[ch4s3]

> 10,000 years old, since agriculture made migratory hunter-gatherer societies obsolete.

This isn't really how the transition to agriculture worked. Historically agricultural elites captured lands with conscripted armies and forced people to farm. There are plenty of examples where central authority collapsed and the archeological evidence shows us that people largely stopped farming.

[trimethylpurine]

This seems reasonable without negating the previous comment.

With no army to protect the farm, there can be no farm. A return to hunting and gathering would occur as an effect of warfare, regardless of whether or not the farmers have any choice. But hunting and gathering is still obsolete, whereupon agriculture is possible.

Obsolescence does not by definition imply permanence.

[twoodfin]

I’m not sure you’re disagreeing with me: Those who owned the land and didn’t have to migrate / soldier around or work someone else’s land to survive were doing well for themselves!

[ch4s3]

The people farming didn't really own the land, in many cases they were captured or corralled in place and forced to farm. The were also forced to dig canals and occasionally do the soldiering. All of the early Mesopotamian city states use corvée labor. Being an early farmer was super shitty, and no one did it by choice.

[twoodfin]

Right, I’m saying the jerks who did the capturing and the forcing (the owners!) were doing well, not the proto-feudal farmers.

[jltsiren]

When archaeological evidence shows that people largely stopped farming, it usually means that those people largely stopped existing. Or at least living in that area. Apart from a few rare exceptions, agriculture is the only viable way to support substantial populations.

Farming came first, and with it came larger communities and higher population density. That led to surplus, which enabled elites and other forms of existence beyond basic subsistence. And that lifestyle mostly spread organically. Not because the agricultural elites didn't try to conquer hunter-gatherer societies, but because there were so few hunter-gatherers to conquer. Conquered lands were mostly farmed by descendants of farmers from neighboring regions, because they formed the majority of the population.

[ch4s3]

> When archaeological evidence shows that people largely stopped farming, it usually means that those people largely stopped existing

No, there are signs of habitation. If you look at the evidence from the alluvial plain around ancient Babylon and similar cities from the early history of cities in the region you see people returning to fishing, hunting, and sort of opportunistic planting on river banks. These cities had a tenuous grasp, and people would often just leave, or the city would collapse and people would stop doing intensive agriculture. People would abandon irrigation channels which they had been forced to dig and simply just go fishing. James C. Scott's Against the Grain covers the archeology nicely.

[jltsiren]

That's what I meant by "largely stopped existing". With the decline of agriculture, there was a major decline in food production and therefore a major decline in population.

[ch4s3]

Again, you don't see a major decline in population in many cases based on the archeology. Insofar as we can tell people would spread out a bit away from the cities. In the fertile crescent early city states attempted to corral people in to controlled zones of production. Absent coercion, people didn't die they just moved.

[jltsiren]

If you are basing your claims on Against the Grain, Scott focuses on early centralized states, which emerged thousands of years after agriculture and towns.

Such states were by definition exceptional. Most of them were in regions, where rainfall alone was insufficient, and agriculture dependend on irrigation. Such a dependence on centralized infrastructure favored state formation, but it also made the communities fragile. Local population collapses were common everywhere, but the fragility made them worse. When the irrigation infrastructure failed, harvests failed, the town failed, and the survivors dispersed.

But agriculture spread long before states. Where the local conditions were favorable, agricultural communities naturally had a surplus of labor. If there was unclaimed land available, landless men and women would occasionally split from the community and start a new one. That was the primary mechanism of the spread of agriculture.

[ch4s3]

I don’t think there’s a good basis for your claim. The earliest agricultural cultures all practiced flood retreat agriculture in alluvial plains.

If you look at the Americas you also only see intensive agriculture in coercive top down city states or small empires. Outside of that you see opportunistic plantings and forest agronomy mixed with foraging and hunting. Or in coastal regions you see marginal planting supplementing diets focused on fishing.

Settled agriculture was not spreading very frequently by choice. Why would anyone choose subsistence grain agriculture when literally anything else was available. On an individual level it’s strictly worse than foraging and hunting across almost all measures you’d care about.

[Nicholas_C]

I see you have read James C Scott as well.

[ch4s3]

His book, and Graeber and Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything as well as some miscellaneous books on Mesopotamia. The Dawn of Everything does a great job challenging some popular ideas around state formation as well.

[Nicholas_C]

I found the Dawn of Everything to be misleading - I did research on a few parts of the books that I found interesting and discovered the authors present many things as fact which weren't true or hand wave away or omit contradicting facts/viewpoints. Against the Grain was amazing though.