Jordan: The Neolithic & the Bronze Age

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1. The "Agricultural Revolution"

For ninety-nine percent of the period that humans have been living on this planet, they have been foragers. In technical language, "foraging" is the cover term for "hunting" (land animals), fishing (in rivers and lakes or in the ocean), and "gathering" (plant materials, honey, some insects, and shellfish). [Note 1] Foraging communities were limited to the number of people who could be supported by the animal and plant foods naturally occurring around their home. Except in unusual cases (such as the northern European reindeer hunters or the fishing tribes of the northwest coast of North America), the population that could be supported was very small, no more than one or a few families, and constant movement was necessary as the resources of the immediate area varied seasonally or became exhausted.

Few inventions could have made more difference to the human career than one that would allow human communities both to increase in size and to remain in one place indefinitely. Larger population size meant new and more specialized social statuses and vastly more complex kinds of relations between people. Not having to move meant the possibility of permanent buildings (including and especially food storage facilities) and the construction of things too heavy to move, such as pottery, furniture, stone sculpture, or such industrial equipment as looms, water works, or millstones. We shall examine some of the effects in more detail below. Both larger population size per community and the ability of communities to remain in one place resulted from the practice of agriculture, and, to a lesser extent, herding. Because of the dramatic effects that agriculture had on the possible human ways of life, the first appearance of agriculture in the archaeological record is often called the "agricultural revolution," and the term "Neolithic" ("New Stone") is often applied to this period or stage in human history. [Note 2] (More About Neolithic Ground Stone Tools)

It is clearly not correct to think of agriculture as being "invented" by some Upper Paleolithic genius who suddenly one day decided to plant things. Instead, evidence suggests that the transition from a hunting way of life to an agricultural one was a very gradual process, one that went on more or less independently in several different parts of the world. Agriculture seems, from what we now know, to have developed independently in the Near East [Note 3], Mexico, northern China, and Peru. Quite probably there was agriculture of sorts in other areas before the influence of these focal regions arrived and supplemented it. [Note 4]

Specialists are not certain what brought about plant and animal domestication, and even nomadic foragers engage in some deliberate manipulation of plants. Some have argued persuasively that this shows they understand perfectly well how to plant seeds or cuttings to produce additional food, but that this knowledge is of only limited use to nomads. Whatever happened, significant domestication began getting "invented" over most of the planet within a few thousand years, beginning about 8000 BC or so, so one has to assume that the cause of the change must have been something that happened planet-wide. One of the best candidates is climate change. The ice age had just ended, and with the warmer climates came changes in plant life, some of them pre-adaptive to human exploitation for food. At the same time, the warming climates may have been responsible for some population increase in the human communities in peripheral areas, and for the spread of humans into new areas. Increased pressure on traditional foraging resources could have led to various "temporary" or "minor" expedients to increase the food supply, possibly including experimentation with deliberately nurturing edible plants.

The Near Eastern development seems to have been the earliest, beginning about 8000 BC. A principal domesticate of this area in early times, as today, was wheat, and the story of agriculture begins with this.

A. Wild Grain & the Origins of Agriculture

Robert Braidwood is an archaeologist well known for his work in seeking the earliest traces of domesticated wheat in the Near East. Working in the second half of the XXth century, he chose to investigate an area in the foothills of the Zagros and Taurus Mountains, which form an enormous arc flanking the famous "fertile crescent," ranging through the modern nations of Iraq, Iran, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, and Israel.

The Zagros-Taurus foothills were selected on the hunch that the domestication of wheat and barley and of common domestic animals must have occurred first in an area where they all existed in a wild state. Today, as in ancient times, a wild species of barley grows in the area, as well as a small-grained wheat called "einkorn" and a larger-grained kind called "emmer." In addition, there were wild sheep, goats, hogs, cattle, and horses, all mainstays of the Near Eastern farm and barnyard from earliest historic times. Braidwood and an interdisciplinary team of specialists excavated a site called Jarmo in the heart of the hilly flanks of the fertile crescent in northeastern Iraq, about 250 km from Baghdad. (Web link.)

In the lowest layers of the Jarmo deposits, dating between 6750 and 6500 BC, were goat and sheep bones from animals that seem to have had some of the characteristics of domesticated breeds. Grain from that long ago is, of course, unlikely to be available for examination today. Nevertheless, there was also evidence of domesticated wheat and barley because some kernels were preserved by accidental heating in or near ancient fires (which prevented them from rotting). There were also impressions of kernels in clay bricks, since the bricks had been made by mixing straw with mud for greater strength and sometimes grains had still attached to the straw, leaving their impression in the hard-packed bricks for archaeologists to observe thousands of years later. Jarmo at this early period seems to have been the site of a settled agricultural village of earlier date than any of the communities archaeologists had discovered by digging outside the hilly flanks zone.

The importance of Jarmo when it was uncovered was that it confirmed Braidwood's hunch that earlier evidence of domestication would be found in the natural environments of the potential domesticates than in the river valleys where archaeologists had looked previously. The village of Jarmo itself, of course, was not expected to be "the earliest" location of agriculture in the ancient Near East. But it showed that the zone where the wild form grew was likely to be the general area of early domestication.

Further archaeological attention has brought a number of earlier sites to light. The best known of these, and the oldest found so far, are Zawi Chemi Shanidar and Karim Shahir, both in Iraq. These sites have provided sickle blades and millstones dating from nearly 9000 BC. Probably by the time of the Jarmo occupations herding and agriculture were already a primary modes of subsistence in the hilly flanks area, involving domesticated goats and sheep and possibly hogs, and including the cultivation of barley, einkorn, and emmer.

B. The Importance of Beer

None of this speaks to ancient people's motivations, of course. Although it is easy to imagine foragers happily increasing their supply of some foods, many of the plants destined to become the most important agricultural foods were never significant for foragers. Why would grains of wild wheat would be very attractive to most foraging peoples? They are a nuisance to harvest. They are hard to eat without a lot of preparation. They do not offer much to eat on any one stalk, let alone any single grain. And finally, if one tries to eat them right off the plant, they don't taste particularly good. So why would anybody bother with wheat anyway? Bread and gruel, the commonest ways of consuming cereal grains in antiquity, would not have occurred naturally. So what could possibly have tipped ancient people off to the fact that cereals like wheat and barley were edible at all, let alone potentially important foods?

Beginning in the 1950s some scholars explored the possibility that the earliest use of wheat and barley may have been in combination with dried fruits as ingredients in beer. Since grain fallen into water can sometimes ferment naturally, a kind of primitive proto-beer could more plausibly have been produced by accident than could proto-bread, or perhaps even proto-gruel. Bread, in this reconstruction, would then have developed initially from a product used in brewing. (More About Beer)

One of the most persistent advocates of this position was Solomon Katz of the University of Pennsylvania, basing himself partly on the fact that barley, an even bigger nuisance than wheat as a bread grain but optimal for making beer, seems to have been domesticated slightly earlier than wheat. The problem was that our earliest solid evidence of beer drinking in the Near East still came from several thousand years later than earliest domestication.

But by 2003, scientists in China had discovered residues clinging to the insides of broken bits of ceramic jars showing evidence of a fermented grain beverage, almost certainly rice-based, having been consumed at a site called Jiăhú 贾湖 in central China's Henan province about 7,000 BC. Rice does not provide its own yeast for fermentation, but traces of tartaric acid suggested that the fermentation agent had been grapes. (McGovern 2003: 314-315). From the chemical analysis, the rice beer appeared similar to a fermented wine-and-beer beverage made in Turkey about 700 BC. Separate evidence for both rice and grapes was then found at Jiăhú, which, as we shall see below, now provides some of our earliest evidence so far for the development of agriculture in eastern Asia. (Or were people fermenting a wild product?) (More About Fermentation)

Beer, even if it was the "discovery" that led to bread and gruel, was destined to play a much smaller role in human life than other ways of consuming grains. To provide the carbohydrate basis for settled agricultural life, wheat would have to have been used in non-fermented form and consumed in greater quantity than would be possible with beer, it is reasoned.

C. The Biology of Agriculture

The domestication of wild wheat provides an instructive example of the interplay of forces involved with the origins of agriculture and of many crops all over the world. Wild wheat is different from domesticated wheat in a number of respects. That is how archaeologists can tell them apart, and that is why domesticated wheat can be effectively used for human consumption. The grains of any type of wheat are arranged in a head, or spike, at the end of a stalk. Each grain is enclosed in a kind of shell, which is joined to the spike at a node. Wild wheat, for reseeding itself, has highly fragile nodes that dry out when the wheat is ripe and drop individual grains from the spike very easily. Such wheat is accordingly called "fractionating." Domesticated wheat would be very hard to harvest if the grains tumbled off the stalk at the slightest breeze.

In ancient times people presumably used wild wheat anyway, in spite of these handicaps. However, the wheat that they were able to harvest successfully tended to be the grains of wheat that clung best to the stalks. There is quite a bit of genetic variation in wheat, and apparently on some aberrant stalks nodes were tight enough that the wheat kernels did not drop at all. Although such a mutation would not have seeded itself efficiently and therefore would not have propagated itself successfully as a wild strain, it would have been the very thing that was easiest for early farmers to harvest. If they dropped seeds around their settlement on the way home or in the course of processing wheat, the seeds would have tended to be of wheat that was easiest to harvest, the kind that did not naturally drop its kernels. More and more of the wheat that would have sprung up near human settlements would have been of the "non-fractionating" variety. In a comparatively short time, the natural low proportion of mutant, non-fractionating stalks would have turned into a high proportion of non-fractionating stalks in the now "artificial" fields of domesticated wheat.

Archaeologists have two main sources of evidence for the change from fractionating (wild) to non-fractionating (domesticated) wheat. One is the great variety of differences between domesticated and wild wheat that came about in the course of early harvesting and cultivation. Another is the study of microwear on stone sickles used to cut the stalks of grasses like wheat. [Note 5]

Other genetic changes came about in wheat as it was transported out of its home region in the hilly flanks of the fertile crescent into new environments. For example, as people planted wheat in drier areas, the mutants that were suitable for dry climes survived in higher proportions than those that depended on wetter weather, gradually producing strains of wheat suitable to the new environment. The same happened with wetter climates, and with colder and hotter zones. In some cases the introduction of wheat complemented other crops almost perfectly. For example, in the American Southwest cold-tolerant wheat introduced after the Spanish conquest could be planted in the fall, after the corn harvest, and harvested in the spring, when corn was just being planted, substantially increasing the available grain resources. It is this genetic variation and resultant enormous adaptability that leads to wheat's extraordinarily wide distribution over the world today.

The genetic variation in wheat, with its constant production of mutant forms and consequent potential for transformation in new situations, is unusual. Most food products were less easily transformed from wild varieties to domestic ones, and some show virtually no genetic differences at all.

Similar changes occur in early domesticated animals. For example, domestication of Near Eastern sheep and goats (and therefore human protection from natural predators) removed heavy selective pressures favoring the strong, straight horns necessary for self-defense in the wild. In domesticated herds, mutant genes producing aberrant horns often did not get eliminated from the population, and a gradual change in horn (and bone) forms occurred after a few generations of domestication. This enables archaeologists to establish whether a given animal was hunted or raised.

The creation of domesticated strains of plants and animals results from the artificial selective pressures (or removal of natural selective pressures) that, in turn, result from human contact. This provides a convenient guide for the archaeologists, but it is not its only significance. It also has implications for our view of how domestication came to be. Our example of wheat in particular suggests that the development of agriculture was not just a matter of people learning about plants or the "discovery" that if things are planted, they will grow. Instead domestication involved a long, continuing interaction between, on the one hand, human beings gathering wild plant species as supplements to their diet and, on the other, the plant mutations that made locally prominent populations of these wild species into more and more dependable and productive varieties, suitable to play a bigger and bigger role in human diet.

In other words, like other great but gradual transformations of the human condition, the beginnings of agriculture probably did not seem like very much of an innovation to the participants. The agricultural "revolution" was not revolutionary in its suddenness, but in its ultimate importance.

In fact the term "revolution" in the expressions "Neolithic revolution" and "agricultural revolution" has always bothered many archaeologists. Significant as the difference is between a typical foraging society and a typical Neolithic one, there is nevertheless a full range of intermediate types, both among living peoples and in the archaeological record. The carefully studied Yąnomamö of Venezuela, for example, raise gardens for their principal sustenance, but continue to hunt wild animals. So do the Arapesh of Papua New Guinea and many other peoples. Importantly, Yąnomamö gardens are unable to sustain them very many seasons in the same location, and they therefore must move from one village site to another over time. Although the Arapesh have sustained continuous village residence far more successfully, they too have a history of village movement. Not surprisingly, the Yąnomamö and Arapesh exhibit relatively few of the characteristics of developed agricultural societies, and their movements tend to bring them into conflict with similar neighboring groups of foragers.

D. Terminal Foragers: The Natufians

Archaeologically, in most areas where we can trace the dawn of agriculture we do so among people who were "terminal foragers," that is, who were foragers who knew about gardening and raised a few crops, but did not depend significantly on them for most of their diet. In the Near East, in the area around Jarmo, for example, many sites are associated with so-called Natufians, a name given to various Near Eastern groups practicing a terminal foraging adaptation in which wild grains were harvested, processed with grinding stones, and eaten. Clearly the Natufians were on the edge of agriculture. One example of a site with such a "terminal foraging" adaptation is Abu Hureyra in Syria, occupied from about 9500 BC to 8100 BC by foragers. It was home to as many as 300 people at a time, at least some of them year-round, who included wild grains as a routine part of their diet. People ceased to live there about 8100, but the same site was reoccupied five hundred years later, from 7600 to about 5000 BC. Vegetable remains from this second occupation were mostly domesticated, and it is possible to trace their meat supply from entirely hunted meat at the beginning of this occupation through the incipient domestication of sheep and goats at the end.

Natufians, being terminal foragers, are not normally referred to as Neolithic, but they were followed by people referred to as Neolithic. However the earliest Neolithic societies of this area still lacked pottery, which became a hallmark of Neolithic life in the same area later. Thus the site of Jericho, for example, the lowest layers of which look very much like Jarmo, contains levels identified as Pre-Pottery Neolithic A (PPNA) and Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (PPNB). At ’Ain Ghazal, in Jordan, there is even a Pre-Pottery Neolithic C (PPNC) level, suggesting quite long "semi-Neolithic" occupation when inhabitants depended largely upon cultivated crops, but still lacked what was to become the "full Neolithic complex" in that region.

All terminal foragers -and all Neolithic peoples for that matter- continued to engage in hunting, fishing, and the collection of wild plants. The transformation from food collection to food production is not total even today. Fish and shellfish have remained important "wild" crops throughout the world up to the present, despite successful " fish farming" in modern times. Probably many -perhaps most- Neolithic communities could not have survived in some years without ocean, lake, or river resources as a supplement to what they were able to raise. [Note 6]

To summarize, the "Neolithic Revolution," despite its name, was a gradual process. Neolithic people were quite unaware that they were being Neolithic. And the thousands of small innovations that in retrospect we can see as part of the transition were probably all considered trivial when they occurred. The latest foraging society was as complex as the earliest gardening society, and it is not entirely accurate to say that agriculture "caused" a Neolithic mentality any more than that a late-foraging mentality "caused" agriculture!

E. European Farming and the "Wave of Advance" Model

That may not be quite as true of areas to which agriculture spread once it had appeared. Europe, for example, "received" agriculture from the Near East. One model, associated with the work of L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza at Stanford University, suggests that growing Near Eastern populations, finding a need for more and more land, slowly expanded outward, especially into Europe, gradually moving into more and more of that continent, and driving out or assimilating the thin population of foraging peoples that had been there before. This "wave-of-advance" model, based on the distribution of earliest agricultural sites in Europe, envisions the leading edge of the agricultural way of life, like the leading edge of a lava flow or a glacier, moving northwestward at about one kilometer per year, and reaching northwestern Europe about 4000 BC. (A variant of the same model sees "population pulses" moving, not evenly, but in fits and starts across Europe. That fits a bit better with the actual dates of sites.)

In the "wave-of-advance" model the transition to farming in any local area is often relatively abrupt, and we think of a change from hunting in the forest to cutting down the forest to plant fields as being complete in any given area in as little as five or six generations. Foragers would have assimilated, converted, or been killed or starved. That of course makes the "Neolithic Revolution" revolutionary not just in impact, but also in the sense of being very fast in each area it swept over. (However it still would have been relatively uninteresting to participants; the span of five or six generations is a long time.)

A second, more recent model challenges the "wave-of-advance" view and proposes the movement, not of people, but for the most part of ideas. (The ideas would have moved, like the migrants in the previous model, at a rate of about one kilometer per year.) It postulates that the understandings and techniques of agriculture were gradually adopted by the European foragers as a kind of insurance for their food supply. This model postulates that population densities rose as a result, making the former nomadic foragers eventually completely dependent upon agriculture.

Neither view entirely excludes the other of course. Studies since 2000 offer evidence in both directions. The data base of agricultural village sites supporting the wave-of-advance model has been vastly expanded from Cavalli-Sforza's initial 53 sites to over 700. It continues to support the general rule of thumb of one kilometer per year "flow" nothwestward, and demographers project that natural population increase could have supported that. Some researchers argue that if only ideas had been involved, agriculture might have spread much faster, concluding that therefore the process must have been population movement.

On the other hand, a 2005 mitochondrial DNA study of twenty-four bodies from European farming villages from about 5500 BC reveals less similarity with modern Europeans than expected if modern Europeans were descended from them. That would seem to argue against the "wave-of-advance" model (unless one imagines that it was normal for farming men to marry foraging women).

Obviously understanding the expansion of farming into Europe will require more information and, in the end, probably a far more complex model. The origins of agriculture in other regions is just as challenging. The "bottom line," however, is that the spread of agriculture was a different and probably faster process than the "invention" of agriculture.

F. Other Cereals & the Sorghum Puzzle

Millet & Sorghum. We know far less about the origins of agriculture in areas other than in the Near East. An interesting Old World area from this perspective is China. Millet and sorghum are both important cereal crops in China, and both are tall, strong grasses that look somewhat like maize (corn), except that the flowers and subsequently the grains are in dense clusters at the top of the stalk.

Archaeological sites in north China dating from about 4000 BC already show evidence of well established domestication of two genera of millet. [Note 7] Both kinds of millet have extremely small kernels, but are known for drought resistance, making them ideal cultigens for the windy, dusty north China area where they seem to have been cultivated first. [Note 8]

Closely supplementing Chinese millet was a very similar, cultivated grain, but an archaeological puzzle: sorghum. In addition to the use of sorghum grain as food, the stalk has traditionally been used for thatching, floor matting, packing and fencing material, and fodder, and the roots and occasionally the stalk are a supplementary source of fuel. By historic times sorghum was a major crop in north China and Korea. Indeed, it became so central to the ancient Chinese economy that it was long thought to have originated in the wind-blown loess [Note 9] soils of north China. But there seemed to be no evidence about how or where it could have been domesticated, since the wild and domesticated forms are effectively indistinguishable, and any traces of sorghum in an archaeological site therefore tell us nothing about its domestication.

The basic biological properties of these grains had a great influence on their potential for domestication. We have seen that wheat tends to have a high rate of genetic mutation, which provides the basis of new varieties, often well suited to new environments, and accordingly it was comparatively easy to develop strains appropriate to domestication. Maize (corn) tends to inter-fertilize easily with other grasses, producing great variation in the resultant plants, and allowing the variability on which domestication is based. Millet is also manipulable, and China had several varieties by at least 1000 BC. Sorghum, on the other hand, is genetically quite stable, and the plants are self-fertile, so even in modern times it was difficult to produce enough genetic variation to develop "improved" varieties. [Note 10]

Despite its prime importance in north China, sorghum does not appear in Chinese texts until about AD 300, where it is referred to as "millet of Sichuan" (a province in the southwest). This suggests it may have been an imported crop, [Note 11] and that scholars had been deceived by its importance in early historic China into imagining it to have been domesticated there. Latest research suggests that sorghum was grown in Egypt at least as early as in China, if not earlier. [Note 12] The place where domestication must have happened is now considered unknown (rather than China). And there is still no very convincing scenario for the emergence of sorghum from a "wild" ancestor.

Example village: Bànpō. Our comments about early agriculture in China refer mostly to the Yellow River basin, one of the so-called "cradles" of Chinese civilization. A Neolithic village apparently typical of the hundreds that are now known for the region is Bànpō 半坡, outside of the city of Xi'an (Shaanxi Province), where archaeologists found some 200 sturdy timber-and-mud houses of two different designs, which would have a supported a population that we may estimate (depending upon our guess about household size) to be between 500 and 1000 souls.

The population density at Bànpō and its surrounding villages does not provide the only suggestion of Chinese agriculture at this period. Storage pits of millet (all Setaria italica) were also found. In some of the villages in the vicinity such tools as hoes, spades, and sickles have come to light, similar in form to those of much later, early historic times in China. Clearly Bànpō and its neighboring villages, although they are the earliest agricultural communities yet discovered in the Yellow River basin archaeological record, were already well established, entirely agricultural villages.

One historical sociologist (Ho 1975), examing the Bànpō evidence, noted that it is congruent with a system of cultivation possibly implied in much later Chinese texts dating from about 1000 BC. By that time three types of fields seem to have been distinguished: Fields newly brought into cultivation, called zī 菑, were left dormant for a year:

The same term —zī— was used for fields allowed to lie fallow a year between plantings. Two other terms (xīn 新and yú 畬) distinguished fields ready to be (re)planted and those in active cultivation. If Ho is right in extracting this set of agricultural procedures from the early texts and then projecting it backward to the Bànpō material, it suggests an extremely well developed system of agriculture, which means of course that we still have not "hit bottom" on the origins of Chinese domestication. Even as Jarmo was located in an area of the Fertile Crescent where wheat and barley once grew wild and were therefore available for potential domestication, the same is true for the Yellow River area millet. We may expect earlier Neolithic finds in China as archaeologists continue to work in this area where millet once grew wild. Whether evidence will point to an origin of Chinese agriculture as early as the Near Eastern one, only time will tell.

Rice. Rice is today a major cereal crop in India, China, Southeast Asia and, for that matter, much of the rest of the world. Its origins are still unclear, although the distribution of different rice types suggests the possibility of separate domestication in different regions. Rice grows rapidly in warm weather, but is distinctive among major cereal crops in requiring swampy conditions. Traditional rice germinates in heavily saturated mud, and the growing plants thrive only in standing or slowly moving water. Modern Asian rice farmers keep their fields flooded at all times until just before the harvest itself.

(Many a rice crop has been lost when wind or rain knocked over the seed-heavy stalks and the grain began to rot in the water below.) Although today some strains of lower-yielding "dry" rice exist, traditional-style "paddy fields" need constant maintenance to keep the water levels appropriate. Naturally, wet rice production works much better in comparatively flat terrain. To grow rice on a sloping field or hillside the terrain must be terraced into a series of flat fields surrounded by dikes and capable of holding water. This is backbreaking work, and is avoided if flat land is available.

For our understanding of its role in history, the critical fact is that rice has a very high output of calories of nutrition per unit of land devoted to its production, although because of the need for constant water, it is also an extremely labor-intensive crop. This combination makes it pre-adaptive to conditions of high population density.

Was there rice at Bànpō? Evidence is mixed, and most archaeologists have been cautious about stating that rice was cultivated in China that early. But in 1997 some carbonized rice grains found in northwestern Shaanxi, the province where Bànpō is located, were dated to about 3000 BC. That is later than the settlement at Bànpō, but much earlier than previously realized.

For years, provocative but still very slender evidence also suggested rice cultivation in Thailand early enough to precede or be contemporary with the development of domesticated plants in China. At the site of Nan Nok Tha, in Thailand, pottery fragments dating from about 3500 BC had impressions of rice chaff in them, suggesting that rice was being grown (or gathered) by people settled enough to be producing such heavy objects as pottery. This was very probably cultivated rice, although the impressions are not clear enough for the biological difference to be visible.

At another Thai site, called Spirit Cave, in northwestern Thailand, slate blades turned up that resembled rice-harvesting knives known from later periods in Indonesia. Whether rice cutting (wild or domesticated) is what the blades in Thailand were used for is unknown. If so, it would be the earliest evidence for rice as a routine item in the diet. (Spirit Cave has also produced the remains of apparently cultivated beans and peas dated to about 7000 BC, the earliest date yet well defended for these in East-Asian agriculture.) In 2005 there were reports of a few grains of what excavators considered to be cultivated rice dating to an incredibly early 10,000 BC Jiăhú, the site in central China mentioned earlier as providing early evidence of Chinese fermented beverages. If the dates and cultivated status are confirmed, this would not only be the earliest date so far for rice, but one of the earliest dates for any cultivated grain anywhere.

Maize/Corn. In the New World, agriculture seems to have arisen independently in Mexico and in Peru, although we must always be open to evidence from other regions. In Mexico research attention has focused especially on the domestication of maize. [Note 13] Unlike wheat, the individual grains of maize do not fall to the ground and seed themselves. In all varieties of maize known today, the grains or kernels are clustered together on a cob, covered by a tight husk that prevents the kernels from falling out. Maize as we know it seems always to have been dependent on human help for seeding. The presence of maize in an archaeological site is therefore always evidence for the existence of agriculture.

But maize has to have had a wild ancestor, one that would have been able to seed itself and that reasonably could have turned into the familiar article after it was domesticated. There logically has to have existed some kind of "wild maize" that provided the base for the modern domesticate. And in fact fossilized "proto-maize" pollen has been found in the Mexico City area dating to more than 80,000 years ago, well before people arrived in the New World. But it is quite unclear how it actually connects to maize of later periods.

So far the likeliest candidate for ancestral, probably pre-domesticated maize is a collection of tiny, dried cobs found in a cave in southern Mexico, dating to between 5200 and 3400 BC. As far as can reasonably be reconstructed, there is a great likelihood (but not a certainty) that the husks on these tiny cobs, smaller than a human thumb, opened as the kernels ripened, and the kernels, loosely anchored, fell out. Current thinking is that the modern varieties of maize are the result of a cross between this ancestral strain and wild teosinte [tay-oh-SIN-tay] grass.

In maize, fertilization involves pollen blowing from the "tassel" at the top of the stalk to the "silk" protruding from the end of each cob. If the wind blows the pollens of other grasses onto the maize silk, hybridization easily occurs. This produces both genetic variation and frequent frustration in the New World even today.

Probably throughout most of its history maize has continually crossed with various wild grasses, producing a range of short-lived aberrant forms. Chance crosses between strains of ancestral maize and nearby teosinte grass, about 1700 years ago, however, may have produced hybrids with larger cobs and apparently with the tight husks so distinctive of maize today. The tight husks would have doomed the hybrids in the wild, as they probably doomed many earlier maize-teosinte crosses, but at this particular time humans were on hand to intervene.

We saw that humans were almost certainly a major factor in the development of non-fractionating strains of wheat, which would have perished in the wild owing to their impaired ability to reseed themselves. Similarly human preference for the more conveniently harvested ears of tightly wrapped maize (each ear larger than older maize and with a full complement of kernels) would have provided a selective factor favoring the continuation of the teosinte hybrid.

G. A Balanced Diet: Beans & Squash

Aboriginal Mexican diet did not consist entirely of maize, of course. Like the diet of Mexican peoples of historic times, ancient diet also included squash and beans as important staples. Archaeologist Richard MacNeish, the discoverer of the tiny cobs of ancestral maize, also unearthed early evidence of domesticated beans and squash.

The squash evidence consists of seeds found in a cave on the Mexican Gulf Coast. Six seeds were found in the same deposits with human remains, three of a smaller, apparently wild variety of proto-squash, and three of a larger variety, which MacNeish considered to have been domesticated. The carbon-14 date puts this find at about 7000 BC. In another find, also on the northern Gulf Coast of Mexico, MacNeish found more of the cultivated squash seeds as well as remains of two species of beans. In 2001 researchers announced further finds of early domesticates along the Mexican Gulf Coast: both squash and maize also dating to between 8,000 and 5,000 BC.

In squash and beans, as in maize, there is an easily recognized and understood difference between wild and domesticated varieties. Let's begin with beans.

Modern milkweed pods, when they have matured and dried, burst open and hurl their contents in all directions (to the dismay of anyone who puts them in a winter bouquet). So do the seed pods of some common garden flowers. Wild bean pods do exactly the same thing. They burst open and hurl their beans all about. Normal genetic mutation in wild beans, however, produced the occasional pod that malfunctioned and did not throw its beans around normally. Human harvesting (in a situation quite similar to the harvesting of non-fractionating wheat) would have included larger numbers of the non-opening bean pods, and early planting would have introduced a heavy, human selective factor encouraging the growing of the non-opening varieties. MacNeish believes that the beans that he found were non-opening ones, dating from between 5000 and 3000 BC.

Squash, beans, and maize form an excellent nutritional complement to each other, and, with vitamin-C-rich peppers, were destined to become the agricultural foundation for settled life in much of the New World. For a long time researchers were unable to find materials suggesting that squash, beans, and maize were domesticated at about the same time, and the evidence still is not perfect.

Since none of the three by itself provides adequate nutrition to support a settled way of life, and each is subject to theft if left unguarded as harvest time draws near, it was hard to imagine what the long period could have been like in any region where one of these important cultigens had been domesticated but not the others. As more evidence accumulates, however, it now appears that these three major items of the diet probably were in fact domesticated at about the same time, probably along the marshy Gulf Coast of Mexico.

Potatoes. Peru is a country of high mountains and steep valleys. From the steep mountains numerous rivers flow rapidly into the Pacific across a bleak, barren, desert, plain that runs along the coast. Early populations living along this coast subsisted on fish and other sea life rather than by extensive land hunting. Some kinds of squashes and gourds are native to the coastal area, and these were presumably utilized from earliest times. There is no evidence for independent domestication of crops among the coastal populations, although perhaps in time we shall find evidence of deliberate planting of squashes there.

High in the Peruvian mountains however, agriculture appears to have become important very early. Staples included tomatoes, peanuts, and lima beans, among other things, although the most important domesticate was the potato. Domesticated beans, carbon-dated to about 5600 BC, have been found in the mountains also. [Note 14]

The potato (Solanum tuberosum) grows well in the steep and high mountains of Peru, where grain is both less adaptable and harder to plant and harvest. Potatoes are a good crop for cold climates, since they are extremely nourishing, can be raised in a comparatively short growing season, and, critically, can be stored for a long time in a cellar, as is still done throughout the world today. They can even be left unharvested in the soil for a long time (secure from marauding neighbors who will raid a storehouse but not stop to dig up a field). These advantages made the potato far and away the most important influence on Europe after the discovery of the Americas, bringing northern Europe greater nourishment with less labor demand than the crops used earlier (McNeill 1999). It is said that in our own era the dollar value every year of the world-wide potato crop vastly exceeds the dollar value of all the gold the Europeans ever took from the empires of the New World.

In highland Peru, almost as soon as potatoes were cultivated, the technique arose of freeze-drying potato slices by exposing them to the freezing, dry night air. Freeze-dried potatoes (called chuño) were light, portable, and nourishing, and they rapidly came to serve as a kind of currency. Chuño was collected as tax and used to sustain soldiers and to pay laborers on the extensive road and building projects.

Food production, in other words, is not just a matter of cereals, and it is not just a matter of domesticating a single crop. Human beings need at least an approximation of adequate nutritional balance, which usually involves a wide range of foods, only some of which were necessarily domesticated.

2. Foragers versus Farmers: Two Life-Styles

The development of agriculture did not simply happen. It was made possible by certain kinds of social, cultural, and personality characteristics, and it produced certain kinds of social, cultural, and psychological effects. Scholars are still sorting out the complex interaction between the way a group makes its living and the way in which it organizes society, shares understandings, or rears children. However it is already clear that there are some important differences between agricultural groups and foraging groups. In spite of the fact that some foraging groups have lived in ways that resemble the ways some farming groups have lived, for the most part the two ways of life are radically different. The "Neolithic revolution" therefore, despite the existence of part-foraging, part-gardening adaptations, like the Natufians, still represents a cultural, social, and psychological change in the human condition, and not merely a material one. We move now to an exploration of some of the implications.

A. Agricultural Society and Culture

Population Density. Agriculture normally supports a far greater population per area of land than does hunting and gathering. Foragers depend on the chance occurrence of edible plants among many inedible ones and on whatever wildlife feeds on the particular plants (or on other animals) that happen to occur in the area. Most of their environment, despite the variety it provides, is unhelpful to them in satisfying their food needs. Agriculturalists, on the other hand, can fill an area of land with almost nothing but food-producing plants. And greater availability of food means higher density of population. Foraging groups tend to be small (typically bands of one or a few families); agricultural societies are always much larger. Even if the immediate living unit is an isolated farming family, it is typically in very frequent contact with other farming families in its vicinity. And it is both possible and common for farming families to live together in hamlets and villages. Farming also provides the food base for cities, ancient and modern.

Access rights. A tremendous number of additional contrasts follow from this difference in population density. For example, in an agricultural community there must be clear understandings about who is entitled to which land, which water, and which harvests, about who is supposed to work on which crops, and there must be people empowered to do something about it if the understandings are violated. An agricultural community typically needs a more elaborate organization of political power than does a foraging band.

Immobility. Besides being generally larger, agricultural populations are comparatively immobile. [Note 15] If a foraging group finds itself in conflict with another group, it is sometimes able to move into a new territory at least for a while. If an agricultural group (a family, say) finds itself in conflict with its neighbors, it is not so easy to move. The crops are tied to the ground in a complex planting-and-harvesting cycle (with something growing or in storage all the time), and equipment necessary to farming (millstones, winnowing baskets, plows) is often heavy or bulky and cannot easily be transported. Even as living near each other leads to conflicts, not being able to move freely makes it imperative that these conflicts be resolved!

Even small, relatively autonomous communities of the Neolithic world must therefore have had various kinds of peace-keeping (and war-making!) arrangements; otherwise the inhabitants would readily have been driven back into foraging bands that could move away from each other. In historically known agricultural communities of this scale (such as the Hopi and other Pueblo peoples of the American Southwest) we see the development of ethical systems and of political offices with important peace-making functions, even though we do not necessarily see strongly coercive power in the hands of designated leaders.

Another result of immobility is that people accumulate things. Carrying luxuries around turns them into burdens, and foragers (and nomadic herders) own little that is not immediately useful. Settled populations, on the other hand, can accumulate material goods almost without regard to weight or bulk. In most parts of the world, pottery appears in the archaeological record at about the same time as farming, and serious work in metals and the carving of large stones appears only after farming does. The reason is simple: Only the agricultural adaptation normally allowed the accumulation of material goods of any weight or bulk.

Material goods, like crops, also need protection, of course. Once again, political organization is necessary. Indeed the idea of private property becomes strikingly more important in an agricultural community simply because there is so much more property in total and, accordingly, so much more concern about it. There is much truth to the stereotype of foragers as people who share and agriculturalists as people who hoard. (Contrasting to both are herders, stereotypically people who raid.)

The ability to accumulate property is also the ability to be rich or poor. In foraging communities some people are better hunters than others; some people find or process plant products more successfully; some people are healthier than others; some people know more about medicinal plants; some are more persuasive; and some have more kinsmen than others. But there is very little difference in wealth as measured by tangible, physical objects. The ability to stay in one place and accumulate goods, however, almost inevitably entails differences in how much and what is accumulated, and differences in material wealth begin to appear.

Social stratification. Social stratification is importantly based on differences in wealth and power, and some degree of social stratification is a common characteristic of agriculturally-based societies. Social stratification is not necessarily characteristic of all agricultural societies, and it is by no means entirely wanting in foraging societies, but archaeologists and ethnologists have both noted that there is a very much higher probability of finding clear social stratification in agricultural societies than among foragers. Most early Neolithic communities do not in fact show significant differences in social status; on the other hand most communities in the Bronze Age (the period following the Neolithic in most regions) are fully class-ridden, headed by a powerful monarch at the top, served by comparatively powerless peasants, with slaves at the bottom. [Note 16]

Example village: Çatal Hüyük. (Wikipedia) Earlier we mentioned the Chinese site of Bànpō as a fairly typical Neolithic village in a world of similar small villages very much like it, each apparently more or less autonomous, each showing some only very modest differences in wealth. But some Neolithic sites are much different, and challenge the stereotype of Neolithic simplicity. One of the most remarkable Neolithic sites ever excavated is Çatal Hüyük [cha-TAHL hee-YEEK], located in what is today south central Turkey. Archaeologists often give it the title "the first city" because it is much larger than other Neolithic sites of its age or earlier. Çatal Hüyük (sometimes spelled Çatalhöyük or Çatal Höyük) is about ten times as large as settlements anywhere else in the Near East at that period. Something special was clearly going on here!

Çatal Hüyük was discovered in the 1950s, but only about four percent of the site was excavated at that time. In the mid-1990s excavation began again, but our picture is still by no means complete. Excavations carried out so far show that by 6150 BC it was far larger than other settlements. Twelve excavation levels record about 800 years of habitation at the site. In all levels it was a mass of houses made of sun-dried mud brick, built against each other with shared walls. Access to each house was through a trap door in the roof and a ladder, and access to the city itself was by ladders up the outermost house walls, and then over the roofs to the various houses. With no doors at ground level, such a complex would be easily defended, particularly by a population much larger than the forces any potential enemy would be likely to bring against it. However there are no signs of warfare at Çatal Hüyük, and it is not clear that the arrangement was intended to be defensive, although other reasons seem unconvincing.

The roofs were apparently not all the same height, which allowed all but the lowest to have small windows near the ceilings to admit light and fresh air. When a house was destroyed or abandoned, it would fall in and the space would serve as a trash heap for a time; eventually a new house would be built on top of the trash, so that over time the vast complex became a higher and higher mound of rubble with rooms on top.

The agricultural base of Çatal Hüyük included the usual Near Eastern cereals (barley and wheat) as well as peas and vetches, and various nuts. Evidence suggests that beer was brewed, although the recipe is lost to us. Hunting was practiced, but domesticated sheep and cattle were also kept. Tools made of obsidian have turned up in such large numbers as to suggest that Çatal Hüyük may have been a central trading point for obsidian blades and mirrors, and an obsidian trading network has been postulated that includes western Turkey, Cyprus, and the eastern Mediterranean coast. Those who received obsidian apparently received it in exchange for other types of stone, sometimes worked, and shells, among other things. Some specimens of turquoise have been identified as coming all the way from Sinai. Some fragments of woolen cloth have been preserved, but how if at all they figured in the trading network is unclear.

None of these features explain Çatal Hüyük's enormous size compared with other settlements. It is possible that there was trade also in some less tangible good. We have historical examples of settlements that functioned as religious centers and received material goods in exchange for healing, fortune telling, magical objects, or blessings. Modern "sacred cities" like Vārānasi (Benares), Lourdes, or Makkah (Mecca) derive much of their income from pilgrims who do not take away substantial physical goods. Possibly Çatal Hüyük did so as well, and we will need to hypothesize "intangible trade goods" to produce a convincing model. Nearly thirty percent of the rooms excavated in the 1950s were designated "shrines" by the puzzled archaeologists on the basis of their odd decoration and contents. The plastered walls bear paintings and sculptures of bulls' heads, dead bodies, vultures, and "goddesses," sometimes shown giving birth to bulls. Breast-like sculptures protrude from corners of some rooms, but where the nipples should be are found vultures' beaks. Dead bodies are buried beneath plaster platforms that in other respects seem to have been used as altars.

The stress upon vultures in the wall paintings suggests that vultures may have been allowed to clean the bones of the dead before burial. In any case, the head of the body was usually removed before the body was buried. Small votive statues of clay and stone represent both bulls' heads and enormously fat "goddesses," reminiscent of Gravettian "Venus figures" of the European Upper Paleolithic. One white marble figure shows a man wearing a leopard skin as a headdress. In many "shrine" rooms real bull skulls were plastered and decorated. Or plaster bull's heads were decorated with real horns. No two "shrine" rooms are identical, but they share enough features that they are clearly part of the same general system of activity.

One possibility is that the town, or anyway the excavated part of it, was a religious center, perhaps, like Chinese Buddhist monasteries in much later times, making its living partly through the sale or rental of religious paraphernalia and by providing funeral services and disposal of the dead.

Çatal Hüyük is of course special, by no means a "typical" Neolithic community. That is part of why it is famous. If it were a Bronze Age settlement, its size would be less impressively distinctive, for, as we shall see, "cities" become the mark of the Bronze Age. Its interpretation, however, would be just as challenging.

B. Personality in Agricultural Societies

What sort of person is a Neolithic agriculturalist? We have seen that differences in social structure and culture seem to flow simply from the high density and relative immobility of an agricultural population. We can readily imagine how personality differences might also result both directly from these facts of density and immobility and indirectly from the social and cultural features associated with them.

For example, in an agricultural society, where disputes must be avoided or peaceably settled, discipline and obedience to authority are extremely important. Discipline and obedience not only help prevent disputes from arising in the first place; they also make the resolution of disputes much easier. Not only is there established political leadership in most agricultural societies, but parents must train their children to be obedient to leaders, and adults must expect to obey higher authorities in their society. The details of how personality is formed make up an important field of study (called "socialization"), but the point here is only this: more complex and more frequent human contacts with a wider variety of people living close together make discipline and obedience more important issues than they would otherwise be. If population density and immobility go up, then so must the social and psychological means of coping with them.

Patience. Another feature of agricultural life also makes discipline adaptive: crops do not pay a farmer back immediately for the work put into them. A forager is usually rewarded the same day for effort expended. A hunter is nearly always rewarded at least once every few days with a successful kill. A gatherer similarly finds what is sought fairly quickly. If this were not so, the foragers would starve to death. Farmers, on the other hand, must wait months, sometimes years, before they see the fruits of their labors. They must not expect immediate gratification of their desires, but must plan ahead and have confidence that in the end the effort they are putting into planting and tending crops will be worth it. Here too discipline and obedience are necessary.

The hunter can encourage his child to be brave and self-reliant in situations that are frightening and dangerous: that is how animals are caught and killed and how hunters avoid being bitten, scratched, trampled, or gored. No two kills are alike, and the young hunter must be encouraged to be self-reliant and quick enough for any circumstances. The young farmer, on the other hand, must be motivated to work without either the threat (and thrill) of immediate danger or the promise of immediate reward. The farmer must follow procedures that are not suggested by his wit at the moment, but by the collective wisdom and experience of the group to which he belongs. From Classical antiquity through the early years of the XXth century social theorists generally tended to see the beginnings of agriculture as the moment in history when boorish vigor was supplanted by civilized self-restraint; it is not hard to see where they got the idea.

Wealth. But there is more: The proliferation of leadership and mediation roles in agricultural communities requires that at least some of the members of a community desire these positions and be willing to fulfill them. Often leadership is also linked to possessions. In agricultural communities for example we should expect to find not only wealth and differences in wealth, but also the desire for wealth and interest in differences in wealth.

Ethnographers have observed that the uncertainty whether a given hunter will kill anything or not in a given day, or whether the quest to find shell fish or plant food will succeed, seem to have led foraging peoples to place a high premium on generosity. Most meat killed by hunters is divided among many or all members of the hunting band, often following lines of kinship ties (as was traditional among the San of Namibia and Botswana, for example, or the Pygmy populations of central Africa or the arctic Eskimos). The adaptiveness of the custom of sharing food in a foraging group is obvious, and presumably groups that did not have such a custom would sooner or later have some of their members starving to death because they were too ill or too old to fetch their own food and water, or because they were simply unlucky.

Among agriculturalists, however, the day-to-day sharing of produce, except within families, is much rarer, perhaps because individual disasters are rarely as sudden, as unpredicted, or as extreme as in foraging groups. [Note 17] On the other hand, among agriculturalists the necessity of large amounts of labor during planting and harvest leads to mutual exchanges of labor between one farming family and the next in these periods. Sharing is a particularly valued trait among foragers, a much less important one among farmers; but cooperation is usually a highly valued trait among farmers (and among hunters who use techniques that require participation of large numbers of people in pursuit of their prey).

Sharing and cooperation do not just occur naturally in the interest of efficiency. They must be motivated, like any other behavior. Foragers must be motivated to share what they are able to collect, and agriculturalists must be motivated to cooperate with their neighbors during planting and harvest. Sharing and cooperating must be part of normal life in these two kinds of societies, taught to children as they grow up. We should expect that child training in the two kinds of societies would exhibit certain differences because of this.

There is of course tremendous variation from group to group and from individual to individual, and therefore generalizations such as those we have been making are not very useful in understanding the behavior of some particular group of people. The point is that in general successful adaptation to agriculture entails the creation of personality structures and values that are capable of handling delay of gratification, obedience to authority, interest in material goods, cooperation with other people, and the desire to occupy a wide variety of social statuses. Successful adaptation to foraging, on the other hand, rewards a personality that is independent and self-reliant, that desires to fulfill the role of providing and sharing rather than of hoarding material goods, and that has a high tolerance for the uncertainty of not knowing just what, if anything, will be on hand to eat tomorrow. The agricultural revolution has interested archaeologists not merely because it was a change in where food came from; it was also a change in the social, cultural, and psychological possibilities open to people.

3. Pastoralism (Herding)

We should not leave the subject of foraging and agriculture without mentioning herding. Most agriculturalists raise a few domesticated animals. So do some foragers. But as a way of life, herding (or pastoralism) is an adaptation found particularly in semiarid areas where the local ecology produces pasturage (such as grass) but where it is not rich enough to support a substantial population through horticulture or agriculture. (Definition .)

Although both involve making a living from animals, herding is quite different from hunting. Hunters do not cultivate animals; they merely kill them. The welfare of the target animals is rarely a consideration. Juveniles, for example, being weaker and easier to hunt, are killed with eagerness. Herders, on the other hand, deliberately cultivate their animals. Juveniles are normally protected so that they will become adults. Care is taken to avoid slaughtering animals unnecessarily. And a diminishing herd is taken as a danger signal of some importance. Herders, unlike hunters, seek to protect their animals from other predators. [Note 18]

Like hunters, herders must orchestrate their lives to the needs of their animals, but while hunters simply follow the animals wherever they lead and can be found, preferably in large numbers, herders take it upon themselves to lead their animals to areas where they can flourish as well as possible. Sometimes the animals are moved from their natural environment into areas more comfortable for human habitation. If it were not for human guidance, it is unlikely that the animals would be able to survive in many such climes.

Typically pastoralism involves a series of encampments, varying by season, as the pasture resources of different areas are used up and must be left to recover. Usually there is at least a winter encampment or village and a summer one, and the group moves back and forth between the two each year. [Note 19]

Example: Yak herders. Yak herders of Tibet and Nepal were still a typical nomadic herding society when they were described by Robert Ekvall in a book provocatively entitled Fields on the Hoof (1968). The Tibetan herders that Ekvall studied organized their lives around the necessity of moving their animals very frequently, as the resources of any given area became exhausted. With frequent moves, they lived in portable tents and avoided excessive personal possessions. When they had the option to stay put, they built more lasting shelters which, archaeologically, would have looked Neolithic.

The community was sometimes more compact spatially than other times, for it had to adjust itself constantly to new terrain; however community members tried to stay together and to keep their social contacts intact. They even tried to maintain the same general spatial relationships when they could.

A. Personality Again: Herding, Farming, and Values

In the mid-XXth century, a number of anthropologists participated in a joint effort called the "Culture and Ecology in East Africa Project," under the direction of Walter Goldschmidt of UCLA. One of the project's concerns was the investigation of the effects of different subsistence adaptations upon culture, social structure, and personality. Goldschmidt was able to point to a number of significant differences between pastoralism and agriculture (1965).

As in the case of foraging, pastoralism requires that people be mobile; it therefore does not allow the investment of a large amount of energy and wealth in material goods (other than animals). Unlike both foraging and agriculture, however, the concern with the welfare of animals requires particular attention to rights in water sources and, to a lesser extent, salt sources. Elaborate conventions and frequent contention over the use of oases are a constant concern in much of the Arab world, for example, with its long traditions of pastoralism.

War and raiding. Pastoral societies also seem to be more prone than agricultural ones to raiding and local warfare. A number of features of herding may be related to this. Goldschmidt notes the fact that, because stealing herd animals is easy (at least compared with stealing fields), the temptation to raid is great and the necessity of defense is correspondingly great. Further, the movement of pastoral peoples means that a group's susceptibility to attack differs at different times. The strategic relationship between groups is therefore constantly changing, and even a strong group has moments of weakness when its resources are not conveniently arranged for defense. Long-term military stalemates are difficult to maintain. Quite aside from the logistics of the situation, organization for defense requires techniques different from those that are available to the farmer. A farmer can organize defense on a regional basis (although not all farmers do it this way). Pastoralists, because their spatial relations are ever changing, must depend upon organization through kinship ties or similar, non-regional links. Goldschmidt writes:

Division of labor. For reasons about which specialists disagree, herding societies uniformly assign the tasks of animal care to men (and occasionally partially to little boys) rather than to women. One opinion is that this is due to the need of greater physical strength in some aspects of handling herds and in defending them against theft. Greater physical strength is not needed in all aspects of herding, however. Another opinion is that the mobility needed from a herder is incompatible with bearing and tending children. If some aspects of herding are going to be men's work, it is argued, then the use of little boys instead of little girls when children are involved can be explained by reference to the sexual division of labor already established among adults and the practical need of training children in the same spheres in which they will be expected to function as adults.

Whatever the reason for this link between men and herds, pastoral social organization displays a marked tendency toward male-centeredness in group membership, in residence patterns, and in the distribution of authority. The typical pastoral society is one in which women are in a clearly subordinate position to men. Often households are dominated by one senior male, with several wives and children. Boys are given responsibility for the day-to-day maintenance of the herds, but always under the tight control of an authoritarian father, a child training that Goldschmidt describes as "combining both the independence of action and the acceptance of authority" (1965: 405).

Male dominance, militarism, and independence are found to be particularly common themes in pastoral male child training. Goldschmidt characterizes the personality attributes of the ideal male in most pastoralist societies this way:

Robert Edgerton, in another paper for the same project, describes some of the other findings on the differences between farmers and herders: He writes that some of the predictions that the project verified about the differences

The culture and ecology project dealt with only four groups. It was only a beginning, and specialists have been sadly slow to extend its range to more data. It is easy to speculate (as we did concerning foragers and farmers) about the kind of society, culture, and personality that, all other things being equal and under most circumstances, might be expected to fit most congenially with such a subsistence adaptation as foraging, herding, or farming. Ethnologists and historians are just beginning to work out the details even for living peoples. It is already clear, however, that there are potentials, pressures, and problems that are peculiar to each of these three ranges of adaptation, and that the birth of agriculture in the archaeological record represents not only a major transformation in the source of human food, but also a transformation in the available range of social, cultural, and psychological arrangements that characterize human communities in the millennia between that time and the present.

4. The Bronze Age

The agricultural revolution gradually brought to a close the long period of human history for which stone tools are the major surviving artifacts. The terms "Paleolithic," "Mesolithic," and "Neolithic" ("Old Stone," "Middle Stone," and "New Stone") are used for this reason. With the new possibilities that agriculture brought into being, however, new materials turn up in the archaeological record, and archaeologists speak of subsequent prehistoric and early historic periods in the Old World as the Bronze Age and the Iron Age (which in southern Europe began about 1700 BC and about 750 BC, respectively).

If one takes the metallic references seriously, different dates apply to different areas, of course. The Bronze Age in Europe begins somewhere between 2000 and 1500, depending on the area, but in Western Asia it is much earlier, beginning sometime in the early second or late third millennium BC (somewhere between 2500 and 1500). Some primitive bronze in both areas seems to occur by about 3500 BC, however, and it is impossible to tell when "the first" bronze was made in these areas. In some areas, such as Turkey and Mesopotamia, specialists find it useful to distinguish a "copper age" or Chalcolithic [kal-ko-LITH-ic] between the Neolithic and the Bronze Age. As the name implies, the Chalcolithic saw the use of copper without the additives that make it into stronger bronze (copper plus tin) or brass (copper plus zinc). [Note 20] (A separate page of this web site is devoted to ancient metallurgy.)

Iron. This essay does not discuss the Iron Age. In most of the world iron ore is more plentiful than the copper and tin needed to make bronze -iron makes up about 5% of the earth's crust- and iron is stronger (although subject to rust). But, although cheaper and stronger, iron requires more heat to work it well. The necessary technical skill to produce hammered iron artifacts first appeared in central Turkey about 1800 BC, but was regarded as a secret of the central Anatolian defense industry until eventually pried out of them by Assyrian conquerors sometime about 1100 BC. (The Assyrians blabbed about it and the secret then spread quickly.) Iron was formed in these areas through hammering, but when the knowledge of iron working eventually reached China, craftsmen there developed casting techniques (based on earlier bronze casting). Because iron could be made of cheaper material, it eventually transformed life partly because it made metal implements, whether of agriculture or of war, available to lower classes in the population, who had not been able to afford bronze. Not surprisingly, the "date" at which the "Iron Age" begins differs in different areas, just as dates for the Bronze Age do. In Western Asia the Iron Age begins somewhat before 1100 BC, in Europe somewhat later -750 is merely a round number- and in Africa some time during the first millennium AD. Arguably we are still living in the Iron Age, but the term is seldom applied to societies with an extensive written tradition, which are described as "historic," while the Iron Age is "prehistoric." (Actually futurologists and historians seem to be in the process of deciding that we are living near the beginning of the "Information Age.")

The terms "Bronze Age" and "Iron Age" are appropriate in that they do designate periods in which bronze and iron came to be important materials in the objects found in archaeological sites. On the other hand, like the "-lithic" words, they ambiguously refer to a single item in the artifact inventory, to an era, and to a stage of development, seen as more or less inevitable once agriculture is discovered.

The use of the terms "Bronze Age" and "Iron Age" continues a tradition of viewing prehistory that was initiated by the Greek writer Hesiod of the eighth century BC, who divided history into five great ages. These began with a mythical "Golden Age," "when Saturn reigned in heaven" and proceeded through ages of progressively baser materials to his own day in the "Iron Age." Iron had become a prominent material for making tools, Hesiod noted, and he thought it was also an appropriate symbol for an age in which human hearts had become "as hard as iron," and things were generally going to pieces. Early in the XIXth century a Danish curator picked up this ancient system and organized finds in a Danish museum as Stone Age, Bronze Age, and Iron Age. Setting Hesiod's allegorical fantasies (and old-age grouchiness) aside, it is interesting that even in antiquity there was an awareness of a progression of industrial materials and of the fact that they had implications for the state of human society.

One difficulty with the "metallic terms" is that the ability to work a metal says little about how much it was worked, or what was made from it, or who used it for what purposes or with what implications. In most respects the Bronze Age of northern Europe could just as well be Neolithic, for little was done with bronze that couldn't have been done without it. In the Near East the Bronze Age brought some advances in weaponry, as the Iron Age did afterward. But in northern Europe copper made little real difference except in the creation of prestige items. In Ireland, for example, much bronze working was devoted to making horns and bells, and the bronze of the Bronze Age was largely irrelevant to daily life. Similarly, in China bronze was almost entirely devoted to luxury food and wine vessels used as prestige items sustaining an early state that seems to have had plenty of weaponry made of other materials. Bronze mattered, but as a source of symbols for elites.

The Iron Age made a greater difference to everyday life, mostly because iron, uglier and harder to work but stronger and made from more plentiful materials, was less often used for prestige items and more often made functional weapons and tools, especially nails. With iron, a great many activities, from clearing trees and building houses to plowing and smashing heads, became substantially more efficient.

Any detailed archaeological discussion inevitably finds the metallic terms inadequate for serious comparative use, but for present purposes, as we turn our attention to archaic states arising from the Neolithic, the traditional term Bronze Age will have to serve.

The Old World Bronze Age can be thought of as representing a series of cultural and social innovations in societies in which agriculture and the developments that sprang most directly from it had already become facts of life. The Neolithic base period in the Old World extended roughly from the first evidence of agriculture in about 8000 BC to about 5000 or 4000 BC. As populations increased and as understandings and social structures developed for the integration of human activity in denser populations, a series of what archaeologists call "high civilizations" developed, including the world's first major cities, with monumental architecture and centralized state apparatus. The Bronze Age is normally associated with hierarchical societies, often dominated by warrior nobles, and one might argue that the most important fact about bronze had nothing to do with its physical properties, but rather was its cost and its ability to symbolize its owner's importance.

The larger kingdoms -even empires- that often emerged at this point throw into ever higher relief the continuing human problem of political organization. The typical Bronze Age solution is a small class of decision makers, and a much larger class of followers, so that we find what seems (in modern perspective) extreme social class differentiation, with an absolute monarch on top and slaves or at least serfs at the bottom. (Some examples of strongly class-differentiated kingdom organization of this kind continued into modern times and have been studied ethnographically. An example is the kingdom of Bunyoro in what is today Uganda.)

In many areas writing either developed independently or was borrowed or stimulated from other areas. The first availability of writing is the event that tradition regards as the end of prehistory and the dawn of history in the strict sense of the term. In some areas it is regarded as the end of the Bronze Age itself.

The states that emerged once agriculture had been established as a primary mode of human subsistence bring us into a kind of human life that we can recognize as very much like our own. Just as we were able to recognize the biologically fully modern human being in the capacities and forms of the Upper Paleolithic, so also we are able to recognize the culturally and socially fully modern human being with the development of Bronze Age empires.

5. The Example of Mesopotamia

Each of these developments was unique in many ways, even as modern civilizations are different from each other. It is difficult to generalize about them, except very superficially, and impractical to present them individually in very much detail, but our discussion of the evolution of culture and society would be incomplete without at least one example. We shall focus on the Mesopotamia, essentially a wide plain, roughly corresponding to modern Iraq, through which the Tigris and Euphrates rivers run from north to south, joining together at the south end of the plain and flowing together into the Persian Gulf. (The name Mesopotamia literally means "land between the rivers.")

In a slightly more extended sense, Mesopotamia also refers to all the areas that eventually came to be part of the same broad cultural system, including the mountain areas that rim the valley and even distant colonies of Mesopotamian traders. The area roughly corresponding with the portion of Iraq south of Baghdad is known as Sumer, and as far as we know, Sumer was the earliest "civilization" in the technical sense of having a domesticated food supply and writing. [Note 21] Mesopotamia will provide us with an example of the processes involved in the development of "civilization."

Civilization. The term "civilization" is of little practical use in the study of any particular society, but comes into its own in the broad analysis of the whole sweep of human tradition, when certain societies emerge that seem to function on a scale qualitatively greater than that of many others. The term "civilization" is difficult to define exactly and yet still in a useful way. If we wish to characterize civilization broadly rather than strictly define it, most often it is linked to (1) urbanization, (2) a state (or city-state) type of political organization, (3) division of labor into specialized professions, often divorced from food production, (4) elaboration of artistic, religious, and/or ceremonial life, and usually (5) the development of literacy. The idea of scale is critical to the general concept, and in archaic civilizations the social integration necessary to organize large groups of people always entailed considerable social inequality. This inequality, troubling as it is to our modern sensibilities, has been so inevitable in earlier societies that some theorists even build it into the definition itself:

As we have seen, the earliest evidence for agriculture in Mesopotamia is from village sites like Jarmo that were occupied about 8000 BC. From about 8000 BC to 5000 BC people in this area lived in villages each housing between 100 and 300 people. By 5000 BC these villages had become fairly close to one another, with many in sight of each other and very few more than a day's walk from their nearest neighbors. By 4000 BC the population of the villages and the area covered by each had increased a great deal, largely as a result of improved agriculture and animal husbandry. The first domesticated plants, low-yielding emmer wheat and two-row barley, gave way to higher-yielding strains, and sheep, goats, and cattle became common instead of rare. Hill country villages like Jericho and Jarmo were where the action was.

But it was not to last. For reasons that have inspired many hypotheses, the hill-dwellers began to lag behind the people of the river basin in the exploitation of the social possibilities that agriculture created.

The prime example ("type site") for the Mesopotamian agricultural villages of the more developed sort at around 4000 BC is Al Ubaid, located in southern Iraq, in Sumer. (Link) Indeed, many villages of the so-called Ubaidian phase seem already to have enjoyed a stable and even comparatively wealthy agricultural economy at about the same time. The remains of these villages included stone hoes, adzes, querns, pounders, and knives as well as clay sickles, loom weights, spindle whorls, and figurines, and a distinctive variety of painted pottery (Kramer 1963: 39).

The wide distribution of Ubaidian pottery shows that they engaged in some trade with surrounding peoples. They lived in houses made by covering a reed framework with mud (a technique called "wattle-and-daub") and topping it with a thatched roof. All that seems very Neolithic. But they also built large buildings of adobe brick that seem to have been temples.

According to later, literate Sumerian tradition, the development of Ubaidian civilization was abruptly interrupted by a great flood, which some modern scholars believe is also reflected in the tale of the flood of Noah in the Bible (Genesis 6-9). Archaeological evidence at Al Ubaid confirms such a flood covering Ubaidian sites. Shortly after this time, new peoples arrived, probably nomads from Syria and Arabia (Kramer 1963: 40), who lived with those who had survived the flood. The newcomers brought metalworking techniques and introduced the potter's wheel, and their pottery began to replace the Ubaidian painted ware in the archaeological record. It may be that these newcomers also invented writing, for the first written language, "Sumerian," may reflect their speech. A third migration came from the east about 3000 BC, and it appears that classic Sumerian civilization arose as a result of the interaction, and eventually merging, of these three groups.

Writing first appeared some time before 3000 BC, but it was mostly devoted to bookkeeping and provides us little that is revealing about many aspects of the Sumerian cultural system. But by 2500 BC the earliest texts appear that allow some fairly well-based inferences about Sumerian society and culture. Some time during this period, perhaps at roughly 3000 BC, the people of Sumer began using copper and possibly bronze sickles. They wore clothes made from sheepskin and worked imported gold, silver, and copper. The ox-drawn plow is also known from about the same time, although the major transport animal was (and is) the ass. (Horses, when they were introduced a thousand years later, were principally used to pull war chariots.) By 1600 BC the art of glassmaking had developed to the point where glass bottles could be produced.

The Sumer of 3000 BC was divided into a number of independent city-states and lacked an over-arching political administration. A prime factor in promoting cooperation and restricting conflict between the city-states was water control. The Tigris and Euphrates rivers were subject to occasional, unpredictable, and often disastrous flooding, sometimes just before harvest, when floods threatened to ruin crops. Mutual aid was essential at such times. At other, more usual, times, natural water was inadequate, and the Sumerians developed an intricate system of canals crisscrossing the entire area to provide irrigation for crops. Each city-state was an administrative center for the agricultural land and had a canal system immediately servicing it, but the canals of different cities crossed and linked, and the administration of this system of canals (and the mediation of associated disputes) provided a link binding the city-states.

In addition to lacking regular supplies of agricultural water, which made the canal system necessary, the Sumerians lacked many other natural resources, such as stone, timber, limestone, lead, copper, gold, silver, and even bitumen (a kind of natural asphalt used to stick things to each other). They had to engage in far-flung trade to acquire these raw materials, and thus each city was not only the social center for an agricultural population, but, at least as importantly, a manufacturing and trading center. (The outgoing trade items, so far as we can tell, must have been largely perishable agricultural products: grain, fish, dates, cloth, leather, and the like. Some intangible trade items, as postulated for Çatal Hüyük, cannot be excluded.)

One of the most important and earliest of these Sumerian city-states was Uruk, a site that also gives its name to a period of vigorous expansion beginning about 3600 BC. Like other Sumerian city-states, Uruk was an economic (and probably political) center for farming hamlets all around it.

A. Elites & Trade

Research conducted by Guillermo Algaze of UCSD centers on the curious fact that many of the items traded (such as silver, gold, and lapis lazuli, a semi-precious stone) were being imported at the pleasure of Sumerian elites. [Note 22] (Everybody likes gold, but it is hard to argue that it was "needed" except to show off.) As the elites became more important about 3400 BC in cities like Uruk, they encouraged ever more trading relationships northward, until people of Sumer's Uruk period cities maintained a system of satellite communities or outposts spread over modern Iraq, Iran, Syria, and even Turkey to assure a steady flow of elite goods.

Since what are found archaeologically are only the traces of exchange goods, it is of course hard to tell who actually lived in these "colonies," Sumerians or their local agents; even Sumerian refugees are a remote possibility! (Algaze notes [1993] that the site of Habuba Kabira on the northern Euphrates in Syria, for example, is laid out exactly like southern Mesopotamian cities.) Algaze argues that this long-distance trade was an important, even critical, factor in the expansion and development of the Sumerian cities as they competed with each other for size and glory.

One reason why elite goods were so important in early trade is that they provided the wherewithal for people in power to demonstrate that they were different from other people, with the implication that it was appropriate for them to be in power. This process is sometimes referred to as the "mystification" of political authority. Although the full process is difficult to reconstruct from archaeological materials alone, the ability to monopolize rare commodities (like gold) or highly valued ones (including human labor or even human life) seems to be a cornerstone of the political division of labor that underlies the success of archaic states in creating large-scale social systems. (Further clarification of this idea will be found in the Sourcebook section on theory.)

In the similar case of very early Egypt, one source (Adams & Ciałowicz 1997: 52) summarizes the role of elites as follows:

The colonization of the Delta and the rise of the aristocracy were connected in a continuous loop: the conquest of new territories brought about the enrichment of families and individuals as well as the accumulation of property in the hands of the few; bigger élite graves, into which greater quantities of goods were put, stimulated demand for the production of more; and this in turn necessitated the colonisation of further territories and seizure of commercial routes. Egypt moved inexorably towards a national court culture under one king, who strengthened bureaucratic control over Egypt by monopolising the supply of luxury items through trade, controlling their production in royal workshops and dispensing patronage to the nobility.

Naturally, being able to engage in trade requires that one have access to resources that can be traded. In a article provocatively subtitled "The Mesopotamian Advantage," Algaze argues that between 5000-3000 BC, the combination of good agricultural resources and good water transportation resources -the Tigris and Euphrates rivers- provided the emerging Mesopotamian elites the means to bolster their social position through trade, and may have been the reason why Sumer was the earliest archaic state to emerge (Algaze 2001).

B. Temples & Politics

The central role of Sumerian elites in this trade is most likely not merely because luxury goods were included. It appears that the trade was not privately conducted, but was rather the business of the state itself, probably in the form of a temple system with important economic and political functions. Sumerian cities shared a common religious system based on a pantheon of the patron gods of the various cities. An interesting myth has survived in a written text and appears to have been important to the Sumerians. In the myth a council of gods divides the lands of Mesopotamia into different territories with one god in charge of each city. There is some controversy about how important religious sentiment may have been in the day-to-day politics of the Sumerian cities of 2500 BC, but they all had impressive temples, and among the temple staffs are listed attendants, craftsmen, laborers, and food producers, suggesting that the temples were intimately involved with the economic system.

Political control was in the hands of the en ("lord"), lugal ("king), or ensi ("governor-priest"), depending on the period being considered, and it seems clear that religious belief and civic responsibility were intimately associated with each other. Indeed, it is in the cities of Sumer with their domination by "temples" that we find the first political states with a hierarchy of social classes and a system of governmental bureaus centered on kings.

Most Sumerian families worked as farmers, merchants, and artisans. Indeed, Uruk society seemed to support a surprising number of artisans, producing pottery and other goods at several levels of quality. The farmers did not own their land in early Sumerian days, but rented portions of it from the temple and paid a tax to the temple each year. The tax was usually 10 percent of the crop, a modest enough amount by most later standards, including our own. The land could not be sold or mortgaged by its workers because it belonged to the god. By 2000 BC, however, private ownership of land had become more prevalent. A smaller amount of land was also worked under the direct management of priests, the labor being provided by serfs and slaves.

Guilds for the various crafts were very important in the city's organization, and there were stringent laws governing the guilds and apprenticeship to them. There was also a class of slaves, typically prisoners of war or bankrupts who had sold themselves to pay off their debts. It appears that a household functioned as an economic unit under the name of a senior man. Texts suggest than a man facing household bankruptcy could sell his wife, sons, and daughters to redeem himself. Disobedient sons could also be sold into slavery. The king could call on both slaves and freemen to work on the canals, build roads, repair temples, and so on.

But it was clearly the priests who were the elite group in Sumerian society. The temples were apparently used as warehouses, which may indicate the sort of religious involvement in commerce hinted at by the lists of temple staffs mentioned earlier. In the earliest days the medium of exchange was grain. Later copper and eventually silver and gold were used as media of exchange, although loans were still sometimes paid in grain.

All commercial transactions were recorded, using a system of writing that seems to have been developed specifically for that purpose. Probably it was also as a consequence of their extensive trading relations that the Sumerians devised a system of arithmetic, including both whole numbers and fractions. They invented also a lunar calendar to keep track both of the various days on which rents were due and the days of temple ritual. Literacy was initially a skill of the priests, despite its being used almost exclusively for commercial purposes and not in ways we would think of as religious. (In later times a class of professional scribes arose, who were available (for a fee) to aid the lay citizenry in their business transactions.)

Learning in general, not literacy in particular, was the domain of the priesthood. Priests were, for example, the population from which judges and lawyers of the typical city were recruited, and it was priests who practiced medicine, using a wide variety of vegetable (and occasionally animal or mineral) products, oil enemas, dietary regulations, and other methods.

The vast majority of Sumerian documents that have come down to us have to do with trade and accounting, contracts, treaties with other city-states governing trade, laws governing commerce, and so on. It is through our ability to read these records that we have as good an understanding of Sumerian life as we have. It is also due to the peculiarly commercial focus of these texts that our knowledge of Sumerian economic life is much greater than our knowledge of some other areas of Sumerian culture.

Uruk was not alone. Many Sumerian cities are archaeologically known from the period after 3000 BC, while Uruk remained a dominant center: Eridu, Ur, Erech, Lagash, Nippur, and Kish are the most famous. A brief description of the famous city of Ur, excavated early in the XXth century, will serve to represent them all here, as seen through their archaeological remains. Ur was divided into three parts: a temple area, a royal palace, and a residential district.

The temple area in the northwest corner dominated the walled city. Here a large, stepped pyramid (or ziggurat) of mud bricks rose twenty meters high and was topped by a shrine to the city's patron, the moon god. This temple to the moon god dominated the city. Around it were the god's storehouses and offices where the farmers' rent produce was stored. The rest of the sacred area was filled with other temples. The common citizens never approached their city god directly, but had their own temples to lesser gods (and to the gods of other cities) by the hundreds throughout the city.

The king's palace and lesser houses occupied a second area of the city. The third, residential area of Ur was made up of dozens of small, winding, unpaved, and apparently rather unplanned streets with houses of all sizes crowded together. Some of the larger houses were two or three stories high, but regardless of height all were built on the same basic plan, with the rooms grouped around a central courtyard. Some parts of the residential quarter appear to have been craft areas, and others look as though they were slums, where the poorest people probably lived. The population of Ur was estimated by its excavators to have been about 360,000 (Hawkes & Woolley 1963: 428).

Canals or no canals, common language and religion or not, the various cities fought each other quite often over water and land rights and other causes (possibly linked to foreign trade competition). Most of the population of any city was liable to the draft to fight in its wars. If captured in war, these citizens could be ransomed by sale of their private property. If they could not raise the ransom, then their local temple or the state itself had to pay the ransom. (Or they served as slaves.) In most respects the warfare had little effect on the general form of Sumerian society. Conquest of one city-state by another would not change the basic rules by which society operated. Indeed it did not even change the god who owned the city. The new rulers would simply take over the care of the city god from the old ones and continue very much as before.

This was also true to a very large extent even when the entire region was occasionally conquered by a single ruler. That happened briefly about 2600 BC, when a strong king of the city of Ur managed to unite Sumer under the so-called First Dynasty of Ur. It happened more importantly with the rise to prominence of the northern cities of the Tigris-Euphrates region in the area known anciently as Akkad (after the city of Agade). In about 2400 BC, King Sargon of Akkad conquered Sumer and unified Sumer and Akkad under a single royal house. This new entity was politically dominated by the Akkadians, but was Sumerian in general cultural style. [Note 23]

Far more important than the internal wars were the international relations that the Mesopotamians had to develop in order to protect their trade relations. Something akin to international law had to be developed (and enforced!) to protect the trading system in elite goods that was critical to the happiness of the elite families and hence to the maintenance of the system they dominated. So successful was this network that in later times the Akkadian language was used as a diplomatic tongue even in Egypt.

6. Other Civilizations

The most important considerations in the dawn of agriculture and the subsequent emergence of the archaic Bronze Age empires have now been laid out, with Mesopotamia the "classic case" that has dominated Euro-American archaeological attention and imagination for decades. Of course "pristine" civilizations -those arising without complex local antecedents or substantial admixtures from outside- arose in many other parts of the globe as well, usually within a couple of thousand years of the Mesopotamian developments. Eastern, Southern, and Western Eurasia all had such developments, as did Africa and the Americas.

We noted at the beginning that some specialists seek to explain this timing by reference to the end of the ice age, which led both to changes in human adaptations around the globe, and to increasing populations that almost required the development of agriculture, with its more predictable, if less varied and nutritious, food supply.

Others argue that there almost certainly has to have been a good deal of interaction between great centers, even though we can no longer trace it, so that innovations in one area gradually became known elsewhere and imitated where feasible, a process that is obvious enough within smaller groups like the Tigris-Euphrates basin or the Yellow River basin.

For purposes of this course, our goal is to identify and exemplify the processes involved in the making of the modern world, and to understand the intellectual approaches by which we know about them. It is not to discuss all the known cases. This chapter has provided an overview and some famous examples. Accordingly our discussion ends here.

[This has been a long and complex chapter, with a rapid progression of proper names. Before you close the book you may wish to go back over the section titles and bold-face terms by way of reviewing what you have read.]

The Neolithic & the Bronze Age

D.K. Jordan

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