This Bachelors of Philosophy Thesis builds upon the present body of literature and research concerned with the relationship between craft production and the emergence of complex societies. This is done by examining the evidence for textile production at the Early Bronze Age site Karatas, in the Elmali plain of SW Turkey. This research uses the tools of textile production to draw conclusions about the settlement's complex social organization. Karatas consists of a central mound, approximately 100 m in diameter with a 1.9 ha settlement surrounding it. Excavation at this site began in 1963 and continued to 1975, conducted by Bryn Mawr College under the directorship of Dr. Matcheld Mellink (Warner 1994: Preface, 5). This research demonstrates that Karatas went through varying degrees of economic centralization leading ultimately to the site's abandonment. By conducting a GIS analysis of the distribution of artifacts associated with textile production, this research reveals a concentration of textile production in the fourth period of the site's habitation (EBA II). This concentration is presented as possibly the result of an increase in political authority, emanating from the central mound, which was not previously present within this ancient community. It is followed by a gradual decentralization of textile production in the fifth and sixth periods (EBA II-III) and then abandonment. The final decentralization reflects a loss of political control across the settlement, and may be tied directly to the abandonment.

/pdf/textile-production-and-its-implications-for-complex-social-q94jkmuaag.pdf

Nomads in Archaeology

Textile Production and Its Implications For Complex Social Organization

The nomad’s model of the world is reasonable and rational; comprehending the universal laws, it often extrapolates its own qualities and structures to surrounding world (up to the cosmic scales). In creating the picture of a real world, the nomad endows it with meanings and values that go far beyond the ordinary everyday life. The aim of our research involves not only the depth of the study of certain aspect of historical and cultural era, but also the determination of the field of culture, where ‘everything and everyone is connected’. It involves the determination of the role of nomadic spiritual culture in the world culture; the analysis of religion of the ancient Turks Tengrism; the relationship and mutual enrichment of Tengrism with a complex, multi-element nomadic culture. Without the study of cosmogonic conceptions of nomadic world, it is impossible to comprehend the spirituality, complex worldview of the ancient Turks.

/pdf/spatial-orientations-of-nomads-lifestyle-and-culture-ijwvj35x2a.pdf

Spatial Orientations of Nomads’ Lifestyle and Culture

Cimmerians and the Scythians: the Impact of Nomadic Powers on the Assyrian Empire and the Ancient Near East

Finkelstein’s work is both entertaining and challenging. The challenge is presented by a new, all-embracing thesis explaining long-term socio-economic development in the southern Levant. This publication develops one component of this thesis: the southern arid areas of the southern Levant between c. 3000 BC and 500 BC. This component is important, Finkelstein argues, because and-zone developments are likely to have implications for our understanding of developments in adjacent areas and neither can be understood in isolation. This is a highly plausible suggestion based partly on well-established, ethnographically founded perceptions of relationships between mobile occupants of arid zones and their neighbours in moister areas. Finkelstein’s principal proposal in this work is that occupation in the arid steppe and desert fringes of the southern Levant is subject to cycles ofsedentarization and nomadization. These cycles are underwritten by economic and political processes in the arid areas but more so by those in the moister areas. These factors, he would argue, play a more important part in settlement in these zones than environmental and demographic change. At favourable periods, he suggests, desert polities emerged (Early Bronze Age I1 first half of the 3rd millennium BC, 12th century BC, Nabatean period) evidenced by very substantial settlements or investment in land management. A key argument proposed by Finkelstein is that, at those periods when there are high frequencies of settlement sites detected in the archaeological record in the arid zones, local nomadic communities became more sedentarized and more willing to invest in risky cereal production. This is advocated as a healthy reaction to the view that fluctuations in settlement frequency in the southern arid areas represent fluctuations in density of populations. He convincingly demonstrates that nomadic groups must have been present in these areas when little settlement evidence has been found (e.g. Late Bronze Age when we have a number of Egyptian references to Shasu in Negev and north Sinai). Are we, however, necessarily faced with the stark choice between these two alternatives, that fluctuating settlement visibility reflects 1) fluctuation in the degree of sedentism or 2) population fluctuation? It is a weak argument that, simply because there is no direct correlation between settlement numbers and population densities, there is never any relationship. Part of the problem lies in Finkelstein’s failure to examine more widely the nature of ethnographic evidence for the settlement sites of nomadic groups (Cribb 1991). For Finkelstein the presence of settlement architecture on sites, the greater investment in site facilities therefore, and thus increased archaeological visibility, must be a correlate of increased sedentism and indeed related to cereal exploitation. More detailed survey of accounts of nomadic behaviour might suggest that such investment in sites can relate to seasonal factors -that is, greater investment in facilities of sites occupied at certain seasons, group size, transportation facilities and the nature of dwelling construction. A switch to the use of prefabricated tents might well change the nature of permanent facilities on site, as might the ability to transport such items or other materials using differenthew domestic animals. Site visibility is as likely to reflect seasons of occupation of particular areas, group composition and the technology of transportation and construction as the presence or absence of sedentary cereal cultivation. In short, Finkelstein explores no alternative explanations for site visibility. He does not manage to exclude the possibility that in periods when there are many visible sites groups are virhially as mobile as at other periods, just more visible. In Finkelstein’s model arid-zone communities are able to turn to high-risk cereal cultivation when other economic activities also support the settlement system. His justification for this proposition partly rests on an illuminating study of a specific area of the Negev, the Sede-Boker area of the Negev highlands which illustrates potential subsistence yields under different strategies of pastoralism and agriculture. One principal problem with the use of this study is that Finkelstein treats this subsistence system as a closed system. It is unlikely, particularly under pastoral management regimes, to have been such. Groups exploiting the area are likely to have moved in and out. A second problem is the dubious procedure of implying that cereal agriculture is going to be as productive in other parts of the southern deserts as that for which he provides a detailed analysis. The part of the Negev he discusses, because it is an upland in relative proximity to the Mediterranean, receives

Sedentarizing nomads and desert polities

The handling of space and landscape 1 among individuals and groups with diverse academic backgrounds produces specific views of the same reality. As far as the techniques, formulas and images of space are concerned, the new disciplines (affected by the spatial turn) differ in some extent from the conventional geographical ways of constructing spaces. Here the characteristics of the physio-geographical approach with its two techniques of classification and localisation of natural criteria are presented to demonstrate the way in which this field of geography refers to “the material reality”. The theoretical background of the second part of the article is the geographical perspective – as one possible view of a landscape – which generally presents the ecological characteristics of the steppe in order to access an account of the steppe via its natural conditions and factors. Forms of nomadism as a “socio-ecological mode of culture” and spatial mobility as a “strategy of human existence” (Scholz 1995, 7) can be seen as ideas immanent to this region. In this context the difficulties associated with historical placement and the detection of spatial mobility and temporary or seasonal settlement in the archaeological record should be discussed in connection with questions concerning the origin of that very old life form.

https://ojs.ub.uni-freiburg.de/behemoth/article/download/715/641

Sehnsuchtsort, Risikolebensraum, Nomaden-Highway. Die Steppe als Ort der Erkenntnis Scene of Longing, Space of Risk, Nomads' High- way. The Steppe as a Place of Cognition

Nomads in Archaeology

Citations

Textile Production and Its Implications For Complex Social Organization

Spatial Orientations of Nomads’ Lifestyle and Culture

Cimmerians and the Scythians: the Impact of Nomadic Powers on the Assyrian Empire and the Ancient Near East

Sedentarizing nomads and desert polities

Sehnsuchtsort, Risikolebensraum, Nomaden-Highway. Die Steppe als Ort der Erkenntnis Scene of Longing, Space of Risk, Nomads' High- way. The Steppe as a Place of Cognition

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