Towards an Archaeology of Pastoralism: The Near East and Beyond

Drawing upon a variety of geographical, historical, and ethnographic observations, and using a number of variables including the degree of mobility, division of labor, and social organization, this paper defines a series of strategies for pre-modern pastoralism and then proceeds to detect the markers for these strategies using recent developments in the fields of archaezoology, archaeobiology, archaeochemistry, archeobotany, spatial analyses and settlement pattern studies.