Pastoral Workshops? Rethinking Iron Age bone production in the Eastern Tianshan region

The concept of “workshop” is widely used in studies of ancient craft production, yet it often relies on rigid, culturally specific criteria that are ill-suited to mobile pastoral contexts, where conventional traces of organized manufacturing activity are seldom preserved. In Northern China, interpretations have been further shaped by a perceived divide between pastoralist and agricultural communities—the former assumed to rely on domestic production and the latter linked to more complex workshop-based systems. Functional, zooarchaeological, and workflow analyses of temporally and spatially contextualized worked bones from Building IIIF1 at the Iron Age pastoral campsite of Shirenzigou, in the Eastern Tianshan, provide compelling evidence for a specialized production space associated with pastoral strategies. Beyond evidence of bone working, the combination of diverse production-related items and deposits, the structure’s unusually large size, and the absence of domestic features together suggest that IIIF1 functioned as a collective multi-craft facility, likely emerging in response to increasing regional socio-political complexity during the first millennium BCE. These findings prompt a reconsideration of the concept and defining attributes of workshops and highlight the need for more flexible models that can account for the variability of pastoralist societies.