Pastoralism (Other Keyword)
76-92 (92 Records)
The Moquegua Valley in southern Peru was the locale where the rival early imperial states of Wari and Tiwanaku established provincial colonial centers. Both Wari and Tiwanaku colonists concentrated their settlements in the low to mid-sierra elevations of the valley, elevations that are not modern zones of camelid husbandry. The political ecology of imperial settlement at this elevation fostered the development of local systems of camelid pastoralism that were significant economic components for...
Presence of the Mycobacterium Tuberculosis Complex (MTBC) in ancient skeletal samples from Ukraine (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Ancient DNA in Service of Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This research aims to investigate biocultural interactions by studying ancient disease among the Tripolye, a Neolithic group dating to 4,900-2,900 calBC, and one of the first agricultural populations in Eastern Europe. The Tripolye lived at higher population densities and had closer contact with bovines than the hunter-gatherers that came before...
Quilcapampa and Points of Convergence in Middle Horizon Arequipa: Faunal Evidence for Extensive Interregional Interaction (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Wari and the Far Peruvian South Coast: Final Results of Excavations in Quilcapampa" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Quilcapampa was an important point of convergence for communities from around the southern Andean region with these people and/or their material culture suggesting extensive interregional interaction. The zooarchaeological work conducted on the vertebrate remains from Quilcapampa will be presented in this...
A Re-examination of the Animal Bone Remains from Rojdi, a Sorath Harappan Site in Northwest India (2018)
The later 3rd and early 2nd millennium site of Rojdi in Gujarat, India was excavated under the direction of the Professor Gregory Possehl d over eight field seasons between 1982 and 1995. Rojdi is an agricultural village with substantial stone architecture, most of which dates to the early second millennium (1900-1700 BCE). Significant progress has been made in our understanding of the Sorath Harappan culture, including detailed ceramic studies, analyses of archaeobotanical materials, and...
Reconstructing Multiregional Pastoral Strategies in the South-Central Andes (2023)
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...