Administration, control, and negotiation in agricultural decision-making
Under the Yahwist model, the ruler controls agricultural production in an authoritative top-down fashion. Decision-making is highly centralized in hierarchical government, and the means and modes of production are dictated to a bonded labour force.
While that may have been the case in a few highly despotic settings, in most early cities different decisions were not only made at different levels, but they were also negotiated through complex webs of potential authority relationships.27 In all cases, however, early cities were grappling with the same fundamental question: How do you reliably feed a large population in a sustainable fashion? While there is a tendency to focus on a basic assessment of carrying capacity and yields, the systems of social, political, and economic obligations that enable any given farming system are as crucial to its success as choosing the right irrigation method or crop variety. Here we will explore the environmental, technical, and social constraints on decision-making, and how both the availability of information and variability in cultural norms could empower and restrict the authority of various constituencies.While certain limitations can be overcome through the use of technology (see below), aspects of the local environment, including precipitation, day- length, temperature, humidity, and soil quality, dictate the types of crop that are easiest to grow and the types of animal that are easiest to keep. Farmers and herders must consider not only the average conditions, but also the typical fluctuations. Some environments, like the savannas of West Africa, have extremely high interannual variability, such that annual precipitation amounts will not reach the mean four out of five years.[354] In addition, many early cities had to cope with periods of climate change, i.e.
persistent changes in ‘normal' local conditions.[355]To reconstruct the ancient environments in which these early urban agricultural systems operated, archaeologists draw on a wide range of data from a diversity of disciplines.[356] For example, scholars will often work with palaeoclimatologists to determine the variability and trends in local climates, utilizing a variety of methods, each of which has both particular settings in which it is appropriate or possible and limitations in terms of its spatial and temporal resolution.[357] For example, tree-rings can be used to develop an annual record of precipitation but only for a fairly local area in places with arid climates and/or long-lived trees. In contrast, while ice cores are useful for reconstructing general global trends over long periods (in some cases more than 750,000 years), they have limited temporal and spatial resolution.
For the archaeologist interested in the limitations of environments for farmers and herders, resolution is crucial, as decisions will often be made based on local or at most regional information. The farmers themselves, who are generally the most familiar with the conditions of any given field, may curate and exchange information, which may also be collected and pooled at the regional level. Many of the so-called ‘managerial' models of hierarchical political formations focused on this process of assembling and processing information in order to enact and manage well-formed agricultural strategies.[358]
While perhaps limited by their local environments, most urban agricultural systems are characterized by their technologies (here taken broadly to include crop varieties, animal breeds, irrigation systems, fertilization practices, tools, and other farming/herding techniques). These technologies are utilized for a variety of purposes: to increase the land under cultivation, to increase the yield of a given area, to decrease the labour required to produce a certain harvest, or to increase the reliability of the agricultural system.
Regardless of how well adapted any particular set of agricultural technologies is to the local environment, or how stable the typical conditions are, there is still always an inherent risk of crop or herd failure.In a 20iι review, Marston summarized the diversification and intensification strategies early urban agriculturalists utilized to buffer the risk in their systems.[359] Diversification strategies are those that spread risk over space and time. Early urban centres almost always grew multiple varieties of multiple crops and/or multiple breeds of domestic animals and regularly included hunted or gathered foods in their diet (in many cases from managed ‘wild' populations). To take advantage of local microclimates and small-scale variation, spatial diversification through fragmenting fields (particularly in areas with patchy rainfall or susceptibility to flooding) and animal trans- humance was common, as was establishing reliable trade relationships such that, if necessary, food could be obtained from outside the region. Temporally, within a given year, crops could to a certain extent be spaced to allow for successive harvests (or in certain climates year-round harvests), a practice that also relieved labour bottlenecks. Finally, many early urban centres stored significant quantities of staple foods. While there were often strong sociopolitical goals associated with this stockpiling, these stores also served the practical function of bridging bad years. While the ability to store a particular crop varied depending on local environment and crop variety, technologies such as parching, ventilation, and domestic cats could extend storage life. It should be noted that storage doesn't necessarily imply a large warehouse: even in urban centres storage could take place at the household level, and long-lived livestock such as cattle may be considered storage on the hoof.
In contrast to diversification, intensification strategies increase production per unit of land.
However, as Marston points out, it is useful to expand the definition to include strategies that increase both the labour input and land under cultivation in order to significantly improve expected yields. Numerous well-known agronomic strategies such as multiple weedings, mulching and other forms of fertilization, crop rotation, irrigation, and terracing require significant effort, but can pay off not only in improved yields but also in maintaining the productivity of a given field over an extended period of time. While many of these practices can easily take place at the scale of a single homestead, larger intensification projects, notably extensive irrigation networks, are often assumed to have implications for labour and hierarchical control.As described above, despotic control of labour necessary for irrigation is at the heart of WittfogcTs conceptualization of early cities as extractive in nature, and many scholars working in more current frameworks have likewise assumed that this type of labour-intensive capital investment in agricultural productivity would have required both centralized management and an elite-driven impetus to increase harvests. However, as Erickson points out, historical and ethnographic analyses of large-scale irrigation networks have found that locally organized and controlled systems are often more productive, efficient, and stable and the mere occurrence of irrigation or other labour-intensive agricultural infrastructure in conjunction with urbanism does not necessitate top-down management and control.[360] This is not to say that urban elites did not frequently leverage irrigation networks for wealth and political gain, but rather that this process must be demonstrated rather than assumed.
Both diversification and intensification strategies are inevitably linked to questions of growth and sustainability. Most cities experience net growth over the course of their occupation, and agricultural systems generally increase their capacity with increased investment in extensive or intensive strategies. This is expected since, as Boserup famously argued, in response to increasing population pressure on agricultural resources, farmers will respond by innovating and working harder (eventually for diminishing returns).[361] In contrast, the Weberian extractive economy model lies at the other extreme, arguing that production will rise at a more rapid pace than population growth in order to maximize the surplus of the wealthy elite.
However, both Boserup and Weber assume that farmers will expend the least effort possible, and neither approach allows for the many household- and community-level motivations to intensify and increase agricultural production in the absence of an external stimulus (be it population pressure or a powerful despot).[362]
Regardless of the particularistic circumstances of growth in agricultural production around an urban centre, agricultural practices must be sustainable if the city is to persist. Just as success in agricultural production has been tied to the origins and growth of urban settlements, the abandonment of urban centres is likewise often attributed to problems in the agricultural system.[363] These problems, which may include declining yields, population growth outpacing agricultural capacity, or outright crop failure, are often broadly attributed to the effects of climate fluctuations, unsustainable farming practices, or, most frequently, a combination of the two.
Climate fluctuations, and in particular severe multi-year droughts, can have a significant impact on agricultural production. However, not all droughts lead to urban abandonment, and in many cases urban centres have previously weathered severe droughts or other natural disasters.[364] Likewise, the technologies and practices discussed above can buffer the impact of interannual fluctuations such that severe drought can affect some urban centres more severely than others. In contrast, ‘overfarming' (intensive utilization of soil leading to a long-term loss of fertility through processes such as erosion or salinization) is more frequently seen as evidence of unsustainable practices. However, recent research has demonstrated that characterizing an agricultural system as unsustainable is challenging in the context of the changing social and environmental conditions that often accompany city abandonment, particularly since these other factors may prevent the development of technological solutions.[365]
While the ‘collapse' of urban societies is frequently a research focus, the archaeology of early cities in practice speaks more broadly to questions of sustainability in agricultural systems.
Many cities known primarily through archaeology were occupied for hundreds or thousands of years. Thus in cases like Mesopotamia, where the rich soils were eventually rendered infertile due to salinization related to intensive irrigation, there is perhaps as much to learn from the several thousand years of successful intensive farming as from the eventual agricultural problems. Likewise, many of the cities of classical antiquity, such as Athens and Rome, maintained sustainable agricultural systems such that their surrounding territories are still farmed today.[366]Within these contexts of sustainable production, it is essential to realize that cultural practices and goals fundamentally shape the ways in which agriculture is carried out in different times and places. Stone has discussed the importance of considering what he terms ‘social technology' in analysing agricultural systems, notably the ability of an individual or group within a given society to motivate labour resources.[367] Local economic needs, political goals, and systems of obligation (or in the case of the Yahwist perspective, coercion) ultimately dictate production methods and objectives.
The organization of labour in urban settings, according to the standard narrative, derives from the direct managerial control of a stratified ruling class. This highly centralized model of political/economic organization, while potentially characterizing some time periods in archaeological and historical examples, is not in fact common in ancient political systems.[368] We now know that urban centres are typically characterized by diverse populations holding both competing and shared goals who can control aspects of the economic system, regardless of whether the political apparatus is highly centralized.[369] For example, Mesopotamian cities varied over time in the organization of production, with some periods in which centralized bureaucratic systems were in control and others in which competing labour groups, notably the kin-based oikos, owned and managed agricultural land.[370] While in both situations agriculture functioned as an important political/ religious/economic tribute, in the former it was a top-down means of control, while for the oikos it was a potential avenue to political power. Similarly, among the Yoruba, with their diffuse urban zones incorporating significant agricultural production, the urban centre can be modelled as a ‘macrocosm of an extended family compound', with complex networks of social relations and obligations characterizing the system.[371] Kin groups appear to have had the ability to access land in areas both close and peripheral to their residential spaces, creating cross-cutting social connections. There is little evidence that this agricultural production was managed by the elite (whose power and prestige are thought to have been derived from religious authority and access to trade goods rather than surplus), and even some construction of the extensive earthworks may have been controlled at the local level. It is interesting in this discussion of urbanism that the most centralized agricultural economy that could be used to support parts of the standard narrative is one, ancient Egypt, that was not highly urbanized.
Contributing to understanding the past and present diversity in the organization of agricultural labour in urban settings has been an increasing realization of the fallacy that settlement hierarchies imply control hierar- chies.[372] Rather, researchers throughout the world have begun to recognize that most complex societies and urban environments have heterarchical elements and include multiple nodes of power and decision-making that play a dynamic role in the political process.[373] These groups and/or individuals, who may be fluidly ranked depending on the circumstances, can range from kin-based organizations of agricultural production, competing elite class groups, republics characterized by more market-based systems, etc., rather than a single concrete stratified elite that abstracts individuals from their labour.
In conclusion, the role of agriculture in urban settings is constrained by local environments, enabled by technological innovation and practices, and controlled by cultural values. While production can be organized in a top-down fashion and surplus may be funnelled to a small elite, this scenario is the exception rather than the rule. In practice, agriculture is intensively negotiated, with different social segments manipulating production in diverse ways. While these negotiations may take place within a framework of classic power relations, they illustrate that within the context of very complex systems, such as the agricultural networks supporting early urban centres, a constricted, abstracted decision-making apparatus is rare. We will now turn our attention to a case study which exemplifies the alternative ways in which agricultural production can be organized in an urban context, and the attendant implications for the structure of urban society.