Introduction

Barfield (2003) expands on the difficulties that a modern ethnographer encounters in his or her work when explaining the past. Our information, our clues about the past, are hidden in sources of a widely varying kind, each demanding a different interpretational approach. It consists of texts, archaeological sites and settlement patterns. To interpret these sources, we inevitably use the present. We use analogy, often combined with experimental archaeology. Fernand Braudel (1949) introduced the concept of the longue durée, the long, slow cycles of history that lay underneath the political, social and natural events that create the historical narrative. The current of the longue durée in a particular part of the world is determined by geography, climate and social structure, all of which change little, if at all, over time. The concept of the longue durée is the justification for the work of the ethnographer. In this study it is the justification for the continuity of tribalism, the way of life that determined society in the Near East until the beginning of the twentieth century.