A revolution in archaeology is transforming our picture of past populations

https://aeon.co/essays/an-archeological-revolution-transforms-our-image-of-human-freedoms

by summerdown2 • 2 years ago

50 23 2 years ago

mikhmha• 2 years ago

I've thought about this idea a lot. It seems like the idea we have of the centralized empires of the past is mostly based on movies and fiction - and maybe from the actions of the last remaining empires in the 19-20th century. I think we take for granted advancements in communications and transportation that allowed for the governance of large areas of land in more recent history.

Are maps of ancient empires even accurate? What do they even mean. If you went back in time to some backwater village on the edges of some Empire map and asked the villagers who was the emperor could they even tell you? Or would they still name some king from 50 years ago?

prox• 2 years ago

That really depends. I have been reading a lot recently on early Indian civilization, and really most of what we know in terms of historicity, aka writing in the earliest times, is only in the north, the Indus, the Ganges plains and so on. However there were many cultures living in the subcontinent south. Some of those “tribes” were deep in forests and survived relatively intact to the current day, with at least some features unscathed.

Then there is the trade of the early CE time. Trade between India and the Roman Empire over sea was of incredible proportions. Recently a sanskrit brahmi script was uncovered in an old Egyptian harbour port. So there must have been also a large group of people exposed to trade and exchange of ideas.

So I don’t think any broad sweeping statements can be made. To answer your question, it totally depends on the place and time you want to look at.

ijidak• 2 years ago

It's true. Control of many fringe regions was tenuous at times.

For example, the Annals of Sennacherib show the Assyrians had to re-conquer areas that drifted after previous subjugation.

But how do you draw those boundaries between subjugations?

In the Bible, it shows that Nebuchadnezzar's armies had to repeatedly return to Israel to re-subjugate it between rebellions.

No doubt similar rebellions could occur in many different areas all at once.

Boundaries were likely never as neat as the boundaries we show today.

Plus, it's not like they were surveying their boundaries and monitoring them via a supranational body like the U.N.

digging• 2 years ago

Borders are a more modern concept anyway, and even modern borders are anything but a line on a map. (Consider airports. Embassies. Checkpoints. Federal agencies operating inside neighboring countries to deter migration. Etc)

Boundaries are policies, not objects. They always have been.

elphinstone• 2 years ago

There are interesting ideas here, but also a lot of presumption. Just because a people lacked stone writing and centralisation doesn't mean they were free of local tyrants and internecine tribal warfare.

brabel2• 2 years ago

I was thinking the same thing. I don't think there's evidence of anyone ever trying to flee from an Empire where they lived, at least if they were not there as slaves brought from another area. If the "outside" was so great, you would expect people to try to move there... everything I've read so far makes me believe the exact opposite has been true. People tend to want to move to more prosperous areas, just check the world today.

golergka• 2 years ago

Soviet union was in most ways a colonial empire, and a lot of people risked their lives to escape from it.

dash2• 2 years ago

Like these guys' fascinating book, The Dawn of Everything, this article introduces but over-interprets some exciting new data.

A lot of what we're told about is new locations for urban life. But the claim that they weren't empires is arguing from absence of evidence. We mostly don't know what they were.

For an interesting pairing, see Bryan Ward-Brown on the fall of Rome, interviewed here by Razib Khan (https://www.razibkhan.com/p/bryan-ward-perkins-the-material-...). There we do know what happened when an empire ended, and it was very bad for the people in it. That's because big empires are usually not replaced by anarchy, or by democratic nation-states, but by small empires, which have fewer economies of scale and therefore more taxation and exploitation.

DiogenesKynikos• 2 years ago

In a lot of the former Western Roman Empire, taxation ended when the empire fell. Standards of living also rapidly declined.

Taxation in the empire had funded public goods, like aqueducts, roads and security, which enabled large urban centers and long-distance trade.

bregma• 2 years ago

Apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system, and public health ... what have the Romans ever done for us?

openrisk• 2 years ago

Today it seems very possible that another 2,000 years of world governance by ‘powerful extractive elites’ could lead to the destruction of most life on Earth.

While it is difficult to assign a probability, the possibility of modern civilization suffering catastrophic collapse in a relatively short time is not unthinkable. The combination of ever advancing technological capabilities and stagnant sociopolitical maturity should be prompting any thinking person to ponder how we could possibly learn and evolve long-term sustainable social structures.

The underlying 'freedom vs empire' theme that permeates the article is too simplistic. E.g., in the modern era empires fragmented into national states, granting "freedom" to populations self-identifying as "one people" yet the local extractive elites did not disappear, they persisted and promptly collaborated in a variety of supranational cartels.

The human society "equation" that would guide us how to reach a desirable stable state has never been written down. If it is close to anything it is highly complex and non-linear system, admitting a variety of solutions as "N" (our numbers) and "C" (the collective cultural imprints in our brains) keep cumulating, but "P", our planet, remains fixed.

Oppressive hierarchical societies seem to have been a relatively stable state in various phases of human development. This does not make them natural or inevitable under all conditions. Even a simple linear string will admit different solutions depending on boundary conditions.

arkh• 2 years ago

modern civilization suffering catastrophic collapse

If it happens next potential civilizationable species will be fucked: we have extracted all the easy high density resource we could find. So no easy gas for them which may hamper any progress. Also no easy high nitrogen sources: food sources will have to not depend on this cycle if they want a huge population. And maybe a lack of helium if they're unlucky.

signalToNose• 2 years ago

Kurt Vonnegut Galapagos show is an alternative future

ch4s32• 2 years ago

That seems true if you only think about coal, but we started with wood and any future world without people would have a ton of that. Whale oil too would also be available. Depending on the time periods we're talking about, there would be a LOT of oil wells that could be discovered via the crumbling infrastructure left behind. Surface level coal my be gone in most places, but large mines full of coal site idle in a lot of places now for economic reasons, and energy poor society may dig out these deposits. On the scale of millions of years, there could well be additional hydrocarbons produced, and methane could be used by some future sapient organisms.

StanislavPetrov• 2 years ago

if they want a huge population.

Then maybe our folly will save them from making the same mistakes?

mncharity• 2 years ago

simplistic [...] yet the local extractive elites did not disappear, they persisted

Another complication is elites could be leveraged against each other. In the Ottoman Empire, Egyptian farming villages would use strikes to discipline local elites. Village(s) unhappy with local elite decisions would go on strike - slowing down or abandoning work, and moving in with family in nearby villages. The production drop would bring down a pissed and powerful Ottoman official on the local elite - "you will fix this, now".

t43562• 2 years ago

Surely it's all just about organising people on a larger and larger scale that has benefits? Perhaps an empire is a way to do that which works in the sense that some controlling centre has to be chosen and that's going to happen initially by war and conquest.

The rulers of tribes are going to want "freedom" so they can stay in the game of possibly building their own empire but that doesn't mean their people in the end wouldn't find some consolation in the stability of being under e.g. Roman rule.

I'm sure nobody wants to be under Russian or Chinese rule but if the rest of us cannot organise ourselves on a larger scale than they can .... it might eventually happen.

tivert2• 2 years ago

Or maybe, by then, none of it will really matter very much, because the past will itself have been automated. Instead of historians, we’ll have ‘history machines’ based on algorithms and databanks: more facts on file, designed by survivors of the final bureaucratic assault on what was once fondly called ‘the humanities’.

Honestly, I can't imagine that a machine like that won't devolve into a Ministry of Truth.

allturtles• 2 years ago

archaeologists working in the inland delta of the Middle Niger revealed evidence for a prosperous urban civilisation with no discernible signs of rulership or central authority

I don't have access to this article, but I'm skeptical. How would you conclusively determine that the ruins of a city without writing indicate a lack of rulership or central authority? Likewise, the fact that various archaeological finds are turning up more organized societies in previously unexpected places tells us nothing about how state-like and hierarchical they were, while all our evidence of cities from places where we have written historical records is of states that function on the basis of organized violence. This feels like ideologically-motivated wishful thinking. The author wants to believe that empires are not just bad, but "unnatural."

What, exactly, were ancient empires ‘successful’ at, if extraordinary levels of violence, destruction and displacement were required to keep them afloat?

It comes down to whether you are with Hobbes or Rousseau. This author is clearly with Rousseau, and believes the natural state of humanity is to be free and happy and that empires are a kind of unnatural cancer. If you are a Hobbesian, and believe that violence and exploitation are endemic to human life, than what empires succeed at is to push the violence to the periphery, and allow those inside the orbit of the empire to enjoy a relatively peaceful existence.

A revolution in archaeology is transforming our picture of past populations

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