Technology on the Move: The Influence of Mobility on Pottery Production on the Ancient Russian Steppe

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

On the desert-steppe zone of southwestern Russia, mobile pastoralism served as the dominant mode of subsistence for much of its history. However, mobile pastoralism as a term refers to a diversity of practices, distinguished across multiple axes, the least of which is the mobile strategy itself. Pottery, as both an everyday object and a form of technology whose use and production is constrained by mobile lifestyles, serves as an avenue of insight into this everyday diversity. Between the Eneolithic and Early Iron Age, or the end of the fifth millennium B.C.E. to the first few centuries C.E., mobile pastoralists would first emerge in the river valleys then expand their exploitation to each available ecological niche of this area of the steppe, before developing into what has historically been recognized as pastoral nomadism. By focusing on pottery from newly emerging camps in this region and period, technical choices concerning resource procurement, clay recipes, and investment, informed by p-XRF and ware-analysis, allow insight into how technological production shifted with increasing mobility, as well as how these technical choices reflect contemporary diversity among potters otherwise engaged in similar subsistence and mobility practices.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 25075