Preface. There’s a great deal of evidence that past tribes did grow food but deliberately chose not to make that the entirety of the way they lived, preferring a more seasonal styles of life with hunting and gathering, and governance that gave everyone more freedom, and different freedoms depending on their habitat. It is yet more evidence that we can choose how to live and govern ourselves far differently than the industrial capitalism “rape and pillage” of resources.
Alice Friedemann www.energyskeptic.com Author of Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy; When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, & “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”. Women in ecology Podcasts: WGBH, Planet: Critical, Crazy Town, Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, Kunstler 253 &278, Peak Prosperity, Index of best energyskeptic posts
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Graeber D, Wengrow D (2021) The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity.
Seasonally different societies
Although many animals and non-human primates like chimpanzees and bonobos vary the size and structure of their groups seasonally, depending on edible resources, humans are categorically different. Seasonal societies altered their moral, legal, and ritual organization. Entire systems of roles and institutions were periodically disassembled and reconstructed to allow for seasonal differences in living.
The Nambikwara
For Lévi-Strauss, what was especially instructive about the Nambikwara was that, for all that they were averse to competition (with little wealth to compete over), they did appoint chiefs to lead them. The very simplicity of the resulting arrangement, he felt, might expose ‘some basic functions’ of political life that ‘remain hidden in more complex and elaborate systems of government’. Not only was the role of the chief socially and psychologically quite similar to that of a national politician or statesman in European society, he noted, it also attracted similar personality types: people who ‘unlike most of their companions, enjoy prestige for its own sake, feel a strong appeal to responsibility, and to whom the burden of public affairs brings its own reward’. Modern politicians play the role of wheelers and dealers, brokering alliances or negotiating compromises between different constituencies or interest groups.
The Nambikwara lived in what were effectively two very different societies. During the rainy season, they occupied hilltop villages of several hundred people and practiced horticulture; during the rest of the year they dispersed into small foraging bands. Chiefs made or lost their reputations by acting as heroic leaders during the ‘nomadic adventures’ of the dry season, during which times they typically gave orders, resolved crises and behaved in what would at any other time be considered an unacceptably authoritarian manner; in the wet season, a time of much greater ease and abundance, they relied on those reputations to attract followers to settle around them in villages, where they employed only gentle persuasion and led by example to guide their followers in the construction of houses and tending of gardens. In doing so they cared for the sick and needy, mediated disputes and never imposed anything on anyone.
More than anything, they resembled modern politicians operating tiny embryonic welfare states, pooling resources and doling them out to those in need. What impressed Lévi-Strauss above all was their political maturity. It was the chiefs’ skill in directing small bands of dry-season foragers, of making snap decisions in crises (crossing a river, directing a hunt) that later qualified them to play the role of mediators and diplomats in the village plaza. But in doing so they were effectively moving back and forth, each year, between what evolutionary anthropologists insist on thinking of as totally different stages of social development: from hunters and foragers to farmers and back again.
Upper Palaeolithic sites
Almost all the Ice Age sites with extraordinary burials and monumental architecture were created by societies that lived a little like Lévi-Strauss’s Nambikwara, dispersing into foraging bands at one time of year, gathering together in concentrated settlements at another. True, they didn’t gather to plant crops. Rather, the large Upper Palaeolithic sites are linked to migrations and seasonal hunting of game herds – woolly mammoth, steppe bison or reindeer – as well as cyclical fish-runs and nut harvests.
In western Europe, equivalents would be the great rock shelters of the French Périgord and the Cantabrian coast, with their deep records of human activity, which similarly formed part of an annual round of seasonal congregation and dispersal.
The overall pattern of seasonal congregation for festive labor seems well established. Such oscillating patterns of life endured long after the invention of agriculture.
Stonehenge, framing the midsummer sunrise and the midwinter sunset, is the most famous of these. It turns out to have been the last in a long sequence of ceremonial structures, erected over the course of centuries in timber as well as stone, as people converged on the plain from remote corners of the British Isles at significant times of year.
Still more striking, the people who built Stonehenge were not farmers, or not in the usual sense. They had once been; but the practice of erecting and dismantling grand monuments coincides with a period when the peoples of Britain, having adopted the Neolithic farming economy from continental Europe, appear to have turned their backs on at least one crucial aspect of it: abandoning the cultivation of cereals and returning, from around 3300 BC, to the collection of hazelnuts as their staple source of plant food. On the other hand, they kept hold of their domestic pigs and herds of cattle, feasting on them seasonally at nearby Durrington Walls, a prosperous town of some thousands of people – with its own Woodhenge – in winter, but largely empty and abandoned in summer. The builders of Stonehenge seem to have been neither foragers nor herders, but something in between.
All this is crucial because it’s hard to imagine how giving up agriculture could have been anything but a self-conscious decision. There is no evidence that one population displaced another, or that farmers were somehow overwhelmed by powerful foragers who forced them to abandon their crops. The Neolithic inhabitants of England appear to have taken the measure of cereal-farming and collectively decided that they preferred to live another way.
If there were kings and queens at Stonehenge, exactly what sort could they have been? After all, these would have been kings whose courts and kingdoms existed for only a few months of the year, and otherwise dispersed into small communities of nut gatherers and stock herders.
The Innuit
In the summer, Inuit dispersed into bands of roughly 20-30 people to pursue freshwater fish, caribou and reindeer, all under the authority of a single male elder. During this period, property was possessively marked and patriarchs exercised coercive, sometimes even tyrannical power over their kin – much more so than the Nambikwara chiefs in the dry season. But in the long winter months, when seals and walrus flocked to the Arctic shore, there was a dramatic reversal. Then, Inuit gathered together to build great meeting houses of wood, whale rib and stone; within these houses, virtues of equality, altruism and collective life prevailed. Wealth was shared,
(Other circumpolar peoples, he noted, including close neighbors of the Inuit facing near-identical physical conditions, organized themselves quite differently.) To a large extent, he concluded, Inuit lived the way they did because they felt that’s how humans ought to live.
Kwakiutl, indigenous hunter-gatherers of Canada’s Northwest Coast
Here it was winter – not summer – that was the time when society crystallized into its most hierarchical forms, and spectacularly so. Plank-built palaces sprang to life along the coastline of British Columbia, with hereditary nobles holding court over compatriots classified as commoners and slaves, and hosting the great banquets known as potlatch. Yet these aristocratic courts broke apart for the summer work of the fishing season, reverting to smaller clan formations – still ranked, but with entirely different and much less formal structures. In this case, people actually adopted different names in summer and winter – literally becoming someone else, depending on the time of year.
Plains nations
Plains nations were one-time farmers who had largely abandoned cereal agriculture, after re-domesticating escaped Spanish horses and adopting a largely nomadic mode of life. In late summer and early autumn, small and highly mobile bands of Cheyenne and Lakota would congregate in large settlements to make logistical preparations for the buffalo hunt. At this most sensitive time of year they appointed a police force that exercised full coercive powers, including the right to imprison, whip or fine any offender who endangered the proceedings. Yet, as Lowie observed, this ‘unequivocal authoritarianism’ operated on a strictly seasonal and temporary basis. Once the hunting season – and the collective Sun Dance rituals that followed – were complete, such authoritarianism gave way to what he called ‘anarchic’ forms of organization, society splitting once again into small, mobile bands.
The Plains Indians were conscious political actors, keenly aware of the possibilities and dangers of authoritarian power. Not only did they dismantle all means of exercising coercive authority the moment the ritual season was over, they were also careful to rotate which clan or warrior clubs got to wield it: anyone holding sovereignty one year would be subject to the authority of others in the next.
Recently we discovered that Amazonia was covered with towns, monuments and roadways
Until quite recently, Amazonia was regarded as a timeless refuge of solitary tribes, about as close to Rousseau or Hobbes’s State of Nature as one could possibly get. As we’ve seen, such romantic notions persisted in anthropology well into the 1980s, through studies that cast groups like the Yanomami in the role of ‘contemporary ancestors’, windows on to our evolutionary past. We now know that, by the beginning of the Christian era, the Amazonian landscape was already studded with towns, terraces, monuments and roadways, reaching all the way from the highland kingdoms of Peru to the Caribbean.
Up until a few decades ago, all these developments were explained as the result of yet another ‘Agricultural Revolution’. It was supposed that, in the first millennium BC, intensified manioc-farming raised Amazonian population levels, generating a wave of human expansion throughout the lowland tropics. More recently, in southern Amazonia, the cultivation of maize and squash has been traced back to similarly early periods.
Yet there is little evidence for widespread farming of these crops in the key period of cultural convergence, beginning around 500 BC. In fact, manioc only seems to have become a staple crop after European contact. All this implies that at least some early inhabitants of Amazonia were well aware of plant domestication but did not select it as the basis of their economy, opting instead for a more flexible kind of agroforestry.
The more ancient mode allowed for a much wider range of cultivars, grown in doorstep gardens or small forest clearings close to settlements. Soil enrichment in ancient Amazonia was a slow and ongoing process, not an annual task.
‘Play farming’ of this sort, in the Amazon as elsewhere, has had advantages for indigenous peoples. Elaborate and unpredictable subsistence routines are an excellent deterrent against the colonial State: an ecology of freedom in the literal sense. It is difficult to tax and monitor a group that refuses to stay in one location, obtaining its livelihood without making long-term commitments to fixed resources, or growing much of its food invisibly underground (as with tubers and other root vegetables).
The “did we tame grains or they tame us” argument
Think about the Agricultural Revolution from the viewpoint of wheat Harari suggests. Ten thousand years ago it was just another form of wild grass, of no special significance; but within the space of a few millennia it was growing over large parts of the planet. How did it happen? The answer, according to Harari, is that wheat did it by manipulating Homo sapiens to its advantage. There’s something ineluctable about all this. But only if we accept the premise that it does in fact make sense to look at the whole process ‘from the viewpoint of wheat’. On reflection, why should we? Humans are very large-brained and intelligent primates and wheat is, well … a sort of grass. It’s also undoubtedly true that, over the long term, ours is a species that has become enslaved to its crops: wheat, rice, millet and corn feed the world, and it’s hard to envisage modern life without them. [Michael Pollan makes the same point about maize in “Botany of Desire”.]
Harari’s retelling is appealing, we suggest, not because it’s based on any evidence, but because we’ve heard it a thousand times before, just with a different cast of characters. In fact, many of us have been hearing it from infancy. Once again, we’re back in the Garden of Eden.
Let’s focus on wheat and barley. After the last Ice Age, these particular crops were among the first to be domesticated, along with lentils, flax, peas, chickpeas and bitter vetch. As we’ve noted, this process occurred in various different parts of the Fertile Crescent, rather than a single center. The key genetic mutation leading to crop domestication could be achieved in as little as 20-30 years, or at most 200 years, using simple harvesting techniques like reaping with flint sickles or uprooting by hand. All it would have taken, then, is for humans to follow the cues provided by the crops themselves. Harvesting by sickle yields straw as well as grain.
Today we consider straw a by-product of cereal-farming, the primary purpose being to produce food. But archaeological evidence suggests things started the other way round. Human populations in the Middle East began settling in permanent villages long before cereals became a major component of their diets. In doing so, they found new uses for the stalks of wild grasses; these included fuel for lighting fires, and transformed mud and clay to build houses, ovens, storage bins and other fixed structures. Straw could also be used to make baskets, clothing, matting and thatch. As people intensified the harvesting of wild grasses for straw (either by sickle or simply uprooting), they also produced one of the key conditions for some of these grasses to lose their natural mechanisms of seed dispersal.
Now here’s the key point: if crops, rather than humans, had been setting the pace, these two processes would have gone hand in hand, leading to the domestication of large-seeded grasses within a few decades. Within a few human generations, the Faustian pact between people and crops would have been sealed. But here again, the evidence flatly contradicts these expectations. In fact, the latest research shows that the process of plant domestication in the Fertile Crescent was not fully completed until much later: as much as 3,000 years after the cultivation of wild cereals first began.
The cultivation of wild cereals dates back at least to 10,000 BC. Yet in these same regions, the biological process of crop domestication (including the crucial switch-over from brittle rachis to tough) was not completed until closer to 7000 BC.
We need to understand this 3,000-year period as an important phase of human history in its own right. It’s a phase marked by foragers moving in and out of cultivation – and as we’ve seen, there’s nothing unusual or anomalous about this flirting and tinkering with the possibilities of farming, but in no way enslaving themselves to the needs of their crops or herds. So long as it didn’t become too onerous, cultivation was just one of many ways in which early settled communities managed their environments.
This approach makes perfectly good sense.
Cultivating domestic cereals, as the ‘affluent’ foragers of the Pacific Coast knew well, is enormously hard work. Serious farming meant serious soil maintenance and weed clearance. It meant threshing and winnowing after harvest. All these activities would have got in the way of hunting, wild food collection, craft production, marriages and any number of other things, not to mention storytelling, gambling, travelling and organizing masquerades.
This balancing act involved a special kind of cultivation, which brings us back full circle to Çatalhöyük and its wetland location. Called ‘flood retreat’ or ‘flood recession’ farming, it takes place on the margins of seasonally flooding lakes or rivers. Flood-retreat farming is a distinctly lackadaisical way to raise crops. The work of soil preparation is given over mostly to nature. Seasonal flooding does the work of tillage, annually sifting and refreshing the soil. As the waters recede they leave behind a fertile bed of alluvial earth, where seed can be broadcast. This was garden cultivation on a small scale with no need for deforestation, weeding or irrigation. In terms of labor, flood-retreat farming is not only pretty light, it also requires little central management. It was practiced until recent times in India, Pakistan, and the American Southwest.
Any given parcel of territory might be fertile one year, and then either flooded or dried out the next, so there is little incentive for long-term ownership or enclosure of fixed plots. It makes little sense to set up boundary stones when the ground itself is shifting underneath you. No form of human ecology is ‘innately’ egalitarian, but much as Rousseau and his epigones would have been surprised to hear it, these early cultivation systems did not lend themselves to the development of private property.
Women and Agriculture
Rejecting a Garden of Eden-type narrative for the origins of farming also means rejecting, or at least questioning, the gendered assumptions lurking behind that narrative. Apart from being a story about the loss of primordial innocence, the Book of Genesis is also one of history’s most enduring charters for the hatred of women. It is Eve, after all, who proves too weak to resist the exhortations of the crafty serpent and is first to bite the forbidden fruit, because she is the one who desires knowledge and wisdom. Her punishment (and that of all women following her) is to bear children in severe pain and live under the rule of her husband, whose own destiny is to subsist by the sweat of his brow.
When today’s writers speculate about ‘wheat domesticating humans’ (as opposed to ‘humans domesticating wheat’), what they are really doing is replacing a question about concrete scientific (human) achievements with something rather more mystical. Rather than ask who was doing all the intellectual and practical work of manipulating wild plants: exploring their properties in different soils and water regimes; experimenting with harvesting techniques, accumulating observations about the effects these all have on growth, reproduction and nutrition; debating the social implications, this idea waxes lyrical about the temptations of forbidden fruits and musing on the unforeseen consequences of adopting a technology (agriculture) that Jared Diamond has characterized – again, with biblical overtones – as ‘the worst mistake in the history of the human race’.
Consciously or not, it is the contributions of women that get written out of such accounts. Harvesting wild plants and turning them into food, medicine and complex structures like baskets or clothing is almost everywhere a female activity, and may be gendered female even when practiced by men. This is not quite an anthropological universal, but it’s about as close to one as you are ever likely to get.
There is a peculiar tendency among (male) scholars to skip over the gendered aspects of this kind of knowledge or veil it in abstractions.
Nowhere in The Savage Mind – a book ostensibly dedicated to understanding that other sort of knowledge, the Neolithic ‘science of the concrete’ – does Lévi-Strauss even mention the possibility that those responsible for its ‘flowering’ might, very often, have been women.
What if we shifted the emphasis away from agriculture and domestication to, say, botany or even gardening? At once we find ourselves closer to the realities of Neolithic ecology, which seem little concerned with taming wild nature or squeezing as many calories as possible from a handful of seed grasses. What it really seems to have been about is creating garden plots – artificial, often temporary habitats – in which the ecological scales were tipped in favor of preferred species. Those species included plants that modern botanists separate out into competing classes of ‘weeds’, ‘drugs’, ‘herbs’ and ‘food crops’, but which Neolithic botanists (schooled by hands-on experience, not textbooks) preferred to grow side by side.
Instead of fixed fields, they exploited alluvial soils on the margins of lakes and springs, which shifted location from year to year. Instead of hewing wood, tilling fields and carrying water, they found ways of ‘persuading’ nature to do much of this labor for them. Theirs was not a science of domination and classification, but one of bending and coaxing, nurturing and cajoling, or even tricking the forces of nature, to increase the likelihood of securing a favorable outcome. Their ‘laboratory’ was the real world of plants and animals, whose innate tendencies they exploited through close observation and experimentation. This Neolithic mode of cultivation was, moreover, highly successful.
In lowland regions of the Fertile Crescent, such as the Jordan and Euphrates valleys, ecological systems of this kind fostered the incremental growth of settlements and populations for three millennia. Pretending it was all just some kind of very extended transition or rehearsal for the advent of ‘serious’ agriculture is to miss the real point. It’s also to ignore what to many has long seemed an obvious connection between Neolithic ecology and the visibility of women in contemporary art and ritual. Whether one calls these figures ‘goddesses’ or ‘scientists’ is perhaps less important than recognizing how their very appearance signals a new awareness of women’s status, which was surely based on their concrete achievements in binding together these new forms of society.
We can see this clearly in Early Neolithic cereal cultivation. Recall that flood-retreat farming required people to establish durable settlements in mud-based environments, like swamps and lake margins. Doing so meant becoming intimate with the properties of soils and clays, carefully observing their fertility under different conditions, but also experimenting with them as tectonic materials, or even as vehicles of abstract thought. As well as supporting new forms of cultivation, soil and clay – mixed with wheat and chaff – became basic materials of construction: essential in building the first permanent houses; used to make ovens, furniture and insulation – almost everything, in fact, except pottery, a later invention in this part of the world.
Seen this way, the ‘origins of farming’ start to look less like an economic transition and more like a media revolution, which was also a social revolution, encompassing everything from horticulture to architecture, mathematics to thermodynamics, and from religion to the remodeling of gender roles. And while we can’t know exactly who was doing what in this brave new world, it’s abundantly clear that women’s work and knowledge were central to its creation; that the whole process was a fairly leisurely, even playful one, not forced by any environmental catastrophe or demographic tipping point and unmarked by major violent conflict. What’s more, it was all carried out in ways that made radical inequality an extremely unlikely outcome.
In earlier chapters, we’ve explored why farming was much less of a rupture in human affairs than we tend to assume. Now we’re finally in a position to bring the various strands of this chapter together and say something about why this matters. Let’s recap.
From its earliest beginnings, farming was much more than a new economy. It also saw the creation of patterns of life and ritual that remain doggedly with us millennia later, and have since become fixtures of social existence among a broad sector of humanity: everything from harvest festivals to habits of sitting on benches, putting cheese on bread, entering and exiting via doorways, or looking at the world through windows.
The job of foragers in this conventional narrative is to be all that farming is not (and thus also to explain, by implication, what farming is). If farmers are sedentary, foragers must be mobile; if farmers actively produce food, foragers must merely collect it; if farmers have private property, foragers must renounce it; and if farming societies are unequal, this is by contrast with the ‘innate’ egalitarianism of foragers. Finally, if a particular group of foragers should happen to possess any such features in common with farmers, the dominant narrative demands that these can only be ‘incipient’, ‘emergent’ or ‘deviant’ in nature, so that the destiny of foragers is either to ‘evolve’ into farmers, or eventually to wither and die.
It will by now be increasingly obvious to any reader that almost nothing about this established narrative matches the available evidence. In the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East, long regarded as the cradle of the ‘Agricultural Revolution’, there was in fact no ‘switch’ from Paleolithic forager to Neolithic farmer. The transition from living mainly on wild resources to a life based on food production took something in the order of 3,000 years. Since there was no Eden-like state from which the first farmers could take their first steps on the road to inequality, it makes even less sense to talk about agriculture as marking the origins of social rank, inequality or private property.
In the Fertile Crescent, it is – if anything – among upland groups, furthest removed from a dependence on agriculture, that we find stratification and violence becoming entrenched; while their lowland counterparts, who linked the production of crops to important social rituals, come out looking decidedly more egalitarian; and much of this egalitarianism relates to an increase in the economic and social visibility of women, reflected in their art and ritual.
It is difficult to make any sort of convincing argument that warfare was a significant feature of early farming societies in the Middle East, as by now one would expect some evidence for it to have shown up in the record. On the other hand, there is abundant evidence for the proliferation of trade and specialized crafts, and for the importance of female figures in art and ritual.
Since our species came into existence, there have been only two sustained periods of warm climate of the kind that might support an agricultural economy for long enough to leave some trace in the archaeological record. The first was the Eemian interglacial, which took place around 130,000 years ago. Global temperatures stabilized at slightly above their present-day levels, sustaining the spread of boreal forests as far north as Alaska and Finland. Hippos basked on the banks of the Thames and the Rhine. But the impact on human populations was limited by our then restricted geographical range. The second is the one we are living in now. When it began, around 12,000 years ago, people were already present on all the world’s continents, and in many different kinds of environment.
The most vigorous expansion of foraging populations was in coastal environments, freshly exposed by glacial retreat. Such locations offered a bonanza of wild resources. Saltwater fish and sea birds, whales and dolphins, seals and otters, crabs, shrimps, oysters, periwinkles and more besides. Freshwater rivers and lagoons, fed by mountain glaciers, now teemed with pike and bream, attracting migratory waterfowl. Around estuaries, deltas and lake margins, annual rounds of fishing and foraging took place at increasingly close range, leading to sustained patterns of human aggregation quite unlike those of the glacial period, when long seasonal migrations of mammoth and other large game structured much of social life.
Expanding woodlands offered a superabundance of nutritious and storable foods: wild nuts, berries, fruits, leaves and fungi, processed with a new suite of composite (‘micro-lithic’) tools. Where forest took over from steppe, human hunting techniques shifted from the seasonal co-ordination of mass kills to more opportunistic and versatile strategies, focused on smaller mammals with more limited home ranges, among them elk, deer, boar and wild cattle.
Farmers entered into this whole new world very much as the cultural underdogs. Their earliest expansions were about as far removed as one could imagine from the missions of modern agrarian empires. Mostly, as we’ll see, they filled in the territorial gaps left behind by foragers: geographical spaces either too remote, inaccessible or simply undesirable to attract the sustained attention of hunters, fishers and gatherers. Even in such locations, these outlier economies of the Holocene would have decidedly mixed fortunes.
The ecology of freedom describes the proclivity of human societies to move (freely) in and out of farming; to farm without fully becoming farmers; raise crops and animals without surrendering too much of one’s existence to the logistical rigors of agriculture; and retain a food web sufficiently broad as to prevent cultivation from becoming a matter of life and death. It is just this sort of ecological flexibility that tends to be excluded from conventional narratives of world history, which present the planting of a single seed as a point of no return. Moving freely in and out of farming in this way, or hovering on its threshold, turns out to be something our species has done successfully for a large part of its past.
Combining garden cultivation, flood-retreat farming on the margins of lakes or springs, small-scale landscape management (e.g. by burning, pruning and terracing) and the corralling or keeping of animals in semi-wild states, combined with a spectrum of hunting, fishing and collecting activities – were once typical of human societies in many parts of the world.
Why do we assume that people who have figured out a way for a large population to govern and support itself without temples, palaces and military fortifications – that is, without overt displays of arrogance, self-abasement and cruelty – are somehow less complex than those who have not? Or that they depended completely on agriculture?
The mega-sites of Ukraine and adjoining regions were inhabited from roughly 4100 to 3300 BC
Further research showed that these settlements in Ukraine, often referred to as ‘mega-sites’ – with their modern names of Taljanky, Maidenetske, Nebelivka and so on – dated to the early and middle centuries of the fourth millennium BC, which meant that some existed even before the earliest known cities in Mesopotamia. They were also larger in area. Yet, even now, in scholarly discussions about the origins of urbanism, these Ukrainian sites almost never come up. Indeed, the very use of the term ‘mega-site’ is a kind of euphemism, signaling to a wider audience that these should not be thought of as proper cities but as something more like villages that for some reason had expanded inordinately in size.
No evidence was unearthed of centralized government or administration – or indeed, any form of ruling class. In other words, these enormous settlements had all the hallmarks of what evolutionists would call a ‘simple’, not a ‘complex’ society.
The mega-sites of Ukraine and adjoining regions were inhabited from roughly 4100 to 3300 BC, that is, for something in the order of eight centuries, which is considerably longer than most subsequent urban traditions. Why were they there at all? Like the cities of Mesopotamia and the Indus valley, they appear to have been born of ecological opportunism in the middle phase of the Holocene. Not floodplain dynamics, in this case, but processes of soil formation on the flatlands north of the Black Sea. These black earths (Russian: chernozem) are legendary for their fertility; for the empires of later antiquity, they made the lands between the Southern Bug and Dniepr Rivers a breadbasket
Ukrainian and Moldovan mega-sites did not come out of thin air. They were the physical realization of an extended community that already existed long before its constituent units coalesced into large settlements. Some tens of these settlements have now been documented. The biggest currently known – Taljanky – extends over an area of 300 hectares, outspanning the earliest phases of the city of Uruk in southern Mesopotamia. It presents no evidence of central administration or communal storage facilities. Nor have any government buildings, fortifications or monumental architecture been found. There is no acropolis or civic center.
What we do find are houses; well over 1,000 in the case of Taljanky. Rectangular houses, sixteen or so feet wide and twice as long, built of wattle and daub on timber frames, with stone foundations. With their attached gardens, these houses form such neat circular patterns that from a bird’s-eye view, any mega-site resembles the inside of a tree trunk: great rings, with concentric spaces between.
Just as surprising as their scale is the distribution of these massive settlements, which are all quite close to each other, at most six to nine miles apart. Their total population – estimated in the many thousands per mega-site, and probably well over 10,000 in some cases – would therefore have had to draw resources from a common hinterland. Yet their ecological footprint appears to have been surprisingly light. There are a number of possible explanations. Some have suggested the mega-sites were only occupied part of the year, even for just a season, making them urban-scale versions of the kind of temporary aggregation sites we discussed in Chapter Three. This is difficult to reconcile with the substantial nature of their houses (consider the effort expended in felling trees, laying foundations, making good walls etc.). More probably, the mega-sites were much like most other cities, neither permanently inhabited nor strictly seasonal, but somewhere in between.
We should also consider if the inhabitants of the mega-sites consciously managed their ecosystem to avoid large-scale deforestation. This is consistent with archaeological studies of their economy, which suggest a pattern of small-scale gardening, often taking place within the bounds of the settlement, combined with the keeping of livestock, cultivation of orchards, and a wide spectrum of hunting and foraging activities. The diversity is actually remarkable, as is its sustainability. As well as wheat, barley and pulses, the citizens’ plant diet included apples, pears, cherries, sloes, acorns, hazelnuts and apricots. Mega-site dwellers were hunters of red deer, roe deer and wild boar as well as farmers and foresters. It was ‘play farming’ on a grand scale: an urban populus supporting itself through small-scale cultivation and herding, combined with an extraordinary array of wild foods.
This way of life was by no means ‘simple’. As well as managing orchards, gardens, livestock and woodlands, the inhabitants of these cities imported salt in bulk from springs in the eastern Carpathians and the Black Sea littoral. Flint extraction by the ton took place in the Dniestr valley, furnishing material for tools. A household potting industry flourished, its products considered among the finest ceramics of the prehistoric world; and regular supplies of copper flowed in from the Balkans. A surplus was definitely produced, and with it ample potential for some to seize control of the stocks and supplies, to lord it over others or battle for the spoils; but over eight centuries we find little evidence for warfare or the rise of social elites.
How did it all work? In the absence of written records (or a time machine), there are serious limits to what we can say about kinship and inheritance, or how people in these cities went about making collective decisions. Still, some clues exist, beginning at the level of individual households. Each of these had a roughly common plan, but each was also, in its own way, unique. From one dwelling to the next there is constant innovation, even playfulness, in the rules of commensality. Each family unit invented its own slight variations on domestic rituals, reflected in its unique assemblage of serving and eating vessels, painted with polychrome designs.
Closer study reveals constant deviation from the norm. Individual households would sometimes opt to cluster together in groups of between three and ten families. Ditches or pits marked their boundaries. At some sites these groups coalesce into neighborhoods, radiating out from the center to the perimeter of the city, and even forming larger residential districts or quarters. Each had access to at least one assembly house, a structure larger than an ordinary dwelling where a wider sector of the population might gather periodically for activities we can only guess at.
Careful analysis by archaeologists shows how the apparent uniformity of the Ukrainian mega-sites arose from the bottom up, through processes of local decision-making. This would have to mean that members of individual households – or at least, their neighborhood representatives – shared a conceptual framework for the settlement as a whole.
Hopewellian society and their avoidance of agriculture
We’ve already mentioned how researchers calculating the maths were startled to discover that, from the Archaic phase onwards, geometric earthworks across large parts of the Americas appear to have been using the same system of measurement: one apparently based on the arrangement of cords into equilateral triangles. So the fact that people and materials were converging from far and wide upon the Hopewell mound complexes is not in itself extraordinary. Yet as archaeologists have also observed, the geometric systems characteristic of the ‘Woodland peoples’ who created Hopewell also mark something of a break with past custom: The introduction of a different metrical system, and a new geometry of forms.
Central Ohio was just the epicenter. Sites with earthworks based on this new, Hopewellian geometrical system can be found dotted along the upper and lower reaches of the Mississippi valley. Some are the size of small towns. They might, and often did, contain meeting houses, craft workshops and charnel houses for the processing of human remains, along with crypts for the dead. A few might have had resident caretakers, though this isn’t entirely clear. What is clear is that for most of the year these sites remained largely or completely empty. Only on specific ritual occasions did they come to life as theatres for elaborate ceremonies, densely populated for a week or two at a time, with people drawn from across the region and occasional visitors from far away.
This is another of the puzzles of Hopewell. It had all the elements required to create a classic ‘grain state’ (as Scott would define it). The Scioto-Paint Creek bottomlands, where the largest centers were built, are so fertile they later came to be nicknamed ‘Egypt’ by European settlers; and at least some of the inhabitants will have been familiar with maize cultivation. But in the same way that they appear to have largely avoided this crop – except perhaps for limited, ritual purposes – they also largely avoided the valley bottoms, preferring to live in isolated homesteads scattered across the landscape and mostly on higher ground. Such homesteads often consisted of a single family; or, at most, three or four. Sometimes these tiny groups moved back and forth between summer and winter houses, pursuing a combination of hunting, fishing, foraging and cultivating local weedy crops in small garden plots; sunflowers, sumpweed, goosefoot, knotweed and maygrass, along with a smattering of vegetables. Presumably people were in regular contact with their neighbors. They seem to have got on with them well enough, since there is little evidence for warfare or organized violence of any sort. But they never came together to create any sort of ongoing village life.
So what kind of societies were these? One thing we can definitely say is that they were artistically brilliant. For all their modest living arrangements, Hopewellians produced one of the most sophisticated repertories of imagery in the pre-Columbian Americas: everything from effigy pipes topped by exquisite animal carvings (used to smoke a variety of tobacco strong enough to induce trance-like states, along with other herbal concoctions); to fired earthen jars covered in elaborate designs; and small copper sheets, worn as breastplates, cut into intricate geometrical designs. Much of the imagery is evocative of shamanic ritual, vision quests and soul journeys (as we noted, there is a particular emphasis on mirrors), but also periodic festivals of the dead.
Like Chavín de Huántar in the Andes, or indeed Poverty Point, social influence derived from control over esoteric forms of knowledge. The main difference is that the Hopewell Interaction Sphere has no discernible center, no single capital, and unlike Chavín it offers little evidence for the existence of permanent elites, priestly or otherwise.
Analysis of burials reveals at least a dozen different sets of insignia, ranging perhaps from funerary priests to clan chief or diviner. Remarkably, it also appears to reveal the existence of a developed clan system, since the ancient inhabitants of central Ohio developed the historically unusual – but from an archaeologist’s point of view extraordinarily convenient – habit of including bits of their totem animal – jaws, teeth, claws or talons, often fashioned into pendants or jewelry – in their tombs. All the clans most familiar from later North America – Deer, Wolf, Elk, Hawk, Snake and so on – were already represented. The really striking thing is that, despite the existence of a system of offices and clans, there appears to be virtually no relation between the two. It is possible that clans sometimes ‘owned’ certain offices, but there is little evidence for the existence of a hereditary, ranked elite.
In the northernmost, centered on Hopewell itself, funerary assemblages focus on shamanic ritual, heroic male figures traveling between cosmic domains. In the southern, best exemplified by the Turner Site in southwest Ohio, the emphasis is on an imagery of impersonal masked figures, hilltop earth shrines and chthonic monsters. Still more remarkably, in the northern cluster all those buried with badges of office are men; in the southern, those buried with the same badges of office are just as exclusively women. (The central cluster of sites is mixed, in both respects.) What’s more, there was clearly some kind of systemic co-ordination between the clusters, with causeways joining them.
Everybody appears to have been free to make a spectacle of themselves, or to obtain some dramatic role in the theater of society, and this individual expressiveness was reflected in miniature depictions of people sporting what seem to be an endless variety of playful, idiosyncratic styles of haircut, clothing and ornamentation.
Yet all this was intricately coordinated over large areas. Even locally, each earthwork was one element in a continuous ritual landscape. The earthworks’ alignments often reference particular segments of the Hopewell calendar (such as the solstices, phases of the moon and so on), with people presumably having to move back and forth regularly between the monuments to complete a full ceremonial cycle. This is complex: one can only imagine the kind of detailed knowledge of stars, rivers and seasons that would have been required to co-ordinate people from hundreds of miles away, such that they might congregate on time for rituals in centers that lasted only for periods of five or six days at a time, over the course of a year. Let alone what it would take to actually transform such a system across the length and breadth of a continent.
In later times, Feasts of the Dead were also occasions for the ‘resurrection’ of names, as the titles of those who were now gone passed to the living. It may have been through some such mechanisms that Hopewell disseminated the basic structure of its clan system across North America. It’s even possible that when the spectacular burials in Hopewell came to an end around AD 400, it was largely because Hopewell’s work was done. The idiosyncratic nature of its ritual art, for instance, gave way to standardized versions disseminated across the continent; while great treks to fantastic, temporary capitals that rose miraculously from the mud were no longer required to establish ties between groups, who now had a shared idiom for personal diplomacy, a common set of rules for interacting with strangers.
One of the many puzzles of Hopewell is how its social arrangements seem to anticipate much later institutions. There was a division between ‘white’ and ‘red’ clans: the first identified with summer, circular houses and peacemaking; the second with winter, square houses and warfare. Most later indigenous societies had a separation between peace chiefs and war chiefs: an entirely different administration came into force in times of military conflict, then melted away as soon as matters were resolved. Some of this symbolism appears to originate in Hopewell. Archaeologists even identify certain figures as war chiefs; and yet, despite all this, there is an almost total lack of evidence for actual warfare. One possibility is that conflict took a different, more theatrical form, as in later times, when rival nations or ‘enemy’ moieties would often play out their hostilities through aggressive games of lacrosse.
In the centuries following the decline of the Hopewell centers, roughly from AD 400 to 800, we start to see a series of familiar developments. First, some groups begin adopting maize as a staple crop and growing it in river valleys along the Mississippi floodplain. Second, actual armed conflict becomes more frequent. Especially in the Mississippi valley and on adjacent bluffs, a pattern emerged of small towns centered on earthen pyramids and plazas, some fortified, often surrounded by extensive stretches of no-man’s-land. A few came to resemble tiny kingdoms. Eventually this situation led to a veritable urban explosion with its epicenter at the site of Cahokia, which was soon to become the Greatest city in the Americas north of Mexico.
[And why did Hopewell fail? The rapid decline of the Hopewell culture about 1,500 years ago might be explained by falling debris from a near-Earth comet that created a devastating explosion over North America, laying waste to forests and Native American villages alike. The airburst affected an area bigger than New Jersey, setting fires across 9,200 square miles between the years A.D. 252 and 383. This coincides with a period when 69 near-Earth comets were observed and documented by Chinese astronomers and witnessed by Native Americans as told through their oral histories. UC archaeologists found an unusually high concentration and diversity of meteorites at Hopewell sites compared to other time periods. The meteorite fragments were identified from the telltale concentrations of iridium and platinum they contained. They also found a charcoal layer that suggests the area was exposed to fire and extreme heat. Beyond the physical evidence are cultural clues left behind in the masterworks and oral histories of the Hopewell. A comet-shaped mound was constructed near the epicenter of the airburst at a Hopewell site called the Milford Earthworks. Various Algonquin and Iroquoian tribes, descendants of the Hopewell, spoke of a calamity that befell the Earth. What’s fascinating is that many different tribes have similar stories of the event. The Miami tell of a horned serpent that flew across the sky and dropped rocks onto the land before plummeting into the river. The Shawnee refer to a ‘sky panther’ that had the power to tear down forest. The Ottawa talk of a day when the sun fell from the sky. And the Wyandot recount a dark cloud that rolled across the sky and was destroyed by a fiery dart. if the airburst leveled forests like the one in Russia, native people would have lost nut trees such as walnut and hickory that provided a good winter source of food. Kenneth Barnett Tankersley KB et al (2022) The Hopewell airburst event, 1699–1567 years ago (252–383 CE). Scientific Reports DOI: 10.1038/s41598-022-05758-y ]