Jacobs Crackers? (NEW CONCEPTS)

[DPCrisp]

The City Sources of Rural Work (3)

The goods purchased by the little cities from the hungry countryside were largely materials that went into crafts: raw wool, hides, horn. The food of the little cities was, in large part, not agricultural produce but wild food: chiefly wild fowl and fish. Salt fish was as much the staff of life as bread; often more so. This, incidentally, is the reason why London's fishmongers were such important and prestigious merchants. Their wares, carried great distances from London, were helping to feed many other little trading cities, and manors out in the country too.

But the early medieval cities did depend in part on grain. Indeed, by using grain for bread, city people were also beginning the long process of reinventing the European diet; gruel and porridge, not bread, had become the customary European grain dishes in the centuries after Rome's fall. The mills and the bakeries of early medieval cities were not copies of village or manorial industry brought into the cities. They were, rather, the forerunners of village and manorial mills and bakeries.

Some of the grain of the little cities was probably gotten from the rural world. But much of it, likely most of it, the city people grew for themselves in the fields both within and without the walls; throughout Europe, such fields were standard facilities of early medieval cities. The medieval cities must have been their own first markets for the metal agricultural tools made by their smiths -- the metal tools that were to become so important to rural Europe in the twelfth century and later:

In Europe of the eleventh century, it was still the general rural practice to use patches of land until the fertility was depleted and then to abandon those patches; or else to cultivate a field for several years, let it grow up to brush for another few years, then burn it over and plant again. Charlemagne had tried to reinstitute the old Roman system of alternating two crops, but his efforts were to little avail, if any, because not until the twelfth century was rotation widely adopted, and then it differed from the Roman practice.

In the medieval system, wheat or rye was planted on a given plot the first year, oats or barley (sometimes peas or beans) the second, and the land was allowed to lie fallow the third. Under the three-field system, as this scheme of crop rotation is called, three plots made a unit, each plot being at a different stage in the cycle, like a singer of a round. It was not a very efficient system of crop rotation but it was an enormous improvement, one of the chief changes in the complex collection of new rural practices and tools that historians call "the twelfth-century agricultural revolution."

Nobody knows just where the medieval three-field system began but this much is evident: it centered around cities. The rural areas that first adopted it were those near the cities and along the trade routes that lay between cities. Its further extension was rather slow. It took two centuries and more to reach the rural backwaters of Europe. The last places to adopt rotation were those most distant from cities and least touched by city trade and goods.

[Brian Ambrose]

According to Genesis, the first city was constructed soon after the deluge:

As men moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar and settled there. They said to each other, "Come, let's make bricks and bake them thoroughly." They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar. Then they said, "Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves and not be scattered over the face of the whole earth."

So rather than being a gradual evolution from trade and farming, the foundation of cities were conscious acts of communalism, with ambitious motives. They seemed to know that it was the city structure that would enable them to 'make a name' for themselves, by enabling the development of knowledge, technology, and culture.

[DPCrisp]

Yes, it's interesting that they entertained the notion that cities were not just existing villages and towns grown large. But other than that, this doesn't look an enlightening episode. This first city was obviously conceived retrospectively: when civilisations using stone or brick and making names for themselves had already been invented. You don't simply invent cities out of thin air. Even if you found a city on virgin soil -- which is certainly possible -- you are simply putting the already-developed techniques to work.

Jacobs' point is that being a city has to do with how things are done rather than how many people live together and in what sort of housing. My view is that they arise from unconscious acts of communalism, with (on the whole) petty motives.

[Mick Harper]

Sorry, Bri, didn't quite catch the reference for this piece of information.

[DPCrisp]

The City Sources of Rural Work (4)

Early in the eighteenth century, a great improvement was made in crop rotation, a change so important that it is at the heart of what is called "the eighteenth-century agricultural revolution." In the former fallow year, crops not previously employed in the rural farming of Europe were planted: alfalfa, clover, and another fodder crop called sainfoin. The fodder crops did more than "give the land a rest." They replaced nitrogen used up by grain and at the same time supported cattle. The livestock provided nitrogen-rich manure. Fertility of the cropland and numbers of farm animals both increased at an extraordinary rate, making possible the abrupt European population increases that so alarmed Malthus.

Where did rural Europe get the fodder crops, along with the practice of fitting them into the rotation in place of the fallow year? Duby and Mandrou say the fodders were being grown in the city gardens of France for at least a century before they were adopted into rural farming, and that they were also grown in nearby fields to feed city draft animals. As in the case of the twelfth-century rotation, the new agriculture spread first near cities and along the trade routes, and it was adopted last in the rural areas most distant from cities and least touched by their trade and goods.

The idea that agriculture itself may have originated in cities, the thought to which I have been leading, may seem radical and disturbing. And yet even in our own time, agricultural practices do emerge from cities. A modern instance has been the American practice of fattening beef on corn before slaughter, the practice that has given us the corn-fed steak. This "farm work" did not begin on farms or cattle ranches, but in the city stockyards of Kansas City and Chicago. It was a forerunner of such present farm work. The fattening pens are all but gone from the cities now because the work has been transplanted from cities to the rural world.

Meat-packing plants themselves are in process of moving from city to countryside. To our descendants, it may seem almost incredible that the "country industry" of slaughtering and packing meat for city consumers, of saving pituitaries for laboratories, and of manufacturing toilet soap from animal fats were all formerly city work -- as strange as it seems to us that growing alfalfa was once city work.

In very ancient times, too, cities were engaged in developing agriculture and animal husbandry. In the Egyptian cities of the Old Kingdom, for example, many experiments with animal domestication were tried; records of the efforts have been left in pictures. A zoologist engaged in modern attempts to domesticate wild African animals for meat, R. C. Bigalke of the McGregor Memorial Museum in Kimberley, notes that during early Old Kingdom times, "Hyenas were tied up and force-fed until fat enough for slaughter; pelicans were kept to lay eggs; mongooses were tamed to kill rats and mice in the granaries; and there is a suggestion that Dorcas gazelles were herded in flocks. Pictures also show ibex and two of the large kinds of antelope, addax and oryx, stabled and wearing collars." The ass and the common house cat were domesticated in the ancient cities of the Nile; they are "city animals," distributed into the rural world.

Both in the past and today, then, the separation commonly made, dividing city commerce and industry from rural agriculture, is artificial and imaginary. The two do not come down two different lines of descent. Rural work -- whether that work is manufacturing brassieres or growing food -- is city work transplanted.

[Brian Ambrose]

[DPCrisp]

[Brian Ambrose]

So the sequence of events is (presumably):

City
Civilisation
Agriculture

[DPCrisp]

[DPCrisp]

Be especially careful with this idea of spreading. All of official history is built on the assumption that agriculture spread as farmers and/or the idea of farming took over successively larger areas, from its inception in the Middle East. All of human life was transformed as hunter-gatherers were seen off or killed off or decided to take up the new life style in a series of individual decisions on exposure to the 'leading edge' of expanding farmers. And then growing populations condensed into villages. Some of which grew into towns. Some of which grew into cities.

But this is bollocks. Per Jacobs, there were cities first: no matter how small, they developed their own economies through innovation and commerce. And there had to be a network of them, dependent on each other. Amongst other things, they invented domestic animals (sheep here, pigs there...) and cultivars (spelt here, beans there...) and traded them amongst themselves. When farming was transplanted out of the cities, patches of wilderness were transformed into patches of rural countryside. It was someone's job to do that work and supply food. And other cities followed suit and other people took up those jobs.

This is not a strictly geographic spread where the next piece of ground is claimed as a field by an expanding family or hunter-gatherer succumbed to the allure. The spread is on the backbone of the network of cities as the techniques, the plans, the tools, the livestock, the seed grain are rolled out. (And with the success of the scheme, the population rises, new cities spring up and reinforce the trend...)

Almost everywhere can be converted from wild to rural -- and the fact that it has been creates the illusion that farming is the basic mode of life everywhere -- but the same principle of communication between cities applies to other sorts of technology, including mineral exploitation. In particular, the city network got plugged into the copper and tin of the British Isles, but that doesn't mean bronze was invented in Wales, nor that bronze making passed from neighbour to neighbour. Sure, someone said "look what I can do" or "I need help trying this out", but not to the next guy; rather to some economic partner, in this city or another one, with the resources to develop and exploit or the market to receive the new thing.

[DPCrisp]

A Theory of City Origins of the First Agriculture (1)

The logical inference is that in prehistoric times, also, agriculture and animal husbandry arose in cities. But if this is so, then cities must have preceded agriculture. To imagine how this could occur, and how grain culture and domestication of animals could have emerged in pre-agricultural cities of hunters, let us try to imagine such a city. I am choosing to imagine for the purpose a city I shall call New Obsidian and I am pretending that it is the center of a large trade in obsidian, the tough, black, natural glass produced by some volcanoes. The city is located on the Anatolian plateau of Turkey.

There are two reasons for this choice. First, the ruins of a city, Çatal Höyük, that might well have been the successor to my imaginary New Obsidian, have been found by a British archeologist, James Mellaart, and are beautifully described and illustrated in his book, Çatal Höyük. [ Remember, this was pretty much fresh news in 1968. ] Thus we have the advantage of seeing how our imaginary city developed later. To put it the other way around, the New Obsidian we are going to imagine is the precursor to a known ruin and so is less difficult to imagine than a city entirely made up. The second reason for my choice is that obsidian was the most important industrial material traded in the part of the world where scholars believe wheat and barley culture first arose, although it was by no means the only industrial material traded there. Thus a city in which obsidian trade centered is a logical choice as a pre-agricultural metropolis. To be sure, an equally logical choice might be a center of the copper industry in the Caucasus or the Carpathians during the same period, or a coast city that had developed a trade in its shells. But New Obsidian will serve as a suitable candidate to explain the principles.

While the city is imaginary, I shall be strict and unfanciful in describing its economy. I shall allow to New Obsidian only the same economic processes that I have found operating in cities of our own and historical times.

New Obsidian, although it thrives on obsidian trade, is not located at one of the several volcanoes on the Anatolian plateau from which the black glass comes. It is at least a score of miles away from the nearest volcano of the group, and probably farther. This is because the Upper Paleolithic hunting tribes who controlled the volcanoes when the trade began would not permit strangers near the seat of their splendid treasure. In the distant past, they themselves had wrested control of the obsidian-bearing territory from predecessors less wily than they. They did not risk a repetition of this conquest.

Thus, since at least 9,000 B.C., and possibly earlier, the trading of the local obsidian had taken place by custom in the territory of a neighboring hunting group who had become regular customers for the obsidian and, subsequently, go-betweens in the trade with more distant hunting peoples. It is the settlement of this group that has become the little city of New Obsidian.

[DPCrisp]

A Theory of City Origins of the First Agriculture (2)

In 8,500 B.C., New Obsidian's population numbers about two thousand persons. It is an amalgam of the original people of the settlement and of the obsidian owning tribes, much of whose population is now settled within the city because of the trade and the various kinds of work connected with it. A small outlying population, to be sure, still works at the volcanoes and patrols the territory around them. Every day, parties from New Obsidian traverse the route between, bringing down treasure. The people of the city are wonderfully skilled at crafts and will become still more so because of the opportunity to specialize. The city has a peculiar religion because not one, but several, tribal deities are respected, officially celebrated and depended upon; these deities have become amalgamated like the population itself.

The system of trade that prevails runs this way: The initiative is taken by the people who want to buy something. Traveling salesmen have not yet appeared on the scene; the traders, rather, regard themselves, and are regarded as, traveling purchasing agents. Undoubtedly, they take trade goods of their own to the place of purchase, but this is used like money to buy whatever it is they came for. Thus, the traders who come to New Obsidian from greater and greater distances come there purposely to get obsidian, not to get rid of something else. For the most part, the barter goods they bring consist of the ordinary produce of their hunting territories. When the New Obsidian people want special treasures like copper, shells or pigments that they themselves do not find in their territory, parties of their own traders go forth to get these things from other settlements. With them they take obsidian, as if it were money.

In this way, settlements that possess unusual treasures -- copper, fine shells, pigments -- have become minor trading centers for obsidian too. They exchange with nearby hunting tribes some of the obsidian that has been brought to them in barter and are paid in ordinary hunting produce. And New Obsidian, similarly, is a regional trading center for other rare goods besides obsidian.

New Obsidian, in this fashion, has become a "depot" settlement as well as a "production" settlement. It has two kinds of major export work, not one. Obsidian, of course, is one export. The other export is a service: the service of obtaining, handling and trading goods that are brought in from outside and are destined for secondary customers who also come from outside.

The economy of New Obsidian divides into an export-import economy on the one hand, and a local or internal economy on the other. But these two major divisions of the settlement's economy are not static. As time passes, New Obsidian adds many new exports to those first two, and all the new exports come out of the city's own local economy. For example, the excellently manufactured hide bags in which obsidian is carried down from its sources are sometimes bartered to hunters or traders from other settlements who have come to purchase obsidian but, after seeing the bags, wish to carry their obsidian back in one. Fine, finished obsidian knives, arrowheads, spearheads and mirrors of the kind that the workers in New Obsidian produce for their own people are also coveted by those who come for raw obsidian. The potent religion of prospering New Obsidian becomes an object of trade too; its common local talismans are bought. Trinkets of personal dress also go into the export trade.

[DPCrisp]

A Theory of City Origins of the First Agriculture (3)

A lot of copying goes on among the major trading settlements. For a while, New Obsidian sold quite a few of the hide bags, but then craftsmen in the copper- and pigment-trading settlements began copying them. Meanwhile, in New Obsidian; craftsmen began copying some of the imports that were popular there: strong, elegant little baskets occasionally imported from a settlement that traded red ocher, and carved wooden boxes from a settlement whose major trade was in fossil oyster shells. By the time the minor work of making hide bags for export had somewhat dropped off in New Obsidian, the little city had already developed a small, compensatory export trade in the imitated baskets and boxes.

The people of New Obsidian, the people of other major settlements, and the people of all the small and ordinary hunting settlements that lie between the major trade centers fiercely resent and try to repel encroachments upon their own hunting territories. Exceptions are made solely for trespass to reach trading centers. Thus the routes to New Obsidian from afar cross the territories of many, many hunting groups. These routes ran, at first, through the territories closest to the city and then extended outward as people farther away became customers, and then people beyond those. As the range of customers extended outward, so did the routes to New Obsidian. Linked to routes extended from other cities, the paths to New Obsidian help form a network that, by the time of Çatal Höyük, will stretch almost two thousand miles from east to west.

A peace of the routes was early established. This was possible because trespass always ran through the territory of a group that was already being served by the trade. Any people that shut off the routes or that robbed and killed traders was itself denied obsidian, and moreover was fought by a coalition of warriors from the nearest city and from nearby hunting people who used the trade routes.

The resting and watering points used by trading parties along the routes have become traditional. They are spots of total sanctuary, protected powerfully under the city's religious code. These places always have a spring or other source of water and it is under the same protection. But there are no hotels. Traders eat sparsely on their journeys and carry their own food. They do not live off the land on which they trespass. They travel swiftly without dawdling, but they are usually hungry when they reach home.

[DPCrisp]

A Theory of City Origins of the First Agriculture (4)

In New Obsidian the buildings are made of timber and adobe; later in the millennium there will also be buildings made of shaped mud bricks. The "center" or barter space of the little city is physically on the edge where the routes join and approach the settlement. As the city has grown, this space has been kept clear. To its rear, the city slowly grows larger. On the route side of the barter square, the alien traders make their camps. These have become permanent abodes although their residents are transient. In the barter space, the two worlds meet. The square is thus the only "open space" in the city itself, left open originally because what has since become a busy meeting and trading spot was at first a space of separation, deliberately kept empty. The barter space, or city square as it has become, is on the side of the city that faces toward the volcanoes. The reason for its location is that in the beginning here was where the original New Obsidian people traded with the volcano owners. When neighboring tribes began bartering at the settlement too, they used the already established barter point. For obvious reasons, storehouses of treasure are not at the barter square. But many workshops are squeezed among the buildings around it, especially those using materials of little intrinsic value.

To understand why New Obsidian has become a trading center of such importance, the goal of people from great distances, it is necessary to understand the enormous value of obsidian to hunters. Obsidian is not merely a substance that catches the eye or carries prestige; it is a vital production material. Once possessed, it is regarded as a necessity, both by the hunters in every little trading city and by the rural hunting tribesmen. Obsidian makes the sharpest cutting tools to be had. We get a hint of what a material like this means to the Middle Eastern hunters and craftsmen ten thousand years ago by considering a comment concerning modern knives in Peter Freuchen's Book of the Eskimos:


In Committee Bay I have met Eskimos who had no knives. The only cutting instruments they had were made of old metal straps from barrels. For flensing they used sharp stones or knives made of bone. They were walrus hunters, and it would take them days to flense and cut up one single walrus. While they worked with their miserable tools, hundreds of walrus would pass by their camp. If they had had steel knives, as they do now, the whole job could be done in half an hour and they could get out again while the hunting was still good and maybe get a whole winter's supply in a day or two.


Obsidian is not steel, but it is the nearest thing to it in the world of New Obsidian.
---

Tests by modern surgeons show obsidion to be as good as, sometimes better than, surgical steel for scalpels.

[DPCrisp]

A Theory of City Origins of the First Agriculture (5)

The food of New Obsidian is derived in two ways. Part of it comes from the old hunting and gathering territory -- which is still hunted, foraged and patrolled as diligently as it formerly was when the people were solely hunters and gatherers --and from the territories of the volcano-owning groups whose headquarters are now also at New Obsidian. But a large proportion of the food is imported from foreign hunting territories. This is food that is traded at the barter square for obsidian and for other exports of the city. Food is the customary goods brought by customers who do not pay in copper, shells, pigments or other unusual treasures. Wild food of the right kind commands a good exchange. In effect, New Obsidian has thus enormously enlarged its hunting territory by drawing, through trade, upon the produce of scores of hunting territories.

The right kind of wild food to bring to the barter square is nonperishable. Except in times of great shortage and unusual hunger when anything is welcome, only nonperishable food is accepted. There are two reasons for this. First, unless the customers are from territories very nearby, nonperishable food stands the trip to the city best. Second and more important., the people of New Obsidian like to store the food and mete it out rationally rather than gorge upon it and perhaps go hungry later. Thus the imported food consists overwhelmingly of live animals and hard seeds. In this New Obsidian resembles all pre-agricultural settlements that import wild food.

Because of New Obsidian's unusually voluminous and extensive trade, large quantities of live animals and seeds flow into the city. The animals are trussed up or carried in pole cages if they are dangerous. They are hobbled with fiber rope and alternately carried and driven on their own feet if they are not dangerous. Nonperishable plant food is easier to handle than animals, and traders carrying it can travel more swiftly. Thus, especially from the greater distances, beans, nuts and edible grass seeds pour into New Obsidian.

The imported food promptly enters New Obsidian's local economy and there it comes under the custody of local workers who specialize in its protection, storage and distribution. They are, in effect, stewards: stewards of wild animals and stewards of edible seeds. Consider, first, the duties of the animal stewards. In principle, their work is the not very difficult task of keeping the animals alive until it is time to slaughter them. This does, however, require judgment. The first animals chosen for slaughter are those that are either the hardest to feed or the most troublesome to manage, or both. Most carnivores fall into one or both of these categories and they are eaten very soon after their arrival in New Obsidian. The craftsmen get the pelts and other by-products. Animals that can live on grass are removed last from the natural refrigerator of life. And among the grass-eating animals, the females, being the less rambunctious, are kept longest. Sometimes they give birth to young before their time of slaughter comes; and when this happens there is, of course, extra wild meat and extra pelts. The animal stewards of New Obsidian, with their unusually large supplies of meat to pick and choose among, make it a practice to save these docile breeders whenever they can. They have no conception of animal domestication, nor of categories of animals that can or cannot be domesticated. The stewards are intelligent men, and are fully capable of solving problems and of catching insights from experience. But experience has not provided them yet with any idea that can be called "trying to domesticate animals." They are simply trying to manage the city's wild food imports to the best of their abilities.