Altai in ancient southern connections
(66th Annual Meeting of the PIAC Göttingen, 2024)
This paper is summing up around a decade (2006–2015) of own visits of Xinjiang and Northwestern China with special focus on visits of ancient sites of Indo-European and non-Indo-European populations. The paper combines an extensive set of own photographs documenting some ancient sites before their contemporary reconstruction. Accompanying comments have focus on rather long-range relations and conditions of inter-oasis contacts. Due to changing climatic conditions, shifting ethnolinguistic borders and dynamic power relations, some understudied natural passes and frontier areas like Yiwu have special importance as occasional migration routes used by both Altaic and Indo-European groups. Especially the jewelry with other archaeological data attest early exchange influencing emergence of multi-ethnic cultural complexes and population dynamics around the Altai range.