▶ Nomadic and Pastoral Societies
introduction
Historians and archaeologists take a keen interest in the
ways in which ancient societies were organized and how they
scratched a living out of the resources available to them. Th e
earliest Stone Age peoples were largely hunter-gatherers,
meaning that they lived in small bands and survived by mov-
ing from place to place, usually following seasonal patterns,
to fi nd game, fruits, berries, roots, nuts, and leafy vegetables.
Most Native American tribes and the aboriginal people of
Australia provide good examples of nomadic communities.
Th ese early people were called nomads, meaning that they
lived in temporary settlements.
As early human communities made the transition from
hunting and gathering to agriculture, many came to depend
on herds of animals, including cattle, sheep, goats, llamas,
camels, and yaks. Th ey already knew about the behavior of
the animals they hunted, especially those that ran in herds,
so herding was a way to ensure a steady and reliable source of
food using similar knowledge and skills. Th ese animals pro-
vided people with meat, milk, cream, and butter. Th ey also
supplied hides for leather, horns and bones for tools and other
objects, and dung to burn for fuel or use as fertilizer. Ancient
herders even discovered that enzymes from the stomachs of
these animals are useful in coagulating milk to make cheese.
In the ancient world, where people struggled to survive, vir-
tually every part of the animal was used in some way.
Communities that relied on herding for their livelihood
are said to be pastoral, a word derived from the Latin word
pastor, meaning simply “herdsman.” Ancient herders needed
to fi nd grazing land for their herds, so many maintained a no-
madic life, moving from place to place to fi nd vegetation for
their herds. Th ese nomads not only provided food for large
numbers of people but also played a role in the diff usion of
ideas. In moving about, they made contact with other com-
munities, lessening the isolation of these communities and
sharing knowledge, technologies, medical practices, and the
like. Th ey were also traders, bringing their products to com-
munities of agriculturalists and exchanging them for crops
and other goods that they could not provide for themselves.
Some, however, settled into relatively fi xed communi-
ties; historians use the word sedentary to refer to ancient
communities that were more or less permanent and fi xed.
Th ese pastoral communities, like agricultural communities,
played a major role in human development. By tying people
to the land and a defi ned community, they allowed people to
form towns and eventually cities that gave rise to the major
achievements of the ancient world.
It should be noted that historians disagree about the se-
quence of developments t hat led to pastora lism. Some see it as
a natural outgrowth of hunting and gathering. Th us, they be-
lieve that pastoralism was the second step in a sequence that
began with hunting-gathering and led to agriculture. Others,
however, believe that pastoralism was the third step in this
sequence, so that farming predated pastoralism. Th ese his-
torians argue that as human populations became denser and
more pressure was placed on farms to be productive, people
turned to pastoralism as a way to exploit land farther away
from towns and cities.AFRICA
BY KIRK H. BEETZ
Th e history of ancient African nomads and pastoralists is one
of people trying to adapt to climate and geography. It is a story
with many twists and turns. For instance, the Fulani in cen-
tral Niger have a history stretching back perhaps 6,000 years;
during that time, they have been nomadic pastoralists, herders
who migrated from highlands to lowlands and back according
to the seasons, herders with fi xed homes, and farmers of grain,
and they have shift ed from one way of life to another more
than once as they adjusted to changes in rainfall.
Th e Fulani are oft en cited by people studying the ancient
Saharan pastoralists, because some of their religious rituals
duplicate ones found depicted in Saharan rock paintings dat-
ing back to 3000 b.c.e. For instance, in one rock painting dat-
ing back 5,000 years a cow is depicted being herded through
a doorway of palm fronds shaped like a large letter U, with
people dancing nearby and others tending to the cow. Th is
ritual is still performed by the Fulani; it is intended to protect
people from illness. One should take care in making infer-
ences about an ancient culture that has had several thousand
years to develop and change, but archaeologists nonetheless
infer from modern Fulani customs that their ancient Saharan
society was patriarchal and one in which individual people
developed their places in society through complex family re-
lationships, making those relationships more important than
any fi xed territory. As the nomadic Fulani moved across the
grasslands of the Sahara, family relationships would be the
social constants of their lives, rather than villages.
Another people thought to have a lineage as ancient as
that of the Fulani are the modern Beja people of Nubia, who
were called “Blemmye” in ancient times. Like the Fulani, they
had a nomadic pastoralist culture that changed over thou-
sands of years as the climate of North Africa changed. Th ey,
the Fulani, and other herders are thought by archaeologists
to have been nomads when they began herding cattle; they
wandered with their herds across vast grassy plains, moving
according where they found food for their cattle. Wars would
have been fought over possession of cattle, not territory. Some
pastoralists used their cattle for food, but others kept them
as signs of wealth. Th e development of territorial confl icts
would have come aft er the Sahara began to dry up around
3000 b.c.e. As rivers dried, wells would have been needed to
water the herds, and those wells would have been protected
from outsiders. Th e response of the Blemmye to the drying of
the Sahara was to move to sources of water to the east of the
Sahara and settle in villages near water, seldom moving their
herds far from their villages.786 nomadic and pastoral societies: Africa