This introductory chapter discusses how archaeologists have studied and represented pastoralism, often in ways that parallel the tropes that the film Grass introduced. Despite decades of work and varied approaches associated with different theoretical traditions, archaeologists largely have not written histories of pastoralism that address continuity and change. The archaeology of pastoralism faces four longstanding problems that contribute to an ongoing tendency to see pastoralists as changeless: (1) conceptual conflation, (2) misuse of ethnographic analogy, (3) a paucity of direct data, and (4) separate regional traditions of research.