Farming populations are not inherently resilient. They're inherently vulnerable until you've got some concept of a state and a pretty large geographic area. (This is in large part the Roman innovation, a generalized concept of the state.) Once you've got that, fighting any of them is fighting all of them, at least in principle, and there are inevitably a lot of them.
Prior to that point when you've got a fragmented population of near-subsistence agriculturalists, the low-density/high-mobility pastoralists come in and burn the food stores in the early winter. Nobody really has surplus and getting to an area with unburnt food is hard anyway. If the pastoralists have wool technology and move comfortably in the early winter and the agriculturalists do not, well. It's even easier.
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Date: 2018-11-17 08:22 pm (UTC)Prior to that point when you've got a fragmented population of near-subsistence agriculturalists, the low-density/high-mobility pastoralists come in and burn the food stores in the early winter. Nobody really has surplus and getting to an area with unburnt food is hard anyway. If the pastoralists have wool technology and move comfortably in the early winter and the agriculturalists do not, well. It's even easier.