Pastoralism and urbanism
The next two chapters have a strong focus on agriculture's propensity for encouraging and sustaining social and economic inequalities, in particular through the acquisition of ‘wealth on the hoof (Chapter 6) and as a part of early urbanism (Chapter 7).
Alan Outram describes how, whether keeping a few livestock within a mixed farming system or maintaining large herds and/or flocks in systems of specialized pastoralism, the key limiting factors that have to be solved are access to grazing land and, for times of the year when the natural grazing is insufficient, adequate supplies of fodder. For specialized pastoralists, mobility is invariably the key response, though as Outram describes, this can take many forms, including genuine nomadism and, more commonly, seasonal horizontal or vertical transhumance to move animals between winter and summer grazing. The anthropologist Tim Ingold divided pastoralists in the ethnographic record into three groups: ‘meat pastoralists' who, like hunters, exploit animals just for the products of the carcass; ‘milch pastoralists' who keep livestock such as cattle, horses, sheep, goats, and llamas not only for meat but also for the ‘secondary products' of the live animal such as the power to be ridden or pull equipment, milk, and in the case of sheep their wool; and ‘ranchers' who operate within a cash economy.[11] As Outram describes, these categories cannot be imposed on the archaeology of ancient pastoralism in a simplistic way: ‘it is key to remember that activities in the past do not always have modern or recent analogues' (Chapter 6). Also, the boundaries between controlled herds and wild populations around them may often be fluid - the modern and ancient DNA of horses, for example, suggests that this has characterized domestic horses on the Eurasian steppes for most of their history, until recent decades in fact. As Chapter 6 describes, the ‘secondary products revolution' (the exploitation of horses for riding and pulling light carts or chariots; cattle for pulling ploughs and carts; cattle, sheep, and goats for milk and milk products; sheep for wool; and all of them for their manure), first defined by Andrew Sherratt in a brilliant paper in 1981, was clearly a much more complicated process in time and space than he envisaged with the limited data available to him then - the revolution in archaeological science has transformed this branch of archaeology, just as it has the study of health and disease discussed by Charlotte Roberts. Nevertheless, it remains a fundamental step in the development of wealth on the hoof, whether in agricultural societies or specialized pastoralism.One of the most ubiquitous characteristics of agrarian societies was their impact on the spatial organization of increasingly permanent settlements. Once farmers settled down, populations began to soar and, around the world, both the density and size of communities increased along with the complexity of social structures. Daphne E. Gallagher and Roderick McIntosh (Chapter 7) contend that linking agriculture to urban growth is the necessary consequence of its being at the foundation of our traditional conceptualization of the city (see also Volume 3 in this series). Not only did villages and towns emerge as a result of successful food production, but also large settlements were catalysts for agricultural innovation. However, moving beyond the thinking that agriculture was a simplistic and irreversible driver of societies down the path towards civilization, elite-controlled surplus, and the elaboration of political and social systems, Gallagher and McIntosh remind us that there were many permutations to the relationships between centres and peripheries and urban spaces and their hinterlands. ‘The standard narrative that urban zones were highly centralized systems abstracted from [a] hinterland... under despotic control', they note, was not the case everywhere, as complex decision-making and control were often negotiated in vastly different points of concentration rather than the agricultural systems of early urban societies simply being the result of top-down decision-making by urban elites. Their Jenne-Jeno case study in the middle Niger valley illustrates how a heterarchically rather than hierarchically organized urban centre was not based on the generation of significant agricultural surplus but relied instead on reciprocal relationships between specialist corporate groups.