An Edible History of Humanity (4 page)

As people began to settle down and hunting and gathering shaded into farming, the first villages were still broadly egalitarian
communities. Archaeological evidence shows that the earliest such villages, typically inhabited by no more than one hundred
people, were made up of huts or houses of similar shape and size. But settlement and agriculture changed the rules that had
previously discouraged people from pursuing wealth and status. The social mechanisms that had been developed to suppress man’s
inherent tendencies toward hierarchical organization (clearly visible in apes and many other animal species) began to erode.
Once you are no longer moving around, it starts to become possible to amass surplus food and other goods. The first signs
of social differentiation begin to appear: villages in which some dwellings are larger than others and contain prestige items
such as rare shells or ornate carved items, and burial grounds in which some graves contain valuable grave goods and others
from the same period do not. All of this implies that the concept of private property quickly became accepted—there is no
point in owning status goods if you have to share them—and a social hierarchy started to emerge in which some people were
richer than others.

In some places, this process began even before the advent of agriculture, as hunter-gatherers in particularly food-rich areas
settled down in permanent villages. But it became widespread with the adoption of farming. Early agricultural villages in
China’s Hupei basin on the Upper Yangtze River, in the region where rice was domesticated around 4000 B.C., provide a good
example. Of 208 graves excavated, some contained elaborate grave goods, while others contained nothing more than the bodies
of the dead. Similarly, 128 graves dating from around 5500 B.C. at Tell es-Sawwan, in what is now northern Iraq, show a clear
variation in grave goods. Some graves contain carved alabaster, beads made from exotic stones, or pottery, but others contain
no grave goods at all. In each case the pattern is the same: The adoption of agriculture leads to social stratification, subtle
at first but then increasingly pronounced.

It is easy to see how variations in different families’ agricultural productivity, and the ability to store certain foods
(notably dried cereal grains), would make people more inclined to assert ownership over their produce. And since a storable
food surplus can be traded for other items, it is equivalent to wealth. But a village in which some inhabitants manage to
accumulate more food and trinkets than others is still a far cry from the elaborate social hierarchies of the first cities,
in which the ruling elites appropriated the surplus by right and then distributed the portion of it they did not consume themselves.
How did these powerful leaders emerge, and how did they end up in control of the agricultural surplus?

An important step along the road from an egalitarian village to a stratified city seems to be the emergence of “big men” who
win control of the flow of surplus food and other goods and so amass a group of dependents or followers. Perhaps surprisingly,
the big man’s means of persuasion is not the threat of violence, but his abundant generosity. By bestowing gifts on others
he places them in his debt, and they must reciprocate with more generous gifts in the future. Such gifts most often take the
form of food. To get the ball rolling, a big man might persuade his family to produce surplus food, which he then gives to
others; he subsequently receives more food in return, which he can then distribute among his family and give to others, thus
conferring further obligations. This process can still be observed today, since big-man cultures still exist in some parts
of the world.

In Melanesia, a big man might take several wives in order to increase the resources at his disposal to give away: one wife
to garden and produce food, one to collect wood, another to catch fish. He then deploys these resources carefully, putting
other people in his debt, so that they must repay him with even more, which he passes on to others, thus securing an even
greater obligation. This process encourages intensification of food production, and eventually it culminates in big feasts
as the big man tries to “build his name.” He invites people from outside his existing circle, and even from other villages,
thus placing them in his debt as well and bringing them into his sphere of influence. In this way, the big man establishes
himself as an influential and powerful member of the community. Rivalry between big men accelerates the process, as they vie
to hold the biggest feasts and amass the most credit.

Does this mean big men are rich and lazy? Far from it. For a big man, wealth is not something to sit on, but something that
is only useful if it is given away. In some cases big men may even end up being poorer than their followers. In North Alaskan
Eskimo groups, for example, the most respected whaling captains are responsible for trading with inland caribou hunters, and
therefore end up controlling the distribution and circulation of valuables within their group. But since they must give away
everything they receive, and cannot refuse a request for help, they are often materially worse off than their followers. Big
men must work hard, too. According to one observer in Melanesia, the big man “has to work harder than anyone else to keep
up his stocks of food. The aspirant for honours cannot rest on his laurels but must go on holding large feasts and piling
up credits. It is acknowledged that he has to toil early and late.”

All of this actually serves a useful purpose within the group or village: The big man acts as a clearing house for surplus
food and other goods and can determine how best to distribute them. If a family produces extra food, it can give the surplus
to a big man with the expectation of being able to call in the favor at a later date—when a tool needs replacing, perhaps,
or food runs short. A successful big man thus integrates and coordinates the economy of the community, and he emerges as its
leader. But he has no power to coerce his followers. Maintaining his position depends on being able to provide for the group
and govern redistribution. Among the Nambik-wara of Brazil, for example, if the leader of the group is not generous enough
and fails to provide for his followers, they will leave and join a different group. Within Melanesian groups, leaders who
fail to deliver or who try to keep too much of the surplus for themselves may be deposed or even murdered. In such a situation
the big man is still far more of a manager than a king.

So how does the big man, whose position depends on generosity and sharing, develop into the powerful chief of a group of villages,
or chiefdom, and then the king at the top of a ruling elite? Not surprisingly, as with the origins of agriculture and the
spread of farming, the mechanism is unclear and there are many competing theories. And once again it is likely that no single
theory provides the answer, and some explanations are more valid in some parts of the world than others. Yet by looking at
several such theories it is possible to get an idea of how chiefdoms, and then civilizations, might have emerged. In each
case, the emergence of social stratification is tightly bound up with the production of food. More elaborate forms of social
organization make possible greater agricultural productivity, and a larger food surplus can support more elaborate forms of
social organization. But how does the process start?

One theory contends that a big man or leader can become more powerful by coordinating agricultural activity, particularly
irrigation. Farming yields can vary widely, but by leveling land and building irrigation canals and levee systems—all of which
is only possible with a certain amount of social organization—it is possible to reduce these variations. This would increase
the village’s agricultural productivity, and would have other effects too. Members of the community would be less inclined
to leave once they had invested in irrigation systems and had come to rely on them; control of the irrigation system would
confer power on the leader, since anyone who fell out of favor might have his water supply reduced; the irrigation system
might also need to be defended, using full-time soldiers funded by the food surplus and placed under the leader’s control.

What starts off as a community farming project, in short, could have the effect of greatly increasing the leader’s power.
With his followers more dependent on him and a private guard to protect him, he would then be able to start retaining more
of the surplus for his own use, to feed his household, provision soldiers, and so on. Irrigation systems are certainly a common
denominator of many early civilizations, from Mesopotamia to Peru. They are found in chiefdoms, too, in places such as Hawaii
and southwestern North America. But some chiefdoms that relied on irrigation did not go on to become any more complex or sharply
stratified; and some elaborate irrigation schemes seem to be the consequences of greater organization rather than its cause.
So evidently there is more to the emergence of complex civilizations than irrigation, though it seems to have played a role
in some cases.

Another theory suggests that the communal storage of agricultural surpluses might provide the leader with an opportunity to
establish greater control over his followers. Villagers hand over surplus grain to the big man in anticipation of reciprocal
gifts at a later date, prompting him to organize the construction of a granary. Once built and provisioned, it provides the
big man with the “working capital” to do other things. He can fund full-time craft specialists and organize agricultural works
using the surplus, on the basis that such investments produce a positive return that can be put back into the granary. Increasingly
elaborate public-works projects then legitimize the leader’s position and require a growing number of administrators, who
emerge as the ruling elite. According to this view, there is a natural progression from reciprocal sharing organized by a
big man to redistribution overseen by a powerful chief.

In the Near East, large central buildings started to appear within villages after around 6000 B.C., but it is unclear whether
they were shared granaries, feasting halls, religious buildings, or chiefs’ houses. They may well have served several of these
functions: A feasting hall built to impress the neighboring village might have been the logical place to store food, and a
granary would have been an obvious place to perform fertility rituals to ensure a good harvest. There is evidence from Hawaii
that what were originally public areas built for feasting were later walled off, with access restricted to a select group
of high rank. So temples and palaces could have started out as communal store houses or feasting halls.

A third suggestion is that competition for agricultural land led to warfare between communities in areas where such land was
environmentally circumscribed. In Peru, for example, seventy-eight rivers run from the Andes mountains to the coast through
fifty miles of extremely dry desert. Agriculture is possible near the rivers, but all the suitable farming areas are hemmed
in by desert, mountains, and oceans. In Egypt, farming is possible on a narrow ribbon of fertile land along the Nile, but
not in the desert beyond. And on the alluvial plains of Mesopotamia, only areas near the Tigris and Euphrates rivers are suitable
for farming. To start with, such areas would have been lightly populated by a few farmers. As the population of farmers expanded
(since sedentism and farming enable population growth beyond hunter-gatherer levels) new villages would have been established.
Once all the available farming land was being used, farmers intensified production, extracting more food from a given area
using elaborate terraces and irrigation systems.

But eventually they reached the limit of agricultural productivity, at which point the villages began to attack each other.
When one village defeated another it then appropriated the defeated village’s land or forced its people to hand over a proportion
of their harvest every year. In this way, the strongest village within an area emerged as the ruling class, and the weaker
villages had to hand over their surplus production, thereby establishing a system in which the poor farmed for the rich. This
all sounds plausible, but there is no evidence that people reached the limit of agricultural productivity in any of the places
where stratified societies first emerged. In the event of a drought or a bad harvest, however, it is possible to imagine villages
with food reserves coming under attack from neighboring villages where the food had run out.

A more general view that encompasses all of these theories is the idea that more complex societies (that is, those with strong
leadership and a clear social hierarchy) will be more productive, more resilient, better able to survive hardship, and better
at defending themselves. Villages in which strong leaders emerge would then outcompete other, less well organized villages
nearby, and would be more attractive places to live, at least for those who do not mind submitting to the leader’s authority.
The emergence of strong leaders is often assumed to be dependent on coercion, but people might initially have regarded the
need to hand over some or all of their surplus production to the leader as a price worth paying if the benefits they received
in return—working irrigation systems, greater security, performance of religious rites to maintain soil fertility, mediation
in disputes—were deemed to be of sufficient value. But the leader would then have been in a position to keep more and more
of the surplus for his own use. Once you have settled down and invested labor in a house, fields, and irrigation systems,
you have a reason to stay put even if the leader starts to put on airs and graces, claims he is descended from a god, and
so on.

How can we tell what happened? The archaeological evidence shows the process of social stratification happening around the
world in much the same way, culminating in the emergence of broadly comparable Bronze Age civilizations in different parts
of the world, but at different times: starting in Egypt and Mesopotamia around 3500 B.C.; during the Shang dynasty in northern
China around 1400 B.C.; with the rise of Maya civilization in southern Mexico from around 300 A.D.; and in South America around
the same time, leading to the establishment of the Inca Empire in the 15th century A.D.