Food and Environment in Early and Medieval China. E. N. Anderson

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СКАЧАТЬ all over Eurasia (Achilli et al. 2012). The first secure evidence comes from the Botai culture in Kazakhstan (Anthony 2007; Frachetti 2008, 2012; Levine et al. 2003). The Botai people depended almost exclusively on horses for animal protein—not just the meat (of which they ate an enormous amount) but also the milk, as shown by residues in pots. Milking horses implies domestication.

      No one knows when riding started—claims of bit wear on ancient horse teeth have not held up—but presumably it entered the picture about this time. By 3000 BCE, mounted riders seem to have been ranging widely over the steppes, and by 2000 the war chariot was a major part of warfare as far afield as the Near East. Horses and war chariots reached China around 1500. The Indo-Europeans were among those who took advantage of the horse and of livestock nomadism in general to radiate in all directions and build up large populations. It is tempting to associate the Botai with them, but the Botai are farther east than the presumed IE center in Ukraine. Perhaps the Indo-Europeans were already in the east, or perhaps the Botai people were ancestral Uralic or Altaic groups.

      Horses were in China by the middle Shang Dynasty, 1400–1500 (Harris 2010: 82; Lawler 2009), but, so far, are not reported earlier. China is not good horse country; there is little good grazing, and, in historic times, there was little room to grow fodder. Much of China’s lands are deficient in selenium, which horses need (May 2012). China always obtained its best horses from the steppes.

      Local conditions—ecological and cultural—led to different emphases in different areas of China and Central Asia: sheep and goats dominated widely, and there were even cattle specialists in some relatively favorable areas, but the all-importance of the horse in Kazakhstan was slow to change (Frachetti 2012). The western, central, eastern, montane, and far eastern steppes all had different histories, political as well as ecological; nearness to great civilizations, isolation by mountain ranges, and ease of mobility all mattered.

      When the steppe peoples entered Chinese history, their way of life was already ancient. It was, however, far more than nomadic herding. Central Asia, especially at the western and eastern ends, was a complex intermingling of steppe nomads, seminomadic groups with varying degrees of agriculture, settled riverine farmers using intensive irrigation, and dry-farmers taking advantage of every wet period to extend farming far out into dry lands—as pointed out by scholars such as Owen Lattimore (1940) long ago and many others since (e.g., Barfield 1989, 1993; Barthold 1968).

      By 1500 BCE there were substantial farming settlements in the Zhunge’er (Junggar, Dzungarian) Basin, in what is now far northwest China. The people dry-farmed wheat, barley (naked barley was prominent), and foxtail millet. They had sophisticated pottery, similar to that from other parts of eastern Central Asia at the time (P. Jia et al. 2011) but quite different from the wares of China—at that time just entering the Shang Dynasty. No hints of their ethnic affiliation exist. The area is traditionally a haunt of “nomads,” but these people were not nomadic. The widespread occurrence of early intensive farming in Central Asia, now established, has changed some historical speculation.

      Other high cultures with distinctive art and architecture have been discovered in Central Asia (see Lawler 2009 for a quick overview). They share many broad patterns with the better-known early cultures of the Yellow River plain but are still distinctive. Data on these societies are only beginning to appear, and the instability of the region makes excavation difficult at best.

      The early Chinese and Roman historians shared a tendency to overstate the nomadism and the dependence on stock as a way of differentiating the “Huns” and “Xiongnu” and other “barbarians” from “civilized” folk. In fact, every major stable Central Asian state or conquering horde had to depend on agriculture for a great deal of its food, clothing, and wealth (cf. Honeychurch and Amartuvshin 2006). The Xiongnu, for instance, held vast areas that were very dry but that were and are farmed, as well as several major riverine oasis-strips.

      The Central Asian cultures have produced many mummies, preserved by the dry, cold climate. They show that most of the people there were of West Asian (some perhaps even European) background. Current genetic theory holds that the East Asian peoples are derived largely from groups that moved up very slowly from Southeast Asia. So their late radiation into Central Asia led to a meeting of quite different stocks when they encountered Caucasians spreading through Central Asia from the west. Many of the Central Asian mummy-wrapping textiles are wool woven in patterns similar to European ones; some are strikingly similar to Scottish plaids (Barber 1999; J. Mallory and Mair 2000). The earliest mummies date to 1800–1500 BCE. These people certainly include the ancestors of the Tocharians. (The Tocharoi of Greek history were in northern Afghanistan, whereas the people discussed here, the Twghry, occupied what is now Xinjiang. Tocharoi is a very reasonable Greek spelling of Twghry, so the mistake may simply be a minor misplacement by the Greek writers. See Hansen 2012: 73.) At least three Tocharian languages were spoken in this area in early historic times. The better known ones are usually called Tocharian A and B, but the more useful names Kuchean and Agnean are coming into use (Hansen 2012: 74). They are Indo-European, close enough to eastern European languages that their word for “fish” was “lox”! (Phonetically laks, lakse, or laksi.) And a modern Uyghur bread resembles the bagel (C. Robinson 1998). The Uyghur, a Turkic people, absorbed the Tocharians in early medieval times. Also well represented are people related to known Iranic groups. Probably most of the people of the ancient Tarim Basin and neighboring areas were Indo-Iranian. Turkic and Mongol speakers probably were established at the northern fringes.

      The food attested was largely wheat and barley, with sheep, goats, cattle, horses, Bactrian camels, donkeys, and probably yaks to provide variety of dairy and meat stock. Some of the mummies, including the spectacular Beauty of Xiaohe (1800–1500 BCE), were buried with wheat grains; she also has a basket and winnowing fan to use in the afterlife. She was blonde and probably blue-eyed and came with mummified lice. More significant is the fact that she was buried with very European-looking fabrics, including woven wool goods that look like modern Scottish or northern European woolens. A baby was buried at about the same time, with similarly European clothing and a sheep-nipple baby bottle and goat-horn drinking cup. By Han times, grapes, apricots, melons, and other fruit were established. Apricots and wild grapes are probably native to the area, and apples have their home not far off in the mountains of Kazakhstan.

      Horses and chariots had not entered the picture yet in eastern Central Asia, although they were established by this time in the western steppes. The delay is strange. If, as seems virtually certain, the Indo-Europeans and specifically the Indo-Aryans were in at the birth of horse-and-chariot culture, why were these not found among the Caucasians of east-central Asia? The grave goods and appearance of the mummies seem almost impossible to explain if they were not Indo-Europeans. Possibly the horse riders all moved south and west, to where there was more booty, leaving the East to foot travelers.

      Tibet may have been settled by 30,000 years ago, though evidence is shaky. In any case, people entering around 6,000 years ago indicate the coming of agriculture and presumably animal husbandry (Brantingham and Xing 2006), at least to the lower margins of Tibet; the highlands were only seasonally occupied at best until somewhat later. There and in Central Asia, once again, complex cultures flourished by 1500–2000 BCE or earlier.

      Soviet archaeological practice, including some of the best Soviet work, came to China in the early Communist period, before Mao broke with the USSR (Zhang Liangren 2011 gives a very detailed, and favorable, analysis of this phase). Then, after a long hiatus, Russian archaeology in Central Asia is now so important and pervasive that Chinese archaeologists are once again following Russian work closely. American and European influences dominated before 1949 (with some unfortunate colonialism intruding; Zhang Liangren 2011) and again in the 1980s and 1990s, under much more cooperative circumstances. A great deal of ongoing work is now done by mixed-national teams.

      CHAPTER 3

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