The emergence of farming was an unqualified success.
In fact, by about
6000 B.C. farming communities in Palestine were confronting an
ecological catastrophe of their own making. They had burned far too
much timber in order to manufacture lime to plaster the walls of their
houses. Down to the present day farming and its requirement to
create permanent human settlement has contributed greatly to the
erosion of the Near Eastern landscape.
The oldest walls at the early Neolithic site of Jericho
in Palestine
date from around 8000 B.C. They belong to well- constructed round
houses, and represent a dense permanent settlement inhabited by at
least a couple of thousand people. This is intensive, not extensive,
exploitation of an environment; and a more intensive way of life means
more people and more culture. The very nature of the site, a hill
created not by nature but by successive human occupations, provides a
metaphor for the cultural accumulation that this lifestyle made
possible. Each generation built on what the preceding generation had
left behind. So once the platform of the original farming package was
in place, numerous innovations could follow. A nice example is the
plough, which appears in the fourth millennium B.C.: it presupposes
prior development of domesticated animals to pull it and of
domesticated plants to sow in its wake.
We could cite the making of pottery, the domestication
of the olive,
and the invention of the wheel and metalworking. Stone tools have
their limits. A good metal can be worked thin and still be strong.
Copper on its own is too soft, but mixed with some tin or arsenic to
make bronze is a great improvement. Iron is much better, and steel
better still.
Metalworking involves smelting ore and shaping metal
at high
temperatures. Fortunately there is a cultural platform for this
development. If you make pottery, you need to fire it, and within the
confines of a Neolithic culture the higher the temperature at which you
fire it, the better. If you also have building skills, you should be
able to construct kilns in which you can fire your pottery at suitably
high temperatures. This is well on the way to the technological
requirements of metalworking.
Copper, like other ingredients of bronze, is not in
plentiful supply,
and its distribution over the surface of the planet is uneven. This
constrains the uses to which most societies can put it. Typically a
Bronze Age society, like that of China or Greece in the last centuries
of the second millennium B.C., is dominated by an aristocracy that uses
bronze for its weapons and its ceremonial activities, while the mass of
cultivators at the bottom of the society are still effectively in the
Stone Age. The solution to this problem is iron. For reasons to do with
the relative abundance of the elements produced in supernovas, iron is
plentiful all over the earth. If you can reach the temperatures needed
to smelt and work it, you can use it to make metal implements rather
cheaply. It is thus with the Iron Age that we first encounter the
widespread use of metal tools to cultivate the soil. At the same time
the adoption of cheap iron weapons tends to destabilize traditional
Bronze Age aristocracies, and so to open the door to new forms of
social and political organization.
