Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant: Variation In Pastoral Herding Strategies

在Natalie Munro博士的指导下，Siavash Samei将通过开发牧区组织模型并将其应用于牧区考古记录来研究牧区实践的可变性。牧民协会的组织告知并塑造了牧民在区域文化和政治进程中发挥的作用。纵观历史，牧民在更大的进程中发挥了重要作用，例如最早的城市和州的出现和演变，社会不平等的制度化，以及长途交流网络。考古研究为牧民如何通过他们的经济组织和畜群管理模式影响更大的区域进程提供了一个深入的视角。然而，由于他们相对较轻的考古足迹，牧民在史前记录中的代表性远远不足。学者们必须依赖一些间接措施来发现牧民活动：往往将牧民归入掩盖其组织多样性的广泛类别的代理人。该项目促进了越来越多的近期考古学术，重点是牧民作为社会和政治变革的重要推动者的作用。因此，为确定牧区做法的可变性而制定的标准适用于不同时间和地点的一系列考古遗址。由于位于亚美尼亚和伊朗的地理位置，该项目还有助于美国和亚美尼亚学者自20世纪90年代以来合作的复兴，并为美国和伊朗之间关系的解冻提供了少量但重要的学术贡献。萨梅使用经济学理论，通过关注经济专业化和人口流动，来理解牧民的组织变异性。这两个变量定义了四种牧区组织模式，每种模式都对动物遗骸和稳定的同位素有一套独特的期望。一系列分析方法，如羊群动物人口统计学，被用来研究经济专业化。专业化应该体现在畜群的种类组成、年龄-性别结构和所开发的动物产品的类型上。牙釉质碳酸盐和骨胶原中稳定的氧和碳同位素值跟踪动物的供应以及沿地形和季节梯度的流动性。这些方法将被用来调查模型与南高加索两个地点的动物遗骸之间的匹配性，在那里，牧业在形成更广泛的文化变化和移民机制方面发挥了核心但模糊的作用；这些机制使高加索地区(公元前4世纪中期-公元前3世纪末)的库拉-阿拉克斯文化传统成为公元前6世纪之前西南亚最广泛的文化地平线。伊朗的Köhne Shahar设防定居点(公元前3300-3200年)和亚美尼亚的Areni-1洞穴建筑群(公元前4300-3400年)是理想的遗址，因为它们具有出色的骨骼保存特征。通过将经济学理论与动物考古学和稳定同位素方法相结合，该方法具有更强的分析能力和方法通用性，可以跨时间和跨空间检测和评估过去牧业实践中的多样性。

Under the supervision of Dr. Natalie Munro, Siavash Samei will investigate variability in pastoral practices by developing models of pastoral organization and applying them to the pastoral archaeological record. The organization of pastoral societies informs and shapes the role pastoralists play in regional cultural and political processes. Throughout history, pastoralists have been instrumental in shaping larger processes such as the emergence and evolution of the earliest cities and states, the institutionalization of social inequality, and long distance exchange networks. Archaeological research affords a deep-time perspective on how pastoralists affect larger regional processes through their modes of economic organization and herd management. Because of their relatively light archaeological footprint, however, pastoralists are vastly underrepresented in the prehistoric record. Scholars must depend on a number of indirect measures to detect pastoral activities: proxies that tend to lump pastoralists into broad categories that mask their organizational diversity. This project contributes to an increasing body of recent archaeological scholarship centering on the role of pastoralists as significant agents of social and political change in general. The criteria developed for identifying variability in pastoral practices are thus applicable to an array of archaeological sites in different times and places. Because of its geographic setting in Armenia and Iran, this project also contributes to the resurgence of collaboration between American and Armenian scholars since the 1990s and provides a small but significant intellectual and academic contribution to the thawing relationship between the United States and Iran. Mr. Samei uses economic theory to understand the organizational variability of pastoralists by focusing on economic specialization and population mobility. These two variables define four models of pastoral organization, each with a unique set of expectations for faunal remains and stable isotopes. A battery of analytical methods, such as herd animal demographics, is used to study economic specialization. Specialization should manifest itself in the species composition of herds, age-sex structures, and the types of animal products exploited. Stable oxygen and carbon isotope values from tooth enamel carbonate and bone collagen track animal provisioning as well as mobility along topographic and seasonal gradients. These methods will be applied to investigate the fit between the models and the faunal remains from two sites in the South Caucasus, where pastoralism played a central but ambiguous role in shaping broader mechanisms of cultural change and migration; mechanisms that made the Kura-Araxes cultural tradition of the Caucasus (mid 4th-late 3rd millennium BC) the most extensive cultural horizon in southwest Asia prior to the 6th century BC. The fortified settlement of Köhne Shahar in Iran (ca. 3300-3200 BC) and the Areni-1 cave complex in Armenia (ca. 4300-3400 BC) are ideal sites as they are characterized by exceptional bone preservation. By combining economic theory with zooarchaeology and stable isotopic methods, the proposed approach has much greater analytical power and methodological versatility to detect and assess diversity in past pastoral practices through time and across space.