About the Project

The domestication of the horse led to revolutions in transport, communications and forms of warfare - a process that involved more than one geographical region and multiple stages through time. Over 5,000 years ago, in the forest steppe grasslands of modern-day Kazakhstan, the Botai Culture emerged as a hotspot of human experimentation centred around early horse husbandry, but the focus of this animal management seems to have centred largely around community food supply.

Early animal management was initially a form of specialized equine herding, but, over the next 1,000 years, cattle, sheep and goats were introduced to the region - causing people in this region to innovate further in a new type of mixed pastoralism. As this was happening, over 2,500km away, different cultural groups in the Pontic-Caspian region of Russia were changing their relationship to a different lineage of horses in a way that led to genetic selection for traits that helped improve their use for riding and pulling chariots. It was this later type of domestic horse that eventually gave rise to all our modern domestic horses, but this fact tends to obscure the richly diverse nature of the full story and the people and animals involved in it.

PASTLOST investigates early experimentation with animal husbandry in northern and eastern Kazakhstan, a crucible of human innovation in the steppe where horses were brought under human control much earlier than elsewhere. It examines how equine-focused pastoralists restructured their human-horse relationships with the arrival of cattle, sheep and goats, and adopted 'know-how' in the form of new husbandry practices for all their animal stock. PASTLOST investigates how all this changed when the new lineage of domestic horse was introduced from further west. In doing so we seek to develop a new theoretical paradigm that explicitly foregrounds understanding the diversity of past animal-use systems that fostered cultural and subsistence resilience, and will question the concepts of "success" and "failure" that are currently embedded in archaeological discourse and our wider understandings of the past.

PASTLOST combines new archaeological excavations of key archaeological sites with a range of cutting-edge scientific techniques applied to both newly excavated materials and those in existing museum collections. Methods include advanced mass spectrometry and genomic and proteomic analyses to reconstruct mobility and diet of people and animals. 

Through the course of the project, our team seeks to establish:

Our project also explicitly promotes knowledge exchange between researchers in UK, Germany, Kazakhstan, and internationally.