Cutting-Edge Archaeology on the Eurasian Steppe: Gino Caspari on the Scythians

Tides of History

Wondery / Patrick Wyman

Documentary, Society & Culture, History

4.8 • 6.3K Ratings

🗓️ 26 October 2023

⏱️ 50 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In excavating massive Iron Age burial mounds in southern Siberia, Dr. Gino Caspari is doing some of the most innovative archaeology in the world, and he's doing it in one of the most remote places on the planet. Dr. Caspari is an expert on the Scythians, the enigmatic, powerful people who ruled the vast grasslands of Eurasia during the Iron Age.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	The Eurasian Step is a vast and fascinating place.
0:16.3	It's both the highway connecting the two ends of Eurasia, the medium through which practically
0:20.0	every important development of the past five millennia has passed, and an incredibly
0:24.0	creative space of movement, interaction, and innovation in its own right.
0:27.8	Mongols, Turks, Huns, all of them left their mark on the step and the society surrounding
0:31.8	it in every direction, from China to Central Europe, the Iranian Plateau to the Baltic.
0:36.5	But before the Mongols and Turks and Huns, the step peoples and polities we know from
0:40.9	late antiquity onward, there were the Scythians.
0:43.6	Herodotus tells those about them in great and quite literally fabulous detail.
0:47.5	We find stunning material remains everywhere from Ukraine to Siberia.
0:51.0	But what did their world look and feel like?
0:53.1	How can we square the textual and archaeological records?
0:55.9	And what can we learn from the cutting-edge tools that archaeologists are bringing to
0:59.4	bear on these fascinating and long-lost societies?
1:03.0	Today's guest is the perfect person to shed new light on the Scythians in their world.
1:06.8	Dr. Gino Caspari is a person of many parts, a genuine explorer, a life member of the Explorer's
1:11.5	club.
1:12.5	He is an archaeologist with extensive experience excavating in some of the most remote
1:16.0	parts of the Eurasian Step, and he's one of the best known communicators of archaeological
1:19.9	science on social media, especially Instagram.
1:22.8	In that capacity, he has authored and co-authored a stunning variety of papers on everything from
1:26.7	remote sensing techniques, to land-use patterns, to paleopathological analysis of human remains.
	...

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