Horses in Pazyryk culture burials and their afterlife in China

Trans -continental migration is of central concern to proposals about the transmission of ideas, objects, and people in the ancient Eurasian world in the first millennium BCE ( Hanks, 2012 ; Cunliffe, 2019 , and others). Horses and the transport that they provided were central to making this contact possible. The focus of this paper is the Pazyryk Culture, dating from the late forth-third c. BCE, although we examine broader process of exchange by examining DNA testing of the animals and the results of isotopic testing. By looking at the results of scientific testing and analysis of material culture at Pazyryk, we investigate how the role of horses affected this micro-region. This inquiry has allowed us to reimagine the role and importance of horses to the activities of their related human populations in the Altai Mountain region of Russia and Kazakhstan. We include with this a case study noting the surprising appearance of funerary horses with clear Pazyrykian affinities in newly excavated sites in present-day western Mongolia and China and the differing effects of that association. This paper adds a greatly more nuanced and complex narrative about migrations across Eurasia and the role of horses by looking at a sub-region in the Siberian Altai at Pazyryk where horses played a significant role a millennium later than previous discussions 1 and asks what explains the movement out of that region into the Chinese and Mongolian Altai. Our analysis demonstrates the value and importance of local studies that test and in this case challenge broad-brush interpretations.