Joy McCorriston, PhD

Professor at Department of Anthropology

Director of Middle East Studies Center

The Ohio State University

An oasis green in date palms and flowing water haunts the imagery of Saharan-Arabian desert life, but it was Arabia’s mobile pastoral communities that connected oases, carried goods, and transferred information among oasis nodes. This talk links archaeological research on the origins and resilience of pastoral societies in Southern Arabia. Archaeological fieldwork in Yemen documented the earliest domesticates and the landscapes in which food production (herding domesticated cattle, sheep, and goats) emerged as an independent adaptation to Southern Arabia’s arid wadi (canyon) ecosystems. These domesticates preceded oasis farming by at least 3000 years. A remarkable Neolithic monument in Wadi Sana, Yemen, provides unprecedented evidence for an early development of cattle pastoralism and Arabia’s distinctive pilgrimage societies. Building on these findings, further survey and small-scale excavations in Dhofar, Oman have suggested a social resilience to changing desert landscapes in which people sustained mobile pastoralism, episodic social congregation, and monumental touchstones to social identities.