Karasuk culture

Curved bronze knives with animal-headed handles are the calling card of the Karasuk culture, a group of Late Bronze Age societies of the Siberian and Central Asian steppe, dated to roughly 1500–800 BCE. Its range is described as stretching from the Aral Sea to the upper Yenisei and south to the Altai and Tian Shan, with its best-known sites in the Minusinsk Basin. Its metalwork travelled far to the east, and Chinese bronzes of the Shang period copy its designs.

Karasuk took over the eastern part of the area held by the Andronovo culture, and most archaeologists see it as growing mainly out of Andronovo with additions from local Yenisei cultures such as Okunev. Its dates come largely from its burials, of which at least 2,000 are known; the Karasuk period is usually taken to last until about 700 BCE, after which the Tagar culture succeeded it.

The economy combined farming with stockbreeding, and the culture seems to have been more mobile than Andronovo. Settlements are few and mainly found south-west of the Minusinsk Basin. People lived in semi-subterranean pit houses, with larger winter houses of about 100–200 square metres whose domed or pitched roofs were covered with earth against the cold. The dead were laid in stone cists beneath mounds, surrounded by square stone enclosures.

Karasuk smiths worked bronze on a large scale, including arsenical bronze. Their typical products were bronze knives with curving profiles and decorated handles, and horse bridle fittings. Their metallurgy may have built on the earlier Seima-Turbino tradition and became the centre of what some scholars call an East Asian metallurgical province. No Karasuk chariot has been found, but rock drawings, harness gear and burials of charioteers point to spoke-wheeled chariots. These resemble Shang chariots of around 1200 BCE, and the scholar Wu (2013) argues that the Shang chariot kit was a local version of the Karasuk set. Chinese sites have yielded many bronzes made after Karasuk patterns, notably in the royal cemetery at Anyang of the thirteenth to eleventh centuries BCE, and blades of the Shang and the Zhou dynasty drew on Karasuk forms. These influences probably travelled with steppe nomads over more than 3,500 kilometres.

Karasuk animal art, realistic in style, probably contributed to the animal style of the Scythians and other Iron Age steppe peoples. The weapons carved on the deer stones of the neighbouring Deer stones culture to the south-east follow Karasuk types, and Karasuk nomads may have helped build those monuments. Long-distance trade links ran from northern China and Lake Baikal to the Urals and the Black Sea.

The identity of the Karasuk people is uncertain. Andronovo is associated with Indo-Iranian speakers, while the local Yenisei cultures are thought to be unconnected to the steppe peoples, and some have proposed that Karasuk people spoke Proto-Iranian; the linguist George van Driem instead suggested a link with the Yeniseian languages and Burushaski. A 2020 genetic study modelled Karasuk individuals as about 65 per cent Sintashta-related and 35 per cent from north-east Asian hunter-gatherers of the Baikal region. A 2024 anthropological study found them physically closest to later neighbours such as the Saka.

Our maps draw an approximate Karasuk zone in 1500, 1000 and 700 BCE, centred on the Minusinsk Basin and the Altai in today's Russia and Kazakhstan.