Nomads in Archaeology

On nomadic transhumance at Neolithic Tepe Tula'i, Iran: A re-analysis of findings

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Living with Durham Cathedral : understanding the dynamic relationships between a community and their cathedral

Research on Late Bronze Age relations between Egyptians and local nomadic or semi-nomadic Libyans has hitherto focused almost exclusively on Egyptian textual and iconographic sources. Recent archaeological evidence for grain production and agrarian practice at the Egyptian fortress of Zawiyet Umm el-Rakham allows us to address this imbalance, in combination with ethnographic data and cross-cultural parallels drawn from nomad-sedentary interactions in the Near East. Results suggest that Egyptian subsistence in this relatively isolated outpost of the New Kingdom Empire was probably dependent upon Libyan manpower and their knowledge of local environmental conditions and effective farming methods

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Cereal cultivation and nomad-sedentary interactions at the Late Bronze Age settlement of Zawiyet Umm el-Rakham

Prehistoric Transhumance in the Northern Mediterranean

This paper presents a brief overview of an archaeological prospection in the steppe of eastern Syria based on highresolution satellite images. While earlier research often stressed the extremely limited visibility of nomadic pastoralists in the archaeological record this study illustrates the high density of nomadic traits in arid areas which can be traced in satellite imagery. Using Ikonos (1m) imagery, a 200 km2 study area 125 km southeast of Palmyra, Syria, was visually searched for evidence for nomadic use of the steppe. Features such as abandoned tent sites, animal feeding sites, stone corrals, cross-wall fields and animal trail networks centered on wells (piospheres) could be readily identified due to their simple characteristic signatures: • Abandoned tent sites appear as small, regular white (high-reflectance) or sub-white colored rectangles. In just the small study area over 2300 tent sites were visually plotted. • Sheep are herded together by pastoralists for feeding and drinking where thick layers of dung accumulate. The resulting features are typically dark brown and have a diameter of about 35m. • Given sufficient rainfall the pastoralists engage in rainwater-harvesting—parallel alignments of low retaining walls in the flat beds of wadis disclose this mode of farming. • Vast radial networks of narrow animal trails centering on wells, form dramatic patterns over several kilometers. However, as a single piosphere with a radius of six kilometers is composed of around five thousand linear elements it is not efficient to manually map these features in detail. The tent site rectangles, the circular brown dung patches, the parallel lines of wadi walls and the radial linear piospheres are highly suitable for semi-automated detection due to their simple form, the repetition and configuration of the form and their sheer abundance against the background of a largely uniform barren steppe landscape. This range of features will be of particular interest to scholars looking for a body of data with which to test algorithms in semi-automated archaeological prospection with good chances of achieving high levels of detection. Semi-automated pattern recognition would thus be an efficient method to map the extensive patterns of nomadic activity known to exist and assist in documenting range degradation in arid landscapes across the Near East.

Nomads in Archaeology

Citations

On nomadic transhumance at Neolithic Tepe Tula'i, Iran: A re-analysis of findings

Living with Durham Cathedral : understanding the dynamic relationships between a community and their cathedral

Cereal cultivation and nomad-sedentary interactions at the Late Bronze Age settlement of Zawiyet Umm el-Rakham

Prehistoric Transhumance in the Northern Mediterranean

Tracking Mobility in the Syrian Desert. Potential of Simple Features for Mapping Landscapes of Mobile Pastoralists

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