Since this kind of thing seems to be your area of expertise, I was wondering whether or not you knew of European neolithic societies that would allow pastoralists to feed their herds on the fields after a harvest in exchange for taxes in wool, meat, cheese, etc? I know that this was common practice in Mesopotamia, but I haven’t the slightest clue about European practices. Or, I guess more broadly, how did nomadic and sedentary populations interact during the neolithic in Europe?
So I wouldn’t call it my area of expertise, but for what I know: I am unaware of any Neolithic European societies that where stratified enough to have taxation exist. They may be out there, but I haven’t been shown evidence of them so far.
The closest thing I know of to what you are talking about is probably in modern Romania. First of all: Pastoralists had to have some form of contact with settled farmers, because most of the species you would heard (sheep, goat, cow) where domesticated in areas where farming took over (some of these may have been domesticated prior to farming becoming established, in which case mesolithic pastoalists became settled farmers, but that’s outside my scope of knowledge). Anyway, Cow, Sheep, and Goat where introduced to Romania/Ukraine by people migrating over from Anatolia via Greece/Thessaly, and then slowly transmitted to the hunter gatherer societies beyond where the farmers settled, initially probably as a “back up” in case hunting failed, then more and more as a primary mode of life. There quite probably was a language barrier between the two cultures as well.
Later in the Eneolithic we do see some Pastoralists appearing around the mouth of the Danube, but their exact relation to the (by that point collapsing) settlements of Old Europe isn’t really clear. It may have been militaristic, long distance raids to steal cattle, that ended up with them finding pastures around the Danube, but that’s not certain. (btw it may be those Danubian pastoralists who’d eventually bring the ancestors of Hittite and Luwian into Anatolia). Why they went as far as the Danube when there where closer settlements to raid just across the river is interesting, maybe they wanted to keep on good terms with the neighbors so they could have access to things like copper? We also see some growing of domestic plants in the western steppes and some short term settlements (I think probably Pastoralists who planted seeds, but didn’t tend to them, instead made a note to come back in the autumn and harvest them).
edit essentially I also don’t think that the pastoralists would need to bring their heards onto farm lands because they had a lot of steppe to the east for that (and as technology improved, first with horses, later with wagons) they where able to use more and more of the steppes. And if there really was a problem (like might have happened with the Repin culture) you could always migrate east of the Urals and settle there (again like the Repin culture did when many of them migrated to the Altai mountains).
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“If we cannot find the camps that Yamnaya Herders [Early Bronze Age Steppe Pastoralists herding cattle on horseback] occupied through the winter, when they had to retreat with their herds to the protection of riverine forests and marshes […] then their herds where so large that they had to keep moving, even in winter. In similar northern grassland environment with very cold winters, the fifty bands of the Blackfoot Indians of Canada and Montana had to move a few miles several times each winter just to provide fresh forage for their horses. And the Blackfeet did not have to worry about feeding cattle or sheep. Mongolian herders move their tents and animal herds about once a month throughout the winter. The Yamnaya herding system probably was equally mobile.”
-David Anthony, The Horse the Wheel and Language, 2007, Princeton University Press, page 325.
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Thank you!
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