Mobility
The OED definition of pastoralism suggests that living from grazing herds naturally implies a nomadic existence. This issue is clearly of key importance in understanding the nature of pastoralist societies, particularly the nature of land tenure and the environments they inhabit.
The topic becomes particularly interesting where there was potential for conflict of interest in land use between mobile herders and sedentary agriculturalists. Despite high mobility offering some military advantage in short-term territorial gains, for instance by the Mongol invaders, history appears to suggest that the long-term winners in such conflicts have been settled agricultural groups who defend defined territories, with, most likely, higher population densities. Surviving groups of nomadic pastoralists are only to be found in lands that are marginal or impossible for agriculture. Even then, the scale of their mobility is somewhat curtailed by modern geopolitics. In Africa, groups like the Maasai, Tuareg, and Bedouin are still mobile, but much less nomadic than records show they once were.[302] Kazakh steppe pastoralists were forcibly settled by Soviet interventions, and not just in the agriculturally rich north of Kazakhstan.[303] Mongol herders still maintain strong nomadic traditions,[304] as do some groups of reindeer herders, such as the Evenki in Siberia.[305]Mobility can be classified into two basic types. First, a ‘nomadic pastoralist' moves constantly, camping for only relatively short periods in any given area. The economic assumption that underlies such regular movement is that most lands can only support the grazing of animals for a limited period before needing to be left to regenerate. The pattern of movement is also likely to take account of the likely availability of water sources in dry seasons, and more sheltered areas in cold winters.
Storage of fodder is rarely practised. Second, ‘transhumant pastoralists' tend to move their stock seasonally between two areas of pasture. Most commonly, this involves taking herds into upland pastures during the summer when these areas are free of snow, and returning to a lowland base in winter. This can be regarded as a semi- sedentary way of life, because lowland settlements are often long term and include the construction of immovable houses. The summer residences are temporary encampments and, in some cases, only part of the population travels with the herds into the uplands, so lowland residences might be occupied year round. Such transhumance with livestock is common around the Mediterranean and in Alpine regions among traditional farming economies today and in the recent past.[306] Such groups are, of course, not purely pastoralists, and it is hotly contested whether these transhumant practices date back into prehistory in their familiar form. If one examines ethnographic examples of pastoralism in the Central Asian steppes, both forms of mobility are found. To take Kazakhstan as an example, pastoralists in the central semi- arid steppe zones were certainly fully nomadic, as they remain today in many regions of Mongolia. But in the foothills of upland zones such as the Altai and Tian Shan mountains, they practised transhumance, and ethnic Kazakh groups on the Chinese side of the Tian Shan still do.[307]Because mobility is fairly ubiquitous among ethnographic examples of pastoralism, there has been a general assumption that prehistoric pastoralists were similarly mobile. While this may be true for the majority of cases, the assumption could be dangerous. All our ethnographic examples come from environments that are relatively marginal from an agricultural point of view, so these are areas where pastoralists have not faced competition from other cultures. In periods when there were lower populations and less worldwide pressure on land, it is possible to conceive of pastoralists inhabiting richer lands, with higher levels of plant growth and resource predictability.
In such circumstances, it may not have been necessary to range so widely, and it may have been possible to concentrate herd movements around a sedentary base. It is key to remember that activities in the past do not always have modern or recent analogues, so assumptions of this type should be avoided.It is archaeologically very difficult to reconstruct patterns of mobility among ancient pastoralists. Fully nomadic groups will leave extremely ephemeral settlement evidence. In some cases funerary monuments may be much easier to find than domestic structures, but such monuments will tell us relatively little about the pastoral economies of their builders, even if they do inform us about other social matters. Transhumance is much more likely to leave a good archaeological signature, because of semi-sedentary sites, with more substantial domestic structures, and more structured patterns of repeated movement. Zooarchaeologists are relatively accustomed to reconstructing the seasonality of hunting camps, but slaughter patterns within mobile domestic herds are much more likely to relate to global husbandry strategies and, hence, will not mark out the season of site use in the same way as an immediate-return hunting economy will. Advances in isotope science offer a potential solution to this problem. The stable isotopes of oxygen within the atmosphere change with temperature and season. An animal will absorb different ratios of oxygen isotopes from its diet at different times of year. In most of the body this isotopic record is not preserved, but it is preserved in teeth as they grow and form in the jaw of a young animal. If one extracts samples of tooth enamel and analyses them for isotope ratios, then one sees seasonal fluctuation in temperature over the months of growth which that tooth represents.[308] Nomadic or transhumant movement of herds on a seasonal basis will affect those patterns. Furthermore, the tooth profile will also record changing geographic sources of diet over the year. Plants carry isotopic signatures of the geologies they grow on, and these can be reflected in the stable isotope ratios seen in trace metals such as strontium. Movements from one geological zone to another may therefore also show up in the isotopic analysis of tooth profiles. By combining these two lines of evidence, it is becoming possible to understand animal seasonal movements much more precisely.[309] These methods are still very new, and while they have been demonstrated to work, much larger samples need to be analysed before a clear picture of mobility is established for most early pastoralist societies.