Earliest direct evidence for broomcorn millet and wheat in the central Eurasian steppe region

Abstract

Before 3000 BC, societies of western Asia were cultivating wheat and societies of China were cultivating broomcorn millet; these are early nodes of the world's agriculture. The authors are searching for early cereals in the vast lands that separate the two, and report a breakthrough at Begash in south-east Kazakhstan. Here, high precision recovery and dating have revealed the presence of both wheat and millet in the later third millennium BC. Moreover the context, a cremation burial, raises the suggestion that these grains might signal a ritual rather than a subsistence commodity.

Multiregional Emergence of Mobile Pastoralism and Nonuniform Institutional Complexity across Eurasia

“…Ongoing projects increasingly extend the prehistoric time depth of Eurasian pastoralist landscapes and resituate the regional and chronological range of material and technological developments that shaped early steppe societies (Anthony et al 2005;Chang et al 2003;Frachetti and Mar'yashev 2007;Hanks, Epimakhov, and Renfrew 2007;Olsen et al 2006;Parzinger and Boroffka 2003;Wright, Honeychurch, and Amartuvshin 2009). Taken synthetically, new data position central Eurasia as the host of key innovations, such as horse domestication and chariots, and as the terrain for distant transmission of commodities such as semiprecious stones, domesticated grains, and bronze technology and the ideological and political institutions associated with these innovations (Frachetti et al 2010;Mei 2003;Outram et al 2009). This outburst of discoveries in central Eurasia elicits the questions (1) How did materials and ideas innovated in the steppe diffuse or translate beyond the steppe region and (2) How were they integrated into larger-scale centralized societies in south, southwest, and east Asia?…”

“…Along the western periphery of the steppe, grain agriculture provided a complementary resource that further distinguishes the economy of pastoralist groups north of the Black Sea. In the eastern steppe regions, grains were not raised as subsistence crops until the mid-first millennium BC (Miller-Rosen, Chang, and Grigoriev 2000), although new evidence indicates that millet and wheat were likely exchanged as commodities by 2300 BC (Frachetti et al 2010). Furthermore, the process of horse domestication in the north-central steppe zone-an undeniably catalytic innovation for Eurasian societies in that regionscores an economic divide between the eastern and western forms of mobile pastoralism in the fourth millennium BC.…”

“…Recently published botanical evidence from Begash illustrates the ritual use of domesticated wheat and broomcorn millet in cremation ceremonies around 2300 cal BC (Frachetti et al 2010). The archaeological context of the Begash wheat and millet-a cremation burial-does not indicate that the grains were grown locally at this time.…”

Freshwater Reservoir Effect on Redating of Eurasian Steppe Cultures: First Results for Eneolithic and Early Bronze Age Northeast Kazakhstan

“…Frachetti et al 2010;Murphy et al 2013). Archaeologically, fishing is regarded as playing only a minor role in the economy of the Early Bronze Age populations in the region, as very few associated artefacts have been recovered.…”

Panicoids in Xiongnu burial ground (Mongolia, First Century AD): problems of identification

“…A large project on the study of panicoid grasses was fulfilled by a scientific team based on the data of archaeological excavations of settlements in Ukraine (The East-West Millet Project) (Hunt et al, 2011;Motuzaite-Matuzeviciute et al, 2012. Interesting findings of plant remains, including grasses, were recently made at the Begash burial site, Kazakhstan (Frachetti et al, 2010;Sprengler et al, 2014;Doumani et al, 2015).…”