The systematic nature of this rejection of agriculture is a fascinating phenomenon in itself. Most who attempt to explain it nowadays appeal almost entirely to environmental factors: relying on acorns or pine nuts as one’s staple in California, or aquatic resources further north, was simply ecologically more efficient than the maize agriculture adopted in other parts of North America. No doubt this was true on the whole, but in an area spanning several thousand miles and a wide variety of different ecosystems, it seems unlikely that there was not a single region where maize cultivation would have been advantageous.

And if efficiency was the only consideration, one would have to imagine there were some cultigens – beans, squash, pumpkins, watermelons, any one of an endless variety of leafy vegetables – that someone, somewhere along the coast might have found worth adopting.

The systematic rejection of all domesticated foodstuffs is even more striking when one realizes that many Californians and Northwest Coast peoples did plant and grow tobacco, as well as other plants – such as springbank clover and Pacific silverweed – which they used for ritual purposes, or as luxuries consumed only at special feasts. In other words, they were perfectly familiar with the techniques for planting and tending to cultigens. Yet they comprehensively rejected the idea of planting everyday foodstuffs or treating crops as staples.

One reason this rejection is significant is that it offers a clue as to how one might answer the much broader question we posed – but then left dangling – at the beginning of Chapter Four: what is it that causes human beings to spend so much effort trying to demonstrate that they are different from their neighbors? Recall how, after the end of the last Ice Age, the archaeological record is increasingly characterized by ‘culture areas’: that is, localized populations with their own characteristic styles of clothing, cooking and architecture; and no doubt also their own stories about the origin of the universe, rules for the marriage of cousins, and so forth.

Ever since Mesolithic times, the broad tendency has been for human beings to further subdivide, coming up with endless new ways to distinguish themselves from their neighbors. It is curious how little anthropologists speculate about why this whole process of subdivision ever happened. It’s usually treated as self-evident, an inescapable fact of human existence. If any explanation is offered, it’s assumed to be an effect of language. Tribes or nations are regularly referred to as ‘ethno-linguistic’ groups; that is, what is really important about them is the fact they share the same language. Those who share the same language are presumed, all other things being equal, also to share the same customs, sensibilities and traditions of family life.

If everyone was broadly aware of what surrounding people were up to, and if knowledge of foreign customs, arts and technologies was widespread, or at least easily available, then the question becomes not why certain culture traits spread, but why other culture traits didn’t. The answer is that this is precisely how cultures define themselves against their neighbors. Cultures were, effectively, structures of refusal. Chinese are people who use chopsticks, but not knives and forks; Athabascans in Alaska refused to adopt Inuit kayaks, despite these being self-evidently more suited to the environment than their own boats, while the Inuit refused to adopt Athabascan snowshoes.

What was true of particular cultures was equally true of culture areas or ‘civilizations’. Since almost any existing style, form or technique has always been potentially available to almost anyone, these too must always have come about through some such combination of borrowing and refusal.

This process tends to be quite self-conscious.

It is precisely in comparing themselves with their neighbors that people come to think of themselves as distinct groups. Framed in this way, the question ofhow ‘culture areas’ formed is necessarily a political one. It raises the possibility that decisions such as whether or not to adopt agriculture weren’t just calculations of caloric advantage or matters of random cultural taste, but also reflected questions about values, about what humans really are (and consider themselves to be), and how they should properly relate to one another.

From the Klamath River northwards, there existed societies dominated by warrior aristocracies engaged in frequent inter-group raiding and in which, traditionally, a significant portion of the population had consisted of chattel slaves. But none of this was the case further south. How exactly did this happen? How did a boundary emerge between one extended ‘family’ of foraging societies that habitually raided each other for slaves, and another that did not keep slaves at all?

The Yurok were famous for the central role that money – which took the form of white dentalium shells arranged on strings, and headbands made of bright red woodpecker scalps – played in every aspect of their social lives.

In dealings between indigenous people, however, it was almost never used to buy or sell anything. Rather, it was employed to pay fines, and as a way of forming and remembering compacts and agreements. This was true in California as well. But in California, unusually, money also seems to have been used in more or less the way we expect money to have been used: for purchases, rentals and loans. In California in general, and its northwest corner in particular, the central role of money in indigenous societies was combined with a cultural emphasis on thrift and simplicity, a disapproval of wasteful pleasures, and a glorification of work that – according to Goldschmidt – bore an uncanny resemblance to the Puritan attitudes described by Max Weber

Aboriginal Californians did not hire one another as wage laborers, lend money at interest, or invest the profits of commercial ventures to expand production. There were no ‘capitalists’ in the literal sense. What there was, however, was a remarkable cultural emphasis on private property. All property, whether natural resources, money or items of wealth, was ‘privately and usually individually owned’, including fishing, hunting and gathering grounds. Such a highly developed concept of property requires the use of money, such that in Northwest California ‘money buys everything – wealth, resources, food, honor and wives.’

They took it for granted that we are all born equal, and that it is up to each of us to make something of ourselves through self-discipline, self-denial and hard work.

Perhaps the classic historical example (in both senses of the term ‘classic’) would be the ancient Greek city-states of Athens and Sparta, in the fifth century BC. Dynamically interconnected, they were then reciprocally constituted … Athens was to Sparta as sea to land, cosmopolitan to xenophobic, commercial to autarkic, luxurious to frugal, democratic to oligarchic, urban to village, autochthonous to immigrant, logomanic to laconic: one cannot finish enumerating the dichotomies … Athens and Sparta were antitypes.

Each society performs a mirror image of the other. In doing so, it becomes an indispensable alter ego, the necessary and ever-present example of what one should never wish to be. Might a similar logic apply to the history of foraging societies in California and on the Northwest Coast?

The ‘spirit’ of northern Californian foragers was at root, a series of ethical imperatives, the moral demand to work and by extension pursue gain; the moral demand of self-denial; and the individuation of moral responsibility. Bound up in this was a passion for individual autonomy. Yurok men scrupulously avoided being placed in a situation of debt or ongoing obligation to anyone else. Even the collective management of resources was frowned upon; foraging grounds were individually owned and could be rented out in times of shortfall.

Property was sacred, and not only in the legal sense that poachers could be shot. It also had a spiritual value. Yurok men would often spend long hours meditating on money, while the highest objects of wealth – precious hides and obsidian blades displayed only at festivals – were the ultimate sacra. Yurok struck outsiders as puritanical in a literal sense as well: ambitious Yurok men were ‘exhorted to abstain from any kind of indulgence – eating, sexual gratification, play or sloth. Big eaters were considered vulgar. Young men and women were lectured on the need to eat slowly and modestly, to keep their bodies slim and lithe.

Wealthy Yurok men would gather every day in sweat lodges, where an almost daily test of these ascetic values was the need to crawl headfirst through a tiny aperture that no overweight body could possibly enter. Repasts were kept bland and spartan, decoration simple, dancing modest and restrained. There were no inherited ranks or titles. Even those who did inherit wealth continued to emphasize their personal hard work, frugality and achievement; and while the rich were expected to be generous towards the less fortunate and look after their own lands and possessions, responsibilities for sharing and caring were modest in comparison with foraging societies almost anywhere else.

Northwest Coast societies, in contrast, became notorious among outside observers for the delight they took in displays of excess. They were best known to European ethnologists for the festivals called potlatch, feasts were scenes of dramatic contests, sometimes culminating in the ostentatious destruction of heirloom copper shields and other treasures, which sometimes culminated in the sacrificial killing of slaves.

Each treasure was unique; there was nothing that resembled money. Potlatch was an occasion for gluttony and indulgence, ‘grease feasts’ designed to leave the body shiny and fat. Nobles often compared themselves to mountains, with the gifts they bestowed rolling off them like boulders, to flatten and crush their rivals.

The Northwest Coast group we know best are the Kwakwaka’wakw (Kwakiutl), among whom Boas conducted fieldwork. They became famous for the exuberant ornamentation of their art – their love of masks within masks – and the theatrical stage effects employed in their rituals, including fake blood, trap doors and violent clown-police. All the surrounding societies – including the Nootka, Haida and Tsimshian – appear to have shared the same broad ethos: similarly dazzling material cultures and performances could be found all the way from Alaska south to the area of Washington State. They also shared the same basic social structure, with hereditary ranks of nobles, commoners and slaves. Throughout this entire region, a 1,500-mile strip of land from the Copper River delta to Cape Mendocino, inter-group raiding for slaves was endemic, and had been for as long as anyone could recall.

Nobles alone enjoyed the ritual prerogative to engage with guardian spirits, who conferred access to aristocratic titles, and the right to keep the slaves captured in raids. Commoners, including brilliant artists and craftspeople, were largely free to decide which noble house they wished to align themselves with; chiefs vied for their allegiance by sponsoring feasts, entertainment and vicarious participation in their heroic adventures.

‘Take good care of your people,’ went the elder’s advice to a young Nuu-chah-nulth (Nootka) chief. ‘If your people don’t like you, you’re nothing.’ In many ways, the behavior of Northwest Coast aristocrats resembles that of Mafia dons, with their strict codes of honour and patronage relations; or what sociologists speak of as ‘court societies’ – the sort of arrangement one might expect in, say, feudal Sicily, from which the Mafia derived many of its cultural codes. The followers of any one of these ‘fisher-kings’ rarely numbered more than 100 or 200 people,

All this begins to make the anthropologists’ habit of lumping Yurok notables and Kwakiutl artists together as ‘affluent foragers’ or ‘complex hunter-gatherers’ seem rather silly: the equivalent of saying a Texas oil executive and a medieval Egyptian poet were both ‘complex agriculturalists’ because they ate a lot of wheat.

But how do we explain the differences between these two culture areas? Do we start from the institutional structure (the rank system and importance of potlatch in the Northwest Coast, the role of money and private property in California), then try to understand how the prevailing ethos of each society emerges from it? Or did the ethos come first – a certain conception of the nature of humanity and its role in the cosmos – and did the institutional structures emerge from that? Or are both simply effects of a different technological adaptation to the environment?

Are societies in effect self-determining, building and reproducing themselves primarily with reference to each other? In many ways, the seasonal gatherings of Californian tribes seem exactly to reverse the principles of potlatch. Staple rather than luxury foods were consumed; ritual dances were playful rather than regimented or menacing, often involving the humorous transgression of social boundaries between men and women, children and elders (they seem to be one of the few occasions when the otherwise staid Yurok allowed themselves to have a bit of fun).

So are we talking about the same basic institution (a ‘redistributive feast’) carried out in an entirely different spirit, or two entirely different institutions, or even, potlatch and anti-potlatch? How are we to tell?

Clearly the issue is much broader, and touches on the very nature of ‘culture areas’ and what actually constitutes a threshold or boundary between them. We are looking for a key to this problem. It lies in the institution of slavery, which, as we’ve noted, was endemic on the Northwest Coast but correspondingly absent south of the Klamath River in California. Slaves on the Northwest Coast were hewers of wood and drawers of water, but they were especially involved in the mass harvesting, cleaning and processing of salmon and other anadromous fish. Slavery on the Northwest Coast was a hereditary status: if you were a slave, your children were also fated to be so.

Cemeteries of Middle Pacific age, between 1850 BC and AD 200, reveal extreme disparities in treatments of the dead, something not seen in earlier times. South of Cape Mendocino we seem to be dealing with a different kind of Middle Pacific – a more ‘pacific’ one, in fact.

But we can’t put these differences down to a lack of contact between the two groups. On the contrary, archaeological and linguistic evidence demonstrates extensive movement of people and goods along much of the West Coast. A vibrant, canoe-borne maritime commerce already linked coastal and island societies, conveying valuables such as shell beads, copper, obsidian and a host of organic commodities across the diverse ecologies of the Pacific littoral.

In many of these societies one can observe customs that seem explicitly designed to head off the danger of captive status becoming permanent. Consider, for example, the Yurok requirement for victors in battle to pay compensation for each life taken, at the same rate one would pay if one were guilty of murder. This seems a highly efficient way of making inter-group raiding both fiscally pointless and morally bankrupt.

Californian ‘shatter zone’ were aware of their northern neighbors and saw them as warlike, and as disposed to a life of luxury based on exploiting the labor of those they subdued. It implies they recognized such exploitation as a possibility in their own societies yet rejected it, since keeping slaves would undermine important social values (they would become ‘fat and lazy’). Turning south, to the California shatter zone itself, we find evidence that, in many key areas of social life, the foragers of this region were indeed building their communities, in good schismogenetic fashion, as a kind of mirror image; a conscious inversion of those on the Northwest Coast.

Native Californians seem to have been well aware of the kinds of values they were rejecting. They even institutionalized them in the figure of the clown, whose public antics of sloth, gluttony and megalomania – while offering a platform from which to sound off about local problems and discontents – also seem to parody the most coveted values of a proximate civilization.

How were Amerindian ‘capturing societies’ different from other kinds of slave-holding societies?

Let’s define slavery itself. What makes a slave different from a serf, a peon, captive or inmate is their lack of social ties. In legal terms, at least, a slave has no family, no kin, no community; they can make no promises and forge no ongoing connections with other human beings. This is why the English word ‘free’ is actually derived from a root meaning ‘friend’.

Unsurprisingly, the archetypical slaves are usually war captives, who are typically far from home amid people who owe them nothing. There is another practical reason for turning war captives into slaves. A slave’s master has a responsibility to keep them alive in a fit state to work. Most human beings need a good deal of care and resources, and can usually be considered a net economic loss until they are 12 to 15 years old. It rarely makes economic sense to breed slaves – which is why, globally, slaves have so often been the product of military aggression.

Sometimes the foraging peoples – such as the Guaicurú of the Paraguay palm savannah, or the Calusa of Florida Keys – had the upper hand militarily over their agricultural neighbors. In such cases, taking slaves and exacting tribute exempted a portion of the dominant society from basic subsistence chores, and supported the existence of leisured elites. It also supported the training of specialized warrior castes, which in turn created the means for further appropriation and further tribute.

Captives were likened to vanquished prey. Experiencing social death, they would come to be regarded as something more like ‘pets’. While being re-socialized in their captors’ households they had to be nurtured, cooked for, fed and instructed in the proper ways of civilization; in short, domesticated (these tasks were usually women’s work). If the socialization was completed, the captive ceased to be a slave. However,captives could sometimes be kept suspended in social death, as part of a permanent pool of victims awaiting their actual, physical death. Typically they would be killed at collective feasts (akin to the Northwest Coast potlatch) presided over by ritual specialists, and this would sometimes result in the eating of enemy flesh.

True, crops were sent as tribute from nearby conquered villages, but tributary villages also sent servants, and raids on villages further out tended to concentrate on enslaving women, who could serve as concubines, nursemaids and domestics – allowing Guaicurú ‘princesses’, their bodies often completely covered with intricate tattoos and spiral designs painted on daily by their domestics, to devote their days to leisure.

Might there not be a more straightforward explanation for the prevalence of slavery on the Northwest Coast, and its absence further south? It’s easy to express moral disapproval of a practice if there’s not much economic incentive to practice it anyway.

From this perspective, the behavior of indigenous Californians was far from optimal. As we’ve noted, they relied primarily on gathering acorns and pine nuts as staples. In a region as bounteous as California, there’s no obvious reason to do this. Acorns and pine nuts offer tiny individual food packages and require a great deal of labor to process. To render them edible, most varieties require the back-breaking work of leaching and grinding to be carried out, to remove toxins and release nutrients. Nut yields can vary dramatically from one season to the next, a risky pattern of boom and bust.

Fish are both more nutritious and more reliable than nuts. Despite this, salmon and other aquatic foods generally came second to tree crops in Californian diets. Salmon can be harvested and processed in great quantities on an annual basis, and they provide oil and fats as well as protein. In terms of cost-benefit calculations, the peoples of the Northwest Coast are eminently more sensible than Californians

Granted, they also had little choice, since nut-gathering was never a serious option on the Northwest Coast (the main forest species there are conifers). It’s also true that Northwest Coast peoples enjoyed a greater range of fish than Californians, including eulachon (candlefish), intensively exploited for its oil, which was both a staple food and a core ingredient in ‘grease feasts,’.

In the technical language of behavioral ecology, fish are ‘front-loaded’. You have to do most of the work of preparation right away. As a result, one could argue that a decision to rely heavily on fish – while undoubtedly sensible in purely nutritional terms – is also weaving a noose for one’s own neck. It meant investing in the creation of a storable surplus of processed and packaged foods (not just preserved meat, but also fats and oils), which also meant creating an irresistible temptation for plunderers. Acorns and nuts, on the other hand, present neither such risks nor such temptations. They are ‘back-loaded’. Harvesting them was a simple and fairly leisurely affair, and, crucially, there was no need for processing prior to storage.

Instead most of the hard work took place only just before consumption: leaching and grinding to make porridges, cakes and biscuits. (This is the very opposite of smoked fish, which you don’t even have to cook if you don’t want to.)

Note 52: Joaquin Miller’s 1873 description of acorn gathering from “Life Amongst the Modocs”. Here we passed groves of magnificent oak with trunks six feet in diameter, boughs covered with acorns and matted with mistletoe. Coming down to the banks of the Pit river, we heard the songs and shouts of Indian girls gathering acorns. They were up in the oaks, half covered with mistletoe. They beat the acorns off with sticks, or cut off little branches with tomahawks while older squaws below gathered them off the ground, then threw them over their shoulders in baskets borne by a strap around the forehead’.

Note 53: What the Maidu, Pomo, Miwok, Wintu and other California groups sacrificed in short-term nutritional value they gained over the long term in food security (not in book, but acorns can last for two years).

So there was little point in raiding a store of raw acorns. As a result, there was also no real incentive to develop organized ways of defending these stores against potential raiders. One can begin to see the logic here. Salmon-fishing and acorn-gathering simply have very different practical affordances, which over the long term might be expected to produce very different sorts of societies: one warlike and prone to raiding (and after you have made off with the food, it’s not much of a leap to begin carrying off prisoners as well), the other essentially peaceful.

The most obvious difficulty is that the capture of dried fish, or foodstuffs of any kind, was never a significant aim of Northwest Coast inter-group raiding. To put it bluntly, there’s only so many smoked fish one can pile up in a war canoe. And carrying bulk products overland was even more difficult: The main aim of raids was always to capture people, so ‘optimal foraging theory’ and other ‘rational-choice’ approaches seem utterly unable to explain this.

The ultimate causes of slavery didn’t lie in environmental or demographic conditions, but in Northwest Coast concepts of the proper ordering of society; and these, in turn, were the result of political jockeying by different sectors of the population who, as everywhere, had somewhat different perspectives on what a proper society should be. The simple reality is thatthere was no shortage of working hands in Northwest Coast households. But a good proportion of those hands belonged to aristocratic title holders who felt strongly that they should be exempted from menial work. They might hunt manatees or killer whales, but it was inconceivable for them to be seen building weirs or gutting fish. This was mainly an issue in the spring and summer, when the only limits on fish-harvesting were the number of hands available to process and preserve the catch. Rules of decorum prevented nobles from joining in, while low-ranking commoners would instantly defect to a rival household if pressed too hard or called upon too often.So although aristocrats probably felt commoners should be working like slaves for them, commoners had other opinions.

Slavery probably evolved to have controllable labor at key times of year.So we must conclude that ecology does not explain the presence of slavery on the Northwest Coast. Freedom does. Title-holding aristocrats, locked in rivalry with one another, simply lacked the means to compel their own subjects to support their endless games of magnificence. They were forced to look abroad.

In any true Northwest Coast settlement hereditary slaves might have constituted up to a quarter of the population. No free member of a Northwest Coast household would ever be seen chopping or carrying wood. To do so was to undermine one’s own status, effectively making oneself the equivalent of a slave. Californian chiefs, by contrast, seem to have elevated these exact same activities into a solemn public duty, incorporating them into the core rituals of the sweat lodge.

Further inversions occur in the domains of spiritual and aesthetic life. Artistic traditions of the Northwest Coast are all about spectacle and deception: the theatrical trickery of masks that flicker open and shut, of surface figures pulling the gaze in sharply opposed directions. The native word for ‘ritual’ in most Northwest Coast languages actually translates as ‘fraud’ or ‘illusion’. Californian spirituality provides an almost perfect antithesis. What mattered was cultivation of the inner self through discipline, earnest training, and hard work.

Californian art entirely avoids the use of masks.

As one ethnographer wrote of another Yurok neighbor, the Atsugewi: ‘The ideal individual was both wealthy and industrious. In the first grey haze of dawn he arose to begin his day’s work, never ceasing activity until late at night. Early rising and the ability to go without sleep were great virtues. It was extremely complimentary to say “he doesn’t know how to sleep.”’ Wealthy men – and it should be noted that all these societies were decidedly patriarchal – were typically seen as providers for poorer dependants, improvident folk and foolish drifters, by virtue of their own self-discipline and labor and that of their wives.

With its ‘Protestant’ emphasis on interiority and introspection, Californian spirituality offers a perfect counterpoint to the smoke and mirrors of Northwest Coast ceremonials. Among the Yurok, work properly performed became a way of connecting with a true reality, of which prized objects like dentalia and hummingbird scalps were mere outward manifestations.

In 1865, Captain Spott, for instance, trained for many weeks as he helped the medicine man prepare for the First Salmon ceremony at the mouth of the Klamath River … ‘the old (medicine) man sent him to bring down sweathouse wood. On the way he cried with nearly every step because now he was seeing with his own eyes how it was done.’ … Tears, crying, are of crucial importance in Yurok spiritual training as manifestations of personal yearning, sincerity, humility, and openness.

The Yurok, with their puritanical manners and extraordinary cultural emphasis on work and money, might seem an odd choice to celebrate as anti-slavery heroes (though many Calvinist Abolitionists were not so very different). But of course we’re not introducing them as heroes, any more than we wish to represent their Northwest Coast neighbors as the villains of the piece.We are introducing them as a way to illustrate how the process by which cultures define themselves against one another is always, at root, political, since it involves self-conscious arguments about the proper way to live. Revealingly, the arguments appear to have been most intense precisely in this border zone between anthropological ‘culture areas’.

Almost all the peoples of central and southern California, the Maidu, Wintu, Pomo and so on, rejected the institution entirely. There appear to have been at least two reasons for this. First, almost everywhere except in the northwest, a man or woman’s money and other wealth was ritually burned at death – and as a result, the institution served as an effective levelling mechanism.

Captives were not slaves, all sources insist they were redeemed quickly, and all killers had to pay compensation; but all this required money. This meant the important men who often instigated wars could profit handsomely from the affair by lending to those unable to pay, and the latter were thus either reduced to debt peons, or retreated to live ignominiously in isolated homesteads in the woods. One might see the intense focus on obtaining money, and resultant puritanism, and also the strong moral opposition to slave-raiding as a result of tensions created by living in this unstable and chaotic buffer zone between the two regions. Elsewhere in California, formal chiefs or headmen existed, and though they wielded no power of compulsion they settled conflicts by raising funds for compensation collectively, and the focus of cultural life was less on the accumulation of property than on organizing annual rites of world renewal.

States do not evolve from Bands to Tribes to Chiefdoms to States

Posted on May 15, 2022 by energyskeptic

Preface. The bulk of this book is dedicated to showing why the idea of the evolution from tribes to states is false. If the authors are correct, then the flexibility of societies to invent ways of living with more freedom and fulfilling lifestyles is far greater than we think, since we’re “stuck” now in modern civilizations (made possible by fossil fuels) and can’t see that other options exist.

The fact that new and better societies may arise out of the ashes of overshoot gives me great hopes for the future after fossil fuels are gone. I just hope enough people read this book who survive to help build better societies in the future, especially for women, who suffer in agricultural societies where the muscle power of men leads to domination and backbreaking tedious roles for women.

Graeber D, Wengrow D (2021) The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity.

Why ideas about how bureaucracies and states evolved are wrong

At this point it should be easy enough to understand why ancient Egypt is so regularly held out as the paradigmatic example of state formation. It’s not just that it is chronologically the earliest of what we’ve called second-order regimes of domination; aside from the much later Inca Empire, it’s also just about the only case where the two principles that came together were sovereignty and administration. In other words, it’s the only case from a suitably distant phase of history that perfectly fits the model of what should have happened.

Small, intimate groups (the argument goes) might be able to adopt informal, egalitarian means of problem-solving, but as soon as large numbers of people are assembled together in a city or a kingdom everything changes. Therefore, if you want to live in a large-scale society you need a sovereign and an administration. It is more or less taken for granted that some kind of monopoly of coercive force.

It was once widely assumed that if bureaucratic states tend to arise in areas with complex irrigation systems, it must have been because of the need for administrators to co-ordinate the maintenance of canals and regulate the water supply. In fact, it turns out that farmers are perfectly capable of coordinating very complicated irrigation systems all by themselves, and there’s little evidence, in most cases, that early bureaucrats had anything to do with such matters.

Urban populations seem to have a remarkable capacity for self-governance in ways which, while usually not quite ‘egalitarian’, were likely a good deal more participatory than almost any urban government today. Meanwhile most ancient emperors, as it turns out, saw little reason to interfere, as they simply didn’t care very much about how their subjects cleaned the streets or maintained their drainage ditches.

We’ve also observed that when early regimes do base their domination on exclusive access to forms of knowledge, these are often not the kinds of knowledge we ourselves would consider particularly practical (the shamanic, psychotropic revelations that seem to have inspired the builders of Chavín de Huántar would be one such example).

Our emerging archaeological understanding suggests that the first systems of specialized administrative control actually emerged in very small communities. The earliest clear evidence of this appears in a series of tiny prehistoric settlements in the Middle East, dating over 1,000 years after the Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük was founded (at around 7400 BC), but still more than 2,000 years before the appearance of anything even vaguely resembling a city.

In a late Neolithic community of about 150 individuals, excavators discovered that not only did the inhabitants of this village erect central storage facilities, including granaries and warehouses; they also employed administrative devices of some complexity to keep track of what was in them. But these were not written archives: writing, as such, would not appear for another 3,000 years. What did exist were geometric tokens made of clay, of a sort that appear to have been used in many similar Neolithic villages, most likely to keep track of the allocation of particular resources.

It’s important to note that the central bureau and depot of Tell Sabi Abyad is not associated with any kind of unusually large residence, rich burials or other signs of personal status. If anything, what’s striking about the remains of this community is their uniformity: the surrounding dwellings, for instance, are all roughly equal in size, quality and surviving contents. The contents themselves suggest small family units which maintained a complex division of labor, often including tasks that would have required the co-operation of multiple households. Flocks had to be pastured, a variety of cereal crops sown, harvested and threshed, as well as flax for weaving, which was practiced alongside other household crafts such as potting, bead-making, stone-carving and simple forms of metalworking. And of course, there were children to raise, old people to care for, houses to build

What you find in the 5th millennium BC is the gradual disappearance from village life of most outward signs of difference or individuality, as administrative tools and other new media technologies spread across a large swathe of the Middle East. Households were now built to increasingly standard tripartite plans, and pottery, which had once been a way of expressing individual skill and creativity, now seems to have been made deliberately drab, uniform and sometimes almost standardized. Craft production in general became more mechanical, and female labor was subject to new forms of spatial control and segregation.

In fact this entire period, lasting around 1,000 years (archaeologists call it the ‘Ubaid, after the site of Tell al-‘Ubaid in southern Iraq), was one of innovation in metallurgy, horticulture, textiles, diet and long-distance trade; but from a social vantage point, everything seems to have been done to prevent such innovations becoming markers of rank or individual distinction – in other words, to prevent the emergence of obvious differences in status, both within and between villages. Intriguingly, it is possible that we are witnessing the birth of an overt ideology of equality in the centuries prior to the emergence of the world’s first cities, and that administrative tools were first designed not as a means of extracting and accumulating wealth but precisely to prevent such things from happening.

Ayllu too were based on a strong principle of equality; their members literally wore uniforms, with each valley having its own traditional design of cloth. One of the ayllu ’s main functions was to redistribute agricultural land as families grew larger or smaller, to ensure none grew richer than any other – indeed, to be a ‘rich’ household meant, in practice, to have a large number of unmarried children, hence much land, since there was no other basis for comparing wealth. Ayllu also helped families avoid seasonal labor crunches and kept track of the number of able-bodied young men and women in each household, so as to ensure not only that none were short-handed at critical moments, but also that the aged or inform, widows, orphans or disabled were taken care of.

Between households, responsibilities came down to a principle of reciprocity: records were kept and at the end of each year all outstanding credits and debts were to be cancelled out. This is where the ‘village bureaucracy’ comes in. To do that meant units of work had to be measured in a way which allowed clear resolution to the inevitable arguments that crop up in such situations – about who did what for whom, and who owed what to whom. Each ayllu appears to have had its own khipu strings, which were constantly knotted and re-knotted to keep track as debts were registered or cancelled out. It’s possible that khipu were invented for such purposes.

It was the pre-existing ayllu system that continued to provide social security under Inca rule. By contrast, the overarching administrative structure put in place by the Inca court was largely extractive and exploitative in nature (even if local officers of the court preferred to misrepresent it as an extension of ayllu principles): for purposes of central monitoring and recording, households were grouped into units of 10, 50, 100, 500, 1,000, 5,000 and so on, each responsible for labor obligations over and above those they already owed to their community, in a way that could only play havoc with existing allegiances, geography and communal organization.

Those who were unable to meet labor debts or who tried unsuccessfully to flee or rebel, were reduced to the status of servants, retainers and concubines for Inca courts and officials. This new class of hereditary peons was growing rapidly at the time of Spanish conquest.

None of which is to say the Inca reputation as adept administrators is unfounded. They apparently were capable of keeping exact track of births and deaths, adjusting household numbers at yearly festivals and so on. Why, then, impose such an oddly clumsy and monolithic system on to an existing one (the ayllu) which was clearly more nuanced? It’s hard to escape the impression that in all such situations, the apparent heavy-handedness, the insistence on following the rules even when they make no sense, is really half the point. Perhaps this is simply how sovereignty manifests itself, in bureaucratic form. By ignoring the unique history of every household, each individual, by reducing everything to numbers one provides a language of equity – but simultaneously ensures that there will always be some who fail to meet their quotas, and therefore that there will always be a supply of peons, pawns or slaves. In the Middle East, very similar things appear to have happened in later periods of history.

Most famously, perhaps, the books of the Prophets in the Hebrew Bible preserve memories of powerful protests that ensued as demands for tribute drove farmers into penury, forced them to pawn their flocks and vineyards, and ultimately surrender their children into debt peonage. Or wealthy merchants and administrators took advantage of crop failures, floods, natural disasters or neighbors’ simple bad luck to offer interest-bearing loans that led to the same results.

Similar complaints are recorded in China and India as well. The first establishment of bureaucratic empires is almost always accompanied by some kind of system of equivalence run amok.

What’s important here is the fact that this equality could be viewed as making people (as well as things) interchangeable, which in turn allowed rulers, or their henchmen, to make impersonal demands that took no consideration of their subjects’ unique situations. This is of course what gives the word ‘bureaucracy’ such distasteful associations almost everywhere today. The very term evokes mechanical stupidity.

As anyone knows who has spent time in a rural community, or serving on a municipal or parish council of a large city, resolving such inequities might require many hours, possibly days of tedious discussion, but almost always a solution will be arrived at that no one finds entirely unfair. It’s the addition of sovereign power, and the resulting ability of the local enforcer to say, ‘Rules are rules; I don’t want to hear about it’ that allows bureaucratic mechanisms to become genuinely monstrous.

FORAGING SOCIETIES HAD WIDE VARIATIONS IN GOVERNANCE IN THEIR SOCIETIES

Societies from roughly 50,000–15,000 BC – with their ‘princely’ burials and grand communal buildings – seem to completelydefy our image of a world made up of tiny egalitarian forager bands. The disconnect is so profound that some archaeologists have begun taking the opposite tack, describing Ice Age Europe as populated by ‘hierarchical’ or even ‘stratified’ societies. In this, they make common cause with evolutionary psychologists who insist that dominance behavior is hardwired in our genes, so much so that the moment society goes beyond tiny bands, it must necessarily take the form of some ruling over others.

Notes: Recent and historical hunter-gatherers range from assertively egalitarian groups like the Ju/ ‘hoansi of the Kalahari, the Mbendjele BaYaka of Congo or the Agta in the Philippines to extremely non-egalitarian, hierarchical ones like those of native Americans in the Canadian Northwest Coast, the Calusa of the Florida Keys, or the forest-dwelling Guaicuru of Paraguay, many of them keeping slaves and living in ranked societies.

So holding up any particular subset of recent foragers as representative of ‘early human society’ is cherry picking.

AS POLITICAL ACTORS, TRIBES CREATED MANY KINDS OF SOCIETIES

Carefully working through ethnographic accounts of existing egalitarian foraging bands in Africa, South America and Southeast Asia, a whole panoply of tactics collectively employed to bring would-be braggarts and bullies down to earth – ridicule, shame, shunning (and in the case of inveterate sociopaths, sometimes even outright assassination) – none of which have any parallel among other primates.

These bands understand what their society might look like if they did things differently: if skilled hunters were not systematically belittled, or if elephant meat was not portioned out to the group by someone chosen at random (as opposed to the person who actually killed the beast). This is the essence of politics: the ability to reflect consciously on different directions one’s society could take, and to make explicit arguments why it should take one path rather than another.

If the very essence of our humanity consists of the fact that we are self-conscious political actors, and therefore capable of embracing a wide range of social arrangements, would that not mean human beings should actually have explored a wide range of social arrangements over the greater part of our history?

HUMANS AS POLITICAL ACTORS: EUROPEANS & ANTHROPOLIGISTS VASTLY UNDERESTIMATED WHAT PAST SOCIETIES WERE CAPABLE OF

The really insidious element of Rousseau’s legacy is not so much the idea of the ‘noble savage’ as that of the ‘stupid savage’. We may have got over the overt racism of most nineteenth-century Europeans, or at least we think we have, but it’s not unusual to find even very sophisticated contemporary thinkers who feel it’s more appropriate to compare ‘bands’ of hunter-gatherers with chimps or baboons than with anyone they’d ever be likely to meet.

Perhaps the real question here is what it means to be a ‘self-conscious political actor’. Philosophers tend to define human consciousness in terms of self-awareness; neuroscientists, on the other hand, tell us we spend the overwhelming majority of our time effectively on autopilot, working out habitual forms of behavior without any sort of conscious reflection. When we are capable of self-awareness, it’s usually for very brief periods of time: the ‘window of consciousness’, during which we can hold a thought or work out a problem, tends to be open on average for roughly seven seconds. What neuroscientists (and it must be said, most contemporary philosophers) almost never notice, however, is that the great exception to this is when we’re talking to someone else. In conversation, we can hold thoughts and reflect on problems sometimes for hours on end. This is of course why so often, even if we’re trying to figure something out by ourselves, we imagine arguing with or explaining it to someone else.

Humans were only fully self-conscious when arguing with one another, trying to sway each other’s views, or working out a common problem. True individual self-consciousness, meanwhile, was imagined as something that a few wise sages could perhaps achieve through long study, exercise, discipline and meditation.

Over the course of the 18th AND 19th centuries it was political self-consciousness that European philosophers came to see as some kind of amazing historical achievement: as a phenomenon which only really became possible with the Enlightenment itself, and the subsequent American and French Revolutions. Before that, it was assumed, people blindly followed traditions, or what they assumed to be the will of God. To Victorian intellectuals, the notion of people self-consciously imagining a social order more to their liking and then trying to bring it into being was simply not applicable before the modern age – and most were deeply divided as to whether it would even be a good idea in their own time.

And if certain hunter-gatherers turn out not to have been living perpetually in ‘bands’ at all, but instead congregating to create grand landscape monuments, storing large quantities of preserved food and treating particular individuals like royalty, contemporary scholars are at best likely to place them in a new stage of development: they have moved up the scale from ‘simple’ to ‘complex’ hunter-gatherers, a step closer to agriculture and urban civilization. But they are still caught in the same Turgot-like evolutionary straitjacket, their place in history defined by their mode of subsistence, and their role blindly to enact some abstract law of development which we understand but they do not; certainly, it rarely occurs to anyone to ask what sort of worlds they thought they were trying to create.

Anthropologists who spend years talking to indigenous people in their own languages, and watching them argue with one another, tend to be well aware that even those who make their living hunting elephants or gathering lotus buds are just as skeptical, imaginative, thoughtful and capable of critical analysis as those who make their living by operating tractors, managing restaurants or chairing university departments.

Paul Radin in his 1927 book Primitive Man as Philosopher, ended up concluding that at least those he knew best – Winnebago and other Native North Americans – were actually, on average, rather more thoughtful.What really struck him about the ‘primitive’ societies he was most familiar with was their tolerance of eccentricity. This, he concluded, was simply the logical extension of that same rejection of coercion that so impressed the Jesuits in Quebec. If, he noted, a Winnebago decided that gods or spirits did not really exist and refused to perform rituals meant to appease them, or even if he declared the collective wisdom of the elders wrong and invented his own personal cosmology (and both these things did, quite regularly, happen), such a skeptic would definitely be made fun of, while his closest friends and family might worry lest the gods punish him in some way. However, it would never occur to them to punish him, or that anyone should try to force him into conformity – for instance, by blaming him for a bad hunt and therefore refusing to share food with him until he agreed to perform the usual rituals.

There is every reason to believe that skeptics and non-conformists exist in every human society; what varies is how others react to them. Radin was interested in the intellectual consequences, the kind of speculative systems of thought such out-of-sync characters might create. Others have noted the political implications. It’s often people who are just slightly odd who become leaders; the truly odd can become spiritual figures, but, even more, they can and often do serve as a kind of reserve of potential talent and insight that can be called on in the event of a crisis or unprecedented turn of affairs.

There are no discrete stages of political organization from bands, tribes, chiefdoms, and states

Amazonian chiefs were calculating politicians forced to maneuver in a social environment apparently designed to ensure they could never exercise real political power. In the winter, the groups they led were tiny and inconsequential. In the summer, they didn’t ‘lead’ at all. Yes, their houses might have resembled social service dispensaries in modern welfare states; but as a result, in terms of material wealth, they were actually the poorest men in the village, since chiefs were expected constantly to give everything away. They were also expected to set an example by working much harder than everybody else. Even where they did have special privileges, like the Tupi or Nambikwara chiefs, who were the only men in their villages allowed to have multiple wives, the privilege was distinctly double-edged. The wives were held to be necessary to prepare feasts for the village. If any of those wives looked to other lovers, which it appears they ordinarily did, there was nothing much the chief could do about it, since he had to keep himself in everyone’s good graces to remain chief.

Chiefs found themselves in this situation because they weren’t the only ones who were mature and insightful political actors; almost everyone was. Rather than being trapped in some sort of Rousseauian innocence, unable to imagine more complex forms of organization, people were generally more capable than we are of imagining alternative social orders, and therefore had created ‘societies against the state’.

How could one possibly claim that stateless societies were self-consciously organizing themselves to prevent the emergence of something they’d never actually experienced? There are a lot of possible ways in which to respond to this objection. Were Amazonians of centuries past, for instance, entirely unaware of the great Andean empires to their west? People used to get around. It’s unlikely they simply had no idea of developments in neighboring parts of the continent.

It’s easy to see why the neo-evolutionists of the 1950s and 1960s might not have known quite what to do with this legacy of fieldwork observations. They were arguing for the existence of discrete stages of political organization – successively: bands, tribes, chiefdoms, states – and held that the stages of political development mapped, at least very roughly, on to similar stages of economic development: hunter-gatherers, gardeners, farmers, industrial civilization.

It’s surely no coincidence that the most popular ethnographic films of the post-war era either focused on the Kalahari Bushmen and Mbuti Pygmies (‘band’ societies, which could be imagined as roughly resembling hippie communes); or on the Yanomami or ‘fierce people’ (Amazonian horticulturalists who, in Napoleon Chagnon’s version of reality – but not, let’s recall, in Helena Valero’s – do bear a rather disturbing resemblance to Hell’s Angels).

Since in this new, evolutionist narrative ‘states’ were defined above all by their monopoly on the ‘legitimate use of coercive force’, the 19th century Cheyenne or Lakota would have been seen as evolving from the ‘band’ level to the ‘state’ level roughly every November, and then devolving back again come spring. Obviously, this is silly.

it exposes the much deeper silliness of the initial assumption: that societies must necessarily progress through a series of evolutionary stages to begin with.

If we are right, and if human beings really have spent most of the last 40,000 or so years moving back and forth between different forms of social organization, building up hierarchies then dismantling them again, the implications are profound. For one thing, it suggests that rather than being less politically self-conscious than people nowadays, people in stateless societies might actually have been considerably more so.

Seasonal festivals may be a pale echo of older patterns of seasonal variation – but, for the last few thousand years of human history at least, they appear to have played much the same role in fostering political self-consciousness, and as laboratories of social possibility.

DOES AGRICULTURE ALWAYS LEAD TO INEQUALITY & RISE OF THE STATE?

Rousseau’s argument that it was only the invention of agriculture that introduced genuine inequality, since it allowed for the emergence of landed property. This is one of the main reasons people today continue to write as if foragers can be assumed to live in egalitarian bands to begin with – because it’s also assumed that without the productive assets (land, livestock) and stockpiled surpluses (grain, wool, dairy products, etc.) made possible by farming, there was no real material basis for anyone to lord it over anyone else.

Conventional wisdom also tells us that the moment a material surplus does become possible, there will also be full-time craft specialists, warriors and priests laying claim to it, and living off some portions of that surplus. Or warriors, spending the bulk of their time trying to figure out new ways to steal it from each other. Before long, merchants, lawyers and politicians will inevitably follow. These new elites will, as Rousseau emphasized, band together to protect their assets, so the advent of private property will be followed, inexorably, by the rise of ‘the state’. While there is a broad truth here, it is so broad as to have very little explanatory power.

Ruling classes are simply those who have organized society in such a way that they can extract the lion’s share of that surplus for themselves, whether through tribute, slavery, feudal dues or manipulating ostensibly free-market arrangements.

Truly egalitarian societies are those with ‘immediate return’ economies: food brought home is eaten the same day or the next; anything extra is shared out, but never preserved or stored. All this is in stark contrast to most foragers, and all pastoralists or farmers, who can be characterized as having ‘delayed return’ economies, regularly investing their energies in projects that only bear fruit at some point in the future. Such investments inevitably lead to ongoing ties that can become the basis for some individuals to exercise power over others. Hadza and other egalitarian foragers understand all this perfectly well, and as a result they self-consciously avoid stockpiling resources or engaging in any long-term projects. Far from rushing blindly for their chains like Rousseau’s savages, immediate return hunter-gatherers understand precisely where the chains of captivity loom, and organize much of their lives to keep away from them.

This might sound hopeful or optimistic. It’s anything but. What it suggests is equality is essentially impossible for all but the very simplest foragers.

Few anthropologists are particularly happy with the term ‘egalitarian societies’, for reasons that should now be obvious; but it lingers on because no one has suggested a compelling alternative. The closest we’re aware of is the feminist anthropologist Eleanor Leacock’s suggestion that most members of what are called egalitarian societies seem less interested in equality per se than what she calls ‘autonomy’. What matters to Montagnais-Naskapi women, for instance, is not so much whether men and women are seen to be of equal status but whether women are, individually or collectively, able to live their lives and make their own decisions without male interference.

The ancient forager ethos of leisure (the ‘Zen road to affluence’) only broke down when people finally –began to settle in one place and accept the toils of agriculture. They did so at a terrible cost. It wasn’t just ever-increasing hours of toil that followed but, for most, poverty, disease, war and slavery – all fueled by endless competition and the mindless pursuit of new pleasures, new powers and new forms of wealth.

Not all modern hunter-gatherers value leisure over hard work, just as not all share the easy-going attitudes towards personal possessions of the!Kung or Hadza. Foragers in northwestern California, for instance, were notorious for their cupidity, organizing much of their lives around the accumulation of shell money and sacred treasures and adhering to a stringent work ethic in order to do so. The fisher-foragers of the Canadian Northwest Coast, on the other hand, lived in highly stratified societies where commoners and slaves were famously industrious. According to one of their ethnographers, the Kwakiutl of Vancouver Island were not only well housed and fed, but lavishly supplied: ‘Each household made and possessed many mats, boxes, cedar-bark and fur blankets, wooden dishes, horn spoons, and canoes.

There was no truly ‘original’ state of affairs.

Clearly, foragers didn’t shuffle backstage at the close of the last Ice Age, waiting in the wings for some group of Neolithic farmers to reopen the theatre of history. Why, then, is this new knowledge so rarely integrated into our accounts of the human past?

• On the shores of the Atlantic and around the Gulf of Mexico lie enigmatic structures: just as remarkable as Poverty Point, but even less well known. Formed out of shell in great accumulations, they range from small rings to massive U-shaped ‘amphitheatres’ like those of St Johns River valley in Northeast Florida. These were no natural features. They too were built spaces where hunter-gatherer publics once assembled in their thousands.

• An entire, forgotten social history of pre-agricultural Japan is resurfacing, for now largely as a mass of data points and state heritage archives. In future, as the bits get pieced back together, who knows what will come into view?

• Europe, too, bears witness to the vibrant and complex history of non-agricultural peoples after the Ice Age. Take the monuments called in Finnish Jätinkirkko, the ‘Giants’ Churches’ of the Bothnian Sea between Sweden and Finland: great stone ramparts, some up to 195 feet long, raised up in thei tens by coastal foragers between 3000 and 2000 BC.

THE CALUSA: You don’t need agriculture to get extreme inequality & stratification of wealth

Fish, shellfish and larger marine animals comprised a major part of the Calusa diet, supplemented by deer, raccoon and a variety of birds. Calusa also maintained a fleet of war canoes with which they would launch military raids on nearby populations, extracting processed foods, skins, weapons, amber, metals and slaves as tribute. When Juan Ponce de León entered Charlotte Harbor on 4 June 1513 he was met by a well-organized flotilla of such canoes, manned by heavily armed hunter-gatherers.

The man known as ‘Carlos’, the ruler of Calos at the time of initial European contact, even looked like a European king: he wore a gold diadem and beaded leg bands and sat on a wooden throne – and, crucially, he was the only Calusa allowed to do so. His powers seemed absolute. ‘His will was law, and insubordination was punishable by death.’

He was also responsible for performing secret rituals that ensured the renewal of nature. His subjects always greeted him by kneeling and raising their hands in a gesture of obeisance, and he was typically accompanied by representatives of the ruling class of warrior nobles and priests who, like him, devoted themselves largely to the business of government. And he had at his disposal the services of specialized craftsmen, including court metallurgists who worked silver, gold and copper.

Court life appears to have been made possible not only by complex systems of access to coastal fishing grounds, which were exceedingly rich, but also by canals and artificial ponds dug out of the coastal everglades. The latter, in turn, allowed for permanent – that is, non-seasonal – settlements (though most Calusa did still scatter to fishing and gathering sites at certain times of year, when the big towns grew decidedly smaller).

By all accounts, then, the Calusa had indeed ‘got stuck’ in a single economic and political mode that allowed extreme forms of inequality to emerge. But they did so without ever planting a single seed or tethering a single animal.

Adherents of the view that agriculture was a necessary foundation for durable inequalities have two options: ignore them, or claim they represent some kind of insignificant anomaly. Surely, they will say, foragers who do these kinds of things – raiding their neighbors, stockpiling wealth, creating elaborate court ceremonial, defending their territories and so on – aren’t really foragers at all, or at least not true foragers.

In academic thought, there’s another popular way of propping up the myth of the ‘Agricultural Revolution’, and thereby writing off people like the Calusa as evolutionary quirks or anomalies. This is to claim that they only behaved the way they did because they were living in ‘atypical’ environments.

Anyone who was still living mainly by hunting animals and gathering wild foodstuffs in the early to mid 20th century was almost certainly living on land no one else particularly wanted. That’s why so many of the best descriptions of foragers come from places like the Kalahari Desert or Arctic Circle.

There was nothing atypical about the Calusa. They were just one of many fisher-forager populations living around the Straits of Florida – including the Tequesta, Pojoy, Jeaga, Jobe and Ais.

They were also among the first Native American societies to be destroyed since, for obvious reasons, coasts and estuaries were the first spots where Spanish colonizers landed, bringing epidemic diseases, priests, tribute and, eventually, settlers. This was a pattern repeated on every continent, from America to Oceania, where invariably the most attractive ports, harbors, fisheries and surrounding lands were first snapped up

That the Calusa managed to maintain a sufficient economic surplus to support what looks to us like a miniature kingdom does not mean such an outcome is inevitable as soon as a society is capable of stockpiling a sufficient quantity of fish.

It’s possible they were simply imitating more powerful neighbors. Or maybe they were just odd. Finally, we don’t really know how much power even a divine king like Carlos really had.

Environmental determinism

Environmental determinists have an unfortunate tendency to treat humans as little more than automata, living out some economist’s fantasy of rational calculation.

Anthropologists who object to this kind of determinism will typically appeal to culture, but ultimately this comes down to little more than insisting that explanation is impossible: English people act the way they do because they are English, Yurok act the way they do because they’re Yurok; why they are English or Yurok is not really ours to say. Humans – from this other perspective, which is just as extreme in its own way – are at best an arbitrary constellation of cultural elements, perhaps assembled according to some prevailing spirit, code or ethos, and which society ends up with which ethos is treated as beyond explanation, little more than a random roll of the dice.

Putting matters in such stark terms does not mean there is no truth to either position. The intersection of environment and technology does make a difference, often a huge difference, and to some degree, cultural difference really is just an arbitrary roll of the dice: there’s no ‘explanation’ for why Chinese is a tonal language and Finnish an agglutinative one; that’s just the way things happened to turn out.

Both approaches presume that we are stuck.This is why we ourselves place so much emphasis on the notion of self-determination. Just as it is reasonable to assume that Pleistocene mammoth hunters, moving back and forth between different seasonal forms of organization, must have developed a degree of political self-consciousness – to have thought about the relative merits of different ways of living with one another – so too the intricate webs of cultural difference that came to characterize human societies after the end of the last Ice Age must surely have involved a degree of political introspection.

Since this book is mainly about freedom, it seems appropriate to set the dial a bit further to the left than usual, and to explore the possibility that human beings have more collective say over their own destiny than we ordinarily assume.

It is popular in certain circles to claim that ‘nations make choices’, that some have chosen to be Protestant and others Catholic, and that this is the main reason so many people in the United States or Germany are rich, and so many in Brazil or Italy are poor. This makes about as much sense as arguing that since everyone is free to make their own decisions, the fact that some people end up as financial consultants and others as security guards is entirely their own doing (indeed, it’s usually the same sort of people who make both sorts of argument).

It seems part of the human condition that while we cannot predict future events, as soon as those events do happen we find it hard to see them as anything but inevitable. There’s no way to know. So precisely where one wishes to set the dial between freedom and determinism is largely a matter of taste.

Slavery, we’ve argued, became commonplace on the Northwest Coast largely because an ambitious aristocracy found itself unable to reduce its free subjects to a dependable workforce.

Was farming from the very beginning about the serious business of producing more food to supply growing populations? Most scholars assume, as a matter of course, that this had to be the principal reason for its invention. But maybe farming began as a more playful or even subversive kind of process – or perhaps even as a side effect of other concerns, such as the desire to spend longer in particular kinds of locations, where hunting and trading were the real priorities.

Generations of archaeologists have wanted to see Çatalhöyük as a monument to the ‘origins of farming’. Certainly, it’s easy to understand why this should be. It is among the first large settlements we know of whose inhabitants practiced agriculture, and who got most of their nutrition from domesticated cereals, pulses, sheep and goats.

Since the 1990s, new methods of fieldwork at Çatalhöyük produced a string of surprises, which oblige us to revise both the history of the world’s oldest town and also how we think about the origins of farming in general. The cattle, it turns out, were not domestic: those impressive skulls belonged to fierce, wild aurochs. The shrines were not shrines, but houses in which people engaged in such everyday tasks as cooking, eating and crafts – just like anywhere else, except they happened to contain a larger density of ritual paraphernalia. Even the Mother Goddess has been cast into shadow. It is not so much that corpulent female figurines stopped turning up entirely in the excavations, but that the new finds tended to appear, not in shrines or on thrones, but in trash dumps outside houses with the heads broken off and didn’t really seem to have been treated as objects of religious veneration.

Today, most archaeologists consider it deeply unsound to interpret prehistoric images of corpulent women as ‘fertility goddesses’. The very idea that they should be is the result of long-outmoded Victorian fantasies about ‘primitive matriarchy’. In the 19th century, it’s true, matriarchy was considered the default mode of political organization for Neolithic societies (as opposed to the oppressive patriarchy of the ensuing Bronze Age). As a result, almost every image of a fertile-looking woman was interpreted as a goddess. Nowadays,archaeologists are more likely to point out that many figurines could just as easily have been the local equivalents of Barbie dolls. So we should dismiss the entire debate by insisting we simply have no idea why people created so many female images and never will, so any interpretations on offer are more likely to be projections of our own assumptions about women, gender or fertility than anything that would have made sense to an inhabitant of Neolithic Anatolia.

There is no evidence that Çatalhöyük’s female inhabitants enjoyed better standards of living than its male ones. Detailed studies of human teeth and skeletons reveal a basic parity of diet and health, as does the ritual treatment of male and female bodies in death. Yet the point remains that there exist no similarly elaborate or highly crafted depictions of male forms in the portable art of Çatalhöyük. Wall decoration is another matter. Where coherent scenes emerge from the surviving murals, they are mainly concerned with the hunting and teasing of game animals such as boar, deer, bear and bulls. The participants are men and boys, apparently depicted in different stages of life, or perhaps entering those stages through the initiatory trials of the chase. Some of these spritely figures wear leopard skins; in one deer-baiting scene, all have beards.

One thing to emerge clearly from the newer investigations at Çatalhöyük is the way in which household organization permeates almost every aspect of social life. Despite the considerable size and density of the built-up area, there is no evidence for central authority. Each household appears more or less a world unto itself – a discrete locus of storage, production and consumption. Each also seems to have held a significant degree of control over its own rituals, especially where treatment of the dead was concerned. The residents of Çatalhöyük seem to have placed great value on routine. We see this most clearly in the fastidious reproduction of domestic layouts over time. Individual houses were typically in use for 50 to100 years, after which they were carefully dismantled and filled in to make foundations for superseding houses. Clay wall went up on clay wall, in the same location, for century after century, over periods reaching up to a full millennium. Still more astonishing, smaller features such as mud-built hearths, ovens, storage bins and platforms often follow the same repetitive patterns of construction, over similarly long periods. Even particular images and ritual installations come back, again and again, in different renderings but the same locations, often widely separated in time.

What were the underlying realities of social life and labor at Çatalhöyük? Perhaps the most striking thing about all this art and ritual is that it makes almost no reference to agriculture. As we’ve noted, domestic cereals (wheat and barley) and livestock (sheep and goats) were far more important than wild resources in terms of nutrition. We know this because of organic remains recovered in quantity from every house. For 1,000 years the cultural life of the community remained stubbornly oriented around the worlds of hunting and foraging.

Another kind of social life altogether may have existed on the rooftops. It is in fact quite likely that what we are seeing in the surviving remains of Çatalhöyük’s built environment are largely the social arrangements prevalent in winter. With the harvest in, the organization required for agricultural labor would have given way to a different type of social reality as the community’s life shrank back towards its houses, just as its herds of sheep and goats shrank back into the confines of their pens.

What we can learn from The Fertile Crescent

Note 33: The initial growth of permanent villages – between 11,000 and 9500 BC – may have had to do with the temporary return of glacial weather conditions (the “Younger Dryas” period), obliging foragers in the lowland parts of the Fertile Crescent to commit to well-watered locations.

Between 10,000 and 8000 BC, foraging societies in the ‘upland’ and ‘lowland’ sectors of the Fertile Crescent underwent marked transformations, but in quite different directions. The differences cannot easily be expressed in terms of modes of subsistence or habitation. In both regions, in fact, we find a complex mosaic of human settlement: villages, hamlets, seasonal camps and centers of ritual and ceremonial activity marked out by impressive public buildings. Both regions, too, have produced varying degrees of evidence for plant cultivation and livestock management, within a broader spectrum of hunting and foraging activities. Yet there are also cultural differences, some so striking as to suggest a process of schismogenesis, such as the Pacific North West and California tribes. It might even be argued that, after the last Ice Age, the ecological frontier between ‘lowland’ and ‘upland’ Fertile Crescent also became a cultural frontier with zones of relative uniformity on either side, distinguished almost as sharply as the ‘Protestant foragers’ and ‘fisher kings’ of the Pacific Coast.

In the uplands, there was a striking turn towards hierarchy among settled hunter-foragers, most dramatically attested at the megalithic center of Göbekli Tepe and at nearby sites like that recently discovered at Karahan Tepe. In the lowlands of the Euphrates and Jordan valleys, by contrast, such megalithic monuments are absent, and Neolithic societies followed a distinct but equally precocious path of change.

‘Lowlanders’ and ‘uplanders’ – were well acquainted. We know this because they traded durable materials with each other over long distances. Obsidian from the Turkish highlands flowed south, and shells (perhaps used as currency) flowed north from the shores of the Red Sea.

The lowlanders who lived here were devoted craft specialists and traders. Each hamlet seems to have developed its own expertise (stone-grinding, bead-carving, shell-processing and so on), and industries were often associated with special ‘cult buildings’ or seasonal lodges, pointing to the control of such skills by guilds or secret societies. By the 9th millennium BC, larger settlements developed along the principal trade routes. Lowland foragers occupied fertile pockets of land among the drainages of the Jordan valley, using trade wealth to support increasingly large, settled populations. Sites of impressive scale sprang up in such propitious locations, some, such as Jericho and Basta, approaching ten hectares in size. The lowland crescent was a landscape of intimate contrasts and conjunctures (very similar, in this respect, to California). There were constant opportunities for foragers to exchange complementary products – which included foods, medicines, drugs and cosmetics.

Local growth cycles of wild resources were staggered by sharp differences in climate and topography. Farming itself seems to have started in precisely this way, as one of so many ‘niche’ activities or local forms of specialization. The founder crops of early agriculture – among them emmer wheat, einkorn, barley and rye – were not domesticated in a single ‘core’ area (as once supposed), but at different stops along the Levantine Corridor, scattered from the Jordan valley to the Syrian Euphrates, and perhaps further north as well.

At higher altitudes, in the upland crescent, we find some of the earliest evidence for the management of livestock (sheep and goats in western Iran, cattle too in eastern Anatolia), incorporated into seasonal rounds of hunting and foraging. Cereal cultivation began in a similar way, as a fairly minor supplement to economies based mainly on wild resources: nuts, berries, legumes and other readily accessible foodstuffs. Cultivation, however, is rarely just about calories. Cereal production also brought people together in new ways to perform communal tasks, mostly repetitive, labor-intensive and no doubt freighted with symbolic meaning; and the resulting foods were incorporated into their ceremonial lives.

At the site of Jerf el-Ahmar, on the banks of the Syrian Euphrates – where upland and lowland sectors of the Fertile Crescent converge – the storage and processing of grain was associated less with ordinary dwellings than with subterranean lodges, entered from an opening in the roof and suffused with ritual associations.

In crops, domestication is what happens when plants under cultivation lose features that allow them to reproduce in the wild. Among the most important is the facility to disperse seed without human assistance.In wheat, seeds growing on the stalk are contained by tiny aerodynamic capsules known as spikelets. As wild wheat ripens, the connection between spikelet and stem (an element called the rachis) shatters. The spikelets free themselves and fall to the ground. Their spiky ends penetrate the soil, deep enough for at least some seed to survive and grow (the other ends project upwards, equipped with bristle-like awns to deter birds, rodents and browsing animals).

In domestic varieties, these aids to survival are lost. A genetic mutation takes place, switching off the mechanism for spontaneous seed dispersal and turning wheat from a hardy survivor into a hopeless dependent. Unable to separate from its mother plant, the rachis becomes a locus of attachment. Instead of spreading out to take on the big bad world, the spikelets stay rigidly fixed to the top part of the stem (the ‘ear’). And there they remain, until someone comes along to harvest them, or until they rot, or are eaten by animals.

Distributing agricultural land fairly and communally

Any student of agrarian societies knows that people inclined to expand agriculture sustainably, without privatizing land or surrendering its management to a class of overseers, have always found ways to do so. Communal tenure, ‘open-field’ principles, periodic redistribution of plots and co-operative management of pasture are not particularly exceptional and were often practiced for centuries in the same locations. The Russian mir is a famous example, but similar systems of land redistribution once existed all over Europe, from the Highlands of Scotland to the Balkans, occasionally into very recent times.

The rules of redistribution varied from one case to the next – in some, it was made per stirpes, in others according to the number of people in a family. Most often, the precise location of each strip was determined by lottery, with each family receiving one strip per land tract of differing quality, so that nobody was obliged to travel much further than anyone else to his fields or to work soil of consistently lower quality. In pre-industrial Germany, where land tenure was apportioned between ‘mark associations’, each tenant would receive lots divided among the three main qualities of soil.

There is simply no reason to assume that the adoption of agriculture in more remote periods also meant the inception of private land ownership, territoriality, or an irreversible departure from forager egalitarianism.

Geographers and historians used to believe that plants and animals were first domesticated in just a few ‘nuclear’ zones: the same areas in which large-scale, politically centralized societies later appeared. This invited speculation that the former led to the latter: that food production was responsible for the emergence of cities, writing, and centralized political organization, providing a surplus of calories to support large populations and elite classes of administrators, warriors and politicians.

Invent agriculture – or so the story once went – and you set yourself on a course that will eventually lead to Assyrian charioteers, Confucian bureaucrats, Inca sun-kings or Aztec priests carrying away a significant chunk of your grain. Domination – and most often violent, ugly domination – was sure to follow; it was just a matter of time. Archaeological science has changed all this. Experts now identify between 15 and 20 independent centers of domestication, many of which followed very different paths of development to China, Peru, Mesoamerica or Mesopotamia. To those centers of early farming must now be added, among others, the Indian subcontinent (where browntop millet, mungbeans, horse gram, indica rice and humped zebu cattle were domesticated); the grasslands of West Africa (pearl millet); the central highlands of New Guinea (bananas, taroes and yams); the tropical forests of South America (manioc and peanuts); and the Eastern Woodlands of North America, where a distinct suite of local seed crops – goosefoot, sunflower and sumpweed – was raised, long before the introduction of maize from Mesoamerica.

We know much less about the prehistory of these other regions than we do about the Fertile Crescent.None followed a linear trajectory from food production to state formation. Nor is there any reason to assume a rapid spread of farming beyond them to neighboring areas. Food production did not always present itself to foragers, fishers and hunters as an obviously beneficial thing. Historians painting with a broad brush sometimes write as if it did, or as if the only barriers to the ‘spread of farming’ were natural ones, such as climate and topography.

The failure of farming to ‘reach’ California is not a particularly compelling way to frame the problem. This is just an updated version of the old diffusionist approach, which identifies culture traits (cat’s cradles, musical instruments, agriculture and so on) and maps out how they migrate across the globe, and why in some places they fail to do so. In reality, there’s every reason to believe that farming ‘reached’ California just as soon as it reached anywhere else in North America. It’s just that (despite a work ethic that valorized strenuous labor, and a regional exchange system that would have allowed information about innovations to spread rapidly) people there rejected the practice as definitively as they did slavery.

Even in the American Southwest, the overall trend for 500 years or so before Europeans arrived was the gradual abandonment of maize and beans, which people had been growing in some cases for thousands of years, and a return to a foraging way of life.

In more recent times, crops and livestock were able to ‘spread’ like wildfire, transforming existing habitats in ways that often rendered them unrecognizable within a few generations. But this has less to do with the nature of seed cultivation itself than with imperial and commercial expansion: seeds can spread very quickly if those carrying them have an army and are driven by the need endlessly to expand their enterprises to maintain profits.

Domestic plants and animals could not ‘spread’ beyond their original ecological limits without significant effort on the part of their human planters and keepers. Suitable environments not only had to be found but also modified by weeding, manuring, terracing, and so on. The landscape modifications involved may seem small-scale – little more than ecological tinkering – to our eyes, but they were onerous enough by local standards. Of course, there were always paths of least resistance, topographical features and climatic regimes conducive or less conducive to the Neolithic economy. The east–west axis of Eurasia discussed by Jared Diamond in his Guns, Germs and Steel (1997) or the ‘lucky latitudes’ of Ian Morris’s Why the West Rules – For Now (2010) are ecological corridors of this sort.

Back in the 1970s and 1980s, a geographer called Alfred W. Crosby came up with a number of important theories about how ecology shaped the course of history. Among other things, he was the first to draw attention to the ‘Columbian exchange’, the remarkable crossover of non-human species set in motion by Europeans’ arrival in the Americas after 1492, and its transformative effect on the global configuration of culture, economy and cuisine. Tobacco, peppers, potatoes and turkeys flowed into Eurasia; maize, rubber and chickens entered Africa; and citrus fruits, coffee, horses, donkeys and livestock travelled to the Americas. Crosby went on to argue that the global ascendance of European economies since the sixteenth century could be accounted for by a process he called ‘ecological imperialism’. The temperate zones of North America and Oceania, as Crosby pointed out, were ideally suited to Eurasian crops and livestock; not only because of their climate, but because they possessed few native competitors and no local parasites, such as the various funguses, insects or field mice that have developed to specialize in sharing human-grown wheat. Unleashed on such fresh environments, Old World domesticates went into reproductive overdrive, even going feral again in some cases. Outgrowing and out-grazing local flora and fauna, they began to turn native ecosystems on their heads, creating ‘Neo-Europes’ – carbon copies of European environments, of the sort one sees today when driving through the countryside of New Zealand’s North Island, for example; or much of New England. The ecological assault on native habitats also included infectious diseases, such as smallpox and measles, which originated in Old World environments where humans and cattle cohabited. While European plants thrived in the absence of pests, diseases brought with domestic animals (or by humans accustomed to living alongside them) wreaked havoc on indigenous populations, creating casualty rates as high as 95%, even where settlers were not enslaving or massacring the indigenous population – which, of course, they often were.

Regional collapse around 5000 BC in Austria/Northern Europe, cereal farming lost for 1,000 years

The arrival of farming in central Europe was associated with an initial and quite massive upsurge in population – which is of course exactly what one would expect. But what followed was not the anticipated ‘up and up’ pattern of demographic growth. Instead came a disastrous downturn, a boom and bust, between 5000 and 4500 BC, and something approaching a regional collapse. People enclosed their settlements within large ditches, which yield evidence of warfare in the forms of arrows, axe heads and human remains. In some cases, when the sites were overrun, these ditches were turned into mass graves for the residents they had failed to defend. These Early Neolithic groups arrived, they settled, and then in many (but, we should emphasize, not all) areas their numbers dwindled into obscurity, while in others they were bolstered through intermarriage with more established forager populations. Only after a hiatus of roughly 1,000 years did extensive cereal-farming take off again in central and northern Europe.