Understanding the Agricultural Revolution

Good morning everyone. Welcome back to History 151. And we are finishing off the topic section in this timetable that refers to the question, What was it like being a food gatherer involved in what Smith and her colleagues call the peopling of the world? And so today the focus really is on the section of chapter one people in the world that deals with the agricultural revolution as i've called it before or evolution or development and the two subsidiary readings that you had assigned for today to secondary sources as well the Kaplan and the Solins or I should say Solins and Kaplan in that order that I asked you to read for today and the lines of inquiry we can develop to investigate specific questions and the specific question that I'd like to tackle today is really this issue of the agricultural change the discovery or as Smith refers to it on page 23 the invention of agriculture So what makes agriculture, or what I should say in the past tense, what made agriculture a change that humans experienced in particular ways? Now that's a huge question. Smith begins to tackle it in terms of the classic questions that we pose as scholars, right? We want to know, what was this agricultural invention? Because it's not self-explanatory, necessarily. And we're going to discuss how, in some ways, in fact, agriculture was a development of pre-existing tools of food gathering. So, you know, the what. What was this? Obviously, the second thing, when. And where? And when, of course, being the key question historians ask, right? When did this happen? Where did it happen? And I have some observations to make, some glosses or explanations on Smith's narrative of the where, because it's sometimes easy to fall into commonsensical... nonsensical interpretations of the link between where something happens and who this is happening to or with or through I'll get back to this okay so the what the when the where the who And we need to spend time thinking about the who, because in fact it turns out that, as Smith argued in chapter one, not everybody experienced this invention of agriculture, and even those who did sometimes chose not to pursue it. So the who is an interesting question, right? And who will get us to the debate, the scholarly conversation, and it is an acrimonious debate at times, between those who have followed... Salins interpretation of hunter-gatherer life and those who have followed Kaplan's interpretation of that same life seen from very different analytical perspectives. And then we've already gestured to the why, but we want to spend a bit more time concerning this, right? Why pursue agriculture? It's not a self-explanatory development. That is, lots of reasons could be adduced, and Smith gives you some. I think Kaplan and Sullins give you an even greater body of plausible explanation for why one would engage in agriculture and perhaps why one would not. Finally, from time to time, I mention scholarship or evidence that is not in the timetable. I will bring in maps occasionally. I'll bring in a video clip, as I've done before. We're going to start the class today with a video clip. But I'm also going to gesture to an article, a very, very good peer-reviewed article that actually was published by the University of Hawaii Press. I'm going to bring it into our discussion today. You're not required to read it. It's not posted anywhere. But obviously, some of you might be interested in pursuing that. further on in your careers as historians or just for personal interest and I'll give you the information, the bibliographic information for that. Okay, so where do we begin today's analysis of agriculture, the prehistoric or Neolithic history of agriculture? As I mentioned at the end of the last class, we begin in a place that is to be found today in Turkey, Çatalhöyük in Turkey. This is one of the earliest... sedentary towns we have archaeological evidence for. Now there's some others that date back to roughly the same period in Asia and you know we could choose them but the reason we choose Çatalhöyük is because a you have the greatest amount of evidence for it in your reading in Smith and b you have the greatest depth of analysis in Smith's interpretation of the importance of Çatalhöyük. But how is it related to agriculture? Obviously this is a place where agriculture was practiced, and it was practiced ten thousand years ago. In fact, almost closer to 11,000 years ago. Every time the archaeologists go back to the site of Çatalhöyük, they discover more evidence that requires they revise their previous interpretation. So it's an exciting part of historical investigation here. But as we were at pains to explore in the last set of lectures, you know, the unwritten past is difficult to explain. And in order to explain it, in order to pick up a piece of a stone, that's being chipped at, or to look at those fantastic paintings that we have in caves and also at Çatalhöyük and elsewhere. We need to draw in the expertise, the insights of other disciplines, sociology, art history psychology climatology etc etc so one way of bringing it together is to ask specific questions that alert us to plausible interpretations and that's where this video click i'm going to show might be useful today it is part of Oxford University Press's body of video clips that can be used to explore the historical significance that Smith and her colleagues begin to narrate in their chapter for you. Okay, so without further ado, I'll let the documentary filmmakers take over. This is a very short clip. Unfortunately, due to technical difficulties, we've not been able to include the documentary film clip in this recorded lecture. So please follow the instructions that came along with the Laulima link announcement for this particular lecture. Watch the documentary film clip. It's about six minutes long now. And when you're done, return to watch the end of the lecture. All right, so a couple of observations to make and then we'll delve deeper into the evidence for the agricultural revolution or development. One, obviously, what you're seeing is a documentary. film in which we have recreations based on the archaeological evidence of Çatalhöyük, right? So that's obviously self-explanatory. But there's good documentary films and there's bad documentary films. And so when I show a clip in the class, it's because it's gone through a certain degree of peer review. That is, it's gone through that process of the modus operandi of historians that we've discussed. So there's lots of stuff available on the web that recreates prehistoric societies for us that is very, very poorly documented and peer reviewed. And I can remember at one point in my own specialized fields of research being asked to participate in a document. film on the history of piracy, origins of piracy, and I'm lucky that I made the right choice. One of my colleagues in the same field made the wrong choice and I won't mention which documentary film it is now, but he's been embarrassed for years now that his voice was incorporated into this particular documentary film. So I will alert you to significant errors or problems in any of the documentary films that I'll show in the class. This one had no None, to my knowledge. It's a very good recreation based on the best available reconstructions of the archaeological evidence concerning Çatalhöyük. All right, so that's the first observation. The second observation is something that I hope most of you have noticed is a common theme between the previous lecture and this lecture. I was gesturing towards the interpretive challenge of what historians do with the changes we can observe in the evidence between, you know, early lithic technologies, stone tools, and neolithic, new stone age tools. Obviously, there's a change, right? We have a couple of examples that I focused on in the lecture. But what do we do with that change? Do we call it improvement? Do we call it progress? What do we call it? And if we do that, can we do it in such a way that we avoid erroneous interpretations of history as some kind of inevitable progress to better and better? better lives and better and better worlds. And of course that little documentary clip ends with the word progress, right? Progress or progress. And it should raise questions in your minds that are tied to the methodological issues that we've been exploring in the course so far. What do we as historians use the term progress to refer to? And obviously it wasn't progress if one takes the perspective of disease avoidance. The hunter-gatherer bands, the small hunter-gatherer bands that characterized most of our hominin history over the course of 3,880,000 years, most of those bands avoided the kinds of intense diseases associated with close living environments or habitats with animals, which of course sedentary agriculture and the domestication of animals produced as the film explored and as Smith chapter one explores, right? So in some ways that's not progress at a kind of general level when we as humans expose ourselves to those diseases. So it's just as important in this course to be able to ask good questions as it is to be able to offer good answers. based on good evidence. So what does Smith mean by progress? What does this film clip mean by progress? That's something to explore in your discussion labs in terms of the evidence we have at our disposal in the course. So let's talk more about the agricultural changes. So there's a very useful map on pages 26 and 27, the origins of agriculture. And you can see there the main points at which that happens. This is part of the where. So what today essentially is the People's Republic of China is a focal point for the development of agriculture. There's another one in what today is Iraq, Syria, Turkey, Iran, parts of Iran, etc. The Middle East or the Near East. That's a second very important focus point. There's one in Mesoamerica, and it should really be defined as more than one. Smith refers to it as kind of the America, but I mean the most important in some ways is this one in Mesoamerica subsidiary one here and the Andean region Although it's turned out in world history to have been probably one of the most significant significant points of the domestication of certain plants. You'll notice here in the list of plants that were originally tamed or domesticated, brought into agriculture. Potatoes. possibly one of the most important items for nutrition in the world in the last 500 years. As well, you'll notice the chili pepper. And I'm going to highlight that although it's nutritionally perhaps not important, and, you know, many, many culinary cultures and societies around the world do not think of chili as an essential ingredient. Can you imagine South Asian cooking in the... Indian cooking, Thai cooking without chili peppers, without that big and the hotness of chili peppers, it's impossible to imagine. And in fact, if you asked somebody in Singapore or in Mumbai, you know, could you imagine your food without that hot, spicy ingredient? They would say, no, it's always been with us. It's part of Indian cooking or Thai cooking or Singaporean cooking. So. The where of the agricultural revolution is very closely tied to many other things that have to do with the second part of the word agriculture. Agri is just an old Latin Roman term that means field. Field as, you know, just land. Culture. Ah, culture is literally the same word that we have been using to refer to something like the Lapita culture, which had to do with a certain type of pottery in the Pacific, right? So culture is a question more than an answer. And I stress that you should be exploring. the ways, the multiple ways in which we're using the term culture. And I'm going to explore this in a few minutes with you in terms of agriculture. All right, so the Americas in plural. And then finally this, I do not know why specifically they did not put a darker green focal point for the development of sub-Saharan African domestication of plants and animals. We have a very clear indication that it was here. in what today is west part of Nigeria, in this part of Africa, and probably a secondary area in the highlands of Ethiopia. So maybe that's why they didn't put the two darker areas focal points. So obviously important for everyone to be able to discuss the evidence we have for where this agricultural change occurred. There are two other areas to study on the map that I should have noted. But then there's another aspect to this that really does matter and it connects to the three types of history that I explained at the beginning of the course constitute world history. The first one that I'd like to mention here is comparative, comparative world history. So a comparative world history of this development of human discovery and implementation of agriculture. could explore the questions of why did it happen in one place and not in another at the same time? Why did it happen in certain points and not elsewhere? Why don't we have agricultural invention here or here or here? It could also explore how they might have been related, in which case we're getting into a kind of transliminal world history, right? And the key word to look for in chapter one of Smith is the spread. spread I did highlight one point on page 29 for example if you look towards the bottom of 20 page 29 this is the paragraph that begins once Neolithic people developed agriculture the technology spread rapidly into regions surrounding the fertile crescent etc etc and this of course is the arrows we see on this map right the spread But a little bit further down in that same paragraph, listen to what Smith says, and I'm quoting, Farmers also moved into regions of southwest Asia where rainfall was insufficient for farming. Their invention of irrigation, agriculture, made settlement possible even in the most arid zones, which really they're talking about this region through here from India to North Africa. But did you notice the shift? Did you notice the shift? The first one was about technology spread. The second one was about farmers spreading, moving. But that's not the same thing, right? Absolutely not the same thing. Did it happen always in that way? Was it always farmers taking technology with them to a new place? Which is suggested sometimes if we're caught up in the idea that somehow place and people and technology technology are all the same thing, a question that I brought up when I was discussing Lapita culture, right? Well, obviously, the answer is no, not necessarily, because after all, what's happening right now in this classroom is you're being taught, this is the theory, theory of what's happening, you're being taught by a historian lecturing and a historian leading your discussion labs, right? So there's a practice of technology transfer. And the history of technology transfer tells us one thing, and over and over again, which is that we should never, ever confuse technology transfer with the movement of peoples or persons, right? They don't necessarily happen that way. It can happen as As easily, and one of the most famous examples is from 19th century India, where technology colleges were set up by industrialists from England, from the factories in England. And once the textbooks were in place and the lesson plans were in place, we didn't need those industrial experts from England to keep coming over to India to teach the steam engine machinery, you know, building of it and the use of it anymore. We could. Just. pick up a book, a textbook, and begin to read and begin to develop, etc. So think about that issue of essentially not confusing where, with what, and with whom. Or I should say whom. And a good example of that, another example that I can point to is on page 25 of your textbook. You have a table 1.1, the rise of agriculture, and it lists regions on the left-hand side, main plant, crops and approximate dates. Notice that it could be very easily confusing to someone who is not thinking carefully here to look at the regions on the left-hand side, and the second one that's listed is China, and begin to talk about the Chinese developing agriculture and domesticating rice and millet between 8,000 and 600 BCE. But it would be an error. It would be an analytical error to jump from modern Chinese identity, whether it's linguistic, political, etc., etc., and project it back in time to 10,000 years ago. It would be an error. We need to think very carefully about what do we mean when we as scholars say this happened in China in 8,000 BCE versus this happened. amongst Chinese or Chinese developed this in 8000 BC. So that's not to say that there weren't ancestors, linguistic ancestors, cultural ancestors of modern Chinese involved in that process. But it's to become conscious of the time span. the incredible time span of difference that separates us as modern Chinese from them as ancient Chinese. And that's the point that I'm bringing here. I tried to lecture to that by pointing out that transliminal also refers to across differences in time, in period. And so there's an element of transliminal there. But obviously if we go back to this map, what we're also dealing with here is a process of globalization, right? That last category of world history, the spread of of agriculture, and it really is spread, is a globalizing process. And it's a long, long-standing one. One that in some ways is still going on today, right? The intensification of industrialized agriculture in parts of North America. parts of South America, parts of Africa, Europe, and Asia, as well as the Pacific region, Oceania. That is part and parcel of that same development. And in a long view, we could talk about the intensification of agriculture today as essentially the last part of the history of how agriculture took over from hunting and gathering. I do have a course, those of you interested in this, on the history of agriculture. of maritime contexts, world maritime contexts, in which we explore the fact that one of the ways in which hunting and gathering survives for all of us today to a great degree, even if we live in densely urban, sedentary, agriculturally dependent communities, is fish. because fishing is still essentially hunting and gathering wild resources for the use of sedentary agricultural urban peoples and the reason i bring that up is that um Smith chapter one gives you a great a great depth of evidence as to the connectedness and I'm using my hands here. I mean, I inevitably using my hands in a kind of Desmond Morris body talk way that that points me, if you want, culturally. Whatever we see happening in agricultural communities in the past is not foreign to what's happening amongst the hunter gatherers who keep hunting. and keep gathering. And that's a point I made at the end of lecture on Monday, which is we shouldn't see these as two stages of history, antagonistic or antithetical to each other, right? But rather, oftentimes, usually complementary to each other. So that we're going to come back in the next week to this issue of how hunter-gatherers and farmers coexisted in historical connections, right? So we don't want to think of this process of the spread of agriculture as sort of the supplanting of one people's by an other, but rather the complex interaction between agricultural lifestyles, if you want to use that term, and hunter-gatherer lifestyles. And we'll come back to that next week when we talk about Gilgamesh. Okay. So let's turn our attention to some of the specific evidence that takes us to the Marshall Solons and to the Kaplan reading I assigned for today as well. And you'll see on this map, as opposed to the one that you have on pages 26 and 27 of your textbook, we've got two little blue boxes. I cannot pronounce the exclamation mark in the name of these people here. The kung is a click. It's kung. I can't pronounce Bushman. Bushman is another term that arises in the scholarly literature for these Kung people and then the Aborigines or the Aboriginal persons peoples of Australia also arise in your readings today mostly in the Smith chapter one but they do pop up actually in the evidence discussed by Sullins and Kaplan so let's turn our attention to the hunter-gatherers The hunter-gatherer is in there. Let's just change that for a second here. And this is an image from your textbook on page 37. It is modern Aboriginal Australians or Australian Aborigines collecting turtle eggs. So a couple of observations before I get to how this leads us into the Salins-Kaplan debate. One of the observations to make is simply to reiterate what is... Smith's, one of Smith's key points here. It might be common sense in the sense of persons not educated in the history of prehistory and this agricultural revolution to assume that somehow it's easier, less sophisticated to be a hunter gatherer than it is to be an agriculturalist. After all, if one thinks about the details of how to turn a grass like barley or millet or wheat or rice into a vegetable, into modern food staples, yeah, there's a lot involved in there. In fact, you know, originally millet and rice, these plants, wheat and barley were just like grasses that we see growing in a field, very small. The seeds were tiny. They were hard to gather because the husk that covers the individual seed of these cereals or these grains can be too tough to eat. It can be indigestible. So a lot of technological thinking, experimentation and development and selection over time, over centuries, millennia, needed to be done in order to turn these wild grasses into the rice and the wheat and the barley and the millet that became so important to humans in this Neolithic agricultural development. So tremendously sophisticated, tremendously difficult history and a fascinating one which I would like to share with you. wish we had more time to explain. But Smith over and over again reiterates, and particularly in the last section of chapter one, that an equal sophistication was necessary to survive as hunters and gatherers. So the change from hunting and gathering to agricultural life was not one necessarily of increased sophistication, perhaps one of broadened sophistication, sophistication that had not just to do with understanding. animal lives in the wild and the processes of plant botanical changes in the wild, but also these issues of technologically manipulating the environment of the growth of grasses or the reproduction of animals, which essentially is the agricultural revolution, right? It's the level of manipulation of those natural resources that Smith explains to us. broaden the sophistication and change the type of sophistication, the quality, if you want, of that sophistication, or the object of that sophistication's manipulation of the environment. So we have a change there. But we also have potentially, as I mentioned at the end of the last class, a loss of sophistication. As I mentioned, who amongst us could go back into that Ko'olau Mountains, you know, in the middle of Oahu, and survive by hunting and gathering things that... that are there in the forest, probably not any of us at all. And so we're all, um charged by the evidence that's been analyzed by our sources with thinking carefully about this change to agriculture and and characterizing it appropriately precisely and accurately as we've discussed before okay so hunter gathers so let me let me turn our attention to uh the solins and the kaplan for for almost the entire end of the lecture today uh what do we have here in Solins and Kaplan? Well, we have a debate, a scholarly debate, and think back to the modus operandi. Scholars debate with each other, right? Just like in that image, I presented my findings at a conference and I got critiqued by the audience of my peers, and then I went back and I changed what needed to be changed, and then hopefully I got it published, which in fact I did. process means that we're going to talk a little bit about the stage of how scholarly conversations happen. So let's take a look at the Sullins and the Kaplan. And the first thing to note is within scholarship, we have a kind of micro history of the scholarly conversation. And I chose Sullins and Kaplan particularly because of how well they illustrate this. So I'm going to do a little bit of a what we call a historiographical analysis of Kaplan. So I'm going to begin with the Kaplan piece, which was published in 2000. The Solins piece was published in 1968. Well, first version, 68. The one that you're reading is 1972. So Kaplan's essay that I chose a piece from is a commentary on Solins. So Solins writing back in the 1960s, actually summarizing evidence that was. brought up in the 1950s and 60s, and then Kaplan revisiting some of that original 1950s and 60s evidence, interpreting it differently than Salins, and then writing up Kaplan's own rejection of Salins'main point or thesis. So that's the first thing to think about is scholarly conversations have their own little histories. And sometimes it's important for us to keep track of those histories. And this is that moment for you in this course, the first moment where we need to say, OK, I know that Solins comes first in 68-72 and then Kaplan second in 2000. So let's turn our attention to Solins. I'll make a few comments that will gesture to how to explore the Solins-Kaplan debate or discussion in your lab. What was the main thesis and I'm going to be using these two terms thesis and argument. Essentially that's the analytical or meta-analytical term we use for a scholar's argument. or answer to the historical question. So we summarize what a scholar has developed as an answer to a historical question. We can refer to that as her or his thesis or argument. So what was Salen's thesis in the original affluent society? And as you can see, oops wrong one, let me get the right one here all right here we go um so i've got this this is my own marked up version of it Well, I'm beginning at the end of the selection for you, because it really is the conclusions to Salen's famous essay, in which he argued that prehistoric hunter-gatherer peoples lived a more affluent life than post-agricultural and even modern industrial peoples. And I like this particular quotation here from Salens. This much history can always be rescued from existing hunters. The economic problem is easily solvable by Paleolithic techniques. Now there's a lot embedded in that little phrase. which i'm hoping you can you can explore but essentially what you have is solon's doing a version a very scholarly and dense version of that little film clip that i showed you in the last lecture the gods must be crazy that kind of poked fun at our modern urban car based It's 8 a.m. so you have to look busy at 10.30 you can take a break etc. You know the film was making fun of that but in some ways this is what Sahlins was getting at in this particular piece. The Affluent Society isn't us modern industrial... dependent on intensive agriculture and specialization so on and so forth we have not solved the economic problem of being humans and living on limited resources was arguing in 1972, it was actually our Paleolithic, pre-Neolithic agricultural ancestors who had already solved that economic problem, how to survive on earth and to survive well. So what you need to do is take time in your discussions to build up your mutual consensus as historians in the lab of how Solins argued that by focusing on the evidence that sociologists anthropologists and ethnographers derived from observing the kung the Bushmen and the aborigines mostly in Africa and in Australia today or at least in the 20th century right that was the body of evidence they were looking at because one cannot look at stone tools or the remnants of stone tools from you know 100,000 years ago or 50,000 years ago and get to the depth of analysis that Solins achieves in this particular article in 1972. So I'll leave it there. Obviously Solins answer has to do with the fact that although these Bushmen and Aborigines seem to have lived a very impoverished life, They actually lived a high quality of life in which they really weren't required to work a lot. They weren't required to gather or hunt very much, or at least, you know, for not very many hours in a day or a week, maybe even just five hours a week. So take time to reconstruct the argument as Solon shares it with you. So along comes a different scholar, Kaplan. And what does Kaplan argue in this particular piece? All right, so Kaplan is relying on scholarship that has revised some of Salin's original affluent thesis, and particularly the scholarship of... Wiesner in 1982, and Colson, Elizabeth Colson as well. And it has all to do with critiquing, at a very detailed level, what Solins did with the word work. and with the word affluence. Of course, affluence could be misinterpreted as having to do with abundance of possessions and property. And so there's a whole debate about whether these ancient prehistoric, Paleolithic hunter-gatherers had a lot of property. And these scholars need to rely on 20th century hunter-gatherers to try to interpret back into time just how much property these hunter-gatherers accumulated with them and moved. with them. But to cut to the chase, obviously, what Kaplan is saying is Stalin's underestimated the work involved in being a hunter-gatherer. Because it's not just about what, you know, the hours you spend actually hunting one animal, or how long that animal can feed a small band of, say, 20 to 50 people, right? That's a miscalculation of the word work. There are lots of subjective elements to what we can consider leisure. non-work. For somebody like myself, I was out there gardening this morning, gardening is leisure. But for somebody else, gardening is work. What's the actual difference, the definitional difference between work and leisure? Does it matter to us? Yes, it does when we apply those terms analytically to understanding the agricultural revolution. So spend time thinking with that and also spend time carefully thinking about what Kaplan says to this issue of... property and the accumulation of property, and what made hunter-gatherers in the past probably not too different from us, perhaps even more problematic than our large societies. Because the image Solins gave in his essay was one of almost a kind of paradisiacal a paradise of hunter-gatherers sitting around being able to enjoy life much more than we in our highly intense agricultural industrial societies. But Kaplan's evidence teaches something else, which is that a lot of the Kung, the Bushmen and Aborigines spend a lot of time arguing about the sharing of these resources, the sharing of what is hunted and what is gathered, and keeping track of those who are, as one scholar puts it quite nicely, freeloading, right? Freeloaders. So spend time thinking about the terminology. One very quick definition, the British term dunning. Dunning means bickering, bickering, teasing, critiquing, you know, slide remarks. okay so that gives you a heads up on what's involved in reconstructing analyzing and thinking about the Solon's Kaplan debate in your discussions one final point I've got one minute to make this and I want to share this image with you here so something that is not discussed in in in your assigned materials and that's a possible alternate reason for the agricultural change. So you do have explanations of why, potentially two theories by Smith of why the agricultural revolution happened in your text on pages 24, 23 following, but I'm going to give you another one just to think about and this comes from the peer-reviewed journal article uh journal Asian Perspectives, sorry, Asia Perspectives, published by the University of Hyatt-Pilz, 2005. It's a collaboration by a set of scholars. And what they've been looking at is the very first pottery of some of these sedentary societies in northwestern China. And what they've discovered is... Almost all of these earliest remains of pottery contained within them grains which we can now analyze for their origin. What were these grains? And even more interestingly, it seems to indicate that they were fermented grains, fermented cereals. So they're beginning to posit the theory that in fact it was fermentation that led to the, or at least significantly contributed to the agricultural revolution. Now, the drinking of alcoholic beverages is something that animals and birds do unwittingly when fruit drops from trees and ferments on the ground. And human beings perhaps at certain points develop these sedentary societies, these agricultural communities in the fertile crescent of the Middle East, in northern China, perhaps largely, if not mostly, so that they could cultivate fermentation. Unless we think this is all about, you know... alcohol as a kind of modern controlled substance problem, we should link it back to Smith's analysis of the dream world of the Aborigines at the end of Chapter 1. Because, of course, a certain degree of alcoholically induced insight perhaps is quite connected to the dream world of the Aborigines discussed in Smith chapter one. So I've gone a minute over time. I apologize for that. Maybe I'll pick up on this in the next lecture. Have good discussions. Cheers. Bye-bye.

Now that's a huge question. Smith begins to tackle it in terms of the classic questions that we pose as scholars, right? We want to know, what was this agricultural invention? Because it's not self-explanatory, necessarily.

And we're going to discuss how, in some ways, in fact, agriculture was a development of pre-existing tools of food gathering. So, you know, the what. What was this? Obviously, the second thing, when.

And where? And when, of course, being the key question historians ask, right? When did this happen?

Where did it happen? And I have some observations to make, some glosses or explanations on Smith's narrative of the where, because it's sometimes easy to fall into commonsensical... nonsensical interpretations of the link between where something happens and who this is happening to or with or through I'll get back to this okay so the what the when the where the who And we need to spend time thinking about the who, because in fact it turns out that, as Smith argued in chapter one, not everybody experienced this invention of agriculture, and even those who did sometimes chose not to pursue it. So the who is an interesting question, right? And who will get us to the debate, the scholarly conversation, and it is an acrimonious debate at times, between those who have followed...

Salins interpretation of hunter-gatherer life and those who have followed Kaplan's interpretation of that same life seen from very different analytical perspectives. And then we've already gestured to the why, but we want to spend a bit more time concerning this, right? Why pursue agriculture?

It's not a self-explanatory development. That is, lots of reasons could be adduced, and Smith gives you some. I think Kaplan and Sullins give you an even greater body of plausible explanation for why one would engage in agriculture and perhaps why one would not.

Finally, from time to time, I mention scholarship or evidence that is not in the timetable. I will bring in maps occasionally. I'll bring in a video clip, as I've done before.

We're going to start the class today with a video clip. But I'm also going to gesture to an article, a very, very good peer-reviewed article that actually was published by the University of Hawaii Press. I'm going to bring it into our discussion today.

You're not required to read it. It's not posted anywhere. But obviously, some of you might be interested in pursuing that.

further on in your careers as historians or just for personal interest and I'll give you the information, the bibliographic information for that. Okay, so where do we begin today's analysis of agriculture, the prehistoric or Neolithic history of agriculture? As I mentioned at the end of the last class, we begin in a place that is to be found today in Turkey, Çatalhöyük in Turkey.

This is one of the earliest... sedentary towns we have archaeological evidence for. Now there's some others that date back to roughly the same period in Asia and you know we could choose them but the reason we choose Çatalhöyük is because a you have the greatest amount of evidence for it in your reading in Smith and b you have the greatest depth of analysis in Smith's interpretation of the importance of Çatalhöyük.

But how is it related to agriculture? Obviously this is a place where agriculture was practiced, and it was practiced ten thousand years ago. In fact, almost closer to 11,000 years ago.

Every time the archaeologists go back to the site of Çatalhöyük, they discover more evidence that requires they revise their previous interpretation. So it's an exciting part of historical investigation here. But as we were at pains to explore in the last set of lectures, you know, the unwritten past is difficult to explain. And in order to explain it, in order to pick up a piece of a stone, that's being chipped at, or to look at those fantastic paintings that we have in caves and also at Çatalhöyük and elsewhere. We need to draw in the expertise, the insights of other disciplines, sociology, art history psychology climatology etc etc so one way of bringing it together is to ask specific questions that alert us to plausible interpretations and that's where this video click i'm going to show might be useful today it is part of Oxford University Press's body of video clips that can be used to explore the historical significance that Smith and her colleagues begin to narrate in their chapter for you.

Okay, so without further ado, I'll let the documentary filmmakers take over. This is a very short clip. Unfortunately, due to technical difficulties, we've not been able to include the documentary film clip in this recorded lecture.

So please follow the instructions that came along with the Laulima link announcement for this particular lecture. Watch the documentary film clip. It's about six minutes long now.

And when you're done, return to watch the end of the lecture. All right, so a couple of observations to make and then we'll delve deeper into the evidence for the agricultural revolution or development. One, obviously, what you're seeing is a documentary.

film in which we have recreations based on the archaeological evidence of Çatalhöyük, right? So that's obviously self-explanatory. But there's good documentary films and there's bad documentary films. And so when I show a clip in the class, it's because it's gone through a certain degree of peer review.

That is, it's gone through that process of the modus operandi of historians that we've discussed. So there's lots of stuff available on the web that recreates prehistoric societies for us that is very, very poorly documented and peer reviewed. And I can remember at one point in my own specialized fields of research being asked to participate in a document.

film on the history of piracy, origins of piracy, and I'm lucky that I made the right choice. One of my colleagues in the same field made the wrong choice and I won't mention which documentary film it is now, but he's been embarrassed for years now that his voice was incorporated into this particular documentary film. So I will alert you to significant errors or problems in any of the documentary films that I'll show in the class. This one had no None, to my knowledge.

It's a very good recreation based on the best available reconstructions of the archaeological evidence concerning Çatalhöyük. All right, so that's the first observation. The second observation is something that I hope most of you have noticed is a common theme between the previous lecture and this lecture. I was gesturing towards the interpretive challenge of what historians do with the changes we can observe in the evidence between, you know, early lithic technologies, stone tools, and neolithic, new stone age tools.

Obviously, there's a change, right? We have a couple of examples that I focused on in the lecture. But what do we do with that change? Do we call it improvement?

Do we call it progress? What do we call it? And if we do that, can we do it in such a way that we avoid erroneous interpretations of history as some kind of inevitable progress to better and better?

better lives and better and better worlds. And of course that little documentary clip ends with the word progress, right? Progress or progress. And it should raise questions in your minds that are tied to the methodological issues that we've been exploring in the course so far.

What do we as historians use the term progress to refer to? And obviously it wasn't progress if one takes the perspective of disease avoidance. The hunter-gatherer bands, the small hunter-gatherer bands that characterized most of our hominin history over the course of 3,880,000 years, most of those bands avoided the kinds of intense diseases associated with close living environments or habitats with animals, which of course sedentary agriculture and the domestication of animals produced as the film explored and as Smith chapter one explores, right? So in some ways that's not progress at a kind of general level when we as humans expose ourselves to those diseases.

So it's just as important in this course to be able to ask good questions as it is to be able to offer good answers. based on good evidence. So what does Smith mean by progress? What does this film clip mean by progress? That's something to explore in your discussion labs in terms of the evidence we have at our disposal in the course.

So let's talk more about the agricultural changes. So there's a very useful map on pages 26 and 27, the origins of agriculture. And you can see there the main points at which that happens.

This is part of the where. So what today essentially is the People's Republic of China is a focal point for the development of agriculture. There's another one in what today is Iraq, Syria, Turkey, Iran, parts of Iran, etc. The Middle East or the Near East. That's a second very important focus point.

There's one in Mesoamerica, and it should really be defined as more than one. Smith refers to it as kind of the America, but I mean the most important in some ways is this one in Mesoamerica subsidiary one here and the Andean region Although it's turned out in world history to have been probably one of the most significant significant points of the domestication of certain plants. You'll notice here in the list of plants that were originally tamed or domesticated, brought into agriculture. Potatoes. possibly one of the most important items for nutrition in the world in the last 500 years.

As well, you'll notice the chili pepper. And I'm going to highlight that although it's nutritionally perhaps not important, and, you know, many, many culinary cultures and societies around the world do not think of chili as an essential ingredient. Can you imagine South Asian cooking in the...

Indian cooking, Thai cooking without chili peppers, without that big and the hotness of chili peppers, it's impossible to imagine. And in fact, if you asked somebody in Singapore or in Mumbai, you know, could you imagine your food without that hot, spicy ingredient? They would say, no, it's always been with us.

It's part of Indian cooking or Thai cooking or Singaporean cooking. So. The where of the agricultural revolution is very closely tied to many other things that have to do with the second part of the word agriculture. Agri is just an old Latin Roman term that means field. Field as, you know, just land.

Culture. Ah, culture is literally the same word that we have been using to refer to something like the Lapita culture, which had to do with a certain type of pottery in the Pacific, right? So culture is a question more than an answer.

And I stress that you should be exploring. the ways, the multiple ways in which we're using the term culture. And I'm going to explore this in a few minutes with you in terms of agriculture. All right, so the Americas in plural. And then finally this, I do not know why specifically they did not put a darker green focal point for the development of sub-Saharan African domestication of plants and animals.

We have a very clear indication that it was here. in what today is west part of Nigeria, in this part of Africa, and probably a secondary area in the highlands of Ethiopia. So maybe that's why they didn't put the two darker areas focal points. So obviously important for everyone to be able to discuss the evidence we have for where this agricultural change occurred. There are two other areas to study on the map that I should have noted.

But then there's another aspect to this that really does matter and it connects to the three types of history that I explained at the beginning of the course constitute world history. The first one that I'd like to mention here is comparative, comparative world history. So a comparative world history of this development of human discovery and implementation of agriculture.

could explore the questions of why did it happen in one place and not in another at the same time? Why did it happen in certain points and not elsewhere? Why don't we have agricultural invention here or here or here?

It could also explore how they might have been related, in which case we're getting into a kind of transliminal world history, right? And the key word to look for in chapter one of Smith is the spread. spread I did highlight one point on page 29 for example if you look towards the bottom of 20 page 29 this is the paragraph that begins once Neolithic people developed agriculture the technology spread rapidly into regions surrounding the fertile crescent etc etc and this of course is the arrows we see on this map right the spread But a little bit further down in that same paragraph, listen to what Smith says, and I'm quoting, Farmers also moved into regions of southwest Asia where rainfall was insufficient for farming.

Their invention of irrigation, agriculture, made settlement possible even in the most arid zones, which really they're talking about this region through here from India to North Africa. But did you notice the shift? Did you notice the shift? The first one was about technology spread.

The second one was about farmers spreading, moving. But that's not the same thing, right? Absolutely not the same thing. Did it happen always in that way? Was it always farmers taking technology with them to a new place?

Which is suggested sometimes if we're caught up in the idea that somehow place and people and technology technology are all the same thing, a question that I brought up when I was discussing Lapita culture, right? Well, obviously, the answer is no, not necessarily, because after all, what's happening right now in this classroom is you're being taught, this is the theory, theory of what's happening, you're being taught by a historian lecturing and a historian leading your discussion labs, right? So there's a practice of technology transfer.

And the history of technology transfer tells us one thing, and over and over again, which is that we should never, ever confuse technology transfer with the movement of peoples or persons, right? They don't necessarily happen that way. It can happen as As easily, and one of the most famous examples is from 19th century India, where technology colleges were set up by industrialists from England, from the factories in England.

And once the textbooks were in place and the lesson plans were in place, we didn't need those industrial experts from England to keep coming over to India to teach the steam engine machinery, you know, building of it and the use of it anymore. We could. Just.

pick up a book, a textbook, and begin to read and begin to develop, etc. So think about that issue of essentially not confusing where, with what, and with whom. Or I should say whom.

And a good example of that, another example that I can point to is on page 25 of your textbook. You have a table 1.1, the rise of agriculture, and it lists regions on the left-hand side, main plant, crops and approximate dates. Notice that it could be very easily confusing to someone who is not thinking carefully here to look at the regions on the left-hand side, and the second one that's listed is China, and begin to talk about the Chinese developing agriculture and domesticating rice and millet between 8,000 and 600 BCE.

But it would be an error. It would be an analytical error to jump from modern Chinese identity, whether it's linguistic, political, etc., etc., and project it back in time to 10,000 years ago. It would be an error. We need to think very carefully about what do we mean when we as scholars say this happened in China in 8,000 BCE versus this happened. amongst Chinese or Chinese developed this in 8000 BC.

So that's not to say that there weren't ancestors, linguistic ancestors, cultural ancestors of modern Chinese involved in that process. But it's to become conscious of the time span. the incredible time span of difference that separates us as modern Chinese from them as ancient Chinese. And that's the point that I'm bringing here. I tried to lecture to that by pointing out that transliminal also refers to across differences in time, in period.

And so there's an element of transliminal there. But obviously if we go back to this map, what we're also dealing with here is a process of globalization, right? That last category of world history, the spread of of agriculture, and it really is spread, is a globalizing process.

And it's a long, long-standing one. One that in some ways is still going on today, right? The intensification of industrialized agriculture in parts of North America. parts of South America, parts of Africa, Europe, and Asia, as well as the Pacific region, Oceania. That is part and parcel of that same development.

And in a long view, we could talk about the intensification of agriculture today as essentially the last part of the history of how agriculture took over from hunting and gathering. I do have a course, those of you interested in this, on the history of agriculture. of maritime contexts, world maritime contexts, in which we explore the fact that one of the ways in which hunting and gathering survives for all of us today to a great degree, even if we live in densely urban, sedentary, agriculturally dependent communities, is fish.

because fishing is still essentially hunting and gathering wild resources for the use of sedentary agricultural urban peoples and the reason i bring that up is that um Smith chapter one gives you a great a great depth of evidence as to the connectedness and I'm using my hands here. I mean, I inevitably using my hands in a kind of Desmond Morris body talk way that that points me, if you want, culturally. Whatever we see happening in agricultural communities in the past is not foreign to what's happening amongst the hunter gatherers who keep hunting. and keep gathering. And that's a point I made at the end of lecture on Monday, which is we shouldn't see these as two stages of history, antagonistic or antithetical to each other, right?

But rather, oftentimes, usually complementary to each other. So that we're going to come back in the next week to this issue of how hunter-gatherers and farmers coexisted in historical connections, right? So we don't want to think of this process of the spread of agriculture as sort of the supplanting of one people's by an other, but rather the complex interaction between agricultural lifestyles, if you want to use that term, and hunter-gatherer lifestyles. And we'll come back to that next week when we talk about Gilgamesh.

Okay. So let's turn our attention to some of the specific evidence that takes us to the Marshall Solons and to the Kaplan reading I assigned for today as well. And you'll see on this map, as opposed to the one that you have on pages 26 and 27 of your textbook, we've got two little blue boxes. I cannot pronounce the exclamation mark in the name of these people here.

The kung is a click. It's kung. I can't pronounce Bushman.

Bushman is another term that arises in the scholarly literature for these Kung people and then the Aborigines or the Aboriginal persons peoples of Australia also arise in your readings today mostly in the Smith chapter one but they do pop up actually in the evidence discussed by Sullins and Kaplan so let's turn our attention to the hunter-gatherers The hunter-gatherer is in there. Let's just change that for a second here. And this is an image from your textbook on page 37. It is modern Aboriginal Australians or Australian Aborigines collecting turtle eggs. So a couple of observations before I get to how this leads us into the Salins-Kaplan debate. One of the observations to make is simply to reiterate what is...

Smith's, one of Smith's key points here. It might be common sense in the sense of persons not educated in the history of prehistory and this agricultural revolution to assume that somehow it's easier, less sophisticated to be a hunter gatherer than it is to be an agriculturalist. After all, if one thinks about the details of how to turn a grass like barley or millet or wheat or rice into a vegetable, into modern food staples, yeah, there's a lot involved in there.

In fact, you know, originally millet and rice, these plants, wheat and barley were just like grasses that we see growing in a field, very small. The seeds were tiny. They were hard to gather because the husk that covers the individual seed of these cereals or these grains can be too tough to eat.

It can be indigestible. So a lot of technological thinking, experimentation and development and selection over time, over centuries, millennia, needed to be done in order to turn these wild grasses into the rice and the wheat and the barley and the millet that became so important to humans in this Neolithic agricultural development. So tremendously sophisticated, tremendously difficult history and a fascinating one which I would like to share with you. wish we had more time to explain. But Smith over and over again reiterates, and particularly in the last section of chapter one, that an equal sophistication was necessary to survive as hunters and gatherers.

So the change from hunting and gathering to agricultural life was not one necessarily of increased sophistication, perhaps one of broadened sophistication, sophistication that had not just to do with understanding. animal lives in the wild and the processes of plant botanical changes in the wild, but also these issues of technologically manipulating the environment of the growth of grasses or the reproduction of animals, which essentially is the agricultural revolution, right? It's the level of manipulation of those natural resources that Smith explains to us. broaden the sophistication and change the type of sophistication, the quality, if you want, of that sophistication, or the object of that sophistication's manipulation of the environment.

So we have a change there. But we also have potentially, as I mentioned at the end of the last class, a loss of sophistication. As I mentioned, who amongst us could go back into that Ko'olau Mountains, you know, in the middle of Oahu, and survive by hunting and gathering things that... that are there in the forest, probably not any of us at all. And so we're all, um charged by the evidence that's been analyzed by our sources with thinking carefully about this change to agriculture and and characterizing it appropriately precisely and accurately as we've discussed before okay so hunter gathers so let me let me turn our attention to uh the solins and the kaplan for for almost the entire end of the lecture today uh what do we have here in Solins and Kaplan?

Well, we have a debate, a scholarly debate, and think back to the modus operandi. Scholars debate with each other, right? Just like in that image, I presented my findings at a conference and I got critiqued by the audience of my peers, and then I went back and I changed what needed to be changed, and then hopefully I got it published, which in fact I did. process means that we're going to talk a little bit about the stage of how scholarly conversations happen. So let's take a look at the Sullins and the Kaplan.

And the first thing to note is within scholarship, we have a kind of micro history of the scholarly conversation. And I chose Sullins and Kaplan particularly because of how well they illustrate this. So I'm going to do a little bit of a what we call a historiographical analysis of Kaplan. So I'm going to begin with the Kaplan piece, which was published in 2000. The Solins piece was published in 1968. Well, first version, 68. The one that you're reading is 1972. So Kaplan's essay that I chose a piece from is a commentary on Solins.

So Solins writing back in the 1960s, actually summarizing evidence that was. brought up in the 1950s and 60s, and then Kaplan revisiting some of that original 1950s and 60s evidence, interpreting it differently than Salins, and then writing up Kaplan's own rejection of Salins'main point or thesis. So that's the first thing to think about is scholarly conversations have their own little histories.

And sometimes it's important for us to keep track of those histories. And this is that moment for you in this course, the first moment where we need to say, OK, I know that Solins comes first in 68-72 and then Kaplan second in 2000. So let's turn our attention to Solins. I'll make a few comments that will gesture to how to explore the Solins-Kaplan debate or discussion in your lab. What was the main thesis and I'm going to be using these two terms thesis and argument.

Essentially that's the analytical or meta-analytical term we use for a scholar's argument. or answer to the historical question. So we summarize what a scholar has developed as an answer to a historical question.

We can refer to that as her or his thesis or argument. So what was Salen's thesis in the original affluent society? And as you can see, oops wrong one, let me get the right one here all right here we go um so i've got this this is my own marked up version of it Well, I'm beginning at the end of the selection for you, because it really is the conclusions to Salen's famous essay, in which he argued that prehistoric hunter-gatherer peoples lived a more affluent life than post-agricultural and even modern industrial peoples. And I like this particular quotation here from Salens.

This much history can always be rescued from existing hunters. The economic problem is easily solvable by Paleolithic techniques. Now there's a lot embedded in that little phrase. which i'm hoping you can you can explore but essentially what you have is solon's doing a version a very scholarly and dense version of that little film clip that i showed you in the last lecture the gods must be crazy that kind of poked fun at our modern urban car based It's 8 a.m.

so you have to look busy at 10.30 you can take a break etc. You know the film was making fun of that but in some ways this is what Sahlins was getting at in this particular piece. The Affluent Society isn't us modern industrial...

dependent on intensive agriculture and specialization so on and so forth we have not solved the economic problem of being humans and living on limited resources was arguing in 1972, it was actually our Paleolithic, pre-Neolithic agricultural ancestors who had already solved that economic problem, how to survive on earth and to survive well. So what you need to do is take time in your discussions to build up your mutual consensus as historians in the lab of how Solins argued that by focusing on the evidence that sociologists anthropologists and ethnographers derived from observing the kung the Bushmen and the aborigines mostly in Africa and in Australia today or at least in the 20th century right that was the body of evidence they were looking at because one cannot look at stone tools or the remnants of stone tools from you know 100,000 years ago or 50,000 years ago and get to the depth of analysis that Solins achieves in this particular article in 1972. So I'll leave it there. Obviously Solins answer has to do with the fact that although these Bushmen and Aborigines seem to have lived a very impoverished life, They actually lived a high quality of life in which they really weren't required to work a lot.

They weren't required to gather or hunt very much, or at least, you know, for not very many hours in a day or a week, maybe even just five hours a week. So take time to reconstruct the argument as Solon shares it with you. So along comes a different scholar, Kaplan. And what does Kaplan argue in this particular piece? All right, so Kaplan is relying on scholarship that has revised some of Salin's original affluent thesis, and particularly the scholarship of...

Wiesner in 1982, and Colson, Elizabeth Colson as well. And it has all to do with critiquing, at a very detailed level, what Solins did with the word work. and with the word affluence. Of course, affluence could be misinterpreted as having to do with abundance of possessions and property. And so there's a whole debate about whether these ancient prehistoric, Paleolithic hunter-gatherers had a lot of property.

And these scholars need to rely on 20th century hunter-gatherers to try to interpret back into time just how much property these hunter-gatherers accumulated with them and moved. with them. But to cut to the chase, obviously, what Kaplan is saying is Stalin's underestimated the work involved in being a hunter-gatherer. Because it's not just about what, you know, the hours you spend actually hunting one animal, or how long that animal can feed a small band of, say, 20 to 50 people, right? That's a miscalculation of the word work.

There are lots of subjective elements to what we can consider leisure. non-work. For somebody like myself, I was out there gardening this morning, gardening is leisure. But for somebody else, gardening is work.

What's the actual difference, the definitional difference between work and leisure? Does it matter to us? Yes, it does when we apply those terms analytically to understanding the agricultural revolution.

So spend time thinking with that and also spend time carefully thinking about what Kaplan says to this issue of... property and the accumulation of property, and what made hunter-gatherers in the past probably not too different from us, perhaps even more problematic than our large societies. Because the image Solins gave in his essay was one of almost a kind of paradisiacal a paradise of hunter-gatherers sitting around being able to enjoy life much more than we in our highly intense agricultural industrial societies.

But Kaplan's evidence teaches something else, which is that a lot of the Kung, the Bushmen and Aborigines spend a lot of time arguing about the sharing of these resources, the sharing of what is hunted and what is gathered, and keeping track of those who are, as one scholar puts it quite nicely, freeloading, right? Freeloaders. So spend time thinking about the terminology.

One very quick definition, the British term dunning. Dunning means bickering, bickering, teasing, critiquing, you know, slide remarks. okay so that gives you a heads up on what's involved in reconstructing analyzing and thinking about the Solon's Kaplan debate in your discussions one final point I've got one minute to make this and I want to share this image with you here so something that is not discussed in in in your assigned materials and that's a possible alternate reason for the agricultural change. So you do have explanations of why, potentially two theories by Smith of why the agricultural revolution happened in your text on pages 24, 23 following, but I'm going to give you another one just to think about and this comes from the peer-reviewed journal article uh journal Asian Perspectives, sorry, Asia Perspectives, published by the University of Hyatt-Pilz, 2005. It's a collaboration by a set of scholars. And what they've been looking at is the very first pottery of some of these sedentary societies in northwestern China.

And what they've discovered is... Almost all of these earliest remains of pottery contained within them grains which we can now analyze for their origin. What were these grains?

And even more interestingly, it seems to indicate that they were fermented grains, fermented cereals. So they're beginning to posit the theory that in fact it was fermentation that led to the, or at least significantly contributed to the agricultural revolution. Now, the drinking of alcoholic beverages is something that animals and birds do unwittingly when fruit drops from trees and ferments on the ground. And human beings perhaps at certain points develop these sedentary societies, these agricultural communities in the fertile crescent of the Middle East, in northern China, perhaps largely, if not mostly, so that they could cultivate fermentation.

Unless we think this is all about, you know... alcohol as a kind of modern controlled substance problem, we should link it back to Smith's analysis of the dream world of the Aborigines at the end of Chapter 1. Because, of course, a certain degree of alcoholically induced insight perhaps is quite connected to the dream world of the Aborigines discussed in Smith chapter one. So I've gone a minute over time. I apologize for that. Maybe I'll pick up on this in the next lecture.

Have good discussions. Cheers. Bye-bye.

Transcript for:Understanding the Agricultural Revolution

Transcript for:
Understanding the Agricultural Revolution