The Bronze Age officially marks the time in Eurasia when people started regularly using tools and weapons made from bronze.  The adoption of bronze tool-making technology happened in different places at different times, but regardless of the time or place it marked a period of major social and economic change with the intensification of commodification and intensified trade in luxury goods.  We can see archaeological evidence of that change whether we are looking at hunter-gatherer living sites, small-scale herder camps, farming villages, or urban centres.

In East Asia, the Bronze Age begins later than in the West and is associated with the spread of domesticated herd animals – cattle, horses, sheep, and goats – from Central Asia (where they had spread from Europe and Southwest Asia) into East Asia.  There were multiple migrations of people bringing herd animals and bronze technology from the West; however, local people played the biggest role in the eastward spread of both bronze technology and herding.  Settlers from Central Asia appear to have arrived in the Altai mountains on the western fringe of Mongolia by about 5500-5300 years ago, but it is not until nearly two thousand years later that the material remains associated with Bronze Age herding lifestyle explode across the eastern steppes: stone monuments (BA, Fig. 1 – Monument) and burials (BA, Fig. 2 – Burial), horse drawn chariots, ritual burials of domesticated herd animals, and the production and sale of luxury goods like beads (BA, Fig. 3 – Beads), and bronze knives.