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naem posted:The Nile, Tigris and Euphrates rivers all flood every year like clockwork, dumping silt (swamp muck) everywhere which is perfect fertilizer. You can just run around giggling manically throwing handfuls of wheat everywhere and it's like boom instant bread. Eh, H/G societies actually end up having more leisure time if you actually look at the data available. Agriculture is insanely work heavy and if you are just starting out you need a food source for the first couple months before your crop comes in, not counting weeding, field maintenance and other poo poo. Then the grains need to be harvested, processed and stored before more processing for cooking. This is ignoring the other issues that come about from being sedentary. One argument for societal complexity is that with a large food source from agriculture you need a way to distribute it or oversee its general storage which means you implement or develop new systems to do this. Also you maybe need a system to keep track of when the crops will grow best and for how long and that just adds more layers. Several early writing systems were basically just record keeping systems likely because of this. Telsa Cola fucked around with this message at 22:39 on Oct 24, 2017 |
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Oct 24, 2017 22:35
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Senor Dog posted:Maybe the average h/g has more leisure time than the average farmer, but the average farmer wasn’t the one writing or designing cool pyramids. Also there’s the whole offseason where you’re just eating from your stores that h/g didn’t really have did they? True but the same argument could be said for non-egalitarian H/G societies were the elites get tribute or labor done for them. H/G groups definitely had food storage methods and caches so they totally could have, especially if its something relatively east to store like acorns or smoked meats. I havent done the math for it yet I would bet in a hypothetical situation where you still need to hunt and gather food in the winter you would still have in total more leisure time year round then an agricultural society Telsa Cola fucked around with this message at 22:54 on Oct 24, 2017 |
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Oct 24, 2017 22:50
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Radical 90s Wizard posted:I don't think it's "leisure time vs leisure time" as much as the amount of food being produced means people can dedicate themselves to a craft or whatever and just trade for food. But there is nothing to prevent someone from doing so in a H/G society, people weren't just going out and bringing back exactly x amount for x people, surplus got brought back which could be stored and traded. The average "work" week for a H/G just to get food is often put at around 20ish hours which is little more then 3 hours a day which means you could gently caress off and do crafts for the rest of your time if you wanted too. Basically food production was not a bar to specialization. Basically to answer the original question we dont actually know why societies got more complex and there are a poo poo ton of possible answers ranging from economic to political reasons. naem posted:We could argue that an organized agrarian society isn't better/worse than a hunter gatherer society, and they definitely existed on a spectrum with farming/hunting/gathering/specialized crafts happening in varying degrees as needed. Ah fair enough.
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Oct 24, 2017 23:33
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Rutibex posted:sure you have lots of leisure time as a hunter gatherer, but you also have to carry everything you own on your back. that doesn't leave a lot of room for elaborate art or heavy tools that are not absolutely essential. people began to specialize and create different objects (like pottery) once they were settled and didn't have to carry all of their poo poo around everywhere. Yeah you do but only during the times you are moving locations, and what do you define as elaborate art and heavy tools? Lots of art in the North Americas and Mesoamericas for instance got "focused" towards light movable objects like bowls, vases, and clothing. Not to mention weavings and what not. Pottery isnt some agricultural exclusive technology and even if it was various H/G societies have things that function in the same way. Ratios and Tendency posted:Farming gives you higher population density and trade networks which is the cultural equivalent of bigger brains. Again, not something that is exclusive to agricultural societies. Telsa Cola fucked around with this message at 02:13 on Oct 25, 2017 |
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Oct 24, 2017 23:57
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Pac-Manioc Root posted:I have a dumb hypothesis that in addition to this, raw population gives you more exceptional outliers, too. So your tribe of a couple dozen hunter gatherers is scratching off fewer lotto tickets than your city state of 100,000 to win the Einstein who helps you figure out a better pulley or the germ theory of disease or how to determine the area of a triangle or what the heck ever. I actually kinda like this but the "Brilliant Man" hypothesis get shut down a lot in anthropological work. My favorite analogue to it is the theory that certain people got really greedy and started gathering resources and materials and people to themselves to show off and the competition between them leads to more gathering and boom you have a centralized power figure in a society with specialized goods and people. Telsa Cola fucked around with this message at 00:05 on Oct 25, 2017 |
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Oct 25, 2017 00:01
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Have Blue posted:He's kinda interesting but he pulls most of his "history" from "my larp group does it this way so clearly that's how the ancients did it!" Yeah the opinion on him in the other history threads is he basically has no idea what he is talking about half the time. Anyways, have a dancing Maya lobster man. Also likely my 4th favorite extant piece of Maya art. 
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Nov 16, 2017 23:46
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just another posted:so what was so special about Central and South America that enabled such large and complex cultures to flourish there? There are like 30 different answers for this. Some argue that agriculture means you need more complex systems to keep track of growth seasons,land, inventory, storage, distribution, etc, which leads to administration and other stuff which is what people generally think of when they think of complexity. Others argue that "aggrandizers" wanted to show off which leads to the development of elite traded goods and monumental architecture. Others will argue its due to environmental carrying capacity factors. Still others will just say its a historical accident and that its foolish to try to point to any one or two things as the prime mover. The joke answer is corn (this also might be the real answer).
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Nov 17, 2017 03:22
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mind the walrus posted:Probably. Also llamas? I don't think the PNW had any real pack animals to speak of with much less hospitable terrain to pre-iron civilizations. Llamas are only really an Inca area thing though, everyone else in Mesoamerica and such did fine with out them. And terrain is not really as big as in issue as you think.
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Nov 18, 2017 08:21
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Nucleic Acids posted:If the Cahokia culture had built with stone instead of wood we'd have the equivalent of ruined Mayan cities in southern Illinois. We also would most likely would still have a poo poo ton more mounds present but farmers decided to plow like 98% of them over, mainly due to racism.
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Nov 18, 2017 20:41
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Rime posted:One of the things which changed my perception on life forever was touching an inscription by Xerxes, located just outside the gargantuan hewn-out throne room of the rock of Van - imperial capital of ancient Urartu. Went to Gobleki-Tepi a couple of days later. So I don't want to be the rear end in a top hat here but honestly people shouldn't touch things of archaeological or historical significance with their bare hands unless its been okayed and even then I'm hesitant. The oils gently caress things up alone not to mention the damaging effect of repeated touching. Its been a real problem at archaeological sites and museums. That being said, Im glad you had a moment of connection with history and I wish more people had that. I have seen enough carved modern graffiti on ancient sites to make me wish people either respected it more or just didn't have access to it. There has been an ongoing debate in heritage management basically around this topic and it doesn't look like it will be settled soon.
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Dec 9, 2017 06:14
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Alhazred posted:Given the widespread belief that routine handling of paper with bare hands chemically damages it, it is telling that our research uncovered no scientific evidence supporting this notion. The closest citation on the subject found was an article entitled, "Fingerprints on Photographs" in which Klaus Hendriks and Rütiger Krall (1993) state that a fingerprint could damage a silver image if the salts in sweat, particularly sodium chloride, managed to penetrate through the gelatin layer. Since the surface of paper is almost always protected by a layer of gelatin (or some other sizing agent), sodium chloride would have to permeate this barrier before it could interact with the cellulose beneath, and the corrosion potential of cellulose is not remotely as great as that of silver. As discovered by Hendriks and Krall, the other necessary component for the silver corrosion reaction is oxygen, and it can be argued that bound sheets of paper in closed books are not exposed to high levels of environmental oxygen for long periods of time, and neither are unbound sheets stored along with other pieces of paper in archival storage folders and boxes. Ehhhh, this argument relies on the assumption that the protective layering is completely intact on the document, or that there even is one. Thats debateable for documents hundreds of years old and even more debatable for different paper making traditions. Also the oxygen thing seems odd to argue because lol archival storage folders and boxes being air tight, often times (at least with the ones I worked with) they go for an acid free approach and thats seen as being good enough in many instances. Many collections cant fork over the $$$ for really good poo poo and even if they could they dont have the cash to match the amount of materials they have. This also ignores the point (and I guess the paper doesn't really argue against this) that you should be preventing any and all foreign contaminants on the items in general because it can gently caress up chemical testing down the line. If, as the paper claims, cloth gloves make your hands too "bulky" then buy thinner material or use a different,sterile material. Washing your hands is a laughable standard and saying "eh this is good enough" is not the standard I think we should be setting when dealing with possibly unique objects. But tbh I guess I have to say I dont know for sure, I worked with a pretty (in)famous collection and gloves were always mandatory. Im not a paper archival expert by any means but the arguments presented within the article are not that convincing. Also if your gloves are as dirty as people hands then you are loving up with either your cleaning methods or climate control. Tldr: I think that the argument presented is bullshit,lazy and I would not loan anything to the conservators there. But Im not an archival expert for paper. If you are feel free to rip my argument apart. Telsa Cola fucked around with this message at 10:09 on Dec 9, 2017 |
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Dec 9, 2017 09:30
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Speaking of archives and collections, someone really needs to do a study on the amount currently held by private individuals in their basements or whatever because their associated research center/school/whatever doesn't have space for it. Im almost certain it would be a decently large amount compared to what we have in academic centers.
Telsa Cola fucked around with this message at 10:28 on Dec 9, 2017 |
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Dec 9, 2017 10:18
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That lion looks shook.
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Dec 11, 2017 04:03
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