Quad B on site D069-002. Exposed bedrock shows structure collapse. Picture by Anne Skidmore
Originally presented in 2011 within a five-year plan “PASTORALISM AND THE SOUTH ARABIAN STATE IN DHUFAR, OMAN,” the American team plans a January-March 2017 two month field season with the support of the Ministry of Heritage and Culture, Muscat and Salalah. With colleagues in USA, Oman, UK, and Germany, Dr. Joy McCorriston has secured new research and training support from the USA National Science Foundation. In recognition of the roles and contributions of a broad new set of collaborators, the new project name is “ASOM Project.” This acronym for the Ancient Socio-ecological systems in OMan comes from a local Jebali-language term (ʾasὑm) for a type of stone monument used for burial and other purposes in antiquity (al-Shahri 1991: 184). The interdisciplinary ASOM Project will examine the environmental conditions that lead to human territorial behavior in pastoral ecosystems as well as how territoriality shapes the environment.
The project will provide new insights into whether the dynamics of woodland-grassland-woodland cycling are coupled with pulses in human social behavior. ASOM Project fieldwork will collect archaeological and paleoecological data to provide new insights regarding the degree to which such long-term cycling-and-coupling provides alternative perspectives about human-environmental interaction. A cycling-and-coupling model challenges paradigm characterizations of a linear history of progressive human degradation of pasture lands. By focusing attention on the nonlinear dynamics of change and continuity in coupled human and natural systems, the project will provide a new conceptual approach for examining change and continuity in prehistoric societies. This is an appropriate development of McCorriston’s program of archaeological survey and excavation in Dhufar to document the socio-economic development of Bronze Age and Iron Age pastoralismand to look for introductions of crop agriculture and their impacts on socio-economic systems (see McCorriston’s five-year plan filed with the Ministry of Heritage and Culture in 2011). Assessment of dynamic, interlocked cycles of human territorial behavior and rangeland ecology also have broader implications for development and sustainability of human environments as coupled systems. The project will provide education and training opportunities for graduate, undergraduate, and high school students in the transdisciplinary study of complex social-ecological systems, and it will further collaborations between researchers in the U.S. and the Middle East.