The Square or the Round? Agro-pastoral Household Structure in Southeastern Kazakhstan

Summary

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 year-round habitations often signaled the transition from round houses to rectangular, agglomerated rooms or households. A discussion of the spatial layout of Iron Age villages and hamlets at three excavated sites in the Talgar region also considers the nature of household organization, gendered space, and settlement form in communities that practiced both transhumant farming and the cultivation of wheat, barley, and the two millets. Ethnographic analogies drawn between Kazakh yurt organization and the ancient Iron Age house forms will be explored as part of the ‘nomadic tradition’ within a settled community. The dispersed spatial organization of the Talgar settlements contribute to a larger regional perspective on the nature of landscape use by the Saka and Wusun confederacies of the Semirech’ye Region.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Empirical Approaches to Mobile Pastoralist Households   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23188