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Mobile pastoralist activities occur at different scales across the landscape, including local, regional, and supra-regional scales. Most archaeological studies of mobile pastoralist social organization have focused on the latter two scales via the extant monumental and herding landscapes. Household levels of analysis figure much less in these studies. This volume brings together the work of archaeologists currently engaged in mobile pastoralist household research in different regions of the world to highlight the importance of household studies and the utility of both archaeological and ethnoarchaeological approaches in understanding mobile pastoralist household formation, continuity, and adaptation to environmental, social, economic, and political change.
“Altogether, this is a substantial contribution to decoding the past. The essays will be particularly useful to all social scientists working in Central Asia, as well as to scholars focused on pastoralism in the Andes, the Middle East, and Africa.” • Choice
“Overall, this is an excellent volume that truly takes the study of pastoralism to new places. It replaces pedantic, by-now routine archaeological discussions of what pastoralists are and how to read mobility in the ancient record with concrete examples and thoughtful discussions about the humanity behind the archaeological record.” • Lynne M. Rouse, German Archaeological Institute
Jean-Luc Houle is an Associate Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Folk Studies and Anthropology at Western Kentucky University. His research interests focus on the social and ritual construction of landscapes among Bronze and Iron Age mobile pastoralists in Mongolia, and how all this relates to the development of complex societies in Inner Asia. His research has been funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, with funding from the Henri Luce Foundation, the Rust Family Foundation, and Western Kentucky University. Houle’s publications can be found in several books and journals, including Oxford Handbooks Online in Archaeology, Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology, Quaternary International, and Archaeological Research in Asia.
List of Maps
List of Figures
List of Tables
Foreword
Bryan K. Hanks
Introduction: Mobile Pastoralist Households: Archaeological and Ethnoarchaeological Perspectives
Jean-Luc Houle
Part I: ‘Place, Path, and the Material Manifestation of Mobile Pastoralist Households’
Chapter 1. House Hunting: A Systematic Approach to Identifying Ephemeral Households of Mobile Pastoralists
William R. M. Gardner and Jargalan Burentogtokh
Chapter 2. Where on the Mountain? Patterns of Bronze Age Transhumant Pastoralism in the Western Tianshan Region of Xinjiang, China
Alison Betts, Peter Jia, Dexin Cong, Michael Spate, Duo Tian, Qi Meng, and Gino Caspari
Chapter 3. Gone With the Wind? The Materiality of the Kel Tadrart Tuareg Settlements in Central Sahara
Stefano Biagetti
Chapter 4. Herders and their Homes on the Range: Ethnoarchaeological Perspectives on Pastoralist Households in Eastern Africa
Katherine Grillo
Chapter 5. Household and Settlement Organization of Mobile Hunter-Fisher-Reindeer Herders in Western Siberia: An Ethnoarchaeological Study
Henny Piezonka, Vladimir Adaev, Aleksandr Kenig, Aleksey Rud, and Morgan Windle
Part II: ‘Household Space and Placemaking’
Chapter 6. Mobile or Settled? Vectors of Economic and Social Amplification among Pastoral Communities of the Late Bronze Age in the Caucasus
Sabine Reinhold
Chapter 7. House Form: Round or Square? Agropastoral Households of the Iron Age in the Talgar Region of Southeastern Kazakhstan
Claudia Chang
Chapter 8. Around the Hearth: Patterns of Spatiality at Sámi Reindeer Herder Sites in Northwest Sápmi (Finnish Lapland)
Oula Seitsonen
Chapter 9. Home-Making among the Living and the Dead in the Khorezm Oasis (Karakalpakstan, Uzbekistan)
Elizabeth Brite
Part III: ‘Local Household Dynamics and External Relations’
Chapter 10. Camelid Caravans of Middle Horizon Peru: Household Contexts, Local Transformations, and Interregional Interaction in Cusco
Aleksa K. Alaica and Véronique Bélisle
Chapter 11. Empire and Everyday Life: Continuity and Change in Mongolia’s Bronze and Iron Age Domestic Practices
Jean-Luc Houle
Concluding Commentaries
Michael Frachetti