Footprints of children and adults from near White Sands National Monument in New Mexico, dated at more than 20,000 years old
The Food Web 3,000
Years Before Agriculture
In the sixth chapter of The
Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow, the question of when
agriculture began is addressed. This question is thought to be all-important
because of the assumption that settled cities, bureaucracy, politics, warfare,
and society in general all arose from the practice of agriculture. Indeed, in
an almost Biblical Garden-of-Eden way, agriculture has been called the source
of all ills and evils. ‘But how can we live without agriculture?’ we cry. This
dichotomy doesn’t need to exist because, as Graeber and Wengrow prove in their
692-page tome, this condemnation is a myth.
Neolithic peoples could have domesticated wild grains, clearing,
tilling and planting fields, protecting seedlings from animals and growing
crops as early as 10,000 years ago. But they didn’t. For 3,000 years, they
instead practiced pre-domestication cultivation, doing the minimal amount of
work “to improve the life chances of favored crops.” Often, this took the form
of “flood retreat” or décrue farming, where seeds were sown in the alluvial mud
left behind during seasonal floods of rivers or floodplains. There were no
enclosures, fixed plots, or measurements, because the areas to be planted
changed from season to season.
With the seasonal shifts, cultivation did not beget cities.
It was the other way around, with cities located where people wanted to hunt,
forage, trade and gather. Neolithic gardens were laboratories with scientists
(mostly women) as the first gardeners. And for thousands of years, these food
raising and gathering methods were successful. The authors describe a free
ecology, where peoples were able to “retain a food web sufficiently broad as to
prevent cultivation from becoming a matter of life and death.”
Off to a Rocky Start
So, after 3,000 years of a mixed bag of cultivating,
hunting, and foraging, early agriculture began with the domestication of cereal
grains such as wheat, barley, and millet, as well as domestication of sheep,
goats, pigs, and cattle. The crops were gathered by hand or sickle, and the
grains most suited for farming made it into the next year’s sowing. The grains
also had to be threshed (seeds beaten off) and winnowed (hulls removed). This had already been going on for a long
time, because people found the straw even more valuable than the seeds. Straw
was used for animal bedding and fodder, fuel, baskets, clothing, mats, and roof
thatch. It was also mixed with clay to build pottery, structures, and
furniture.
Agriculture was first practiced on plains and in marginal
areas where fisherfolk, hunters, and foragers didn’t live. There were setbacks
and crop failures; these settlements sometimes ended in violence, disease,
starvation, and mass graves. “…the grain-based kingdoms were fragile, always
prone to collapse under the weight of over-population, ecological devastation
and the kind of endemic diseases that always seemed to result when too many
humans, domesticated animals and parasites accumulated in one place.”
Parallels to Today
People, especially young women, left the failed agricultural
settlements and went to live with the hunters/foragers. Later examples of this
kind of migration were in the early 18th Century in North America.
Visiting Jesuits described daily life among the Iroquoi: “Each day the adult
men of a town would gather to spend much of the day arguing about politics, in
a spirit of rational debate, in conversations punctuated by the smoking of
tobacco and the drinking of caffeinated beverages.”
Centralized and hereditary power, personal freedoms and the
independence of women were much debated during these Native American councils.
The Osage nation of the Great Plains found it necessary to ‘move to a new
country’ several times to reform and restart their self-government,
reorganizing the placement of their physical structures as well as their
outlook and approach.
Ideas and cultural practices of Native Americans made their
way back to Europe and influenced the Enlightenment movement. Indigenous
philosophers who were invited to come to Europe and speak their mind created a
discourse described as the ‘Indigenous Critique’ that further influenced
Enlightenment thinkers, particularly in France. A passion for the Native
American values of liberty, equality, and fraternity began to grow and
culminated in the turbulence of the French Revolution. The resulting backlash
put reactionary thinkers at the forefront, and indigenous peoples were branded
as savages. Modern social theory stems from this backlash.
Earlier civilizations were more thoughtful, more creative,
and freer than we give them credit for. The authors ask who was the first woman
“to figure out that you could make bread rise by the addition of …yeasts?” The
zone of ritual play is also that of social experimentation. But at a point in
time not tied to agriculture, social reality froze into a pattern of violence
and domination, and has not really progressed beyond it. The authors cite the
anthropologist Franz Steiner’s work in pinpointing when and how this happened. Where
there were royal courts, disconnected people, widows, orphans, the disabled,
refugees, and people who had surrendered in war gathered for protection.
Welcomed and accorded special status at first, these people were gradually
downgraded to the positions of domestic workers and then enslaved. They were
deprived of the first and foremost freedom identified by the authors: the
freedom to move away or to escape from the domination of others. This also led
to the loss of the second freedom to disobey or ignore others. Then, finally
the last and greatest freedom was lost: that of envisioning new ways of relating
with others.
