How to create Nomads
- Thread starter Berserker
- Start date
assuming a modern setting and with small bands, they could simply move to follow seasonal work. wild herds are pretty much gone except in a few part of the world so that's out.
Another option is the raiding party. You move around both to attack preys and to stay one step ahead of your enemies.
Starving. Let's assume a disease touching the main cattle and/or agricultural production of a people, and you'll have soon peasant forced to move regularly.
If the region is isolated and/or without too much ways to free land for these people to return to original lifestyle, you may have something.
If the region is isolated and/or without too much ways to free land for these people to return to original lifestyle, you may have something.
War. A settled people become victims of regular incursions from a foreign power intent on genocide or enslaving them, and are forced to flee their homes to a more remote and inhospitable location, where a nomadic lifestyle is more appropriate.
Also, economics. A group of people may try to get into the 'gypsy' niche of society, acting as entertainers or tinkers. This will require them to have a settled community to interact with but not integrate into.
Also, economics. A group of people may try to get into the 'gypsy' niche of society, acting as entertainers or tinkers. This will require them to have a settled community to interact with but not integrate into.
The Pannonian basin is pretty good farmland. I don't see nomads setting up base there permanently. Farmers would definitely move in, and probably drive the nomads to less farmable steppe.
Perhaps if there was some sort of mega-drought in the region, but even then the rivers would still support sedentary farmers.
The Bedouin went nomad from living in settled farms when they moved into the deserts (for obvious reasons).
There are theories that the Cossacks were originally peasants and serfs who fled to the open steppes in order to find a better life.
The Irish Travellers, perhaps?
There are also cases of Native American groups that were displaced by European contact adopting somewhat of a nomadic lifestyle - For example, the agriculturalists of the Amazon river basin that turned to smaller, nomadic and semi-nomadic lifestyles after their societies were ravaged by disease, or farming and horticultural groups in Eastern North America that were driven further and further west due to the influx of white settlers during the colonial period.
The introduction of the horse also seems to have led certain Great Plains groups that were in the stages of adopting agriculture to stay nomadic or become even more so.
The Mississippian Cultures. Their cities were already in serious decline, probably due to climate change from the Little Ice Age, but when the European disease epidemics hit in the late 1500s, well ahead of Europeans in the area, the survivors fled the remaining permanent settlements and went back to a semi-nomadic lifestyle, becoming the Chickasaw, Cherokee, Apalachee, Alabama, Choctaw, Creek, Yamasee, and a half-dozen other tribes.
The Great Plains tribes abandoned river valley farming for pastoralism as soon as they worked out the domesticated horse.
