E.E. KUZMINA, edited by VICTOR H. MAIR. The prehistory of the Silk Road. xii+248 pages, 72 figures, tables. 2008. Philadelphia (PA): University of Pennsylvania Press; 978-0-8122-4041-2 $65 & £42.50.
MICHAEL D. FRACHETTI. Pastoralist landscapes and social interaction in Bronze Age Eurasia. xviii+214 pages, 53 illustrations. 2008. Berkeley & Los Angeles (CA): University of California Press; 978-0-520-25689-7 hardback £26.95.
Over the last three years, the archaeology of Bronze Age Eurasia has witnessed an explosion of accomplished, synthetic books intended for English-speaking audiences — the fruit of almost two decades of collaborative research since the emergence of the region's independent states. Monographs by Anthony (2007), Kohl (2007) and Koryakova & Epimakhov (2007), as well as edited volumes by Peterson et al. (2006), Popova et al. (2007), Linduff & Rubinson (2008) and Hanks & Linduff (in press) provide not only scholarly discussions of a complex archaeological region, but also a palpable sense of a field in the midst of a substantive intellectual transition. On the one hand, the robust interpretive apparatus established by the Soviet (now Russian) archaeological school continues to play a critical role in contemporary research, a perspective most clearly visible in an emphasis on the historically determinative role of productive economies and an attention to tracking formal artefact variation as evidence of culture groups and their migratory paths. On the other hand, the waxing influence of Anglo-American social archaeology can be seen in studies of social heterogeneity and the more micro-scale analytics that such thematic interests require. While this transformation is clearly part of a wider shift, Eurasia is quite unique in that both perspectives tend to thread their way through the work of local and foreign scholars alike, one result of research projects that are truly collaborative.
The two works under review here succinctly capture this complex intellectual terrain. Elena Kuzmina's The prehistory of the Silk Road is a solid introduction to the region by a distinguished scholar trained in the Soviet school. The geographic reach of the work is vast, embracing the entirety of central Eurasia from the Pontic Steppe to eastern Central Asia. The interpretive aspirations of the work are comparably modest, restricted largely to the familiar spheres of productive and trade economies situated within an account of shifting ecological conditions. In contrast, Michael Frachetti's Pastoralist landscapes and social interaction is a work by a member of a new generation of American archaeologists who come to the region from traditions of anthropological inquiry. Although the broad context of the book is the Eurasian continental space, the focal point of investigation is restricted to eastern Kazakhstan. However, the more limited geographic scope of Frachetti's analysis allows for a more extensive interpretive agenda.
Kuzmina opens her book with a brief historical introduction to the Silk Road. These overland exchange networks connecting China to western Asia and Europe were under development as early as the second century BC when the Han dynasty sent emissaries into Central Asia to cultivate commercial ties with Bactria, Ferghana and the Parthian Empire. However, as Kuzmina notes, there is some evidence of much earlier long-distance exchanges that articulated the Steppe and Central Asia: trade relationships that brought, for example, lapis lazuli from Afghanistan to the Urals and Bactrian turquoise to Siberia. Kuzmina's argument is that Bronze Age inter-regional connections, made possible by economies committed to mobile lifeways and critical technologies like the chariot and the camel, paved the way for the Silk Road.
Chapter 1 examines the ecology of the Eurasian Steppe, working through current understandings of palaeoclimatic fluctuations from the Neolithic to the end of the Bronze Age. These climatic shifts are, for Kuzmina, the motor of Steppe history, provoking large-scale social transformations by forcing either migrations to more favourable environments or 'economic and cultural adaptations' (p. 17) to new climatic regimes. The author's commitment to ecological determinism is consistent throughout the book, reflecting a key tenet of later Soviet archaeology.
Chapters 2 and 3 offer a summary of the economic shifts that reshaped the societies of the Ponto-Caspian Steppe from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age in response to environmental shifts. Kuzmina charts five key transformations in Steppe subsistence, from small-scale mixed farming to extensive mobile pastoralism. The majority of this narrative strays rather far from long-distance exchange relationships, but serves to establish the foundations of a regional economy centred on mobility and possessed of technologies that made long-distance movements of both goods and people possible.
Chapter 4 regrettably abandons the unifying economic prehistory of earlier chapters in favour of an extended list of Central Asia's primary archaeological cultures. Kuzmina's agenda here is to set out the key culture groups that provide the critical linkages between Central Asia and the Steppe. But the list is not particularly effective in providing a coherent sense of how the pieces fit together as elements of a primordial Silk Road.
Chapter 5 is the capstone chapter, summarising the archaeological and historical evidence for Bronze Age relations between China and the Eurasian Steppe across Central Asia. It describes various normative, highly ethnicised archaeological cultures migrating across the region and establishing 'cultural relations' with one another. However, these Bronze Age interactions appear to differ substantially from the socio-economic phenomena captured by the term 'Silk Road'. The latter was a complex network of routes for the movement of goods across large distances carried through locally mediated exchanges that allowed value to be transformed with each shift in social, cultural and political context. Kuzmina's prehistoric Silk Road is really neither a road nor about silk or any other commodity. It is instead a vague set of cultural encounters made by peoples committed to mobility along well-worn routes, but not driven by participation in an emergent commodity economy. While Kuzmina provides a very useful account of long-term shifts in Eurasia's subsistence economy, the argument that this constitutes a prehistory for later exchange networks is not convincing. While there is no doubt that long distance exchanges took place in the Bronze Age, often over routes that would later become part of the Silk Road, to conflate these two phenomena is to obscure the very different social and economic forces that motivated and structured exchange.
Even if the central argument fails to persuade, the book is nevertheless a useful introduction to the archaeology of Eurasia, a credit to both author and editor. One missed opportunity in the editing of the book should be noted. Kuzmina is an accomplished scholar trained in the Soviet school and the book could have served as an excellent introduction to one of world archaeology's most prominent traditions. So it is regrettable that Victor Mair chose to camouflage the particularities of the Soviet archaeological lexicon through 'circumlocutions' (p. viii) in order to avoid topics that might raise red flags with Western scholars such as morphological discussions of human physical types or Marxist-derived terms like 'productive economy'. As a result, the work is drained of what might have been a clear statement on the central themes and premises of the Soviet tradition as presented by one of its most distinguished practitioners.
Michael Frachetti also opens his study by invoking the Silk Road, but with quite different interpretive ambitions. By centring the book on the results of his fieldwork in Semirech'ye and the Dzhungar Mountains in eastern Kazakhstan, Frachetti eschews the broad brush strokes that are the central preoccupations of most work in Eurasia. Instead, the author adopts a more intimate scale that allows him to detail everyday herding strategies which establish the contexts for social interactions. The central argument of the book, set out in chapter 1, is that pastoral groups in central Eurasia were invested in local migrations that produced bounded socio-economic landscapes. Such landscapes were constantly re-inscribed by movements amongst historically enduring places (p. 30). Frachetti's introduction makes a spirited defence of this scalar shift, overturning the 'highway of grass' model of Eurasia in favour of a complex mosaic of 'eco-social spheres or landscapes' (p. 7) that empowers local historical processes.
Chapter 2 provides a useful account of the intellectual and archaeological context of the work, explaining some of the theoretical framework of (post-)Soviet archaeology and orienting the reader to regional trends from the Eneolithic to the Bronze Age. Chapter 3 presents a detailed account of pastoral ecology in the eastern Steppe that is both readable and rigorous. Yet despite its obvious merit, the chapter stands out from the remainder of the book in that, as ecology takes centre stage, landscape recedes from view. Frachetti argues, from the ecological data, that the area under study has substantial capacities for pastoral production and can support only small-scale agriculture, leading to the obvious conclusion that the region is not just well-suited as pastureland but optimally exploited by pastoral strategies. This kind of argument, from a theoretical optimal standpoint but divorced from particular socio-historical contexts, is contrary to the more persuasive landscape approach adopted elsewhere in the book which emphasises human strategic decision-making.
Chapter 4, which embarks on a comparative ethnographic study of pastoral strategies and the contexts of social interaction, is one of the book's more interesting chapters. Frachetti glosses over the challenges of making ethnographic analogies too quickly yet avoids the trap of slotting local pastoralists into a global type by making the general pattern serve local analytical interests. The larger point of the chapter is important: it highlights the historical potency of the 'coincidental, opportunistic, or even passively organized interactions' (p. 122) that framed the social lives of pastoralists in the Dzhungar Mountains.
Chapter 5 brings us to the data Frachetti collected during his survey in eastern Kazakhstan, tracking transformations in site distributions over some 4000 years of regional prehistory. The data are remarkably rich and testify to the potential of systematic regional survey in Eurasia. What emerges is a landscape largely shaped by internal political and social forces. As chapter 6 makes clear, economic decisions loomed quite large in framing broad site distributions, but Frachetti opens considerable room for the impact of sacred and social forces on the landscape. That said, there is some tension in the analytical results. On the one hand, there is at times an eternal quality to the local pastoral landscape of the Dzhungar Mountains, the product of sedimented practices that 'reproduce an embedded sense of social history' over millennia (p. 172). On the other hand, Frachetti is clearly aware of the dangers of reducing the pastoralist landscape to an unchanging set of people and places removed from history, hence his focus on key shifts in migratory patterns over time.
The book concludes by moving to wider Eurasian phenomena that bear reconsideration in light of the results obtained from the Dzhungar Mountains. Frachetti singles out the 'Seima-Turbino phenomenon' of the Late and Final Bronze Age as particularly open to re-examination. Here the central issue is the rapid dispersal of metal objects which originated in the Altai Mountains to archaeological contexts as distant as the Urals. Rather than the mass migration suggested by Chernykh (1992) to explain the phenomenon, Frachetti proposes that slight shifts in local migration networks might have created the conditions for new interaction and exchange networks. The suggestion is cogently reasoned, and forces us to abandon vague accounts of cultural interaction or contact to specify how such encounters took place.
In sum, both books provide important insights into the current state of Eurasian archaeology. Frachetti's book is a thoughtful study that augurs important transformations in the intellectual focus of the field. It is appropriate for both scholars of the region and students looking for an orientation to the eastern Steppe, as well as for archaeologists and ethnographers interested in pastoralism more generally. Kuzmina's book is a valuable introduction for students looking for a well-defined summary of the critical phases in the development of Eurasia's prehistoric economy, but is less convincing as an argument for a primordial Silk Road. In fact, it is Frachetti's book which, perhaps inadvertently, makes the more compelling case for a prehistoric Silk Road by clearly defining the socio-economic practices that articulated distinct pastoral groups within a wider sphere of exchange relations. Both Kuzmina's continental-scale prehistory and Frachetti's detailed local models advance the conversation and the two works together signal that the archaeology of Eurasia is in the midst of a vibrant era.
