Re: Civilizations

Joe Bernstein wrote:
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.

No attempt here to say that Mexicans visited Andeans.
Only that there was some form of contact whether direct
or through intermediaries, there was contact. Also, that
contact may well have been intentional since maize
varieties which grow in wet tropical climates has not
been developed at the time (have they even been
developed now?). Because of this there was little hope
of slow diffusion to the south as may well have occurred
to the north into the US southwest and further with the
spread of maize.

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.

OK, let me be a little more concise in my understanding of
the process and it is a process.

First, before we get too far along in this are we in
agreement that starving people do not invent agriculture?

If so, then we can proceed.

Populations do not seem to grow at a very high rate in
hunter-gatherer societies. This is due to several causes.
The first and foremost is the fact that women nurse their
children for up to four years because of the lack of other
suitable food for very young children. This tends to
reduce fertility directly in women and they don't tend
to reproduce in any greater than a four or five year
cycle. Other causes also obey the law of nature that
"Populations increase as the food supply increases."
and the opposite is also true.

So, agriculture was probably developed, in several separate
areas around an observation and a collection (gathering) of
indigenous wild foods. If you have great stands of a grass
with a very large seed pod that tastes good when you harvest
and prepare it in certain ways, people will do so. There is
convincing evidence that the toolkit needed to harvest and
prepare wild grasses (emmer wheat) were invented quite some
time before the the grasses came to be actually planted
and tended by people in an organized way. Other specific
plants are also valuable as potentially domesticated. The
list I gave below give a few of them.

One book I read sometime back give the interesting hypothesis
that the toolkit used for processing wheat was actually
developed for processing tree mast, most specifically acorns.
Further that the earliest use of wild grasses was to feed
domesticated animals. It's interesting and might be true,
but it's not at all well studied and documented and I'm not
convinced, even though tree mast has sustained populations
into modern times.

First, there is evidence that domesticated animals followed
plant domestication except possibly for the dog, which
doesn't regularly eat wheat anyway. The probable first
animal domesticated was the goat. Goats are browsers, like
deer, and while they will eat grass, it's not their
favorite, and besides they pretty much take care of themselves
anyway.

Even pastoral nomadism appears to be a development of
plant domestication. It appears that the nomads borrowed
what technology they wanted from their sedentary neighbors
and ignored the rest. Or they realized that the animals their
neighbors herded could be herded on land that wouldn't support
planted crops. Who knows for sure.

Anyway, I've digressed a couple of time here. But the
point is agriculture was invented, or it developed, or it
simply grew (!) out of hunting/gathering.

Once this occurred, the population now had a fairly reliable,
stable food supply. The probably supplemented their diet
with protein from hunting initially and then from
domesticating animals for the purpose.

In agriculture, if you have suitable land, you can increase
your food production. If you do, then the Law of Nature
takes over and population will increase.

So far so good. Agriculture will increase food supply for
a population and the size of that population will increase.
One of the mechanisms for that increase is increased fertility
of women due to the fact of earlier weaning of children in
agricultural societies. Women begin to have children on a
one to three year cycle in agricultural societies. As an
aside, ever hear of Irish twins? That would be babies born
within 12 months of each other. There was a HUGE increase
in the population of Ireland when potatoes were introduced
and a HUGE crash in population due to the potato famine.
Politics, of course, entered into the equation, but the
prime source was the potato blight.

It may be that there simply isn't enough arable land for
agriculture of some form to REALLY increase the size of
the population. It may just stop at a modest increase or
just simply allow a population to remain where they have
been without increase. Agriculture itself will not
increase a population size. Agriculture CAN lead to an
increase in food supply which WILL lead to an increase
in population.

So a population increases in size. At some point the
individuals in this population can no longer get along
with each other without some form of agreement between
people that is more formal than simply sitting down and
ironing out differences and some way for agreements to
be enforced. There seems to be a critical mass for this
to happen. The number is rather small.

A "band" would be numbered in no more than dozens and
their government would be egalitarian. Their settlement
pattern would be nomadic.

A "tribe" would be numbered in hundreds and might still
be egalitarian or it might have a "big man" whose power
is derived by agreement of the people and whose office
is not hereditary. This group would be located in one
fixed village.

A "chiefdom" would be numbered in thousands. The chief's
power would be hereditary and they would live in one or
more fixed village.

A "state" would number over 50,000. The government would
be centralized and could take several different forms.
The people would live in many villages and cities. There
may be more than one language and/or ethnicity represented.
The rule would consist of laws and judges. One village or
city would be the capital.

This is from Diamond. Notice that a "state" begins to
have the trappings of a civilization.

Notice also that none of this is inevitable. The process
can stop at any point.

To sum up, the process is:
agriculture => population increase => increased organization
=> civilization.

Again, this is the process, but none of it is inevitable.

It's how things in some areas have progressed and how
things CAN progress, but not always and in all places.

Diamond says that aboriginal Australians were on the
brink of inventing agriculture in southeast Australia
at the time the Europeans arrived. Apparently they had
developed some fish farming techniques and were on the
verge of adapting the ideas to plant domestication.

A racist theory of the "advance" of civilization is not
warranted under Diamond's ideas, especially if the
inventions of agriculture is the single most important
development in the future progress of civilization since
New Guinea highlanders, basically the same people as
the original Australians, black Africans, east Asians
and native Americans all came up with agriculture
independently. And some of these groups also came up
with civilization.

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.

Oh? and irrigation is not linked to farming and
population growth?

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.

No problem at all with this. I just suggest that if
irrigation is necessary for effective farming, then
it may increase the need for organization which is a
force toward "civilization".

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.

You have pointed out that not all population increases
led to "civilization". Certainly a valid observation.
However, there seems to be a critical mass in which if
the population increase is large enough (or rather the
population for a given area gets big enough) civilization
seems to be inevitable. Don't know for sure if it is
or not, it just seems so.

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.

I's OK, they are there someplace.

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.

Diamond also points to where a particular crop grows
"wild" in his selection of an area where it was first
domesticated. This seems at least a valid approach.

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.

Hmm. You are probably correct here. I may have used
Mesopotamia incorrectly. What Diamond actually says is
the "Fertile Crescent", which does include areas of
Anatolia and the Levant as well as Mesopotamia which
is narrowly the "land between the rivers" meaning the
Tigris and Euphrates.

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.)

Again from Diamond. He agrees that the Eastern US crops
noted were not especially important and did little to
bring the people out of hunting/gathering. And I point
out that nothing like civilization developed in the
area until the introduction of the Mexican maize/beans/
squash triumvarite.

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.

Indeed. I think that is what I was trying to say.

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.

As with the example of maize going to the Andes and the
southwest US, there certainly could have been diffusion
and IMO, there probably was. Just as possible is a
trader from Iraq, making a trip to the Indus valley
and bringing the food he's familiar with and finding
fertile ground...

It seems to me that once agriculture was invented/developed/
grew, that it diffused outward from its original centers
*if it could*. I would point out that it couldn't particular
diffuse from the New Guinea highlands to even the lowlands
of New Guinea because of climate restrictions.

So it seems easy for agriculture to diffuse toward Europe,
North Africa and eastward into Asia. In fact Diamond makes
a big deal of the ease of diffusion through Eurasia/North
Africa because of the obvious east-west axis of the
continents as opposed to the north-south axis of North
and South America and the path from north to south in
Africa. The east-west axis makes the diffusion easy by
not putting too many climate restrictions in its way.

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!).

My observation above has no basis in fact. I just put
place names to a hypothetical scenario.

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

No? then what do you call a rice paddy? They have been
around for a while.

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.

You don't have to concede anything. As I have said
elsewhere, I'm no scholar, I just have an abiding interest
in where we come from and where we are going.

While I'm not much of a Marxist, when asked about something
in history or current events, I will invariably reply in
terms of the economy of the people involved.

RW

Joe Bernstein

.

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