The silent film Grass (1925), which follows the seasonal migration of members of the Bakhtiari tribal confederation and their herds, shows mobile pastoralism as a changeless, remote, environmentally driven, and primitive way of life. An anthropological and historical analysis of the film explores problematic conceptions that still underlie the contemporary study of historical and ancient pastoralism.

This chapter extends the conceptual framework laid out in Chapter 2 to a series of basic questions about various dimensions of ancient and historical pastoralism, using constellations of methods reviewed in Chapters 4 and 5. Answering these questions on the basis of empirical archaeological data also builds a broader basis for comparing ancient pastoralism to historically and ethnographically documented practices, providing the means to generate stronger ethnographic analogies for archaeological interpretation, as discussed in Chapter 3.

The misuse of ethnographic analogy, illustrated through several case studies, has been and remains widespread in the archaeology of pastoralism. Earlier programmatic papers on how to strengthen the use of analogy in archaeology point to three proposals for how archaeologists interested in pastoralism might use ethnographic analogy more reliably, especially through evaluation of systematic biases in mid-twentieth-century pastoralist ethnography and highlighting temporal and spatial variability evidenced in ethnographic and historical accounts. Archaeological and ethnoarchaeological work on historical mobile pastoralism in southeastern Turkey illustrates one way of engaging with some of these proposals.

New field and laboratory methodologies increasingly allow scholars to collect direct data on pastoralism, including data on mobility, sociopolitical organization, and intensification/diversification of production. A discussion of each methodology – survey, excavation, zooarchaeology, archaeobotany, and geoarchaeology – assesses possibilities and limitations for an empirical and critical archaeology of pastoralism.

This introductory chapter discusses how archaeologists have studied and represented pastoralism, often in ways that parallel the tropes that the film Grass introduced. Despite decades of work and varied approaches associated with different theoretical traditions, archaeologists largely have not written histories of pastoralism that address continuity and change. The archaeology of pastoralism faces four longstanding problems that contribute to an ongoing tendency to see pastoralists as changeless: (1) conceptual conflation, (2) misuse of ethnographic analogy, (3) a paucity of direct data, and (4) separate regional traditions of research.

A critical and empirical archaeology of pastoralism has already begun to rewrite some of the long-standing “grand narratives” of pastoralism’s role in shaping ancient urbanism, trade, polities, and landscapes.

New research agendas tackle questions about the social and political dimension of ancient and historical pastoralism and the impact that herd animals and herding had on societies through time. These research agendas include social zooarchaeology and the archaeology of social spaces in pastoral landscapes, such as monuments, gathering spaces, and corrals or other herding infrastructure. In the future, household archaeological approaches to settlements and campsites should play a more important role.

Archaeological research on pastoralism has mostly occurred within the silos of separate regionally specific traditions in the Middle East, Central Eurasia, North Africa, and East Africa. The common questions concerning pastoral ecologies and economies outlined in Chapter 6 and the social research agendas discussed in Chapter 7 open space for a more robust comparative archaeology of pastoralism across disparate regions and longer time spans.