Revolutions in the Desert

The Rise of Mobile Pastoralism in the Southern Levant

Steven Rosen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315399928
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

Revolutions in the Desert investigates the development of pastoral nomadism in the arid regions of the ancient Near East, challenging the prevailing notion that such societies left few remains appropriate for analytic study. Few prior studies have approached the deeper past of desert nomadic societies, which have been primarily recognized only as a complement to the study of sedentary agricultural societies in the region. Based on decades of archaeological field work in the Negev of southern Israel, both excavations and surveys, and integrating materials from adjacent regions, Revolutions in the Desert offers a deeper and more dynamic view of the rise of herding societies beyond the settled zone.

Rosen offers the first archaeological analysis of the rise of herding in the desert, from the first introduction of domestic goats and sheep into the arid zones, more than eight millennia ago, to the evolution of more recent Bedouin societies. The adoption of domestic herds by hunter-gatherer societies, contemporary with and peripheral to the first farming settlements, revolutionized all aspects of desert life, including subsistence, trade, cult, social organization, and ecology. Inviting processual comparison to the agricultural revolution and the secondary spread of domestication beyond the Near East, this volume traces the evolution of nomadic societies in the archaeological record and examines their ecological, economic and social adaptations to the deserts of the Southern Levant. With maps and illustrations from the author's own collection, Revolutions in the Desert is a thoughtful and engaging approach to the archaeology of desert nomadic societies.

1
Beyond History

The Importance of an Archaeology of Pastoral Nomadism

An Introductory Mythology

Nomads in the Near East are the stuff of myth. The nomadic horde sweeping out of the desert, plundering and pillaging the hapless village and laying siege to the city has long been a theme of Near Eastern history, both ancient and modern, from the Amorites as eaters of raw flesh to Lawrence of Arabia. These myths have provided a convenient deus ex machina for naive historical explanation. The collapse of states, and indeed civilizations, and the rise of new ones have been ascribed countless times to nomadic invasions; the rise of true religions has been attributed to nomadic desert tribes.

In fact, the myth of the “struggle between the desert and the sown” can be traced far beyond the confines of the Near East. Lattimore’s (e.g., 1962) studies of ancient Chinese history are built on a similar conception of fundamental conflict between heartland China and the Asian steppe. In North Africa, the tensions between the Saracens and the Romans have been couched in similar language (Shaw 1982). Even the Pueblo-Plains Indians hostilities have been interpreted in much the same framework, and are also far more complex than the stereotypes would have it (Cordell and McBrinn 2012:297–299).

The origins of these myths are ancient, antedating by millennia the accounts of the likes of Burkhardt and Burton. They can be traced easily back to classical times when Greek and Roman historians and travelers described (or repeated descriptions of) peripheral tribal groups like the Nabateans (e.g., Diodorus Siculus XIX, 94; Politis 2007), the Scythians (Herodotus Histories IV), the Blemmys (Strabo 17.1; Burstein 2008; Dijkstra 2012), or the Saracens (Mayerson 1994) stereotypically, and usually in rather hostile terms. Earlier than this, in the 2nd millennium BCE, the Babylonians and others reviled the purportedly nomadic Amorites, referring to them as “eaters of raw meat” (Chiera 1934:58, 112), and in the Bible, the conflict between Cain and Abel is commonly interpreted as that between herder and farmer (e.g., Gaster 1969:53–55).

The origins of these myths are also complex, undoubtedly deriving from a combination of factors, including the difficulties in state control over nomads within its realm (e.g., problems of taxation, census, mineral or water rights, rights of passage, grazing rights), conflicts between the state or empire and tribal groups beyond the borders of the regime (or within them), economic competition between farmer and herder over arable grazing lands (shades of Rogers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!), and general human tendencies to fear “the other.”

The general contrast between state literacy and nomadic illiteracy further underscores the power and the perspective of the state in the construction and control of these myths. This is not only a question of who writes the histories which serve as our source texts (with all the issues of bias and perspective that are inherent in this issue), but how these are disseminated, and how accessible they may become. The state is active in promoting its narrative myths, not merely passive in their writing. These “objective” reasons behind the construction of the myths combine with state control over the production and propagation of information and the political role of that information in maintaining state authority; historians are left with the task of trying to understand both the history and historiography of these myths with few balancing texts from the nomad side.

From another perspective, if perhaps elements of the conflicts and contrasts are not myth, for certainly there really were conflicts between tribal groups and the state, and there really were disputes over lands and rights, in the recounting or constructing of the myth, crucial components of nomadic history and society seem to drop out of the telling. These include the trade and goods exchanged, the services provided both sedentary to nomad and vice versa, the collaborations, the partnerships, the client and patron relationships, the efficiency of the use of otherwise non-productive lands, the constant passage of individuals between sedentary and nomadic, the pervasive kinship links, and indeed often the very blurring of the distinction between sedentary and nomadic, between tribe and state, between private and corporate ownership of land, and indeed at the level of personal identities. Thus, in the reduction to myth, the characterization of the other becomes caricature, losing all complexity, nuance, and richness.

With the rise of critical history and anthropology, fundamental problems in the naive acceptance of the myths of the desert and sown have been demonstrated repeatedly. Anthropology in the late 20th century established the complexity of relations, not only between the nomad and the settled, but within nomadic society itself. In detailed and relatively long-term studies of pastoral nomadic societies, not only has ethnography contradicted many of the popular external myths about nomads, but it has questioned the nomads’ notions about their own cultures and societies. Similarly, more critical perspectives on the texts, both ancient and modern, have disputed their objectivity and historicity. Of course, the very idea of objectivity is itself suspect. Thus, it is not that the myths are “wrong”, but rather that they must be understood in the contexts of their specific cultural and historical circumstances. It is those circumstances which are the subjects of more critical anthropological and historical inquiry. Needless to say, our own modes of explanation must also be understood within the contexts of Western culture, but this is a subject beyond the scope of this book.

The Role of Archaeology

If the general conception of nomads and nomadism is molded by myth, then so are conceptions of how archaeology can address the issue. In contrast to its sister disciplines of social anthropology and history, archaeology—and Near Eastern archaeology in particular—has seemingly been slower to adjust to new paradigms on nomadic societies, and this is partially based on the myth that mobile societies do not leave remains that can be studied by archaeology. The reasons for this seem to derive from the structure of the discipline. If on the one hand, nomadic societies (and the intent is those tribal groups based on herding, not hunting-gathering) date primarily to the historic periods, the nature of their archaeological remains can be characterized as “Paleolithic”, or at best, perhaps “Neolithic”. Researchers of the Paleolithic and Neolithic periods in the Near East, whose field and analytic methods are the most appropriate for studying the “scrappy” remains of historic and proto-historic nomads, have rarely ventured into the later periods. Later period archaeologists, accustomed to excavating the cities, towns and villages of historic and proto-historic times, often have difficulty seeing even the potentials in the excavations of encampments, or small campsites. Thus, such luminaries as Albright (1949:82–83) and Kenyon (1964 [1980]:204–206) have questioned whether archaeology is capable of researching putative biblical nomads, and by extension, nomads in general. Finkelstein and Perevoletsky (1990:68) have claimed “groups that practice subsistence economy based on hunting-gathering or on animal husbandry—and migrate in search of food, water, and good pasture—do not leave traceable remains,” leaving one to wonder how they missed the entire discipline of Paleolithic archaeology.

A second aspect here is, of course, the role of the texts. In the study of recent times, archaeology serves to offer important insights and critique of text-based history. However, both narrative and analytic history are written and determined from the texts. This is not to denigrate the role of historical archaeology,¹ but texts are the basis of understanding the First World War (for example), and to deny their primacy is delusory. On the other hand, without a doubt, there are modern histories whose texts are so lacking that any history based exclusively on them would be not only be incomplete, but probably fundamentally wrong. Thus, histories of colonized or enslaved peoples, often known textually only from the records of the colonizers, demand archaeological research to offset the inherent prejudices in the written records. Archaeology offers a voice not available from the texts. It is notable here that oral histories, even when recorded long after the fact, are also crucial (e.g., for the Negev, Bailey 1980; for a general example from the New World, Trimble et al. 2008). For ancient times, the problems of the texts are compounded (e.g., for ancient Egypt, Burstein 2008). For non-literate peoples, like virtually all nomads in historic times, archaeology offers the only tool which might complement the few textual references available.

However, beyond the problems of the texts themselves, in ancient history, and in the history of biblical lands, the texts exert an even greater power (cf. Smail 2007). The structure of historical enquiry has been dictated by the narratives derived from the texts, whether Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, based exclusively on classical textual accounts, or biblical histories, based on the Holy Writ. If archaeology today often disputes the biblical narrative (e.g., Silberman and Finkelstein 2002), the text still serves as the referent, the starting point. A tribal group, a place, and event, or a process not named in the Bible does not exist historically, whether they existed in reality or not. This is all more the case for peoples and groups living beyond the horizon of literate societies.

Thus, as the only discipline with the tools to investigate small-scale, non-literate societies, and to offer non-sedentary perspectives and data on historical period mobile societies, the potentials for archaeology to vastly expand our understanding of mobile pastoralism are tremendous. Notably, these potentials offer both deeper time perspectives, as well as greater geographic range. In both of these, archaeology has the potential to greatly increase the range of variability we see in the societies we classify as pastoral nomadic.

Archaeology as a discipline (as opposed to history based on the interpretation of ancient texts) operates on two levels when researching nomads: the indirect and the direct. The direct approach to the archaeology of nomadic societies comprises the investigation of the features part and parcel of nomadic lifeways, campsites, ephemeral camps, cemeteries, and of course the material remains recovered from them, and a large range of other features in the nomadic geography such as quarries, hunting blinds, rock shelters, rock art, paths, traps, cisterns, etc. An indirect approach r...