by Peter Watson
The fact that domesticated mammals were kept for their milk or other products, and not just killed for their meat, meant that the relationships between humans and large mammals was closer in the Old World than in the New. This had a marked effect on disease transmission, on immunity to disease, and on ideas about animals – what they were capable of, physically and mentally, what the ethics were of animal husbandry – and this all influenced ideas about killing animals – see, for example, chapter 19 below.
Early on in the Old World, vegetable fibres formed the basis of the earliest textiles, as happened in the New World. In the Americas cotton replaced skins and leathers whereas in the Old World flax was the most used vegetable fibre. Elaborate weaving techniques were already developed long before wool came into use. Wool, which would in time become the most important Old World fibre, emerged during the urbanisation of Mesopotamia (or at least the record of it does). We know from archaeological discoveries that flax was still being used in Europe in the mid-third millennium BC, while in the earliest proto-literate period in Mesopotamia over thirty signs representing sheep are known, including ‘hair sheep’, ‘woolly sheep’ and ‘fat-tailed sheep’.11 Shearing lists show that there was already a spring shearing period in the calendar.
In Europe in the third millennium, there is a marked increase in the proportion of sheep bones found in excavated sites, 40 per cent as against 10 per cent earlier. From Greece to Switzerland, wool gradually replaced leather and linen (flax) towards the end of the third millennium, and we also see a change in fastenings, which become suitable for the looser weaves of wool. Wool products were among the first goods to be exchanged on a large scale – the traction complex and the properties of wool had a major impact on the trading development of the Old World – and this had something to do with the change to a predominant male role in agriculture, with women being left at home to spin and weave. The emerging dominance of the male role is something we shall return to.12
As Sherratt also points out, when animals are raised for their meat, it is most economical to slaughter them relatively early, as soon as they reach their adult size. Until that point they are growing quickly but once they are fully grown, the cost of keeping them alive does not diminish but no more meat, so to speak, is ‘manufactured’. Milking, however, is very efficient in terms of the amount of energy that is recovered for the amount of food that is consumed. This also means that, relatively speaking, female animals are preferable to male ones, who are more likely to be slaughtered, though with sheep males also generate wool. In general it seems that sheep were kept for six to eight years before being slaughtered. Either way, keeping animals alive, for their secondary products, was a new way of amassing and conserving wealth. As we shall see, much of the history of the wealth/industry of the Old World concerns wool.
Animals used for traction are for the most part castrated males which, at three or four years, are virtually fully grown. Castration, which has a marked effect on mammals, and the idea for which may have originated accidentally with humans, turned out to be very useful for transport/energy purposes and was, of course, not available in the New World where all large mammals save for the llama, were wild.
Overall, Sherratt’s review of the evidence concludes that before the fourth and third millennia BC, domestic animals were exploited only for their meat, but that the secondary products revolution, in the mid-fourth millennium, ‘brought about major changes in animal husbandry’, changes that were to have marked sociological effects.
PLOUGHS, PASTORALISM, AND POPULATION PATTERNS
The changes which took place in the third millennium came about as a result of the expansion of early mankind into more marginal areas, itself stimulated by the changes that occurred during the early domestication of crops and animals. But the increased scale of investment now in animal husbandry brought about a new phase in man-animal relationships, of which the basic feature was an increase in the scale of animal-keeping, something which never occurred in the New World.
The practice of milking allowed the population of domestic animals to contain breeding stock, working and production stock, and creatures kept for meat.13 Milk likewise allowed the emergence of pastoralism. It was continuously obtained, far less risky than hunting (the other alternative on the semi-arid steppes) and was helped immeasurably by the invention of riding. The evolution of lactose tolerance was an important ingredient here. Most likely, according to Sherratt, this all began in northern Iraq, Syria and Palestine where the Ghassulian culture (~3800–3350 BC) shows a ceramic ‘inventory’ which includes vessels for manipulating liquids, including a ‘butter churn’ and a mortality pattern of its livestock that suggests secondary products were in place.*
Overall, the mechanical plough increased the farmer’s ability to prepare his land by a factor of four, which not only increased the productivity of good land but enabled for the first time the exploitation of poorer land. At the same time, the increased production of wool created circumstances for an exponential increase in trade. Pastoralism became more and more attractive.
Pastoral peoples continued to spread where grain-growing was unprofitable and this dichotomy would prove crucial in the years ahead. Between pastoral nomads and sedentary farmers there was, alternately, the opportunity for symbiosis, trade, but also for conflict, in the occasional need for equal access to land, for grazing or cultivation. This conflict, already introduced, was to have a major effect on the course of Old World history.
In more arid regions – such as Africa – pastoralism spread without the plough. Use of the plough stretched from Europe to India but in Africa it was used no further south than the upper Nile. Below that, pastoralism, involving milking, penetrated most of the Sahara and East Africa, without either the cart or the plough. (The tropical African evidence has taxed archaeologists. In the most-heavily studied ancient sub-Saharan societies, those of West Africa, the inhabitants must have included individuals who had seen metal ploughs on the northern reaches of the continent, and their own societies had cattle for thousands of years. Yet they never added the plough over that time. One answer seems to be that, in at least some areas, such as the Middle Senegal Valley and the Inland Niger Delta, the annual floods were of such a size, and so chaotic and unpredictable, that available agricultural areas could not be predicted, even from year to year, and so such areas never emerged and stabilised. Certainly, evidence shows that large proportions of the population switched from time to time from seed agriculture to fishing. This diversity probably hindered the development of political hierarchies, conceivably for millennia.)
On the Eurasian steppes, the plough was used in oases but the lactose intolerance prevalent among the Chinese inhibited pastoralism and therefore draught animals, which is one reason why China had ploughs pulled by humans for so long.15 Some scientists attribute the prohibition on pork to the need to concentrate on milking and traction, for which the pig is unsuitable.
But the overall effect of plough cultivation was to change fundamentally the pattern of settlements. The greater efficiency of the plough both enabled fresh land to be exploited and at the same time used up the land more quickly, so it had to be left fallow for a number of years. This is shown in the appearance of mines and quarries in a broad swathe across northern Europe, from Britain to Russia, outfits which were producing flint and stone axes for forest clearance. People in northern Europe grew crops on the land for as long as they could (often prolonged somewhat because animal manure helped), then moved on, without returning. In southern Europe they occupied higher ground, as milk-based pastoralists, preferring that to lowland cereal cultivation.16
In the Middle East the advent of the plough brought about a five-fold increase in the number of sites during the Uruk period (~4000– 3100 BC), followed by increasing concentration of the population in a few well-defended locations.17 It is not known whether the cities were defending themselves against other cities or against pastoralists. Trade networks were growing.
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��While the Mesoamerican evidence shows that animal-traction is not a necessary precondition for the development of urban communities, the rarity and much later appearance of towns in the New World suggests that while a variety of settlement systems may eventually reach an urban form, the higher energy of the Old World systems greatly accelerated movement along this trajectory.’18
The cart and traction complex had a major effect on the development of the steppes of Asia. This dovetailed with the opening up of the forests in northern Europe and, again according to Sherratt, was an important influence on, among other things, language. It is this opening up, and the similar spread of the traction complex into North Africa, that accounts for the dispersal of the Indo-European and Semito-Hamitic languages across the Old World. ‘The eastward movements of population on to the steppes in the third millennium BC linked east Europe with the Pontic and Trans-Caspian region as far as the Tarim Basin and the Iranian plateau, and there seems no doubt that it was such relatively rapid movements in the semi-arid zone which gave Indo-European its geographical range.’ (The distribution of wheeled transport is shown on map 3.)19
The changes we are discussing also implied alterations in the relations between the sexes and in the rules of inheritance. In simple hoe agriculture, it is said – and this applies world-wide – the major contribution comes from female labour: sowing, weeding, harvesting, and that brings with it matrilineal inheritance, and is characteristic of aboriginal societies in the woodlands of the American south-east, which are generally regarded as the closest parallel to pre-plough agriculturalists.20
In contrast, both plough agriculture and pastoralism are associated with male dominance and patrilineal descent. According to one worldwide survey, two-thirds of plough agriculturalists, and the same proportion of pastoralists are patrilineal. This change is shown to be associated with increased use of the loom, and with traces of weaving equipment that show up in greater numbers in the third millennium.21 The main point is that, as more land is brought under control, marital alliances become more important in consolidating holdings so that arranged marriages multiply. Competition for land intensifies and, in this way, inequalities in wealth begin to emerge. This was more true in the Mediterranean region than northern Europe, where land was more plentiful, at least to begin with.
All these systems penetrated only slowly into east Asia. ‘There an alternative system of protein capture based on fish (especially in rice paddies) and on the pig was already supporting a relatively dense population, and the expanded pastoral sector which the secondary products revolution required could not easily be brought about. For this reason, the civilisation of China was in many respects comparable to those civilisations of the New World where domestic animals played a minor role.’22 This patterns fits neatly with the point made in an earlier chapter about the limited distribution of the images of the Great Goddess.
The secondary products revolution, even in its amended version, was an acceleration and an expansion, containing within it sources of wealth creation and conflict on a grand scale. With the vicuña and the llama, the New World had sources of wool and beasts of burden. But these mammals could carry little more than a man could so they did not represent the marked expansion of energy that cattle and horses did in the Old World. The absence of milk meant that cheese in particular, as a long-lasting source of protein, never featured in New World life.
• 9 •
CATASTROPHE AND THE (ALL-IMPORTANT) ORIGINS OF SACRIFICE
The Woman and the Bull, identified by Cauvin as the first true gods (i.e., as abstract entities rather than animal spirits, a move beyond shamanism), found echoes elsewhere, at least in Europe in the Neolithic period. These echoes occurred in very different contexts and cultures, together with a symbolism that itself differed from place to place. But this widespread evidence confirms that sedentism and the discovery of agriculture did alter early humans’ way of thinking about religion.
This is shown, first of all, in the development, between, roughly speaking, 5000 BC and 3500 BC, of megaliths. Megaliths – the word means ‘large stones’ – have been found all over the Old World but they are most concentrated, and most studied, in Europe, where they appear to be associated with the extreme western end of the continent – Spain, Portugal, France, Ireland, Britain and Denmark, though the Mediterranean island of Malta also has some of the best megalithic monuments. Invariably associated with (occasionally vast) underground burial chambers, some of these stones are sixty feet high and weigh as much as 280 tons. They comprise three categories of structure. The original terms for these were, first, the menhir (from the Breton men = stone and hir = long), usually a large stone set vertically into the ground. The cromlech (crom = circle, curve, and lech = place) describes a group of menhirs set in a circle or half-circle (for example, Stonehenge, near Salisbury in England). And third, the dolmen (dol = table and men = stone), where there is usually an immense capstone supported by several upright stones arranged to form an enclosure or chamber. The practice now is to use plain terms such as ‘circular alignment’ rather than cromlech.
Most of the graves were originally under enormous mounds and could contain hundreds of dead. They were used for collective burial, on successive occasions, and the grave goods were in general unimpressive. Very rarely the chambers have a central pillar and traces of painting can be seen. As Mircea Eliade has said, all this ‘testifies to a very important cult of the dead’: the houses where the peasants of this culture lived have not stood the test of time, whereas the chamber tombs are the longest-surviving structures in the history of the world and this has given Andrew Sherratt the basis of his explanation for megaliths. His theory is not the only one available and two accounts will be given here because they are not necessarily mutually exclusive and because the other account offers an explanation for some of the most enduring (and otherwise puzzling) aspects of ideology/religion where there are marked differences between the Old World and the New.
THE MEANING OF MEGALITHS
The spread of farming to Europe occurred in two trajectories. In the Balkans and central Europe, the ‘west Asiatic package’ was imported wholesale, which involved cereal farming, livestock keeping, pottery and the construction of villages with substantial houses. This pattern occupied the central European loess corridor, whereas further south along the north Mediterranean coast, cereals were less important (loess is very fine silt, many feet thick, left behind by retreating glaciers). Farming villages therefore spread throughout Europe along the loess corridor but where the loess ended the village pattern broke down and the megaliths began. ‘Whereas the village was the basic settlement unit and primary community of Neolithic central Europe, early settlement in western Neolithic Europe was insubstantial and dispersed. The element of permanence seems to have been provided not by the settlements themselves, but by monumental tombs and enclosures.’1
In central Europe, farming villages – cereal cultivation plus the keeping of small amounts of livestock – would have produced sufficient structure for stable lineages to emerge, controlling inheritance and ritual life. Beyond the loess belt, however, where the land was poorer, and unsuited to cereal cultivation, pastoralism became the preferred form of farming, with larger herds and with the population correspondingly spread more thinly over larger areas (a form of subsistence unavailable in the New World). In such circumstances, villages did not meet the requirements of the new situation but megalithic structures – great ceremonial centres unifying these larger areas – did. People would have come together at these centres several times a year, for marriage, burial and other ritual ceremonies that helped unify these otherwise more dispersed communities.
These monuments spread across western and northern Europe over many centuries, their long-term survival showing they met a general need. Their earliest forms were often long mounds of earth and timber.2 But then, further out from the loess corridor and later, stone replaced timber for revetments and internal structures, still often in long moun
ds. Later still, round forms became more frequent, and the chambers increased in size. To begin with, these structures were very similar in design to the contemporary houses in the loess belt, but they progressively diverged from this pattern. What seems to have happened is that, in a dispersed society where labour was the most important commodity, moving large stones symbolised the strength of that community, what could be achieved by coordinated effort. Monumentality began in France ~4600 BC, only reached Denmark around ~3800 BC, but many megalithic structures continued to be used as centres of ritual long after they had ceased being used for interment. Later, passageways were introduced which, Sherratt says, may have allowed access to the tombs after burial, indicating a different attitude to the dead.3
This is reinforced by other ways in which the layout of the megalithic structures also changed over time. The earlier ones were built to contain closed cists and were decorated on the outside, whereas the later ones, with passages allowing re-entry, were decorated on the inside. There was also a change in orientation: east in the case of the former, southeast in the latter.4 For Sheratt this suggests the existence of two – perhaps competing – ideologies, ‘an ideological struggle between the central European tradition and that of the local French’. And this perhaps puts into context the recent work by Jean-Yves L’Helgouach and colleagues who have shown that at some time around 3800 BC, ‘a massive phase of iconoclasm’ occurred in the area around Locmariaquer, on the Brittany-Atlantic coast, in north-west France, at which time many sculpted standing stones were pulled down, and incorporated into a new generation of large passage graves. The largest site where this iconoclasm took place was at Gavrinis, an island off Brittany which has a profusion of intricately carved ornamentation, together with a ‘sensitive’ astronomical alignment. This marked change in ideology seems to have coincided with the arrival of migrants from the south and east, the Chasséen. (Is this why the orientation of the structures was changed from east to south-east, as a form of folk memory of where the Chasséen came from?)
