Over the past two decades, archaeological research has resulted in a rewriting of Central Asian prehistory, and Alicia Ventresca-Miller pulls together many of the key revisionary perspectives. The book opens with a poignant exploration of her earliest adventures in Central Asia, while a Peace Corps volunteer, illustrating that this book has been more than two decades in the making. When I first met Ventresca-Miller at Claudia Chang’s excavations in 2008, in the foothills outside Almaty, Kazakhstan, she was already deeply immersed in her studies and was developing a scholarly reputation (I was just an eager young student). Since then, she has played a prominent role in rewriting the story of the peoples that lived between two continents and linked the ancient world. I had the privilege to piece together some of this revisionary narrative with Ventresca-Miller in a 2021 article in Current Anthropology, titled Nomadic Narratives, in which we presented a complex and well-orchestrated argument in support of agropastoralist models of palaeoeconomy. In Domesticated, she surpasses our initial discussions, challenging the nomadic narratives for Central Asian prehistory and the broader ‘exceptionalism’ that has dominated much of the archaeology for this region. Stepping away from claims that Silk Road trade routes were formed by nomads or that socially complex political systems developed in the absence of farming, the volume seeks to integrate a more holistic view of palaeoeconomy and the rise of social institutions.
The book is framed around one specific question: “How did the adoption of domesticates transform societies?” (p.2). Anywhere else in the world, this question would seem almost self-evident, but archaeologists working in Central Asia have always envisioned their subjects as being exceptional, and have written stories of highly specialised nomadic empires, mass militant migrations of mobile people that altered the course of history, and shepherds forming the most expansive trade networks of the ancient world. The question gains particular interest in northern Central Asia, as domesticated herd animals appear to spread into this region many centuries prior to cultivated grain crops. This debate is particularly popular among Eurasian specialists in light of the resurrection of the Yamnaya Expansion model through a series of ancient human genetics studies over the past decade. “What Domesticated aims to show is that cultivated species (harnessed by local groups) were the driving force behind the complex ancient societies that culminated in the Silk Roads” (p.29).
While few archaeologists would challenge claims regarding the importance of sheep, goats, cows and horses in the daily life of ancient Central Asians, it is the integration of farming that provides novelty to Ventresca-Miller’s perspective. She states that: “The term agropastoral is generally used to signify a practice of agriculture that comprises both the growing of crops and the raising of livestock” (p.25). Even when discussing the Mongolian grasslands, she rips down the façade of exceptionalism, noting that “agriculture was an important part of a productive economy in the region, facilitating the rise of a steep hierarchy and multiple levels of elites among the Xiongnu” (p.204). She replaces the Shadow Empire of Thomas Barfield (Reference Barfield1989) and the various dependency models with a framework that she coins the Millet Empire.
Once recognising that most ancient Central Asians were agropastoralist, they can be better fit into a global comparative archaeological perspective and, again, Ventresca-Miller’s claims would not seem exceptional anywhere else in the world. She argues that farming and pastoralism are simultaneously responsible for the rise of socially complex political systems, expansive exchange networks and the alteration of the local ecology. Humans modified their landscapes by herding animals and clearing land for cultivation, resulting in both positive and negative feedbacks. “Complex relationships between ecologies, humans, and food production strategies suggest that the ways that land is used have had a greater impact on the ecosystem than the size of the population” (p.21).
The volume traces the movement of goods, people, ideas and domesticated organisms along two perceived routes—the steppe highway and the Silk Road. Ventresca-Miller coins new terms for each of these corridors of communication, branding them the Great Steppe Route (GSR) and Mountain River Pathways (MRP), respectively. She believes that the steppe routes would have been equally effective in disseminating cultural memes, but that they tend to be overlooked in scholarship given the perceived inhospitable nature of the open grasslands. The Silk Roads were characterised by mountain river valleys and their glacial-melt streams and rich rain-fed meadows. The most-detailed and well-researched section of the book is the discussion of the history of debate surrounding the domestication of the horse—most notably in relationship to the Botai controversy. Ventresca-Miller traces the history of research at the Botai sites (Kazakhstan) and the, often heated, debates over the origin of horse domestication.
Possibly the most controversial—yet the part that I appreciate most—aspect of the book is the insistence that agriculture was key to the rise of social complexity. This is, as above, a shocking statement only for Central Asia where there has been a century of debate about how socially complex systems formed in the absence of farming; the debaters often relied on either a conflation of cultural complexity and political complexity or a replacing of vertical with horizontal complexity. Ventresca-Miller states: “While social complexity can be problematic to measure, it generally includes a shift towards inequality, population aggregation, occupational specialization, and social stratification. The adoption of domesticates is often associated with a radical restructuring of human societies” (p.8). She concludes: “In the case of north-central Asia, one of the main drivers of social complexity is the introduction of domesticates” (p.9). Again, all these statements would hardly merit mention anywhere else in the world, as rarely (if ever) have elaborate political systems formed in the absence of farming.
This book presents a brief, yet captivating, discussion of the myriad new results from modern scientific investigations into Central Asian archaeology over the past two decades. Ventresca-Miller discusses the ecological impacts of grazing on past landscapes, the evidence for foddering in prehistory and the role of storing dairy as an adaptive strategy. She also focuses on revelations regarding the widespread prominence of farming deep into the past in Central Asia, summarising the dispersal process of East Asian millets westward and the cereals eastward. She emphasises the ways in which these agropastoral systems were integrated, for example, by feeding chaff to herd animals after grain harvest. She does not avoid controversial topics, such as her claim that “in north-central Asia, hunting-gathering-fishing (HGF) economies transitioned directly to pastoralism, with grain cultivation being adopted later” (p.173). Ongoing research is testing whether local hunters transitioned at all (versus simply being replaced) and also whether there are earlier iterations of farming than previously recognised. In grappling with the rise of social complexity, Ventresca-Miller is taking the bull by the horns and challenging the exceptionalist views of Central Asian prehistory.
