The Times of Their Lives by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HISTORY / Europe / General
ISBN: 9781785706691
Publisher: Casemate Publishers & Book Distributors, LLC
Published: 2018-08-30T00:00:00+00:00

Generalising chronologies are also routine in other, thematic treatments. A deliberately broad-brush account of the development of attitudes to the human body and its involvement in the creation and changing of social relations has split up the European Neolithic sequence into substantial blocks of time, variously 6500–4000 cal BC, 4500–2400 cal BC, 3300–2000 cal BC, and so on (Harris et al. 2013, table 4; see also table 3). Another discussion of the conditions in which wealth is argued to have emerged, in the form of ‘transportation infrastructure’, durable goods made of metal, and ‘capital investment in oxen used for traction’ is centred on a broad period in the fourth and third millennia cal BC, contrasting with ‘nearly two millennia’ of the practices and strategies of early farmers (Bogucki 2011, 109; see also the comparative generalisations on intergenerational heritability among small-scale agricultural societies offered by Borgerhoff Mulder et al. 2009). Several of these concepts used risk being anachronistic, and ignore the earlier possibilities for the production, circulation and accumulation of valuables, including live animals in large herds; I will include issues of the so-called secondary products revolution in the next chapter. There is welcome reference to the tempo of change, with the assertion that ‘wealth quickly began to be accumulated’ once the three strands identified had begun to converge (Bogucki 2011, 113; cf. Heyd and Walker 2015), though just where and when is not spelled out in detail.

The above are just a selection from a much wider literature. My intention has not been to single out these various treatments for exceptional critique, but rather to underline, first, how routine it is to discuss social trajectories within chronological frameworks built mostly of blocks of centuries, with only occasional reference to more precisely defined horizons and to the tempo of change, and secondly, how the great majority of accounts adopt a more or less gradualist but progressive view of change. These two features are closely interlinked; a gradualist-progressive perspective is perhaps not directly entailed in a broad chronological framework, but it is certainly encouraged by it. Nor do I necessarily want to argue against all these characterisations of broad trends. Social relations and value systems may well have been stable or slow-changing in many areas, but without finer chronological resolution, there is the considerable danger of missing out, through lumping together, the ups and downs, the cycles, peaks and troughs, and the fine detail of the flow of life at lifetime and generational scales.

Probably the vast majority of discussions in the literature are couched in similar, chronologically broad or generalising frameworks, but not all adopt what I am calling a neatly gradualist and progressive view of social change. Interestingly, in the account of northern France sketched above, unexpected early differentiation is suggested for Brittany, as well as later simplification (Demoule 2007b, 84). Indeed, the results of ‘Projet Jade’ have highlighted the potential for unusual developments early in the sequence of Neolithic Brittany. The argument is based partly on ethnographic analogy with situations in

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