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This is KZSU Stanford.
Welcome to entitled opinions. My name is Robert Harrison.
And we're coming to you from the Stanford campus.
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When the glaciers of the last ice age began to retreat some 10,000 years ago,
lifting the blanket of wind tree abstraction that had covered much of the northern hemisphere,
it marked the beginning of a new climatic era that geologists call the Neothermal.
The warming trend provoked heavy rainfall and forests hitherto suppressed by the ice age,
sprung up again and choked the land.
Melting glaciers, relentless rainfall, the spread of forests,
these concurrent phenomena amounted to an ecological upheaval of cosmic proportions.
It is not by chance that one finds across so many diverse ancient cultures,
remarkably similar stories about a universal flood.
Those stories preserve a haunting memory, a very real events in our prehistory.
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It's hard for us to imagine several millennia later how the return of the forests was experienced as a cataclysm by many of our stone age ancestors,
who during the most recent period of glaciation had evolved into a remarkable biological and cultural species.
A species of predators sustained by the great herds that had roamed the open tenders of Europe.
With the advent of a Neothermal climate their habitat changed and so did their way of life.
As the herds fled the inhospitable density of the forests, many tribes died of starvation,
some followed the migrating herds further and further north,
while some managed to accommodate themselves to the changing habitat,
thanks to that genius for adaptation which had enabled the species to survive other sorts of upheavals in the past.
Broadly speaking, the major accommodation to the new climate took the form of the Neolithic Revolution.
That is, the domestication of animals and the practice of agriculture as a way of life.
It was thanks to that way of life that human prehistory gave way to history.
For animal domestication and agriculture provided the material and economic basis for villages, cities,
nations and empires, in short for history in the broad institutional sense of the term.
If cultural memory has a future which at present seems doubtful,
the 20th century will one day be remembered as the fitful and prolonged continuation of a process that began in earnest a century earlier.
The end of the Neolithic era.
Throughout this era, the great majority of human beings lived and toiled on the land where their ancestors were interred,
where they and their children and their children's children would also be interred.
This is no longer the case in western societies.
For the first time in millennia, most of us don't know where we will be buried,
assuming we will be buried at all.
The likelihood that it will be alongside any of our progenitors becomes increasingly remote.
Uncertainty as to one's posthumous abode would have been unthinkable to the vast majority of people,
even in western societies, just a few generations ago.
He goes hand in hand with another uncertainty that until recently would have been equally unthinkable for the majority.
Most of us have no idea where the food we eat comes from.
We're oblivious of the fields that yielded our grain, the gardens are vegetable sprouted in,
the orchards where our fruits are gathered.
We're not familiar with the animals we eat.
We don't tend to them.
We don't watch them grow.
We don't know what flocks they come from,
or on which pastures they grazed and above all, we have had no hand in their sacrifice.
The daily holocausts that supply the world market's demands for meat, fish, and pool tree take place in another world
than the one most of us now inhabit.
The fact that so many of today's children have never seen a cow is not necessarily a problem for the cows,
but some of us would say it's a problem nonetheless.
Milk remains more or less the same substance whether we know where it comes from or not,
but when a staggering proportion of first-world children responded to the question,
"Where does milk come from?"
with answers to the effect that it comes from the carton,
or in the case of meat, it comes from the supermarket.
There is every reason to believe that the Neolithic era is as good as over.
It's precisely because we are entering a post-Neolithic era that it is all the more important to come to a fuller understanding of what the Neolithic was all about,
how it originated, what changes it entailed for our ancestors,
and what it did to shape our most fundamental views of the world.
That is why I am pleased to welcome to entitled opinions,
an eminent scholar from the Department of Classics and Archaeology here at Stanford,
who has done some fascinating work on the origins of agriculture,
and who does not shrink from the challenge of trying to make sense of the larger picture
when it comes to what we know and don't know about early Neolithic societies.
His name is Michael Shanks, and he joins me today for a two-part show.
The second part of our conversation will air sometime in the next few weeks on KZSU,
but meantime, we will be making it available immediately on our website and on our iTunes podcast.
Michael, thanks for joining us today. It's great to be with you, Robert.
Perhaps before we discuss what we know about the rise of the Neolithic Michael,
we could say a word about how that knowledge has been gathered.
I take it that almost all the direct evidence we have of prehistoric societies
comes to us from the objects and artifacts that have been uncovered or salvaged by the efforts of archaeology.
Is that the case?
Yes, I think in terms of hard evidence, if you like.
That's certainly the case. The material remains of those societies are all that are left,
virtually none of them were in any way literate.
But you also have, of course, really a set of other knowledges that can be applied indirectly
and comparative ethnography, anthropology has been a major source of thinking about early agriculture.
So if you like tracking back from what we know today about agricultural societies
and hunter-gatherer societies, and supposing that they do retain within themselves
some of their history and some of the history of these changes in the nature of humanity.
Yeah, it's funny that archaeology is a very modern discipline I take that it arose out of...
Well, it is.
It is, you know, it is a beganic antiquarianism or...
That's one of the stories, yes.
You can certainly see the origins of archaeology as we know it now.
Back in what is commonly called the Antichourian tradition,
which found it home in Europe, although there are Antichourian traditions,
and globally they are all over the place. But really as a discipline,
yeah, archaeology is a creature of the modern world.
It's not even there though with...
Well, it's kind of there with the Enlightenment, but it's a branch of experimental science,
it's a branch of natural philosophy in its early days.
It's not until the mid-19th century that it comes together really as a discipline,
and it's a very small discipline, not an academic discipline.
It's actually connected with in its early days with its obvious origins, really, in collections.
So it finds its own in the museum.
So what we know today, scientifically speaking, about prehistoric societies,
is obviously something that would not have been known to those societies
that preceded the rise of antichourianism and archaeology.
And they would have had very different concepts of what their remote ancestors were all about.
Would they have had mythical or somehow poetic stories about origins?
I think the theme, the genre of an origin story, is a very old one,
and it's found in many, many different societies, so yeah, you're right.
But I would hesitate to say that archaeology is free from mythology, far from it.
I think what we're going to find in our conversation today and in the next one,
I think we're going to find that the mythological, the deep kind of narratives of mythology,
are really still there in even the most scientific of archaeology.
So that's one of the challenges, really, to tease apart these big broad framing devices,
these big stories that help us understand where we are, where we come from,
how you disentangle those from, our aspirations to be much more scientific.
Well, I'm all for the mythology part of it.
Well, in the sense that this drive to be more and more scientific
and to disentangle the facts from the broader picture, sometimes I think those stories and myths,
as Pagle said, so much the worse for the facts.
It's a good story. I'll take the story.
And oh, it's still a case in archaeology, I can tell.
Well, before we get into the real substance of our topic,
which is the rise of agriculture that we wanted to vote most of our show to,
what are some of the dominant myths and stories that still govern the practice of agriculture,
or the discipline of agriculture?
I think that's not agriculture.
Archaeology.
Yeah, I'm sorry.
In terms of agriculture, yeah.
How do we put it?
I think there's been some changes over the last 30 years in terms of how as archaeologists
we see the origins of agriculture.
And a lot of the changes in how we think of it are in reaction to what we've just been talking about
obliquely, but the framing devices, the big stories,
of human kind, of history, the capital H.
Very frequently, in terms of agriculture, you find notions of radical,
major, significant, change or revolution.
You've already used the term yourself from it.
And this has all sorts of roots.
19th century evolutionary thinking is one,
and even more so, though, is the marketing component of even social evolution,
of understanding social and cultural evolution.
So the notion of radical change is one theme that we see commonly coming up in the stories,
accounts of the origin of agriculture.
The second I think is probably the idea that because, maybe because,
yes, maybe because it's such a big change,
there must have been something big to prompt the change.
So the notion of a prime move, that people change the agriculture for a big reason.
And that's why it was a big change.
And the big reason, well, it varies.
It might be that's, you know, the environment changed.
You mentioned already, there were major environmental changes going on in the post-glacial era.
And it's about warming, it's getting wet, et cetera, et cetera.
And you've covered some like ground already.
So maybe it was an environmental change, or maybe it was to do with an economic change.
The obvious, apparent, apparently obvious advantages of agriculture over other economic systems,
that is, it generates significant surplus.
It allows more settled life, apparently.
And I'm putting it apparently in all of this because, actually, our pictures changed on a lot of these themes.
But the notion of a prime move, you know, sometimes it's, now, put it another way.
It's almost always that these prime movers are almost always seen as kind of external factors,
or, you know, like environmental change, or, you know, something that's bigger than people, you know,
the invention of a more efficient agricultural economic system.
Prime movers nevertheless.
I take it that you don't believe there was such a radical difference in that there wasn't a prime movers.
No, that's such a way.
Well, I think it's a lot more complex, but that doesn't mean we can't understand it.
I think it's actually a lot more interesting.
And that's one of the reasons I'm delighted to be told into your values,
because I think we're going to cover some of that interest, I hope.
Well, perhaps I can throw out some of the concepts that I've come across in terms of prime movers.
I already mentioned, you know, climate change.
Yes.
And, you know, there's something, if what the geologists tell us is true,
that there was the melting of the glaciers, a lot more rainfall,
that all of a sudden now you had forests that had altered the migrating patterns of the herds,
on which the hunter gathers, depended, and that you had then this law of vegetation,
which seemed to triumph over the law of animal, let's say, flesh.
And that's, that one had to come to terms with vegetation and domesticated
because it had become, let's say, an environmental reality.
You know, keep going.
And so it was a way in which this law of vegetative profusion could be cultivated or controlled or domesticated.
And that, in exchange, well, in exchange for all the hardships that agriculture brought in its initial wake.
And we know from stories, it's not only in Genesis where Adam has to, you know, earn his bread through the toil and sweat and blood and tears,
everything associated with agriculture.
The daily grind.
The daily grind is.
That's where the concept comes from.
It's almost a curse.
Yes, it was at least many of the ancient myths tell us that it arose really as a curse and a curtailing of the freedom of movement.
But in exchange for that curtailing of movement, it gave these early Neolithic side, at least what we would call roots.
Almost in the literal sense.
It planted them in one place and allowed for settlement in that.
So, there's the climatic do you think that that's far too generic?
No, I think you put your finger on some key themes that are, you know, at the heart of understanding why people, you know, take to agriculture.
What I would do, there was kind of switching around a little bit and rather have, you know, the profusion, as you put it lovely,
it would be very, very well.
The profusion of, you know, the vegetable, you know, like that.
Instead of having that happen and then people have to say, oh my goodness, what are we going to do about this?
Let's start domesticating the things, you know.
Let's turn it the other in round.
That is, let me give you another picture of late glacial times in what is now temperate Europe.
Okay, so the ice sheets, you know, were much lower.
That is in terms of latitude.
They come much for the south in glaciated times.
That doesn't mean though that the tundras of central Europe were like the arctic tundras that we know today.
Simply because there was a different latitude.
So in fact, even in glaciated times, the summers were really very bountiful.
Yes, they're a great herd.
What are the herds eating?
Right, they're eating a profusion of vegetation.
It's there already.
And this notion, definitely, you've got kind of, you know, the agricultural society, which is focused upon,
you have to investigate the species, animal species, but also plants and, you know, the daily grind and all this.
In contrast to people who are following herds, it's over drawn.
This is over drawn.
And this is one of the, if you like, this is an aspect of the finer grain of history, the picture of history that we're getting in archaeology now.
With this finer grain, we can see that, you know, a lot of those societies were not dependent upon great herds of meat.
It's not, you know, a great world of meaty to, as opposed to the plant eaters later.
Not at all.
There were, in fact, you know, the use of plant species prior to agriculture was profoundly important to those economies.
So, what I'm saying by switching it around is instead, it's not that it's not an important factor.
I think you're putting your finger on something about your relationship with the environment.
Absolutely.
It's about your relationship with other species, crucially.
The notion of domestication, you've put your finger on it, is absolutely central to what's going on here.
But what is domestication?
Now, that's where it starts getting interesting.
The notion that is a prime mover, lots of plants, we've got to domesticate them know.
But the theme, plants our relationship with them, animals, our relationship with them, yes.
And it's a switching those relationships that we're seeing happening.
And how we understand where that comes from is precisely the issue.
But it's not that they suddenly appear.
They've always been.
Right.
Well, I want to go into the, you know, the crucial part of it, which is the, the relationship to other species.
But first let me just throw out another few theories.
One that I, that I came across, I think I mentioned it to you before we came on here.
The discovery that grains could be turned into a crude form of beer or a alcohol.
And that there are some scholars in the 50s who were suggesting that it was this enormous enthusiasm for the alcoholic effects of fermented grains that prompted our forebears to make a concerted effort to supply the source of their rice.
And therefore the neo-luthing would have had something to do with this enthusiasm for alcohol.
I take this very seriously, but again in a very, in a different way, oh, absolutely.
Let me put a kind of different frame on it.
Your frame there, or what is, you know, it's a vice, you know.
Therefore maybe the root of history is seen.
Absolutely.
The scholars of the 50s were all right.
Absolutely.
And they would.
And there's an anxiety there as well about where we've come from and how we've ended up in the way we are.
Certainly.
However, this interest in substances, mind-olving substance or whatever.
It's ubiquitous.
And our radical separation of psychotropic substances from ordinary everyday life is a particular historical one.
So anthropologically, it's very, very common.
So, but let's now think of exactly what's involved in making beer.
You know, and it's, of course, a byproduct and a very closely connected byproduct of processing grain.
If you're making bread, you're applying, okay, if you may or may not use yeast as a rising agent.
But applying, you know, putting together, you know, recipes that produce bread, warming grain processing it, grinding it up.
It's very similar to making beer.
So, you know, it's a very closely connected process.
Absolutely.
Therefore, involved, it would have been involved in the early days of processing of this grain.
It would not, given what I've just said about, you know, the ubiquity of fondness for such substances.
There's absolutely every reason to think that it was there.
Yes, at the beginning, it would have been part of what's going on.
Understanding that is your relationship with a plant species and its product.
And as in terms of metamorphosis, of work you do upon it to create something else,
its translation, transformation, and what do these substances do for you?
They sustain you.
And which is, or, you know, what's the difference between, you know, sustenance and the sustenance of the mind, which lets it take you into other worlds?
And after all, what are the other worlds, but the other worlds, perhaps, of other species?
Hence, you can tie in as has been often done, attitudes towards to atomic species, other species.
Your continuity with a world of nature, your ecological relationships, which, in working on grain in the world,
in your cultural environment, is turning what we call ecology into a culturally ecology.
That is a series of interconnections that are about basic experiences of yourself and obes.
So, yes, absolutely. It's there at the beginning.
Yeah.
Meanwhile, I'm all for that.
T.S. Eliot said humankind cannot bear very much reality.
And sometimes it's the economic, the tyranny of economic interpretations of human motivation and human history and prehistory.
Where everything is reduced to material needs without taking into account a whole other set of needs that are not reducible to economic terms, which might be spiritualistic in nature.
And certainly the need to have some, what we would call respite from the real, from the overbearing oppressive presence of the real, would seem to me to explain exactly.
And you're right to go down this line, I think, because one of the, this issue of prime movers has often revolved around essentially economic, economic,
and explanations for agriculture.
So, here I'd like to just, I'd like to quote an Italian scholar's name is Pietro Lureano.
And you and I have also talked about this in relation to the relationship between gardens and agriculture.
Okay. I was, I've just finished a book on gardens and I was having a conversation with a poet, W.S. Merwin, very well known poet.
It was out here at Sanford a few years ago.
And he was, and he grows a lot of gardens in his homestead in Hawaii.
And he was saying that he believes that gardens preceded the rise of agriculture.
Unlike many theorists who would claim that gardening was a byproduct of agricultural practices.
No, no, he's absolutely right.
He's a horticulture, yes.
But of course he's a poet and he says it, I suppose, more by intuition than by method.
But here is what this Italian Pietro Lureano says in more, let's say, evidentiary terms.
When he says that the first timid experiments from which the techniques of domestication and cultivation were derived could not have had utilitarian goals.
Why? Because domestication as well as the gathering and selection of species to obtain types with exploitable characteristics are practices that come to fruition only after several generations.
Hence, they cannot be explained by the need to procure allermentation or other benefits.
So from this premise, now, Lureano then deduces that the first gardens would have been created by the hunter-gatherers for the purposes that we're unquoting now.
Ritualistic, magical, or simply ludic and aesthetic, but not economic or productive.
Is that at all the persuasive too?
Well, there's a good deal of sense in that.
But he's still making this distinction between the ludic or the non-utilitarian and the utilitarian.
I would say, just do away with the distinction. Instead of saying, oh, it's not utilitarian, it's ludic.
Say, no, no, actually, the two, it's an artificial distinction.
The utilitarian is often. In fact, it's best if it is the ludic, because there is a motivational factor in doing it.
If you can make it much more broad than simply sustenance, you're getting some way.
But this notion, though, that experiment comes first.
That experiment is not going to deliver the goods as it were, except after a while, and therefore needs to be motivated by another reason.
This is an interesting one. For me, it raises these two.
Origins of agriculture. Is it this an invention that delivers certain rewards?
Well, yes, of course. You can look at it that way.
But how are you understanding invention here?
Well, here's the notion of tentative experiment, and then eventually you light upon the right answer,
or you've found the combination of species and practices that deliver your surplus, and off it goes.
I think this actually is again a bit the wrong way round.
Increasingly, as we look with this finer grain picture, let me come back to this finer grain picture that archaeology is now affording of long-term historical change.
What I would say, what I see coming out of it is, really some checks and balances on how we understand such things as invention and origins.
For example, with horticulture agriculture, the practices that constitute agriculture had been around for millennia when it actually took off in a big way as a regular economic system, social system, social system that we recognize now very distinctively.
All its different components had been there to repeat for millennia. What does this mean?
Is it that they're experimenting, and then come up with the answer and off it goes, no.
I think what we need to look at human history in terms of is a background of constant creativity and invention.
You mentioned this at the beginning with the notion of the human species and its adaptability. What is that adaptability?
Well, maybe it's that, you know, we're constantly experimenting.
Maybe there's something in everyday life and attitude towards things, which is about trying something else out.
And it's not, therefore, that there's a dearth of, that there's a lack of good ideas as to how you might go on change things, improve things.
It's not that you can't think of new inventions. They're all around you. The issue is, which ones do you choose?
So the issue is not, what are the origins of agriculture or water to offer? It's, why didn't agriculture happen earlier?
That is, why did it happen when it did, or in the way that it did? Given, as I say, you know, the existence of the
all the components of agriculture millenia before they came together. So we're creative as a species. The issue is, why do we adopt certain of our inventions and not others?
Another way of putting that is, why are some changes actively held back? Why are we stopped from changing? So the issue for me in human history is not, why do we change?
It's why aren't we changing faster? Well, we are now. And there's a theme that you've already flagged up.
Right. I have two responses. Well, both in the form of questions as well, when you raise the question of why if we had the techniques and the knowledge is to bring about what scholars have called the Neolithic Revolution earlier did it not come about earlier.
I want to know what your answer to that question might be. And second, I would also ask, I think that the Neolithic, by Neolithic, I mean, societies that are based primarily on agriculture and animal domestication.
And why Neolithic societies are invariably very conservative, hostile to change, very committed to reproducing the models of the past and tradition fiercely stubbornly allied to tradition, and is there a deeper wisdom about slowing down the pace of transformation that they had that we perhaps have lost in this post-Neolithic kind of
society that we live in? Yeah, let me take the second bit there. First, is there something inherently conservative about Neolithic societies? I'm not going to say that there isn't, because yes, we see a resistance to change in agricultural societies for all sorts of reasons. We could go into those, but let's leave those for the moment.
And the guy on a society is a profoundly conservative, simply in terms of the stretches, the millennia in prehistory, where the agricultural remains hardly change at all. It's extraordinary, the technological, the material cultural conservatism of most of human history.
In the big picture, the long-term view of humanity, Neolithic societies are actually incredibly innovative, because we've got, if we say that human species is, well, now, we've got evidence that anatomically modern humans have been around maybe 200,000 years.
But let's say 120,000 years for the human species. Agricultural society, in the sense of the managed economy, a managed economy based upon settled village life, a few domesticated species and all the rest.
So, agricultural society, it's only been around a few thousand years. That's a tiny amount of time. And if you then look at the Association of Agricultural Societies with cities, states, it's even less.
So, yeah, the pace of change is speeding up, and agriculture is part of that.
So, agriculture provides the possibility for this very dynamic evolution on the institutional basis, for villages to cities, to empires and so forth.
But would you agree that it's mostly the surpluses that are produced by agriculture that enable that history, but that, at the level of production, namely agrarian societies,
remain amazingly constant over the generations and over millennia, such that up until in the 19th century, a peasant in France would recognize the practices at Homer is describing when he's talking about ancient Greece because they're at that level. Not that much as really.
Here, maybe we're getting to some of these issues in the first part of your question, which is, you know, if what why were these ways of life adopted, what you have is a successful system, a system that works.
It doesn't just develop, deliver surplus. There are many non-agricultural ways of life that deliver considerable surplus.
What agriculture does is deliver surplus with a fair deal of predictability. Of course, there are issues you're going to be careful about also in managing its management as a crucial issue.
But nevertheless, it's a system that works, but it's not just an economic system that works.
The basic system which allows the exploitation of surplus by certain sections of society, you can build that in a very robust way.
That is elites get a very robust way of life using an agricultural system. They don't have to work so hard to maintain their position.
Then, I think what you've also mentioned already is crucial to agriculture. I choose to as land and place belonging identity are all built into this system.
So what I would say agriculture is, is a coming together in a particular form, it's this culturally-colleging notion I mentioned.
It's a set of connections that are extremely robust. It's a network, it's a system which is expansive.
That is, I'm sort of alternating here between system and network. Network is an open system. It's an open system.
That allows development to change, it's expansive, and it becomes imperialist, which is part of its initial expansion, is kind of ethos.
It's robust, it expands, it is based upon very solid linkages that aren't just economic, but answer, frankly, they answer some crucial issues about life, the universe and everything.
And people tune into it. That's why many, many myths and such have these profound things to say about the significance of our relationship with certain species in a cosmological sense.
I want to talk about that more in-depth perhaps even in the second hour, but perhaps go back to this, the phenomenon of horticulture agriculture.
Is that a distinction which you would also happily do away with?
No. I think it's a good one. I think agriculture is as a term, as a concept, is best kept for these more developed economies based upon domesticated species.
They're more managed, they're more focused upon the species we're so used to in western agriculture. That is a basic stable grain, it's usually wheat, partly.
But there's always ancillary species too. And then that regular range of domesticated animals, which in the west, of course, has been sheep, ovicaparids, sheep goats, cattle and pigs.
So I think keep agriculture for that and also agriculture really for the use of secondary products.
It's a crucial component actually of what you do with the secondary products of your animals and plants.
The year actually is one and there's an argument, it didn't mention earlier, but there is an argument that the beer comes along later as a secondary product.
I think that's an open case, an open issue.
But in terms of cheese, for example, milk products, we see the material culture that goes with those coming later.
In fact, I think you can quite, yes, I think this is pretty incontivable.
By coming later you mean that they were the primary exploitation of the animal.
We don't, well, on the basis of material evidence, cheese strainers are not there at the beginning.
So these animals originally would have served only for consumption of the flesh.
Indeed. But leather, leather working, this, and the gap between you domesticating animals and then starting to exploit them in this much more elaborate way.
It's several thousand years.
So in the beginning, I think we can look at a much more mixed economy.
Now this makes sense if you think about it. If you are a hunter-gatherer society, it's not that you are only relying on this hand to my existence of,
whoops, they follow the herds, let's grab a few more elk, or there's a bush of berries, let's have them too.
What you have basically is a profound knowledge of a region and its ecology.
And you're part of that. So you know what time of year to go when you're going to have the shellfish.
You're also probably doing, well, it's not probably.
You're also, as a community involved in managing these species, selective weeding is a classic way of encouraging certain plants to do well so that the next time you come, they're going to be better, that's going to be more fruit.
Or you selectively cull herds.
You don't keep them pinned in.
What you do is you kill certain members of the herd so that it will prosper.
So, selective culling management of plants and animals is a regular part of a hunter-gatherer way of life.
It's when you kind of increase your investment in that kind of management that you start moving towards agriculture.
And if you offer, example in a very rich environment where you don't have to move around that much, then settling in one place, it makes sense to have the plants and animals closer to hand so you move them.
But this is a gradual process. When you start saying, "Okay, I'll have 250 species that we regularly feed ourselves with."
It's not uncommon to find this, that you have these very, very diets, I'm going to gather early, early people.
When you start saying, "Well, we're not going to have 250 plant animal species, a very wonderful rich diet, but instead we're going to have six."
Well, that is the kind of big change that comes with a managed agricultural system. It doesn't have to be like that, though.
And that, I think, is room for the concept of horticulture where you're, yes, tending to species, but not managing them in the way that comes later.
Very clearly, it comes later. Horticulture would apply them to animals as well as to plants. I don't see why not.
It's all a question might have degree. When does, you know, sort of, you know, panning in a herd, or just preventing it from moving long distance, when does that action upon the herd become a much closer form of tending?
And when does the open range become, you know, not the garden, but something else.
And Michael, what about forms of community that arise naturally from the shift to agriculture as a dominant way of life?
I'm very interested in the connection we see occurring between horticulture agriculture, okay, and architecture.
I think there's something going on with this. It's a polyaphatica of settlement, and you've mentioned you flagged up this issue, being in one place, you know, and the notion of place.
Now, horticulture or societies do have noticed a place, you know, and it's often to do. It's all listed with stories, with anthologies, with legendary histories attached to place.
So, you know, we're not saying that this is radical distinction. However, there is something different, I think, when you start building things in the land, that is, when you start taking geology, stone, earth, the forest, sorry, earth and the forest, wood and earth.
When you take the land itself, manipulate it, using labor, that is, surplus labor, when you start putting your energies into this kind of thing, something different is going on.
You're not in the same kind of relationship with these materials, and indeed, with other species, of course, plants and animals.
As you were before, this is where we start, I think, getting more into what's going on with horticulture agriculture.
So, architecture, buildings, and buildings and architectures, of course, are about the physical matrix, the social fabric. They are the material form that is crucial to certain kinds of community.
Living in a village. How much can we tell about the beliefs, creeds, religions, mentalities of societies that didn't leave any written record for us through their architectural remains?
The old view used to be really materialistic, and therefore pessimistic, that is, because religious views are conceived to be kind of immaterial.
The idea has been that they're therefore very difficult to access. One of the changes we've seen in archaeology in the last 30 years is much more optimism towards our ability to recover.
Components of worldviews of mentalities.
And I'm with that. I'm for that. I think, yes, we're much more able to do it.
Not least, because I think the distinction between the material and immaterial realms of human life has been overdrawn.
I think that most of the thing, this notion of utility, non-utility that we've already mentioned, it's overdrawn.
Most utilitarian items are saturated with immaterial values and meanings. The intangible world is as much part of reality as the tangible.
So I'm for that. Okay, so then the question was, what about the views? Why don't we say, oh, this was a matriarchal society centered upon the mother goddess.
But what you can certainly see from very early times is clear evidence for interest in a bunch of, if you like, kind of broad, almost kind of meta-religious or conceptual things.
But I mean, you can't get to the detail, but you can see, for example, that there is a profound interest in other worlds of dream worlds, of dream states, or of spaces beyond this.
And that can often be about cosmology and indeed astronomy, a regular feature of early farming society is a fascination. It's of course quite understandable, a fascination with astronomical movements with the cycles of the heavens.
And you have whole built environments across Northern Europe, which are oriented, which are all of that cosmology in this sense. Or yet towards the sound.
It's, yeah, there's an ortho. In convertible evidence of profound knowledge and orientation upon the solar calendar. There's less evidence, but I think it's significant for a deep understanding of the lunar calendar.
And in fact, we still live with it. We have direct evidence from the prehistoric built environment that is the monumental landscapes of Northern Europe from six millennia ago. We have clear evidence of recognition of the classic astronomical moments of the solar calendar, which we still observe Halloween. And mid-summer and all this, these were observed way back then. And you can see why.
I'm often wondered whether settlement and being blocked in one place if you like to look at it in that way, didn't actually activate or energize some sort of interest or nostalgia for elsewhereness even more than hunting.
Absolutely hunter-gatherers and therefore cosmology and other worlds and so forth, were almost a kind of response to the fact that one couldn't physically oneself move that easily anymore.
There, I think what you're touching on is that for me, certainly, is the relationship of architecture of building to notions of home base. That is this is your base. When you go out into the world to, well, what? You're leaving home. You're leaving the security of the system of the community to discover it, to find out now.
And here, again, we're into all sorts of components of mythology of the traveler, the wanderer, the journey away and as important the north-source, in the Homeric House, the home coming, coming back to the base.
And what that, what you bring with you when you come back. And it is often experience, of course, of other worlds, of other people's.
And stories, absolutely, because one has to do something in the evening, in the night times and nothing is more important perhaps than the poet.
But if not, literally, the one who is the wanderer who sets out and then comes back, at least sees the voice of the wanderer and tells the stories of other worlds and other places and fantastic occurrences so that the people at home may hear them.
But I'm going to mention a site, when you're talking, thinking of a site that fascinates me, it's not a farming village. It's a hunter's camp called Donnie Vestinice.
And it's in Central Europe. It's in the Czech Republic. And it was built out of mammoth bones. Okay, so it's a late glacial site. And it's 30, 25, 30, 30 years ago.
And it's absolutely got clear, controversial evidence of this notion of a home base when people go out into the world and come back. And absolutely what you've just described there, because it's not that it's permanent, by no means.
It was probably a tent-like structure held down, held together with these bones, but the kind of almost permanent feature of the camp were hearts. And people were clearly sitting around these because they're in their main feature of the site.
And they have fire clay ornaments. So they've invented pottery and they're making little figurines, which are highly individualistic. So they have...
There's almost the feeling some of these boys do recognize them as a kind of heroic... I'm not going to call them hunter figures because there's all sorts of problems with that.
But they're at these very distinctive individuals. And what else is in that camp? Musical instruments. And exotic stone.
It brings stone from many, many miles away and fashioning implements out of it. There you are. There's the components of this sitting around the half of hearing of places afar beyond, which were almost certainly the locale for strange encounters for great deeds.
Now that, for me, you see, is an example of the genealogy of what we're talking about with agricultural society. The difference being they weren't in a village. It wasn't a built environment. There wasn't the same material if you're like expression of all of this.
And that comes with much more investment in the walls of the village, the fabric. And then what comes right at the beginning of the village is the shrine.
That is, sometimes it's very difficult to tell the difference between the domestic unit and the temple. They're actually coincident in many, many sites to begin with. And it comes with... It comes as well with sculpted objects, with inscribed artifacts, that are a material, clearly a material component to this new sense of place, of belonging and what you do there in relationship to your other species, your domesticate species, your economy, and what you do there in relationship to your other species, your domesticate species, your economy.
And what is beyond?
All fascinating stuff, Michael. What we will do is continue our conversation along these lines in the second hour and encourage our listeners, those of you who are listening live to stay tuned.
And sometime in the future we're going to air this on KZSU. But if you can't wait to hear the second part of our conversation, just go to the webpage of the French and Italian department here at Stanford.
And there we have a link for entitled opinions and our show, all our shows, past shows are archived there.
So you can, as of tomorrow, I believe here, part two of our conversation, as well as we're on iTunes. Our podcast is on iTunes, so you can download it, put it on your iPod and listen to it in that form.
So thank you, Michael. We're going to end with a little song from our generation and be right back.
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