Believed in the "neolithic revolution" - a process not an event

• Equated this to the industrial revolution; 
• Technology changes associated with these stages affected how humans organized themselves

Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Jordan

Earliest evidence of food production - barley, wheat

1. Southwest Asia - barley, rye, sheep etc
2. Africa - finger millet, sorghum, coffee, cattle, donkey
3. Asia - millet, rice, pig
4. Southeast Asia - chicken, yam, rice, bananas
5. South Mexico - maize, beans, squash, etc
6. South America - potatoes, llamas, peanuts, sweet potatoes
7. North America - sunflower seeds, maygrass etc

• Hard work
• Risk
• Nutritional deficiencies
• Disease
• Social mechanisms - might need a leader

• Material Culture Spread
• Can feed many more people per unit of land
• Dramatic shift in behavior

• Less rainfall at the end of pleistocine era
• Southeast Asia becomes less arid
• Plant communities concentrate around places of water (oasis)
• Animals get attracted to oasis
• Humans are also attracted due to abundant resources
• Promixity/familiarity to one another leads to domestication and farming

Carl Sauer

• People with food shortage would not be able to experiment with domestication - if failure it would be disastrous
• Domestication first experimented with hunter gatherers who had good food supply
• Domestication a success with sedentary, well fed people.

Mark Cohen

• Saw population sizes were growing
• Transition to food production occurred because of the unrelenting pressure on groups to find new ways to get food to feed their growing population

Binnford and Flannery

• With climate changes, some groups overshot their carrying capacity and had to split into smaller groups.

• These smaller groups had to move to marginal areas where food acquiring techniques had to intensify in order to feed their population

• Some groups took animals and plants from the nice resourced area to the marginal area

David Rindos

• Food domestication was not intentional
• Domesticaiton happened as a coincidence between relationship of animals and humans
• Symbiosis - humans did something good for plants by harvesting them and plants responded

Barbara Bender

• No external pressures made us start domestication (climate change, pop growth)
• End of pleistocine there were complex social structures
• More material/ritual culture
• People had new kinship obligations to cover so they had to intesify food getting efforts

1. People arent living in caves anymore
2. Larger than tribal groups (not as large as modern)
3. Writing, urbanism, large scale cities, food production and domestication

Wheat and Barley

Sheep and Goats

o   Period 1a: the late Epipaleolithic in 8500 BC

o   Period 2b: becomes a pajor town 6300 – 5000 BC)

§  Population increase from 3,000 people in 2A to

·         From about 6000 BC, irrigation transformed the agricultural potential of Mesopotmaia 

3000-2400 B.C

First to use wheels 

3500-3000 BC

Non mobile sedentary societed that domesticated horses

People drank fermented horses' milk

Silk Road - 200 B.C

Arch of Bronze Age Kazakhstan indicates that Eurasian connections were already functioning over long distances by at least 2000 BC

Han Dynasty

Why did Wang Mang fail (eastern philosophy vs. western)

220 BCE to 206 AD

Eastern - Wang Mang did not live up to the mandate of heaven, not faithful to confucian principles "bad guy"

Western - Failed due to outside forces (drought, floods, climate change) he was "unlucky"

• Growing Populations
• Increased use of resources
• More investment in technology - discovery of iron leads to deforestation; increased agriculture, which leads to erosion
• Social/political consequences (Wang Mang)
• Xiongnu - northern barbarians were forcing people out of heavily populated areas and moved them to the Loess Plateau (specifically)

24 diverse languages

7 million (+) Mayans

·         K’yjulajaw – the spirit master. The kings, queens, and royalty were capable of communicating with the gods on a daily basis.

·         San Bartolo, Peten. Late Preclassic (100 BC)

·         The entire peninsula is made out of lime stone

·         Temple 1 Tiak, Whilte Soul Flower Vessel of king Jawa Chan K’awiil, holy Mutal lord, Tikal maize god, lord of the 14 stone

·         El Peru, Ancient Waka, Peten, Guatemala, royal capital of an ancient secondary dynasty. The vassals kings of Waka were strategic in 2 episodes of imperial war. 

- Overproduced people, over produced expectation and underproduced food because they had

a drought

- Lineal success- they inherit parents ranking (kings) - succeed because of family

·         archaic states evolve out of chiefdoms, societies characterized by ranking and they can be identified by

o   1. Complex settlement and decision-making hierarchies

o   2. sacred rulers contrasted with non-divine commoners

o   3. at least 2 distinct classes, elite and commoners

Mayan state not a big collapse (process)

”the cultural evolution of civilizations” that societies could experience crisis and failure because of “hypercoherence” of their institutions, generating what we might prosaically call the “domino effect” when crisis infects one key part of the overall social system. 

1. Lack of hard data
2. Lack of objective accounts
3. Unwillingness to confront the harsh realities of slavery

- The history of the oppressed are often writen by their oppressors- because these are

the rich and elite people

- Written records arise out of a perspective that is foreign to the people that are learning

about

- Archaeology provides a voice from those that have been silenced by written records

- Written records are writtn from a business like perspective

- Different aspects (economy, how to best) own slaves

- In written documents we have an auction notes (ex: a sell in the duc for art- sell

for slave) - selling human beings with rice, gram, paddy, books (other goods)

- Docs refer to:

- How many rations to give slaves (what to feed) - so they can work but

we can also stay in business

- Numbers

- State of health

- How much they paid for slaves

- How to build slave cabins (maybe Jackson did think that the health

and comfort of occupants was important)- but Jackson built the

same cabin for every slave family- one window, one door, 100 square ft,

wooden floor (ALL SAME- shows that the economy of construction was

the most important) - uniformity

- health and comfort of occupants

- Convenience of surveillance and discipline

- supply of wood and water

- Cost of building

- Uncle Tomʼs Cabin- novels written from different perspectives

- Written documents are biased

They were built from mud and logs- not brick (esp earliest structures- mud/thatch)

- No permanent material- so nothing left

- Canʼt find them because there are no plantations/ quarters - no where to start looking -

- A lot of plantation grounds have undergrone lots of development - literally there is

nothing left

-Development of modern buildings destroyed many slave homes