@article{THESIS,
      recid = {1761},
      author = {Chazin, Hannah},
      title = {The Politics of Pasture: The Organization of Pastoral  Practices and Political Authority in  the Late Bronze Age  in the South Caucasus},
      publisher = {University of Chicago},
      school = {Ph.D.},
      address = {2016-08},
      number = {THESIS},
      pages = {428},
      abstract = {This dissertation investigates how human-animal  relationships in pastoralism shaped the organization of  political life in ancient pastoralist societies. This  project uses zooarchaeological and isotopic analysis to  outline the organization and political implications of  pastoralist practices of production, circulation, and  consumption in the mid-2nd millennium BCE in the South  Caucasus through the material traces they left in  archaeological faunal remains. This project approaches the  question of the relationship between politics and  pastoralism, not as a contradiction needing to be resolved,  but as a project of understanding the affordances that  pastoralist activities provide for the creation and  maintenance of forms of political authority and  subjectivity. 

In doing so, the dissertation project  considers how the specific ethological and material  characteristics of domesticated herd animals and their  relationships with humans gives them the ability to shape  the form and content of political organization in  pastoralist societies. It combines a theoretical approach  to human-animal relationships based on scholarship from in  animal studies and insights on the relationships between  the material world, value, and politics from the  anthropological and archaeological literature on  materiality and value.keep this language? Close attention  is paid to how the particular ‘material’ characteristics of  domesticated herd animals shaped pastoralist activities,  and the suitability of such activities to participate in  the creation and maintenance of particular forms of value.  

These characteristics are the basis of the specific  affordances of human-herd animal relationships, which shape  the creation and stabilization of political subjectivity  and authority. In order to build a synthetic account of the  relationship between pastoralism and political organization  in the mid-2nd millennium BCE in the South Caucasus, I  analyze pastoralism as a set of practices that can be  broken down into three aspects: 1) space, 2) seasonality,  3) distribution and consumption. This approach expands on  recent work rethinking the relationship between pastoralism  and the political by focusing on aspects of pastoralism  beyond geographic mobility. Analysis of strontium and  oxygen isotopes contributes fine-grained data about the  movement of individual animals across the landscape, in  contrast to zooarchaeological data (which is based on  aggregations of individuals). In order to integrate these  different types of data, I re-work osteobiography (drawing  on its use in bioarchaeology). This facilitates the  interpretation of data that represents simultaneously a  unique individual (the individual life history) and a  member of certain populations (both biologically and  socially).

The investigation of the organization of  pastoralist production, distribution, and consumption  through isotopic and zooarchaeological analysis reveals the  complex organization of pastoralist labor based in species,  age, and site location in the mid-2nd millennium BCE  Tsaghkahovit Plain. While herd mobility was spatially  limited within the plain itself, the analysis reveals that  production was oriented both around the year-round  provisioning of dairy, as well as prime-weight meat  production. The analysis also reveals that much consumption  of domesticated herd animals took place off site, through  practices that circulated partial skeletal remains  post-mortem. 

Late Bronze Age pastoralist practices,  grounded in human-animal relationships, worked to produce  both social cohesion and differentiation across a number of  registers. The complex organization of pastoralist  production, circulation, and consumption entailed a number  of competing and conflicting objectives, practices, and  orientations. These disjunctures required negotiation and  intervention, around which power and authority were both in  play and at stake. While the specific content of and  engagement around these points of friction remains opaque,  the archaeological evidence presented here suggests that  Late Bronze Age political authorities were able to command  and re-distribute certain resources, through practices and  activities of consumption linked to fortress sites.  However, these results also suggest that this organization  was countered by other networks and activities that  circulated both people and animals in other, potentially  less regulated and centralized, ways.},
      url = {http://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/1761},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.6082/uchicago.1761},
}