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| This
workshop will
concentrate on how nomadism can be defined,
characterized and
recognized in the archaeological record of both the Old
World and the
Americas. The participants will explore the relation of
(pre)historic
nomadic populations with their environment
and the settled population, based on archaeological,
historical and/or
ethnoarchaeological sources (some
practical information for the participants can be found
here). Part of the sessions will be used to discuss the written contributions that have made the 'soft' deadline of Saturday 19 June 2004. Another part will entail a video conference with participants on different continents (video recordings of the presentations can be found here). The final deadline for contributing to the volume is Monday 15 November 2004, production and publication of a volume are expected shortly after that. The title for the publication will be: 'The Archaeology of Mobility. Nomads in the Old and in the New World' (some guidelines for contributors can be found here). |
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| Hans Barnard
(Cotsen Institute of
Archaeology, University of California, Los Angeles): Eastern Desert Ware. Microtraces of a lost people (view video): Excavations at Berenike, a Graeco-Roman harbor on the Egyptian Red Sea coast, have yielded small quantities of characteristic potsherds from 4th-6th century AD deposits. The vessels were mostly cups and bowls made, without the use of a potters wheel, of a sandy fabric with no or very few organic inclusions. Their surfaces have been wiped, smoothed or burnished and most vessels have been decorated with impressed or incised patterns, often asymmetric and frequently enhanced with a white inlay or a partial red slip. Parallels for this pottery have been described at Wadi Qitna, Tabot and various other sites in Nubia and the Eastern Desert. The current hypothesis is that it was a utilitarian ware produced and used by the nomads living in the Eastern Desert at the time. In order to learn more about these 'Eastern Desert Dwellers' their pottery, which has only been found in graves and in places where outsiders provided the infrastructure for them to settle, is studied with a variety of techniques including petrologic thin-sectioning, trace-element finger-printing (with ICP-MS) and fatty acid residue analysis (with GC-MS). A confrontation of the results from this analysis with the textual sources and both ethno-archaeological and experimental information will provide an insight into the lifestyle of the ancient dwellers of the Eastern Desert (back to top). |
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| Alison Betts (Department of
Archaeology, University of
Sydney, Australia): Things to do with sheep and goats. Neolithic hunter-forager-herders in North Arabia (view video): This paper will examine the apparent spread of hunter-forager-pastoralist groups across the Syro-Arabian steppe in the Late Neolithic period. The evidence suggests a fairly rapid change in land-use patterns from the preceding Aceramic Neolithic period. It also indicates wide-spread cultural uniformity across the steppe and yet considerable diversity of site types within the broader picture. It is possible that this diversity represents varied early responses to the social and economic changes brought about by new and unfamiliar blends of subsistence strategies. The paper will review the wide range of evidence for the period and present some interpretative models (back to top). |
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| Stanley
Burstein (Department of History,
California State
University Los Angeles): Trogodytes = Blemmyes = Beja? The limits of ancient ethnography (view video): The correlation of textual and
archaeological evidence is one of the chronic problems
of the
historiography of the margins of the ancient world.
The eastern deserts
of Egypt and lower Nubia in
late antiquity are no exception. Archaeological
remains in the eastern
desert are typically associated with the Blemmyes, who
are considered
typical
desert nomads. This paper argues that the sources
offer little support
for this reconstruction, since they indicate that in
late antiquity the
Blemmyes were primarily a sedentary population located
in the Nile
valley (back
to top).
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| Roger
Cribb (Independent
Scholar, Australia): Mobility, conflict and the negotiation of space (view video): I will address the issue of conflict and conflict resolution in mobile communities focusing on Near Eastern mountain nomads and the Australian Aboriginal people, emphasizing the spatial dimension, illustrated through archaeology and ethnoarchaeology. In particular I'm interested in the effects of restricted movement on people living in tribal societies, where interpersonal or intergroup conflict has traditionally been handled by moving away from it. Forced sedentarization is the obvious example among Near Eastern nomads and the changes are reflected in the floor plans and distribution of their dwellings. In Australia, where Aboriginal people were gathered into artificial 'communities', there seems to be a complete disjunction between the tribal and kinship considerations, avoidance rules that dominate people's lives and the physical space in which they are forced to live (back to top). |
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| Jelmer
Eerkens (University
of
California, Davis): On the relationship between pottery production and mobility. Lessons from the Western Great Basin of North America (view video): Cross-cultural research has demonstrated a relationship between residential mobility and pottery-making: mobile societies usually do not make pots while sedentary ones usually do. There are good theoretical reasons to assume this relationship, however, there are also many exceptions. This study uses the Western Great Basin of North America as a case study to draw more general conclusions about the relationship between pot use and residential mobility. The hunter-gatherers of this region practiced an array of mobility strategies from semi-sedentism to nomadism, yet many made and used pots. The study considers the following questions: Other than mobility, what factors affected pot use in this region? How did more mobile groups incorporate pot production into their seasonal rounds? What were pots used for in this region and why did people make pots at all? (back to top) |
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Brooke
Milne (Department
of
Anthropology,
The University of Western Ontario, Canada):
Colonization, structured landscapes and seasonal mobility. An examination of early Palaeo-eskimo land use patterns in the Eastern Canadian Arctic (view video): The early Palaeo-eskimos were a pioneering culture that populated the pristine environment of the Eastern Canadian Arctic roughly 4500 years ago. Archaeologists have long speculated how these nomadic peoples made this journey from Alaska eastward, given the small size of the population and the geographic expanse of this region. How did they survive in unfamiliar surroundings and how did they maintain contact with one another? Current explanations of Palaeo-eskimo land use patterns are closely tied to the seasonal availability of subsistence resources. In winter, people hunted seals on the sea ice while in spring and summer they ventured inland to hunt caribou. In other words, people followed the animals and eventually colonized the region. A corollary of this model is an image of Palaeo-eskimos living a tenuous existence that hinged almost entirely on the availability of food resources. This paper proposes an alternative view that argues the procurement of lithic raw material was an equally important if not more influential factor contributing to the colonization of the Arctic environment. The Palaeo-eskimos were a stone-tool using culture; thus, procurement of lithic raw material was of central importance to the organization of their technological system. Toolstone is restricted throughout the Arctic, being only available in certain places at certain times of the year. Initially, every group of Palaeo-eskimos would have had to find suitable source areas and logically, other distant groups would come to those same locations to procure toolstone. This, in turn, would provide a place where people could meet and socialize while satisfying their technological needs. Evidence from sites located on southern Baffin Island indicates Palaeo-eskimos continued to make long distance journeys on a regional level to acquire toolstone despite local abundances. The motivation to maintain these land use strategies appears to have been entirely social. Lithic source areas not only provided a place for people to get stone but they also served as a place to meet and greet (back to top). |
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Desert pastoral nomadism in the longue durée. A case study from the Negev and the Southern Levantine Deserts (view video): Archaeological studies of pastoral nomadic systems over the longue durée, in this particular case derived from the Negev and surrounding areas, reflect a deeper and more complex dynamic of social and ecological adaptation than is usually acknowledged. Although the inherent adaptive resilience of pastoral nomadic societies has long been recognized as one of its primary attributes, this recognition has been limited virtually exclusively to the short-term ethnographic present. This short-term perspective, on which many historical interpretations have been based, has resulted in a static understanding of the actual history of peripheral nomadic societies. The deep time perspective, the longue durée, based on archaeological study, suggests that some of our basic assumptions concerning these groups are flawed. Re-evaluation of the development of these societies reflects an evolution no less complex than that of their sedentary cousins, places them in a three-dimensional historical context where they are not simply a static given in the landscape, and indeed implies that our very definitions of these societies may be problematic (back to top). |
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| Stuart
Tyson Smith (Department of
Anthropology, University of California, Santa Barbara): Crossing boundaries: nomadic groups and ethnic identities (view video): Ethnicity
has proven elusive in the archaeological record, causing some archaeologists
to despair of
ever identifying ethnic groups, especially when
dealing with nomads,
who often leave ephemeral traces in the archaeological
record.
Symbiotic relations with other groups also often
characterize nomadic
peoples, especially pastoralists, producing a mixed
material assemblage
that defies characterization as
a distinctive tradition, bounded in space and time.
Ethnicity is
usually framed in this way, with an expectation of a
distinct, bounded
people with a shared culture and primordial
attachments. Archaeologists
have generally assumed along similar lines that
ethnicity should appear
as a distinctive material assemblage, reflecting
ethnicity’s primordial
attachments. There is, however, an emerging consensus
among
anthropologists and sociologists that we should not
expect to find
absolute and bounded ethnic groups either
archaeologically or
ethnographically. Instead, ethnic identities are
situational and
overlapping, constructed and negotiated by individuals
in specific
social
contexts. As a result, we as archaeologists must
re-orient our
perspective away from the search for neatly bounded
groups in favor of
an agent centered approach that instead focuses on
ethnic dynamics. This paper examines some different ways in
which
archaeological evidence can be used to examine ethnic
dynamics, using
as
examples two colonial communities on ancient Egypt’s
southern frontier,
Askut
and Tombos in Nubia, and concluding with some thoughts
on some of the
problems
and potential of studying the ethnicity of nomadic
groups like the
Blemmyes,
with a brief consideration of the potential for
documenting ethnicity
at
Berenike (back to top).
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Jeffrey
Szuchman
(Near Eastern Languages and Cultures,
University of
California, Los Angeles):
Mobility and sedentarization in Late Bronze Age Syria (view video): Pastoral nomadism in north Syria and southeast Anatolia are primarily known from the archives of the 19th century BC Mari palace and the Neo-Assyrian records touching on Aramaean nomadism. Work on these periods has focused on textual rather than archaeological data and has left a chronological gap in our knowledge of nomadism in Upper Mesopotamia during the Late Bronze Age. Yet the political and economic conditions of Late Bronze Age Syria and Turkey suggest that it is precisely during this period that we should expect to see a rise in nomadic activity. Only near the end of the second millennium BC, as the Middle Assyrian kingdom consolidated its control over north Syria, nomadism would have decreased. This paper will re-evaluate previous surveys of Upper Mesopotamia in order to build a picture of the nomadic character of north Syria and southeast Turkey in the late second millennium BC. One aim will be to evaluate the usefulness of archaeological surveys in answering questions about mobilization as a response to political circumstances (back to top). |
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| Willeke
Wendrich (Near
Eastern Languages and Cultures, University of
California, Los Angeles): Adaptation or marginalization. Nomadism in 21st century Egypt (view video): Egypt today has several nomadic
populations, most of which live in desert areas that
until recently
were of little interest to the settled population.
Only in times of
particular stress, such as periods of war, did
the authorities
take an active interest in the population of these
remote areas. With
the development of tourism the desert regions and the
arid coasts of
the Mediterranean and the Red Sea
are in demand for desert and dive safaris. The
development of these
regions
is mostly in the hands of large companies based in
Cairo, Alexandria or
abroad. The Ababda nomads, who live in the southern
part of the
Egyptian Eastern Desert, are aware of the potential
threat to their
culture and way
of life and try to find ways of coping with these.
This paper will
discuss
several strategies of adaptation and place these in a
broader
theoretical context (back
to top).
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| Juris Zarins (Department of Anthropology, Southwest
Missouri State
University) and Steven Brandt (Department of Anthropology, University of Florida): The Eastern Desert of Egypt. A case study for the spread of Semitic-speaking pastoral peoples (cancelled): In a previous
presentation we argued that a complex,
two-pronged development
resulted in the creation of pastoral nomads in Arabia.
One of these
arose which was closely related to the Fertile
Crescent. As the result
of animal domestication by 6000 BC, groups began
to herd
ovicaprids in areas adjacent to the Crescent,
especially in northern
Arabia, southern Levant and the Sinai. The second
developmental wave
may have originated in the Horn of Africa. The
domestication of bovids
and specialized sheep led to pastoral groups
developing in southwest
Arabia, perhaps as early as 6000 BC as well. Recent
genetic evidence
tends to buttress already known archaeological and
rock art data for
such assumptions. The concomitant issue of Semitic
language origins can
also be re-examined in light of recent
linguistic-genetic modeling
proposed by a number of researchers. An examination of
the Eastern
Desert of Egypt can perhaps shed light on this problem
as well. By the
late Old Kingdom, hieroglyphic records suggest that at
least two major
pastoral, linguistic-ethnic groups developed in the
Eastern Desert. The
first group, as traditional Semitic speakers, may have
originated in
the northern areas of Sinai, the southern Levant and
Arabian
Midian. These groups would include the ‘3M
and/or IWN.TYW
/ ST.TYW / MNTW N SWT. From the Horn
of Africa area
ranging into the southern Eastern Desert we see the
arrival of the
?Cushitic MD3 and BK / BKK / B3KT.
For
the subsequent Middle Kingdom, a well defined regional
characterization
develops perhaps enhanced by the cordon sanitaire
maintained by the
Egyptians along the Wadi Hammamat (back to top).
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