Archaeological horse remains from Mongolia's late Bronze Age Deer Stone-Khirigsuur (DSK) culture present some of the oldest direct radiocarbon dates for horses in northeast Asia, hinting at an important link between late Bronze Age social developments and the adoption or innovation of horse transport in the region. However, wide error ranges and imprecision associated with calibrated radiocarbon dates obscure the chronology of early domestic horse use in Mongolia and make it difficult to evaluate the role of processes like environmental change, economic interactions, or technological development in the formation of mobile pastoral societies. Using a large sample of new and published radiocarbon dates, this study presents a Bayesian chronological model for the initiation of domestic horse sacrifice at DSK culture sites in Mongolia. Results reveal the rapid spread of horse ritual over a large portion of the eastern Steppe circa 1200 BCE, concurrent with the first appearance of draught horses in China during the late Shang dynasty. These results suggest that key late Bronze Age cultural transformationsspecifically the adoption of mobile pastoralism and early horseback riding-took place during a period of climate amelioration, and may be linked to the expansion of horses into other areas of East Asia.

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The question of complex socio-political organization among pastoral nomadic groups has long posed a theoretical challenge for anthropologists, historians, and archaeologists alike. The problems arise from a disciplinary tendency to view pastoralists within a narrow economic and ecological framework but, in addition to this, the basic conception of 'complexity' has itself proven problematic. The definitions of complexity built originally upon systems theory and political economy place emphasis on organizational criteria derived primarily from sedentary societies with class stratification, intensive subsistence economies, and centralized administration. In this paper we argue that these classic definitions of complexity have not provided a good fit for analyzing the kinds of political organizations constructed by pastoral nomads of the Eurasian steppe zone. For that reason, we explore new ways of conceptualizing complex organization based on processes of integration, scale, and mobility. This approach offers a better explanation for material patterns documented across two neighboring valleys in northern Mongolia and provides substantial insight to the sub-regional polities preceding the rise of the Xiongnu state during the late first millennium BCE.

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