Project Overview
The Isaac Newton Trust has once again been most
generous in funding an adjunct project to the Leverhulme Trust
Chariot Project, which will allow the collection and collation
of ethnographic data on horse husbandry in central and east Asia.
Through a thorough review of literature and the ethnographic
record, and a series of targeted fieldwork periods, this project
proposes to assess contemporary geographical variation in forms
of horse herding and pastoralism in central and east Asia and
explore how this ethnographic data can be related to genetic
data from living horse populations and the recent and archaeological
past.
This ethnographic data will, not only expand our understanding
of the position of the horse in human society but will
also generate data that will aid in the interpretation of
the archaeozoological,
paleopathological and archaeogenetic data of the Chariot
Project. This is a collaborative project with equine ethnographer Dr
Rebecca Cassidy, UCL.
This work is funded by the McDonald Institute and the Isaac
Newton Trust
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Marwari and Kathwari horses are central to Indian culture.
This, and the work of our collaborator Raghvendra Singh Dunlod,
Secretary General of the Indigenous Horse Society of India
has led to the preservation of these very ancient breeds. In
some areas these horses are dressed in their finest, with hennaed
feet, and invited as honoured guests to 'dance' at traditional
weddings. |
