Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-rdxmf Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-20T07:15:45.358Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Archaeology, archaeozoology and the study of pastoralism in the Near East

Review products

Steven A.Rosen. Revolutions in the desert: the rise of mobile pastoralism in the southern Levant. 2017. xv+314 pages, numerous b&w illustrations. New York & London: Routledge; 978-1-62958-544-4 paperback £24.99.
ReuvenYeshurun, LiorWeissbrod, NimrodMarom & GuyBar-Oz (ed.). Bones and identity: zooarchaeological approaches to reconstructing social and cultural landscapes in Southwest Asia. 2016. xiii+338 pages, several b&w illustrations. Oxford & Philadelphia (PA): Oxbow; 978-1-78570-172-6 paperback £38.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 September 2017

Canan Çakırlar
Canan Çakırlar*
Affiliation:
Groningen Institute of Archaeology, Poststraat 6, NL-9712 ER, Groningen, The Netherlands (Email: [email protected])
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Sheep and goat herding, the basis of pastoralism in the Near East, has been integral to the social organisation, diet, economy, religion and environment of the region since the beginnings of animal domestication. Interestingly, this omnipresent factor of life in the Near East has not been a popular topic of enquiry in its own right amongst archaeologists—of course, they deal with pastoralism in one way or another, but they mostly manage to keep the herder separate from the king. Instead, the study of pastoralism in this region has been largely the domain of archaeozoologists who study the sheep, goat and indeterminate ‘sheep/goat’ bones that dominate Near Eastern faunal assemblages from the Early Holocene onwards (the notorious difficulty of distinguishing sheep and goat bones led archaeozoologists to invent the sheep/goat, now an official taxon in the Encyclopedia of Life no less! http://eol.org).

Type
Review
Information
Antiquity , Volume 91 , Issue 359 , October 2017 , pp. 1375 - 1378
Copyright
Copyright © Antiquity Publications Ltd, 2017 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Arbuckle, B.S. 2012. Pastoralism, provisioning, and power at Bronze Age Acemhöyük, Turkey. American Anthropologist 114: 462–76. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1433.2012.01446.x Google Scholar
Balasse, M. 2014. Isotopic studies of husbandry, in Smith, C. (ed.) Encyclopedia of global archaeology: 4120–28. New York: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-0465-2_2111 CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bar-Oz, G., Nadel, D., Avner, U. & Malkinson, D.. 2011. Mass hunting game traps in the southern Levant: the Negev and Arabah ‘Desert Kites’. Near Eastern Archaeology 74: 208–15. https://doi.org/10.5615/neareastarch.74.4.0208 Google Scholar
Çakirlar, C., Gourichon, L., Birch, S.P., Berthon, R., Akar, M. & Yener, K.A.. 2014. Provisioning an urban center under foreign occupation: zooarchaeological insights into the Hittite presence in late fourteenth-century BCE Alalakh. Journal of Eastern Mediterranean Archaeology & Heritage Studies 2: 259–76. https://doi.org/10.5325/jeasmedarcherstu.2.4.0259 Google Scholar
Childe, V.G. 1936. Man makes himself. London: Watts.Google Scholar
Childe, V.G. 1950. The urban revolution. Town Planning Review 21 (1): 3. https://doi.org/10.3828/tpr.21.1.k853061t614q42qh Google Scholar
Hesse, B. & Wapnish, P.. 1998. Pig use and abuse in the ancient Levant: ethnoreligious boundary-building with swine. MASCA Research Papers in Science and Archaeology 15: 123–36.Google Scholar
Makarewicz, C.A. & Sealy, J.. 2015. Dietary reconstruction, mobility, and the analysis of ancient skeletal tissues: expanding the prospects of stable isotope research in archaeology. Journal of Archaeological Science 56: 146–58. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jas.2015.02.035 Google Scholar
Marinova, E., Linseele, V. & Kühn, M.. 2013. Bioarchaeological research on animal dung—possibilities and limitations (Introduction to the Special Issue, ‘Bioarchaeological research on animal dung’). Environmental Archaeology 18: 1–3. https://doi.org/10.1179/1461410313Z.00000000023 Google Scholar
Marom, N. & Zuckerman, S.. 2012. The zooarchaeology of exclusion and expropriation: looking up from the lower city in Late Bronze Age Hazor. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 31: 573–85. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaa.2012.06.002 Google Scholar
Martin, L. & Edwards, Y.. 2013. Diverse strategies: evaluating the appearance and spread of domestic caprines in the southern Levant, in Colledge, S., Conolly, J., Dobney, K., Manning, K. & Shennan, S. (ed.) Origins and spread of domestic animals in Southwest Asia and Europe (UCL Institute of Archaeology Publications 59): 49–82. Walnut Creek (CA): Left Coast.Google Scholar
Weiss, H., Courty, M.A., Wetterstrom, W., Guichard, F., Senior, L., Meadow, R. & Curnow, A.. 1993. The genesis and collapse of third millennium north Mesopotamian civilization. Science 261: 995–1004. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.261.5124.995 Google Scholar