wave of large-scale migration, this time most probably by
pastoral nomads speaking an Indo-Iranian branch. Th ese
later migrants occupied regions as far east as the western
and southern regions of the Tarim Basin, wedging the earlier
Indo-European migrants into eastern Xinjiang.
Th e steppe-bronze culture that emerged in the wake of
this invasion is known as the Andronovo. Th e Andronovans
lived in small, fortifi ed villages and towns in large houses that
were at least partly subterranean. Th eir economy was based
on stockbreeding (cattle, sheep, goats, pigs and horses), and
their way of life was one of mobile pastoralism with occa-
sional periods of semisedentary agriculturalism. Th e immedi-
ate predecessor to the Andronovans was the Sintashta culture
(ca. 2300–1900 b.c.e.), which was based in the southeastern
Urals, particularly near modern Magnitogorsk. Associated
with the emergence of both the Sintashta and subsequent An-
dronovo cultures was the appearance of many fortifi ed settle-
ments and royal burials with chariots, indicative perhaps of
the troubled nature of this period.
However, the chariot did not make any signifi cant mili-
tary impact on ancient inner Asia. Although the introduc-
tion of the chariot transformed warfare in Southwest Asia
and India, it was less practical in the steppes of central and
East Asia and was replaced from about 1500 b.c.e. by more
eff ective horse-riding archer warriors using compound bows.
It was pastoral nomadic forces of this type that the Chinese
Zhou and Han chroniclers later described when discussing
the “barbarians” to China’s north, including the Wusun,
Xiongnu, and Yuezhi.
Th e Andronovan culture continued to spread eastward
through present-day Kazakhstan and into eastern central
Asia. Archaeological evidence indicates the eventual exis-
tence of a dividing line that developed in Mongolia between
both the Indo-European Afanasevan and Indo-Iranian
Andronovan migrants from the west and the ethnic Proto-
Mongolians in the east, representing the most easterly expan-
sion of the migrants through northern Inner Asia by about
1800–1500 b.c.e. To the south, beyond the reach of Soviet and
Russian archaeologists, the evidence is less plentiful, but both
Indo-European and Indo-Iranian pastoral nomads must also
have spread into the eastern steppes, particularly along al-
ready well-trodden routes through the Tarim Basin, until
they were brought to a halt perhaps by the indigenous peoples
who dwelt in eastern Mongolia and along China’s northwest-
ern borders.
COLONIZATION OF THE BORDER REGIONS OF
ANCIENT CHINA
From early in the 20th century explorers began fi nding mum-
mifi ed remains at a number of sites in the Tarim Basin. More
recently several hundred such “mummies” (actually the re-
mains of dried-out bodies) have been discovered in the region.
Th e oldest of these corpses dates from about 2000 b.c.e. and
the earliest Indo-European corpses from perhaps 1750 b.c.e.,
which suggests at the very least that from the Late Bronze Age
a signifi cant and increasing proportion of the population of
Xinjiang began to be of Indo-European/Caucasoid ethnicity.
Many of the bodies have been subjected to DNA and textile
analysis, but the results have been inconclusive.
Archaeological research into the prehistoric cultures of
the Tarim Basin has provided evidence of a number of cul-
tures, the earliest of which appears to be the Qawrighul (early
second millennium b.c.e.), whose remains have been found
about 50 miles west of Lop Nur. Mummies of the Yanbulaq
culture (located near Hami and dated to about 1750–700
b.c.e.) were mainly of Mongoloid stock, though also found
were eight Caucasoid types, which represent perhaps the old-
est Europoid human remains so far discovered in the Tarim.
Th e presence of three diff erent grave types has led some re-
searchers to suggest that this is evidence of the movement of
Caucasoid migrants into a region in which Mongoloid popu-
lations had already established themselves from the east.
One possibility is that Afanasevo groups migrated south
from their homeland in the Altai-Yenisei region. One branch
headed toward the Huanghe River, where they may have in-
teracted with the ethnic Chinese Qijia culture, and another
moved southwest into the Gansu and Tarim areas. As noted
earlier, subsequent migrations of Indo-Iranian-speaking no-
mads also entered the Tarim and established their languages
on top of the earlier Indo-European dialects, but they were
never able to achieve linguistic supremacy in the north and
east, where Indo-European variants remained dominant. Th e
obvious route for both the Indo-Europeans and Indo-Irani-
ans was south through a mountainous funnel that opens up
near Urumqi and which then off ers passes to both the Dun-
huang region of the Gansu or southwest into the Turpan Ba-
sin and the eastern Tarim.
At the same time that Indo-European groups were mi-
grating south to take up residencies in the Gansu and Xinjiang
sometime between the 18th and 17th centuries b.c.e., farther
to the east and to the north of the main zones of irrigated ag-
ricultural communities along the valley of the Huanghe, large
communities of Mongoloid nomads also began to emerge be-
tween the 18th and 12th centuries. Th ese and other pastoral
nomadic communities are listed in the chronicles of the Chi-
nese Zhou Dynasty. Farther north again, in northern inner
Asia and southern Siberia, the Karasuk culture replaced the
Andronovo between the 13th and 10th centuries.
Evidence of the importance of livestock to the Kara-
suk indicates that they followed more mobile lifeways than
did the Andronovans, though the discovery of large dugout
dwellings in the Minusinsk basin also indicates the retention
of a semisedentary way of life. Th e basin of Minusinsk is made
up of undulating land on either side of the Yenisey River. It
is one of the largest prehistoric graveyards in all of Eurasia,
with numerous barrows having yielded vessels, amulets, and
weapons. Archaeological evidence clearly shows that from
the middle of the second millennium b.c.e. a succession of
cultures and ethnicities occupied the region, each of which
gradually adapted to a sedentary, agricultural way of life.704 migration and population movements: Asia and the Pacific