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Jacobs Crackers? (NEW CONCEPTS)
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Hatty
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In: Berkshire
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In Holland it was the huge demand of the various armies in the Thirty Years War that led to the Golden Age of Dutch Agriculture.

Is this a documented fact? The way we were told it the Thirty Years War was waged sporadically (campaigns in the dry season type of affair). In times of war food production would have to be made more efficient naturally but the Dutch were at war before the onset of hostilities in 1618.

Perhaps the boom period of Dutch agriculture was a result of the northern provinces' successful bid for independence from the Spanish Habsburgs.
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Mick Harper
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In: London
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No, the prices are quite well documented, and this is all happening way after the north achieved de facto independence from Spain.

The fighting may have been sporadic but the armies were permanent features of the landscape. And Holland was perfectly placed to provide the goodies since a) it alone was spared peripatetic devastation b) it had complete control over all the relevant waterways and c) was the world-leader in cheap'n'cheerful transportation.

Come to think of it, the same war presumably put the kybosh on German cities since although they were majorly important in the High Middle Ages they never amounted to much until well into the nineteenth century.
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DPCrisp


In: Bedfordshire
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I am reporting on the hyper-modern experience. I do not know how well it accords with early cities.

If you can't say how they're different, let's assume they're the same.

1. New cities did not appear; old small ones simply became new large ones.

Fair enough. I believe city life is the primordial state of Man.

2. Cities do not appear to have any natural increase because city-dwellers have fewer children and plagues have greater effect in cities.

Not sure, but they also concentrate the poor, who tend to have more children. The poor flood in from outside and the poor inside flood... um... inside.

I should have mentioned that the growth in the Dutch cities was fuelled by immigration from outside Holland as well as the countryside -- perhaps cities always offer higher wages and therefore are always prone to this effect.

So who is doing the fuelling?

3. Developments in agriculture are not specifically city-created. In Holland it was the huge demand of the various armies in the Thirty Years War that led to the Golden Age of Dutch Agriculture.

How sweet. Warring is city work!
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Wile E. Coyote


In: Arizona
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You will start to notice that fear of Covid in the cities will place the seeds of future regeneration in the towns and villages.

Cities always come first.
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Wile E. Coyote


In: Arizona
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When you re-read this thread, it does make you wonder, if there was a mesolithic (middle) age at all, hunter gatherers are really a geographically fringe lifestyle that develop out of the need for fur (clothing) and cowrie shells (currency) needed in established settlements(cities).

Its not just agriculture that comes after cities.
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Mick Harper
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I have often pointed out that hunting is such an inefficient way of acquiring protein that only sportsman would go in for it. And sport is definitely post-city. The only example in the world today I know of is bushmen in the Kalahari tracking antelope -- but even these seem to be more in the nature of ritual. Just hauling the wretched thing back to the family uses up any energy left over from the hunt itself. So what is the AE explanation for hunter-gatherer compulsion? It stems, as usual, from the eighteenth century when

primitive = early

The anthropology pioneers selected Amerindians as their model. And, as usual, every anthropologist (and therefore all pre-historians) have repeated it down the generations. Amerindians do trap (and poison dart) nearby small animals (counts as hunting) but for the most part live on berries, wild root veg, bird eggs et al (the gathering part). It's fine as long you have a population of one per square mile of rain forest.

So what of Mesolithic people who, for sure, didn't live in rainforests. Who the hell would? It's a pretty fair bet they lived a relative life of Reilly on seashells on the seashore et al as their middens indicate. Or whatever the inland equivalent is. So they got the gatherer part right and agriculture, after all, is only a sophisticated form of gathering.
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Mick Harper
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A case in point was sent to me this morning

Karahan Tepe Shares Incredible Features with “Sister” Site of Göbekli Tepe
https://twistedsifter.com/2023/03/karahan-tepe-shares-incredible-features-with-sister-site-of-gobekli-tepe/

Göbekli Tepe in southern Turkey is the world’s oldest known megalithic site, but its “sister site” of Karahan Tepe, discovered in 1997, shares many of the same stunning architectural features. Karahan Tepe also challenges some of archeology’s fundamental beliefs.

Don't hold your breath. Göbekli Tepe didn't change a single archaeology belief, fundamental or otherwise.

The word “tepe” means hill or summit in Turkish and refers to both sites that are located around the rocky Tektek Mountains. The Karahan Tepe’s ruins span an area of 3.4 million feet squared, approximately one-third the size, and are situated 27 miles east of Göbekli Tepe.

In other words, a whole bunch of people in not very promising hunter/gatherer territory.

While Karahan Tepe is not yet fully excavated and its exact age is unknown, experts estimate the two areas were built around the same time, during the Pre-Pottery Neolithic period.

Imagine that. They can build cities but haven’t figured clay hardens.

Karahan Tepe has similar pillar features, special structures, obelisks, and ornate animal sculptures to her “sister site.” According to an additional study, archeologists have discovered 274 architectural artifacts there, with at least 266 pillars still standing. Some have retained their intricate designs of snakes and human faces.

They’ve got art galleries but they haven’t figured clay hardens.

Perhaps the most important connection these two sites share is their age. Both were created during the Neolithic age (between 9600 and 8200 BCE) but it’s widely thought that humans didn’t create such complicated structures until after the first agricultural revolution. During this period, only 10,000 to 12,000 years ago, humans were believed to live in small gatherings as they learned to domesticate plants and animals.

No, before they learned to domesticate plants and animals. That’s the official story.

Until recently, Göbekli Tepe was considered an anomaly in this timeline. However, with the discovery of Karahan Tepe, it may be time to review our chronology. By definition, there can’t be two one-offs.

Oh can’t there? I was messing about with the Kindle version of THOBR and came across this [it's about Celtic languages surviving]

It is true Cornwall is a one-off corner of England and thereby definitely a prime candidate for the old “That’s just the way it happened” explanation so beloved of orthodoxy. They may have forgotten that Cornwall was not the far-off fustian corner we know today but, thanks to the tin trade, plugged right into the mainstream of British and Continental life. Not forgetting either that Cornwall is one of six examples of ‘long-term Celtic survival’ so they would have to say “It just happened in six different places.”
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Wile E. Coyote


In: Arizona
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Just thinking out loud, (it's a pathetic try for help!) Is the idea that Britons abandoned their hunter-gatherer existence and started adopting crops, eating more meat animals and developing farming methods roughly at the same time as they were building new stone monuments correct ?

These monuments, eg chambered tombs, often overlook a seashore. There is one on the cover of ME (?). They look to my eyes like crabs, seashells, are they not in part signalling what is on the seashore?

Isn't that why there is no late mesolithic?
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Wile E. Coyote


In: Arizona
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Isn't the neolithic architecture of the chambered tomb, hard shell on the outside (shelter... from sea and wind ) encasing an important centre, based on shellfish?
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Nick Weech



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D J Crisp wrote:
The old idea that permanent settlements were impossible until after agriculture was invented is contradicted by so much hard evidence that many archeologists no longer subscribe to this idea, although few scholars in other fields seem, as yet, to be aware of this reassessment. The world is dotted with various kinds of Paleolithic leavings which indicate that hunters had permanent settlements.

There's a long gap between 'Paleolithic' and where I'm at presently, the Saxon-Norman change-over period. (H/T Mick)

Frederick Seebohm in The English Village Community wrote:
The English, like the Continental village community, as we have said, inhabited a shell — an open- field system — into the nooks and corners of which it was curiously bound and fitted, and from which it was apparently inseparable. The remains of this cast-off shell still survive in parishes where no Enclosure Act happens to have swept them away.

I don't know how many places were left un-enclosed: Not many?

From as early as the 12th century agricultural land had been enclosed.[16] However, the history of enclosure in England is different from region to region.[17] Parts of south-east England (notably sections of Essex and Kent) retained the pre-Roman Celtic field system of farming in small enclosed fields. Similarly in much of west and north-west England, fields were either never open, or were enclosed early. The primary area of field management, known as the "open field system", was in the lowland areas of England in a broad band from Yorkshire and Lincolnshire diagonally across England to the south, taking in parts of Norfolk and Suffolk, Cambridgeshire, large areas of the Midlands, and most of south central England. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure

All the 'tons' and 'hams' were originally isolated settlements living off local resources. Maybe that system 'evolved' from a previous H-G system, maybe not.(We'd have to ask Dr Alice Roberts) I'm a believer in going from what we know but that -as you all know- only goes a tiny way back into the murk of the past. Did the serfs under Saxon rule simply get a Norman overlord or lackey- hence nothing changed much?

Or was it written up in Tudor Times, presenting a faux past to justify their current status quo? (as Edwin Johnson posits in "The Rise of English Culture"? Inventing the whole Norman 'transition' root & branch? after inventing the Anglo-Saxon Hengist/Horsa saga...)

The Doomsday Book doesn't even mention Harold as previous 'Lord-in-Chief' ; he was left out of the picture because ...

Exeter was a settlement in Domesday Book, in the hundred of Wonford and the county of Devon. It had a recorded population of 1 household in 1086, putting it in the smallest 20% of settlements recorded in Domesday, and is listed under 19 owners in Domesday Book. Land of King William Valuation: Annual value to lord: 12 pounds in 1086.
Owners
Tenant-in-chief in 1086: King William.
Lords in 1086: Baldwin the sheriff; Colwin (the reeve).
Overlord in 1066: King Edward.
Lord in 1066: Queen Edith."

https://opendomesday.org/place/SX9292/exeter/
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Mick Harper
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There's a long gap between 'Paleolithic' and where I'm at presently, the Saxon-Norman change-over period. (H/T Mick)

It is is my contention -- or rather it is an assumption emanating from the AE rule 'What is is what was unless there's evidence it wasn't' -- that all agriculture at all times and in all cultures was conducted communally except in very special local circumstances or in very modern times. What was true when agriculture was first introduced into Britain is true in Anglo-Saxon times and Norman times i.e. the open field system. [What does H/T stand for?]

The primary area of field management, known as the "open field system", was in the lowland areas of England in a broad band from Yorkshire and Lincolnshire diagonally across England to the south, taking in parts of Norfolk and Suffolk, Cambridgeshire, large areas of the Midlands, and most of south central England.

In other words, wherever there is decent arable land, agriculture is communal using large open fields, crop rotation etc and everyone lives in villages. Wherever it isn't it's either pastoral or small walled (terraced?) fields and everyone lives in hamlets.

I don't know how many places were left un-enclosed: Not many?

I think you have to be careful when using the word 'enclosed'. It is quite a technical term, both agriculturally and legally, but maybe we can go into this anon.

All the 'tons' and 'hams' were originally isolated settlements living off local resources.

All aggregations of human beings are physically separated from all other aggregations of human beings, so they are isolated in that sense. I do not accept they ever live off local resources. They might eat their own wheat and meat but they'd be crazy to make their own clothes, leather, salt, ploughs etc etc.

Maybe that system 'evolved' from a previous H-G system, maybe not. (We'd have to ask Dr Alice Roberts)

Best not. [What does H-G stand for?]

I'm a believer in going from what we know but that -as you all know- only goes a tiny way back into the murk of the past.

Good man.

Did the serfs under Saxon rule simply get a Norman overlord or lackey- hence nothing changed much?

Well, that's orthodoxy, isn't it? Though since you mention it, it is interesting that proud Englishmen were free tillers of the soil until the French came along and enslaved them.

Or was it written up in Tudor Times, presenting a faux past to justify their current status quo? (as Edwin Johnson posits in "The Rise of English Culture"? Inventing the whole Norman 'transition' root & branch? after inventing the Anglo-Saxon Hengist/Horsa saga...)

We have written a bit about Edwin Johnson elsewhere but he may not be radical enough, by the sound of it. You'll have to raise this with more specificity.

The Doomsday Book doesn't even mention Harold as previous 'Lord-in-Chief' ; he was left out of the picture because ...

This seems to belong to a different post.
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Wile E. Coyote


In: Arizona
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A circular series of neolithic pits was discovered in 2020 surrounding Durrington Walls, one of Britain’s largest henge monuments.

This caused a bit of excitement at the time.

The problem is this site is 1.9 miles north-east of the famouus Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain and, if you classify the pits as part of a structure, this structure would then be in a large area, 20 times the size of Stonehenge. Ridiculous, so they said. The pits must be natural features.........

In 2021 more scientific tests again suggested that these huge gaping pits were definitely human-made and so needed to be considered part of the ancient landscape.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/nov/23/new-tests-show-neolithic-pits-near-stonehenge-were-humanmade

The individual pits are 5 metres deep, 10 metres in diameter, they all look the same.

The function has been described as ritual, sacred, etc etc.

I haven't seen better explanations. Not yet.
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Mick Harper
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Better than what? Since there is no evidence for 'ritual, sacred' and ritual and sacred are by definition rare, they should not be put forward even as hypotheses. It's not far short of 'space ship landing aids'. Are you sure about the 'natural features' explanation, however fleetingly made? I ask because it would be unusual for archaeologists to give up territory so lightly, even if they don't know what they are.

The key, I suppose, is the circularity. This would appear to rule out the most utilitarian purposes eg storage bins, water supply. They are not so exactly circular as to be useful for measurement. Too big a circle for defensive construction. For ritual, sacred purposes? If they are so truly a one-off as to have taken everyone by surprise then 'rareness' becomes a buttressing argument. Being so close to Stonehenge and all.
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Wile E. Coyote


In: Arizona
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Maybe they took the earth from these pits, transported it, and then used it to build something like the earthwork enclosure that is thought to predate Stonehenge? Maybe the earth had more importance than the pits? They did move the stones a long way....to build Stonehenge.

https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/stonehenge/history-and-stories/history/
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Mick Harper
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OK, so why take it from regularly-spaced pits arranged in a circle?
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