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The Sami siida has been described as an organizational institution tailored to meet the dynamic demands of reindeer herding. Historically, it has been characterized as a relatively small group base...

There has been a great increase in archaeological research in Mongolia since 2000. Increasingly precise chronologies, regional studies, and the growth of development-driven archaeology are transforming our knowledge of this key region of northeastern Asia. This review summarizes recent work and provides a narrative of the prehistoric and medieval cultural sequences as presently understood. I focus on long-standing key topics: early human habitation, the adoption of food-producing economies, Bronze Age social transformations, and the emergence of central places and large polities. I argue that, on the one hand, Mongolia has unique data and new examples to offer the archaeological community and, on the other, that the prehistory of Mongolia and the steppe are not so different from the rest of the world in its history of research and key questions. This review provides general overviews covering the Upper Paleolithic, Epipaleolithic or Neolithic, and Bronze Age to the Xiongnu period; specific data related to each period provide jumping-off points for comparative analysis and further examination.

Nomadic pastoralism persists at a substantial scale in Tuva and neighboring regions of Inner Asia. Tuvan pastoral lifeways reflect adaptations to both local environments and current economic realities. Much of our quantitative understanding of the economics of Tuvan nomads is derived from data collected in the first half of the 20th century. Accordingly, this paper provides an updated picture of the inner workings of nomadic households using data collected in Barun-Khemchik and Bai-Taiga provinces in 2013–2015. It analyzes herd composition and size, and compares the frequency of different animals kept today with values recorded in Tuva in 1916 and 1931. It then quantifies rates of provisioning hay and grain, and the production of meat and dairy products for consumption and sale. Finally, it characterizes typical costs of food, petrol, medicine, clothing, and school supplies faced by present-day herders. We advocate the collection of quantitative ethnographic data that can shed further light on the future of the Tuvan pastoralist niche.

This article explores the impacts of environmental crises on pastoral nomads in Ottoman Kurdistan/Armenia in the late nineteenth-century. It demonstrates that the climatic fluctuations characterizing these environmental crises were synchronized with global climatic oscillations, specifically the El Niño Southern Oscillation. Recurrent episodes of severe drought and cold dramatically affected these groups, who were unable to withstand extreme changes in temperature and precipitation. Back-to-back drought episodes created a shortage of water, dried up pastures and damaged forage, while severe cold resulted in high rates of premature death among herd animals. These climatic events thus had devastating economic and social consequences.

The dynamic relationship between horses and nomadic peoples has a long history of study within pastoralist research worldwide. In the Plains of North America, however, the story of the horse is not often considered within these discussions. This article focuses on the story of the Blackfoot people in order to move beyond description of observed impacts of the horse and toward a discussion of what these impacts mean in terms of culture change, continuity, and Indigenous resistance. Recognizing Blackfoot horse culture as a true mode of pastoralism acknowledges the complexity of Indigenous responses to Euroamerican contact while also expanding our understanding of the global development of pastoralism as a lifeway.

The Eurasian rangelands contain the world’s largest contiguous pasture area, grazed for millennia by mobile pastoralists’ livestock. This paper reviews evidence from one Eurasian country, Kazakhstan, of how nomadic pastoralism developed from some 5,000 years ago to the present. We consider a timespan from pre-industrial, socialist and capitalist periods, during which pastoral social formations shifted from clans, to state employees to private farm families and ranchers. The aim is to understand how events over the last hundred years have led to sequential dissolution and re-formation of the social units necessary to manage livestock across the geographical scale of spatially heterogenous and seasonally variable ecosystems. It is argued that the social scale of extensive livestock management must be tailored to the geographical scale of the biotic and abiotic conditions. The paper briefly appraises archaeological data indicating the long duration of mobile pastoralism in the Kazakh rangelands. The middle sections then provide an overview of how events from the late 17th C onwards unravelled the relationships between Kazakh nomads’ socio-economic units of livestock management and the rangeland environment. At present, mobile animal husbandry is not feasible for the majority of Kazakh livestock owners, who operate solely within small family units without state support. These reformulated post-Soviet livestock grazing patterns are still undergoing rapid change, influencing the balance between vegetation communities, wildlife and carbon, as ecological publications show. In conclusion, there is trend that by concentrating capital and landed resources onto a minority of large-scale pastoralists, a few can re-extensify through mobility in combination with selective intensification, such as more reliance on cultivated feed. Unfortunately, current state and international efforts are leaving out the majority of small-scale livestock owners and their livestock who are unable to adopt either practice at sufficient scale, leading to more environmental damage and social inequity in the future.

This article examines the extent to which the adoption of the horse created a transition in modes of production from hunting and gathering to nomadic pastoralism by tracing the horse's impact on Blackfoot settlement patterns and landscape use during the Precontact and Postcontact periods on the Northwestern Plains. While changes in hunting techniques, raiding frequencies, and certain social implications such as status and wealth differentiation have been studied from an ethnohistoric perspective, less work has been done to trace the subtle changes to patterns of landscape use that may have directly resulted from the adoption of horse husbandry by the Blackfoot people. This study applies Geographical Information Systems (GIS) technology to broadly distributed Precontact- and Contact-period archaeological sites of Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Montana to reveal the role of horse husbandry on landscape use in the Northwestern Plains. This research expands on previous ethnohistorical work, while also contributing a new, material dimension to the dynamics of this transition at various spatial scales.

Bones of domestic sheep dated to the early first millennium AD are described from the Dâures massif in the Namib Desert. The remains confirm earlier investigations which inferred the acquisition of livestock from indirect evidence in the rock art, suggesting a fundamental shift in ritual practice at this time. Dating of the sheep remains is in broad agreement with the dating of other finds in the same area and in southern Africa as a whole. The presence of suspected sheep bone artefacts, possibly used for ritual purposes, draws attention to the importance of livestock as more than a component of diet in the changing economy of hunter-gatherer society.

© 2019, © Council for British Research in the Levant 2019. The circumstances in which domestic animals were first introduced to the arid regions of the southern Levant and the origins of nomadic pastoralism have been the subject of considerable debate. Nomadic pastoralism was a novel herd management practice with implications for the economic, social and cultural development of Neolithic communities inhabiting steppe and early village environs. Combining faunal stable isotope and chipped stone analyses from the eastern Jordanian Neolithic steppic sites of Wadi Jilat 13 and 25, and ‘Ain Ghazal in the Mediterranean agricultural zone of the Levantine Corridor, we provide a unique picture of the groups exploiting the arid areas.

This article investigates how, with increasing land pressure during Russian settlement in Kazakh steppes in the late nineteenth century, clan institutions affected the transition from nomadic pastoralism to settled agriculture. Using a novel dataset constructed from Russian colonial expedition materials matched with clan genealogies, we find that, controlling for geographic factors, clan identity strongly influenced the duration of transhumance period, the organization of production, and the acquisition of new agricultural tools. Information transmission within clans, external economies of scale in nomadic pastoralism, and clan-specific values and norms underlie the results.

In attending to the diachronic dimension of change, this chapter explores the historical literature on nomadic pastoralists of eastern Tibet in order to establish an understanding of their previous relationships. What becomes clear is that the literature complicates a simple or single idea of Tibetan nomadic pastoralism. Focusing on Tibetan nomadic pastoralists’ relationships with each other and with outsiders, an assumedly egalitarian system is disrupted by the presence of hierarchical relationships with local kings and aristocrats. Moreover, civil wars and wars with distant empires entangled nomadic pastoralists in larger political strategies as they contributed to military skirmishes. Even within pastoralist communities, the system of relationships was punctuated by inequalities of rank, wealth, and access to good pastures. Feuds and raids led to movement for physical and strategic needs, marking these communities with dynamism and fluidity. Finally, historic trade and exchange with others contributed to the continuation of a pastoral way of life. The complexities and dynamism of these previous relationships set an understanding from which contemporary adaptations and transformations may be analyzed.

Donald Joe Bedunah, a member of the editorial board of Nomadic Peoples, Professor of Range Resource Management at the University of Montana, USA, and a rangeland ecologist who worked for many years with nomadic communities throughout Central Asia, died suddenly on 28 January 2012 at his home in Lolo, Montana. He was 59. His wife, Mo Gary, and his son, Andrew, were with him when he died. Don Bedunah's career as a rangeland scientist began in 1981 as an Assistant Professor at the University of Montana, Missoula. Don's research interests related to rangeland ecosystems were broad, like the grassland and steppe environments he enjoyed working in. He authored or co-authored over forty-five scientific papers about rangelands in the western United States and Central Asia, was the editor or co-editor of a number of scientific books and publications, including Rangelands of Central Asia: Transformations, Issues and Future Challenges, and an editor of the Journal of Range Management. Don was an important contributor to the journal, Nomadic Peoples, co-authoring a paper about Kazak nomads in Western China in 2005, co-editing, with Carol Kerven, Volume 12, Number :2 in 2008, and was a reviewer of manuscripts submitted to Nomadic Peoples for publication. Don had agreed to review a manuscript for Nomadic Peoples only a week before his untimely death. He was also on the Editorial Board of the journal Pastoralism: Research, Policy and Practice. His passing will be greatly missed among those who work on range resource management and nomadic pastoralism in the United States and Central Asia. I first met Don in September 1981 as a graduate student in a class he was teaching on rangeland inventory and analysis. Being the same age and with many similar interests, we quickly established a close friendship. Although Don had never worked overseas before, he was very interested in stories I told him about my time in Himalayan and Tibetan plateau rangelands and working with Tibetan-speaking nomads. This undoubtedly made the defence of my Masters thesis much easier! In 1991, Don quickly jumped at the opportunity to accompany me on a research project in the Wild Yak Valley in the Kunlun Mountains on the northern edge of the Tibetan Plateau. Camping out at an elevation of 4,000 m for two months in the remote Tibetan wilderness and cooking over a yak-dung fire is not everyone's cup of tea, but Don was in his element. He greatly enjoyed being outdoors, and the Tibetan Plateau was new territory for him. Riding tough little Mongolia horses on wild yak trails across steep scree slopes was not for the fainthearted, but Don quickly adapted to the exigencies of exploring the wilds of northern Tibet. With an observant, rangeland ecologist's eye, he saw patterns to the vegetation on the landscape and, as we rode along, we talked about why certain plants were found where they were and why wild yaks and Tibetan gazelle were seen in certain habitats and not others. We had what could probably be termed intellectual discussions about the Tibetan rangeland ecosystem. Don's easy-going nature also allowed him to make friends quickly with our Chinese colleagues and the Kazak nomad, Mohan, who was our guide. I believe it was this seminal trip twenty years ago to Tibet that really instilled in Don an interest in Central Asian rangelands and nomads. In 1992, I got Don his first assignment on a pastoral development project in Mongolia. I had been asked to go to Mongolia as a consultant on a livestock project formulation mission for the Asian Development Bank, but I was unable to commit myself for the required two month's of fieldwork. Eager to see Mongolia, I managed to convince the consulting finn that they should hire both Don and me. We would overlap for an initial two weeks, I would brief Don on what consulting work was all about, and then he would continue with the mission after I left. Being a good rangeland scientist does not necessarily make you a good consultant on livestock development projects, but Don was successfully able to make the transition. …

In traditional models, nomadic empires are often depicted as ‘parasitic’ on the neighbouring sedentary polities. Inspired by the development of anthropologies and archaeologies of colonialism, this paper adopts the political-landscape approach to address the emerging steppe urbanism of the nomadic Liao Empire. Perceptions of Liao urban landscapes are discussed from six viewpoints – settlement location, city walls, architectural orientation, camping sites, spatial segregation and sacred places – in order to understand the political practices of city making. I argue that the nomadic Khitan did not simply emulate spatial strategies of settled agricultural polities in the heartland of China, but rather produced a radically new form of urbanism that was brought forth as one of the creative instruments constitutive of authority, formed and transformed in the process of nomadic empire building in which traditions of nomadic pastoralism with ties to eastern Eurasia were manipulated and remade along with Chinese urban planning.

To explore the question of why archaeology matters to society, this study turns to the recent attempt to promote economic development in the eastern steppe nation of Mongolia. The past two decades have witnessed transformation of Mongolia's largely pastoral-based economy and society according to models advocated by international development agencies and adopted by the Mongolian government. The preconceptions of nomadic pastoralism embedded in policy decisions and resource allocations are unsupportable given the archaeology, history and ethnography of the region. As a result of these embedded assumptions about nomads, Mongolia's transition to free market economics has been devastating for the rural sector. Given the unique time depth and variation available through the material record, I argue that archaeologists have a responsibility to apply their research and ask salient questions of narrowly conceived agendas for development. In Mongolia, archaeology and the material record matter because they...

Khirigsuurs are the largest and most common archaeological monuments of the Mongolian Steppe in the Bronze Age and Early Iron Age, a critical time for the spread of nomadic pastoralism and the emergence of a new social order during the Bronze Age in Inner Asia. Using data from a full coverage regional survey of the Lower Egiin Gol valley, this paper presents a system for studying the defining ground level features of Khirigsuurs to discover structural categories, organize sites, compare Khirigsuur monuments across regions and explore activities that may have gone on around the Khirigsuurs themselves as they were built and used. The primary methods used are a study of monumental scale and a typology of additive parts from which complex and comparable types emerge. Elaborate Khirigsuurs illustrate the use of Khirigsuurs as small monuments, stages for group activities, and are the persistent backdrop for social transformations during the spread of nomadic pastoralism. I suggest that the Khirigsuurs of the Lower Egiin Gol are monuments constructed with relatively regular frequency, by a consistently sized group, and used for group oriented activities rather than the memorialization of an elite. This is consistent with something one might see as part of a regular yearly nomadic round.

The transition from a hunting/gathering economy to an agricultural economy, beginning about 10,000 years ago, was accompanied by the development of specialised innovations including nomadic pastoralism. It was also associated with the emergence of increasingly sedentary human societies in which relatively large numbers of people lived in a crowded urban environment. The dynamic relationship between agriculture and urbanisation undoubtedly had a profound effect on evolutionary dynamics in developing complex human societies. By the beginning of the Early Bronze Age (EB IA, ca. 3300 BCE) an agricultural economy was well established in the region surrounding Bâb edh-Dhrâ, located in the southeastern plain adjacent to the Dead Sea in Jordan. However, the site apparently did not begin to develop as an urban centre until EB IB. The objective of this paper is to explore what is known about the EB IA people of Bâb edh-Dhrâ. The presence of infectious and metabolic diseases coupled with high infant mortality and low life-expectancy at birth suggest a society at risk. Nevertheless the people were robust and give evidence of at least a moderately successful adaptation to the environment in which they lived. Published in 2007 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Until the mid-19th century, the Middle Volga and Trans-Volga region could be considered as a frontier of the Russian state. It was a specific border between Europe and Asia, an imperial periphery facing the southeast, the nomadic steppe world. Until the mid-18th century, the administrative system in the Middle Volga had primarily fulfilled military and fortification tasks. The permanent process of mass colonization was the most important feature of the region’s history between the mid-17th century and the early 20th century; it was facilitated owing to a large amount of vacant land and favorable market conditions. Mass migration caused establishment of Russian farms and landownership in the region and a gradual replacement of nomadic pastoralism. By the mid-19th century, the policies of the Russian Empire in the Trans-Volga region had lost their military and foreign-policy functions, and the administrative system had been brought into line with the all-imperial standards. The region began to turn into an “inner periphery” of Russia which combined some features of the border region and those of the inlands of the Empire. After the abolition of serfdom in 1861, the Trans-Volga region acquired the status of the “Russian breadbasket”, one of the main centers of grain production and supply of bread to the national and international markets. Construction of railways and the development of the Volga river shipping lines contributed to the intensive influx of people to the region, and to the plowing and cultivation of the virgin steppe lands. The main feature of the region’s population was its ethnic and religious diversity, as well as historically conditioned interaction of the peoples of “forests and steppes”. By the beginning of the 20th century, the “inner periphery” had acquired its recognizable historical and cultural image and become motherland for its diverse population., Авторский коллектив исходит из концепции, согласно которой вплоть до середины XIX в. средневолжский регион может быть охарактеризован как один из фронтиров Российского государства – специфическое пограничье Европы и Азии, окраинная территория, обращенная на юго-восток, к кочевому степному миру. До середины XVIII в. система управления в Среднем Поволжье выполняла прежде всего военные и фортификационные задачи. Важнейшей особенностью региона был процесс его массовой колонизации, осуществлявшейся с середины XVII и до самого начала ХХ в., чему способствовали наличие здесь значительного фонда свободных земель и благоприятная рыночная конъюнктура. Результатом переселенческого движения стало укоренение на основной территории региона русского крестьянского хозяйства и помещичьего землевладения, постепенное вытеснение кочевого скотоводства. К середине XIX в., когда имперская политика в Заволжье утратила военные и внешнеполитические функции, а система управления была унифицирована по общероссийскому образцу, средневолжский регион из фронтира вдоль юго-восточной границы начал превращаться в своеобразную «внутреннюю окраину» России, обладавшую чертами пограничья и одновременно внутренних территорий империи. В пореформенный период Заволжье обрело статус «российской житницы», одного из основных центров товарного зернового производства, поставщиков хлеба на внутренний и внешний рынки. Строительство железных дорог, развитие волжского пароходства способствовали интенсивному притоку населения, стремительной распашке степных земель. На рубеже XIX–ХХ вв. регион стал транзитным узлом, через который шло массовое переселение крестьян из центральных губерний России и Украины в Сибирь. Особенностью сельского населения региона, его отличием от других «внутренних районов» России являлась этноконфессиональная неоднородность и активное взаимовлияние народов «леса и степи», что имело глубокие исторические корни. К началу ХХ в. «внутренняя окраина» превратилась в особое историко-культурное пространство со своим узнаваемым обликом, в «общую родину» для своего многоликого населения.

The debate on the evolution of culture has focused on two processes in particular, phylogenesis and ethnogenesis. Recently, it has been suggested that the latter has probably always been more significant than the former. This proposal was assessed by applying cladistic methods of phylogenetic reconstruction to a data set comprising decorative characters from textiles produced by Turkmen tribes since the 18th century. The analyses focused on two periods in Turkmen history: the era in which most Turkmen practised nomadic pastoralism and were organised according to indigenous structures of affiliation and leadership; and the period following their defeat by Tsarist Russia in 1881, which is associated with the sedentarisation of nomadic Turkmen and their increasing dependence on the market. The results indicate that phylogenesis was the dominant process in the evolution of Turkmen carpet designs prior to the annexation of their territories, accounting for c.70% of the resemblances among the woven assemblages. The analyses also show that phylogenesis was the dominant process after 1881, although ethnogenesis accounted for an additional 10% of the resemblances among the assemblages. These results do not support the proposition that ethnogenesis has always been a more significant process in cultural evolution than phylogenesis.

This paper investigates the relationships between the Early Metal Age cultures of the Inner Mongolia and Gansu-Qinghai area with the Erlitou culture of the Central Plains region, and addresses the issue whether specific metal objects characteristic of these cultures may have their source of inspiration in areas as remote as southern Siberia and present-day Afghanistan and southern Turkmenistan. The proposal that China at the very beginning of its Bronze Age may have been affected by long-distance cultural transmissions depends upon recent reevaluations of the early history of the Eurasian steppe, in particular the advent of nomadic pastoralism and horse riding, and upon newly recalibrated carbon dates ascertained for specific Siberian sites and for the Bactrian-Margiana complex.

The construction of large stone fortresses across much of northern Armenia during the Late Bronze Age (ca. 1500–1150 BC) represented a shift away from centuries of nomadic pastoralism, and also marked a profound transformation in the constitution of political authority and how social orders were mediated through the built environment. To date, however, little archaeological attention has been given to Late Bronze Age (LBA) settlements located outside the fortress citadels, partly due to the difficulty in detecting them from the surface. In this report we highlight results and observations from a magnetic gradiometry survey in northwestern Armenia where we test the hypothesis that an extensive LBA domestic complex existed at the base of the fortified hill at the site of Tsaghkahovit. The study surveyed four grids in the settlement area at the base of fortress. Three test units were excavated in three of the four survey areas to test selected anomalies. Two of the test units confirmed the presence of subsurface LBA deposits, including basalt stone walls, burned features, and a storage pit, appearing in the data as large dipoles. The spatial configurations of buildings revealed by the gradiometry surveys elucidate the extent of the Tsaghkahovit settlement and the formal differentiation of domestic and institutional spaces as new architectural traditions emerge during the Middle to Late Bronze Age transition. However, targeted subsurface tests also hint at the ephemeral nature of the domestic constructions suggesting the retention of mobility among subject populations under the authority of settled fortress elites. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The weapon is his companion … Who knows no submission, Who eats uncooked flesh, Who has no house in his lifetime. (from a Sumerian text, in Chiera 1924, p.20) While the quest for the origins of nomadic pastoralism is not the central theme of this work, the issue must be raised if only because it has formed the focus of so much archaeological work. Yet the origins of nomadism may not be of quite the same significance as other origins – such as the origins of food production and of urban life. In the latter instances we are dealing with major systems transformations which require extremely complex explanations and models and which are part of a general trend towards organizational complexity and increased energy capture. The advent of nomadic pastoralism has its place in all this but if; as suggested earlier, it is peripheral to the main line of cultural evolution, then it may not require the same level of explanation. Perhaps nomadic pastoralism cannot be said to have had a precise origin, or perhaps it has had many origins in many places and at different times. If, as argued by some (Khazanov 1984; Gilbert 1983; and also in this work), nomadism is an unstable and fluctuating phenomenon involving a heavy commitment to pastoralism, then we would be far better off studying those sets of conditions under which it emerges or declines than in searching for origins or building causal models.

A model is presented which describes the transition from mixed rainfall-dependent agriculture with animal husbandry to specialized modes of production based upon irrigated agriculture and nomadic pastoralism. This model emphasizes selective pressures for mixed farming before irrigation agriculture had expanded in the arid alluvial zones of Mesopotamia, and selective pressures for specialization after irrigation agriculture had become established in that zone. It goes on to describe dynamic interaction between specialized groups once such specialization has become institutionalized.

By the middle of the first millennium BC, the combination of nomadic pastoralism and Scythic culture reigned from south Russia and the north-eastern provinces of Iranian settlement to northern China. The secret of silk is said to have been closely guarded by the Chinese. The exact date of its communication to Iran is not certain, but it cannot have been long after AD 419, if the story of a Chinese princess who smuggled the silkworm into Khotan in that year, is to be believed. In art, China experienced the influence of Iran from the 4th century onwards as a more or less direct transmission from the east Sasanian provinces. The chief Iranian influence on the iconography of Central Asian and Chinese Buddhism was however of a more general and theological kind. The full impact of this iconography in China follows the end of Sasanian rule, falling in the T'ang dynasty and particularly the first half of the 8th century.

The Iranian plateau is an ideal area for investigating the relationship be? tween ecological and sociological factors because of its stark aridity, on the one hand, and its historical role as a meeting place of ethnic and cultural movements on the other. The part of the plateau which forms the southeast corner of Persia is particularly interesting from this point of view. Over an area of some 200,000 square kilometers the great majority of the population, which numbers about half a million and includes both peasants and nomads, call themselves Baluch. Most, but not all of them, speak a dialect of Baluchi as their native tongue, and practically all adults speak it as a lingua franca. However, their political and social organization shows important variations, and there are striking geographical variations in the country they inhabit. It is unusual to find such wide variations among people who consider themselves one society. This paper shows how the variations in political and social organization in the area may be related to variations in human ecology. I wish to demonstrate that in this area of Persia, where political leadership relies on an income from settled agriculture, there is a definite social differentiation into classes and cognatic values are given to kin relationships, whereas leadership which relies primarily on nomadic pastoralism works through a structure of agnatic kin relationships without class differentiation.1