- For other senses of this word, see nomad (disambiguation).
Kazakh nomads in the steppes of the Russian Empire, ca.
1910
Pastoral nomads camping near
Namtso in 2005
Communities of nomadic people move from place to place, rather than settling down in one location. Many cultures have been traditionally nomadic, but nomadic behaviour is increasingly rare in industrialised countries. Typically there are two kinds of nomads, pastoral nomads and peripatetic nomads. Pastoralists raise herds and move with them so as not to deplete pasture beyond recovery in any one area. Peripatetic nomads are more common in industrialised nations travelling from place to place offering a trade wherever they go. Nomadism is suggested to have originated throughout three stages that accompany population growth and an increase in the density of social organization. Sadr has suggested the following stages:
- Pastoralism This is a mixed economy with a symbiosis within the family.
- Agropastoralism This is when symbiosis is between segments or clans within an ethnic group.
- True Nomadism This is when sybiosis is at the regional level, mostly it starts between specialized nomadic and agricultural populations.
Nomadic people in industrialized nations
Modern nomads in industrialized nations
Indigenous nomadic peoples
History of nomadic peoples
Nomadic pastoralism seems to have developed as a part of the secondary products revolution proposed by Kurt Flannery, in which early pre-pottery neolithic cultures, that had used animals in order to store live meat (on the hoof) began also using animals for their secondary products, for example, milk, wool, hides, manure and traction.
The first nomadic pastoral society developed in the period from 6200 - 6000 BC in the area of the southern Levant. There during a period of increasing aridity, PPNB cultures in the Sinai were replaced by a nomadic pastoral pottery using culture, which seems to have been a cultural fusion between a newly arived mesolithic people from Egypt (the Harifian culture), adopting their nomadic hunting lifestyle to the raising of stock. This quickly developed into what Jaris Yurins has called the circum-Arabian nomadic pastoral techno-complex and is possibly assocoated with the appearance of Semitic languages in the region of the Ancient Near East. The rapid spread of such nomaic pastoralism was typical of such later developments as of the Yamnaya culture of the horse and cattle nomads of the Eurasian steppe, or of the Turko-Mongol spread of the ater Middle Ages.
Many Native Americans and Indigenous Australians were nomadic prior to Western contact, although they were not a pastoral people in that they did not systematically raise animals on whose products they depended.
See also
Further reading
