Doctoral Dissertation Improvement: Landscapes of Pastoral Nomads in Southeastern Turkey

Harvard University, Cambridge MA

Investigators

Abstract

Under the supervision of Dr. Jason Ur, Emily Hammer will examine the spatial organization of nomadic pastoral inhabitation over the last 500 years in Diyarbakýr province, southeastern Turkey. The study area is located at the northern edge of ancient Mesopotamia, along the Tigris River at the interface between a fertile plain and an agriculturally marginal area of eroded limestone hills. For approximately 9000 years Middle Eastern economy and society was composed of both sedentary agriculturalists and transhumant pastoral nomads. To date however, Mesopotamian archaeologists have collected data almost exclusively on the sedentary sector of ancient societies with economies based on agriculture. The ephemeral traces of nomadic pastoral encampments rarely survive in the archaeological record because they are typically destroyed by modern farming activities. The study area is of particular importance because it has preserved the remains of both campsites and surrounding landscape features such as cisterns, corrals, and caves resulting from at least 500 years of nomadic pastoral land-use. This provides a unique opportunity to begin to correct biased, "sedentary-centric" understandings of Middle Eastern history. The project will contribute to anthropological theory by investigating an enduring anthropological phenomenon - the transformation of natural resources into socially constructed places of significance. Many studies of space and place have focused on the cultural transformations associated with public and urban spaces; the proposed research extends these studies by focusing on the meaning invested in landscapes by past mobile groups through seasonal re-inhabitation and the manipulation of natural resources. By investigating cisterns as spatial nodes in the landscape orienting people's camping and pasture patterns over long periods of time, the project will contribute to ongoing discussions of how people inscribe their presence on the environment in an enduring way. Archaeological survey and satellite imagery work have mapped features that provide evidence for diachronic patterns in nomadic pastoral winter land-use, including campsites and spatially associated landscape features such as cisterns, corrals, and caves. In the current phase of the project, analyses will focus on how water accessibility relates to inhabitation and herding patterns. Via sediment coring and radiocarbon and terrestrial in-situ cosmogenic nuclide dating methods, the project will determine the relative dates of campsite use and cistern creation in order to evaluate hypotheses about the evolution of mobile settlement and landscape. The research has broader implications for internationally collaborative salvage research, geoarchaeology, and anthropology. As the Ilýsu Dam reservoir on the Tigris River will soon flood the study region, the proposed fieldwork and analysis will gather data on features and landscapes that will soon be destroyed. Collaborative fieldwork, analysis, and publication will strengthen cooperation between American and Turkish archaeologists. Fieldwork will involve training both Turkish and American graduate students in field methodology and GIS technology. Results will be published in peer-reviewed publications and presented at scientific conferences in Turkey and the US. The application of terrestrial in situ cosmogenic nuclide dating, a geological technique whose archaeological applications have been limitedly realized, will help add another method for dating inorganic materials to the archaeological toolkit. The proposed methodology is novel and will have wider geological applications.