Medieval mortuary millet: Micro and macrobotanical evidence from an early Turkic burial in the Altai

While early Turkic populations of northern Central Asia are traditionally thought to have been specialized nomads, over the past few years archaeological studies have shown that at least some of these peoples were engaged in farming, especially low-investment millet cultivation. The Turkic populations that spread across West Asia are thought to have originated in northern Central Asia. Despite the importance of these regions for understanding cultural developments, we have a dearth of data relating to the role of cultivated plants in their life, and scholars generally assume that people in this region lived on a diet of meat and dairy. In this article, we present micro and macrobotanical evidence of millet from a ceramic vessel recovered in a burial in the Kurai Valley of the Altai Mountains in Russia. Ceramic seriation and AMS dating, place the burial in the early Turkic period of the seventh century A.D., providing unique evidence for agricultural goods in medieval northwest Asia. Given the ritual context of the vessel, these data do not elucidate the role of millet in the economy, but we can convincingly demonstrate its presence among people thought to be the ancestors of later Turkic speakers in the Altai mountains. We note that millet cultivation could have been integrated into the economy as part of the seasonal migration cycle of the early Turkic semi-nomads, or they might have acquired the grains from farming communities in the adjacent Altai foothills.1. Introduction 2. Archaeological context 3. Materials and methods 4. Results 4.1. Archaeobotany 4.2. Pollen 4.3. Epidermal tissue remains 5. Discussion 5.1. Food offerings in funerary practice in Ancient Central Asia 5.2. Archaeological millet of the Altai and adjacent area 5.3. Macro and microbotanical evidence of millet offerings from Kurai early Turkic burial 6. Conclusio

Plant food in the diet of the Early Iron Age pastoralists of Altai: Evidence from dental calculus and a grinding stone

Archaeological studies have hypothesized that the diversification of production activities was an important adaptive strategy of seasonally mobile herders in the Eurasian steppe belt. The aim of this study, based on the extraction of starches and phytoliths from dental calculus and a grinding stone, was to determine the composition of plant food in the diet of ancient Altai pastoralists. Specimens of dental calculus (n = 43) and a fragment of muller, attributed to the Early Iron Age (5th c. BC – 5th c. AD) archaeological cultures of the Forest-Steppe Altai and Altai Mountains (Russia) were examined. For the analysis of extracted residuals, both optical and scanning electron microscopies were used. Seven plant species were identified in dental calculus, two of them were found on the grinding stone as well. The results of the study suggest that the Early Iron Age Altai pastoralists incorporated small-scale farming and foraging into their subsistence strategy. They consumed cultivated cereals, peas, and wild edible plants. The most important plant components of their diet were millet and underground storage organs (bulbs, roots) of wild edible plants, including kandyk (Erythronium sibiricum), lily (Lily martagon), and peony (Paeonia anomala). Young green herbs, such as nettle (Urtica dioica) and cow parsnip (Heracleum dissectum), were also consumed, though the range of green food in the analysed group can be underestimated. Millet was possibly a prestige food. The wild edible plants seem to have been gathered to diversify the pastoralist diet rather than as a “famine food”.</p

The link between climate change and biodiversity of lacustrine inhabitants and terrestrial plant communities of the Uvs Nuur Basin (Mongolia) during the last three millennia

The paper is focused on changes in biodiversity, the environment, and human activity in the Uvs Nuur Basin during the last three millennia based on biological and geochemical proxies from the lake Bayan Nuur. Regions with high biodiversity and relatively low anthropogenic pressures are typically the most vulnerable to both climate change and human activities. One such area is the Uvs Nuur Basin located on the north of the Great Lake Depression of Mongolia. The main objective of this study is to assess changes in the past biodiversity of the lake’s microflora and microfauna, and surrounding vegetation biodiversity in the Uvs Nuur Basin, and to determine the main drivers of diversity change. Based on the analysis of pollen and chironomids we conclude that the most humid and afforested phase was between 1400 and 1800 CE. We assume that the Little Ice Age in the Uvs Nuur Basin was humid with mean annual precipitation ca. 305 mm/year and mean July temperature about 13°C. Conversely, the warmest and most arid period was between 650 and 1350 CE with mean annual precipitation ca. 280 mm/year and mean July temperature of about 16°C, attributed to the Medieval Warm Period. The biodiversity of terrestrial plants, chironomids, and Cladocera positive react to changes in annual precipitation and July temperature, whereas diatoms do not correlate directly to the climatic factors. The diversity and the evenness of plants are strongly correlated with the change in the leading biomes. The calculated species turnover suggests no significant changes in plant and Cladocera taxa composition, but significant changes in diatom and chironomid communities. This may be explained by the instability of lake ecology due to the fluctuation of the salinity and acidity of the water. An additional aim was to assess if dung fungi in lacustrine sediments reflect changes in human population density around the lake. We found that neither historical sources of human presence nor the influx of coprophilous fungi are correlated with the inferred climate changes. Coprophilous fungi can be used as individual or additional sources of assessment for the peopling and human-related herbivore density including overgrazing of the studied area

Hill coefficients from different sources of sediment core from Lake Bayan Nuur

Estimating aquatic and pollen-assemblages, and community diversity. Comparison of multivariate datasets of bioproxies. To evaluate the similarity or dissimilarity of aquatic (lacustrine) and pollen assemblages, and their response to environmental changes, different datasets were compared using the statistical methods applied in modern species ecology. The richness and diversity of all bioproxies (pollen, diatoms, cladoceran, and chironomids) were calculated as the effective taxon numbers N0, N1, and N2 proposed by Hill (1973, doi:10.2307/1934352). Investigators using Hill numbers should report, at least, the diversity of all species (q0), of ''typical'' species (q1), and dominant species (q2) (Chao et al., 2014, doi:10.1890/13-0133.1). where S is the number of taxa in the sample count and the ith taxon has a relative abundance pi. The parameter q determines how sensitive the estimate is to taxon frequencies, where q = 0 is simply the total number of taxa in a community (Hill N0, 0D), q = 1 is the number of common taxa represented by the exponential of the Shannon-Wiener diversity index (Hill N1, 1D), and q = 2 is the number of dominant taxa represented by the inverse of Simpson's diversity index (Hill N2, 2D) (Chao et al., 2014, doi:10.1890/13-0133.1). These measures give easily interpretable numbers and provide information at three different levels based on how rare and abundant taxa are weighted. Diversity analyses for pollen, diatom, chironomid, and cladoceran (original counts) were conducted using the iNEXT package version 2.0.12 for R. Integrated curves that allow rarefaction and extrapolation were used to standardize samples based on sample size or sample completeness, and facilitate the comparison of biodiversity data; and the Hill numbers (N0, N1, and N2) were calculated using a non-asymptotic approach. A comparison of multivariate datasets can be performed using Procrustes rotation, which assesses the overall degree of correlation between two or more ordination results, and finds an optimal superimposition that maximizes their fit. PROTEST performs a random permutation test and assesses the degree of concordance between two matrices, producing the significance of the Procrustes fit as an r value with an associated p-value to indicate the likelihood of the relationship occurring by chance (Jackson, 1995, doi:10.1080/11956860.1995.11682297); and this approach has been employed in evaluating the similarities among different proxies or between environmental signals and their driving factors. We evaluated the similarity in temporal evolutions among pollen, diatom, chironomid, and cladoceran using Procrustes rotation and tested the significance of any relationship found with the associated PROTEST permutation test for the non-metric multidimensional scaling (NMDS) results of these datasets. Preliminarily to NMDS, Procrustes analyses, and PROTEST, all datasets were temporally standardized for each 100-year interval between 2850 and 50 cal yr BP. The NMDS, Procrustes analyses and PROTEST were carried out using the vegan package version 2.5-2, and linear interpolation was achieved by interp.dataset function in the rioja package version 0.9-15.1. Evenness (E) was calculated as the N2/N0 ratio. Evenness is a measure of the relative frequency of species in the community (sample). If evenness is at maximum, then all species are likely to be represented in a sample comprising only a few per cent of the individuals of the community. In contrast, if evenness is very low only a fraction of the species present in the entire population is likely to be found in even a large sample comprising almost half the individuals of the community. Interpretations of fossil assemblages in terms of evenness dynamics prove more rewarding than studies of past species richness (N0). Detrended canonical correspondence analysis (DCCA), the direct form of DCA, with species assemblage changes constrained to sediment age as the sole environmental variable, was used to develop quantitative estimates of compositional turnover, scaled in standard deviation (SD) units for each taxonomic group. The analysis is performed in CANOCO 5. Pollen percentages were square-root transformed. No down weighting of rare species was selected in this study because of the many rare pollen taxa present in our data. The change in weighted average (WA) sample scores reflects compositional change or turnover in standard deviation (SD) units along the temporal gradient

Pollen based annual precipitation for Lake Bayan Nuur

Method for quantitative reconstruction of mean July air temperatures (Tjuly). The quantitative reconstruction of mean July air temperatures (TJuly) is based on calibration chironomid data sets for lakes from northern Russia (Nazarova et al., 2015, doi:10.1016/j.gloplacha.2014.11.015). Mean July air temperatures were inferred using a North Russian (NR) chironomid-based temperature inference model (WA-PLS, 2 component; r 2 boot = 0.81; RMSEP boot =1.43 °C) based on a modern calibration data set of 193 lakes and 162 taxa from East and West Siberia (61-75°N, 50-140 °E, T July range 1.8 - 18.8 °C). The mean July air temperature of the lakes for the calibration data set was derived from New et al. (2002, doi:10.3354/cr021001). The TJuly NR model was previously applied to palaeoclimatic inferences in Europe, arctic Russia, East and West Siberia, and demonstrated a high reliability of the reconstructed parameters. The chironomid-inferred TJuly were corrected to 0 m a.s.l. using a modern July air temperature lapse rate of 6 oC km-1. Chironomid-based reconstructions were performed in C2 version 1.7. The chironomid data was square-rooted to stabilize species variance. To assess the reliability of the chironomid-inferred TJuly reconstruction, we calculated the percentage abundances of the fossil chironomids that are rare or absent in the modern calibration data set. A taxon is considered to be rare in the modern data when it has a Hill N2 below 5. Optima of the taxa that are rare in modern data are likely to be poorly estimated. Goodness-of-fit statistics derived from a canonical correspondence analysis (CCA) of the modern calibration data and down-core passive samples with TJuly as the sole constraining variables was used to assess the fit of the analyzed down-core assemblages to TJuly. This method shows how unusual the fossil assemblages are in respect to the composition of the training set samples along the temperature gradient. Fossil samples with a residual distance to the first CCA axis larger than the 90th and 95th percentile of the residual distances of all the modern samples were identified as samples with a 'poor fit' and a 'very poor fit' with the reconstructed variable (TJuly). CCA was performed using CANOCO 5. In the evaluation of goodness-of-fit, the CCA scaling focused on inter-sample distances with Hill's scaling selected to optimize inter-sample relationships

The link between climate change and biodiversity of lacustrine inhabitants and terrestrial plant communities of the Uvs Nuur Basin (Mongolia) during the last three millennia

In August 2016 the lacustrine sediment core was obtained from lake Bayan Nuur one of the northern lakes in the Great Lake Depression of Mongolia. Exact location of coring site (50.01072 N, 93.9745 E; 932 m a.s.l.) was in a water depth of 29 m at the deepest part of the lake. Corning was performed by small platform using a 60-mm gravity corer UWITEC. A 112-cm-long sediment core (BN2016-1) was studied by number of proxies including: radiocarbon dating, geochemical, pollen, diatoms and cladocera analyses. Acquired data were used for numerical analyses such as biomization, reconstruction of annual precipitation rate based on pollen data and reconstruction mean July temperature based on chironomid data, additionally was evaluated past biodiversity of the lake's microflora and microfauna using Hill numbers (Hill, 1973) based on all bioproxies data (pollen, diatoms, cladoceran, and chironomids). Six AMS radiocarbon measurements for bulk sediment samples were used for calibration and the age modeling. The average sediment accumulation rate is estimated at 0.37 mm/year. The reservoir effect calculated as 736 years was subtracted from the age-depth model. Core BN2016-1 covers the last 2885 cal. years BP

Pollen counts of sediment core from Lake Bayan Nuur

A total of 94 samples (0.8-1.2 g of dry sediment) from lake Bayan Nuur (Core BN2016-1) were used for pollen and non pollen palynomorphs analysis. The samples were chemically treated according to the methodology suggested by Faegri and Iversen (1989, doi:10.1016/j.gloplacha.2014.11.015), including treatment with a 10% solution of hydrochloric acid to dissolve carbonates, a 10% solution of potassium hydroxide to remove humic acids, and high concentration hydrofluoric acid to remove silicates. Acetolysis was not performed. A Lycopodium spore tablet (batch 483216) was added to each sample to calculate the total palynomorph concentration. Pollen grains mounted in glycerine were analyzed under a transmitted light microscope AxioImagerD2 with x400 magnification. In addition to pollen and spores, other non-pollen palynomorphs (NPPs), including spores and the fruit bodies of coprophilous fungi, were counted, and are included in the total sum. Pollen percentages were calculated based on the pollen sum of all detected taxa, taken as 100%. NPP percentages were calculated on the basis of the total sum taken as 100%. In the pollen diagram, dung fungi Sordaria, Sporormiella, and single coprophypous Ascomycetes (Podospora and Gelasinospora) are combined in one group, “coprophilous 40 fungi”. The coprophilous fungi were calculated in the pollen slides simultaneously with pollen. As fungi spore production and incorporation into sediments is independent of vegetation or pollen deposition; we calculated the coprophilous fungi concentrations and accumulation rates (influx) that would be the most reliable way to assess the real herbivore population and grazing trends (according to Wilmshurst and Wood, 2013, doi:10.5305/amerjintelaw.107.2.0390)

Chironomids counts of sediment core from Lake Bayan Nuur

A total of 42 samples from the Lake Bayan Nuur sediment core were studied for chironomid analysis . Treatment 66 of sediment samples for chironomid analysis followed the standard techniques described 67 in Brooks et al. (2007, https://edoc.unibas.ch/67001/). Subsamples of wet sediments were deflocculated in 10% KOH, heated to 70 oC for 10 minutes by adding boiling water, and left for another 20 minutes. The sediment was passed through stacked 225 and 90 µm sieves. Chironomid larval head capsules were picked out of a grooved Bogorov sorting tray under a stereomicroscope and were mounted in Hydromatrix two at a time, ventral side up, under a 6 mm diameter coverslip. Chironomids were identified as the highest taxonomic resolution based on Brooks et al. (2007). Information on the ecology of chironomid were used to reconstruct past paleoecological situation in the lake

Freshwater Reservoir Effects in Archaeological Contexts of Siberia and the Eurasian Steppe

In this paper we evaluate the extent of freshwater reservoir effects (37 samples across 12 locations) and present new data from various archaeological sites in the Eurasian Steppe. Together with a summary of previous research on modern and archaeological samples, this provides the most up-to-date map of the freshwater reservoir offsets in the region. The data confirm previous observations highlighting that FREs are widespread but highly variable in the Eurasian Steppe in both modern and archaeological samples. Radiocarbon dates from organisms consuming aquatic sources, including humans, dogs, bears, aquatic birds and terrestrial herbivores (such as elk feeding on water plants), fish and aquatic mammals, as well as food crusts, could be misleading, but need to be assessed on a case-by-case basis