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

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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])
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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 

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