REVOLUTIONS IN SOCIAL ORGANIZATION

Life in Villages

In the many regions across the globe where domestication of plants and animals took hold, agricultural villages were established near fields for accessible sowing and cultivating and near pastures for herding livestock. Villagers collaborated to clear fields, plant crops, and celebrate rituals in which they sang, danced, and sacrificed to nature and the spirit world for fertility, rain, and successful harvests. They produced stone tools to work the fields and clay and stone pots or woven baskets—and later on, pottery vessels—to collect and store the crops. As populations grew and lands yielded surplus food, some villagers became craftworkers, devoting some of their time to producing pottery, baskets, textiles, or tools, which they could trade to farmers and pastoralists for food. Craft specialization and the buildup of surpluses contributed to early social stratification, as some people accumulated more land and wealth while others led the rituals and sacrifices.

Settling in villages also made possible the rise of the extended family as the principal social unit, eroding the influence of clusters of families and free-floating communities that had been the predominant social units among hunters and gatherers. Because successful families strove to accumulate wealth and power and to pass their successes on to offspring, the family also promoted social inequality and stratification.

The earliest dwelling places of the first settled communities were simple structures: circular pits with stones piled on top to form walls, with a cover stretched above that rested on poles. Social structures were equally simple, being clan-like and based on birth relationships. With time, however, population growth enabled clans to expand. As the use of natural resources intensified, specialized tasks evolved and division of labor arose. Some community members procured and prepared food; others built terraces and defended the settlement. Later, residents built walls with stones or mud bricks and clamped them together with wooden fittings. Thus all played a role in safeguarding food.

As construction techniques changed, houses evolved from the traditional circular plan to a rectangular one. Because the rectangular shape does not exist in nature, it is a truly human mark on the landscape. This new shape reflected new attitudes and social behaviors: in rectangular houses, walls did more than support and protect—they also divided and separated. The introduction of interior walls meant that family members gained separate spaces, conferring privacy. Human relations would never again be as they had been in the relatively egalitarian arrangements of the mobile hunters and gatherers.

Archaeological sites in Southwest Asia have provided evidence of what life was like in some of the earliest villages. At Wadi en-Natuf, for example, located about 10 miles from present-day Jerusalem, a group of people known historically as Natufians began to dig sunken pit shelters and to chip stone tools around 12,500 BCE. In the highlands of eastern Anatolia, large settlements clustered around monumental public buildings with impressive stone carvings that reflect a complex social organization. In central Anatolia around 7500 BCE, at the site of Çatal Hüyük, a dense 32-acre honeycomb settlement featured rooms with artwork of a high quality. The walls were covered with paintings, and sculptures of wild bulls, hunters, and pregnant women enlivened many rooms.

Another example of village settlement occurred after 5500 BCE, when people moved into the river valley in Mesopotamia (in present-day Iraq) along the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers and small villages began to appear. The inhabitants collaborated to build simple irrigation systems to water their fields. Perhaps because of the increased demands for community work to maintain the irrigation systems, the communities in southern Mesopotamia became stratified, with some people having more power than others. We can see from the burial sites and myriad public buildings uncovered by archaeologists that for the first time some people had higher status derived from birth rather than from the merits of their work. A class of people who had access to more luxury goods and who lived in bigger and better houses now became part of the social organization.

It is important to emphasize that changes arising from agriculture enabled larger numbers of people to live in denser concentrations, and the household with its dominant male replaced the small, relatively egalitarian band as the primary social unit.

Men, Women, and Evolving Gender Relations

The gradual transition to an agricultural way of life sharpened the differences in gender roles. For millions of years, biological differences—the fact that females give birth to offspring and lactate to nourish them and that males do neither of these—determined female and male behaviors and attitudes toward each other. But it is incorrect to think of these biologically based sexual relations as gender (social and cultural) relations. One can speak of the emergence of gender relations and roles as distinct from biological difference only with the appearance of modern humans (Homo sapiens) and, perhaps, Neanderthals. Only when humans began to think in complex symbolic ways and give voice to these perceptions in a spoken language did well-defined gender categories of man and woman crystallize. As these cultural aspects of human life took shape, the distinction between “men” and “women,” rather than between “males” and “females,” arose. At that point, around 150,000 years ago, culture joined biology in governing human interactions.

As human communities became larger, more hierarchical, and more powerful, the rough gender egalitarianism of hunting and gathering societies eroded. An enhanced human power over the environment did not bring equal power to everyone, and it is possible that women were the net losers of the agricultural revolution. Although their knowledge of wild plants had contributed to early settled agriculture, they did not necessarily benefit from that transition.

Advances in agrarian tools introduced a harsh working life that undermined women’s traditional status as farmers. Men, no longer so involved in hunting and gathering, now took on the heavy work of yoking animals to plows. This left to women the backbreaking and repetitive tasks of planting, weeding, harvesting, and grinding the grain into flour. Thus, although agricultural innovations increased productivity, they also increased the drudgery of work, especially for women. Consider the evidence from fossils found in Abu Hureyra, Syria: damage to the vertebrae, osteoarthritis in the toes, and curved and arched femurs suggest that the work of bending over and kneeling in the fields took its toll on women farmers. These maladies do not usually appear among the bone remains of (male) hunters and gatherers.

The revolutions in social organizations sprang first of all from the domestication of plants and animals. These radical innovations permitted humans to settle down in villages and led to population increase. They also resulted in a differentiation of the roles of men and women. Power relations changed within households and communities, where the senior male figure became dominant in households and males dominated females in leadership positions. Where the agricultural transformation was most widespread and population densities grew, marked inequalities appeared in the social and political realms. These inequalities affected gender relations, and patriarchy (the rule of senior males within households) began to spread around the globe.