Farmers, Foragers, Fossils

Ian Morris

Greece, A Donkey

In 1982, I went on my first archaeological excavation in Greece..

One evening, an old man came down the dirt road past the house, riding sidesaddle on a donkey, tapping the animal with a stick. Next to him was an old woman, on foot, bent under the weight of a bulging sack. As they passed, one of my fellow students greeted them in broken Greek.

The old man stopped, all smiles. He exchanged a few sentences with our spokesman, and then the little party trudged on.

“That was Mr. George,” our interpreter explained.

“What did you ask him?” one of us said.

“How he’s doing. And why his wife isn’t riding the donkey.”

There was a pause. “And?”

“He says she doesn’t have one.”

It was my first taste of the classic anthropological experience of culture shock. Back in Birmingham, a man who rode a donkey while his wife struggled with a huge sack would have seemed selfish (or worse). Here in Assiros, however, the arrangement was clearly so natural, and the reasons for it so self-evident, that our question apparently struck Mr. George as simpleminded...

I am convinced, like the eighteenth-century philosophical historians, that the sources of energy available to a society set the limits on what kinds of values can flourish. Foragers living off wild plants and animals find that only a rather narrow range of ways of organizing their societies works out well, and these forms of organization tend to reward particular kinds of values. Living off domesticated plants and animals pushes farmers toward different organizations and values, and people able to tap into the energy locked in fossil fuels find that still another kind of organization and value system works best for them...

Culture, religion, and moral philosophy certainly do shape the regional versions of each of my three stages—no one would mistake, say, Plato’s Apology for Confucius’s Analects... That said, though, the bottom line is that while cultural traditions generate variations on the central themes, energy capture is the motor driving the big pattern...

[My] argument is .. universalist. .. my framework does incorporate the overwhelming majority (probably more than 95 percent) of all the people who have ever lived...

[My] argument is also explicitly evolutionist.. What I mean by this is that human values have evolved biologically in the seven to eight million years since we split off genetically from the last common ancestor we shared with the other great apes. Because our biology has not changed very much in the ten to fifteen thousand years since farming began, anthropologists, psychologists, and historians find that a few core concerns—treating people fairly, being just, love and hate, preventing harm, agreeing that some things are sacred—recur all over the world, regardless of time or place. To some extent, they recur in our closest kin among the great apes, and perhaps among dolphins and whales too. Up to a point, at least, human values are genetically hardwired, and because of this, the biologist E. O. Wilson observed forty years ago, “Scientists and humanists should consider together the possibility that the time has come for ethics to be removed temporarily from the hands of philosophers and biologicized.”...

Foragers

Everywhere from the Arctic to Australia, ethnographers have commented on foragers’ aversion to political hierarchy. (In the excellent Cambridge Encyclopedia 40 of Hunter-Gatherers, for instance, almost all the contributors observe that the people about whom they are writing have no institutionalized leaders.)...

Nonhierarchical values are just as pronounced in economics as in politics, even if the nineteenth-century notion that foragers practiced “primitive communism,” holding all goods in common, was clearly mistaken. Rather, as Johnson and Earle emphasize in their survey of social evolution, foragers “are closely attentive to matters of possession and ownership. As a rule, every item produced has an individual owner who decides how it is to be used.”

[N]o subgroup within a foraging society has ever set itself up as a rentier class that owns the means of production. Excluding others from access to wild plants that are scattered over a huge area or wild animals and fish that are constantly on the move is normally impossible... In almost all foraging societies, these practical constraints on wealth accumulation are reinforced by a strong sense that material hierarchy is morally wrong. In most societies, the value of sharing is drummed into children early on... Refusing to share the good things that come your way is a forager deadly sin, every bit as bad as being an upstart. In fact, greed and upstartism seem to merge in forager thought.. After all, if there is no way for a hunter who makes a big kill to store the meat for his own or his immediate family’s future use, why not share today’s abundance, in the hope that someone who benefits from your generosity now will reciprocate in the future?...

[F]orager bands are male-dominated, but rarely have steep gender hierarchies. Abused wives regularly just walk away from their husbands without much fuss or criticism, and attitudes toward marital fidelity and premarital female virginity tend to be quite relaxed...

The shallowness of gender hierarchies and the weakness of marital ties, like the shallowness and weakness of economic and political hierarchies, seem to be a direct consequence of the nature of foraging as a method of energy extraction. The food that women gather is vitally important, especially near the equator, where plants make up such a large proportion of most foragers’ diets, but the ethos of sharing normally means that all members of a group will have access to this. The main reason that male foragers generally care less than male farmers about controlling women—and particularly about controlling women’s reproduction—is that foragers have much less to inherit than farmers. For most foraging societies, wild foods are equally available to all, regardless of who their parents are. Consequently, material success depends much more on skill at hunting, gathering, and coalition-building than on physical property that can be passed down between generations, which in turn means that questions about the legitimacy of children matter a lot less than they do when only legitimate offspring will inherit land and capital.

Farmers

Like foraging, farming emerged in a particular place—in this case, what archaeologists call the “Hilly Flanks” (.. basically, an arc curving up through the Jordan Valley to the Turkish border and then back down along the Iraq- Iran frontier)—at a particular time (roughly ten thousand to fifteen thousand years ago), and then spread across the rest of the planet...

Because all farming societies sooner or later invented or adopted writing, beginning around 3300 BC in what is now southern Iraq, we have enormous numbers of primary sources for farming societies. However, of the millions of texts that survive, most share a serious problem: their authors belonged to small, educated, and overwhelmingly male elites, and usually wrote for their own peers and purposes. Consequently, the primary historical sources tell us surprisingly little about the lives of the three-quarters or more of the population that actually did the farming...

Taking agriculture into new environments, however, opened new possibilities, and farmers gradually learned that great rivers—particularly the Euphrates, Tigris, Nile, Indus, and Yellow Rivers—could be turned to the purposes of irrigation, transport, and communication. This pushed yields and economic integration higher, and it was along 64these rivers that farmers built the first true cities, with populations running into the tens or occasionally the hundreds of thousands. Yet if having access to a great river was good for farming, having access to an entire sea was even better. In the late first millennium BC, the Roman Empire brought the whole Mediterranean basin under its control, and the city of Rome grew to a million residents...

The steady increase in energy captured per acre of farmland made it possible to feed these millions of mouths, but it came at the price of constant, backbreaking labor. The relatively leisured foragers of Sahlins’s primitive affluent society make a striking contrast with the brutally overworked farmers documented by historians, anthropologists, and development economists. “Pile work with work upon more work,” advised the ancient Greek poet Hesiod, whose Works and Days (composed around 700 BC) is our oldest surviving source purporting to describe life from a peasant’s point of view. Twenty-six centuries later, a priest in southern Italy concluded that “the peasant works in order to eat, he eats in order to have the strength to work; and then he sleeps.” Excavated skeletons suggest that ancient farmers tended to suffer more than foragers from repetitive stress injuries; their teeth were often terrible, thanks to restricted diets heavy on sugary carbohydrates; and their stature, which is a fairly good proxy for overall nutrition, tended to fall slightly with the onset of agriculture, not increasing noticeably until the twentieth century AD...

[B]etween 1346 and 1400, the Black Death —which killed nearly half the continent’s population—shifted the land-labor ratio back dramatically in the survivors’ favor. Unskilled workers’ real wages spiked up to unheard-of levels in the fifteenth century, but as population recovered, farmers once again began having to work harder for lower returns.. In eighteenth-century Europe, enlightened intellectuals found that peasants looked back on the fifteenth century as a golden age of leisure, cakes, and ale, in sharp contrast to the misery of their own days...

Inequality

[On inequality] The earliest case for which we have actual statistics is the Roman Empire, and here some people were astonishingly rich... [A] senior military man named L. Tarius Rufus lost 100 million sesterces when a single property deal went wrong, and the historian Chris Wickham suggests that by the fourth century AD, the greatest families—the Anicii, Petronii, and Caeonii—“may have been the richest private landowners of all time.”...

Because (1) the foods produced by farmers often required more processing (threshing, sifting, grinding, baking, and so on) than those brought home by foragers; (2) the increasingly permanent homes that farmers built required a lot more upkeep and cleaning than foragers’ temporary shelters; and (3) these activities could be done in the home by women supervising small children, the logic of farming pointed toward a new sexual division of labor and space. The conclusion that farmers all over the world apparently reached was that men should go out to work in the fields while women stayed home to work in the house. So obvious did this decision seem, in fact, that no farming society that moved beyond horticulture ever seems to have decided anything else...

In twentieth-century preindustrial farming societies, anthropologists and sociologists typically found strong correlations between the intensity of agricultural practices, the importance of inheritance, and male obsession with female sexual purity. This too seems to be a consequence of the logic of agriculture. Foragers share their knowledge with the young, teaching them how to find ripe plants, wild game, and safe campsites, but farmers have something much more concrete to pass on: property. To flourish in a farming world, people need a house, fields, and flocks, not to mention wells, walls, and tools, and improvements such as weeding, watering, terracing, and removing stones. Inheriting property from older generations literally becomes a matter of life and death, and with so much at stake, peasant men want to be sure that they are the fathers of the children who will inherit their property. Foragers’ rather casual attitudes about sex yield to ferocious policing of daughters’ premarital virginity (the “symbol of symbols,” one anthropologist of southern Italy called it in the 1950s) and wives’ extramarital activities. Peasant men tended to marry around the age of thirty, after they had come into their inheritance, while women generally married around fifteen, before they had had much time to stray...

Patriarchal values made sense in societies that captured energy through farming. Male power over women increased after the agricultural revolution not because male farmers were more brutish than male hunters, but because this was the most efficient way to organize labor in peasant societies. In a world of constant competition over scarce resources, over the course of several thousand years the most efficient societies replaced less efficient ones, and because patriarchy proved so successful, men and women alike accepted patriarchal values as just. If either of these conditions had not applied, the historical and anthropological records would contain at least some examples of farming societies organized along different lines and expressing different values...

Worship

Many early farming societies seem to have been obsessed with ancestors, and even to have worshipped them as supernatural beings. Several sites in the Hilly Flanks have apparent ancestor cults (strange semisubterranean rooms containing jawless human skulls) going back to 10,000 BC, just as domestication was beginning. By 7000 BC, people at Jericho, Çatalhöyük, and numerous other sites were burying their ancestors under their house floors while cutting off and keeping their heads, often coating the skulls with painted plaster and passing them around for generations. By this time, girls in the Hilly Flanks probably no longer lived like the !Kung forager Nisa. Instead, they grew up under the authority of their fathers and then, as teenagers, exchanged that for the authority of husbands old enough to be their fathers...

Slavery

[M]ost material goods, in most farming societies, were produced within the household. The ancient Greek farmer-poet Hesiod assumed that farmers would make everything they possibly could at home, rather than buying, bartering, or borrowing outside the household... Despite his commitment to self-sufficiency, however, .. no farm family could do everything for itself, increasing specialization [occured] between households... [some] would specialize in particular crafts, exchanging goods in marketplaces and competing with each other..

Forced labor was almost unknown within foraging societies. .. unlike the slaves in many of the more developed farming societies, who remained permanent, subjugated outsiders. Farming societies seem to have shifted toward forced labor because they had to: neither kinship nor the market could generate the labor needed to build the ships, harbors, roads, temples, and monuments without which their (relatively) huge populations could not have fed themselves or maintained their societies. In a classic paper published in 1959, the ancient historian Moses Finley asked “Was Greek civilization based on slave labor?” The answer, he concluded, was yes, and, if we broaden the question to include forced labor of all kinds, Finley’s answer applies (to varying degrees) to all farming societies. In extreme cases, of which classical Athens was one, as many as one person in three was a chattel slave, and few if any farming societies did without slavery or serfdom altogether. Forced labor, like patriarchy, was functionally necessary to farming societies..

The Old Deal

[The] image of the king as his people’s shepherd, dealing directly with the divine sphere on their behalf and protecting them from predators, became a staple of political philosophy in most agrarian societies [author calls this the Old Deal]. All over the world, political hierarchy tended to rest on the idea that the men (or, very occasionally, women) at the top were to some degree godlike.. The Old Deal was at heart a circular argument, tying political and economic inequality together and justifying both. Virtue and power followed each other: because the gods loved the rulers, the rulers were rich, and the fact that the rulers were rich showed that the gods loved them...

Socrates, the Buddha, Zoroaster, and Jesus [called Axial thinkers] .. seem to have agreed on the general point of the exercise: that people needed to transcend the squalor, corruption, and impermanence of our own sullied world to attain a state of purity and goodness that lies beyond it. One key factor behind this claim seems to have been a general loss of confidence in older visions in which the great chain of being, culminating in a godlike king, was enough to anchor the moral order.

From China to Greece, Axial theorists generally felt that the transcendent realm beyond this world—the Buddhist nirvana (literally “blowing out,” a state of mind in which the passions of this world are snuffed out like a candle), the Confucian ren (often translated “humaneness”), the Platonic to kalon (“the good”), the Christian Kingdom of Heaven, and the Daoist “Way”—was ultimately indefinable, but despite their vagueness about where they were going, they showed remarkable agreement on how to get there. Neither godlike kings nor the priests who worked for them, the new critics argued, could anchor the moral order by providing transcendence. That depended on self-fashioning, an internal, personal reorientation toward goodness. Each Axial tradition had its own recommended way to achieve this (meditation for Buddhists, conversation for Socratics, study for Jews, a combination of study and punctilious observation of ritual for Confucians), but all these techniques—and others —worked to guide followers toward the same ends: living ethically..

Much in Axial thought was radical and countercultural, threatening .. status quo. Axial thinkers (and their first-millennium AD heirs) tended to be men from the lower reaches of the elite (Socrates, Confucius, Muhammad, and most of the Hebrew Prophets fit this bill), or even from outside it (such as Jesus). They also hailed from the geographical margins of the great empires—places like Confucius’s home state of Lu, the Buddha’s of Sakya, or peripheries such as Israel, Greece, and Arabia— rather than from great, powerful states such as Wei and Zhao in China, Magadha in India, or Assyria, Persia, and Egypt. At least some of them cast doubt on the need for the poor to defer to the rich, the humble to the wellborn, and even women to men. Daoists and Buddhists tended to ignore political hierarchy; Confucius, Socrates, and Jesus upbraided rulers for their ethical shortcomings; and the Hebrew Prophets positively abused their kings. Agrarian elites regularly returned the compliment, persecuting, exiling, or executing Axial thinkers, but overall, all the great ancient empires eventually coopted the critics, taming the wilder fringes of Axial thought and bringing its bright young men into the establishment...

The Han dynasty that united China in 206 BC [was succesful] at turning Axial critiques into a state ideology, rewarding with wealth and influence those Confucians who emphasized texts that stressed duty and submission to authority rather than those that pointed toward independence and critique... The greatest success story of all, though, was surely the Roman Empire. Greek philosophy caused constant conflict within the Roman ruling class in the second century BC, but over the next hundred years or so the state turned Stoicism into the same kind of ideology of public service as Confucianism. No sooner was this accomplished, though, than Christianity emerged as a much more powerful critique— only for Rome to tame it too...

The Old Deal proved to be remarkably resilient. Despite constant criticism of inequality in Buddhist, Confucian, and Christian texts, post-Axial political and economic hierarchy was just as robust as the pre-Axial version (in the fourteenth century AD, one pope even tried to ban Christians from saying that Jesus had been poor)...

There were no feminists in Agraria, and precious few communists or anarchists either. Rather, most people recognized that hierarchy, and its endless degrees of rank, was the moral foundation of the good life... Thomas Hobbes [then wrote.. ] one of the most important arguments ever made in political philosophy [during agrarian age]: that the only way to prevent the war of all against all is to enshrine degree so firmly that it brings forth a Leviathan, a government powerful enough to intimidate its unruly subjects into living peacefully...