Political pastures: Navigating the steppe in the Middle Volga region (Russia) during the Bronze Age

This dissertation develops a more nuanced understanding of pastoralism during the Bronze Age (3,300--1,300 BC) in the Middle Volga region by analyzing the spatial and temporal dynamics of people and animals in places, and by reintegrating the environment into pastoral histories as both the product of and the setting for human interactions. In particular, I focus on pastures, since it is in the construction, maintenance, and abandonment of these places that pastoral practice is inscribed upon the landscape. As a reflection of this goal, the dissertation is divided into three conceptual parts. The first section, deals with the major theoretical and methodological trends in Russian archaeology and their impact on conceptions of pastoralism. The second section unveils a revised history of pastoralism in the Middle Volga region during the Bronze Age. This history is established by linking a detailed spatial analysis of settlement and burial strategies over time with a description of climate and vegetation change as indicated by the palynological analysis of a continuous sediment core from an offsite swamp. The third section examines the practice of pastoralism at a more local scale over a shorter time period - the Late Bronze Age (1,800--1,300 BC). In this section, several types of settlements are examined through archaeological, faunal, macrobotanical, and pollen analyses, including a long-term permanent village, herding camps, and a metallurgical workshop. The end result is an historical political ecology of pastoralism in the Bronze Age that weaves together the political economy of pastoral groups with local ecological conditions. In this respect, the lessons learned in this dissertation about the nature of human-environment interaction in pastoral society can be widely applied to other studies of pastoralism.