Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States

by James C. Scott

rejected any categorical distinction among hunter-gatherers, pastoralists, and agriculturalists, emphasizing that for safety’s sake, most peoples have preferred to straddle at least two of these subsistence niches—“keeping two strings to their bow in case of necessity.”

A striking illustration of the shift may be found in Anne Porter’s perceptive reading of the many variants of the Epic of Gilgamesh.

In the earliest versions, Gilgamesh’s soul companion Enkidu is merely a pastoralist, emblematic of a fused society of planters and herders.

In versions a millennium later, he is depicted as subhuman, raised among beasts, and requiring sex with a woman to humanize him. Enkidu becomes, in other words, a dangerous barbarian who knows not grain, houses, or cities, or how to “bend the knee.”

It was precisely the rich mosaic of resources around them and thus their capacity to avoid specializing in any single technique or food source that was the best guarantee of their safety and relative affluence.

but why they bothered to plant at all.

Despite its cost in labor, so the argument goes, it represented something like a subsistence insurance policy for hunter-gatherers who also knew how to plant.

It assumes, implicitly, that the harvest from a planted crop is more reliable than the yield from wild stands of grain.

Second, this perspective overlooks the subsistence risks that the sedentism associated with having to plant, tend, and guard a crop entails.

Historically, the subsistence safety of hunters and gatherers lay precisely in their mobility and the diversity of food sources to which they could lay claim.

attests to sedentism as a strategy rather than the ideology it would later become.

Storage “on the hoof” in the form of livestock is the most obvious.

Having a ready supply of fat and protein handy when required may have made small experiments with planting seem less risky

that it was the relative absence of domesticated livestock that helps explain why crop planting spread so much later; it was simply t...

From a broader perspective, one might view the landscape as a forager probably saw it: as a massive, diverse, living storage area of fish, mollusks, birds, nuts, fruits, roots, tubers, edible rushes and sedges, amphibians, small mammals, and large game.

In the diversity and varying temporalities of this living storage complex lay its stability.

The cultivator, it asserted, is a qualitatively new person because he must look far ahead in preparing a field for sowing, then must weed and tend the crop as it matures, until (he hopes) it yields a crop.

It suggests, by the implied contrast, that the hunter-gatherer is an improvident, spontaneous creature of impulse,

the building of long narrowing “drive corridors” to a killing ground; building weirs, nets, and traps; building or digging facilities for smoking, drying, or salting of the catch.

These are delayed-return activities par excellence. They involve a large kit of tools and techniques and a far greater degree of coordination and cooperation than agriculture requires.

One form of agriculture, however, eliminates most of this labor:

Just as our ancestors noticed how a fire cleared the land for a new natural succession of quickly colonizing (the so-called r plants) species, so they must have noticed much the same succession with floods.

Given sufficient time to work its magic, slow motion forest “gardening” of this sort can create the soils, flora, and fauna that represent an abundant subsistence niche.

The preeminent tool for this, before the Industrial Revolution, was not the plough so much as fire.

This is why, finally, the conventional “subspecies” of subsistence modes—hunting, foraging, pastoralism, and farming—make so little historical sense.

Why this should be so is a puzzle around which dispute still swirls. The dominant explanation until fairly recently was what might be called the “backs-to-the-wall” theory of plough agriculture associated with the great Danish economist Ester Boserup.

Some combination of population growth, the decline in wild protein to hunt and nutritious wild flora to gather, or coercion, must have forced people, reluctantly, to work harder to extract more calories from the land they had access to.

This demographic transition to drudgery has been read by many as metaphorically captured in the biblical tale of Adam and Eve being expelled from Eden to a world of toil.

fails to match the available evidence.

Instead, it seems to have arisen in areas characterized more by abundance than by scarcity.

Whatever the reasons for the growing reliance on domesticated grains and animals for subsistence, it represented a qualitative change in landscape modification.

Here the term “domestication”—from “domus,” or household—needs to be taken rather literally. The domus was a unique and unprecedented concentration of tilled fields, seed and grain stores, people, and domestic animals, all coevolving with consequences no one could have possibly foreseen.

Those most eligible for domestication were, aside from their food value, “generalists” that could thrive in disturbed soils (the tilled field), could grow in dense stands, and were easily stored.

Oats apparently began their agricultural career as a weed (an obligate pest mimicking the crop) in the tilled field and eventually became a secondary crop.

Many of the characteristics of a domestic grain are simply the long-run effects of sowing and harvesting.

The morphological differences between the continuously selected, planted cultivar and its wild progenitor become massive over time.

“Fully domesticated” means simply that it is, in effect, our creation; it can no longer thrive without our attentions.

In evolutionary terms a fully domesticated plant has become a superspecialized floral “basket case,” and its future is entirely dependent on our own.

a relatively muted fright-and-flight response to external stimuli.

herd behavior does not guarantee domestication. The gazelle, for example, was by far the most frequently hunted animal for several millennia.

When archaeologists wish to know whether a large find of sheep or goat bones is from a wild or domesticated flock, the age and gender distribution of the remains provides the strongest evidence of active human management and selection.

The likelihood that such traits are in part a “domus effect”

Male sheep horns, for example, diminish or disappear altogether because they are no longer selected to ward off predators or to compete for breeding mates.

The reduction in brain size and, somewhat more speculatively, its consequences, seem decisive for the ensemble of what we might call “tameness” among domestic animals generally.

Compared with their wild ancestors, sheep have undergone a reduction in brain size of 24 percent over the ten thousand–year history of their domestication;

The shrinkage of the limbic system is associated with raising the threshold that would trigger aggression, flight, and fear. In turn, this helps explain the diagnostic characteristics of virtually all domesticated species: namely the general reduction in emotional reactivity.

Such emotional dampening can be seen as a condition for life in the crowded domus and under human supervision, where the instant reaction to predator and prey are no longer powerful pressures of natural selection.

Among confined llamas, for example, the mortality rate for newborns approaches 50 percent, far higher than among wild llamas (guanacos). The difference can be largely attributed to the effects of confinement—muddy, feces-rich corrals in which virulent clostridium bacteria, among others, thrives and, like other parasites, finds an abundant supply of hosts close at hand.

Captured wild rats have quite low rates of fertility, but after only eight (short!) generations of captivity, their rate of fertility was found to increase from 64 percent to 94 percent and by the twenty-fifth generation, the reproductive life of captive rats was twice as long as “noncaptives.”

The paradox of relative ill health and high newborn mortality on the one hand, coupled with more-than-compensating increases in fertility on the other, is one to which we shall return, as it bears directly on the demographic explosion of agricultural peoples at the expense of hunters and gatherers.