The Emergence of Pastoralism East of the Jordan Valley

Braidwood Visiting Scholar Lecture: Cheryl Makarewicz, Christian Albrechts University Pastoralism has long fascinated archaeologists, invoking powerful images of wind-swept herders journeying with their animals across vast, resource-poor landscapes in a relentless search for graze. Pastoralism was a late development in the polycentric, multi-trajectory Neolithic transition from hunting-gathering to food production, one that transformed how humans could survive and thrive in challenging landscapes. However, we know surprisingly little about how pastoralism first emerged, what forms it took, how it was initially sustained, and the processes by which it spread. Drawing from the archaeological and biomolecular records, Makarewicz will first investigate how the spread of domesticated goats and sheep during the mid-seventh millennium into the rapidly changing built Neolithic environments of the Jordanian highlands sparked the emergence of a novel form of animal management central to pastoralism: seasonal transhumance. She will then consider how shifts in the human-animal relationship sparked by this mobility practice fundamentally altered human-human relations, fomenting the disintegration of communality that structured early Neolithic societies while composing extra-community negotiation-led forms of nascent pastoralist social organization. In this unfolding socio-political context, she will explore how the complex intersection between highland agro-pastoralist subsistence dynamics, animal-based wealth generation, and steppe-seated traditions involving mass hunting of gazelle using desert kites may have facilitated the spread and further evolution of pastoralism in the eastern badia.