Barry Cunlife - The Scythians

landscapes with people
Alongside the expanding productivity came a steep rise in population,
some estimates suggesting a tenfold increase over
the 500-year period. The population increase led
to a more hierarchical social structure expressed
in the arrangement and elaboration of tombs.
The elite were buried in stone-built cists set
in large circular burial enclosures up to
100 m in diameter. While the grave goods
were still comparatively modest—pottery
vessels, food offerings, and bronze
knives—the social effort required
to build the large grave structures
marked them out as belonging to
individuals of importance. The
burial evidence also showed that
society was strongly patriarchal.
The enclosed Minusinsk
Basin, well protected and
increasingly fertile, provides a
3.9 Stone slab carved with a rider on horseback from the cemetery
of Krest-Khaja in the Minusinsk Basin.
microcosm of the changes taking
place in favoured areas in and around the Altai–Sayan
Mountains in the Final Bronze Age (c.1200–850 bc). Similar developments can be
seen in other steppe regions, notably in eastern Kazakhstan, but the enclosed upland
environments tended to intensify them. In the Minusinsk Basin, in the ninth century
bc, the economic and social changes underway during the Kasusuk period culminated
in the creation of a very different kind of society, known archaeologically as the
Tager culture, one in which horse-riding elites began to dominate life and to change
3.9
the course of history. The significance of these developments for the emergence of
the Scythians will be considered in the next chapter.
In the Pontic steppe the effects of climate change are also apparent. Here, in the
Late Bronze Age up to the twelfth century bc the climate had been moist and cool,
allowing for a growth in population on the steppe and expansion onto the more open
grassland with the scattered communities living in permanent settlements. Two
3.10 (Opposite) The Yenisei River threads through the Sayan Mountains linking expanses of steppe. In the
Minusinsk Valley many settlements and cemeteries of the Late Bronze Age Karasuk culture have been
identified, indicating a dense population.
78