Paying For Megalithia (British History)

[Mick Harper]

Paying for Megalithia (Cont)

It may be that the Saxons and the Celts were 'Megalithics' in some guise--as we shall see the Megalithics were adept at reinventing themselves to take account of any particular development in the world around them--but we can be certain that sooner or later the salt trade would no longer be a Megalithic staple because that is the way of the world, nothing lasts for ever.

We can be equally certain about what replaced salt as the normal carrying trade of the Megalithics: metals. Or rather, bronze. What historians call the Bronze Age and the Iron Age, we would rather term the Rise and Fall of a Megalithic Industry. A lot of nonsense is talked about why bronze, an expensive and hard-to-find alloy, preceded iron, which is cheap and abundantly available. Usually some explanation involving higher smelting temperatures is cobbled together to account for the fact that it required thousands of years to make the really rather minor technical adjustments that iron-smelting requires.*

* The complete immolation of a human body (a routine practice in the Neolithic) requires a higher temperature than iron smelting.

[Donmillion]

[Mick Harper]

[Donmillion]

[Mick Harper]

If you don't know the difference between bold assertion and fraud, you won't be happy here. Anybody over the age of six would be able to work out that I couldn't possibly know that no work has been done on the subject. How would one ever test such a proposition without going through every paper ever written anywhere anytime. But again thanks for your support from your own brief immersion in the subject -- it means I won't have to bother.

I have not said that sandbar lagoons are artificial, indeed I have just accepted (on your testimony) that Texas's aren't. I said that (for particular reasons) we start from the proposition that they might be -- clearly an idea that hasn't occurred to you in your vast lifetime and, as I have pointed out, hasn't occurred to any geologist in all their lifetimes. That's what we do in AE, we explore things that are never explored, and is why I am so confident that Carthage's lake's status hasn't been explored either.

[Donmillion]

[Mick Harper]

Thank God that's settled.

[Donmillion]

Time to move on ...

[Ishmael]

[Ishmael]

[Ishmael]

[Mick Harper]

Paying for Megalithia (cont)

The true explanation for the long dominance of bronze is that the Megalithics operated a very successful metallurgical monopoly organised at all levels from extraction to smelting to transportation to production of finished goods ('vertical integration' in the modern parlance).

This is why there ever was a Bronze Age -- the production of bronze requires that somebody has to bring tin and copper together since they do not ordinarily occur together and hence a de facto control over long distance travel will also be a de facto control over the bronze industry. Tin and copper on their own are useless for everyday pre-historical purposes.

Iron by contrast can be mined, smelted and manufactured on one site. And one might say, by anyone. So the 'Bronze Age' is a story of how techniques are kept secret. As you follow the references throughout this book to Megalithic metalworkers, always keep in mind that a kind of mystery craft is being described, where symbology and story-telling take the place of overt description.

On the other hand, as you also read about how Iron Age states were able to replace their predecessors, you will grasp what happens when a monopoly is broken and new forces come to the fore, leaving the Megalithics to cease being metallurgists and once again search around for a staple for their long distance enterprises. In conventional history books you can read a version of this struggle in terms of those loose alliances based on trade--Trojans, Phoenicians, pre-Classical Greeks, Etruscans, Carthaginians--being replaced by territorial states operating by conquest--Hittites, Assyrians, New Kingdom Egypt, Persians, Classical Greeks and Romans.

[Mick Harper]

Paying for Megalithia (cont)

But all this is the Big Picture. How did Megalithia operate at grass roots level? How for instance did the average village, nestling in some quiet inland spot minding its own business in the late Mesolithic, pay for its long-distance goods such as salt and superior flint axes.

The salt has to be manufactured at the seashore a hundred miles away and the flint axes come from Norfolk a hundred miles in the other direction. Besides the transport costs, both the salt pan and the flint mine require the concentration of labour and capital on a scale that the village, even perhaps the state insofar as that existed, could scarcely contemplate.

[Mick Harper]

Paying for Megalithia (cont)

But of course that is the wonder of capitalism, the village doesn't have to concern itself with any of this--neither for the infrastructure nor the upkeep of the transport nodes--it merely purchases the finished goods. Actually, this being a pre-monetary as well as a pre-literate era, the village barters its own production, say clips of wool, or if it is strategically located, the right of passage, for the salt and for the axes, but either way all the costs are in the price.

The end consumer pays for the whole system. It is just like value-added-tax except it is entirely voluntary, the village is free to wallow in sheep clips and go without the value-added stuff if it prefers. But, also like value-added-tax, everybody has to vaguely give consent to the whole system if everybody is to benefit from reasonably priced salt and axes. If the village regularly robs salt traders (and, remember, any village is in a position so to do) then there will soon be no salt traders.

Indeed, there is the further presumption that everyone has a clear interest in ensuring that nothing untoward happens between villages, all of which presupposes a minimum of law-and-order in any country where long distance trade occurs. But equally if your village refuses to let salt-traders through ie to pay a small price of inconvenience for the benefit of others, then again the whole system breaks down.

[Mick Harper]

So, avoiding these two long-term and potentially terminal dangers is a Megalithic imperative. Thus in any society where systematic long distance trade is present but literacy isn't, two things can be predicted:
1. A territorial state that has sufficient integrity to allow reasonably free internal movement
2. A supra-territorial organisation that allows for reasonably free inter-state movement.

This is exactly the set-up in north-west Europe that emerges as soon as the light of history is shone on it: ie the tribal states of Britain and Gaul described by Caesar and others, together with the Druids operating in both countries. It is also the pattern that re-emerges after Caesar & Co, when the unitary conditions of a large empire held together by a bureaucracy are gone and life once more returns to 'tribal states plus a supra-territorial organisation'. What are called the Dark Ages.