Theme:
1. Artefacts, Buildings & Ecofacts
Session format:
Regular session
Title:
Following the Steps of Past Shepherds. Searching for Pastoralism in Mountain Areas
Content:
Managed grazing systems are regarded as one of the most extensive forms of land use on Earth. Pastoralism has been considered as one of the main causes of landscape transformation in many upland areas, where centuries of livestock mobility have actively modelled the character of the landscape and, in some cases, helped preserve threatened ecosystems.
This session is aimed at sharing how researchers identify past pastoral practices in mountain environments, as well as the problems and challenges emerging from it (e.g., difficulty of locating mobile pastoral sites, scarce material culture, rugged nature of upland areas). In this line, we encourage participants to address the methodological approaches that have enabled them to deal with these issues. Approaches include (but not only):
- Survey strategies (e.g., surface survey, remote sensing)
- Scales of register: from the archaeological site to the object (e.g., how to record dispersed but continuous evidence over mountain spaces, how to delimit a mobile pastoral site)
- Multitemporal approaches (e.g., dating methods, working with different scales of time)
- Ethnoarchaeology and pastoral groups
- Computational archaeology (e.g., computer modelling and simulation, predictive modelling)
In addition, in the face of global warming, depopulation and mass tourism, this session also seeks to generate debate on how archaeological research can inform future landscape planning to maintain and promote sustainable practices in upland areas, such as non-industrialised pastoral systems.
The objective of the session is to share and discuss different methodological approaches that have been successfully applied to the study of pastoralism in mountain areas. Speakers are encouraged to share how common problems in this field are handled in different areas, highlighting the potential of their methodologies. Overall, this session aspires to be a platform to move forward in the research of past pastoralism, while generating proposals for the future of mountain spaces.
Keywords:
pastoralism, mountain archaeology, landscape archaeology, environment, ethnoarchaeology, sustainability
Session associated with MERC:
no
Session associated with CIfA:
no
Session associated with SAfA:
no
Session associated with CAA:
no
Session associated with DGUF:
no
Session associated with other:
Main organiser:
Guillem Domingo Ribas (United Kingdom) 1
Co-organisers:
David Garcia Casas (Spain) 2
Affiliations:
1. Newcastle University
2. Institute of Heritage Sciences - Spanish National Research Council
THIS SESSION CAN NOT BE SELECTED AT THIS MOMENT