Mr. Sink’s AP World History
Document Analysis: The Origins of Civilization
Background:
The first question that historians ask about almost everything is “How did it get
started?” Scholars of all kinds – archaeologists, anthropologists, sociologists, and
historians – have been arguing about the origins of civilization for a very long time
with no end in sight. It appears that all of the first civilizations had their roots in
competing chiefdoms in the regions where they developed. Yet, not all agricultural
societies or chiefdoms developed into civilizations, so something else must have
been involved. It is the search for this “something else” that has provoked such
great debate amongst scholars. It is also the focus of the three documents below.
After reading and analyzing the documents, decide what you think that “something
else” was that led humans to establish the first civilizations, or complex states.
Document 1
Source: Robert Caneiro, anthropologist*, excerpts from his article “A Theory of
the Origin of the State”, article published in scholarly journal Science (August
1970)
One promising approach is to look for those factors common to areas of the
world in which states arose indigenously—areas such as the Nile, TigrisEuphrates, and Indus valleys in the Old World and the Valley of Mexico and the
mountain and coastal valleys of Peru in the New. These areas differ from one
another in many ways—in altitude, temperature, rainfall, soil type, drainage
pattern, and many other features. They do, however, have one thing in common:
they are all areas of circumscribed agricultural land. Each of them is set off by
mountains, seas, or deserts, and these environmental features sharply delimit the
area that simple farming peoples could occupy and cultivate.
But what is the significance of circumscribed agricultural land for the origin of
the state? Its significance can best be understood by comparing political
development in two regions of the world having contrasting ecologies — the
coastal valleys of Peru and the Amazon basin.
Looking first at the Amazon basin, we see that agricultural villages there were
numerous, but widely dispersed. Thus, the typical Amazonian community, even
though it practiced a simple form of shifting cultivation which required extensive
amounts of land, still had around it all the forest land needed for its gardens.
Warfare was certainly frequent in Amazonia, but it was waged for reasons of
revenge, the taking of women, the gaining of personal prestige, and motives of a
similar sort. There being no shortage of land, there was, by and large, no warfare
over land. The consequences of the type of warfare that did occur in Amazonia
were as follows. A defeated group was not, as a rule, driven from its land. Nor did
the victor make any real effort to subject the vanquished, or to exact tribute from
him. This would have been difficult to accomplish in any case, since there was no
effective way to prevent the losers from fleeing to a distant part of the forest. With
only a very few exceptions, noted below, there was no tendency in Amazonia for
villages to be held in place and to combine into larger political units.
In marked contrast to the situation in Amazonia were the events that transpired
in the narrow valleys of the Peruvian coast. However, instead of being scattered
over a vast expanse of rain forest as they were in Amazonia, villages here were
confined to some 78 short and narrow valleys. With increasing pressure of human
population on the land, however, the major incentive for war changed from a desire
for revenge to a need to acquire land. And, as the causes of war became
predominantly economic, the frequency, intensity, and importance of war
increased. In Peru, the mountains, the desert, and the sea—to say nothing of
neighboring villages—blocked escape in every direction. A village defeated in war
thus faced political subordination to the victor. This subordination generally
entailed at least the payment of a tribute or tax in kind, which the defeated village
could provide only by producing more food than it had produced before. Political
evolution was attaining the level of the chiefdom.
As land shortages continued and became even more acute, so did warfare.
Now, however, the competing units were no longer small villages but, often, large
chiefdoms. From this point on, through the conquest of chiefdom by chiefdom, the
size of political units increased at a progressively faster rate. Naturally, as
autonomous political units increased in size, they decreased in number, with the
result that an entire valley was eventually unified under the banner of its strongest
chiefdom. The political unit thus formed was undoubtedly sufficiently centralized
and complex to warrant being called a state.
*NOTE: An anthropologist is a scholar who studies early human beings and the way societies and
cultures originate and are organized.
Document 2
Source: Jared Diamond, ethnobiologist*, Guns, Germs and Steel (book), 1999
Plant and animal domestication meant much more food and hence much
denser human populations. The resulting food surpluses, and (in some areas) the
animal-based means of transporting those surpluses, were a prerequisite for the
development of a settled, politically centralized, socially stratified, economically
complex, technologically innovative societies. Hence the availability of domestic
plants and animals ultimately explains why empires, literacy, and steel weapons
developed earliest in Eurasia and later, or not at all, on other continents. The
military uses of horses and camels, and the killing power of animal-derived germs,
complete the list of major links between food production and conquest . . .
Eurasian peoples happened to inherit many more species of domesticable
large wild mammalian herbivores than did people of the other continents. That
outcome, with all of its momentous advantages for Eurasian societies, stemmed
from three basic facts of mammalian geography, history and biology. First,
Eurasia, benefiting its large area and ecological diversity, started out with the most
candidates. Second Australia and the Americas, but not Eurasia or Africa, lost
most of their candidates in a massive wave of late-Pleistocene extinctions . .
.Finally, a higher percentage of the surviving candidates proved suitable for
domestication on Eurasia than on other continents.
*NOTE: An ethnobiologist is a scientist that studies the dynamic relationships between peoples, biota**,
and environments, from the distant past to the immediate present.
**NOTE: Biota is the animal and plant life of a particular region, habitat, or geological period.
Document #3
Source: Charles C. Mann, journalist, excerpts from article “Birth of Religion”,
National Geographic , June 2011
Every now and then the dawn of civilization is reenacted on a remote hilltop
in southern Turkey. The reenactors are busloads of tourists—usually Turkish,
sometimes European…Before them are dozens of massive stone pillars arranged
into a set of rings, one mashed up against the next. Known as Göbekli Tepe
(pronounced Guh-behk-LEE TEH-peh), the site is vaguely reminiscent of
Stonehenge, except that Göbekli Tepe was built much earlier and is made not from
roughly hewn blocks but from cleanly carved limestone pillars splashed with basreliefs of animals—a cavalcade of gazelles, snakes, foxes, scorpions, and ferocious
wild boars. The assemblage was built some 11,600 years ago, seven millennia
before the Great Pyramid of Giza. It contains the oldest known temple. Indeed,
Göbekli Tepe is the oldest known example of monumental architecture—the first
structure human beings put together that was bigger and more complicated than a
hut. When these pillars were erected, so far as we know, nothing of comparable
scale existed in the world.
At the time of Göbekli Tepe's construction much of the human race lived in
small nomadic bands that survived by foraging for plants and hunting wild
animals. Construction of the site would have required more people coming
together in one place than had likely occurred before. Amazingly, the temple's
builders were able to cut, shape, and transport 16-ton stones hundreds of feet
despite having no wheels or beasts of burden.
…Most of the world's great religious centers, past and present, have been
destinations for pilgrimages—think of the Vatican, Mecca, Jerusalem, Bodh Gaya
(where Buddha was enlightened), or Cahokia (the enormous Native American
complex near St. Louis). They are monuments for spiritual travelers, who often
came great distances, to gawk at and be stirred by. Göbekli Tepe may be the first
of all of them, the beginning of a pattern. What it suggests, at least to the
archaeologists working there, is that the human sense of the sacred—and the
human love of a good spectacle—may have given rise to civilization itself.
… [Archaeologist Klaus] Schmidt speculates that foragers living within a
hundred-mile radius of Göbekli Tepe created the temple as a holy place to gather
and meet, perhaps bringing gifts and tributes to its priests and craftspeople. Some
kind of social organization would have been necessary not only to build it but also
to deal with the crowds it attracted. Surely there were feasts; Schmidt has
uncovered stone basins that could have been used for beer…Over time, Schmidt
believes, the need to acquire sufficient food for those who worked and gathered for
ceremonies at Göbekli Tepe may have led to the intensive cultivation of wild
cereals and the creation of some of the first domestic strains... In other words, the
turn to agriculture celebrated by V. Gordon Childe may have been the result of a
need that runs deep in the human psyche, a hunger that still moves people today to
travel the globe in search of awe-inspiring sights.