The Archaeology of Pastoralism, Mobility, and Society

Beyond the Grass Paradigm

Emily Hammer

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2025
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781009561686
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title
• Title page
• Imprints page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue: Grass and Orientalist Perspectives on the Bakhtiari
• Chapter One From Orientalist Tropes to aDNA and Isotopes: Persistent Problems in the Archaeology of Pastoralism
• Chapter Two Resolving Conceptual Conflation: Pastoralism, Mobility, Complexity, Production, and Landscapes
• Chapter Three Escaping the Tyranny of the Ethnographic Record on Pastoralism
• Chapter Four Bones, Teeth, Seeds, Dung, Corrals, and Beyond: Foundational Methodologies Applied to Landscapes, Sites, and Assemblages Related to the History of Pastoralism
• Chapter Five Biomolecular Approaches to Pastoralism, Diet, and Mobility in the Past
• Chapter Six Multidisciplinary Means of Addressing Pastoral Ecologies and Economies in the Past
• Chapter Seven Social and Political Perspectives on Ancient and Historical Pastoralism
• Chapter Eight Uniting Separate Regional Traditions for a Comparative Archaeology of Pastoralism
• Chapter Nine Conclusion: Histories of Pastoralism; Revisiting ‘‘Grand Narratives’’
• Bibliography
• Index