ИСТИНА

Caucasia, especially the northern flank of the High Caucasus, is an area with highly variable environments including high mountain steppes, woodlands, forest as well as wet and dry steppes. These provided rich and diverse resources for animals and humans and formed the basis for different subsistence strategies. Building on extensive and well documented archaeological excavations of Bronze Age burial mounds in different environmental zones and excellent bone preservation, the north Caucasus offers exceptional conditions for integrative anthropological and isotope analyses. Skeletal remains are key sources to investigate dietary habits and mobility patterns via stable carbon and nitrogen as well as strontium isotope ratios of bones and teeth. The presentation will introduce case studies from the dry steppe and more humid areas which produced highly diverse isotope datasets that are formed by environmental and human behavioural influences. Based on archaeological models of mobility patterns and subsistence strategies we will discuss their informative potential but also challenges of data interpretation in a study area whose environmental complexity still requires profound basic research. Compared to Central European isotope values, those of the Eurasian steppe differ considerably due to variation in plant compositions and climatic factors. Therefore basic research is still required to characterize isoscapes, i.e. to interpolate isotopic background values both of local plant species from the steppe and the animals, which live from them.