grazing land. Th e hunter-gatherers who inhabited Europe
until the appearance of agriculture between 9,000 and 6,000
years ago could be called nomads in the sense that they relo-
cated their settlements periodically. Archaeologists try to fi g-
ure out how oft en campsites were moved and for what reason.
For example, the hunter-gatherers who recolonized northern
Europe aft er the retreat of the ice sheets migrated in pursuit
of herds of reindeer, which were abundant in the territory of
modern-day Germany, Poland, Denmark, and Sweden.
Aft er the introduction of agriculture based on the culti-
vation of crops, the sort of nomadism that characterized the
ice age inhabitants of Europe generally disappeared. Farm-
steads, and eventually villages and towns, were built in fi xed
locations near fi elds, streams, and communication routes.
Initially, domestic animals such as cattle, sheep, and goats
were used only for their meat, which they could provide only
once, when they were killed. Eventually, however, these ani-
mals became valued for the products that they could supply
while they were living, such as milk and wool. Such products
can be collected from the animal over and over, making the
living animal valuable. People began to amass large numbers
of livestock, and with their animals they began to accumulate
wealth.
In some areas domestic animals became the founda-
tion of the farming economy. Instead of fertile soil, herders
sought rich pasture for their livestock. Grazing animals de-
plete grass, so it is necessary to relocate from exhausted graz-
ing land to fresh pasture periodically. Such societies returned
to a nomadic way of life, but one much diff erent from that
of the ice age. Such mobile people who move their herds in
search of pasture and water are known to archaeologists and
anthropologists as mobile pastoralists. Mobile pastoralism is
a complex way of life, determined by the relationships among
agriculture and animal husbandry in society, by natural ge-
ography and the kinds of livestock, and by the ownership of
herds. Th ese factors combined in diff erent ways to create a
wide range of adaptations in livestock management in an-
cient Europe. While hardly ever manifested in their pure
form, several basic types of mobile pastoralism can be distin-
guished on the basis of known historical and ethnographic
examples.
Nomadic pastoralism is the traditional form of land use
in the Old World, from deserts to savannas, mainly practiced
in the ecozone of the tropical and subtropical arid regions.
In the classic sense, it is practiced by entirely mobile human
populations, who oft en follow seasonal routes, generally
along a north-south axis, in search of pasture for their herds.
Th ese paths are not necessarily followed repeatedly, but they
tend to be bound to vegetation along the courses of rivers or
near other sources of freshwater. Aside from this technical
defi nition, the term nomadic also refers to sophisticated civi-
lizations, such as the Scythians and the Xiongnu, both fl our-
ishing before the Christian era. Th e Eurasian steppes saw a
succession of nomadic empires that largely relied on nomadic
pastoralist communities.
Tra n s h u m a n c e is a more specialized form of mobile pas-
toralism in which part of the livestock is moved to seasonal
pastures over the course of the year, usually from a perma-
nent home settlement. Ethnographic examples show, for ex-
ample, that large herds of sheep may be thus moved with only
a few goats or cows that supply daily milk for the herders.
Many of them, however, as well as pigs and chicken, remain
in the main settlement. Transhumance thus involves a degree
of specialization both in terms of the animal species herded
and the part of the population, usually families of herdsmen,
who are assigned to this task. Transhumant pastoralists tend
to cover shorter distances and follow routes used by many
generations. Th e most common form, vertical transhumance,
moves herds to summer pastures at high altitudes. Today this
system remains best known in the Alps in Europe. Ancient
references to it in peninsular Italy are found in the Roman
scholar Varro’s Rerum rusticarum libri III (Agricultural Top-
ics in Th ree Books)
Inverse transhumance means that inhabitants in moun-
tain areas take their fl ocks to low-lying winter grazing areas
in better-protected valleys, a form of animal husbandry that
was documented not only for Vlach shepherds living in the
Carpathians in the Middle Ages but indeed during the time
of Augustus in the early Common Era. Th e Roman poet Hor-
ace, in his Epodes, mentions fl ocks exchanging Calabrian
fi elds for Lucanian ones while it is cool.
Horizontal transhumance refers to the cyclical movement
of herds in plains, largely dependent on the seasonal extremes
of water conditions. Th is makes its archaeological evidence
especially elusive. Th e hypthosis has been put forward that
the fi rst farming communities of the Starčevo/Körös cultures,
who inhabited the low-lying section of the Carpathian Basin,
practiced seasonal exploitation of fl oodplains and must have
herded their sheep between seasonally inundated areas. Ac-
cording to recent ethnographic documents, large stock (cattle
and horses) were seasonally grazed between shoals and river
bars in the inland delta of the Danube River between modern-
day Slovakia and Hungary. At the other extreme, examples of
aridity’s imposing seasonal limitation on grazing have been
identifi ed since the Chalcolithic (fi ft h to fourth millennium
b.c.e.) in the Middle East.
Because they are mobile, these types of pastoralism share
many traits and are oft en confused with each other. Identi-
fying them in the archaeological record is diffi cult because
these mobile lifestyles leave little evidence behind. Th e pres-
ence of nomads is indicated primarily when archaeologists
fi nd a single layer of settlements, temporary in appearance,
and the remains of mobile domesticated animals, such as
horses, cattle, or sheep (as opposed to pigs, which are con-
sidered a more sedentary animal). Identifying transhumant
pastoralism is diffi cult because excavations usually recover
architectural remains of centralized settlements, while the
lightweight, transient structures in temporary summer pas-
tures leave much less of a trace and might also occur outside
intensively excavated areas altogether.nomadic and pastoral societies: Europe 793