The development of Agriculture and the Neolithic revolution 1

When did the world shift from hunter-gatherers to an agricultural way of life?

Around 15,000 ya, societies of modern humans in different areas of the world shifted from hunter-gatherers to an agricultural way of life—many areas of the world 

What are the 3 components for the origins of agriculture?

• Domestication

• Technology

• community/settlement 

What is domestication?

 new relationship between humans, and plants, and animals (humans play a role in protecting and reproducing plants and animals)

What is technology?

the tools and infrastructure used for daily tasks, including: farming, food processing, food storage

What is community?

the development of settled villages and a constructed landscape: the process of settling down–construct a specific way of inhabiting  

Changes in:

• Social organization

• Leadership

• Relationship between kin groups

• Property

• Cosmology

• Societies around the world took different pathways toward agriculture–doesn’t happen in one palace or one moment, took many years in many parts of the world 

• Advanced way of life? Progress?

What intellectual challenge did Europeans face since the 15th century?

• encountering “others: in the americas, australia, asia, and africa 

• Facing these people and they don't know how they live or why they live like that

  • Understand these people in a different stage of evolution 

• A consciousness of historical past, but little or no conception of the past as fundamentally different from the present 

• People in the past were considered to be “just like us”--not much different 

• Every vision of the past is a product of its time 

Solution to the intellectual conundrum:

• perhaps “we”, the civilized people of Europe, were like them in the past

  • We aren't different but they are on a lower stage of evolution–we went through those changes but now we are civilized 

  • Those savages represented an earlier or lower order of human existence 

  • (this was wrong idea)

What did people struggle to distinguish?

• objects of human manufacture from objects created by natural processes

  • Emergence of methods for recognizing objects of human manufacture 

What are ThunderStones?

• objects such as axes that people in Medieval Europe believed were formed in spots where lightning struck the earth 

Who was Antoine de Jussieu?

comparison of “thunderstones” with stone tools from the american islands and canada

What is cultural evolution?

•  cultural change is progressive from simple to complex, from “primitive to civilized”

Who was Lewis Henry Morgan?

• American anthropologist

• Traits of civilizations:

  • The invention of pottery

  • The construction of buildings out of mud brick 

  • The domestication of animals and plants 

  • The development of agriculture 

• In 1877, published Ancient society, or researches in the line if human progress from savagery through barbarism to civilization 

• Unilinear theory of cultural evolution

What is the unilinear theory of cultural evolution?

• idea that there is a set sequence of stages that all groups will pass through at some point, although the pace of progress through these stages will vary greatly

• Stages

  • Savagery

    • agriculture/domestication

  • barbarism

  • Civilization

Who was V. Gordon Childe?

• attempts to link Morgans scheme with technological changes 

  • civilization=Iron

  • barbarism=bronze

  • savagery=stone 

• Neolithic revolution

What is the Neolithic revolution?

• the critical transition that resulted in the birth of agriculture, taking Homo sapiens from scattered groups of hunter-gatherers to farming villages, to technologically sophisticated societies

• Revolution: an event that affected every aspect of human society 

• The ability to control food production and increase food supply

• Increase in population (consequences)

• Development of settled villages 

Who was Herbert Spencer?

• he attempts to link the evolutionary scheme with morality

  • Savagery

  • Barbarism 

  • Civilization 

  • Increase in morality and progress as you reach civilization 

Who was Lieutenant General Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt Rivers?

• applied cultural evolution to museum exhibitions

  • Rooted in our brain–cultural way of thinking 

  • Place objects in displays thinking of these stages 

What did Morgan and Childe both imply?

• Morgan: Human supremacy above nature

• Childe: active partners with nature

  • They both implied that humans removed themselves from nature 

What were the critiques of cultural evolution?

• Evolutionary thinking tends to apply criteria from “outside”

  • outside=thinking they are primitive 

• Past societies are “flattened out” against general models 

  • Apply general way of thinking that they have to go through these process to evolution 

• Evolutionary models tend to be teleological

  •  Some kind of goal we have to arrive to (society)

  • But there is no goal 

• No room for historical accidents: chance, ambiguities…Coincidences!

Who was David Rindos?

• American anthropologist

• The development of agriculture resulted from a coevolutionary process involving a symbiotic relationship between plant and animal species 

  • Work together 

  • Agriculture evolved in a symbiotic way 

Who was Tim Ingold?

• British anthropologist

• He rejects the distinction between the natural and the human world (they are the same)

• A hallmark characteristic of hunter-gatherer social relations is sharing based on trust

• He views the shift from hunting to agriculture as a shift from trust to domination and dependence 

Who was Marshall Sahlins?

•  the “original; affluent society” (with development of agriculture)

• argued that hunter-gatherers enjoyed abundant leisure because they were unburdened by the presence of commercial markets, which induce people to spend more time working in the pursuit of material goods

• Hunter-gatherers:

  • Less time working for their food

  • More leisure time

  • Because of the increased crowding of villages, agricultural societies were vulnerable to disease outbreaks 

What are the new perspectives?

1. to recognize that plants and animals have been domesticated independently in numerous locations 

2. To approach the origins of agriculture as a process, distinguishing origin and spread–nit just an event, took many years and generations  

What do archaeologists question?

• whether the development of agriculture resulted from people choosing or inventing a “better” way of life 

• why did it develop?

Who was Ester Boserup?

• Danish archaeologists

• Discussed what triggered changes:

  • Climate conditions

  • Increase in population: a cause rather than an effect

• Criticized models that tended to emphasize single explanations 

What are the multifactorial approaches?

• Binford: climatic conditions and population size

• Brian hayden: surplus food and social organization 

What was Brian Haydens Model?

• Generalized hunter-gatherers:

  • Rely on scarce resources

  • Low pops

  • Competition is detrimental to the group

• Complex

  • Rely on abundant resources

  • Larger pops

  • Competition can develop…and it is expressed in feasts 

    • Can be from overexploitation of resources