In collaboration with the Oxford University Collective for Pastoralist and Nomadic People, this transhistorical seminar on pastoral mobilities explores the intersections of nomadic and environmental humanities from contemporary Mongolia, medieval Provence to the deep past.

Dr Ariell Ahearn: Gendered Sacred Landscapes: Mobile Pastoralist Commons and Mobility beyond Environmental Determinism
Pastoralism is popularly presented in terms of environmental determinism, where mobility is a key technique for making the most of variable vegetation and water resources in arid and often extreme climatic conditions. However, the way in which these ecologies co-evolve with pastoralist mobilities based on practices deeply infused with spiritual and cultural beliefs. These environments are not simply ‘resources’ to be consumed by livestock, but are spiritual landscapes where non-human entities reside. This talk will present recent research on how these sacred landscapes are gendered and what this means in terms of mobility and environmental ethics practiced by Mongolian herders.

Patrick Hegarthy-Morrish: Patterns of pastoral mobility in late-medieval Haute-Provence
The voluminous archives of Provence give voluminous source material, in many different formats, to piece together how pastoralism functioned over time and space in the late middle ages. In my talk I will focus on the fourteenth century, and on the mountainous region of Haute-Provence, and will explore how different scales of pastoralism, and different routines of mobility, interacted and co-existed in one region. Depending on the season, herders moved livestock between the local upland commons and the cultivated area; they grazed flocks on the pastures of a neighbouring community; or they took their animals on ponderous long journeys to access different ecosystems with better climate or better suited to the fodder needs of their flock. All this human-directed mobility was also paired with the instinctive movement of the animals themselves, as they sough out the best pasture in a certain environment. Livestock mobility was deeply interactive with the local environment. Across the seasons, herders sought rich upland meadows or sclerophyllous woodlands in response to the annual rotation in their animals’ nutritional requirements. On their journeys, livestock picked up insects and seeds from vegetation along the drove roads and transported them across the region. Animals’ manure and eating habits created soil microbiomes in permitted spots, constituted from the digested vegetable matter that local or less local livestock had brought perhaps from a different ecological region some hundred kilometres away. All this shows a complex, interactive jigsaw of different forms of pastoralism, in which animals, humans, and ecosystems interact.

Dr Valasia Isaakidou (Archeology, Oxford) and Professor Paul Halstead (Archaeology, Sheffield): Pastoral mobilities in the longue durée
In social evolutionary narratives, hunter-gatherers typically lacked both private property and sedentism, while crop cultivators had both characteristics. Accordingly, pastoralists, combining private property with mobility, were often viewed as an intermediate stage between primeval hunter-gatherers and later cultivators. A fundamental critique of this view argues that contemporary/recent pastoralists either raise crops as well as livestock (thereby constraining their mobility) or are dependent for staple crops on agricultural societies, usually by exchanging pastoral for agricultural products in urban markets. If so, specialised pastoralist societies are unlikely to have emerged prior to the appearance of cities or even of market economies. Archaeological literature is replete with claims of early (pre-urban/pre-market) pastoralists, but these (1) do not address the argument that specialised pastoralism is not viable without reliable exchange with crop producers and (2) cite empirical support in distant and ambiguous proxies (e.g., material culture, settlement patterns) that are equally compatible with sedentary mixed farming.
Recent advances in stable-isotope analysis of archaeological animal bones and teeth are providing more direct proxies for ancient livestock mobility, but basic methodological work is still needed on modern livestock of known (and agrochemical-free) life histories to ensure reliable interpretation of such stable-isotope data. Such work is currently underway in the Oxford School of Archaeology.