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For other senses of this word, see nomad (disambiguation).

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. There are three kinds of nomads, hunter-gatherers, pastoral nomads, and peripatetic nomads. Nomadic hunter-gatherers have by far the longest-lived subsistence method in human history, following seasonally available wild plants and game. 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.

Nomadic hunter-gatherers

For more than one million years before domestication, nomadic hunter-gatherers moved from campsite to campsite following game and wild fruits and vegetables. This lifestyle consisted of staying for a period at a campsite, and then picking up and leaving when the food moved.

Examples of nomadic hunter-gatherers

Pastoral Nomads

The term "nomad" most often refers to one whose subsistence is based upon domestication of animals. This nomadic pastoralism is thought to have developed in three stages that accompanied population growth and an increase in the complexity of social organization. Sadr has proposed 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 symbiosis is at the regional level, mostly it starts between specialized nomadic and agricultural populations.

Origin of nomadic pastoralsm

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 arrived 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 nomadic 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 later Middle Ages.

Examples of pastoral nomads

Traditionally nomadic people in industrialized nations

Nomadism unique to industrialized nations

See also

Further reading

  • Sadr, Karim. The Development of Nomadism in Ancient Northeast Africa, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991. ISBN 0812230663
  • Cowan, Gregory. "Nomadology in Architecture: Ephemerality, Movement and Collaboration" University of Adelaide 2002 (available: *)
  • Grousset, René. L'Empire des Steppes (1939)
  • Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (1980)

Nomads | Cultural anthropology | Simple living

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This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the "Nomad".

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