XII. A Forager’s Mecca: Dreams of Power

On the fertile plains and river valleys north and west of the Black Sea—the corridor through which agriculture entered the European subcontinent—the stories of some of the first agricultural societies shed light on both the effects of agriculture on society, and on the history of the State. The Cucuteni-Trypillian culture existed from 4800 to 3000 BCE in the area that is now western Ukraine, Moldova, and eastern Romania. They practiced an agriculture based on the cultivation of wheat, rye, and peas. Women carried out textile and pottery manufacturing, and men hunted and herded, especially cattle. This culture built some of the largest settlements in the world of that time, including cities of up to fifteen thousand people. They invented the oldest known proto-writing system in the world, manufactured and traded, and lived in pit houses that gave way over time to above-ground clay houses with thatched roofs.

Contrary to assumptions about the state being a more advanced form of political organization, the Cucuteni-Trypillian culture was stateless, egalitarian, peaceful, and non-patriarchal, with a matrifocal spirituality. It ended with the arrival of the the patriarchal and militaristic Indo-European Kurgan or Yamna culture, which was stateless but at least mildly hierarchical (for example, they buried their warrior-kings in special, lavish graves). How this displacement played out is uncertain, and Marija Gimbutas’s hypothesis of a patriarchal Indo-European invasion is disputed. There is evidence of coexistence between the two cultures. It is known that they traded goods, and the Cucuteni-Trypillian inhabitants migrated west, abandoning settlements and creating new ones, which is evidence of some kind of negative pressure coming from the east. Such a settlement disruption suggests a more gradual process rather than invasion, slaughter, and conquest. However, the permanent settlements of the Yamna culture were in the Don basin at this time, far to the east. Radiocarbon dating suggests that there was almost no time window in which Yamna and Cucuteni-Trypillian settlements existed in adjacent territories. One possibility is that trade was carried out by intermediary populations who became increasingly hostile as a response to Yamna expansion, or that early waves of Yamna came to trade or make war but not to settle permanently.

Farther south, the Boian culture existed in similar conditions, but with different social organization and a different end. Existing between 4300 and 3500 BCE in what is now Romania and Bulgaria, the Boian culture practiced agriculture, lived in wattle and daub houses with wooden platform floors and thatched roofs, and made fine decorative pottery that was traded throughout the region. The culture descended from the Gumelniţa culture, which was famous for its anthropomorphic and zoomorphic art. Eventually, the Boians transitioned smoothly into several subsequent cultures of the region. Unlike the Cucuteni-Trypillian, starting around 4100 BCE they developed hierarchies within and between settlements, suggesting the development of a non-state elite that began to centralize political power in federations linking multiple villages and towns. Later in their development, these settlements grew to include defensive fortifications, suggesting an increase in warfare. The Boian culture may have intermingled with or been absorbed by arriving Indo-European populations, rather than having been destroyed or expelled.

And to the west, in the gentle valley where the Ljubljanice River snakes past wooded hills, a stateless people lived for millennia, until around 1000 BCE, in pile dwellings amid the marshes and lakes, using stone and wooden tools until late in their existence. They sustained themselves with hunting, fishing, and primitive agriculture, traveling in dugout canoes. Though they might appear especially primitive in our eyes, they happen to be the inventors of the oldest known wooden wheel in the world. It seems that they were peaceful, non-patriarchal, and egalitarian. They may have been the ones to build the first fortified hilltop settlements in the valley, or this may have been the work of new arrivals; in any case their fortunes changed with the influx of various warlike Indo-European tribes.

The Illyrians were a grouping of hierarchical Indo-European tribes who established a kingdom in the Balkans and earned the hatred of their commerce-focused southern neighbors with constant piracy and warfare. They were eventually defeated and conquered by the Romans. After the arrival of various Celtic populations, the Taurisci, a militaristic Gallic federation, settled here following their defeat by the Romans at the battle of Telamon (225 BCE). They subsequently allied with the Romans but were defeated by invading Germanic tribes, the Cimbri and Teutons, in 112 BCE. The Romans extended their power to the eastern shore of the Adriatic and the region of the Ljubljanice River around 200 BCE, building a city in 50 BCE where Ljubljana now stands. It was the definitive arrival of state power, thousands of years after the advent of agriculture.

In the Pyrenees and on the Mediterranean coast of the Iberian Peninsula, where I now sit finishing this book, the indigenous inhabitants were Ibers and Vascones, a non-Indo-European people who are the ancestors of the present-day Basques, and who settled in the peninsula sometime around 4000 BCE. Celtic and Lusitanian (both Indo-European) tribes had arrived some time after 2000 BCE, but they moved on and settled primarily in the western half of the peninsula. The Ibers, the indigenous inhabitants most influenced by the Phoenicians and Greeks, lived in fortified hilltop settlements, raised crops, made bronze tools, herded animals, and oscillated between war and peace, engaging primarily in raiding rather than territorial conquest. Their society was organized in tribal confederations that could unite around war leaders but were relatively egalitarian. The Vascones lived in more mountainous regions. They practiced pastoralism, hunting, and gathering, and used even more decentralized, non-patriarchal, and horizontal forms of social organization. Starting around 1100 BCE, the Ibers began trading with Phoenician sailors, who established commercial colonies across the Mediterranean coast (in fact it was probably this commercial contact that began to distinguish the Ibers from the Vascones). In subsequent centuries, the Phoenicians were supplanted by the Greeks, who established even more trading colonies, including one where Barcelona now stands. Increasingly, the Ibers were integrated into a world economy, but they remained independent and stateless.

State power was finally imposed around 210 BCE, when first the Carthaginians under Hannibal, and then the Romans, defeated the Iberian and Celtic confederations in a series of wars and subjected them to a system of total colonization and forced production. Some, like the Lusitanian war leader Viriathus, proved indomitable; Rome put an end to the resistance of the tribal confederation he led by paying some of his own to assassinate him after luring him to peace talks. To their credit, they then executed the hired killers with the reasoning that “Rome doesn’t pay traitors.” Many war-captives were forced into slavery and made to work on the villas of the legionaries who had defeated them.

There is a common element in all of these stories. Agriculture could be adopted as an intensive practice or as a light complement to herding, hunting, and gathering. It made up a variable part of the repertoire of stable, non-patriarchal, egalitarian societies for thousands of years. Some such societies engaged in trade, others were relatively isolated; some were peaceful, others were warlike, although their bellicose practices were generally limited to raiding and not the conquest of territory. Hierarchical, non-state, patriarchal societies such as the Illyrians or Kurgans frequently disrupted or uprooted the non-hierarchical alternatives. Other times it was a fully formed state, such as the Roman Empire. In both cases, the conquerors used agricultural production as a sort of weapon and a way to sustain permanent military mobilization. Such a practice is not a consequence of agriculture but a specifically cultured way to understand and to organize agriculture reflecting a worldview and a strategy. What’s more, at least a few hierarchical societies, such as the Bini and the Aryans, resulted when a nomadic society took over an agricultural society. The culture that reproduces an authoritarian and exploitive worldview and deploys militaristic and oppressive strategies will do so no matter what material conditions they are presented with.

We have seen enough examples, demonstrating myriad pathways of social evolution, to put to rest the progressivist assumption that agriculture and sedentary living inexorably lead to state formation. However, agriculture does seem to be a clear precondition for state formation. Sedentary hunter-gatherer societies (typically those with permanent villages near inexhaustible fishing spots) did not develop states, and the nomadic empires, though they did develop complex hierarchies incorporating huge populations, only founded states in the moment when they conquered preexisting agricultural polities. Is there anything in the invention of agricultural techniques that might shed a little light on state formation?

It is now known that agriculture was developed independently in at least eleven different regions of the globe, including multiple sites in Asia, Africa, and North and South America. The first area where it appeared was in the Near and Middle East. Recent research shows that agriculture was not a singular invention in the Fertile Crescent but that it was first developed across a broad region spanning what is now Syria, Palestine, Turkey, Iran, and points in between. [206] At multiple sites throughout this region, 11,500 years ago (9500 BCE) hunter-gatherers started sowing wild barley, wheat, and lentils. For thousands of years previously, they would have already been eating the seeds of these wild-growing grasses, but now they started taking extra steps to encourage their spread, collecting and sowing seeds rather than eating all of them, then storing seeds, and eventually taking the step of clearing land and planting directly, and also selecting seeds from the plants with the characteristics they preferred. Nothing about the beginning of this process is unique in hunter-gatherer practice, since such societies regularly influence their environments to make their food supply more abundant, the same way beavers, ants, and many other species do. Perhaps it becomes useful to dispense with the myth of pristine nature and distinguish between influenced and artificial environments.

For some reason, certain hunter-gatherers of the Fertile Crescent started expending the extra effort to store, to clear, and to plant, settling at sites that may first have been seasonal camps and later permanent villages. The critical point that signals the beginning of agriculture is domestication: the selection and guided evolution of a species, plant or animal, until a new species is created, corresponding to the characteristics desired by the cultivator and not to the species’ relationship with its original ecosystem. The earliest domesticated plant species found in eastern Turkey, Syria, and Lebanon date to 10,500 years ago (8500 BCE).

Chogha Golan, in Iran, was continuously inhabited for 2,200 years starting 12,000 years ago (10,000 BCE). People began cultivating wild barley, wheat, and lentils more than 11,500 years ago (9500 BCE), with domesticated species appearing there 9,800 years ago (7800 BCE), a few hundred years later than in the western Fertile Crescent, though DNA testing confirms that domestication was an independent event at different places in the Fertile Crescent rather than a one-time invention that spread across the region. [207] At Chogha Golan they also kept wild goats in pens, a transition stage between the hunting of wild, free-range animals and the breeding of domestic species.

Because agriculture was developed simultaneously at so many sites across such a wide area, and in multiple regions across the globe, scientists—at least archaeologists, paleoecologists, archaeobotanists, and members of similar disciplines—insist that farming was “inevitable” once the Ice Age ended and conditions for a bountiful agriculture spread and improved. [208] On the one hand, we can accept the simple proposition that, given a large enough human population divided into a diverse enough range of separate societies (as unification and centralization tend to stifle innovation), anything that can be invented eventually will be invented. But there are certain cultural valuations that infiltrate discourses on inevitability that we would do well to question, not only because they normalize and naturalize occurrences that perhaps should spark our ethical disgust and condemnation, but also because they tend to erase a large part of the human panorama. In this case, what about all the human societies that did not develop agriculture?

In fact, there is a huge body of evidence regarding the rejection of agriculture and a widespread aversion to laboring to achieve what nature can provide us freely. Many hunter-gatherer groups (and today, probably all of them) have demonstrated knowledge of agriculture, but choose not to partake. Probably most of the hunter-gatherer societies that have adopted agriculture and sedentary living in the last three hundred years—societies that covered a significant portion of the globe—were forced to do so by processes of colonialism, and some still resist deep in the Amazon or the Kalahari Desert.

Clastres discusses a number of societies that practiced agriculture and gave it up, such as the Lakota of the North American Great Plains, the indigenous inhabitants of the Chaco region in South America, and the Guayaqui in the Amazon. There are also numerous examples of societies that may have transitioned directly from hunting and gathering to nomadic pastoralism, such as the Sami of arctic Europe, the Khoikhoi of southern Africa, and maybe even the early Indo-Europeans.

Agriculture was not independently developed wherever it was ecologically feasible. In fact, it would be safer to say it was only developed in the places and during the climates where it was most favored and would be most abundant. This is no surprise, given that agriculture constituted a major decline in human well-being, with more work or poorer health. [209]

The earliest forms of proto-agriculture (the collecting, storing, and wild sowing of seeds) were not as labor-intensive as the later practice of clearing fields to plant domesticated species. The practitioners of proto-agriculture still sustained themselves on a diverse and healthy diet including hundreds of species of hunted, gathered, and cultivated food sources. At Chogha Golan, archaeologists found 116 different plant taxa and the remains of dozens of hunted animal species, from gazelles to boars to rodents to reptiles to birds to freshwater crustaceans. Wheat only constituted 20 percent of the plant remains found during the last centuries of the settlement, after a more than two-thousand-year-long trajectory towards agriculture. [210]

Once the hard work of domestication and tool innovation was accomplished, agriculture did not necessarily spread by adoption, but by population expansion. Most white Europeans are genetic descendants of farmers in the Fertile Crescent and the Levant. [211] Early farmers, buried eight thousand years ago in what is now Germany, are genetically most similar to the modern inhabitants of Turkey and Iraq. Certainly there are plenty of cases of societies voluntarily adopting agriculture, although we should also take into account that the spread of agriculture makes foraging in the same ecosystem untenable, as forests are cut down and animals over-hunted. But in many other cases, agriculture was spread as part of a cultural complex by a specific people, like the Sumerians, the Bantu, or the Han.

In other words, agriculture cannot be viewed as a mere technological shift, and certainly not as an improvement. It was in large part a cultural choice and many cultures were evidently disposed to avoiding it. What cultures, then, were disposed towards the development of agriculture? Is there anything within such a cultural make-up that might have favored the intensification of hierarchy in some of these societies, and not in others?

We know that while all hunter-gatherer societies are stateless and in material terms egalitarian, we also know that they cover a great range from mildly patriarchal and gerontocratic to resolutely anti-authoritarian. A society of the former type could potentially develop kinship and religious hierarchies once agriculture gave them the opportunities for denser populations, fixed territoriality, craft specialization, and inheritance.

Examining studies on the earliest agriculture, a few things become apparent. For one, sedentary living preceded full-scale agriculture. At Chogha Golan, settlement began around 10,000 BCE, cultivation of wild cereals began around 9500 BCE, and the first domesticated crops appeared around 7800 BCE, roughly mirroring the timeline elsewhere in the Fertile Crescent. This is no paradox. Hunter-gatherer societies can be roughly divided into two modes, foragers and collectors. The latter, in response to ecological conditions, are not fully nomadic. Rather, in certain seasons, they settle in semi-permanent camps to take advantage of a temporary bounty (e.g. the salmon run or the ripening of an abundant fruit, nut, or grain) or to pass the winter, surviving off smoked meats, nuts and grains, or other foods stored up throughout the year. Collectors tend to specialize more in the gathering of especially abundant foods. Hunter-gatherers in the Fertile Crescent may have had semi-permanent settlements in the winter or in the summer months when the abundant wild cereals ripened, and they may well have returned to the same settlements year after year, eventually building permanent structures.

At these settlements, they would have noticed an increase in the growth of the very cereals they collected, as a result of transported seeds falling to the earth, seeds passing intact through the human digestive tract, and so on. Eventually, with just a little extra effort, they might begin to put aside a part of these seeds to sow later, making the natural supply even more abundant. But why take the labor-intensive next steps, when so many other collector societies did not? What else might have induced hunter-gatherers to take the step to permanent sedentary settlement?

We know that sacred sites played an important role in many early states and in the stateless agricultural societies that preceded them, some hierarchical, others horizontal. We also know that nomadic hunter-gatherers had sacred sites where they might go for visions or to perform certain rituals or make spiritual art, from rock carvings to more ephemeral kinds that have not survived the passage of time. Such sites were often in out-of-the-way places or along seasonal migration routes, and not connected to permanent settlement.

It turns out, though, that there is at least one example of hunter-gatherers erecting a permanent monumental site, and it just so happens to be in the Fertile Crescent, dating to a few hundred years before the appearance of proto-agricultural settlements.

The Göbleki Tepe site in the southeast of modern-day Turkey dates to around 11,600 years ago. There, hunter-gatherers made a monument consisting of rings of large stones, up to five meters high, arranged in concentric circles and engraved with animal motifs. The stones weighed between ten and twenty metric tons; placing them therefore required a large group of people and advanced techniques.

If hunter-gatherers in the region had permanent sites, what if these sites also had permanent residents, religious hermits supported by the offerings of visiting pilgrims and by their own activities, which came to include agriculture? It may be feasible that over-hunting in a region populated by many semi-sedentary bands of collectors forced the residents to either move away or take the step to more intensive forms of plant cultivation, yet the symbolic weight of such a decision and the role of spiritual and cultural criteria in its outcome should not be underestimated. The shift to agriculture could never have been a simple calculation of calories per unit of labor because it called into question the very worldview and relationship with nature of those who undertook it. Such a shift would have required a site of spiritual production.

Contrary to ideological mumbo-jumbo regarding “surplus” and “subsistence economies,” hunter-gatherer societies are perfectly capable of supporting a large proportion of nonproductive members, namely the old and the young. Supporting a specialized group of holy people would have been perfectly within their means. A minority of religious hermits living at monumental or sacred sites might not account for the greater part of proto-agricultural settlements. But given the widespread use of semi-permanent, seasonal dwellings by collectors across the world, I think that the greatest leap is not between pure hunting and gathering and a diversified cultivation of wild plants, but between the latter and the labor-intensive clearing of land to plant domesticated crops, together with permanent settlement.

Sedentary religious hermits not only would have aided in the process of innovation and domestication (living at a permanent site and without the distractions of society they would have been privileged observers to the natural processes that led to domestication), [212] they would also have provided an example for the holiness of sedentary living and the magic of co-opting natural processes, shaping the environment, tracing human esthetics on the natural world (ever a fascination for a symbolic species), and giving birth to other species.

Over time, as sedentary settlements gave rise to trade networks and populations grew, the spiritual practice would have intensified. We can imagine shamans who were supported by offerings and gifts and who earned their status through charismatic performances, skill in healing, or ability in other artistic techniques, who lived at sites of spiritual significance that became the destination of pilgrimages and thus nodes of trade. As spiritual/material trade expanded, these holy people could take on disciples, eventually founding hierarchical religious orders that spread through the very trade networks that sustained them. Those orders that executed their functions more out of love for status than out of love for gift-giving, healing, and spiritual experiences would develop authoritarian values that would result in the expansion of internal hierarchies—initially just a pedagogical organization dividing masters, intermediates, and novices. Authoritarian orders within the network would unite, since their logic favored the accumulation of power over the unimpeded search for truth, meaning, and ecstasy. A clash between these different spiritualities may also be a point of origin for the first specifically anti-authoritarian, state-resisting cultural practices.

The development of agriculture was above all a spiritual development, and in every single instance in which this spiritual economy arose, it had the opportunity to promote a tolerance for hierarchy, the specialization of ritual, and the monopolization of occult knowledge, or to promote spiritual commoning and to make ecstatic, transformative experiences available to all. In the former case, the earliest predecessor to a politogen would be intimately connected to a cultural complex binding agricultural methods, spiritual values, and organizational principles. Authoritarian and anti-authoritarian versions of this cultural complex slowly spread across multiple continents.

In the thousands of years that followed, these cultures had the chance to blend, to reverse their directions, or to intensify. Once agriculture was generalized and became the practice, not of spiritual enclaves but of entire societies, hierarchy was probably forced to take several steps back. Next to a growing population that was no longer nomadic, and therefore less inclined to undertake pilgrimages, the preexisting spiritual centers probably faced a sharp decrease in their relative importance. It would take a long time for spiritual hierarchies to either reemerge in each agricultural settlement, or for the earlier spiritual centers to reestablish themselves as regional capitals, once the growth of population and crafts broke the immobility and self-sufficiency of the agricultural settlements and allowed spiritual/material trade to flourish again.