Pastoralist societies that organize into seasonal trade caravans share structural characteristics; some of these characteristics tend towards promoting social inequalities and others that counter-act the tendency (Browman 1990). The organizing of a trade caravan is often simplified among dedicated pastoralists because pastoralism is relatively efficient in the use of labor, and the herding and caravanning schedules can be prioritized (Nielsen 2000: 44-45). A single herder can monitor hundreds of animals on a typical, uneventful day of pasturing without a great deal of effort, and as physical labor is low as compared with agricultural tasks, children and the elderly often contribute and broaden the herding labor pool. As a consequence, during caravan season the loss of several capable family members (usually adult men) to the caravan journey for weeks or months during a single year may not unduly hamper the productivity of a household of dedicated pastoralists.
As mentioned above, all pastoral households must acquire non-pastoral products through diversification or exchange, however the ability to organize a caravan inherently favors the wealthier herders for several reasons.
(1) Herders with large herds are more likely to have a sufficient number of hearty animals capable of enduring long journeys with cargo.
(2) Caravan animals provide the mechanism of transport. Therefore, for direct exchange consisting of spot transactions, pastoralists must initiate the trade opportunity by traveling to their trade partners with a sufficient surplus of goods to acquire goods in exchange.
(3) The rewards of such trade caravans accrue differentially, allowing those who regularly participate in such ventures to acquire access to non-pastoral resources, a more extensive social network and perhaps fictive kin among distant trade partners, and enhanced prestige among their community.
While some elements of dedicated herding societies favor differential accumulation of wealth in the form of large herds, diversification of the resource base, and extensive trade networks, the realities of high risk to pastoral wealth and low intensity of land use affect all herding households equally to the extent that they dedicate themselves to pastoralism. Thus, while redistributive mechanisms and corporate tenure of pasture serve to stabilize pastoral systems, the structure of herding systems also provides a few opportunities for strategic advantage to more opportunistic and aggrandizing elements of prehistoric society. In addition, despite the risk in herding systems the ownership of a large herd may directly confer prestige on pastoralists (Aldenderfer 2006;Hayden 1998;Kuznar 1995: 45), and inequalities in pastoral wealth can be channeled into more enduring and intensifiable avenues such as increased exchange (ultimately resulting in large trade caravans) or a mixed agro-pastoral strategy. As a pastoral economy with cargo transport capabilities first takes hold in a region, increased social differentiation may reflect a co-evolution between more extensive exchange relationships, greater sedentism, population increases, and larger population centers.