Looking beyond the world as we know it
What we've missed about hunter-gatherers
There’s a pervasive sense, in archaeology and beyond, that the world as we know it came into being with the rise of farming. Not only do we know how to recognize the evidence for societies that tended to stay in one place and grew quite large, we also know how to imagine them. What it felt like to live in them, what the challenges were, what jobs people did, what the relationship to the environment was like. What technological and cultural achievements might have been possible, and what might have counted as an achievement in the first place.
The era of hunting and gathering, despite being a much, much longer period of our species’ history, doesn’t pop to life so easily in our mind’s eye. (It’s also not a period that definitively ended; there are still hunter-gatherers today, despite centuries of pressure on their resources and legal prohibitions against their ways of life, mostly from colonial regimes.) This is especially true, ironically, the closer that era gets to the beginnings of agriculture in a given region. Archaeologists in Europe, especially, were long enchanted by the dazzling cave paintings of the Paleolithic, intrigued by the rapid cultural transformations of the Neolithic, and somewhat befuddled by the era in between, called the Mesolithic.
During the Mesolithic, the glaciers of the last ice age were melting, and ecosystems around the world were changing quickly and irreversibly. It was the last time people dealt with rapid, global, and sometimes catastrophic climate change, and as such, it seems to me like a period we’d want to understand. But that very dynamism and instability have obscured much of the evidence of how people survived and adapted, not least by drowning many of the places where they lived.
In APOCALYPSE, I explore what Mesolithic sea level rise meant for the people who lived through it, to the extent that we can see them, and how this inherently limited view has influenced archaeology’s conception of them. And this week, I wrote a separate story about another piece of the Mesolithic’s story we’d been missing. In the Mediterranean, archaeologists long believed the first people to reach the remote islands of Malta had to be farmers. Agricultural societies would have been the only ones with the time and resources to develop advanced seafaring technologies, capable of an overnight voyage of at least 100 kilometers, and the only ones with the need or desire to use them. Even if hunter-gatherers had been able to reach small islands far from any mainland, they wouldn’t have been able to transform a marginal environment into something that could support them long-term, as farmers can do with such stunning success.
And yet, archaeologists recently found a site in Malta that shows hunter-gatherers reached the archipelago more than a millennium before farmers. Rather than growing crops to increase the resources available on the small islands, they found everything they needed by looking beyond the terrestrial—to fish, shellfish, seals, and birds, along with the islands’ deer. It’s possible these hunter-gatherers didn’t even consider Malta to be particularly remote or isolated. For them, the sea was likely not a barrier to be overcome, but the web that connected many different places into the constellation they called home.
Archaeologists have historically had a much harder time looking beyond the terrestrial, or conceiving of the sea as a source of nourishment and connections, rather than danger and separation. But as something like the Mesolithic’s environmental instability returns to our world, we desperately need to understand, and learn to value, the kinds of lives that allowed people to survive and thrive. Not necessarily so we can adopt them—I, for one, am not prepared to become a sea nomad or even a farmer overnight—but so we can practice shaking off the limits on our imagination we didn’t even know were there.
Book events!
If you live in/will be in southern California in May, come see me talk about APOCALYPSE!
On Friday, May 16 at 6 pm, I’ll be at Cellar Door Bookstore in Riverside, CA, co-hosted by the University of California, Riverside’s Center for Ideas and Society. I’ll be in conversation with UCR sociologist Victoria Reyes. To quote the event page, “If you’re interested in the history of our world, and how we can use that history to survive and create a less bleak future, this conversation is absolutely for you!” You can preorder APOCALYPSE from Cellar Door here.
On Saturday, May 17, I’ll be at Automata in Los Angeles, in conversation with Don Wildman, host of the TV shows Mysteries at the Museum and Cities of the Underworld, and the podcast American History Hit. Stay tuned for the time and an RSVP link!
