Download or read book Eurasian Steppes Ecological Problems and Livelihoods in a Changing World written by Marinus J.A. Werger and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-06-14 with total page 570 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Steppes form one of the largest biomes. Drastic changes in steppe ecology, land use and livelihoods came with the emergence, and again with the collapse, of communist states. Excessive ploughing and vast influx of people into the steppe zone led to a strong decline in nomadic pastoralism in the Soviet Union and China and in severely degraded steppe ecosystems. In Mongolia nomadic pastoralism persisted, but steppes degraded because of strongly increased livestock loads. After the Soviet collapse steppes regenerated on huge tracts of fallow land. Presently, new, restorative steppe land management schemes are applied. On top of all these changes come strong effects of climate change in the northern part of the steppe zone. This book gives an up-to-date overview of changes in ecology, climate and use of the entire Eurasian steppe area and their effects on livelihoods of steppe people. It integrates knowledge that so far was available only in a spectrum of locally used languages.
Download or read book The People of the Eurasian Steppe written by Warwick Ball and published by . This book was released on 2021-10-31 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The history of movement across the Eurasian steppe since prehistory and its effect on Europe
Download or read book The Metal Road of the Eastern Eurasian Steppe written by Jianhua Yang and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-01-03 with total page 634 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is one of the first to systematically explore cultural interactions between the Northern Zone of China and the Eurasian Steppe, with a focus on the formation process of the Xiongnu Confederation and the Silk Road. Combining partition and staging analyses, the authors adopt a broad perspective, viewing the Northern Zone as part of the Eurasian Steppe and combining history with culture by investigating the spread of bronze artifacts. In addition, with more than three hundred figures and color photographs, it offers readers a uniquely grand panorama of two thousand years of cultural interactions between the Northern Zone of China and the Eurasian Steppe.
Download or read book The Role of Migration in the History of the Eurasian Steppe written by NA NA and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-04-30 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout their entire history, the sedentary civilizations of China and Europe had to deal with nomads and barbarians. This unique volume explores their drastically different responses: China 'chose' containment while Europe 'chose' expansion. Migration played a crucial role in this interaction. Issuing from two population centers, the sedentary one in the West and the nomadic one in the East, two powerful population streams confronted each other in the Eurasian Steppe. This confrontation was a crucial factor in determining patterns of Eurasian history - it destroyed existing states, created new ones, and drastically changed the balance of power. Even today, while Russian populations in Asia contract, the population pressures in China and Central Asia continue to build and are likely to spill over across the border. This book shows how we are witnessing the beginning of a new cycle of the age-old contest.
Download or read book Nomadic Art of the Eastern Eurasian Steppes written by Emma C. Bunker and published by Metropolitan Museum of Art. This book was released on 2002 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This fascinating book examines the artistic exchange between the nomadic peoples of what is now Inner Mongolia and their settled Chinese neighbors during the first millennium B.C.
Download or read book Nomads of the Eurasian Steppes in the Early Iron Age written by Jeannine Davis-Kimball and published by . This book was released on 1995 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Prehistoric Mobility and Diet in the West Eurasian Steppes 3500 to 300 BC written by Claudia Gerling and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2015-07-01 with total page 569 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Questions concerning mobility and migration as well as subsistence strategies of past societies have always been of major importance in archaeological research. The West Eurasian steppes in the Eneolithic, the Early Bronze and the Iron Age were largely inhabited by cultural communities believed to show an elevated level of spatial mobility, often linked to their subsistence economy. In this volume, questions concerning the mobility and potential migration as well as the diet and economy of the West Eurasian steppes communities during the 4th, the 3rd and the 1st Millennia BC are approached by applying isotope analysis, specifically 87Sr/86Sr, δ18O, δ15N and δ13C analyses. Adapting a combination of different isotopic systems to a study area of vast spatial and chronological dimension allowed a wide variety of questions to be answered and establishes the beginning of a database of biogeochemical data for the West Eurasian steppes. Besides the characterisation of mobility and subsistence patterns of the archaeological communities under discussion, attempts to identify possible Early Bronze Age migrations from the steppes to the steppe-like plains in parts of Eastern Europe were made, alongside an evaluation of the applicability of isotope analysis to this context.
Download or read book By Steppe Desert and Ocean written by Barry W. Cunliffe and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2015 with total page 541 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of the peoples of Eurasia, from the birth of farming to the expansion of the Mongols in the thirteenth century. An immense historical panorama set on a huge continental stage, this is also the story of how humans first started building the global system we know today.
Download or read book The Horse the Wheel and Language written by David W. Anthony and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2010-07-26 with total page 566 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Roughly half the world's population speaks languages derived from a shared linguistic source known as Proto-Indo-European. But who were the early speakers of this ancient mother tongue, and how did they manage to spread it around the globe? Until now their identity has remained a tantalizing mystery to linguists, archaeologists, and even Nazis seeking the roots of the Aryan race. The Horse, the Wheel, and Language lifts the veil that has long shrouded these original Indo-European speakers, and reveals how their domestication of horses and use of the wheel spread language and transformed civilization. Linking prehistoric archaeological remains with the development of language, David Anthony identifies the prehistoric peoples of central Eurasia's steppe grasslands as the original speakers of Proto-Indo-European, and shows how their innovative use of the ox wagon, horseback riding, and the warrior's chariot turned the Eurasian steppes into a thriving transcontinental corridor of communication, commerce, and cultural exchange. He explains how they spread their traditions and gave rise to important advances in copper mining, warfare, and patron-client political institutions, thereby ushering in an era of vibrant social change. Anthony also describes his fascinating discovery of how the wear from bits on ancient horse teeth reveals the origins of horseback riding. The Horse, the Wheel, and Language solves a puzzle that has vexed scholars for two centuries--the source of the Indo-European languages and English--and recovers a magnificent and influential civilization from the past.
Download or read book The Scythians written by Barry Cunliffe and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-09-26 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Brilliant horsemen and great fighters, the Scythians were nomadic horsemen who ranged wide across the grasslands of the Asian steppe from the Altai mountains in the east to the Great Hungarian Plain in the first millennium BC. Their steppe homeland bordered on a number of sedentary states to the south - the Chinese, the Persians and the Greeks - and there were, inevitably, numerous interactions between the nomads and their neighbours. The Scythians fought the Persians on a number of occasions, in one battle killing their king and on another occasion driving the invading army of Darius the Great from the steppe. Relations with the Greeks around the shores of the Black Sea were rather different - both communities benefiting from trading with each other. This led to the development of a brilliant art style, often depicting scenes from Scythian mythology and everyday life. It is from the writings of Greeks like the historian Herodotus that we learn of Scythian life: their beliefs, their burial practices, their love of fighting, and their ambivalent attitudes to gender. It is a world that is also brilliantly illuminated by the rich material culture recovered from Scythian burials, from the graves of kings on the Pontic steppe, with their elaborate gold work and vividly coloured fabrics, to the frozen tombs of the Altai mountains, where all the organic material - wooden carvings, carpets, saddles and even tattooed human bodies - is amazingly well preserved. Barry Cunliffe here marshals this vast array of evidence - both archaeological and textual - in a masterful reconstruction of the lost world of the Scythians, allowing them to emerge in all their considerable vigour and splendour for the first time in over two millennia.
Download or read book A Bronze Age Landscape in the Russian Steppes written by David W. Anthony and published by Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press. This book was released on 2016-12-31 with total page 537 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first English-language monograph that describes seasonal and permanent Late Bronze Age settlements in the Russian steppes, this is the final report of the Samara Valley Project, a US-Russian archaeological investigation conducted between 1995 and 2002. It explores the changing organization and subsistence resources of pastoral steppe economies from the Eneolithic (4500 BC) through the Late Bronze Age (1900-1200 BC) across a steppe-and-river valley landscape in the middle Volga region, with particular attention to the role of agriculture during the unusual episode of sedentary, settled pastoralism that spread across the Eurasian steppes with the Srubnaya and Andronovo cultures (1900-1200 BC). Three astonishing discoveries were made by the SVP archaeologists: agriculture played no role in the LBA diet across the region, a surprise given the settled residential pattern; a unique winter ritual was practiced at Krasnosamarskoe involving dog and wolf sacrifices, possibly related to male initiation ceremonies; and overlapping spheres of obligation, cooperation, and affiliation operated at different scales to integrate groups defined by politics, economics, and ritual behaviors.
Download or read book The Steppe Tradition in International Relations written by Iver B. Neumann and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-07-19 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Neumann and Wigen counter Euro-centrism in the study of international relations by providing a full account of political organisation in the Eurasian steppe from the fourth millennium BCE up until the present day. Drawing on a wide range of archaeological and historical secondary sources, alongside social theory, they discuss the pre-history, history and effect of what they name the 'steppe tradition'. Writing from an International Relations perspective, the authors give a full treatment of the steppe tradition's role in early European state formation, as well as explaining how politics in states like Turkey and Russia can be understood as hybridising the steppe tradition with an increasingly dominant European tradition. They show how the steppe tradition's ideas of political leadership, legitimacy and concepts of succession politics can help us to understand the policies and behaviour of such leaders as Putin in Russia and Erdogan in Turkey.
Download or read book Are All Warriors Male written by Katheryn M. Linduff and published by Rowman Altamira. This book was released on 2008 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of original essays presents an in-depth look at the archaeology of the Eurasian steppe--from China to Europe--and the evidence of gender roles in ancient nomadic societies.
Download or read book Eurasian Environments written by Nicholas Breyfogle and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2018-11-06 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through a series of essays, Eurasian Environments prompts us to rethink our understanding of tsarist and Soviet history by placing the human experience within the larger environmental context of flora, fauna, geology, and climate. This book is a broad look at the environmental history of Eurasia, specifically examining steppe environments, hydraulic engineering, soil and forestry, water pollution, fishing, and the interaction of the environment and disease vectors. Throughout, the authors place the history of Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union in a trans-chronological, comparative context, seamlessly linking the local and the global. The chapters are rooted in the ecological and geological specificities of place and community while unveiling the broad patterns of human-nature relationships across the planet. Eurasian Environments brings together an international group scholars working on issues of tsarist/Soviet environmental history in an effort to showcase the wave of fascinating and field-changing research currently being written.
Download or read book Empires and Exchanges in Eurasian Late Antiquity written by Nicola Di Cosmo and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-04-26 with total page 1284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Empires and Exchanges in Eurasian Late Antiquity offers an integrated picture of Rome, China, Iran, and the Steppes during a formative period of world history. In the half millennium between 250 and 750 CE, settled empires underwent deep structural changes, while various nomadic peoples of the steppes (Huns, Avars, Turks, and others) experienced significant interactions and movements that changed their societies, cultures, and economies. This was a transformational era, a time when Roman, Persian, and Chinese monarchs were mutually aware of court practices, and when Christians and Buddhists criss-crossed the Eurasian lands together with merchants and armies. It was a time of greater circulation of ideas as well as material goods. This volume provides a conceptual frame for locating these developments in the same space and time. Without arguing for uniformity, it illuminates the interconnections and networks that tied countless local cultural expressions to far-reaching inter-regional ones.
Download or read book Masters of the Steppe The Impact of the Scythians and Later Nomad Societies of Eurasia written by Svetlana Pankova and published by Archaeopress Publishing Ltd. This book was released on 2021-01-21 with total page 802 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents 45 papers presented at a major international conference held at the British Museum during the 2017 BP exhibition 'Scythians: warriors of ancient Siberia'. Papers include new archaeological discoveries, results of scientific research and studies of museum collections, most presented in English for the first time.
Download or read book Nomads as Agents of Cultural Change written by Reuven Amitai and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2014-12-31 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the first millennium BCE, nomads of the Eurasian steppe have played a key role in world history and the development of adjacent sedentary regions, especially China, India, the Middle East, and Eastern and Central Europe. Although their more settled neighbors often saw them as an ongoing threat and imminent danger—“barbarians,” in fact—their impact on sedentary cultures was far more complex than the raiding, pillaging, and devastation with which they have long been associated in the popular imagination. The nomads were also facilitators and catalysts of social, demographic, economic, and cultural change, and nomadic culture had a significant influence on that of sedentary Eurasian civilizations, especially in cases when the nomads conquered and ruled over them. Not simply passive conveyors of ideas, beliefs, technologies, and physical artifacts, nomads were frequently active contributors to the process of cultural exchange and change. Their active choices and initiatives helped set the cultural and intellectual agenda of the lands they ruled and beyond. This volume brings together a distinguished group of scholars from different disciplines and cultural specializations to explore how nomads played the role of “agents of cultural change.” The beginning chapters examine this phenomenon in both east and west Asia in ancient and early medieval times, while the bulk of the book is devoted to the far flung Mongol empire of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. This comparative approach, encompassing both a lengthy time span and a vast region, enables a clearer understanding of the key role that Eurasian pastoral nomads played in the history of the Old World. It conveys a sense of the complex and engaging cultural dynamic that existed between nomads and their agricultural and urban neighbors, and highlights the non-military impact of nomadic culture on Eurasian history. Nomads as Agents of Cultural Change illuminates and complicates nomadic roles as active promoters of cultural exchange within a vast and varied region. It makes available important original scholarship on the new turn in the study of the Mongol empire and on relations between the nomadic and sedentary worlds.
