interesting review Why did we start farming?
“His account of the deep past doesn’t purport to be definitive, but it is surely more accurate than the one we’re used to, and it implicitly exposes the flaws in contemporary political ideas that ultimately rest on a narrative of human progress and on the ideal of the city/nation-state..... Why hunter-gatherers passed up their affluent lifestyle in favour of far more onerous and risky existences growing a narrow range of crops and managing livestock is a fundamental question to which we have no good answer. Was it by choice, or was that first sowing of seed a trap, locking people into a seasonal cycle of planting and harvesting from which we have been unable to escape?
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In Scott’s picture, the barbarians and the city-states were entirely dependent on each other for their existence. They rose and fell together: the Huns and the Romans; the ‘Sea People’ and the Egyptians. And for the vast part of recorded history the majority of people lived in the barbarian world. Scott’s view is that the barbarian Golden Age ended as recently as four hundred years ago, when the power of the state finally became overwhelming, partly due to the invention of durable gunpowder. Which is, of course, a means to make fire sparked by flint – a return to the ‘moment’ 400,000 years earlier which marked the beginning not of the steady rise of civilisation, but rather the muddled and messy affair that is the human past.“
“His account of the deep past doesn’t purport to be definitive, but it is surely more accurate than the one we’re used to, and it implicitly exposes the flaws in contemporary political ideas that ultimately rest on a narrative of human progress and on the ideal of the city/nation-state..... Why hunter-gatherers passed up their affluent lifestyle in favour of far more onerous and risky existences growing a narrow range of crops and managing livestock is a fundamental question to which we have no good answer. Was it by choice, or was that first sowing of seed a trap, locking people into a seasonal cycle of planting and harvesting from which we have been unable to escape?
......
In Scott’s picture, the barbarians and the city-states were entirely dependent on each other for their existence. They rose and fell together: the Huns and the Romans; the ‘Sea People’ and the Egyptians. And for the vast part of recorded history the majority of people lived in the barbarian world. Scott’s view is that the barbarian Golden Age ended as recently as four hundred years ago, when the power of the state finally became overwhelming, partly due to the invention of durable gunpowder. Which is, of course, a means to make fire sparked by flint – a return to the ‘moment’ 400,000 years earlier which marked the beginning not of the steady rise of civilisation, but rather the muddled and messy affair that is the human past.“
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