Gregory's ServerAh-ha! Perhaps here is our evidence for Diamond’s thesis! Newcomers (re)introducing agriculture and overwhelming the non-farmers with their vastly and implacably larger numbers.
Except that, strangely, there’s no evidence for a violent take-over. No mass graves, no battle sites. The skeletal remains found during this period show no increase in injuries that would indicate interpersonal violence. The newcomers intermarried with the indigenous population. The newcomers began using and maintaining the same sacred sites as the indigenous community, including Stonehenge.
Whatever happened during this period, it seems like it was a lot more complicated than Diamond’s conquest story.
8/12
These historical and archeological examples point to a much more flexible, dynamic process than Diamond claimed. There was no one-way process of expansion and conquest. They were not trapped; they did not inevitably conflict with each other because of structural imperatives. People could and did make choices.
So why do we live in a world now in which virtually everyone is fed by agriculture, descended from a global society in which virtually everyone was a farmer?
If we reject Diamond’s teleological argument—that this world of ours was *inevitable*—then I would point a theme from the works of recently-deceased James Scott as a tentative alternative: the state’s obsession with order, predictability, and legibility.
From the earliest states to the present, states have tried to settle foragers and convert them to agriculturalists. Foragers tend to move around, resist authority, and create diverse surpluses. They are, in short, hard to rule, hard to count, hard to conscript, and hard to tax.
But farmers are the opposite: they tend to stay in one spot, close to their crops. They can be associated with fixed locations and discrete units of territory. And they tend to produce—or can be coerced into—regular and uniform surpluses.
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/james-c-scott-against-the-grain
9/12
These historical and archeological examples point to a much more flexible, dynamic process than Diamond claimed. There was no one-way process of expansion and conquest. They were not trapped; they did not inevitably conflict with each other because of structural imperatives. People could and did make choices.