Ancient nomads offer insights to modern crises

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, Dr. Frachetti, an archaeologist at Washington University, hopes to complicate received notions of the lives and societies of the nomads who once thrived in this region.

Dr. Frachetti's work concerns Bronze Age nomads, and his scholarship is aimed purely at a historical understanding of how a preliterate society functioned more than 3,000 years ago. But his work coincides with a geopolitical reality that has important implications for American foreign policy makers: many of the countries that most trouble the West -- like Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia -- have government institutions that reflect a nomadic past.

Recent investigations have challenged long-held views of nomadic culture as purely transient, with little impact on the urban, sophisticated societies that emerged later.

Instead, scientists like Dr. Frachetti are discovering that nomadic cultures are flexible, switching between transient and more sedentary ways of life, and assimilating and inventing new ideas and technologies. Nomads created durable political cultures that still influence the way those countries interact with outsiders or negotiate internal power struggles.

•	Ancient Nomads Offer Insights to Modern Crises Memo From Almaty The New York Times, Wednesday, Aug. 8, 2007 Byline: Ilan Greenberg

	Story also ran in 1 others:  International Herald Tribune