Invisibility and Visibility: A Background to the Archaeology of Pastoral Nomadism

In his introductory essay to Perspectives on Nomadism , Neville Dyson-Hudson (1972) complained about what he saw as a fundamental backwardness in anthropological research on pastoral nomadic societies. In spite of a large fi rst-hand descriptive literature, nomadic studies into the 1950s were dominated by approaches essentially non-anthropological, anthropologically simplistic, or even obsolete. Writing in 1972, Dyson-Hudson viewed the 1950s as a watershed period which saw the fi rst social anthropologists working directly with nomads, and, citing especially the work of Frederik Barth (e.g., 1961, 1969), the 1960s as marking the adoption of anthropological interpretations of that fi eldwork. One could make a similar claim with respect to work on hunter-gatherers, beginning with the Man the Hunter volume (Lee and Devore 1968), regardless of later critique.