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Jacobs Crackers? (NEW CONCEPTS)
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DPCrisp


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Jacobs Crackers?

Just to get the thread established and by way of a preface, here is a telling question from Ma'at that illustrates the orthodox stance.

http://www.hallofmaat.com/read.php?1,332480,332480#msg-332480

"Sorry for what is possibly a newbie question, but I've been looking around this site (and the rest of the web via google) with no success, which means I don't even know enough to know how to phrase the question properly

"What information is there about the demographics in ancient cities - I mean the earliest cities 7000-5000 BCE sort of range. I'm looking for estimates of e.g. the fraction of people involved in agriculture, trade, administration, 'elite' with leisure time, if such information is actually knowable. I'd imagine that some estimates of the surplus (non-farming) population supportable ought to be possible, but I've no idea where to look really."

The premise is clear: agriculture replaced hunting/gathering as the primary way of feeding people... and people became sedentary. Only then could anyone be released from the daily grind of food production and develop "other interests"... from which all divisions of labour and hierarchies grew... first into villages, then towns, then cities. If there is a city, there must be agriculture.

A few first-off comments:

1. There must always have been a so-called surplus population, since not everyone always fed themselves: at the very least, those fit to labour provide for those who are not.

2. If agriculture began without any surplus population, there would be no reason ever to gain one. Why wouldn't numbers expand and still have each person only feeding himself? For someone to become surplus, they would have to break away from an entire lifestyle (which is generally called banishment and taken to be a bad thing!) to do... what?

3. The whole thing about hierarchy and division of labour is laughable, but more on that later.

Any other comments, anyone?
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DPCrisp


In: Bedfordshire
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As a piece of general Applied Epistemology, here is a quote from Jane Jacobs (Wikipedia):

"For the first time I liked school and for the first time I made good marks. This was almost my undoing because after I had garnered, statistically, a certain number of credits I became the property of Barnard College at Columbia, and once I was the property of Barnard I had to take, it seemed, what Barnard wanted me to take, not what I wanted to learn. Fortunately my high school marks had been so bad that Barnard decided I could not belong to it and I was therefore allowed to continue getting an education."
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Oakey Dokey



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I also could never see why agriculture freed up time. The way I see it those tribes that take from hunter gathering have a LOT of leisure time to do other things. The only real differences are agriculture really means not travelling at all, unless to market, and you can get a lot of people to be stable and more or less fixed in one area. So really agriculture itself is the cause of city life. Aren't most towns and cities built from old market places?
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DPCrisp


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The only real differences are agriculture really means not travelling

Not necessarily. First, remember a distinction between migration and wandering. Many people and animals do the former: seasonal movement between defined locations. (You can still be territorial even if your territory is large, a funny shape, or broken into pieces. Even so, it isn't proven that there was ever a period in human history when everyone was migratory.) I can't think of a single species that actually does the latter: wandering about, constantly in search of something different or better or not yet exhausted, as our "hunter-gatherer" ancestors are said to have done.

Second, don't be fooled by the fact that agriculture is invariably practised by sedentary people. While there are always some adventurous types, most people are sedentary, so that's the way agriculture is bound to be practised. There are logical alternatives where the crops have to stay more or less where they are (of course), but the people could move about from place to place or job to job, in regular or random patterns, with large scale or small scale co-operation...

And don't be caught out by the concept of agriculture being defined by sedentariness. There is a wide spectrum of human intervention in floral and faunal affairs, but the term 'agriculture' is only applied up at one end.

you can get a lot of people to be stable and more or less fixed in one area.

If you mean "it's easy to get people to stay put -- because that's just what they do" then I agree. But if you mean agriculture can persuade people to become sedentary, I think you've got it backwards. The only view that matches everything else we know about human and other species' behaviour and adaptations is that agriculture was developed to create new resources to support growing (or displaced?) populations.

We're not the only ones to do this. Such-n-such nuts were not food for chimps because their shells are too tough. But nowadays, they crack them with hammers and anvils. They turned a feature of their environment into a resource.

I was most interested to see on TV that even South American (capuchin?) monkeys do it. There was a big stone "table" (formerly a boulder or outcrop) where the monkeys brought nuts to crack. The smooth hammer stones weighing as much as the monkeys themselves were brought from a river a mile or more distant and the top of their anvil was pitted and covered in the dust from long, pulverising use. Having cracked the nuts (like small coconuts) and drunk the milk, they left them to mature a while before eating the flesh. Very cool.

Aren't most towns and cities built from old market places?

That's another chicken-and-egg question we can explore here.

But notice that even Stone Age ancestors are reckoned to have had regular gathering places for tribal reunions and wife-swapping.

What I could never understand is that these wandering hunter-gatherers were all supposed to go their separate, random, unplanned ways and lose touch with one another... and then (when it suited the anthropologists to say so) turn up on cue.

I was stunned by something else I saw on telly recently. They put radio trackers on elephants to plot their migrations... It seems the elephants periodically converge from long distances (hundreds of miles?), all at the same time, to a given clearing and water hole: a clearing a they had made themselves.
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Martin



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Hunter gatherer populations were sedentary in the more productive areas. These areas have subsequently been taken by agiculture and hunter gatherers are left with less productive areas which enforce a non-sedentary lifestyle.
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DPCrisp


In: Bedfordshire
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Let's take up the development-of-agriculture elements of the Beaker People thread here, too.
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DPCrisp


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What shall we call people who ate wild food before there was such a thing as farmed food? Agriphages -- no, agrios (wild) is a bit too close for comfort to agros (land, field). How about feravores? Without a doubt, that is what people were doing before agriculture was invented, even if we admit that they could interfere with the lives of plants and animals quite a lot without being considered agriculturalists (clearing scrub to encourage deer, picking out shoots to encourage fruit, felling trees to encourage funguses and grubs... that kinda thing).

The whole question is about the relationship between these people and the agriculturalists and the development of civilisation -- and it sets the pattern for other developmental questions such as shamans vs. priests.

But there is a problem with the evidence. The term hunter-gatherer is applied to modern people who procure their food from the wild. Since it is assumed that these lifestyles are the remnants of pre-agricultural lifestyles, the term is also applied to all pre-agricultural humans.

I don't like the term hunter-gatherer. In the latter case, it is a constructed image: there is no direct, independent evidence to support it; all evidence is interpreted in terms of this image. The orthodox H-G wanders in search of a new place with resources to denude before heading off randomly again. Not only is this stunningly at odds with what we know about how all other animals live -- including the migratory ones which are famously predictable in their habits -- it begs questions like how did widely dispersed, isolated people come up with annual wife-swapping parties and a 6mm bead industry?

In the former case, it has to be assumed because it can not be demonstrated that modern H-Gs are in any way representative of the ancient feravores.
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DPCrisp


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Hunter gatherer populations were sedentary in the more productive areas. These areas have subsequently been taken by agriculture and hunter gatherers are left with less productive areas which enforce a non-sedentary lifestyle.

Do you see that it is only a premise that there were always H-Gs, subsequently overtaken or displaced by agriculturalists? And that tweaking the classic view to accord with what strikes you as common sense (about being sedentary where you can be) just shows that the classic view is wrong?

If people started out only living in the comfortably productive areas -- which is near enough the definition of human animals occupying their own niche -- then everyone was sedentary to begin with. Mastering the crappy, marginal areas would have to follow later.

And if you acknowledge that the places we find H-Gs -- such as Kalahari, Amazon and Arctic -- are low on productivity, then you acknowledge that those lifestyles can not be taken as representative of the ancient feravores of productive climes; and therefore that any connection has (yet) to be demonstrated.

H-G lifestyles now are far from the norm; and this is exactly the situation that would arise if these peripheral societies grew out of the majority, sedentary population.

How that is possible will unfold in this thread.
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DPCrisp


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I love all this politically correct relativist stuff. Hunter-gatherers eke out an existence on the fringes of society because they cannot compete with the agriculturally or industrially-based societies that dominate the globe. End of story.

No political correctness here: it's a matter of the sequence of events and how development actually unfolds. Evaluation of what is more advanced than what else is another matter.

"Eking out an existence" sounds a little politically charged. Why isn't it the other way around: agriculture/industry can not complete with hunter-gatherers in certain places?

Not a whole lot of scope for hunting and gathering in Bedfordshire, so I'll assume you've answered that one.

By the way, a relatively trivial but irritating aspect is that hunting and gathering are themselves misrepresented: as if the women gather berries and roots while the men charge around after the big game. Except for an abundance of monkeys in the Amazon, most of the telly progs lately show that trapped birds and rodents are the mainstay of the diet alongside elaborately processed vegetable stuff.

I'm constantly reminded by road-kill how bountiful this environment is. I'm also surrounded by acorns, beechnuts and nettles, but they'd take a lot of hard work. Quite a lot of scope for hunting and gathering in Bedfordshire, actually.

---

A lot of fruit bushes and trees, too. Which reminds me: has anyone ever seen a field of brambles? i.e. a large expanse mostly inaccessible to humans. They're all over the place in Britain, but I've never seen any far out of reach.
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Hatty
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The orthodox H-G wanders in search of a new place with resources to denude before heading off randomly again.

The orthodox view seems more respectful than that, the H-G knew what flowered/ripened when and where and there was a seasonal rhythm to the 'wandering', rather like pastoralists' animals selecting pastures, not random at all.

it begs questions like how did widely dispersed, isolated people come up with annual wife-swapping parties and a 6mm bead industry?

People everywhere have always traded in kind, and it's essential surely to form neighbourly relations and to 'marry out'.

Mastering the crappy, marginal areas would have to follow later.

It's not a crappy environment if it's your home and you have learnt the skills from childhood to exploit it, skills which wouldn't be of use elsewhere.
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DPCrisp


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Thanks for underlining my points, Hatty.

The orthodox view seems more respectful than that, the H-G knew what flowered/ripened when and where and there was a seasonal rhythm to the 'wandering', rather like pastoralists' animals selecting pastures, not random at all.

It seems to me they've been revising the orthodox view over the years -- common sense creeping in and conflicting with it. (In certain areas, this was Richard Rudgley's mission.) But it still wasn't many years ago that Meet the Ancestors did a piece on a 10,000(?) year old house found in Scotland and Julian Richards reiterated the view that this was a big surprise coz people were thought to be itinerant back then. I think he used the word 'wandering'. Certainly, the prevailing view is that people did not live as they do now.

Think about it a minute. How do you know the seasonal rhythm of places you've never been before? If you wander about randomly, how do you ever learn the rhythm? Sure, the last feravores before the farms came might have migrated as you suggest, but what about the first ones? I've never heard of the distinction: only of "hunter-gatherers".

And it is a distinction. Migration and nomadism have more to do with sedentism than wandering. Having a territory that is elongated or split between seasonal latitudes or altitudes is still having a territory. It's still 'living in a certain place'. It means getting to know the landscape and its resources; and being able to pass on this knowledge. (It's not as though the seasons change slowly and everyone just follows the fruit or retreats from the falling leaves. And if people can move down, say, from the north of Scotland to the south, while others move from the south of Scotland to the Midlands, etc. then there must be a living to be had in southern Scotland and in the Midlands, etc. all year round. This seasonal migration lark doesn't get by without a lot more explanation.)

How do people moving into an area for the first time know what they're doing? By definition, it's not a regular thing. They do tell us bands of people split up and went their separate ways and verily zoomed across the face of the globe. They say, for instance, that Neanderthal had a limited range and was not very good at exploiting new or varied resources and were just outclassed by sapiens sapiens.

People everywhere have always traded in kind, and it's essential surely to form neighbourly relations and to 'marry out'.

That's fine if you have neighbours and the story they feed us is effectively that people had none. They never knew when they would come across another band. The landscape "filling up" to such an extent that competition for resources became an issue is supposed to have been a turning point in human history. And yet, from complete isolation, they turned up at the get-togethers at certain favoured spots. (That is, certain spots have evidence of frequent use, but most places have no evidence at all.) And were prepared to swap marriageables.

I agree with you, Hatty, that people always have neighbours.

It's not a crappy environment if it's your home and you have learnt the skills from childhood to exploit it, skills which wouldn't be of use elsewhere.

Absolutely. Mick accused me of Acacia Avenue Syndrome on this, too. But it is a plain fact that people die from exposure. If you have to know precisely how to get from one water hole to another and you risk dying if you miss it, you live in a crappy environment. If you need special knowledge to catch fish from under the ice and there is no more food around that you can reach before you collapse, you live in a crappy environment. But if you can blunder around and come across food and water without even trying, then you are not in a crappy environment.

There is a scale of crappiness: the more your life depends on knowledge and equipment (clothing, tooling, shelter...) the crappier the place is. Crappiness of the environment has nothing to do with the happiness or misery of the people living there. Call it harshness, if you prefer.

It takes time and a developmental attitude to develop the means (the skills learned from childhood) to overcome a harsh environment.
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Ishmael


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As I pointed out in my God's Garden piece, I don't think there's a single non-crappy human environment on Earth.
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DPCrisp


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Humans, like every other species, must have come from a place with zero crappiness, otherwise, by definition, they would have perished. Is there nowhere left on Earth where humans can live unclothed and unequipped?
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DPCrisp


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The Economy of Cities

Like I said, I would like an alternative to the Agriculture First model to be unfolded in this thread. I have therefore scanned and will post up the beginning of Jane Jacobs' book The Economy of Cities. It was written in 1968, so there has been plenty of new archaeology since, but as far as I know the general shape of her reasoning is not affected.

Rather than trying to re-present the argument, I'll just let chapter one, Cities First...Rural Development Later speak for itself.
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DPCrisp


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Cities First...Rural Development Later (1)

This book is an outcome of my curiosity about why some cities grow and why others stagnate and decay. I have relied greatly and gratefully upon the findings -- reliable, as far as I am able to judge -- of many scholars; historians and archeologists in particular. But I have not necessarily adopted their views about the meanings of their findings in my effort to develop a theory of city economic growth.

One of many surprises I found in the course of this work was especially unsettling because it ran counter to much I had always taken for granted. Superficially, it seemed to run counter to common sense and yet there it was: work that we usually consider rural has originated not in the countryside, but in cities. Current theory in many fields -- economics, history, anthropology -- assumes that cities are built upon a rural economic base. If my observations and reasoning are correct, the reverse is true: that is, rural economies, including agricultural work, are directly built upon city economies and city work.

So thoroughly does the theory (in my view, the dogma) of agricultural primacy saturate the conventional assumptions about cities that I propose to deal with it in this chapter as the first order of business. In the chapters that follow I shall then describe what I have been able to learn about how cities grow, taking each part of the growth process separately. Thus this first chapter is a prologue.

We are all well aware from the history of science that ideas universally believed are not necessarily true. We are also aware that it is only after the untruth of such ideas has been exposed that it becomes apparent how pervasive and insidious their influence has been.

To take an example: for thousands of years otherwise intelligent men thought that those small animals found in rotting meat, cheese and still water took form and came to life without parents. Their environment, it was supposed, not only nourished them, it created them by a process called spontaneous generation. This theory seems to have gone unquestioned until the Renaissance, when a Florentine poet-physician demonstrated that maggots did not materialize in rotting meat if the meat had been screened from flies. He drew the proper inference that the new life arose from existing life. But just as his insight was gaining currency, the microscope was invented. Hitherto invisible bits of life now became visible. Their presence was promptly interpreted to be new proof of spontaneous generation and thus the dogma stood a full two centuries longer, buttressed, ironically, by the tools of science until it was demolished by Pasteur in the nineteenth century.
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