Collaborative Research: Human and material mobilities among fisher-hunter-gatherers and pastoralists

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Mobility has long been recognized as a crucial aspect of human social organization. Among herding societies, mobility allows flexible and dynamic responses to aridification, social and political instability, and natural disasters. This project uses new archaeological tools for documenting mobility, to shed light on how people coped with climatic changes and other challenges in the past. Survey and excavation are used to examine how and why resilient herding systems and mobility patterns developed in the context of changing biomes. New data on potential changes in human mobility patterns and interaction spheres are contextualized by examining economic, technological, and cultural changes before, during, and after major regional aridification. The researchers emphasize advanced training and research support for junior scientists. Fieldwork allows for student training in survey, excavation, and artifact analysis and provides opportunities to participate in international fieldwork. The team also works with underserved communities and schools near the field sites, sharing scientific knowledge and building intellectually inclusive research frameworks.Archaeologists working in dryland environments have demonstrated the long-term resilience of pastoralist systems across millennia of often dramatic climatic fluctuations. In some regions, those systems were likely based upon residential mobility, livestock mobility, and complex social networks, which allow peoples today to make flexible responses to aridification as well as shifting social, economic, and political situations. Even with high-resolution paleoclimatic records, archaeological studies need to gather detailed data to test how frequently, where, and why groups in the past may have moved – and how those mobilities may have been consequences of, or catalysts for, other changes. In this project, new archaeological fieldwork includes excavations at three sites. Isotopic analyses of human and livestock teeth from these sites are analyzed to reconstruct mobility and diet during the lifetimes of individuals, and geochemical sourcing of stone tools and pottery are used to reconstruct movement or exchange of objects. These methods allow critical assessment of how human, livestock, and material mobilities shaped – and were shaped by – the social and ecological landscapes of a region central to broader-scale narratives of pastoralist resilience, migration, and climatic change.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.