Prehistory of Siberia

In the Chalcolithic, the cultures of western and southern Siberia were pastoralists, while the eastern taiga and the tundra were dominated by hunter-gatherers until the Late Middle Ages and even beyond.

Substantial changes in society, economics and art indicate the development of nomadism in the Central Asian steppes in the first millennium BC.

Scholarly research of the archaeological background of the region between the Urals and the Pacific began in the reign of Peter the Great (1682-1725), who ordered the collection of Scythian gold hoards and thereby rescued the contents of several robbed graves before they were melted down.

Southwest Siberia reached a neolithic cultural level during the Chalcolithic, which began here towards the end of the fourth millennium BC, which roughly coincided with the introduction of copper–working.

In the valleys of the Ob and Irtysh the same ceramic cultures attested there during the neolithic continue; the changes in the Baikal region and Yakutia were very slight.

In the middle Bronze Age (c. 1800–1500 BC), the west Siberian Andronovo culture expanded markedly to the east and even reached the Yenissei valley.

The Andronovo culture dissolved; its southern successors produced an entirely new form of pottery, with bulbous ornamental elements.

A much larger break occurred in the central Asian steppe: the sedentary, predominantly pastoralist society of the late Bronze Age is replaced by the mobile horse nomads who would continue to dominate this region until modern times.

The mobility, which the new cultural form enabled, unleashed a powerful dynamic, since henceforth the people of Central Asia were able to move across the steppe in great numbers.

Settlements are no longer found, members of the new elite were buried in richly furnished kurgans and completely new forms of art developed.

Some theories, like the Kurgan hypothesis of Marija Gimbutas, attempt to relate hypothetical language families to archaeological cultures, but this is a highly uncertain procedure.

In the areas to the north of the Asiatic steppes, speakers of Uralic and Palaeo-Siberian languages are suspected to have been settled; in the Middle Ages, Turkic peoples appear here as well, but their prehistoric extent is not clear.

There is stronger evidence than usual for settlement continuity here from the Mesolithic until the second half of the first millennium AD, when the not yet entirely clear transition to the Medieval period occurred.

The Ymyyakhtakh culture (2200–1300 BC) is marked out by a new kind of "waffle ceramic", whose upper side is decorated with textile impressions and takes on a waffle-like appearance as a result.

Unlike in Yakutia, pastoralism was adopted in the Baikal region before the Middle Ages; the earliest evidence comes from the chalcolithic Glazkov culture.

From the Neolithic or early in the Chalcolithic, sedentary groups in which pastoralism played an important economic role developed in southwestern Siberia.

In the eastern part of the west Siberian forest steppe, on the Ob, Irtysh and Yenissei, decoration consisted of comb patterns, puncture rows and dimples, arranged in long series or fields (right image).

These ceramic types endured even into the Iron Age in west Siberia, yet a stark decline in decoration is observable, contemporary with the entrance of the Scythian and Hunnic Sarmatian nomads.

Excepting the abstract decoration of the pottery, which has been dealt with above, artistic products are found in south Siberia only in the early Bronze Age.

Millet seeds are also found in graves from Tuva, possibly indicating that a hitherto unknown population of settled agriculturalists, who might have been responsible for the area's metal-working, existed there alongside the horse nomads.

In the early Bronze Age, kurgans were erected for the first time, whose inhabitants were members of a newly developed warrior class (to judge from the grave goods interred with them) and were not buried in simple pits, but in wooden or stone structures.

The inhabitants of the Minusinsk hollow remained settled pastoralists even in the Iron Age, but their cultural development shows strong affinities to the neighbouring nomads.

[16] The situation in northern Tianshan and Zhetysu is remarkable: in the early Iron Age the nomadic Sakas lived there, but the region was subsequently taken over by the sedentary Wusun.

Especially in the western steppes metal wares are found almost exclusively decorated with elements of the animal style; in the permafrost of south Siberia and Transbaikal, felt carpets and other textiles with elements from the animal style are also found, among which a felt swan stuffed with moss deserves special attention.

Known features, which were shared by the societies of the horse nomad cultures of the Bronze Age, include a powerful warrior elite, whose wealth and strength is clear from their elaborate grave goods.

Evidence for the handling of the dead are only known from Altai and Tuva, were some bodies are preserved as ice mummies by the permafrost, making detailed analysis possible.

[22] This corroboration not only affirms the accuracy of Herodotus, but also indicates the cultural homogeneity of the steppe peoples of west Siberia, Central Asia and the region north of the Black Sea.

These could include up to twentyfive richly outfitted horses and an elaborate chariot; the actual burial chamber was built from wooden planks (often larch).

[24] Outstanding examples of kurgans include the necropoleis of Pazyryk in Altai, Noin Ula in Mongolia, and Arzhan in Tuva, where organic matter was preserved by the permafrost.

Although many large kurgans have been robbed of their contents by grave robbers, exceptional examples still remain, including countless gold objects.