CHAPTER 3
Early States and Civilizations
The earliest human groups lived in an interaction with the natural environment, with adaptations and dependencies. Gradually, a shift occurred from gathering wild plant-foods (foraging) to crop production (horti-/agriculture) and from hunting to protective herding and raising livestock (pastoralism). In this process of agrarianization, people started to live in settlements and to make investments.
- Control and dependency loops evolved between the natural environment (‘resources’), organization (‘state’), culture (‘religion’) and skills (‘technology’). There were extra-human, inter-human and intra-human forces and threats at work in the form of natural phenomena like climate change and earthquakes, wars and conquests, and internal mismanagement;
- (Re)construction of stories speak about an alliance between peasant and soldier, a role for priests in economic organization, overexploitation of the population by elites and occasionally devastating impacts from natural disasters and environmental degradation;
- In the great river plains, civilizations were hierarchically structured. Elewhere, the biogeography of islands or valleys with large ecological gradients were more polycentric and trade-oriented. Nature shaped social organization;
- States emerged and, in some places, they expanded into empires with increasing socio-political and techno-economic complexity. They lasted for generations – until they deteriorated or collapsed from a combination of the three forces and threats mentioned above;
- Several theories have been proposed to explain the disintegration processes. Some emphasize external natural catastrophes, others highlight declining returns on increasing complexity, environmental feedbacks, perverse institutional mechanisms and erosion of elites;
- The state (still) represents in its different appearances the most complex organizational form by which human groups resolve the perennial tension between the individual and the group and between competition and cooperation.
Test your understanding of this chapter by reviewing the study questions below.
Answer:
The tendency for exponential population growth was reined in by shortage and depletion of available resources and by competition with other species via increased mortality (diseases, prey).
Answer:
One possible CLD is shown below; it is taken from the Stella TM website. It reflects the theory that felling coconut palm trees for statue building was the major cause of collapse. There are other, also speculative theories which give rise to other CLDs.
Answer:
The sociologist Elias mentions in his book The civilizing process the threats from the extra-human world, from inter-human relationships and from intra-human nature. The first are still experienced in earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, wild beasts and pests, droughts and floods and other natural disasters (which are themselves partly and interestingly caused by human activity). The second category is still evident in the many military conflicts, variously driven by rising population numbers and densities, resource scarcities and weapon technology. The third one can be associated with an ever-increasing complexity which induces mismanagement due to negligence, ignorance and lack of self-restraint.
Answer:
Some civilizations are called hydraulic civilizations because they developed around a large river with fertile soils and a large irrigation potential. Examples are the civilizations in the Euphrates-Tigris and Nile river basins.
Another example in which biogeography codetermines societal evolution is the role of mountains and the sea. People on islands in the Aegean Sea were more or less forced to trade with people elsewhere, because their island could provide only a narrow band of goods. Hence the early development, already in the 2nd millennium BCE, of ships to overcome the barrier of water. In Oaxaca in Mexico, on the other hand, the barrier were the mountains.
Answer:
Many possible causes have been proposed. One is the rising complexity with declining marginal returns for the policies responses and adaptations, and subsequent consequences such as an increasingly financial imbalance. A second one is, that Rome became more dependent on interaction with the periphery and that it gradually lost its information and control advantage over the periphery. A third cause mentioned is the influence of long-term environmental change from human-environment interventions.
Answer:
Asabiya is a concept introduced by the 14th century Arab scholar Ibn Khaldun and can be described as ‘the ability to defend oneself, to offer opposition, to protect oneself, and to press one’s claims’. It means ‘group feeling’ or ‘collective solidarity’. Initially, a human group has a large asabiya and lives austerely in great ethnic unity, oriented towards outward expansion and conquest. If it becomes larger and develops, a tribe or people acquires the coherent force and spirit to expand and does not yet experience the inner erosion that goes with luxury and power struggles in the center. Asabiya then tends to decrease with increasing ‘civilization’ with its luxuries and intra-elite conflicts.
Answer:
Environmental determinist denotes the view or theory, that environmental factors are the only or most important factors in societal processes. Examples are natural disasters or overpopulation and overexploitation of resources as cause of collapse. Other explanations put more or all emphasis on economic and/or social dynamics as mechanism of downfall and collapse.
All Materials Relevant to this Chapter
Easter Island Model
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Energy: the Colosseum, slaves and containerships
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Population overshoot, collapse and recovery: the role of climate change in medieval Europe.
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Demographic and territorial overshoot: India and Russia
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Environmental history: an empirical reconstruction of collapse
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Nauru: phosphate, fish, money and refugees on a 21st century Easter Island? *
Some 1500 km east of Papua New Guinea, in the Pacific, is the small island of Nauru. It is the smallest independent republic, with nowadays some 12.000 inhabitants on an area of less than 25 [...]