by Kevin Reilly
Ibo Culture . In some places, Neolithic culture ended with the rise of cities 5,000 years ago. New urban ways replaced the culture of the village. But in most parts of the world, Neolithic culture continued or changed more gradually. The modern African novelist Chi-nua Achebe re-creates the Neolithic culture of his Ibo people in a series of novels set in West Africa at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. In Things Fall Apart, a story of the destruction of traditional Ibo culture by European missionaries and colonialists, as well as other historical novels, Achebe recalls a world of family-centered rural Africa in which individual households are relatively equal and individuals are distinguished by merit and ability rather than birth. Ibo men compete not for money, which barely exists, but for titles that recognize their good works or feats of strength. Some have more yams than others, some are more ambitious than others, but everyone is taken care of by family, clan, and village. In proverbial Ibo wisdom, individuals must remember their roots: “However tall a coconut tree, it originated in the ground.”30 And no one is entirely selfsufficient: “A bird with a very long beak does not peck out what is on its head.”31
At the beginning of the previous century, Ibo culture was also one in which both men and women had important sources of power and status. Both had personal spiritual guides, called chi, which they challenged only at their peril. There was an earth goddess, Ani, who was the source of fertility, provider of the harvest, and arbiter of morality. There were other gods and goddesses, natural and ancestral, mediated through priests and priestesses, but in an agricultural society, the earth goddess was the most important in people’s lives. Her power did not necessarily translate into female domination, however. Ani was interpreted through her priest.
In certain respects, Ibo culture favored men over women. Men but not women were allowed to have more than one spouse. Men were the heads of the household. A male-centered culture encouraged men to discipline women and demeaned weaker males by calling them women.
Was Ibo society more male-centered than early Neolithic societies like Catal Huyuk? Did inequality increase? How did Neolithic societies change? In some cases, of course, they became larger. Population pressure could lead to increased density in a single village like Catal Huyuk. Alternately, a growing population could send members away to settle new colonies. On a large scale, this is how Austronesian and Polynesian society colonized the Pacific. Population size affected government. Small villages often governed themselves. Typically, a group of elders would decide what was best for the village. From all indications, Catal Huyuk managed such self-government by elders despite its size. The slice of Ibo culture that Achebe re-creates in Things Fall Apart consists of nine villages. In this case, some decisions were made by the elders of the village and some by the larger clan or tribe that embraces all nine villages.
Not all societies become larger and larger. Some were able to reach a balance and remain the same size for generations. But when some Neolithic societies expanded beyond the size of self-governing villages, they often developed a more complex system of government. Some anthropologists call this a transition from a tribal structure to a chiefdom. Such a transition may have occurred for the first time in the Middle East as early as 7,500 years ago and in the Americas about 3,000 years ago. One example of an American chiefdom was the Taino people of the Caribbean at the time of the arrival of Columbus, 500 years ago.
The Taino . The Taino inhabited the Bahamas and the Caribbean, north of Guadeloupe, in 1492. The island of Hispaniola (Haiti and the Dominican Republic today) may have had as many as 500,000 inhabitants. Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Jamaica each had a population of a few hundred thousand. The Taino lived in villages of 100 to a few thousand in round wood and thatch dwellings around a plaza. In a slightly larger building on the plaza lived the cacique, or chief. A group of villages were ruled by a district chief, one of whom, the regional chief, was in charge of all districts. This hierarchical organization was reflected even on the small scale of the village, which distinguished between upper- and lower-class people.
Taino society was also more specialized than Catal Huyuk or later Ibo society. There were Tainos experienced in such crafts as woodworking, pottery, cotton weaving, and hammering gold nuggets into jewelry (but not smelting). There were Tainos who made the hammocks in which most people slept, the baskets that hung from every wall, the elaborate wooden stools on which the chief sat, and the individual and grand chiefly canoes that provided transportation.32 Yet none of these were full-time specialists.
The basic work of Taino society, like less complex Neolithic societies, was agriculture. And the basic implements of agriculture were still the digging stick and the hoe. But Taino agriculture was more sophisticated than that of early Neolithic farmers. Those who lived in lush environments like the Taino often used a method of clearing land called swidden, or “slash and burn.” By this method, they cleared land by cutting trees so that they would die and dry out. Then they burned off the dry biomass for ash that would provide nutrients for three or four plantings before becoming exhausted, but at that point they would have to move on to slash and burn another area of forest. The Taino developed a more sustainable agriculture with a unique method of irrigating and draining their crops. They constructed mounds of soil called canuco in which they planted their mainly root crops—yuca (manioc or cassava) and sweet potatoes. These mounds were self-irrigating and needed little weeding or care. Yuca and potatoes added carbohydrates to a rich protein diet that included fish, small animals, and beans.
Did the complexity of Taino society make it necessary to have a more hierarchical political structure? Or did the caciques and nobles create a more complex society for their own benefit? Two aspects of Taino culture may help answer that question: religion and sports.
Taino religion, like other Neolithic religions, had elements of ancestor and nature worship. Every individual had a special relationship to an ancestral deity called a zemi. While each Ibo had one chi, the Taino had many zemis; the term was applied to objects that contained the spiritual force of the ancestor as well as the ancestor. These objects—made of wood, bone, shell, pottery, or cotton cloth—were kept in special places in a Taino home. In this respect, they may have functioned much like the skulls, masks, figurines, and sculpture of ancient Catal Huyuk. But unlike Catal Huyuk and Ibo society, each Taino village also had a chief. And each chief had zemis in his home or in specially built temples that required the worship of the entire village. Once a year, the villagers would gather to pay homage to the chief’s zemi. Women brought cassava bread as a gift. A priest would make sacrifices, and all would sing the praises of the zemis and feast and dance. Clearly, the centerpiece of Taino religion was the chief’s zemi. The sacred ground was the plaza in front of the chief’s house, where all rituals and festivals were carried out under the watchful eye of the most important zemi.
As the religion of the Taino chiefdom was both more centralized and more widespread than that of less complex societies, so was its leisure. The bounty of the natural environment, combined with canuco agriculture, gave the Taino a considerable amount of free time. One activity that filled that time was a kind of ball game that was played throughout the Americas. The ancestors of the Taino had brought the rubber ball from the Amazon. On the Taino court, two sides of about 10 players each tried to keep the ball in the air without using their hands or feet. Ball courts were located not only in villages but also at the border between villages. In Puerto Rico, the most elaborate ball courts have been found on what were the borders between chiefdoms, suggesting that they may have played a role in diplomacy or the settlement of disputes. In the Caribbean, the outcome of the ball game was benign, but in the more complex states of Central America at the same time, the losers (or sometimes winners) would forfeit their lives. Did shared competition and shared religious observance bring unity and commonality to a society spread out over hundreds or thousands of villages? Or did the controller of the game and the owner of
the zemi use sport and religion to magnify and centralize power?
The changing role of women offers a clue. Tainos worshipped two supreme deities: a male god of cassava and the sea and his mother, the goddess of freshwater and human fertility. But in practice, it was the chief and his zemi who commanded obedience. Theoretically, women could be chiefs, but few were. Taino society was matrilineal; even the chief inherited the position through his mother’s line. Nevertheless, at least by the end of the fifteenth century, male Taino chiefs and nobility seem to have garnered considerable power and privilege for their sex as well as their class. They commonly took a number of wives, and when a chief died, one or two of the wives might be buried with him. That was a hallmark of patriarchy that was to become more common in post-Neolithic kingdoms and imperial states.
Neolithic Continuity and Change
In comparison with foraging societies, agricultural societies were larger, denser, and more complex. Neolithic life was settled life. Dozens of related families or clans lived in villages, and almost everyone tilled the soil or cared for animals. Neolithic villagers made and used far more tools, containers, clothing, and other objects than hunter-gatherers. They invented not only farming but also pottery, fermenting, and storage. Like their Paleolithic predecessors, Neolithic farmers were relatively equalitarian: no individual, group, or sex dominated. Women’s work, although different from men’s, was invaluable, and their deities were indispensable. Fear of famine or disaster mitigated greed, arrogance, and self-indulgence. Security lay in numbers and mutual aid.
In these respects, most agricultural societies were similar. But Neolithic societies also changed over the course of the past 10,000 years. From the time of ancient Jericho, agricultural societies evolved from family-centered villages to larger chiefdoms, in the process eroding early traditions of equality, goddess worship, and matrilineal descent. This process was gradual in some places, swift in others. Signs of inequality appeared in ancient Catal Huyuk, yet habits of mutual aid continued down to the present. But despite their many differences, Neolithic societies shared a lot of common ground. Unlike later cities and state societies, virtually all villages managed without money, writing, occupational specialization, or social classes but relied on a common fund of tradition and experience.
Changes in a Mexican Valley . Archaeologists have recently excavated the site of one of the earliest state societies in the Americas, the Zapotec state of Oaxaca in a valley of central Mexico.33 By digging beneath the elaborate remains of the state society, they have been able to reconstruct some of the changes that occurred in the Oaxaca valley since about 7000 BCE, when it was occupied by foragers. At the lowest excavated level, they found a ritual earthen field surrounded by stones, dating from 6500 BCE. Here they believe that hunters and gatherers gathered at special times of the year for initiations and courtship. Like foragers today, they probably joined together in ritual dances to celebrate these meetings.
Around 1500 BCE, the people of the Oaxaca valley domesticated corn and began living in permanent settlements. The first villages were probably communities of equals like the equalitarian bands of hunters and gatherers. At a slightly later stage, there appeared men’s houses apart from community field of dance, suggesting the development of a special religious or political role for leading males.
By 1150 BCE, the Neolithic villages show signs of social inequality and the emergence of elites who lived in large houses, wore jade, and stretched the skulls of their children as a mark of their status. The men’s houses were now large temples, destroyed and rebuilt every 52 years to conform to the calculations of two calendar systems of 260 and 365 day-years, which came together every 52 years. A world in which the natural rhythms of gathering and planting could be marked by the entire community had become a hierarchical chiefdom with secret knowledge preserved by privileged specialists.
Around 500 BCE, the Zapotecs wielded the chiefdoms of the Oaxaca valley into a military state centered on the crown of Monte Alban. There they constructed large pyramids around a central ceremonial plaza, where priests lived apart from the people, administering the rule of a king with religious rituals sanctioned by celestial calendars and the force of arms.
The history of Oaxaca from foraging to Neolithic villages to chiefdoms to state summarizes the history of much of the world over the course of the past 10,000 years. In the following chapters, we survey that pattern, its varieties, and its exceptions.
Conclusion
The history of 99 percent of the past 14 billion years is hard to summarize. From the vantage point of seconds before midnight, however, certain conclusions leap out at us. Two are as obvious as they are contradictory: humans have taken over the world, and human history is a flash in the pan. Each of these truths reflects a different time line. From the perspective of the past 10,000 years, even perhaps the past 100,000 years, the emergence, expansion, and increase of the human population is staggering. Its capacity for invention and adaptation marks the human animal as far and away the most successful of its age. And yet that age is only seconds on the solar calendar. Further, the fossil remains on which we walk so proudly are reminders of numerous species that thrived far longer than our brief 100,000 years, only to evaporate in a cosmic accident or fall prey to a new carnivore.
Are human chances any better than the dinosaurs’? Certainly, our tool kit is infinitely more subtle and diverse. But the tools that might intercept and destroy a small to middling meteor or even provide food for a population under an ashen sky are not unlike the tools used to kill other humans or those that extract ever-greater leverage from the mantle of nature that gives us life. The exploitation of nature did not begin with agriculture. In some ways, farmers were more attentive to nature’s ways and needs than hunters and gatherers. But more than any other species, humans have sought and found ways of reaching nature’s limits and surmounting its obstacles. There is both enormous hope and vulnerability in that achievement.
Suggested Readings
Christian, David. Maps of Time. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. A “Big History” by the founder of the movement; full of charts and insights about the first 14 billion years.
Diamond, Jared. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. New York: Norton, 1997. Award-winning best-seller offers a long-view answer to the question of why some countries became rich and others poor.
Fagan, Brian. World Prehistory: A Brief Introduction. 8th ed. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2010. A well-written short text by a master of the subject.
McNeill, J. R., and William H. McNeill. The Human Web: A Bird’s Eye View of World History. New York: Norton, 2002. All of world history in brief volume by two masters—the modern dean of the subject and his son.
Peregrine, Peter N. World Prehistory: Two Million Years of Human Life Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2003. Well-written and well-illustrated college-level text.
Ristvet, Lauren. In the Beginning: World History from Human Evolution to the First States. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2007. The story of this and the next chapter told engagingly and authoritatively.
Notes
1. For a full “Big History,” see David Christian, Maps of Time (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).
2. Kenneth Chang, “Meteor Seen as Causing Extinctions on Earth,” New York Times, November 21, 2003, A28.
3. On North America here and later in this section, I am indebted to Tim Flannery’s The Eternal Frontier: An Ecological History of North America and Its Peoples (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2001), a fascinating and highly readable account of North American prehistory. Recently, some scientists have argued that such collisions may have occurred far more often than previously thought: possibly every few thousand years rather than 500,000 to a million years. See Sandra Blakeslee, “Ancient Crash, Epic Wave,” New York Times, November 14, 2006, F1.
4. See Jamie Shreeve, “The Evolutionary Road,” National Geographic, July 2010, 35–67.
5. Nichol
as Wade, “Signs of Neanderthals Mating with Humans,” New York Times, May 7, 2010, A10.
6. John Noble Wilford, “Bones in China Put New Light on Old Humans,” New York Times, November 16, 1995, A8.
7. New DNA evidence has established that the crossing could not have been made more than 18,000 years ago, not, as previously thought, 30,000 years ago. Nicholas Wade and John Noble Wilford, “New World Ancestors Lose 12,000 Years,” New York Times, July 25, 2003, A19.
8. The thesis of University of Arizona paleontologist Paul S. Martin—that it was mankind, not a change in climate, that caused the great extinctions at the end of the Pleistocene—might be modified slightly to emphasize the role of the post–13,000 BCE wave of “Clovis” or stone projectile point–wielding humans.
9. See Sally McBrearty and Allison Brooks, Human Evolution, November 2000. The entire issue of the journal is devoted to their thesis.
10. Hillary Mayell, “Oldest Jewelry? ‘Beads’ Discovered in African Cave,” National Geographic News, April 15, 2004.
