Horses for Courses: Enduring Cultural Landscapes and Steppe Pastoralism – Accounting for Significant Pastoralist Settlements of the Steppe

Abstract

From the conception of history as a written subject the pastoralists of the Eurasian steppe have presented a challenge for interpretation. Distinct in their mobile lifeways and perceived as fundamentally dichotomous to the settled agriculturalist world, the ‘nomad’ came to embody an antagonistic and destructive force. As opposition to ‘civilised’ societies they were seen as disinclined to engage in anything constructive, construed as despoilers who were transitory in multiple senses of the word.

Itineraries of early travellers who ventured into the steppes noted vast populations organised around complex and region-wide systems. Several accounts regarding mobile pastoralist heartlands illustrate the complex inner workings that sustained some of history’s most expansionistic polities. Importantly there are references to monumental constructions that combined seasonal movements with permanent forms, at a scale that rivalled and at times exceeded sedentary examples. Recent archaeology has begun to vindicate these accounts and rectify millennia of misunderstanding.

This thesis is concerned with the structures positioned in the Eastern Steppe, along the waterways of the Mongolian Plateau and the inferences that can be made about them and their creators. Far from being intermittent or occasionally utilised, permanent constructions were consistently positioned along the lengths of river valleys and date from periods as early as the Xiongnu of the 3rd c. BCE to the Mongols of the 13th c. CE onwards. The most expansive of the mobile pastoralist states were developed around and sustained through vast arrays of structures which were configured in a way that complimented and utilised itinerance. These products of multi-scalar systems of mobility, aggregation and landscape management are fitting subjects for remote sensing with an extraordinary potential for research and understanding.