The Rise of Pastoralism in the Ancient Near East

Abstract

In this paper, we present a history of pastoralism in the ancient Near East from the Neolithic through the Bronze Age. We describe the accretional development of pastoral technologies over eight millennia, including the productive breeding of domestic sheep, goats, and cattle in the early Neolithic and the subsequent domestication of animals used primarily for labor-donkeys, horses, and finally camels-as well as the first appearance of husbandry strategies such as penning, foddering, pasturing, young male culling, and dairy production. Despite frequent references in the literature to prehistoric pastoral nomads, pastoralism in Southwest Asia was strongly associated with sedentary communities that practiced intensive plant cultivation and was largely local in nature. There is very little evidence in prehistoric and early historic Southwest Asia to support the notion of a "dimorphic society" characterized by separate and specialized agriculturists and mobile pastoralists. Although mobile herders were present in the steppe regions of Syria by the early second millennium BC, mobile pastoralism was the exception rather than the rule at that time; its "identification" in the archaeological record frequently derives from the application of anachronistic ethnographic analogy. We conclude that pastoralism was a diverse, flexible, and dynamic adaptation in the ancient Near East and call for a reinvigorated and empirically based archaeology of pastoralism in Southwest Asia.

Dairy pastoralism sustained eastern Eurasian steppe populations for 5,000 years

“…In contemporary central and eastern Eurasia, mobile dairy-based pastoralism is a key subsistence practice for many people 1 . Much of the eastern Eurasian Steppe is covered by dryland grasses which, while challenging for grain agriculture, can sustain large meat and dairy-producing herds 2,3 . Across the steppe, dairy is a staple food and the product of rich culinary traditions.…”

Considering change with archaeological data: Reevaluating local variation in the role of the ~4.2k BP event in Northwest China

“…Numerous scholars have challenged the application of wholesale nomadic pastoralism onto past societies and argue that these are later developments (see in Jaffe, 2020). Furthermore, pastoral economies encompass a wide range of herd management strategies, mixed with agricultural reliance and sedentary preferences (Arbuckle and Hammer, 2019; Honeychurch and Makarewicz, 2016). The actual relative proportion of grains, animals and their products, as well as other aspects of the societies in question, including the built environment, must be taken into account.…”

Pigs in Sight: Late Bronze Age Pig Husbandries in the Aegean and Anatolia

“…We recently demonstrated how animal subsistence in Kaymakçı depended on mixed husbandry, fishing, hunting, and, to a lesser degree, fowling, but pig exploitation was a dominant component (Roosevelt et al 2018). This is intriguing, because Kaymakçı's environs could well have sustained pastoralist systems with large sheep, goat, and cattle herds, a feature often associated with large regional Bronze Age centers in southwest Asia (e.g., Arbuckle and Hammer 2019). In this paper, we examine the characteristics of pig husbandry in Kaymakçı and extend our analysis to an exploration of pig husbandry in 38 archaeological sites across LBA Greece and Anatolia (Figure 1; see Supplemental Material 1 for references to sites).…”