Horseback Riding and Bronze Age Pastoralism in the Eurasian Steppes

On Saturday, March 19, 2011 at the Penn Museum was held the Secrets of the Silk Road Symposium.
David W. Anthony gave a lecture "Horseback Riding and Bronze Age Pastoralism in the Eurasian Steppes".

The people who populated the Tarim Basin during the Bronze Age initially came from the west, and brought with them pastoral herding economies that had been evolving for 3000 years before the oldest of the Tarim ‘mummies’ was buried. This paper reviews the evidence for the development of pastoral herding economies in the Eurasian steppes before and during the Bronze Age. Pastoralism spread from west to east, arriving in the western Altai in the mid-fourth millennium BC. By the time that pastoral populations spread into the Tarim, perhaps in the late third millennium BC, a variety of very different kinds of pastoral economies had evolved in the mountains and steppes to the west.

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