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Hasn't England been like that for so long that "pastoral English countryside" is the biome now?
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Jul 7, 2023 18:57
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Nessus posted:Hasn't England been like that for so long that "pastoral English countryside" is the biome now? Yes, pretty much. I was up on Dartmoor recently and it was kinda sobering to realise the landscape wasn't some timeless wilderness It's just a wasteland that used to be a verdant temperate rainforest. Before people turned up.
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Jul 7, 2023 20:28
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Lead out in cuffs posted:IIRC that was in the context of trying to settle Greenland using dairy farming, while scoffing at those primitive seal-hunting Inuit who were there for thousands of years before, and hundreds of years after the vikings had long-abandoned their colonies. That's nonsense, and if Diamond put that in his book its just another example of him barfing half-researched dreck onto page. The Norse hunted and fished as much as they could without living nomadically because farming was extremely limited in Greenland. Most of the arable land was only suitable for pasture, which is why they brought grazing animals over. The Inuit didn't exist at the time of Norse settlement, the native population of Greenland were Dorset people, who were displaced over time by the proto-Inuit under poorly documented circumstances roughly contemporaneous to the Norse abandoning Greenland.
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Jul 7, 2023 21:35
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They also hunted narwhals and sold the tusks as unicorn horns to clueless Southrons.
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Jul 7, 2023 21:55
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FreudianSlippers posted:They also hunted narwhals and sold the tusks as unicorn horns to clueless Southrons. To be fair narwhals are at least as insane a thing to exist as a unicorn.
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Jul 7, 2023 22:15
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Barry Foster posted:Yes, pretty much. British environmentalists should work to regrow the Welsh rainforest. Pretty famously, the British also terraformed New Zealand for sheep, and you can see the area of natural land they left from space.  Although it's more plausible that more work will be done to preserve or even regrow New Zealand's forests, because more of what they used to be like is within recorded memory and there's a lot of people who value its natural ecosystem.
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Jul 7, 2023 22:54
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The nipple-fication of New Zealand
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Jul 7, 2023 23:05
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:Cheese is highly nutritious food and efficient form of food preservation, tenant farmers aren't going to stick their noses up at the idea. The actual reason why its rare in let's say, subtropical East Asia, is just land usage. If you don't reserve a lot of land for pasturing cattle or sheep or goats, then you're not getting much milk, and then you're definitely not making much cheese. Yeah, and land use is complicated. The economic system of a group of Western European farmers in 1300 is significantly different from the economic system of Southeast Asian farmers in 1300. There's a lot of broad similarities - large peasant populations, limited but still extant slavery, diets extremely high in grain, market connections that are robust over short distances and increasingly tenuous over longer distances, sometimes even similar family and mating structures, high degrees of stratification with significant but not total hereditary elements, etc etc etc. But there's some huge differences in the details, and a big one is animal rearing. One of those things that is impossible to miss studying Chinese history is the importance of horse importation. Horses are incredibly valuable military animals, just unbeatable for scouts and pickets and messengers. Even if you have no full cavalry formations, having horses is a huge advantage to military and lacking horses puts you at a severe disadvantage. And Chinese governments always struggled to get enough horses. It was a perpetual problem, and a major strategic consideration was constantly "how do we secure sources of horses for our military." The value of land for crops was just so high that for anybody other than high level military strategists, raising horses was just a "absolutely no why the gently caress would I do that" kind of thing. So horses were primarily imported and MAN is that a hell of a lot to think about in the classical Chinese context. Slim Jim Pickens posted:That's nonsense, and if Diamond put that in his book its just another example of him barfing half-researched dreck onto page. The Norse hunted and fished as much as they could without living nomadically because farming was extremely limited in Greenland. Most of the arable land was only suitable for pasture, which is why they brought grazing animals over. hate to say it but your post is actually closer to what Diamond said than what the poster your responding to characterized Diamond's argument as
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Jul 8, 2023 00:31
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Is there anywhere to read about the Chinese search for horses? Sounds fascinating.
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Jul 8, 2023 01:18
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There was a great film on it, Need For Steed
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Jul 8, 2023 01:23
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I have a feeling that that all those steppes and plains to the north famously inhabited by people for whom horses are a central feature of life probably played a part in many ways. Also actually a feature in a lot of history; horses are expensive as gently caress by any metric, let alone breeding and training them for specific tasks, and ESPECIALLY for war. has come up itt before I think.
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Jul 8, 2023 13:32
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Now horses do directly compete with other livestock in a way that livestock in general don't necessarily compete with like wheat for land usage. And I think they're less efficient eaters compared to most livestock. But I don't really know the details for the old world, I just know that the Comanche at their height started to go through a collapse because a lot of their economy was based around horsetrading, but also they were still relying on the buffalo as their main food source, and they ate the same grasses.
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Jul 8, 2023 14:03
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SlothfulCobra posted:Now horses do directly compete with other livestock in a way that livestock in general don't necessarily compete with like wheat for land usage. And I think they're less efficient eaters compared to most livestock. Big horses are definitely less efficient eaters.
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Jul 8, 2023 14:58
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ancient history thread / bfc bad with money thread crossover
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Jul 8, 2023 15:24
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Ghost Leviathan posted:I have a feeling that that all those steppes and plains to the north famously inhabited by people for whom horses are a central feature of life probably played a part in many ways. Yea that is extremely the context that more or less defines imperial china's entire foreign policy paradigm.
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Jul 8, 2023 22:15
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Anybody here have any opinions on which ruins within day trip distance of Athens are the coolest? I'm going there soon, and after accounting for time in the city proper, I have time for two day trips. I'm pretty set on going to Mycanae unless I hear it sucks, but the options for my second day are a little harder--Delphi, the temple of Poseidon, and doing a mini-cruise of the nearby islands all sound cool. I figure this thread is more likely to have similar tastes to me in travel than other threads.
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Jul 8, 2023 23:51
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Tulip posted:Yea that is extremely the context that more or less defines imperial china's entire foreign policy paradigm. Imagining a low level beureaucrat watching a horde of steppe people and their horses approach the Great Wall, wondering whether it's an invasion or Crazy Cingghis' Insane Spring Horse sale.
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Jul 9, 2023 00:04
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I think we also need to talk about what kind of cheeses we are talking about. Not all are really suited for melting. I recently read some kind of paper about the evolution of cheeses in Switzerland from around 1000CE till today. It seems that in earlier times they were more on the soft side („Ziger“) and not on the harder side like Gruyère or Emmentaler („Swiss cheese“). Not sure anymore on the details but it had to do with more use of Alps and better traderoutes.
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Jul 9, 2023 01:04
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Elissimpark posted:Imagining a low level beureaucrat watching a horde of steppe people and their horses approach the Great Wall, wondering whether it's an invasion or Crazy Cingghis' Insane Spring Horse sale. if you read anything about xiongnu-han relations, 90% of the sources are existing in that state of anxiety all the time. the guys who just loving hate the xiongnu come across as refreshingly clear in their proto-racism
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Jul 9, 2023 04:18
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cheetah7071 posted:Anybody here have any opinions on which ruins within day trip distance of Athens are the coolest? I'm going there soon, and after accounting for time in the city proper, I have time for two day trips. I'm pretty set on going to Mycanae unless I hear it sucks, but the options for my second day are a little harder--Delphi, the temple of Poseidon, and doing a mini-cruise of the nearby islands all sound cool. I figure this thread is more likely to have similar tastes to me in travel than other threads. If you start early enough you could hit Mycanae and then Olympia and back but it would be like 3 hours in a car there and back.
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Jul 9, 2023 05:01
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SlothfulCobra posted:British environmentalists should work to regrow the Welsh rainforest. Neat. What mountain* is that? *I'm guessing from it's solitude it's actually a Volcano.
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Jul 9, 2023 15:19
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Tulip posted:hate to say it but your post is actually closer to what Diamond said than what the poster your responding to characterized Diamond's argument as Probably! It's been about 15 years since I read the book, and I was definitely oversimplifying and likely misremembering.
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Jul 9, 2023 18:02
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This is more related to the pre-cheese topic and I'm sure this has been talked about but what's this thread's opinion on The Dawn of Everything? I'm about halfway through. It's interesting but its points are a bit muddled I feel.
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Jul 10, 2023 11:29
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Deptfordx posted:Neat. Mount Taranaki. It's a stratovolcano on North Island. Tom Scott made a video about it a while back: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRUmt_4F_58
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Jul 10, 2023 12:28
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Deptfordx posted:Neat. Took longer to make this post than it took to find it with satellite view lol /e: oh the park is still called Mount Egmont, that was what Captain Cook named it. It was changed back to the original Maori name in 1986 stringless fucked around with this message at 12:32 on Jul 10, 2023 |
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Jul 10, 2023 12:29
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kiminewt posted:This is more related to the pre-cheese topic and I'm sure this has been talked about but what's this thread's opinion on The Dawn of Everything? if a popularizing book has an unqualified noun like "everything" on it it can't be any good graeber was an economic historian and anthropologist in the vein of sahlins et al, so despite the title it can't really escape the economic history and anthropology
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Jul 10, 2023 12:37
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kiminewt posted:This is more related to the pre-cheese topic and I'm sure this has been talked about but what's this thread's opinion on The Dawn of Everything? I loved it. It gave me hope for humanity after a period of feeling deep despair because of, well, living in late capitalism. It might seem muddled at first, but the various examples throughout the book are all pointing to the idea that we are not doomed to live in hierarchical or authoritarian systems forever. The old idea that "civilization" or complex societies required hierarchy is wrong: people have organized themselves in a huge variety of ways throughout all of history and prehistory. Book Good.
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Jul 10, 2023 14:55
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kiminewt posted:This is more related to the pre-cheese topic and I'm sure this has been talked about but what's this thread's opinion on The Dawn of Everything? I loved it, but I think a lot of the critiques of it are very fair. There are two issues with it that I think are outstanding, one kind of silly and one very substantial. The sillier critique is that the Daves have a habit of using a chain of logic that is basically, "we don't actually know 100% for sure this didn't happen, so we're going to act as if it 100% for sure absolutely did happen." This is just a silly technique. The other more substantial one is that they just flatly do not treat gender and sexuality seriously in the work, in ways that are really glaring when a person who knows the subject matter points it out. The most accessible version of this critique I found here: https://strangematters.coop/dawn-of-everything-graeber-wengrow-review/
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Jul 10, 2023 16:42
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kiminewt posted:This is more related to the pre-cheese topic and I'm sure this has been talked about but what's this thread's opinion on The Dawn of Everything? The reception among historians I like was negative enough I skipped reading it. The consensus was they're making a lot of assumptions for the purposes of a narrative out of little to no evidence.
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Jul 10, 2023 17:26
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Tulip posted:I loved it, but I think a lot of the critiques of it are very fair. There are two issues with it that I think are outstanding, one kind of silly and one very substantial. The sillier critique is that the Daves have a habit of using a chain of logic that is basically, "we don't actually know 100% for sure this didn't happen, so we're going to act as if it 100% for sure absolutely did happen." This is just a silly technique. I mean, I'll grant you that flat out ignoring sexuality and gender is a pretty serious problem, and I'm not going to downplay or mitigate that in the slightest, but saying that the other is a silly critique isn't correct either. It's a major, fundamental methodological flaw. It's also the same flaw at the roots of all this guy's stuff:  Claims require evidence to back them up, and absent that you're into purely conjectural territory.
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Jul 10, 2023 17:27
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FishFood posted:
This really depends on how you are defining hierarchy, but also I have not read the book.
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Jul 10, 2023 17:52
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I'd be curious how hierarchy is defined, because it seems like a really difficult thing to say "is or is not" present, especially from pre-writing artifacts alone. I presume you could make at least some guesses about things like "comparing the fanciness/embellishment of grave goods from the same culture," of course.
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Jul 10, 2023 18:05
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Nessus posted:I'd be curious how hierarchy is defined, because it seems like a really difficult thing to say "is or is not" present, especially from pre-writing artifacts alone. I presume you could make at least some guesses about things like "comparing the fanciness/embellishment of grave goods from the same culture," of course. Frankly I kind of reject the notion that you can have a situation with a group of the animal Homo sapiens sapiens where hierarchies are totally absent. They can be more or less pronounced, but I can't think of a single example of a human society - be it large or small - that has been truly egalitarian to the point that every individual is considered to be the absolute equal of all others. Even something as simple as acknowledging that one person has a specific skill or tallent - say, they can weave baskets better than the other people in the group - is going to confer a degree of social prestige that can then be leveraged within the group. I understand the desire to create a more equal, less stratified society, but I'm skeptical that a truly hierarchy-free society is anything that you will find in the historic record. My gut intuition is that if we can't find evidence of a hierarchy it's likely because we don't have the necessary evidence or context to see or understand it. In which case we're kind of left being unable to say that they had one, but we're equally unable to say that they didn't.
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Jul 10, 2023 18:16
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Cyrano4747 posted:I understand the desire to create a more equal, less stratified society, but I'm skeptical that a truly hierarchy-free society is anything that you will find in the historic record. My gut intuition is that if we can't find evidence of a hierarchy it's likely because we don't have the necessary evidence or context to see or understand it. Yeah. I've never seen compelling evidence for a non-hierarchical human society at any point in history. Societies that aren't abusive authoritarianism sure, plenty of those, but no hierarchy of any kind? I don't want to get  but I kinda agree a completely non-hierarchical society is impossible as long as it's human based. Put Helios in command and maybe.
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Jul 10, 2023 18:32
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Even something as simple as "Vinnie is really good at making arrows, let's let him cook and bring him supplies" would be a hierarchy of a sort, and at a certain point trying to avoid that is going to be stamping you in the same mold, just in reverse. (Also, maybe Vinnie's arrows ARE really good and you would much rather have five hundred Vinne-made arrows than two hundred arrows, some really good and others just OK.) Ideally you have - or cultivate - counterbalances. I was thinking that if you're judging by grave goods, you're going to have the idea that all traditionally buried Jews were of equal status (if you don't have access to the grave markers, anyway) if you found a Jewish cemetery in ten thousand years. And in many senses, you would be right! But you wouldn't be getting the whole story. I was somewhat humbled once, when I read of a carved-stone ball like artifact they found in England somewhere. 'We have no idea who made this - or why. Only that they did, because we have the object right here.'
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Jul 10, 2023 18:42
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Yup bingo. I had a anthropology theory class years ago where this was discussed and the point that I brought up was that at the very very least there is going to do be a divide in regards to knowledge and by extent, age, whether its skill knowledge or cultural knowledge (rituals or whatever) and that this knowledge transfer confers power.
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Jul 10, 2023 18:57
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Nessus posted:Even something as simple as "Vinnie is really good at making arrows, let's let him cook and bring him supplies" would be a hierarchy of a sort, and at a certain point trying to avoid that is going to be stamping you in the same mold, just in reverse. (Also, maybe Vinnie's arrows ARE really good and you would much rather have five hundred Vinne-made arrows than two hundred arrows, some really good and others just OK.) A similar case is the graves of Saudi royalty. Saudi royals are buried in plain, unmarked graves, wrapped in an unmarked cloth shroud, following Wahabist practice also used by many other Saudis who are not royalty. This is the grave of King Abdullah, who died in 2015: 
CrypticFox fucked around with this message at 19:04 on Jul 10, 2023 |
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Jul 10, 2023 19:02
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Hierarchy was maybe not the most precise word: I guess "stratification" would be better. But they also aren't arguing for the existence of some perfect Rousseauan state of nature, or even that perfectly egalitarian societies could exist, just that societies have organized themselves in a variety of ways throughout all of history and prehistory. There's an old narrative about human development where early human societies were more egalitarian and that farming, urbanization, etc. both required and encouraged inequality and stratification. "The Dawn of Everything" is basically about how that idea just isn't true: while farming, larger populations, and urbanization were also accompanied by inequality in some places, this was not universal. There's evidence of large, urban, and relatively egalitarian societies all over the world. They also highlight more hierarchical societies that are not urban or agricultural: the way people organize themselves is not determined by whether or not they have large, urban societies or small, nomadic or semi-nomadic ones, it's determined by a combination of environmental factors and the active choices of people themselves. The basic premise of the book is that people have organized themselves in a huge variety of ways, inequality is no more "natural" than egalitarianism, and that human societies are not predestined to follow some set track of advancement. FishFood fucked around with this message at 19:13 on Jul 10, 2023 |
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Jul 10, 2023 19:11
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I wouldn't be surprised if there's some element of hierarchy being a military advantage: that if you stick to your egalitarian guns, you'll be conquered by your neighbors who didn't.
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Jul 10, 2023 19:32
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cheetah7071 posted:I wouldn't be surprised if there's some element of hierarchy being a military advantage: that if you stick to your egalitarian guns, you'll be conquered by your neighbors who didn't. I think that's really ultimately dependent on how everything is structured and how poo poo is being defined. These are pretty nebulous terms, and while I can envision scenrios where this might be the case, I can also see some where they are not. One of the biggest takeways I got from my academic career in anth is that if you do not define your terms or your scenario or whatever you get into long drawn out debates with people who might agree with you but are working under a different set of assumptions. Telsa Cola fucked around with this message at 19:37 on Jul 10, 2023 |
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Jul 10, 2023 19:35
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