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The Early Slavs. Culture and Society in Early Medieval Eastern Europe

contributions in the volume attribute periods of rapid cultural change to climate change. This is another mechanistic habit of CIS archaeological interpretation – rarely do we see a detailed explanation of exactly how climate change would have encouraged the specific cultural shifts visible in the archaeological record. Metzner-Nebelsick’s article is a welcome exception to this rule. Interesting individual discoveries noted in these articles include a Sauromatian grave at Aksai containing a Greek amphora like those from Olbia, dated c. 550 BC. It is the first one found as far east as the Don-Volga steppes, and from the oldest Sauromatian phase. Also from later graves here were swords with Chinesestyle hilts, connected by the authors to the migrations caused by the Hunnic expansion in the East around 200–100 BC. Koryakova and Daire suggest that Iron Age steppe pastoralism was locally varied, and included settled, seminomadic, and nomadic aspects that varied over time and between regions – a needed corrective to the facile characterization of steppe economies as ‘nomadic’. Davis-Kimball excavated a unique site, the Beiram mound in the Mongolian Altai, a ritual stone mound surrounded by a stone ring enclosure with radiating stone ‘spokes’ at the cardinal points. The stone mound contained 4000 votive objects deposited between the Iron Age and the year 1625 (a votive box dated by inscription), but no graves. F. Allard (not in this volume) at the University of Michigan has recently excavated a series of somewhat similar concentric stone ritual enclosures, but with many sacrificed animals and a few human graves, in central Mongolia. This is a new type of site. One of the encouraging aspects of this volume is the level of international cooperation represented. There are Franco-Russian, USRussian, US-Kazakh, and US-Mongolian projects (but strangely, no articles from the German-Russian or other collaborative projects of the Eurasien-Abteilung). Western and Soviet archaeologies developed in different directions over the 40 years before 1991, so a question that is now quite immediate is, how do westerners take advantage of two generations of work by Soviet and post-Soviet archaeologists? Can their interpretations be joined profitably with ours? This volume suggests that some bridgebuilding remains to be done in both directions, but the teams are close enough to shake hands. David Anthony Department of Anthropology, Hartwick College, Oneonta, NY, USA