Steppe Societies - Revisiting the Andronovo Culture

The Late Bronze Age (~3200-1200 BC) horse-back riding cultures of Asia, sometimes called Andronovo culture, have always been an interest to me. But I admit, I haven't written much to date. The problem has been the scarcity of data to be gathered from such a huge, huge area: a lot of it isn't in English. Previous syntheses pulled together what disparate data there was from a dozen different countries, but frankly, as a non-specialist, I've found it hard to get a reasonable handle on it.

In a new article in Current Anthropology this month, Michael Frachetti provides a new synthesis of the recently gathered data across the broad region of Asia, and argues that the mobile pastoralists arose from three separate trajectories, rather than just one big "Andronovo culture" block out of the Black Sea. He built his new set of theories on recent research, and emphasizes the variations in the region, rather than the similarities: my impression, bolstered by that of the people who commented on the article, is that this new set of theories both riles up long-standing paradigms and excites new ideas.

In his article, Frachetti uses an "Inner Asian Mountain Corridor" as a proposed route through which central Asia connected to the Eurasian steppes--one of his commenters suggests another. The commentaries provided by eminent scholars from the different countries, and their presence next to the article, exemplifies why Current Anthropology is among my favorite journals. The study has lit my fires to probe a bit deeper, and perhaps it will light yours as well.

• Read my introduction to Steppe Societies (much more to come)

Frachetti MD. 2012. Multiregional emergence of mobile pastoralism and nonuniform institutional complexity across Eurasia. Current Anthropology 53(1):2-38. With comments by David W. Anthony, A.V. Epimakhov, Bryan K. Hanks and R.C.P. Doonan, Nicolay N. Kradin, C.C. Lamberg-Karlovsky, Sandra L. Olsen, D.T. Potts, J. Daniel Rogers, and Natalia Shishlina.