Prehistory by Chris Gosden

Author:Chris Gosden
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2018-04-17T00:00:00+00:00

Towards a new model

An emphasis on the origins of farming has given us a two-phase view of history: a before when everyone was hunter-gatherers and an after with domesticated plants and animals, sedentary life, crafts such as pottery, and moves towards more complex social relations. Accumulating evidence from across the planet looks very different. From at least the late glacial onwards, over the last 20 kya or so, people have experimented with plants and animals, so that many crops later cultivated were harvested in wild form and maybe cultivated. Trees were important, as they continued to be over the last 10,000 years, but were increasingly displaced by cereals and root crops. Pottery was a Pleistocene invention, as was seafaring in the Mediterranean, Indian Ocean, and Near Oceania. The dog was domesticated from the grey wolf somewhere in the north of the planet. People had close relations with other species such as gazelle or reindeer, the former as a hunted wild animal and the reindeer in both domesticated and wild forms.

Late Pleistocene ways of life were not just a series of isolated experiments, but were centred on connected practices that might have huge longevity. Cooking, which focused on steaming and boiling in the east, was not just about what was culturally acceptable food, although this was important, but linked also to ritual practices and connections to powers beyond the human. Bread was the stuff of life in the Judeo-Christian tradition, which probably has very ancient roots, through grains as foodstuff but also a set of cultural associations. People do not live by bread alone (although it is often hard to live without it), but through links with cosmological powers. The massive structures found at Göbekli Tepe show a commitment to quarrying, carving, and setting stones of many tonnes in built circular settings. But rather than slavishly following sets of orthodox beliefs, people are better seen as engaging in sets of experiments concerning food, social relations, and cosmology.

People had a range of significant relations across the planet with other living species, but also with stone, clay, and later metal, which were conceived of not just in functional terms—questioning how best to make a living—but also through relationships conceived of in a rounded manner. The development of a new relationship with early domesticated dogs or clay fired as pots was also a development of the skills of the human body, which are rarely developed on their own but in concert with other bodies. Hunting gazelles obviously required coordination, skill, and equipment. But so too did the care of wild grasses, with their particular needs of water, sun, shade, and the scattering of seeds in order to reproduce.

People were engaged in a dance with other species and objects, where the requirements of other entities and those of humans formed joint rhythms and responses. Some reindeer herders today talk of ‘reindeer magic’, arising from the joined understandings of the herd and the herders. Power shifts between humans and herd as it does in all relationships, as the herders fully acknowledge.

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