Richard Bulliet - History of the World to 1500 CE (Session 1) - Introduction to World History

and on Tuesday so it's time for the history of the world to begin the discourse is one that I haven't taught before and to the best of my knowledge no one else at Columbia has taught it before because world history has generally been regarded as a subject that either cannot or should be taught at elite universities it it has been a very unusual area of history in that instead of deriving from the thought and writings of famous historians it has emerged from the ground up from essentially it's a demand-side course that comes out of the K through 12 educational system and I need to tell you a little bit about how that occurred in order for you to understand how I'll approach this course during the 60s and the 70s you all know enough about history to know that we had a profoundly transforming civil rights movement accompanied and even more followed by a feminist movement along with a very strong increased awareness of the role of Native Americans and immigrant groups from non-european backgrounds and the result of this educationally was that in the in the school systems both college but even more pre-college it became understood that American history should be taught as a history that embodies that embodies diversity now that provoked a certain opposition of people who said that multiculturalism is somehow a betrayal of American values and and principles but by and large a multicultural or diversity oriented narrative of American history became the standard in the American school systems to a lesser degree in other parts of the world to a much lesser degree the the problem was that if you went back and taught American history this way how far back could you go you could go back to 1776 you could go back and maybe do a century of colonial American history but there's a problem that if you wanted to get the earlier take on history that would meld with the new ways of teaching American history you are going to have to have a narrative that manifested the same degree of diversity or of say cultural relativism or at least appreciation of different cultures that you had for the new American history courses and yet the way history was taught is that Western Civ was the broad context within which American history is placed and Western Civ was a narrative constructed in a very innocent artificial fashion starting from Egypt to Mesopotamia migrating to Greece migrating to Europe forgetting Ethiopia forgetting Egypt and Mesopotamia in Greece becoming the Roman Empire becoming the Dark Ages becoming the Renaissance the Reformation early modern period the sural revolution and us so you had a master narrative of the of how Europe got to be Europe that was just fine as a preamble for American history so long as the only Americans you're interested in teaching were white Americans of European background so now you had a problem that you had a you had a history that was developing for for American history courses in a diverse fashion coming on top of a broader history that was Eurocentric and Europe well not exclusively Eurocentric because Egypt and Mesopotamia are not in Europe but we forget about Egypt Mesopotamia once we get the Greeks revved up and going so we had a Eurocentric history that didn't match the American history so the result was that various educators in various states started to agitate for global awareness or global studies and in the course of time you know 20 or 30 states mandated that global studies of some sort be taught so that there was some kind of a of a linkage between the way American history was being rethought and the way history broadly was this job went initially to social studies teachers who had been around for several generations usually taught in elementary schools and now they were charged with global studies and that a problem developed because social studies teachers tended to have a chronological depth of about 10 years and so they couldn't do that part of history that would dovetail with the early stages of American history so a sort of a coup came about in the 1980s in which high school history teachers fought with and succeeded in grasping from the social studies teaching Network the teaching of world history now these history teachers were teachers of American history and of Western Civ none of them had ever taken world history but it was a kind of a turf war they said we're historians we deal with the past you want to do the past differently you go through us you don't go hire somebody else now we do the history and so they kicked the social studies teachers out I may be exaggerating and now it became the job of history teachers particularly in high school to to carry out the state mandates for global awareness Global Studies and so forth now the problem was that none of the people who were now going to teach world history had ever taken world history because world history wasn't taught in American universities I remember the 90s going to you know seminars on how to teach world history in which you might have a hundred high school teachers and if you took a show of hands you know how many of you were teaching world history and they'd all raise their hand and say how many of you have taken world history and no one would raise their hand and this was a terrible problem because you had people who had no qualifications to teach world history who are now teaching it by mandate and they were struggling just to say the least and we're talking about 10,000 plus teachers nationwide who had to do this in addition to coaching the soccer team or whatever else they were expected to do this was seen as a crisis by certain organizations the College Board brought together a workshop of senior historians and high school teachers to talk about how to do it the National Council of the humanities funded a project to create a master outline for world history involving I think eight senior professors of history none of whom either taught or had studied world history the meetings of the committee were essentially turf wars you know we need more in China no no we need more India and so forth we never would have finished the job if our professor of Japanese history had not been absent on the last day because she was not going to give up any turf to the rest of us so you had national standards for world history you had a report by the College Board you had the Educational Testing Service which is an offshoot of the College Board created an AP exam in world history and the AP exam had a division a chronological division said here is how world history should be taught the AP exam had a massive impact the rat most rapidly growing field for AP examination that the Educational Testing Service had ever known you know thousands upon thousands of students were taking world history in tenth grade taking the advanced placement exam in 11th grade and and then blowing off their senior year in language college this was a profound challenge for the textbook industry which quite openly did not pay any attention whatsoever to what any of these well-intentioned committees were trying to do the textbook industry had a huge investment in producing Western Civ textbooks and now their market was being challenged so what they did initially was to take a Western Civ book and pay somebody to write an additional chapter in India a chapter in China chapter and Africa chapter on something else and so you've got not Western Civ light but a Western Civ heavy where you took your the same there to be had and you added these things to it and it really worked well as a reinforcement of imperialism to show that Europe always was and always will be the center and other parts of the world are peripheral areas to to Europe and it became very clear that that the Augmented Western Civ approach was going to be a failure too much western civ and indeed the project of world history became pretty explicitly defined by the end of the 80s as a project of provincial of provincial izing europe and provincial izing the United States now they could do it they could provincial eyes United States that is to say right a world history in which the United States plays very little role because they knew that there was another course entirely on American history and therefore nobody could criticize them for for soft-pedaling the American side of it or provincial izing Europe was a huge problem universities like this one and most others they gave PhD degrees had industry departments that were divided into American Historians frequently a majority or if in the South Civil War historians and maybe a majority but American Historians European historians and other or what we call here Columbia we say we have the Americanists European s and the world and the world group was often thought of as being of the parallel of the American as the European us except a little bit smaller because they just had to cover Asia Africa a Senate Center so so they were you know that the investment in Western Civ was colossal professorships scholarship of every variety publishing companies you could not abandon Western Civ without without a fight overtime Eurocentrism as a Bugaboo was joined by sino centrism because the Chinese historians had a record of archival resources and documents and scholarly effort and so forth that made them say ok let's do the world the way it should be namely Europe and China and so you ended up with the idea that world historians should be should avoid Eurocentrism and avoid sino centrism or indeed avoid any centrism and that is the reason that I maintain that that this course which is our first on world history will be eccentric it's also built into the fact that this is my last year teaching before retirement and I can say anything I damn well please with no consequences you know no regrets so you know some of you will look back and say he seems really eccentric but he didn't say is going to be all but you know you'll find out the so so this was an interesting case you had a world history being taught in the schools and then you had a sort of second and third-tier public colleges you know state universities community colleges who felt we have to teach the high school teachers who teach world history so they started to offer world history so that their graduates could have some background when they went to got a job teaching high school well it turned out their professors had no background in world history so then there's a thought well maybe the universities that produce PhDs should teach people to teach people to teach world history and very gradually world history has gone from being in the schools and worked its way up to being now at Columbia I don't think Harvard teaches this I'm pretty sure Princeton doesn't but and if they may not do it after this year who knows but it's a it's a fascinating example of the way in which history is built not on just intellectual achievement or vision but also on matters of politics and ideology this is a course that is heavily rooted in issues of politics and ideology every year in the summer this past year was in Fort Collins Colorado hundreds of teachers gather for a week or two to grade the AP exams this year was eight hundred and seventy high school teachers throughout Colorado and I think they had to do several grades several hundred exams apiece and a close friend of mine I've known people who have done it I haven't done it never will but my friends had you know it was like a cult these people live world history they look down on other forms of history world history is is what it is and yet there's no real clarity as to what world history actually is so to some degree it's an ideology if you had to define it as an ideology as a philosophy in my view what I'd say is that world history in the way that it is being thought of by people who identify themselves as world historians of members of the World History Association which unlike other academic associate patience is about 50% high school teachers and 50% college professors what they are doing they might define as the antidote to the Columbia core curriculum now for last 80 years or so we have had a core curriculum at Columbia that has assumed a certain quasi divine quality for the Western civilization accomplishment at its highest level and we we teach that in CC and litt hum our tongue music hum all of these are worthy courses I have no objection to the Columbia core curriculum in fact I'm the only member of the faculty is actually taught all four of those courses and yet there is no way that you can tweak the Columbia core curriculum to include the rest of the world you cannot say oh this year we're going to include even khaldoun or you know a passage from Mencius or Gilgamesh and therefore we have the whole world covered because your standard of comparison remains the Western Civ Core beyond that the structure of the Columbia core curriculum assumes that the proper way to study cultures over time is through literary tax or artistic monuments of one sort or another in other words the the core curriculum is strongly biased against popular history social history economic history quantitative history all these areas that do not depend upon the great works we have the the conceit that that there's a sort of conversation among all the great thinkers that you know you can sit in class and imagine what would st. Augustine say to Martin Luther or John Rawls or something like that notes total baloney but it's it's the conceit that keeps the thing going that you imagine that this is a great conversation world history tends to avoid the the peaks of high culture both because they're trying to D Center the narrative and get it away from Europe and because the problem with any high cultural text is that in an American school system people are always looking for the European analog you know what is the bhagavad-gita like in Western history what are the analog Analects of Confucius like and so forth so the world historians tend to use different principles than the people who who designed and you know devoted their careers to things like the Columbia core curriculum nowadays we have a lot of debate over the core curriculum about how to and whether to tweak it to be international and my own view is that that cannot work and that you have to actually move out of that house and moved into into another one maybe that one's made of bricks and this one's made of twigs nevertheless we're moving with the piggies into a different house in a course like this so what do we do in a course like this on the first place there are three different levels at which you can think about world history and to some degree I want to use this course to to introduce all three the first is as a narrative when you finish this course particularly to take both semesters you will know everything that happened of importance in the entire history of the world and you know mines will drop out of college after that because what more is there to know actually that won't happen the problem is that the narrative is a colossal grand compromise that comes out of the whole history of curriculum design a combined with the interests of textbook publishers what distinguished world history from American history was that everyone could assume that a high school teacher teaching American history actually knew something about American history before the course began and could read a textbook and sort of understand it and augment it through their own additional reading and experience the opposite sumption was the true world history the assumption was that the teacher knows nothing and everything must be in the textbook this put enormous power in the hands of the textbook publishers and the textbook publishers have progressively abandoned the Western Civ augmented approach and adopted a sort of a pan global perspective that tries to give balance to all parts and all periods this has not been wildly successful educationally but it is phenomenally successful if you're lucky enough to be an author I happen to be lucky enough to be an author and it has allowed me to to lead a life over the last 10 years or so very different from what my Columbia salary would have permitted because the teachers are so dependent on the textbook so if you have a successful textbook you to you sell many many thousands of book units and you fight off your competition you struggle for market share and so forth and so on very tedious but fortunately very lucrative and one of the things that you discover is that when you write this narrative you're not writing history in the way you would if you were writing a monograph on say the climate history of Iran and the Oh in the 11th century which is what my most recent monographic work has been on nobody expects you to have anything new they expect you to be artful in putting together things that are generally agreed upon and broadly known in the textbook race the victory goes to the fastest horse not to the fastest animal you cannot enter a text book that looks like a cheetah because you will be seen as cheating and it has to look like a horse and smell like a horse and run like a horse in order to be accepted so the result is that all the publishers read each other's publications sample the views of adopters and potential adopters and they gradually focus in on certain ways of doing it the result is that even though this field is less than 20 years old in the way I'm describing it it's become prematurely ossified now the books all say more or less the same thing but what they're saying really isn't any more world history than and it's a it's a new construction of history that is not the old Eurocentric history but it isn't really a world history in the way that a world history might be done by people who are more adventurous and yet this is the way we teach it this is the way the Educational Testing Service designs the exam that is the way I'm going to other readings in this in this course for this semester we're going to read this book this is volume 1 of the earth and it's people's authored by me and several colleagues this is my effort to profiteer off the class and we will read one chapter a week this is the way it's designed for the 14 weeks of the semester I do not expect you to learn any of the material contained in the book the exams will not ask you for any factual material I don't expect you to memorize anything in the book I'm going to be asking you to do something that is much harder than say think about what's in the book and be prepared on papers and exams to to to raise questions to deconstruct it to to suggest ways in which it's you know it's ridiculous the model for how to demonstrate the ridiculousness of it will be my lectures other words the lectures for this course will be a second level of history let's say we'll have a narrative containing a book and then we'll have a course of lectures that is kibbutzim the book I know every debate that has gone into this book I have been the principal or author or a editorial rewriter on every chapter in the book I know where we left things out and why where we put things in that didn't belong and why where we made compromises that were undesirable and so I'm going to talk about the problems with constructing world yesterday's narrative the third level is going to take place in sections in this class undergraduates will be offered a choice of four sections starting on the the section times and places will be handed out on Thursday and the first sections will be held next week and the sections will discuss the material generally speaking the material in the chapter from the week before our graduate students will be in a section with me that will meet on Thursday from 10 to 10:50 tentatively in my office in upstairs in room 421 depending on how many graduate students there are the TAS will will talk not only about what's been in the material for in the textbook for the week and perhaps give their version of what was wrong with lectures but they will also talk about and ask you to discuss ancillary readings of which there won't be a lot but also material contained on a website called bridging world history this was a very large and expensive project by the Annenberg foundation that produced units covering themes of world history and certain themes these are videos plus transcripts plus visual materials and so forth and certain units will be matched with specific chapters and specific weeks and you'll be expected to look at them and be able to to to talk about them it is not inconceivable that for a paper or an examination that one would use you know or involve one of the units from ridging world history that is not assigned in the course this is not simply a matter to try and produce history light it is also an effort to to come to to grips with the fact that we are rapidly moving into an a teaching environment at all levels in which written materials have no intrinsic priority over materials in some other in some other medium what is distinctive about the bridging world history is that the unlike the narrative which is diachronic that is to say it moves along progressively in time the the units in bridging world history are thematic and they will compare things from different periods in different parts of the world according to a certain theme like a religious proselytization or you know spread of writing systems or something like that there will be no expectation that you go into program logic Ronna logical progression and in fact you can look at those units in any order in any order you like but I'm going to try and match them to specific chapters because this embodies one of the great puzzles of the world history field should world history be chronological and if not what are the alternatives all of the books that exist as narratives world history are chronological they start early and they ordinarily manifest a certain crescendo as you get closer to to modern times there is the conceit that history moves faster as you go along further in time I don't think anybody who thinks about that really believes it there are certainly types of change that occur more rapidly in certain areas but to say that history moves faster is to imply that history is something that moves as opposed to simply the aggregate of what humans have done over some thousands or tens of thousands of years to the degree that these can be recovered from surviving materials but nevertheless of the textbooks tend to move in a crescendo fashion so the AP course usually acquires that the second semester started in 1500 AD while the first scene first semester starts in about 8000 BC so we have ninety five hundred years of her one semester followed by a semester with five hundred years there's a problem you know there any reason why that should be now in addition to the theory that history moves faster you have people who will look at him and say history is proportional to the number of humans living and the population increases since 1500 have been so gargantuan compared with the slow growth of population prior to that time that you can in justify it on that basis because if it is the aggregate of human experiences there are more humans who have experiences that can be aggregated so you can make excuses for for this chronological crescendo and yet the tendency is to to on the one hand minimize what happened before 1500 on the other hand to give the historians who focus on the pre 1500 period a chance to wield their brush very broadly while the ones after 1500 are expected to actually pay closer attention to facts now there are certain people who are will become famous as world historians like Oswald Spengler or Arnold Toynbee in the 20th century HG Wells you go back farther you get Hegel back farther you get even called une but the history books that we have now really don't come from that from that intellectual line as I say they have come up from from more practical considerations in the k-12 system so let's notice this issue of how do you prevent eyes Europe it isn't simply a matter of saying less about Europe although that's certainly part of it it's also a matter of of asking question is Europe special in any way other than the fact that we know a lot about it in other words is the narrative of Europe absolutely distinctive or is it simply the one we know best certainly in the post-world War two period we had a kind of climax of of several centuries of world of European triumphalism that Europe and it's American you know sidekick they now ruled the entire world and they believed very firmly particularly the United States particularly the 1960s that the entire world was destined to become like America in a process known as modernization modernization Theory became the technique for approaching non-european parts of the world or non-western parts as they were called why the word West is used is why anyone would say Europe is Western civilization when we are so far west of Europe when we say America's Western civilization in Europe as Eastern yeah oriental but we don't so the the modernization theory was climaxing in the decade when the European empires were collapsing and by the 1980s it became clear to pretty much everyone that somehow the model of Europe as being the exemplar of where the whole world was going to go was not quite working out and now you have people who are saying suggesting that maybe China is the exemplar of where the whole world will go just as in the 1970s you had some people were saying that Japan might be exactly exemplar of where the world will go maybe we will still reach the point where we can say that Iran is the exemplar where the world will go my favorite but the thing is there is no for all the world to go 2-1 into one place and this is one of the things that that gets troublesome in world history do you look at the world as converging and here the current word globalization embodies this notion that there's a convergence or you to say or do you say that there has always been a shifting pattern of dominance and a ever refreshing current of diversity and that it's never going to come together there's fundamentally a philosophical issue or an economic one whatever the distinction is between those the if you try to look at it more broadly one way of doing it is to say that are there common denominators although differently I would say there are common denominators there are aspects of human experience and behavior that are common to every society at every period of history in every part of the world and if you focus on common denominators you cannot end up with a centrism because those those currents those forces those manifestations of the human experience will will still be there so what would common denominators be the ones that are built into this book that you'll see are to one or to some degree to two sub degree for one of them is called environment and Technology every human society has seen human groups coping with environmental problems or opportunities and deploying inventing and deploying or discovering technologies to make this possible so one of the themes we have is ent environment and technology another one we have is called diversity and dominance it's originally called dominance and diversity and then it was felt that that was a little too heavy-handed so we switched it around to diversity and dominance and said that all societies have some pattern of ranking or domination but you never have total uniformity you always have diversity manifested in one way or another now the reason for these themes this was inside the first world history book that that adopted a thematic approach and this has made us the target of numerous other heavily-armed textbook writing teams that are trying to to destroy bullet they haven't succeeded yet but but themes proved to be a fairly viable approach as opposed for example to an opposing version which relates to convergence which is contact where you say world history is the story of when societies come into contact so it's a story of travelers and traders conquerors and explorers yeah but that gets pretty boring and the complaint by most historians was that why should we only look at Marco Polo and leave out the rest of the Renaissance you know why is it that only the traveler and the trader and the Explorer so forth why do they get special mention so the contact approach which is favored by some of my colleagues in the world history field notably Ross done out in San Diego I don't think has been as successful as the thematic approach but the thing is there are common denominators that don't lend themselves to to writing for example you can say spirituality is a common denominator human groups as far as we can tell have some orientation toward toward spirituality the problem is that they are very inconsistent in their preservation of evidence about that and the same thing would be true of let's say rhythm you know humans understand the beat line Oh some we don't but you know but and the rhythms differ but we don't have any any data that are going to to give us this you talk to dance historians and they're incredibly frustrated in trying to push the history of dance back they can see the history of dance at the the upper end you know what what survives now but knowing where it was five hundred years ago is extremely difficult to do art history art history is a little bit better but again it depends upon the what things have been have survived what materials they were they dealt with and so forth audio-visual resources like those in bridging world history to some degree permit a an expansion of the sorts of common denominators that that you know I think are make it possible to compare societies across time and space the particular common denominator that I have developed as my hobby horse has been relations with animals human societies always have some sort of attitude toward the natural world and particularly the world of animals presumably they have attitudes toward plants as well not only yeah but what can you say about that so I have written a book entitled hunters herders and hamburgers it was the product of a course I taught here for many years entitled domestic animals in human history it was a book that was intended to transform animal history with brilliant new theses it was a total failure partly because while I described the existence of the animal rights movement I did not endorse it so the animal rights people said what you're not out there you know freeing minks why write about animals at all so so the book is there and I'm actually that'll be the first reading that I'll ask you to do which is a segment from several chapters from hunters herders and hamburgers that will be available on course works is available now it's available now and it has to do with with the beginnings of of domestication how did domestic animals come into being there is a an enormous literature in this subject in which there is great controversy and very little agreement which is to say there are lots of people who disagree with me which is a fault but what can I do so that you know animals will come up again and again in this course technology will come up again and again because I've taught history of Technology here so to some degree the lectures will be will lean toward the things that I know most about now let me move to a substantive question it has to do with where does it start the you know because we have a word prehistory we have a philosophical presumption that history starts otherwise we couldn't have something that comes before it the problem with this is that when the word prehistory gained circulation the history profession seemed to believe fairly uniformly that history depended upon written records that therefore prehistory was what happened before you had written records there isn't anyone in the historical profession today that would really maintain this definition against all comers partly because of the amazing discoveries made by archaeologists partly because of increased scientific ability to analyze material remains and partly because Africa and Latin America or pre-columbian America don't have anything like a trove of early written materials and yep you know you can't leave them out and therefore how do you do how do you do that history so so the question of where history starts begins to be debated there let's say the the classic starting point was the first civilizations supposed to be in river valleys in the Middle East this is probably not true but this is where it started because that's where we got the first written materials Mesopotamia in Egypt well maybe not but that's where it appeared that we got the first written materials then we move toward the idea of well maybe it's the Neolithic Revolution and the beginning of domesticated plants and animals that's a starting point which in the Middle East is around 8000 BC problem is that you can have domesticated plants without mosquito animals investigated animals without domesticated plants and there is very very little relationship between the processes that seem to lead to the domestication of plants the process is a contribute to the domestication of animals but they're they're lumped together in this thing and we call the Neolithic Revolution which technically is this is defined as pre metallic archaeological sites that have hundreds and thousands of itty-bitty chips of Flint and the the Flint or other stone was set in a sickle so you would have a piece of wood shaped roughly like that and then you would embed in it these sharp stone chips and you would use this sawtooth like device to cut grass you'll go into a field of wild wheat or al barley put your arm around a whole bunch of stalks and you'd sawed through them and the the residue of the grass can be found on the chips that survive today we know that this was done so we say okay with it this is Neolithic we know that we can attach these little bits of stone to the growing of of grasses that become domestic what this has to do with animals is you know is purely conjecture because there was a theory that is still hotly debated that the best Gatien of animals depends upon sedentary life because the animals have to be kept in a pen and how are you going to pen up the animals if you're traveling around every night so if you have to have sedentary life then you have to have something you're living on therefore you have to have something like domesticated plants this was a this notion of penning up the animals to begin a process of Investigation and I'll go into this in more detail on Thursday this was a successor theory to the theory that hunters became herders so that people let's say in Central Asia for safe and the Mesolithic on they hunted horses and ate them and then just about the time some people somewhere else we're planting wheat and barley they said let's stop hunting the horses and let's start hurting them instead and voila domestic horses they simply evolved and then you think well why didn't they do that ten thousand years earlier wasn't that a stupid thing to wait so long I said well they didn't know domestication existed well of course they did because they had dogs well you know maybe they just didn't maybe they thought about the dogs differently than horses it became very confusing but the Neolithic Revolution becomes this hypothetical starting point then you have something that has arisen in the last five years or so which is called big history and it's their books on it their debates on it and big history says why is it that if we've had hominids around for 3 million years why are we only writing the history of them for the last ten thousand years from 8000 BC to the present what about those other millions hundreds of thousands of years shouldn't we write that as part of our history and so the big history people say let's think of all of the hominids and people you know how human like beings existed and think of them all together and then you think and you think and you think and no you realize that you're not going to get anywhere so you leave the bathroom and you go back to your office and you try and do some real history but the the problem with big history is that it it encourages people to really get involved with the science because this you know for the pre Neolithic stuff it's really complicated science to understand how to interpret the things you're looking at and the science changes over time just take one small but perhaps telling example dating with carbon-14 carbon-14 is a naturally occurring isotope of carbon that is taken in by plants and animals and there the carbon oxygen cycle and so the percentage of carbon-14 in your body at any one moment is considered to be equivalent to the percentage of carbon-14 that you have in the atmosphere at large so you get a ratio between carbon-14 which decays into carbon-12 the rate of decay is known and therefore when you look at organic remains from long ago and you look at the ratio of carbon 14 to carbon 12 you can say there must have been so much carbon-14 and now it is diminished and therefore we can measure them out of time so the amount of carbon-14 becomes a dating device this was a great breakthrough in archeology and it proved to be only partially correct because the assumption was that the percentage of the carbon in the atmosphere that was of the isotope carbon-14 was not a constant but rather changes over time and this was determined by studying the wood contained in tree rings so that every ring in a tree the the wood stops absorbing carbon after that season and the next ring out the next ring out and so you could look at a sequence of carbon-14 in tree rings and by matching tree-ring thicknesses you could push back thousands of years and so you came up with something called corrected carbon 14 dates the corrected dates tend to be much older than the straight carbon 14 dates depending on how fact far back you go in time now this this could have consequences for example if you look at carbon 14 dates and you think of Stonehenge and you say well you know if you go to Greece you take a tour and you go to Mycenae and you go to a tomb there where you see the stone work that's been done or you go to Terrans and you see the stone work done there then you look at Stonehenge you and you look at the carbon 14 dates you say well the Greeks who had domestic animals and wheat and barley built in big stones and somewhat later you had big stones showing up in France and Scotland and England so the Greeks must have come and taught the people to schlep big stones around why they would have done this is unclear except presumably that the Greeks knew that moving big stones was what civilized people did then corrected carbon 14 dates came in and it turned out the Stonehenge was older than the earliest big stones in Greece so then people had to say well none of us believed that the English went to Greece and taught them how to schlep big stones because that would make no sense at all because the Greeks are civilized and you know in England they were living in caves so instead we have to think of some way that those stones could have been moved without the assistance of some smart Greek now we've known this for some time and the issue of carbon 14 dates as opposed to corrected carbon 14 dates is an important one I'll come back to it later on when I talk about the invention of the wheel which is a crucial topic that I will bore you with of some length but turns out that now we look further at carbon-14 and we find you know there are sites where the carbon-14 level in animal bones is different from the carbon-14 level in human bones as if you had three hundred year old people who were hurting six-month-old sheep you know it didn't make much sense why would you have a difference in the bones and the answer that turns out so far as I can read I'm not a chemist to have to do with the issue of nitrogen 15 who knew the nitrogen 15 is conveyed into human skeletal remains by the consumption of fish because fish you know have a high levels of nitrogen 15 that correlates with different levels of carbon 14 so if you can compare the two you can say here are the animal bones let's call those hard carbon 14 dates and here are the human bones and the human bones have slightly different ones so what can we infer we can infer from this the percentage of the diet depended on fish and this is sort of a revelation because fish bones do not preserve archaeologically unless big big fish but ordinarily fish bones don't show up very much but it turns out that there are societies such as around the big rivers flowing into the Black Sea the the Danube the de Nestor the did yepper the dawn the Boog we're in the early days of human settled society fifty percent of the animal protein was coming from fish not from hunting the other fifty percent came from hunting there were no domestic animals and of course it applies to the Pacific Northwest where he had huge elaborate communities with possessions and ranks of society and so forth but no farming but lots of fish I mean Hitchhiker's Guide to the gallery to the galaxy was right on about thank you for all the fish because fish are terribly important so then you go back to the question of Egypt and Mesopotamia these early river valleys were they the Centers of civilization because that is where wheat and barley are grown as we know because of the remains of these Neolithic sickles or these are the centers of civilization because that's where the fish were well of course at the time people were doing their archaeological studies of Egypt Mesopotamia they didn't know anything about nitrogen 15 and so going back and now trying to decide what sort of role Phish played hasn't yet been done but of course it leads to to the possibility that you say that settled society does not may not depend upon domesticated plants though may depend upon abundance of fish so communities by lakes communities along seashores where you often have a whole acres covered with seashells from edible mollusks rivers you might even say that areas that have the fewest opportunities to get fish that is to say deserts with rivers running through them are more likely to have dense human settlement in those valleys than areas like Central Africa where there are fish flopping about all over the place from myriad rivers and streams and so forth because they get you know 30 plus inches of rain per year in the Middle East gets and most of it less than eight inches of rain per year so you know what we've written in our narrative assumes that grain farming is the key and yet it may it may not be the key and indeed farming may not be the key and this leads to something that I have been perplexed by all summer long when I was supposed to be writing a book and this is the problem of the the grand narrative we have that by growing wheat and barley fields of grain we could have a more dense population because the calories per acre were greater if the grew grain than if you were simply a forager the broad estimate that is used is that foragers require about one square mile per year to support a single person so a foraging band of 50 to 75 people you can imagine living somewhere within a circle with a radius of about 5 miles and that would be you know between 75 and 80 square miles and that would sustain that band for the year and the next band of 57 that people would be at least 10 miles away and therefore you don't have density of of settlement you just have small dispersed bands but if you have wheat and barley then you can have dense settlement and then the theory is that we have in this book and in all the other books now once you have dense settlement then you have division of labor then you have social classes you have trade you have cities you have gods you have warfare and you have civilization all because you can have this density of a population if you have wheat and barley but wheat and barley are not really all that big on producing calories per acre potatoes produce way more calories per acre than wheat and barley so do yams soda sweet potatoes so does manioc so does rice so do apples wheat and barley Oh their grass seed they don't you know that they're edible but but they're not really you know even corn produces a lot more I mean sort of wonder if could wheat have been grown and trained to become like corn to be giant so you just have an ear of wheat leave it we never tried it but but then the result is that if all of these other plants that are domestic and are grown in other parts of the world other than the river valleys the Middle East if they produce not only more calories per acre than wild plants but they produce more calories per acre than wheat and barley and other grains then why didn't civilization grow where those plants were why didn't these things that we associate with density of population settlement arise in central Africa or northern Brazil or places that where you had these other plants growing no one can answer that they can't answer it because these other plants don't so far leave archaeological remains whereas the straw that is used for that wheat and barley grow on comes to be used as a strengthening item in early pottery and you can identify Queen barley straw in places where you've had burning the carbonization of the of the kernels will allow you to identify grains but no one has a way of identifying the earliest manioc or the earliest yams and yet the foragers of South and Central America and Africa and Southeast Asia who still live by hunting and gathering eat these things as wild plants it isn't that the plants weren't known so when did they become domestic when did they start to support dense populations why weren't they the first and here you get you get mysteries like let's take bananas the genus of the banana moose has four species as I recall three of which are not edible by humans at least all bananas plantains and bananas same thing are belong to the same species and what is striking about bananas is that the banana has no seeds you can take a banana and stick it in the ground and wait the rest of your life and you will not have a banana tree growing where you put that banana in the ground there are no seeds nor is there any evidence of their ever having been banana seeds and yet the other species of that genus all have seeds so at some point selection of this particular edible banana plant developed so specifically in relationship to human population that the only way the bananas could be spread was by humans taking cuttings from banana trees and sticking them in the ground and they did this around the world in prehistoric times whatever that may mean bananas produce enormous numbers of calories per acre they'd be cut we know that they're that they become domestic very early because they lose their seeds but we don't know how early because we have no archaeological remains that prove that could you have had civilisation predicated on massive eating of bananas well why not you know fried plantains are at least as good as oatmeal so but it didn't happen so it leads to this question of historical reasoning that says you know post hoc ergo propter Hoke you know civilization comes in the place where you have wheat and barley cultivation therefore it must be a result of that cultivation we put this in the in the world history textbook repeated over and over again and there's a strong likelihood that it is simply not true now let me say one final word going back to this question of world history in general because of the this evolution I mentioned at the beginning of class from the k-12 educational system rising up higher and higher spiraling toward the pinnacle of achievement and finally reaching Columbia University as a result of this the United States is the only place of teachers world history at least in this in this sort of a decentralized fashion and it's becoming a peculiarity of what America and historians do and something that is very questionable from other historical perspectives because if you if you as I said if you're doing American history what do you do for the period before 1776 you have to Dueling what if you're doing English history you have lots of history before 1776 you can just take that island and wring it out for thousands of years and have more history same thing with France or Slovakia or you know Korea or something it was the Americans that have found that found it necessary to to embark on this on this eccentric this.d central program so to the degree that world history is becoming a sort of philosophical outlook and not simply a narrative it's one that is going to become a proselytizing one I think in other words I think Americans are going to try to sell world history to the world in the years to come and when they get around in doing that my hope is that they will be writing a lot better books than the one that you're going to be reading this semester and hopefully better books along the ingenious lines posed by the author of the book when he's taking his own work to pieces so I'll see you on Thursday how many graduate students are in the room okay one two three four five six

Channel: Columbia University

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Keywords: columbia university, richard bulliet, history

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Length: 77min 23sec (4643 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 11 2010