This essay is a personal experiential account of my own studies of the ethnoarchaeology and archaeology of pastoral societies in Mediterranean Greece and my later archaeological research on first-millennium bce Iron Age agropastoralists at the fringes of Central Asia, in southeastern Kazakhstan. And for these reasons this paper is neither an exhaustive review of the Greek ethnoarchaeology of pastoralism, nor does it cover a full review of feminist archaeology in Central Asian contexts. In tracing my own intellectual shifts throughout my career in the understandings and application of gender to the study of pastoralism, I also introduce Braidotti's (Reference Braidotti2011) nomadology as a means of investigating ancient pastoral societies. Like so many of my generation studying the archaeology of pastoralism, until recently I did not discuss women's contribution to pastoralism (Honeychurch & Makarewicz Reference Honeychurch and Makarewicz2016). In my earlier ethnoarchaeological studies of Greek pastoralists, I did not discuss women's contributions in the household economy. Others, such as Lucia Nixon and Simon Price (Reference Nixon and Price2001), have argued that studies of ancient and contemporary Greek pastoralism needed to go beyond descriptions of ecology and economics to include gender identities, household division of labour and levels of cultural integration. Among my generation of processual archaeologists, why were women and gendered relations often erased from archaeological discourse (Conkey & Spector Reference Conkey, Spector and Schiffer1984)? Two reasons account for such omissions: (1) the study of nomadic pastoralism was wed to masculine tropes of the nomad, and (2) female subjectivities and identities appeared invisible and unrecoverable in the archaeological record (Wylie Reference Wylie2007). Feminist archaeologists argued for an inclusion of women in studies of technology, production, households and hierarchical structures. Thus the material world of pastoralists, often without texts, tended to be described in terms of male power and hierarchy. In this essay feminism as a kind of new materialism is put forth drawing upon Haraway (Reference Haraway1991) and Braidotti (Reference Braidotti2011) to revise pastoral studies in archaeology.
When female bodies have been recovered in Iron Age Scythian burial mounds with weapons and objects usually associated with males, they have been labelled as ‘Amazons’ (Davis-Kimball Reference Davis-Kimball2003). In studies of the Pokrovka kurgan (barrow) necropolis of the southern Urals, Davis-Kimball (Reference Davis-Kimball, Pierce and Tosi1998; Reference Davis-Kimball, Biehl, Bertemes and Meller2001) divided (69) female burials into: (1) hearth women (75 per cent), (2) priestesses (7 per cent) and (3) warriors (15 per cent) based on grave good inventories found with female burials. In more recent studies, Taylor (Reference Taylor and Bolender2010) situated the Amazon question of women warriors as a disjuncture between Herodotus’ textual accounts of the Amazons and the empirical evidence for female burials associated with weaponry at cemeteries such as Pokrovka. This figuration of the Amazon is transgressive and places ‘the other’ or woman in a position of liminality and anomaly, rather than fully recognizing her sexual difference. The ‘Other’ or transgressive nature of elite women as warriors in Scythian society also indicates both textually and archaeologically the possibility for ‘third’ or even ‘fourth’ genders. In a more recent comparison of dental palaeopathologies and stable isotopes of carbon and nitrogen at two southern Siberian Scythian necropoles, Ai-Dai and Aymyrlyg (Tuva), Murphy et al. (Reference Murphy, Schulting, Beer, Chistov, Kasparov and Pshenitsyna2013) were able to demonstrate differences in the possible amounts of carbohydrates consumed by males (much higher) than those consumed by females at Ai-Dai, but not at Aymyrlyg. The authors put forth the speculation, drawn from ethnographic comparisons, that Iron Age males at Ai-Dai may have engaged in rigorous agricultural cultivation and thus consumed a diet richer in agricultural cereals, such as millets, than females. In the Central Asian context, I specifically focus on ceramic craft production and possible curation of household items, feasting and architectural patterns of round versus rectilinear housing at settlement sites as an avenue for examining gender and sexual differences as put forth in Braidotti's (Reference Braidotti2011) nomadology. In Eurasian Iron Age contexts, there is clear necessity to link gendered mortuary practices with everyday activities at settlement sites, yet there is a clear gap in empirical data to do so at this time. Thus Davis-Kimball's (Reference Davis-Kimball, Biehl, Bertemes and Meller2001) rigid classifications of early Iron Age female burials, questioned rigorously by Hanks (Reference Hanks, Linduff and Rubinson2008) and others, now suggests that archaeologists need to turn their attention to the study of Iron Age settlements of pastoral nomadic societies. Simple questions such as the nature of gendered labour, craft production, household management, feasting and the architecture of dwellings in agropastoral contexts may widen this area of exploration. In this essay, my aim is to discuss sexual differences with specific regard to female labour and craft production and social relations through marriage and residential patterns. The Central Asian focus on earlier archaeological research on households, labour and subsistence represents a theoretical rethinking of earlier research, providing a set of speculative hypotheses on posthumanism and its applications. I base my arguments on concepts and ideas put forth by Rosi Braidotti in the second edition of Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and sexual difference in contemporary feminist theory (Reference Braidotti2011) in order to apply a different perspective on agropastoral households at an Iron Age settlement in Kazakhstan. To do so, I use ethnographic analogies drawn from Central Asian nomadic societies and archaeological examples from an Iron Age settlement in southeastern Kazakhstan.
Braidotti (Reference Braidotti2011) defines nomadic subjectivity as a non-unitary and multi-layered set of figurations for female identities. Nomads or mobile peoples often appear as ‘othered’ and alienated in contrast to sedentary people in fixed locations. The nomad who has a fluid identity through mobility and interconnectedness may also exhibit independent political agency, whereas the anchored, sedentary person is more likely to conform within a centralized political structure. The fixed centralized political structure and territorialized nature of property ownership in many agrarian societies subjugates those from minority categories. Both women and mobile groups may be placed in these peripheral locations, both spatially and temporally. The nomad is defined by Braidotti (Reference Braidotti2011, 42) as ‘a transgressive identity whose transitory nature is practically the reason she can make connections at all’.
The nomadic trope used to discuss the Central Asian Scythians, Hunnic peoples, or Mongols in Inner Asian studies often describes nomads as transgressive, non-sedentary and transitory, yet the essential link between the ‘desert (steppe) and sown’ (Khazanov Reference Khazanov1994). In premodern historical renderings such nomads could be stereotyped as ‘barbarians’ or outsiders that created conflict, plunder and disruption of agrarian civilizations (Beckwith Reference Beckwith2009, 322). Clearly the historical use of ‘nomad’ and its philosophical use in postmodernism are dissimilar. Braidotti (Reference Braidotti2011) applies the term nomad as an idea used to discuss female subjectivities, building upon Deleuze and Guattari's (Reference Deleuze, Guattari and Massumi1987) philosophy of nomadology. From a historical point of view, especially that of premodern states, the nomads existed at the periphery of the city walls and were agents of chaos. In philosophical discussions the woman is split, fragmented, and alienated from textual discourse and also in Western political and philosophical enquiry primarily constructed as phallologocentric (Braidotti Reference Braidotti2011). I have chosen to apply some interpretive ideas from the philosophy of Braidotti's nomadic subjects to actual ethnographic or archaeological interpretations of nomadic societies (Braidotti Reference Braidotti2011, 10).
What does the philosophy of nomadology in feminist thought have to do with ancient studies of nomadism? First, there is a lack of feminist thought applied to the empirical study of ancient pastoral nomadism. This also allows one to ‘leap-frog’ over earlier feminist readings of women's equality to a discussion of sexual differences in the material record. Sometimes flashes of insight can re-shape a set of intellectual inquiries about ancient societies. Central Asian nomadic societies have often been seen as the perpetrators of the collapse of agrarian civilizations, or alternatively as the hidden force behind their cyclical development (rise and fall) (Barfield Reference Barfield1989; Di Cosmo Reference Di Cosmo1994). Nomadism as studied by archaeologists in this part of the world has not been subject to poststructural or postmodern narratives. Therefore, I set forth a series of ‘thought experiments’ as to why Braidotti's (Reference Braidotti2011) discussion of nomadic subjectivity constitutes a bridge between theoretical imaginings of ancient nomads and a feminist agenda that includes posthumanist approaches.
Nomadic society, as I have observed archaeologically and ethnographically (Chang Reference Chang2017; Chang & Tourtellotte Reference Chang and Tourtellotte1993;), tends to be rhizomic and transversal. Those individuals who must seek water and pasture on a seasonal basis, thus moving their flocks and herds from place to place, are transitory and manage interconnections across geographic space and according to a seasonal timeframe. In the societies where the economic basis combines both a sedentary agricultural component as well as a mobile herding one, members in the same household can alternate between these two strategies. Occupational groups can also be either herders or farmers. The very fact that there is an oscillation between mobility and sedentism allows for fluidity and more lateral ties of a rhizomic nature.
Those of us who study mobile groups in prehistory or ethnographically know that such mobile groups, whether migrants, pastoralists, or foragers, lie ‘outside’ the normative framework of fixed residency and are often seen as alienated from stable agrarian societies. This feature of mobility suggests that a person's identity and mode of being functions and behaves differently from those who are rooted in a single original place or residence. The notion of ‘women becoming’, rather than being a fixed subject, is also intriguing. How does a woman embody sexual difference that makes her ‘other’ and therefore alienated from a male-centric world? Braidotti (Reference Braidotti2011, 151, 154) suggests that the embodied entanglements of women's identities provides a different kind of consciousness or awareness, not only within the collective category of women but between individual women. The female encompasses a wide spectrum of her own sexual difference. And this consciousness may be situated in her own experiences. For archaeologists working with questions of mobility and the situated experiences of women in such mobile cultures, there are two avenues for interpretation: (1) a space where feminist thought reframes our narratives about the past; and (2) a place where women's subjectivities are defined as non-unitary, multi-layered and fluid. Now the question is not about where women actually fit into our narratives of gendered differences, but how women as nomadic subjects provide the connective tissue in material life. The situated knowledge and embodied experiences of nomads (women) go beyond reductive essentialism of earlier feminist investigations. In staking out a ‘nomadic subjectivity’ within the ancient material world, it is then possible to go beyond rationalist, humanistic interpretations in archaeology.
Why have the studies of nomadic pastoralism in archaeology escaped a discussion of sexual differences? I have some suggestions as to how this may have happened. The foundation of nomadic pastoral studies in ethnography and social anthropology was based upon Evans- Pritchard's (Reference Evans-Pritchard1940) East African Nuer, where the pastoral nomad was described in masculine terms, often stressing their autonomy, fierceness and independence. In such acephalous societies the Leopard Skin Priest, a religious negotiator who also resolved conflict disputes, was decidedly masculine (Evans-Pritchard Reference Evans-Pritchard1940). The early structural-functional models of mechanical solidarity were based on the adage that ‘brothers were against each other, until they joined together against cousins’, or where social solidarity was founded on agnatic kinship. In this patrilineal lineage system, women circulated as forms of property, owned either by their fathers or their husbands. Yet pastoral societies could also be described as engendering natural reproductive capital, both in terms of the reproductive increase of herd animals and the exchange and circulation of wives in these lineage systems (Kuper Reference Kuper1982). It is hardly surprising that a colonialist anthropology would utilize models of society that functioned as systems of male hierarchy. Pastoral nomadism was described as a social formation based on male-centric characteristics, not so different from the foraging model of ‘Man the hunter, woman the gatherer’. There was an erasure of women's placement in these societies, except as a form of property, similar to that of cattle and other herd animals. So, then, could women's identities become visible in the material record of pastoral societies, if the ethnographic models followed by archaeologists tended to erase them as subjects? This leads us to the larger question. How can Braidotti's (Reference Braidotti2011) philosophical ideas of nomadic subjectivity be applied to archaeological material culture? In order to explore these ideas more fully, I begin with my own autobiography of research on mobile pastoral peoples.
My life studying pastoralism in material culture
In the late 1970s I began my career as an ethnoarchaeologist studying Greek village pastoralism, and in particular the animal folds used as summer and winter encampments by a group of sheep and goat herders. My main objective was to discover material correlates between animal corral attributes and ecological/environmental adaptations such as seasonal use, number of animals herded, and spatial use of such structures among the pastoral households in a peasant village comprised of farmers and sheep and goat herders. The definition of ‘nomadic pastoralism’ did not fit my project, since the contemporary herders I studied lived in year-round village homes. Herds and households moved across landscapes of olive and nut trees, cereal fields and wild maquis scrub. Their mobility was hidden, yet life in and around their folds was sufficiently different from residency within the village. The locations of animal folds marked pasture territories on the village common lands through a system of use-rights. A herder's movement to these use-right common pastures was a ‘mapping on’ of fluid yet tethered localities, encompassing an arena of social and economic ties away from the permanent village settlement. The herders did stay overnight in their encampments, but their village homes were often less than 10 to 5 km distant. Yet in the late ’70s it was difficult to argue that agropastoralism or village livestock systems had any relationship to seasonal mobility or a nomadic subject. What aspects of mobility were social, political, ideological and gendered? Did the daughters of herding households only marry into other herding households? If they married into a farming family, were they moving up in hierarchical status, but subject to alienation by a farming household that deemed them ‘less than’? What did it mean to be both a woman and a pastoralist? How was a mobile lifestyle used strategically by a group of herders and specifically by women? Here sexual difference, largely unexplored, revealed differing levels of power and status dynamics in a village society. A woman moving in marriage from one pastoral household to another took her status and position, technical skills and knowledge necessary for the continuation of that household. Yet close observation of the households that practised village pastoralism often showed otherwise, that routine movements across landscapes and different environmental zones shaped an entire household's status and position within society as well as their gendered relationships.
First of all, both men and women herded flocks of sheep and goats, milked these animals and participated in the entire range of activities necessary to maintain the animals. Yet in most anthropological studies, productive labour of herding households appeared to be male-centric or at least focused on men's labour and roles in actual pastoral activities. I observed women who herded animals, engaged in vital activities such as the birthing cycles of animals, veterinary practices, shearing, milking animals, processing wool and hair products, making dairy products, transporting milk to cheese merchants and preparing sacrificial feasting. My own ethnoarchaeological studies were devoid of any specific study of sexual differences and simply erased women's contributions by categorizing their labour as domestic or household work. Here, I apply Braidotti's (Reference Braidotti2011, 150) discussion of sexual differences. She outlines phases of sexual difference as: (1) differences between men and women; (2) differences among women; and (3) differences within each woman (Braidotti Reference Braidotti2011, 151). These phases of sexual difference can be applied to the labour of Greek women in pastoral households. Some were more skilled than others and each also represented their own trajectory, exhibiting differences throughout her life cycle. Ethnographic observations allow for a close examination of such phases of sexual difference. There were indeed herding women engaged in activities such as cheese-making, weaving and veterinary practices who had special roles in village households distinct from men, often seen as more skilled in butchering, feasting and wood craft. Also, in the village of Didyma in the late 1970s, specific women were known for their exceptional skills in household cheese production, weaving and healing of animals. No doubt women also underwent changes within their life cycles. How could such differences be apparent in the production of material culture? Certainly, I observed these phases of sexual difference, but often did not attach them to specific examples of material culture production nor to the embodied and entangled individual identities of women in pastoral households.
Archaeologists can revise their perspectives to include Braidotti's (Reference Braidotti2013, 49–50) critical posthumanism that asserts interconnections and relationality between humans and non-humans in a non-unitary manner. The debate goes beyond the discussion of the classic division of labour by sex to a re-invention of the means by which humans–animals–natural environment intersect temporally and spatially. Pastoral systems are particularly well suited for this kind of exploration, because humans and herds extract resources from the natural world (water, grassland, forage) and then re-cycle these resources into forms of bioenergy (animal byproducts, human life, environmental residues or waste). Here humanistic rationality does not sufficiently articulate a non-anthropocentric view. The sustainable ecologies among humans, herds and natural environments require a different sense of multi-layered paths or networks. Later in the late ’80s and early ’90s we conducted a number of ethnoarchaeological surveys on transhumant Vlach and Aroumani herders in northern Greece on the eastern slopes of the Pindos Mountains (Chang & Tourtellotte Reference Chang and Tourtellotte1993). There were transhumant pastoralists who moved with their flocks of sheep and goats between upland summer pastures 150 to 200 km from their winter villages in the lowland plains of Thessaly. Also, there were fixed farming and herding communities where people lived year-round and only moved their flocks from summer to winter pastures (Halstead Reference Halstead1996). The social ideology of transhumant mobility, especially among the Vlach and Aroumani, was re-asserted in their upland summer villages during celebratory feasting, political voting and alliance-making. In addition, many city dwellers whose parents or grandparents had been transhumant herders or muleteers migrated to their summer villages to strengthen kin and ethnic ties. Here mobility provided a dramatic narrative of selfhood and collective identity. Being a ‘nomad’ was a state of mind and an empowering narrative (Chang Reference Chang1993). From lower-class shepherds to upper-class Athenian city dwellers, the nomadic subjects could control and empower themselves temporally and spatially. Why do contemporary scholars of pastoralism not discuss the process of ‘becoming’? In my own ethnoarchaeological studies of the 1990s, I also could have expanded how transhumant and village pastoralists, and in particular women, underwent the process of ‘becoming’. Furthermore, the political dimensions of ‘otherness’ or even alienation from fixed centralized geographical spaces gave mobile pastoralists a decentred but fluid access to wider spatial arenas. It suggests that women of pastoral households, also by default, had access to a fluid interconnectivity and networks that women in sedentary agrarian communities lack.
The nomadic subject I am proposing is a figuration that emphasizes the need for action both at the level of identity, of subjectivity, and of differences among women. These different requirements correspond to different moments, that is to say, different locations in space, that is to say different practices. (Braidotti Reference Braidotti2011, 164)
Both the philosophy of nomadology and the social science investigation of pastoral nomadism share a common thread, if we focus on the dynamics of spatial movement. Mobility takes apart essentialist views on identity, subjectivity and difference. An important discussion of ‘a dialogue between the anthropology of nomadism and philosophy of nomadology’ has been presented in Anthony D'Andrea's discussion of neo-nomads, or global expatriates found in centres of youth culture such as Ibiza and Goa/Pune (D'Andrea Reference D'Andrea2006, 107). Here D'Andrea focuses on a key element found in both disciplines, the topic of mobility and displacement as aspects of selfhood and identity. Whereas the anthropological literature focuses on pastoral nomadism as autonomous household units that move as an economic strategy to seasonal pastures and as a cultural value of ‘fierce independence’, philosophers such as Braidotti (1994) discuss a feminism that reflects nomadology, a kind of subject where alien, fragmented, outside and transformative beings exist in movement and fluidity. If we return to what is known about the pastoral nomadic woman in ethnographic terms, she is often characterized as ‘more independent, as preserving honor as virtue, and having higher status than her sedentary counterparts’ (D'Andrea Reference D'Andrea2006, 110). Pastoralism, whether semi-sedentary or nomadic, is governed by strategies of resource-gathering (grasslands, foraging, agricultural products, water) that involves local or long-distance movement. In these mobile economies, everyone must have the skilled abilities to transverse several locations across space on a cyclical basis. So why have females and non-masculine others been erased from archaeological studies of pastoralism for the most part?
The major difference between the philosophy of nomadology as espoused by Braidotti (Reference Braidotti2011) and pastoral nomadic studies in anthropology, and more specifically in archaeology, lies in the discussion of women. Braidotti (Reference Braidotti2011) labels feminism as a kind of nomadic subject because she, like Haraway (Reference Haraway1991), sees the woman as an alien, fragmented, Other who stands outside the phallocentric world of psychoanalysis or materialism. Archaeologists studying pastoralism often fail to recognize women except in burial contexts. Only in posthumanism does Braidotti (Reference Braidotti, Banerji and Paranjape2016) discard both anthropocentrism and humanism for a new paradigm. This paradigm also rejects the binary oppositions of man/woman, nature/culture, subject/object, etc.
The elaboration of the normative frameworks for the posthuman subject is the focus of collectively enacted, non-profit-oriented experimentation with intensity, that is to say with what we are actually capable of becoming. They are a praxis (a grounded shared project) not a doxa (common sense belief). My own concept of nomadic subject embodies this approach, which combines a non-unitary subjectivity with ethical accountability by foregrounding the ontological role played by relationality. (Braidotti Reference Braidotti2013, 93)
Iron Age agropastoralism in Kazakhstan: a case study for the nomadic subject engendering ceramics studies at an Iron Age site
Ceramic production, especially handmade pots used for domestic household activities such as cooking, serving and eating, are usually assumed to be the work of women. Yet there are many societies where pot making is done by both men and women. By examining the rim sizes of tableware at an Iron Age agropastoral site in southeastern Kazakhstan, we (Chang & Zak Reference Chang and Zak2019) posited that the diameters (19–23 cm) of serving dishes known as tabac [large round serving dish ubiquitous throughout ancient as well as contemporary times] were from serving plates most often used in feasting contexts. Ethnographic analogies of contemporary Kazakh and Kyrgyz households demonstrate that women's work often involves the management, preparation and serving of sumptuous meat and noodle or starch dishes served in elaborate feasting displays for holidays and important ritual events marking status changes (first haircutting, male circumcision, marriages, funerals).
In contemporary Kazakh and Kyrgyz households, women's status can be evaluated directly by their roles in the cooking, food preparation and display of the feast table. The head woman serves guests, providing individual bowls for kumiss [mare's milk] or tea with milk. The large platters (tabac) of meat and noodles usually are placed in the centre for display. At the Iron Age site of Tuzusai, Pithouse 9, a circular structure approximately 5 m in diameter, also has clusters of ceramic sherds interspersed with animal bones, indicating the disposal of feasting events in the floor fill of a domestic dwelling. The ceramic sherds included pitcher and bowl fragments along with scatters of sheep, horse and cattle bones as well as a camel scapula. Feasts are often described as events used by ‘Big Men’ as status- and privilege-building strategies (Hayden & Villeneuve Reference Hayden and Villeneuve2011). And women's labour at such events is glossed over or summarily invisible. Here the male performances in feasting that make ‘Big Men’ require the labour of women and junior males. Women, even if not the actual crafters of the feasting vessels, are expected to procure, curate and display these serving vessels during sumptuous meals. We may also enquire as to gendered patterns of disposal of feast items. Who performed the clean-up of sacrificial feasts, and why would such items such as a sheep jaws and ribs be placed in a broken ceramic bowl in pit house floor fill (Pithouse 9, Context 115)? Discarding sacrificial meat parts with broken dishes as a single event could also represents a possible ritual or symbolic act of finalizing household feasting. Do these artifact and bone scatters represent a ritualized ending to household feasting? And is this gendered labour in the same way that, in contemporary Kazakh households, the female head organizes and distributes the remains of a feast (meat, bread, sweets) to departing relatives?
The gendered nature of the craft production of household pottery at the Iron Age settlements at Talgar is unknown. Yet there is a very small but significant amount of fabric-impressed vessel fragments. The fabric impressions are often noticeable in the interior of hand-made coiled or slab-built ceramics. Early evidence for weaving and textile production comes from the Bronze Age sites of the Dzhungari Alatau (Doumani et al. Reference Doumani, Spengler and Frachetti2018). At the Iron Age settlements of Talgar, there are occasional finds of fabric-impressed sherds, usually in the interior surface of vessels. Were the fabric impressions examples of basketry moulds, or actual textile pieces used in the moulding and hand-building of coiled or slab constructed vessels? If indeed weaving was a female-based activity, as it is in today's pastoral societies of Central Asia, perhaps the crafting of household vessels was a female activity, too.
In what ways does women's labour contribute to the procurement, management and display of feast items, including the serving vessels? The circulation of such objects and their display also suggests that women engage in the feasting activities for promoting members of a lineage (and not always from their own natal or marital lineage). Especially in ancient pastoral nomadic societies that were presumably patrilocal and patrilineal, the nature of marriage exogamy may also be considered. Across vast spatial landscapes the heads of the confederacy of a nomadic state attempted to dominate or at least control large territories of pasture areas. Marriage alliances could promote these dendritic networks. The circulation of women across groups or clans speaks to the outside, alienated position of women and their vital role in fluid interconnection. What kind of political agency did women have in such alliances? When social anthropologists have written about marriage exogamy among ‘patriarchal systems’ such as the agricultural Tiv, where residence is patrilocal and polygyny is practised, the outside marrying-in women are characterized as potential disruptors of the lineage. They can destroy lineage honour through infidelity and co-wives can either band together to assert their power over sons or husbands in the patrilineage, or they can fight over the common estate, also wreaking havoc among brothers, fathers and uncles (Bohannan Reference Bohannan and Bowen1964). Cynthia Werner (Reference Werner2009) discusses bride abduction among Kazakhs, formerly nomadic peoples. In these recent bride-stealing practices among Kazakhs, the female victim is often shamed into accepting the forced marriage. This then reinforces a patriarchal ideology often linked to increased ethnic nationalism (Werner Reference Werner2009, 320). These marriage practices (Tiv and Kazakh) suggest that the woman as the Other is doubly signified in symbolic and material ways. Here Braidotti's (Reference Braidotti2011) formulation of the alien being (a woman) who is a nomadic subject is important.
The Other from outside is both necessary in a functional sense, but she is marked as ‘Other’ and therefore inherently disruptive. Rather than seeing the dangerous and disruptive nature of women in exogamous systems, the use of Haraway's (Reference Haraway1991) cyborg allows for a heightened awareness of women's ability to disassemble and re-assemble themselves and family/social groups:
The home, workplace, market, public arena, the body itself—all can be dispersed and interfaced in nearly infinite, polymorphous ways, with large consequences for women and others—consequences that themselves are very different for different people and which make potent oppositional international movements difficult to imagine … The cyborg is a kind of disassembled and re-assembled, postmodern collective, and personal self. (Haraway Reference Haraway1991,163)
The gendered technology of ancient agropastoralist women, often invisible except in activities such as pot-making, textile-working, housework, cooking, or feasting was ‘dispersed and interfaced in nearly infinite, polymorphous ways’ (Haraway Reference Haraway1991, 163). Haraway's cyborg (womanmachine) is under-utilized as a theoretical construct for interpreting the materiality of social life or technology at prehistoric sites.
Round versus square houses
I conducted another analysis of the two house-forms found at the Iron Age site of Tuzusai (dated 400 bce–ce 1) (Chang Reference Chang2019). The household dwellings showed a distinctive break from the earlier period (400–300 bce) circular subterranean round pit houses to later period (200 bce–ce 1) above-ground unevenly shaped mudbrick or adobe rooms. Just like the shift of round to square/rectangular buildings in the early Neolithic periods of the Levant, the shift from round to square/rectangular houses at the Tuzusai settlement may also represent a different kind of symbolic, cosmological worldview, one associated with sexual difference. The yurt, found throughout Central Asia in historic and contemporary times, is the round felt dwelling or tent-like structure over a wooden lattice. In ethnographic terms, the yurt is the pastoral nomad's house at seasonal pastures, found throughout Central Asia to Mongolia and parts of western China. Yurts have a certain romantic cachet of the semi-nomadic way of life; they can be taken apart and moved elsewhere. Yurt etiquette is such that there are gendered areas (right for males, left for females) and areas for guests (towards the door). The ethnographic descriptions of Kazakh yurts always emphasize the fact that it is women who set up the yurts, another aspect of gendered technology, but men place the central dome piece or shanyrak. The roof opening of the yurt, often known as the smoke hole, with the central circular shanyrak looks to the sky, or tengrii, the cosmological force (Aljanova et al. Reference Aljanova, Borbassova and Rysbekova2015). While one may argue this is a male cosmic force, the cervical vertebrae of a sacrificed lamb killed during the birth of a child are hung from this shanyrak and remain there for 40 days, resembling an umbilical cord (Aljanova et al. Reference Aljanova, Borbassova and Rysbekova2015).
The shift from round to square dwellings at the Iron Age settlement site of Tuzusai also presumably marked a symbolic change in the construction of household space, but also perhaps in gendered space. When cosmological use of space is no longer round or oval-shaped, but rectangular, this may also mark a change in the spatial nature of the household, and even sexual differences within the household. The typical burial mounds for elite members in the Semirech'ye region reflect a kind of circular or rounded earthen construction (barrow), although the burial chambers themselves were most often rectangular (Baipakov & Taimagambetov Reference Baipakov and Taimaigambetov2006). What appears as a definite Saka predisposition, the oval-shaped or round pit house, is also apparent in the circular nature of the above-ground structure of the burial mounds themselves. The symbolic and cosmological use of spherical space versus quadrilateral space can be seen as a reflection of Eurasian nomadic life, at least in mortuary traditions of half-spherical burial mounds of the Early Iron Age and the Saka use of round or oval pit houses at Tuzusai, Tseganka 8 and Taldy Bulak 2 settlements in the Talgar region (Chang Reference Chang2017). These are questions I can only posit. In posthuman philosophy, Braidotti (Reference Braidotti2013) goes beyond the questions of sexual, racial and naturalized differences:
Sexualized, racialized and naturalized differences, from being categorical boundary markers under Humanism, have become unhinged and act as forces leading to the elaboration of alternative modes of transversal subjectivity, which extend notably beyond gender and race, but also beyond the human. (Braidotti Reference Braidotti2013, 98)
A nomadic sensibility includes a boundless set of interrelations between humans and cosmic forces (Aljanova et al. Reference Aljanova, Borbassova and Rysbekova2015). The round dwelling is not merely an enclosed misshapen sphere; it encloses inner and outer worlds of the pastoral nomadic cosmic reality. Humans build those worlds and impose them on natural landscapes. Some human groups more than others attempt to incorporate natural forces or cosmic energies into their dwellings. Without providing an over-idealized view of nomadic subjectivities, the nomad and the cyborg may intersect. The dispersed identities of both are often viewed by the external world as alien, outsiders, misconfigurations. When Iron Age dwellings became square or rectangular and no longer circular, the architecture of an enclosed sphere was lost. The notion of embodiment is important here, because a round or a square structure is entangled space, symbolically charged. The shift from round, spherical shapes to rectangular, square shapes in the archaeological record could indeed also be tied to the shift from nomadic mobility to agrarian sedentism. The nomadic subjectivity may be doubly reified: women's autonomy and dense lateral ties versus agrarian hierarchy and loss of multi-layered identities.
In conclusion
There are more connections to be made between posthumanism and the cyborg collective that may effectively revise the social evolutionary models used by my generation of processual archaeologists. The philosophy of nomadology and the study of pastoral nomads are two separate and non-congruent disciplines. They both intersect through their attention to mobility, fluidity and the formation of rhizomic networks. Archaeological materialism requires a different approach by which non-unitary, multi-layered subjectivities are considered. This may take more imagination and revision of feminist theory in order to produce a de-centred and posthumanist inquiry into archaeological and ethnographic studies. The Anthropocene movement in archaeology, while quite important, still privileges ‘human-centred behaviours and actions’ and thus downplays a continuum of a world ‘in becoming’ where subject/object, machine/human, nature/culture boundaries are far from dichotomous but are multi-layered, rhizomic and in some true fashion ‘nomadic subjectivities’.
In my own archaeological journey, I have begun to examine the archaeological record of mudbrick, serving plates and the architecture of houses as expressions of differences derived from either nomadic or gendered subjectivities. The new materialism of Braidotti (Reference Braidotti2011; Reference Braidotti2013; Reference Braidotti, Banerji and Paranjape2016) has the potential to re-energize the study of ancient pastoral societies, especially in places where the study of sexual difference was erased from the investigation of ancient lives. Central Asian archaeology as an object of study also follows its own trajectory of ‘becoming’, so that a post-Soviet past and a former attention to Soviet historical science may also be met with an infusion of ideas encapsulating nomadic subjectivities and posthumanist paradigms.
Acknowledgements
The author wishes to acknowledge US National Science Foundation Grant Archaeology Program for funding Collaborative Research: Bronze and Iron Age Prehistory on the Margins of the Eurasian Steppe: Modeling Interactions between Climate and Ancient Herders and Farmers, co-PIs I.P. Panyushkina (Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research, University of Arizona), Claudia Chang (Sweet Briar College). In the Republic of Kazakhstan, the A.Kh. Margulan Institute of Archaeology provided permits and assistance for archaeological fieldwork through Dr Baurzhan Baytanev, General Director. Collaborators on aspects of this project include Claire Zak, graduate student in Marine Archaeology at Texas A & M University, and Perry A. Tourtellotte, independent scholar. Archaeologists from the Republic of Kazakhstan who collaborated and contributed to this archaeological fieldwork include Yeraly Akimbek, Feydor P. Grigoriev, Murat N. Nurpeisov and Boris A. Zhelezhnyakov. I express special gratitude to Dr Rachel Crellin and Dr Hannah Cobb for inviting me to participate in this special section.
