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Abstract

The project focuses on the lived and constructed relationships between humans and domesticated herd animals of the Xiongnu Empire in late Iron age eastern Eurasia. The dissertation introduces three novel concepts (living materiality, relational osteobiography, and pastoral fold) developed to identify and interpret a near-universal yet undertheorized phenomenon in the Xiongnu archaeological record: their deliberate assembling of humans and herd animals together in mortuary space. Scholars generally consider the Xiongnu to be the first imperial nomads, yet the ‘pastoral’ dimension of their mobile pastoralism remains underexplored. Building on previous scholarship, I posit that the Xiongnu pre-occupation with bringing humans and herd animals together in mortuary ritual indicates that constructing multispecies relationships was highly significant within Xiongnu imperial ideology. In particular, I hypothesize that the Xiongnu believed that their subjectivity, their “Xiongnu-ness”, was bound up in their being together with herd animals (and other people) in specific constellations of particular social beings. These suppositions emerged in tandem with first-hand research in Mongolia on human and nonhuman animal remains excavated from eight Xiongnu ring tombs at the Elst Ar cemetery, using bioarchaeological and zooarchaeological methods to generate osteobiographical data for once-living Xiongnu social beings. I integrated these data and crafted them into eight relational osteobiographies: creative, empirically-grounded interpretations of these multispecies assemblages constructed by living Xiongnu through mortuary ritual. Comparing these relational osteobiographies indicates that the Xiongnu who buried their dead at Elst Ar enacted an overall pattern – assembling humans and herd animals– yet consistently varied the kinds of social beings they brought together in death. Such variability and fluidity of associations working strictly with the ‘raw materials’ of mobile pastoralism (humans and herd animals) evokes the way mobile pastoral communities and societies organize their multispecies members: the herd. As a refinement of the herd, I suggest the term ‘pastoral fold’ to assemble human herders together with their herd animals as the Xiongnu did in their tombs. Each multispecies mortuary assemblage at Elst Ar was an iteration or performance of the pastoral fold: a potent yet fluid biopolitical category always under construction, always negotiating intersections of biological processes and social dynamics, and always contingent. The iterations of the pastoral fold at Elst Ar evince a Xiongnu community for whom being and becoming a subject, a being that mattered in the socio-cosmological order, was to be embedded in relations with other herders and herd animals. Such a possibility represents a radical shift in interpretations of the Xiongnu that implicitly assume they shared the broad Western ontological commitment to the distinctness and primacy of the human in opposition to the nonhuman. The pastoral fold instead suggests that Xiongnu political ontology was relational and material, more akin to ontogenies of being and society than transcendental categories. Entertaining the possibility that the Xiongnu viewed themselves and their social world from a radically different perspective, and enacted the logics of their views in heightened form during mortuary ritual, opens the door for further creative speculation about Xiongnu politics and ideologies constructed from the ground (or tomb) up.

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