The Eurasian Iron Age Scythians, in all their regional iterations, are known for their lavish burials found in various kinds of tumuli. These tumuli, of varying sizes, are located throughout the Eurasian steppe. Based, at least partially, on the amounts and types of grave goods found within these mounds, the Scythians are usually modeled as militant, patriarchal mobile pastoralists, with rigid social structures. Yet, such interpretations are also due to accounts of Scythian lifeways provided by “classical” societies from the Greeks to the Persians, who saw the Scythians largely as barbarians, much like their neighbors to the north of the Greeks, the “Celts”. Despite recent interrogations of the barbarian trope, and the opportunity to dissect the classic formula of large mounds = elevated status, I contend that many studies on Scythian mortuary practices remain monolithic and under-theorized, especially by Western scholars. Drawing upon different conceptual and methodological frameworks, I present alternative, multi-scalar understandings of Scythian mortuary landscapes. Utilizing a spacetime-oriented, dialogical approach supplemented with geographic information systems, I interrogate how and why various meanings and experiences may have intersected in these protean Scythian landscapes of the dead, rather than reducing them to monolithic symbolic proxies of ideological status.

中文翻译：

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斯基泰人死者的时空：重新思考欧亚铁器时代及以后的墓葬、可见性和社会行动

欧亚铁器时代的斯基泰人，在他们所有的地区迭代中，都以在各种古墓中发现的奢华墓葬而闻名。这些大小不等的古墓遍布欧亚草原。至少部分地基于这些土丘中发现的陪葬品的数量和类型，斯基泰人通常被塑造为好战的、父权制的流动牧民，具有严格的社会结构。然而，这种解释也是由于从希腊人到波斯人的“古典”社会对斯基泰人生活方式的描述，这些社会将斯基泰人视为野蛮人，就像他们希腊北部的邻居“凯尔特人”一样。尽管最近对野蛮人的比喻进行了质疑，并且有机会剖析大土丘=地位提升的经典公式，但我认为，许多关于斯基泰太平间实践的研究仍然单一且缺乏理论化，尤其是西方学者的研究。借鉴不同的概念和方法框架，我提出了对斯基泰太平间景观的替代性、多尺度的理解。利用以时空为导向的对话方法，并辅以地理信息系统，我探究了各种意义和经历如何以及为何在这些千变万化的斯基泰死者景观中交叉，而不是将它们简化为意识形态地位的整体象征性代理。