The Koban culture, which flourished in the Central Caucasus during the Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age, is named after the eponymous necropolis on the northern slope of the main Caucasus ridge. The cemetery covered around two hectares and originally contained several hundred burials. Between 1881 and 1891, more than thirty burial complexes from Koban were acquired for the Natural History Museum in Vienna at the request of Franz Heger, yet these grave assemblages were never catalogued and presented in their entirety. The new publication series is now correcting this gap, following an earlier study devoted to burial 5 and male attire.

Burial 4 stands out because of the sheer quantity and character of its grave goods, which consist mainly of female jewellery. The inventory includes two multi-turn temporal pendants made of bronze wire with triangular cross-section and spiral ends, two long bronze pins nearly thirty centimetres in length with flattened rectangular heads, two bronze plate bracelets with three relief ribs and spiral terminals, a spiral-shaped finger ring, two massive arc-shaped fibulae decorated with carved bands and herringbone ornament, a ring-shaped pendant twisted from bronze wire, a large bronze belt buckle, a fragmented bronze belt, two bird-shaped zoomorphic pendants, a pendant in the form of a ram’s head, two perforated boar tusks and a small clay pyxis. Additional items recorded in the inventory book include cross-shaped plaques, a rhombic button, thirteen narrow bronze tubes, four round plaques and beads of carnelian and whitish calcareous material.

The temporal pendants with spiral ends are a hallmark of female adornment at the Koban cemetery and are rarely found outside the northern slope of the Central Caucasus. Their chronological range is wide: comparable pieces from burial 9 of the Koban necropolis have been radiocarbon dated to the 10th to 9th centuries BCE, while examples from the Seržhen-Yurt cemetery in the northeastern Caucasus belong to the 7th and 6th centuries BCE. Similar pendants from the Tli cemetery in South Ossetia were made not of bronze wire but mainly of wide electrum plate, and the authors question earlier claims that these rare electrum or silver pendants remained in use for as long as three centuries.

The long bronze pins with flattened, paddle-like heads are considered a specific ornament of the female costume of the Koban community. At least three varieties can be distinguished by the shape and proportions of the head, and items with a head-to-needle length ratio of 3:1 predominate. Pins with triangular heads, found together with cylindrical and spiral bronze armbands, appear to be relatively older, while younger modifications, some made of iron, continued into the Early Scythian period with smaller sizes and narrower rectangular heads. A hoard from the Dzhi-Dzhi tract near the Koban village, dated no later than the 8th century BCE, contained artefacts whose closest parallels lie in burial 4, including belt buckles inlaid with iron, a ram’s-head pendant and long pins with flattened heads.

Among the most spectacular objects are the belt fittings. The buckle from burial 4 is more than twenty centimetres long and belongs to a distinctive group of large bronze buckles decorated with iron inlay. Its surface bears three W-shaped figures set against an engraved background of zigzags, elongated triangles, hatched grids, dots and circles, all enclosed in a rectangular frame. The accompanying belt, made of a thin bronze plate attached to a leather base, is decorated with rows of dotted patterns and images of two writhing snakes whose bodies are filled with slanting rows of dots. The closest parallels to these snake images come from Tli burials 50 and 266, which are dated to the 8th century BCE. Iron inlay on bronze objects became widespread in the Central Caucasus no earlier than the 8th century BCE, making the buckle a valuable chronological marker.

The zoomorphic pendants shed light on the spiritual world of the Caucasian highlanders. The two bird-shaped pendants combine a triangular tail with a narrow elongated animal muzzle turning into a curved neck, and such figures come mainly from female burials. The authors suggest that figures combining bird and ram features may reflect Iranian ideas about the goddess farn, who could be personified as both a bird and a ram. The ram’s-head pendant from burial 4, with twisted horns spread wide apart and a suspension loop at the base of the horns, belongs to a type whose distribution centre lay in North Ossetia. The sheep was one of the most venerated animals in Ossetia, and in the Ossetian Nart epic sheep herds appear as indicators of wealth and the ram acts as a sacrificial animal. Notably, the joint occurrence of ram’s-head and bird-shaped pendants recorded in burial 4 has not yet been established in other areas of the Koban culture.

Perhaps the most telling find is the clay pyxis, a small lidded vessel with curved shoulders, two pierced lugs and incised decoration of hatched triangles forming zigzags, with traces of white inlay. Of all the numerous sites of the Koban culture, pyxides are known only from the eponymous necropolis, where at least six examples have been found, two of them now in Vienna. The vessels have no prototypes in the ceramic tradition of the Central Caucasian population and are undoubtedly borrowed pottery. Their origin lies in Iran and neighbouring countries: one of the main centres of pyxis manufacture in the Near East during the first half of the 1st millennium BCE was located in southwest Iran, in Elam, and ornate concave-sided pyxides with perforated side protrusions were produced mainly during the 8th and 7th centuries BCE. The route by which such vessels reached the Central Caucasus probably ran through the territory of modern Azerbaijan, where a similar pyxis is known from the Zeyamchay cemetery. The authors reject earlier hypotheses that linked the Koban pyxides to the Aegean basin and dated them to the 10th century BCE.

Bringing together the typological and chronological evidence, the researchers date burial 4 to the 8th century BCE. The iron-inlaid buckle, the pyxis with its Iranian affinities and the finger rings with spiral shields, which first appeared in the Koban culture in the 8th century BCE, all point to this century, and a radiocarbon date obtained from one of the wild boar tusks places the burial within 786 to 541 calBC at 95.4 percent probability. Given the absence of any material from the 7th or 6th centuries BCE in the inventory, a date within the 8th century BCE seems the most realistic. The perforated boar tusks themselves probably served as amulets endowed with special magical powers, a practice shared by various peoples of the Caucasus and the Eurasian steppe.

The funerary inventory of burial 4 can be divided into groups that point to different Caucasian traditions and trade networks. The largest group reflects the activities of the North Ossetian bronzeworking centre and is practically unknown outside the local Koban community, comprising the large pins, the iron-inlaid buckles and the temporal pendants with spiral ends. A second group includes artefacts typical of the Central Caucasian mountain zone, such as the ram’s-head pendant, the herringbone-decorated fibulae, the snake belt and rhombic plaques, the latter two categories being most fully represented at Tli on the southern slope of the same ridge. A third group comprises objects common to both mountainous and foothill regions of the North Caucasus, including the ribbed bracelets, bird-shaped pendants, round plaques, cross-shaped buttons and cylindrical tubes. Because the Koban community had no local sources of tin, its highly artistic tin-bronzes depended on international exchange networks, and the authors suggest that Iran and its neighbouring countries may have been among the suppliers of tin to the Central Caucasian metal industry in the early 1st millennium BCE. The consistency of the burial 4 assemblage with other closed finds, such as Chantre’s burials 16 and 17 and the Dzhi-Dzhi hoard, confirms it as a reliable archaeological complex and demonstrates that the Viennese Caucasian collection remains a valuable source for the study of the entire Koban culture.

Subject of Research: Archaeological analysis of an elite female burial of the pre-Scythian Koban culture in the North Caucasus

Article Title: Elite female burial of the pre-Scythian period from the Koban Necropolis

Article References: Makhortykh, S., Grömer, K., & Tiefengraber, G. (2025). Elite female burial of the pre-Scythian period from the Koban Necropolis. Annals of the Natural History Museum Vienna, 126, 183-209. https://doi.org/10.3897/anhmw.169550

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3897/anhmw.169550

Keywords: Koban culture, Caucasus archaeology, North Ossetia, Bronze Age, Early Iron Age, female burial, Natural History Museum Vienna, clay pyxis, iron inlay, zoomorphic pendants, pre-Scythian period, ancient jewellery

Kern’s academic path began unconventionally. He first studied history and English to become a teacher before turning to prehistoric and early history at the University of Vienna. His 1987 doctoral dissertation examined the prehistoric finds from the Oberleiserberg in the Ernstbrunn district, cataloguing unstratified material held in private, federal, state and local museum collections. That early engagement with prehistoric artefacts foreshadowed a career devoted to the material culture of ancient Austria, including his 1990–1991 contribution to the Kulturpark Kamptal, a cultural tourism project run with the regional development agency Ecoplus in Lower Austria.

He joined the Prehistoric Department of the Natural History Museum in 1991, first serving as curator for the Bronze and Iron Age before becoming Director in 2001. His research portfolio was broad: excavations at the multiperiod site of Mannersdorf an der March uncovered settlement features from the Middle Neolithic through the Early Middle Ages, along with graves from the Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age. He also pursued the reanalysis of Late Celtic finds from the Oberleiserberg, a project rooted in his dissertation research.

But Hallstatt was his great passion. From 1992 until his retirement in 2022, Kern devoted himself to the exploration of the Hallstatt cemetery, working in fruitful cooperation with the Salinen and Salzwelten salt operations. The cemetery, which once held probably more than 5,000 cremation and inhumation burials, ranks among the most important archaeological legacies in Europe because of its rich grave goods drawn from across the continent. The burials, dating between 800 and 400 BC, offer crucial evidence for the beliefs, daily life and working world of the people interred there. Major discoveries such as the grave containing the second cow-calf vessel and the grave of the shaman owe their recovery to his efforts.

Kern and his team also solved a persistent technical problem: the recovery of ceramics from the Hallstatt cemetery. Their solution made it possible for this crucial class of archaeological material to finally enter Hallstatt research in a systematic way. A rich grave with numerous ceramics, now displayed in the permanent exhibition of the Natural History Museum, stands as a direct testament to that work. Away from the cemetery, his surface research in Hallstatt led to the discovery of a Late Bronze Age block building, a fascinating structure that was also featured in a Terra Mater documentary production.

He championed popular science publishing as well. Kern co-edited Salz-Reich. 7000 Jahre Hallstatt, published in 2008 by the Natural History Museum Vienna, and its English version Kingdom of Salt: 7000 Years of Hallstatt, released in 2009. Both appeared in two editions, reaching audiences far beyond the specialist community. His expertise also shaped the management plan for the UNESCO World Heritage Site Hallstatt/Dachstein-Salzkammergut, commissioned by the Upper Austrian state government. After the 2013 flood in Hallstatt, he became a key advocate for heritage protection during torrential water and avalanche control measures, pressing for sound building-archaeological practices in the high valley.

Public outreach was where Kern truly broke new ground. When Hallstatt/Dachstein-Salzkammergust received UNESCO World Heritage status in 1997, the Prehistoric Department staged a science event that later became the annual Archäologie am Berg. Kern inspired many University of Vienna students to serve as science communicators at the event, which alternated with the mining team to present the latest research results. Even in September 2023, already severely weakened by his illness, he attended the event, chatting with colleagues and sharing cheerful anecdotes about the newest discoveries.

Under his directorship, the first decades of the twenty-first century saw a massive increase in international and interdisciplinary research cooperation and in the acquisition of national and EU-level projects, including Dress ID – Clothing and Identity in the Roman Empire (2007–2012) and CINBA – Creativity in the Bronze Age (2010–2013). He also guided major long-term excavations at the Celtic sanctuary of Roseldorf, the early farming settlement of Brunn am Gebirge, and the hunter-gatherer site of Grub Kranawetberg. In recent years, his focus shifted toward digitisation, making archaeological research and its underlying processes more accessible to the public. The 2015 redesign of the permanent prehistoric exhibition in halls 11–13, including the Gold and Venus cabinets, was another landmark of his tenure, accompanied by the bilingual exhibition guide Fundstücke/Artifacts. Treasures of the Millennia, co-edited with Karina Grömer and published in 2017 and 2018 respectively.

Kern initiated numerous travelling exhibitions, including shows on Situla art and on Hallstatt research, which travelled to Bibracte in France, Switzerland, Germany and even Alicante in Spain. He held leading positions across Austrian archaeology: a member of the Archaeological Council of the Federal Ministry for Science and Research since 2005, a board member of the Kuratorium Pfahlbauten from 2012, which manages the UNESCO World Heritage Prehistoric Pile Dwellings around the Alps, and a scientific advisory board member of the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nürnberg from 2017. He served on the boards of the Anthropological Society in Vienna and the Austrian Society for Prehistoric and Early History, where he ultimately held the presidency. He also promoted Hallstatt locally as a leading member of the Musealverein Hallstatt and sat on the board of the Musealverein Stillfried an der March.

Colleagues remember Kern as a unifying figure who acted across disciplinary boundaries, remaining composed even when wronged and never losing his humour despite tragic losses and personal turbulence. The many anecdotes and appreciative words shared on his Facebook page after news of his death speak clearly to that character. Even a month before his death, when a friend at the Archäologie am Berg event in mid-September 2023 remarked that she still had so many questions, Kern replied with characteristic warmth: I have them too. His scientific curiosity and positive spirit remained intact to the very end, a fitting close to a life devoted to connecting people with the deep past.

Subject of Research: Obituary and scientific legacy of prehistoric archaeologist Anton Kern, former director of the Prehistoric Department at the Natural History Museum Vienna and leading Hallstatt researcher

Article Title: Nachruf HR Dr. Anton Kern, Direktor der Prähistorischen Abteilung i.R. (1957–2023)

Article References: Grömer, K. (2025). Nachruf HR Dr. Anton Kern, Direktor der Prähistorischen Abteilung i.R. (1957–2023). Annals of the Natural History Museum Vienna, 126, 177-181. https://doi.org/10.3897/anhmw.169455

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3897/anhmw.169455

Keywords: Anton Kern, Hallstatt, Natural History Museum Vienna, prehistoric archaeology, UNESCO World Heritage, Iron Age cemetery, salt mining, Bronze Age, Austrian archaeology, archaeological exhibitions, science communication, obituary

The Koban Culture, flourishing between roughly 1200 and 400 BCE on both sides of the Greater Caucasus Range, is one of the most significant archaeological phenomena of the Late Bronze and Early Iron Ages in the region. Its eponymous cemetery, located about 32 kilometers southwest of Vladikavkaz, gave its name to a culture defined in the nineteenth century through spectacular bronzes adorned with zoomorphic and geometric ornamentation. After the initial discovery by the local landowner Khabosh Kanukov, excavations between 1877 and 1881 by Russian and European scholars — including the renowned Rudolf Virchow and Ernest Chantre — examined more than 25 burials and scattered the finds to museums in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Berlin, Saint-Germain-en-Laye, Lyon, and Vienna.

The Vienna collection owes its existence to Franz Heger, director of the museum’s anthropological and ethnographical department, who undertook scientific missions to the Caucasus in 1881, 1890, and 1891. With the assistance of Vasilij Dolbezhev, a local expert who participated in the Koban excavations for over a decade, Heger assembled more than 30 grave assemblages of extraordinary scientific interest. Many of these burials most probably belonged to elite members of prehistoric society, containing valuable grave goods and costume elements that make the Vienna holdings a key resource for studying the material culture and history of the Caucasus between the twelfth and fourth centuries BCE.

Burial 5 itself was inventoried in 1883 and described by Heger as a male grave. The assemblage contains weapons — a bronze dagger blade, a Scythian-type arrowhead, a richly decorated axe, and a stone mace — alongside tools, jewellery, and pottery. The researchers acknowledge that, without modern documentation, the unity of the inventory must be treated with caution, yet the composition of the finds is consistent with well-documented Koban burials and offers chronological markers of exceptional value.

The weaponry tells a story of technological transition. The bronze dagger belongs to the so-called flame-shaped group with a narrowed middle section, and its features — horizontal shoulders at the transition to the handle, a wide relief rib, and two holes for hilt attachment — mark it as the latest Central Caucasian modification of this type, in use up to the eighth and seventh centuries BCE. The authors also engage critically with existing typologies, noting that Sabine Reinhold’s variant DoC2 bundles daggers ranging from 13.2 to 28 centimeters in length with differing blade shapes, and that errors in her catalogue listings undermine the seriation and chronology built upon them.

The most spectacular object is the bronze axe with a twice-curved body, richly engraved with zoomorphic and geometric imagery. One blade bears two symmetrically arranged predators — presumably dog-wolves — depicted in dynamic running poses with open mouths and bodies filled with chased dots and herringbone patterns. The reverse displays a so-called Maltese cross, a rhombus with nine circles and nested triangles, while the shaft-hole faces carry fish, snakes, and a solar sign of a seven-pointed star within a circle. Such double-curved axes are considered status symbols of the classical Koban Culture, and their latest occurrences coincide with the emergence of early Scythian elements in the Caucasus.

The bronze two-bladed socketed arrowhead of Scythian type is among the rarest finds in the Koban sites of the Central Caucasus, with only two other specimens known from the cemetery. Its closest parallels come from early Scythian sites of the Northern Caucasus, such as Krasnoe Znamya and the Alekseevsky hamlet, dated to the first half through the middle of the seventh century BCE. Together with a fibula bearing two knot-like protrusions and a pendant-amulet in the form of a mountain goat’s head — a motif that replaced the earlier ram-head pendants with the onset of the Scythian period — these artefacts anchor the burial firmly in the first half of the seventh century BCE.

Beyond chronology, the assemblage illuminates far-reaching cultural networks. The Maltese cross motif, the authors argue, spread from the Near East and Transcaucasia into the Central Caucasus and onward to the forest-steppe of the left-bank Dnieper in present-day Ukraine, where it appears on clay ladle handles of the seventh century BCE — a Caucasian route of distribution rather than one via the Basarabi Culture of southeastern Europe. Supporting this hypothesis, bronze pins with heads rolled into tubes of proper Caucasian origin have been found at the same Ukrainian sites as ceramics bearing the cross motif.

The grave goods also speak to social hierarchy. A richly decorated axe and a spherical stone mace — a prestige weapon combining sacred and combat functions, known from only two examples among the several hundred burials of the Tli cemetery — emphasize the high status of the buried person, perhaps a member of the elite. The bronze knife, typologically alien to the Caucasus and tracing its origins to the Northern Pontic and Carpathian-Danubian regions, further testifies to the wide horizons of contact maintained by the mountain communities.

This study opens a planned series of publications on the unpublished Koban materials in Vienna, which will apply interdisciplinary methods including metallographic and XRF analyses, micro-CT scanning of composite objects, radiocarbon dating, and statistical seriation using the Montelius image database and WinSerion software. In the second half of the seventh century BCE, Scythian influence in the Central Caucasus intensified markedly, and local Koban material culture shifted toward increased use of iron. Burial 5, frozen at the threshold of that transformation, offers researchers a rare, precisely datable window into a society on the eve of profound change — and demonstrates that collections assembled more than a century ago can still rewrite the story of the ancient Caucasus.

Subject of Research: Typo-chronological analysis of Burial 5 from the Koban cemetery and the transition from the late pre-Scythian to the early Scythian period in the Central Caucasus

Article Title: Burial 5 of the Koban Necropolis in the Context of the Transition from the late pre-Scythian to the early Scythian Period

Article References: Makhortykh, S., Grömer, K., & Tiefengraber, G. (2025). Burial 5 of the Koban Necropolis in the Context of the Transition from the late pre-Scythian to the early Scythian Period. Annals of the Natural History Museum Vienna, 126, 151-176. https://doi.org/10.3897/anhmw.169446

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3897/anhmw.169446

Keywords: Koban Culture, Caucasus archaeology, Scythians, Early Iron Age, Bronze Age, Natural History Museum Vienna, burial assemblage, typo-chronology, Franz Heger, North Ossetia, cultural contacts, bronze axe

For decades, scholars studying the origins of inequality have pointed to two dominant explanations. One emphasizes agricultural intensification, the idea that as farming communities produced surplus food, some people gained control over that surplus and converted it into lasting advantage. The other highlights the rise of the state itself, whose institutions of taxation, law, and organized violence could lock social differences into place across generations. Both models treat hierarchy as a product of large-scale economic or political transformation. The new analysis suggests a different story. When Li and colleagues examined the burial record across the Central Plain, the differentiated social positions they documented could not be explained by agricultural intensification or by the size of the population. Something else was structuring who got more and who got less.

That something, the researchers conclude, was the architecture of social relationships themselves. The team reconstructed networks of social connection in prehistoric China using a combination of isotopic, osteological, and zooarchaeological data from sites dated between 7000 and 1500 BCE. Isotopic signatures preserved in human remains can reveal where individuals grew up and what they ate, offering clues about mobility and diet. Osteological analysis of skeletons records the physical toll of labor, disease, and violence across a lifetime. Zooarchaeological evidence, the animal remains deposited in graves and settlements, illuminates subsistence practices and the ritual significance of particular species. Read together, these lines of evidence allowed the researchers to infer the relational positions individuals occupied within their communities, positions that determined access to labor, resources, and symbolic capital such as ritual objects.

The methodological core of the study lies in how inequality was measured. Burial wealth, the quantity and quality of grave goods interred with the dead, served as one proxy for relational standing, since funerary treatment in early societies typically reflected the social identity of the deceased as perceived by the living. Skeletal health indicators provided a second proxy, because chronic nutritional stress and heavy workload leave readable marks on bone. Dietary variety offered a third, distinguishing people who consumed diverse, protein-rich diets from those constrained to narrower foodways. Crucially, these proxies capture lived experience as well as symbolic display, allowing the researchers to distinguish genuine material inequality from mere differences in mortuary fashion. Across six millennia, the pattern that emerged was one of persistent, structured disparity that predated any recognizable state apparatus in the region.

The Central Plain of China is an ideal laboratory for this question. The region, centered on the middle and lower reaches of the Yellow River, witnessed one of the world’s most consequential trajectories toward urban civilization, culminating in the Bronze Age polities often associated with the earliest Chinese dynasties. Because the study covers sites from 7000 to 1500 BCE, it brackets the entire sequence from early farming villages through escalating social complexity to the threshold of statehood. That long temporal window meant the researchers could test whether inequality appeared only when states emerged, or whether it was already entrenched in communities that lacked centralized government. The answer was unambiguous: the disparities were there from the beginning, embedded in the networks through which people accessed the things that mattered.

According to the study, differential access to valued but scarce items was the original engine of unequal social-relational networks in the region. In small-scale societies, prestige goods such as exotic raw materials, finely crafted ornaments, and ritual paraphernalia carry enormous social weight precisely because they are rare and hard to obtain. People who controlled the flow of such items could build obligations, alliances, and followings, converting access into influence. Over time, those relational advantages compounded. The networks did not merely reflect inequality; they actively produced it, channeling labor, resources, and symbolic capital toward some individuals and away from others in ways that could persist across generations even in the absence of formal political institutions.

What happened next, the researchers argue, was a reorganization rather than a creation of hierarchy. As subsistence practices changed, as wealth became more mobile and therefore more easily accumulated and defended, and as violent conflict escalated across the region, the pre-existing social networks were reshaped to concentrate control over ritual, political, military, and technological domains. Mobile wealth, in particular, changes the calculus of inequality: herds, metals, and other transferable assets can be defended, exchanged, and inherited in ways that fixed fields cannot, giving ambitious actors new tools to consolidate advantage. Escalating warfare likely reinforced the process, since communities under threat tend to concentrate authority in leaders who command violence. The old relational disparities did not disappear; they were repurposed and intensified, their benefits flowing increasingly toward a narrowing elite.

The study’s most striking conclusion concerns the role of the early state itself. Rather than inventing inequality, Li and colleagues conclude, early states stabilized disparities that already existed, institutionalizing control over resources, violence, and network-based access. In this view, the state is best understood not as the author of hierarchy but as its codifier, taking informal, relationship-based advantages and hardening them into law, tribute systems, and hereditary office. This reframing has implications well beyond ancient China. If states institutionalized rather than created inequality, then the search for hierarchy’s origins must look to the micro-level dynamics of human relationships, exchange, and access, not only to the macro-level emergence of governments. It also suggests that dismantling entrenched inequality requires addressing the relational structures, the networks of access and obligation, that underlie formal institutions, not merely reforming the institutions themselves.

The research also demonstrates the power of synthesizing existing data at scale. Rather than excavating new sites, the team reanalyzed previously published mortuary records, integrating isotopic, osteological, and zooarchaeological evidence into a single framework covering more than two millennia of burials. This kind of large-scale comparative approach is increasingly central to archaeology, allowing researchers to detect patterns invisible at any single site and to test long-standing theories against region-wide datasets. The 6,000-year sweep of the Central Plain record offers a rare opportunity to watch social inequality emerge, deepen, and transform across the full arc from Neolithic village to Bronze Age polity, and the results suggest that the roots of hierarchy reach down into the ordinary fabric of social life, far deeper than the rise of states alone can explain.

Subject of Research: The origins of social inequality in Neolithic and Bronze Age China as revealed by mortuary evidence

Article Title: Burial data in ancient China reveal inequality’s deep roots before the rise of states

Article References: Burial data in ancient China reveal inequality’s deep roots before the rise of states. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: archaeology, inequality, ancient China, Central Plain, burial analysis, state formation, social networks, Science Advances, Neolithic, Bronze Age, mortuary data, isotopic analysis

The team, led by Mariya Antonosyan of the Max Planck Institute for Geoanthropology together with Anahit Hovhannisyan and colleagues, analyzed dental calculus from 77 individuals excavated at 22 archaeological sites across Armenia, spanning the Late Neolithic to the Middle Ages. Dental calculus, the mineralized bacterial biofilm that accumulates on teeth, acts as a remarkable time capsule. As it forms during life, it traps fragments of proteins from everything a person ate, preserving them for millennia in a protective mineral matrix. Using liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry, the researchers extracted and identified these ancient proteins, screening each sample against a curated database of oral and contaminant proteins to ensure that only well-preserved, authentic samples were analyzed.

Of the 77 samples, 60 showed well-preserved oral signatures, indicating their suitability for dietary analysis. Within this group, dairy peptides were identified in 16 individuals from nine sites. The overwhelming majority of these milk proteins were beta-lactoglobulin, a major whey protein found in ruminant milk, detected in 14 samples, while beta-casein appeared in two others. Crucially, some peptides allowed the researchers to identify the species of origin: seven peptide matches pointed to goat milk, four to cattle, and four to sheep, with a larger group of 55 matches that could not distinguish between sheep and cattle. This taxonomic resolution is what transforms a simple detection of milk into a nuanced picture of ancient herd management and dietary choice.

The chronological pattern that emerged is striking. The earliest individual in the study, an adult male aged 45 to 60 from the Late Neolithic site of Masis Blur, showed no direct evidence of milk consumption, nor did any of the Early Bronze Age individuals associated with the Kura-Araxes cultural complex. The earliest direct evidence of milk drinking in the Armenian dataset comes from the Middle Bronze Age, around the 2nd millennium BCE, when all four individuals analyzed, buried at the high-altitude sites of Sotk-2 and Sotk-10 near Lake Sevan, carried milk proteins in their calculus. From that point onward, milk consumption persisted continuously through the Late Bronze, Iron, Classical, and Medieval periods, with both the intensity of consumption and the diversity of exploited animals increasing over time.

Geography mattered as much as chronology. Milk proteins were recovered predominantly from high-altitude sites situated above 1,500 meters above sea level. Among prehistoric individuals with confirmed protein preservation, all seven who yielded dairy peptides came from sites above 1,600 meters, while six individuals from lowland sites showed no milk signal at all. The researchers suggest that milk may have functioned as an adaptive resource in harsh highland environments, where crop cultivation was difficult and livestock offered a reliable source of hydration and nutrition without the need to slaughter valuable animals. A parallel pattern has been observed on the Tibetan Plateau, where ancient milk proteins were found only at high-elevation sites beyond the limits of agriculture. Yet the relationship is not straightforward: seven high-altitude individuals from the Iron Age and Medieval periods passed preservation screening without yielding dairy proteins, indicating that elevation alone cannot explain the mosaic of dietary preferences across landscapes and centuries.

The genetic side of the study tells an equally compelling story. Adult digestion of lactose, the sugar in milk, depends on lactase persistence, a trait controlled by regulatory variants near the LCT gene. The team screened five known lactase persistence-associated variants in 158 modern Armenian individuals and found only the European variant, 13910C>T, at a modest frequency of roughly 6 to 8 percent. The other four variants, including the 13915T>G allele that predominates in the Near East just to Armenia’s south, were entirely absent. This finding resolves previously conflicting estimates for Armenians, which had ranged from 2.7 to 18 percent, and highlights the population’s distinctive genetic position at the crossroads of Europe and the Middle East.

Ancient DNA screening added a temporal dimension to this genetic picture. After imputing lactase genotypes in published ancient genomes from Armenia, the researchers directly examined sequencing reads covering the rs4988235 position using stringent filtering criteria designed to guard against false positives, a critical safeguard because the C>T transition at this site mimics characteristic ancient DNA damage patterns. The earliest confirmed carrier of the derived allele in Armenia dates to the Late Urartian period, around 680 to 550 BCE, approximately 3,000 years ago. Results for eight other samples, including Early Bronze Age specimens, could not be confirmed and may represent imputation artifacts. The confirmed appearance of the allele post-dates a documented Late Bronze and Iron Age genetic influx into the region, suggesting the variant may have been introduced through population interactions rather than arising locally.

Placed side by side, the proteomic and genetic data reveal a profound mismatch. Dairying in the South Caucasus intensified from at least the Middle Bronze Age onward, sustaining mobile pastoral communities, highland herders, and eventually the elite of medieval burial complexes, yet lactase persistence never became widespread in the population. The authors argue that cultural and dietary strategies, rather than genetic adaptation, were the key enablers of milk consumption. Fermentation into products such as matsun, Armenia’s traditional yoghurt, along with cheese-making and the mixing of milk with grains and other foods, reduces lactose content and allows lactose-intolerant people to benefit from dairy without discomfort. Armenia’s rich fermented dairy cuisine, which persists today, may itself be a living legacy of this ancient workaround.

The study also uncovered intriguing social dimensions. In the Late Classical period, individuals from the Odzaberd site displayed the earliest evidence of goat milk consumption in the assemblage, with some showing diversified profiles spanning sheep, goat, and cattle milk, possibly reflecting mixed herding practices or access to trade networks. In the Medieval Aghtsg burial complex, dairy proteins were detected exclusively in two individuals interred in sarcophagi, markers of elevated social status, hinting at preferential elite access to milk, although better preservation conditions inside sarcophagi cannot be ruled out. Meanwhile, the absence of horse milk proteins in the South Caucasus, despite their identification in the neighboring North Caucasus steppe, suggests that horse milking may have been a specifically steppe-based adaptation of mobile horse-reliant groups.

The researchers caution that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence: missing milk proteins may reflect sampling bias, small sample sizes, or individual dietary choices rather than a true lack of consumption. Only one Late Neolithic individual and no Chalcolithic individuals from Armenia were available for analysis, leaving the earliest chapters of the region’s dairy history open. Future work combining larger sample sets, ceramic residue analysis, and stable isotope studies of human bones and teeth promises to refine the picture. Even so, this first integrated genetic and palaeoproteomic reconstruction for a single region across such a wide temporal span delivers a powerful message: for six millennia, the people of the Armenian highlands drank their milk on their own cultural terms, and their genes never needed to catch up.

Subject of Research: Millennial-scale dairy consumption and lactase persistence in ancient Armenia

Article Title: Palaeoproteomic and genetic insights into millennial-scale dairy consumption in Armenia

Article References: Antonosyan, M., Hovhannisyan, A., Roberts, P., Cassidy, L. M., Mkrtchyan, S., Simonyan, H., Bobokhyan, A., Aghikyan, L., Piliposyan, A., Badalyan, R., Yeranyan, N., Gnuni, A., Avetisyan, H., Badalyan, M., Gabrielyan, A., Sarkisian, N., Grigoryan, A., Simonyan, H., Safaryan, M., … Wilkin, S. (2026). Palaeoproteomic and genetic insights into millennial-scale dairy consumption in Armenia. iScience, 29(11), Article 117829. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2026.117829

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1016/j.isci.2026.117829

Keywords: palaeoproteomics, dental calculus, dairying, lactase persistence, ancient DNA, Armenia, South Caucasus, Bronze Age, fermented dairy, matsun, beta-lactoglobulin, highland pastoralism

The research team, led by Mina Amzirkov of the University of Belgrade together with colleagues in Vienna and Kikinda, focused on two necropolises: Mokrin and Ostojićevo, both located near the town of Kikinda in the Banat region of northern Serbia. The Maros culture, which flourished across parts of present-day Hungary, Romania, and northern Serbia between roughly 2700 and 1500 cal. BC and peaked around 2000 BC, is famous among archaeologists for its highly normative funerary ritual. Adults were buried as individual inhumations in a flexed position, lying on either the left or right side, with bodies and grave pits aligned along a north-south axis. Decades of study of adult skeletons established the code: males were placed on their left side with the head to the north, producing a north-south orientation, while females were placed on their right side with the head to the south, producing a south-north orientation. In both cases the face was turned toward the east.

What remained unknown until now was whether children followed the same prescriptions. That question has been extraordinarily difficult to answer because estimating the biological sex of immature skeletons from bone morphology is notoriously unreliable. The sexual characteristics that anthropologists rely on in adult remains — features of the pelvis, the skull, and other bones — simply have not developed in children. Combined with a historical lack of scholarly interest in the youngest members of past communities, this methodological barrier meant that the gender roles of Bronze Age boys and girls remained essentially a blank page, filled mostly by assumption rather than evidence.

The breakthrough came from a technique that has rapidly become the gold standard for archaeological sex estimation: peptide-based sex identification from dental enamel. The method targets amelogenin, an enamel protein encoded by genes on both the X and Y chromosomes. Sexually dimorphic fragments of this protein survive in tooth enamel for millennia and can be detected by ultra-high-performance liquid chromatography coupled with high-resolution mass spectrometry. The presence of both Amelogenin X and Y peptides indicates a genetic male; the presence of X without Y indicates a genetic female. Because tooth enamel forms in early childhood and is the hardest tissue in the human body, the method works even on poorly preserved juvenile remains where skeletal morphology fails entirely — and it requires only minimally invasive sampling.

Applying this technique, the team determined the biological sex of 77 non-adult individuals aged from around 9 to 12 months up to 18 to 22 years, buried at the two cemeteries. For 76 of them, sex was established through enamel peptide analysis; for one individual, previously published ancient DNA results were used. The researchers then compared each child’s biologically determined sex with two key elements of the Maros funerary norm: the orientation of the body along the north-south or south-north axis, and the side on which the body was placed. The statistical analysis, using Fisher’s exact test and Cramer’s V as a measure of association strength, produced striking results.

At Mokrin, a necropolis first excavated in the 1960s that yielded 312 graves and was in use between roughly 2100 and 1800 BC, the association between biological sex and body orientation was overwhelmingly strong, with a Cramer’s V of 0.80 and a p-value below 0.001. The association with body position was moderate but still statistically significant, with a Cramer’s V of 0.56 — a figure partly explained by the many skeletons whose position could not be determined due to poor preservation. At Ostojićevo, a smaller but even clearer dataset of 16 to 17 individuals from the site’s Early Bronze Age horizon, the correlations approached perfection: Cramer’s V reached 1.0 for both orientation and position, with no males placed on the right side and no females on the left. In plain terms, boys were buried like adult men — oriented north-south, on their left side — and girls were buried like adult women — oriented south-north, on their right side.

The exceptions are as revealing as the rule. Fewer than 10 percent of the children deviated from the norm. At Mokrin, six graves stood out: in graves 25, 103, and 236, peptide analysis showed that boys had been buried according to the female norm with their heads to the south, and the same pattern appeared in grave 220, where sex had been determined by ancient DNA. Conversely, graves 216 and 238 contained girls buried in the male orientation with their heads to the north — yet in those two cases, the body position matched the peptide-determined sex perfectly. The authors consider several explanations. Poor skeletal preservation visible in the field photographs of some graves may have led excavators to record the orientation incorrectly. In other cases, the deviations may represent genuinely socially meaningful exceptions. Notably, none of the exceptional burials contained gender-typical grave goods, and the children’s graves in general were less well equipped than those of adults.

The Serbian findings align closely with earlier work elsewhere in Central Europe. At the Early Bronze Age cemetery of Franzhausen I in Lower Austria, peptide-based sex identification of 75 children aged between 0 and 12 years showed that 62 of 63 individuals with determinable archaeological gender classification matched their biological sex — a concordance of 98.4 percent, with a single exception of a 4-to-5-year-old female buried in male position. A companion study of adults at Franzhausen I and the nearby cemetery of Gemeinlebarn F found that most apparent mismatches between osteological sex and burial treatment stemmed from errors in morphological sex estimation or documentation rather than genuine gender variance. Together, these studies suggest that the strong alignment between biological sex and gendered burial treatment was a widespread feature of Early Bronze Age societies in the region.

The results feed directly into a lively theoretical debate about the nature of gender in European prehistory. Some scholars have argued that the Neolithic was characterized by a fluid, situational “contextual gender,” with rigid binary identities emerging only in the Bronze Age; others counter that prehistoric gender was always diverse and context-dependent, varying across time, space, age, and social circumstance. A large-scale study of 1,252 individuals from Central European burials found that while the binary model accounted for roughly 90 percent of cases, a small minority showed non-binary or contradictory sex-gender combinations, which the authors interpreted as a socially acknowledged minority rather than mere error. The Maros data add a crucial new dimension to this discussion by demonstrating that, in at least one well-documented cultural sphere, binary gender was not an adult achievement but a social fact recognized from early childhood.

There are also poignant gaps in the picture. No burials of children under two years were identified at Mokrin, and while settlement evidence suggests infants were sometimes interred within settlements, the documented number falls far short of demographic expectations — hinting at alternative practices, possibly including water or sky burials, that have left little archaeological trace. Children’s graves were also typically shallower than adult ones, making them more vulnerable to destruction by agriculture and soil processes, which explains the poor preservation that long obscured this research. What survives, however, is unambiguous: a shared mortuary code, replicated across multiple communities of the Maros cultural sphere, in which females were symbolically aligned with the right side and the south, males with the left side and the north. In death as in life, Bronze Age children were already boys and girls in the eyes of their community — a codified, material expression of gender that endured for centuries along the banks of the Tisa River.

Subject of Research: Gendered funerary practices of children in the Bronze Age Maros culture of northern Serbia, determined through peptide-based sex identification of dental enamel

Article Title: Growing into gender: Funerary practice of boys and girls in the Bronze Age Maros culture (2100 − 1700 BC)

Article References: Amzirkov, M., Porčić, M., Rebay-Salisbury, K., Kanz, F., Wolf, M., Gavrilović, M. K., & Stefanović, S. (2026). Growing into gender: Funerary practice of boys and girls in the Bronze Age Maros culture (2100 − 1700 BC). Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences, 18(11), Article 216. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12520-026-02578-3

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12520-026-02578-3

Keywords: Bronze Age, Maros culture, gender archaeology, children, burial practices, amelogenin peptides, dental enamel, Mokrin, Ostojićevo, Serbia, mass spectrometry, biological sex

The site itself is dramatic. Two sets of paintings, designated C1 and C2, adorn the inner walls of naturally formed caves along an east-west oriented granite ridge in Fuyun County, roughly 70 kilometres from the county town. The two panels are separated by about 40 metres of vertical elevation and 112 metres of horizontal distance, and a circular stone mound tomb built of white pebbles lies approximately 100 metres from the cave entrances. Panel C1 stretches roughly 20 metres in length and 11.8 metres in width, while C2 contains 51 independent compositions distributed along both walls and even onto the ceiling. The paintings’ good state of preservation, unusual for open rock art in this harsh environment, is precisely what makes the site such a valuable archive.

The technical heart of the study lies in how the team saw the invisible. Working in two stages, the researchers first captured high-resolution digital photographs of the entire rock art panels using a Canon EOS 5D Mark IV camera, magnifying the images block by block to flag suspicious micro-traces and areas of superimposition. These regions of interest were then scanned with a Specim IQ hyperspectral camera, which records reflected light in 180 narrow spectral bands between 400 and 930 nanometres, far beyond the discrimination of human vision. After radiometric calibration against a standard white reference and removal of noisy bands, the resulting data cubes were processed using Independent Component Analysis, a statistical method that performs blind source separation to extract distinct pigment signatures, and the Spectral Angle Mapper algorithm, which classifies regions sharing identical or similar spectral compositions using a maximum spectral angle threshold of 0.8 radians.

The payoff was immediate and striking. In panel C2, hyperspectral imaging revealed two motifs, labelled C2-50 and C2-51, that are completely invisible to the naked eye. Crucially, one visible figure, C2-41, was found to be superimposed over the hidden C2-51. The ICA components showed that the red and green areas correspond to genuinely different pigments rather than variations of a single material, and the spectral curves confirmed the distinction. Because the outlines of C2-41 are continuous and intact while C2-51 appears fragmented and truncated, the team concluded that the hidden motifs predate the horned anthropomorphic figures that dominate the panel, evidence of a painting sequence older than anything previously documented at the site.

The same analytical machinery resolved a long-standing ambiguity in panel C1. One blurred motif, C1-12, had resisted identification for years, its faint traces lost against the naturally reddish granite. Hyperspectral processing revealed it to be a crossed vajra, one of the most recognisable symbols in the Tibetan Buddhist visual system, representing indestructible wisdom and the firmness of the dharmadhatu. Alongside it, the panel preserves three instances of Sanskrit mantras rendered in Tibetan script, complete with termination marks and, in one case, a Tibetan seed syllable, features central to the textual traditions of Buddhist mantra practice. These are not casual doodles but technically literate reproductions of an institutionalised religious vocabulary.

Dating the imagery required a different toolkit. In the absence of direct scientific dating, the researchers built a relative chronology through iconographic comparison anchored to two benchmarks: the Chemurchek culture, which flourished between roughly 2500 and 1700 BCE, and the broader Early Bronze Age from about 3000 to 1000 BCE. The bell-shaped anthropomorphic figure C1-2, positioned at the centre of C1’s rear wall, closely resembles figures carved on stone slabs at the Khar Chuluut-1 monumental ceremonial enclosure in Mongolia’s Bayan-Ölgii Province, structures that radiocarbon dating places before the mid-third millennium BCE. A comparable motif also appears at Dundebulake-1 in Altai Prefecture, Xinjiang. Because northern Xinjiang formed part of the wider Chemurchek cultural interaction sphere, the team attributes C1-2 to the early Chemurchek period, making it one of the oldest images in the cave.

The horned anthropomorphic figures that crowd panel C2 tell a slightly later story. These figures, marked by short horn-like lines on the head, frequently cluster around X-shaped symbols and appear in groups; some display rounded abdomens with small circular marks that earlier scholars have interpreted as possible indications of pregnancy, while three figures hold bows and arrows. Their closest parallels lie in the Samus, Karakol, and Okunev cultures of the Altai and southern Siberian Bronze Age, spanning roughly 2500 to 1000 BCE. The researchers also demonstrated that apparent colour differences among some figures, such as motifs C2-45 through C2-48, are deceptive: ICA analysis confirmed they share the same pigment composition, with the visual variation caused by water rusting rather than separate painting episodes, a cautionary lesson in how weathering can manufacture false chronologies.

Perhaps the most tantalising question concerns the three-eyed face C1-1, with its seventeen radiating head lines, concentric-circle eyes, a third eye on the forehead, and an arc-shaped beard. Its formal traits echo the sun-headed and multi-eyed figures of the Okunev tradition, often discussed within shamanic interpretive frameworks, and some team members noted a visual resemblance to Tibetan Buddhist wrathful deities such as White Mahakala. Yet the authors are deliberately cautious. The weathering of C1-1 is substantially heavier than that of the confirmed Buddhist motifs, and its pigment appearance differs markedly, arguing for a different and earlier phase of execution. The similarity, they conclude, is best understood as formal resemblance rather than evidence of religious continuity, and the motif’s precise meaning and dating remain open pending scientific dating.

The Tibetan Buddhist layer, by contrast, can be situated historically. Under the Yuan dynasty, which ruled from 1271 to 1368, imperial patronage carried Tibetan Buddhist ideas and iconography into frontier zones well beyond the Tibetan Plateau, and a second wave of transmission accompanied the eastward migration of the Torghut tribe during the mid to late Qing dynasty, which brought lamas and monasteries into the Altai. Within this framework, the researchers hypothesise that the Buddhist motifs at Tangbaletasi could have first appeared as early as the Yuan period. Notably, the later painters did not erase what came before: earlier images remained visible beneath and beside the mantras and vajra-crosses, producing a genuine coexistence of visual systems within a single cave space.

What was the cave for? The team is careful to frame its answer as a working hypothesis grounded in converging spatial evidence rather than a single smoking gun. The site conforms to regional patterns documented for anthropomorphic rock art across the Altai, occupying a consistent elevation band, lying close to water sources, and opening onto a south-facing rock face. Its proximity to a burial mound echoes wider Inner Asian associations between image-bearing sites and commemorative landscapes. Inside, the compositions, horned figures arranged in clusters around fire-like symbols, symbolic avatars rather than portraits of real people, suggest collective, non-domestic activity rather than everyday life. The authors acknowledge their limitations honestly: no direct scientific dating was performed, and no excavation data underpin the functional interpretation. But the picture that emerges is compelling, a mountain shelter where Bronze Age ritual specialists, and centuries later Buddhist practitioners, each found reason to leave their mark on the same sacred stone, layer upon layer, across four thousand years of human belief.

Subject of Research: Chronology and function of the Tangbaletasi Cave Paintings in Xinjiang's Altai region using hyperspectral imaging and iconographic analysis

Article Title: Chronology and function of Tangbaletasi cave paintings via hyperspectral and iconographic analyses

Article References: Huang, F., Fu, Y., Zhou, G., Li, L., Chai, Y., Liu, C., Wang, J., Peng, J., & Zhuoya, B. (2026). Chronology and function of Tangbaletasi cave paintings via hyperspectral and iconographic analyses. npj Heritage Science, 14(1), Article 540. https://doi.org/10.1038/s40494-026-02433-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s40494-026-02433-7

Keywords: Tangbaletasi Cave Paintings, rock art, hyperspectral imaging, Altai Mountains, Bronze Age, Chemurchek culture, Tibetan Buddhism, Yuan dynasty, Independent Component Analysis, pigment analysis, archaeology, Xinjiang

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