Pastoralism in archaeological research has often been marginalised or set in contrast to more ‘dominant’ lifeways such as agriculture and urban-industrialism. The persistent narrative of invisibility or ephemerality of pastoralist groups, notions of nomadism, and a simplification of social complexity (or lack thereof—the pervasive egalitarian pastoralist trope) run through most archaeological discourse to this day. Emily Hammer’s new volume, The archaeology of pastoralism, mobility, and society, acts as a manifesto to redress some of these conceptual conflations, inherited assumptions and misconceptions that archaeology brings to the study of pastoralism, while establishing a framework for a more nuanced and comprehensive understanding of pastoralism and mobility going forward.
The book is structured around tackling core ideas, models and terms related to pastoralism (Chapters 1–3) and applying methodologies for studying pastoralist societies in archaeology (Chapters 4 & 5). It guides the reader towards the final three chapters, which lay out a comprehensive roadmap for handling data through multidisciplinary approaches (Chapter 6), addressing complex research questions (Chapter 7) and moving beyond regional disciplinary traditions (Chapter 8). With this approach, Hammer successfully brings along pastoralism specialists, regional archaeologists and archaeological scientists, providing enough for everyone to end up in the same place—to understand that pastoralism and mobility are not marginal concepts but lifeways and actions woven into the fabric of agricultural and urban landscapes and the social lives of many people in the past. The angle she sets up though is that modern and colonial actions have relegated pastoralism to the background, and the baggage this brings with it has led to poor archaeoethnographic recognition of our own relationship with these important economic and social elements.
It is from this basis—the impact of ethnography on/in archaeology—that Hammer begins. For me, as an archaeobotanist (and one working to the east of the main case studies of her book: primarily the Middle East, Central Eurasia and North-East Africa), this was a fascinating insight and reminder into the way colonial histories and echoes have affected the modelling of pastoralism, and an important lesson on the effects such legacies continue to have on our models of mobile groups in archaeology. The first three chapters walk the reader through some of the challenges in terminology and the use of ethnography in building models and analogies for pastoralism and mobility. Hammer uses Chapter 2 to great effect to draw attention to the way that both terminology and models have created almost static and subconsciously pervasive paradigms of pastoralism that are holding back the discipline. She lays out four older types of frameworks—nomadism, egalitarianism/dependency, specialised pastoralism/static lifeway and marginal land—and rethinks these in terms of mobility, complexity, intensification/change and landscape affordances. This chapter in particular was one that I, as a reader coming from a more agriculture-focused area of archaeology, found to be enlightening because it made me reconsider how ‘types’ still remain in much of our work, despite efforts to shake off the shackles of evolutionist culture history. One terminological aspect that I would have liked to see reinterpreted here is the notion of foddering and grazing. While the meaning of these words may seem obvious, exploring how different feeding (and watering) strategies are managed, what implications these may have on the management of landscapes (and their affordances) as well as other resources, would be an interesting aspect to unpack. That said, no book can cover everything, and perhaps in future works this could be explored in more depth.
Hammer then moves to ways in which different archaeological sciences can be used in the study of pastoralism and mobility. This section is set up for those less familiar with different methodologies, and perhaps this is a space to discuss the audience(s) of this book. On the one hand, due to its case studies, it is for archaeological scholars interested in the Middle East, Central Eurasia and to a lesser extent North-East Africa, but goes also beyond, e.g. South India. It will be interesting, down the line, to see how this work affects other pastoralist archaeologies in light of Chapter 8’s call to bridge regional divides going forwards. On the other hand, this book seems to be written with a more focused goal in mind: to lay a foundation for pastoral archaeologists to follow and build on. In this respect it is aimed squarely at pastoral theorists and framed as a manifesto to redress the perceived problems facing pastoral specialist scholars. This volume provides a deep and dense dive into the challenges facing such specialists, before providing a basic introduction to different scientific methods and methodologies that they could use to fix said problems. The latter sections of the book do a good job at giving a basic introduction to those scientific approaches. For the casual methodologist, the density may be daunting but I encourage them to read on because the important messages around ethnographic analogy, data collection and model building have implications for our work. The Eurasian focus does not deliver a complete introduction to the region but serves only to provide a setting for the more in-depth theoretical debates on the challenges facing pastoralism studies (such debates could perhaps be reframed into other regions as Hammer points out in Chapter 8), and some supplement reading may be needed to provide chronology or regional support. The latter sections may appear for the scientific audience a little shallow and in need of more nuance. For example, the discussion of dung fuel (Chapter 4), while trying to balance out the debate on fuel versus crop-processing waste within a pastoral context, gave a slightly misleading impression that most waste can ultimately be interpreted as dung fuel or linked to foddering with only a few exceptions. This is a difficult concept as there are many wider-ranging debates around this, such as the discussions on non-cattle or wood fuel in dominant regions with similar floral assemblages, and pre-cattle domestication time periods with similar assemblages, that have been part of a much larger debate on the dung fuel identification (see summaries in Bates Reference Bates2025). Given the careful nature by which Hammer calls for ethnographic observation and analogy building, such dung-fuel work requires a similarly careful approach on a site-by-site basis (see for example Portillo et al. Reference Portillo2017). That said, the archaeological science sections are all balanced in terms of the strengths and weaknesses of each method, and it is heartening to see that the ‘new sciences’ (aDNA, isotopes, archaeochemistry) are not simply given preference because of their newness, and instead are explored in terms of what they can bring, what they cannot address, and how they can/must be utilised alongside more traditional methodologies.
For me the book’s greatest strength is in the final three chapters, where Hammer brings all lines of evidence together and presents a path forward for scholars. This is encapsulated beautifully in fig. 6.1. This flowchart shows how the older questions can be readdressed into new frameworks, how these lead into new broad research questions, and how different methodologies can be woven together and applied within these. This flowchart of ideas is the constructive synthesis that draws this book together and is the reason I will be recommending it strongly to colleagues and to students, as it sets up the field of pastoral archaeology for generations to come.
