The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

by David Graeber

As indigenous legal scholars have been pointing out for years, the ‘Agricultural Argument’ makes no sense, even on its own terms. There are many ways, other than European-style farming, in which to care for and improve the productivity of land. What to a settler’s eye seemed savage, untouched wilderness usually turns out to be landscapes actively managed by indigenous populations for thousands of years through controlled burning, weeding, coppicing, fertilizing and pruning, terracing estuarine plots to extend the habitat of particular wild flora, building clam gardens in intertidal zones to enhance the reproduction of shellfish, creating weirs to catch salmon, bass and sturgeon, and so on. Such procedures were often labour-intensive, and regulated by indigenous laws governing who could access groves, swamps, root beds, grasslands and fishing grounds, and who was entitled to exploit what species at any given time of year. In parts of Australia, these indigenous techniques of land management were such that, according to one recent study, we should stop speaking of ‘foraging’ altogether, and refer instead to a different sort of farming.38