Barry Cunlife - The Scythians

further reading
The steppe is a fragile ecozone and slight changes of climate can have dramatic
effects on the lifestyle of those who depend on it. A study of the impact of recent
climatic fluctuations is provided by S. Begzsuren et al., ‘Livestock Responses to
Droughts and Severe Winter Weather in the Gobi Three Beauty National Park, Mongolia’,
Journal of Arid Environments, 59 (2004), 785–96. A series of papers exploring the
effects of climate change on Eurasian societies in the past has been brought together
in E. M. Scott, A. Y. Alekseev, and G. Zaitseva (eds.), Impact of the Environment on Human
Migration in Eurasia (Dordrecht, 2005). Two specialist papers of direct relevance to the
changes which saw the emergence of the Scythians are G. I. Zaitseva et al., ‘Chronology
and Possible Links between Climatic and Cultural Change during the First Millennium
BC in Southern Siberia and Central Asia’, Radiocarbon, 46/1 (2004), 259–76
and B. van Geel et al., ‘Climate Change and the Expansion of Scythian Culture after
850 BC: A Hypothesis’, Journal of Archaeological Science, 31 (2004), 1735–42. The suggestion
that increased rainfall in the early thirteenth century ad may have been a cause
of the rapid expansion of Mongol power is presented in M. Hvistendahl, ‘Roots of
Empire’, Science, 337 (2012), 1596–9. There can be little doubt from these and other
studies that minor fluctuations in climate in the steppe zone can have far-reaching
effects on society. Excellent use of data of this kind is made by D. W. Anthony in his
important book, The Horse, The Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian
Steppes Shaped the Modern World (Princeton, 2007), which is essential reading for
anyone wanting to trace the development of pastoral societies on the steppe from the
fifth to the second millennium bc.
The horse features large in the story. D. Anthony’s book, just mentioned, offers
a thorough summary of the evidence of horse domestication up to the date of the
book’s publication, much of the crucial original research having been carried out by
Anthony himself. Another important source is S. L. Olsen, ‘Early Horse Domestication:
Weighing the Evidence’, in S. L. Olsen et al. (eds.), Horses and Humans: The Evolution
of Human–Equine Relationships (Oxford, 2006), 81–113. More recent papers adding
to the debate include: R. Bendrey, ‘New Methods for the Identification of Evidence
for Bitting on Horse Remains from Archaeological Sites’, Journal of Archaeological
Science, 34 (2007), 1036–50; A. K. Outram et al., ‘The Earliest Horse Harnessing and
Milking’, Science, 323 (2009), 1332–5; and V. Warmuth et al., ‘Reconstructing the Origin
and Spread of Horse Domestication in the Eurasian Steppe’, Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences, 109/21 (2012), 8202–6.
The fascinating story of the strenuous attempts to re-establish herds of wild Przewalski’s
horses in Mongolia is told in I. Bouman and A. Groeneveld, The History and
Background of the Reintroduction of the Przewalski Horses in the Hustai National Park (Boomdijk,
2008).
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