Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant: Pastoral Ecologies and Economies of the Late Bronze Age in the Middle Volga Region, Russia

University Of Chicago, Chicago IL

Investigators

Abstract

Under Dr. Kathleen Morrison's supervision, Laura Popova will complete the collection of paleobotanical and archaeological data for her dissertation research on the Late Bronze Age (1700-1300BC) of the Middle Volga region, Russia (Samara province). During the Late Bronze Age (hereafter LBA), groups that inhabited the steppe and forest-steppe of Samara were strategically located between mining centers in the Ural Mountains, the desert oases of Kazakhstan, the metallurgical centers of the Don River, and dense forests to the north. In this period of unprecedented cultural interaction and trade, the Middle Volga region was a hub of activity. At the same time, there was a shift in settlement strategies from groups living in dispersed temporary communities to more long-term settlements. Most archaeologists attribute the change in settlement patterns to a change in climate (arid to humid) at the beginning of the LBA. This interpretation of the role of the environment in social change sees the environment as something static, and the group's reaction to environmental change as a given. This project seeks to re-evaluate this alteration in settlement strategies by examining how humans interacted with the environment of the Volga-Ural region during the LBA. We cannot understand why people built these long-term settlements until we have a better sense of the social, political, economic and ecological issues the people of the region faced during the LBA. This research will embed the occupational histories of places within the broader landscape histories of the region, because it is in understanding the linkages within and between places that we begin to reconstruct how resources were appropriated. Bronze Age landscape histories will be examined through excavation, survey and detailed macrobotanical, pollen, and fecal spherulite analyses highlighting a variety of spatial scales: intramural, local, and regional. The spatial and temporal dynamics of several LBA places (Peschani Dol, Kibit, Krasnosamarskoe), which correspond respectively to three environmental zones: steppe, forest-steppe, and the ecotone between these two zones, will be studied so as to illuminate how people moved through, were shaped by, and altered the LBA landscapes in the Middle Volga region. Popova's research will continue the Russian-American collaboration started by Dr. David Anthony and Dr. Igor Vasiliev. An aim of this partnership is to educate students of the Samara State Pedagogical University about the latest archaeological techniques. Students will make up the excavation crew at Kibit, where they will learn about new methods for studying pastoralism (macrobotanical, fecal spherulite, and pollen analyses). Results of this project will be disseminated in Popova's dissertation, journal publications, and in a field report prepared for the Russian Academy of Sciences. In addition, the results will be presented at national and international archaeology meetings in 2005. Popova will also create a pollen database for Samara using the pollen comparative collection at the Institute of Geography in Moscow. This database, which will be part of a larger Russian-English project website, will be the first easily accessible resource on pollen of the Russian steppe and forest-steppe and thus important for future palynological research of the region.