Multi-Season Reproduction and Pastoralist Production Strategies: New Approaches to Birth Seasonality from the South Caucasus Region

ABSTRACT

Current debates about pastoralists’ role in the development of complex forms of political organization in the ancient Near East and the Caucasus revolve around questions about pastoralist production and mobility. This study investigates sheep birth seasonality at Late Bronze Age (1500–1100 b.c.) sites in the Tsaghkahovit Plain, Armenia, using ${\delta }^{18}$O data from the incremental analysis of tooth enamel and zooarchaeological age at death data. Incorporating age at death data in sampling and analysis, and analyzing larger datasets, makes it possible to use birth seasonality data to examine the organization of pastoralist production, labor, and mobility. Analysis reveals that sheep were born across multiple seasons (80% of the annual cycle) in the Tsaghkahovit Plain and that there are significant differences in the birth seasonality of sheep slaughtered at different ages. The data suggest that herders in the Tsaghkahovit Plain were actively manipulating sheep reproduction by both constraining and expanding it.

KEYWORDS:

• Late Bronze Age
• mortality/survivorship analyses
• oxygen isotopes
• pastoralism
• zooarchaeology
• sheep
• milk

Acknowledgements

Publication of this research was supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowships for Assistant Professors Fund at the Institute of Advanced Study, and the original research project was supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation [#8998] and the University of Chicago Social Sciences Division. Many thanks to Ruben Badalyan and Adam T. Smith for access to the faunal materials from the Project ArAGATS excavations and to Kelly Knudsen for laboratory access. In addition, thanks go to Ariel Anbar, Gwyneth Gordon, and the staff and faculty at the W.M. Keck Foundation Laboratory for Environmental Biogeochemistry for laboratory access and expertise. I am grateful to Camilla Sturm and Soudeep Deb for their helpful comments and suggestions and for the comments provided by the three anonymous reviewers.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflicts of interest are declared by the author.

Geolocation Information

Gegharot: 38 T 434555E 4506367N; Tsaghkahovit: 38 T 434965E 4498728N.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by: the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowships for Assistant Professors Fund at the Institute of Advanced Study; the Wenner-Gren Foundation under Grant #8998; and, the University of Chicago Social Sciences Division.

Notes on contributors

Hannah Chazin

Hannah Chazin (Ph.D. 2016, University of Chicago) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University. She is currently the co-director of the Karashamb Animals Project and has been a team member of Project ArAGATS for the past 10 years. Her research interests include the longterm history of human-animal relationships, the archaeology of political life, and the integration of scientific methods into archaeological theory and interpretation.