Searching for Nomads in Iron Age Thrace

Adela Sobotkova In M. Manoledakis (ed.) 2016. The Black Sea in the Light of New Archaeological Data and Theoretical Approaches. Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on the Black Sea in Antiquity Held in Thessaloniki, 18-20 September 2015, Oxford: 77-87.

Mobile lifestyle is frequently used to explain lacunae in archaeological evidence, such as the absence of permanent and long-term occupations in the archaeological record of 1^st millennium BC Thrace. In this paper, I investigate the feasibility of Iron Age nomadic pastoralism, defined as an economic activity in which the whole community moves along with the herds. New paleoecological, paleo-diet, and settlement data produced by the Tundzha Regional Archaeological Project, when complemented by historical and ethnographic sources, show that the necessary conditions for nomadic pastoralism were not present in Thrace during the 1^st millennium BC.