"In this book, Emily Hammer articulates a new framework for investigating variability in past pastoral practices. She proposes ways to develop a more rigorous relationship with pastoralist ethnographies and illustrates new archaeological and scientific methodologies for collecting direct data on herding, mobility, and social complexity in the past"--
In this book, Emily Hammer articulates a new framework for investigating variability in past pastoral practices. She proposes ways to develop a more rigorous relationship with pastoralist ethnographies and illustrates new archaeological and scientific methodologies for collecting direct data on herding, mobility, and social complexity in the past.
Though mobile pastoralists were long a significant component of many societies in Eurasia and Africa, scholars have long considered them to be materially and documentarily 'invisible.' The archaeological study of pastoralism across these regions has relied on ethnographic analogies and environmentally deterministic models, often with little or no data on historically specific herding communities. This approach has yielded a static picture of pastoralism through time that has only recently been challenged. In this book, Emily Hammer articulates a new framework for investigating variability in past pastoral practices. She proposes ways to develop a more rigorous relationship with pastoralist ethnographies and illustrates new archaeological and scientific methodologies for collecting direct data on herding, mobility, and social complexity in the past. Hammer's approach to the archaeology of pastoralism promotes efforts to dismantle the legacy of evolutionary classifications of human societies, which have drawn sharp distinctions between farmers and herders, and to investigate how diverse non-agricultural and mobile groups have shaped complex society and environment.
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Demonstrates new archaeological and scientific methodologies for collecting direct data on herding, mobility, and social complexity in the past.
List of illustrations; List of tables; Preface; Acknowledgements;
1. From orientalist and primitivist tropes to aDNA and isotopes: persistent problems in the archaeology of pastoralism;
2. Resolving conceptual conflation: pastoralism, mobility, complexity, production, and landscapes;
3. Escaping the tyranny of the ethnohistoric record on pastoralism;
4. Bones, teeth, seeds, dung, corrals, and beyond: foundational methodologies applied to landscapes, sites, and assemblages related to the history of pastoralism;
5. Biomolecular approaches to ancient pastoralism, diet, and mobility;
6. Multidisciplinary means of addressing ancient pastoral ecologies and economies;
7. Social and political perspectives on ancient pastoralism;
8. Uniting separate regional traditions for a comparative archaeology of pastoralism;
9. Histories of pastoralism; Revisiting 'Grand Narratives'; Bibliography; Index.
Emily Hammer is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures at the University of Pennsylvania. An anthropological archaeologist of the Middle East and the South Caucasus, she has conducted fieldwork in the UAE, Turkey, Azerbaijan, and Iraq. Her ongoing research contributes to three fields of inquiry: the archaeology of pastoralism, comparative studies of early urbanism in Mesopotamia and its surrounding highlands, and GIS methodologies for environmental and landscape archaeology.
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