Ancient Economies Miniseries - The Archaeology of Farming and Herding - Gil Stein

anyway thank you very much captain Terry for inviting me to speak with you today and I wanted to really call attention to what a wonderful thing Kathy and Terry and Carole cook-off and the people in the public education section have done by creating this series I think it really epitomizes the very best in and what the Oriental Institute has to offer that it gives a venue to talk about pretty complex issues and it really pushes us as the researchers to communicate our interests in our work in a way that is actually going to be comprehensible or should be I have to check with you afterwards on that one but obviously economies are an extremely important topic and the way that they have organized this miniseries really provides a beautiful range of the economic activities of ancient human societies and gives us a lot to think about so thank you for setting this up and I'm very honored to be able to participate in it today what I want to talk about is really I'll be covering three topics one is I'll be talking about a kind of system that you can call mixed farming and then I'm going to go from there to talking about the ways that archeologists reconstruct ancient farming systems and herding system and then at the very end I'll talk a little bit about how those farming and herding systems change with the development of civilization now tell him her introduction already mentioned that working definition of what an economy is that it's basically the social organization of production exchange and consumption so economies are ultimately cultural things that if you think of the term subsistence subsistence basically means food but once you talk about how humans organize producing and exchanging and consuming food there are so many different choices involved in that there's so many different ways to organize that that it really is a cultural product so by looking at ancient economies it's a very powerful way to try to understand how ancient cultures work I think we can say that there are four main forms of economic activity that were characteristic of ancient societies and in one way or another all of them or some aspect of all of them is covered by this miniseries the first two are farming and herding the third is craft production and the fourth is trade and exchange or distribution how goods get from from the producers to the consumers and we'll have talked about markets and pallas economies and that's subsumed there but I would have to say that of all of those forms of economic activity farming and herding are the most basic and the most important and for obvious reasons subsistence farming is absolutely fundamental to survival that's what we eat and yet it is so much more that than that when we realize that the subsistence economy is a cultural product we have to realize those very active subsistence and the production of subsistence things changes markedly as society develops so farming and herding are not only essential for our survival but they also form the basis of surplus in other words producing extra beyond your own consumption needs and those surpluses became the main forms of wealth that enabled complex civilizations to develop that the urban civilizations of the ancient Near East or anywhere for that matter could not exist without that economic base of farming and herding or it's say I would say it's impossible to overestimate its importance food is life and food is wealth it's both of those things and it's fascinating for archaeologists to study the interplay between those two things so humans and human ancestors lived by hunting and gathering for 99 percent of our past food production a way of life based on domesticated plants and animals was only invented about 10,000 years ago in the Neolithic period it happened stages and those stages are actually very important because they tell us something this shows you a map of what James breasted called the Fertile Crescent and it's the area where agriculture and food production first developed so the earliest domestication of plants and animals took place in this arc this Crescent that extends from southern Israel up through Jordan the West Bank Syria Lebanon southeast Turkey and down into Iraq and Iran this process happened by stages at the end of the Ice Age the people who had been mobile hunter-gatherers in the Near East changed their way of life completely when the climate warmed up at the end of the Ice Age an amazing thing happened there was a spread of vegetation of plant life all across the Near East it had been cold and dry during the Ice Age but during the whole scene it became warm and wetter and in those optimum climatic conditions plant communities and especially things like wild wheat and wild cereals spread all over the place so what happened at that point and that's roughly 10,000 BC the hunter-gatherers started to settle down next to those very rich areas of wild wheat and wild barley there was so much wild wheat that an agronomist named Jack Harlan from the University of Illinois I believe did an experiment he made a little sickle with Flint blades and he went to a hillside in southeast Turkey and he just wanted to see how much grain can I harvest in a couple of hours in his own calculations he figured that a family of five in two weeks could harvest enough wild wheat to feed themselves for an entire year that's how rich things were at the in these stands of wild wheat so it's only natural then that people would have settled down next to those rich plant resources over time their population grew and a series of environmental stresses took place that went to the development of domestication and I'm not really going to go into that today that's a fairly long technical thing so the first stage of the Neolithic Revolution is when people domesticated plants and domesticated plants just plants they domesticated wheat barley and that is the origin of the Neolithic Revolution first village life and then the domestication of cereals but those first villages of the pre pottery Neolithic a are actually few and far between we don't know of a lot of them there were small one of them is at the very bottom of Jericho for instance but there were not a lot of them it wasn't until the pre Potter realistic be about seventy three hundred years so it's about a thousand years later that they domesticate animals as well sheep and goat and later cattle and pigs and that is when things really take off population grows very markedly and most importantly once you combined domesticated plants and domesticated animals you had an economic system that was incredibly productive and durable and so P P n B villages spread all over the Near East archeologists know of hundreds of ppmv villages everywhere from southern Jordan all the way across up through Syria Anatolia and down into Iraq and Iran so there was something very very special about that particular combination of domesticated plants and domesticated animals and that's the system that we call mixed farming I put this guy in here just to remind me to tell you that we can monitor this transition as it is happening that early domestication of that early focus on wild wheat and barley leading to domestication this is a burial of a guy from the Natufian culture and period that's those first hunter-gatherers who settled down next to these very rich wild wheat resources one of the biggest things that you see when you look at the the teeth of meal of Natufian burials is they start to get lots of cavities that the increased amount of starch in their diet it got you know gets caught in their teeth and sorry said that Natufian did not floss and so there's a very high rate of tooth decay among that - Afiya and it's connected the the hidden cost of a focus on cereals so we can already see the focus on cereals leading to domestication and as I mentioned these are the earliest domesticates it's both cereals wheat and barley and legumes chickpeas lentils peas and veg so when you combine cereals and legumes the legumes have various amino acids especially lysine so you get a complete protein when you when you combine them so it's very very good for you and the way I remember what these earliest domesticates are so it's basically all the ingredients in a falafel sandwich and then I just wanted an excuse to show this guy but these are the four main early investigated animals so those plants that I just showed you and those animals that I just showed you they are the crucial components that make up a mixed farming system and it is a linked integrated system okay let's talk about poop dung is actually an extremely important part of this mix of goods because a mixed farming system has a real set of synergies in it the animals the domesticated animals are fed by the crops that are raised and they graze on the stubble in the fields after the harvest while they're grazing on the stubble in the fields their manure fertilizes those fields as well that fertilizer dung fertilizer can be collected and mixed with ash and spread out over a field a lot of times they'll also burn the fields and burning helps speed up the release of nitrogen into the soil so the animals and the crops are enriching each other I also want to emphasize that this is these are some pictures I took in the village where I was living when we were doing my dissertation work there carouse next to the houses at the end of the winter they take out these enormous pieces of packed dung they make molded dung cakes that are extremely important as a source of fuel and any of you who've traveled in the Near East will see everywhere in every village a huge pile next to each house of these dung cakes that are used as a very efficient fuel and dung fuel became more and more important as the Neolithic people started burning up all the farmers and brushwood around them they were clearing forests to make agricultural fields they were using large amounts of fuel all the time once they developed metallurgy the amount the fuel and wood and charcoal they were burning just to smoke metals was also enormous so basically we could see a very quick process of deforestation in the Near East and dung fuel became the fuel of choice afterwards it actually burns very cleanly and consistently so it's really good in things like pottery production as well what I'm trying to show you is all of these things are interconnected that the farming the herding the fuel use it's all connected now so I mentioned that those are two advantages of the mixed farming system but a third one is something that it should be familiar to all of us in the time of recession and that is the value of diversifying your portfolio that the crops and the animals are not subject to the same risks so that if your crops fail you always have your animals as an extremely important source of nutrition and protein either for meat or from the dairy products that they produce I should mention also that the animals are also flower animals that are helping cultivate your fields so it is that's another aspect of the interconnections but by having both the the animal option and the crop option people could survive very hard times like drought you can't move your fields to where the water is but you could move your animals to where water is if you're not getting rainfall in in your own village so taken together then the incredible resilience of a mixed farming economy made it the case that these systems were able to last for over 9,000 years and they are still the fundamental building block of life in the middle not only are they resilient but they're highly adaptable so that the village went this mixed farming village way of life was characteristic of the Neolithic but also the development of urban civilizations now the way people live their lives in those mixed farming villages certainly change the economic strategies of their herding and farming systems also changed but the fundamental idea of the mixed farming village has absolutely continued and is still the basic building block of life and that's pretty amazing as a cultural economic invention so now I'd like to long to talk about how we look as archaeologists how we study ancient farming systems and what's nice is that there are a variety of different pathways in ways that we can learn about these farming systems one of the nicest ones is artistic representations of agricultural activities and we're very fortunate in having highly detailed Egyptian tomb paintings that show every stage of agricultural the agricultural cycle so here you see a man following his field here you see them breaking up the earth clods and hoeing it and doing some land clearing this is deforestation they've admitted it here we see love these men carrying sickles to harvest the crops here they're harvesting and collecting the crop in large baskets and here they're scooping it out measuring it out for delivery and here what they're doing is they are winnowing the crop and winnowing of course is when what you Thresh it first which means you chop up the grains you're trying to do is separate the seeds from the outer casings of them and first you Thresh and then you winnow which is you can see it at the very top these people look like they're raising their hands in the air and you see the stuff falling down in the middle they're tossing the thrashed wheat up in the air the wind blows the chaff away because the chaff is very light and the seeds fall down so that's how you separate the wheat from the chaff in the farming system that's the Argent of the metaphor there's some beautiful paintings of farmers plowing and you get very detailed technical knowledge of how these ploughs worked they're very different from the medieval system the medieval system is called a moldboard plow which actually turns the ground over turns the soil over the ancient Middle Eastern ploughs what we call an arch plow which essentially is a pointed stick that is running through the ground digging a thorough but it's not actually turning the soil over that's the difference so it's a little more labor-intensive I'm showing you this because it's a really nice parallel in Egyptian tomb painting this is a Mesopotamian cylinder seal impression also of a plow scene you'll notice they're both working with a yoke pair of oxen pulling the plow but the cool thing here is this little element so we see that little funnel there and that too that's a cedar plow the Mesopotamians had developed this technology where you basically dump the seed in cement sand is right on the far there he's pouring barley seed into the into that top funnel part and it's dropping down right behind the point of the plow so the plow digs the furrow and as long as you keep moving you're getting this constant dropping of barley grains into your furrow very very accurately very cleverly avoiding any kind of waste so the artistic evidence gives us all kinds of really neat insights into the way that these farming systems work we also have a variety of textual evidence for how ancient farming systems worked this is a tablet showing it's a map showing you the canals and the the irrigation system in an area right near the Euphrates River in Babylonia and one of the real amazing discoveries of the 1950s came at nippur in the joint Oriental Institute and University of Chicago I'm sorry joint oriental and student University of Pennsylvania excavations at the very important site of Nippur in south-central mesopotamia and many of you will have heard of it because this is the site where professor Gibson excavated for many years until the outbreak of the Gulf War and he's publishing it now this was the religious capital of Mesopotamia it's a very very important city and what they found in the early 50s was this little tablet which turned out to be a farmer's almanac from about 1700 BC which with apologies to Jim Sopranos is a thousand years older than Hesse odds works in days until this was found has he had had pride of place as the world's oldest-known Farmers Almanac but this one is wonderful it's very detailed instructions to a farmer on how to irrigate his field how deep the water should be what to watch out for when he's irritating the field and then how to plant it how deeply the how deep the furrow should be and he has all this this stuff about make sure your workmen don't slack off you're really gonna have to over them with a whip and there were all kinds of management hints in there as well but my favorite part of it is that you have to say a prayer to the goddess of field mice and vermin when on the day that the seed breaks through the ground in order to make sure that the seed field mice and vermin don't don't harm the field and then it also gives you very good advice about when is the exact right time to harvest how to Thresh had a window it's a really remarkable document and it gives a richness of information it's an example of how amazing a source of information it is when we can draw on the textual record and the artistic record and the archaeological record to understand ancient farming we in the absence of textual data and when you're dealing with village economy is a lot of the people in fact almost all the people living in the villages were not literate so we really have to rely very heavily on archaeological information and there's a lot we can do and so I wanted to just quickly run through some of the methods archaeologists use to try and understand ancient agriculture some of the best evidence comes from these things which are sickle blades this is a gorgeous one it's from that Natufian period and it was actually used to harvest wild grain would have been El Din this is a small one held in the hand and it's the head it's a piece of bone and the head is carved in the shape of a deer or a gazelle and then these pieces of Flint were sent into the bone and it was held in the hand and used to harvest and what you can see here is polish on the edge of the sickle and that is called silica glass or sickle Sheen and that is a byproduct of their silica inside every plant if you ask yourself why does this talk to the plants Stan upright it's because there are little pieces actual hunks of silica called phytoliths which means plant rocks that are inside the stalks of the plant and when you harvest the plant the silica from those phytoliths polishes the the stone the sickle blades and amazingly the heat it's very hot when you do that at that point of contact and so phytoliths often get stuck to the sickle blades themselves can be extracted from them and archaea botanists can identify from the shape of the phytoliths what plant was being harvested so finding the sickle blades we know that they were farming if you have enough grant money you can extract the finalists and figure out from the stone tools what they were farming I find that amazing and sick of ways can be very useful I've been I was excavating and rook Mesopotamian training colony and I wanted to find out were these people producing their own food or were they so rich and powerful that they were having the local people deliver food to them and in fact we found tons of sick of ways that black stuff is bent human they were hafted in bitumen they have sickle gloss on them and those were in the erupted part of the settlement so we know those people the colonists themselves were farming so you get real insights by looking at the artefactual distributions of these things now we talked about textual evidence we talked about the actual tools used in harvesting but one of the main forms of evidence to reconstruct ancient farming system is is looking at the actual remains of the plants themselves and one way that this is done is through what's called flotation Wingham it's a very very simple thing the idea is that you take soil samples as your excavating especially when you see carbonized or burnt charcoal in the soil that you're digging up now you dump it into this bucket this barrel which actually has a showerhead in it sticking up and see how the water is being agitated the water is being frost up by the showerhead that's sticking up so as the soil is dumped into the water the water is throwing up the pieces of charcoal the burnt seeds and the burnt charcoal float to the top they flow through this little channel and are captured in this cheesecloth which is suspended in an open bottom bucket and here's a close-up of it and you can see all the little pieces of seeds in charcoal are being gathered there and we that's called the light fraction of floatation we see it's labeled with so we know exactly what layer and feature or oven or pit it's come from and then when it dries we're able to open it up and you can see it's all charcoal and seeds and plant remains you can examine them under a microscope this is in particular on these are great pets or grape seeds that were found through flotation so it's a very simple idea but it really gives you very valuable results and very important insights into the how the farming what people were farming another way that people are able to look directly at plant remains is by looking at pollen either from archaeological sites directly or from the fields and marshes around those sites and here we see a guide coring using an auger to core into the the moist soil near an archaeological site in where I worked in southeast New Mexico and this is the range of the different pollen types it's a beautiful picture looks very unworldly but you can see how the pollen this is what's causing your allergy you can see how the pollen is easily identifiable to the different species so that's really valuable because it tells you what crops people were raising but pollen is blown around by the wind so it also tells you a lot about the ancient climate in that area like you can look at what's the ratio of tree pollen to grass pollen then you can tell is it an open area or forested area very useful very important direct evidence about farming systems now it's crucial to make a distinction we talked about farming and you know farming is a big big term in the Middle East there are two kinds of farming you can really divide the Near East up this way one is called dry farming and the other is irrigation and it all depends on water this is a rainfall map of the Near East remember I showed you the Fertile Crescent at the beginning of my talk well how bad I had coordination see how the Fertile Crescent exactly maps on for the rainfall pattern that these are areas where there is enough rainfall to support agriculture without needing any help ok and as it turns out there's a magic number and that number is about 250 if you have 250 millimeters of rainfall every year reliably you have enough for agriculture in this dry farming system so where does dry farming characterize the agricultural systems in southern Levant Israel the West Bank and Jordan Lebanon Syria southeast Turkey the slopes of the Zagros in northern Iraq and in western all of those are dry farming zones Mesopotamia and Egypt are in irrigation zones and it hasn't escaped people's notice that the world's first really major civilizations arose in areas characterized by irrigation now why should that be that's been a huge problem in the social sciences some people a man named Karl Victo NGO had suggested well managing irrigation requires a bureaucracy and once you have a bureaucracy that very quickly leads to the emergence of the state and that's been critiqued very extensively in fact by some very important work by cultural anthropologists at the University of Chicago who showed that in fact you can manage irrigation systems without bureaucracy and bureaucracy seems to come after the state and not really proceeded so irrigation that doesn't seem to explain that link between irrigation and these high civilizations it's a much more direct link i mean i'm i would go with Occam's razor that you should always prefer the simplest explanation the fact is irrigation agriculture produces twice the yields of rain fed agriculture and it does require many more inputs of labour and capital because you have to build the canals you have to have a labor force that will build them and a way before us that will maintain them and of course people to harvest the crop so it's a lot of labour in capital but you get these enormous yields when Herodotus visited Babylonia in the the 5th century he was astounded at the wealth of of area of the productivity of irrigation agriculture so if we say that food was not just life food was wealth you could produce twice as much wealth with irrigation agriculture even though you had to work pretty hard to do it of course the trick is to get other people to do the work and then you get the grain so that's the distinction then the dry farming zone in this is in the hub Warplanes in Northeast Syria that's the border with Turkey and those of the mountains of eastern Turkey and this is the irrigation zone where it's less than 250 millimeters of annual rainfall this is the the Nile Valley in Egypt but that's a fundamental distinction that really divides up the Near East now what's neat is that there are different ways of doing the archeology of agriculture in the dry farming zone and in the irrigation zone the dry farming zone there just plowing they don't have all these huge agricultural installations right like irrigation canals and things like that so how do you look at the agricultural system in the dry farming zone I'm very proud to say that people at the University of Chicago especially Tony Wilkinson and students Affairs like God Jason were and carry Chris have done a huge amount in developing a way to work with this stuff it all boils down to a dinner party in Washington when former director of the ally Robert McCormick Adams who was secretary the Smithsonian happened to be seated next to the head of the CIA it was woolsley at the time and they're talking and they're talking about this top secret word what used to be top secret project called keyhole which was a satellite that called the corona satellite that produced unbelievably accurate very very detailed pictures actual photographs all across the Middle East in the late 60s and early 70s is when they were flying those missions and it it's like us well the spy novels in this case were based on fact the satellite would take the pictures it would eject the film out it would drop out into parachute and this is a picture of a plane actually she has this little sky book this u-shaped sky it would snag the parachute with the film and they bring it back to I think it's right outside of Baltimore was the puzzle palace the National Security Agency and they would work with his film so all of this was done in the 60s and 70s and got incredibly detailed pictures coverage of the entire Near East by the mid-90s when this dinner party took place this data was totally obsolete so Robert Adams was a man who'd been using remote sensing for years trying to understand ancient Mesopotamia so he said to woolsley you know how the CIA you really should declassify this stuff you don't need it anymore and it would be really valuable for researchers and Wolseley I maybe had a one Merlot too many he said okay why not they classify the images we know in our camel lab upstairs we have one of the largest archives of these Declassified satellite images the data they give is tremendously valuable why not just because they're very detailed aerial photographs but they were taken at a point in time before agriculture in the Middle East was mechanized now they have ploughed very very deeply they have just totally month about the landscape these corona images give us views of a landscape at a moment in time before industrialized agriculture took place and because of that there are many very very fragile features of the landscape that still survived and this is a picture of tell Brock in Northeast Syria and what you can see radiating out from it are these lines that are called hollow ways they're the remains of ancient tracks waise what are they notice how they fork out there's there's one of those Forks there that's much better they're very hard to see virtually impossible to see on the ground this is a great thing where they drain so you can see the rain gathering there's the site this is cycle tell hawa and you can see the water in the hollow a leading right back to the town you almost never would be able to see that on the ground but in the satellite imagery you can see it so what those are is the pathways that people took when they were reading their animals out to pasture and when they were going out to the fields to work them and just by going back and forth the same way every day they were these paths in the ground those paths survived these are Bronze Age systems dating to 2500 BC 4,500 years later those fragile things still survived and it's only in the last 20 years that they've gotten mucked up so these Corona images and mr. woolsley a couple of Merlot's too many have been responsible for our having a total revolution in our understanding of ancient agriculture in the Middle East so Tony Wilkinson and his colleagues started mapping first they mapped where all the sites were this is Hama car by the way one of our Oriental Institute excavations that Clements rifle is directing you can map where the sights are then map the hollow waves and what you see is patterning very clear patterning you see how each site has it looks like a starburst of radiating hollow ways leading out from it and where the Holloway's end that tells you that's the limit of their field system so you can see how much land did they actually farm around the settlement that's something you'd never be able to figure out otherwise even with you have texts and tablets those texts usually only record land that belongs to the king or the temple they don't show you the totality of it but these Holloway's why they show you the foot stand the system so you can measure out where there's one city and it's around it's another one another one another one and then cutting across it is yet another system of Holloway's and those are roads that connected the different cities across so because we have these Corona satellite images we can reconstruct an entire landscape of Agriculture during the Bronze Age in this dry farming system we're really the traces of the farming itself are very hard to find but what we can find is the paths that led to the fields and that helps us reconstruct them now in the irrigation zone in Mesopotamia in Egypt we have much more to go on in Mesopotamia proper Robert Adams was able to map the incredibly elaborate irrigation canal networks that crisscross the southern alluvium and this is a little diagram from the book by Nicolas post gate about ancient Mesopotamia and it shows you how elaborate this system was its first you have this a cross section there's the river this is the levee you don't keep tup earth the raised earth on either side of the river and then a down slope down to a swamp at the other end so you have the river and then a feeder canal that comes off the river and then a second canal and then tiny canals that go into the fields and then the water drains out of those fields into the marshland and of course you've graze your animals in the marshland at the bottom of the system very very elaborate incredible engine for the production of wealth but there is a downside and that hidden cost of irrigation is salinization and this is some very important work that McGwire Gibson and other people have done if you over irrigate something really bad happens first of all as we know it's incredibly hot in places like mess Tamia so the water evaporates leaving the salts behind if you over irrigate the water table Rises your bringing water up to the surface the water is wasted by evaporation and it leaves the salt behind and that's no joke this you can actually see these crusts of salt next to the canals and here you can see an entire irrigation canal with the salt and the whole landscape has been abandoned so southern Sumer is now a desert where it was once paradise and it's because not only but in a significant measure because of over irrigation so archeologists can see those irrigation canals and as I was showing you in that last slide we can map entire networks of the irrigation system but there are many different kinds of irrigation farming systems in the Middle East and I think one of the coolest ones deals with this problem of evaporation if the water is flowing in an open canal it you'll lose more than half of it by the time that reaches the village okay and if water is scarce we begin with you want to be careful the Persians in the time of the Persian Empire invented what has got to be the coolest irrigation technology no the second coolest irrigation technology around and it's something called that cannot which is similar to our word canal what the idea is this if you have a village down here the mountains here the aquifer the underground water is higher up next to the mountains so that you dig a well straight down and then underground you take a horizontal mineshaft like that every so often you have to dig holes forward to get rid of the soil and for maintenance and that's what you're seeing on the surface it looks like bomb craters but those are the hols the openings of these holes for maintenance so the water flows out of that aquifer and then eventually surfaces right next to the fields so it's protected from evaporation for almost all of its journey now this is it's a great schematic but you can actually see that on the ground in this aerial picture these are near firoozeh body in iran here's one of those cutouts now watch what happens it goes like this up takes a turn you can follow it exactly from the little pock marks that's the point where it emerges see that's where it comes reaches the surface then it's a canal for short distance on the surface and then it gets to the fields what an amazing system and archaeologically of course if you fly over iran those of you who visited there or if you're planning on going really look out the window you'll see the entire landscapes covered with these long lines of these little holes that are the remnants of Kanak systems so I think that's pretty neat but my my nomination for one of the coolest irrigation systems is one in the Negev in southern Israel the Negev is a very inhospitable place and I figured that sand Viper would encapsulate some of it very very harsh remember we talked about how you need to under 50 millimeters of rainfall for farming we're talking about an area with 150 25 millimeters a year not a lot but here's the thing in this part of the Negev it's 100 millimeters it's not nearly enough you would think for dry farming there was a whole series of small cities and villages and farms in the time of the Nabataeans the people who built Petra and in Byzantine times that's an example it's a place called I've died so what was going on how could they live there there's not a lot of but when it falls it all falls at once in these massive flash floods here to see the flood drying out and then it gets to look like that again so there is rainfall but almost all of it washes away now why does it wash away it washes away because of the soil this is loose soil like in northern China in the Yellow River loose soil has this funny characteristic when the grains get wet they swell up and they form like this sheet this impermeable sheet it's as if you spread plastic so any rain that falls on it will just zoom right across and as a flash flood and will be gone what what happened was in the 50s and early 60s and agronomists in Israel started looking at aerial photographs and they found that almost every little dry body of seasonal water course had all of these terraces built in it and they started they decide that let's go and look at these things and see how they work and now what are you looking at this is the water course what they found was all across the water course for these little terrace walls okay this is upstream this is downstream but look at the hillsides that's what I want to point out to you see all these lines those are walls and see these things these pimples those are piles of rocks what the farmers did was their principle was if we saved every drop of rainfall and slow it down it'll penetrate the soil we'll be able to farm so the first thing they did was they cleared the hillsides of all the rocks so there'd be a very clean surface of this loose soil for to catch the water and shoot it down then they built these diversion walls each wall channels every drop of rainfall in this entire area into one little wall terraced field so each Terrace field has its own from each side of the Rivage from the watercourse it's collecting every drop of rainfall that fell in there and that is enough to support raising crops so these guys figured all right let's see if we can reconstruct these things and see how they work so they went to a place near off dot in that part of the Negev and they rebuilt one of the systems and the foreground you can see the ancient terraces that have not been reconstructed in the background where they sort of fixed up some of the terraces here you can see some of the traces of those walls that channel the water down see it here you could see them also up here and here's where the farmstead was on the top of the hill so look at the amount of rainfall that gets collected in these things it's astounding and then they're harvesting peaches and most fields of wheat in a place that gets a hundred millimeters of rainfall of the year every drop of rain came from the sky there wasn't River irrigation but that's an astounding accomplishment of ancient people and a very nice bit of archaeology to figured out how it worked and reconstructed it ok so that's how farming systems work I want to very briefly go through herding systems because I know I'm really out of time here I talked way too much and I apologize for that herding system is the same thing we can reconstruct a lot of what was going on through artistic representations here are people making straining yogurt this is the Olive babe milking freeze you have figurines of the herded animals this is from my excavations that tells a Don it's a very attractive sheep we can find ancient Corral's this is one that Tony Wilkinson and I found and the shirts associated with it date to the early Bronze Age but most of all we rely on the actual animal bones that we dig up at these sites to reconstruct the ancient hurting the economies and this is the site of Greenland early Bronze Age village in southeast Turkey where I studied the animal bones and you can the neat thing about animal bones is that depending on what we what purpose you're raising the animals for you'll want to have a different herd structure so for instance if you're raising animals for a dairy production bait you know you want mostly females and in a tiff you're going to focus on dairy production you'll kill off all the males very young and your adult herd will be almost all females that's just logic right if you're raising them just for meat it doesn't really matter male or female you wait until the animal reaches its full size and then you kill them off and you keep some as breeding stock if you're raising them for wool it really doesn't matter males are okay and if you're if you're doing well production what you do is you castrate the males that's what weather czar is castrated males and they are known to produce a particularly fluffy fiber so that wool production you'll have you'll keep the animals around to a very advanced age and the adults would be 50% now 50% female so if you can figure out the ages of the animals and their sexes you can reconstruct what people were hurting the animals for what products they were trying to get so I looked at the ages when they killed the animals and there was a big peak at about a year and then most of you know most of them survived and then a second peak at about 8 which is when the females reproductive powers start to say and what I did was I tried to compare it to the expectations of what would what should the the age profile of the herd look like under those different production strategies so this is a meat production it's a beautiful tool model wooden model of butchering and animal and see the the Flint knife and at the carotid artery right there this is an area Egyptian gallery and I found that the black curve is what I found that greets Allah and the dotted lines are what you'd expect under meat production and it's very very close so they're producing meat and eating it in the village I compared it to dairy production where you kill off all of them almost all of the nails very young and it didn't match it at all I compared it to wool production and again this is the profile and won't production and this is what I had at greets when I began it was very different so the up shop Oh another thing is you can see whatever the pattern would look like if the village was supplying animals to the city and the suppliers would have the very young animals and very old animals the consumers in the city would have the prime aged animals so the city and the village would be complements and if you put them together you'd have a complete profile but each half would look very different and greets Allah didn't fit either one of them so what putting that together what it meant was that this village of greet Allah even though it was a farming village connected with the city was largely self-sufficient in its animal production and it wasn't supplying the city but many other parts of the Neary's more urbanized parts like southern Mesopotamia had very elaborate systems where villages were supplying the cities here we can see the network of canals and villages around the city of Uruk and it was very very elaborate indeed so when you take it together by combining the artistic evidence the textual evidence archeology ethnography satellite imagery we can put together a remarkably rich picture of how ancient farming economies worked and we have to thank the God in Naruto for all of that because he is the source of that great leap so I'm sorry if I went a little bit over thank you very much and I'd be happy to answer any questions that you might have yeah it's really remarkable there's a book it's kind of hard to find out my men in bronze wolf wUl FF called the traditional crafts of Persia and he has all these pictures of guys actually digging these kinetic tunnels so they had very elaborate sort of what they just dug straight down and then they had these big ceramic rings I don't know how I can describe it to you if you think of a like maybe a wash tongue and if you cut off the bottom so it was open at the top of the bottom these big ceramic rings that they would then sit down into the canal into those shafts to keep them from collapsing inward so they they needed to have the shaft open so they could periodically muck out muck them out and that that's why they have that pockmarked look on the surface because they're scooping the dirt out from them but it's it's a very simple technology these ceramic rings and just digging straight down with fairly simple you know iron tools which they have with the time of the Persian Empire but the end result was this very elaborate system the financing of it is where you see it could only work in a civilization where there's someone very wealthy who can put up the investment in cash and the hire the people to do it two blind because it's a very arid environment if they were in a lot of cases over time those areas were abandoned and so the system lasted also the cannot have been in use for in some cases for thousands of years so it's only in the last two decades that they've stopped making comments so the whole landscape is is littered with them and sometimes one system will fill up silt up or the water table will drop and so they'll build another one right next door so that's why in that picture I showed you they looked like there were all these radiating lines some of them were use at the same time it's that's a really good point because what's interesting is when you look at the put together the aerial photographs of that part of the Negev what you see is lots of small farmsteads each one on its own little water course where they're just getting every last drop of water out of that water course but you're right it must have been organized locally it's not this kind of massive engineering effort that where all the water goes to one village and the AHA or the landlord owns that village and he owns the cannot it's much more decentralized I think that's a really good point and it's a perfect point about how an economy is a cultural product it's not just food the short answer is yes we do have evidence remember of that pool of that system of the hollow ways in the dry farming zone the dry farming zone is much more vulnerable to rain you know if the rainfall drops you're really in trouble in the irrigation zone and you basically you have the Tigris and the Euphrates you're not dependent on rainfall where you are so what we do know is that at about 2200 BC there seems to have been a terrible drought that lasted for maybe about 50 almost a hundred years a very long term drought and all of those early Bronze Age cities they were very fragile they collapsed the people basically at the end of them became nomads or moved into villages but they couldn't support those large groupings of people anymore so that's one example we also know from the textual record periodically we'll talk about that we had a very talented guy named Magnus where Delta was our the head of our research archives our library for a while and Magnus was interested in the ecological history of that dry farming zone so he went and looked at medieval chronicles which are always great at all's good stuff in them they Aramaic speaking Syriac people of North Syria had chroniclers in medieval times and then saying this year this happens here this happened and he was able to trace the periodicity of droughts by looking at the medieval chronicles because they're not gonna lie about that stuff and it's very interesting you can see it's a very fragile marginal area so family was a very real and recurring risk for those people yeah what I was talking about how much agriculture has changed since they will find those corona missions in the early seventies and a big part of it is not just really deep plowing mechanized agriculture but also gasoline pump irrigation so that even in that dry farming zone everyone who could was buying gas pumps and drilling down and getting and started to irrigate even in the dry farming zone and what has happened is it's really an underreported kind of ecological disaster in the making the water table in those areas has dropped by like 30 meters and when you combine them that there's been a terrible drought in the last couple of years their vast areas of North Syria right you know where my project is working close to the Turkish border where basically the villages people moved out of the villages the villages are almost abandoned and people have gone to like Saudi Arabia to get work in areas outside of agriculture so yes they are supplementing it but it doesn't always work well obsidian or volcanic glass and mostly comes from the raw number of sources in central Turkey and eastern Turkey and they started trading obsidian very early on so really early in the Neolithic there's obsidian from from central Anatolia and from eastern Anatolia and Jericho in these early PPN a pretender in the illicit day levels now what's interesting is they usually didn't use the obsidian for harvesting it's very very sharp it's incredibly sharp so you want to use it for cutting things but it's also very brittle so what you want is something a little less sharp but very durable for your sickle blades and that's why flint is better for sickles but obsidian is better for a sort of way when you really want something sharp for scraping hides you want flint for cutting through them you'd want obsidian so you people probably have toolkits like that and what we do see is there are large increases in obsidian trade but once they started making metal tools the obsidian trade disappears so the early Bronze Age is sort of the last gasp of obsidian because that's when they start making enough of these tools that people said well you know we really don't need to have I worn you out thank you very much

Channel: The Oriental Institute

Views: 17,156

Rating: 4.9145298 out of 5

Keywords: Ancient, Economy, Archaeology, Oriental Institute, Museum, Lecture, History, Economics, documentary, Farming, Herding, Animal, Husbandry, Gil Stein, University of Chicago

Id: tpldfpPKdz8

Length: 63min 35sec (3815 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 04 2013

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Dr. Gil Stein of the Oriental Institute lectures on the archaeological evidence for farming and herding.