Empirical Approaches to Mobile Pastoralist Households
Part of: Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)
This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Empirical Approaches to Mobile Pastoralist Households," at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.
Most archaeological studies of mobile pastoralist social organization have focused on regional and supra-regional scales via the extant monumental and herding landscapes. While not totally absent from the literature, household levels of analysis figure much less in these studies. Unless we assume that mobile pastoralist social organization can only be understood on a macro-regional scale, then an understanding of the local, everyday structures is essential. Fortunately, the past decade has witnessed an increase in anthropological and ethnoarchaeological studies of mobile pastoralist household organization in different parts of the world, particularly in the Near East, Central Asia, Africa, the Andean highlands and Southern & Northern Europe, where pastoralism is a well-developed form of human adaptation. These studies have emphasized the inter-site and intra-site spatial organization of households/campsites, the changing form and function in household organization, the characterization of households that often lack structures, demographics, the impact of major economic and social changes on household activities, and so on. This session brings together archaeologists who share an empirical orientation regarding the household organization of mobile pastoralists in order to discuss the present status of research on this topic and its future directions.
Other Keywords
Household Archaeology •
Iron Age •
Ethnography/Ethnoarchaeology •
Pastoralism •
Survey •
Landscape Archaeology •
arctic •
Neolithic •
Bronze Age •
Material Culture and Technology
Geographic Keywords
Asia (Continent) •
Kyrgyz Republic (Country) •
Republic of Azerbaijan (Country) •
Republic of Uzbekistan (Country) •
State of Kuwait (Country) •
Turkmenistan (Country) •
Islamic Republic of Afghanistan (Country) •
Republic of Tajikistan (Country) •
Republic of Kazakhstan (Country) •
Asia: Central Asia
Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-8 of 8)
- Documents (8)
-
Archaeology of High-Mountain Pastoral Campsites in the High-Pyrenees (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "Empirical Approaches to Mobile Pastoralist Households" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. European high-mountain landscapes are nowadays characterized by the presence of pastures and grasslands. Archaeological and palaeoenvironmental research conducted during the last decades are picturing these environments as long-term cultural productions, resulting from complex environment-society interactions. Since prehistory,...
-
The Communalities of Pastoralist Life: Perspectives on Household Organization at the Pastoral Neolithic site of Luxmanda, Tanzania (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "Empirical Approaches to Mobile Pastoralist Households" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Household organization has been a topic of relatively little archaeological discussion in the Pastoral Neolithic (PN) literature for eastern Africa, in part because domestic architecture has rarely been found. Scholarly literature has therefore focused on pastoralists’ putative mobility, rather than on their settlements. However,...
-
Earth House, Chum and Reindeer Shed: Ethnoarchaeological Research on Household and Settlement Organization of Mobile Hunter-Fisher-Reindeer Herders in Western Siberia (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "Empirical Approaches to Mobile Pastoralist Households" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Taz Selkup are a Siberian indigenous group of hunters, fishers and reindeer herders in the northern taiga between Ob' and Yenisei. In the 17th and 18th centuries they have migrated north from Tomsk region, and in the new territory have preserved their nomadic ways until today. The adaptation to the new environment and its effects...
-
Home-making in the Khorezm Oasis (Karakalpakstan, Uzbekistan) (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "Empirical Approaches to Mobile Pastoralist Households" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A key feature of mobile pastoralism is the circulation of kin groups within a landscape, where movement is structured at least in part by the repeated return to places of social and ritual significance. Cultural anthropologists describe these as practices of "belonging made by moving," where notions of lineal descent, home, and...
-
New Insights on Mobile Pastoralist's Household Ritual Activity: Early Observations from the Excavation of a Mongol period Ephemeral Dwelling in northern Mongolia. (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "Empirical Approaches to Mobile Pastoralist Households" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Conversations on ritual practice along the Mongolian steppe are often dominated by discussions of monumental architecture that is typified by large stone mounds referred to as "khirigsuurs" or "Deer Stone" steles. Conversely, the idea that ritual space and practice can be considered at the small-scale household has been mostly...
-
Resilient Herders: Continuity and Change in Pastoral Household Life in Mongolia (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "Empirical Approaches to Mobile Pastoralist Households" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Understanding how human societies interacted with environmental changes is a major goal of anthropological archaeology. In this paper, we assess human-environment interactions at the household level in three regions of Mongolia during the Bronze and Iron Ages. We review shifting environmental conditions and the continuities and...
-
The Square or the Round? Agro-pastoral Household Structure in Southeastern Kazakhstan (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "Empirical Approaches to Mobile Pastoralist Households" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Iron Age agropastoralists of the Talgar region built a variety of houses including rectangular double-walled mud-walled houses, semi-subterranean pit houses, mud brick platforms, and central circular rooms with multiple plastered floors. In earlier periods of prehistory the description of transition from mobile to sedentary...
-
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)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
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...