Od nasycených tlup migrujících k hladovým miliardám usedlých

Transcription

Civilizace_2_Zlom1-172stare 12.8.13 13:11 Stránka 7
Od nasycených tlup migrujících
k hladovým miliardám usedlých:
Ekonomické dějiny světa
Jakub Rákosník
Úvod
Předmět této kapitoly není zřetelně ukotven. Pojem „ekonomika“
(oikonomia) je sice prastarý, avšak jeho význam se v dějinách výrazně
proměňoval. V antickém Řecku označoval vše, co se týkalo provozu
domácnosti, tedy nikoli jen úzce hospodářsky zaměřené aktivity,
natož pak činnosti vedené ekonomickou racionalitou v moderním
smyslu tohoto slova. To ovšem neznamená, že by se předmoderní lidé
nezabývali úvahami o záležitostech, jako jsou peníze, úroky, ceny či
monopoly. Chyběl však jakýkoli sémantický vztah k všeobecným pojmům, jako je ekonomika nebo hospodářství. Proto také Johannes
Burchardt kdysi konstatoval, že „všeobecný pojem pro hospodářské
jednání či vědu o něm od antiky až po raný novověk neexistoval“
(Brunner, Conze, Koselleck 1978, Band 7, 512). Karl Polanyi šel ve čtyřicátých letech minulého století ve svých úvahách dokonce tak daleko,
že prohlásil ekonomiku za evropský (či přesněji původně anglický)
výmysl s nedozírnými následky pro celý svět. V tomto smyslu také
napsal: „Ani kmenová ani feudální ani merkantilní společnost neměla oddělený ekonomický systém. […] Ekonomické faktory omezují
všechny typy společností. Ale jen civilizace 19. století byla ekonomická v jiném a zvláštním smyslu, neboť se rozhodla opřít se o motiv,
který se v historii lidských společností pouze zřídka uznával za
právoplatný a určitě nikdy předtím nebyl pozvednut na úroveň oprávnění jednání a chování v každodenním životě – totiž o zisk. Právě z tohoto principu unikátně vzešel seberegulující tržní systém. […] Celý
lidský svět podlehl jeho nezředěnému vlivu v rámci jedné generace“
(Polanyi 2006, s. 35, 75).
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CiVilizACE A děJiny
Musíme se tedy na následujících stránkách odhodlat k tomu, že budeme mluvit o lidech, kteří svět nepopisovali pojmy obsahově shodnými s našimi. Budeme tak popisovat jejich „ekonomiku“, přestože oni
sami, má-li Polanyi pravdu v tom, že seberegulující ekonomický systém
je diskursivní konstrukcí vzniklou až v post-osvícenské Evropě, si ji ani
nebyli schopni představit.
Neolitická revoluce
Pojmy jako „mezolit“ či „neolit“ znamenají teoretické konstrukty, či
slovy Maxe Webera ideální typy, pomocí kterých můžeme vymezovat
vývojové fáze lidstva v kontinuu plynutí času. Ve skutečnosti neplatí
jednoduchá poučka z učebnic evokující zřetelný předěl mezi oběma fázemi doby kamenné. Ačkoli s neolitem je spojen fundamentální přerod
ve způsobech obživy lidských komunit, tedy vynalezení zemědělství,
neznamená to, že by již mezolitičtí lidé dávno nepěstovali plodiny jako
doplněk stravy a naopak že by lidé neolitu zcela opustili lovecko-sběračské způsoby.
Přechod k zemědělství byl předpokladem k novým formám organizace. nomádský způsob života byl vystřídán usedlým. narůst produkce potravin umožnil populační růst. Potřeba regulace přísunu vody
v podobě budování rozsáhlých zavlažovacích systémů a ochrana usedlého obyvatelstva před útočníky vyžadovaly vyšší míru kooperace, což
posléze vedlo ke vzniku prvních civilizací a států. záleželo i na načasování této zemědělské revoluce. Jak ukázal Jared diamond, právě načasování přechodu k zemědělství předurčilo příští rozdíly jednotlivých
společností v otázkách technologického rozvoje i sociální organizace
v podstatě až do počátku 16. století n. l., kdy byly tyto dlouhodobé vývojové trendy narušeny evropskou zámořskou expanzí. na adresu světa na prahu neolitické revoluce proto poznamenal: „Výzkumník, který
by se nechal přenést zpět v čase do roku 11 000 př. Kr. by nemohl předpovědět, na kterém kontinentu se lidské společnosti budou vyvíjet nejrychleji. naopak by měl u každé z nich dobré důvody předpokládat, že
to bude právě tato“ (diamond 1999, 52).
Vznik zemědělství spadá do období mezi rokem 8000 a 5000 př. Kr.
a byl pravděpodobně důsledkem radikální proměny v možnostech
obživy lidí po skončení poslední doby ledové – počátek zatím poslední
epochy čtvrtohor, tzv. holocénu je kladen zhruba k roku 10 000 př. Kr.
nejstarší doklady o pěstování pšenice a ječmene či chovu domestikovaných zvířat, jako jsou vepři, skot, kozy či ovce, pocházejí z oblasti tzv.
úrodného půlměsíce, jenž zahrnuje dnešní Turecko, Sýrii a irák. z doby kolem roku 6500 př. Kr. máme doloženy tyto postupy z Balkánu
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Od nASyCEnýCh TluP MigruJíCíCh K hlAdOVýM MiliArdáM uSEdlýCh
a okolo roku 4000 př. Kr. pronikly i do dnešní jižní Francie nebo střední Evropy. z oblasti úrodného půlměsíce neolitická revoluce nepostupovala pouze západním směrem. zemědělství postoupilo do roku
6000 př. Kr. do nilského údolí Egypta a brzy se odsud rozšířilo také
jižním směrem proti proudu nilu do Súdánu a odtud do Etiopie.
Pěstování obilnin máme doloženo z doby po roce 7000 př. Kr. ze severní indie a kolem roku 5000 př. Kr. začala být v jihovýchodní Asii pěstována rýže, odkud se brzy rozšířila i do jižní Číny. z oblastí dnešní severní Číny máme již k roku 6000 př. Kr. doloženo rozšířené pěstování
prosa nebo chov psů jako domácích zvířat. zhruba ve stejné době proběhla neolitická revoluce také na západní polokouli. ze Střední
Ameriky z období mezi rokem 7000 př. Kr. a 5000 př. Kr. máme doloženo pěstování kukuřice nebo fazolí, stejně jako chov domácích zvířat
(vepř, pes atd.; duiker, Spielvogel 2010, s. 6).
není bezdůvodné předpokládat, že rychlé pokroky, které učinila
archeologie v posledních desetiletích, posunou tato tradovaná data dále do minulosti, což dosvědčují i výsledky interdisciplinárního sympozia na téma vzniku zemědělství, konaného v Mexiku v létě 2009 za
účasti předních světových badatelů. nyní si nárokuje zhruba deset
lokalit na světě prvenství ohledně vynálezu zemědělství a naše vědecké poznatky zatím neumožňují tento spor rozhodnout. navzdory
výše uvedeným rámcovým datům, nemálo autorů v současnosti posunuje proces „neolitizace“ o řadu tisíciletí zpět do minulosti (Current
Anthropology 2011).
Oblast Blízkého východu, kam nejčastěji klademe počátky zemědělství, byla unikátní svou polohou na rozhraní Asie a Afriky.
Obyvatelstvo přicházelo do této oblasti z různých směrů od nejstaršího
pravěku a jeho pohyb měl na následek vzájemné ovlivňování, výměnu
technologií i zvýšený tlak na přírodní zdroje. To může vysvětlit, proč
tak mnoho „revolucí“ v životním způsobu lidí se odehrálo právě zde:
objevení se moderních lidí, zemědělského hospodaření nebo měst
a prvních říší (van de Mieroop 2010, 24).
Patrně jen o málo později se začal rozvíjet také obchod, jakkoli jeho
počátky jsou obestřeny ještě větším tajemstvím, než tomu bylo v případě zemědělství. nicméně badatelé se v zásadě shodují v názoru, že jedno z prvních doložených raných měst na Blízkém východě Çatal
hüyük ležící ve střední Anatolii, jež se na vrcholu svého rozkvětu
kolem roku 6500 př. Kr. rozkládalo na ploše 13 hektarů, vděčilo za
svůj rozvoj již dálkovému obchodu s obsidiánem, sopečným kamenem
využívaným tehdy pro výrobu nástrojů, zbraní či ozdob. nálezy dokládají, že v tomto městě již fungovala relativně rozvinutá dělba práce.
Působili zde hrnčíři, košíkáři, truhláři nebo koželuzi. Velikost domů
sice byla rozdílná, avšak nic zároveň nenasvědčuje tomu, že by tu
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existovala nějaká dominantní vládnoucí třída, ani centralizovaná politická struktura (Bulliet et al., 13).
Ačkoli Çatal hüyük nebo jen o málo mladší palestinské Jericho
bývají v literatuře označovány za města, za první skutečné město
v dějinách světa bývá považován teprve sumerský uruk, který se během 4. tisíciletí př. Kr. vyvinul v regionálního mocenského hegemona
pravděpodobně právě v důsledku rostoucí dělby práce. Ekonomická
nesoběstačnost zemědělských rodin i méně početných rodin řemeslníků vyžadovala směnu. A směna vyžadovala komplexnější organizaci.
V jejím centru stál chrám. Odtud používáme pojem chrámové hospodářství. distribuce prostřednictvím chrámu vyžadovala třídu specialistů. A ti potřebovali měrné jednotky, účetní záznamy a písmo.
důležitou úlohu zde sehrávala již i plavba za obchodem, ať k břehům jižní Arábie, odkud byla získávána například měď, nebo k ústí
indu (zlato, drahé kameny, stavební dřevo; Potts 1993, 396). někteří
badatelé se domnívají, že přes námořní obchodní styky uruk dokonce
ovlivnil raný Egypt, kde se koncem 4. tisíciletí př. Kr. objevila celá řada
kulturních rysů podobných těm z jižní Mezopotámie (obdobná keramika či cihelné stavby s výklenky). zůstává ovšem stále ne zcela jasně
zodpovězenou otázkou, co obyvatele Sumeru vedlo k tak rozsáhlým
obchodním aktivitám se vzdálenými oblastmi, když některé potřebné
dovážené materiály mohli nahradit domácími substituty. zdá se, že
zde úlohu sehrála nikoli prostá potřeba, nýbrž spíše ekonomicko-mocenská diferenciace společnosti, kdy „nově vznikající elity mohly usilovat o přístup k cizokrajným materiálům, jejichž vlastnictví by je odlišovalo od lidí ostatních“ (van de Mieroop 2010, 50–51). Obyvatelé Sumeru
objevili secí pluh, kterým velmi výrazně pozvedli výnosnost svých polí.
Proto jeden renomovaný autor bez nadsázky v roce 1974 poznamenal:
„nemusí jít o fantazii, když tvrdíme, že tato metoda spolu s efektivním
zavlažováním v presargonovském lagaši1 vedla k úrodám rovnajícím
se 76násobku vysetého obilí.“ Jedině tak totiž můžeme vysvětlit schopnost uživit početně rychle rostoucí obyvatelstvo blízkovýchodních velkoměst té doby (Silver 1995, 202).
Vytváření hierarchické společenské struktury koinciduje s formováním větších lidských společností, jimž zemědělství umožnilo usedlý
způsob života. To můžeme dovozovat z podoby lovecko-sběračských
pospolitostí, které přetrvaly do pozdější doby, pro něž bylo vždy charakteristické větší rovnostářství, a to jak ve smyslu mocenském, tak
i majetkovém nebo genderovém. Kdesi na pomezí mezi oběma ekonomickými formami lidských seskupení setrvali hluboko do novověku
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Sargon (Šarrukén), akkadský král vládnoucí v Mezopotámii zhruba v letech 2334–2279 př. Kr. lagaš
byl spolu s ummou či urukem ve 3. tisíciletí př. Kr. jedním z hlavních městských center jižní
Mezopotámie.
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například obyvatelé Polynésie. z poloviny 2. tisíciletí př. Kr. máme doloženy z Melanésie kulturu lapitů. Ti již dokázali využívat některá domácí zvířata, avšak jejich zemědělství se opíralo jen o dočasné obhospodařování ploch získaných žďářením. Jejich potomci posléze zalidnili
většinu Oceánie a stali se základem populací ostrovů od Tahiti až po
nový zéland. Vulkanické ostrovy a blízké moře prosolující půdu sice
neposkytovaly vhodné podmínky pro rozvoj zemědělství, jak jej známe
z ostatních kontinentů, na druhé straně však tyto geografické podmínky z Polynésanů vytvořily přeborníky v jiné ekonomické aktivitě – rybolovu. Mezi ostrovy fungovaly dávno před příchodem Evropanů čilé
obchodní styky. Jakkoli z naší eurocentrické perspektivy se již našim
předkům objevujícím Tichomoří zdáli být beznadějně zaostalí, lze spíše přitakat názoru gregoryho Alderetea, který ve své učebnici konstatoval: „Ačkoli Polynésané nebudovali žádná velká města, vytvořili
úspěšnou, bohatou a dlouhotrvající kulturu, která v oblastech jako je
plavba či navigace dosáhla jedněch z nejpůsobivějších výkonů ze všech
civilizací“ (Aldrete 2011, 246–250).
Od bronzu k železu a první axiální věk
dalším zásadním krokem v hospodářských aktivitách člověka bylo
zpracování kovů. Měděné výrobky, jako sekyrky či ozdoby, máme doloženy z archeologických nalezišť v iránu či Turecku z 6. tisíciletí př. Kr.
zhruba ve stejné době začalo být zpracováváno také zlato či stříbro.
Budoucnost však patřila bronzu, slitině mědi a cínu, která byla tvrdší
a odolnější než měď. rozmach zpracování bronzu spadá do první poloviny 3. tisíciletí př. Kr. doba bronzová bývá rozličně datována podle
jednotlivých oblastí. na Blízkém východě je její počátek kladen zhruba
k roku 3000 př. Kr. naopak v méně rozvinutých oblastech střední a severní Evropy je její počátek datován až do doby zhruba o tisíc let později. i pro formování této epochy byly určující hospodářské aktivity
lidských komunit. zemědělsky nejrozvinutější oblasti Blízkého východu v mezopotámské nížině nedisponovaly vlastními zdroji potřebných
rud, a proto je byly nuceny dovážet mnohdy z velkých vzdáleností. Tím
byly dány podmínky pro rozvoj dálkového obchodu – zemědělské přebytky úrodných oblastí se směňovaly za rudy a kovové výrobky. honba
za surovinami potkávala i další civilizace bronzového věku. Příznačně
lidé mínojské kultury z Kréty byli v 2. tisíciletí př. Kr. hnáni touto potřebou k severu a západu: ze Sardinie získávali měď, z oblasti Karpat
zlato a měď, skrze tuto oblast dokonce i baltský jantar a zdroje cínu
nalézali dokonce až ve vzdálené jižní Anglii (Kristiansen, larsson
2005, 100). Citovaní autoři na základě překvapivě rychlého šíření
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znalostí zpracování bronzu o tomto období prohlašují: „zde vidíme
první historický příklad interakce mezi civilizačními centry a produkční periferií, jež postupem času urychlovala také výměnu dalších kulturních výdobytků [mýty, symboly, válečné postupy, formy vlády
apod.]“ (Kristiansen, larsson 2005, 112). Philip Kohl v tomto směru neváhá hovořit dokonce o počátku globalizačního procesu, jenž trvá napříč staletími s různou mírou dynamiky až do dnešních dní. zároveň ve
své práci z roku 2007 upozorňuje, že navzdory výrazné funkcionální
diferenciaci lidských komunit, která byla v době bronzové již velmi vysoká, je velmi nesnadné jedny klasifikovat jako rozvinuté (civilizované)
a druhé jako zaostalé (barbarské). Mobilní společenství pastevců z eurasijských stepí, můžeme-li usuzovat z řídkých archeologických dokladů, navzdory svému způsobu života nijak z technologického hlediska
nezaostávaly za urbánními společnostmi Blízkého východu (Kohl 2007,
248–260).
dobu bronzovou vystřídala doba železná, jejíž počátky jsou na
Blízkém východě a ve východním Středomoří datovány mezi 12. a 10. století př. Kr. nástup železa měl zásadní důsledky pro obchod, protože
nyní již nebylo nutné dovážet v takovém množství těžko dostupný cín
z velmi vzdálených oblastí. V důsledku toho došlo ke změnám obchodních tras i skladby předmětů, s nimiž se obchodovalo. Ještě zásadnějším důsledkem však bylo něco jiného. Vere gordon Childe kdysi v tomto směru výslovně hovořil o „demokratizaci zemědělství, řemesel
a válčení“. Železné nástroje byly i obyčejným lidem snadněji dostupné
a s „novými kovovými nástroji pro obhospodařování půdy, klučení
a kopání zavlažovacích kanálů si i drobný rolník mohl vydobýt nezávislost zušlechtěním kusu divočiny – a v každém případě byl také schopen proto daleko více vypěstovat“ (Childe 1964, 200).
Přestože přechod od bronzu k železu byl pozvolný, z politického
hlediska je snadno identifikovatelný. Byla to doba, kdy říše bronzového věku ve východním Středomoří, v severovýchodní Africe (Egypt)
a na Blízkém východě musely čelit vpádu tzv. mořských národů, které
po roce 1200 př. Kr. rozvrátily mínojskou civilizaci Mikén, chetitskou
říši v Turecku a výrazné otřesy zažily věčně se hašteřící velmoci tehdejší Mezopotámie, tj. Assýrie, Babylonie a Elam, stejně jako egyptská
nová říše, která sice náporu odolala, avšak nakonec se rozložila v důsledku vnitřních konfliktů o pár desítek let později. Je otázkou, co bylo
pravou příčinou vzniku železného věku. zpracování železa bylo známé zhruba stejně dlouho jako bronzu, třebaže kvalita zpracování byla
zprvu nevalná. zdál by se být logický závěr, že železo bylo praktičtější
a dostupnější. Přesto je pravděpodobné i jiné vysvětlení spočívající ve
změně politických podmínek. O následujících staletích po vpádu mořských národů se obvykle v literatuře hovoří jako o „temném věku“, který
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ovšem byl temný spíše z důvodu nedostatku pramenů pro jeho poznání, než že by došlo k dlouhodobému ekonomickému rozvratu. O politické destabilizaci však nemáme důvod pochybovat, a proto donald
Wagner na začátku devadesátých let minulého století formuloval jednoduchou příčinnost: politická nestabilita podvazovala obchod; bez
dálkového obchodu bylo těžké vyrábět bronz; bez bronzu bylo nutné
přistoupit ke zpracování železné rudy (Wagner 1993, 410).
Mezi novými národy, které povstaly z tohoto dynamického období
temného věku, nacházíme mezi jinými rovněž Řeky a Židy, jež se stali
vedle dalších hlavními aktéry příští epochy – axiálního věku. Autorství
pojmu „axiální věk“ bývá často přisuzováno německému filozofu
Karlu Jaspersovi, ačkoli se vyskytoval již z 19. století. Citovaný autor jej
ohraničil 9. a 2. stoletím př. Kr. a umístil sem velkou transformaci lidského myšlení na euroasijském kontinentě, což vyjadřuje vznik konfuciánství a taoismu v Číně, hinduismu a buddhismu v indii, monoteismu v Palestině, zoroastrismu v Persii, respektive působení filozofů
v Řecku. Pojem patří především do oblasti duchovních dějin a vyjadřuje „novoty uskutečněné v 1. tisíciletí př. Kr. na poli duchovním, konceptuálním, filozofickém, kterými lidstvo vkročilo do intelektuálního
světa, v němž žijeme dodnes“ (gauchet 2005, 47). Ti badatelé, kteří redukují historickou příčinnost na ekonomická zdůvodnění, nepochybují o tom, že i za touto duchovní revolucí utvářející budoucí svět až do
našich dní, kdy lidstvo vykročilo ze světa starobylé mytologie ke kritickému myšlení, stojí primárně hospodářské předpoklady. Měl to být
růst peněžní ekonomiky, soukromé vlastnictví, rostoucí dělba práce,
prohlubování rozdělení společnosti na bohaté a chudé, co nalezlo svůj
odraz nejen v oblasti politické a hospodářské, nýbrž i kulturní a duchovní (duchrow ,linkelammert 2012). Karen Armstrongová, autorka
zřejmě v dnešní době nejznámější publikace o axiálním věku, naopak
soudí, že přelomovou zkušeností byla existenciální nejistota v důsledku náporu tzv. mořských národů, které obrátily kolem roku 1200 př. Kr.
v prach kvetoucí říše bronzového věku (Armstrongová 2012).
Axiální věk s sebou přinesl nové nasměrování obchodních aktivit.
hegemony středomořského obchodu se stali Féničané – purpuroví lidé
(označení si patrně vysloužili díky svému vysoce rozvinutému barvířství). Tito ve své době zřejmě nejschopnější mořeplavci doslova ovládli
obchod od dnešního Španělska až po Egypt a Blízký východ, jakkoli
„v námořnictví byli Egypťané učiteli, Féničané žáci, nikoli obráceně“.
(Kienitz 1991, 83–85). Pokud některému ze starověkých národů můžeme přisoudit obchodního ducha, pak to byli jistě oni. V oblasti státnictví nedosáhli nikdy sjednocení, ani nevytvořili mocné impérium.
Fénická města a obchodní osady se naopak bez výraznějšího odporu
poddávaly silnějším sousedům a dál se oddávaly svým ekonomickým
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aktivitám. Ani v umění nedosáhli Féničané ničeho; jen neobyčejného
mistrovství v napodobování a obdivuhodné řemeslné dovednosti
v těchto nápodobách. Proto také jistý badatel již dávno na jejich adresu
prohlásil, že fénické práce nejsou ničím jiným než jen „zbožím, které
slibuje dobrý odbyt“. (Kienitz 1991, 85). Jejich obchodní aktivity vedly
k rozsáhlé kolonizaci středomořského prostoru. nejen známé Kartágo
bylo produktem fénického osídlení, nýbrž i španělský Cadiz, osady na
Maltě nebo sicilská Mozia.
V kolonizačních aktivitách Féničanům od 8. století př. Kr. zdatně
sekundovali Řekové, třebaže v obchodu se jim dlouho ani zdaleka nemohli rovnat. Ostatně v hodnotovém žebříčku tehdejší řecké společnosti nepatřil obchod mezi zvlášť prestižní povolání, což dosvědčuje
i fakt, že bůh hermes byl patronem jak zlodějů, tak zároveň i obchodníků (Brown 1990). Postupem času se však právě Řekové stali hlavními
obchodníky středomořského světa a tyto jejich aktivity přispěly k rychlé helenizaci přilehlých oblastí během 4. a 3. století př. Kr. Prosazení
řecké kultury nejen na Blízkém východě a v iránu, nýbrž i ve starobylém Egyptě, pak jen stvrdila, spíše než zapříčinila expanze Alexandra
Makedonského před rokem 323 př. Kr.
V závěru axiálního věku došlo na eurasijském kontinentě ještě
k jedné fundamentální ekonomické změně. Ačkoli již předtím existovaly jisté kontakty středomořské oblasti se vzdálenými civilizačními
okruhy Číny a indie, nyní došlo k jejich výraznému zintenzivnění.
Král ášoka, který žil v letech 304–232 př. Kr., načas v zásadě sjednotil
indický subkontinent. Ve stejné době došlo i k prvnímu sjednocení
Číny a tato jednota přetrvala smrt svého tvůrce, Prvního císaře jménem Čchin Š’ Chuang-ti v roce 210 př. Kr. na jeho úsilí v tomto směru
navázala dynastie Chan (206 př. Kr. – 210 n. l.). Jak poznamenává
Philip Curtin, civilizační okruhy Eurasie do té doby oddělovaly hory,
stepy, pouště a hluboké pralesy a jejich vzájemné kontakty byly velmi
řídké. Poslední dvě století před naším letopočtem se však bouřlivě začal rozvíjet obchod plynoucí mezi Čínou a Středomořím přes Střední
Asii – po moři podél břehů jižní Asie a po souši přes Střední Asii.
Obchod se tehdy stal pravidelnou aktivitou od břehů Maroka až k pobřeží japonských ostrovů, k čemuž Curtin doplňuje: „Tyto obchodní
cesty, jak po moři, tak po souši, přežily pád dynastie Chan i pád římského impéria a umožnily obchod mezi jednotlivými civilizacemi,
jenž se rozvíjel až do 7. a 8. století n. l., kdy dynastie Tchang v Číně
a abbásovský kalifát s centrem v Baghdádu znovu vytvořily imperiální deštník nad většinou obchodních cest mezi Čínou a Středomořím“
(Curtin 1984, 91).
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Ekonomické zázraky temného středověku
rozpad římské říše a zánik její západní části v roce 476 je jistě zásadním
přelomem z hlediska politických dějin – alespoň pro Evropany. z hlediska hospodářských dějin však nic zásadního neznamenal. rozpad
otrokářských vztahů a jejich nahrazování jinými podobami závislosti
byly procesy, které trvaly několik staletí a ani v době dezintegrace západní části impéria ještě nebyly zdaleka završeny. Přechod ke středověkým feudálním pořádkům, v nichž lokální vrchnost a nikoli centralizovaná státní moc chrání své závislé poddané, přitom stejně tak
započal dávno předtím s tím, jak ústřední římský aparát ztrácel na efektivitě. Vznikaly tak relativně soběstačné velkostatky a ekonomika získávala stále zřetelnější autarkní rysy (Kuiper 2010, 188).
henry Pirenne kdysi (1939) vyslovil tezi, že skutečný přelom znamenal teprve rozmach islámu v 7. století, což vyjádřil svou slavnou formulací: „Bez Mohameda by byl Karel Veliký nemyslitelný“ (Pirenne
2001, 234; Elazar 1975, 35–40). Podle jeho názoru raně merovejská
franská říše velmi silně navazovala na římskou praxi, ať již šlo o formy
veřejné administrativy nebo obchodní vazby. Měl to být teprve rozmach islámu na Blízkém východě a v severní Africe, co způsobilo
úpadek západu a jeho návrat k primitivnějším formám soběstačné ekonomiky. novější historiografie ovšem tento názor nesdílí a naopak zdůrazňuje, že pohled na evropský raný středověk jako úpadkovou epochu v důsledku vpádu barbarů a následné izolace kontinentu kvůli
arabským výbojům je chybný. za celkem nesporný se ale na druhé straně dodnes považuje Pirennův závěr z citované knihy, že karolinská renesance znamená vznik nové civilizace. Menšímu souhlasu se již těší
jeho závěry o ekonomické izolaci západní Evropy. Vtipně hlavní
námitku formuloval v tomto směru ronald Findlay, když napsal:
„Mohamed skutečně v jistém smyslu byl tvůrcem karlovského státu,
jak tvrdil Pirenne, avšak podporou ekonomického růstu a obchodu
v západní Evropě, a nikoli jeho zpomalováním.“ Evropské zemědělství
navíc v následujícím období profitovalo ze zavedení tří velkých technologických inovací, které zapříčinily rychlý demografický růst na kontinentu v období vrcholného středověku. za prvé to byl těžký železný
pluh, za druhé chomout, který umožňoval koním či hovězímu dobytku takový pluh tahat, a za třetí to byl trojpolní systém (Findlay,
O’rourke 2007, 74, 84). díky tomu bylo možné uživit rostoucí počet
obyvatelstva, které nejen postupně kolonizovalo pusté kouty kontinentu, nýbrž i zalidňovalo města. nelze jednoznačně říci, zda se
Evropané vrcholného středověku stěhovali do měst a věnovali se
obchodu a řemeslům proto, že pro ně nezbyl dostatek půdy, nebo zda
samotná existence měst a potenciálně lukrativních trhů pobízela
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zemědělce k vyšší produktivitě. Jak říká rondo Cameron, šlo v případě
obou procesů bezesporu o vzájemné ovlivňování (Cameron 1996).
Agregátní růst evropské ekonomiky zastavila načas až tzv. černá smrt
v polovině 14. století, v jejímž důsledku vymřela zhruba třetina evropské populace. V dějinách jen výjimečně bývají věci pouze černé nebo
bílé a platí to i pro takové katastrofy, jakými jsou morové rány. Tato epidemie měla osudové důsledky pro restrukturalizaci kontinentálního
hospodářského systému, a proto se k ní níže ještě jednou vrátíme.
není pochyb o tom, že v předchozím období raného středověku se
západní Evropa stala doslovnou ekonomickou periferií eurasijského
kontinentu. Byla to naopak Čína éry dynastie Tchang (618–907) a především dynastie Sung (960–1276) a jistě též arabský svět za vlády
umájjovců (683–750 ) a Abbásovců (750–1258), kdo představoval skutečné ekonomické centrum tehdejšího světa. Muslimský svět těžil ze
svého výhodného geografického postavení. Byl nejen ekonomickým,
nýbrž i kulturním zprostředkovatelem mezi západem a dálným východem. Mnoho důležitých technologických výdobytků, jako byl kompas nebo papír, se Evropané od Číňanů naučili používat právě prostřednictvím Arabů. Obdobné platí také o účetnictví nebo o arabských
číslicích, které v porovnání s těžkopádnými římskými číslicemi významně usnadňovaly obchodní interakci.
Sinologové se celkem shodují v názoru, že éra dynastie Sung představovala vrchol čínských dějin jak z hlediska rozvoje umění či filozofie,
tak i hospodářství, technologie nebo veřejné správy. Byla to doba značné sociální mobility. Císařům se podařilo potlačit nároky aristokratických rodů a jejich mocenské postavení zabrali noví byrokraté, jejichž
počet se údajně v první polovině 11. století zdvojnásoboval každé čtyři
roky, a také rychle bohatnoucí obchodníci (Wood 1995, s. 41). Tehdejší
hlavní město Kchaj-feng se 750 tisíci obyvateli bylo ve své době největším městem světa. V porovnání s tím byla tehdejší evropská „velkoměsta“ bezvýznamnými osadami – největší italská města jako Milán,
Benátky či Janov obývalo ve vrcholném středověku mezi 100 a 200 tisíci
obyvatel, obdobně velká byla Paříž, zatímco takový londýn se pohyboval kdesi mezi 20 a 30 tisíci. Prosperita Číny závisela na rozmachu zemědělské výroby (pěstování rýže) a rozvoji obchodu, který byl usnadněn pokroky v říční i námořní dopravě. Světového věhlasu se právě
tehdy dočkal třeba čínský porcelán, považovaný za „nejčistší typ keramiky, jaká byla kdy vyrobena“. Ostatně fakt, že původ slova kaolín je odvozen od tehdejšího klíčového čínského naleziště jílu Kao-ling je dostatečně výmluvný (hart-davis 2009, 163). Produkce železa v tehdejší Číně
dosáhla takového objemu, že se jí znovu vyrovnala až Velká Británie
v počátcích průmyslové revoluce na konci 18. století. Čína v éře dynastie
Sung bývá právem považována za nejpokročilejší ekonomiku své doby.
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William Thompson (a mezi badateli není zdaleka s tímto názorem osamocen) proto také vyslovil následující kontrafaktuální tvrzení: „Kdyby
se podařilo udržet tento trend ekonomického růstu, dějiny druhého milénia mohly být úplně jiné“ (Thompson 2002, s. 107). Čína byla na nejlepší cestě stát se matkou průmyslové revoluce, a to navíc o řadu staletí
dříve, než se jí ve skutečnosti stala Velká Británie.
Podrobením Číny Mongoly však tamní vývoj nabral odlišný směr,
třebaže rozhodně nelze ani mongolskou dynastii Jüan považovat
za nějakého nositele tmářství, v čemž nás utvrzuje i legendární spis
Milion Marca Pola, který v poslední třetině 13. století v Číně pobýval
(Polo 1950). Skutečný obrat politický i ekonomicky nastal v Číně teprve
později za dynastie Ming (1368–1644 ), která navzdory faktu, že ještě na
počátku její vlády byla Čína co do počtu lodí námořní velmocí, se nakonec během 15. století z vůle císaře vnějšímu světu téměř uzavřela.
Přitom na počátku 15. století měla Čína ty nejlepší předpoklady k tomu, aby právě její mořeplavci objevovali nové kontinenty a ovládli globální námořní obchod. Ať již šlo o technologii budování lodí nebo navigační techniky, Evropané se svým východoasijským konkurentům
ani zdaleka nemohli rovnat. V době, kdy portugalské karavely nesoucí
stěží padesát až sto tun nákladu opatrně putovaly podél afrických břehů, čínské lodě byly schopny naložit více než čtyři sta tun nákladu.
Byly to jednak vnitropolitické konflikty a rostoucí ohrožení z pevniny,
které nutily čínské císaře věnovat větší pozornost obraně na souši než
námořním výbojům, a jistě také rostoucí vliv konfuciánských učenců,
kteří byli z principu nepřátelští vůči obchodu a kontaktům s cizinci
(Cole 2001, 3). ne, že by se v Evropě neobjevovaly obdobné tendence.
Papežové (například Jan XXii. ve dvacátých letech 14. století) se periodicky snažili zakazovat obchod s muslimy. Politická rozdrobenost kontinentu však efektivně bránila prosazení jejich vůle. Právě tato decentralizace moci bývá mimo jiné často považována, zvláště mezi odpůrci
evropské integrace, za jednu z klíčových podmínek budoucího mocenského i ekonomického růstu Evropy.
Findlay a O’rourke ve výše citované práci vznesli, či spíše oprášili
a konzistentně vysvětlili jednu značně kontroverzní tezi o ekonomickém rozvoji. Podle jejich názoru ve středověku došlo ke dvěma zásadním událostem, které předurčily evropský kontinent k tomu, že jako
první nastoupil cestu k modernitě. za prvé to měla být Čingischánova
mongolská expanze v první polovině 13. století, za druhé pak černá
smrt v polovině 14. století. dvě naprosté sociální katastrofy, že by měly
být základem blahobytu společností dnešního západu?
V případě Čingischána literatura běžně hovoří o bohapusté genocidě, jíž padlo za oběť ne méně než 30 milionů lidí. V porovnání s výkony
řady režimů 20. století se toto číslo nezdá být až tak ohromující.
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Vezmeme-li však v úvahu tehdejší odhadovaný počet obyvatelstva
a dáme-li jej do poměru s uvedeným počtem mrtvých, pak kdyby měl
Čingischán dosáhnout stejného poměrného výsledku v dnešních
podmínkách, musel by zahubit přes půl miliardy lidí. zároveň však
stejní Mongolové tím, že se jim podařilo vytvořit skutečné eurasijské
impérium, vytvořili i podmínky pro do té doby nevídaný rozvoj obchodu. navzdory tomu, že si mongolská říše nedokázala zachovat jednotu, vládci jejích jednotlivých částí se shodovali v názoru na prospěšnost kontinentální obchodní výměny a dbali o bezpečnost, jež byla
pro její rozkvět nezbytnou podmínkou. Byl to skutečný zlatý věk
tzv. hedvábné stezky, po níž proudily výrobky, suroviny i ideje napříč
Eurasií. Výmluvně tuto janusovskou tvář mongolského impéria vystihl
Allan Cooper, když napsal: „Mongolové vytvořili první globální ekonomiku a vytvořili civilizaci sjednocující roztříštěné kmeny Asie. Čína byla sjednocena pod jedinou autoritou, rusko překročilo horizont své feudální minulosti. zůstává tu však stále oněch zhruba 30 milionů
lidských bytostí, zahubených během budování tohoto nového světového řádu“ (Cooper 2009, 133). už to nebyl svět oddělených civilizací, jež
o své vzájemné existenci měly jen nejasné povědomí. Jejich kontakty
a kooperace postoupily na novou, kvalitativně vyšší úroveň. „Jestliže
Evropa měla jednou ovládnout svět, bylo to možné proto, že Evropa jako první začala chápat existenci světa, který je možné ovládnout.
Existuje tak přímá linie od Marka Pola ke Kryštofu Kolumbovi, od
Benátčana hledícího na východ k muži z Janova, jenž obracel svůj zrak
k západu“ (Findlay, O’rourke 2007, 109).
Podobně jako mongolská expanze, byla i černá smrt, tedy rychlé
rozšíření moru během čtyřicátých let 14. století, formou „kreativní destrukce“, jak by to pravděpodobně nazval Joseph Alois Schumpeter.
Byla to společenská katastrofa nevídaného rozsahu. Evropa potřebovala nejméně dvě století na to, aby se její populace dostala znovu na
úroveň před rokem 1348. Série morových ran po tomto roce zredukovala do poloviny 15. století evropskou populaci zhruba o třetinu, přičemž v některých severoevropských zemích počet lidí klesl až o 60 %
(livi-Bacci 2003, 99–100). Agregátní výkon jednotlivých ekonomik se
v důsledku populačních ztrát hluboko propadl. na černou smrt však
lze nahlížet i jinak. nedostatek pracovních sil vedl k výraznému růstu
reálných mezd nižších vrstev. A jejich vyšší disponibilní příjem zvýšil
poptávku po kvalitnější stravě i řemeslných výrobcích, na něž dříve nemohly ani pomyslet (Epstein 2007, 70–71).
Karl Polanyi kdysi kategoricky poznamenal: „Co se materiálních
podmínek týče, západní Evropa kolem roku 1100 sotva dosahovala
úrovně Říma o tisíc let dříve. […] Středověká Evropa byla v ekonomickém smyslu z velké části na úrovni staré Persie, indie nebo Číny a zcela
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jistě, co se bohatství a kultury týče, by nemohla soutěžit s královstvím
nového Egypta, které existovalo o dva tisíce let dříve“ (Polanyi 2006,
50). Podíváme-li se na západní polokouli té doby, stěží lze konstatovat
něco jiného. Ekonomické systémy velkých indiánských civilizací byly
velmi divergentní. zatímco aztécká ekonomika více splňovala znaky
komercializace, incké hospodářství se neslo ve znamení přísně centralizované redistribuce prostřednictvím silné ústřední státní moci.
Ačkoli z hlediska užívaných technologií se jistě vyrovnaly civilizacím
bronzového věku, existovaly dva osudové faktory, jež na jedné straně
podvazovalo jejich další ekonomický rozvoj, a na druhé straně předurčilo i porážku v konfrontaci s evropskými conquistadory. za prvé to byla
chabě rozvinutá doprava. Středo- a jihoameričtí indiáni sice kolo znali,
ale příliš jej nevyužívali. V tomto směru zřejmě působil nevhodný geografický reliéf plný příkrých horských srázů. za druhé je nutné zmínit
odlišný vztah ke zpracování kovů. Metalurgické umění indiánských
civilizací předkolumbovské éry sice bylo v komparativní perspektivě
nemálo pokročilé, avšak o to méně užitečné. utilitární využívání kovů
bylo minimální, pročež tato indiánská impéria stěží mohla odolat zbraním dobyvačných Evropanů.
Velká divergence
Odhady produktivity hospodářství nevyznívají tak pesimisticky, jak
evokují výše citovaná slova Polanyiho. Propočty hdP na hlavu, které
provedl Angus Maddison, předpokládají, že kolem roku 1000 byla výkonnost evropských, asijských a amerických ekonomik víceméně srovnatelná. V roce 1500 však byl již patrný mírný náskok evropského
západu a tento náskok se v dalších staletích velmi rychle zvyšoval.
zatímco v západní Evropě nebo Japonsku mezi rokem 1500 a 2000
vzrostl hdP na hlavu zhruba 30x, v latinské Americe jen 15x a v Africe
ani ne 4x. Přitom výchozí produkce v roce 1500 byla téměř srovnatelná2
(Maddison 2005, 7).
Otázka, proč došlo k této „velké divergenci“ a Evropa nastoupila
svůj ekonomický Sonderweg, který ji jako první civilizační okruh vyvázal
ze zajetí malthusiánského ekvilibria ovládajícího tradiční ekonomiky,
představuje jedno z největších „mystérií“ historické vědy. Tak jako je
vysvětlení velké hospodářské krize z let 1929–1934 považováno za
„svatý grál“ ekonomie, za nímž se neúspěšně pachtí celé generace
2
Maddison předpokládá pro západní Evropu v roce 1500 zhruba 771 dolarů, latinskou Ameriku 416
a pro Afriku 414. V roce 2001 uvádí v případě západní Evropy 19 256 dolarů, pro latinskou Ameriku
5 811 a pro Afriku 1 489.
19
badatelů, platí totéž pro hospodářské historiky ve vztahu k vysvětlení
této tzv. velké divergence.
navzdory četným a dlouhým obdobím ekonomického růstu v dějinách lidstva, růst, který započal v Evropě 17. a 18. století, byl něčím
novým a historicky bezprecedentním. Žádný civilizační okruh totiž nedokázal do té doby prolomit výše zmíněnou malthusiánskou logiku
systémové rovnováhy. Podle ní technologický rozvoj a vyšší produktivita zemědělství měla zásadně pozitivní efekt na populační růst a zároveň minimální vliv na růst životního standardu, což dokládá řada
srovnávacích historických studií (Ashraf, galor 2011).
Thomas Malthus ve svém Eseji o principech lidské populace z roku 1798
předestřel zákonitost, podle níž každý ekonomický růst má pozitivní
vliv na zlepšení životní úrovně lidí jen krátkodobě. V dlouhodobé perspektivě je však bez efektu. Ekonomický růst totiž umožní, aby přežilo více dětí, které by jinak z důvodu nedostatku zdrojů zahynuly.
Proto je nutně každý ekonomický růst dlouhodobě neutralizován populačním přírůstkem (Malthus 2003). ze stejného důvodu lze stěží
postihnout mezi starověkem a raným novověkem nějaké výrazné zlepšení životní úrovně obyčejných lidí. gregory Clark proto nedávno vyslovil na první pohled velmi kontroverzní závěr: „zatímco po dlouhou
dobu před průmyslovou revolucí si jen nepočetné elity mohly dopřát
blahobytný životní styl, průměrný člověk se v roce 1800 neměl o mnoho lépe než jeho předkové z doby paleolitu nebo neolitu“ (Clark 2007,
5). Citovaný autor dokonce na několika místech evokuje nevyslovenou otázku, zda nebylo historickou chybou, že lidstvo nezůstalo u lovecko-sběračských způsobů obživy. Jistěže by tím bylo ochuzeno
o produkci řemesel, rozvinutý náboženský život či rozličné kulturní
výdobytky. na druhé straně si však lidé mohli ušetřit spoustu dřiny.
na základě výzkumů strategií přežití komunit primátů a antropologických výzkumů lovecko-sběračských společností Clark dovozuje, že lidé by jistě museli pracovat daleko méně než v zemědělské nebo industriální společnosti: „Pokud vezmeme v úvahu jen druhy nejbližší
člověku – lidoopy a opice –, jejich pracovní nasazení [hledání potravy,
stěhování, obrana teritoria apod.] zabírá v průměru 4,4 hodiny ve dni.
Typicky minimální pracovní nasazení takových samozásobitelských
komunit pomáhá vysvětlit, proč se Polynésie jevila evropským námořníkům tak idylicky a proč kapitán Blyth měl velký problém, aby své
muže vůbec dostal zpátky na palubu, když přistáli na Tahiti. hlavními
poživatinami tam byly plody chlebovníku a kokosy, což tamní obyvatelé občas proložili vepřovým a rybím masem. […] Polynésané zcela
zjevně pracovali jen minimálně“ (Clark 2007, 66). na druhé straně, pokud by lidé neučinili v neolitu krok k zemědělské civilizaci, planeta by
jistě byla schopna uživit jen zlomek dnešního počtu obyvatelstva.
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Clark v tomto směru uvádí výmluvný příklad Tasmánie, kde tamní lidé
zažili velmi výrazný technologický regres, takže v době jejího objevení Evropany v roce 1788 byla tato země schopna uživit jen zhruba pět
tisíc osob, zatímco jen dvojnásobně velká Anglie ve stejné době osm
milionů (Clark 2007, 142).
historikové se bez větších problémů shodují v tom, že první zemí,
kde došlo ke zformování nového ekonomického řádu modernity, jenž
prolomil neúprosnou malthusiánskou logiku, byla Velká Británie.
Podstatně méně se již shodnou v otázce, co bylo příčinou tohoto vývoje. Jednoznačně dnes v historiografii převažuje přesvědčení, že nešlo
o proces monokauzální, tedy že není možné nalézt jedinou příčinu,
jež by podmiňovala všechny ostatní. Výmluvný je v tomto směru výrok
klasika ekonomické historiografie šedesátých let 20. století Walta
rostowa, který zvolil následující formulaci: „A tak Velká Británie, která
měla více základních průmyslových zdrojů než nizozemí, více protestantů různých sekt i více plavidel než Francie, a jež uskutečnila roku
1688 svou politickou, sociální a náboženskou revoluci, tato Velká
Británie byla jediná schopna zapřáhnout do téhož vozu svůj bavlnářský průmysl, své uhelné doly a své železářství, využít výhod parního
stroje a rozvinout zahraniční obchod, a tak dát počáteční impuls celkovému vývoji“ (Brinton 1976, 564).
rostow zde vyjmenoval hlavní faktory, jež se obvykle objevují v diskusích o příčinách oné velké divergence novověku. Ústředním fenoménem průmyslové revoluce je jistě rychlý růst produktivity práce. z čeho
však tento růst pramenil? Mohlo to být tím, že Evropané si osvojili nový vztah k práci a k přírodě. Francis Bacon, anglický filozof z přelomu
16. a 17. století, toto nové myšlení formuloval pregnantně, když prohlásil, že „vědění je moc“ a na okolní svět začal nahlížet jako na souhrn
neomezených zdrojů určených pro exploataci. historik Jan de Vries
kdysi vymyslel úsměvnou slovní hříčku, že průmyslová revoluce byla
ve skutečnosti revolucí přičinlivosti (tedy v angličtině místo industrial revolution hovořil o industrious revolution; de Vries 1994). Avšak odkud se tato přičinlivost vzala? německý historik Werner Conze kdysi kategoricky prohlásil, že evropská proměna pojmu práce, z níž se stal klíčový
konstitutivní prvek naší identity a hlavní nástroj naší seberealizace
ve světě, bezpochyby byla klíčovým předpokladem revoluce nejen
průmyslové, nýbrž i v politicko-sociálním smyslu (Brunner, Conze,
Koselleck 1973, Band i, 173–176). Proč však došlo k proměně statusu
práce v hodnotovém žebříčku Evropanů? Max Weber, třebaže dnes jeho teorie rozhodně není brána jako absolutní, se domníval, že tato proměna zasáhla nejprve mysl protestantů, kteří z náboženských důvodů
začali v práci hledat znamení Boží přízně a tím i své naděje na spásu
(Weber 1998, 185–245).
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nehrály však určující roli úplně jiné faktory? Jak již bylo řečeno
výše, v Evropě došlo v důsledku černé smrti k výraznému vzrůstu reálných mezd. Třebaže do 16. století v důsledku logiky fungování malthusiánského ekvilibria ve většině zemí došlo k obnově původní rovnováhy, v holandsku či v Británii zůstaly relativně vysoké i v následujícím
období. globální britská obchodní expanze, doprovázená merkantilistickou politikou, vtělenou do Navigační akty z roku 1651, vedla
k akumulaci drahých kovů v Anglii, pročež byl kapitál laciný a dostupný, zatímco lidská práce relativně drahá, což představovalo potřebný
impuls pro technologické inovace, jejichž rychlý sled se stal charakteristickým rysem pozdější průmyslové revoluce. nebo snad byla nejen
podmínkou, nýbrž i příčinou akumulace technických vynálezů rostoucí vzdělanost Evropanů v osvícenské epoše? Steven Epstein nabízí ještě
další možnou perspektivu. Objevení Ameriky poskytlo Evropě neomezené zdroje půdy. Právě nedostatek půdy byl totiž vždy klíčovým faktorem, na němž se v předchozích epochách ekonomický a s ním populační růst vždy spolehlivě dříve či později zastavil. Evropa se tak mohla
efektivně zbavovat populačního přetlaku. Afrika díky obchodu s otroky poskytovala zase v zásadě neomezený zdroj pracovní síly. A sami
Evropané k těmto vhodným podmínkám přispěli efektivním politickým uspořádáním, kdy centralizace státní moci v éře absolutismu vystřídala feudální roztříštěnost, vždy ohrožovanou inherentní nestabilitou válek lokálních aristokratů, což neprospívá ani obchodní výměně
ani ekonomickému růstu (Epstein 2007). A k tomu ještě můžeme v duchu Adama Smithe doplnit znovu význam globálního obchodu. růst
trhu umožňuje větší specializaci a prohloubení dělby práce, což vede
k ekonomickému růstu. Podmínky pro růst trhu dávala námořní expanze Evropanů do ostatního světa.
S tímto způsobem argumentace a kladení otázek by bylo možné pokračovat i nadále. Je zřejmé, že všechny uvedené příčiny lze zařadit do
kauzálního nexu průmyslové revoluce a že všechny spolu více či méně
souvisí. Velká Británie byla jistě první, ale záhy, již od počátku 19. století, ji následovalo rostoucí množství zemí. Přesto je nutné patrně dát za
pravdu Milanu Myškovi, který odkazuje přesvědčení o tom, že Anglie
byla pro Evropu školou průmyslové revoluce, do říše historických báchorek. Její podmínky byly totiž natolik specifické a jedinečné, že stěží
některá jiná země, ať již evropská nebo mimoevropská, mohla použít
v nezměněné podobě britskou strategii industrializace (Myška 2010, 96).
zatímco starší teorie modernizace předkládala anglickou transformaci jako ideální modelový případ, soudobé přístupy jsou zdrženlivější. zmíněný starší přístup totiž nutně implikuje ve větší či menší
míře odsouzení všech ostatních modernizačních strategií. Shmuel
Eisenstadt, jeden z klíčových kritiků singulární teorie modernizace,
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proto opakovaně upozorňoval, že modernizace není synonymem pro
westernizaci (Eisenstadt 2002, 3). Citovaného autora vždy více zajímala politická a kulturní stránka modernizace než její ekonomická dimenze. Přesto však je jeho vize plurality modernit (multiple modernities)
užitečná i pro pochopení diametrálně odlišných cest, kterými se jednotlivé společnosti vydaly na pochod od malthusiánské stagnace
k ekonomickému růstu. V jisté míře lze tyto cesty zobecnit do čtyř ideálně typických forem přechodu k moderní industriální společnosti
(Myška 2010, 95–97).
za historicky nejstarší lze považovat liberální model, charakteristický pro britskou industrializaci. Příklon Británie k tomuto neintervencionistickému modelu lze snadněji vysvětlit jedinečnými strukturálními podmínkami, než nějakou zvláštní osvíceností tamních
obyvatel nebo politických elit. Protože tamní industrializace byla první, nemusela čelit vyspělejší konkurenci. zprvu byly navíc využívány
i kapitálově relativně nenáročné technologie, a proto si mohla bez větších obtíží dovolit s úspěchem aplikovat uvedený postup.
O něco mladším byl protekcionistický model, který se rozvinul v zemích s opožděným nástupem industrializace, kvůli čemuž bylo nutné
nejprve rozvíjející se domácí průmyslovou výrobu chránit proti vyspělejší zahraniční (britské) konkurenci. Myška právem v tomto směru poznamenává: „Pod deštníkem protekcionismu vyrostly nejmocnější tržně-hospodářské průmyslové systémy naší epochy: uSA, Japonsko
a německo. Všechny využívaly ochranných cel, ve všech se průmysl
rozvíjel s podporou bank, ve všech bylo nezbytné, aby se zvýšená potřeba kapitálu kryla vznikem kapitálových asociací na bázi akciových
účastí“ (Myška 2010, 96).
Třetí, intervencionistický, model se začal prosazovat až ve 20. století. Pro něj se stala charakteristickou vysoká míra státního zasahování,
kdy stát cíleně provádí rozvojovou politiku a organizuje investiční aktivitu, zatímco na druhé straně má tendenci omezovat samoregulační
mechanismus trhu. Takové přístupy se staly charakteristickými zvláště
pro širokou plejádu rozličných rozvojových diktatur. Úspěch v tomto
směru sklidila například Jižní Korea, třebaže spíše patrně platí lakonický postřeh Surjita Bhally o tom, že „na každou úspěšnou diktaturu připadá nejméně deset neúspěšných sourozenců“ (Bhalla 2002, 186).
Poslední možnost pak představuje socialistický model spočívající
v ideálním případě na úplném postátnění hospodářství, zrušení tržního mechanismu a centrálním plánování. Typickým se ve 20. století
stal pro diktatury sovětského typu. Třebaže Stalin prostřednictvím
masového uplatnění teroru a milionů lidských obětí dokázal s touto
rozvojovou strategií dosáhnout v zaostalé agrární zemi, jakou byl
Sovětský svaz mezi světovými válkami, bezprecedentního růstu prů23
myslové základny, v dlouhodobé perspektivě tato strategie narazila
na své inherentní limity a po roce 1989 byla v globálním měřítku
v podstatě opuštěna.
Překonání malthusiánského ekvilibria ovšem nedokázaly dosáhnout všechny společnosti. Ba dokonce fakt, že některé to dokázaly,
znamenalo pro jiné výrazné zhoršení jejich situace. dobře je to vidět
na případu Číny a indie, které nesporně byly velmi úspěšnými předmoderními ekonomikami. důkazem toho byla jejich dlouhodobá
schopnost uživit mimořádně početnou populaci. V roce 1750 se většina
světového sekundárního zpracovatelského sektoru, předchůdce moderního průmyslu, nacházela v Číně (33 %) nebo v indii (25 %). V roce
1913 však již byla situace zcela odlišná. Čínský podíl klesl na 4 %
a indický dokonce na pouhé jedno procento. naopak Británie, uSA
a zbytek evropského kontinentu tehdy představovaly více než tři čtvrtiny veškeré světové průmyslové produkce. nebylo to ale jen tím, že průmyslový výkon v těchto zemích prudce vzrostl. V Číně a indii totiž zároveň v absolutních číslech poklesl, protože tamní ať již textilní nebo
metalurgický průmysl zkrachoval v důsledku neschopnosti konkurovat pokročilejšímu západu. Během 19. století se tak Asie stala z dřívějšího zpracovatelského centra světa zaostalou periferií orientující se na
zemědělskou výrobu a její export (Allen 2011, 6–8). Ekonomický růst
moderní epochy tak lidstvo dovedl do paradoxní situace, kterou výmluvně vyjádřil již výše citovaný gregory Clark: „Prosperity se nedočkaly všechny národy. Konzum v některých zemích, zvláště v subsaharské Africe, se nachází pod úrovní předindustriálních časů. země
jako Malawi nebo Tanzánie by na tom hmotně byly lépe, kdyby nikdy
nepřišly do kontaktu s industrializovaným světem. […] Tyto africké
společnosti zůstaly v zajetí malthusiánské éry, kde technologické pokroky mají za následek jen růst populace a životní standardy jsou tak
stlačeny na existenční minimum. Moderní medicína však toto existenční minimum stlačila hluboko pod stav, který byl nutný v době kamenné. […] V dnešní době tedy kráčí po planetě nejbohatší a zároveň
s nimi i nejchudší lidé, jací kdy v dějinách žili“ (Clark 2007, 3).
Globalizovaná budoucnost?
V roce 2001 publikoval geoffrey hodgson knihu úsměvně nazvanou
Jak ekonomie zapomněla na historii, v níž trefně poznamenal: „Stoupenci
obecné teorie [v ekonomii] neuznávají problém historické jedinečnosti, neboť věří, že ekonomie může fungovat výhradně na základě univerzálních, historicky nekonkrétních předpokladů“ (hodgson 2001, 28).
Vůbec to neznamená, že by hodgson v sociální vědě proti obecné teorii
24
prosazoval vulgární empirismus, který není schopen jakéhokoli zobecnění a dokáže popsat jen jednotlivosti. Ani tato stať neměla takový cíl.
historické studium fungování ekonomických systémů může ukázat,
jak řada našich přesvědčení, mnohdy alespoň implicitně opřených
o teoretické modely, se otřásá během konfrontace s poznatky o minulosti v samotných základech. zadlužení veřejných rozpočtů nemusí
nutně znamenat úpadek, jak se den co den můžeme dočítat v novinových článcích o soudobé fiskální krizi. Velká Británie v první třetině
19. století dokázala být i s dluhem plně srovnatelným s dnešními problémovými zeměmi Evropské unie nejrychleji rostoucí ekonomikou
světa. A byla to stejná Británie, kterou oslavujeme jako zvěstovatele
moderního individualismu, svobody a omezené vlády, kdo své občany
v 18. století zdaňoval s daleko větší razancí než ve stejné době bourbonská Francie, považovaná v duchu osvícenských výkladů za příklad
svévolného despotismu absolutistické vlády. radikální doktrínu tržní
samoregulace v duchu zásady laissez faire, již máme tendenci považovat
za výdobytek evropského liberalismu 19. století, nalezneme efektivně
fungovat v dávných dobách v místech, kde bychom to snad ani neočekávali, ať již to byla říše muslimských Fatimovců ve středověkém
Egyptě nebo asijské přístavy Kalkata či Malaka v raném novověku.
Otroctví na západní polokouli v 18. a 19. století, jež se jeví jen jako
ohavné reziduum hodné zrušení v rodící se osvícenské civilizaci modernity, bylo na druhé straně jednou z neopominutelných podmínek
nastartování ekonomického růstu v Evropě. A navzdory očekávání to
byli otrokářští Jižané, kdo se v roce 1861 ve jménu obhajoby svobodného obchodu odtrhli od uSA, a nikoli lincolnovi Seveřané, kteří naopak
usilovali o protekcionistická opatření na ochranu domácí průmyslové
produkce (Wakelyn 1996).
Populární poučka Fréderica Bastiata o tom, že „tam, kde zboží
nemůže překračovat hranice, překračují je armády“, naráží na stěží
zpochybnitelný fakt, že úžasná expanze evropského obchodu
v 17. a 18. století se realizovala v éře neutuchajícího válčení, s nímž
byla nerozlučně spojena, ba dokonce uskutečňovala se v nemalé míře
díky tomuto válčení a jeho prostřednictvím. hospodářské dějiny jsou
doslova plny takových paradoxů. A právě proto při mnohdy užitečných poučeních vyvozovaných z rozličných grafů a teorií ekonomické
vědy, bychom nikdy neměli zapomínat na jedinečné historické podmínky, na které tato teoretická poučení hodláme aplikovat. Vždy tak
znovu člověku vyvstane na mysli legendární goetheovo úsloví o šedivosti každé teorie a věčně zeleném stromu života.
Příběh dějin holocénu, jak byl v krátkosti nastíněn na předchozích
stránkách, jistě utvrzuje přesvědčení o nevyhnutelné (nejen ekonomické)
globalizaci světa, která krůček po krůčku postupuje napříč tisíciletími
25
lidské civilizace. Přesto by však z úhlu naší pozornosti neměla unikat
období, která se naopak nesla ve znamení deglobalizačních procesů.
nebyla ani krátká ani jich nebylo málo. Po Bastiatovi výše uvedenou
poučku o blahodárnosti obchodu pro mírovou koexistenci opakoval
bezpočet renomovaných ekonomů – jmenujme z doby před první
světovou válkou alespoň léona Walrase, gustava Schmollera nebo
Fréderica Passyho. Tito mužové byli současníky velké globalizace závěru 19. století, kdy komerční spolupráce a objem globálního obchodu
i díky dlouhodobé stabilitě v mezinárodních vztazích vzrůstaly v nevídané míře, zatímco války byly jen lokální a odehrávaly se daleko za branami rozvinutého světa (Adolf 2009; Stearns 2010, 98–99). Byli svědky
procesů, jež nejsou nepodobné uctívané stejně jako zatracované ekonomické globalizaci naší současnosti. Opravdová světová válka byla
tehdy něčím těžko představitelným a žádná z vlád tehdejších evropských impérií o ni plánovitě neusilovala (Ferguson 2004). A pak se nečekaně, doslova ze dne na den na dlouhá desetiletí globalizační proces
zastavil a obrátil nazpět, protože kdesi na zapadlé periferii rozvinutého
světa zaznělo několik výstřelů. To v bosenském Sarajevu bezvýznamný
student gavrilo Princip namířil svou zbraň na vůz rakouského následníka trůnu. Psal se 28. červen 1914…
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30
BAD YEAR
ECONOMICS:
CULTURAL
RESPONSES TO
RISK AND
UNCERTAINTY
EDITED BY
PAUL HALSTEAD AND JOHN O'SHEA
CAMBRIDGE
UNIVERSITY PRESS
68
Chapter 5
The economy has a normal surplus: economic
stability and social change among early farming
communities of Thessaly, Greece
Paul Halstead
The subject of surplus may seem out of place in a volume concerned with
scarcity, but the two issues are integrally linked. The importance of surplus
lies in its problematic relationship with the emergence and maintenance of
elites and other non-producing specialists. It is proposed that surplus be
viewed as a normal response to the risk of scarcity in certain types of economy and certain types of environment. The changing role of surplus, and
the way in which it may be appropriated by an emerging elite, are explored
in the particular context of early farming communities in Thessaly, Greece.
In conclusion, the Thessalian case is reviewed in a broader context.
Surplus: problems of definition
The traditional view of surplus, and of its relationship to the
development of social complexity, is that: 'Society persuaded or
compelled the farmers to produce a surplus of food over and
above their domestic requirements, and by concentrating this surplus used it to support a new urban population of specialised
craftsmen, merchants, priests, officials, and clerks' (Childe
1954:30-1). An agricultural surplus was needed to support the
full-time specialists who created 'civilisation', and in this sense surplus was a necessary precondition of the development of social
complexity.
The early civilisations occurred in rather similar natural environments. This suggested that the breakthrough which permitted the creation of surplus, and so of civilisation, was the coincidence in the Nile, Euphrates and Indus valleys of (a) the technological expertise and (b) the environmental opportunity for ir-
rigation agriculture. In Mesopotamia, for example: 'If once the
flood waters could be controlled and canalized, the swamps
drained, and the arid banks watered, it could be made a Garden of
Eden. The soil was so fertile that a hundred-fold return was not
impossible ... Here, then, farmers could easily produce a surplus
above their domestic needs' (Childe 1954:98-9). Given Childe's
view of civilisation as 'progress' (e.g. 1954:292; cf. Dunnell 1980),
it was perhaps natural for him to stress the conditions under which
farmers were able to produce a surplus. In so doing, however, he
came close to treating the ability to produce a surplus as a sufficient precondition of the development of civilisation.
A major reappraisal of the relationship between surplus and
the development of social complexity was triggered by Pearson in
a paper somewhat misleadingly entitled 'The economy has no surplus' (Pearson 1957). He offered a two-fold critique of the traditional view. Firstly he rejected the idea of an absolute surplus - of
redundant production above subsistence which, as it were, invites
use to support specialists. The minimum biological requirements
of food for human beings are rather variable, as are culturally acceptable levels of mortality. Moreover, the notion of absolute surplus assumes 'primacy ... of eating over thinking, socializing,
governing, crafting, trading, playing' (Pearson 1957:325). But man
does not live by bread alone and cultural perceptions of minimum
subsistence levels incorporate varying amounts of other resources.
If a minimum subsistence level could not be defined, absolute sur-
The economy has a normal surplus
69
plus could not exist. In this sense, Pearson argued, the economy
has no surplus.
The second part of Pearson's critique followed from the
first. If an absolute surplus could not be defined, either biologically or culturally, surplus had to be seen in a relative sense: 'goods
or services would be surplus only if the society ... declared them to
be available for a specific purpose'. And whether this purpose was
trade, feasting, the support of an elite or whatever, T h e essential
point is that relative surpluses are initiated by the society in question'. Moreover, relative surpluses might result from increased
production, but 'they may also be created with no change whatsoever in the quantity of subsistence means by re-allocating goods or
services from one use to another' (Pearson 1957:323). In short:
There are always and everywhere potential surpluses available.
What counts is the institutional means for bringing them to life'
(Pearson 1957:339). In arguing that the institutional means for
mobilising surplus are more critical than the environmental opportunity or technological capacity for producing it, Pearson effectively rejected surplus as a sufficient precondition for the development of social complexity - a stance which has won widespread
acceptance as perception of civilisation in terms of progress has receded.
Pearson's argument that absolute surplus must be rejected,
because of the lack of a biologically defined minimum subsistence
level, has rightly been criticised by Harris (1959): problems in the
calculation of such a minimum arise, mercifully, from a shortage
of data from controlled starvation experiments, rather than because human beings do not starve if fed too little. Paradoxically,
however, it is Pearson's contention that the economy has no (absolute) surplus which seems to have made more impact than his
observation that the economy always has a (relative) surplus.
Sahlins, for example, advances a broadly similar argument
(Sahlins 1974). He attacks the false dichotomy between production/or and production beyond subsistence: even in the smallestscale societies, individual households are not autonomously viable
- they are dependent on others for mates, peace, food in emergencies, etc. The economy provisions not just individual households,
but also society (Sahlins 1974:187n2) and in this sense, again, the
economy always has a (relative) surplus. Though Sahlins notes the
existence (and indeed necessity) of production beyond immediate,
domestic, subsistence needs, however, his emphasis is on underproduction in small-scale societies. The domestic mode of production 'harbors an antisurplus principle. Geared to the production
of livelihood, it is endowed with the tendency to come to a halt at
that point. Hence if "surplus" is defined as output above the
producers' requirements, the household system is not organized
for it. Nothing within the structure of production for use pushes it
to transcend itself (Sahlins 1974:86).
Thus the economy, or at any rate the domestic mode of
production, has no surplus, relative or absolute, and so the mobilisation of surplus also requires institutionalised means for ensuring increased production. Appropriately, the onerous task of stimulating intensification and greater production is assigned to emerging leaders. Tribal powers ... encroach upon the domestic sys-
tem to undermine its autonomy, curb its anarchy, and unleash its
productivity' (Sahlins 1974:130,140). Sahlins' emphasis on the
catalytic effect of emerging leaders has been widely adopted to
account for the development of social complexity - and of the
'surplus' which underpinned it (e.g. Friedman and Rowlands
1977; Redman 1978:233; Bender 1978; Friedman 1984).
This approach has been elaborated for bronze age Greece
by Gamble (1981,1982) and Renfrew (1982). Renfrew's account is
the more explicit. He reaffirms the traditional role of surplus as a
necessary precondition of social complexity: 'no complex society
can function unless the level of subsistence production is sufficient
to feed a range of specialists, including the leaders and organisers,
in addition to those engaged in food production' (Renfrew
1982:265). Like Pearson, Renfrew apparently opts for a relative
rather than absolute interpretation of surplus. The term "surplus" is a dangerous one ... We shall use "production beyond subsistence". .. production may be disaggregated into subsistence
production . . . and into social production and trade or cash
production, and it is for these latter purposes that production beyond subsistence level... is available' (Renfrew 1982:267-8). Tacitly following Pearson and Sahlins, however, in assuming that the
(domestic) economy has no (absolute) surplus, Renfrew concludes
that the appearance of social complexity required substantially increased production and, therefore, economic intensification. Such
intensification could not be understood in terms of technological
or environmental opportunities, as these had remained more or
less unchanged in Greece from the beginning of the Bronze Age
until this century (Renfrew 1982:275). Rather T h e crux of the
matter is incentive, whether voluntary or coercive - the carrot or
the stick' (Renfrew 1982:269). The carrot (in this case) was waved
by an emerging elite, offering the benefits, material and symbolic,
of interaction with other emerging states or 'peer polities' (Renfrew 1982:289).
There are thus two strands to Renfrew's argument:
(1)
(2)
Production beyond subsistence is a necessary precondition
of an elite (the basis of the traditional view as elaborated by
Childe);
Production beyond subsistence is stimulated by the elite (a
variant of the arguments advanced by Pearson and Sahlins).
Although each strand, viewed independently, is plausible, together
they make up a circular argument, in which the elite is a precondition of its own existence.
The task of the emerging elite would be easier if they could
appropriate an existing surplus, rather than having to stimulate its
creation, and some have escaped the circular argument by assuming precisely that (Friedman and Rowlands 1977; Giddens
1981:22; Friedman 1984). In fact this assumption is consistent
with Pearson's assertion that the economy always has a relative
surplus. Sahlins in effect argues the same, though the point is concealed by his emphasis on underproduction in the domestic economy.
The key to the problem is present in Sahlins, and to varying
degrees in the works of Pearson, Harris and Friedman, but to find
Paul Halstead
70
it we must cut the Gordian knot of Pearson's substantivist approach to surplus. Pearson at once goes too far, and yet not far
enough, in his desire to weld the economy indissolubly to society.
In denying the possibility of establishing a minimum subsistence
level, and so of identifying an absolute surplus, he throws away
the analytical tool for recognising that individual social units at
times have more or less food than they need just to survive. Then
in stressing the importance of relative surplus in, to use Sahlins'
term, 'provisioning society', he obscures the vital role of relative
surplus, and of the social relations which it maintains, in ensuring
bare subsistence in times of shortage. For, as Sahlins makes abundantly clear, a substantial degree of domestic economic failure is
characteristic of primitive economy (1974:69) and overproduction
within the domestic economy is a prerequisite of the survival of
society as a whole (1974:86).
documented archaeologically (Figure 5.1). The small coastal
plains, in the southeast of Thessaly, have a Mediterranean climate
with mild, wet winters and hot, dry summers. The land-locked
lowland interior is dominated by the western Kardhitsa basin
(2200 km2) and eastern Larisa basin (1000 km 2 ), where a modified
Mediterranean climate prevails with rather colder winters and
more rainfall. The lowland soils are mostly formed on fertile alluvium or marl and the early farmers faced a well-wooded landscape (Bottema 1979). The western basin is well watered, with an
average rainfall of 600-1000 mm and a dense network of more or
less perennial watercourses. The eastern and coastal plains are
'semi-arid', with an average rainfall below 600 mm and perennial
water sources restricted to a handful of major rivers, lakes and
springs: in particular, much of the southern part of the Larisa
basin has less than 500 mm rainfall and only ephemeral seasonal
torrents (Sivignon 1975).
The distinctive mound settlements of the early farmers, arising from construction in mudbrick or pise and repeated occupation in the same spot, are widely distributed in lowland Thessaly,
with the glaring exception of the poorly watered southern Larisa
plain. Conditions for the survival and recovery of settlement remains are good in this part of the plain and the absence of early
sites must be treated as significant (Halstead 1977, 1984). The
early settlements, covering c. 0.5-1.0 ha, were permanent villages
of somewhere between 50 and 300 persons. There is no evidence of
institutionalised inequality, so the upper limit on the size of these
settlements may reflect the inability of egalitarian communities to
maintain order and cohesion if they grew any larger (Forge 1972;
Chagnon 1979).
Dependence on farming is apparent from the overwhelming
predominance of remains of domesticates over those of wild
plants and animals and from the fact that, in this environment, aggregations of 50-300 people effectively precluded any other form
of subsistence (Halstead 1981a). Cereal and pulse crops evidently
provided the bulk of the diet (doubtless supplemented by fruits,
greens and so on for vitamins, minerals and relishes), and livestock played a subsidiary role: cattle, pigs and goats, which are all
well suited to woodland, were far less common than sheep, which
are better suited to grazing sprouting crops, stubble and fallow
fields. This suggests that stock rearing was largely restricted to the
part of the landscape cleared for cultivation and so not very extensive. Moreover, the mortality patterns of early livestock in Greece
conform to a 'meat' production strategy (cf. Payne 1973), with
peak mortality among juveniles as opposed to infants or adults
(Halstead 1987a). This does not mean that meat only was
produced, but that management was not geared to maximising the
yield of milk (the most productive strategy in terms of energy
[Leggel981]).
The manure of livestock doubtless helped to maintain the
fertility of the arable sector and so contributed to the remarkable
longevity of the early villages, some of which were occupied more
or less without interruption for centuries or even millennia. Given
the modest size of the villages, cultivation was probably on too
small a scale to warrant the considerable expense of keeping work
animals (Halstead 1987b) and available archaeozoological ev-
Differences in production within any given village are even
more critical than output differences between villages. At
least no Moalan village seems to be starving, whereas it is
apparent that some men do not produce enough food for
family needs . . . At the same time, no village . . . appears to
have much surfeit, whereas some families are producing
more food than they can consume. (Sahlins 1974:69-70)
The same point is made even more forcefully by Allan's
proposition that:
subsistence cultivators, dependent entirely or almost entirely on the produce of their gardens, tend to cultivate an area
large enough to ensure the food supply in a season of poor
yields. Otherwise the community would be exposed to frequent privation and grave risk of extermination or dispersal
by famine, more especially in regions of uncertain and fluctuating rainfall. One would, therefore, expect the production of a 'normal surplus' of food in the average year. (Allan
1965:38)
Allan's argument was based on experience of traditional cultivators in East Africa, where normal surplus was used in a range
of social, ritual and economic contexts. And the size of the normal
surplus could be considerable - Allan estimated that amongst the
Tonga between 1936 and 1949 it varied between about 10 percent
and 150 percent of subsistence needs and averaged 40 percent
(1965:39).
Production for and production beyond subsistence are evidently inseparable in more ways than Pearson realised, and any
discussion of surplus, relative or absolute, is meaningless unless
the temporal and social scales of analysis are specified. The following section evaluates the probable role of normal surplus among
early farmers in Thessaly and suggests how it could have been
appropriated by an emerging elite.
Early farmers in Thessaly c. 6000-4500 be (the Early and
Middle Neolithic)1
Farming communities proliferated in Greece from c. 6000
be. The remains of their settlements are most numerous in the
northeast mainland and the region of Thessaly is particularly well
71
Fig. 5.1. Map of Thessaly, showing the principal alluvial plains and the location of sites mentioned. K: Kardhitsa basin; L: Larisa basin;
1: Prodhromos; 2: Filia; 3: Akhillion; 4: Tsangli; 5: Pirasos; 6: Sesklo; 7: Dhimini; 8: Iolkos; 9: Pevkakia; 10: Visviki; 11: Argissa; 12: Nessonis;
13: Rakhmani; 14: Ay Sofia; 15: Otzaki; 16: Servia
idence suggests that traction or pack animals were not a priority in
Greece until the Bronze Age at the earliest (Halstead 1987a). A
small-scale horticultural regime probably prevailed, therefore, in
which human labour rather than land or plough animals was the
limiting factor on crop production.
Thessaly has long been renowned as the granary of Greece
(e.g. Garnsey, Gallant and Rathbone 1984) and the density of
early village sites reflects not only the intensity of archaeological
reconnaissance, but also the suitability of the region for a mixed
farming economy. Nonetheless, the natural and social environments of early Thessalian farmers posed problems on a variety of
time scales, which may conveniently be considered in terms of
seasonal, interannual and long-term variability.
Seasonal variability
The climate of the Thessalian plains, particularly inland, is
markedly seasonal, and winter cold and summer heat are amongst
the most severe in lowland Greece. On the other hand, seasonal
variability is very predictable and many of the mechanisms for
coping with it were permanent, integral features of early farming
culture. Mudbrick houses, for example, provide remarkably effective insulation against extremes of temperature and, though surface water is fairly scarce in summer, the early farmers colonized
those parts of the plains endowed with more or less permanent
watercourses.
The seasonal harvest of cereal and pulse crops could be
stored for the rest of the year. Storage took place indoors, probably in pots at Sesklo (Theokharis 1976) and in a clay- or dunglined basket in House T at Tsangli (Wace and Thompson 1912),
while at Servia in neighbouring Macedonia the grain itself has survived through carbonisation in a house fire (Ridley and Wardle
1979:202). In the case of the glume wheats, emmer (Triticum dicoccum) and einkorn (7". monococcum), the reliability of storage may
have been enhanced by storing the crop as spikelets, because in
this partly threshed state the enclosing glumes provide the grain
with some protection against fungal and insect attack (Hillman
1981). This practice (now widely documented in prehistoric
Greece - Jones 1987; also Housley 1981) may help to account for
the prevalence of the glume wheats over free threshing bread (or
macaroni) wheat (T. aestivum (durum)), which is easier to process
for consumption but more vulnerable in storage.
The seasonal climate makes it difficult to grow staple crops
for storage in sufficient quantity. To some extent the time available during winter and spring, for preparing the ground and sowing, and in early summer, for harvesting, can be extended by growing a range of different crops, and early farmers evidently took advantage of this. Emmer, pea (Pisum sativum), grass pea (Lathyrus
sativus) and bitter vetch (Vicia ervilia) dominate individual samples from Sesklo (Tsountas 1908:359) and Prodhromos (Halstead
and Jones 1980) and were probably cultivated as crops in their
Paul Halstead
own right. Einkorn, bread/macaroni wheat, six-row barley {Hordeum vulgare), common millet (Panicum miliaceum), lentil {Lens
culinaris) and chick pea (Cicer arietinum) have also been found
(e.g. Kroll 1983) and, to judge from finds elsewhere in Greece,
several of these may also have been cultivated.
Tasks such as weeding and herding could be undertaken by
children and old people not fit for heavier work (e.g. du Boulay
1974), but inevitably the seasonal nature of agriculture created a
heavy demand for labour at certain critical periods (e.g. Delille
1977:120) and of course the labour of tilling and sowing produced
no return until the end of the growing season. Such acute and
highly seasonal demands on labour place the stable family household at a substantial advantage as the basic unit of production and
consumption over the looser groupings commonly found among
hunter-gatherers and tropical cultivators (Flannery 1972). The
rectangular dwellings of early farmers in Thessaly are of a size suggesting that the family household was the normal residential unit
(Halstead 1984) and at fifth-millennium be Sesklo the ubiquitous
distribution of coarse pottery suggests that storage did indeed take
place at the domestic level (Kotsakis 1981). Early farming households were well suited to meeting their considerable seasonal labour requirements under normal or average conditions, but significant increases in production targets, loss of labour or decreases
in yields could not easily be absorbed.
Interannual variability
In fact production targets, labour supply and crop yields
must all have varied considerably from year to year. Some of the
variability in production targets and labour supply will have been
fairly predictable and so relatively easy to cope with. Periodically
production requirements might be raised in anticipation of feasts
celebrating major rites of passage (van Gennep 1909), and houses
would need rebuilding every generation or so. Such predictable
demands on production or labour can often be scheduled to conform with the year-to-year vicissitudes of farming - a bumper harvest is an opportunity to celebrate a rite of passage (MacCormack
1978) or organise a 'beer party' for friends and neighbours helping
in a major project like house building (Allan 1965:44-5).
Also, with the passage of a generation, the ratio of consumers to workers within a household changes (and with it the
output required of each worker), as growing children expand first
the level of consumption and then the size of the labour force
(Chayanov 1966; Sahlins 1974:87-92). Superimposed on these
gradual changes, unpredictable losses of labour, through illness or
injury, and of time available for work in the fields, because of unusually severe winter conditions, could further exacerbate the
seasonal labour crisis. Given the range of tasks which can be carried out by young children in a small-scale horticultural regime,
parents who raise a large family are somewhat insured against
shortage of labour in the future (cf. Athens 1977:366). In fact the
close spacing and longevity of early farming villages implies that,
whether farming was introduced by a (presumably) modest number of immigrants or adopted by a sparse indigenous population
of hunter-gatherers, substantial demographic growth did take
place from an early stage.
72
Of course the main source of uncertainty on the interannual
scale would have been variation in crop yields. Sown crops could,
at various stages in their growth cycle, be damaged by late frosts,
drought, hail storms, desiccating 'livas' winds, insect pests, blight
or marauding deer (e.g. Khalikiopoulos 1905:452). The impact of
such hazards would have been lessened by the documented practice of growing a range of crops with different susceptibilities and
differently timed growth cycles. In parts of Greece today, mixed
'maslin' crops are also grown as an insurance against weather inimical to only one of the species and there is some evidence for this
practice from bronze age Macedonia (Jones, Wardle, Halstead
and Wardle 1986). Suggested early maslin samples from Thessaly
(Renfrew 1972), however, may simply reflect postdepositional
mixing (Renfrew 1966:26; Dennell 1974).
The dispersal of individual garden plots could have
provided some protection against crop diseases, pests and perhaps
local storm damage (cf. Christodoulou 1959:86), but rather less
protection against climatic hazards like drought than in the topographically heterogeneous Methana peninsula in southern Greece
(Forbes, this volume). The timing and volume of water flow in the
surface drainage network of Thessaly is too unpredictable to support regular irrigation without modern technology, but in drought
years the water level recedes earlier than usual and late crops have
been sown on this naturally watered ground in recent times (Leake
1967:424). Moreover, a few perennial springs offer a more
manageable, if modest, supply of water, which is nowadays used
almost exclusively to irrigate fruit trees and vegetables, but has
been diverted within living memory to save cereal crops from
drought (cf. Arnon 1972:53; Hillman 1973:231). Given the small
scale of neolithic cultivation, such emergency irrigation could have
played an important role in localities with a suitable water source.
Such preventive measures would have provided protection
against many potential sources of crop loss, but from time to time
a shortage of cereal and pulse staples must have arisen because of
events like the destruction of stored crops by fire at Servia or because of unusually severe weather conditions. During the 1970s,
the coastal plains of Thessaly experienced three winters with
growing-season rainfall (October-May) at or below the 300 mm
regarded as the minimum for a successful wheat crop (Arnon
1972:4, 7, 55), followed by a severe drought {c. 150 mm rainfall).
In the years of low rainfall, poor yields of wheat and barley were
partly offset by a reasonable lentil crop (Figure 5.2). In the
drought year, however, all three crops performed badly and diversification offered no protection against shortage. Early Thessalian
farmers could have used a variety of further mechanisms to avoid
such shortages.
At sites such as Argissa (Boessneck 1962), Sesklo (Renfrew
1966; Kroll 1983) and Prodhromos (Halstead and Jones 1980),
there are remains of a variety of wild mammals (including deer,
boar, aurochs and hare), birds, fish, molluscs, nuts and fruits, but
collectively these make up only a very minor part of the archaeozoological and archaeobotanical assemblages. On a small scale,
farmers could switch to hunting and gathering and this doubtless
saw individual households through brief periods of hardship. For
the most part, however, wild resources in Thessaly were neither
73
•
40-i
-40-1
1969/70 1970/1*
1971/2
1972/3* 1973/4
1974/5* 1975/6
1976/7** 1977/8
Fig. 5.2. Yields of three field crops in coastal Thessaly, 1969/701977/8 (controlling for long-term improvement by regression).
wheat;
barley;
lentil; *low rainfall (growingseason precipitation 250-300 mm); **drought (growing-season precipitation 150 mm). Source: crop yields from the annual Agricultural Statistics of Greece of the National Statistical Service of
Greece and from the Greek Ministry of Agriculture; precipitation
data from the Agrarian Bank of Greece and Meteorological Service
of Greece.
abundant nor concentrated and, with the possible exception of
fishing and fowling from sites near the River Pinios and Lake
Karla, their pursuit would have entailed a level of mobility which
conflicted with cultivation of future crops.
Another source of diversity was livestock and three aspects
of husbandry enhanced the reliability of domestic animals as a
source of food in the event of crop failure. Firstly a mixture of cattle, sheep, goats and pigs was maintained, which reduced the risk
of losing the entire herd through disease or shortage of fodder.
Secondly all four species were reared to a meat production strategy, which creates a more resilient herd structure than dairying
(Ellis, Jennings and Swift 1979; Redding 1981), because breeding
females, young livestock and milk yields are very vulnerable to disease and to the sort of climatic extremes which cause crop failure
(e.g. Haresign 1983). Thirdly sheep, the commonest animal, are a
particularly valuable 'walking bank' of food, because of the way
they store fat (Halstead 1987a). Their dominance in this wooded
environment, however, suggests that livestock were few in number
(above, p. 70).
Arguably the most effective household-level mechanism for
coping with crop failure was to store surplus from good harvests
for use in bad years and in theory a household which aimed merely
to break even in an average year would find that good and bad
harvests balanced out in the long run. In practice, of course, the
storage life of grain with traditional techniques is too short (Will
and Hyde 1917:138; White 1970:189) for farmers to secure themselves against repeated crop failure simply by direct, long-term
storage, so the prudent farmer sows enough to break even in the
event of at least the more usual and expectable levels of crop loss.
Given the paucity of alternative food sources, the remarkable longevity of many early farming settlements is inexplicable without
such overproduction and direct storage of the resulting 'normal
surplus'.
This strategy would secure a household against most yearto-year fluctuations in the size of the harvest, but its potential
must still have been limited, because of the unreliability of direct
storage and inevitable drudgery of producing surplus food which
the household was normally unable to consume. Some surplus
grain could be used to fatten up domestic livestock, which could
be slaughtered in time of dearth - in effect a form of indirect
storage (cf. Flannery 1969:87) - but sooner or later shortages
would be faced which could not be coped with at the level of the
individual household. A key member of the work force might be
permanently lost through premature death, a failed harvest might
occur at a stage in the domestic cycle when the ratio of producers
to consumers was particularly unfavourable, or a succession of
poor crops might deplete all stores.
It is for this reason that, as Sahlins stresses (1974:101), the
self-sufficient household of the 'domestic mode of production' is
dividual households can only be economically self-sufficient in the
short term (Sahlins 1974:69-74). In situations where shortage is
not universal, a potentially powerful coping mechanism is exchange of surplus food between households. There are abundant
ethnographic examples of such exchange, which takes a variety of
cultural guises ranging from simple sharing to the provision of
feasts in formal social contexts, and from hospitality in the context
of'casual' visiting by needy neighbours or relatives to more or less
blatant exchanges of food in return for goods or services (e.g.
Richards 1939:142-7; Allan 1965:44-5; Sahlins 1974:123-48, 219;
O'Shea 1981). Sahlins has argued that such social obligations are
the driving force behind overproduction in 'primitive' economies
(1974:101-48), but normal surplus produced by households aiming only for self-sufficiency would offer considerable scope for exchange among households. The potential for such exchange
among early farmers in Thessaly is not dependent on the assumption of a socially prescribed goal of overproduction.
In Thessaly, food must have been exchanged between neighbouring households to maintain the cohesion and survival of the
early farming villages. In the absence of institutionalised authority, kinship ties form the basis of village solidarity and kinship is
widely affirmed by the sharing or giving of food (Sahlins
1974:125-6). Given the long-term non-viability of individual
households, the persistence of the village as the normal form of
early farming settlement surely indicates that neighbouring households rendered mutual assistance in times of subsistence crisis.
Village settlement was maintained in spite of its considerable disadvantages to individual households for both normal and emergency food production, but it did facilitate cooperation between
households in adversity.
Early farming households were also dependent on links with
Paul Halstead
74
those outside their own village. Among the Bemba,
munities today in southeast Asia (Forge 1972) and South America
(Chagnon 1968), where raiding is endemic. In the latter, tropical
areas the natural environment is quite stable from year to year,
whereas in Thessaly climatic hazards to agriculture were a serious
threat and a powerful incentive to the suppression of hostility.
Again, the proven ability of many early farming communities in
Thessaly to survive the rare but inevitable incidences in which
severe crop failure afflicted the whole village indicates that, whatever their overt motivation, exchange relationships between inhabitants of distant villages must on occasion have served as a
vehicle for the provision of much-needed subsistence relief.
Thus exchanges of food must have taken place over a range
of social and geographical scales and the nature of the exchanges
is likely to have changed with increasing social distance (Sahlins
1974:185-230). In early Thessalian villages, cooking facilities were
usually located in open yards between the houses (Theokharis
1980; e.g. Otzaki - Milojcic 1955:168, 1971; Sesklo-Theokharis
1971; Akhillion - Gimbutas 1974; also Servia - Ridley and Wardle
1979), an arrangement which would have facilitated and, arguably, forced sharing of cooked food at least among neighbouring
households (cf. Richards 1939:121; also Whitelaw 1983). Cooked
food is widely subject to particularly strong obligations to share,
where uncooked food remains uncontested private property (e.g.
Sahlins 1974:125), and it is surely significant that the most elegant
part of the early ceramic repertoire was that suited to the serving
and consumption of food and drink (e.g. Theokharis 1973 Plate
33).
Between close kin or neighbours, food might be given without particular concern for reciprocation or in the confident expectation that help would eventually be reciprocated. Over greater
social distances, however, food might be exchanged for more
immediate reciprocation in labour or in the form of valuable items
which could themselves ultimately be converted back to food. The
provision of food in return for labour is widely documented in the
ethnographic literature - the example of the African 'beer party'
has already been noted - and is likely to have been the norm where
distance forced the recipient household to reside with the donor,
rather than taking food home (cf. Lightfoot 1979). Given the
drudgery of agriculture in a seasonal environment, such an arrangement has obvious attraction to the donor household, but
threatens the recipients with permanent destitution if they are unable to fulfil their obligations to their hosts and cultivate their own
gardens. Alternatively, hospitality could be repaid with livestock,
provided the 'exchange rate' operated to the nutritional advantage
of the hungry household, but again the loss of livestock needed to
fertilise the fields could compromise the long-term viability of the
household. A third solution, particularly attractive where the distance between donor and recipient household was not so great as
to rule out the movement of food rather than consumers, would be
to avoid immediate reciprocation in labour or kind. O'Shea (1981;
also Flannery 1974) has argued that such an arrangement may be
facilitated between socially or geographically distant partners by
the exchange of food for valuables: valued 'tokens' are received in
the expectation that in the future the donor or a third party will be
prepared to accept them in return for the provision of food (or
kinship obligations result in quite a considerable distribution of food. If a man's crops are destroyed . . . relatives in
his own village may be able to help him by giving him baskets of grain or offering him a share in their meals. But if the
whole community has been visited by the same affliction . . .
the householder will move himself and his family to live
with other kinsmen in an area where food is less scarce.
(Richards 1939:108-9)
In eastern Thessaly, drought years often come in clusters: on the
coast precipitation fell below 300 mm in three out of four growing
seasons between 1931-2 and 1934-5 and in the Larisa plain failed
to reach this level 11 times (including twice below 150 mm) in the
14 growing seasons between 1964-5 and 1977-8. Under such circumstances, even if complete crop failure is averted, stores in the
worst-hit villages are likely to drop to the point where neighbouring households cease to help each other and retreat instead into
isolation (Sahlins 1974:128-9). Such is the topographic uniformity
of lowland Thessaly, however, that farmers forced to look outside
their own village for help might well have to look very far indeed over distances of 50-75 km (Halstead 1981b; Garnsey et al. 1984).
Given the density of settlement in Thessaly, marriage partners could have been secured within the immediate vicinity of
most villages (Goody 1976:31), but marriage alliances may have
been sought further afield for other reasons. Obsidian from southern Greece reached Thessaly, but local stone seems to have been
used for basic necessities such as cutting and grinding equipment
(e.g. Wijnen 1982) and so the acquisition of exotic raw materials
should perhaps be seen more as a reflection than a sufficient cause
of contact between distant villages. Such contact is also documented in the widespread distribution of fine pottery styles, arising
largely from local manufacture of similar vessels, though a few
pieces were apparently exchanged (e.g. Wace and Thompson
1912:241). The contrast between the ubiquitous distribution of
some fine wares and the more restricted distribution of others
(Rondiris 1981; Halstead 1984) suggests that the latter at least
were actively signalling long-distance (up to 50-75 km) interactions, or chains of interactions, rather than passively reflecting
opportunities for acculturation. Similarly, the small corpus of published stamp seals and sealings from Thessaly includes four examples with an identical design, from Nessonis in northeast, Pirasos in southeast, Tsangli in central and Filia in southwest Thessaly (Yiannopoulos 1913; Matz 1933; Theokharis 1959:64, Fig. 28,
1973:311, Fig. 211a, 333 Plate 272b-c). Stamp seals were often
pierced, as if for wearing about the person, and so may symbolise
the maintenance of distant social ties on an individual basis.
Trade or marriage partnerships between distant households
and villages are literally a vital element in the primitive economy,
in that such exchanges are a safeguard against, and indeed the alternative to, open hostilities (Mauss 1970:79-81; Sahlins
1974:302). The longevity and close spacing of early farming settlements in Thessaly suggest that such a peaceful accommodation
was normally maintained (cf. Vayda 1979:210-12) - in contrast
with the mobility and dispersal of similarly sized farming com-
75
labour). In effect this cultural mechanism allows food to be committed to 'social storage' (O'Shea 1981; Halstead and O'Shea
1982) and later recouped on a time scale longer than that ensured
by direct storage. Fine pots, some of which were exchanged over
substantial distances, may have served as such social storage
tokens: considerable skill and time (of the order of 10-20 hours for
experimental reproduction of an unexceptional piece - M. Nikolarakis personal communication) were invested in their manufacture.
The exchange of food for tokens is a contentious issue, both
for anthropologists and for those they study (O'Shea 1981), and
frequent cultural proscriptions against such transactions underline
the vital importance of food in times of dearth: 'Food has too
much social value - ultimately because it has too much use value to have exchange value' (Sahlins 1974:218). Such normative proscriptions lose their weight, however, with increasing social distance (Sahlins 1974:219) and also tend to be 'abandoned' in times
of stress (O'Shea 1981:177; cf. Sahlins 1974:129). The importance
of such material tokens is that, in times of extreme need, they
allow exchanges of food to be made over greater temporal, social
and spatial distances than would otherwise be possible.
Early Thessalian farmers mustered an impressive array of
mechanisms to cope with interannual variability in their food supply. At the level of the individual household, a diversified strategy
of crop husbandry reduced the risk of crop failure, storage of normal surplus took care of bad years which followed good ones and
diversification to make use of livestock and wild resources would
cater for short-term shortages of staple crops. If the buffering
potential of such mechanisms was exhausted, exchanges between
households might be resorted to. The sharing of normal surplus
among closely related or neighbouring households would facilitate
future reciprocation, but more distant partners offered the only
hope of surviving those rare failures which were both severe and
widespread. Distant partnerships would be inherently unstable,
however, because they would not be easy to maintain through
inevitable periods of redundancy, because hospitality in a distant
village posed a serious obstacle to raising future crops at home
and because such distant relationships would be very prone to imbalance. Western Thessaly is far less vulnerable to widespread
crop failure through drought than the semi-arid eastern plains, so
reciprocation of west Thessalian hospitality would entail a net
flow of mobile or portable resources from the east - either of livestock and labour, which would undermine food production in the
east, or of material tokens, which would gradually lose their value
through inflation. Moreover, in the long term the growth of population, itself perhaps a short-term solution to periodic labour
crises, threatened to undermine the effectiveness of lower-level
coping mechanisms.
were changes in the social environment - most obviously in the
size, distribution and organisation of the human population.
During the late fifth and early fourth millennia be new villages were established between the earlier foundations, while the
southern Larisa plain was belatedly colonised by a rash of shortlived hamlets. At the same time there are indications at the east
Thessalian villages of Ayia Sofia (Milojcic 1976a), Sesklo, Dhimi
ni and perhaps Visviki (Theokharis 1973) of the emergence of institutionalised inequality. In each case this is projected in a large
'megaron' house set in a central courtyard and at Ayia Sofia associated with a unique minority burial mound. The megaron elite e\
idently made it possible for communities to grow beyond the limii
imposed by egalitarian organisation because, during the later
fourth millennium, most of the hamlets and many of the villages
were abandoned and the human population aggregated into a
smaller number of settlements. The largest of these, covering up U
seven ha during the third millennium and up to 25 ha by the end o
the second millennium be, served as central places for their smalle
neighbours (Halstead 1984). Further consideration of the problems of food production, in normal and abnormal years, sheds
light on both the causes and consequences of these radical change
in the social environment.
Long-term variability
In addition to seasonal and interannual variability, early
Thessalian farmers were faced with longer-term shifts in their environment. Secular climatic changes doubtless occurred, but will
not have posed such problems as in more marginal areas of human
habitation (e.g. Mine and Smith, this volume). Far more drastic
Change in the social environment c. 4500-3750 be (the Late
Neolithic)
The infilling of the landscape fuelled by continuing population growth undermined earlier household-level mechanisms for
coping with interannual variability. Crop diversification may no\*
have been enhanced by cultivation of bread wheat, barley and len
tils (Tsountas 1908:359; Renfrew 1966; Kroll 1979), in addition to
earlier known crops, and some evidence for increased importance
of cattle, pigs and goats, at the expense of sheep, may indicate
greater use of woodland (Halstead 1981a; but cf. Payne 1985:222 •
The increasing density of settlement, however, will have further rt
duced the subsistence potential of sparse wild resources and the
colonisation of the southern Larisa plain brought farming to an
area largely devoid of watercourses with potential for fishing,
fowling, emergency irrigation or summer pasture in years of
drought. The potential for direct storage of normal surplus was
unchanged, but the evidence for storage is far richer: coarse pottery suitable for bulk storage is now much more abundant (Hourmouziadhis 1979:116; Kotsakis 1983:214n33), reinvestigation of
the settlement at Dhimini has produced a plethora of built indoor
storage facilities (Hourmouziadhis 1979) and elsewhere numerous
deep pits (e.g. Milojcic 1976a) attest to outdoor storage as well.
Most of these pits seem excessively large (where dimensions are re
ported) for the storage of just seed corn (cf. Reynolds 1974) and
such pits are not a practicable means for a household to store its
annual supply of grain for consumption. Subterranean storage is
effective, provided the pit is tightly sealed, because carbon dioxide
given off during spoilage of the outermost 'skin' of grain protects
the remainder of the contents. As a result, small pits (holding, say
a week's or a month's rations for a household) entail disproportionately high losses from spoilage of the ouier skin, while large
pits cannot be opened at intervals through the year without jeo-
Paul Halstead
pardising their entire contents (Reynolds 1974). It follows that
these pits represent storage of grain surplus to immediate requirements and additional to that noted in earlier periods. This development may be related to contemporary changes in the pattern
of exchange.
In the parts of lowland Thessaly favoured by the earliest
farmers, individual households faced a variety of hazards which
could be overcome by seeking help from more fortunate neighbours, but in the arid southern Larisa plain the main hazard was
drought, against which sharing between co-villagers offered little
protection. Partly for this reason perhaps, this area was colonised
by small hamlets. These offered less scope than villages for internal
sharing, but did allow easier cultivation closer to home and
greater opportunities for reliance in emergency on the sparse wild
resources available. Even within the village settlements sited in
more favoured areas, however, sharing may now have been subject to greater constraints. Again Hourmouziadhis' (1979) reinvestigation of Dhimini is instructive: most cooking facilities are located indoors and the settlement is partitioned by stone walls so
that, architecturally, sharing was only encouraged within small
clusters of buildings corresponding perhaps to an extended family
household or a 'courtyard group' (Flannery 1976:75). A similarly
subdivided settlement plan is suggested by more limited excavations at other east Thessalian sites.
The declining effectiveness of household-level coping mechanisms and of mutual assistance between near neighbours would
have enhanced the importance of exchanges with more distant
households. Conversely, the scope for such exchanges would have
been increased by the progressive infilling of the east Thessalian
landscape, which brought larger numbers of potential producers
and, equally important, consumers of normal surplus within easy
reach of one another. In effect this meant more opportunities for
'banking' normal surplus and, as long as surplus banked in this
way could ultimately be recouped in kind or in services, this would
favour increased overproduction and so further enhance the effectiveness of the social storage system.
The increased evidence for storage, and in particular for
subterranean storage, suggests that substantially higher levels of
overproduction did take place - at least in east Thessaly. With the
increasing capacity of the social storage system, medium-distance
exchanges within eastern Thessaly would have become more viable alternatives to imbalanced, long-distance exchanges between
east and west and by 4000 be west Thessaly had lost touch with the
rapidly changing ceramic fashions of the east and the distribution
of the more elaborate fine wares was strongly restricted to the latter area (Halstead 1984).
Exchanges within east Thessaly must also have been subject
to some imbalance. Some households, by virtue of misfortune or
mismanagement, and some villages, by virtue of location, would
have been short of food more often than others. The use of material tokens would absorb short-term imbalance in exchanges, but
in the medium term tokens would be distributed increasingly unevenly, both between villages and - if tenure of fields was vested in
particular descent groups - within villages. Fixed tenure of plots at
least inside the settlement is suggested (Kotsakis 1986) at fifth-
76
millennium Otzaki (Milojcic 1960:12-13) and Sesklo (Kotsakis
1986) and fourth-millennium Dhimini (House 18 - Hourmouziadhis 1979:149), where houses were repeatedly built on the same
spot. The same may well have applied to the ownership of fields
and markedly unequal access to fine pottery is apparent by the
mid-fifth millennium be within the settlement at Sesklo (Kotsakis
1981, 1983, 1986). As more and more tokens were manufactured
by households in need of food, their value would decrease (Sahlins
1974:295-7, 311-12;O'Shea 1981). Households with a particularly
unreliable food supply could counter this trend towards 'depreciation' by investing more labour and using scarcer raw materials in
the manufacture of craft goods and both tactics were employed in
east Thessaly - more elaborately decorated pottery vessels were
produced and fine shell bracelets were traded inland from the
coast (Theokharis 1973; Halstead 1984).
In the long term, however, the greater value of the tokens in
circulation simply enhanced the ability of the more successful farmers to accumulate wealth and, if the social storage system was
not to collapse from an inflationary spiral, these farmers ultimately had to be able to redeem tokens for food, labour or personnel
(O'Shea 1981:178-9). Two consequences of this development are
apparent in the archaeological record. Firstly, villages in unfavourable locations risked crippling temporary losses of labour
or permanent losses of personnel and many later foundations, especially in the marginal southern Larisa plain, were short-lived.
Secondly, by acquiring rights to additional labour, the most successful households could further enhance their productivity and
would be better able to maintain exchange partnerships in other
villages. In consequence, they would be better placed both to consign normal surplus to social storage and to recoup food when
needed and so could act as 'social storage agents' for their less successful neighbours. At Sesklo (Theokharis 1973) and Dhimini
(Hourmouziadhis 1979), the number of buildings in the central
court suggests preferential access to labour and/or produce, and
the fact that the development of institutionalised social inequality
was materially projected at different sites in the same way (a central megaron) underlines the importance for the emerging elite of
contacts with similar households in other villages.
The well-being of ordinary households was now highly dependent on access to a successful elite household and this, coupled
with the ability of elite authority to suppress conflict in large communities, accounts for the subsequent aggregation of the population of east Thessaly into fewer and larger settlements. (In west
Thessaly there is as yet no evidence of a megaron elite and only
modest settlement aggregation is documented.) This shift in the
pattern of settlement in turn had radical implications for the scale
and nature of land use, for the range of mechanisms available for
coping with subsistence crises and for the organisation of society.
Change in the social environment c. 3750 be-1200 BC (the
Final Neolithic and Bronze Age)
The growth of large settlements which began in the fourth
millennium bc would have forced many households to farm further from home and so to adopt more extensive techniques of husbandry. Any consequent reduction in the diversity of crops plan-
77
ted, in the intensity of tillage, manuring and weeding (Halstead
1981a) or in the opportunities for emergency irrigation would
have increased both the difficulty of producing a storable reserve
in good years and the risk of crop failure in bad years. Similarly,
the increasing difficulty under such an extensive regime of herding
small numbers of livestock would have favoured communal herding (such as was customary in the region in recent times - Sivignon
1975:181-2) and so perhaps weakened household control of the
livestock 'bank'. In short, settlement nucleation must have undermined existing household-level coping mechanisms and so caused
yet further dependence on surplus controlled by the emergent elite.
Increasing dependence on centrally controlled surplus is reflected in the apparent collapse of earlier mechanisms for exchange between ordinary households. From the later fourth and
third millennia be onwards, cooking facilities were either placed
indoors, in the 'kitchen' which formed a distinct part of many
dwellings, or were set outdoors in a closed yard (e.g. Argissa Milojcic 1976b; cf. Halstead 1980; Pevkakia - Milojcic 1972 Plan
2). The preparation and consumption of food were now entirely
private, thus actively discouraging sharing between neighbours.
At the same time, the production of fine, decorated pottery ceased,
while ornaments and simple tools appeared made of copper - a
raw material which was at once rare and, probably, imported and
so far more amenable to elite control than potting clay (cf. Hourmouziadhis 1979:95-6, 1980:120). The place of decorated pottery
may also partly have been taken by woollen textiles. A cache of 22
spindlewhorls in a final neolithic house at Rakhmani (Wace and
Thompson 1912) hints at large-scale, centralised production of
yarn (J. Carrington-Smith personal communication), while at
bronze age Pevkakia a substantial improvement in the survivorship of male sheep suggests a greater emphasis on wool. Moreover, this change in male survivorship is apparently not matched
by a change in overall age structure, implying that more female
sheep were killed young - perhaps because of the need for a smaller proportion of breeding stock in larger, communally herded
flocks (Halstead 1987a). Like copper, therefore, woollen textiles
may have been amenable to centralised control, so the demise of
decorated pottery may mean that the elite took control of the
production of the fine craft goods used as tokens in social storage
transactions.
In fact these indications of diversification at the regional
level may have conferred little advantage at the household level.
Firstly, artistic evidence from southern Greece hints that hunting
may have been primarily an elite sport (Vickery 1936) and, for
ordinary households, residence in large settlements would have
made the pursuit of wild resources even less reliable than previously as an emergency source of food. Secondly, households farming
distant fields would have been ill placed to exploit the full range of
available annual crops - particularly the labour-intensive pulses
(cf. Halstead 1981a, 1987b) and the more demanding of the cereals. Thirdly, although walnut and chestnut have very different
growth requirements from annual crops and so should be subject
to quite independent fluctuations in yields, in recent times they
have flourished only on some of the mountain slopes encircling the
Thessalian lowlands. Tree crops may have been accessible,
therefore, to only a few settlements on the margins of Thessaly.
The use of horses and donkeys as pack animals could partly
have offset the difficulties of increasingly extensive agriculture and
may have been accompanied by other developments in transport
and cultivation technology. During the third and second millennia
be, oxen may have been raised at Pevkakia (Halstead 1987a, after
Jordan 1975; Amberger 1979) and there is widespread evidence
from other parts of Europe for ard ploughs and wheeled carts
(Sherratt 1981). Work animals are costly to maintain, however,
and carts at least are the product of skilled craftsmanship, so these
technological advances may only have been available to a minority with access to abundant fodder and the services of craft specialists (Halstead 1987b; also Goody 1976; Sherratt 1981). With the
development of extensive agriculture, therefore, access to expensive capital items and to scarce areas of good land near the settlement would increasingly have replaced human labour as the limiting factor on household productivity and so led to further disparity between elite and ordinary households.
The pressures favouring aggregation were thus reinforced
and indeed, in eastern Thessaly, a number of nucleated settlements
continued to grow in size through the third and second millennia
be (Halstead 1977, 1984), so forcing ordinary households into a vicious circle of increasing dependence on the elite. By the late
second millennium BC, there are signs of a three-tier settlement
hierarchy, though not of regional polities as extensive as those of
southern Greece. At the same time, elite control of specialised
craft production is reflected in the association of workshops with a
'palatial' complex at the coastal centre of Iolkos (Theokharis
1961) - an association which, on a grander scale, is characteristic
of the contemporary palaces of southern Greece (Keramopoullos
1930; Finley 1957; Alexiou 1961; Iakovidhis 1977; Killen 1984,
1985; Shelmerdine 1985).
From the southern palaces, there is archival evidence that
many craftsmen were full-time specialists (e.g. Killen 1984:52),
collectively constituting a substantial drain on food amassed by
the elite. At least some of this food, however, may have been normal surplus acquired in exchange for palace craft products (Halstead 1988), rather than additional surplus extracted by taxation.
In Thessaly too, the erosion of household autonomy during the
Bronze Age was presumably matched by opportunities for the
Settlement growth is paralleled by indications of continuing
diversification in the subsistence economy: the remains of wild animals are far more abundant than previously (Boessneck 1962; Jordan 1975; Amberger 1979; Hinz 1979); einkorn, broomcorn millet
and Celtic bean are added to the range of annual crops attested
(Tsountas 1908:360; Renfrew 1966; Kroll 1983); there is widespread palynological evidence from other parts of northern
Greece that the chestnut and walnut were introduced or brought
into cultivation (e.g. Bottema 1980); and the range of domestic
livestock was enlarged to include the horse and donkey (Boessneck 1962; Jordan 1975). The increase in hunting does not take
place until well into the third millennium be (later Early Bronze
Age), however, and the evidence for all the new domesticates come
from the second millennium be (Middle and Late Bronze Ages) too late to reverse the erosion of household independence.
Paul Halstead
elite to extract surplus by coercion, but the costs of maintaining an
elite could have been offset at least in part by the economies of
scale possible with centralised redistribution of normal surplus.
The principal burden imposed by the elite on the labour of subordinate households, therefore, may not have been taxation, but the
need to live in large settlements which reduced the efficiency of
farming.
Economic stability and social change in Thessaly, 6000
DC-1200BC
During the period 6000 be-1200 BC, farming communities
in Thessaly experienced radical social and economic change. In
attempting to identify and explain these changes, the preceding
discussion illustrates three general points raised in the introduction to this volume:
(1)
(2)
(3)
at an empirical level: the major problems of survival and reproduction faced by past human communities in a given
context can be identified;
at a heuristic level: a range of viable solutions to these problems can be specified, allowing a number of past cultural
traits to be recognised as buffering mechanisms, the effective
use of which is demonstrated by the longevity of many of
the early farming settlements;
at a theoretical level: a choice between current polarised
stances is neither necessary nor helpful - the problems
facing prehistoric Thessalians arose from the interaction
between culture and nature and were countered by a combination of economic and social behaviour.
More specifically, settlement in permanent villages ensured
that cultivated cereals and pulses were the only viable staple foods
and so enforced dependence on storage as a response to the highly
seasonal climate of Thessaly. This in turn created seasonal labour
crises which favoured the family household as the basic unit of
production and consumption. The agricultural economy was also
vulnerable to variation from year to year in demand, labour and
yields. The central role of storage in coping with seasonal variability, coupled with delayed returns from the cereal and pulse crops,
strictly limited the potential of mobility in buffering against interannual scarcity. Diversification is well documented throughout
the period: the cultivation of a range of species reduced the risk of
crop failure, while livestock and wild resources were alternative
foods in the case of short-term or very local shortage of staples.
Total crop failure or repeated poor harvests, however, required
the use of'normal surplus' stored up during good years - either
within the household or, in more severe cases, through exchange
with other households. The barriers to such exchanges posed by
the emphasis on the family as the basic domestic unit were transcended by the use of craft goods as valuable tokens. Finally, the
need to ensure a viable household labour force in the face of uncertain life expectancy may have encouraged substantial population growth.
Whatever the reason, the early farming population did grow
and colonised parts of east Thessaly increasingly marginal for
agriculture and so subject to greater risk of crop failure. More-
78
over, as losses afflicting individual households were outweighed by
more pervasive losses due to drought, the potential benefit of sharing with near neighbours was reduced and the importance of more
distant exchanges enhanced. Many of the new foundations were
small hamlets, while increasing investment in fine craft goods and
widespread provision for bulk storage in pits suggest that the isolating effects of dispersed settlement were offset by greater exchange. Although the expansion of settlement enhanced the opportunities to commit and recoup surplus through social storage,
it also heightened the vulnerability of some farmers to agricultural
failure. At the same time, the growing value of craft tokens in circulation allowed successful farmers to accumulate durable wealth
and then to gain rights to the labour and/or produce of those less
fortunate.
By c. 4000 bc, the central 'megaron' signals the emergence in
east Thessaly of an elite able to dominate social storage transactions with other communities. Thereafter the attraction of population to successful elites led to the continuing growth of larger settlements, which in turn necessitated more extensive agriculture
and so undermined existing household-level buffering mechanisms. The use of exotic or scarce raw materials (metal, wool) in
craft production and the growing importance of'capital' items
(oxen, pack animals, carts) in extensive agriculture reinforced the
grip of the elite.
Thus once imbalance in social storage transactions in east
Thessaly had initiated the process of settlement aggregation,
ordinary households were trapped into increasing dependence on
the elite. An initially ranked society, in which elite status was related to success in agriculture and social storage, was rapidly
transformed into a stratified society, in which the elite had
preferential access both to the land, labour and capital equipment
necessary for agriculture and to the craft goods used in social and
economic intercourse. Moreover, the internal colonisation of east
Thessaly, which triggered these developments, was itself made
necessary by population growth and made possible by a regional
social storage system which enabled vulnerable communities to
survive temporary dearth. Population growth and social storage
arose from attempts by early farming households to buffer themselves against the inevitable, but unpredictable, year-to-year vicissitudes of the agricultural economy. In sum, cultural mechanisms for ensuring economic stability in the face of interannual variability repeatedly posed new problems for early farmers and so,
in the long term, promoted radical social and economic change.
Ultimately elite control of the surplus necessary for its own maintenance was a consequence of short-term attempts by all households to ensure a reliable food supply.
Conclusion: risk, surplus and social complexity
Most of the preceding discussion has been devoted to early
farmers in Thessaly, so as to explore in some detail the role of surplus in the maintenance and, ultimately, transformation of that
society. Obviously, a host of factors conditions the creation and
appropriation of surplus in different historical and geographical
contexts, but some tentative generalisations may be offered by way
of conclusion. In the case of prehistoric Thessaly, the appropria-
tion of existing surplus by an emergent elite entailed three essential
steps:
(1)
(2)
(3)
the production of a normal surplus was a basic household
response to the risk of crop failure;
some of this normal surplus was 'banked' through social
storage in return for material valuables;
sustained imbalance between farmers in the likelihood of
subsistence success or failure allowed some to accumulate
valuables and rights to labour or produce, and so to transform predominance in social storage transactions into economic and political dominance.
Which sorts of societies, in which sorts of environments, are likely
to have taken these steps?
1 Periodic discrepancies between food acquired and food needed
are universal. Surplus, therefore, in the sense of food which a foraging or producing group cannot expect to eat before it spoils, is
probably a feature of all human economies - ranging from the
meat exceeding immediate requirements after a successful kill to
the enduring 'butter mountains' and 'wine lakes' stockpiled by the
EEC. Among hunter-gatherers who are not geared up for storage,
day-to-day surpluses are rapidly absorbed by temporary suspension of work or by sharing within a larger social unit (e.g. Sahlins
1974:17-18; Lee 1979:256-7; Whitelaw 1983). Equally such groups
tend, by virtue of their small size and mobility, to have access in
the event of scarcity to a variety of alternative food sources.
Among farmers and hunter-gatherers dependent on seasonal storage, the availability of food must be reckoned over rather
longer units of time and quite substantial discrepancies may accumulate - particularly in environments subject to significant interannual variability. In the event of scarcity, such groups tend, by
virtue of their large size (e.g. Fletcher 1981:100, Fig. 4.1) and because they are tethered to fields or facilities (cf. Binford 1980), to
have access to few alternative food sources. In such situations, a
strategy of overproduction and a substantial, recurrent surplus
may be anticipated (cf. Rowley-Conwy and Zvelebil, this volume).
Such a 'normal surplus' is widely documented, for example among
cereal farmers in Africa (Allan 1965), Europe (Forbes, this volume) and the Near East (Hillman 1973:231-2), among root crop
cultivators in Melanesia (Vayda, Leeds and Smith 1961), among
African and Near Eastern pastoralists (Legge, this volume; Dahl
and Hjort 1976:133-7) and among sedentary hunter-fishers of the
American northwest coast (Suttles 1968).
2 Overproduction is only an effective buffer against risky environments if normal surplus from good years can in some way be
'banked' for use in the worst years. Direct storage of surplus is unreliable over a period of years, given the severely limited storage
life of most foodstuffs, while indirect storage, by feeding surplus to
livestock, entails massive energetic losses in conversion (e.g. Rappaport 1968:66-7). Alternatively, normal surplus may be banked
through social storage - giving it to others and so establishing
some sort of entitlement to future reciprocation (O'Shea 1981;
also Sahlins 1974, passim). The nature of this entitlement is rather
variable.
79
Among non-storing hunter-gatherers, strong social pressure to share is reinforced by a crowded settlement pattern
(Whitelaw 1983) and, with no provision for efficiently storing any
surplus, there is little concern to ensure balanced reciprocity. The
settlements of farmers and storing hunter-gatherers are far less
crowded (Fletcher 1981:100 Fig. 4.1), in part reflecting a greater
reluctance to share and a greater concern to ensure reciprocation in food, labour or valuables. A contrast should be drawn between
tropical farmers, however, for whom agricultural work and the
ripening of crops may be relatively continuous (e.g. Forde
1963:380; Grigg 1974:72; Ellen 1982:159 Fig. 7.4), and those of
higher latitudes often facing sharply seasonal environments.
In the tropics, production and consumption are often undertaken by rather large social units (e.g. compounds - Flannery
1972; collective work groups - Grigg 1974:58) or by several overlapping small units (wife + husband, wife + brother, etc. - Rappaport 1968:44). In environments which are not markedly seasonal, such collaborative arrangements spread the drudgery and
risks of agricultural work and also provide numerous channels for
sharing food. Moreover, sharing is often encouraged by the difficulty of direct storage, because of the prevalence of root crops
and fruits (e.g. Norman, Pearson and Searle 1984:13 Fig. 1.2) and
of warm, wet conditions conducive to spoilage (e.g. Tempany and
Grist 1958:246-7), and by the relatively short lapse between harvests.
In higher latitudes, by contrast, farmers tend to grow intrinsically more storable seed crops, in environments where there is
often a full year between harvests but storage is facilitated by seasonal cold and/or aridity (e.g. Duckham and Masefield 1970:520).
Also the strongly seasonal nature of agricultural work militates
against widespread cooperation and favours the restricted family
household as the basic unit of production and consumption. In
spite of the obstacles to sharing posed by such households, social
storage may still be vital to survival and it is in such societies that
the use of valuable tokens to facilitate exchange of food should be
most developed. The family household was the norm among early
cereal/pulse farmers in the Near East and Mesoamerica (Flannery
1972), as well as in Greece, and this may account for the precociousflorescenceof craft production in those societies.
3 Even where 'levelling mechanisms', such as social pressures to
share surplus, are only weakly developed, institutionalised inequality is unlikely to develop unless imbalances in production are
sustained over many years, if not generations. Such imbalance is
relatively unlikely among tropical cultivators, who tend to shift
their fields frequently and often own land communally (Grigg
1974:57-8). Similarly, among pastoralists the ownership of grazing is often communal (Lefebure 1979; Tapper 1979) and the widespread practice of loaning or giving surplus livestock to other
households (to reduce the labour costs of herding and the risk of
loss) operates as a powerful constraint on the accumulation of
wealth (Dahl 1979). Among mid-latitude farmers fixed-plot farming is more usual and suggestions of an initial phase of shifting
cultivation in temperate Europe are ill-founded (Rowley-Conwy
1981). Sustained imbalance is still unlikely, however, where the
Paul Halstead
main hazards to farming are equally likely to afflict all producers
(e.g. damage by birds, loss of labour through illness). Such conditions may have obtained for early farmers in the less arid parts
of southeast Europe, for instance in west Thessaly (above, p. 75).
Where the principal threat is from the physical environment
(drought, flooding, frost, etc.), even minor differences between
plots in height, aspect, soil conditions and so on may make the difference between success and failure. Such conditions are widespread, especially in the semi-arid regions of the world where early
cereal/pulse farming developed and where successful harvests
commonly depended on uncertain rainfall or on irrigation from
rivers which could not be relied upon to supply the right amount
of water in the right place at the right time (e.g. Adams 1981).
It is not intended to deny that social complexity can arise
under different conditions or for different reasons, nor that the development of complexity in the semi-arid regions often followed
quite divergent paths - a point developed elsewhere for the contrasting trajectories of Thessaly and southern Greece (Halstead
1981b; Halstead and O'Shea 1982). As regards the initial appropriation of surplus by an emergent elite, however, it is argued that
the model developed here for prehistoric Thessaly should be widely applicable to early cereal/pulse farmers. In seeking to ensure a
stable food supply, early farmers paved the way for the unequal
access to resources which is the hallmark of social stratification.
Childe (1954:75-6) recognised the problem facing early
farmers:
A second defect in the neolithic economy was the very selfsufficiency the barbarian village prized so highly. Such a
community ... could reasonably plan ahead to meet future
80
eventualities. But all its labours and plans might be frustrated by events still beyond its control: droughts or floods,
tempests or frosts, blights, or hailstorms might annihilate
crops and herds. And even a local failure might spell famine
and annihilation for the self-contained and isolated community. Its reserves were too small to tide over any prolonged succession of disasters or to let it take preventive measures on an effective scale.
But he misunderstood the solution: The worst contradictions in
the neolithic economy were transcended when farmers were persuaded or compelled to wring from the soil a surplus above their
own domestic requirements, and when this surplus was made
available to support new economic classes not directly engaged in
producing their own food' (Childe 1954:77). Normal surplus probably did, eventually, support new economic classes, but it was first
wrung from the soil as a strictly domestic initiative. And the
growth of large settlements and centralised economic institutions
did not so much solve, as reformulate, the problems facing early
farmers.
Notes
The Thessalian case study draws heavily on unpublished settlement reconnaissance by David and Lisa French and on reinvestigation of the classic
sites of Sesklo and Dhimini by George Hourmouziadhis, Kostas Kotsakis
and the late Dhimitris Theokharis. I am also indebted to Andrew Sherratt,
who first introduced me to Allan's work on 'normal surplus', and to Glynis
Jones, Kostas Kotsakis and John O'Shea, for comments on an earlier draft
of this paper.
1 The Thessalian case study is based on data presented and evaluated
in greater detail, together with more complete bibliographical information, in Halstead 1984.
301 - 320
Feeding the village
Reflections on the ecology and resilience
of the medieval rural economy
Survivre au village
- Reflexions sur I'ecologie et la resilience de I'economie
du village medieval
Oberleben im Dorf
- Oberlegungen zur Okologie und Krisenresistenz
mittelalterlicher Dorfwirtschaft
Rainer Schreg
In recent decades. a rchaeologicaJ research has
shown that the development of rural setUements in
Europe was morc complex than previously thought
There are impor tant changes within the settlement system seen not only in colonization. abandonm ent, and
concentration but also in ecology. society and mentality. These changes are poorly understood.
Models reflecting on the ecology and resilience of
th e medieval rural economy provide important pOSSibilities to explain iliese changes. This contribution will
present some theoretical concepts derived from system theory recently dis cussed in environmental history. As all pre-modern cultures were based on solar
energy, food production is a central element of ever y
human-ecological system.
Medieval village ecosystems mainly in western central Eu rope are reconsidered in light of these concepts.
in an attempt to understand their changes and to evaluate the risk of starvation and the n eed for continuous
adaptation.
In this article I want to s uggest an ecological approach to analyze tilese changes ~nd to broaden tile
archaeological perspective. 1 will do this in . a rather
theoretical way. as it is not the inte.nlion to analyze a
speciflc landscape but to look at medieval food production and its rol e for changing settlement systems in a
more general way.
This contribution aims:
to call attention to the ecological dimensions of food
production. storage. and consumption
to examine dynamics underlying changes in settlement systems and food production
to evaluate the usefulness of archaeological approaches based on systems theory.
Food production as a limit to growth
Starvation and poverty are one of the most important and probably one of th e most popular perceptions
of tile 'dark' Middle Ages. As population increased continuously from the Merovingian period until th e late
medieval cris is in the 14th century, historians understand food production as a determining as well as a
l!miting factor of medieval history. They deal with colonisation as well as with technological innovation as
a reaction to increasing population (Herrmann 1987).
Colonisation opened new land for agriculture (Erlen
1992). Technological innovation in agrarian IDOls and
production strategies increased rural productivity
(White, Jr. 1968). However. the Middle Ages have been
seen as a prominent example for a MalOlusian crisis.
as the increase in food production did not meet the
needs of growing population (Malthus 1977: Postan
1966).
In dealing with these changes. historians h ave focussed on aspects of the economic market and have
emphasised the role of demography. In recent years
an eco1ogical perspective has gained more importance
among historians. I t has been suggested that over-exploitation and deforestation were res pons ible for at
least some of the problems of the late medieval crisis
(Schreg 2009b). The crisis of tile l4til century including processes of settlement abandonment economic
problems. star vation and a major decline in population h as been understood as an ecological crisis
(Bowlus 1988).
There is ongOing debate about tile extent to which
late m edieval events can be understood as a Malthus ian criSis. Desai criticized the notion of a Malthusian
criSiS in 14th century England by argUing that tile
famines of tile early 14th century had no long-lasting
Process ing. Storage. Distribution of Food. Food in the Medieval Rural Environmel1"t, ed. by Jan Klapste & Petr Sommer,
Rura lia, VIII ITurnhoul: Brepols, 20111, Pp. 301-320.
BR.EPOLS ;;,; PUBLISHER.>
lO.1484/ M.RURALlA·EB.l.100175
Scl"eg. Feeding t he village
effects (Desai 1991). More general critics focus on the
lack of explanatory value or they suspect that the interpretation as "crisis" is a projection of OUf own modern
concepts of crises back to the medieval past (Schuster
1999; Winiwarter in press).
It is the case that over large areas of Europe many
villages. farmsteads and agrarian fields were abandoned in the 14th century. and there are many other
arguments for some kind of cris is (Abel 1976: Siedlungsforschung 1994: Seibt 1984). There are numerous
studies. mainly in physical anthropology. which show
that nlcdieval populations were deficIent in nutrition.
both in terms of the quantities of food consumed, as
well as in the necessary balance of minerals and vitamins (Haidle 1997). We also know of pestilence, heavy
rain events, and c1imate change as well as changes in
settlement systems. econ omy. society. and mentality
(Dahlerup 2009). It is hardly possible to think of them
as isolated processes.
At present. medieval settlement abandonment is
poorly understood. The fact that we must take into account many factors. r egional differences and complex
interactions m eans that it is a g reat m ethodological
challenge to build a more objective basis for argumentation.
With respect to changes in food production in an historIcal perspective. it is necessary to use a long-term
perspective and to an a lyse changes using a structural
or systemic approach. It is not enough to describe the
changes: we also n eed to evaluate th em.
Theoretical approaches to cu ltural
and environmental changes
It is one of the most challenging tasks of global history to analyze processes of cultural and ecological
change a s an interaction of several quite different historical. anthropological or natural factors. There are
several d ifficu lties to overcome. The lack of data is a
s erious issue. but it Is probably not the most important ch allenge. as controversies about cultural changes
in well documented historical s ituations show (Briiggemeier - Rommelspach er 1991). Rather more important
are the intellectual concepts which are used to understand historical processes (Radkau 2002). In many
cases the value judgem ents of modern researchers
a nd their preconceptions of n ature and humans affect
the Insights more fundamental.
Changes in past political and social systems have
often been understood as the evolution of our own
present. German historiography provides an example. The evolution of historical thought h as b een heavily dependent on political history a fter the Napoleonic
wars, r eflecting nostalgia for the los t national state, th e
302
301-320
development of the Prussian concept of State and nation. and nat ional SOCialistic ideology as well as democratisation. westernlsation and European integration of
Germany after WWlI and after 1989. For a very long
time German medieval history leaned towards an imperial national state as an aim of history. A strenglliening
of central power has been seen as progress. while decentralisation or processes which balance interests of
different social groups were denounced as weaknesses
of the state. Ch anges were often perceived as progress
or decline relative to the values of the present Even today, history and esp ecially medieval a nd modern history foms part of our modern identities and therefore is
part of a teleological view concentrated on continuities
rather than on changes. Historians. archaeo logists.
and geographers primarily follow a genetic approach.
seeking origins. continuity of traditions, and preconditions of the present (or at least later situations).
Classical historical research traditions, as represented by historism - which has not been a purely
German phenomenon (Oexle 1996) - emphasized human action. Many historia ns were very sceptica] about
abstract factors and many approaches of social or economic history were apprecIated as deterministic. functionalistic or more generally as "ahlstoric". History was
linked with events, juridical institutions and human
action; history h as been seen as a teleological process driven by human individuals. human polities or
nations. Even Marxist historical m aterialism followed
this teleological view of history leading to a communist
SOCiety as th e aim of histor y. Tra nsformations leading
to this goal were thought of as a series of revolutions
realized by humans, but determined by dialectical conditions of th e socio-economic situation. Today several
modern historical schools a re r econsidering d a ily life.
mentality and socio-economic conditions. They s howed
different processes of cultural adaptation. cultural exchange. and cultural ch ange lasting over gen erations.
'When Fernand Braudel and the French Annales in troduced their con cept of different time scales - which
gives priority to long-term h istorical structures over
conjunctures and short-time events - it was possible
to integrate eco nomic and social history with their
mid- and long-time perspective (Braudel 1958).
Today environmental history gains more and more
importance and requires again a broadening of the
his toric perspective. Because environmental research
gains its topics mainly from current debates on climate
change and ecological problems, its key co ncepts go
beyond historical perceptions of the environment and
cannot be taken from historical texts. Environmental
history h as three levels: 1) the study of natural environments of the past to understand ecological interdep endencies irrespective of human activIties; 2) human
modes of production to understa nd the socioeconomic
RURALIA VIII
Schreg. Feeding the village
301-320
1900
1910
1920
1930
1940
1950
1960
I
I
1970
1980
1990
2000
I
I
natural sciences
anthropology
ethnoarchaeobotany
archaeozoology
ge
Human being determined
by natu
e
':,":~r- T ---j ---r- Tr
Anthropogeography
Cultural and economic phylum
· Ku l turkreislehre~
I
settleme t patte rn
I ite catch
".". "'" "'"'.,.,
I
en'
car jog capaFity
adaP,a'r
~'"l
r"'
I
cape
land cape as sefles of s quen',al 0f cupancy l"palimpst")
anthropo emc land cape-
I
I
andscape 5 artifact
Human in nature: the idea of mutual creativity
land cape as a synthesis of natural nd cultural meaning
geO::jystem
I
(
I ecosys' t
I
beh vier
I
I
stress
~djUS'men' .
nalure cOIOn~ati~
sustam bUity
I
rOClal me'lbolisms
I
c evolution
I
Fig. 1 . Archaeological concepts related
(0
man and environment
I
I
re ilience
..
eco-efficlency (ec oglcal finghn n') ?
elegiea!
f~otprint ?
« Sc hreg in press b), adapted from Srnyntyna 2003).
realm as it interacts with the environment: and 3) the
perception. ideology and value of the environment as
a basis for human decisions. reactions and activities
(Worster 1988. 293ff).
As environmental history took its origins from modern ecological disasters and problems, the analysis of
ecological sysiems. interrelations of natural and cultural factors and understanding of systems or regimes
is the most important research topic. A systemic view
Is therefore qUite often characteristic for an environmental perspective. Human culture and action is seen
within the framework of ecological systems. However.
there are several concepts within environmental history which do not form one coherent general theory
(Winiwarter 2007). As they pay attention to different aspects of cultural changes and provide alternative perspectives. they may be able to give new insights even to
well established discussions. Environmental history
promises a synthesis of quite different approaches to
historical processes and changes. providing also some
RURALIA VIII
I
concepts which deal specifically with the role of culture
and human perceptions of the environment.
Food production is a key element of every human
society since the Neolithic; and consequently changes
in food production are crucial for environmental history. The analysis of food producUon in the Middle Ages
provides deeper ins ights into settlement history. periods of historical expansion and crises. and may also
bring to mind the complexity and ecological sensibility
of modern food production.
The close association of archaeology with physical
geology, anthropology. botany and zoology has e nsured
that the relationship of man and environment has
played an Important role in archaeological research
since the 19th century (Fig. 1). Discussions of diluvlal
huma n foss ils as well as the pile dwe11!ngs of the circum-Alpine region. or the kitchen middens of Southern Scandinavia. have referred to man-environment
relations. Though historians e mphasized the role of
Ulan as an active agent in history. early 20th century
303
301 - 32
Sch reg, Feeding the village
archaeologists generally viewed human actions as be~
ing determined by nature. Even in the late 19708. Herbert Jankuhn's introduction to settlement archaeology
viewed the environment as a determining factor for
settlement (JanJeuhn 1977). However. several new approaches were also developed in UlOse years.
Within Anglo-American archaeo logy in particular,
researchers had begun to focus on processes of cultural changes since at least the 1960s. They favoured
an anthropological point of view which was interested
to a much higher degree in general observations than
in the specific historical situations. Many theoretical
concepts were adopted from the natural sciences, especially from ecology (Jochim 1981 : Butzer 1982). Processua! archaeologists tried to explain culture as the
non-biological adaptation of man to his environment
and emphasized the functions of distinct system elements (Binford 1962; Johnson 2003, 75.f). Early processual archaeolog ists preferred systemic models which
emphasized the dependencies of humans in their environment. Typical approaches included site catchment
analysis, carrying capacity assessment. or cu ltural
adaptation. It showed however. that these approaches
reduced humans to a rather passive element of closed
systems (Preucel 1991). In one reaction. aspects of human cognition and agency gained importance. Another consequence was a refinement of the systemiC
approach by r eferring to ecosystems (Butzer 1982),
and by integrating ideas of stress. nature colonization.
sustalnability and m etabolism. Early deterministic approaches h ave developed towards the Idea of mutual
creativity of man and nature (Smyntyna 2003). In r ecent years, h owever. complexity theory has been introduced to archaeology producing new models which are
more abstract on the one hand, but which provide new
qu estions a nd insights on the other (Bentley 2003;
Redman 2005).
the level of s ingle settlements or lands capes: 2) to d.
scribe ecology and SOCiety in one complex system; an
3) to deal with regimes and their stages through time
Pre-industrial village ecosystems
Models of pre·industrial village ecosystems provide <
perspective which allows us to reflect on specific fune
lions and characteristics at the scale of a rural settle
ment community (Fig. 2).
The village ecosystem comprises the totality of the
settlement. its inhabitants , its surrounding landscape
and their mutual activities as a dynamiC and organic
whole. The function of a village ecosystem mainly de·
pends on the major b io·productive systems such as
agricu ltural lands. grasslands. forest and wetland .
Plants transform the solar energy which is basic for
every pre·industrial ecosystem. Other central aspects
of the village ecosystem are the extent and nature of
the available land as well as the labour reserve. Tech·
nological s kills, subsistence strategies. land tenure.
social structures, reproduction. and power relations.
as well as social values and world-view are crucial for
the specific layout of the village ecosystem.
Within the village ecosystem several elements are in
mutual dependency. For example. in most European
agrarian village ecosystems. cattle were required for
manuring fields to preserve their fertility. As cattle
herding produces lower yields per h ectare than arabIc
production, this may place stress on agrarian societies. The needs for more agrarian products could n ot
be met by converting meadows into field s. because fertility would decline. Food production, storage and consumption form another subsystem, as consumption
influences production in different ways (Fig. 3).
SystemiC models suitable for dealing with changes
Sonnlechner and others have sketched a model of
the pre-industrial village ecosystem on the basis of
some villages in Austria (Sonnlechner-Winiwarter 2001 :
Sieferle et al. 2006). Less abstract ap proaches which
are closer to the written record have also been pursued, an d Rainer Beck described the small village of
Unterfinning in Southwestern Bavaria. representing
the "typical" village with around 220 inhabitants. approximately 165 hectares of fields and 237 hectares
of meadows in 1721 (Beck 2004: Freudenberger 1998).
Based on late medieval / early modern data on yields.
taxes, family sizes. and food requirefllents, several
s tudies calculated the sufficiency of nutrition. For ~x
ample. David Sabean has s hown that peasants' wealth
in the decades before the 16th century peasant's war
was quite good generally - in contrast to their complaints. However some families were at g reat risk of
poverty and famine (Sabean 1972).
in medieval food production need: I} to concentrate on
These studies represent a pre-industrial situation of
We can understand systems only by describing
them within Simplified models. In practice, archaeologists primarily analyzed small sub-systems. As ar chaeologists depend on material data sources. they have
preferred a materialistic point of view, neglecting the
humans as agents who depend on cognition. ideology and religion. It is not the purpose of these models
to describe the past reality or to show the totality of
all factors and all relations. They are simply a methodological tool to detect possible interrelations and to
make research questions more precise. Depending on
the research questions. they select certain elements
and spatial/temporal scales in order to get a simplified,
understandable. more abstract idea about the interaction. which can be used as an hypothesis for further
research.
304
RURALIA VIII
301 - 320
farmstead
humans
means of
products
. . . labour
. . . products
climate I
environmental factors
cultural
factors
ecological footprint
Fig. 2. Model of the European agrarian village ecosystem of pre-industrial period (graphics by R. Schreg).
the late middle ages/ early modern period. as they a re
based on distinct farmsteads which are understood to
have been largely independent economic units. There
are some common regulations regard ing land management ("Zwing und Bann") but storage and distribution
of food a re mainly organized at the level of single far m steads. The models used are rather static and provide
little baSis for understanding change.
Recent archaeological research has s hown in many
regions that setUement patterns were not static, as
farmsteads gradually shifted their position and there
were substantial restructurings during the later middle ages. We must ask wh eth er these changes were
more than just a spatial reorganization or if they were
even a systemic transform ation.
Ebersbach's recent studies of Neolithic cattle breeding (Ebersbach 2002: Ebersbach 2008) has drawn on
historical and eth nogr aphical data from several villages! mainly within temperate climate zones. to sketch
different models of village ecosystems. Most of h er
examples do not come from Europe. but s he included
Unterflnning and the data fro m Peterborough abbey
during the 12th/ 13th century (Biddiclc 1989). representing medieval village ecosystems. even if the latter
is part of a monastic economy. Based on the relative
RURALIA VIII
sizes of population. or more specifically labour capacity. usable land and livestock. s he distin guis h ed different models of village ecosystems (Fig. 4) .
The "closed system" is associated with a relatively
small territory suited for agricu lture. Land use intensity is not very high . th ere is ploughing and manuring.
a nd the yields ra rely exceed 1000 kg per hectare. The
malenal How
demography.
cultural settings
settlement pattern, economy
Fig. 3. The system of food prOduction. storage and consumption (graphics by R. Schreg).
305
301 -3 :
dosed system
maximum system
a 15 hal person
063ca nlelperson
open system
practic.lIy llnlimiled iiii'd
0.85 cattlelperson
.. . .
•
_
.
agrarian fields
_
usable land
meadows
_
forest
Fig. 4. Closed, maximum and open vii/age systems (graphics by
R. Schreg).
amount of farmland that each person needed to cultivate Is quite high. averaging 0.39 ha. The amount of
meadow wiiliin closed system villages is rather limited.
Cattle are used mainly for their work and to a lesser
degree for th eir dung. Because they a re of secondary
inlportance for nutrition, they are often in a bad state:
there a re only 0.28 cattle per p erson. This type of village ecosystem typifies the pre-industrial late medieval
village.
Within the "maximum system." villages h ave r estricted a reas of arable land, which could b e u sed as
meadows as well. The econonlY is based on livestock.
but the farmland is used very intensively. On average
only 0.15 ha is cultivated per person; but yields average nearly 2400 kg p er hectare. The land is intensively
manured, ploughed r epeatedly and often h e a\~ly transformed by terraces or irrigation. Land use is therefore
a kind of garden cultivation. In contrast to arable fields,
villages of the maximum systems comprise large areas
of meadows. The number of animals is not limited by
the area but rathe r by th e human labour reserve which
is needed for the farmland. Acco rding to the casc studies used by Ebersbach. the aver age livestock is around
306
0.63 cattle per person. more than double the numb
in the closed system. Examples of villages correspon
ing to the maximum system a r c Alpine villages. A
thropologist Robe rt McNetting's influential s tudy ,
the Alpine village of Toerbel in Switzerland gave mOl
emphasis to th e ecological balance b etween the con
munity's inhabitants a nd its en vironment (McNettin
1981). His study, e ntitled "balancing on an Alp". inve:
tigated population, resources. a nd environment whic
h ave b ee n in balance in the ~llage of Toerbel becaus
of compensating social mecha nisms. Integrating aE
p ects of geography, technology and land-use manage
m ent with historical de mography and social practi ce
and th eir ad aptation to va rying conditions . the idea 0
th e ecological system Is less static and offers an under
standing of cultural changes. In contrast to the north
Alpine ex a mples , ToeTbel r epres e nts a maximum vil
lage ecosystem where food production is based on ;:
restricted a rea of agrarian fi elds.
The "open system " represents a third model of th,
b alance b etween agrarian land use, livestock breeding
and labour. WithIn this system, the a mount of land
is not limited. Village territories can be up to several
days' walking dista n ces and composed of several areas
with different land use. Land managem ent can comprise relatively small "Infields" and large areas of less
intensively worked "outfields," sometimes associated
with seasonal settlements. Today, ex a mples of these
systems a re quite rare within Central Europe, but
early medieval economies in low mountain r anges or
m ountainous la nds capes were probably organized in
this way. Stock breeding is most often extensive, without indoor housing of animals. fodd er s torage or the
collecting of dung. but with relatively large stocks of
animal p er person. On average 0.85 cattle we re k ept
per person. Labour needed for the infield economy is
the most important limiting factor for the size of live
stock-h e rds.
Ebersbach's models were intended to deal with early
Neolithic economy and therefore they are not completely adequate for our questions concerning the Middle
Ages and the early modern period. Factors s u ch as
centralisation, s ocial diversity. and specialisation and
organisation ~l complexity of polities or states lead to
a n increasing need for surplus a nd to an increasi ng
pressure on land use. Urban centres tend toward export-orientated syste ms in which a market economy
plays an increasing role. Ther efore we n eed to add a n
export-orientated system. There is a huge m a terial and
energetic flow from rural landscapes to urban centres.
For the rural economy. this means an intensification
of agrarian production limited m ainly by the avallable
land. In the early modern period. the introduction of
the potato offered the possibility of a more prod uctive use of agra rian land. Cattle breedIng is a less ef-
RURALIA VIII
)
Schreg. Feed ing the vil lage
r
ficient use of land area but is important for the urban
market. In many regions. feudal authorities reorganized land use in the early modern period in favour of
livestock breeding. which resulted in village abandonment. In England. the enclosure movement strengthcned wool production; the TUrkish cattle economy in
the Carpathian basin exported meat to German towns:
and the "Verein6dung" in the pre-Alpine landscapes
of Southern Germany was largely oriented towards
cheese production.
Archaeologists have long made use of these kinds
of ecosystem models. In processual archaeology since
late 1960s. many studies h ave analyzed sma ll communities as ecological systems (Moran 1990; J ochim 1981).
Such studies have mainly co ncerned hunter-gatherer
communities, to a lesser degree Neolithic setUements.
and qUite seldom permanent villages (Flannery 1976).
Jochim investigated resource procurement strategies
among Mesolithic groups in the Upper Danube. Based
on assumptions on the early Holocene landscape. he
drew on eth nographic examples to come up with a
model of hunter-gatherer decision-making. based on
efficiency and risk minimization, and h e used that
model to develop h ypotheses about Mesolithic subsistence an d settlement (Jochim 1976).
For medieval archaeology the calculations at the ea rly medieval settlement of Kootwijk in the Netherlands
are of special interest (Pals 1987). Based on archaeological data an d ethnographic and historical a nalogies
it was possible to provide some estimations of livestock. farmland . yields. and inhabita nts. In most cases
th e archaeological application of the village ecosystem
does not aim at exact calculations of food production
and consumption. but rather shows the limits of certain land use strategies. Estimates of the early medieval settlement region at Geislingen. s ituated at the
northern rim of the Swabian Alb in Southwest Germany, s howed that there was probably a shortage of land
as early as the Merovingian period (Schreg 2009a).
Archaeological studies have usually not attempted to
analyze rural villages as ecosystems because crucial
data is missing in most cases. It is rarely possible to
get accurate estimates of land surface. population a nd
agricultural yields. F'or m edieval archaeology. it is posSible to use data from late medieval or early modern
texts. even if there is the risk of not recognizing substantial changes through time. However, even if such
estimates cannot be taken as an accurate reconstruction of the past. these estimates might provide s ubstantive information about the limits of rural economy at a
specific location or landscape. Estimates of population
an d yields can be compared with th e site catchment
and carrying capacities. This may h elp to determine
Possible stress situations a nd to recognize the risks
COming from climatic and ecological changes.
RURALI A VI II
301 - 320
Stress, risk , and crisis
The concept of stress was introduced from psychology to cultural a nthropology and to archaeology to
explain socio-economic as well as ecological changes
(Friesen 1999). Early studies dealt mainly with huntergatherers. but the idea of socio-economic stress was
also applied to 7th ceniury Anglo-Saxon England (Hodder 1979; Arnold 1982). Soclo-economlc changes wcre
thought of as a cultural adaptation to ch anged circums tances. External haza rds such as climate change
or military invasions have usually been advanced as
causal factors. but the concept of stress also allows for
a co nsideration of internal factors. Stress has been understood as a state of disequilibrium in an organism
or a system (Broth well 1998). Within the village ecosystem there must be a balance betvvccn agrarian yields.
labourers and the number of cattle. If these factors are
out of balan ce a stress situation will develop.
To identify situa tions of socia-economic stress, Coh en proposed four teen criteria more lhan 30 years ago
(Cohen 1977. 78f1);
1. increasing foraging distances
2. expans ion of settlement into new ecological
zones
3. concentration on previously ignored micro niches while continuing to exploit the old niches
4 . redu ced selectivity of food
5. concentration on water-based resources relative
to its use of land-based resources
6. a shift from large to s mall animal resources
7. a shift from organisms at a high trophic level to
such of a lower trophi C level
8. a shift from the utilization of foods requiring litlie
or no preparation to foods r equiring more preparation
9. environmental degrada tion
10. significant increase of skeletal evidence of m alnutrition
II. a steady decline of qu ality and size of Individuals
exploited through time
12. disappearance of exploited species
13. local specialisation (within hunter-gatherer SOCieties) as a r esult of Increasing competition for resources or increasing request of labour for their
exploitation
14. sedentisrn and increas ing role of food storage.
Cohen \vas mainly interested in th e origins of agraria n production in Neolithic times. He focussed on population pressure and nutritional stress within a prehistoric situation of hunter-gatherers or early farmers.
For application to the pre-industrial village ecosystem
this list must be modified and enlarged;
15. an intensification of land use
16. disproportionate distribution of wealth
3 07
301-32
Schreg, Feeding the village
climatic hazards
•
•
•
•
•
•
temperature
precipitation
changing sea levels
storm flood
storm
drought
einundation
biological stress factors
• rivals in nutrition I vermin
mental perception I
preferences
•
•
•
•
•
•
survival
food security
guarantee affluence
health
social status
wealth
vulnerability
• biophysical
• socioeconomic
• diseases
• neophytes
ecological stress factors
CriSIS
• soil degradation
• water turbidity
demographic stress factors
• obsolescence
• population growth
• migration
social stress factors
•
•
•
•
•
•
hostile neighbours
individual interests
balancing of interests
ability to respond
social inequality
taxes and prestigious items
response
• coping strategy
(short-term behaviour
modification)
• adaptation
(middle-liang-term
resilience
• collapse/revolution
• transformation
• adaptation
• regenera tion
cultural changes )
Fig. 5. Stress factors and Cultural effects (graphics by R. Schreg).
17. a shift in labour and e n ergy efforts
18. abandonment of farmsteads and settlements
19. traces of violence. either as tra uma on skeletons
or as destruction horizons
20. safeguards, such as fortifications or h oards. especially defended storage.
S ingle criteria are not adequate to indicate stress.
Settlement abandonment, for example, may have
many causes. Within a system of shifting settlenlent
locations i t could b e the consequence of a successful
land-use strategy (Schre9 in prep.). Not all of these criteria are directly vis ible in the a rchaeological record;
rather they represent a meta-level. For example, the d etection of increased storage capacities has to be seen
in relation to population size, wh ile shifts in animal r esou rces must be exa mined closely with respect to poss ible taphonom ic processes. Indicators of stress may
vary with in the different village ecosystems as defined
above. Furthermore. these c riteria represent some
kind of reactio n to, or consequen ce of stress. either
acute or structural.
It is necessary to distinguish b etween stress. risk
and crisis (Fig. 5 ). Whereas s tress is a state of disequilibri um or refers to envi ronm e ntal challenges to
organisms a nd polities, risk paints to the possibilities
of consequences inherent in systems and statistically
308
predictable: commonly seen as dangers to the system
itself. This definition, taken from sociology and environmental history is in con trast to the definition of
risk in archaeology (Beck 2007; Sieferle - Muller-Herold
1997). Many archaeologists who a pply ecological theory define risk as the probability of loss. danger. or
failure associated with certain d ecisions or courses of
action. Risk minimization has b een defin ed as a m ain
motivation for economic as well as social organisations (Jochim 1981. 90ff 101f1l. CriSiS has been d efined
as a Significant interference in the maintenance of vital resources due to natural factors and/ or the m anenv ironment inte raction (Knopf in press). In additi on,
crisis must be seen as a s ituation when decisions
have to be made beca use of h igh risks for tile further
functio ns of the system. Resulting changes or innovations, including ecological reactions as well as cultural
responses. lead to n ew s tress a nd new risks. Sieferle
a nd Muller-Herold evolved the idea of the risk spi ral
as a dynamiC principle in the developmen t of complex
societies (Sieferle - Muller-Herold 1997). The reduction
of a particula r risk leads to new types of stress which
in turn require further. risky innovations. Cultural
response may be a rather s h ort-term reaction trying
to deal with the immediate proble m s . or a strategy of
adaptation. Mental preferences are crucial for the decisions; social structur es a nd the political system de-
RURALIA VIII
301-320
termine how the interests of differen L groups will be
taken into account.
However. as the terms "stress", "crisis" a nd "risk"
have a component of s ubj ective recognition they have
a restricted explanato ry value (compare Winiwarter in
press: Schreg in press a). In common speech s tress is
an individual perception. The same Is true for cris is.
Therefore there has been a discussion about its justifi cation as a useful technical term in history. The semantics of ris k have only d eveloped in the modern period. even if humans have always been subj ected to a
level of risk either by non-human or by anthropogeni c
forces. But usually the respons ibility for ris k has been
seen with non-human forces a nd it is only in moder n
"risk society", based on scIentific research. that ris k
has been developed towards the anticipation of cris is
or catastroph e and has become a central poInt of politics (Beck 2007).
Within discussions of the middle ages. stress s ituations have been identitled in the contexts of resource
shortage and social conflicts (Arnold 1982; Rosener
1984). The Ma lthusian situation in particular could
be described in th ese terms. The stress of population
growth leads to the ris k of food security. The recognition of this risk. in terms of the p r esence of real star vation, gives rise to a crisis which requires ada ptation or
transfo rma tion.
Vu lnerability and resilience
The concept of stress. criSiS and risk (Fig. 5) is a
rathe r linear one. It provides a framework for discus sion and a rgumentation and helps to evaluate poss ible interrelations. However. it does not expla in why in
some situations hazards or slress may have remarkable effects on the system - even its collapse - while in
other situations these effects do n ot occur. When are
changes part of a long-term process and when they are
revolutiona ry? To understand cultura l and ecological
changes a more complex idea of an ecosystem is needed: one "tha t views ecosystems as co mplex adaptive
systems tha t possess intriguing structural qualities.
such as r esilience. hierarchy. scale, nesting. dissipative structures, and a utocatalytic design . and descriptors of dyna mics, such as nonlinearity. irrevers ibility.
s elf-organization. emergence. development. directionality. history. co-evolution. surprise. indeterminism.
pulSing, and chaotic dynamics" (Abel 2003). To understand past Situations we h ave to deal with open and
complex systems (Bentley 2003) .
Resilience theory is s u ch a concept rec en tly introdu ced to ar chaeology (Redma n 2005). As the theory
aims to unders tand changes within complex systems.
including a ll possible factors, tile conce pt is a lso called
RURALIA VIII
"panarchy" tileory (Gunderson 2002; Holling 2001) .
Panarchy describes the totality of non-hierarchical organized systems which are determined by a co nstant
interaction within a r egime of ecological. social. economic. and cultural forces. Il is bas ed on the idea of
an open system changing through time.
Three dimensions have been determ ined to describe changes within the system (Gunderson - Holling
2002) :
Potential: this dimension refers to the accumulated
"capital" of biomass. materia l, skills/knowledge, or
established r elatio n ships within a system.
Connectedness refers to the complexity of the system. The more elements and interrelationships.
the higher the con nectedness within the n etwork of
forces.
Resilience refers to the ability of th e system to absorb stress caus ed by internal interaction as well
as by external factors. Th e lower fue reSilience the
higher til e vulnerability of the system.
Panarchy theory describes changes within selforganizing systems as a n a daptive cycle characterized by a success ion of four stages which differ in
r egard to th e three dimens ions (Fig. 6) . The stages
are (re)organisation (a-stage), explo itation (r-stage),
conservation (k-stage) and r elease (O-stage). In a firs t
stage so m e fundamental decis ions on the organisation
of the system ar e made. As there is few accumulated
capital and a ver y low connectedness there is a broad
variety of opportunities. Decisive facto rs on the direction of th e developmen t are either external (the inter-
k
ol,,'no.···.
/
!l slage
release
.----
Fig. 6. The adaptive cycle within panarchy (redrawn after Gunderson
- Holling 2002 by R. Schreg).
309
3 01 -3 :
, - -- -- - - - -- - - - -- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - , Fig. 7. Selected adaptive cycles within the pan
chy system (modified from Gunderson - Holli
4
religion I myth I mentality
states
huge forested landscapes
ocean, continental plate
3
2002).
law
distric t
fores t
river, mountain
1
rules
o
family , village
tree, branch , leaf
creek, hill
4
6
8
action with neighbouring systems or systems at other
scales) or based on a kind of tradition from previous
cycles. Within the exploitatton s tage the system becomes increasingly complex. that means. the degree of
connectedness between internal controlling variables
and processes becomes more numerous. In the n ext
stage. the conservation stage the system therefore has
a low fl exIbility and therefore is increasingly vulnerable to stress. A crisis easily leads toward the O-s tage
which means that most of the potential or capital accumulated in the system during the previous stages is
released. This release most often comprises a short period of time and appears as a collapse. Afterwards the
system has to be reorganised; its s tarting conditions
have changed, but there m ay stU! be some elements
of ilie system left - or some cultural traditions vivid,
which influence the further development of the system
during th e n ext cycle. The fact tha t the development of
the system is shown as a cycle just refers to the three
dimensions and not to real history. Panarchy theory
does no t imply that the system com es back to a certaln
point and history repeats. Every pass of the adaptive
cycle is historically unique and the specific outline of
the system depends on history. During earlier passes
of the adapttve cycle the environment h as been transformed and provides n ew preconditions. Reorganisation therefore do es not have the full r ange of p ossibilities as it depends on material preconditIons as well as
on cultural traditions which prefer specific forms of
organisation.
Systems cannot be considered as isolated. A panarchy is a nested set of adaptive cycles. An open and complex system is interacting with many other systems on
different scales. Systems reach from a micro scale to
global dimensions a nd tb eir adaptive cycle may take a
very s hort or a very long time (Fig. 7). With respect to
the spatial scale. the village ecosystem is somewhere in
310
(log) space
the middle. It is pa rt of the landscape ecosystem and it
interacts witb the geosystem. but it is also part of the
social system of a political district or even state, or indeed the whole world. On the other ha nd. one village
system comprises several other systems. such as the
household or family level, the ecosystem of an agrarian
field or the ecosystem of rodents or worms. At the time
scale it is important to notice. that the adaptive cycle of
large systems may be rather slow, because changes in
their subsystems m ayor may not revolt the large system. For example the collapse of a village ecosystem
has limited effects on the whole m edieval state. We recognise several periods of settlement abandonment in
th e course of the middle ages, but it is only in tb e 14tb
century that a general cris is comes into being.
There are several connections between the single
a daptive cycles. The collapse of a small a nd fast regime
can influence or "revolt" the adaptive cycle of a bigger
and s lower regime if it m eets the conservation-stage
with low resilience. The reorganisation of a regime can
be influenced by the "remember" connection, which
facilitates r en ewal by utilising potential from a higher
scale. In a human ecosystem "remembering" could
also refer to a more s pecific sense: the reorganisation
after a collapse will probably u se traditional ways of
organisation. Human experiences. perception and val~
ues are crucial for the outline of the new regime. For
example. s ettlement patterns of the migration period
in the form er Roman territorIes still ben efit from the
remains of Roman infrastructure - such as roads - .
and they also depend on the presence of former Roman fa rmsteads (Schreg in prep a.).
Stress, crisis and risk may be integrated within this
concept. In principle stress may occur at every stage
of tb e adaptive cycle. External factor s s uch as climatiC
hazards or natural catastrophes like earthquakes and
volcanoes have a steady ris k of occurrence. Internal
RURALIA VIII
)
Schreg. Feed ing the village
stress increases with the connectedness between internal controlling variab les an d processes and reduced
potentials. The p ossib ilities for respon ses reduce.
Within the k-stage of conservation there will be a high
level of stress a nd a high number of c ritical situ ation s.
Because connectedness is quite high at this point. innovations can easily cause stress and a very high risk,
because resilience is low at that point. Regarding medieval settlements th is was probably the case in the late
Middle Ages, when there was a n increasingly complex
organisation of polities at the local as well as on the
statlal leveL Land-use was very intensive and organised within a very rigid rotation system. Vulnerability
was high and whe n the climate changed in the l 4thcentu ry and land-u se pressure came to its maximum,
there were few possibilities for respons e . .As discussed
below in s ome more detail. the crisis of th e 14th-century. conn ected in many regions with a high quantity
of late deserted villages. can be under stood as a conseque nt collapse of many village ecosystems.
The u s efulness of resilience theory for archaeo logy
is not in modelling past cultural processes using s pecific quantitative data, s ince adequate data is missing
fo r most periods. Geo- and bioarchaeologica] research
is probably best su ited to p roduce proxy data which
could be u sed to identi fy the s ingle stages within the
adaptive cycle (Dearing 2008). Serial data are a n important precondition a t a pr actical level; a more much
more general problem lies in the precondition that human behaviour is difficult to reduce to calculable reactions. "Stress" and "crisis" which could be under stood
as a specific situation within an adaptive cycle, are in
reality detern1ined by human recognition and m entality. However. stress. risk, and crisis as well as vulnerability a nd resilie n ce may be important categories to
provide new questions and a possibility to see food
production in a broader context.
Food production, stress and resilience
in the medieval village ecosystem
The following case study will try to use these theoretical concepts as a framework to look a t ch anges in
medieval setUement pattern. economy. and food prodUction a nd to explore the dynamiCS underlying these
changes. Data u sed for this case study come mainly
from medieval rural settlements in South-western Germany.
In recent decades. a rch aeological research in many
European landscapes h as s h own substantial ch a nges
within the setUement system during the middle ages
and modern p eriod. which clearly indicales that the
typical village is only the product of a long process
(Fabre 1996; Schreg 2006: Schreg 2009c). This is espeCially true for South-western Germany.
RURALIA VIII
301 - 320
We have to start with a characterisation of th e early
medieval village ecosystem. Even if we do not have exact data for numbers of inhabitants, yields and herd
sizes, it seems possible to refer to the ecosystem models s ketch ed previou sly.
Case studies at Schleitheim and Geislingen
At Schleitheim in Northern Switzerland models of
diet an d demography have been calculated for the middle of the 7th cen tury. th e middle of the 14th centu ry and the la te 19th century (Hotz - Rehazek - Kuhn
2002) (Tab. 1). It appeared that food supply in the
early Middle Ages and in the 14th century was betler safeguarded than in the 19th century. Based on
d emographic data from the Merovingian cemetery, it
has been a rgued that th ere were 210 inhabitants of
Schleitheim in the 7th century.' The land r equired for
this population can be calculated as 63 hectares for
grain an d 5 hectares for legumes per year. Based on
the assumption of a closed village ecosystem with ley
farming (Feldgraswirtsch aft). consisting of two years
of fallow to one year of cultivation. the early medieval
settlement would h ave n eed ed ab out 205 h ectares of
agrarian land. The modern village boundary of Schleitheim cover s 2154 h ectares: a bout 1000 h a of which
are suitable for cultivation. There is e nough tole rance
that the village ecosyste m at Schleitheim in llie early
Middle Ages co uld have been an open system with ley
farming. Outfields co uld h ave been located in the periph e ry of the village territo ry as repres enled by late
medieval boundaries, or even at a greater distance in
the Southern Black Forest.
At Geislingen the situ ation seems to b e quite differe n t (Tab. 2). Whereas in Schleitheim in the 14th ce n tury the carrying cap acity eve n of ley farming was not
yet reached, we can assume that at Geis lingen the population was probably already in the early middle ages
near the limit (Schreg 2009a). The population was too
large to be supplied from local resources by the time
the town was founded in the 13th century. Geis lingen is located within a small basin at the rim of the
Swabian Alb, a low mountain ra n ge in Southwestern
Germany. The surrounding slopes as well as the presence of bogs in the valley itself have limited or constrained the location of cultivable fields. If th e village
was limited to the valley. its ecosystem could only have
worked as a closed . a maximum or an import-based
system.
Arch aeological surveys on the surrounding Alb plaI
Estimates of livestock numbers based on minimum individual
counts [Hotz et al. 2002, 460f) a re of limited value because of
fund amental methodological problems, especially taphonom~
ie. of th is a pproach. The number of 0. 1 cattle/person seems
far too low.
311
301-:
7th c.
14th c.
Late 19th c.
Lat e 18th c.
Estimated inha bitants and field sizes
Nu mber
of inhabitants
210 inhabitants
360- 400 inhabitants
1438 inhabitants
(based on cemetery)
(based on written documents)
(1790)
2450 inhabitants
(statistical data 1860)
Estimated land u se
Agrarian fields: 250 ha
Agrarian fi elds: 150 ha
fallow: 7 5 ha
?
Agrarian fie lds:
meadows: 750 ha
(estimation)
meadows: 75 ha
1207.8 ha
m eadows: 2 5 1.1 ha
forest: 642.4 ha
Assumed land use
management
Ley farming
Regulated three-fiel d
crop rotatio n
Regulated Lhree-fi eld
crop rotation with beginning of the abandonment of fallow
Regulated three-field
cr op rolation with
permanent cultivation .
introduction of pota to
Maximum Carrying capacity
1040 individuals
(based on closed system
with ley fa r ming)
Maximum number
of Inhabita n ts
Maximum possible
agrarian fields
1000 ha
{agrarian fields: 2 50 ha
fallow: 750 hal
J 2 35- 1380 individuals
(based on closed syste m
with regulated three·field
crop rot a Uon)
1000 ha
{agrarian fi elds; 500 ha
fall ow: 250 h a
meadows: 250 hal
Tab. 1. Schleitheim: calcufation of population and field sizes (Hatz et al. 2002).
7th c.
15th c.
mid 19th c.
Estimated inhabitants and field sizes
Number
of inhabita nts
> 116 inh abitants
probably 200-400 inhabita n ts
(based on cemeteries)
1488 inhabitants
(written documents . 1544)
3120 inha bitants
(statistical data, 1842)
Estimated land u se
Agrarian fields: 200 ha
fallow: 100 ha
m eadows: max. 670 ha
{extended swamps a nd la kes}
fore s t: 580 ha
Agrarian fields: 275 h a
fallow: 135 ha
meadows: max. 555 ha
forest: 580 ha
Agrarian fields: 416.14 ha
m e adows: 247.01 ha
gard en: 314.69
forest: 578.26 ha
Ass umed land use
management
Closed system with unregulated
three-fi e ld crop rotation
Closed o r even maximum syste m
irriga ted m e adows) willi regu lated
three-field crop rotation su pply of
the town of Geisl1ngen
Regulated Unce-fleld c rop rotation
with red u ced faU ow
Maximum Carrying capacity
Maximum number
of inhabitants
<480 individuals
(bas ed on r egulated three-field
crop system)
5670 individuals
(based on r egulated
c rop system)
Maximum possible
agrarian fields
300 ha
<415 ha
thre e~ field
41 5 ha
In c r eased by draina ge and lerraces at the slopes
(maxim um of 415 ha minus
s wa mps and lakes. turn-around
area for ploughing teams and
h edges a re n ot conSidered)
Tab. 2. Geislingen: calculation of inhabitants and field sizes (Schreg 200 9a).
teau showed a remarkable number of early medieval
settlements. The toponyms of these villages at the
plateau com e from Merovingian or early Carolingian
times, and local historians have seen them as an expansion of that time that is connected with clearance
and the founding of new villages. In some cases, h ow~
ever, archaeological finds from the 5th century predate
the toponyms by at least several generations. This is
an indication that settiements on the Alb plateau developed over a long period. The naming of the settle-
312
ments marks a later stage of this process, probably
when the settlement had become self-sufficient and
gained enough economic importance to be mentioned
by manorial institutions as a separate unit. At least at
an early stage. settlements on the plateau a nd in the
valley formed one community wh ich could be under·
s tood as an open system.
As the examples of Schleitheim and Geislingen shoW.
at some point th e number of inhabitants exceeded the
carrying capacity of the landscape. This is a clear indi·
RURALIA VIII
Schreg, Feed ing th e village
cation that the village ecosystem was in stress as food
prod uction and consumption diverged. At Geislingen.
in its narrow valley. this occurred earlier than it did at
Schleitheim.
From open to closed settlement systems
- Expansion and intensification in the early
Middle Ages
Open settlements may have been ch a racteristic for
the Migration period (4th/ 5th century) and possibly
even for the Merovingian period (late 5th-late 7th century) in Central Europe. but the tran s ition to a closed
system should h ave taken place soon thereafter - depending on the site catchment and th e specific landscape potentials.
Growing population as well as the emergence of seigneurial power and Christlanisation may h ave been
stress factors which created the need for a s urplus
production . Large qu antities of grave goods in Merovingian cenleteries. which probably wer e not only signs
of religion but also of social competition. caus ed an increasing need for raw materials (Arnold 1982). Stress
is indicated not only by reaching carrying capacities,
but also by archaeozoological data s h owing that livestock declined in body height (Stephan 2008).
Within an open system, yields had to increase by
intensification of land-use. causing th e transition to
a closed system. In con sequence outlying a reas of the
village ecosystem becam e more self-contained and developed into independent villages.
After the fall of the Roman Empire, lower numbers
of settlements are observed, a nd palynological data
also supports the view of quiLe low popula tion numbers a nd a reduction of land-use. Merovlngian cemeteries and early place names reveal an agrarian land
use orientated toward the fertile lowlands. Only in
some regions did settlenlent also include low mountain ranges. In the following centuries, settlements expanded in more m arginal areas . When we have written
SOurces on colonisation processes they are often organized by noblemen and typically included the foundation of new setUe ments which were populated with
farmers from remote areas. As in many cases. observations from later p eriods have been us ed to describe
earlier processes of colonisation. Consequently early
medieval colonisation in Southern Germany has been
seen as a similar process of clearance and subsequent
foundation of new villages. as a conquest of the wilderness by adventurous pIoneers. The process s hould
have been a multiplica lion of grain- and cattle-based
Villages in a n early wild environment - or we could
say: colonisation is understood as a process of growth
(compa re Schreg 2008).
RURALIA VIII
301 - 320
However, the idea of conquering the forests is probably rather a modern one (Blackbourn 2007). Settlement of marginal landscapes probably began in many
regions with seasonal outfield use (Schreg 2008). Subsequent intensifica tion of la nd use due to factors s uch
as population growth. increasing manorial needs and
strengthening of authorities brought an orientation
towards agrarian fi elds an d grain production . Close
connections between villages in the core settlement
landscapes and the m arginal landscapes became less
intensive and there was an increasing need for n ew
m ech anis ms of exchange.
Village formation and three-field crop rotation
Parallel to land-us e intenSification in m argi nal areas, we can trace a process of village for mation in many
core ar eas of Central Europe. In the beginning the landscape was characterised by an increasing number of
s mall settlements, arranged around some larger ones,
but with slightly shifting locations over centuries. Later,
a concentration and local stability around the parish
church and the churchyard developed. In some regions
this concentration at the location of the early modern
v1llages began as early as 1000 AD, while in other regions it belongs mainly to 12th/ 13th centuries, s hortly
before the rise of towns. Th ese changes in settlem ent
pattern s urely were correlated with ch anges in land use
a nd food production. One important factor was probably the introduction of th e r egulated three-field crop
rotation ("Dreizelgenwirtschaft"j. This system of land
management was much m ore effective in the exploitation of space. Coordination of working rhythms between neighbours made it poss ible to relinquis h enclos ures a nd turn-around areas of harnessed ploughing
teams. At the same time fallow periods were reduced.
The introduction of this new system also meant that
the village itself became concentrated and station ary.
This transformation brought new risks. The early
m edieval settlement system was characterized by shifting settlement locations. Proposed explanations for
these s hifts include s hifling cultivation as well as ge neralional changes. As farmsteads wer e typically shifted
only short distances it is not likely that each generation relocated the settlement. and these ideas are not
convincing. It is more probable that the r elocation of a
settlement was part of a traditional land-use managem ent where settlement areas shifted to avail of more
fertile la nds as form er areas became exhausted. There
are other arguments supporting lliis interpretation . In
several rural settlements th ere were r elics of dark earth
similar to the dark earth of late antique towns. They
were preserved only in topographic depressions. but in
situ ar ch aeological finds a nd structures indicate they
were not colluvial depOSits. If this is true. th e introduc-
313
lion of the regulated three-field crop rotation was not a
total s u ccess, but had some major risks. The clearance
of h edges, th e development of large fields ploughed at
one time, permanent cultivation with only short periods of fallow, a nd manuring by livestock dung brought
about a decli ne in biodiversity. soil exha ustion. and
increasing erosion (Schre9 in prep.). Geoarchaeologlcal
studies in the last decades across several landscapes
have revealed a recurring pattern of erosion and stabilisation. or in other words of dyna mic and stable
periods of landscape change, The studies have shown
s ignificant landscape changes during the Middle Ages,
such as over-exploitation, erosion. and degradation of
soils. These can b e understood as consequences of the
expansion and intensification of food production (Bork
et al. 1998).
One can therefore conclude that the processes of
village formation and three-field crop rotation, which
are commonly seen as representing moments of maJor progress in m edieval history, probably brought
new risks. In a long-term persp ective, the chan ge from
s hifting settlements wi!.h soil a melioration by longterm manuring towards permanent villages and threefield crop rota tion did not r educe stress, but produced
new risks and caused a higher social complexity. Within the village communities. which went through a period of institutional structuring during !.he high Midd le Ages, !.he peasants had a limited range of options.
The economic change from subsistence farming with
its associated s trategies of risk minimisation (see Thomas Meier, this volume) towards a market orientation
leads to dependencies outside the village, Th e development of !.he feudal system and later of towns brought
a permanent need for increasing surplus production,
which m eant higher yields per labourer,
The late medieval "crisis" - a system collapse?
There has been a long debate about the 14tb-century crisis (Harvey 1991). Historians painted to quite different phenomena to understand !.he late middle ages
as a kind of crisis (Seibt 1984). There are also m a ny
contemporary statements indicating that people even
felt a crisiS of morality and fai!.h (Ber9dolt 2003). It is a
challenging question whether we can understand !.he
situation as a system collapse or, in contrast, as an example of a successful r eorganisation,
There is yet to be any consensus on whether the
term "crisis" is adequate to characterize the 14th century. The main critique is r elated to the term "crisis"
itself, which is !.hought to lack explanatory value (Winiwarter in press). It has been pOinted out that the crisis
of !.he 14!.h century m ay b e primarily a re-projecUon
of our own present and current problems (Schuster
1999). Certainly, !.he concept of criSiS Is a modern one,
314
301-320
as ecological thinking is a modern develop ment. Investigating past ecosystems therefore requires a terminological framework independent of written documents
and of the per ceptions of past humans. who used other
categories to understand their environments. In light
of the concepts outlined above. we need to ask whether
the late middle ages could be understood as a crisis, as
a release within the adaptive cycle. or as a collapse of
the medieval village ecosystem.
A number of observations point to a late m edieval
lan ds cape degradaUon that h ad significant impact on
villages. Archaeobotanical and geoarchaeologlcal research document th e formation of heath. a nd the expansion of dunes (Kirleis 2003, 97; Groenewoudt 2009;
Hirsekorn 2003) as well as the formation of erosion
gullies (Bork - Beyer - KrallZ in press; Bark et al. 1998).
Currently, most indications come from central Germany. while in Southern Germany th ere ar e relatively few
r eports of late medieval la nd degradation. This is probably du e to !.he s tate of research ra!.h er !.han to lower
stress.
Some of these processes are m an-made a nd are dir ectly Unked \vi!.h less sustainable land-use strategies.
However others are due to climatic changes (Behringer
et al. 2005). In !.he 14th century, cooling brought extreme weather events, Usually such climatic change
m ay h ave little effect. but in !.he cleared landscape of
the late Middle Ages vulnerability was high. The stress
of demographic and climaUc factors brought !.he risk
of declined food security by degra dation and erosion.
At !.he sam e time, the social organisation of !.he village
wi!.h !.he r egulated three-field crop rotation. and !.he incr eased power of sovereigns created a s ituation of high
connectedness which ma de adaptation quite difficult.
In contrast to the settlements of early a nd high Middle
Ages, which shifted !.heir position probably as pa rt of a
sustainable land-u se s trategy. the permanent villages
lost an important opportunity for s oU regeneration in
favour of a complicated social organisation that included rigid rules on land-u se, Some villages collapsed.
o!.hers s u cceeded. The abandonment of m any villages
can be understood as the collapse of the s pecific village ecosystem - at least in some more vulnerable environmen ts. On a higher spatial scale, however, villages were just reorganised In a process of concentratio n.
and early modern agriculture followed strategies that
existed before. However. the late m edieval crisis altered
labour-land ratios in favour of the peasantry (Moore
2003). In some cas es villages of !.he closed system m ay
h ave transrormed for a time to a n open system . because !.hey gained land which h as bee n u sed mainly
for extensive h erding (compare Schre9 2009b).
Only later, in !.he 18!.h and 19 !.h centuries, when
there were again situations of stress. risk and crisiS
were there major reorganisations in the whole village
RURALIA VIII
Unterrombach, Sauerbach
Rommelshausen , MSurech
Sonlheim im Siubenial
GroBbetUingen, ScMferScker
Renningen. Raile
Hayingen , Obere Wiesen
Igersheim, Neuseser Tal
Grol!k.uchen, GassenScker
301 - 320
'.
III
III
III
II
I
111111
"j
III
I • III
II
I I
-
111- ",III
Sontheim, Sraike
VVilimandingen
Forchheim, NiemandsplStlle
Endersbach , Halde
Hermaringen , Berger Steig
Hochstetten, Kinkelrain
III
II
III
II
II 111111
III
II
III
III
III
Hengen, BOhringer StraBe
11111
MOnchingen , Hofslatt
VClrstetten, Grub
Ehingen, Bei der Mauer
Deffingen , Gemeindesteinbruch
Burgheim
Eltingen. Beim alten Kirchhof
Siengen, Obere Hippenacker
Gelslingen, Muhlwiesen
Wittislingen. Schabringer Weg
Edingen, Untere Neugasse
Grabensletten, Kindergartenweg
GSchlngen, Kirchbraike
Hochstetten. KlosterScker
Stetten, Bachacker
Oberrimsingen, Gruningen
Sletten a.H., Friedhof
Flacht. FriedhofstraBe
Gerlingen, Leonberger Weg
Kleinengstingen, Romerslr.
11111
II
II
I I
III
I
II
II
1111111
II II
11111
111111 III
11111
III
Otlingen , Speck
Neuhausen. BMerstraBe
Bickesheim, 1m Eel<
Obersletten, Brunnenlicker
11111
Mengen i. Brsg. , LOChleacker
Wallsladt, Vogelstang
Ditzingen, Beutenfeld
GenkingE!l1 , Gonninger StraBe
Schatksletten, Unlerer lNiesenweg
GroBengstingen, Bahnhof-' Trochlel mger SIr.
Altheim, KQhlwiesen
Undingen, Brunnenwiesen
Hailfingen, WJrmfeld
Schmiden, Unlere Gartenacker
Nattheim, Badwiesen
Eningen u.A., BrunnenstraBe
Rommelshausen , HaldenslraBe
Urspring , Am breiten Weg
II
BOckingen. Haaggassengarten
Renningen , Neuwiesen3cker
1111
I ....
-~
III" 1111111 11111 111111 111111 :. • II
:::;;
III II
11111.111111
II
II 11111
II
•
111 1 11 II
Erpfingen, Untere Wlissere
Sasbach. Behans I LimburgstraBe
Oslerfingen, lNier
Obersletten, Steinhaus
-
300
,
0
400
50.
500
• 0
600
700
' .0
"
800
"
1000
900
"0
11 c.
1100 12
Jh
1200
," 0
1300
""
1400AO
data of high q uality
data of medium quality
(based on old excavations, surface collections,
preliminary reports , o r restricted q uantities)
Fig. 8. Duration of medieval settlements in Southwestern Germany indicating some periods with higher risk of abandonment (Schreg 2006).
RURAUA VIII
315
301
ecosystem. The reduction of fallow. the introduction
of the potato and increasing efforts in manuring in~
traduced a new ecosystem _ probably on the verge a
maximum system, which was the basis for modern
industrialized agricullure. There are several examples
of starvation periods, or famine, in the early modern
period, and these may be indications of further passes
through adaptive cycles.
Reorganisation of the village ecosystem after a cri~
sis does not mean that there is always a complete
system restructuring after a collapse, because not all
the potential has been lost The mechanism of the 'remembering connection" results in a reorganisation
depending on earlier system organisations. Nevertheless, settlement abandonment could be an indication
for reorganisation and could be used to determine
single passes of adaptive cycles. The abandonment of
settlements need not be connected with single events,
such as the thunderstorms of 1342 or the pestilence
of 1347/ 48. In reality there may have been longer periods with high stress and low resilience.
As there were several other periods of settlement
abandonment in central Europe and especially in
South-western Germany (Fig. 8), the late medieval crisis Is probably not the only period of reorganization.
but is just the best documented one. It could be worth
asking if the discontinuities of settlements around
700. in the 9th and 10th centuries and in the 12th/
13th century represent passes of the adaptive cycle.
Abandonments around 700 could be in relation to the
transition from an open to a closed village ecosystem:
9th/ 10th-century abandonments may reflect a reorganisation of the feudal system at beginning market
economy: while 12th/13th-century changes could represent the introduction of three-field crop rotation and
the formation of permanent villages. At present. th ese
are only hypotheses. which must be checked by specific case studies in different landscapes.
Conclusions and prospects
The panarchy model allows understanding the interaction of different subsystems and offers a more
complex explanation for failure and success. Today it
meets increasing interest in past crises and collapses.
The work of Jared Diamond In particular looked at
the circumstances of the rise and fall of societies, and
tried to link past and present (Diamond 2006). His exanlples of collapsed past and present societies spread
around the world. from the Easter Island, over the
Mesoamerican Maya. the Anasazi in the US-Southwest.
and Greenland as examp les for failed past societies. 2
2
See for a criUque of Diamonds case studies: McAnany - Yolfee
2010.
316
He used a framework of five factors to analyse fa
and success of societies:
damages that people inadverten tiy inflict on
environment
climate change
hostile neighbours
support by friendly neighbours
society's responses to its problems.
I
Food and food production as a factor of change h
to be seen in a broader context of rural economy,
village ecosystem. Food and food production ar e
close interaction with state and polity, with values a
mentality as well as with landscape and environme
It indicates that the model of a Malthusian crisis de
not explain the changes adequately. as it is does r
embrace sufficienUy the complexlty of Change. The I,
medieval crisis is more than just a Malthusian situ
tion; the idea of a crisis within an adaptive cycle of tl
village ecosystem seems to be more adequate. Settl
ment history from the Migration period to the begil
ning of the late Middle Ages could be understood .
an intensification of land use, transforming village
probably from an open system towards a closed an
an export orientated system.
Abstract
Archaeological research on food production and
consumption is mainly concerned with their material
remains. This article calls attention to the ecological
dimensions of food production. storage, and consumption. They are a fundamental element of the village ecosystem and an important driving factor for changes
within the settlement system.
Models reflecting on the ecology and resilience of
the medieval rural economy prOVide important possibilities to explain these changes. The concept of
the village ecosystem enables us to distinguish several models. how pre-industrial villages balanced their
agrarian yields. the number of caWe and the dispos able manpower. If this balance is disturbed the whole
system comes under stress and needs some kind of
reorganisation. However. the concept of stress does not
suffice to understand the complex dynamics of change
which can be recognized in many medieval settlement
landscapes. Therefore we need a much nlore complexe
concept dealing with non-linear, adaptive and self-organized socio-cultural systems. Panarchy theory provides a theoretical framework which has recently been
introduced to archaeology.
In this article I want to evaluate the usefulness of
these archaeological approaches based on systems
theory. Medieval village ecosystems mainly in western
central Europe are reconsidered in the light of thes e
RURALIA VIII
320
ure
concepts. in an attempt to understand their cha nges
and to evaluate food production as well as the risk of
sta rvation as a factor of the continuous ad aptation of
medieval rural communities.
.cir
301 - 320
Resume
ve
Id
n
d
1.
Les etud es archeologiques s u r la production et la
consommation des aliments s'attachent principalemcnt it 1a reconstitution de I'alimentation et des praUques culturelles qui lui sont liees. Production. stackage
et consommation sont toutefois aussi un element esscoUei de l'ecosysteme villageois cUe principal facteur
de sa transformation. La p rescn te contribution voudrait aUirer I'attention sur ces aspects ecologiques.
Pour expUquer la transformation . il faut rccourir a
des con ce pts abstraits qui. d'une part, comprennent
Ie village m edieval comme un ecosysteme complexe el
d'autre part. detinissent la transformation et la resilience des system es. La conception de r ecosys tem e villageois perm et d e faire la distincti on avec les modeles
de vi llages preindustrlels sur base de l'equilibre des recolles. de la taille du cheptel et de la charge de travall.
Les perturbations de ces equilibres creent une situation de stress qUi aboutit a un changernent du systeme. Le stress ne suffit pas it expliquer les dynamiques
complexes du changement observable dans plusleurs
paysages. II faut uUliser un concep t qUi Henne compte
de la complexite et des qualites non-lineaires a da pta lives et autoregu lees des ecosystemes socioculturels. Le
concept d e la panarchie depu is peu. aussi discute en
archeologie. developpe une theorie pareille.
L'objectif d e la presente contrib u tion est d'ouvrir des
perspectives et de montrer ravan tage de ces concepts
en archeologie. Des ecosystemes de villages medievaux
sont analyses scion ces concepts p ou r comprendre la
dyna mique d e leurs chan gements et po u r ln ettre en
exergue Ie role de la production a limentaire et ses risgues d e famine dans Ie changement it long terme du
paysage ru ral.
Traduction: H. Pantermehl
Zusammenfassung
Archaologische Forschungen zu Produ ktion und Konsum von Nahrungsmitteln fok ussieren hauptsach lich
auf di e Rekonstruktion der Erniihrung und der damit
verbundenen kulturellen Techniken. Produktion. Bevorratung und Konsum s ind j edoch auch wesenUicher
Bestandteil des DorfOkosystem s und ein wesentlicher
Faktor fUr dess en Wandel. Vorliegender Beitrag machte das Augcnmerk auf diese 6kologisch en Aspekte d es
Themas lenken_
Urn den Wa ndel zu erkUiren. sind abstrakte Konzepte erforderlich, die einerseits das mittelalterliche
RURALIA VIII
Dorf als komplexes Human-Okosystem begreifen und
anderseits den Wandel und die ResiUen z von Systemen
beschreiben . Das Konzept des DorfOkosystems erlaubt
es. anhand der Ausbalancierung von Flachenertragen,
Viehbestand undArbeitsbelastung verschiedene ModelIe vorindustrieller Darfer zu unterscheiden. Starungen
dieser Balancierungen fiihren zu einer Stresssituation ,
die zu einer Anderung des Systems flihren muss.
Das Konzept der Stresss ituationen r eicht allerdlngs
nt cht aus. urn die sehr komplexen Dynamiken des Wandels. wie sie in vielen Siedlungslandschaften beobachtet
werden kannen, ausreichend zu erklaren . Dazu bedarf
es eines Konze ptes. das gerad e die KomplexiUit und
di e n ichUinearen. adaptiven und selbst-organisierten
Elgenschaften sozio-kultureller Okosysteme abbildet
Das neuerdings auch in der Archaologie diskutierte
Konzept d er Panarchie ist solche cin e Theorie.
Das Ziel des vorliegenden Beitrages ist es. Perspektiven und Nutzen dieser Konzepte in der Archaologie zu
refl ektieren. Mittelalterlich e DorfOkosysteme werden
im Licht dieser Konzepte betrachtet. urn die Dynamik
ihres Wand els zu verstehen - und urn die Rolle der
Nahrungsmitte1p roduktion und dcs Hungerrisikos fUr
den langfristigen Wandel d es landlichen Raumes herauszustellen.
Acknowledgments
The ideas presented in this papcr benefited from the
work on culttrral changes in Southern Germany and
beyond. I a m grateful for discu ssions with several colleagues inside and outside RGZM. I thank especially
Lynn Fisher (University of lllinois_ Springfield) who
r ead an earlier d raft. made h elpful observations and
corrected my En glis h .
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320
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