Archaeology, Ethnology & Anthropology of Eurasia 47 (3) 2019   DOI: 10.17746/1563-0110.2019.47.3.027-037

Annotation:  New Dental Finds Associated with the Paleolithic Selenga Culture, Western Trans-Baikal Region The “Kalgutinsky” Style in the Rock Art of Central Asia Technical and Social Innovations: A New Field of Research The Ishkinino Bronze Age Mining Complex in the Southern Urals: Radiocarbon Dating An Early Iron Age Foundry at Kargat-4, Southwestern Siberia Sibirskoye I: A Late Irmen Site on the Irtysh Steppe Cultural Interaction Patterns in the Bronze Age: Ritual Bronze Artifacts from Korea and Japan An Early Iron Age Camp of Reindeer Hunters in the Bolshezemelskaya Tundra, Nenets Autonomous Okrug The Bear Cult and Kurgans of the Scythian Elite An Early Jurchen Text Among Rock Representations Near the Arkhara River in the Amur Basin (History, Evidence Relating to the Christian Missions in the Trans-Urals and Northwestern Siberia (8th to 16th Ivan Lepyokhin’s Expedition to the Middle Volga Mordvins in Western Siberia in the Late 19th to Early 20th Century: Certain Issues in the Migration The Buryats: Ethno-Social Development and Post-Soviet Transformations (Based on the 2017 Opinion Pol A Multidisciplinary Study of Egyptian Mummies from the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts (Methodical Secular Dynamics of Body Height and Weight in Russian Children Aged 0–17   

Technical and Social Innovations: A New Field of Research

S. Hansen

Deutsches Archaologisches Institut, Im Dol 2–6, Berlin, 14195, Germany

The grand narrative of cultural developments claims that all technical achievements in prehistory stemmed from urban centers in Mesopotamia and Egypt. But current studies, for instance on the oldest wagons, have opened up space for alternative working hypotheses and models: modern radiocarbon dating of complexes that revealed the cited innovations, e.g. the oldest wagons, functional metal tools, and an advanced copper metallurgy, which predate their first appearance in Mesopotamia, questions the role of this region in the development of technology. Possibly, Mesopotamian cities operated rather as a melting pot of numerous innovations obtained from various areas, which were then re-combined and placed into a different context. The North Caucasus, in particular the Early Bronze Age Maykop culture, is an exemplary candidate for such an interactive process in technical developments. The Maykop culture has been known in research for 120 years, and its genesis is supposed to have originated in Mesopotamia. This is an archaeological narrative meant to explain the high technical state of the Maykop culture. In the light of the new chronology based on a relatively small number of radiocarbon dates, a re-examination and alternative models are necessary. It is obvious that this culture developed a highly innovative potential in metalworking and sheep breeding, and fulfilled an important function as mediator in knowledge transfer between the Eurasian steppe and Upper Mesopotamia. Recent aDNA studies support this view.

Keywords: Innovations, Early Bronze Age, Caucasus, wagon, composite bow, shaft-hole axe