Research Article The world’s oldest-known promontory fort: Amnya and the acceleration of hunter-gatherer diversity in Siberia 8000 years ago Henny Piezonka 1, * , Natalya Chairkina 2 , Ekaterina Dubovtseva 2 , Lyubov Kosinskaya 3 , John Meadows 4,5 & Tanja Schreiber 5 1 Institute for Prehistoric Archaeology, Free University Berlin, Germany 2 Institute of History and Archaeology, Russian Academy of Sciences, Ekaterinburg, Russia 3 The Urals Federal University, Ekaterinburg, Russia 4 Centre for Baltic and Scandinavian Archaeology, Schleswig, Germany 5 Cluster of Excellence ROOTS, Christian Albrechts University, Kiel, Germany * Author for correspondence ✉ henny.piezonka@fu-berlin.de Archaeological narratives have traditionally associated the rise of social and political ‘complexity’ with the emergence of agricultural societies. However, this framework neglects the innovations of the hunter- gatherer populations occupying the Siberian taiga 8000 years ago, including the construction of some of the oldest-known fortified sites in the world. Here, the authors present results from the fortified site of Amnya in western Siberia, reporting new radio- carbon dates as the basis for a re-evaluation of the chronology and settlement organisation. Assessed within the context of the changing social and envir- onmental landscape of the taiga, Amnya and similar fortified sites can be understood as one facet of a broader adaptive strategy. Keywords: Mesolithic, Neolithic, Eurasia, radiocarbon dating, palaeoenvironment, 8.2 ka event, fortification Introduction The subarctic boreal landscapes of the Siberian taiga may seem remote, but it is here, 8000 years ago, that hunter-gatherers built fortified settlements, many centuries before comparable enclosures first appeared in Europe (Figure 1). The building of fortifications by forager groups has been observed sporadically elsewhere around the world in various—mainly coastal—regions from later prehistory onwards, but the very early onset of this phenomenon Received: 1 April 2022; Revised: 26 February 2023; Accepted: 20 March 2023 © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Antiquity Publications Ltd. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Antiquity 2023 Vol. 97 (396): 1381–1401 https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2023.164 1381 https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2023.164 Published online by Cambridge University Press