Doctoral Dissertation Research: Governance, Organizational Complexity, and the Role of Pastoral Communities

Yale University, New Haven CT

Investigators

Abstract

This award is funded in whole or in part under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (Public Law 117-2). This doctoral dissertation research project explores whether barriers to governance could be influenced by the incorporation of disparate pastoral communities into processes of governance to service the dietary and mobility needs of herders and livestock. This project is relevant to research on nomadic pastoralism and mobile societies, and is especially pertinent to studies dealing with the relationships between governance, mobility, and herding at the community level. This is an immediate concern currently, as modern herders everywhere grapple with globalization, forced sedentarization, and reduced mobility due to international borders, environmental change and pasture degradation. In addition to providing funding for the training of a graduate student in archaeology in methods of empirical, scientific data collection and analysis, the project would enhance public understanding of science and the scientific method by broadly disseminating its findings. Using two existing models of state formation, this research assesses hypotheses for a decentralized and centralized political structure based on changes in human and livestock diet and mobility patterns through time. Data for this analysis comes excavations at two cemeteries and stable (δ13C and δ15N) and radiogenic (87Sr/86Sr) isotope analyses of human and sheep skeletal remains. This project holds promise to generate insights from an understudied area, elucidate unique endogenous and indigenous forms of complex political organization, and evaluate the veracity of historical documents. Such findings would highlight the variability that exists in global forms of pre-industrial political complexity and reinforce the broader anthropological need to examine data generated from patterns of human organization that are not agriculture-centric. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.