6 - The Circulation of Peoples and Materials – Evolution, Devolution, and Recurrent Social Formations on the Eurasian Steppes and in West Asia: Patterns and Processes of Interconnection during Later Prehistory

Summary

The Bronze Age was, however, unique even in ancient times in that the great river valley civilizations relied on metal for production and that metal (copper, tin, lead, etc.) was scarce and had to be procured from afar, from less developed regions. Thus trade involved not just luxuries but also basic requirements, interaction between societies at contrasting levels of technology and social organization, and organization by ruling elites … Bronze Age societies [however] were not inchoate versions of our own.

(Ratnagar 2001: 351)

Over against the processes of divergent development leading to the separation of distinct peoples – and confusion – can be traced no less clearly a process of convergence…. At least in the Old World the peoples accessible to archaeological study were constantly interchanging material objects, ideas and inventions…. What we call Civilization is the product of this collective tradition, transcending all national frontiers.

(Childe 1933: 418–419)

This study has attempted to relate an interconnected story of developments from Chalcolithic through Bronze Age times that affected archaeologically defined peoples from the Balkans east to the borders of China. It has stressed the importance of contacts among different cultures and has emphasized the continuous circulation of materials, peoples, technologies, and ideas over long distances. At the same time it has inveighed against anachronistic reasoning, insisting that the dominantly herding economy that developed on the western Eurasian steppes during the Bronze Age qualitatively differed from the mounted steppe pastoral nomadism that emerged during the Iron Age and that is richly documented in later historical and ethnographic sources.