Nomadism in Iran

Daniel Potts’s volume delivers a broad overview of the historical practice of nomadism in Iran, with a particular focus on the political impact of transhumant pastoralist groups. Potts’s longue durée begins even earlier than stated in the title, as he presents a systematic chronological narrative that runs from the Neolithic Revolution to that of 1979. At the core of the volume, however, lie two critical observations of the current dominant perspectives on early pastoralism in this region. The first is that nomadism has been misidentified in the archaeological record as an autochthonous development in deep prehistory. Potts instead proposes that communities practising perpetual transhumance arrived through a series of migrations of nomads, which began not before the middle centuries of the first millennium BC. His second thesis is that prevailing archaeological depictions of early Iranian nomadic practice are flawed in their representation of these groups, as they are based on nineteenth- and twentieth-century ethnographic observations of societies that are markedly different. These two poignant challenges frame the book; laid out in the initial chapters and returning in the final conclusions, which stress the departure of modern nomadic societies from earlier models of political and economic organisation. The intermediate chapters chart the development of pastoralism between the earliest documented nomads in Persia and the tribal groups of modern Iran

Ancient history · Archaeology · Art · Ethnography · Geography · Literature · Narrative · Pastoralism · Political science · Politics · Prehistory · Representation (politics · Sociology · Ancient Near East History · Anthropology · Archaeology and ancient environmental studies · Eurasian Exchange Networks · History · Law