Horses carrying steppe DNA moved south into China while Chinese bronze flowed north, and this two-way exchange helped create the first states in East Asia. The project tackles a fundamental gap in understanding how settled Chinese empires and mobile horse-borne steppe societies shaped each other between 2000 BCE and the rise of the Silk Road. By combining ancient DNA from horse skeletons, chemical tracing of metals from mine to burial mound, and new excavations of stone burials in Mongolia and the First Emperor’s mausoleum in China, the team will map the movement of animals, materials, and people across thousands of miles of Eurasia. This is primarily fundamental historical and archaeological science. Success would produce the first unified chronology for the region and reveal whether horse breeding and metal recycling drove the emergence of complex states. The findings will reach the public through exhibitions at the Terracotta Warrior and British Museums, showing that big historical questions require collaboration across scientific and cultural boundaries.
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Horse Power is to investigate the relationship between the settled and mobiles peoples whose civilisations crossed thousands of miles of Eurasia from 2,000 BCE. We will combine the most cutting-edge scientific approaches, including ancient DNA, metallurgy and radiocarbon dating, together with the well-targeted archaeological excavations to address this overarching historical question. The targeted space involves the two major states, the Xiongnu in Mongolia and the Qin in China. The Xiongnu arose in 209 BCE and set the model for mobile horse-borne states through to the rise of the Mongols 1400 years later. The Qin took over China in 221 BCE, providing the model for the bureaucratic Chinese state down to today. Both developed through local historical forces, but also in interaction with each other, an interaction which set the basis for the Silk Road. The core hypothesis of Horse Power is that horses moved south into China from the Steppe, while Chinese metals went north. It is through this exchange that two groups started one earliest form of state in human history. We will apply the most advanced genetic analysis to the ancient horse skeletons and unravel patterns of flow of horses and selective breeding in terms of numbers of horses produced at the time, as well as characters that do not fossilize, such as their colour, speed, size, and more. The other end of the core hypothesis is rooted in metal. With rich metal deposits and massive population, China was able to accumulate enormous wealth in the form of metal. In return, metal helped China to achieve a variety of ritual, social, cultural and economic purposes. Horse Power aims to push archaeometallurgy to a new level by following metal from mine to mound - that is from the source of the metal to the final burial context of artefacts. The previous ERC funded project FLAME has assembled over ten thousand chemical and lead isotopic data of bronzes from Arc to the Yangtze River valleys. This created a vital foundation for tracing the flow of metal in these regions. The new scientific analysis of metal objects will be focused on the Mongolia Steppe, therefore to fulfil the last but also most important gap in the overall picture. Together the new set of multivariant statistical model promoted by Horse Power, we will identify and quantify mixing and recycling, in order to illustrate a more detailed and realistic life history of metal in the past societies. Archaeological excavation is fundamental to providing secured samples for scientific analysis and context for interpretation of the data. Horse Power will excavate both the large stone burials khirigsuurs and the First Emperor's mausoleum complex as part of a targeted excavation strategy investigating a range of sites in Mongolia and China to recover the long-term history of the sacrificial economy, but also to provide further samples of horse bones, metals and dating materials with excellent contexts for other members of the project to analyse. The underlying coordinated dating programme will also produce the first over-arching chronology for the region using both a targeted and flexible sampling strategy. In addition to academic investigation, another equally important target is to develop an innovative programme of public engagement, art and popular science through blogs, podcasts as well as exhibitions in the Terracotta Warrior and British Museums to discuss our findings with a broad public particularly aiming to show that big historical and cultural questions can only be tackled in synergistic ways, by a team with varied cultural and intellectual backgrounds.
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