Contents

List of Figures and Table

List of Contributors

Fitful Histories and Unruly Publics: An Introduction

Adam T. Smith, Kathryn O. Weber, Emma Hite and Lori Khatchadourian

Part 1

Making Time: Constructed Temporalities and Foregone Futures

Chapter 1

Tin and Oil: Can We Foresee the Future through the Remote Past?

Mikheil Abramishvili

Chapter 2

Tempus Interruptus: Archaeological Explanation and the Unraised Columns of Oğlanqala Period III

Hilary Gopnik

Chapter 3

One Eye Forward, One Eye Back: Multiple Temporalities, Community, and Social Change in the Culture History of the Southern Urals, Russian Federation (2100–1300 bc)

James A. Johnson

Chapter 4

Echoes in Eternity: Social Memory and Mortuary Stone Monuments in Bronze-Iron Age Mongolia

Erik G. Johannesson

Chapter 5

Paths, Pathos, and Portables: Nomadic Culture and Materiality of Movement in the Black Lands of Kalmykia

Irina Shingiray

Part 2

Culture and Counter-Culture: Practice, Place, and Eurasian Prehistory

Chapter 6

Long-Term Occupation and Seasonal Mobility in Mongolia: A Comparative Study of Two Mobile Pastoralist Communities

Jean-Luc Houle

Chapter 7

Bronze Age Communities and Potting Techniques along the Kazakh Steppe Fringe

Paula N. Doumani Dupuy

Chapter 8

Settlement Mobility and the Politics of Ritual among Late Bronze Age Fortress Communities: Recent Findings from the Site of Tsaghkahovit, Armenia

Ian Lindsay

Chapter 9

Explaining the Kura-Araxes

Mitchell S Rothman

Chapter 10

Land of the Unrule-ables: Bactria in the Achaemenid Period

Xin Wu

Part 3

Timelessness and the Politics of the Past

Chapter 11

Unruly Remains: Ethnogenesis and Physical Anthropology in the South Caucasus

Maureen E. Marshall

Chapter 12

Chinese Autochthony and the Eurasian Context: Archaeology, Mythmaking and Johan Gunnar Andersson’s “Western Origins”

Magnus Fiskesjö

Chapter 13

Orientalism in Russia: The Caucasus, Historical Narrative and the Formation of a National Identity

Kathryn O. Weber

Index