The Oxus Civilization and the Northern Steppes

The steppe communities of the Bronze Age have been traditionally classified under the broad term “Andronovo culture.” They share similar design elements and forms of material culture, burial traditions, as well as pastoralism as their primary economic activity. Regional variations such as Petrovka, Alakul’ and Fedorovo, and Sargary and Alekseevka spread out across the Central Eurasian steppes: from the Urals to the borders of western Mongolia and as far south as the foothill terraces and oases of eastern Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, north Afghanistan, and Margiana in South Turkmenistan. The material culture and economic nature of this intricate patchwork of mobile communities arguably began to emerge in locally independent contexts as early as the middle of the 3rd millennium. Evidence of sustained contacts and interactive processes between the Central Eurasian steppes and southern Central Asia, where agricultural economy prevailed, is so far unclear and scant. The reasons are twofold: First, archaeological finds only partially document the cultural, linguistic, and biological interactions that certainly took place in prehistory; and, second, few specialists have studied the archaeological evidence of early interaction between these two geographical and cultural worlds.