Introduction

Archaeologists, art historians, and historians have explored the trajectory by which Inner Asian nomadic confederacies, states, and empires expanded across vast territories of the mountains, steppe, and desert areas of Eurasia. Inner Asia is broadly defined as the steppe grasslands and deserts and mountains of a vast area that includes major parts of contemporary China, Mongolia, Russia, the desert-oases regions of Central Asia proper and Kazakhstan. A main stumbling block of nomadic studies in Inner Asia has been the use of specific terminology defining the peculiarity of Inner Asian social structures from the Bronze Age through the Mongol period. Ethnographers and anthropologists studying nomadic pastoralists for the past century described the necessary interactions that pastoral nomads had with settled populations. Ecological anthropologists describe the process by which the development of intensive agriculture results in increased labor demands as well as population growth.