By Ilan Greenberg
Wednesday, August 8, 2007
ALMATY, Kazakhstan: Every summer for the past eight years, Michael Frachetti has come to the desert steppe that rolls like endless yellow waves across this expansive Central Asian nation searching for evidence of a vast, connected nomadic society.
With each new excavation, Frachetti, an archaeologist at Washington University in St. Louis, hopes to complicate received notions of the lives and societies of the nomads who once thrived in this region.
Frachetti's work concerns Bronze Age nomads, and his scholarship is aimed purely at a historical understanding of how a pre-literate society functioned more than 3,000 years ago. But his work coincides with a geopolitical reality that has important implications for American foreign policymakers: many of the countries that most trouble the West - such as Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia - have government institutions that reflect a nomadic past.
"Take Afghanistan, where politics are much more dispersed," said Frachetti, while sitting in an upscale Almaty café in July, a few days before trekking to the Saryesik-Atyrau Desert to conduct that remote area's first archeological survey. "I think some of our foreign policy complications derive from our inability to locate a nomadic dynamic within contemporary political structures."
More at http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/08/08/news/kazakh.php
