Mobile Pastoralist Households

Jean-Luc Houle is an Associate Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Folk Studies and Anthropology at Western Kentucky University. His research interests focus on the social and ritual construction of landscapes among Bronze and Iron Age mobile pastoralists in Mongolia, and how all this relates to the development of complex societies in Inner Asia. His research has been funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, with funding from the Henri Luce Foundation, the Rust Family Foundation, and Western Kentucky University. Houle’s publications can be found in several books and journals, including Oxford Handbooks Online in Archaeology, Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology, Quaternary International, and Archaeological Research in Asia.

List of Maps

List of Figures

List of Tables



Foreword

Bryan K. Hanks



Introduction: Mobile Pastoralist Households: Archaeological and Ethnoarchaeological Perspectives

Jean-Luc Houle



Part I: ‘Place, Path, and the Material Manifestation of Mobile Pastoralist Households’



Chapter 1. House Hunting: A Systematic Approach to Identifying Ephemeral Households of Mobile Pastoralists

William R. M. Gardner and Jargalan Burentogtokh



Chapter 2. Where on the Mountain? Patterns of Bronze Age Transhumant Pastoralism in the Western Tianshan Region of Xinjiang, China

Alison Betts, Peter Jia, Dexin Cong, Michael Spate, Duo Tian, Qi Meng, and Gino Caspari



Chapter 3. Gone With the Wind? The Materiality of the Kel Tadrart Tuareg Settlements in Central Sahara

Stefano Biagetti



Chapter 4. Herders and their Homes on the Range: Ethnoarchaeological Perspectives on Pastoralist Households in Eastern Africa

Katherine Grillo



Chapter 5. Household and Settlement Organization of Mobile Hunter-Fisher-Reindeer Herders in Western Siberia: An Ethnoarchaeological Study

Henny Piezonka, Vladimir Adaev, Aleksandr Kenig, Aleksey Rud, and Morgan Windle



Part II: ‘Household Space and Placemaking’



Chapter 6. Mobile or Settled? Vectors of Economic and Social Amplification among Pastoral Communities of the Late Bronze Age in the Caucasus

Sabine Reinhold



Chapter 7. House Form: Round or Square? Agropastoral Households of the Iron Age in the Talgar Region of Southeastern Kazakhstan

Claudia Chang



Chapter 8. Around the Hearth: Patterns of Spatiality at Sámi Reindeer Herder Sites in Northwest Sápmi (Finnish Lapland)

Oula Seitsonen



Chapter 9. Home-Making among the Living and the Dead in the Khorezm Oasis (Karakalpakstan, Uzbekistan)

Elizabeth Brite



Part III: ‘Local Household Dynamics and External Relations’



Chapter 10. Camelid Caravans of Middle Horizon Peru: Household Contexts, Local Transformations, and Interregional Interaction in Cusco

Aleksa K. Alaica and Véronique Bélisle



Chapter 11. Empire and Everyday Life: Continuity and Change in Mongolia’s Bronze and Iron Age Domestic Practices

Jean-Luc Houle



Concluding Commentaries

Michael Frachetti