Holocene climate and culture change in the Lake Baikal region, Siberia

This research is part of a multidisciplinary collaboration investigating Holocene culture change and continuity among hunter-gatherers in the Lake Baikal region of southern Siberia. Archaeological data have demonstrated two distinct periods of social complexity, as evidenced by the use of large formal cemeteries dating to the Early Neolithic Kitoi and Late Neolithic-Early Bronze Age Serovo-Glazkovo periods, separated by a ca. 1000-year interval spanning the 7th millennium before present in which large mortuary sites are entirely absent. Evidence further suggests that cultural groups on either side of this Middle Neolithic hiatus differed in such fundamental areas as subsistence, diet, mobility, social and political relations, and genetic affiliation. The causal factors underlying this 'biocultural discontinuity' are still unknown, though thus far have been attributed to various social processes. Regional climate change, however, may have played a contributory role by acting as a stimulus for environmental fluctuations which required the development of new adaptive strategies by resident hunter-gatherer groups. The present study is designed to examine this middle Neolithic discontinuity within the context of changing climatic and environmental conditions during the Holocene.; Given the relative scarcity of detailed paleoecological investigations currently available from the Lake Baikal area, a major objective of this research was to document and interpret previously unstudied, high temporal resolution biostratigraphic sequences to add further to the growing record of Holocene climate and environmental change in the region. Field studies were carried out in areas which have received rather limited investigation, including sites in the upper Lena (Basovo site) and lower Selenga (Burdukovo site) river valleys. A multi-proxy research strategy was used to reconstruct the environmental significance of radiocarbon dated pedogenic cycles recorded in alluvial and aeolian depositional contexts, along with the associated records of macro- and micro-fossil datasets. Due to their extraordinary abundance and diversity at the study sites, particular emphasis is given to the Holocene successional history of land and freshwater molluscs. Results from these new data, in combination with other local and regional paleoecological proxy records, are used to examine the potential relationship between climate and environmental variability and culture change during the Baikal Neolithic.