At the Society for American Archaeology national meetings, Joy McCorriston presented a paper (McCorriston, Moritz, Hamilton, Ivory, Pustovoytov, and all) “Pastoral Territoriality as a Dynamic Coupled Human Natural System” in the National Geographic Society invited session, “The Human Journey: Understanding Human Migration in the Past to Address Challenges for the Future.”

Subsequently, she presented “Monuments, Mobility, and Pastoral Territoriality in Dhufar, Oman” at a public colloquium organized by the Embassy of Oman (Sultan Qaboos Cultural Center) and the Library of Congress.

(Tim Everhart presenting his (other) dissertation research at the Society for American Archaeology Meetings)

Abigail Buffington organized and taught a Phytolith Methods course with Kyle Riordan and Drew Arbogast assisting. The course ran 20 contact hours in the Archaeobiology Laboratory (McCorriston’s lab) from 8-22 January, 2018. Online lectures and laboratory practice made this a crash introduction and excellent resource for phytolith analysis. Students processed ASOM Project archaeological sediments and practiced counting and identifying phytoliths using prepared slides from Buffington’s dissertation on ancient Yemen pastoralist landscapes. We learned a lot and had fun!

Joy traveled to Antibes to attend the 38th Rencontres Internationales d’Archéologie et d’Histoire d’Antibes where she gave a paper by our group under the title “Constructing the South Arabian Landscape.” The conference focused on the construction of niches from refugia in Arabia; our paper argues that all of the Arabian landscape is a cultural niche and that human interventions in natural systems are evident beyond the classic date palm oases emergent in the third millennium BC. Here is a picture of some of the CEPAM students, staff, and conference attendees. Joy was off with Liliane Meignan, parsing theory in Paleolithic archaeology when this was taken.

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.