It’s a tough read. It’s worth it. Thanks for your understanding about the focus of this thread, but lease feel free to start another thread on interesting tangents.
I finally finished this book. Well, except for the extensive notes. My Kindle says I’m only 66% through it.
This is one of the best books I’ve read in years. Every time i picked it up, i felt like it made me think about stuff in new ways. That’s actually what’s hard about it. The writing is quite accessible. But most books you can just consume, they don’t fight back. 
It concludes that:
The agricultural revolution wasn’t. That is, there was no revolution, people took up and out down agriculture many times over thousands of years before most people were agriculturalists
There is not a natural relationship between type of organization and the size of communities. There were tiny villages with powerful kings, and vast societies with no central authority, and whole cities organized by collections of civic groups.
Our ideas of “property” come from Rome, and are not inevitable.
A bunch of other stuff I’m sure I’m missing.
They organize their view of society looking at three basic human freedoms. The freedom to leave (and be accepted somewhere else) the freedom to say “no”, and the freedom to redefine your social relationships. And they talk about how we, modern westerners, have come to lose those freedoms that were commonplace through most of human existence.
They also look at three fundamental forms of power. Violence, knowledge (often of something obscure, like the gods or calculus), and charisma. And discuss how different early civilizations manifested one or more of these.
One thing they that underlies most of their discussion, they they never explicitly address, is that they view a lot of human history and relationships through the lens of the sacred, but never really engage in where that comes from, or why it matters to so many groups.
Anyway, hoping to revive this thread a bit.
It’s been some time since I read this, but that seems to be a pretty good summary. Probably better than ones in The Grauniad, etc. which do not give you the impression the author finished the book.
I must admit I also did not read all the notes, just some interesting ones, in particular those about the much neglected role of Canadian aboriginals on European thought. I did not believe this initially since even in Canada few discuss it. I had never heard this. However, I think the authors are correct after reading their sources.
I read every note, as they came up in the text. Just the way I read.
My biggest takeaway from the book (but not a new idea to me) was that the sciences of archaeology and anthropology are no more settled than cutting-edge physics, and new discoveries can overturn old narratives just as easily. Just lidar, for instance, has led to a paradigm shift in Mesoamerican archaeology.
I read notes on the subjects of greatest interest. Not all of them, but a substantial part.
Lidar has certainly been a game changer. I agree with anthropology and archaeology being unsettled and much more fluid than one might suppose (which is hardly surprising, but one cannot keep up with recent developments in every field hence the usefulness of this book). A better comparison might be economics - people assuming “obvious” conclusions which are but will-o’-the-wisps with as little substance as the real relation between, say, inflation and employment. Things are more complicated despite a desire to “scientifically” simplify them. So is modern physics, of course, but there experiments are possible and discrepancies much smaller. It’s hard to experiment on ancient societies, where one hopes technology just better illuminates what is left of the fossils.
My biggest takeaway was that archeology has been blinded by the social environment of the archeologists. All the observations of Egyptian history, and how only the strong monarchies “count” as an organized society, when in fact the society kept being organized and prosperous (and freer) during the times between, for instance.
I was reminded of some fake ancient Greek art that i saw at the British museum. Today, they are obviously fake. Like, obvious to people like me, not just to art historians. Because they look like the style of art popular in Britain at the time they were made, with a few “ancient Greek” elements added on. But at the time, they were accepted and even ended up in the British museum because that current style was the water they swam in, and they just didn’t see it.
But i thought the most interesting observation was the importance of American aboriginal political philosophy on Europe, and especially the importance of Lahontan in disseminating that. Talk about erasure! Their arguments seem very strong, and i hope Lahontan gets added to “standard” narratives about the development of “Western” thought.
I read the originals quoted in the text, in English and French, since the story seemed hard to believe. But I now agree with it.
Academia has always been susceptible to the pressures of influential people. And bigger, more important societies which left more evidence will attract more attention than smaller ones hard to study. It seems obvious to say they might be different beasts. Even if so, even if there was reasonable evidence, even if academics were always polite and welcomed dissenting views, people still make lazy generalizations. Sometimes they can’t see the forest. Sometimes, like a museum, they may have incentives not to look to closely at the trees.
I’m most of the way through the book right now, but not quite done. Looks like they’re coming back around to where they started, in North America. I knew some bits of this because I’ve known for some time that I’m living on Haudenosaunee ground and have been told some portions of that knowledge, though I haven’t studied it properly; but most of the rest of this is new to me.
I find the footnote structure annoying. Footnotes in hardcopy can be done in one of three ways: all the footnotes, both the ones that only provide information identifying where to look for the cite and also the ones that include further discussion, at the bottom of the page; all the cite-only notes at the back in their own section, but the notes with discussion on the bottom of the page which they go to; or all the notes at the back of the book, including the ones with discussion. I much prefer version 2 and don’t mind version 1, but they’ve chosen version 3: which requires the reader either to continuously flip back and forth between the chapter they’re reading and the back of the book, or to read further-discussion notes separate from the subject being discussed (or, of course, to ignore them entirely.)
I do want to read the discussion notes, and have been compromising by reading them chapter by chapter – finish a chapter, then go read its notes – but find that sometimes in order to make sense of the notes I have to go hunt back through the chapter for that tiny superscript in order to re-read what the note applies to.
Haven’t read the book, but the feel I get off this thread is that the scope of the book, as far as the various scientific consensuses go, isn’t quite up to date.
Archaeologists have been acutely aware of the biases stemming from their own social environment, preconceived notions, culturally determined ‘common sense’ etc., for the past couple of generations of scholars, at least.
See e.g. Bruce Trigger’s History of Archaeological Thought (1989, 2nd edition 1996)
Aah, this might be he difference - I read the e-book, where flipping back and forth is no trouble for me…
Again, I haven’t finished the book yet; but what they appear to be saying doesn’t contradict that. They seem to me to be saying that the back-of-the head assumptions caused by earlier bias, combined with a human tendency to think that history must by its nature in some way essentially lead up to wherever we happen to be now, combined with the fact that both of those factors caused a great deal to be left out of the information most people are relying on, combined with the fact that until quite recently some of the techniques now available for use in archaeology didn’t exist and therefore we had less information about many societies, have led quite a lot of people both in the field and, even more importantly, outside it to assume that our choices as to how to live now and in the future are far more limited than they actually are.
Sorry about that sentence, don’t have time to try to write it better now.
I suspected that would make it easier; but I don’t think I could handle reading something this long and involved on a screen.`
Speaking of which, the book talks about “revealed preference”, where you look at what choices people actually make, not what they say they like.
I have been doing more and more reading on my Kindle, recently, but feel like i like paper. So i decided to test that, and bought two copies of this book, one hardcopy and the other electronic.
I read the electronic one. At least for giant, heavy tomes, i prefer ebooks. But it is harder to flip back and forth, and i had no idea how far I’d gotten through the book until suddenly i hit the end.
Same - for this book, in particular, the notes take up so much of the book that I hit the end of the text while still having lots of pages “left” - except I’d read those pages already.
I was reading a different book, and the author claimed the transition from hunting and gathering to sustained farming led to a loss in individual nutrition. Specifically, it claimed human males went from an average 5’10 to 5’5 due to a diet more heavy in plants. I was wondering if this has any basis on research or fact. It seems to be a fairly well researched book in other respects.
I have been told that this was determined long ago by simply measuring the size of skeletons. Recent studies may have further contributed chemical analysis of bones that indicates diet deficiencies. I haven’t seen these studies myself but the info seemed credible. Bones also revealed repetitive motion characteristics and injuries that were never seen in hunter gatherers.
I’ve heard it from a physical anthropologist (not the detail in inches, but that when a population takes up farming the bones show nutritional problems); but don’t have a cite handy.
I learned it in my archaeology course.
I believe the seminal work is by Clark Spencer Larsen, 1995’s Biological Changes in Human Populations with Agriculture in the Annual Review of Anthropology
It was my understanding that farming communities also had more famines; HG have a more diverse diet, and so if one biome or food type is struggling, the others may be okay–and when things were bad in one area, they can move. Of course, you can stockpile grain, but not always enough, and you had to have had a surplus before. Families were also smaller in HG bands: fewer children, much lower maternal and child mortality. Big families are very helpful on farms, but more mouths to feed in a famine.
Are you asking whether the reduction in height is real, or whether they know it’s from “more reliance on plants”?
I’ve seen references to farmers being short due to poor nutrition in lots of places – including the recent increase in height, which is associated with better modern nutrition and also fewer childhood diseases, I think.
How can you measure a small reduction in height thousands of years ago? You look at the skeletons and there is probably some equation, but correlating it to such a specific change might be challenging. Might such changes be due to weather, hunting conditions, greater parity (more babies, more frequent children), more competition, so many other things?
It wasn’t the fact it happened or has done so before. It was just the numbers were so specific. A little too much so?