Colin Renfrew, Prehistory: The Making Of The Human Mind
[Part 2 of 3] Constructing the Community, 'take-off', construction, permanence, control, equipment, food production, housing, wealth difference, defence, pottery, metallurgy, ritual, cognition..
In his book Prehistory: The Making Of The Human Mind, published in 2007 …
Colin Renfrew wrote:
Chapter Seven [2nd part]
Constructing the Community
The Take-off: The Construction of Settled Life
It is time now to turn again to the first of those great changes in human life that Gordon Childe identified nearly seventy years ago. Over the past couple of decades, research in western Asia, following on the pioneering mid-century work of Robert Braidwood at Jarmo and Kathleen Kenyon at Jericho, has taken the origins of agriculture back much earlier than had been thought, as far back as 9000 BCE in the case of the ‘Pre-Pottery Neolithic A’ settlement at Jericho and other sites in the Levant, with the cultivation of barley, wheat and legumes. What has now become much clearer, however, is that the appearance of settled village life did not follow upon the establishment of a secure agricultural regime, as had earlier been thought; it preceded it.
The evidence is clear that sedentism preceded farming, although it was dependent upon the availability of abundant wild food resources. In one of the earliest known cases, the Early Natufian culture in the Levant – which was still based upon foraging, well before the cultivation of cereal crops – there developed what were perhaps the world’s first settled villages.
They had pit-houses, burials, rich lithic and bone industries, numerous stone tools for pounding and grinding, and a range of small figurative carvings as well as personal adornments that are slightly reminiscent of those of the French Upper Palaeolithic.
What might seem a simple shift, from the mobile life pattern of most hunter-gatherer communities to one of sedentism, is in reality one with very significant consequences.
Sedentism implies, of course, living in one place on a permanent basis, or at least for several years at a time. It therefore entails a permanent place of residence. Usually that place will be a house – a deliberate residential construction requiring input of labour and materials, a substantial labour investment. With this continuity of location the requirements of ‘travelling light’ disappear and the way is open for the development of permanent installations, for example preparation facilities requiring heavy equipment (such as quern stones and weighty stone grinders). It was possible now to create locations (such as ovens) for the application of special techniques. The way is also open for the storage of goods including foodstuffs in new ways, and the possibility arises of the control over property. Previously such immediate control could be exercised only over the kit that one could carry.
Of course there exist partially mobile economies, for instance those relying upon transhumance [seasonal livestock movement], where some of these things are possible. And there are other adaptations, such as those of nomad pastoralists, that show some of the features of sedentary societies. But mobile pastoral economies generally emerged after the development of such sedentary societies and often live in a symbiotic relationship with them.
Most obviously, sedentism requires the availability of a mix of food resources permitting year-round occupancy. In most cases this implies food production, although, as we have seen, this was not entirely true of the early days of sedentism in western Asia. It is also the case that specially abundant marine resources can sometimes support sedentism without food production.
Mesolithic shell middens (mounds of discarded mollusc shells, formed over time from the successive repasts of gatherers and collectors working the tidal margins) sometimes reflect what was close to a sedentary way of life. And the recent case of the Kwakiutl and Nootka communities of the north-west coast of America, with their emphasis upon fishing, offer a good example of what may be regarded as sedentary communities that did not practise food production.
In his illuminating book The Domestication of the Human Species (1988), Peter Wilson emphasises the cognitive significance of the house in contrast to the world of the hunter-gatherers whose ‘life is by and large intimate and open to view’:
QUOTE The adoption of the house as the permanent context of social and economic life also marks a major development in cosmological thinking. Open societies have available to them as tools for thought language and such features of the natural environment as animals, landmarks, topographies and the like. But their artifacts are limited by the need for portability, and their nomadism restricts the range of communication of their art somewhat. With settlement comes a proliferation of material culture and with the house is made available what has proved to be the most powerful practical symbol until the invention of writing. In many domesticated societies the house is appropriated to mediate and synthesize the natural symbols of both the body and the landscape. At the same time it provides the environment and context for social life. The adoption of the house and the village also ushers in a development of the structure of social life, the elaboration of thinking about the structure of the world and the strengthening of the links between the two. END QUOTE
Various ethnographic and ethnoarchaeological studies have emphasised how the internal structuring and arrangement of domestic dwellings is shaped by and also shapes the social relations within the family and the community. As Gaston Bachelard has remarked in The Poetics of Space (PUBLISHED 1964): QUOTE ‘for our house is our corner of the world. As has often been said it is our first universe, a real cosmos in every sense of the word.’ END QUOTE
The domestic animals reared by one group will usually be theirs to exploit and slaughter – their property. Here the accumulation of wealth becomes an obvious possibility. The way is open also to the appropriation of property and to differentiation in terms of property: the roots of inequality.
Access to the land cultivated by the group and to its products may well become restricted. The issue of inheritance now presents itself; social reproduction takes on new forms. The children will wish to secure ‘their’ land and ‘their’ cattle from appropriation by outsiders, and rules will have to be established to determine which children have the right to which land.
It is easy to see how, in a sedentary society, ‘property’ emerges as a substantive reality whose recognition establishes it as an institutional fact. All of this presumably happens before the notion of ‘property’ becomes a legal concept, generally in more complex societies, since the notion of law in itself implies the emergence of other institutional facts. Not the least of these is some authority to which appeal can be made when disputes arise concerning the application of the legal principles involved. Property is itself one of those special concepts (like weight and value) that are at once symbolic and material, and whose material nature is constitutive of the institutional fact.
Ian Hodder in The Domestication of Europe (PUBLISHED 1990) has emphasised very effectively the profound change in lifestyle that accompanies the spread of what he calls the domus, the hearth and home, of the developing and expanding sedentary population. As his work implies, while food production is a concomitant of much sedentary life, it is not so much food production as the experience of sedentism on a stable and enduring basis that is the prime revolutionary concept in the ‘neolithic revolution’. The process of engagement or substantivisation continues with the development of the new technologies involved. The use of dried mud (tauf or pisé) becomes feasible as a building material, opening the possibilities of large constructional complexes such as that seen at Çatalhöyük in Anatolia. Extensive stone construction is no longer unduly labour intensive, if it is to be used over long time periods. Such factors not only make possible, but the scale of domestic investment actually makes desirable, the development of defensive facilities, such as the very early walls at Jericho.
Processes of intensification favour the development of irrigation, as well as what Andrew Sherratt termed the ‘secondary products revolution’, with reliance on such animal products as milk and cheese, wool and traction, and favouring the use of the plough.
The reference above to the use of installations in sedentary societies leads on to what was one of the most significant of these, the oven. The oven represents a new development in pyrotechnology, going beyond the use of fire in hunter-gatherer societies for cooking, the heat-pretreatment of flint, and in other ways. But while the oven may have been an extension of the open fire in the field of food preparation and cooking (used for the parching of grain and the baking of bread), these new enterprises led on to the development of new materials. The long story of the human engagement with clay to produce ceramics could now take off. Pottery manufacture is seen in most sedentary societies but very few mobile ones. And in Europe as in western Asia it is clear that the pyrotechnology required for ceramic production soon offered the technical means needed for metallurgy. With the development of ceramics and metallurgy came the production of the first artificially produced materials. The ‘bronze age’ could begin.
Sedentism in western Asia is also associated with what Jacques Cauvin has termed ‘the birth of the divinities’. Figurines occur there in settlements prior to the development of domesticated plants and animals. Indeed, Cauvin has suggested that there may be a causal relationship, that the worship of divinities brought people together into larger social groups during the rituals practised. We may note also that to be altogether effective these divinities (if that is what they are) had to take material form, so that their enduring material presence could facilitate and act as a focus for ritual. That is what Elizabeth DeMarrais and her colleagues have called the ‘materialisation’ process, by which, as they argue, symbols take material form and enhance their influence. The long-term persistence of religious beliefs is facilitated by their permanent embodiment in material form.
There are indeed suggestive indications of the collective practice of ritual at this time. In various early sedentary village sites there are large rooms or spaces for which no other function has been suggested. Even before the development of such villages, at Göbekli Tepe in south-east Turkey, before 9000 BCE (and so before the domestication of plants and animals in that area), a room with upright pillars showing animals in carved relief has been found, which must surely have a ritual function; this must be considered a ritual site.
These factors do not, in themselves, indicate why sedentism began in western Asia at the time that it did, rather than at some earlier date. Most commentators, including Lewis Binford and Jacques Cauvin, accept that climatic change was crucial (global warming, and the establishment of more stable conditions with fewer oscillations in temperature). This will have permitted a greater population density. Researchers like Barbara Bender or Jacques Cauvin see social processes – meeting together for feasting or to conduct rituals – as a key factor alongside the new ecological conditions.
It seems clear that an adequate understanding of the development of the early farming villages of western Asia and of Europe would be difficult to achieve without considering such cognitive issues as those raised above, and without considering the position of the human individual during such processes. For although, as noted earlier, it is possible to speak of the ‘distributed mind’ in considering the development of culture complexes, it is inevitably at the level of the human individual that personal experience occurs. The learning process, crucial to the whole experience of becoming human, is in the first instance a personal and individual learning process.
Nor can the functioning of those early village communities be investigated without first considering how concepts like property, or novel usages such as formalised ritual practised on a large scale, came into being. For it is clear that ritual is often a feature when human individuals come together in large groups.
Ritual practice may of course have been an important feature in earlier hunter-gatherer societies. Certainly, as far as France and Spain are concerned, this is certainly implied by the creative explosion experienced there in the Upper Palaeolithic. Ritual frequently shapes and sometimes motivates group behaviour. An integrated approach, where these cognitive aspects are considered, is therefore needed.
These observations have, of course, been formulated with one particular cultural trajectory in mind: the development of sedentism and of food production in western Asia, and its spread to Europe, as well as its transmission east to the Iranian plateau and as far as neolithic Mehrgarh in north-west Pakistan.
It is an interesting question to consider whether such an analysis can be applied to the other food-producing revolutions noted earlier [IN THE BOOK], such as those of China or Mesoamerica. There, for instance in Oaxaca, the development of what are termed ‘Early Formative’ villages, with the first well-constructed houses accompanied by the early use of domesticated maize, can certainly be claimed as a parallel to what had happened in western Asia. The recognition of ritual buildings, and the first production in that area of terracotta figurines representing humans or ancestors, strengthen the similarity.
Certainly there are similarities here also with the earliest sedentism of coastal Peru. There the earliest village settlements did not at first have agriculture but depended upon the rich resources of the sea. The site of La Paloma was continuously occupied for 2,000 years from shortly after 7000 BCE. Further south, on the Chilean coast, the fishermen of Chinchorro village were the first to make intentionally prepared mummies, their faces painted with red ochre and black manganese, and wrapped in animal skins or mats. Here also new burial practices with rich symbolism accompanied the development of sedentism.
[THAT IS THE END OF PART 2]
The Source has been:
Colin Renfrew, Prehistory: The Making Of The Human Mind, Weidenfeld & Nicolson 2007
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