Love this. As someone who spends most of his time reading about settler colonialism, hearing westerners describe Indigenous peoples as "uncivilized" or lacking complex civilization is infuriating. Just because each group of people operates differently doesn't make them any less valuable or equal.
I have been a long time listener and am really enjoying the prehistory and early history pods. I had wondered why there was no coverage of the development of agriculture, etc. in Africa since you hit Europe, Asia and the Americas. However, I suspect this article answers it somewhat:
Maybe biggest feature of civilizations is their tendency to expand and to dominate “non civilized” people. That part really matters if you are a non civilized people group in the path of an expanding civilization.
Have you had time to play Crusader Kings 3 yet Patrick? I bought it day one and have pumped around 4/500 hours into it! I'm in my late 20s and play an inordinate amount of video games, and although many consider it 'wasted time' for me it helps a lot with getting me to unwind after a stressful workday. Especially during the pandemic/lockdowns. I'd also recommend checking out Dawn of Man, it's perfect to play while listening to Tides!
This is a longish comment - bear with me - I think it's important.
Your companion episode of Tides from around 19-22 minutes insightfully touches on a topic that deserves much more elaboration. "I don't think any human society . . . that develops over thousands of years in response to the strains and pressures of the world around it can ever really be simple. Sophistication and innovation come in many different forms. We should appreciate that breadth and diversity."
My whole life when the topic of people who continue to live "traditional" agrarian or hunter/gatherer societies without use of fossil fuels, chemicals or gunpowder comes up I've asked, "how do we know they aren't right?" I uniformly get only puzzled looks.
But as your comment suggests, those people knew as much about the world as we do - they just knew different things. Civilization and, in the last five centuries, fossil fuels, have altered our understanding of and relationship to the planet. We are not "smarter" than people from 10,000 BC, we just have more elaborately articulated societies - and vast amounts of cheap energy. And there is at least one thing we can say about them with confidence: their lifestyles were, on the whole, sustainable.
If you haven't already done it, I implore you to read or listen to Vaclav Smil's "Energy and Civilization". If I had your address I'd have mailed it to you already. It's a remarkable book (incidentally, by Bill Gates' favorite author). Nothing I've ever read has helped me understand civilization past and present so well.
BTW, in responding to your comment about civilization being somewhat "extractive", and in mentioning the role of energy, I'm *not* making any social or political commentary. I think you have to put those things aside if your goal is to understand rather than persuade. Smil's book is very much in that camp.
Great podcast, substack, and Twitter btw. Easy to consume yet still very intelligent and thoughtful. And it's fun to know you're a fellow gym rat :).
I appreciate your podcast so much! Eagerly look forward to new 'casts each week.
You are so curious and interested in changes in theories, reframing with new evidence, and so on, that you are probably familiar with the work of the two archaeologists interviewed in the BCC podcast described below. Would be interested in your thoughts! Thanks!
Women digging for answers from the ancient past: The Conversation Feb 28, 2021
"Can our modern-day gender biases influence our understanding of the past? Kim Chakanetsa meets two archaeologists to talk about the risks of projecting our own assumptions onto the ancient world."
"Dr Charlotte Hedenstierna-Jonson is a senior researcher in the department of Archaeology and Ancient History at Uppsala University in Sweden. She’s also one of the lead investigators on the Viking Phenomenon research project and she’s been studying a grave found in Sweden in the 19th century, which contained the remains of a high-ranking Viking warrior. For more than 100 years this person was assumed to be male. But when Charlotte and her team carried out a DNA test on the bones, they found out they belong to an individual who was biologically female. Her discovery shook the academic world."
"Dr Sarah Murray is assistant professor at the University of Toronto and she specializes in the material culture and institutions of early Greece. She thinks we should re-consider the way we look at women’s participation in the social and economic structure of Ancient Greece. She recently published a paper dispelling the myth of the so-called Dipylon Master, a pottery artist who has been credited with creating very distinct funerary vases between 760 and 735 BC. Based on her studies, Sarah believes it’s more likely that a group of women were behind these artefacts."
Produced by Alice Gioia.
IMAGE DETAILS
Left: Charlotte Hedenstierna-Jonson (credit Linda Koffman)
I'm late commenting because I had a pile of marking to get through, but I just had to add:
On a personal note, the questions you ask, while interesting, have led me to spend the last week humming "Mr Wendell" by Arrested Development!
Professionally? I teach middle class French teenagers, and am occasionally caught off-guard by their casual assumption that civilisation means , well, them. It takes a lot of effort, and careful schemes of work, to change minds and opinions. So, thank you - you've given me more ammunition in the fight. And, of course, I really enjoyed the episode as well.
Just listened to "Alcohol and Agriculture in Prehistoric East Asia" episode but no substack article for it so I'm posting here.
Just to say Wow! What a cool interview! So many fresh ideas and Chinese perspectives on the development of agriculture, and the present "golden age of archaeology" in China. The thing about how it's less connected to anthropology and more about history and identity than in the West was an eye-opener.
Then the alcohol discussion! So great. I want to start making the healthy mixed grain & tuber low-alcohol drink/,gruel she described every household making for socializing and nutrition. Could launch a new fermentation craze following footsteps of kombucha, sourdough, sauerkraut, etc.
Lotsa gems in that interview. Comparative analysis rocks. Thx!
I am fascinated by the Inca. I have done a lot of reading about them and I have visited Cusco and Machu Picchu. I think they are the corner case that tests your definition of civilization. "cities, social hierarchies and the division of labor, the written word, and a higher-level form of political organization we can call the state"
Cities: Emphatically. Cusco was a large city laid out and constructed according to a plan. Streams were rerouted around it. It was a center of government and religion. There were other planned cities in the empire.
Social hierarchies and the division of labor: The Inca hierarchy was elaborate and highly codified. Labor was specialized and minutely organized.
Written Word: the Inca did not have writing. They had a system of knotted strings called Quipu, that apparently encoded numeric information for census, tax, and management purposes. Some scholars have argued that the quipu (the word means knot in Quechua the Inca language) did encode non numeric information, but the examples they have found are minimal.
Higher-level form of political organization we can call the state: And how. The Inca ruled an empire that extended along the spine of the Andes from modern Ecuador thru Peru and Bolivia to the middle of Chile, almost 3,000 miles. It was administered very tightly. There were roads, messengers, way stations, army posts. they had taxation and maintained a system fro feeding and employing the population.
I think the Inca represent a civilization in a very comprehensive way. The quipu could have evolved into a writing system. The cuneiform script of Mesopotamia started as an accounting system. Alternatively, the Inca could have expanded into Mesoamerica and the learned the art there. Tragically, they were cut short.
I enjoyed the episode this entry is based on a great deal, but I'm surprised you didn't go into further detail about the importance of writing on political entities. Your own dissertation, while focusing on a much later time, demonstrates that the ability to correspond over distance is an important component of socio-political unity. I don't think it is a coincidence that writing is present in every civilization: without writing, information--and consequently cooperation--is strictly limited to interpersonal ties. Perhaps as importantly, writing disintermediates communication among interlocutors, allowing coordination among elites who are not proximate in space or time. The ability to bridge space is important for state-building, but the ability to bridge time is important for contracting, also important for state-building.
Love this. As someone who spends most of his time reading about settler colonialism, hearing westerners describe Indigenous peoples as "uncivilized" or lacking complex civilization is infuriating. Just because each group of people operates differently doesn't make them any less valuable or equal.
I have been a long time listener and am really enjoying the prehistory and early history pods. I had wondered why there was no coverage of the development of agriculture, etc. in Africa since you hit Europe, Asia and the Americas. However, I suspect this article answers it somewhat:
https://aeon.co/essays/not-all-early-human-societies-were-small-scale-egalitarian-bands
Thanks for all you do.
Maybe biggest feature of civilizations is their tendency to expand and to dominate “non civilized” people. That part really matters if you are a non civilized people group in the path of an expanding civilization.
Have you had time to play Crusader Kings 3 yet Patrick? I bought it day one and have pumped around 4/500 hours into it! I'm in my late 20s and play an inordinate amount of video games, and although many consider it 'wasted time' for me it helps a lot with getting me to unwind after a stressful workday. Especially during the pandemic/lockdowns. I'd also recommend checking out Dawn of Man, it's perfect to play while listening to Tides!
I find this article very helpful. Thanks for sharing
This is a longish comment - bear with me - I think it's important.
Your companion episode of Tides from around 19-22 minutes insightfully touches on a topic that deserves much more elaboration. "I don't think any human society . . . that develops over thousands of years in response to the strains and pressures of the world around it can ever really be simple. Sophistication and innovation come in many different forms. We should appreciate that breadth and diversity."
My whole life when the topic of people who continue to live "traditional" agrarian or hunter/gatherer societies without use of fossil fuels, chemicals or gunpowder comes up I've asked, "how do we know they aren't right?" I uniformly get only puzzled looks.
But as your comment suggests, those people knew as much about the world as we do - they just knew different things. Civilization and, in the last five centuries, fossil fuels, have altered our understanding of and relationship to the planet. We are not "smarter" than people from 10,000 BC, we just have more elaborately articulated societies - and vast amounts of cheap energy. And there is at least one thing we can say about them with confidence: their lifestyles were, on the whole, sustainable.
If you haven't already done it, I implore you to read or listen to Vaclav Smil's "Energy and Civilization". If I had your address I'd have mailed it to you already. It's a remarkable book (incidentally, by Bill Gates' favorite author). Nothing I've ever read has helped me understand civilization past and present so well.
BTW, in responding to your comment about civilization being somewhat "extractive", and in mentioning the role of energy, I'm *not* making any social or political commentary. I think you have to put those things aside if your goal is to understand rather than persuade. Smil's book is very much in that camp.
Great podcast, substack, and Twitter btw. Easy to consume yet still very intelligent and thoughtful. And it's fun to know you're a fellow gym rat :).
I appreciate your podcast so much! Eagerly look forward to new 'casts each week.
You are so curious and interested in changes in theories, reframing with new evidence, and so on, that you are probably familiar with the work of the two archaeologists interviewed in the BCC podcast described below. Would be interested in your thoughts! Thanks!
Women digging for answers from the ancient past: The Conversation Feb 28, 2021
https://apple.co/3q67SA6
"Can our modern-day gender biases influence our understanding of the past? Kim Chakanetsa meets two archaeologists to talk about the risks of projecting our own assumptions onto the ancient world."
"Dr Charlotte Hedenstierna-Jonson is a senior researcher in the department of Archaeology and Ancient History at Uppsala University in Sweden. She’s also one of the lead investigators on the Viking Phenomenon research project and she’s been studying a grave found in Sweden in the 19th century, which contained the remains of a high-ranking Viking warrior. For more than 100 years this person was assumed to be male. But when Charlotte and her team carried out a DNA test on the bones, they found out they belong to an individual who was biologically female. Her discovery shook the academic world."
"Dr Sarah Murray is assistant professor at the University of Toronto and she specializes in the material culture and institutions of early Greece. She thinks we should re-consider the way we look at women’s participation in the social and economic structure of Ancient Greece. She recently published a paper dispelling the myth of the so-called Dipylon Master, a pottery artist who has been credited with creating very distinct funerary vases between 760 and 735 BC. Based on her studies, Sarah believes it’s more likely that a group of women were behind these artefacts."
Produced by Alice Gioia.
IMAGE DETAILS
Left: Charlotte Hedenstierna-Jonson (credit Linda Koffman)
Right: Sarah Murray (credit Kat Alexakis)
I'm late commenting because I had a pile of marking to get through, but I just had to add:
On a personal note, the questions you ask, while interesting, have led me to spend the last week humming "Mr Wendell" by Arrested Development!
Professionally? I teach middle class French teenagers, and am occasionally caught off-guard by their casual assumption that civilisation means , well, them. It takes a lot of effort, and careful schemes of work, to change minds and opinions. So, thank you - you've given me more ammunition in the fight. And, of course, I really enjoyed the episode as well.
Just listened to "Alcohol and Agriculture in Prehistoric East Asia" episode but no substack article for it so I'm posting here.
Just to say Wow! What a cool interview! So many fresh ideas and Chinese perspectives on the development of agriculture, and the present "golden age of archaeology" in China. The thing about how it's less connected to anthropology and more about history and identity than in the West was an eye-opener.
Then the alcohol discussion! So great. I want to start making the healthy mixed grain & tuber low-alcohol drink/,gruel she described every household making for socializing and nutrition. Could launch a new fermentation craze following footsteps of kombucha, sourdough, sauerkraut, etc.
Lotsa gems in that interview. Comparative analysis rocks. Thx!
I am fascinated by the Inca. I have done a lot of reading about them and I have visited Cusco and Machu Picchu. I think they are the corner case that tests your definition of civilization. "cities, social hierarchies and the division of labor, the written word, and a higher-level form of political organization we can call the state"
Cities: Emphatically. Cusco was a large city laid out and constructed according to a plan. Streams were rerouted around it. It was a center of government and religion. There were other planned cities in the empire.
Social hierarchies and the division of labor: The Inca hierarchy was elaborate and highly codified. Labor was specialized and minutely organized.
Written Word: the Inca did not have writing. They had a system of knotted strings called Quipu, that apparently encoded numeric information for census, tax, and management purposes. Some scholars have argued that the quipu (the word means knot in Quechua the Inca language) did encode non numeric information, but the examples they have found are minimal.
Higher-level form of political organization we can call the state: And how. The Inca ruled an empire that extended along the spine of the Andes from modern Ecuador thru Peru and Bolivia to the middle of Chile, almost 3,000 miles. It was administered very tightly. There were roads, messengers, way stations, army posts. they had taxation and maintained a system fro feeding and employing the population.
I think the Inca represent a civilization in a very comprehensive way. The quipu could have evolved into a writing system. The cuneiform script of Mesopotamia started as an accounting system. Alternatively, the Inca could have expanded into Mesoamerica and the learned the art there. Tragically, they were cut short.
I enjoyed the episode this entry is based on a great deal, but I'm surprised you didn't go into further detail about the importance of writing on political entities. Your own dissertation, while focusing on a much later time, demonstrates that the ability to correspond over distance is an important component of socio-political unity. I don't think it is a coincidence that writing is present in every civilization: without writing, information--and consequently cooperation--is strictly limited to interpersonal ties. Perhaps as importantly, writing disintermediates communication among interlocutors, allowing coordination among elites who are not proximate in space or time. The ability to bridge space is important for state-building, but the ability to bridge time is important for contracting, also important for state-building.