The Communalities of Pastoralist Life: Perspectives on Household Organization at the Pastoral Neolithic site of Luxmanda, Tanzania

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.

Household organization has been a topic of relatively little archaeological discussion in the Pastoral Neolithic (PN) literature for eastern Africa, in part because domestic architecture has rarely been found. Scholarly literature has therefore focused on pastoralists’ putative mobility, rather than on their settlements. However, recent excavations at the 3100 BP settlement of Luxmanda in Tanzania have revealed a spatially complex site with evidence for multiple house floors, hearths, distinct collections of large lower grindstones, and other concentrations of domestic refuse. This paper addresses the methodological challenges of recognizing and analyzing households at a pastoralist open-air settlement. We also examine ways in which pastoralist social organization may or may not be reflected in the spatial layout of a PN settlement site, and we specifically question assumptions made about the communalities of pastoralists’ domestic lives.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

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

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 25028