Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Development of Pastoralism in a Steppe Environment

This doctoral dissertation research project undertakes archaeological research to study hunting and animal herding in arid steppe ecosystems. Understanding the deep history of grassland adaptations and economies is of importance because grasslands cover forty percent of the earth’s surface and are under significant environmental and anthropogenic pressures.

This project specifically focuses on examining a long-term human-environment relationships in the world’s most expansive grassland. For thousands of years, animal herding has been the dominant mode of survival in this region, making it key to understanding how farming and herding spread across different environments in ancient times. Commonly viewed as a homogenously arid and landmass, grasslands consist of a complex mosaic of rich environmental pockets with extremely diverse plants and animal inhabitants well adapted to this environment.

Although well documented in an ecological sense, very few archaeological studies focus on the use of these resource-rich micro-regions and their importance in facilitating sustainable and successful human occupations. This lack of detailed, micro-environmental archaeological research is especially notable in marginal open steppe environments. Archaeologists do not yet fully understand how humans interacted with and adapted to the dry steppe environment using hunting and animal herding.

Of equal importance, this study also has far-reaching methodological implications for the practice of archaeology in grasslands globally. This project contributes to the identification of micro-environments with satellite imagery and develops methods for using zooarchaeological proxies for paleoenvironmental reconstruction.

This research specifically investigates: (1) how and when people first started herding animals; (2) how hunting and herding economies evolved over the past twelve thousand years; and (3) how such changes were influenced by the availability of resources. An animal bone dataset is analyzed using four interdisciplinary methods: First, morphological analysis to identify type of animal species present; Second, stable isotopic analysis of ancient animal teeth to study animal diet (influenced by factors such as foddering) and herding patterns; Third, zooarchaeology by mass spectrometry, in order to identify species of highly fragmentary bones; Fourth, radiocarbon dating for tracking the timing of environmental adaptations such as hunting and animal herding.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.