This dissertation focuses on the interactions of mobile pastoralist groups with sedentary farming communities in the Late Bronze Age period (1950-1500 BCE) in the Murghab alluvial fan of present-day Turkmenistan. Traditional archaeological and historical studies in Central Asia, focused as they are on urban contexts or centers of dense population, have colored interpretations of mobile-sedentary interaction in prehistory and helped reinforce a view that mobile and settled groups were always at odds with one another. The Late Bronze Age Murghab marks the period and locale of the first sustained interaction between distinct cultural communities of mobile pastoralists and sedentary farmers in southern Central Asia. To evaluate long-held conceptions of mobile-sedentary relationships here, this study presents some of the first empirical archaeological data from mobile pastoralist occupation sites. Specifically, I present the results of excavations undertaken at the site of Ojakly (Site 1744), currently the earliest-dated (ca. 1600 BCE), largest, and most complex mobile pastoralist site known in the Murghab. Results from Ojakly, I suggest, reveal how communities are able to participate in and re-shape distinct social institutions without submitting to hegemonic directives or cultural assimilation.