@article{Transition::2543,
      recid = {2543},
      author = {Lowry, K. Bryce},
      title = {Tracing a Transition: The Political Economy of Bronze and  Iron Age Mongolia},
      publisher = {University of Chicago},
      school = {Ph.D.},
      address = {2020-08},
      pages = {471},
      abstract = {It would seem that pastoral nomads have ceaselessly  occupied a distinct space in our world, imaginations, and  academic discourse, often revolving around the concept of  periphery. Pastoral nomads inhabit interstitial spaces,  adjacent and secondary to urban centers and the refinement  of civilization. Further, pastoral nomads are caught in  popular imaginations as simple, barbarous, warlike, and  constantly peripatetic—characteristics perceived to be  antithetical to sedentary agriculturalists. 

These  essentializations of pastoral nomadism have had real  consequences in academic scholarship, and it is here this  dissertation makes its intervention. Accordingly, early  North American and Soviet intellectual trajectories in  archaeology and the social sciences led scholars to have a  predisposition to burial excavation and seriation, solidify  false connections between subsistence and political forms,  and to focus on the pastoral nomad’s connection with urban  centers. In the examination of political economic shifts in  prehistoric Late Bronze to Late Iron Age Mongolia (ca. 1200  BCE-100 CE), I place nomads at the forefront of inquiry  looking to detail internal dynamics and mechanisms of  social change at work over time. I ask: How did the  adoption of pastoralism alter economic practices on the  landscape, and what were the rhythms? How did shifts in  economic life change political structures and the social  processes used to (re)make those relationships? In short, I  advocate for the analyses of malleable and active social  processes over concepts that employ static systems of  change. 

This study brings together the results of 76 km²  of pedestrian survey and the recovery and recording of  thousands of features and artifacts in Bayankhongor  province, Mongolia. These data are scrutinized through an  epistemological framework called occupational landscapes  which finds its strength in breadth of focus and  flexibility of scale. As such, the tripartite scheme of  occupational landscapes takes an ecological, vocational,  and semiotic approach to artifacts and assemblages,  utilizing scales of analysis ranging from a single chemical  element to the regional spatial patterning of material  culture.

In doing so, each aspect of the occupational  landscape emphasized various social processes that  encourage a reevaluation of pastoral nomadic communities  themselves, and as members in wider social entanglements.  Thus, this dissertation attempts to revise the way in which  we investigate, discuss, and chronologically represent  pastoral nomadic communities, refracting cultural change  through active and agentive social processes. As such, the  social processes that are explored in this study include:  (im)mobility, place-making, flake and stone tool  production, habitation patterning and pasture politics,  semiotic usurpation of funerary rites and messaging, the  production of ceramic and chains of craft-knowledge, skill  or specialization, and the navigation of unsolidified  extents of (de)centralized authority.

 In contrast to a  reliance on ideas of a “grand narrative,” linear  neoevolutionary progress, or burial forms as the preeminent  marker for cultural change or replacement, I find that the  shifts in political economy during the Mongolian Late  Bronze and Late Iron Ages are subtle, yet intricate and  vibrant. In pursuing a people-centered approach to  prehistory, I argue that the first-half of the first  millennium BCE in Bayankhongor Mongolia was a time fraught  with uncertainty, experimentation, and fluidity—both  economically and politically—and should not be continually  described using linear temporalities of complexity or the  diachronic presence or absence of particular burial forms.},
      url = {http://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/2543},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.6082/uchicago.2543},
}