Ancient Pastoralism in a Global Perspective

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Ancient Pastoralism in a Global Perspective" at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Pastoralism and its cultural intersections link people and herd animals in close synergy. Around the globe today, millions of households continue to practice aspects of pastoralism, and the archaeological record is rich with evidence of pastoralists having substantial impact on the environment, political dynamics, dietary intake, ritual behaviors, and belief systems. While archaeological interest in ancient pastoralists has received increased attention over the past two decades, analyses seem to remain divided along the lines of specific methodologies or topical branches of archaeological inquiry. This session has two goals: (1) to reposition pastoralism as a foundation for critical anthropological theory, and (2) to encourage the blending of methodological approaches to the study of ancient pastoralist societies and how contemporary pastoralists fit into these new reflections. We invite participants who investigate pastoralism in any region of the world from a variety of theoretical perspectives (multispecies, political ecology, social network, and others) and archaeological methodologies (such as zooarchaeology, spatial analysis, material culture analysis, iconography, and biomolecular analyses). We hope to create a new dialogue between researchers working in diverse regions in order to find common threads that animal-human relationships entangle.