"Focusing on material from the Altai and Tianshan regions, Nomads and Networks explores the specific conditions of mobile lifeways that resulted from particular ecological conditions in the steppes and high valleys of Inner Eurasia. Highlights of the exhibition are grave goods from the burial mounds at the site of Berel and gold mortuary ornaments from Shilikty, Zhalauli, and Kargaly. Attesting to a sophisticated decorative art flourishing among these nomadic populations, the objects skillfully combine older iconographic traditions of animal style in the steppe with more recent influences from foreign cultures--most notably Persia and China."

My copy is making its way towards me, but I am so impatient to read it I am seriously considering getting an electronic version as well. ETA: fortunately, my copy arrived later that morning.

ETA: review: http://bactra.org/weblog/algae-2012-03.html

Oh, I can just imagine my grandfather's reaction to the "famous Turkish ruler" bit...

"(I'm not sure I'd want to be one of Beckwith's doctoral students: they may be expected to bury themselves with him.)"  --- I have this book, and it is everything Danny's review makes it out to be, for good and ill.

"I am quite literally trapped in the mountains of Central Asia – the Amu Darya has flooded out the roads in both directions. This being the case, posting will be (very) light until the 24th, though I still hope to briefly discuss a few papers from the new Econometrica. While I wait for the waters to recede, I’ll be up in the solitude of the Pamirs. As you know, economics, especially the micro theory that is the focus of this blog, is the only social science where the best work can be done without any social interaction at all!"

1950s anti-communist tract comparing the USSR to the central Asian nomadic empires. I am saddened to see the theme of my never-to-be-written _Huns and Bolsheviks_ anticipated by a crank.

Really great post by John Emerson on the roots of the Mongol Empire; the combination of the long-standing aptitudes of the steppe nomads with hundreds of years of intense warfare/competition among central Asian states & tribes which combined nomad components with civilized skills in varying proportions, with the Mongols.

Monumental architecture by tyrants in the service of high culture: very Timurid. (Misses a "bookpr0n" tag because there are no books in the pictures.)

Credit default swaps as an instrument of state capture. (In the immortal words of Patrick Nielsen Hayden, "I have personally felt like I was living in a Ken MacLeod future since sometime not long after 9/11, and I wish he'd CUT IT OUT.")

See Danny Yee's review, http://dannyreviews.com/h/Empires_Silk_Road.html

John Emerson has a review of this somewhere, I think...

Creepy-looking giant hole in the ground in Turkmenistan, full of burning gas for 30+ years

"Since the colonial era, representations of Inner Asia have been dominated by images of fierce nomads organized into clans and tribes-but as Sneath reveals, these representations have no sound basis in historical fact. Rather, they are the product of nine

With a brief reply by the author in the comments.

"That something so preeminently Italian as mozzarella should be rooted in India and midwifed by Central Asian nomads is an extraordinarily satisfying addition to my eccentric encyclopedia of globalization."

Why Xinjaing is _not_ "like Tibet, but full of Turks".

Mongolian winter calenderics

Collectivization famines in Kazakhstan

Recent movies from Russia and Yakutia (!) on Genghis Khan

Very cool photos of Afghanistan, Azeribaijan, etc., etc.

Review of _The Day Lasts More than a Hundred Years_

A catalogue of murdered journalists.

1981 Rand report by Alexandre Bennigsen

Jonathan Mirsky reviews a new book on Xinjiang

"To determine how far to the east Neanderthals ranged, we determined mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) sequences from hominid remains found in Uzbekistan and in the Altai region of southern Siberia. Here we show that the DNA sequences from these fossils fall with