Agricultural Dispersals from Southwest Asia to the East

Central Asia

The agricultural movement that gave rise to the Zagrosian agricultural Neolithic by about 7500 BC continued on to reach Pakistan, the Caucasus, and Turkmenistan in central Asia during the seventh millennium BC. The spread to Pakistan probably occurred through northern Iran, rather than through the desert core of the Iranian Plateau, but current lack of information from northern Iran and Afghanistan makes further speculation rather difficult. However, the remarkable site of Mehrgarh in Baluchistan, on the Kachi alluvial plain about 150 kilometers southeast of Quetta, has a Preceramic Neolithic sequence through about 10 meters of archaeological deposit. Baluchistan lies toward the eastern limit of the winter rainfall zone and Mehrgarh itself provides a remarkable beacon-like outpost, close to the eastern limits of Fertile Crescent Neolithic expansion.

The foundation of Mehrgarh probably occurred a little before 7000 BC. The site has mud brick constructions of small rectangular doorless rooms arranged in rows, like those of some PPNB settlements. The stone tools are dominated by microlithic forms such as trapezes and lunates, similar to Epipaleolithic industries such as the Natufian and Zarzian, the latter perhaps indicating the most likely source of the tradition. Bitumen-hafted glossed sickle blades indicate cereal harvesting, and grain impressions in mud bricks indicate that a naked (i.e., domesticated) form of 6-row barley was the dominant crop. Hulled emmer and einkorn, 2-row barley, possibly durum or bread wheat, and dates were also present. In the lower levels there were no domesticated animals, but sheep and goats were domesticated toward the end of the Preceramic phase, together with the native Indian humped bovid (Bos indicus) that rapidly came to dominate the animal economy. Water buffalo bones occur as well, but it is unclear if this animal, so fundamental to the rice-farming economy of later South and Southeast Asia, was also domesticated in Preceramic Mehrgarh.

Female figurines are of generalized Middle Eastern type.'

Although there have been suggestions that Mehrgarh represents a local independent generation of a Neolithic economy, this is really stretching the evidence rather far. Zebu cattle (Bos indicus) were presumably domesticated locally, and possibly even goats (MacHugh and Bradley 2001), but everything about the site suggests a cultural origin further to the west. Local domestication of a plant or animal need not mean a totally independent generation of an agricultural economy. Perhaps we have here, as so often, a combination of a cultural spread assimilating to some degree a "native" tradition.

The appearance of the first agricultural communities in Turkmenistan, east of the Caspian Sea, occurred somewhat later than at Mehrgarh. The Neolithic of Turkmenistan had pottery from the beginning, with the key site of Jeitun being founded around 6000 BC. Jeitun lies in a region which would have required irrigation to make agriculture successful, hence perhaps its relative lateness and seeming marginality on the northeastern edge of the Middle Eastern early agricultural sphere. The village covered about 0.4 hectares, with one-roomed square houses built of clay bricks with plastered floors and grain bins. Domestic sheep and goats were present from the start, together with einkorn and barley and a possible irrigation ditch. The Jeitun painted pottery seems related to that of the site of Jarmo in Iraqi Kurdistan, and it is probably to this region or northern Iran that the Jeitun culture will ultimately be traced. Here, as at Mehrgarh, the Middle Eastern economy was required to come to grips with its ecological boundaries, in this case on the fringes of the central Asian and zone (Harris et al. 1996; Harris 1998b).

Farming probably reached the Caucasus by about 6500 BC, and large numbers of Neolithic sites are reported from the eastern hinterlands of the Black Sea, on the Kura and Araxes riverine plains and close to some of the other small rivers that flow into the Caspian. According to Karine Kushnareva (1997), the oldest Neolithic sites have pottery and a full complement of domestic animals and plants, but she also notes continuity of Mesolithic technology in some of the remoter regions. As we will see, this is in accord with the linguistic situation in the Caucasus; an incoming farming economy was spread by farmers moving in from the south, but it was also clearly adopted to some degree by native populations whose languages survive in descendant form to the present.

To the north of about latitude 36°, a belt of rather forbidding desert extends east of the Caspian, through the Tian Shan ranges, and into the Taklimakan and Gobi desert regions of China and Mongolia. Early farmers did not penetrate these desert regions as far as we know, at least not until horse riding and the use of bronze allowed Andronovo pastoralists to spread through vast regions during the second millennium BC, as far to the east as the Altai and Tian Shan (Dergachev 1989). However, the grassland steppes to the north of these deserts, together with the belt of forest-steppe further north again, did witness a spread of mainly caprovine pastoralists with some cereal production after 5000 BC. The western steppes run from the mouth of the Danube, around the northern sides of the Black and Caspian Seas (Figure 4.1), and then fade eastward at the feet of the Altai and Sayan Mountains, virtually in the exact center of Asia. They then commence again in Mongolia. As far as the western steppes are concerned, the Kelteminar, Mariupol, Samara, and Botai complexes were all cultures of westerly derivation in the period down to 3500 BC, with Botai being the most easterly and reaching a little beyond the Urals. The succeeding Afanasievo culture reached the Altai by 2500 BC.

The more westerly of these groups in the vicinity of the Black Sea grew cereals such as emmer, einkorn, barley, common millet (Panicum miliaceum), and foxtail millet (Setaria italica), as well as herding sheep, goats, and occasional cattle (the latter perhaps used for traction in later prehistoric periods). To the east of the Urals, it is unlikely that cereal production would ever have been a very viable activity, at least not prior to the Bronze Age, and the early emphasis seems to have been mainly pastoralist. Horses were hunted initially, and the invention of horse riding during the second millennium BC (Levine et al. 1999) allowed for much greater mobility and population expansion.

The Neolithic steppe cultures seem all to have moved in from the west or south; from the Cucuteni and Tripolye cultures north of the Black Sea, perhaps from the Caucasus, and perhaps even from Turkmenistan in the case of the Kelteminar culture of the Aral Sea region. At this time, no serious relationships appear to have existed with Neolithic cultures in China. But during the Iron Age of the first millennium BC, we know that cultures of oasis regions in the Tarim Basin of Xinjiang, and a little to the north in the alluvial outwashes from the Tian Shan in Kazakhstan, were based on the production of crops such as wheat,

common millet (Panicum), and rice, together with sheep, goats, and cattle (Chang and Tourtelotte 1998; Rosen 2001). Given that the Tarim Basin once contained Indo-European languages of one of the earliestdifferentiated subgroups in the family (Tocharian), and given the occurrence of common millet cultivation in Neolithic China, Iran, and the western steppes by 5000 BC, one begins to wonder if there were earlier Neolithic movements through these desert regions. Common millet perhaps originated somewhere between the Caspian Sea and Xinjiang (Zohary and Hopf 2000). Did Neolithic settlers ever penetrate the Tarim Basin from Afghanistan, the Russian steppes, or even western China? Only future research will tell.