Water and Pasture Infrastructure of Mobile Pastoralists in Southeastern Turkey

Summary

Archaeology has long seen mobile pastoral societies as largely materially "invisible" both in the realms of portable artifacts and of infrastructure projects such as buildings and landscape modification. Recent studies have sought to alter this impression as part of larger trends that seek to ground our understanding of pre-modern pastoralists in concrete faunal, botanical, isotopic, landscape, and historical data, which clearly show the effect that pastoral practices and infrastructure have had on cultural landscapes through time. I draw on ethnographic and archaeological case studies from the Middle East to discuss some general political, social, and environmental issues affecting the elaboration of pastoralist infrastructure in seasonal territories and the complex relationships transhumant people have with the infrastructure of surrounding sedentary communities. Drawing on archaeological survey data, I also discuss water and pasture infrastructure of the last 500 years in southeastern Turkey and the changing political environment in which this infrastructure was used by mobile pastoralists to live in a "marginal" area under the Ottoman and modern Turkish states.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 22647