For the last fifteen years, I’ve been complaining to everyone I know about the peculiar absence of fish from historical writing and analysis. Go into any university library, and you will find the stacks filled with massive collections of books and journals about every conceivable aspect of farming, animal husbandry, and nomadism. Urban studies from every region and era have been undertaken. Controversies and debates about the precise relationships between all these activities flash like summer lightning storms. But where is fishing? Try to even find historical studies of fishing and fishing communities in a university library. One immediately plummets from banks of shelving units to a tiny cluster on a single dusty shelf. Very little of this is historical in outlook.
Most of what you can find is contemporary economic studies of fishing as an industry, without much historical or cultural inquiry. A small number of anthropological studies of fishing villages exist, but in the bulk of them, the anthropologist is not much interested in them as fishing villages per se, but only in the standard anthropological issues of kinship, acculturation to larger societies, religion, and so on, which have been laid out before hand in the study of agricultural villages.
There’s a modest body of work about the Medieval and Renaissance herring trade in Europe, but it exists in an isolated compartment, seldom examined in relation to either political or social history. Historians of the “Age of Exploration” sometimes discuss the fisheries of the Atlantic, but only in relation to questions such as whether Columbus heard rumours of western lands from fishermen, and so on. They do not exhibit much interest in the fishermen themselves. Every nation with significant fishing grounds has, of course, some specialists who study the economic and social history of their particular fisheries, but they do not seem too interested in pushing their studies far back in time, or in seeing them in the context of global history. The closest I would venture to call a historical interest in depth is among Canadian historians specializing in our Atlantic provinces. Outside of Canada, this has attracted little attention. Even within Canada, interest rapidly fades when the historians are landlubbers from Quebec, Ontario, or farther west. Even the fact that the Great Lakes, as recently as the 1940’s, supported a huge and profitable fishery ― destroyed by the legal process of eroding riparian law, and handing over the Great Lakes to heavy industry to pollute and destroy as they pleased ― has been forgotten by the community of Canadian historians. Japan and Norway probably have similar, locally oriented historiographies, though I have not run across them in my libraries.
I’m in the middle of a lot of reading about prehistory, state formation, and ancient economies. I find the absence of fish rather peculiar and frustrating, because I think that fish and fishermen are quite important in human history. There’s the occasional glimmer. For example, I’m reading an impressive collection of papers on the prehistory of the Eurasian steppe lands.[1] It is entirely devoted to how the ancient peoples of the region made their livings. There are enormously detailed discussions of the possible relationships between various kinds of hunting, farming, pastoralism, semi-pastoralism, and so one. No fishing. What struck me most forcibly while reading the collection was how water ― our most urgent necessity after breathable air ― was removed from the equation. Yet the region in question includes vast shorelines of the Black Sea, the Sea of Azov, the Caspian Sea (still famed for its fisheries), and the Aral Sea; massive lakes like Balkhash and Baykal, and is dissected by a spider’s web of river systems (Dnestr, Dnepr, Don, Volga, Amu Darya [= Oxus], Syr Darya, Ob-Irtysh, Tarim, Yenisey, and Amur). Sturgeon in the Caspian and its in-feeding rivers reach recorded lengths of 5.5 meters and weights of 2000 kilos, and the sturgeon of the Amur are almost as large. That is more than the weight of three large cows!
Yet there are at least a few hints of interest, which one would not have seen in an earlier collection on the same issue. Some piscatorial curiosity is exhibited in the preface, by Colin Renfrew. Renfrew is the bad boy of prehistoric archaeology, the ornery advocate of alternative interpretations and the habitual questioner of orthodoxies. But even he only says “we shall have to devote more attention to the role of fish in the diet. It is pertinent to ask whether communities with fish playing a more significant role in the diet than meat are likely to have been nomadic. Of course it could be argued that the heart of nomadism is seasonality (usually in relation to pasture lands). But the fish in question are not likely to have been the anadromous fish which have a marked seasonality, since most of the rivers in question are presumably too far from the sea for migratory patterns like those of salmon. Whether there was seasonality in fish resources sufficient to promote mobility is a matter for discussion. But in some cases these communities may have been better off staying put where the fishing was good.”[2] But notice that the presence of fishing is here considered only in relation to its possible influence on the rise of pastoralism.
Within the region in question, only three of ten river systems are “distant from the sea”, and the principal ones, the Volga and the Don, empty into the sea within the region. Sturgeon migrate long distances in these river systems, as part of their breeding cycle. The Volga delta on the Caspian [3] is among the world’s largest and most complex delta systems, and it is the home of the world’s largest sturgeon breeding ground. All such delta systems also provide rich food resources in the form of game (deer, wild boar), and especially fat, highly edible ducks and geese, ecologically intertwined with these rich fish stocks. In this respect, the Volga delta resembles the network of resources available to the inhabitants of the Nile and Tigris-Euphrates deltas. It seems grotesquely improbable that the neolithic inhabitants would ignore such a rich environment.
In the search for the origins of transhumance and pastoralism, today’s scholars have reached a consensus that these specialized lifestyles could not exist except symbiotically with agriculture. The horse-riding nomads of the Kurgan cultures of central Asia can be traced directly to roots among the neolithic farmers of the Cucuteni and Tripolye cultures, in what is now Moldavia and the western Ukraine.[4] Pure pastoralism is an offshoot of transhumance, which is itself an offshoot of mixed farming with animal husbandry. I believe that, as archaeological exploration becomes more extensive and sophisticated, we will eventually reach a new consensus in which we will see that neolithic farming communities emerged from a similar synergy between crop growing and fishing in riverine, lacustrine, and deltaic environments. In other words, I believe that we will come to understand agriculture, transhumance, and even urbanization as grounded in an initial stage of exploiting environments in which the fish, arthropods, shellfish, plants, game animals, and birds associated with lakes and rivers were exploited in unison.
An obstacle to this is a weight of tradition which simply doesn’t look for marine resource exploitation. And if you don’t look, in this case, you will not find. Judith Powell, in her little-known study, Fishing in the Prehistoric Aegean [5] (one of the very few such surveys) pointed out that few archaeologists make the effort necessary to find on-site evidence of fish consumption, and few know the necessary techniques to do so. Shell-fish will leave obvious remains in middens, but fish bones disintegrate quickly, and often the only surviving remnants are otoliths, which are small particles of calcium carbonate which fish use to orient themselves. These can only be found with screen sieving. I would add to this the possibility that early farmers might have recycled all their fish waste into their fields, as the Indians of New England did. That would leave no noticeable trace in domestic sites. Algonkian agriculture in New England was fully integrated with a large-scale fishery, but its sites would probably leave no clear evidence of this in domestic middens. Most fishing equipment, Powell points out, is either unlikely to survive (nets, lines, baskets, weirs), is likely to be lost or disposed of where it is used (at sea, on a lake, or a river), or is indistinguishable from equipment used for non-fishing purposes (knives, tongs, spears, scoops, rakes). It will take a shift in the attitudes of archaeologists to get them to routinely make the necessary effort to uncover fishing activities. This is just beginning to happen.
Yet despite this lackadaisical ethos, evidence of fishing activity turns up often enough in archaeological sites that it should attract the attention of those who discuss the larger scale issues of cultural evolution and prehistoric macro-economics. It just doesn’t seem to.
Renfrew, and T. Douglas Price, are among the few eminent archaeologists who spend any time thinking about marine food resources in prehistory. Both have taken the trouble to discuss archaeological sites that are tellingly significant. Renfrew has also published, in another collection of papers, the extremely important work of Tamsin O’Connell, [6] a bioarchaeologist at Cambridge. Diet leaves an isotopic “fingerprint” in bone collagen, bone carbonate, and hair. O’Connell has been analyzing this evidence in a number of regions and periods.
The Human Journey, By Boat
Even the most conservative estimate places the arrival of the first human beings in Australia at 40,000 years ago. In order to to do this, the ancestors of Aboriginal Australians had to cross the 450km Timor Sea, which means they had to have substantial sailing skills. For that matter, the extremely rapid expansion of Homo sapiens from our African homeland to the extremities of Asia only makes sense if you assume that boats played a part in it. Maps in paleoanthropology books invariably show big black arrows drawn through the inland blanks of the continents when they explain this migration. It’s customary to describe early humans as evolving “on the savanah”, and the mind’s eye pictures our ancestors trudging purposefully across dusty plains, spear in hand, looking for more and ever larger dusty plains. But this is a profound misunderstanding of the fossil record. The remains of early humans were not found “on the savanah”. They were found next to lakes and rivers. Any ecologist will tell you that the ecosystem on either side of a river, or on the shores of a lake, is absolutely nothing like the ecosystem of a savanah. We evolved in the rich environment of riversides, able to swim, and with the highly specialized skill of throwing things, beginning at first with rocks. The physiological changes we see in protohumans, the changes that sent us on a different path from chimpanzees and bonobos, make more sense when they are seen as an adaptation to the rock-throwing strategy than as an adaptation to walking around on the savanah. The two interpretations are not mutually exclusive, but I feel the emphasis is misplaced. Throwing things is a well-attested activity among our close relatives (chimps like to throw shit at each other), but it is not very effective with their particular body configuration. Erect humans, however, are very well built to throw rocks. Among other uses, the rock-throwing skill allowed us to steal kills from large predators, which hunted the herbivores that came to drink at rivers. There is significant archaeological evidence of fist-sized throwing rocks mined by early humans. Such rocks are easily found on riverbanks, but rare on the open grasslands. Rivers and lakes were dangerous places, but very lucrative if you were smart and could throw rocks.
It is only a short jump from throwing rocks to using a spear, and I suggest that spears were used to spear fish before they were used to attack mammalian prey. It is logical to assume that innovation took place in circumstances where danger was not looming. If you are being chased by a sabre-tooth tiger, you don’t stop and say to yourself “Gee, I wonder what I could invent to get out of this situation”. It is more likely that the problems presented by a visible supply of tasty, but slippery fish would initiate invention. The riverine food supply of fish, birds’ eggs, turtles and turtle eggs, tree fruit, and stolen predator kills sounds like a more reliable base for innovation than a miraculous leap to chasing impalas on the savanah. Human beings have had an intimate relationship with water from the beginning. By following the rivers and lakes of East Africa down to the seashore, another environment with a complex and varied supply of food, we discovered the big world outside of our original cradle. The earliest “modern” human beings, exhibiting not only our own physiology, but apparently equipped with artistic impulses and a rapidly evolving and diversifying toolkit, appear on the African seashore, and their middens reveal that they consumed seafood. Seafood is, in fact, rich in the essential fatty acids (DHA) which are critical to brain development.
The maps illustrating the human journey should not be filled with big arrows in the empty savanahs, but little, twisting arrows following coastlines, lakes, and river valleys. This is how people move on the ground, at least in the prehistory I envision. And if human beings could cross 450 km of ocean to reach Australia forty thousand years ago, then it hardly seems likely that they would be stymied by the small patches of water separating the islands of the Aegean during the Mesolithic era, only a few thousand years ago. Yet Judith Powell complains that archaeologists have shown the most astonishing reluctance to consider that humans inhabited the Cyclades in that era. Reports of mesolithic artifacts and burials on those islands were regarded with intense suspicion. Even when Catherine Perlès demonstrated that obsidian found on the Greek mainland, dated at 10,000 BC, had been imported from the Cycladic island of Melos, [7] the controversy continued bitterly for years. Not even the compelling evidence that the pygmy hippopotamus of Cyprus, made extinct around that same time, was done in by human agency, has put it to rest. [8]
Navigation by sea is not likely to evolve in any society without the experience of fishing. I suppose it is possible to imagine a society in which there are no fishermen or fishing boats suddenly getting a notion to go exploring the sea, and developing the technology by a crash program of trial and error…. but be honest, do you really thing it plausible?
Fish seem to have begun to be consumed in steadily increasing quantities among European peoples starting 30,000 years ago, though the patterns of consumption varied tremendously from place to place.
Not all neolithic fish consumers lived by the sea. A site on Mount Sandel, in County Coleraine Ireland, was a small community with solid residential structures between 7000 and 6000 BC, making it the earliest Mesolithic community known in Ireland. The site overlooked the River Bann. Today, salmon and eel fisheries are the most important economic features of the river, and the excavation found evidence that those were consumed in the mesolithic settlement. But so were shellfish, sea bass, and flounder, and even the occasional seal. These last are ocean species, though Mount Sandel is a considerable distance from the sea. [9] A series of marks on the ground can be interpreted as a fish-drying rack.
In southern Scandinavia, abundant evidence of fishing is found in sites from the Maglemosian (7500 — 5700 BC), Kongemosian (5700–4600 BC) and Ertebølle (4600–3300 BC) periods. By the latter period, there was a complex pattern. There were large, perennial occupation sites on the coast, with shell-middens and a balance of land game and marine remains. There were smaller, specialized procurement sites along the coast, too, where deep-water fishing, sealing, and fowling occurred. There were large inland sites occupied only in summer. There were inland trapping stations for small fur-bearing animals. And there were large, permanent inland sites situated on lake shores. [10]
At Vlassac, a large, permanent pre-agricultural settlement near the Iron Gate of the Danube (c. 6000 BC) was partly supported by hunting ibex and deer, but perhaps more important were large Danube catfish, weighing up to a hundred kilos. [11]
A site in Daghestan, on the western shore of the Caspian Sea, between 3600 and 1900 BC, was, according to its excavators, “a sophisticated community practicing agriculture and raising livestock on the coastal plain”. [12] It also exploited the sturgeon and shellfish resources of the Caspian. Clearly fishing was not a last ditch, desperation, or fall-back food, as some archaeologists have imputed for Mediterranean seafood in the Neolithic. [13] The inhabitants were in a position to plant and maintain vinyards. Fishing was clearly one component in a rich and complex local economy.
By the Late Neolithic, marine foods are commonplace. But sometimes the geographical distribution is counter-intuitive. The Orkney Islands hosted a thriving neolithic community of farmers, but they seem to have only consumed modest amounts of easily acquired inshore fish. [They had to wait until the Viking Age, before fishing seems to have provided the bulk of their diet, and they eventually exported cured fish to the continent in the Middle Ages] [14] . In contrast, contemporary (circa 3,500 BC) sites on the west coast of Scotland, Wales, and England have produced massive shell-middens and evidence of fish as a staple food.
So What Is My Point, Then?
I believe that the accumulating evidence will shortly cause us to shift gears in our conceptualizing of the evolution of human society in the Neolithic era. My guess, for what it’s worth, is that in another decade or so we will be taking it for granted that the activities of fishermen are the key to understanding the evolution of village life and agriculture. At least in Europe, the Middle East, and the Mediterranean, and perhaps in India. I believe that ultimately we will even tie the development of what we call “urban civilizations” to this same template. Why? Because fishermen combine mobility with stability. I don’t think that agricultural villages filled up Europe in the fashion that Renfrew describes: a carpet of cleared land and villages advancing a kilometer at a time, as each family split up and its offshoots trudged a short distance to the nearest new homestead. I believe that agriculture infiltrated an already existing web of fast moving connections along rivers, lakes and shores. Agricultural villages formed on nodes already created by fishing communities, some seasonal, some permanent. These interlinked fishing settlements had already created a web of long distance trade that began with dried and salted fish, which are compact packets of protein that can travel great distances before losing their value. To this simple trade, any number of portable commodities could be added, from amber to native copper to treated hides, and jerkies. The surest way to open up an area for its first agricultural settlements would have been for farmers to attach themselves to such a pre-existing network. The symbiosis between river travel, trade at a distance, fishing, hunting and agriculture would have been the dynamo that drove the Neolithic transformation, and the spectacular increase in population associated with it. Instead of an expanding “wave front” growing by one farmstead at a time, I picture small clusters of settlers moving fairly long distances, by boat, along rivers and shores well known already, to places which already held symbiotic potential. I think the best place to look for evidence of this process would be along the rivers of northern Germany and Poland, where the Neolithic Linear Pottery culture clearly sends “fingers” northward along the course of the rivers. I believe the key to understanding the movement of neolithic farmers lies in recognizing the importance of fishermen, their boats, and their spectacular mobility.
A Fishier Look at the Urban Revolution
The urban revolution of Mesopotamia began in a swamp. The Marsh Arabs, until recently, still lived the kind of life that was the starting point of the urban revolution. They hunted the game and fowl that thrive in the marshlands. They farmed on little bits of “land” that they constructed by an elaborate process of assembling matted reeds and containing mud until they have a dry surface ― a sort of inverse irrigation, “landigation”, on which they grew crops and kept domestic animals. But first and foremost, they were fishermen. And the critical fact is that fishermen traveled and traded as well as fished. Fishing produces sharp spikes in productivity, which can be disposed of through trade because the producers of the surplus, being fishermen with boats, already have the most efficient means of transporting them to market. Surpluses in agricultural production could rarely move any great distance, as the cost of transporting overland, feeding traction animals as you go, absorbs the surplus. That is why inland empires often experienced famines in one province while neighbouring provinces produced abundant harvests. Dried and smoked fish remain edible long enough to be transported great distances. The regularly occurring super-abundance of salmon at the mouth of the Columbia River, for example, was the foundation of a vast network of trade over thousands of kilometers, and a huge assortment of other products (buffalo robes, pemmican, feather headdresses, parfleches, catlinite, whale and seal bone and oils, ornamental shells, obsidian, basketwork, canoes, hemp, pelts and hides, bitteroot, camas, and wapatoo) piggy-backed on that trade.
In the fourth millennium BC, Uruk, sometimes called the first “true city” was founded. Whether this title is accurate or not, Uruk was the first city in Sumeria to undergo the phenomenal transformation that is called the “Urban Revolution.”
Uruk was built exactly where the marsh met the dry land, at a place accessible both to the main course of the Euphrates, and to the ocean by way of a series of interlocked lagoons. Its early architectural forms mimic, in mud brick, the reed houses still built today in the marshes. Uruk was first a trading place for fish. Baskets of fish where the usual offerings to the temple in the early days. [16] Then it became a trading place for anything that could move by boat. Even before Uruk underwent spectacular growth, it’s trading connections with the distant land of Dilmun (Bahrain) were evident. A chain of trade carried by river and sea, extending thousands of kilometers, is demonstrable. Articles as distant as the specialty woods of India and Lebanon came to its docks, by boat.
And the trade was possible because Uruk had become a manufacturer of textiles and other products for export. We find Sumerian textiles replacing locally made products over a wide region. Ultimately, Sumeria’s industrial and intellectual culture came to dominate the entire Near East, and its language continued to be studied long after it ceased to be spoken. It’s writing system, invented at first merely to do book-keeping, became the basis for hundreds of others. None of this was possible without boats and seamen, experts in navigation and travel and trade, people who had to have begun as fishermen.
The agricultural innovation of long fields and irrigation controlled by the temples may have been a significant element of the urban economy, but it was not what made Uruk, or even what made Uruk possible. It was not a “surplus of food” produced by irrigation that generated the urban revolution, nor was it the centralized direction of a wealthy elite. The temple complex and its centrally managed system of irrigation were not the creative force behind Uruk’s growth. It was merely an institution that cashed in on it. The temples made their substantial profits by manufacturing textiles with slave labour, overwhelmingly that of women and children. These were at first children “offered” to the temple, then victims captured in war, and eventually bankrupted peasants and city dwellers who found themselves in debt bondage. [17] They worked in combination prison/factories, weaving wool into exportable textiles. The long-field irrigation system merely provided barley to keep them fed, and to pay the guards and soldiers who enforced the system. Far from being a “redistributive economy”, as fans of the temple elite are wont to describe it, the temple’s administrative aim was always to minimize any redistribution it was forced to do. There is no mention of what happened to the army of women and children textile weavers after they wore out, for instance. There is no evidence that anyone fed them after that. The temples acquired the wool on a contract basis from shepherds, and doubtless could drive a hard bargain with them, but they could not control them. [18] The irrigation sharecroppers were maintained at the bare minimum that would keep them alive. The profit margin for the temple was made by extracting forced “corvée” labour from peasants at various stages in the operation, and by the low cost of child slaves in the key manufacturing process.
Only a quarter of Uruk’s population was ever tied to the temple system, and the normal form of irrigation that actually fed people was a system of local village-regulated, decentralized square-field irrigation. [19] You see the same split in later eras between individual Roman farmers and the vast, slave-worked latifundia. Those who were locked into the temple corporate system were slaves, or indebted share-croppers, who did not significantly benefit from the system, though the yields may have been higher than the traditional system’s. [20] Thus, the temple was essentially a parasitic operation grafted onto a city that had already had a spectacular growth spurt, based on trade. Once a temple gained political mastery of an early Sumerian city state, its population rapidly declined and economic growth ended. Because the region is flat, now arid and thinly inhabited, it is possible to form a very good picture of its demographics over a long span of time. Back when Iraq was accessible, just such a survey of all village sites was carried out. This revealed that the period of Uruk’s spectacular growth was very short. In the early dynamic phase, there is little evidence of great social inequalities. Once the temple institutions became extremely powerful, population growth continued in the cities for awhile, as temple-controlled villages emptied out and impoverished peasants went the only place they could go. Then, the city itself became paralyzed, and rapidly declined in population. The same cycle was repeated in other temple-controlled city states. This is precisely what happens to a modern city when a large manufacturing enterprise emerges from a vital and varied local economy, gains control of its political institutions, establishes a monopoly, and converts it into a “one-industry town”. Our modern world is littered with the corpses of once-creative cities, converted into stagnant company towns. Ancient Sumeria was littered with the corpses of failed city-states, where the “temple” corporation did the same kind of stuff.
No it was not temples, and not irrigation, and not a “stratified society” that created the first urban revolution. It was fish, and fishermen, and the trade networks that they created. In this way, the Urban revolution was repeating the dynamics of the Neolithic Agricultural Revolution that preceded it.
But nobody seems to like history when it is made by anyone as prosaic as fishermen, and anything as unexciting as fish.
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[1] Boyle, Katie; Colin Renfrew & Marsha Levine — Ancient Interactions: East and West in Eurasia — McDonald Institute Monographs. 2002.
[2] Renfrew, Colin — Pastoralism and Interaction: Some Introductory Questions [in Boyle, Katie; Renfrew Levine] . p.4
[3] The Volga Delta region has been crossed by many ethnic migrations, and incorporated into a number of states dominated by pastoralist “hordes”. After 1630, the region was inhabited by the Kalmyks, a Mongolian-language group practicing Tibetan Buddhism. Before that, it was under the sway of the
Turkic-speaking Nogai. Before that, presumably various Indo-Iranian peoples.
[4] Goodenough, Ward — The Evolution of Pastoralism and Indo-European Origins [in Cardona, George; Henry M. Hoenigswald; & Alfred Senn — Indo-European and Indo-Europeans: Papers-Indo-European Conference, 3d, University of Pennsylvania, 1966 — U of Pennsylvania P — 1970. p.262
[5] Powell, Judith — Fishing in the Prehistoric Aegean — Paul Åströms Förlag — 1996
[6] O’Connell T.C., Levine M.A., and Hedges R.E.M. (2003). The importance of fish in the diet of central Eurasian peoples from the Mesolithic to the Early Iron Age. In: M.A. Levine, A.C. Renfrew, and K. Boyle (eds.), Prehistoric Steppe Adaptation and the Horse, McDonald Institute Monograph, pp. 253–268.
Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research.
[7] Simpson, Allan H. — Faunal Extinction On an Island Society: Pygmy Hippopotamus Hunters of Cyprus — Interdisciplinary Contributions to Archaeology; Springer — 1999 p.
[8] ibid
[9] Woodman, Peter C. — A Mesolithic Camp in Ireland — Scientific American vol. 254, no. 2, , pp. 120–132 — 1981. & Why not an Irish Upper Paleolithic? Studies in the Upper Paleolithic of Britain and Northwest Europe. British Archaeological Reports, International Series 296:43–5 — 1986.
[10] Price, T. Douglas — The European Mesolithic — American Antiquity 48:4 — 1983. p.768–769
[11] Prinz, Beth — Mesolithic Adaptations on the Lower Danube: Vlasac and the Iron Gates Gorge — Oxford : B.A.R., 1987
[12] Kohl, Philip L.; Magomed G. Gadzhiev & Rabadan G. Magomedov — Between the Steppe and the Sown: Cultural Developments on the Caspian Littoral Plain of Southern Daghestan, Russia, c. 3600–1900 BC [in Boyle, Katie; Colin Renfrew & Marsha Levine — Ancient Interactions: East and West in Eurasia — McDonald Institute Monographs. 2002.]. p.127
[13] Powell — ibid
[14] Barrett, James H.; R. P. Beukens & R. A. Nicholson. — Diet and ethnicity during the Viking colonisation of northern Scotland : Evidence from fish bones and stable carbon isotopes. Antiquity 75:145–154. ‑2001
[15] Barret, James H.; R. A. Nicholson, & R. Cerón-Carrasco — Archaeo-ichthyological Evidence for Long-term Socioeconomic Trends in Northern Scotland : 3500 BC to AD 1500
[16] Edwards, I. E. S., C. J. Gadd, N. G. L. Hammond –ed. — The Cambridge Ancient History, Third Edition; vol.1, part 1: Prolegomena and Prehistory — Cambridge U P 1970 p.332
[17] Liverani, Mario — Uruk, the First City. Equinox. 2006. [edited and translated by Zainab Bahrani & Marc Van De Mieroop. Originally published in Italian as Uruk: La Prima Città. Laterza & Figli. 1998] p.36
[18] ibid p.36
[19] ibid p.28–31
[20] Liverani asserts spectacularly higher yields, with no convincing evidence.
[21] Adams, Robert McCormick & Hans J. Nissen — The Uruk Countryside: The Natural Setting of Urban Societies — U Chicago P — 1972.. p.18
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