UC Merced

Recent historical scholarship has made great strides in elucidating Inner Eurasian, society, cultural gifts, and contributions of world historical significance. However, with few written texts of its own, the ontology and historical development of pastoral-nomadic civilizations and polities is still an open question, beleaguered by interminable truisms related to environmental adaptation and economic autarky. I propose a hypothesis, grounded in a Geographic Information System, that Eurasia more than supports nomadic-pastoralism and that, in part, nomadic expansion may be related to widening the sphere of pastoralist capital accumulation and connecting to the Silk Roads peripheries.