The Neolithic adoption of agriculture was slow and meandering, in contrast with the European conquest of the New World (which was aided by guns, germs and steel), and was conditioned by the climate, viz. the onset of the Holocene. Sometimes it was unsuccessful (as in central Europe, where it went through a boom and bust because of an overreliance on cereals), but the farmers always avoided already settled territories, meaning that they often had to make do with less productive environments.
The Amazonian case is interesting, since there were no domestic animals (except pets) and farming activities remained seasonal for thousands of years. However, far from being an incarnation of the state of nature, this region was in fact quite diverse in terms of modes of production and of social organization.
Farming was generally adopted in the areas with the least resources, but due to its growth potential it left the most archaeological traces. This does not mean that other type of societies did not create large edifices and even cities, as discussed in Chapter 8. The exposition begins with a purported citation from Elias Canetti's Crowds and Power, "Cities begin in the mind", which I cannot find in the text. [If it is from the "Invisible Crowds" chapter, then it refers to people's communion with their ancestors, not to large assemblies being different in nature from small ones.] Nevertheless, the transition from the family (or village) to the city does pose a question: are social hierarchies inevitable above a certain size?
The common sense view that cohesive social groups cannot have more than about 150 members is supposedly challenged by the very extended networks of tribal kinship in modern hunter-gatherer peoples [I do not understand how, since recognition and living together are very different situations]. These large-scale virtual communities would then be the precursors of (or even "squeezed into") actual cities.
In Eastern Europe, the Kurgan culture takes its name from the monumental tombs of warrior-kings but also featured vast "mega-sites" that deserve the title of "cities". What was their organization? Apparently, they combined small-scale farming with foraging and herding and had a relatively flat social structure, as the authors infer from the archaeological evidence and by comparison with modern Basque settlements with the same circular arrangement.
Elements of democracy were also present in Sumerian cities since before 3000 BC, as illustrated by the case of Uruk: the presence of a large public space is taken as proof of governing by popular assembly (moreso than in classical Athens, based on the principle "the wider the space, the larger the participation"). This changed around 2600 BC, when evidence of city rulers begins to appear. How did this change occur?
The smaller settlement at Arslantepe, in eastern Turkey, was roughly contemporary with Uruk, but provides a clearer record of political developments: a warrior aristocracy took over a previous bureaucracy, in a first example of a 'heroic society' (using H. M. Chadwick's term). These cultures always appeared on the margins of urban civilizations, lacked centralized authority, rejected commerce and writing, relying instead on oral transmission (and left behind epic poems around the world).
The story then skips 1000 years forward in time to Mohenjo-daro, in the Indus valley. This city's organization prefigures the caste system documented another thousand years later in the Rig Veda and serves as an example of a hierarchical system where the social rank was not correlated to material possessions (or even anti-correlated for the top caste, the brahmins). On the other hand, Mohenjo-daro lacks evidence for a class of warrior-nobles, with the associated feasts and tournaments. This lack of a clear aristocratic structure opens the possibility that the society was organized on egalitarian principles, the caste hierarchy notwithstanding.
The conclusion would be that some ancient Eurasian cities developed systems of "communal self-governance", but based on two quite different conceptions of egalitarianism:
- all humans are fundamentally identical, or
- individuals are so different as to be incommensurate.
which the authors assign to Uruk and the Ukrainian cities, respectively. Two Chinese sites, Shimao and Taosi, are counterexamples, with a presumably hierarchical structure. More interestingly, the latter might have undergone a dramatic transition from a rigid class system to self-governance.
Chapter 9 presents other examples of social upheaval, this time in central Mexico: Aztec cities were inspired by the ruins of Teotihuacan, a metropolis with at least 100 000 inhabitants (ten times larger than the towns discussed in the previous chapter), and which was also self-governed, unlike the contemporary Classic Mayan cities (schismogenesis at work, once again).
After an authoritarian period, Teotihuacan switched to an egalitarian organization around 300 AD. This did not prevent (or maybe even motivated!) some of its residents to try their luck in Mayan cities such as Tikal (1000 km away, in current Guatemala) where they became rulers. Teotihuacan itself started by a period of intense construction effort, which left behind several large buildings but also hundreds of victims of ritual killings. However, after a sudden upheaval the building activity focused on housing for all the population, not only the wealthy part of it. In this latter period authority was probably decentralized, if we judge by later examples such as the city-state of Tlaxcala, which (democratically!) allied with Hernàn Cortés against the Aztec Empire.
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