Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant: Variation In Pastoral Herding Strategies

University Of Connecticut, Storrs CT

Investigators

Abstract

Under the supervision of Dr. Natalie Munro, Siavash Samei will investigate variability in pastoral practices by developing models of pastoral organization and applying them to the pastoral archaeological record. The organization of pastoral societies informs and shapes the role pastoralists play in regional cultural and political processes. Throughout history, pastoralists have been instrumental in shaping larger processes such as the emergence and evolution of the earliest cities and states, the institutionalization of social inequality, and long distance exchange networks. Archaeological research affords a deep-time perspective on how pastoralists affect larger regional processes through their modes of economic organization and herd management. Because of their relatively light archaeological footprint, however, pastoralists are vastly underrepresented in the prehistoric record. Scholars must depend on a number of indirect measures to detect pastoral activities: proxies that tend to lump pastoralists into broad categories that mask their organizational diversity. This project contributes to an increasing body of recent archaeological scholarship centering on the role of pastoralists as significant agents of social and political change in general. The criteria developed for identifying variability in pastoral practices are thus applicable to an array of archaeological sites in different times and places. Because of its geographic setting in Armenia and Iran, this project also contributes to the resurgence of collaboration between American and Armenian scholars since the 1990s and provides a small but significant intellectual and academic contribution to the thawing relationship between the United States and Iran. Mr. Samei uses economic theory to understand the organizational variability of pastoralists by focusing on economic specialization and population mobility. These two variables define four models of pastoral organization, each with a unique set of expectations for faunal remains and stable isotopes. A battery of analytical methods, such as herd animal demographics, is used to study economic specialization. Specialization should manifest itself in the species composition of herds, age-sex structures, and the types of animal products exploited. Stable oxygen and carbon isotope values from tooth enamel carbonate and bone collagen track animal provisioning as well as mobility along topographic and seasonal gradients. These methods will be applied to investigate the fit between the models and the faunal remains from two sites in the South Caucasus, where pastoralism played a central but ambiguous role in shaping broader mechanisms of cultural change and migration; mechanisms that made the Kura-Araxes cultural tradition of the Caucasus (mid 4th-late 3rd millennium BC) the most extensive cultural horizon in southwest Asia prior to the 6th century BC. The fortified settlement of Köhne Shahar in Iran (ca. 3300-3200 BC) and the Areni-1 cave complex in Armenia (ca. 4300-3400 BC) are ideal sites as they are characterized by exceptional bone preservation. By combining economic theory with zooarchaeology and stable isotopic methods, the proposed approach has much greater analytical power and methodological versatility to detect and assess diversity in past pastoral practices through time and across space.