Empirical Approaches to Mobile Pastoralist Households

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.