Pazyryk Culture Up in the Altai

Katheryn M. Linduff, Karen S. Rubinson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9780429851537
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book reconsiders the archaeology of the Pazyryk, the horse-riding people of the Altai Mountains who lived in the 4th–3rd centuries BCE, in light of recent scientific studies and excavations not only in Russia but also Kazakhstan, Mongolia and China, together with new theories of landscape.

Excavation of the Pazyryk burials sparked great interest because of their wealth of organic remains, including tattooed bodies and sacrificed horses, together with superb wooden carvings and colorful textiles. In view of this new research, the role of the Pazyryk Culture in the ancient globalized world can now be more focused and refined. In this synthetic study of the region, the Pazyryk Culture is set into the landscape using recent studies on climate, technology, human and animal DNA and local resources. It shows that this was a powerful, semi-sedentary, interdependent group with contacts in Eurasia to their west, and to their east in Mongolia and south in China.

This book is for archaeologists, anthropologists, art historians, social and economic historians as well as persons with general interests in mobile pastoralism, the emergence of complex societies, the social roles of artifacts and the diverse nature of an interconnected ancient world.

1 Introduction: The shape of Pazyryk Culture

DOI: 10.4324/9780429456374-1

1.1 What is the Pazyryk Culture? Who were the Pazyryk people?

In the 1920s and 1940s, a group of burials was discovered and excavated in the remote Gorny-Altai mountainous region of Siberia at the site of Pazyryk in what was then the USSR (Fig. 1.1).

Figure 1.1 Map of Pazyryk Culture sites mentioned in the text. Map by Evan Matthew Mann.

Since the contents of these burials were preserved in permafrost, the excavations exposed materials that were not only remarkable simply because of their preservation, but also because of their exceptional artistic merit (Fig. 1.2). They suggested that these remains were of a sophisticated and sizeable group of people who provided a link to a previously unsubstantiated distant past. The region had heretofore been noticed only through study of ancient texts together with much earlier excavations of other nearby mounded tombs at the sites of Berel in what is today Kazakhstan and Katanda in the Russian Altai excavated by Radlov in 1865 (Radlov 1894; Zakharov 1925, 1928). Direct textual evidence about these peoples was absent, but their presence was hinted at in the records of Herodotus (490/480–424 BCE) and Sima Qian (司馬遷; 145–86 BCE), both of whom, although not aware of the other, described a people whose lifestyle was to them of less standing than the state-level societies of either the Greeks or the dynastic Chinese – they were mobile pastoralists, now often called nomads. Archaeological remains of other groups that share the lifeway have been found widely across the Eurasian steppe (Cunliffe 2019), but our focus here is on the cultural remains found in the greater Altai region of what are today Russia, Kazakhstan, Mongolia and China.

Figure 1.2 Pazyryk barrow and contents. (a) Ground plan, Pazyryk, Kurgan 1 showing supporting wooden structure and burials of horses. (Adapted from Jettmar 1967: Fig. 85). (b) Cross section of Kurgan 5, Pazyryk showing frozen ground, wooden chamber and contents. (Adapted from Simpson and Pankova 2017: Fig. 149). (c) Eagle-Griffin on saddle cover, Kurgan 2, Pazyryk, felt appliqué. (Adapted from Rudenko 1953: Pl. 109). (d) Wood, leather finials for male headgear, Pazyryk, Kurgan 2, State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg 1684/170; 1684/162–163. (Adapted from Simpson and Pankova 2017: Pls. 36–37).

The individuals interred in the so-called royal barrows at Pazyryk have been associated with the Scythians, known from Herodotus and also 19th-century excavations of burials in the Black Sea region. Based on the perspective of settled peoples who wrote the texts, those interred in these burials were thought to represent a culture of fierce warriors (both male and female) or thundering hoards who raided and pillaged in western Asia. A similar perspective by Chinese historians cast other named groups as rough and tumble outsiders, mobile pastoralists, who entered and threatened western and northern lands thought to be sovereign territory of the early sedentary, agricultural dynastic Chinese. A more nuanced view of these peoples is of interest here and will be developed with the aid of many sources beyond the written tracts of the ancient authors of literate worlds to their west and east that both named and characterized these people from an outsiders’ perspective.

The excavations at Pazyryk, and other ones in the immediate region, are overwhelmingly of burials and have been proposed to represent part of a linear tradition that stretched across Siberia from the Altai west to the region north of the Black Sea, described by Herodotus as “Scythians” (Cunliffe 2019; Čugunov et al. 2010). As the theory goes, during the first millennium BCE nomadic people spread over the Eurasian Steppe from the Altai Mountains through the northern Black Sea area as far as the Carpathian Basin (Parzinger 2004). Those who had lived in the North Pontic region since the 7th century BCE are the most famous among them due to the early reports in the Histories of Herodotus (Herodotus 1987: bk iv) which were seen to be confirmed by excavations in the Black Sea region (Cunliffe 2019).¹ Many tribal names have been assigned to those buried under tumuli that share certain artifact categories such as horse harnesses, weapon types and ornamentation that featured wild animals (often in combat) which came to be known as “Animal Style.” Greek and Persian historians of the first millennium BCE chronicled the existence of the Massagetae and Sauromatians, and later, the Sarmatians and Saka cultures possessing these similar artifacts, so that they are often grouped under the Scythian rubric. We know other names of related groups, characterized as horse-riding warriors who threatened settled populations and were recorded in other ancient texts such as the Bible. Assyrian records mentioned the Cimmerians, a related group, as well as the Scythians (Phillips 1972: 130–135). As noted, Chinese historians did not name a group Scythian, but they did record similar cultural-economic behaviors among pastoral peoples who lived on their dynastic borderlands, where in some cases artifacts such as belt plaques, daggers, curved knives and horse gear aligned with “Scythian-types” have been excavated as well (Tian and Guo 1986).

Given the persistence of this association, we briefly address here this hotly debated question in Eurasian studies about the origin of the purportedly widespread Scythian culture. The northern Black Sea steppe was originally considered the homeland and center of the Scythians (Yablonsky 2000) until a Central Asian origin hypothesis was formulated (Bashilov and Yablonsky 2000). Evidence supporting an east Eurasian beginning includes analysis of the kurgan Arzhan 1 in Tuva (Griaznov 1980; Grjaznov 1984), which has been considered the earliest known Scythian burial to date (ca. 9th century BCE) (Alekseev 2001; Caspari et al. 2018). This idea was based on the contents of the burial, including many horses, sacrificed humans and artifacts that become part of the “Scythian” canon, including horse tack and a representation of a curled wild feline, materials and practices of the later warrior-style nomadic tombs from across Eurasia (Hanks 2012; Samashev 2012) (Fig. 1.3). Moreover, elements of the characteristic “Animal Style” dated to the 10th century BCE were found in the region of the Yenisei River and in modern-day China, and were used to argue for the early presence of Scythian culture in the East (Parzinger 2004; Bashilov and Yablonsky 2000).

Figure 1.3 Arzhan I, ca. 9th c. BCE, Tuva. (a) Ground Plan of excavated structures, Arzhan I. (Adapted from Simpson and Pankova 2017: Fig. 55). (b) Bronze coiled feline, 25 cm, TRM K2–20, State Museum of the Tuva, Kyzyl Arzhan I. (Adapted from Basilov 1989: 21).

The issue of demographic spread of the “Scythian” culture over a large territory has been addressed most recently by scientists who examine genomic and paleogenetic data.² Martina Unterländer and her enormous team of advisors and scientists have found that “Despite separate origins and the enormous geographic separation, demographic modelling infers ongoing and substantial gene flow between eastern and western groups, which provides a plausible demographic mechanism to explain the low F_ST³ values and the general uniformity of the material culture of Scythians right across the Eurasian Steppe zone” (Unterländer et al. 2017). Their findings go on to suggest that:

During the 1st millennium before the Common Era (BCE), nomadic tribes associated with the Iron Age Scythian culture spread over the Eurasian Steppe, covering a territory of more than 3,500 km in breadth. To understand the demographic processes behind the spread of the Scythian culture, we analysed genomic data from eight individuals and a mitochondrial dataset of 96 individuals originating in eastern and western parts of the Eurasian Steppe. Genomic inference reveals that Scythians in the east and the west of the steppe zone can best be described as a mixture of Yamnaya-related ancestry and an East Asian component. Demographic modelling suggests independent origins for eastern and western groups with ongoing gene-flow between them, plausibly explaining the striking uniformity of their material culture. We also find evidence that significant gene-flow from east to west Eurasia must have occurred early during the Iron Age. (2017: 1)

This exacting work has shown that the underlying population across the Steppe was genetically connected, but the dynamics that may have driven the cultural diffusion are still poorly understood. The populations of the Pazyryk region, for instance, were and still are decidedly a mix of several regional eastern and northern Eurasian gene pools, suggesting movement of peoples in and out of that small region for many centuries before and during the first millennium BCE (González-Ruiz et al. 2012; Voevoda et al. 2000; Molodin 2000b), but the specifics of those movements still await investigation. We will undertake that issue here. How the Pazyryk peoples might have been connected to the larger world called by some the Scythian culture, which they surely did not know first hand, is still an open question. They developed a culture that was internally coherent and short-lived and that allows for a focused discussion of the group as locally as well as regionally constituted and maintained. We will undertake the task of reconstructing the Pazyryk society here and leave the issue of any direct role in the Scythian world to others.

Because there are no direct written documents from the Pazyryk people and the genomic evidence does not reveal the intricacies of life in the Sayan-Altai homeland, primary evidence in the form of burial remains is used here to explain and amplify what can be learned about familial relations, societal organization, the base economy and the rise of a developed sense of community. Images and shared patterns of behavior placed before the constituents through burial display, social order, advanced technologies, successful foreign affairs, control of certain kinds of knowledge such as about animals (especially horses) and their habits as well as tractability, the practice of ritual and employment of military equipment were all practices that allowed for the upkeep of their particular world. Such production, collection and consistent display of materials, imagery and constructions were surely meant to exert group recognition through visual messaging, and although the imagery belonged to a larger set of “animal-style” expression, those from Pazyryk form a subset which tell us about their local world. These displays recognized and then exhibited group coherence as well as distinction from others and signaled management of a territory and its economy, internally as well as externally.

1.2 Archaeological background

The Pazyryk Culture designation derives from the name of the find spot of the best-known group of mounded kurgans located in the valley of the Ulagan River where Russian archaeologists M. P. Griaznov (in 1929) and S. I. Rudenko (in 1947–1949) explored five large barrows preserved in permafrost, and three smaller ones (Fig. 1.4). Although the tombs had been robbed in ancient times, mummies of four people (two men and two women) were found in them, as well as skeletal rem...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of charts
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: The shape of Pazyryk Culture
• 2 Economic topography in the Pazyryk Culture
• 3 Social and occupational topography of the Pazyryk Culture: Valedictory use of burials
• 4 The larger picture: Relationships with Mongolia and China
• 5 The Pazyryk Culture: Concluding remarks
• Bibliography
• Index