Re: Civilizations

In article <45turaF8gvv9U1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, VtSkier
<VtSkier@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Andean civilization arose without contact from Meso-America
evidenced by the suite of crops grown being unrelated to
Meso-American crops, but there was eventually contact as
evidenced by maize being added to the Andean suite at a
later date, after civilization has arisen.

To show that this involved contact with the Mesoamerican civilisation,
you'd have to show that there weren't un-civilised neighbours in e.g.
Colombia who used these crops before the civilised Andeans. There's
no reason a civilisation can't learn from nearby barbarians - note
the history of the horse.

I never meant to imply that the agricultural hearth was
also the the site of a "pristine civilization" as you
put it.

Well, your argument seems to vary between two forms:

1) Population increase is *the* cause of pristine civilisations.

2) Population increase that drives a need for organisation is *the*
cause of pristine civilisations.

At some level, the second is tautological; to the extent that you
identify pristine civilisations with early states, that is. If your
marker has more to do with early cities, not so much so. Anyway,
the first strongly suggests that hearths of agriculture *should*
lead everywhere else in the civilisation race; if not, why not?
I'll return to this below.

From your list, which I pretty much agree with as the
earliest seats of civilization (though civilization in the
Americas is very much later than Eurasia it is still not
derivative), it is suggested that many early civilizations
are derived from something earlier.

For instance Harappa has pretty much the same suite
of cultivated plants as has Mesopotamia. This suggests
trade and contact. While the Indus civilization may
have arisen independently from Mesopotamia, it probably
arose from the same cause; an increased population
requiring an increased level of organization. I note
that Harappa was heavily dependent on irrigation. This
alone, if done on a large scale, would require a
certain level of organization.

Um, well. You are now retracing the history of early prime mover
causes of civilisation. We've had "farming causes it" which more
or less equates to "population growth causes it" and now we're
headed for "irrigation causes it". Pretty soon I guess we'll get
to circumscription and the others.

I'm not seriously arguing that none of these are relevant. I am,
however, saying that as causal explanations they seem to fall short.
Only some population increases lead to states and cities. Only
some early civilisations used irrigation or other management-
intensive forms of agriculture; for that matter, as I understand it,
some of the early irrigation techniques weren't all that management-
intensive. (I think but am not sure that Mesopotamia falls into
this category - the really big canals are much later, I do know that
much.) Circumscription is certainly a useful way to think, and has
obvious applications in deserts (the Near Eastern examples) and
mountain ranges (much of Mesoamerica), but I question its usefulness
for, say, China. Etc.

Ultimately, I note that "Why?" is a question often unanswered by
science, or at most answered indirectly. We don't know why the sky
is blue; we know a lot about how light behaves when it hits an
atmosphere, and one of the by-products of that behaviour turns out
to be blue skies on Earth. Similarly, I think looking for "why"
civilisations start is getting distracted by widely varied
phenomena, whereas if you look at *how* they start, you find much
more consistency.

My list, since you ask, for hearths of agriculture,
follows Jared Diamond's list with the primary
source of carbohydrates listed. This list is not
necessarily in temporal order.

1) Mesopotamia with wheat, pea, olive
2) China with millet and rice
3) Meso-America with maize, beans, squash
4) Andes and Amazonia with potatoes, manioc
5) Eastern US with sunflower, goosefoot
6) Sahel with sorghum, African rice
7) Tropical West Africa with African yams, oil palm
8) Ethiopia with coffee, teff
9) New Guinea with sugar cane, banana

Diamond considers these original because even though
the populations show evidence of cultivating crops
from elsewhere, they had already begun cultivation
with native crops.

I was surprised by this list and went looking for my old college notes
to dispute it. Quel embarrassment! Turns out my old college notes give
*much* less precision than Diamond does, and rather fewer definite
hearths. Sigh.

My old notes indicate Nikolai Vavilov as originator of this whole
research effort, and mentions Carl Sauer as an apostle to the West
for Vavilov's work. Diamond cites Sauer, but refers to Vavilov only
by mentioning his main technique (looking for where the crop grows
wild - more precisely, looking for where the most *varieties* of the
crop grow wild). Now, so happens I'm named for someone who at some
risk to his own life tried to smuggle Vavilov out of Stalin's Russia,
so I tend to feel a bit proprietary about Vavilov, and want to be
aggrieved with Diamond for omitting him. But any serious response
to Diamond's list would have to rest on going back to Diamond's
references, and other material on early farming, and I'm not prepared
to do that at this time.

So OK. This has implications. Everything *I've* heard about the
Near Eastern hearth for agriculture suggests it ought to be in the
Levant or Turkey - sites in Israel, Palestine, Jordan, and Syria
tend to be the most famous, but sites in Turkey seem to be
competitive. Diamond's actual stated location for it, though, is
"Southwest Asia" (in the list you seem to be quoting) but I don't
know if he narrows it down later to "Mesopotamia" as you have here.
And I can't really take the time to dig in and research the point;
I'm still wading through Mithen's <After the Ice> in my actual
current research.

Note that the societies of the Mississippi Valley did
not develop anything like civilization based on
their own crop suite. They developed only after the
introduction of maize from Meso-America.

This local crop suite boggles me. Those crops certainly weren't
important, or noticeably earlier than maize, north and east from
Pennsylvania... (Thinks. Sunflowers *may* have been earlier at
some sites; not sure. But I don't recall any indication that
sedentarism appears before maize. This is what I mean by "weren't
important". Regardless, those northeastern areas are at most very
early in the civilisation process at the time of contact.)

Remember there is a gap of some thousands of years
between the invention of agriculture to the beginnings
of civilization. With this kind of time line, a
population could easily "borrow" agriculture from a
neighbor and then completely lose contact with them
and develop a civilization independently of the
neighbor. Harappa? Perhaps.

Harappan agriculture is to a first approximation the agriculture of
Mehrgarh, circa 7000 BC. I haven't researched early Harappa recently -
there's been a lot of work done since I studied India in the 1980s,
and even then I didn't focus on anything so early. So I'm not trying
to *deny* that the people who started Harappa on the civilisation
path in the 3000s BC or so were in contact with Iraq; but they could
have lacked contact with Iraq for *millennia* and still had
agriculture.

This is particularly true because of the possibility of indirect
diffusion via eastern Iran. We do know that such indirect diffusion
*happened*, so any claim that a particular crop had to have reached
Harappa from Mesopotamia kind of rests on showing that it didn't
occur in between.

Further, agriculture could develop where it's easy,
say South China. The folks in North China may see
the advantages, but maybe agriculture isn't as
easy in the north as it is in the south, so the
continuance of agriculture in the north requires a
level of organization that simply isn't needed in
the south at given population levels, so
civilization develops in the north and is later
imposed upon the south. Possible scenario and purely
speculation on my part.

Well, not unique to you. Engels, in his work that was at the
beginning of this whole branch of anthropology, emphasised that
early civilisations *should* rest on irrigation agriculture, so
there was a big investment in Marxist countries' archaeology, in
the 20th century, in finding irrigation in all early civilisations.
It was also emphasised by some (but not all) Western workers, most
notably Karl Butzer (who was himself no Marxist!).

I don't *think* irrigation is a significant factor in early China,
though, north or south.

All for now. What this boils down to, I think, is that I still
disagree with you, but am reaching the limits of what I can say about
that without serious library work, so I may have to concede the
field.

Joe Bernstein

--
Joe Bernstein, writer joe@xxxxxxxxxxx
<http://www.panix.com/~josephb/> "She suited my mood, Sarah Mondleigh
did - it was like having a kitten in the room, like a vote for unreason."
<Glass Mountain>, Cynthia Voigt
.

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