Friday, March 12, 2008 — “I Called the New World to Redress the Balance of the Old”… A Final Word on the European Neolithic

I’ve been asked to explain exact­ly what I think hap­pened dur­ing the peri­od when agri­cul­ture was intro­duced to Europe, and how it dif­fers from the cur­rent con­sen­sus among pre­his­to­ri­ans. First of all, let me make it clear that I’m propos­ing a mod­i­fi­ca­tion of that con­sen­sus, not a rad­i­cal alter­ation of it. I think that the cur­rent­ly most accept­ed views are ham­pered by a num­ber of fac­tors: 1) an over-reac­tion to the pre­vi­ous generation’s reliance on hypo­thet­i­cal migra­tions, result­ing in a pref­er­ence for sta­t­ic mod­els of human behav­iour, 2) a fail­ure to prof­it from use­ful com­par­isons with the his­to­ry and anthro­pol­o­gy of the New World, 3) the per­va­sive influ­ence of invalid notions of eco­nom­ics and social evo­lu­tion, inher­it­ed and uncrit­i­cal­ly absorbed from 19th cen­tu­ry thinkers.

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The dom­i­nant school, today, of inter­pret­ing the Neolith­ic arose in reac­tion to ear­li­er schools of thought, which viewed pre­his­to­ry as a series of migra­tions and inva­sions of eth­nic groups, each one held to account for some dif­fer­ence in mate­r­i­al cul­ture. Lan­guage and eth­nic­i­ty were, with only per­func­to­ry reser­va­tions, assumed to be con­gru­ent. The spread of agri­cul­ture in Europe and the spread of Indo-Euro­pean lan­guages were assumed to be dif­fer­ent events, tak­ing place at dif­fer­ent times. It was assumed that agri­cul­ture spread into Europe, from its ori­gins in the Mid­dle East, start­ing some­time around the sixth mil­len­ni­um BC. Much lat­er, Indo-Euro­pean tribes of con­querors, empow­ered by their domes­ti­ca­tion of the horse, swept across Europe (as well as Iran, Cen­tral Asia, and India) impos­ing their lan­guage, reli­gion, and social struc­ture on every­one in their path. The “orig­i­nal home­land” of the Indo-Euro­peans, these puta­tive con­querors, was thought to be some­where in the present Ukraine, and much effort was made to deter­mine this loca­tion by exam­in­ing the var­i­ous Indo-Euro­pean lan­guages. Thus, the orig­i­nal farm­ers of Europe were held to be non-Indo-Euro­pean-speak­ing natives, sub­se­quent­ly over­pow­ered by an Indo-Euro­pean élite, who imposed their lan­guage on all but a few iso­lat­ed groups — the Basques, the Finno-Ugri­an peo­ples of the North, and the Etr­uscans. The most elo­quent cham­pi­on of this mod­el was the Lithuan­ian-Amer­i­can archae­ol­o­gist Mar­i­ja Gimbu­tas (1901–1994). Gimbu­tas envi­sioned a pre-Indo-Euro­pean agri­cul­tur­al soci­ety in Europe which was matris­tic and “God­dess-cen­tered”, and peace­ful, while the con­quer­ing Indo-Euro­peans were patris­tic and vio­lent. These Indo-Euro­peans were iden­ti­fied as specif­i­cal­ly being the Kur­gan cul­ture of the west­ern Eurasian steppes. This rather car­toon­ish view of the Neolith­ic, which relied on cul­tur­al­ly com­fort­able notions of gen­der dual­i­ty and also on tra­di­tion­al, but bio­log­i­cal­ly naive, ideas of race and eth­nic­i­ty, had a tremen­dous influ­ence, not only on his­to­ri­ans, but on pop­u­lar culture.

How­ev­er, Gimbu­tas’ con­cepts always encoun­tered skep­tics and crit­ics, and in the 1980’s, their crit­i­cisms were syn­the­sized by the British archae­ol­o­gist Col­in Ren­frew. Renfrew’s opin­ions con­tra­dict almost every ele­ment of Gimbu­tas’ imag­ined Neolith­ic. He believes that the Indo-Euro­pean lan­guages orig­i­nat­ed in the Mid­dle East, in cen­tral Ana­to­lia, among the peo­ple who first domes­ti­cat­ed plants and ani­mals. The spread of agri­cul­ture and the spread of Indo-Euro­pean lan­guages were, he believes, effec­tive­ly con­gru­ent. His argu­ment is that farm­ing, even of the most prim­i­tive kind, would auto­mat­i­cal­ly sup­port an over­whelm­ing­ly denser pop­u­la­tion, and that what­ev­er hunter-gath­er­ing soci­eties exist­ed before the arrival of farm­ers would have been rapid­ly out­num­bered and dis­placed. Only a hand­ful of “native peo­ple”, who were astute enough to adopt agri­cul­ture before they were dis­placed, man­aged to pre­serve their non-Indo-Euro­pean lan­guages, account­ing for the sur­vival of the Basques today. Inva­sions and con­quests by a lat­er Kur­gan cul­ture across the huge area from West­ern Europe to Ben­gal, Ren­frew dis­miss­es as a fan­ta­sy. From the 1980’s onward, Ren­frew and his fol­low­ers picked apart the incon­sis­ten­cies and ques­tioned the archae­o­log­i­cal and lin­guis­tic evi­dence for Gimbutas’s the­sis. They were large­ly suc­cess­ful in doing so, and cur­rent­ly, a mod­el that basi­cal­ly reflects Renfrew’s views dom­i­nates. It is wide­ly held with­in the broad­er frame­work of what is usu­al­ly called “Proces­su­al Archae­ol­o­gy”, In recent years, there has been a lot of archae­o­log­i­cal writ­ing which has either described itself or been labeled as “Post-Proces­su­al”, but none of it seems to address the ques­tions under con­sid­er­a­tion here (and it is some­times dif­fi­cult to deter­mine exact­ly what ques­tions it address­es — it seems to con­sist most­ly of vague­ly asso­ci­at­ing archae­o­log­i­cal sites or arti­facts with para­graphs of inchoate, and some­times com­plete­ly mean­ing­less jar­gon lift­ed from out­mod­ed and inane French philo­soph­i­cal fash­ions of the 1970’s, much in the same way that you find fad­ed Mot­ley Crue t–shirts on the backs of Brazil­ian favel­la children.)

My prob­lem with this con­sen­sus is not with its basic ele­ments, but with the way it has been applied. I think that some unex­am­ined “bag­gage” has accom­pa­nied the devel­op­ment of the new con­sen­sus, in much the same way that the old one car­ried along dubi­ous notions that were not reflect­ed in the evidence.

Since the old con­sen­sus pic­tured exten­sive migra­tions of war­rior aris­to­crats sweep­ing across the Neolith­ic world, the new con­sen­sus react­ed by empha­siz­ing sta­t­ic pop­u­la­tions. They pic­tured a “wave-front” of agri­cul­ture mov­ing out of Ana­to­lia, over­tak­ing the world of hunter-gath­er­ers bit by bit. Great care was tak­en to pic­ture as lit­tle phys­i­cal move­ment of peo­ple as pos­si­ble. Each farm­ing fam­i­ly would sim­ply grow, and its chil­dren would clear and farm adja­cent land. By a sort of ran­dom, brown­ian motion, the farmed ter­ri­to­ry would grad­u­al­ly expand. It would not be nec­es­sary for any­one to have moved more than a few kilo­me­ters from where they were born. The abo­rig­i­nal pop­u­la­tion of hunter-gath­er­ers would be grad­u­al­ly dis­placed, and would have played no sig­nif­i­cant role in this process. Under­ly­ing this vision are sev­er­al pre­sump­tions, all of them as uncrit­i­cal­ly accept­ed and as dubi­ous as the pre­sump­tions that moti­vat­ed the Kur­gan school. The first is the pre­sump­tion that ancient pop­u­la­tions were essen­tial­ly sta­t­ic, and that nobody knew or was aware of any­thing or any­one very far from where they lived. The sec­ond is that peo­ple rarely trav­eled any great dis­tances. The third is that there is a neat evo­lu­tion­ary pro­gres­sion of soci­eties from “sim­ple” to “com­plex”, a pre­sump­tion that has been locked into his­tor­i­cal think­ing since the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry, with­out any coher­ent def­i­n­i­tion of either sim­plic­i­ty or com­plex­i­ty. Hunter-gath­er­er soci­eties are thought to be inher­ent­ly “sim­ple”, hence their effects must be insignif­i­cant, and their dis­place­ment by farm­ing soci­eties an inevitable des­tiny. The fourth assump­tion is that trade is an activ­i­ty which can only be asso­ci­at­ed with lat­er or more “com­plex” soci­eties; con­se­quent­ly, any archae­o­log­i­cal evi­dence of long dis­tance com­merce must be inter­pret­ed in such a way as to deny that it is real­ly trade. If there are objects found in one part of Europe that obvi­ous­ly come from anoth­er, dis­tant place, then they must have moved there in a grad­ual, uncon­scious, and undi­rect­ed process. Trade must have not real­ly been trade ─ it must have been a kind of cer­e­mo­ni­al “gift exchange”. Since some exam­ples of cer­e­mo­ni­al gift exchange can be found in every soci­ety (for exam­ple, any­one who is nice to the Chi­nese Com­mu­nist Par­ty has a good chance of get­ting a pan­da), and since there are some eth­no­log­i­cal exam­ples of prod­ucts drift­ing slow­ly in gift exchanges from tribe to tribe, in iso­lat­ed areas like the Ama­zon and Papua-New Guinea, these are tak­en as the tem­plate. All of these pre­sump­tions, tak­en togeth­er, fit into a world view of peo­ple behav­ing as uncon­scious automa­tons in an “evo­lu­tion­ary” mod­el of neat stages and sta­t­ic populations.

My crit­i­cism is based on the fact that we have, in North Amer­i­ca, well-doc­u­ment­ed and under­stood exam­ples of peo­ple oper­at­ing in a world in which neolith­ic-style agri­cul­ture, hunt­ing and gath­er­ing, and nomadic war­riors inter­act­ed. We know exact­ly how trade oper­at­ed among these peo­ple, and exact­ly how goods trav­eled from one place to anoth­er, and have a good pic­ture of how pop­u­la­tions moved. We know these things because, in many cas­es, we have unbro­ken cul­tur­al tra­di­tions, and cen­turies of eye-wit­ness descrip­tions, to go along with the archae­o­log­i­cal evi­dence. In many cas­es, we can actu­al­ly go and talk to peo­ple who have prac­ticed neolith­ic agri­cul­ture, were once mount­ed war­riors, or who still prac­tice a hunter-gath­er­ing life-style. And the pic­ture pre­sent­ed by all this evi­dence is very unlike the pic­ture of Euro­pean pre­his­to­ry held by the cur­rent consensus.

Now, nobody can prove that the cus­toms and economies of North Amer­i­can Indi­an soci­eties are sim­i­lar to those of Neolith­ic Euro­peans, but it cer­tain­ly seems log­i­cal that our knowl­edge of them should inform our choic­es when we make spec­u­la­tive recon­struc­tions of the latter.

I wrote ear­li­er about the exten­sive mobil­i­ty and trade of the tra­di­tion­al cul­ture of the Hudson’s Bay region. Now I would like to take a look at a soci­ety which offers obvi­ous par­al­lels to ear­ly farm­ing soci­eties in Europe.

Along the Upper Mis­souri riv­er, in North and South Dako­ta, there exist­ed, for rough­ly a thou­sand years, a string of agri­cul­tur­al vil­lages. The Man­dan, Hidat­sa, and Arikara peo­ples inhab­it­ed the area, which was a fer­tile riv­er val­ley cross­ing the open prairies. The sur­round­ing prairies were inhab­it­ed by nomadic, non-agri­cul­tur­al tribes. Archae­o­log­i­cal evi­dence sug­gests that the Man­dans estab­lished them­selves there some­time before the ninth cen­tu­ry AD, and had migrat­ed west­wards from pre­vi­ous cen­ters in Iowa and Min­neso­ta, and that they are his­tor­i­cal­ly con­nect­ed with agri­cul­tur­al pop­u­la­tions fur­ther east. The Man­dan were lat­er joined by lin­guis­ti­cal­ly relat­ed Hidat­sa peo­ple, and the two groups have influ­enced each oth­ers’ mate­r­i­al cul­tures in such a way as to make it dif­fi­cult to untan­gle them, though they remained polit­i­cal­ly inde­pen­dent from each oth­er. The Man­dan have explic­it tra­di­tions of teach­ing the Hidat­sa how to farm, and the Hidat­sa tra­di­tions con­cur with this. Con­verse­ly, the Man­dan assert that they were taught how to hunt Buf­fa­lo after they arrived in the Dako­tas. The Ariki­ra were an agri­cul­tur­al peo­ple with roots in the south­ern Mis­sis­sip­pi val­ley, who migrat­ed north­ward along the Mis­souri until they encoun­tered the Man­dan and Hidat­sa. They also came to share many ele­ments of their mate­r­i­al cul­ture with the oth­er two, and also remained polit­i­cal­ly inde­pen­dent. They belong to an unre­lat­ed lin­guis­tic family.

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Hidat­sa vil­lage on the Knife Riv­er , George Catlin, 1832

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Man­dan Bull-Boats at Matooton­ha, Karl Bod­mer, 1834

At the height of their pros­per­i­ty, in the late 16th and ear­ly 17th cen­turies, these three peo­ples num­bered about 25,000 in sub­stan­tial vil­lages, some bet­ter described as towns, with sol­id, spa­cious hous­es, cer­e­mo­ni­al build­ings and plazas, pro­tect­ed by sub­stan­tial wood­en pal­isades. Though their farm­ing was inten­sive, and they pro­duced an agri­cul­tur­al sur­plus, they hunt­ed buf­fa­lo and wild game on the adja­cent prairies, and fished for stur­geon and cat­fish in the riv­er and its branch­es. They also for­aged and hunt­ed for a wide vari­ety of del­i­ca­cies and raw mate­ri­als that could be found in the rich riv­er ecosys­tem. They close­ly mon­i­tored and man­aged sources of crit­i­cal­ly essen­tial tim­ber. Agri­cul­ture, and the con­struc­tion of hous­es and for­ti­fi­ca­tions was tra­di­tion­al­ly under­tak­en and man­aged by women. War and hunt­ing were the prin­ci­ple province of men, though there was some flu­id­i­ty and over­lap in these roles. There were no kings or aris­toc­ra­cy. Each town or vil­lage was self-gov­ern­ing, through a vari­ety of coun­cils. Polit­i­cal pow­er was dif­fused into spe­cial­ized offices, with no indi­vid­ual or fac­tion exer­cis­ing pow­er out­side of its spe­cial func­tion. Some clans claimed pre­em­i­nence through inher­it­ed “sacred bun­dles”, which con­ferred author­i­ty and pres­tige in dis­tinct areas, but oth­er, pow­er­ful bun­dles could be pur­chased, and indi­vid­u­als from low-pres­tige clans could climb to posi­tions of author­i­ty. War­fare, more often than not, was divorced from estab­lished priv­i­lege, as young men with­out wealth or influ­ence often stirred up trou­ble in the hope of gain­ing influ­ence as war­riors. The matri­lin­eal, exog­a­mous Clans, which exer­cised con­sid­er­able social con­trol, also cared for the old and des­ti­tute. They also made lat­er­al loy­al­ties between vil­lages, and even between tribes, But young men were edu­cat­ed by their fathers’ clans. Age-grade soci­eties cut across clan lines and were entered by pur­chase. These were repos­i­to­ries of cer­e­mo­ni­al tra­di­tions, arts, and tech­ni­cal skills. The best descrip­tion of Upper Mis­souri vil­lage polit­i­cal orga­ni­za­tion would be a dif­fuse, mul­ti-lay­ered con­cil­iar pol­i­tics heav­i­ly influ­enced by an unsta­ble oli­garchy. Above the vil­lage lev­el, polit­i­cal alliances some­times fol­lowed eth­no-lin­guis­tic lines, and some­times did not. The preva­lence of war­fare seri­ous enough to mer­it expen­sive for­ti­fi­ca­tion did not, ipso fac­to, imply that any war­rior aris­toc­ra­cy was in charge, as archae­ol­o­gists often pre­sume in an Old World setting.

We have detailed descrip­tions of the first con­tact with Euro­peans from the jour­nals of the Cana­di­an explor­er La Vérendrye and his par­ty. Since La Vérendrye was pri­mar­i­ly inter­est­ed in trade, we have a good pic­ture of the eco­nom­ics of the region from long before any sub­stan­tial inter­ac­tions with Euro­peans. For the next cen­tu­ry, only a trick­le of sim­i­lar vis­i­tors arrived, and the only notable Euro­pean influ­ence was the incor­po­ra­tion of some Euro­pean prod­ucts into their already exten­sive sys­tem of trade.

This sys­tem of trade is what is impor­tant to look at close­ly. It long pre­dates any Euro­pean influ­ence, is entire­ly autochto­nous in ori­gin, and was not a man­i­fes­ta­tion of cer­e­mo­ni­al gift exchanges or of acci­den­tal, unplanned, or uncon­scious prac­tices. Farm­land was owned by vil­lage women in indi­vid­ual plots. The aver­age plot pro­duced a sub­stan­tial sur­plus, and each woman, after feed­ing her fam­i­ly, processed the crops, chiefly corn and a vari­ety of squash­es, into store-able dried forms, and kept them in indi­vid­u­al­ly owned stor­age caches. The prod­ucts of fish­ing, hunt­ing, and gath­er­ing were sim­i­lar­ly processed to make both fresh, and store-able pre­served jerkies, pem­mi­cans, and can­dies. The food sur­plus from all these activ­i­ties was sub­stan­tial, and there was also a wide range of craft pro­duc­tion, includ­ing excel­lent pot­tery, cop­per-ware, bas­ketry, fine leathers, farm tools, toys, musi­cal instru­ments, domes­tic appli­ances, and dec­o­ra­tive objects. This, too, was under­tak­en on a scale that con­sid­er­ably exceed­ed local needs.

This is because the Three Asso­ci­at­ed Tribes were the region’s pre­em­i­nent mer­chant-traders. It is per­fect­ly clear that this trade was not a mere cer­e­mo­ni­al “gift exchange” net­work, nor was it based on pres­tige items or trin­kets. What­ev­er lux­u­ry or pres­tige goods were exchanged, they were mere side-effects of a large-scale trade in mun­dane goods, start­ing with agri­cul­tur­al sta­ples. Accord­ing to numer­ous first-hand accounts, “vast quan­ti­ties” of food prod­ucts were trad­ed. Both food and non-food prod­ucts were often man­u­fac­tured from raw mate­ri­als pur­chased from oth­er tribes, then resold to third par­ties. For exam­ple, west­ern hunt­ing tribes sold hides for dried corn and squash, and the vil­lagers turned them into high-qual­i­ty leather goods to sell to tribes in the East. Sales took place at reg­u­lar­ly sched­uled trade fairs, orga­nized by the vil­lages, at which indi­vid­u­als sold their stocks. Vis­i­tors came from hun­dreds of kilo­me­ters away to buy and sell at these fairs.

The vil­lages of the Upper Mis­souri were at the heart of a com­plex net­work of orga­nized com­merce that encom­passed two con­cen­tric areas. The first area was one of direct trade. This was the zone were buy­ers and sell­ers trav­eled to engage in sin­gle exchanges. This zone was approx­i­mate­ly the size of Eng­land. A larg­er zone sur­round­ed this, in which trade goods moved by two or three “jumps” until they reached the Three Asso­ci­at­ed Tribes. This area was the size of West­ern Europe. There is no evi­dence that any sub­stan­tial amount of trade goods trav­eled in a crawl­ing, incre­men­tal fash­ion from one vil­lage or group to anoth­er over short dis­tances. This is illus­trat­ed by the endur­ing mer­can­tile con­nec­tion between the Upper Mis­souri, and the low­er Colum­bia Riv­er. The Crow peo­ple were close­ly relat­ed to the Hidat­sa. They had accom­pa­nied them in their migra­tion from Min­neso­ta, but had not, accord­ing to tra­di­tion, adopt­ed farm­ing. Instead, they ranged the plains to the south­west, and main­tained a spe­cial rela­tion­ship with the Hidat­sa, car­ry­ing goods back and forth to the renowned Shoshone Ren­dezvous, sev­en hun­dred kilo­me­ters to the south­west, near present-day Green Riv­er, Wyoming. There, they met Nez Per­cé, Ute, and Flat­head traders, who car­ried goods to The Dalles, in Ore­gon, anoth­er six hun­dred kilo­me­ters to the west (1,600 km by riv­er). As the Upper Mis­souri vil­lages were the great entre­pot of the High Plains, The Dalles per­formed the same func­tion in the North­west, and on a greater scale. Ini­tial­ly, its attrac­tion was as the most pro­duc­tive salmon fish­ery of the whole Colum­bia basin. Thou­sands gath­ered there, in the fish­ing sea­son, not just to fish, but to trade. As Eliz­a­beth Vib­ert describes it, in Traders’ Tales:

Cen­turies before Euro­peans arrived in the region, The Dalles had become the nucle­us of the North­west Coast-plateau trade sys­tem. It has been argued that in terms of the vari­ety of goods trad­ed there, the diver­si­ty of cul­tures rep­re­sent­ed, and the sheer inten­si­ty and vol­ume of trade, the place was pre­em­i­nent among Native Amer­i­can trade ren­dezvous in North Amer­i­ca. From the Great Plains came buf­fa­lo robes and oth­er buf­fa­lo prod­ucts, feath­er head­dress­es, parflech­es, and catli­n­ite (pipe­stone); from the coast, whale and seal bone and oils and orna­men­tal shells, includ­ing the prized hai­qua (den­tal­i­um); from the Great Basin, obsid­i­an and oth­er stone tools; from the Plateau, bas­ket­work, canoes, hemp, and oth­er plant mate­ri­als, pelts and hides; and from the Plateau, Great Basin, and Cal­i­for­nia, food plants like bit­te­root, camas, and wap­a­too. Goods trad­ed at The Dalles have been traced to archae­o­log­i­cal sites from Alas­ka to Cal­i­for­nia, and a thou­sand miles to the east.

To illus­trate how things worked, con­sid­er the ele­gant awl cas­es, which most Hidat­sa women car­ried on their belts to pro­tect a mun­dane, but essen­tial tool. The Hidat­sa craft­ed beau­ti­ful ones, for them­selves, and for sale to oth­ers. These were dec­o­rat­ed with den­tal­i­um shell, from the Pacif­ic coast. We can trace the steps the den­tal­i­um took to reach the Upper Mis­souri: from the Tillam­ook region­al trad­ing cen­ter at the mouth of the Colum­bia to The Dalles; from there to a sec­ondary trad­ing cen­ter at Snake Riv­er or Camas, in Ida­ho; from there to the Shoshone Ren­dezvous; from there to the Hidat­sa. The prod­uct, den­tal­i­um, was not by any stretch of the imag­i­na­tion a non-func­tion­al pres­tige arti­fact. It was a good qual­i­ty raw mate­r­i­al employed to make a high-qual­i­ty, but util­i­tar­i­an object used exclu­sive­ly by women. It was used in many oth­er crafts, by many peo­ple west of the Mis­sis­sip­pi. The trans­ac­tions nec­es­sary involved only four steps, aver­ag­ing about 700km in dis­tance. An equiv­a­lent trade net­work in ancient Europe would have stretched from the Black Sea to Britain.

Cer­e­mo­ni­al gift exchanges per­formed the same role they do in mod­ern soci­eties ─ they act­ed as social lubri­cants facil­i­tat­ing more prac­ti­cal and exten­sive com­mer­cial trans­ac­tions, or they marked polit­i­cal nego­ti­a­tions. Chiefs giv­ing out cer­e­mo­ni­al gifts had to buy them from pro­duc­ers or traders, in the first place, just as a mod­ern politi­cian giv­ing gifts to a vis­it­ing politi­cian has to buy them from the nor­mal econ­o­my. Gift exchanges were depen­dent on the com­mer­cial econ­o­my, so they could not be the econ­o­my. Nor­mal com­merce was not man­aged by kings or war-lead­ers. There were no kings. Trade was planned and direct­ed by indi­vid­ual entre­pre­neurs (often women) and by com­mit­tees and coun­cils con­vened for the task. Until the advent of the horse, war-lead­ers, no mat­ter how emi­nent, did not direct trade. They bought its prod­ucts, like every­one else. How­ev­er, the arrival of hors­es brought to promi­nence a com­mod­i­ty that could be aug­ment­ed as eas­i­ly by raid­ing and theft as by breed­ing and trad­ing, and were from the begin­ning owned by the hunters who dou­bled as war­riors. This pro­duced an impor­tant change in who engaged in trade, and how it was done.

It’s per­fect­ly clear that the Three Affil­i­at­ed Tribes had a good knowl­edge of large-scale geog­ra­phy, knew where prod­ucts came from even when they came through inter­me­di­aries, and under­took both eco­nom­ic and polit­i­cal strate­gies to place them­selves advan­ta­geous­ly in a con­ti­nent-wide sys­tem of trade. La Vérendrye sought out the vil­lages after hear­ing descrip­tions of them from hunt­ing peo­ples in Cana­da. At the west­ern end of Lake Supe­ri­or a Cree named Aucha­gah spon­ta­neous­ly sketched a map for him, on birch bark, that cov­ered hun­dreds of kilo­me­ters. It was no dif­fer­ent in con­cep­tion, tech­nique, or assump­tions of sig­nif­i­cance than with any map that a Euro­pean would have spon­ta­neous­ly sketched under sim­i­lar cir­cum­stances. The Man­dans and oth­er plains peo­ples made ele­gant maps drawn on cured buf­fa­lo hide that showed riv­er sys­tems in accu­rate detail, of which we have sur­viv­ing exam­ples. The Man­dan coun­cils imme­di­ate­ly under­took nego­ti­a­tions to estab­lish a direct trade with the Cana­di­ans and employed a sub­tle sub­terfuge to pre­vent Black­foot traders from gain­ing a foothold as middlemen.

When I look at this kind of large-scale trade net­work, what strikes me most dra­mat­i­cal­ly is that seden­tary agri­cul­tur­al peo­ple, prairie nomads, fish­er­men, and iso­lat­ed bands of hunters all par­tic­i­pat­ed in the trade net­work on an equal basis, and trade was of eco­nom­ic impor­tance to all of them. Peo­ple could not, in fact, be auto­mat­i­cal­ly pegged to a spe­cif­ic cat­e­go­ry, and there is no evi­dence that par­tic­u­lar modes of pro­duc­tion con­sti­tut­ed a fixed evo­lu­tion­ary sequence, or dis­tinct “lev­els”. Peo­ple who lived as mobile hunters in Michi­gan also oper­at­ed large-scale cop­per mines that sup­plied cus­tomers as far away as Mex­i­co. Oth­er “nomadic” peo­ple set up large per­ma­nent fish weirs in order to sell the prod­ucts to dis­tant farm­ing vil­lages, though thy could eas­i­ly have lived com­fort­ably off of hunt­ing in their area. This did not in any way alter their self-iden­ti­fi­ca­tion with lin­guis­tic and cul­tur­al rela­tions who did not do this. All these intri­cate vari­a­tions lead me to con­clude that the trade-net­works long pre­date agri­cul­ture, and that agri­cul­tur­al vil­lages expand­ed into areas, like the Upper Mis­souri, already well-known through trade and trav­el. The sites of Man­dan vil­lages were select­ed, I believe, because they were already known to be pro­duc­tive cen­ters of fish­ing, har­vest­ing wild prairie turnips, berry pick­ing, and good places to dri­ve herds of buf­fa­lo over bluffs. North America’s net­work of rivers was an effec­tive sys­tem of high­ways that could car­ry goods and peo­ple swift­ly over long dis­tances, and this net­work was as famil­iar to every­one as Eng­lish peo­ple are now famil­iar with the M4 and M6. Sig­nif­i­cant gaps between agri­cul­tur­al regions along the Mis­souri, as well as clear tra­di­tions of migra­tion (the three Tribes each arrived from dif­fer­ent direc­tions) demon­strate that a slow-mov­ing “wave-front” of agri­cul­ture was not how agri­cul­ture spread, at least in this part of the world. All the evi­dence points to agri­cul­ture being a prac­tice that took advan­tage of an already exten­sive trade and trans­port net­work to estab­lish itself at strate­gic nodes, which were already sig­nif­i­cant for fish­ing, spe­cial­ized hunt­ing, as pre-agri­cul­tur­al trad­ing places, or for the avail­abil­i­ty of spe­cial­ty prod­ucts. The Three Tribes were as much con­cerned with the avail­abil­i­ty of suit­able con­struc­tion tim­ber as they were with the fer­til­i­ty of the soil, when they placed or moved their vil­lages, and it is not acci­den­tal that a major move cre­at­ed a new vil­lage called Like-a-Fishhook.

The scale, com­plex­i­ty, and eco­nom­ic impor­tance of long-dis­tance trade net­works has long been famil­iar stuff among New World archae­ol­o­gists, but some­how, this has had only reluc­tant, and deval­ued influ­ence on the the­o­ret­i­cal frame­work of Euro­pean pre­his­to­ry. There, old habits that regard com­merce as igno­ble, trav­el as unnat­ur­al, pre-ordained stages as the essence of his­to­ry, and hier­ar­chy as the pre­ferred order­ing prin­ci­ple of soci­ety still shape atti­tudes toward the past. Such ideas, of course, influ­ence New World archae­ol­o­gists and his­to­ri­ans as well, but appar­ent­ly not quite so rigidly.

So, what do these exam­ples from North Amer­i­ca, where we have some secure knowl­edge of social sys­tems and economies, have to say to us when we con­tem­plate Neolith­ic Europe, where we have none? They can tell us noth­ing for cer­tain, but they can give us a good idea of what was pos­si­ble, and even what was most likely.

08-03-07 BLOG Friday, March 7, 2008 - I Called the New World to Redress the Balance of the Old 5What seems most like­ly to me is that agri­cul­ture spread through Europe by plug­ging itself into an already-exist­ing net­work of trade and trav­el. It would have involved indi­vid­u­als and small tribes, or clans, mov­ing sig­nif­i­cant dis­tances, usu­al­ly along rivers, but occa­sion­al­ly jump­ing from one riv­er sys­tem to anoth­er. Agri­cul­tur­al vil­lages would have appeared at loca­tions already eco­nom­i­cal­ly sig­nif­i­cant as fish­ing & gath­er­ing set­tle­ments, or strate­gic trad­ing places. Agri­cul­ture would not have expand­ed as a self-con­tained sub­sis­tence strat­e­gy, but as part of a wide­spread “mar­ket sys­tem”, pro­duc­ing goods for exchange in a pat­tern that already exist­ed for fish and game prod­ucts, and for com­modi­ties such as furs, amber, and flint, and man­u­fac­tured goods such as axes and knives. It would not have advanced in a “wave-front”, by the process of slow­ly adding farms to tbe edges of a uni­form block of agrar­i­an cul­ture, as envi­sioned by Ren­frew, but by inten­si­fy­ing nodal points in a web-like net­work that pre­dat­ed the tech­nol­o­gy. Rivers, not land, would have been the crit­i­cal fac­tor, and fish­er­men and fish­ing set­tle­ments along these rivers would have played a sig­nif­i­cant role. Notice that, in the North Amer­i­can par­al­lel I con­tem­plate, the largest trad­ing empo­ri­um, The Dalles, was first and fore­most a fish­ing cen­ter, from which trade radi­at­ed via a net­work of rivers. In this region, sophis­ti­cat­ed trade net­works clear­ly pre­ced­ed agri­cul­ture, because it was still not agri­cul­tur­al at the time of Euro­pean con­tact. Fur­ther north, along the British Colum­bia coast, vil­lages exist­ed with elab­o­rate­ly ranked aris­toc­ra­cies, com­mon­ers, and slaves, but with­out agri­cul­ture, con­tra­dict­ing neat schemes of cul­tur­al evo­lu­tion. Plateau peo­ples, just as pro­duc­tive and indus­tri­ous, were even more egal­i­tar­i­an than the peo­ple of the plains. Their domes­tic and com­mer­cial man­age­ment of fish­eries, more than 350 species of plants, and dozens of kinds of hunt­ing, in a social frame­work where most peo­ple were mul­ti-lin­gual, loy­al to mul­ti­ple groups and local­i­ties, and put togeth­er co-oper­a­tive enter­pris­es involv­ing hun­dreds of peo­ple at a time, can hard­ly be called “sim­ple” with a straight face. Their econ­o­my was as com­plex as any farm­ing soci­ety’s. Most notions of “sim­plic­i­ty” and “com­plex­i­ty”, and of “cul­tur­al evo­lu­tion” are dubi­ous in the extreme, reflect­ing uncon­scious prej­u­dices and a lack of curios­i­ty about how peo­ple do things if they aren’t famil­iar to one’s own experience.

I also sus­pect that the pre-emi­nence of Indo-Euro­pean dialects as trad­ing lan­guages may have played as much a role in their spread as agri­cul­ture, and would account for the rel­a­tive­ly mod­est degree of diver­gence they dis­play. If Indo-Euro­pean speak­ing farm­ers had been as immo­bile as cur­rent the­o­ry sug­gests, then after five thou­sand years of pres­ence in Europe, there should have been con­sid­er­ably more diver­gence than there is. By 1000 BC, the speech of peas­ant com­mu­ni­ties should have been mutu­al­ly unin­tel­li­gi­ble every fifty kilo­me­ters from each oth­er, the kind of sit­u­a­tion you have in New Guinea. But if Indo-Euro­pean dialects had become lin­gua-fran­ca along well-fre­quent­ed trade routes, then their actu­al degree of diver­gence makes sense.

08-03-07 BLOG Friday, March 7, 2008 - I Called the New World to Redress the Balance of the Old 4With­in this frame­work, it is much eas­i­er to under­stand the com­plex pre-agri­cul­tur­al set­tle­ments like the one recent­ly stud­ied at Argus Bank, in Den­mark, where inshore fish­ing with weirs, deep-sea fish­ing in boats, riv­er fish­ing, and hunt­ing sup­port­ed a sub­stan­tial pop­u­la­tion. Ear­ly farm­ers would have been attract­ed to such places, because they pro­vid­ed a sol­vent mar­ket for sur­plus agri­cul­tur­al prod­ucts, and a wide range of use­ful non-agri­cul­tur­al prod­ucts to buy with that sur­plus, just as the Man­dan and Hidat­sa grew corn and squash where it could be trad­ed for the prod­ucts of the prairie. It is this kind of dynam­ic syn­er­gy that would cre­ate an expan­sion of pop­u­la­tion and vil­lage life, not self-con­tained sub­sis­tence farm­ing. It is already under­stood that nomadic pas­toral­ism evolved in sym­bio­sis with set­tled agri­cul­ture, and could not have exist­ed with­out an agri­cul­tur­al base. I think that we will see that agri­cul­ture devel­oped and expand­ed in sym­bio­sis with fish­ing and hunt­ing, in a sim­i­lar way.

This also makes for a much more sen­si­ble inter­pre­ta­tion of the pat­tern of goods from dis­tant sources found every­where in Euro­pean archae­o­log­i­cal sites, and of the mines and pro­duc­tion cen­ters that we know pro­duced far more com­modi­ties than could pos­si­bly have spread by short-dis­tance gift exchanges, no mat­ter how per­va­sive. You do not dig up hun­dreds of tons of native cop­per so that it can trick­le away from you in gift exchanges over the next few cen­turies; you do it because there is a large pay­ing mar­ket for cop­per. Any pre­his­toric mine that depend­ed on grad­ual dif­fu­sion of its prod­ucts through its imme­di­ate neigh­bour­ing peo­ple could not long func­tion. It would sat­u­rate the local mar­ket, then cease to exist. The exis­tence of these mines implies the exis­tence of reg­u­lar, long dis­tance trade, along rivers, with con­stant pres­sure to reduce the num­ber of middlemen.

Any­way, that’s how I pic­ture things hap­pen­ing in Neolith­ic Europe. It is not a con­tra­dic­tion of the basics of cur­rent the­o­ry, but it seems to me to elim­i­nate some ele­ments of it that have not been thought through judi­cious­ly. I will lay bets that, ten years from now, it will be the con­sen­sus, not because I have had any influ­ence, but because fur­ther arche­ol­o­gy will make it obvious.

Anoth­er ele­ment of New World his­to­ry is worth call­ing atten­tion to, when dis­cussing Euro­pean prehistory:

One of the most dra­mat­ic changes in Native North Amer­i­can soci­ety was the intro­duc­tion of the horse. I find it fas­ci­nat­ing to read dis­cus­sions of how many cen­turies or thou­sands of years it must have tak­en to domes­ti­cate the horse, and to spread it’s use in the old world. Some of the spec­u­la­tions and con­clu­sions seem very odd to me.

The horse first appeared north of the Rio Grande when Span­ish sol­diers sub­dued some of the Pueblo Indi­an vil­lages in what is now New Mex­i­co. By the 1650’s, the Span­ish were main­tain­ing large herds near San­ta Fe and Taos. While the Span­ish for­bade local Indi­ans from own­ing or rid­ing hors­es, some Ute and Comanche pris­on­ers, enslaved by the Span­ish, learned how to ride them. When the Pueblo peo­ples tem­porar­i­ly drove out the Span­ish, in the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, they had lit­tle inter­est in the ani­mals, but the Ute and Comanche pris­on­ers hap­pi­ly stole them and began to raise them. With­in twen­ty years, they had devel­oped spe­cial breeds capa­ble of run­ning along­side buf­fa­lo with­out fear. By 1700, they were sell­ing sur­plus hors­es to the Shoshone, the Kiowa and oth­er neigh­bour­ing tribes. By 1740, they were mak­ing reg­u­lar roundups and sales trips to the Man­dan-Hidat­sa trade fairs. By 1770 hors­es were part of an intri­cate net­work of breed­ing and mar­ket­ing as far north as Alber­ta and almost every­where west of the Mis­sis­sip­pi that had ter­rain that could sup­port them. By the end of the 18th cen­tu­ry, there were numer­ous plains tribes who were so strong­ly iden­ti­fied with hors­es and horse­man­ship that almost every aspect of their lifestyle and mate­r­i­al cul­ture reflect­ed it. Among Plains peo­ples, hors­es were always indi­vid­u­al­ly owned, though they were often bor­rowed, or rented.

Yet these facts seem to have had lit­tle influ­ence on inter­pret­ing the evi­dence for the domes­ti­ca­tion of the horse in the Old World, or in how it is thought to have been used, or how it is thought to have spread. The impres­sion is giv­en that the ancient peo­ples of the Old World, unlike those of the New World, were pret­ty dumb. They domes­ti­cat­ed the horse, and just sort of let it hang around for cen­turies before mak­ing it pull a wag­on, then spent anoth­er thou­sand years before think­ing of rid­ing it, and so on. Per­haps the archae­o­log­i­cal evi­dence sup­ports this. I don’t know. I’m not qual­i­fied to judge. But if it does, isn’t it just a lit­tle bit embarrassing?

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