Conclusion

The Samara Valley project accomplished its goals: to reconstruct the seasonality and subsistence economy of several occupied places across an LBA Srubnaya landscape. If small settlements like KS and Barinovka were typical for the middle Volga region, as Sedova thinks, the majority of people lived in small homesteads, occupied year-round. They relocated to a new place after a short time, possibly after 1-10 years. Herds were kept locally, but were moved seasonally into pastures up to 10-12km distant from the main homestead, very similar to the modern village-based herding pattern in the area today. Cultivated cereals were not present in the landscape or the daily diet at KS. Instead the KS people ate seeds of native wild plants including Amaranthus and Chenopodium, carrots, chicory, garlic, and starches from Typha and Phragmites. The early Srubnaya landscape was occupied by herding-and-gathering communities anchored on kurgan cemeteries spaced 20-25 km apart along the river. Metal working was dispersed; it occurred even at a herding camp. A midwinter dog sacrifice occurred at KS, an Indo-European ritual that had been reconstructed by comparative mythologists but had never before been documented archaeologically.

The dramatic episode of sedentarization that opened the LBA across the northern steppes can now be re-examined in a new light. It was not associated with a shift to new locations in the landscape. People lived at places they had lived in the MBA—even a herding camp at PD 1 showed some MBA occupation. But in the LBA they stayed longer, used the sites more intensively, made more permanent houses, and produced much more garbage at each site. They did not do this because they had suddenly adopted agriculture, and they did not do it because the climate became moister. In fact the climate became warmer in both January and July, and more arid in the centuries when early Srubnaya appeared. The late MBA/early LBA was not a period of amelioration, but of aridity. Why, then, did the population become sedentary not just in the Samara Oblast, but across the northern steppes?

Theories of sedentarization connected with the origins of food production in the Near East might help. Rosenberg (1998) argued that when a traditionally mobile population (as in the MBA here) faced conditions of increased competition for declining resources, it made sense to remain in one key location that contained the most critical resources rather than attempt to defend a wider variety of resources over a large territory. Sedentism results from the increased defense costs associated with larger territories and the risk of losing rights to a critical resource under conditions of competition and declining productivity. In the case of northern steppe pastoralism, the critical resource is winter pasture for the animals. Ethnohistorically, Eurasian steppe pastoralists have favored marshy regions as winter refuges because of the winter forage and protection offered by large stands of Phragmites reeds up to 3m tall. Late MBA/early LBA sedentarization might have been a way to maintain control over the richest winter forage areas for herds—particularly if grazing animals were the principal source of food in an economy that did not include agriculture. Ecologically, KS would have met this criterion. It was located at the edge of one of the largest old-channel marsh environments in the lower Samara River valley, a place where numerous abandoned river channels were filled with oxbow marshes. In the summer it would have been a difficult environment to penetrate (as it is even today) but when frozen over in the winter it would have been easily exploited. The cluster of MBA kurgan cemeteries around this marsh (Krasno Samarskoe I-IV) might suggest that it was already a valued resource before the LBA. As the climate became more arid between 2500-2000 calBC, mobile herding societies began to settle near winter refuges like the KS marsh.

The principal problem with this explanation for the settling-down process is that many of the new settlements, including Krasnosamaraskoe, were established after 2000 BC, which should have been during a period when the climate was beginning to recover, becoming warmer and more humid. Better understanding of the precise dating and intensity of climate shifts after 2000 BC will require many radiocarbon dates on well-studied pollen cores across the northern steppes. It is also possible that the initial shift to sedentary herding that began during the late MBA was caused by a period of climatic stress, but the continuance of the new settlement pattern through a period of amelioration in the early LBA depended less on climatic stress and more on cultural emulation of and territorial articulation with sedentary clans who had become influential in steppe politics after their shift to settled herding during the final centuries of the MBA.

At this point this is a hypothesis. To test it convincingly we need better botanical and seasonality data from other LBA sites. The Samara Valley Project was extraordinarily productive. But like all archaeological excavations, it is just a beginning.