Do you see how this all fits into a picture? Small groups of people living now in this cave, now in that—or out in the open—as they moved after the animals they hunted; no permanent villages, a few half-buried huts at best; no breakable utensils; no pottery; no signs of anything for clothing beyond the tools that were probably used to dress the skins of animals; no time to think of much of anything but food and protection and disposal of the dead when death did come: an existence which takes nature as it finds it, which does little or nothing to modify nature—all in all, a savage’s existence, and a very tough one. A man who spends his whole life following animals just to kill them to eat, or moving from one berry patch to another, is really living just like an animal himself.
THE FOOD-PRODUCING ECONOMY
Against this picture let me try to draw another—that of man’s life after food-production had begun. His meat was stored “on the hoof,” his grain in silos or great pottery jars. He lived in a house: it was worth his while to build one, because he couldn’t move far from his fields and flocks. In his neighborhood enough food could be grown and enough animals bred so that many people were kept busy. They all lived close to their flocks and fields, in a village. The village was already of a fair size, and it was growing, too. Everybody had more to eat; they were presumably all stronger, and there were more children. Children and old men could shepherd the animals by day or help with the lighter work in the fields. After the crops had been harvested the younger men might go hunting and some of them would fish, but the food they brought in was only an addition to the food in the village; the villagers wouldn’t starve, even if the hunters and fishermen came home empty-handed.
There was more time to do different things, too. They began to modify nature. They made pottery out of raw clay, and textiles out of hair or fiber. People who became good at pottery-making traded their pots for food and spent all of their time on pottery alone. Other people were learning to weave cloth or to make new tools. There were already people in the village who were becoming full-time craftsmen.
Other things were changing, too. The villagers must have had to agree on new rules for living together. The head man of the village had problems different from those of the chief of the small food-collectors’ band. If somebody’s flock of sheep spoiled a wheat field, the owner wanted payment for the grain he lost. The chief of the hunters was never bothered with such questions. Even the gods had changed. The spirits and the magic that had been used by hunters weren’t of any use to the villagers. They needed gods who would watch over the fields and the flocks, and they eventually began to erect buildings where their gods might dwell, and where the men who knew most about the gods might live.
WAS FOOD-PRODUCTION A “REVOLUTION”?
If you can see the difference between these two pictures—between life in the food-collecting stage and life after food-production had begun—you’ll see why Professor Childe speaks of a revolution. By revolution, he doesn’t mean that it happened over night or that it happened only once. We don’t know exactly how long it took. Some people think that all these changes may have occurred in less than 500 years, but I doubt that. The incipient era was probably an affair of some duration. Once the level of the village-farming community had been established, however, things did begin to move very fast. By six thousand years ago, the descendants of the first villagers had developed irrigation and plow agriculture in the relatively rainless Mesopotamian alluvium and were living in towns with temples. Relative to the half million years of food-gathering which lay behind, this had been achieved with truly revolutionary suddenness.
GAPS IN OUR KNOWLEDGE OF THE NEAR EAST
If you’ll look again at the chart ([p. 111]) you’ll see that I have very few sites and assemblages to name in the incipient era of cultivation and domestication, and not many in the earlier part of the primary village-farming level either. Thanks in no small part to the intelligent co-operation given foreign excavators by the Iraq Directorate General of Antiquities, our understanding of the sequence in Iraq is growing more complete. I shall use Iraq as my main yard-stick here. But I am far from being able to show you a series of Sears Roebuck catalogues, even century by century, for any part of the nuclear area. There is still a great deal of earth to move, and a great mass of material to recover and interpret before we even begin to understand “how” and “why.”
Perhaps here, because this kind of archeology is really my specialty, you’ll excuse it if I become personal for a moment. I very much look forward to having further part in closing some of the gaps in knowledge of the Near East. This is not, as I’ve told you, the spectacular range of Near Eastern archeology. There are no royal tombs, no gold, no great buildings or sculpture, no writing, in fact nothing to excite the normal museum at all. Nevertheless it is a range which, idea-wise, gives the archeologist tremendous satisfaction. The country of the hilly flanks is an exciting combination of green grasslands and mountainous ridges. The Kurds, who inhabit the part of the area in which I’ve worked most recently, are an extremely interesting and hospitable people. Archeologists don’t become rich, but I’ll forego the Cadillac for any bright spring morning in the Kurdish hills, on a good site with a happy crew of workmen and an interested and efficient staff. It is probably impossible to convey the full feeling which life on such a dig holds—halcyon days for the body and acute pleasurable stimulation for the mind. Old things coming newly out of the good dirt, and the pieces of the human puzzle fitting into place! I think I am an honest man; I cannot tell you that I am sorry the job is not yet finished and that there are still gaps in this part of the Near Eastern archeological sequence.