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C H A P T E R O N E

The Domestication of Fire, Plants, Animals, and . . . Us

F I R E

WHAT fire meant for hominids and ultimately for the rest of

the natural world is presaged vividly by a cave excavation in

South Africa.1 At the deepest and therefore oldest strata, there

are no carbon deposits and hence no fire. Here one finds full

skeletal remains of large cats and fragmentary bone shards—

bearing tooth marks—of many fauna, among which is Homo

erectus. At a higher, later stratum, one finds carbon deposits

signifying fire. Here, there are full skeletal remains of Homo

erectus and fragmentary bone shards of various mammals,

reptiles, and birds, among which are a few gnawed bones of

large cats. The change in cave “ownership” and the reversal

in who was apparently eating whom testify eloquently to the

power of fire for the species that first learned to use it. At

the very least, fire provided warmth, light, and relative safety

from nocturnal predators as well as a precursor to the domus

or hearth.

The case for the use of fire being the decisive transfor-

mation in the fortunes of hominids is convincing. It has been

Scott, James C.. Against the Grain : A Deep History of the Earliest States, Yale University Press, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/washington/detail.action?docID=6424075. Created from washington on 2023-10-12 08:33:02.

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mankind’s oldest and greatest tool for reshaping the natural

world. “Tool,” however, is not quite the right word; unlike an

inanimate knife, fire has a life of its own. It is, at best, a “semi-

domesticate,” appearing unbidden and, if not guarded care-

fully, escaping its shackles to become dangerously feral.

Hominids’ use of fire is historically deep and pervasive.

Evidence for human fires is at least 400,000 years old, long

before our species appeared on the scene. Thanks to homi-

nids, much of the world’s flora and fauna consist of fire-

adapted species (pyrophytes) that have been encouraged by

burning. The effects of anthropogenic fire are so massive

that they might be judged, in an evenhanded account of the

human impact on the natural world, to overwhelm crop and

livestock domestications. Why human fire as landscape archi-

tect doesn’t register as it ought to in our historical accounts

is perhaps that its effects were spread over hundreds of mil-

lennia and were accomplished by “precivilized” peoples also

known as “savages.” In our age of dynamite and bulldozers, it

was a very slow-motion sort of environmental landscaping.

But its aggregate effects were momentous.

Our ancestors could not have failed to notice how natu-

ral wildfires transformed the landscape: how they cleared old

vegetation and encouraged a host of quick-colonizing grasses

and shrubs, many bearing desired seeds, berries, fruits, and

nuts. They could also not have failed to notice that a fire drove

fleeing game from its path, exposed hidden burrows and nests

of small game, and, most important, later stimulated the

browse and mushrooms that attracted grazing prey. Native

North Americans deployed fire to sculpt landscapes favored

by elk, deer, beaver, hare, porcupine, ruffed grouse, turkey,

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and quail, all of which they hunted. The game they subse-

quently bagged represented a kind of harvesting of prey ani-

mals they had deliberately assembled by carefully creating a

habitat they would find enticing.2 Quite apart from being the

designers of hunting grounds—veritable game parks—early

humans used fire to hunt large game. The evidence suggests

that long before the bow and arrow appeared, roughly twenty

thousand years ago, hominids were using fire to drive herd

animals off precipices and to drive elephants into bogs where,

immobilized, they could more easily be killed.

Fire was the key to humankind’s growing sway over the

natural world—a species monopoly and trump card, world-

wide. The Amazonian rain forest bears indelible traces of

the use of fire to clear land and open the canopy; Australia’s

eucalyptus landscape is, to a considerable degree, the effect

of human fire. The volume of such landscaping in North

America was such that when it stopped abruptly, due to the

devastating epidemics that came with the European, the newly

unchecked growth of forest cover created the illusion among

white settlers that North America was a virtually untouched,

primeval forest. According to some climatologists, the cold

spell known as the Little Ice Age, from roughly 1500 to 1850,

may well have been due to the reduction of CO₂—a green-

house gas—brought about by the die-off of North America’s

indigenous fire farmers.3

From our perspective, what this slow-motion landscape

engineering accomplishes over time is to concentrate more

subsistence resources in a smaller and smaller area. It re-

arranges, by a fire-assisted form of applied horticulture, desir-

able flora and fauna in a tighter ring around the camp(s) and

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makes hunting and forging easier. The radius of a meal, one

might say, is reduced. Subsistence resources are closer at hand,

more abundant, and more predictable. Wherever humans

and fire were at work sculpting the landscape for hunting-

and-gathering convenience, few nutrient-poor “climax” for-

ests were allowed to develop. We are nowhere near the oxen,

the plough, and the tame livestock of the domus, but we are

nevertheless looking at a systematic intensification of land-

scape and resource management of massive proportions that

predates by hundreds of millennia the actual cultivation of

fully domesticated crops and pastoralism. Unlike optimal for-

aging theory that takes the disposition of the natural world

as given and asks how a rational actor would distribute his or

her efforts in procuring food, what we have here is a delib-

erate disturbance ecology in which hominids create, over

time, a mosaic of biodiversity and a distribution of desirable

resources more to their liking. Evolutionary biologists term

such activity, combining location, repositioning of resources,

and physical safety, niche construction: think “beaver.” Seeing

the concentration of resources in this light places the mile-

stones of the classical civilizational narrative—the domestica-

tion of plants and animals—in a new light as elements among

many in a longue-durée continuum of ever-more-elaborate

niche construction.4

Fire powerfully concentrates people in yet another way:

cooking. It is virtually impossible to exaggerate the impor-

tance of cooking in human evolution. The application of fire

to raw food externalizes the digestive process; it gelatinizes

starch and denatures protein. The chemical disassembly of

raw food, which in a chimpanzee requires a gut roughly three

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times the size of ours, allows Homo sapiens to eat far less food

and expend far fewer calories extracting nutrition from it.

The effects are enormous. It allowed early man to gather and

eat a far wider range of foods than before: plants with thorns,

thick skins, and bark could be opened, peeled, and detoxified

by cooking; hard seeds and fibrous foods that would not have

repaid the caloric costs of digesting them became palatable;

the flesh and guts of small birds and rodents could be steril-

ized. Even before the advent of cooking, Homo sapiens was

a broad-spectrum omnivore, pounding, grinding, mashing,

fermenting, and pickling raw meat and plants, but with fire,

the range of foods she could digest expanded exponentially.

As testimony to that range, an archaeological site in the Rift

Valley dated twenty-three thousand years ago gives evidence

of a diet spanning four food webs (water, woodland, grass-

land, and arid) encompassing at least 20 large and small ani-

mals, 16 families of birds, and 140 kinds of fruit, nuts, seeds,

and pulses, not to mention plants for medicinal and craft pur-

poses—baskets, weaving, traps, weirs.5

Fire for cooking was at least as important as fire as land-

scape architect for the concentration of population. The latter

placed more desirable foods within easier reach, while the

former rendered a whole range of hitherto indigestible foods

now both nutritious and palatable. The radius of a meal was

much further reduced. Not only that, but softer cooked foods

as a form of external premastication allowed easier weaning

and the feeding of the elderly and toothless.

Armed with fire to sculpt the environment and able to eat

so much more of it, early man could both stay closer to the

hearth and, at the same time, establish new hearths in previ-

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ously forbidding environments. Neanderthal colonization of

northern Europe is a case in point; it would have been incon-

ceivable without fire for warmth, hunting, and cooking.

The genetic and physiological effects of at least half a mil-

lion years of cooking have been enormous. Compared with

our primate cousins, we have a gut less than half the size and

far smaller teeth, and we spend far fewer calories chewing and

digesting. The gains in nutritional efficiency, Richard Wrang-

ham claims, largely account for the fact that our brains are

three times the size one would expect, judging by other mam-

mals.6 In the archaeological record the surge in brain size co-

incides with hearths and the remains of meals. Morphological

changes of this magnitude have been known to occur in other

animals in as little as twenty thousand years following a dra-

matic shift in diet and ecological niche.

Fire largely accounts for our reproductive success as the

world’s most successful “invasive.”7 Much like certain trees,

plants, and fungi, we are a fire-adapted species: pyrophytes.

We have adapted our habits, diet, and body to the character-

istics of fire, and having done so, we are chained, as it were, to

its care and feeding. If the litmus test of domestication for a

plant or animal is that it cannot propagate itself without our

assistance, then, by the same token, we have adapted so mas-

sively to fire that our species would have no future without it.

Even overlooking entirely the fire-dependent crafts that de-

veloped later—potter, blacksmith, baker, brick maker, glass-

maker, metalworker, gold- and silversmith, brewer, charcoal

maker, food smoker, plaster maker—it is no exaggeration to

say that we are utterly dependent on fire. It has in a real sense

domesticated us. One small but telling piece of evidence is

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that raw-foodists who insist on cooking nothing invariably

lose weight.8

C O N C E N T R A T I O N A N D S E D E N T I S M :

A W E T L A N D S T H E S I S

What might have been an earlier trend toward popula-

tion growth and settlement in the Fertile Crescent owing to

warmer and wetter conditions ended abruptly around 10,800

BCE. A millennium-long cold snap that followed is believed

by some to have been caused by a massive pulse of glacial melt

from North America (Lake Agassiz) suddenly draining east-

ward into the Atlantic through what we now call the Saint

Lawrence River.9 Population receded, the remainder shrank

back from marginal highlands to refugia where the climate,

and therefore the flora and fauna, were more favorable. Then,

around 9,600 BCE, the cold snap broke and it became warmer

and wetter again—and fast. The average temperature may have

increased as much as seven degrees Celsius within a single de-

cade. The trees, mammals, and birds burst out of the refugia

to colonize a suddenly more hospitable landscape—and with

them, of course, their companion species, Homo sapiens.

At about the same time, archaeologists find scattered evi-

dence of yearlong occupation of many sites—the Natufian

Period in the southern Levant and the “prepottery” stage

in Neolithic villages in Syria, central Turkey, and western

Iran. They generally occur in water-rich areas and subsist

largely by hunting and foraging, though there is evidence—

disputed—of cereal horticulture and livestock rearing. Not

in dispute, however, is that between 8,000 and 6,000 BCE,

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all the so-called “founder crops”—the cereals and legumes:

lentils, peas, chickpeas, bitter vetch, and flax (for cloth)—are

being planted, though generally on a modest scale. Over the

same two-millennia span—the timing vis-à-vis cereals is not

clear—domesticated goats, sheep, pigs, and cattle make their

appearance. With this suite of domesticates the full “Neo-

lithic package,” seen as the decisive agricultural revolution

that marks the beginning of civilization, including the first

small urban agglomerations, is in place.

Permanent proto-urban settlements emerge in the wet-

lands of the southern alluvium near the Persian Gulf around

6,500 BCE. The southern alluvium is not the earliest site of

year-round settlements; nor is it the site where the first evi-

dence of domesticated cereals appears. In these respects, it is

a latecomer. I concentrate in this book on these later sites for

two important reasons. First, these urban agglomerations at

the mouth of the Euphrates—for example, Eridu, Ur, Umma,

and Uruk—go on to become, much later, the very first “state-

lets” in the world. Second, while other ancient societies such

as Egypt, the Levant, the Indus Valley, the Yellow River Val-

ley, and Maya in the New World have their own variants of

the Neolithic revolution, southern Mesopotamia not only was

the site of the first state system, but it also directly influenced

later state making elsewhere in the Middle East as well as in

Egypt and India.

Even on the basis of this rough-and-ready chronology—

much of it still in some dispute—one can see how much of

it is stubbornly at odds with what I have called the standard

civilizational narrative. That narrative pivoted on the do-

mestication of grain as the basic precondition of permanent

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P E R S I A N G U L F

Euphrates

Diya la

Tigris

Karun-Karkeh

Shatt-ai- Arab

Modern city Archaeological sites Modern watercourse

1 2 3 4 5

Diyala Survey Akkad Survey Kish Survey Nippur Survey Mashkan-Shapir

6 7 8 9

Warka (Uruk) Survey Uruk East Gharraf Tello Region

10 11 12 13

Lagash Zhurghal (Nina-Sirara) Ur-Eridu Survey Hammar Lake Survey

0 100 150 km50

50 100 mi

Gulf ca. 4,000 BCE

Sippar

Uruk

Karbala

Babylon Kish

Samarra

Lagash

Girsu

Isin

Najaf

Shuruppak

Samawa

Umma

Mashkan-shapir

Qurna

Nina-Sirara

T.Lahm Eridu

Nippur

Adab Amarra

Basra

Nasiriyah

Baghdad

T. Jemdet Nasr

T. Uqair

Kut

Susa

Larsa

Borsippa

T. ΄Ubaid

6 7

9 10

12 13

Major archaeological sites of alluvial Mesopotamia, with surveyed areas

Figure 7. Mesopotamian alluvium: Archaeological sites

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sedentary life, and thus of towns, cities, and civilization. The

presumption, still commonly held, was that hunting and for-

aging required such mobility and dispersal that sedentism was

out of the question. Yet sedentism long predates the domes-

tication of grains and livestock and often persists in settings

where there is little or no cereal cultivation. What is also

absolutely clear is that domesticated grains and livestock are

known long before anything like an agrarian state appears—

far longer than previously imagined. On the basis of the latest

evidence, the gap between these two key domestications and

the first agrarian economies based on them is now reckoned

to stretch for 4,000 years.10 Clearly our ancestors did not rush

headlong into the Neolithic revolution or into the arms of the

earliest states.

Those who crafted the older narrative were radically mis-

taken in yet another respect. Taking as their point of depar-

ture the exceptionally arid conditions that have prevailed in

the Tigris-Euphrates Valley in recent history, they reasonably

enough projected this aridity back to the dawn of agriculture.

Confined in limited oases and river valleys, a growing popu-

lation was assumed to have been obliged to intensify its sub-

sistence practices in order to extract more from limited arable

land. The only viable intensification strategy was irrigation,

for which there was archaeological evidence. Irrigation alone

could guarantee the abundant harvests where rainfall was so

woefully inadequate. In turn, such a huge project of land-

scape modification required the mobilization of labor to dig

and maintain the canals, which implied the existence of a pub-

lic authority capable of assembling and disciplining that labor

force. Irrigation works made for a dense agro-pastoral econ-

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omy that, they assumed, fostered state formation as a condi-

tion of its existence.

W E T L A N D S A N D S E D E N T I S M

The prevailing view that “making the desert bloom” by irri-

gated agriculture was the foundation of the first substantial

sedentary communities, however, turns out to be mistaken in

nearly every particular. As we shall see, the earliest large fixed

settlements sprang up in wetlands, not arid settings; they re-

lied overwhelmingly on wetland resources, not grain, for their

subsistence; and they had no need of irrigation in the gener-

ally understood sense of the term. Insofar as any human land-

scaping was necessary in this setting, it was far more likely to

be drainage than irrigation. The classical view that ancient

Sumer was a miracle of irrigation organized by the state in an

arid landscape turns out to be totally wrong. We owe the most

comprehensive and documented revisionist case along these

lines to Jennifer Pournelle’s pathbreaking study of the south-

ern Mesopotamian alluvium during the seventh and sixth mil-

lennia BCE.11

Southern Mesopotamia at that time was not at all arid,

but rather more like a foragers’ wetland paradise. Owing to

the substantial rise in sea levels and the flatness of the Tigris-

Euphrates delta, there was a massive marine “transgression”

into areas that are now arid. Pournelle reconstructs this vast

deltaic wetland zone on the basis of remote sensing, earlier

aerial surveys, hydrological history, readings of ancient sedi-

ments and water courses, climate history, and archaeological

remains. The mistake of most (not all) earlier observers had

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not only been to project the general aridity of the region back

ten thousand years but also to ignore the fact that the alluvium

was then—before the annual depositions of sediment—more

than ten meters below its current level. The waters of the Per-

sian Gulf, under those earlier conditions, lapped at the door of

P E R S I A N G U L F

E L A M

Area of Ubaid culture Settlement of the Ubaid period Towns today

Euphrates

Tigris

Sippar

Uruk

Der

Babylon

Rapiqum

Kish Kid-nun

Larak

Pazurish-Dagan

LagashGirsu

Isin

Shuruppak Umma

Bad Tibira Kutalla

Dilbat

Nina Urukug

Eridu

Akshak

Nippur

Adab

Awan

Dur Untash

(Baghdad) Borahshi

Hidalu

Bit Bunakki

Kissura Susa

Borsippa

Kutha

Marad

Eshunna Tutub

Neribtum Sippar

Uruk

Der

Babylon

Rapiqum

Kish Kid-nun

Larak

Pazurish-Dagan

LagashGirsu

Isin

Shuruppak Umma

Bad Tibira Kutalla

Dilbat

Nina

Eridu

Akshak

Nippur

Adab

Awan

Dur Untash

(Baghdad) Borahshi

Hidalu

Bit Bunakki

Kissura Susa

Borsippa

Kutha

Marad

Eshunna Tutub

Neribtum

Urukug

Larsa

(Basra)

(Nasiriyah) Approx. extension of the Persian Gulf

in the Ubaid period

0 100 150 km50

50 100 mi

Figure 8. Mesopotamian alluvium: Persian Gulf extension,

circa 6,500 BCE. Courtesy of Jennifer Pournelle

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ancient Ur, now quite far inland, and tidal salt water extended

northward as far as Nasiriya and Amara.

A brief description of how substantial populations de-

pending largely on wild, free-living plant and marine re-

sources could arise without benefit of irrigation of substantial

cereal crops will illuminate two issues of analytical concern.

First, it demonstrates the stability and richness of a subsis-

tence based on several diverse food webs. Much of the diet

during the Ubaid Period (6,500–3,800 BCE, named for a

widespread pottery style) came from fish, birds, and turtles

that teemed in the wetlands. Second, it will later serve to show

how the very breadth of a subsistence web—hunting, fishing,

foraging, and gathering in a variety of ecological settings—

poses insurmountable obstacles to the imposition of a single

political authority.

Rather than an arid zone between two rivers, as it largely

is today, the southern alluvium was an intricate deltaic wet-

land crisscrossed by hundreds of distributaries, now merging,

now diverging, with each season of flooding. The alluvium

operated as a great sponge, absorbing the annual high water

flow, raising the water table, then releasing it slowly in the

dry months beginning in May. The flood plain of the lower

Euphrates is extremely flat: the gradient varies from twenty

to thirty centimeters per kilometer in the north to a mere

two to three centimeters per kilometer in the south, making

the river’s historical course highly erratic.12 At the height of

the annual flooding the water courses regularly overtopped

their natural ridges or levees, created by the annual deposition

of their coarser sediments, and spilled down the backslope,

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flooding the adjacent lowlands and depressions. As the beds of

many watercourses were above the surrounding land, a simple

breach in the levee at high water would accomplish the same

purpose—we might call this last technique “assisted natural

irrigation.”13 Seed grains could be broadcast on the naturally

prepared field. The nutrient-rich alluvium, as it slowly dried

out, also produced an abundance of fodder for wild herbi-

vores, as well as well as domesticated goats, sheep, and pigs.

The inhabitants of these marshes lived on what are called

“turtlebacks,” small patches of slightly higher ground, com-

parable to cheniers in the Mississippi delta, often no more than

a meter or so above the high-water mark. From these turtle-

backs, inhabitants exploited virtually all the wetland resources

within reach: reeds and sedges for building and food, a great

variety of edible plants (club rush, cattails, water lily, bul-

rush), tortoises, fish, mollusks, crustaceans, birds, waterfowl,

small mammals, and migrating gazelles that provided a major

source of protein. The combination of rich alluvial soils with

an estuary of two great rivers teeming with nutrients, dead

and alive, made for an exceptionally rich riparian life that in

turn attracted huge numbers of fish, turtles, birds, and mam-

mals—not to mention humans!—preying on creatures lower

on the food chain. In the warm, wet conditions that prevailed

in the seventh and sixth millennia BCE, wild subsistence re-

sources were diverse, abundant, stable, and resilient: virtually

ideal for a hunter-gatherer-pastoralist.

The density and diversity of resources that are lower in

the food chain, in particular, make sedentism more feasible.

Compared, say, with hunter-gatherers who may follow large

game (seals, bison, caribou), those who take most of their diet

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from lower trophic levels such as plants, shellfish, fruits, nuts,

and small fish that are, other things equal, denser and less mo-

bile than the larger mammals and fish, can be far less migra-

tory. The cornucopia of subsistence resources from lower

trophic levels in the wetlands of Mesopotamia was perhaps

uniquely favorable to the early creation of substantial seden-

tary communities.

The first fixed villages in the southern alluvium were not

merely in a productive wetland zone; they were located at

Marsh Zone Marine Mixing Zone

Fresh Mixing Zone

Ancient Levees and Turtlebacks

Euphrates Valley

Dhī Qār

Archaeological sites

Marsh Zone

Estuaries and Tidal Flats

Progressive Beach Ridges

Uruk Nina

Eridu

Marsh Zone

Estuaries and Tidal Flats

Progressive Beach Ridges

Uruk Nina

Eridu

Umma

Girsu

Amarah

Lagash

Kissiga Bit Jakin?

Nasiriyah

Figure 9. Southern Mesopotamian alluvium:

Ancient watercourses, levees, and turtlebacks, circa 4,500 BCE.

Courtesy of Jennifer Pournelle

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the seam of several different ecological zones, allowing vil-

lagers to harvest from all of them and to buffer themselves

from the risk of exclusive dependence on any one. They lived

on the border between the water marine environment of the

coast and estuary with its resources and the very different

fresh water ecology of the upstream river environment. The

brackish-water, fresh-water seam, in fact, was a moving bor-

der, shifting back and forth with the tides, which, in such flat

terrain, moved great distances. Thus for a large number of

communities, the two ecological zones moved across the land-

scape while they remained stationary, taking sustenance from

both. The same, even more emphatically, could be said for the

seasons of inundation and drying and the resources particular

to each. A transition between the aquatic resources of the wet

season and the terrestrial resources of the dry season was the

great annual pulse of the region. Instead of the population of

the alluvium having to shift camp from one ecological zone

to another, it could stay in the same place while, as it were,

the different habitats came to them.14 A subsistence niche in

the southern Mesopotamian wetlands was, compared with the

risks of agriculture, more stable, more resilient, and renew-

able with little annual labor.

A propitious location and a sense of timing are crucial

to hunter-gatherers in another way. The “harvest” of hunters

and gatherers is less a daily hit-or-miss proposition than a

carefully calculated effort to intercept the roughly predictable

(late-April and May) mass migration of game such as the huge

herds of gazelle and wild asses in the alluvium. The hunt was

carefully prepared in advance. Long, narrowing lanes were

prepared to funnel the herds onto a killing ground, where

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they could be dispatched and preserved by drying and salt-

ing. For the hunters, as for hunting folk elsewhere, a crucial

part of their yearly animal protein supply came from a week

or so of intense round-the-clock efforts to take as much mi-

grating prey as practicable. Depending on the setting, the mi-

grating prey in question can comprise large mammals (cari-

bou, gazelle), water fowl (ducks, geese), other migrating birds

at their resting or roosting sites, or migrating fish (salmon,

eels, alewives, herring, shad, smelt). In many cases the factor

limiting the “protein harvest” was not the scarcity of prey but

the scarcity of labor to process it before it spoiled. The point

is that the rhythm of most hunters is governed by the natural

pulse of migrations that represent much of their most prized

food supply. Some of these mass migrations of prey may well

be a response to human predation, as Herman Melville sug-

gested for the sperm whale, but there is no doubt that it gives

a radically different tempo to the lives of hunting and fishing

peoples in contrast to agriculturalists—a rhythm that farmers

often read as indolence.

The most common route for a great many of these mi-

grations has been via the wetlands, estuaries, and river valleys

of major waterways, owing to the density of nutritional re-

sources they offer. Bird migration routes favor marshes and

river valleys, as do, more obviously, the movement of ana-

dromous salmon and their mirror image, catadromous eels,

to mention only two of the numerous migrating fish species.

Any watercourse is itself a nutrient trough with its own flood

plains, back swamps, and alluvial fans. The aquatic life along

it depends not on its channel but on its periodic invasion of

its flood plain (the flood “pulse”) for spawning and growth—

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making it, in turn, attractive for bird migrations. Thus, for

a population located in a rich wetlands at the edge of sev-

eral ecotones, in a favorable climatic period, and bestriding

the intersections of game migration routes for favored prey,

its flourishing in the alluvium was perhaps overdetermined.

A good many explanations of early sedentism elsewhere have

also emphasized the importance of aquatic resources as pro-

viding the most favorable conditions for a reliable subsistence.

Exclusive emphasis on the superabundance of marshes

and riverine settings overlooks a further crucial advantage of

coastal and river locations: transportation. Wetlands may have

been a necessary condition of early sedentism, but the develop-

ment later of large kingdoms and trading centers depended on

an advantageous positioning for waterborne trade.15 The ad-

vantage of waterborne transport compared with overland cart

or donkey travel is almost impossible to exaggerate. A Dio-

cletian edict specified that the price of a wagon load of wheat

doubled after fifty miles. Because it reduces friction dramati-

cally, movement by water is exponentially more efficient.16 To

take the example of firewood, a variety of sources (before rail-

roads and all-weather roads) advise that a cartload of firewood

cannot be sold profitably at distance beyond roughly fifteen

kilometers—in rugged terrain, even less. The importance of

charcoal, though it is massively wasteful of wood, is exclu-

sively due to its superior transportability; its heat value per

unit weight and volume is far superior to “raw” firewood. In

the premodern era, no bulk goods—timber, metallic ores, salt,

grain, reeds, pottery—could be shipped over appreciable dis-

tances except by water.

The southern alluvium, in this respect as well, was

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uniquely favored. For half the year it was a watery world

where transport by reed boats was easy and, being located

downstream from the sources of many of the materials the

wetland population required, they could take advantage of

the current. One must not imagine these early sedentary vil-

lages as autarkic economies, consuming only what they pro-

duced. Even their hunter-gatherer ancestors were not at all

isolated—trading obsidian and prestige goods over substantial

distances. The easy availability of waterborne trade in much

of the alluvium amplified these exchanges far more than what

would have been possible in a landlocked setting.

W H Y I G N O R E D ?

Why, one might well ask, were the wetland origins of early

sedentary villages and early urbanism overlooked? In part, of

course, this is due to the older narrative of civilizations aris-

ing from the irrigation of arid lands, a narrative that fit with

the contemporary landscape that those formulating the nar-

rative were observing. I believe, however, that the larger con-

text of this historical myopia comes from the nearly indel-

ible association of civilization with the major grains—wheat,

barley, rice, maize. (Think of the “amber waves of grain” in

“America the Beautiful.”) Within this perspective, swamps,

marshes, fens, and wetlands generally have been seen as the

mirror image of civilization—as a zone of untamed nature, a

trackless waste, dangerous to health and safety. The work of

civilization, when it came to marshes, was precisely to drain

them and transform them into orderly, productive grain fields

and villages. Civilizing arid lands mean irrigating them; civi-

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lizing swamps means draining them; the goal in each case is

making arable grain lands. H. R. Hall wrote of early Mesopo-

tamia in “the state of chaos, half-water and half-land, of the

[alluvial] fans of southern Babylonia before civilization began

its work of draining and canalizing.”17 The work of civiliza-

tion, or more precisely the state, as we shall see, consists in

the elimination of mud and its replacement by its purer con-

stituents, land and water.18 Whether in ancient China, in the

Netherlands, in the fens of England, in the Pontine Marshes

finally subdued by Mussolini, or in the remaining southern

Iraq marshes drained by Saddam Hussein, the state has en-

deavored to turn ungovernable wetlands into taxable grain

fields by reengineering the landscape.

The absolutely central role of wetland abundance, it mer-

its noting in passing, has not been ignored only in the case

of Mesopotamia. Early sedentary communities near Jericho,

the earliest settlements in the lower Nile, were wetland-based

and only marginally, if at all, dependent on planted grains.

Much the same could be said of the Hangzhou Bay, site of the

early Neolithic Hemudu culture in the most watery patch of

eastern coastal China in the mid-fifth millennium BCE, rich

in undomesticated rice—an aquatic plant. Early Indus River

settlements, Harrapan and Haripunjaya, fit this description,

as do most of the significant Hoabinhian sites in Southeast

Asia. Even higher-altitude sites of ancient sedentism—for ex-

ample, early Teotihuacan near Mexico City or Lake Titicaca

in Peru—were set in extensive wetlands that offered abundant

harvests of fish, birds, shellfish, and small mammals from the

edge environments of several ecologies.

The wetland origins of population settlement have re-

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mained relatively invisible for other reasons as well. We are,

after all, dealing here with largely oral cultures that left no

written records for us to consult. Their relative obscurity is

often magnified by the perishable nature of their building ma-

terials: reeds, sedges, bamboo, wood, rattan. Even later small

societies about which we know from written commentaries

by literate neighbors, such as Srivijaya in Sumatra, have been

almost impossible to pinpoint, as their remains have been re-

claimed by water, soil, and time.

A last and more speculative reason for the obscurity of

wetland societies is that they were, and remained, environ-

mentally resistant to centralization and control from above.

They were based on what are now called “common property

resources”—free-living plants, animals, and aquatic creatures

to which the entire community had access. There was no

single dominant resource that could be monopolized or con-

trolled from the center, let alone easily taxed. Subsistence in

these zones was so diverse, variable, and dependent on such a

multitude of tempos as to defy any simple central accounting.

Unlike the early states that we will examine later, no central

authority could monopolize—and therefore ration—access

to arable land, grain, or irrigation water. There was, there-

fore, little evidence of any hierarchy in such communities

(as usually measured by differential grave goods). A culture

might well develop in such areas, but the likelihood was small

that such an intricate web of relatively egalitarian settlements

would throw up great chiefs or kingdoms, let alone dynasties.

A state—even a small protostate—requires a subsistence en-

vironment that is far simpler than the wetland ecologies we

have examined.

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M I N D I N G T H E G A P

The breathtaking four-millennia gap between the first ap-

pearance of domesticated grains and animals and the coalesc-

ing of agro-pastoral societies we have associated with early

civilization commands our attention. The anomaly of such

a stretch of history, when all the building blocks for a clas-

sic agrarian society are in place but fail to coalesce, begs an

explanation. An implicit assumption of the standard “prog-

ress of civilization” narrative is that once domesticated cereals

and livestock were available, they would generate, more or less

automatically and rapidly, a fully formed agrarian society. As

with any new technique, one might anticipate some hesitation

as new subsistence routines were accommodated—perhaps

even a millennium—but four thousand years, or roughly 160

generations, is far more than a working out of the kinks.

One archaeologist has characterized this long period as

one of “low-level food production.”19 Such a term, however,

seems singularly inappropriate, as its emphasis on “produc-

tion” implies a society that is “stuck” at some inferior and un-

satisfactory equilibrium. Melinda Zeder, a prominent theorist

of domestication, has avoided this teleology in a fashion that

implies by contrast that the populations avoiding full reliance

on fixed-field cereal crops for the bulk of their caloric needs

might actually have known what they were doing: “Stable and

highly sustainable subsistence economies based on a mix of

free-living, managed, and fully domesticated resources seems

to have persisted for 4,000 years or more before the crystal-

lization of agricultural economies based primarily on domes-

tic crops and livestock in the Middle East.”20 In Zeder’s view,

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the Near East was by no means unique in this respect. Citing

work on Asia, Meso-America, and eastern North America,

she claims that “cultigens and domestic animals were incorpo-

rated into the general round of subsistence strategies, some-

times for thousands of years, with little disruption of the tra-

ditional hunter-gatherer way of life.”

Instead, they served as additional—and often not very im-

portant—foods that “differed from wild resources only in that

they require propagation rather than hunting or collection to

secure them. . . . Thus neither the presence of domesticates

or domesticatable resources nor the diffusion of food produc-

ing technologies is sufficient to induce the adoption of food

production as a guiding principle of subsistence economy.”21

The first and most prudent assumption about histori-

cal actors is that, given their resources and what they know,

they are acting reasonably to secure their immediate inter-

ests. In this spirit, and because in this case they cannot speak

directly for themselves, it makes most sense to see them as

agile and astute navigators of a diverse but also changeable

and potentially dangerous environment. Just as early sedent-

ism was pioneered by hunters and foragers taking advantage

of the multiple subsistence options their diverse wetland set-

ting provided, we can see this long period of as one of con-

tinuous experimentation and management of this environ-

ment. Rather than relying on only a small bandwidth of food

resources, they seem to have been opportunistic generalists

with a large portfolio of subsistence options spread across sev-

eral food webs.

The Mesopotamian alluvium, along with the Levant, is

characterized by larger variations in rainfall and vegetation

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over shorter distances than almost any other place in the

world. Seasonal variation in rainfall was also exceptionally

high. Although this diversity put different resources fairly

close at hand, it also required a large repertoire of subsistence

strategies that could be deployed to deal with the variations.

There were also the much larger macroclimatic events that,

over several millennia, before the first agrarian kingdoms

arose around 3,500 BCE, may have made their mark on folk

memory of a “great flood.” The warmer and wetter period

from roughly 12,700 to 10,800 BCE (itself with many oscilla-

tions) gave way to the extremely cold (Younger Dryas) period

from 10,800 to 9,600 BCE, during which settlements were

abandoned and the remaining population retreated to refu-

gia in the warmer bottomlands and on the coasts. Although

conditions after the Younger Dryas were generally favorable

for hunter-gatherer expansion, there were climatic setbacks

such as a century-long period of cold dry weather (beginning

around 6,200 BCE) more severe than the Little Ice Age of

1550–1850 known to historians of early modern Europe. Ar-

chaeologists of the five or so millennia after 10,000 BCE agree

that there were many pulses of population growth and of sed-

entism: cold and dry periods when sedentism might have been

the result of crowding in the available refugia, and warm, wet

periods of population growth and dispersion. Given the varia-

tion and risks, it would have made no sense for early popula-

tions to rely on a narrow bandwidth of subsistence resources.

Thus far we have considered only the climatological and

ecological givens and their effect on population distribution

and sedentism. It is entirely possible that some or even most

of this variation could have had broadly human causes: dis-

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eases, epidemics, rapid population growth, exhaustion of local

resources and game, social conflict, and violence, not all of

which leave unambiguous traces in the archaeological record.

We have surely underestimated the degree of agility and

adaptability of our prestate ancestors. This underestimate is

built into the civilizational narrative that represents hunter-

gatherers, shifting cultivators, and pastoralists virtually as

subspecies of Homo sapiens, with each marking a stage of

human progress. Yet historical evidence shows that peoples

moved fairly readily between these distinctive modes of sub-

sistence and, in fact, combined them in any number of inven-

tive hybrids in the Fertile Crescent and elsewhere. There is

evidence, for example, that quasi-sedentary populations in the

Mesopotamian alluvium during the Younger Dryas cold spell

adopted more mobile subsistence strategies as the abundance

of local subsistence forage dwindled, just as, much later, agri-

culturalists migrating from Taiwan to Southeast Asia (roughly

five thousand years ago) often abandoned planting for forag-

ing and hunting in their new and bounteous forest settling.22

Early in the twentieth century, a major exponent of a geo-

graphical perspective on history rejected any categorical dis-

tinction among hunter-gatherers, pastoralists, and agricultur-

alists, emphasizing that for safety’s sake, most peoples have

preferred to straddle at least two of these subsistence niches—

“keeping two strings to their bow in case of necessity.”23

We should therefore remain militantly agnostic about the

basic terms that have animated the historical narratives about

the rise of civilizations and of states. Both intellectual skep-

ticism and recent evidence point in this direction. Most dis-

cussions of plant domestication and permanent settlement,

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for example, assume without further ado that early peoples

could not wait to settle down in one spot. Such an assump-

tion is an unwarranted reading back from the standard dis-

courses of agrarian states stigmatizing mobile populations as

primitive. The “social will to sedentism” should not be taken

for granted.24 Nor should the terms “pastoralist,” “agricul-

turalist,” “hunter,” or “forager,” at least in their essentialist

meanings, be taken for granted. They are better understood

as defining a spectrum of subsistence activities, not separate

peoples, in the ancient Middle East. Kin groups and villages

might have pastoralist, hunting, and cereal-growing segments

as part of a unified economy. A family or village whose crops

had failed might turn wholly or in part to herding; pastoralists

who had lost their flocks might turn to planting. Whole areas

during a drought or wetter period might radically shift their

subsistence strategy. To treat those engaged in these different

activities as essentially different peoples inhabiting different

life worlds is again to read back the much later stigmatiza-

tion of pastoralists by agrarian states to an era where it makes

no sense. A striking illustration of the shift may be found in

Anne Porter’s perceptive reading of the many variants of the

Epic of Gilgamesh.25 In the earliest versions, Gilgamesh’s soul

companion Enkidu is merely a pastoralist, emblematic of a

fused society of planters and herders. In versions a millen-

nium later, he is depicted as subhuman, raised among beasts,

and requiring sex with a woman to humanize him. Enkidu

becomes, in other words, a dangerous barbarian who knows

not grain, houses, or cities, or how to “bend the knee.” The

“late” Enkidu is, as we shall see, the product of the ideology

of a mature agrarian state.

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Having already domesticated some cereals and legumes,

as well as goats and sheep, the people of the Mesopotamian

alluvium were already agriculturalists and pastoralists as well

as hunter-gatherers. It’s just that so long as there were abun-

dant stands of wild foods they could gather and annual migra-

tions of waterfowl and gazelles they could hunt, there was no

earthly reason why they would risk relying mainly, let alone

exclusively, on labor-intensive farming and livestock rearing.

It was precisely the rich mosaic of resources around them and

thus their capacity to avoid specializing in any single tech-

nique or food source that was the best guarantee of their

safety and relative affluence.

W H Y P L A N T A T A L L ?

Yet a good many early Neolithic sites do contain unambigu-

ous evidence of the cultivation of wild cereals and (disputed)

evidence of some plant domestication. In the light of the pres-

ence in the region of dense wild stands of cereals and other re-

sources, the question becomes not so much why our ancestors

didn’t plunge headlong into farming, but why they bothered

to plant at all. A common answer has been that cereal grains

can be harvested, threshed, and stored in a granary for several

years and represent a dense store of starches and protein if, by

chance, there is a sudden shortage of wild resources. Despite

its cost in labor, so the argument goes, it represented some-

thing like a subsistence insurance policy for hunter-gatherers

who also knew how to plant.

This explanation, in its cruder forms, doesn’t hold up to

scrutiny. It assumes, implicitly, that the harvest from a planted

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crop is more reliable than the yield from wild stands of grain.

If anything, the opposite is more likely to be the case, inas-

much as wild seed will, by definition, be found only in loca-

tions where it will thrive. Second, this perspective overlooks

the subsistence risks that the sedentism associated with having

to plant, tend, and guard a crop entails. Historically, the sub-

sistence safety of hunters and gatherers lay precisely in their

mobility and the diversity of food sources to which they could

lay claim. It was, after all, only the rare proximity of so many

ecologically varied resources—elsewhere far more temporally

and spatially scattered—in the Mesopotamian alluvium that

allowed for early sedentism in the first place. If farming fur-

ther restricted the potential movements of sedentary hunter-

gatherers, their inability to respond promptly to, say, an early

bird or fish migration may well have diminished rather than

enhanced their food security. The periodic evidence through-

out this long period of the abandonment of settlement for

pastoralism and for migratory foraging attests to sedentism

as a strategy rather than the ideology it would later become.

The cruder versions of the “food-storage hypothesis” are

also singularly myopic about the great variety of food stor-

age techniques simultaneously practiced in the alluvium and

elsewhere.26 Storage “on the hoof” in the form of livestock

is the most obvious. The saying that “the cow is the granary

of the Hausa” captures this perfectly. Having a ready supply

of fat and protein handy when required may have made small

experiments with planting seem less risky and, in fact, some

theorists of early agriculture speculate that it was the relative

absence of domesticated livestock that helps explain why crop

planting spread so much later; it was simply too risky without

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a reliable fallback. Other foods could also be readily preserved

for shorter or longer periods: fish and meat could be salted,

dried, and smoked, legumes such as chickpeas and lentils could

be dried and stored, fruits and grains could be fermented and

distilled. A bowl of fermented barley beer was, apparently,

the daily ration for temple laborers in Uruk. From a broader

perspective, one might view the landscape as a forager prob-

ably saw it: as a massive, diverse, living storage area of fish,

mollusks, birds, nuts, fruits, roots, tubers, edible rushes and

sedges, amphibians, small mammals, and large game. If one

source failed in a given year, another might be abundant. In

the diversity and varying temporalities of this living storage

complex lay its stability.

One line of theorizing, favored for a time among students

of social evolution, depicted agriculture as a crucial civiliza-

tional leap because it was a “delayed-return” activity.27 The

cultivator, it asserted, is a qualitatively new person because

he must look far ahead in preparing a field for sowing, then

must weed and tend the crop as it matures, until (he hopes) it

yields a crop. What is wrong—radically so, in my view—is not

so much its depiction of the agriculturalist as its caricature of

hunter-gatherers. It suggests, by the implied contrast, that the

hunter-gatherer is an improvident, spontaneous creature of

impulse, coursing the landscape in hope of stumbling on game

or finding something good to pluck from a bush or tree (“im-

mediate return”). Nothing could be farther from the truth.

All mass capture—gazelle, fish, and bird migrations—involve

elaborate, cooperative advance preparation: the building of

long narrowing “drive corridors” to a killing ground; build-

ing weirs, nets, and traps; building or digging facilities for

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smoking, drying, or salting of the catch. These are delayed-

return activities par excellence. They involve a large kit of

tools and techniques and a far greater degree of coordina-

tion and cooperation than agriculture requires. Beyond these

more spectacular mass-capture activities, hunters and gather-

ers, as we have seen, have long been sculpting the landscape:

encouraging plants that will bear food and raw materials later,

burning to create fodder and attract game, weeding natural

stands of desirable grains and tubers. Except for the act of

harrowing and sowing, they perform all the other operations

for wild stands of cereals that farmers do for their crops.

Neither “food storage” nor “delayed return” are remotely

plausible reasons for the limited use of domesticated grains

that we find in the historical record. I propose a quite differ-

ent explanation for sowing crops based on a simple analogy

between fire and flood. The general problem with farming—

especially plough agriculture—is that it involves so much in-

tensive labor. One form of agriculture, however, eliminates

most of this labor: “flood-retreat” (also known as décrue

or recession) agriculture. In flood-retreat agriculture, seeds

are generally broadcast on the fertile silt deposited by an an-

nual riverine flood. The fertile silt in question is, of course, a

“transfer by erosion” of upstream nutrients. This form of cul-

tivation was almost certainly the earliest form of agriculture

in the Tigris-Euphrates floodplain, not to mention the Nile

Valley. It is still widely practiced today and has been shown to

be the most labor-saving form of agriculture regardless of the

crop being planted.28

For our purposes, flooding in this case can be seen to ac-

complish the same landscape sculpting as the fire deployed by

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hunter-gatherers or swidden (slash-and-burn) cultivators. A

flood clears a “field” by scouring and drowning back all com-

peting vegetation and, in the process, deposits a layer of soft,

easily worked, nutritious silt as it recedes. The result, under

good conditions, is often a nearly perfectly harrowed and fer-

tilized field ready for sowing at no cost in labor. Just as our

ancestors noticed how a fire cleared the land for a new natu-

ral succession of quickly colonizing (the so-called r plants)

species, so they must have noticed much the same succession

with floods.29 And since the early cereals are grasses (r plants),

they would have thrived and gotten a head start on competing

weeds if broadcast on this silt. Nor is it much of a stretch, as

observed earlier, to imagine making a small breach in a natu-

ral levee to provoke a small flood and the recession agricul-

ture that it would make possible. Voila! a form of agriculture

that an intelligent, work-shy hunter-gatherer might take up.

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