R N Spengler
Biographic Data
| ID | 17726 |
|---|---|
| NAME | R N Spengler |
| GIVEN NAMES | R N |
| FAMILY NAME | Spengler |
| SIGNATURE | SPENGLER R N |
| AFFILIATIONS | Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5648-6930 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 51 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 573 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 51 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2010 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
An agricultural complement to ancient northern Central Asian pastoralism on the steppe
The adaptive economies that allowed ancient people to, not only survive on the arid steppe of northern Central Asia, but also form early polities, elaborate burial practices, and specialized craft production, have attracted the attention of archaeologists for more than a century. Traditionally, these scholars have emphasized the first millennium BC as a key period of cultural change, labeling it the period when highly specialized nomadic pastoral…
Reduction of Silk Road Exchange Corresponds with a Decrease in Hydraulic Output of Major Dryland Rivers in Northwest China
Regional variability in faecal bile acids and its implications for species identification in archaeology
Faecal bile acids (BAs) are increasingly used in archaeological studies to detect domesticated species and reconstruct herding practices. However, it is unclear how environmental factors influence BA profiles and how much these profiles vary across regions. This uncertainty raises questions about their reliability for species-specific identifications across diverse settings. To address this, we analysed faecal BA profiles from free-grazing sheep …
Ancient human-environment interactions in the Tianshan mountains
Seeds of Time
Recent excavations at Tilla Bulak have produced the first systematically collected dataset of archaeobotanical remains from a Bronze Age site in the Surkhandarya Plain, southern Uzbekistan. The rich assemblage is dominated by economic crops, primarily hulled barley, wheat, and broomcorn millet, along with legumes, grape, and wild fruits, including pistachio, plum, and apple. The identification of a complex cultivation strategy illustrates the bre…
Adaptations in ancient oasis woodlands of the hyper-arid Tarim Basin, Northwestern China
Historical developments of Anthropocene concepts
Grain impressions in ceramic vessels illustrate the extent of 1st millennium bc agriculture across the northern Central Asian steppe
The Syr and Amu Darya deltas and the littoral zone of the eastern Aral Sea, from Khorezm to Kyzylorda, have attracted the attention of archaeologists for nearly a century. Since the well-known Tolstov expeditions, archaeologists have discussed the establishment of early defensive architecture and elaborate irrigation systems on the periphery of the hyper-arid Kyzyl Kum Desert. Scholars have argued over whether the ancient people in this region du…
Irrigated Farming Among Mountain Agropastoralists
Inner Asian Agropastoralism Within the Mongol Empire
Agropastoralism has been a widespread subsistence strategy in Central Asia from prehistory to the present. While significant research has aimed at understanding past agropastoral communities in the region, reconstructing a generalized economic model remains challenging due to the complex topographic and ecological conditions, as well as its social and political variability. It is likely that subsistence strategies were flexible and adapted to loc…
Multi-proxy investigations of Bronze Age diet and environment in the hyper-arid eastern Tarim Basin (Lop Nur), northwest China
Humans have a long history of occupying ecologically marginal regions, and the ancient cultural mechanisms of adaptation to these challenging environments remain poorly understood. We examine archaeological deposits from a Bronze Age settlement in the hyper-arid eastern Tarim Basin (Lop Nur), identifying well-preserved plant remains and bone fragments that shed light on the palaeodiet and past environmental setting. We use the newly developed pep…
The Cotton Road
Cotton is one of the most culturally significant crops in Central Asia today, and it has a complex history, long predating the collective-labour and intensive-irrigation systems of the Soviet period. In this paper, we explore the ancient history of cotton cultivation in Central Asia. We aim to understand when cotton cultivation switched from low-investment to intensive large-scale agriculture and to theorise about the dispersal routes, type of co…
Occupation of highland Central Asia
Testing the applicability of Watson’s Green Revolution concept in first millennium ce Central Asia
The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s00334-023-00924-2
Food globalization in southern Central Asia
The Silk Road is a modern name for a globalization phenomenon that marked an extensive network of communication and exchange in the ancient world; by the turn of the second millennium AD, commercial trade linked Asia and supported the development of a string of large urban centers across Central Asia. One of the main arteries of the medieval trade routes followed the middle and lower Zarafshan River and was connected by mercantile cities, such as…
The Uzbek-American Expedition in Bukhara. Preliminary Report on the Third Season (2017)
Excavations at the site of Bashtepa, at the western interface of the Bukhara oasis and the Kyzyl-kum desert, and at the kurgan sites at Kuyu-Mazar and Lyavandak on the eastern and north eastern fringes of the oasis, are detailed here, enriching our understanding of agro-pastoralism in Antiquity. At Bashtepa, results indicate a shifting site function, from a border fortress, over a phase during which a monumental though still poorly understood pla…
Medieval mortuary millet
Prehistoric agricultural decision making in the western Himalayas
The high-altitude landscape of western Tibet is one of the most extreme environments in which humans have managed to introduce crop cultivation. To date, only sparse palaeoeconomic data have been reported from this region. The authors present archaeobotanical evidence from five sites (dating from the late first millennium BC and the early first millennium AD) located in the cold-arid landscape of western Tibet. The data indicate that barley was w…
How to use modern science to reconstruct ancient scents
The Results of the Complex Study of the Kurteke Site (Eastern Pamir)
The materials of most of the archaeological sites of the Eastern Pamirs are known from lifting samples. One of them is the Kurteke rock shelter, that was discovered in 1960 by V.A. Ranov. At that time at the site there were distinguished two cultural layers dated to the Neolithic-Eneolithic and Eneolithic-Bronze period. This site is also interesting because on the walls of the rock shelter , directly above the cultural layers there are rock paint…
Niche Construction Theory in Archaeology
Over the past decade, niche construction theory (NCT) has been one of the fastest-growing theories or scholarly approaches in the social sciences, especially within archaeology. It was proposed in the biological sciences 25 years ago and is often referred to as a neglected evolutionary mechanism. Given its rapid acceptance by the archaeological community, it is important that scholars consider how it is being applied and look for discrepancies be…
Qarakhanids on the Edge of the Bukhara Oasis
The urban center of Paykend was an exchange node just off the main corridor of the Silk Road in the Bukhara Oasis on the edge of the hyperarid Kyzyl–Kum Desert. The city was occupied from the end of 4 century B.C.E. to the mid–12 century C.E.; our study focuses on the Qarakhanid period (C.E. 999 – 1211), the last imperial phase of urban occupation at Paykend before its abandonment. In this study, we present the results of an analysis of archaeobo…
Bison, anthropogenic fire, and the origins of agriculture in eastern North America
Scholars have argued that plant domestication in eastern North America involved human interactions with floodplain weeds in woodlands that had few other early successional environments. Archeological evidence for plant domestication in this region occurs along the Mississippi river and major tributaries such as the Tennessee, Ohio, Illinois, Missouri, and Arkansas rivers. But this region is also known as the prairie peninsula: a prairie-woodland …
Evidence for early dispersal of domestic sheep into Central Asia
An Imagined Past
Nomads, or highly specialized mobile pastoralists, are prominent features in Central Asian archaeology, and they are often depicted in direct conflict with neighboring sedentary peoples. However, new archaeological findings are showing that the people who many scholars have called nomads engaged in a mixed economic system of farming and herding. Additionally, not all of these peoples were as mobile as previously assumed, and current data suggest …
Earliest direct evidence for broomcorn millet and wheat in the central Eurasian steppe region
Before 3000 BC, societies of western Asia were cultivating wheat and societies of China were cultivating broomcorn millet; these are early nodes of the world's agriculture. The authors are searching for early cereals in the vast lands that separate the two, and report a breakthrough at Begash in south-east Kazakhstan. Here, high precision recovery and dating have revealed the presence of both wheat and millet in the later third millennium BC. Mor…
Moving agriculture onto the Tibetan plateau
Agriculture in the Central Asian Bronze Age
Millet cultivation across Eurasia
The two East Asian millets, broomcorn ( Panicum miliaceum) and foxtail millet ( Setaria italica), spread across Eurasia and became important crops by the second millennium BC. The earliest indisputable archaeobotanical remains of broomcorn millet outside of East Asia identified thus far date to the end of the third millennium BC in eastern Kazakhstan. By the end of the second millennium BC, broomcorn millet cultivation had spread to the rest of C…
Burial ritual, agriculture, and craft production among Bronze Age pastoralists at Tasbas (Kazakhstan)
Dung burning in the archaeobotanical record of West Asia
In the early 1980s Naomi Miller changed the field of palaeoethnobotany; her research into whether the ancient seed eaters of southwest Asia were human or herbivore opened an ongoing debate over the impact that burning of animal dung had on the formation of archaeobotanical assemblages, and how researchers can differentiate between human and animal food remains. As the number of systematic archaeobotanical studies across West Asia and many other p…
Agriculturalists and pastoralists
An Imagined Past
Nomads, or highly specialized mobile pastoralists, are prominent features in Central Asian archaeology, and they are often depicted in direct conflict with neighboring sedentary peoples. However, new archaeological findings are showing that the people who many scholars have called nomads engaged in a mixed economic system of farming and herding. Additionally, not all of these peoples were as mobile as previously assumed, and current data suggest …
The transition to a barley-dominant cultivation system in Tibet
The spread of agriculture into northern Central Asia
Over the past decade, researchers have directed greater focus toward understanding Bronze (3200–800 BC) and Iron Age (800 BC–AD 400) economies of Central Asia. In this article, we synthesize paleobotanical data from across this broad region and discuss the piecemeal archaeological evidence for agriculture in relation to environmental records of vegetation and climate change. The synthesis shows that agricultural products were present in northern …
Mobility and Ancient Society in Asia and the Americas
Archaeobotanical results from Sarazm, Tajikistan, an Early Bronze Age Settlement on the edge
Sarazm is an agricultural settlement located in the Zerafshan Valley of northwestern Tajikistan; it was occupied from the fourth to the end of the third millennia BC. Located on the northeastern edge of a chain of agricultural settlements (Namazga IV) that span the northern foothill ecotone of the Kopet Dag, Sarazm sat on a crossroads of exchange and interaction. Being at the eastern extremity of this chain of sedentary villages, Sarazm is the ke…
Bison, anthropogenic fire, and the origins of agriculture in eastern North America
Scholars have argued that plant domestication in eastern North America involved human interactions with floodplain weeds in woodlands that had few other early successional environments. Archeological evidence for plant domestication in this region occurs along the Mississippi river and major tributaries such as the Tennessee, Ohio, Illinois, Missouri, and Arkansas rivers. But this region is also known as the prairie peninsula: a prairie-woodland …
Evidence for early dispersal of domestic sheep into Central Asia
The southern Central Asian mountains as an ancient agricultural mixing zone
The mountain foothills of inner Asia have served as a corridor of communication and exchange for at least five millennia, using historically documented trade routes such as the Silk Road and the Tea-Horse Road. Recent research has illustrated the important role that this mountain corridor played in the dispersal of crops and farming technology between northeast and southwest Asia 5,000 to 1,000 years ago. However, the role of the mountain valleys…
Agricultural production in the Central Asian mountains
The site of Tuzusai is located in the Tien Shan Mountains of eastern Kazakhstan; occupation at the site between 410 B.C. and a.d. 150 represents the transition between the Saka and Wusun periods (Saka: 800–200 b.c.; Wusun: 200 b.c.–a.d. 400). Iron Age people of Central Asia are often described simply as mobile pastoralists, yet at Tuzusai, we have evidence that agriculture was practiced along with pastoral transhumance. This multiresource economi…
Niche Dwelling vs. Niche Construction
Qarakhanids on the Edge of the Bukhara Oasis
The urban center of Paykend was an exchange node just off the main corridor of the Silk Road in the Bukhara Oasis on the edge of the hyperarid Kyzyl–Kum Desert. The city was occupied from the end of 4 century B.C.E. to the mid–12 century C.E.; our study focuses on the Qarakhanid period (C.E. 999 – 1211), the last imperial phase of urban occupation at Paykend before its abandonment. In this study, we present the results of an analysis of archaeobo…
Food globalization in southern Central Asia
The Silk Road is a modern name for a globalization phenomenon that marked an extensive network of communication and exchange in the ancient world; by the turn of the second millennium AD, commercial trade linked Asia and supported the development of a string of large urban centers across Central Asia. One of the main arteries of the medieval trade routes followed the middle and lower Zarafshan River and was connected by mercantile cities, such as…
How to use modern science to reconstruct ancient scents
The breadth of dietary economy in Bronze Age Central Asia
Introduction to the Special Issue
For well over a century, scholars from across the social and biological sciences have been trying to understand the origins and spread of agriculture. This debate is often intertwined with discussions of climate change and human environmental impact. Over the past decade, this debate has spread into Central Eurasia, from western China to Ukraine and southern Russia to Turkmenistan, a part of the world often thought to have been largely dominated …
Testing the applicability of Watson’s Green Revolution concept in first millennium ce Central Asia
The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s00334-023-00924-2
Multi-proxy investigations of Bronze Age diet and environment in the hyper-arid eastern Tarim Basin (Lop Nur), northwest China
Humans have a long history of occupying ecologically marginal regions, and the ancient cultural mechanisms of adaptation to these challenging environments remain poorly understood. We examine archaeological deposits from a Bronze Age settlement in the hyper-arid eastern Tarim Basin (Lop Nur), identifying well-preserved plant remains and bone fragments that shed light on the palaeodiet and past environmental setting. We use the newly developed pep…
Occupation of highland Central Asia
Earliest direct evidence for broomcorn millet and wheat in the central Eurasian steppe region
Before 3000 BC, societies of western Asia were cultivating wheat and societies of China were cultivating broomcorn millet; these are early nodes of the world's agriculture. The authors are searching for early cereals in the vast lands that separate the two, and report a breakthrough at Begash in south-east Kazakhstan. Here, high precision recovery and dating have revealed the presence of both wheat and millet in the later third millennium BC. Mor…
Ecotopes and Herd Foraging Practices In the Steppe/Mountain Ecotone of Central Asia During the Bronze and Iron Ages
Eurasian mobile pastoralists living in semiarid environments focus on specific locations on the landscape where pasture resources and water are available. Ecotones –or intermediary zones between the mountain and steppe environments– create mosaic landscapes composed of forage-rich patches and other discrete enclaves of useful biota for pastoralist communities. Ecotopes (ecological patches) provide vital resources for the herding systems used in C…
Archaeobotanical results from Sarazm, Tajikistan, an Early Bronze Age Settlement on the edge
Sarazm is an agricultural settlement located in the Zerafshan Valley of northwestern Tajikistan; it was occupied from the fourth to the end of the third millennia BC. Located on the northeastern edge of a chain of agricultural settlements (Namazga IV) that span the northern foothill ecotone of the Kopet Dag, Sarazm sat on a crossroads of exchange and interaction. Being at the eastern extremity of this chain of sedentary villages, Sarazm is the ke…
Agricultural production in the Central Asian mountains
The site of Tuzusai is located in the Tien Shan Mountains of eastern Kazakhstan; occupation at the site between 410 B.C. and a.d. 150 represents the transition between the Saka and Wusun periods (Saka: 800–200 b.c.; Wusun: 200 b.c.–a.d. 400). Iron Age people of Central Asia are often described simply as mobile pastoralists, yet at Tuzusai, we have evidence that agriculture was practiced along with pastoral transhumance. This multiresource economi…
Late Bronze Age agriculture at Tasbas in the Dzhungar Mountains of eastern Kazakhstan
Agriculturalists and pastoralists
Niche Dwelling vs. Niche Construction
Moving agriculture onto the Tibetan plateau
Burial ritual, agriculture, and craft production among Bronze Age pastoralists at Tasbas (Kazakhstan)
Mobility and Ancient Society in Asia and the Americas
Agriculture in the Central Asian Bronze Age
The breadth of dietary economy in Bronze Age Central Asia
Millet cultivation across Eurasia
The two East Asian millets, broomcorn ( Panicum miliaceum) and foxtail millet ( Setaria italica), spread across Eurasia and became important crops by the second millennium BC. The earliest indisputable archaeobotanical remains of broomcorn millet outside of East Asia identified thus far date to the end of the third millennium BC in eastern Kazakhstan. By the end of the second millennium BC, broomcorn millet cultivation had spread to the rest of C…
The spread of agriculture into northern Central Asia
Over the past decade, researchers have directed greater focus toward understanding Bronze (3200–800 BC) and Iron Age (800 BC–AD 400) economies of Central Asia. In this article, we synthesize paleobotanical data from across this broad region and discuss the piecemeal archaeological evidence for agriculture in relation to environmental records of vegetation and climate change. The synthesis shows that agricultural products were present in northern …
Introduction to the Special Issue
For well over a century, scholars from across the social and biological sciences have been trying to understand the origins and spread of agriculture. This debate is often intertwined with discussions of climate change and human environmental impact. Over the past decade, this debate has spread into Central Eurasia, from western China to Ukraine and southern Russia to Turkmenistan, a part of the world often thought to have been largely dominated …
Linking agriculture and exchange to social developments of the Central Asian Iron Age
Eurasian textiles
Dung burning in the archaeobotanical record of West Asia
In the early 1980s Naomi Miller changed the field of palaeoethnobotany; her research into whether the ancient seed eaters of southwest Asia were human or herbivore opened an ongoing debate over the impact that burning of animal dung had on the formation of archaeobotanical assemblages, and how researchers can differentiate between human and animal food remains. As the number of systematic archaeobotanical studies across West Asia and many other p…
Claudia Chang. Rethinking prehistoric Central Asia
Author: Spengler III, Robert N.; Genre: Book Review; Issued: 2018; Title: Claudia Chang. Rethinking prehistoric Central Asia: shepherds, farmers, and nomads. 2018. Abingdon & New York: Routledge; 978-1-138-73708-2 £105
Fruit from the Sands
The foods we eat have a deep and often surprising past. From almonds and apples to tea and rice, many foods that we consume today have histories that can be traced out of prehistoric Central Asia along the tracks of the Silk Road to kitchens in Europe, America, China, and elsewhere in East Asia. The exchange of goods, ideas, cultural practices, and genes along these ancient routes extends back five thousand years, and organized trade along the Si…
Investigating ancient animal economies and exchange in Kyrgyzstan's Alay Valley
Year-old cereal grains from the eastern Altai Mountains redate the trans-Eurasian crop exchange
Forest cover and composition on the Loess Plateau during the Middle to Late-Holocene
The question of what the ecology communities of the Loess Plateau looked like before the extensive anthropogenic reshaping processes of the late-Holocene has stirred a long debate. A better understanding of these human-induced changes will not only help us understand the extent of paleoeconomic practices, but also inform future conservation actions on this ecologically fragile landscape. This paper presents a systematic study of wood charcoal fro…
Water management and wheat yields in ancient China
The evaluation of ancient crop production and its response to climate change is key to exploring the ancient demographic and social changes. Wheat is currently the third most widely cultivated crop worldwide and was a major component across of the agricultural systems of the ancient Eurasia. In this study, the Δ 13 C values of 116 charred wheat grains from 28 archaeological sites, with direct AMS 14 C dating of 3952 ± 66 to 389 ± 73 cal yr BP, ac…
The southern Central Asian mountains as an ancient agricultural mixing zone
The mountain foothills of inner Asia have served as a corridor of communication and exchange for at least five millennia, using historically documented trade routes such as the Silk Road and the Tea-Horse Road. Recent research has illustrated the important role that this mountain corridor played in the dispersal of crops and farming technology between northeast and southwest Asia 5,000 to 1,000 years ago. However, the role of the mountain valleys…
Archaeology and ancient environmental studies (38 works) · Geography (37 works) · Archaeology (36 works) · Agriculture (25 works) · Eurasian Exchange Networks (21 works) · Biology (17 works) · Ecology (15 works) · History (15 works) · Bronze Age (14 works) · Central asia (14 works)