Modes of Labor Organization and Variations of Pastoral Economies across East Asia during the Second Millennium BCE

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Ancient Pastoralism in a Global Perspective" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

There has been considerable recent momentum in documenting pastoral communities in the past who engaged with multi-resource subsistence strategies, including both husbandry and cultivation. This paper explores the potential conceptual conflict between cultivation and pastoral activities in the context of labour budget and surplus accumulation. Pastoral economies often employ extensive labour approaches in which productivity is driven by the size of herds and the quality and expansiveness of pastures. Traditional farming systems, on the other hand, are often limited by land availability, and consequently, productivity is driven by intensive labour input per area unit. I shall use three case studies from Southern Tibet, Eastern Tianshan and Inner Mongolia, respectively, to illustrate varying labour organizations underlying subsistence choices during the second millennium BCE. These case studies inform about the flexibility and ingenuity of ancient pastoral communities who practiced more than one subsistence mode and combined them in a number of innovative hybrids that coexisted over thousands of years.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Ancient Pastoralism in a Global Perspective   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39355.0