**Preface**

Following the recent environmental turn in the humanities, a growing corpus of art historical and archaeological scholarship is responding to the need for post-humanist frameworks in studies of ancient societies. Such works place non-human agents in the limelight of their inquiries and, in so doing, shift their focus away from the human practitioner and challenge the presumed centrality of the human experience. This line of inquiry is especially pertinent to the study of early China and the adjacent Eurasian Steppe inhabited mainly by pastoral nomads. Despite their markedly different preferences for materials and modes of making, both early China and the Steppe exhibited a shared aesthetic penchant for zoomorphism. Indeed, idiosyncratic animal bodies tend to define the artistic practices of these cultural spheres in ways that one would not observe elsewhere in the ancient world. The following pages uncover the different strategies behind the construction and circulation of animal-inspired images, designs, and objects in ancient Central Eurasia (700 BCE–400 CE), defined here as the broad expanse stretching from the Mongolian-Manchurian grassland to Crimea. Authors engage with several themes, including the use of products and materials derived from animals, the entanglement between human artisans and their biota, animals as cultural capital and tokens of political clout, and, more broadly, the role of animals in one's creative process.

The volume has three primary aims. It ventures to find new perspectives on ancient cultural spheres that have for too long remained on the distant peripheries of the scholarly canon. It also aims to examine the visual parameters of the unique interactions between pastoralists and the fauna they depended on; can the psychology of mobility or exposure to different ecological conditions explain certain design proclivities? At the center of the following inquiries is also the relationship between sedentary and non-sedentary communities at porous frontiers and the ways in which animals might have shaped those interactions. How can animals help elucidate the relationship between China and what was then perceived by China (and other Eurasian empires) as the "Barbaric Other"? While primarily focused on nomadic and semi-nomadic peoples, some papers in this volume also consider zoomorphism as defined by the sedentary elites in early China and its neighboring zones, exploring the convergent, fluid, or changing notions of zoomorphism across cultural boundaries. The reader will encounter portable objects and murals from tombs, hoards, and museum collections across China, Mongolia, Siberia, and Kazakhstan. Adopting interdisciplinary methods and frameworks spanning Archaeology, Cultural Anthropology, Art History, and Museum Studies, the essays study the visual and material parameters of the zoomorphic imagination of ancient Central Eurasia.

One is likely to note this volume's frequent reliance on terms that deserve further clarification here. Many of the papers introduce or engage with the term "animal style". The term itself is a loose, blanket category applied to the zoomorphic arts of the Eurasian Steppe, and often associated with pastoral nomadic contexts. While there is still no clear definition of "animal style", the term can be understood to signal one of several features in ancient design or decoration. Animal-style objects may be adorned with images of zoomorphic junctures, that is, fusions of disparate anatomical parts forming a new (fantastic) species. One also speaks of "animal style" when one encounters a battle between a predator and prey, or a highly stylized interlace of animal contours. Most of the objects defined as belonging to the animal style category are portable metalworks, although as of more recently felt textiles, woodwork, and other materials are also incorporated. A greater methodological issue in the study of such objects (and Central Eurasian artefacts more broadly) is the tension between unprovenanced museum acquisitions and excavated materials. Many of the animal-style objects used

to define the term have come into private collections through the antiquities market. The most well-known yet unprovenanced animal-style treasures are to be found in the imperial collection of Peter the Great, or in early 20th-century Chinese museum collections; museums and galleries with smaller collections include the Penn Museum, the Eskenazi Museum of Indiana University, the Ariadne galleries, Barbier-Mueller Museum in Geneva, Ben Jannsen's Oriental Art in London, to name only a few. The so-called Ordos bronzes (named after the Ordos zone in north China where they were allegedly found) are especially abundant in such collections and even make an appearance at some of the world's largest museums including the MET and the British Museum. Much of this museum material has been dated or analyzed through stylistic comparisons and must now be considered against the growing number of excavated Central Eurasian sites. Many of the objects that have been unearthed in recent years in, for instance, Kazakhstan and Mongolia, were not factored in earlier studies and might indeed change our perceptions of "animal style" and zoomorphism in Central Eurasia. These and other methodological challenges are tackled by the book's authors who offer a glimpse into novel materials or propose novel ways to interpret zoomorphic art. Lastly, the reader might wonder how Chinese tombs and their animal images relate to occurrences in the rest of Central Eurasia. While a unique form of zoomorphism defined early Chinese design since at least the Shang dynasty, traditional Chinese notions of animality may have been later impacted by interactions with nomadic peoples to the north. In the following pages, readers are encouraged to observe both the homologous and analogous developments in Chinese and nomadic art through a bird's eye view of Central Eurasia.

> **Petya Andreeva** *Editor*

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