Herders CaSEs Seminar

Herders     The mobile option

31st of May - Starting at 10 AM - CaSEs Seminars 2012
IMF CSIC - C/ Egipciaques 15, Barcelona

The Complexity and Socio-Ecological Dynamics (CaSEs) research cluster is pleased to organise this seminar on herders. Prehistoric pastoral groups are often pictured as marginal realities within the settled (i.e. post-Neolithic) agricultural world. Yet, pastoral communities are numerous and widespread throughout the Holocene and they still represent an important share of present-day society. Indeed, pastoralists represent the core of some regional economies around the world.

With this seminar, CaSEs aims at breaking the traditional dichotomy between mobile hunter-gatherers and settled agriculturalists, which underlie most anthropological and archaeological research on transitional periods (e.g. Mesolithic to Neolithic).

In this sense, herders are quite special as they represent the mobile option in a sedentary and fully domesticated world. For this reason CaSEs think herders are a sort of hybrid socio-ecological group that deserves a more prominent place under the reflectors of anthropological and archaeological research, to reach a more comprehensive understanding of domestication options and trajectories.

This seminar aims at stimulating debate between in house and invited specialists involved in research on herder communities from different perspectives: archaeological, ethnographical and environmental. We hope this will be a seeding experience for future collaborations and initiatives.