Andronovo culture

Rather than a single culture, Andronovo is a family of related Late Bronze Age cultures that spread across the steppes and forest-steppes of Central Asia and southern Siberia from about 2000 to 1150 BCE, reaching from the southern Urals to the upper Yenisei and western Xinjiang, and south into today's Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. Some archaeologists prefer to call it a horizon or complex. It is widely linked with early speakers of Indo-Iranian languages.

The name comes from the village of Andronovo in Krasnoyarsk Krai, Siberia, where the zoologist Arkadi Tugarinov found the first graves in 1914: crouched skeletons buried with richly decorated pots. The archaeologist Sergei Teploukhov defined the culture in the 1920s. The older Sintashta culture of the southern Urals, about 2200–1900 BCE, was once counted as part of Andronovo but is now usually treated as separate, though closely related.

Most researchers recognise two main sub-cultures: Alakul, about 1900–1500 BCE, centred on the Trans-Urals and Kazakhstan, and Fëdorovo, about 1900–1300 BCE, which reached southern Siberia, Semirechye, the Pamirs, the Tian Shan and Xinjiang. Some also add a late Alekseyevka-Sargary phase of about 1500–1000 BCE. Over the second millennium BCE these groups moved eastwards, as far as the upper Yenisei, where they followed the Okunev culture. Some scholars question this west-to-east model, pointing to earlier evidence of similar features in eastern Central Asia. The borders are hard to draw: to the west the culture overlapped with the Srubnaya culture of the Volga–Ural region.

Andronovo communities included both mobile herders and settled villages of two to twenty houses, occasionally up to a hundred, built of pine, cedar or birch along riverbanks; about twenty fortified sites with ditches, banks and palisades are known. They kept cattle, horses, sheep, goats and camels, but not pigs. Horses were used for riding and draught, and a 2020 study of horses from a cemetery in the Kostanay region suggested riding began earlier than many had assumed. The Andronovo people mined copper in the Altai from around the fourteenth century BCE and made abundant bronze.

The dead were placed in timber or stone chambers under round or rectangular mounds, with livestock, weapons, pottery, ornaments and sometimes wheeled vehicles. Chariot burials with paired horse teams date from around 2000 BCE. At Kytmanovo, a grave of about 1746–1626 BCE yielded an early, weaker relative of the plague bacterium from a woman buried with two children.

Most researchers associate Andronovo with Indo-Iranian speakers, pointing to the spread of Iranian place-names over its area, the later presence of Iranian-speaking peoples such as the Saka and Sarmatians, and parallels with the Vedas and the Avesta. Others, such as Leo Klejn, once considered it too late for that role, and the linguist Rasmus Bjørn describes its heritage as an Indo-Iranian dialect continuum, with loanwords reaching Uralic and early Turkic languages. Ancient-DNA studies, including work published in 2015 and 2019, find Andronovo people closely related to Sintashta and Corded Ware populations, with ancestry largely from groups like the Yamnaya culture mixed with that of early European farmers. Linking those findings to languages remains an interpretation, not a certainty.

In southern Siberia and Kazakhstan the Karasuk culture followed from about 1500 BCE. In the first millennium BCE the steppe was dominated by Iranian-speaking nomads such as the Scythians.

Our 2000 BCE map labels an approximate Andronovo zone across the steppes of Kazakhstan and southern Siberia, east of the Yamnaya successor cultures and overlapping lands where the Afanasievo culture had flourished.