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Jacobs Crackers? (NEW CONCEPTS)
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DPCrisp


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A Theory of City Origins of the First Agriculture (6)

The only reason that second, third or fourth generation captives live long enough to breed yet another generation is that they happen to be the easiest to keep during times of plenty. Indeed; over and over, third and fourth generation captives are killed off without a qualm if the food is needed.

But the stewards make an effort to keep fresh meat always on hand, and, in particular, always to have some for the happy and exciting occasion when a party of New Obsidian traders returns from afar, weary, hungry and eager for welcome. And eventually, the stewards manage to keep fresh meat on hand permanently. They come in this way to possess, and to protect most carefully, what we would call breeding stock. But such animals mingle with imported wild stock that will not harm them, including different varieties of their own species. And among the offspring those that stand captivity best are, by definition, the best survivors and best meat producers on the forage at hand. Among these, the most docile are always kept by preference.

In New Obsidian, it so happens, the animal stewards concentrate especially upon saving and multiplying sheep -- mainly because sheep meet the requirements of convenient maintenance and their meat is as well liked as any. Also, the craftsmen particularly value their pelts.

In another little city with which New Obsidian trades, imported wild goats are being kept by preference because they thrive on poor provender. In still another, from which New Obsidian buys copper, wild cattle are being kept because the females are sufficiently docile and because the craftsmen regard the multiplication of horn to be especially desirable. Far in the western part of the trading belt, wild sows are being kept by preference because they can be pastured in forests and because they yield such splendidly large litters.


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The reason domesticated animals are smaller than wild ones is presumably then that the smaller, more docile individuals were always the easiest to feed and regularly made it to breeding season, while the larger, more energetic individuals quickly made it to the spit.
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DPCrisp


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A Theory of City Origins of the First Agriculture (7)

The seed stewards of New Obsidian have no reason to prefer saving one kind of barter seed over another, and they do not do so. The dry seeds taken in trade are all mingled together in storage and are also eaten as mixtures. Seeds of many, many different kinds of wild grasses flow into the city from wet soils and dry, from sandy soils and loamy, from highlands and from valleys, from riverbanks and from forest glades. They come from the territories of scores of tribes who do not harvest in one another's territories except during war and raids -- when the raiders eat quickly what they have seized. But here in New Obsidian, the world's best market for edible wild seeds, the seeds flow together for storage.

Seeds that have never before been juxtaposed are tumbled into baskets and bins. Husked, pounded and cooked, they are often further jumbled with peas, lentils and nut meats.


[ Footnote ] We have today a distant equivalent of such food called by the trade name Pioneer Porridge, which I sometimes feed my family. It is a coarse mixture of half a dozen different whole grains, and the recipes on the bag recommend mixing the grains with beans and nuts; the barter seeds brought into New Obsidian would have been used for wild versions of just such dishes. It is food that sticks to your ribs, and it tastes good.

When seeds remain after the winter, they are used for wild patch sowing, a practice not productive of much food; it just makes gathering wild seeds more convenient. In and around the barter space, around the storage bins within the city, and in the yards where women husk and pound and carry seed to and from the household bins, some seeds spill. Whether spill sown, patch sown, or sown by little predators -- rats, mice and birds -- these plants cross in unprecedented combinations. It is no problem to get grain crosses in New Obsidian, or crossed beans and peas either. Quite the contrary; crosses cannot be avoided.

The crosses and hybrids do not go unobserved. They are seen, in fact, by people who are experts at recognizing the varieties and estimating the worth of barter seeds, and who are well aware that some of these city seeds are new. Mutations occur no more commonly than they would in the wild, but they are not unnoticed either, as they most likely would be in the wild; nor do occasional batches of mutant seeds brought in barter go unnoticed. But crosses, hybrids and the rare mutants are not deliberately put to use in selective breeding.

Barter-seed stewards do not have custody of locally grown seeds, no more than the stewards of imported animals have custody of meat killed by the hunters of New Obsidian itself. It is not the seed stewards who make the first selections of new grain plants. Some of the householders of New Obsidian take this step, and they do it at first inadvertently. Selection happens because some patches of sown seeds yield much more heavily than other patches do. The particular household bins filled from the lucky patches are, more often than not, the bins with seed left for sowing, in years when seed is saved for that purpose at all.
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DPCrisp


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A Theory of City Origins of the First Agriculture (8)

The unprecedented differentials in yields from New Obsidian's best and poorest seed patches lead to an arrangement formerly unheard of: some people within the city trade seeds to others. That is, they make a business of handing out seeds in return for trinkets. Possibly this trade is confined to the women. It is not as radical an arrangement as their ancestors would probably have thought it, because the people inside the city who engage in this practice are modeling their transactions upon the barter that has long gone on in the city square.

Owing to this local dealing in seeds from patches that yield most heavily, all the grain grown in New Obsidian eventually yields heavily in comparison with wild grains. The people of the city do not really know why their grain is "the best," but they know that it is. And in the second stage of the process, selection becomes deliberate and conscious. The choices made now are purposeful, and they are made among various strains of already cultivated crosses, and their crosses, mutants and hybrids.

It takes many generations -- not just of wheat and barley but of people -- to differentiate the New Obsidian seeds into sophisticated cultivated grains. But it is only under the following conditions that the thing could have happened at all:
1. Seeds that normally do not grow together must come together nevertheless, frequently and consistently over considerable periods of time.
2. In that same place, variants must consistently be under the informed, close observation of people able to act relevantly in response to what they see.
3. That same place must be well secured against food shortages so that in time the seed grain can become sacrosanct; otherwise the whole process of selective breeding will be repeatedly aborted before it can amount to anything. In short, prosperity is a prerequisite. Although time is necessary, time by itself does not bestow cultivated grains on New Obsidian.

Gradually, New Obsidian grows more and more of its own meat and grain but it does not, as a consequence, wallow in unwanted surpluses of imported food. First, the very practice of growing foods in new ways requires new tools and more industrial materials. The population of New Obsidian grows and so does the work to be done in New Obsidian.

The city's total food supply is made up of its own territorial yield of wild animals and plants, its imports of wild animals and seeds, and its new home-grown meats and grains. The total increases but the imports decrease as the new city-made food greatly increases. (The city's own traditional hunting territory probably yields about the same amount as in the past.) The city, in short, is now supplying itself with some of the goods that it formerly had to import. In principle, this is not much different from importing baskets and then manufacturing them locally so they need no longer be imported. Since New Obsidian had formerly imported so much wild food -- in comparison to baskets or boxes, say -- the substituted local production makes a big difference in the city's economy.


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A few comments:

1. "Grain domestication is bound to happen under city conditions and can not happen under (orthodox) hunter-gatherer conditions" seems to be the correct perspective.

2. I'm tempted to think some deliberate intervention would come in at an earlier stage since different sorts of seed of different sizes would not be easy to husk all together. But then, do wild grass seeds vary much in size? The most significant difference is between wild and domesticated -- which would actually accelerate the differentiation once it got going and explain why there are so few staple grains, each from its own location.

3. Çatal Höyük is the ante-prototype for New Obsidian, as it were; but the houses of Çatal Höyük have no yards. On the other hand, there is a distinct possibility that Çatal Höyük has no houses either: if it's a necropolis. Neither case impedes Jabobs' thought experiment.
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DPCrisp


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A Theory of City Origins of the First Agriculture (9)

In place of unneeded food imports, New Obsidian can import other things -- a lot of other things. The effect is as if the city's imports have increased enormously, although they have not. The city, instead, has shifted its imports from one kind of goods to other kinds. This change radically changes the economies of the people with whom New Obsidian trades. Now people from ordinary hunting tribes who come for obsidian find that ordinary industrial raw materials from their own territories -- furs, hides, bundles of rushes, fibers and horn -- are much welcomed in barter, while pouches of grass seeds and exhausted, scrawny live animals do not command the obsidian they once did.

Now too the traders of the city itself go forth ever more frequently to points ever more distant in search of exotic materials for the city's craftsmen. And the things that the craftsmen make of the new wealth of materials pouring in amount to an explosion of city wealth, an explosion of new kinds of work, an explosion of new exports, and an explosion in the very size of the city. The work to be done and the population both increase rapidly -- so rapidly that some people from outlying tribes become permanent residents of the city too. Their hands are needed. New Obsidian has experienced a momentous economic change peculiar to cities: explosive growth owing to local production of goods that were formerly imported and to a consequent shift of imports.

The traders of New Obsidian, when they go off on their trips, take along New Obsidian food to sustain themselves. Sometimes they bring back a strange animal, or a bit of promising foreign seed. And the traders of other little cities who come to New Obsidian sometimes take back food with them and tell what they have seen in the metropolis. Thus, the first spread of the new grains and animals is from city to city. The rural world is still a world in which wild food and other wild things are hunted and gathered. The cultivation of plants and animals is, as yet, only city work. It is duplicated, as yet, only by other city people, not by the hunters of ordinary settlements.
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DPCrisp


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The Earliest City Yet Found (1)

We need not merely imagine what a city like New Obsidian was like after it had replaced a major import and grown explosively, for Çatal Höyük, the city found by Mellaart in Anatolia, had, I suspect, an economic history behind it like that of imaginary New Obsidian. Çatal Höyük ("ancient mound at Çatal") was found while its discoverer, Mellaart, was actually looking for nothing more than a village. He had already unearthed a late Neolithic farming village that had been established in about 6,000 B.C., its culture already fully developed, upon the older site of a long abandoned pre-pottery settlement. Mellaart was seeking the parent culture of this farming village. He assumed it would be found in another village, older of course and more primitive. Among some two hundred possible mounds to explore, the most promising seemed one about two hundred miles east of the village he had already found: a weed- and thistle-covered hump rising gently fifty feet above a great, flat plain, beside what had once been a riverbank.

Digging, under Mellaart's direction, began in 1961. The results of three summers' work have been described in his book on the city.


[ Footnote ] He has also summarized some of this material in an article in Scientific American of April, 1964. The quotations from Mellaart that I use are taken, for the sake of greater conciseness, from the condensed material in his article.

Çatal Höyük proved, as Mellaart had hoped, to be older than the farming village to the west, a good thousand years older. It spanned the period 7,000--6,000 B.C. Also, just as Mellaart had surmised, it was evidently the source from which the culture of the farming village derived. But, surprisingly, Çatal Höyük was a more highly developed settlement, with a richer and more complex culture, than the younger farming village. Indeed, Çatal Höyük was not a village at all. It was a city with remains "as urban as those of any site from the succeeding Bronze Age yet excavated in Turkey." Çatal Höyük is both the earliest city yet found, and the earliest known settlement of any kind to possess agriculture. It is, up to this writing, the earliest known instance of Neolithic life.
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DPCrisp


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The Earliest City Yet Found (2)

Buildings of standardized mud bricks densely covered thirty-two acres at Çatal Höyük. A dwelling for a good-sized household apparently consisted of one rather small all-purpose room, probably with a wooden veranda above. A population that must have run to many thousands was closely concentrated. Dwellings were entered by ladders leading down from "doorways" in the sheltered roofs.

It was a city of crafts, of artists, manufacturers and merchants. Mellaart has drawn up a catalog of the workers it must have contained:

. . . the weavers and basketmakers; the matmakers; the carpenters and joiners; the men who made the polished stone tools (axes and adzes, polishers and grinders, chisels, maceheads and palettes); the beadmakers who drilled in stone beads holes that no modern steel needle can penetrate and who carved pendants and used stone inlays; the makers of shell beads from dentalium, cowrie and fossil oyster; the flint and obsidian knappers who produced the pressure-flaked daggers, spearheads, lanceheads, arrowheads, knives, sickle blades, scrapers and borers; the merchants of skin, leather and fur; the workers in bone who made the awls, punches, knives, scrapers, ladles, spoons, bows, scoops, spatulas, bodkins, belt hooks, antler toggles, pins and cosmetic sticks; the carvers of wooden bowls and boxes; the mirrormakers, the bowmakers; the men who hammered native copper into sheets and worked it into beads, pendants, rings and other trinkets; the builders; the merchants and traders who obtained all the raw materials; and finally the artists -- the carvers of statuettes, the modelers and the painters.

The cosmetics equipment alone included "palettes and grinders" for the preparation of red ocher, blue azurite, green malachite and perhaps galena, and "baskets or the shells of fresh-water mussels for their containers and delicate bone pins for their application . . . [and] mirrors of highly polished obsidian to see the effect."

The oldest cloth yet discovered has been found in Çatal Höyük; there was nothing crude about its manufacture. At least three different types of weaving have been distinguished. And the skillful, richly colored wall paintings in some of the buildings depict, among other things, woven carpets. The men, Mellaart writes, wore leopard skins fastened by belts with bone hooks and eyes, and in the winter they wore cloth cloaks fastened with antler toggles. The women wore sleeveless bodices and jerkins of leopard skin fastened with bone pins, and string skirts weighted with little copper tubes at the ends of the strings.
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DPCrisp


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The Earliest City Yet Found (3)

Just as these people combined manufactured cloth with the fur clothing of huntsmen or trappers, and just as they had added hammered copper to huntsmen's materials of bone and antler, so they had added domesticated food to wild food. The wild food included red deer, boars, leopards, and wild sheep, wild cattle and wild asses; wild nuts, fruits and berries; and eggs that Mellaart judges were from wild rather than domesticated fowl. The domesticated food included sheep, cows and goats, cultivated peas, lentils, bitter vetch, barley and wheat. The barley and wheat, although the oldest yet found, were already far removed from their wild-grass parentage. Among the varieties were naked six-row barley and hexaploid, free-threshing wheat, grains that did not enter European agriculture, it is believed, until about two thousand years later.

Like the people of the European medieval cities, the people of Çatal Höyük obviously depended on a combination of cultivated and wild foods. But they probably ate much better than the medieval Europeans. Their skeletons, Mellaart says, show that they were well fed, healthy and tall.

Owing to fires in about 6,500 B.C., midway during the thousand-year occupation of the site, grains were charred and preserved. This fortuitous preservation provides no record of grains five hundred years earlier but Mellaart reasons, from the evidence of grain bins, mortars and querns, that the city had cultivated grain from the time it occupied the site. It also seems to have had domesticated sheep then, but the domesticated cows and goats seem to have been acquired later. The city had dogs too, but no pigs.

The presumption must be that this civilization came directly -- without a break -- from the hunting life, not only because so many of the crafts were obviously derived from hunters' materials and hunters' skills, but also because of the city's art. Mellaart notes that it is "premature to speak definitively about the origins of this remarkable civilization [but] . . . the discovery of the art of Çatal Höyük has demonstrated that the Upper Paleolithic tradition of naturalistic painting, which died in Western Europe with the end of the ice age, not only survived but flourished in Anatolia. The implication is that at least part of the population of Çatal Höyük was of Upper Paleolithic [the old hunting] stock."
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DPCrisp


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The Earliest City Yet Found (4)

Mellaart pays the usual obeisance to the dogma of agricultural primacy by assuming that "the new efficiency of food production" lay at the city's economic base. But having said that, he cannot swallow the idea that agriculture actually explains Çatal Höyük's economic base. "This was not a village of farmers, however rich." He conjectures that the obviously well-organized trade may "explain the community's almost explosive development in arts and crafts," and he suggests that "the trade in obsidian was at the heart of this extensive commerce." But this too, it seems to me, is an oversimplification. Çatal Höyük had a valuable resource and a trade in that resource, to be sure, but it had something else valuable and more wondrous. It had a creative local economy. It is this that sets the city apart from a mere trading post with access to a mine. The people of Çatal Höyük had added one kind of work after another into their own local city economy.

Many pre-agricultural hunting settlements whose people bartered a territorial treasure may have possessed, briefly, a creative economy that flickered for a relative instant in time. But in modern and historical times, no creative local economy -- which is to say, no city economy -- seems to have grown in isolation from other cities. A city does not grow by trading only with a rural hinterland. A city seems always to have implied a group of cities, in trade with one another. It is thus reasonable to conjecture that, in prehistoric times too, the incipient flickers of a creative city economy could actually be sustained -- as they obviously were in Çatal Höyük -- only if several little cities were simultaneously serving as expanding markets for one another.

If my reasoning is correct, it was not agriculture then, for all its importance, that was the salient invention, or occurrence if you will, of the Neolithic Age. Rather it was the fact of sustained, interdependent, creative city economies that made possible many new kinds of work, agriculture among them.
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DPCrisp


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How Agriculture May Have Become a Rural Occupation

At the time the city work of growing grain and raising domesticated animals developed, there would, of course, have been no such thing as rural agriculture nor would there have been agricultural villages or settlements of any sort specializing in agriculture. In cities, agriculture would have been only a part of economies much more comprehensive, with intensively pursued commerce and industries. The rural world would have been a hunting and gathering world, sparsely dotted by small and simple hunting settlements.

Just as new rural work today develops in cities and then is transplanted, so must the first agriculture have been transplanted. The most likely reason for the transplanting would have been that animal husbandry took up too much room. Grain growing was relatively compact; it did not require enormous acreages, and in a city like imaginary New Obsidian, or even Çatal Höyük, the people could readily tend the city fields, as people in early medieval cities of Europe did, or the early settlers of Boston. But pasturage for herds requires much land, and a limit would have been reached rather quickly to the number of animals that could conveniently attach to a Neolithic city. The solution would have been to spin off herds -- transplant city herds and the work of tending them, to grazing areas more than a day's journey (for a herd) from the city. With the herds would go the herdsmen and their families; and with the herdsmen and their families would go the means to grow grain for themselves, as well as cooking equipment and other everyday necessities. Thus two kinds of rural villages, not one, would now exist at the same time in the hinterlands of cities such as Çatal Höyük: old hunting villages, little changed, and new, radically different, agricultural villages.

An agricultural village thus would have been a specialized community, rather like a company town, to handle one fragment of a city's work. These first agricultural villages would have produced meat and wool for the city. Any other goods, including grain, they would have produced only for themselves. What they did not produce for themselves, they would get from the city in return for meat and wool. When a village ran short of seed it would get more from stewards in the city as a matter of course. When technological improvements were made in the city that were relevant to village work, the improvements would be received in the villages.
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DPCrisp


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How Agriculture May Have Become a Rural Occupation (2)


At first, villages would be located only with grazing in mind. They would be spaced far enough apart so that their herds did not impinge on one another's pasturage, but no farther apart than seemed necessary and no farther from the city than was necessary. But once these specialized and economically fragmentary settlements had been invented, a few other uses for them would become evident and would determine the locations of some. To traders, it would have seemed advantageous to locate villages as distant from the parent city as possible and along main trade routes. Villages would be like caches of food from a trader's point of view, as well as sources of many other comforts: a bit of the city along the journey. Some villages would also have been located to secure and hold fine watering places for stock, even though good pasturage was skipped over and left empty. Hunting villages would be forced to cede territory for these farm settlements and should they resist, would be fought and their people probably killed, enslaved or driven away.

If fatal misfortune dealt either by men or by nature befell a parent city, then its farming villages -- if they managed to survive the disaster -- would be cast loose with their incomplete fragments of a rounded economic life. These orphaned villages would of course continue to specialize -- do the work they could do -- but now only for their own subsistence. They would not develop further because there would be no parent city economy from which they might receive new technology. Again and again during prehistoric times, villages must have been orphaned by the destruction of cities.
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DPCrisp


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How Agriculture May Have Become a Rural Occupation (3)

When those villages lost some part of their own economic life, they would have no way to retrieve or reformulate it. I suspect this explains the origins of nomadic herding peoples. Neolithic villagers who lost their seed grains after their parent city had been destroyed would have had no place to get more. All that would be left to them would be animal husbandry and the practice of a relatively few subsistence crafts based on materials derived for the most part from the animals. Such people would have had to become nomadic herdsmen. No doubt the city civilizations from which these nomads derived could have been traced millennia later from the languages they spoke.

While a village was still prospering and still under protection of a parent city, rural hunters of wild food who had not known city life might often have been assimilated into the village, perhaps as concubines and servants, much as they might have been consistently assimilated into cities.

But hunters and gatherers who had not been so assimilated would not have become agriculturalists even though some of their territory had been seized for pasturage and building. Sometimes they would raid villages, but the grain and animals they took would not turn them from hunting and gathering to farming. At best the raiders' use (as distinguished from merely the consumption) of their plunder would have permitted only a fragmented and barbaric type of agriculture and animal husbandry, in comparison with that of cities and their still-functioning villages.
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DPCrisp


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Re: How Agriculture May Have Become a Rural Occupation

I suspect this explains the origins of nomadic herding peoples... Such people would have had to become nomadic herdsmen.


I had forgotten about this specific passage... and I disagree with it. I can't see why they wouldn't continue to practise animal husbandry in whatever limited territory they occupied before: why would they have had to become nomadic?

This much I agree with: nomadic life is marginal -- I haven't heard of an example to the contrary -- only lightly touching normal, settled, networked city life. But I haven't heard of an example of a sustained nomadic lifestyle (as opposed to some episode of exceptional isolation) that did not touch normal, settled, networked city life at all.

The key things are that nomads do not provide their own material needs (or could not have developed the cruxial techniques in the conditions where they are relied upon for survival) and do rely on considerable technical knowledge. The techniques/technologies were transplanted from cities to enable the most marginal environments to be exploited, even if it means only a few more head of livestock, or daughters or whatever it is they traded back into the cities, it's more produce and a living for more people than there would have been without the margins being occupied.

The steppe cleared by horse nomads may be climatologically more conducive than the deserts or the arctic, but is marginal nevertheless: devoid of the diversity of animal, vegetable and mineral resources necessary for normal economic development -- and probably requiring more abstract technical knowledge to navigate than a feature-rich landscape that you can 'read' as you go along.

Perhaps there is a class of exceptional nomads who really do sharpen bones into knives on rocks and so on, genuinely providing all of their own material needs, but even then, they must derive from normal sedentariness in the past -- otherwise they wouldn't have domestic animals at all, probably wouldn't have tools at all*, however crude, and wouldn't have been able to develop the knowledge of their environment -- and can not represent the primordial human lifestyle.

Perhaps one class of nomads descends from orphaned villagers and another struck out purposefully: both cases are dependant on sedentary, city life to be orphaned or strike out from.

* Don't say hominids and chimps have tools: chimps are sedentary and if the hominids are said to have been wanderers, we only have orthodoxy's say-so.


...a relatively few subsistence crafts based on materials derived for the most part from the animals.


Interesting that she picked up the "materials derived from the animals" angle...

...assimilated into the village, perhaps as concubines and servants


"A bit jaded," I thought. But then, there is such a thing as an underclass.


Sometimes they would raid villages, but the grain and animals they took would not turn them from hunting and gathering to farming.


I have always cringed at the suggestion that the idea of farming spread among hunter-gatherers, as though all the training in one lifestyle can be (much less "was routinely") passed over on a whim and a new lifestyle taken up independent of any tradition to provide the necessary training!
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DPCrisp


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Subtraction of Work from Rural Economies

I have been dwelling upon the fact that city economies create new kinds of work for the rural world, and by doing so also invent and reinvent new rural economies. But of course that is only part of the process by which rural economies change. Cities also subtract old work from the rural world by no longer buying former rural imports. This is what I suspect happened in the rural hinterlands of New Obsidian when wild food was no longer the chief and pressing import of the city. This same process happens all the time today. One of the old ghost towns up the Hudson River once lived on shipping natural ice to New York City -- until the city began supplying artificial ice for itself. Cities never eliminate old work, either from rural economies or their own economies, by "simply" eliminating it. Always, additions of new work lie behind the eliminations of old.

Much of the work subtracted from old rural economies has been replaced by new work transplanted from cities. And this second movement is necessary to prevent cities themselves from being overwhelmed by some of their own successful economic creations. Suppose, in a Neolithic city, it had been deemed more important to retain and expand the already successful animal husbandry, right there, than to make room for newer -- and hence, by definition "less basic" -- kinds of work. Something had to be sacrificed: either some of the already successful, established work or else the opportunities for adding more and different work.
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DPCrisp


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Subtraction of Work from Rural Economies (2)

The reinvention of the pristine rural world, effectively begun in Neolithic times, is still going on. Cities today are still adding new kinds of work into the remaining hunting economies: e.g., the entertainment of vacationers, performance in documentary films, the work of entertaining anthropologists. And cities are still eliminating work from rural hunting economies too. Synthetic tortoise shell, ivory and furs undermine the economic pressure to slay all the remaining tortoises, elephants and beavers.

Just as cities depend less and less upon the old hunting economy to supply them with raw materials, so do they also depend less and less upon the younger agricultural rural economy to supply them with industrial materials. Leatherlike goods without leather, cloth without cotton, flax, wool or mulberry trees, cable without hemp, perfume without factory fields of roses, drugs without acres of roots and herbs, rubber without rubber plantations, machines that need not be fed with alfalfa or oats -- all these are means by which the need for industrial materials from agricultural land is diminished by city work, while the need for food from agricultural land is increased.

Meanwhile, the new work in cities -- some of it -- pulses out into the rural agricultural economy to construct a still younger rural, mass-production manufacturing economy, making chemicals and synthetic yarns.

Just as no real separation exists in the actual world between city-created work and rural work, so there is no real separation between "city consumption" and "rural production." Rural production is literally the creation of city consumption. That is to say, city economies invent the things that are to become city imports from the rural world, and then they reinvent the rural world so it can supply those imports. This, as far as I can see, is the only way in which rural economies develop at all, the dogma of agricultural primacy notwithstanding.
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Hatty
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why would they have had to become nomadic?


What about nomadic fighters as opposed to nomadic herders? A friend told me he examined the legal codex of Ghengis Khan once in the British Library and said it's full of laws against attempting to settle down - draconian penalties (impaling usually) for taking plunder, cultivating land, etc. In other words, they had to be forced to stay mobile though I remember Neal Ascherson in his magnificent book on the Black Sea saying that even the Mongols had a regular seasonal pattern to their lives which enabled them to reap 'their' wheatfields in the course of the summer-winter migrations.

Sounds like even the most 'rootless' groups lived in a state of semi-interdependence with static communities and that the desire to settlle is the more natural way of life.
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