Pastoralism (Other Keyword)
101-122 (122 Records)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ancient Andean pastoralism involved variable herding strategies, including short-term movements within the same ecozone, long-distance caravans for trade, and seasonal mobility across various altitudes. These multiregional pastoral practices are often difficult to differentiate in the archaeological record, yet they are central for understanding the...
Refining Ecological Contexts of Animal Herding: Implications for Culture Process (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Global Perspectives on Human Population Dynamics, Innovation, and Ecosystem Change" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Previous research that derived expectations from hunter-gatherer macroecology demonstrates that the combination of effective temperature zones and setting near coastlines or very large interior lakes display distinct patterns of resource intensification. These patterns allow researchers to predict the...
Rethinking Caprines-As-Capital: Pastoralism and the Low-Power States of Early Mesopotamia (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Ancient Pastoralism in a Global Perspective" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In ancient Mesopotamia, animal husbandry was intimately bound up with the process of state making. The twin institutional powers of palace and temple managed enormous herds of sheep and goats. But were these animals mere wealth-on-the-hoof, staple goods supporting a classic system of staple finance? Or were they something else, operating...
Riego de bofedales y formas de construcción de un paisaje pastoril de origen prehispánico, Andes centro sur (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Water Management in the Andes: Past, Present, and Future" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Distintos factores han llevado a conceptualizar el altiplano como un espacio hostil y deshumanizado, y el pastoreo de camélidos como una forma única de subsistencia en este ambiente “extremo”. Desde esta óptica, se ha promovido que los pastores andinos aprovechan los pastos que crecen aquí naturalmente sin intervenir en su...
Ritual Sites as Anchors in a Dynamic Landscape: The Social and Economic Importance of Monumental Cemeteries Built by Eastern Africa’s Earliest Herders (2018)
In eastern Africa, herding was the earliest form of food production, supplanting fishing-hunting-gathering around Lake Turkana (northwest Kenya) ca. 5000-4000 BP. Fueled by the dramatic recession of Lake Turkana 5300-3900 BP, which made fishing less predictable and exposed vast plains of rich pasture near the lake, early herding probably involved both in-migration of pastoralists and adoption of livestock by local fishers. As herding took hold a mortuary tradition developed, with megalithic...
Scales of Mobility: Oxygen (δ18O) and carbon (δ13C) isotopic insights into Xiongnu herding practice (2015)
Herding strategies involving the regular movement of domesticates to new pastures is a critical feature of pastoralist subsistence strategies. However, the utility of strontium isotope analysis as a proxy for mobility becomes complicated in regions where geological substrates are either homogenous over a wide area or are heterogeneous over small distances. Taking advantage of the geographic sensitivity of carbon and oxygen isotopes to precipitation levels, altitude, and latitude, we explore...
Settlement Persistence in Northwestern Mongolia: Archaeological and Paleoenvironmental Insights from the Long-Term Occupation Site ZK513 (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Exploring Long-Term Pastoral Dynamics: Methods, Theories, Stories" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Mongolian Bronze Age (2500–700 BCE) was a period of greater social interaction and important transformations (e.g., the adoption of domestic livestock herding and intensification to widespread mobile, mounted pastoralism) that prompted social inequality and the formation of the first nomadic states. What is known...
Substantial intensity of millet agriculture during the Bronze and Iron Ages in Kazakhstan is revealed in δ13C and δ18O time series of incrementally sampled livestock teeth (2017)
This paper presents carbon and oxygen isotopic values incrementally sampled from mandibular molars of domesticated livestock from pastoralists sites in eastern, central, and northern Kazakhstan with Bronze and Iron Age occupations. The intra-tooth patterning of δ13C and δ18O values are used to characterize millet consumption from foddering and grazing on stubble in harvested fields. Results indicate that some animals were seasonally consuming large proportions of C4 plants as early as 2400 cal...
The Tabular Scraper Trade: Complexities of a Prehistoric Pastoral Trade System (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Originally modelled as a down-the-line exchange system from the desert to the settled zone, analyses of previously unpublished materials synthesized with newer materials indicate that the flint tabular scraper production and distribution system was a complex mixture of local desert consumption and long distance trade of objects that changed in function, role,...
Taskscapes of Reindeer Herding: Changes in the Land-Use Dynamics and Campsite Organization of the Sámi Pastoralists of Northern Fennoscandia c. 700–1800 AD (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Empirical Approaches to Mobile Pastoralist Households" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Domestication of reindeer commenced amongst the Sámi of northern Fennoscandia in the 8th century AD, and was accompanied by significant cultural changes. This presentation focuses on diachronic changes in the land-use, inter- and intra-site settlement patterns and human-environmental relations. I focus especially on two pivotal...
Tiwanaku Pastoralism, Highland Bofedales, and Grasslands in Far Southern Peru: Creating a Strontium Baseline and Isoscape to Understand Cultural Connections (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Exploring Culture Contact and Diversity in Southern Peru" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Camelid pastoralism was an economic mainstay of the Tiwanaku Empire (~AD 600-1000). Communities of colonists in Moquegua, Peru were connected to their Tiwanaku capital near Lake Titicaca through an informal trade route traversing the altiplano. One component of Tiwanaku hegemony involved the movement of goods via llama caravans...
Toward a Multispecies Perspective on Human-Animal Networks in Early Urban Societies of Upper Mesopotamia (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Breaking the Mold: A Consideration of the Impacts and Legacies of Richard W. Redding" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Decades before anthropologists advocated for multispecies anthropology and ethnography, Richard Redding was charting a new path for a multispecies approach to anthropological archaeology. His research reveals an implicit awareness of the complexity of human-animal relationships that is a hallmark of...
Understanding Reindeer Riding in the Archaeological Record of Northeast Asia through Ethnoarchaeology (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Exploring Long-Term Pastoral Dynamics: Methods, Theories, Stories" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Although the innovation of reindeer transport transformed societies across Northeast Asia, tracing the prehistory of reindeer domestication and riding has proven particularly challenging. Recent cross-species archaeozoological research has built an expanded paleopathological toolkit, but to date there are few mechanisms...
Using Proteomics to Identify Ancient Pastoralism (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Ancient Pastoralism in a Global Perspective" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Biomolecular analyses (proteins, stable isotopes, lipids, and DNA) have been integral in identifying the economic roles of domesticated animals in archaeological contexts. Materials such as human remains, dental calculus, ceramic matrices, and archaeological residues can provide valuable information on which animals were used for primary and...
Using stable isotopes to explore ancient wildebeest mobility in the context of pastoral expansion (2017)
The spread of pastoralism through Kenya may have been slowed by novel disease challenges presented to livestock by wild taxa. In particular, wildebeest-derived malignant catarrhal fever (WD-MCF), which is extremely fatal to cattle, would have been encountered by pastoralists for the first time as they moved south of the Lake Turkana Basin into the native range of East African wildebeest (Connochaetes taurinus). Today, migratory wildebeest have well-known annual migration patterns. However, while...
Wealth on the Hoof: Cajamarca Culture Camelid Pastoralism (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Them and Us: Transmission and Cultural Dynamism in the North of Peru between AD 250 and 950: A Vision since the Recent Northern Investigations" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Located in the Cajamarca Valley, the site of Iscoconga (50 BCE–750 CE) represents one of the few extensively explored domestic contexts of the Cajamarca Archaeological Culture. Excavations at Iscoconga revealed, among many things, that the...
Wetlands and Grasslands: Habitat Choice of Hunters and Herders across the Transition to Mobile Pastoralism in Mongolia’s Desert-Steppe (2024)
This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Wetlands" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Paleoclimate studies across northeast Asia document a pronounced drying and cooling trend across desert and desert-steppe environments around 6,000 years ago, intensifying between 4500 and 4000 BP. While conditions led to the deterioration of lake and wetland habitats, past archaeological research based on museum collections and a limited number of excavated...
Winter Is Coming: Is ‘Fortification’ Always Fortification? (2018)
The case study comes from the southern Urals, Russia. Since 1970’s the walled settlements of the Sintashta archaeological culture (2000-1700 BC) have been interpreted as the fortified towns and centers of social life for the religious and war leaders of the local communities. However, settlements’ primary locations on the bottoms of the rivers’ valleys, as well as lack of other evidence for the warfare, cause doubts about such interpretation. Analysis of natural environments (e.g., local wind,...
The Wolf Under the Plaza: Pastoralism and Predation in Spanish New Mexico (2018)
The nomadic tribes of the Plains—notably, the Comanche and Apache—are typically considered the main obstacles to the northern expansion of the Spanish empire in North America. But early Spanish settlers in New Mexico found themselves up against another formidable foe that has received far less attention in the literature: the wolf. Indeed, for an expanding pastoral society, the wolf posed perhaps the biggest threat to local economic welfare. In this paper, we report on the recent discovery of a...
Wooden Features on the Jicarilla Apache Nation: An Analysis of Navajo and Apache Land Use (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Jicarilla Apache Nation (JAN) reservation was established in Northern New Mexico in 1887 with additional lands added to the southern boundary in 1907-08. Today, the reservation comprises approximately 879,917-acres of pinyon-juniper uplands and sagebrush flats in lower elevations. Prior to the establishment of the JAN reservation, these lands comprised...
Zooarchaeology by Mass Spectrometry (ZooMS) and the emergence of nomadic herding in eastern Central Asia (2018)
Identifying the timing and nature of the emergence of pastoral societies in eastern Central Asia is hampered by many key logistical challenges, including the scarcity of early nomadic habitation sites and the small and fragmented nature of related archaeofaunal assemblages. This study presents faunal identifications of animal bones from two recently discovered Bronze Age habitation sites in northern and western Mongolia using ZooMS (Zooarchaeology by Mass Spectrometry)- a technique that uses...
ZooMSing to Harappan Animal Husbandry: Taxonomic Identification Using Peptide Mass Fingerprinting of Indus Valley Civilization Faunal Remains (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Indus Valley Civilization at its peak extended over 1 million km2 and encompassed an estimated five million people, with over 1,000 sites identified. Although faunal remains have been recovered from the excavations of approximately 100 archaeological sites, very few have been analyzed using biomolecular methods. This is largely because many of the...