Horticulture was in many respects a very successful mode. As populations rose from the first horticultural areas of present-day Iraq and Southwest Asia, SE Asia, central China, northern China, Mexico, and Columbia/Peru, people migrated. As horticulturalists migrated, they took their crops with them, and modified these crops for new environments. Foragers in these areas either adopted horticulture also, or moved to areas where farming was either very difficult or impossible. In many other cases, foragers adopted the plants of neighboring horticulturists, and simply changed their culture. Within 6,000 years horticulturalists had spread to almost every environment where farming is possible today. Only a few areas of the globe, mostly too dry or too cold for farming, were left to the foragers and the pastoralists.
Faced with a threat to their standard of living, climate made further migration impossible (or in the case of Oceania, people ran out of islands.) Horticulturalists had no option but to intensify production (initially by developing chiefdoms) , and to make the technology of production more efficient. (Though remember, there was nothing inevitable about developing chiefdoms. Perhaps because there was enough natural and cultural control over population growth, or perhaps for other reasons, highland New Guinea as well as other areas in the world remained tribal.)
Since both intensification, and making the technology of production more efficeint, tended to deplete the environment, horticulturalists went through several cycles of intensification and technological change. Finally, in a few areas, they developed a new mode of production, a new adaptive strategy which necessitated a change in all aspects the culture. In anthropology and archaeology, this new mode is known as intensive agriculture, or the agrarian state. The model just presented is a version of an ecological model, looking at rising population, environment depletion, and the need to organize the society as a whole to produce more food, as interacting causal factors; there are other models for the development of states and intensive agriculture. Your text, on pp. 501-504, briefly explores other models explaining the development of the political state. As the text notes, no model entirely fits every instance where states developed; yet all of these models are helpful in explaining state development.
Intensive agriculture, as sometimes ethnocentriclly called the "rise" of civilization, first began sometime before 3,100 B.C., in what is now Iraq. In terms of early state development, the area is called Mesopotamia, the area between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. The actual development of this and other early states will be covered in unit 3. This lesson, and pp. 501-504 in text, focus on the definition/traits of agraian states, or as it is sometimes called, the intensive agriculture mode of production.
Intensive agriculture represented increased energy investment per unit area of land, often by massive amounts of human labor invested in irrigation, drainage, and/or terracing systems. Animal energy was also invested in food production in the form of animal muscle and fertilizer. Farmers increasingly became dependent upon complex technology, which required materials or skills not found in each farming family, or within a limited geographical area. The metal plow is a common (not universal) item of more efficient technology, and intensive agriculture is often called plow agriculture as a result.
The horticultural practice of swidden involved burning the land, including forested land, in order to replace nutrients in the the soil as well as to clear it for planting. In certain areas, it was particularly sucessful, as long as people could move to virgin forest areas, or at least not reuse a locality until a secondary forest had grown up there. As population increased, this was impossible in some areas, and productivity declined as a result. Totally turning the soil, as plows did, initially restored fertility and raised crop yields, and was particularly useful for monocropping (planting fields with only one crop, such as wheat.) This approach also left the soil more open to soil erosion, and some have argued that early states lasted only as long as their soil remained fertile.
Plows were initially tipped with bronze. Smelting of bronze (as well as other soft metals such as gold and silver) was probably an invention of horticultural chiefdoms. All of these metals quickly became status items for the chiefs. The earliest site with bronze may be from burials of horticultural chiefs at Maykop (the culture is named for the modern city) on the northern flanks of the Caucasus Mountains in modern day Russia. Here bronze items have been found dated at approximately 3,500 BC. Various sites of similar or slightly younger age in Mesopotamia proper indicate the rapid spread into the area of developing states. Bronze was originally an alloy of copper and arsenic, in part because copper ores in the area are naturally found with arsenic. Very quickly however Mesopotamia was able to import sufficient tin so that bronze artifacts were made of the stronger alloy, copper and tin. The actual smelting of the metal, importation of tin, development of mining, and distribution of the finished product, are all energy expending steps that are incorporated into the intensification of agriculture.
Model of Early Etruscan Plow (Pre-Roman Italian State, ca. 700 BC)
While metal plows were important in all the early states of Asia, as well as Europe and Africa, they were not part of the intensive agriculture found in the Americas.
Utilizing massive amounts of human labor for irrigation, drainage, agricultural terracing etc. developed slowly. In Mesopotamia, early irrigation works were local projects organized by chiefs, but quickly grew in size, since all were connected to the same sources of water.
All these interconnected changes in farming helped spur the social changes that are probably the most important characteristics in the change to the agraian state.
The most important social characteristic was the development of the political state. A state is defined as "a form of politically centralized society whose governing elite's have the power to compel subordinates into paying taxes, rendering services, and obeying the law." (Marvin Harris: Cultural Anthropology) States are the dominant sociopolitical structure today. (The political state that we live in is the United States. The states within the US have some traits of political states, but federal law always trumps state law.)
A second social trait is class stratification. A class is "a group of people with similar relationships to the apparatus of control in state-level societies, and who possess similar amounts of power (or lack of power) over the allocation of wealth and privileges and access to resources and technology." Or a class is "a group of people who have a similar relationship to the mechanisms of wealth, power, and social prestige"(Lenkeit, Introducing Cultural Anthropology, 3rd ed. p.193). A society with class stratification represents the antithesis of the egalitarian foraging band or horticultural tribe, but seems in many ways to be an extension of the ranking system found in chiefdoms.
A third social trait is full-time occupational specialization. In states, large numbers of people were not producing food, but were engaged full-time in other occupations, such as craft specialists, religious specialists, military specialists, etc. Occupation in early as well as modern states was frequently the basis for differences in wealth, power and prestige, and hence the basis of the class system. Industrial states, dependent on fossil fuels and present today, are also characterized by having political states, class stratification, and full-time occupational specialists.
Interestingly, and illogically, the food producers were typically at the bottom of the class system. The food producers in fact became peasants. Peasants were farmers who lacked control over one or more of the means of production: land, water, labor, technology, or knowledge. Usually 60-90% of the population of agrarian states were peasants. For the peasants, this mode of production typically meant that they worked harder than horticulturalists, often for a poorer diet, a similar or shorter life span, less control over their lives, and more diseases.
In addition to the major traits, a variety of other characteristics are associated with intensive agriculture. In many cases, these are the traits that are most apparent to archaeologists, and from which they can infer the social traits, and even the intensive nature of the agriculture.
Monuments to the Power of the State: Pyramids at Giza, Egypt
States have reciprocal exchange, as well as stratified redistributive exchange (taxes). However, market exchange, particularly price market exchange, becomes increasingly important. Horticultural and pastoral societies often had at least some market exchange, but price markets quickly became the norm for state. Price market exchange has the following characteristics.
The price of goods and services exchanged is determined by buyers competing with other buyers, and sellers competing with other sellers. This was not usually the case in horticultural markets. It might well be that I, as a horticultural farmer, might take my excess pigs to a market to exchange my pigs for some good pottery made by a part-time specialist. The potter wanted pork, I wanted some pots, and the exchange was made. We both felt the exchange was of equal value, and the value did not fluctuate. As market exchange became increasingly important for both food producers and non-food producers, how many pots I could get for my pigs might depend upon how many people were selling pigs, and and how many people were buying pots. If many people were selling pigs, I might have to pay many pigs for my pot, particularly if everyone wanted pots. If I was the only pig seller, and nobody wanted to buy pots, I could buy several pots with one small pig. This is a price market.
Price markets leads to anonymous exchange: the buyer and seller do not need to know each other. Once the exchange is made, no further obligation or contact is necessary between buyer and seller.Within a price market, everything ultimately comes to have a price or value, measured against some standard. While theoretically anything--pigs, for example--could be used as the standard of value, in practice all states eventually turned to a somewhat contrived standard, money. Money must be
Price or money markets came to be a significant trait of all agrarian states. These markets expanded, particularly for the elites to obtain luxury items available only from other states in other areas.
Intensive agriculture increased the value of having more children. Intensive agriculture did indeed produce more calories per unit area (acre or square mile) of land. From the point of view of the majority of the peasants, the more children the better. Children could do productive economic work at a very young age. Families usually had to pay taxes in grain, and also often had to provide labor for the state. The larger the family, the higher its standard of living (after taxes)!
Population sizes became larger and denser, particularly in urban areas. The peasants particularly suffered from a poor diet. As a result of both these factors, contagious diseases became an increasing problem.
The relative prestige of females compared to males remained low in essentially all agrarian states, though the details varied. As a result, the unequal treatment of women and girls continued, and resulted in a shorter life expectancy among women. The large numbers of pregnancies contributed to the high death rate in women. Female infanticide became more common with the development of the agraian state.
The intensive agricultural mode of production proved to be the most expansive yet. As population size increased, the peasants particularly found their standard of living threatened. Expansion was the easiest way for a state to settle its problems. Expansion against horticultural or pastoral tribes particularly was easy for the larger, more organized political states. When states invaded chiefdoms, the chiefdom often reacted by becoming a state itself, and perhaps engaging in prolonged warfare with the invaders. Regardless of who won, the agrarian state as a mode of production triumphed.
Certainly hundreds of small horticultural societies and many pastoral societies were destroyed by the "spread of civilization". If you were a member of one of these cultures, you might not have considered the spread "progress", particularly since in many cases not just the culture was destroyed but large numbers of people.
If you were a peasant in any of the early agrarian states, you also might not have considered this progress. Compared to living in a horticultural tribe or even chiefdom, peasants in one of these early states were subject to heavy taxes and the demand for labor and military service. They worked longer hours both on an annual basis and during a life time. Their health was if anything worse than in a horticultural society. Their life expectancy was very short. Knowledge was certainly increasing, but it was not accessible by the peasants. Again, if you lived through the change in mode of production from horticulture to intensive agriculture, you might not have said this was "progress". Of course, if you were a member of the ruling elite, there is no question that your life improved.
Unit 3 will explore the development and spread of the agrarian state.