Taming the Plateau: From Hunting to Herding in the Fourth Millennium BP at Meilong Cave, Western Tibet.

Abstract

High-elevation environments pose severe biological, ecological, and logistical challenges for human adaptation. While humans have used such settings on an ephemeral basis since the late Pleistocene, the timing and catalysts of sustained year-round human occupation in such places remain a matter of debate. On the Tibetan Plateau (TP), the introduction of cold adapted domesticates during the fourth millennium BP (4th mill. BP) is believed to have contributed significantly to permanent human occupation on a large-scale in the eastern TP. However, archaeological research of the western TP is still in its infancy. Prior to the research described in this dissertation, for example, there were no chronometric dates for sites older than 2500 BP in western Tibet Autonomous Region. This dissertation develops an integrated theoretical approach focused on subsistence and subsistence risk to understand how western Tibetan hunter-gatherers participated in specific regional trajectories of change, especially during the mid-to-late Holocene. Supplemented with ethnographic accounts from western Tibetan nomadic groups, a model of risk-reduction and culture contact on the western Plateau during the 4th mill. BP is proposed. The model is evaluated in light of newly discovered settlement and mortuary archaeological data from the Ngari Prefecture in the west of Tibet Autonomous Region that date mainly to the 4th mill. BP. With the establishment of a reliable chrono-stratigraphic sequence and high-resolution paleoenvironmental background at the Meilong Cave site (4100-2850 cal. BP.), risk-reduction mechanisms and culture contact are analyzed through zooarchaeology, archaeobotany, as well as lithic, ceramic, and rock art analyses. In conjunction with data from the survey at Gê’gyai Basin and the excavation of Gebusailu Cemetery, the archaeological investigations in Ngari Prefecture strongly suggest that humans maintained permanent occupation in the region through the combination of hunting and herding. The indigenous highlanders leveraged the geographical centrality of their western Tibetan homeland to tap into the various trade conduits that connected central Tibet and northwest South Asia to gain access to ecologically sustainable innovative material and subsistence technologies, thus offsetting the increased risks associated with environmental instability following the end of Holocene Climatic Optimum. In the process, they both created the conditions for large-scale human viability on the western Plateau and precipitated profound and lasting changes to their society. The resilience and adaptability illustrated by this sequence undermines conventional explanations that envision an agropastoralist “wave of advance” onto the Plateau, and simplistic understandings of Tibetan prehistory in which the engagement and agency of indigenous foragers are either downplayed or ignored. Beyond Tibet, this dissertation has broader anthropological implications as it provides nuanced insights into the diverse adaptive mechanisms and cultural interactions that can contribute to the large-scale sustained human occupation of global high-altitude environments.