ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the Iron Age Talgar folk of Semirech'ye were part of a nomadic confederacy tied to a religious cult spread across a vast territory. It investigates the conundrum that nomadic civilization presents in re-envisioning Central Asian archaeology. In order to render the lives of the Talgar agropastoralists as central to the foundation of the nomadic polity or state, the chapter provides description of the agropastoral economy at ancient Talgar. The daily lives of farmers and herders of the Talgar fan was infused with the presence of burial mounds. A nomadic society that could produce surplus agricultural goods and maintain a sedentary population as in the case of the Talgar was an anomaly. Kazakhs, so well documented by Russian imperial and Soviet ethnographers, rely upon their 'nomadic past' as a means of creating a new future for the nation state.
