Households without Houses: Mobility and Moorings on the Eurasian Steppe

Joshua Wright

doi:10.1086/686297

Households without Houses: Mobility and Moorings on the Eurasian Steppe

Joshua Wright

Archaeology

Oberlin College

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

31 Citations (Scopus)

10 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

Mobility is often cited as the essence of life in the Eurasian steppe, and with it mobile dwellings and households. Steppe nomads offer ethnographically potent visions of inhabited space into which archaeological landscapes fit comfortably. Challenges include the discovery of early household sites, the characterization of households that lack structures, and how to examine the dynamics of mobile pastoralist households without being drawn into an agglomerative model that builds toward optimal practices. This paper will marshal the archaeological evidence for domestic spaces in mobile steppe households. A flexible and extensible model of household spaces will be offered that links activities and resources into a network of contextual relationships at the household scale. This provides a model for analogical use of ethnographic data, frameworks into which the archaeological fragments of mobile households can be fitted, and above all a means of comparative characterization between periods of inhabitation in the world’s steppes.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	133-157
Number of pages	25
Journal	Journal of Anthropological Research
Volume	72
Issue number	2
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1086/686297
Publication status	Published - 30 Mar 2016

Bibliographical note

The research that provided the basis for this paper was carried out in collaboration with the Institutes of History and Archaeology of the Mongolian Academy of Sciences and would not have been possible without my colleagues Chunag Amartuvshin, William Honeychurch, and D. Molor and the hospitality of the people of Egiin Gol and Baga Gazaryn Chuluu. The work was supported by the Center for the Study of Eurasian Nomads, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the National Geographic Society, the Institute of Archaeology of the Mongolian Academy of Sciences, the National Science Foundation, Gettysburg College, Yale University, the Smithsonian Museum’s National Museum of Natural History, the Department of Anthropology at Harvard University, the American School for Prehistoric Research, and the Gerda Henkel Stiftung.

Keywords

campsites
corrals
ethnoarchaeology
Khitan
mobility
Mongolia
nomads
pastoralists
small-scale social networks

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10.1086/686297Licence: Unspecified

Households without Houses: Mobility and Moorings on the Eurasian Steppe
Journal of Anthropological Research (Summer 2016). ©2016 by The University of New Mexico. All rights reserved.
Final published version, 1.21 MBLicence: Unspecified

Joshua Wright
- School of Geosciences, Archaeology - Senior Lecturer
Person: Academic

Cite this

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title = "Households without Houses: Mobility and Moorings on the Eurasian Steppe",

abstract = "Mobility is often cited as the essence of life in the Eurasian steppe, and with it mobile dwellings and households. Steppe nomads offer ethnographically potent visions of inhabited space into which archaeological landscapes fit comfortably. Challenges include the discovery of early household sites, the characterization of households that lack structures, and how to examine the dynamics of mobile pastoralist households without being drawn into an agglomerative model that builds toward optimal practices. This paper will marshal the archaeological evidence for domestic spaces in mobile steppe households. A flexible and extensible model of household spaces will be offered that links activities and resources into a network of contextual relationships at the household scale. This provides a model for analogical use of ethnographic data, frameworks into which the archaeological fragments of mobile households can be fitted, and above all a means of comparative characterization between periods of inhabitation in the world{\textquoteright}s steppes.",

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AB - Mobility is often cited as the essence of life in the Eurasian steppe, and with it mobile dwellings and households. Steppe nomads offer ethnographically potent visions of inhabited space into which archaeological landscapes fit comfortably. Challenges include the discovery of early household sites, the characterization of households that lack structures, and how to examine the dynamics of mobile pastoralist households without being drawn into an agglomerative model that builds toward optimal practices. This paper will marshal the archaeological evidence for domestic spaces in mobile steppe households. A flexible and extensible model of household spaces will be offered that links activities and resources into a network of contextual relationships at the household scale. This provides a model for analogical use of ethnographic data, frameworks into which the archaeological fragments of mobile households can be fitted, and above all a means of comparative characterization between periods of inhabitation in the world’s steppes.

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KW - corrals

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ER -

Households without Houses: Mobility and Moorings on the Eurasian Steppe

Abstract

Bibliographical note

Keywords

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Joshua Wright

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