What did the Central Asian nomads of the Great Silk Road eat?
Medieval nomads who roamed caravan routes of the Great Silk Road in Central Asia were true gourmets and legislators of culinary trends of their epoch, says a new study published recently in the journal Scientific Reports.
The report on the dietary characteristics of the Central Asian peoples in the middle ages was elaborated by an international research group, which includes archaeologists and anthropologists of the Kiel University (Germany), Washington University in St. Louis (USA) and the Academy of Sciences of Uzbekistan.
They applied a method of isotope scanning of remains of 74 ancient humans exhumed from 14 various nomadic and urban burials on the territory of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. All of them date back to the II-XIII centuries AD and vary according to such criteria as the type of community, geographical and climatic features of the area.
Thus, the analysis of the isotopic composition of carbon in bone tissues, for example, allowed to determine the percentage ratio in the diet of cereal food - wheat, millet, barley. The different ratios of nitrogen isotopes described the predominance of plant foods or higher food chain products, such as meat, milk of sheep and goats.
As it turned out, nomadic pastoralists of Central Asia had a more diverse culinary repertoire. They used as food resources not only domestic animals and their products, but also actively ate wild cereals, fish and game, depending on environmental conditions and seasonal availability.
In contrast to the nomadic communities, the medieval urban food system was largely based on grain reserves, that is, the settled population had less diverse menu, limited by cereal crops.
The results of the isotope analysis not only refuted the idea that the constantly migrating pastoralists were meat and milk feeders, but also pointed to the fact that nomadic populations have contributed to cross-cultural exchange along the Silk Road by transforming the dietary traditions of the sedentary population.
“The Silk Road has been generally understood in terms of valuable commodities that moved great distances, but the people themselves were often left out”, said a researcher at the University of Kiel Taylor Hermes.
According to him, food models provide a good opportunity to learn about the links between culture and the environment, as well as revealing important human experience in this huge connectivity system.
Taylor's colleague, associate professor of anthropology at Washington University Michael Frachetti called mobile communities “the essential fiber that fueled social networks and vectors of cultural changes.”
The project is planned even more extensive research, but even now science has already given completely new picture of the life of the peoples of ancient Central Asia.
