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. 2018 Mar 26;8(1):5177.
doi: 10.1038/s41598-018-22995-2.

Urban and nomadic isotopic niches reveal dietary connectivities along Central Asia's Silk Roads

Taylor R Hermes  1   2 , Michael D Frachetti  3 , Elissa A Bullion  4 , Farhod Maksudov  5 , Samariddin Mustafokulov  6 , Cheryl A Makarewicz  7   8
Affiliations

Urban and nomadic isotopic niches reveal dietary connectivities along Central Asia's Silk Roads

Taylor R Hermes et al. Sci Rep. .

Abstract

The ancient 'Silk Roads' formed a vast network of trade and exchange that facilitated the movement of commodities and agricultural products across medieval Central Asia via settled urban communities and mobile pastoralists. Considering food consumption patterns as an expression of socio-economic interaction, we analyse human remains for carbon and nitrogen isotopes in order to establish dietary intake, then model isotopic niches to characterize dietary diversity and infer connectivity among communities of urbanites and nomadic pastoralists. The combination of low isotopic variation visible within urban groups with isotopic distinction between urban communities irrespective of local environmental conditions strongly suggests localized food production systems provided primary subsistence rather than agricultural goods exchanged along trade routes. Nomadic communities, in contrast, experienced higher dietary diversity reflecting engagements with a wide assortment of foodstuffs typical for mobile communities. These data indicate tightly bound social connectivity in urban centres pointedly funnelled local food products and homogenized dietary intake within settled communities, whereas open and opportunistic systems of food production and circulation were possible through more mobile lifeways.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no competing interests.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Map of Central Asia showing sites and regions with human stable isotopic data (δ13C and δ15N) analysed in this paper. Uzbekistan: 1) Tok-kala, 2) Uturlik, 3) Chor Dona, 4) Chartok, 5) Tashbulak, 6) Altyntepe, 7) Frinkent; Turkmenistan: 8) Geoktchik Depe, 9) Misrijan; Kazakhstan: 10) Konyr-Tobe, 11) Temirlanovka, 12) Turgen, 13) Butakty, 14) Karatal. Map generated with Quantum GIS, version 2.18.2 (https://www.qgis.org), using public domain data from Natural Earth (http://www.naturalearthdata.com).
Figure 2
Figure 2
(a) Human carbon and nitrogen isotopic ratios from medieval Central Asia; (b–c) Posterior probability distributions of isotopic means obtained by Bayesian bootstrapping (meanb) from medieval urban communities in Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan and (d-e) from medieval nomadic communities in southern Kazakhstan.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Community-level dietary diversity of medieval humans represented by posterior distributions of core isotopic niche area (‰2) by sites and regions in Central Asia. Isotopic niches were calculated by fitting standard ellipses to cover ca. 39% of the δ13C and δ15N data points using Bayesian inference. Black dots indicate area means, and the shaded boxes, from dark to light, represent the 50%, 75%, and 95% credible intervals.
Figure 4
Figure 4
(a) Medieval urban isotopic niches from Uzbekistan are displayed as probability clouds, and individual isotopic values from southern Kazakhstan (nomadic communities) and western Turkmenistan (urban community) are represented as points. (b) Isotopic niche overlap analysis for urban communities in Uzbekistan. Standard ellipses covering 95% of δ13C and δ15N values were modelled using Bayesian inference. Overlapping areas for each pairwise comparisons in δ-space were visualized as probability clouds with underlying isotopic data points superimposed (lower left). Area overlap of total isotopic niche area for each pair was plotted as probability distributions (upper right).
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