Europe's first farmers

On Thursday, February 16th, the Department of Classical Studies and the Archaeology Program at UNCG hosted a presentation by Dr. Susan Allen entitled "Wetlands and Early Farmers in Europe: The Southern Albania Neolithic Archaeological Project." The event was sponsored by the Greensboro Chapter of the Archaeological Institute of America as part of its lecture series.

My knowledge of the transition to agriculture is limited largely to what I teach in my introductory classes, so it was nice to hear the state-of-the-art from a recognized expert in the field (and a UNCG alumna--Dr. Allen worked on Dr. Jeff Soles's Mochlos project as an undergraduate).

Dr. Allen began by providing some basic background. The transition from foraging to farming in the West (the so-called "Neolithic Revolution") began between 11,000 and 10,000 B.C. in the Near East and the lifestyle eventually reached southern Europe sometime after 7,000 B.C. The most common domesticated plants were wheat, barley, and legumes, all of which were imported from the Near East. Perhaps the most influential explanation for the spread of farming out of the Near East and into Europe is the Wave-of-Advance model proposed by Albert Ammerman and Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza beginning in the 1970s. I'm no expert, of course, but as I understand it, the main driver of the original model was population density. While agriculture increases carrying capacity, the population densities in the Near East eventually grew to such an extent that people, and their agricultural lifestyle, were forced to migrate into more sparsely populated areas. The result of this demographic process was predicted to produce a wave-like pattern of incrementally more recent dates for the arrival of agriculture (as seen in the figure below).

Wave of Advance Model (from Ammerman and Cavalli-Sforza, 1984).

Dr. Allen went on to describe a number of weaknesses with the Wave-of-Advance Model as originally conceived. First, the diagnosis of population density as the causal factor in the movement of an agricultural lifestyle across Europe leaves little room for human agency--that is, the motivations, desires, and pressures that guide the decisions of individual human actors. Second, the model does not take into account geographic barriers like rivers and mountains, which certainly affected how agriculture spread. Closely associated with this is the built-in assumption that agriculture would arrive at more-or-less the same time across an entire area (like, say, western Turkey and Egypt as in the above figure). However, it seems likely that particular ecosystems within a region may have been targeted by populations for agriculture while others were used for foraging or a mixed agriculture/foraging economy. We'll come back to these...

The other major issue with this profound shift in human subsistence is the implicit, and perhaps misplaced, assumption that the Neolithic lifestyle was a deliberate adaptation. The adoption of agriculture, in other words, is seen in hindsight by Westerners as an obviously better and, thus, inevitable development in the march towards "civilization." (In fact, the very use of the word "revolution" when referring to the rise of Neolithic cultures implies a value judgement.) What many non-specialists don't realize, though, is that the shift to agriculture, as I teach in my Introduction to Biological Anthropology course, was (and, for some, still is) in many ways very, very bad for human health (Jared Diamond nicely summarizes this in a 1987 Discover Magazine article).

So, this brings us to Dr. Allen's work in Albania. Why Albania, you might ask? Albania was ruled under the communist dictatorship of Evner Hoxha from 1944 to 1985, a period during which the entire country was essentially cut off from the West. Although reforms were gradually introduced after Hoxha's death, communism eventually collapsed in 1989. This history had profound implications for archaeology in Albania--very little was known about this country's rich archaeological heritage until very recently (to put this in perspective, the first carbon dates for an archaeological site in Albania were not run and published until the 1990s, fifty years after the method was developed). So, the country was essentially a blank space on the map of southeastern Europe until very recently. 

Dr. Allen co-directs the Southern Albania Neolithic Archaeological Project (SANAP), which aims to help fill this void. While several sites with Neolithic components and evidence for early agriculture exist in Albania, Dr. Allen focused her discussion on the site of Vashtëmi, which, at ca. 6,400 cal BC, is one of the earliest farming sites in Europe. The paleoenvironment of the site is reconstructed to be a wetland, which seems to be a pattern among early farming sites in this part of Europe. The spectrum of domesticated plants is not identical to those that are found in the Near East, and the animal bones do not exclusively represent domesticated species. Dr. Allen argued that these observations indicate that (1) early farming populations deliberately chose to inhabit inland sites with wetlands, which are habitats known to harbor high biodiversity, and (2) humans exercised personal choice and preference when deciding which domesticated plants to bring along with them and practiced a mixed agriculture/foraging lifestyle. 

All of this indicates that a straightforward Wave-of-Advance Model probably oversimplifies the situation, as many of the assumptions (ignore landforms, population density as the main driving force, etc.) are probably unrealistic. The spread of agriculture thus probably occurred in starts and stops, likely because it was not an obviously superior adaptation to foraging, at least in the beginning. It is also becoming clear that its spread was mediated by a variety of factors, including the presence or absence of geographic barriers, the individual choices of humans and, yes, population densities.                 

New perspectives on the Harper's Ferry raid of 1859

On February 21st I attended a presentation by Dr. Peter Wood, an Emeritus Professor of History at Duke University (as someone who grew up in Colorado, I was interested to hear that he now lives in Longmont, Colorado). The presentation, entitled "The Harper's Ferry Five," was sponsored by the Durham Library Foundation's Humanities Society in celebration of Black History Month. This presentation is part of a broader movement within the historical community to reevaluate much of Civil War (and, indeed, American) history through the lens of the Black Experience. This change is particularly evident in explorations of the Civil War's beginning. The "White Version" is, naturally, the attack on Fort Sumter on April 12th, 1861. However, one can easily trace the conflict's origins to Nat Turner's rebellion in 1831, the Christiana Revolt of 1851, the Wellington Rescue of 1958 and, of course, the Harper's Ferry Raid of 1859.

Dr. Wood began by running through the relatively well known history of the raid and its major characters: John Brown, Robert E. Lee, Jeb Stuart, and John Wilkes Booth. His main focus, though, was on two less well-appreciated aspects of the raid that, to Dr. Wood's mind, help dispel common misconceptions about this important historical event.

Misconception 1: John Brown attempted to stir up a full-scale slave insurrection, a plan that was at best quixotic and, at worst, utterly preposterous. Many thus see Brown as a mentally unstable fanatic willing to risk his life and the lives of his co-conspirators (including some of his own sons) on a mission that was certain to fail.

There is no doubt that Brown couched his hatred for slavery in fire-and-brimstone religious terms that fueled his strong abolitionism. He is also well-known for his participation in violent attacks against, and the murder of, pro-slavery individuals in Kansas in the 1850s. However, Dr. Wood argued that his intentions for the raid were much more nuanced and could be traced, at least in part, to a trip he made in 1840 to Tyler County, Virginia (now part of West Virginia) to survey land plots. Brown made two very important observations about this part of the Upper South on his travels. First, it was extremely rugged and thus difficult for large groups of people to access and, second, that slaves, and slave-holding, were rare. Voter rolls and enlistment records from 1861-1865 show that northwestern Virginia was pro-Union, something that Brown may also have picked up on in 1840.

When Brown later outlined his plans to Frederick Douglass, he thought that the mountains of northwestern Virginia (the region within which the arsenal at Harper's Ferry was located) would be the key to freeing slaves, since the rugged topography could serve as a protective barrier against pursuit by militia, the military, and slave-catchers. Dr. Wood thus argued, compellingly in my opinion, that Brown's true goal was to acquire guns from the arsenal and retreat with as many slaves as possible to the protective confines of the mountains--all with little or no bloodshed. Once a safe refuge for escaped slaves had been established, Brown hoped that an exodus of slaves would lead inexorably to the collapse of the Southern economy and, ultimately, slavery itself. Of course, Brown's plans misfired badly, and he recognized that his failure left no alternative than for slavery to be swept away through the spilling of much blood.

Misconception 2. While the Harper's Ferry raid attempted to free black slaves, it was a white man's affair.

It is clear that Brown was the driving force behind the raid, and it is also well known that five of Brown's companions were black men. However, these men, both free and formerly enslaved, are often viewed as passive hangers on, rather than active agents, in the events leading up to the Harper's Ferry raid. In fact, as Dr. Wood emphasized, each of these men had very strong convictions about their participation and many were politically astute. To take just one example: Lewis Leary was born free in North Carolina and, after moving to Ohio in 1856, became a member of the Oberlin Anti-Slavery Society and participated in the rescue of the fugitive slave John Price in 1858 (this is the Wellington Rescue referenced above). Dr. Wood's final slide emphasized that these men should not be forgotten.