Emily Hammer

EMILY HAMMER, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, was awarded a Hunt Postdoctoral Fellowship in October 2020 to aid research and writing on “Toward An Empirical Archaeology of Pastoralism and Pastoral Mobility.” Though mobile pastoralists were long a significant component of many societies in Eurasia and Africa, scholars have long considered them to be materially and documentarily “invisible.” The archaeological study of pastoralism has relied on ethnographic analogies and environmentally deterministic models, often with little or no data on historically specific herding communities. This approach has yielded a static picture of pastoralism through time that has only recently been challenged. During the fellowship, the grantee completed a book that draws from recent advances in anthropology, archaeology, and laboratory analysis in order to further a critical and empirical archaeology of pastoralism (“Beyond Grass: The Archaeology of Pastoralism and Mobility”). The work articulates a framework for conceiving of variability in past pastoral practices, propose ways of developing a more rigorous relationship with pastoralist ethnographies, promote the use of new archaeological and scientific methodologies for collecting direct data on herding, mobility, and social complexity in the past, and point to avenues for developing a broader comparative study of historical pastoralism spanning East Africa, the Middle East, and Central Eurasia. A critical archaeology of pastoralism more broadly promotes efforts to dismantle the legacy of evolutionary classifications of human societies, which drew sharp distinctions between farmers and herders, and to investigate ways that diverse non-agricultural and mobile groups have shaped complex society and environment.