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Changing Responsibilities and Collective Action:Examining Early North African Pastoralism

Alexandra MillerNorthwestern University

ABSTRACTThis chapter uses the concept of an economic transition point to examine and challenge assumptions about staticgender roles in pastoralist societies. The transition from a hunting-and-gathering economy to an agro-pastoralisteconomy would have forced North Africans to perform tasks related to both economic systems until the pastoralistway of life could be firmly established. The greater need for labor in these transitional societies would have dis-couraged the formation of strict gender divisions like those seen in today’s pastoralist societies. The changing needsof the economy would have necessitated a flexible division of labor. To examine these changing needs, this chapterexamines evidence from rock art, archaeological sites, and modern pastoralist ethnography.

Keywords: gender, Africa, agro-pastoralism, economic transition point

The words African pastoralism evoke not only a subsis-tence system based on the herding of cattle or sheep but

also an ideology that emphasizes the social superiority ofcattle-owning males over females who merely perform rou-tine household tasks. The prevalence of this ideology canbe traced to historical processes, which include the colonialpowers’ tendency to interact only with male authority figuresand the production of ethnographies by male ethnographerswho imposed the Western idea that male activities were theonly “important” ones onto the activity patterns in pastoralsocieties. Dorothy Hodgson terms this historically producednarrative “the myth of the ‘patriarchal pastoralist’ “and ar-gues that” ‘ownership’ is itself a historical category, withassociated presumptions about private property, alienability,and individual control that differ from more communal andcooperative notions of rights and responsibilities” (Hodgson2000a:11).

This chapter questions the assumptions that regardwomen’s activities in pastoral societies as invariant andlargely irrelevant by examining the “rights and responsi-bilities” involved in the initial domestication of cattle by

early Holocene agro-pastoralists. Agro-pastoralism, whichincludes elements of agriculture and animal herding, grad-ually replaced hunting and gathering across many parts ofNorth Africa in the early Holocene. An examination of thisshift allows us to look at the feedback between gender andeconomy at an economic transition point, a point at whichgender roles have been “shaken up” by the introduction ofnew tasks and the consequent need for extra labor. In thissituation, some members of the workforce must take on newtasks and others must compensate by taking over old ones,at least until new subsistence patterns or technologies havemade the old patterns obsolete.

It can be helpful to think of tasks as becoming metaphor-ically ungendered and then re-gendered as one subsistencesystem combines with and eventually supersedes another.This type of thinking, though, can also lead to the prob-lem of gender attribution, which is the assumption that eachgender has assigned tasks within a certain subsistence sys-tem that are just waiting to be “discovered” (Brumfiel n.d.;Conkey and Gero 1991:11). A cursory look at most modernethnographic work will show that although some duties may

ARCHEOLOGICAL PAPERS OF THE AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION, Vol. 18, Issue 1, pp. 76–86, ISSN 1551-823X,online ISSN 1551-8248. C© 2008 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1551-8248.2008.00006.x.

Examining Early North African Pastoralism 77

be ideologically associated with people of one gender withina certain group, in practice people of another gender oftenperform these same duties if it is expedient or necessary(Brettell and Sargent 1997; Murdock and Provost 1973).

Assessing ideological associations within a prehistoricsociety is always one of the most challenging aspects of ar-chaeological work. In addition to the archaeological record,two other tools exist for analyzing the gender ideology ofHolocene agro-pastoralists: ethnographic analogy and rockart. However, two major problems can occur when usingmodern ethnography to interpret ancient art. First, ethno-graphic insights may be projected uncritically onto the art;this projection generates the false notion that society hasremained static since the rock art was created. Second, an-alyzing art through an ethnographic lens may lead to theassumption that the art represents everyday life. When rockart is analyzed instead as a culturally specific collection ofideals about tasks and relationships (Barich 1998; Quinlanand Woody 2003), both its limitations and its value for in-terpreting archaeological data become clear.

A successful re-gendering of archaeological data, then,considers both whatever ideological data are available andthe archaeological evidence for tasks and task combinationsand creates one or several likely hypotheses about humanactions based on this synthesis. These hypotheses shouldrecognize the flexibility of the actors and the existence ofvariability across time and space. As Conkey and Tringham(1997) have noted, some ambiguity will always be inherent inarchaeological interpretations of gender. However, Brumfielargues for selecting the “subset of most likely pasts” inorder to consider women’s (or other “disadvantaged gen-ders”) contributions to past societies (Brumfiel n.d.:10). Shemakes a convincing argument that negating current views ofpast gender relations is unlikely to convince scholars or thepublic to abandon their views unless new formulations areprovided. Therefore, gendered activities may be most pro-ductively viewed as flexible in any given social situation butnot as totally ambiguous.

This chapter will focus on the re-gendering of tasksduring the economic transformation of Site E-75-6 at NabtaPlaya, an Al Jerar phase (ca. 7700 B.P.: 14C) site in south-western Egypt. Archaeological evidence suggests that theinhabitants of Site E-75-6 were in the early stages of do-mesticating cattle and sorghum. However, most residents ofthis site continued to rely on hunting and gathering as theirmajor source of food. During this transitional period, all theresources of a large group would have been required just toperform the daily tasks of subsistence. Rock art across theSahara indicates that pastoral tasks involved men, women,and children, sometimes acting alone and sometimes in

concert. This chapter will explore tasks and task complexesat Nabta Playa by using evidence from rock art and ethnog-raphy in addition to the archaeological evidence from NabtaPlaya itself.

The Problem of Ethnographic Analogy

Ethnoarchaeological studies have proven useful forstudying the adaptation of gendered practices and ideolo-gies in the recent past and especially for examining thosechanges wrought on pastoralist societies by colonialism andclimate alterations. These studies, such as Smith and Web-ley’s (2000) study of the Khoekhoen, have challenged thegendered accounts of current pastoralist societies, which as-sume that women are simply subordinate adjuncts to theirpatriarchal, cattle-owning husbands and that these gender re-lations also existed in precolonial times (Gifford-Gonzalez1998:118). Ethnoarchaeology counters these assumptionsby revealing women’s sources of power in the past and byshowing how some of these past sources of power persist tothe present.

This type of ethnoarchaeology is useful for studyinggroups in the distant past, even those of the early Holocene,insofar as it prevents archaeologists from uncritically ap-plying modern gender stereotypes in their investigations.However, no modern or even recent precolonial group pro-vides an adequate ethnographic representation of the transi-tion from hunting and gathering to agro-pastoralism, simplybecause the process of domestication is already completefor the most common species used in food production. Mostgroups today can specialize in one particular form of subsis-tence because of these domesticates (Banks 1984). Anotherkey ethnographic difference stems from the increase in ter-ritorial wars among pastoralist groups. These wars oftenallow men to claim privileged status as warriors (Earle, per-sonal communication 2006). No evidence for war is found atNabta Playa or most other early pastoralist sites, and the lowpopulation of the area would probably have made territorialconflicts unlikely.

This does not mean that ethnography is useless for an-alyzing gender relations in the past. Gifford-Gonzalez sug-gests, “We must employ ethnographic evidence to moveus beyond facile gender and culture stereotyping, to locatethose enduring and universal facts of pastoral life to which allgroups and households engaged in the keeping of herds andflocks must respond” (Gifford-Gonzalez 1998:123). Ethno-graphies can thus establish a possible universe of subsistencerequirements that human actors can fill in varying manners.Human agency appears in the tasks that the people at a

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particular site chose to perform in order to cope with envi-ronmental and social pressures, and it is in this choice thatarchaeologists can locate information about gender.

Societies undergoing transitions from one subsistencepattern to another require this conception of a possible “uni-verse of tasks” in order to make sense of the combina-tion of strategies that today would be undertaken by sep-arate groups. Modern pastoralists tend to trade for (or buy)agricultural goods from neighboring agricultural societies,leaving the pastoralists free to follow the herds through-out the wet and dry seasons (Banks 1984:213). In earlyagro-pastoralism, agricultural labor would have been addedto herding duties, and there would have been a continuingneed to hunt and gather for the majority of resources. The“universe” of duties thus becomes larger than in more spe-cialized subsistence systems. This implies that each personwould have performed a more varied set of these duties thanhe or she might in a more specialized system. Stereotypessuch as “Woman the Gatherer” or that of the pastoralistwoman who only tends her husband’s home become impos-sible to uphold in this type of “mixed economy,” as Barich(1998:113) terms it. There would simply be too much workleft over for the men to perform if women’s duties wererestricted to one particular sphere (Barich 1998:114).

The following case study examines the site of NabtaPlaya E-75-6 in the Egyptian Sahara. It is meant to closelyexamine some of the site’s characteristics that indicate earlysteps in the domestication of animals and plants and to the-orize about the task patterns that could have helped to createthese particular features.

Sorghum and Cattle at Nabta Playa

Site E-75-6 at Nabta Playa is one of the earliest knownsites that exhibit evidence of a probable shift from huntingand gathering to agro-pastoralism. Nabta Playa lies in theeastern Sahara, within the borders of present-day Egypt (seeFigure 6.1).

The site was occupied during the El Nabta/Al Jerarphase as defined by Wendorf and Schild (2001), with radio-carbon dates clustering at approximately 8000 B.P. (Banks1984:66; Krolik and Schild 2001:111). Archaeological ev-idence indicates a semisedentary population that may havebeen domesticating both sorghum (Sorghum bicolor) andcattle (Bos primigenius f. taurus) (Banks 1984:236). Thisconstellation of semisedentism, domestication of animals,and domestication of plants certainly represents a departurefrom the mobile patterns of hunting and gathering that hadbeen common.

During the El Nabta phase (ca. 8000–7770 B.P.: 14C),Site E-75-6 consisted of two rows of huts organized around abasin in which water would have pooled (Krolik and Schild2001:111). The site was apparently reoccupied during dryseasons for some time, though whether the occupations oc-curred every year is unknown. The same hut areas werereoccupied frequently, as shown by midden deposits fromvarious phases interspersed with sterile deposits. This sug-gests that the occupant group remained fairly consistent yearby year, though new huts were added that may have eitherreplaced some of the old ones or accommodated a growingpopulation. Major features at the site include huts, bell-shaped storage pits within and outside these huts, and fourwells that were probably dug during separate occupations(Krolik and Schild 2001:117–120).

Hunting and gathering remained the primary means ofsubsistence for the residents of E-75-6, as shown by the as-sortment of faunal remains and various wild grain speciesfound at the site. Domestication is indicated by raritiesor anomalies within this hunting-and-gathering system thatare nevertheless significant enough to require explanation.Barich notes that “[t]hese situations [early Holocene adap-tations] can be better defined as transition contexts, in whichprototypes appeared for the first time, that were later destinedfor domestication, through repetitive gathering and selectionprocesses” (Barich 1998:107). This provides the importantreminder that domestication comprises these “gathering andselection processes,” at the end of which animals or plantsare said to be “domesticated”; but domestication itself is aprocess and not a state. The early stages of this process wouldtherefore look much like the previous subsistence system.

Bearing this in mind, irregularities like that found inthe distribution of sorghum at E-75-6 seem suddenly veryimportant. Archaeologists at Nabta found a large number ofcharred cereal caches in storage pits, which all date to theEl Nabta phase. Analysis of the cereals led to the interestingconclusion that the caches belonging to various huts fit intotwo types. One type, found in several huts, contained a largeamount of sorghum (up to 93.9 percent of the total sam-ple) and relatively few other types of cereals (Wasylikowa2001:580). Another type, also found in several huts and inmost of the bell-shaped storage pits outside the huts, con-tained a wider variety of cereal taxa but far less sorghum (aslow as 0.8 percent of the sample) (Wasylikowa 2001:572).

Various models have been proposed to account for thisuneven distribution, but it seems fairly evident, as Wasy-likowa notes, that some family or household groups werecultivating or preferentially gathering sorghum while otherswere not. The sorghum all appeared wild, but Wasylikowabelieves that its similarity to wild sorghum could simply be

Examining Early North African Pastoralism 79

Figure 6.1. Location of Nabta Playa. Courtesy of the University of Texas Libraries, The University of Texas at Austin.

an indicator that it was in the early stages of cultivation.She suggests that this division may reflect either pref-erential gathering for human consumption during yearswhen sorghum was common or that some kin groups whowere familiar with sorghum may have begun to cultivate it(Wasylikowa 2001:581).

The “preferential gathering” hypothesis alone cannotadequately explain the decrease in plant diversity among thesorghum-rich deposits. A preferential-gathering explanationwould argue that once more sorghum was available, peoplewould eat fewer of the less desirable plants that they hadgathered before. This model, while often a valid explanationof varying plant diversity, does not adequately explain theextreme range of variation in the plant remains at E-75-6.

Unless the environment swung between two poles—beingeither so strained that almost no sorghum was available orso rich that it allowed for a sudden sorghum explosion andcollection of samples with up to 90 percent sorghum—thepreferential-gathering model is unlikely to be valid. Thestark distinction between the sorghum-rich and sorghum-poor households therefore suggests that yearly variation inthe environment cannot have been solely responsible forthese gathering patterns.

Another explanation for differential sorghum gatheringor cultivation may be that the sorghum was produced in con-junction with another task in which only some of the com-munity was involved. Some archaeologists, such as Magid,have suggested that sorghum was not native to Egypt and

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was instead brought there by cattle herders from the Sudanto ensure a reliable food source for their herds (Magid 1995).Sorghum today is commonly used for feeding livestock inarid regions, but in order to provide its full nutritional valueto cattle it must be processed first by grinding or some othermethod to remove the bran shell. The huts containing agreater amount of stored sorghum therefore might belongto family groups who were involved somehow in raisingor maintaining cattle. It is possible that the sorghum wasgathered or cultivated independently of cattle grazing andstored for cattle (or human) feed—or that it was gatheredwhile the cattle were grazing and transported back to the site.This would suggest that the two separate tasks of cultivat-ing or gathering sorghum and cattle herding were connectedto one particular group of people with similar subsistencepractices.

A small number of cattle bones were discovered atE-75-6. Gautier (1980, 1987, 2001) has identified thesebones as those of domesticated cattle, though this identi-fication is questioned by Smith (1992). However, as Bankspoints out, the relationship created between animals and hu-mans by domestication has both a biological and a socialcomponent. In Banks’s view, the biological component ofdomestication comprises the physical effects of domestica-tion on the animals, while the social component is made upof the changes in behavior of both humans and animals asa result of this new relationship (Banks 1984:203). Takinga social view of the relationship between cattle and humansin the early stages of domestication may produce a differ-ent opinion about whether cattle were “domesticated” thantaking a biological view.

Given that the presence of early domesticates is alwayslikely to be contested, in order to talk about the effects ofearly agro-pastoralism one must examine a place where thereis some contention about whether domestication had actu-ally occurred. Thus, the topic of the Nabta cattle’s domesti-cation is not entirely settled: some articles (e.g., Smith 1992,2003) have questioned whether the Nabta cattle were domes-ticated. However, Banks (1984), Gautier (1987), Wendorfet al. (1989), and Wendorf and Schild (2001) all providestrong arguments as to why humans must have brought theNabta cattle to the playa. These arguments include the factthat the Nabta site, as one of the most arid parts of thedesert, would be unlikely to contain any cattle at all unlesshumans had brought them there. Relatively complete skele-tal remains of cattle show that the cattle themselves were notkilled and butchered elsewhere but were physically presentat the site before being killed (Gautier 1987).

Gautier (1987:177) argues that the remaining fauna atthe site, mostly very small animals, do not match the ecolog-ical profile of an area where cattle and other large animals

would have been able to survive on their own. Therefore,the cattle, while they may or may not have taken on somebiological characteristics of domestication, were almost cer-tainly dependent on human intervention for their survival.Banks’s criteria for social domestication are thus met. Forthe purposes of this discussion, the arguments for cattle do-mestication at Nabta are considered valid.

Wendorf and Schild (2001) suggest that “task groups”were responsible for the pasturing of the E-75-6 herds at thebeginning of the rainy season (see also Barich 1998:110).This hypothesis is based on the existence around the largesites like E-75-6 of smaller sites that were apparently onlyoccupied for short periods; these sites are thought to becattle camps. Banks notes that “the presence of ceramics,grinding implements, and a full array of tool types at bothsite types signifies that a full complement of maintenancetasks took place at both site types” (Banks 1984:239). Thesmaller “camps” would therefore have been occupied bya large number of people for a lengthy period, comparedto modern practices in which one or two males follow theherds and camp in different places every day or every fewdays. The groups who lived at the smaller sites during thewet season might have had primary responsibility for themaintenance of the herds during the dry season as well.

If the groups who cultivated or gathered sorghum werethe same groups who owned cattle, then it would seem that“task groups” were not divided by gender but by familyor kin group, since the sorghum-rich caches were foundprimarily in certain huts and not at all in others. Entire kingroups might have moved to cattle camps during the wetseason and then returned to E-75-6 during the dry seasonwith their cattle and their surplus grain for storage. Evenif some duties such as pasturing the cattle, milking them,and gathering their feed were typically divided by gender,all those who worked with cattle would have shared thepastoralist social identity.

There is no reason to assume that those who gathered,cultivated, ground, or stored grain for cattle feed would beperceived as less involved with cattle than those who ac-tually took the cattle to pasture. The activities that womenperform among modern pastoralists, such as milking cattleand marketing the milk, as well as supplementing these dairyproducts by gathering, growing, or buying crops, are just asintegral to the workings of a pastoral society as the cattlethemselves (Hodgson 2000a). Modern pastoralists do notprimarily use their animals for meat; they use by-productssuch as milk and blood much more frequently, and they usethe animals as resource or wealth storage. Therefore, thepeople who milk cattle produce the cattle’s key contributionto the food resources of the community. The low numberof cattle remains at E-75-6 indicates that the residents of

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the site may have followed this same practice (Banks 1984),although there is admittedly little supporting evidence thatdairying had yet become a significant part of pastoralistculture.

Gifford-Gonzalez warns that “we must not refrain frominvestigating important areas of resource use and site forma-tion simply because they are in the hands of persons whomour culture—or even the culture under study—depreciates”(Gifford-Gonzalez 1998:119). Although pastoral societiesand ethnographies often marginalize milk and grain con-trol because these types of food do not always enhance thesocial status of their female possessors, neglecting the roleof these tasks in early agro-pastoralist societies would be agrave error.

Task Combinations and GenderedRelationships

The possible interrelationship of sorghum cultivationand cattle domestication at E-75-6 suggests wider associa-tions between tasks, gender, and social status. Using ethno-graphic analogy to apply stereotyped gender binaries atE-75-6 would provide an inadequate and ineffective anal-ysis, because a process like domestication requires the con-tributions of an entire group. Gender attribution obscuresthe strategic relationships between particular activities andsuggests a rigid social order in a society that would haveto be flexible to survive in a harsh environment. It is moreproductive to look at all the activities involved in achiev-ing a certain goal or fulfilling a particular need and thento consider what activities might have been combined byone particular person, whether male or female. In the caseof sorghum and cattle domestication at Nabta Playa, the“mixed economy” of hunting, gathering, possible cultiva-tion of crops, and cattle raising would have ensured thatwomen and men performed many different types of tasks.

Even though certain groups at E-75-6 may have special-ized in cattle herding, the possible cattle camps distributedaround the playa still contain bones of wild game (Gautier2001). Hunting would have been a major food source if cattlewere primarily used for milk products. Grinding stones pro-vide evidence for either cultivation or gathering activities;even if the people at Nabta were cultivating sorghum, theymust have gathered much of their other wild food (Krolikand Schild 2001). The need to hunt, gather, and watch thecattle either would have necessitated a division betweenthose people who watched cattle and those who hunted andgathered or else it would have required someone to performthese tasks while simultaneously moving to new grazing ar-eas. In this case, it would make more sense for the gatherers

to accompany the cattle, given that appropriate vegetationwould probably be available in the same areas where the cat-tle were grazing. Hunting would be extremely constrained ifthe hunters had to remain with slow-moving cattle and wereunable to track or follow fleeing game.

Gathering while herding would also provide the gathererwith information about the herd’s eating habits. Knowledgeabout cattle’s nutritional needs is essential to domestica-tion processes, and finding ways to provide these nutritionalrequirements would have been a major reason for peopleto change their settlement and subsistence patterns (Banks1984:234). The practice of pasturing herds during the wetseason would be one adaptation to this system. During thedry season, the residents of E-75-6 may have used storedfood like the caches with large amounts of sorghum to sup-plement whatever food the cattle could find around the playalake. The people who gathered or cultivated that food forstorage would have to have had just as much specializedknowledge as herders about what cattle eat and how muchof it they eat, as well as knowledge about which key plantswere likely to be unavailable in the winter.

The task combination of gathering plants and tendinga small herd seems to make sense. However, a more likelyscenario avoids even these rigid task divisions. Hunting andgathering may not always have been separate from one an-other, and herding was probably not strictly distinct from ei-ther of these tasks. Although hunters would almost certainlynot take the cattle on their hunting trips, a person herdingcattle would probably not hesitate to kill some small ani-mal if possible, and a hunter would not hesitate to gathersome choice plant if it did not interfere with the hunt. Thosewhose primary tasks were hunting and gathering would thensupplement these takings. This type of flexibility wouldhave enabled people to carry out all the necessary tasksmore efficiently and productively than maintaining rigid di-visions between those who could and could not perform a setduty. The supposedly rigid roles of men and women in pas-toral societies today (but see Hodgson 2000a and the rest ofHodgson’s edited volume [2000] for many critiques of thisconcept) would simply not make sense for a small groupthat had to procure all its own resources.

Storage, Choice, and Social Distinction

If sorghum cultivation or preferential gathering at E-75-6 was associated with groups who also owned cattle,then what of the groups who did not have large amounts ofsorghum in their households? The above model suggests thatsorghum was perceived as cattle feed and that groups whodid not own cattle would therefore have no reason to gather

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or cultivate the plant. The small size of the community wouldimply that knowledge of how to recognize or grow sorghumcould not have been effectively restricted. Therefore, thepeople who stored little sorghum probably did so with justas much intention as the people who stored a great deal.

If the groups who stored sorghum were the only oneswho owned cattle, then the community would have beencomposed of both hunter-gatherers and agro-pastoralistswho had chosen to follow different subsistence systems andstill live in the same place, which leads to a variety of ques-tions about how these two groups interrelated. Each house-hold appears to have stored food for its own use, and thereis no visible evidence for social stratification on the basis ofthe structure of the households, the amount of food stored,or the ownership of domestic animals (Krolik and Schild2001). The wells that were dug at the site may indicate a de-gree of social cooperation in carrying out necessary tasks.The absence of any other form of social hierarchy basedon cattle ownership could indicate either that every groupat the site owned cattle or else that at this early stage ofdomestication cattle were simply perceived as an importantbut optional addition to the hunting-and-gathering lifestyle.

There are two alternative possibilities to consider. Thefirst is that people stored or cultivated sorghum to feed them-selves, unrelated to the ownership of cattle. The second isthat all the groups at E-75-6 owned cattle but fed them dif-ferent types of diets. Neither of these alternatives can offera definite reason as to how separate groups chose a pro-portion of sorghum to include in their stored grain. Both ofthem, however, emphasize the fact that the gatherers in eachresidential group consciously chose the types of plants thatthey wanted to store, rather than responding blindly to envi-ronmental dictates. Gathering may even have been a meansof social differentiation from other residential groups whogathered different plant types or cultivated sorghum.

In any of these scenarios, gathering or cultivation wouldhave been a central activity in the lives of residential groups.Gathering or cultivating plants for storage to feed eithercattle or humans might have required agreement from theentire household on which plants were best to store thatyear, and problems with grain storage would have had anadverse effect on any kin group, possibly resulting in hungeror starvation for the people and their cattle. The acts ofgathering, cultivation, and storage would thus have beenessential to survival for the pastoralists of E-75-6.

Rock Art and Gender Ideology

Rock art has often been used to legitimate claims aboutgender roles, especially in terms of gathering, hunting, andherding, because it is the main window that archaeologists

and art historians have into the ideology of early Holocenesocieties. This makes rock art a valuable source for consid-ering gender and social change. Using rock art independentof substantive archaeological or historic evidence is, how-ever, a problematic endeavor. Subjective ideological inter-pretations have often turned rock art into a simple tool forprojecting current ethnographies into the past. The people inthe pictures become classified as “male” or “female” by theactivities that they perform, not by their appearance. Thiscreates a circular argument: a figure is male because it ishunting and a hunter must therefore always be male.

Interpretations of the rock art scene in Figure 6.2 havesuffered from this type of fallacy. The scene comes from theGilf Kebir, which lies in southern Egypt near Nabta Playa.The figures to the left are almost certainly female, becausemale figures at the same site always have male genitalia.Some of the women in this artwork are holding “sticks.”When males perform this activity within rock art scenes,they are said to be herding the cattle that are near them.The original caption for this picture stated that it depicted agroup of women holding “ritual sticks” (Fliegel JezerniczkyExpeditions 2005). Although the women in this picture mayor may not be herding the nearby cattle, the double stan-dard is clear. Men holding sticks near cattle are assumedto be herding; women holding sticks near cattle are doingsomething indeterminate.

The scene in Figure 6.2 belongs to the Pastoral or Bo-vidian phase of Saharan rock art (ca. 5500–2000 B.C.E.),which is associated with both cattle and ovicaprid (sheepor goat) pastoralism (Brooks et al. 2003:5). This is one ofthe two major “phases” of Saharan rock art that might revealsome of the preoccupations and practices of the population atE-75-6. The other is the Round Head period (ca. 8000–6000B.C.E.), which has often been associated with hunter-gatherergroups in the Tadrart Acacus and Tassili n’Ajjer. The gapbetween these two phases falls squarely into the hypotheticaltransition period at E-75-6. Rock art can only be assigneddates in the very few cases when it is directly associated withdatable archaeological deposits: for example, at Uan Telocatrockshelter in the Tadrart Acacus, deposits that had built upatop Bovidian paintings on the wall dated to 6754 B.P. (14C),so the paintings themselves dated to approximately 7000 B.P.or earlier (Smith 1992:130). However, the vast majority ofrock art is subjectively dated using its content to relate it toeither hunter-gatherer societies or pastoralist societies, andmost rock art is considered to be part of the ideologies ofestablished hunter-gatherer or pastoral systems.

This view tends to make most of the analyses basedon these phases useless for analysis of transition stageslike that of E-75-6. One exception is found in the work ofBarich (1998), who approaches the transition between the

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Figure 6.2. Women with sticks and cattle in a rock-art scene from southern Egypt. Redrawn from Figure 37, L’art rupestrenord-africain, p. 63 (Archaeological Institute of Human Paleontology).

hunter-gatherer and pastoral phases by looking at the rela-tive frequency of women appearing in paintings of both theRound Head and the Pastoral phases. She notes that womenappear much less frequently in paintings of the Pastoralschool than in those of the Bubaline phase, which includesthe Round Head period. She then hypothesizes that womenhad lost social status during the transition to pastoralism.

Although this conclusion may be valid, it also may re-flect pastoralists’ tendency to represent gender in differentways than hunter-gatherers did. Women and men in RoundHead art are often clearly gendered through depiction ofbreasts and penises. In pastoralists’ art, gender distinctionsare not always as clear. Holl (2004) analyzes a set of pastoralpaintings from the Dr. Khen shelter in the Iheren region ofthe Tassili n’Ajjer in which neither men nor women are read-ily identifiable through representations of breasts, penises,or general body shape. He identifies men as the figures withbare upper bodies and women as the figures wrapped in lay-ers of cloth. His basis for this identification relies on thedifferent activities that the bare-upper-body figures and thewrapped figures perform; he argues that the bare figuresare the ones who herd cattle and make decisions about themovements of the group, while the wrapped figures performmore peripheral tasks like tending children or being marriedoff by their male guardians. This interpretation leads to a

circular argument: because wrapped figures perform stereo-typically female tasks, they are female, and because these“females” do not perform stereotypically male tasks, there isclearly a division of labor between males and females. Thedivision between males and females in this case appears tobe an artifact created by the structure of Holl’s analysis.

Holl’s example highlights some of the problems that canoccur when trying to differentiate genders within pastoral-ist art. His identification of male and female figures is quitepossibly correct, but his allocation of decision-making, mar-riage negotiation, and child care to specific genders relieslargely on ethnographic analogy. This automatically repro-duces the biases of modern ethnography in the ancient art-work. Indeed, although women are shown playing an activepart in the majority of the scenes that Holl analyzes, in hisfinal analysis of the Iheren paintings women are reduced to amere “good matrimonial alliance” for a “young and intrepidherdsman” (Holl 2004:137) or relegated to even greater in-visibility in the phrase “Saharan herdsmen and their familiesand chattel” (Holl 2004:139). This type of assessment re-inforces the belief that women become less important inpastoral paintings than in Round Head paintings, althoughthis belief may be an artifact of ethnographic analogy.

Holl himself calls attention to another problem withethnographic analogy as applied to rock art. Taking an

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ethnographic approach to artworks can leave the impressionthat they represent scenes from everyday life. However, Holl(2004) argues, on the basis of the locations of North Africanrock-art sites relative to the communities that housed theartists, that rock art in the Sahara functioned as a documen-tation of pastoralist ideology rather than a series of scenesfrom everyday life. The communities are located in low-lying areas, while the art lies in high, mountainous areas,on the sides of cliffs, or in caves. These locations indicatethat rock art probably had some special ritual or symbolicmeaning; it did not simply depict the life of a pastoralistcommunity (Holl 2004:2). The art thus may reveal sometypical (or atypical) activities of pastoralist women, men,and children, but it cannot by any means provide compre-hensive information on “who did what.”

Ethnographic analogy still offers a valuable tool for an-alyzing rock art, when it is used with caution and with aclear recognition of the flexibility of early pastoralist soci-eties. For example, women appear to be associated with milkproduction throughout the clearly gendered Round Headperiod. In Round Head rock art, women themselves some-times produce milk from their breasts, and the animals theyinteract with often appear to be lactating as well (for ex-amples, see Sansoni 1994). This shows an ideological asso-ciation between women and milk that may have developedinto women’s control over milk products during the pas-toral phase. Modern ethnographies of pastoralist societies,like that of the Maasai, verify that women often have (orhad, until recently) rights over the marketing of cow’s milk(Hodgson 2000b:110).

Conclusion: Re-Gendering the Past andPresent

Although some tasks may have been linked with womenand others with men, the people at E-75-6 had to performa wide variety of different activities in order to survive,including some that may have been ideologically linked topeople of a particular gender. The transition situation inwhich early agro-pastoralists functioned demanded a greatdeal of labor from small task groups, and people would havehad to combine tasks in creative ways in order to keep upwith the workload.

The best way to differentiate task groups at E-75-6 doesnot appear to be through gender but by looking at thosehouseholds that chose to cultivate sorghum and domesti-cate cattle and those that chose to follow a more traditionalhunting-and-gathering lifestyle. At an early point in the do-mestication process, it makes sense that some householdswould place more emphasis on hunting and gathering while

others experimented with new methods of subsistence. Thisis exactly what the difference in stored grains within house-holds would seem to indicate. Those households with a widervariety of stored grains probably relied more on gatheringvarious wild plants for food, while the households with moresorghum probably were somehow invested in using sorghumin particular as a domesticate or as a high-calorie source ofdry cattle feed.

If households were divided from one another in theirmethods of subsistence, then ideological statements of dif-ference would be more likely to focus on the tasks that dis-tinguished cattle owners from hunter-gatherers rather thanon tasks that distinguished men from women. This may beresponsible for the proliferation of pastoralist rock art soonafter domestication occurred. Pastoralists may have beentrying to set themselves apart and extol the virtues of theirlifestyle through ritual artwork. The pastoralist householdwould have been perceived as a coherent economic unit andthen placed in opposition to the households that used huntingand gathering as their primary mode of production.

Modern ethnographies can provide hints as to some ofthe tasks that the E-75-6 residents would have dealt with,and rock art can hint at how they felt about those tasks.The model presented in this chapter questions assumptionsabout the past and present roles of women among pastoral-ists. The broad spectrum of artifacts present at early “cattlecamps,” for example, blurs the distinction between thosewho herd and those who milk, tend, and grow crops andchallenges modern notions of cattle ownership. Strategicgathering and agriculture, tasks that are demeaned amongpastoralists today, may have been essential to survival in thepast, and both men and women would have been heavilyinvolved.

The process of generating hypotheses to re-gender pastand present societies should be an ongoing one, supportedby ethnographic, historical, and archaeological evidence.African pastoralism is by no means the only type of so-ciety in which gender roles have become essentialized anddeny women their proper authority. In order to continue theprocess, additional villages and sites of everyday life shouldbe investigated and new arguments generated that providealternatives to existing stereotypes about gender in the pastand present.

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