This monograph provides a final report and synthesis of the multiyear, international Samara Valley Project (SVP). It is a must read for scholars interested in the evolution of steppe pastoralism during the Eurasian Bronze Age, and for those interested in exploring variability in prehistoric herding practices more broadly. This is a collaborative endeavor between colleagues from Hartwick College (Anthony, Brown) and the Volga State Academy of Social Sciences and Humanities (Khokhlov, Kuznetsov, and Mochalov) who conducted survey and excavation from 1995 to 2002 in the middle Volga region of the Russian Steppes—a linguistic, cultural, and ecological border zone between the hunting and gathering cultures of the forest steppe to the north and pastoral cultures in the drier steppes to the south.
The SVP focused on a variety of activity sites of the Late Bronze Age Srubnaya (or Timber Grave) tradition. The project's goal was to investigate a pattern of “settling down” that occurred on the Russian Steppes at the start of the Late Bronze Age (1900–1700 B.C.), where settlement numbers and cemeteries increased in frequency from the previous time period. At the project's inception, it was thought that the Srubnaya represented a classic example of Late Bronze Age agropastoralism.
A key assumption evaluated by the work of the SVP was that Bronze Age pastoral economies could not have survived in this region without some dependency on farming. This “Dependency Theory” proposes that farming was a necessary risk management strategy to mitigate against the unstable and often harsh climate of the Russian Steppes. Additionally, Bronze Age pastoral economies have often been thought to lack the internal political organization and market connections needed to exist independently (drawing from preconceptions of marginal nomadic pastoralists from historical and ethnographic contexts). While botanical evidence related to agriculture production is sparse from this region, a lack of systematic paleobotanical collecting techniques at archaeological sites prior to the mid-nineties limited archaeologists’ ability to assess the presence or intensity of plant cultivation and its role in Bronze Age economies in the Eurasian steppes.
The SVP targeted several different activity sites related to the Srubnaya tradition for sampling, radiocarbon dating, and excavation: a settlement, cemetery, copper mining site, and two herding camps. The analysis of finds from these contexts draws from the specialized fields of paleobotany, geoarchaeology, zooarchaeology, archaeometallurgy, and the analysis of human skeletal remains. Additionally, many contributions also incorporate larger regional sample sizes/references spanning the Neolithic to historic time periods, thereby providing readers with a broader temporal understanding of the various forms of data presented.
Contrary to expectations, the SVP did not find any evidence for domesticated plant cultivation or consumption (drawing from both paleobotanical and bioarchaeological data). Multiple lines of evidence support a model of a settled herding and gathering economy at the permanently occupied settlement of Krasnosamarskoe that was linked to a larger community via cooperative herding (as seen at the two herding camps), specialized copper mining, and shared rituals. The authors propose that, instead of becoming agropastoralists, Srubnaya herders may have settled along marshes to ensure winter access to a stable food source for animals during the declining climatic conditions observed at the start of the Late Bronze Age. Sufficient wild plant resources and the potential for specialization and wealth accumulation related to nearby mining resources may have provided additional factors in the cultural changes observed at this time period.
An intriguing and unique discovery of the SVP at Krasnosamarskoe is evidence for ritualized sacrifices and feasting on dog and wolf carcasses during the winter months. The authors speculate that this practice could have drawn members from a larger community (as this practice has not been identified at other Srubnaya sites) to participate in a coming of age ritual for boys akin to Indo-European mythology and traditions.
This publication provides a compelling case study of a sedentary herder-forager adaptation in the Eurasian Steppes, which contributes to a growing awareness of the complexity and variability of prehistoric forms of pastoralism on a global scale. Monographs like this set the stage for building a larger cross-cultural framework for exploring how differing herding/hunting/farming/gathering combinations relate to social, political, and economic organization and change over time. The detailed collaborative work needed to make this important micro-regional discovery can get a bit tedious and repetitive throughout the book's many contributions. However, the authors made sure to include a few juicy field stories in the publication to keep the reader engaged. The origin story of the SVPs “god of archaeology” and the details of the first-time excavator initiation ritual are not to be missed!
