Domestication and Agriculture:
The Neolithic Revolution
• SW Asia, China, Americas
• Cultural materialism: Marvin Harris = “the primacy of the
infrastructure,” i.e., changes in socio-politics (structure)
and worldview (superstructure) result from changes in
techno-economies (infrastructure)
• But, evidence of significant change in ritual, social
inequality, and ideology also are quite early and must be
understood as more than the outcome of population
growth resulting from food production, such as feasting
• Nonetheless, food production did provide the basis for
most political economies with substantial populations, or
civilization
• Review Chapter 5
Civilization
• “the process of civilizing or becoming civilized
• the condition of being civilized; social organization of a
high order, marked by advances in the arts, sciences,
etc.
• the total culture of a people, nation, period, etc.
• the countries and peoples considered to have reached a
high stage of social and cultural development.”
• “Civilize: to bring out of a condition of savagery or
barbarism; instruct in the ways of advanced society”
(Webster’s)
• Cultural bias (ethnocentrism), history (the tyranny of the
ethnographic/historical record), cultural relativism, and
the “psychic unity” of humankind, and gender
Crusades: AD 1095-1291
Gautama Buddha: 563 BC (Nepal) to 483 BC (India)
Jesus Christ: 7–2 BC (Bethlehem) to AD 26–36 (Golgatha)
Mohammad: AD 570 (Mecca) to 632 (Medina)
The History of “Civilization”
• Western History - The West: Greece, Rome, Feudal Europe, and
modern Europe (West/East Roman Empire; Crusades)
• The East: Asian civilizations
• Orientalism (Edward Said, 1978): the construction of the “Orient” as
the alter-ego of the “West” in European discourse, that generally
portrayed Western civilization as more progressive (advanced)
• The Tropics (Tropicality): Other Civilizations – The “primitive” world
Native American, Sub-Saharan African, Pacific Islands
Large, developed civilizations in many non-Western settuings seen
as influenced from elsewhere (Europe, Near and Middle East) until
mid-19th century, and later in some cases (Amazon)
The Rise of the West:
Guns, Germs, and Steel; Ocean Travel;
Conquest, Colonialism, Plunder, and Slavery
• Gunpowder (China: ca. AD 1050)
• Imported to Europe by ca. AD 1250
• Cannons by early 1300s (beginning of the end of
feudalism?)
• In the 1400s, the first mechanical firing mechanism, the
matchlock, was developed.
• Black (Bubonic) Plague: ca. 1350 (from China?), 30-50%
of Europe’s population
• DISEASE! Epidemics decimated many populations,
particularly in Americas, where the indigenous
populations had no biological or cultural defenses
against new pathogens (cause of “Little Ice-Age”?)
I5th Century: Navigation, Exploration, and Slavery:
“The Age of Discovery”
•
1418–1460 Portugal's Prince Henry the Navigator sponsors exploration of Africa's coast. The Portuguese
found valuable sources of pepper in West Africa. 1432 Portuguese discover the Azores, reach Cape Verde.
1445 Portuguese explore West Africa, reach Senegal, and establish slave trade.
•
1450 Henry establishes a Naval observatory for the teaching of navigation, astronomy, and cartography.
•
Invention of the printing press spurs wide distribution of navigation tables and ship plans.
•
1452, Pope Nicholas V issued the papal bull granting Portugal the right to reduce any pagans and “other
unbelievers" to hereditary slavery.
•
1453 Turks overrun Constantinople (Istanbul), shutting off the overland trade route to Asia.
•
1488 Portuguese sailor Bartholomeu Dias rounds the Cape of Good Hope.
•
1492 Christopher Columbus, sailing for Ferdinand and Isabella (Castille & Aragorn), discovers Caribbean
after sailing 69 days. Dies in poverty 1506.
•
1497-98 Vasco da Gama rounds the Cape of Good Hope and reaches India.
•
1497 Italian John Cabot discovers Newfoundland for England
•
1499 Amerigo Vespucci discovers South America. 1500 Pedro Cabral claims Brazil for Portugal. 1501-1502
Vespucci explores the coast of Brazil, proposes that the land is a new continent, which is named America by
German mapmaker Martin Waldseemuller in 1507
•
16th Century: Conquest, colonialism, plunder, and more slavery
“At all times for euer hereafter to discouer, search, find
out and view such remote heathen and barbarous lands,
countries and territories, not actually possessed of any
Christian prince, nor inhabited by Christian people, as to
him, his heires and assignes” (Elizabeth I, 1584, to
Walter Ralegh).
Peoples in Americas, Africa, and many other regions
viewed as barbarians, or even sub-human (Papal bull of
1536 declares Native Americans human)
Manifest Destiny & the ideology of colonialism
The State of Nature
“where everyman is Enemy to everyman. … there is no
place for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain
… no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of
Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worse
of all, continual feare, and danger of violent death; and
the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short”
“the savage people in many places of America, except
the government of small families … have no government
at all, and live at this day in that brutish manner, as I said
before”
– Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, 1651
“In the beginning all the
World was America”
John Locke, 1690
• “Man is born free, and he is everywhere in chains.”
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract (1762)
“The first man who, having fenced in a piece of land, said ‘This is
mine,’ and found people naive enough to believe him, that man was
the true founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and
murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one
have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch,
and crying to his fellows: Beware of listening to this impostor; you
are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us
all, and the earth itself to nobody.”
Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men (1754)
• Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) posited that
all structures in the universe (including
human society) develop from a simple,
undifferentiated, homogeneity to a
complex, differentiated, heterogeneity,
accompanied by a process of greater
integration of the differentiated parts.
• Societal change was progressive (like
neo-Malthusians)
• Emile Durkheim (1858-1917): mechanical
(kinship) and organic solidarity (social
heterogeneity and integration) (Division of
Labor in Society, 1892).
Social Complexity, the State,
and Urbanism
Civilization: primitive and civilized
Lewis Henry Morgan: Savagery,
Barbarism (Agriculture) & Civilization (Writing)
- Morgan saw property as the root of civilization
• Karl Marx (1818-1883): primitive communism
(no surplus), Asiatic mode of production, ancient
mode of production (Graeco-Roman), feudal
mode of production, early capitalism, late
capitalism, communism (hypothetical demise of
nation-state and class system)
• Friedrich Engels (1820-1895): Origin of the
Family, Private Property and the State (1884)
• Modes and relations of production:Capital,
Alienation, and Class (conflict)
The “Urban Revolution”
• V. Gordon Childe was among the first to discuss the
development of ancient civilizations (Near/Middle East)
• defined states – “urban revolution” - based on the presence
of certain key elements, most notably: cities, writing,
surplus, metallurgy, craft specialization
• technological innovations (e.g., metallurgy, writing), craft
specialization, and agricultural surplus were key in the
emergence of ancient states
• Surplus, in particular, allowed certain individuals to be
freed from agricultural labor, creating social inequality
(capital, alienation, and class)
• as with “Neolithic Revolution,” states were seen as an
advancement over earlier cultural forms and given the right
conditions a natural development for humankind
The Urban Revolution
• Childe introduced the Urban Revolution in 1936 (“Man
Makes Himself”); article in “Town Planning Review”
(1950) described 10 traits that defined it:
– Large population and large settlements (cities)
– Full-time specialization and advanced division of labor
– Production of an agricultural surplus to fund government and a
differentiated society
– Monumental public architecture
– A ruling class
– Writing
– Exact and predictive sciences (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy,
calendars)
– Sophisticated art styles
– Long-distance trade
– The state (bureaucracy).
What is a City? Definitions Vary, and some
quite small.
• “In Germany as a whole in the late middle
ages [1300-1500], 3,000 places were
reckoned to have been granted the status
of cities; their average population was no
more than 400 individuals” (Braudel
1985:482)
• Among largest,
Dresden about
2500
A. Chase & D. Chase (2009)
http://www.caracol.org/reports/2009.php
What is Writing?
Khipu (quipu)
Karl Wittfogel’s (1957) Hydraulic Hypothesis
(Oriental Despotism)
Warfare
• “Violence has been a feature of human
society since the Paleolithic, but as
communities grew in size the scale of
conflict increased”
• Internecine and external aggression
Robert Carneiro’s (1970)
Circumscription Theory
Personification of History &
Ideology
• Portraits and cultural
heroes
• Divine Kings, tombs,
palaces, and
prophets
• Anthropomorphic
(Monotheistic)
Religion
The Trade Imperative & Secondary States
Multi-causality and Variation
•
•
•
•
No prime movers (no silver bullets)
Multi-linear cultural development
Cycling (Integration and Disintegration)
Population growth, agricultural
intensification, environment, change in
socio-political organization (inequality),
ideology, trade and warfare, material
culture, urbanism
Indus
Mesoamerica
Andes
Areas covered in this segment (for test 1)
Chiefdoms in the Pacific
• Chapter 8: pp. 275-305 (begin with “The
Islands of Southeast Asia and Oceania”