Mobility and Ancient Society in Asia and the Americas (PDF)

Dr. Michael Frachetti is a professor at Washington University in St. Louis. The main focus of his research is on the dynamic strategies of pastoral nomadic societies living in the steppe region, mountains, and deserts of Central and Eastern Eurasia. His work centers primarily on pastoralism in the Bronze Age, which is intricately tied to questions of social and economic interaction between regional populations across Central Asia at that time. His theoretical interests center on how social groups utilize economic and political strategies to communicate inter-regionally, and how variability in their economic and social strategies introduces opportunities for reshaping the boundaries of their social landscapes and human interactions. He is also interested in the relationships between pastoral strategies and the environment, and how the choices and ways of life of mobile groups contributed to the formation of wide reaching networks as early as 2000 BC (the Mid-Bronze Age). He currently conduct field research in Eastern Kazakhstan, where He is exploring the ways by which pastoral societies employed flexible temporal and spatial patterns of mobility to negotiate ecological constraints as well as alter the political and social conditions of their landscape.

Dr. Robert N. Spengler III is a research associate at Washington University in St. Louis. He is using macrobotanical methods to the study of prehistoric Inner Asian economy, specifically looking at trajectories of agricultural spread and adoption. He is interested in questions about the paleoenvironment, cultural exchange, and social orders in the arid and mountainouszones of Central Asia and western China. These questions feed into a broader understanding of human adaptations, social development, and complexity, while building a new view of the development of complex societies and the role of agricultural intensification.