Farmers' Views
- there was a time before agriculture when people gathered their food from the wild
- not farming is seen as primitive, wild and uncivilised; lawless
- but non-farmers did not not farm because of ignorance
- a god or godess was needed to teach farming and other arts and sciences, e.g. Demter in ancient Greek myth
- so farmers though themselves to be superior to hunter-gatherers
Primitive Affluence - Sahlins (1972) Stone Age Economics
- hunter-gatherer societies achieve affluence by desiring little more than they need and actually meeting them with what is available to them
- contemporary dilemma: man's wants are great, not to say infinite, whereas his mean are limited
- separate roads to influence; the former by desiring little and the latter by producing much
- knowledge and expertise enables them to minimise the amount of time procuring food - "affluence without abundance"
- a surplus would produce problems in storage and transport
- lack of surplus also demonstrates that they trust their environment will continuously provide for them
- foraging only for immediate needs among plentiful resources means that hunter-gatherers are able to increase their leisure time
Migrations
- arrived in Europe 40,000 years ago with modern skeletons and superior weapons
- advanced cultural traits, but within a few thousand years there were no more Neanderthals
- there is little evidence of hybridisation between Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons
- great leap forward - as people moved out of Africa into new environments they came and adapted the environment
Origins of Agriculture
Edward Hahn (1896; 1906) proposed that animals were domesticated for religious reasons such as ritual sacrifices
- cattle in connection with lunar goddess cult as curving horns were seen to symbolise the crescent moon
- in some places today cattle hold special statuses: holy in India, bull fighting in Spain, cattle complex African nomads
Vere Gordon Childe: domestication by crowding or propinquity theory
- in N. Africa/near East grasslands were drying up, so herd animals and humans had to withdraw to river banks and oases = more in contact with one another
- three phases development: hunter, herder, cultivator
Neolithic revolution: shift from hunting to food production, probably the most important transformation of human adaptation since controlling fire
Carl O. Sauer (1952) Agricultural Origins and Dispersal
- agriculturalists were sedentary folk
- people living in the shadow of famine do not have the means or time to discover and develop a different food supply
- so farming must have been conceptualised before it was practised
- hearths of domesticaions are to be sought in areas of marked diversity of plants and animals - not in valleys prone to periodic flooding
- origin in woodlands - open spaces for planting by deadening trees: they could not dig or sod or eradicate vigorous stoloniferous grasses
- inventors of agriculture had special skills in other areas that pre-disposed them to experiment
Esther Boserup - Agriculture as extension of gathering
- dynamic analysis embracing all types of primitive agriculture upended the assumption dating back to Malthus: that agricultural methods determine the food supply and therefore determines the population (i.e. when the food supply is not sufficient to feed the population, the extra people will have to die)
- Boserup inverts this and argues that population determines agricultural methods - "necessity is the mother of invention"
- in times of pressure, people will find ways to increase the production of food by increasing workforce, machinery, fertilisers.. input
- increasing energy inputs results in a decrease of output per amount of energy put into the system
- so switch from meat based to vegetarian diet and so follows farming culture: cultivation of staple foods
Feast and Famine
- the cycle of deprivation and plenty and the meaning of festivities
- changes in religion, from shaman to priesthood, and priests controls seasons of planting
- cities as centres of redistribution of food
Plant Genetics - according to geneticists Daniel Zohary and Maria Hopf
- food production spreads from Fertile Crescent in 8000BC to Greece and Indian subcontinent 6500BC, Egypt 6000BC, Central Europe 5400BC, southern Spain 5200BC
- exchange or migration of by independent domestication?
- wild ancestors of main crops do not occur in Egypt so they must have been imported
- domestics can be traced to one variety
- close relatives were not cultivated in Western Eurasia
- domestication of single cariety does not take place in several locations
The Axis
- developments in food cultivation and production tended to spread along east-west axis
- localities located along an east-west axis are located on the same latitude; this means that they share the same day length and seasonal variation
- they also tend to share similar diseases, temperature, rainfall and habitats; whereas there are considerable differences in climate along north-south axis
- Fertile Crescent package spread across from Eurasia, but it came to a stop in north Africa and did not cross the Sahara or Serengeti plains until the Bantu migrations; livestock and key crops reached souther Africa around 1200AD
Consequences of agricultural/sedentary life
- infectious diseases - some of the most devestating killers in history - have evolved from diseases of animals, due to close contact, and now the microbes that cause these diseases are confined to humans (living off the host, so to speak)
- from cattle we have got measles, TB and smallpox
- flu from pigs and ducks
- pertussis from pigs and dogs
- malaria from birds, esp ducks and chickens
- crowd dieases need sizeable populations to sustain themselves as they spread by passing person to person, e.g. measles needs a population of half million
- population of sedentary farmers 10-100x that of hunter-gatherers
- hunter-gatherers shift camp frequently leaving behind their excrement (with accumulated microbes and worm larvae)
- being sedentary, farmers live amongst their own sewage
- the changes in the environment created conditions that facilitate the spread of diseases
Theories to explain state formation
- hydraulic theory: state authority to construct and manage the irrigation systems
- overpopulation: rising populations give rise to greater complexity and demands better organisation
- trade: organisation and tax
- ecosystem: state arises as an efficient adaptation to the environment
- circumscription: idea that state arises where farmland is limited, e.g. Nile valley, Mesoamerica, Yellow River valley (China), Indus River valley, Mesopotamia
State formation in Egypt
- geography, technology of food production and logic of exploitation
- main function of the state is to transfer wealth from the farmers to the unproductive aristocracy
- agriculture created food surplus; increase in food production per square hectare, per worker
- labour surplus: during flood season no agricultural tasks weere required, so labour was mobilised for the construction of pyramids
- control was relatively easy as agriculture was only possible in a narrow band along the river
- where population density was high there was a complete transformation/transition to agriculture, but where it was low foraging persisted (althoug it was less rewarding)
- incipient states extended their control over unorganised parts of the Nile
- demands for grain and labour forced foragers to shift to farming
Functionalist explanations for social stratification
- elite arises by controlling trade and maintains managerial function (also links with hydraulic theory)
- but this managerial role does not explain hereditary nature of elites
- what needs to be explained is how the can stay in power and privilege even though their role is against the interest of the mass population
Bronze Age Capital Intensification (Europe)
- ploughs; horses domesticated for traction; amount of land farmer can till increases; requires and investment, and also demarcation of land owner ship.. this allowed for state formation
- Mediterranean poly-culture (multiple crops grown in a single area, akin to swidden) - vines take 3 years before bearing fruit, olive trees 15 but 20 to become fully productive and lasts for centuries
- "constitutes a capital intensification of subsistence"
- irrigation in the form of dams, ditches and terraces evident around the Med (as Childe notes) marks considerable investment
- offshore fishing - boats up to 15m long found
Non-fuctionalist explanation
- all these technologies (above) are within the grasp of households that band together
- benefits achieved by preparatory labour can be shared
- this transfers the problem of security from the material to the social field; thus reducing the opportunity for fission
- if protector exacts excessive rents choices are: to submit or leave investment to find another protector (conditions tend to favour the ruling class)
Three propositions
- capital intensificaiton of agriculture preceded social stratification
- the more intense and higher the investment, the more stratified the society: the establishment of stratification, precedes the higher order management tasks (i,e, construction of temples and urban centres)
- elites became warrior elites: to demonstrate their status and perhaps to maintain control
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