High-elevation environments present harsh challenges for the pursuit of agropastoral subsistence strategies and relatively little is known about the mechanisms early communities employed to adapt to such locations successfully. This article presents the sequential carbon and oxygen analysis of archaeological caprine teeth from Bangga (c. 3000–2200 BP), which is approximately 3750masl on the Tibetan Plateau. Made visible through this method, intra-tooth variation in isotopic composition allows insights into herding strategies that possibly included the provisioning of livestock with groundwater and agricultural fodder and summer grazing in saline or marsh environments. Such intensive provisioning differs markedly from lower-elevation agropastoralism.

New excavations at the Jebel Moya cemetery in Sudan reveal previously unknown, continuous burial activity from the third millennium BC to c. 2000 years ago. Radiometric dates, archaeobotanical analyses and new approaches to the pottery sequence reveal a long-lasting and vibrant community in what was previously dismissed as a marginal environment in south-central Sudan.

Archaeological research demonstrates that an agropastoral economy was established in Tibet during the second millennium BC, aided by the cultivation of barley introduced from South-western Asia. The exact cultural contexts of the emergence and development of agropastoralism in Tibet, however, remain obscure. Recent excavations at the site of Bangga provide new evidence for settled agropastoralism in central Tibet, demonstrating a material divergence from earlier archaeological cultures, possibly corresponding to the intensification of agropastoralism in the first millennium BC. The authors’ results depict a more dynamic system of subsistence in the first millennium BC, as the populations moved readily between distinct economic modes and combined them in a variety of innovative ways.