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.

Various biomolecular methods increasingly augment foundational methodologies for the study of pastoralism, including isotopic analyses, analyses of ancient human and animal DNA, identification of milk proteins, and residue analyses that identify animal carcass fat and milk fat. Although the results of biomolecular analyses can significantly expand the evidentiary basis for the archaeology of pastoralism and have in many ways revolutionized the field, they are not some sort of panacea that can easily solve all of the conceptual, interpretive, empirical, and disciplinary problems laid out in Chapter 1.

Twentieth-century scholars defined “pastoral nomadism” as an environmental adaptation inherently linked to specific political, social, and economic traits: long-distance mobility; tribalism, social egalitarianism, and dependence on sedentary agricultural communities; economic specialization in pastoralism; and “marginal” land. To resolve conceptual conflation and promote the writing of histories of pastoralism, archaeologists require a new framework that draws on anthropological ideas about mobility, political complexity, intensification of production, and pastoral landscapes.

The Introduction begins with a description of the final days in the life of Sofia’s main thermal bath that in 1913 stood in the city’s historic center as the last representative of the Ottoman approach to place-making. I show how the decision to demolish one of the structures most characteristic of Sofia’s Ottoman experience cleared the path for the formulation of the national narrative of Sofia’s history. The narrative that still dominates both the scholarly and popular ideas of Sofia’s urbanistic identity is based on an ideologically biased interpretation of the Ottoman understanding of urban space, natural resource management, and public works. In the Introduction, I argue that Sofia’s key position within the Ottoman political and institutional landscapes as well as its role as a hub of cultural and technological exchange make the study of its history a good vantage point for overcoming the artificial spatial boundaries that still divide the research of the European, Asian, and African provinces of the Ottoman Empire. The Introduction shows how the environmental characteristics of Sofia and the Sofia plain make water the most natural and effective thematic pivot for the study of the construction and historical evolution of space and place.

This chapter continues the story of Sofia’s water supply, beginning with the political turmoil that marred urban fabrics and economies across the Ottoman Balkans from the 1790s to the 1820s and ending in 1912 when, after a long series of failed attempts, post-Ottoman Sofia received its first modern water supply system. I emphasize the similarity in the predicaments that shaped the Ottoman and Bulgarian policies in the fields of urban planning, underground infrastructures, and natural resource management. I explain how a series of extreme human-made and natural phenomena, including banditry, war, and intensified seismicity limited the capabilities of the Ottoman authorities to accomplish their modernizing intentions. In post-Ottoman Bulgaria, the modernization of urban fabrics was seen as a statement of the superiority of the nation-state over its former imperial master. However, in a series of attempts to meet the water needs of the national capital’s constantly expanding population, the post-Ottoman authorities found themselves continually unable to come up with solutions superior to the water supply practices of their predecessors. The chapter argues that throughout the long nineteenth century Sofia’s water supply functioned within the bounds of the system established by the Ottomans.