Every summer for the past eight years, Michael Frachetti has
come to the desert steppe that rolls like endless yellow waves
across Kazakhstan searching for evidence of a vast, connected
nomadic society. With each new excavation, Frachetti, an
archeologist at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri,
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
US 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 cafe last month, a
few days before trekking to the Sarye