One common misconception about hunter-gatherers is that they were simply itinerant wanders with no attachment to any particular parcel of land. Rather, hunter gatherers were deeply and intimately tied to the land they inhabited. As one anthropologist wrote about the connection to the land among the native inhabitants of Australia:
No English words are good enough to give a sense of the links between an Aboriginal group and its homeland. Our word "home," warm and suggestive though it may be, does not match the Aboriginal word that may mean "camp," "hearth," "country," "everlasting home," "totem place," "life source," "spirit centre" and much else all in one. (105)
Hunter-gatherers intimately knew every aspect of the territory they inhabited. They had to—otherwise they would not have been able to survive, especially in harsh or forbidding landscapes. The travails of European explorers trying (and often, failing) to survive in inhospitable regions where hunter-gatherers had managed to thrive successfully for millennia demonstrates just how important this collective, generational knowledge of a particular territory is.
Hunter-gatherers knew where to find edible plants and where to dig for tubers. They knew the habits of the animals that roamed through their territory and what their migration patterns were. They knew exactly where the bushes loaded with edible berries were located and when they were in season. They knew which trees provided a bountiful nut harvest. They knew where to find mounds of edible insects and hives of bees for honey. They knew which rivers and streams were abundant with fish and where waterfowl congregated in the marshes. They knew where stands of wild grasses grew. They knew where game animals congregated. They knew exactly where to find watering holes both above and below ground—a critical feature for survival, especially in harsh desert environments.
Moffett notes of the connection to the land among band societies:
Like nations, and in fact all other human societies, band societies identified with an expanse of ground that they exclusively occupied. They were territorial—wary of, and often hostile to, outsiders entering the area. Nomadic they may have been, but the overall movements of band-dwellers could be just as confined as those of the people who came to depend on agriculture...
Unlike chimpanzees and bonobos, who can move anywhere within the space claimed by their community (with some biases to favorite spots by individual chimps), each cluster of people—each band—usually had primary use of only a portion of the society's territory, a space that its residents knew like the backs of their hands, and sometimes inherited. A fondness for home didn't originate with people moving into a physical structure but rather with their connection to the land. (105)
It's often farmers who are often described as being deeply—indeed spiritually—rooted to a particular place, with hunter-gatherers being depicted as simply rootless wanders. But this is exactly backwards! It is farmers, with their standard package of cereal crops and domesticated animals, who can move into any unoccupied patch of land and make a living there, despite knowing practically nothing about it; all they have to know is how to deploy their agricultural package. The expansion and migrations of food-producing peoples throughout history—much of it now being revealed by recent DNA studies—is a testament to that fact. Hunter-gatherers, by contrast, needed to know on an intimate basis every aspect of the region they inhabited, because they were dependent on it's bounty for their survival. As anthropologist Richard Lee noted of African bushmen of the Kalahari: "The !Kung do not amass a surplus, because they conceive of the environment itself as their storehouse."
Indeed, we know that when many Native American tribes were forcibly uprooted and removed from their ancestral lands, their culture often died with them. Their myths and legends often told them that they were the "first people"—the sole occupants of the lands they inhabited from time immemorial (something that DNA studies later confirmed). But when American dirt farmers expanded into the vast empty spaces of the Great Plains, for example, they settled in with little problem (except for the pesky natives who continued to put up resistance), despite their agricultural package originating on a totally different continent!
Agricultural food producers commonly practice something called slash-and-burn (or swidden) agriculture, where a patch of land is cleared by fire, creating carbon-rich soil in which to grow plants. However, because intensive cultivation of annual plants exhausts the soil, new patches have to be cleared every few years, with old plots abandoned. This means that farmers are constantly on the move looking for areas to expand into. In cultures that practiced intensive cultivation like the ancient Mesopotamians, who relied on irrigation, both erosion and salinization caused the lands they occupied to become barren after several generations. In Colonial America, for example, cotton and tobacco farmers would commonly just abandon denuded and gully-strewn land caused by erosion after just a few harvests and move on because land was so "cheap" in those days. Hunter-gatherers, by contrast, survived in these parts of the world sustainably for thousands of years by being good stewards. They had to be—if they treated the natural environment the way agriculturalists did, they would essentially be committing suicide. Hunter-gatherers do not, as a rule, destroy the land that they occupy—it is their lifeblood.
Thus, the truth is, it is farmers who are the itinerant wanderers; hunter-gatherers, by contrast, are the ones who really are deeply and spiritually rooted to the place that they occupy.
While many hunter-gatherer bands were indeed nomadic, their movements were typically seasonal. Because they lived off the land, they had to follow the movements of animal herds, or move to places where resources were in season and move on once they they were not, as with the Great Basin Shoshone of North America:
The Great Basin Shoshone...spent the winter in villages in the pinon and juniper forests of the mountains. As spring came, they moved down to the valley floors and gathered tubers, bulbs, and the first seeds of spring; later, they moved upslope as seeds ripened there. In the summer, they might move to a river where trout were running, or to a marsh where they could hunt waterfowl and gather bullrush seeds. In the early fall, they would move back into the mountains, establish winter camps, and collect pinon nuts while hunting deer and bighorn sheep. [1] p. 77
Such movements often gave the false impression to Europeans that native tribes had no attachment to any particular patch of land; however this was clearly not the case. They moved about precisely because the food resources they exploited within their territory were diffuse and seasonal by nature. This is true of many hunter-gatherer band societies throughout the world.
A nomadic lifestyle is also not confined to hunter-gatherer band societies. Nomadic pastoralists around the world intensively exploit domesticated animals such as sheep, goats, cattle, and reindeer. Their animals act as a "walking larder" upon which they are dependent for milk, meat and hides, trading for whatever commodities they could not produce for themselves. Herding peoples engage in a practice called transhumance, which is a seasonal movement of livestock from one grazing ground to another—typically to lowlands in winter and highlands in summer. While herding peoples tended to occupy the same pasturelands year after year, they could potentially survive anywhere their animals could find forage.
Members of the same band society were generally not hostile to one another, and would allow members of other bands to move about freely within their territory, as long as resources were reasonably abundant and there were no underlying hostilities. The fission-fusion nature of band societies generally did a good enough job of keeping simmering conflicts from boiling over into systemic violence and minimizing tensions.
Some anthropologists call the land crisscrossed by each band a "territory," but use of the landscape was more flexible that that word suggests. Like the neighbor casually knocking at the door to ask for a cup of sugar, any socially upright person could usually traipse onto another band's space. As long as permission was sought, the local band might share water or space to hunt if supplies were short elsewhere, or allow the visitor to stay around and chat with friends and kin. Just as individuals of the same band freely shared and borrowed from each other, reciprocity across the members of a society was routine. (105)
In between the territories occupied by different band societies, however, was a neutral zone which was not claimed by any specific group of people. It was these interstitial regions where conflicts and fighting could potentially occur, just as between groups of chimpanzees.
There was more goodwill between bands than typically existed between the societies that contained them, whose claims were rigidly enforced when necessary. Among the Bushmen, bands of the same society occupied contiguous spaces, whereas a no-man's-land lay between different societies. Similar unoccupied gaps separate the societies of other species too—communities of chimpanzees, packs of wolves, and colonies of fire ants. (106)
Depending on the cost and benefits of defending or granting access to resources, hunter-gatherers differed in their possessiveness toward their realm. Some took the take-no-prisoners approach of chimps, others selectively protected resources as baboons do, while yet others were as open to outsiders as bonobos—with the possibility of negotiating all kinds of concessions in between.
But rarely was there ambiguity about who owned what. Precious assets, among them materials venerated for their symbolic importance (a pigment used in a ceremony, perhaps), could escalate rivalries. In general, though, the low cost of negotiating an easement added to the reasons not to seize foreign territories. This has always fostered contact, and familiarity, between human societies. (232)
Hunter-gatherers rarely conquered and took the lands of neighboring societies, because there would be no benefit to it. Unlike agricuturalists, who must contantly seek new lands to expand into, hunter-gatherers were content to exploit the region they inhabited, so long as they were left alone. To this end, they kep their population densities low.
Neighboring bands of roaming hunter-gatherers more than likley belonged to the same society and would have shown no animus. Of course, not everyone got along, and conflicts between individuals could turn nasty, but whole bands didn’t hold grudges or regard the other bands of their society as hostile. Group aggression was generally directed at other societies.
The extent and form of this violence has long been a contentious question in anthropology. What’s certain is that the nomadic hunter-gatherers shied from high-risk engagements. Their situation was comparable to that of ants with small colonies, which similarly have no permanent structures and few possessions to protect: when outsiders threatened, it made sense to simply move away. The nomads carried out more dangerous action only in times of crushing competition and conflict…Massacres such as the one at Jebel Sahaba would have been rare for people in bands—there was probably a settlement of hunter-gatherers at that site. For human nomads as for equally fission-fusion chimpanzees and spider monkeys, furtive strikes were the preferred choice.
Descriptions of hunter-gatherers anexing terrirories are scarce...A detail provided by the anthropologist Ernest Burch about the Iñupiaq Eskimo gives a clue as to why: "The great majority of people thought that their own estates were the best places to live, and they could hold forth at length on what was special about them." Perhaps a grass-is-always-greener perspective seldom made sense in traditional societies societies where people grew up wise to every nook and cranny of the home turf. Coveting a neighbor's land would be illogical unless it offered a huge improvement over a region already intimately understood. (220-221)
Eventually, many band societies settled down in regions of the globe that were highly abundant in natural resources, such as herds of animals, wild grasses, or runs of fish. In some places, they also made investments in the land to increase it productivity, which allowed them to settle down in one place on a semi-permanent basis. Anthropologists call this intensification. Thus, long before domestication, some band societies had already become food producers, and with that came societal changes as well. We’ll talk about those changes in the near future. But first, we’ll examine an important and often overlooked dynamic of fission-fusion band societies: that of fusion.
Thanks, this is a really important thing I think, to see that 'nomadic' usually meant 'nomadic within a very well-know area'. Have you read 'The Other Side of Eden' by Hugh Brody? It deals quite sensitively with the extent to which the early Biblical stories of Eden, Abel & Cain reflect the actual historical shifts between hunting-gathering and agriculture. Especially the counter-intuitive fact that 'settled' agricultural societies were ultimately more restless and mobile than 'nomadic' hunter-gatherers.
I think one aspect of this is probably reflected in how the sky and stars are systematised (or not) in culture. My sense is that hunter-gatherer stellar myths aren't very systematised, and they use local earthly landmarks such as rivers and hills for orientation - because they always knew the land well. But more systematic stellar models evolved in agricultural societies - and this enabled longer-range migrations, using the sky for orientation, which would remain relatively constant unless you went *really* far.