The research, led by Xue Ling and Zhuoran Zhang of Northwest University in Xi’an together with colleagues from Termez State University and other institutions in Uzbekistan and China, focused on bone collagen extracted from the faunal assemblage excavated at Kattabulak. Stable isotope analysis of carbon and nitrogen in collagen is a well-established technique for reconstructing ancient animal diets. Carbon isotope ratios distinguish between animals that ate C3 plants, such as most trees, shrubs and cool-season grasses, and those that consumed C4 plants, which include millet and other tropical grasses that use a different photosynthetic pathway. Nitrogen isotope ratios, meanwhile, reflect trophic level and can be influenced by factors such as aridity, manuring and the consumption of animal products.

The isotopic results divided the Kattabulak livestock into two clearly different groups. Sheep and goats, represented by eleven individuals, produced a mean carbon isotope value of minus 18.42 per mil with a standard deviation of 1.44 per mil, and a mean nitrogen value of 7.94 per mil. Horses, with five individuals analyzed, yielded a mean carbon value of minus 16.56 per mil and a mean nitrogen value of 8.24 per mil. Crucially, these values broadly overlap with those of eleven wild herbivores from the site, which averaged minus 17.75 per mil for carbon and 7.41 per mil for nitrogen. That overlap is the isotopic fingerprint of free-grazing animals, creatures turned out onto natural pastures and living largely on the same wild vegetation as their undomesticated counterparts.

Cattle tell a very different story. The five cattle individuals analyzed produced a mean carbon isotope value of minus 14.40 per mil, substantially higher than the ovicaprids, equids or wild herbivores, and a mean nitrogen value of 9.86 per mil, also markedly elevated. Carbon values in this range indicate sustained consumption of C4 biomass, and in the Bronze Age Central Asian context the most plausible source is millet, either fed directly as grain or indirectly as stalks, chaff and other byproducts of the harvest. The elevated nitrogen values may reflect the same foddering practice, since millet grown on manured irrigated fields carries higher nitrogen signatures, or they may indicate that cattle were kept in closer proximity to the settlement and its agricultural residues.

This pattern implies a diversified management system in which different species were treated differently according to their economic roles. Sheep, goats and horses roamed free, perhaps tended by herders who moved them across the surrounding landscapes, while cattle were integrated more tightly into the agricultural core of the settlement, fed on the products of cultivated fields and possibly used for traction, dairying or both. Such a system would have made ecological sense. Cattle require more water and better forage than sheep or goats, and keeping them near irrigated fields would have allowed farmers to recycle crop byproducts, exploit manure for field fertility and maintain the animals needed for plowing within easy reach.

The findings carry particular weight because Kattabulak sits within the territory of the Sapalli culture, a southern Central Asian Bronze Age archaeological culture known for its fortified settlements, proto-urban centers such as Dzharkutan and Sapallitepa, and its connections to the wider Oxus Civilization, also called the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex. These communities practiced irrigation agriculture along river valleys, and the new isotope data provide direct biological evidence that animal husbandry was woven into that irrigated agro-pastoral economy rather than existing as a separate, mobile strand of the subsistence system. The herding strategies documented at Kattabulak contrast with those known from northern Central Asia, where steppe communities relied more heavily on extensive mobility and showed different patterns of C4 plant consumption in their livestock.

Millet itself is one of the great travelers of prehistory. Domesticated in northern China, where common millet and foxtail millet were cultivated as early as ten thousand years ago, the crop spread westward across Eurasia during the third and second millennia BCE, a movement sometimes described as the trans-Eurasian crop exchange. Archaeobotanical finds have traced broomcorn millet to the central Eurasian steppe by the late third millennium BCE, and isotopic studies of human bone collagen have charted what researchers have called the Isotopic Millet Road, a corridor of rising C4 consumption stretching from northern China toward Europe. The Kattabulak data add a southern branch to this map, showing that by the Bronze Age millet had reached the irrigated oases of southern Uzbekistan and was being used not only as human food but also as animal fodder.

The use of millet as fodder rather than solely as a staple crop is a subtle but important distinction. When millet enters the human food chain directly, it shows up strongly in human bone collagen. When it is channeled through livestock, its isotopic signature appears first in the animals and only secondarily, and in diluted form, in the people who consumed their meat, milk or labor. The Kattabulak pattern therefore suggests a sophisticated agricultural economy in which crop production, animal management and field fertility were deliberately linked. Feeding cattle on millet byproducts would have converted agricultural waste into meat, milk and draft power, while the resulting manure could return nutrients to the irrigated fields, closing a loop that intensified production in an oasis environment where arable land and water were both precious and limited.

The study also underscores how local environmental and social conditions shaped animal management across Bronze Age Eurasia. In the arid Surkhan Darya valley, with its hot summers and limited pasture, free-grazing sheep, goats and horses could exploit the natural vegetation of the surrounding foothills and steppe, while cattle benefited from the shelter and feed of the settlement. In the wetter, more northerly regions of Kazakhstan and the Tianshan, other communities adopted different solutions, from transhumance to foddering with cultivated crops in mountain valleys. The comparison highlights that there was no single Bronze Age pastoralism but rather a spectrum of adaptive strategies, each tuned to local ecology, agricultural scale and cultural practice, including the presence and extent of millet cultivation itself.

For archaeologists, the Kattabulak results demonstrate the power of faunal stable isotope analysis to recover management practices that leave no trace in architecture or artifacts. The bones of ordinary livestock, carefully sampled and measured, can reveal which animals grazed free and which were fed at the trough, and can trace the movement of a domesticated crop through an ancient economy. As isotope databases for Central Asia continue to grow, sites like Kattabulak will help scholars map the full diversity of Bronze Age lifeways across the region, from the mobile herders of the northern steppes to the irrigation farmers of the southern oases, and to understand how the spread of millet reshaped both human diets and the animals that sustained them. The research was funded by the National Key Research and Development Program of China and partner institutions, and the underlying data are available in the article’s supplementary materials.

Subject of Research: Bronze Age herding strategies and millet foddering in southern Central Asia revealed by faunal stable isotope analysis

Article Title: New evidence for Bronze Age herding strategies and millet exploitation in Southern Central Asia from faunal stable isotope analysis at Kattabulak, Surkhan Darya, Uzbekistan

Article References: Ling, X., Zhang, Z., Shaydullaev, A. S., Kholtojiyevich, U. S., Zhu, L., Zou, T., Sidikova, M., Shaydullayev, S., Normuminov Bakhtiyor ugli, M., Wang, Y., Ding, Y., Zhu, J., Li, D., Festa, M., & Ma, J. (2026). New evidence for Bronze Age herding strategies and millet exploitation in Southern Central Asia from faunal stable isotope analysis at Kattabulak, Surkhan Darya, Uzbekistan. Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences, 18(10), Article 206. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12520-026-02573-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12520-026-02573-8

Keywords: Kattabulak, Bronze Age, Central Asia, Uzbekistan, stable isotopes, millet, herding strategies, agro-pastoralism, Sapalli culture, cattle, Oxus Civilization, zooarchaeology

The research forms part of The Rise II project, a large-scale initiative based at the University of Gothenburg that seeks to reinterpret key processes of European prehistory by integrating ancient DNA, isotopic investigations, linguistics and archaeology. Within that framework, the new paper, titled Exploring mobility in Bronze Age Greece: A Sr isotope perspective, set out to answer two deceptively simple questions: how did human mobility change throughout the Bronze Age, and whether the movement of people was driven by specific identifiable factors. The answers, according to the team, complicate a picture that earlier scholarship had painted in broad and often gendered strokes.

The analytical foundation of the study rests on a well-established principle of geochemistry. Strontium enters the human body through water and food, both of which are typically gathered from the immediate environment in premodern societies. Because the strontium isotope signature of a landscape reflects the age and composition of its underlying geology, that signature is transferred into human bones and teeth during growth and mineralization. Dental enamel, which forms in childhood and does not subsequently remodel, preserves the isotope composition of the place where a person spent their early years. By comparing the values measured in skeletal samples against so-called bioavailable baselines established for the region surrounding each burial site, researchers can determine with a significant degree of certainty whether an individual was local or grew up elsewhere.

Applying this method to 199 individuals from six sites, the team found that non-local people were present in every community examined. The consistency of the figure, holding at roughly five to ten percent across the sampled populations, suggests that foreign-born residents were a normal and enduring feature of Bronze Age Greek society rather than an occasional anomaly tied to a single period or place. The Mediterranean world of the third and second millennia BCE witnessed profound socio-cultural and economic transformations, varying across regions and over time, and expanding exchange networks are known to have played an important role in these developments. What remained poorly understood until now was the extent to which the movement of goods was accompanied by the migration and settlement of foreign individuals within local communities.

One of the study’s most striking findings concerns gender. Previous research has often suggested that women were more likely to move between communities, particularly through marriage in patrilineal societies, a pattern documented in various prehistoric contexts and widely invoked to explain the spread of technologies and styles. The new data do not support such a one-sided picture for Bronze Age Greece. The number of non-local women and men proved to be comparable, indicating that several different factors, rather than marriage alone, may have driven an individual’s mobility. As Serena Sabatini, associate professor of archaeology at the University of Gothenburg, noted, this balance suggests a more complex set of motivations behind movement, potentially including trade, craft specialization, diplomatic exchange and other forms of contact that the expanding Bronze Age networks encouraged.

Status, too, appears to have had little bearing on who moved. Non-local individuals were identified across different burial practices, appearing both in unremarkable graves and in richly furbished ones. This distribution reveals that people were mobile regardless of their wealth or social standing, and that foreigners were integrated into their adopted communities to the point of receiving burial treatment consistent with local norms. For archaeologists, the finding is significant because burial opulence is often used as a proxy for social hierarchy; the new evidence shows that a wealthy grave could belong to someone born far away just as easily as to a member of the local elite, and that mobility was not the privilege of a mobile merchant class alone.

The age profile of the migrants adds another layer of nuance. No foreigners were identified among the investigated children, which is to say that the youngest individuals in the sample all carried isotope signatures matching their burial regions. Young adults under the age of thirty, by contrast, were the group most likely to be non-local. Taken together, these patterns suggest that mobility and migration in Bronze Age Greece concerned, to a considerable extent, single young individuals rather than the relocation of entire families. Whether these young movers arrived as traders, craftspeople, marriage partners, or in other capacities, the data indicate that they arrived as individuals and were buried within the communities that received them.

The methodological strength of the study lies in its scale and its grounding in regional baselines. Strontium isotope analysis has become one of the most powerful tools in modern archaeology precisely because it sidesteps the assumptions embedded in grave goods or architectural styles, which can travel through trade without any human movement at all. By measuring the isotope ratios directly in human tissue, researchers gain a biological record of where a person drew their food and water during the years their skeleton was forming. The 199 skeletal samples analyzed here, drawn from excavations across central and southern Greece, allowed the team to track how mobility behaved across both space and time within the Bronze Age, rather than relying on isolated case studies that might reflect local idiosyncrasies.

The broader implications reach well beyond the Aegean. The Bronze Age Mediterranean is often narrated as a world connected by the exchange of metals, textiles and prestige goods, with palatial centers in the Aegean, the eastern Mediterranean and beyond linked by maritime routes. The new findings demonstrate that this connectivity had a human dimension that was demographically meaningful yet socially diffuse: a small but persistent fraction of every community was foreign-born, drawn from both sexes and all levels of wealth. Such a pattern implies that prehistoric exchange networks did not merely move objects between distant elites but also moved people into the everyday fabric of local life, where they lived, worked and were eventually buried alongside their neighbors.

The study also serves as a corrective to lingering stereotypes about prehistoric societies. The assumption that women moved and men stayed, rooted in models of patrilineal marriage exchange, has shaped interpretations of genetic and archaeological data across Europe. By showing comparable numbers of non-local men and women in Bronze Age Greece, the Gothenburg-led team argues that mobility was a multifaceted phenomenon, produced by a range of social and economic forces that varied from person to person. The research, published open access in PLOS One on 23 September 2026, offers a template for future work across the Mediterranean and Europe, where the combination of large skeletal samples, regional isotope baselines and archaeological context promises to reveal, community by community, how the ancient world was knit together not only by goods and ideas but by the quiet, persistent movement of people themselves.

Subject of Research: Bronze Age human mobility in Greece determined through strontium isotope analysis of skeletal remains

Article Title: New study reveals Bronze Age mobility across ancient Greece

Article References: New study reveals Bronze Age mobility across ancient Greece. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: Bronze Age, Greece, strontium isotopes, archaeology, human mobility, migration, PLOS One, University of Gothenburg, Mediterranean, isotope analysis, burial practices, ancient DNA

The central finding is chronological. Millet, the researchers discovered, was already being consumed in southeastern Poland around 1590 BCE, more than a century earlier than previous estimates had suggested. That revision matters because the timing of millet’s arrival has long been debated among European archaeologists. The crop, domesticated originally in what is now Inner Mongolia, spread westward along trade and contact networks that connected the steppe with the settled farming societies of Europe. Knowing precisely when it appeared in local diets allows archaeologists to align that arrival with broader developments in Bronze Age society, including population growth, increasing food demand and shifting climatic conditions.

Equally significant is the manner of the adoption. The isotope data show that millet did not sweep through the region as an instant staple. Instead, it was consumed at first by only a handful of individuals, gradually working its way into foodways that had been dominated for millennia by wheat and barley. By analysing tissues that form at different stages of life, the team could reconstruct dietary change within individual lifetimes. Several early millet consumers had clearly grown up eating the traditional cereals, only incorporating the new grain later in adulthood. This within-lifetime evidence pins down the moment the crop entered existing diets with a precision that conventional archaeological methods rarely achieve.

The multi-proxy approach at the heart of the study is what makes such fine-grained conclusions possible. Carbon and nitrogen isotope ratios in bone collagen reflect a person’s average diet over the years, capturing the relative contribution of different plant and animal foods. Oxygen and strontium isotopes, by contrast, record the geology and hydrology of the places where an individual’s food was produced during tissue formation. Radiocarbon dating anchors the timeline, palaeoproteomic analysis of tooth proteins establishes biological sex, and previously published ancient genetic data situates individuals within the region’s population history. Each line of evidence answers a different question, and only by reading them together could the researchers distinguish local dietary change from the arrival of new people.

That distinction proved crucial. Both millet consumers and non-consumers in the study shared broadly similar archaeological and genetic backgrounds, and the earliest consumers carried strontium isotope signatures compatible with local origins. The data therefore offer little support for a simple migration-based explanation, in which the crop would have arrived with an incoming population that brought its own farming traditions. Instead, the evidence points to an innovation adopted from within, by communities already rooted in the region, in response to pressures and opportunities they faced in their own environment.

The environmental dimension of the story is where the study’s implications expand beyond diet. Broomcorn millet grows quickly, matures within a single summer season, and tolerates relatively dry conditions and poor soils far better than wheat or barley. Those qualities meant that cultivating it opened up parts of the landscape that had previously seen little agricultural use. According to the researchers, the different strontium isotope compositions found in the skeletal tissues of millet consumers compared with non-consumers likely point to the use of distinct geological zones within the same territory, rather than to different places of birth. In other words, the crop’s adopters were farming different ground.

Lead author Dr Depaermentier of Vilnius University frames the shift as a deliberate strategy. In response to increasing food demand and potential changes in climatic conditions, Bronze Age societies adopted a new resilient staple crop to optimise the use of previously marginal parts of their environment and improve food security. The phrase captures a logic that will feel familiar to modern agricultural planners: diversify the crop base, exploit underused land, and buffer the community against the risk of harvest failure. What the isotope evidence adds is proof that this logic was already operating in European prehistory, centuries before written records could document it.

Just as striking is what the study reveals about who adopted the crop. Millet consumption was not restricted to any particular sex, age group or social status, as co-author Prof Makarowicz of Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań observes. Together with the strontium isotope evidence, this pattern indicates that access to particular parts of the landscape, rather than social identity, was the determining factor shaping who ate the new grain. The division between consumers and non-consumers mapped onto geography, not hierarchy. Senior author Prof Motuzaitė Matuzevičiūtė, also of Vilnius University and principal investigator of the ERC-CoG MILWAYS project, notes that the study is the first to link such a division of the landscape to the cultivation of a new summer crop and to the exploitation of areas that had previously seen little agricultural use.

That conclusion reframes how archaeologists think about prehistoric innovation. The spread of new crops is often narrated in terms of diffusion, trade or conquest, as if ideas and technologies simply travelled across maps. This study instead documents adoption as a local, negotiated process, unfolding over generations, unevenly distributed across a society, and driven by the practical realities of soil, water and subsistence. A handful of individuals began eating a new grain; their communities learned to grow it on land their ancestors had left uncultivated; and over time the practice spread until the crop became a staple. No single dramatic event marks the transition, yet the cumulative result was a fundamentally different relationship between people and their environment.

The findings also carry a contemporary resonance. As modern agriculture confronts climate change, water scarcity and degrading soils, crop diversification has returned to the centre of policy discussions, and researchers increasingly look to the past for evidence of how societies have managed similar challenges. The Bronze Age farmers of southeastern Poland offer a case study in successful adaptation: they identified a crop suited to marginal conditions, integrated it gradually into existing systems, and used it to expand production without abandoning their traditional cereals. Understanding how such transitions succeeded in prehistory, the authors suggest, can inform current debates about building resilient food systems. A grain that travelled from Inner Mongolia to the Carpathian foothills three and a half thousand years ago turns out to have lessons that still speak to the present.

Subject of Research: The adoption of broomcorn millet and its impact on Bronze Age land use in Central Europe

Article Title: The adoption of a new crop reshaped land use in Bronze Age Europe

Article References: The adoption of a new crop reshaped land use in Bronze Age Europe. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: broomcorn millet, Bronze Age, Central Europe, isotope analysis, bioarchaeology, land use, food security, paleodiet, strontium isotopes, crop adoption, Science Advances, southeastern Poland