Landscape Agency and Evenki-Iakut Reindeer Husbandry Along the Zhuia River, Eastern Siberia

This article is dedicated to the memory of Vasilii Nikolaeich Maksimov who drowned with his son while crossing the Zhuia River in 2012. The field research and laboratory analysis for this article was sponsored mainly by a grant from the Research Council of Norway (NFR 179316) within the multinational research framework “BOREAS: Histories from the North” organized by the European Science Foundation EUROCORES programme. A portion of the laboratory work, and the time for writing an analysis was made possible by an Advanced Grant from the European Research Council (ERC AdG 295458). The research could not have been carried out without the in-kind support, equipment and expertise of the Irkutsk State Technological University and the logistical support of the mining enterprise ‘Svetlyi’ based in Bodaibo. We are grateful to Iurii Vasil’evich Zharkov of the goldmining company Vitim and his uncle Iurii Alekseevich Zharkov of Svetlyi Ltd for professionally and reliably arranging ground transport for us and our equipment to and from the banks of the Zhuia River. We are also grateful to Iurii Konstantinovich Polititsyn, a lifetime resident of Svetlyi, who gave advice on sites of previous Evenki occupation and whose family helped us to navigate the river and organise the fieldwork. For this article, DGA was the principal investigator of the two grants, participated in most of the fieldwork, and composed this English text consulting Russian-language drafts prepared by EMI and OPV. EMI organized the fieldwork, conducted the trench digging, and prepared preliminary versions of the maps. OPV participated in the fieldwork, collected botanical samples, and participated in the interpretation of the pollen diagrams. ML participated in the fieldwork and conducted the phosphate analysis. The arduous work of identifying and counting the pollen grains, fungal spores and charcoal fragments was done by NVK in her laboratory in Irkutsk. We are indebted to our colleagues Drs. Ed Schofield and Dmitryi Mauquoy of the School of Geosciences at the University of Aberdeen for drafting the pollen diagrams and constructing the age-depth model and to Paul Ledger and Ilse Kamerling, also of the University of Aberdeen, for helping draft the final versions of the maps and figures.Peer reviewedPostprin

Radiocarbon Dating of Iron: A Northern Contribution

The iron dating project Aikarauta has been launched in Finland. This paper presents the results of the preliminary investigations. The ability for radiocarbon measurement by accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) of iron in Finland has been demonstrated by using coal-produced iron as reference material. An elemental analyzer has been harnessed to measure the carbon content of small iron samples. In addition, we have hypothesized that a fingerprint of the limestone usage in the smelting process is the high Ca content of iron and slag. This has been examined by performing an iron smelting experiment with limestone as flux, by making elemental analyses of ingredients and the resulting slag and iron, and by a 14C analysis of the produced iron. It is possible that limestone dilutes the 14C contents of the produced iron, making its age determination challenging.The Radiocarbon archives are made available by Radiocarbon and the University of Arizona Libraries. Contact [email protected] for further information.Migrated from OJS platform February 202

Neolithic dairy farming at the extreme of agriculture in northern Europe.

The conventional ‘Neolithic package’ comprised animals and plants originally domesticated in the Near East. As farming spread on a generally northwest trajectory across Europe, early pastoralists would have been faced with the challenge of making farming viable in regions in which the organisms were poorly adapted to providing optimal yields or even surviving. Hence, it has long been debated whether Neolithic economies were ever established at the modern limits of agriculture. Here, we examine food residues in pottery, testing a hypothesis that Neolithic farming was practiced beyond the 60th parallel north. Our findings, based on diagnostic biomarker lipids and δ(13)C values of preserved fatty acids, reveal a transition at ca 2500 BC from the exploitation of aquatic organisms to processing of ruminant products, specifically milk, confirming farming was practiced at high latitudes. Combining this with genetic, environmental and archaeological information, we demonstrate the origins of dairying probably accompanied an incoming, genetically distinct, population successfully establishing this new subsistence ‘package’