物种（绵羊、山羊、牛）的到来如何改变了当地的动物管理策略。我们的项目还明确寻求促进英国、德国、哈萨克斯坦以及国际研究人员之间的知识交流。