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glaurungI've been having Thinky Thoughts about the racist, colonialist gatekeeping that goes on in archaeology and anthropology around which groups of people get to be called "agriculturalists" and which end up labelled as "hunter gatherers". Sources like wikipedia say the distinction is important because agriculture enables settled living, with higher population densities, and that in turn enables craft specialization, surplus resources, long term infrastructure, having nicer things, and so on.
But there are so many groups of people who did live in permanent or semi-permanent settlements and were able to have some or all of those knock on benefits, but who continue to be classed as "hunter gatherers" because they didn't *farm*. Or they didn't *plant crops*, even though they did maintain and harvest vast stands of edible wild plants. As research continues to turn up more and more examples of people who weren't nomads living sparsely in small groups and collecting only naturally occurring food sources, the "hunter gatherer" category looks more and more like a catch all for "anyone who doesn't make a living like our wheat growing ancestors."
The gatekeeping isn't only about restricting admittance to the sacred precincts of the "agriculturalist" club, it's also about preventing the creation of additional in-between labels to properly encompass the spectrum of strategies humans have used to feed themselves other than farming. Maintaining the dichotomy is vital to preserving the specialness of the agriculturalist in group and the subaltern status of everyone else. Instead, you find half-assed labels like "enhanced," "complex," or "affluent hunter gatherers." Even though the adjective and non-adjective groups share little in common apart from not being farmers. And even though the closer you look, the fewer regular food collecting cultures there were compared to (pick adjective) cultures.
Let's start a book I won't be finishing: Dark Emu, by Bruce Pascoe, which is a popular history of the food technology and lifeways of pre-colonial Australians, especially those in the south of the continent. (North western Australia is mostly harsh desert - the early British invaders settled in the well watered south eastern parts). Pascoe's thesis is that the original Australians, especially in the fertile part of the continent, were, at the time of invasion, practising sophisticated agricultural techniques and living in large permanent or semi-permanent settlements, rather than being the nomadic "hunter-gatherers" that they have been depicted as in textbooks and categorized as by most historians/anthropologists/archaeologists.
Pascoe is a pale skinned and was raised white but has since discovered he has some Aboriginal ancestry. Regardless, the book is certainly written from a white viewpoint - In the parts I read, Pascoe does not seem to use any Aboriginal sources in making his argument. Instead, he relies almost exclusively on the journals and chronicles of the early British invaders, supplemented by modern archaeological scholarship. What little oral history appears in the chapters I read is framed by the professional qualifications of the academics who published the studies, and limits itself to quoting the conclusions of the academics, without quoting from the Aborigines they interviewed. That might be because the book has been very carefully crafted to appeal to and sway a white audience that is disinclined to listen to Aboriginal people speaking for themselves, or it might be that Pascoe just stayed in his comfort zone while writing it.
Setting the book's white lens and reliance on white sources aside, consider these two characterizations of "hunter gatherers" which come at the beginning and end of the book:
[[These journals revealed a much more complicated Aboriginal economy than the primitive hunter-gatherer lifestyle we had been told was the simple lot of Australia’s First People. Hunter-gatherer societies forage and hunt for food and do not employ agricultural methods or build permanent dwellings; they are nomadic. But as I read these early journals I came across repeated references to people building dams and wells, planting, irrigating and harvesting seed, preserving the surplus and storing it in houses, sheds or secure vessels, creating elaborate cemeteries and manipulating the landscape — none of which fitted the definition of hunter-gatherer. Could it be that the accepted view of Indigenous Australians simply wandering from plant to plant, kangaroo to kangaroo in hapless opportunism was incorrect?]] (from the start of the introduction)
[[The start of that journey is to allow the knowledge that Aboriginals did build houses, did cultivate and irrigate crops, did sew clothes and were not hapless wanderers across the soil, mere hunter-gatherers. Aboriginals were intervening in the productivity of the country and what they learnt during that process over many thousands of years will be useful to us today. To deny Aboriginal agricultural and spiritual achievement is the single greatest impediment to inter-cultural understanding and, perhaps, Australian moral and economic prosperity.]] (last paragraph of the last chapter)
Way to join in with the colonial project and throw all the other food collecting people in the world under the bus as "hapless wanderers," just to enhance the reputation of some (not all) Aboriginal Australians. Thesarus dot net offers "barbarian, hunter, savage" as its first three suggestions for synonyms to "hunter gatherer," and I think that streak of prejudice is clearly showing when Pascoe talks about them.
Now it's time to go into the weeds a bit. Professional archaeologists and anthropologists were also disgruntled by the "hapless... mere hunter gatherers" characterization in Pascoe's book. Some articles and at least one full book argue against Pascoe's thesis. The counter-book is "Farmers or Hunter-gatherers? The Dark Emu Debate," by Peter Sutton (anthropologist) and Keryn Walshe (archaeologist), and (judging from reviews) it spends some time talking about the problematic aspects of Dark Emu being about aboriginal people without ever talking to them or letting them have a say... but is much more concerned with arguing that no, pre-colonial Australians were "hunter-gatherers plus" rather than farmers.
(Reviews of the "Dark Emu Debate" that I've read: https://www.smh.com.au/culture/books/forensic-critique-of-bruce-pascoe-s-dark-emu-presents-a-different-view-20210719-p58ayt.html and
https://theconversation.com/book-review-farmers-or-hunter-gatherers-the-dark-emu-debate-rigorously-critiques-bruce-pascoes-argument-161877
plus an aboriginal scholar's take: https://theconversation.com/how-the-dark-emu-debate-limits-representation-of-aboriginal-people-in-australia-163006 )
There's also an article about which more later: "Foragers or Farmers: Dark Emu and the Controversy over Aboriginal Agriculture" by Ian Keen (full text here: https://surplusvalue.org.au/Misc%20Articles%20and%20Poems/Keen.Pascoe.2021%20%281%29-1.pdf )
What do we know about the pre-colonial Australian food economy? First of all, Pascoe seems to have overstated his case - some Australians might have been practising agriculture or something agriculture-adjacent, but others (particularly those living in the huge desert areas in the northwestern parts of the continent) definitely were not. Even today huge chunks of the western core of Australia have few if any towns, and a few thousand Western Desert Aboriginal people continued to live there as traditional food collectors well into the 20th century, when anthropologists studied them extensively, and used them, along with a few other groups, as the basis for the definition of what "hunter gatherers" are. Life in the Western Desert involved constant movement from one water source to another, with small groups of people with few possessions collecting what food was available in one place before moving on to the next. Few food sources were abundant enough to make preservation and storage worthwhile, and the population density was extremely low. But life was not on a small scale - each camp of 10-30 people would see massive turnover as individuals and families travelled from one camp to another, and there were regular festivals in which multiple camps totalling hundreds of people would come together for several weeks. The economic unit was a tiny camp, but the social unit was everyone who spoke the same dialect and lived in the same geographic region of the desert. ( see https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004724841830157X , paywalled but available with my Toronto public library card).
On the other hand, it's pretty uncontested that all over the non-desert parts of the continent, Australians altered the landscape on a large scale, using fire to thin out trees and brush to create large meadows. In some places, they manipulated water, damming streams to create shallow ponds and wetlands. All of this to increase the supply of game, fish, and especially edible plants. They transplanted, weeded, and possibly seeded to create large stands of wild yams. In the south, they replanted small yams when harvesting the field to ensure it would continue to be productive, and in the north, they cut off the tops of harvested yams and replanted those. Finally, in some places they maintained huge meadows of edible wild grasses and harvested them on a pretty large scale. Regarding that, here are some quotes from colonist Thomas Mitchell's journals:
[[In the neighbourhood of our camp the grass had been pulled to a very great extent, and piled in hay-ricks so that the aspect of the desert was softened into the agreeable semblance of a hay-field. The grass had evidently been thus laid up by the natives, but for what purpose we could not imagine. At first I thought the heaps were only the remains of encampments, as the aborigines sometimes sleep on a little dry grass; but when we found the ricks, or haycocks, extending for miles we were quite at a loss to understand why they had been made. All the grass was of one kind, a new species of Panicum related to P. effusum R. Br.* and not a spike of it was left in the soil over the whole of the ground. A cucurbitaceous plant had also been pulled up and accumulated in smaller heaps; and from some of the roots the little yam had been taken, but on others it remained. The surface, naturally soft, thus appeared as bare as a fallow field.]] - Three Expeditions into the Interior Vol. 1 (1838)
[[The Panicum loevinode of Dr. Lindley seemed to predominate, a grass whereof the seed ("Cooly") is made by the natives into a kind of paste or bread. Dry heaps of this grass, that had been pulled expressly for the purpose of gathering the seed, lay along our path for many miles. I counted nine miles along the river, in which we rode through this grass only, reaching to our saddle-girths, and the same grass seemed to grow back from the river, at least as far as the eye could reach through a very open forest.]] - Journal of an Expedition into the Interior, 1848.
Which brings us to the question of settled living. Some Australians were not nomadic, especially in places with abundant fish. Others, including those grass harvesters, were semi-nomadic, moving seasonally from one village of permanent homes to another. Pascoe in his chapter on agriculture says that Thomas Mitchell could not speak to the people who left behind all those hay-ricks because they had "only just left." (Pascoe's words - there's no separate citation and I failed to see the bit where this was mentioned in the passage that is cited). So, the grass harvesting Australians moved infrequently from one village to another. Pascoe has an entire chapter talking about those villages and their well-built, permanent houses. The agriculture-adjacent people who harvested all that grass were living much more densely than their desert cousins, and were able to enjoy at least some of the benefits of (semi) settled living, like investing in infrastructure.
We also know that the people who harvested those wild seeds also stored them for later use, often in containers (sacks of hide or baskets) which may have been sized to be portable (the largest are reported as holding around 40 or 50kg of seed - about the upper limit of what a person could lug around). In the article linked above, Ian Keen in one breath agrees that caches of stored seed are well attested to, in at least one case amounting to a ton of seed in all, and in the next breath insists that since the seeds were often harvested while unripe (before the bit that holds the seed to the stem could become brittle), that meant that they could not be stored for very long since unripe seed has a high moisture content and tends to rot.
There's a lot of that kind of doublethink and special pleading going on throughout the Keen article. He quotes an account of aboriginal yam harvesting that says "when a woman dug up a wild yam, she would scold a shoot of the plant, command it to grow a bigger tuber next time, then replace it and cover it with soil," and says that contrary to the source, this cannot be called "gardening" - it's just "conservation." (page 3). Likewise, the replanting of the top part of a harvested tuber "could more accurately be regarded as conservation of a wild crop rather than cultivation." (p 7). Basically, when white people do it with domesticated plants, it's gardening, but when indigenous Australians do it with wild plants, it's just conservation.
Here's another bit of special pleading:
[[‘[T]his regime of firing, gathering and digging might well be regarded as a form of “natural cultivation” on the part of the southern Australian Aborigines’ (Gott 1982, 65) Perhaps this is so, but the process did not include all the procedures required to constitute horticulture, in particular the deliberate selection of plant varieties for planting, and the reservation of seed for propagation.]] (p 4-5)
Somehow the goalposts are always positioned so that what precolonial Australians were doing doesn't count as gardening or farming (just a page or so before, Keen says that the gardening of tubers usually doesn't involve any seed at all, with some tubers being cultivated for long times without becoming domesticated - p 4. Kinda hard to select varieties when your tuber refuses to alter from its wild form). Those Australian yam harvesters had no way of knowing that they were supposed to be selecting only the best tubers for replanting and weeding out the smaller, worse ones from the fields so that their yams would become bigger and better over time. Since they didn't do the right things, though, we can't possibly call what they were doing gardening.
Keen makes a big deal of how Australians were not storing nearly as much wild seed as full blown agricultural people do domesticated grain (where a small village would need to store many tons of grain over a year and built granaries to suit that need). His comparison point is always modern agriculturalists dealing with fully domesticated crops. The earliest farmers in the Levant 20,000-30,000 years ago were dealing with wild grasses as well, and almost certainly weren't eating hundreds of pounds of grains per person per year either - wild wheat was one of many food sources for them, and only became the foundation of anyone's food economy after the wild wheat had become domesticated (see an earlier post I did: https://glaurung.dreamwidth.org/28040.html and also https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rstb.2016.0429 ). But there's never any scholarly argument there - everyone agrees that those ice age grain collectors in the Levant were proto-farmers.
The key difference to Keen and his colleagues seems to be that early farmers in the Middle East planted seeds, and, they say, Australians did not, except for token amounts in fertility rituals. Which might be more special pleading - when faced with undeniable evidence that aboriginal people planted seeds, call it a ritual and claim it was not done on a large enough scale to qualify as agriculture. But let's accept the claim that Australians did not plant those huge meadows of grasses, and that they mostly harvested those meadows when the seed was still unripe. The Australian Panicum grass is, after all, a perennial, so it didn't have to be reseeded every growing season like the Mideastern Triticum which eventually became wheat. As long as the people harvesting Panicum didn't pull up the roots, and as long as they left enough unharvested bits each year to naturally re-seed any patches where the grass had died, there was no need for large scale annual planting.
Humans have been collecting and eating seeds for a very long time - currently the earliest evidence of processing seeds into food are residues of sorghum found on 100,000 year old stone tools in Africa (https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/humans-feasting-on-grains-for-at-least-100000-years/ ). And humans have been using fire to turn forest and brush into grassland for at least 125,000 years (https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/scientists-find-the-oldest-evidence-of-ancient-humans-altering-the-natural-landscape-180979251/ ).
If Keen could magically bring together one of those ice age Levant proto-farmers and a pre-colonial Australian grain harvester and tell them that there was a vital difference between the two of them because one planted harvested seeds and the other didn't, they would have been baffled. Planting seeds vs letting the grass self-seed? Ripe vs unripe? surely these are distinctions without a difference, they might have said.
In the ice age mideast, the best seeds for eating came from a grass that you wanted to harvest when it was ripe. You had to hit a narrow time window - collect too early, and the seed wasn't edible without a bunch of troublesome processing. Too late, and all the remaining seed fell off the stem onto the ground at the slightest touch. Because the seed you collected was ripe, any that you didn't eat could be planted in bare spots of the meadow at the start of the next growing season. As people became better at harvesting all the seed they could, they gradually moved from planting a few patches to planting the whole meadow, because the grass they were harvesting was annual.
In Australia, the best seeds for eating could be harvested when unripe, which made the whole collecting process much easier and not time sensitive, although it did mean that the seeds they collected could only be eaten, and not planted. Then again, making sure the meadow remained productive was never all that big a deal since the grass was perennial, so you didn't have to leave that much seed unharvested. Planting (separately collected ripe) seeds was a minor aspect of maintaining the meadow, if it was something that had to be done at all.
Each group started out with the same 100,000+ year old knowledge of how to harvest and process seeds into food. They both adapted that knowledge to fit the specific characteristics of the grasses they were harvesting, to maximize the amount of food they could collect and minimize the amount of work involved in processing it. The people in the Levant had no way of knowing that they were pursuing a virtuous cycle that would lead to ever-increasing harvest sizes as their activity selected for plants where the bit that held the seed onto the stem would not shatter, leaving more and more of the seed on the stem and making the plant more and more dependant on humans planting it. And the people in Australia has no way of knowing that future scholars would look down their noses at them and declare their activities could not possibly be classed in the same category of proto-agriculture as that of those people in the Levant.
In sum, anthropologists and archaeologists need to admit that there's such a thing as agriculture-adjacent, and that it's fundamentally different from food collecting. And stop being such racist jerks about the rules by which some people get classed as farmers and others get shoehorned into the ill-fitting category of "hunter gatherers."
I originally planned to say something about forest gardens and some of the other people in the world who get classed as (adjective) hunter gatherers instead of farmers or farming-adjacent, but this post has grown too long, so there will be a part 2.
But there are so many groups of people who did live in permanent or semi-permanent settlements and were able to have some or all of those knock on benefits, but who continue to be classed as "hunter gatherers" because they didn't *farm*. Or they didn't *plant crops*, even though they did maintain and harvest vast stands of edible wild plants. As research continues to turn up more and more examples of people who weren't nomads living sparsely in small groups and collecting only naturally occurring food sources, the "hunter gatherer" category looks more and more like a catch all for "anyone who doesn't make a living like our wheat growing ancestors."
The gatekeeping isn't only about restricting admittance to the sacred precincts of the "agriculturalist" club, it's also about preventing the creation of additional in-between labels to properly encompass the spectrum of strategies humans have used to feed themselves other than farming. Maintaining the dichotomy is vital to preserving the specialness of the agriculturalist in group and the subaltern status of everyone else. Instead, you find half-assed labels like "enhanced," "complex," or "affluent hunter gatherers." Even though the adjective and non-adjective groups share little in common apart from not being farmers. And even though the closer you look, the fewer regular food collecting cultures there were compared to (pick adjective) cultures.
Let's start a book I won't be finishing: Dark Emu, by Bruce Pascoe, which is a popular history of the food technology and lifeways of pre-colonial Australians, especially those in the south of the continent. (North western Australia is mostly harsh desert - the early British invaders settled in the well watered south eastern parts). Pascoe's thesis is that the original Australians, especially in the fertile part of the continent, were, at the time of invasion, practising sophisticated agricultural techniques and living in large permanent or semi-permanent settlements, rather than being the nomadic "hunter-gatherers" that they have been depicted as in textbooks and categorized as by most historians/anthropologists/archaeologists.
Pascoe is a pale skinned and was raised white but has since discovered he has some Aboriginal ancestry. Regardless, the book is certainly written from a white viewpoint - In the parts I read, Pascoe does not seem to use any Aboriginal sources in making his argument. Instead, he relies almost exclusively on the journals and chronicles of the early British invaders, supplemented by modern archaeological scholarship. What little oral history appears in the chapters I read is framed by the professional qualifications of the academics who published the studies, and limits itself to quoting the conclusions of the academics, without quoting from the Aborigines they interviewed. That might be because the book has been very carefully crafted to appeal to and sway a white audience that is disinclined to listen to Aboriginal people speaking for themselves, or it might be that Pascoe just stayed in his comfort zone while writing it.
Setting the book's white lens and reliance on white sources aside, consider these two characterizations of "hunter gatherers" which come at the beginning and end of the book:
[[These journals revealed a much more complicated Aboriginal economy than the primitive hunter-gatherer lifestyle we had been told was the simple lot of Australia’s First People. Hunter-gatherer societies forage and hunt for food and do not employ agricultural methods or build permanent dwellings; they are nomadic. But as I read these early journals I came across repeated references to people building dams and wells, planting, irrigating and harvesting seed, preserving the surplus and storing it in houses, sheds or secure vessels, creating elaborate cemeteries and manipulating the landscape — none of which fitted the definition of hunter-gatherer. Could it be that the accepted view of Indigenous Australians simply wandering from plant to plant, kangaroo to kangaroo in hapless opportunism was incorrect?]] (from the start of the introduction)
[[The start of that journey is to allow the knowledge that Aboriginals did build houses, did cultivate and irrigate crops, did sew clothes and were not hapless wanderers across the soil, mere hunter-gatherers. Aboriginals were intervening in the productivity of the country and what they learnt during that process over many thousands of years will be useful to us today. To deny Aboriginal agricultural and spiritual achievement is the single greatest impediment to inter-cultural understanding and, perhaps, Australian moral and economic prosperity.]] (last paragraph of the last chapter)
Way to join in with the colonial project and throw all the other food collecting people in the world under the bus as "hapless wanderers," just to enhance the reputation of some (not all) Aboriginal Australians. Thesarus dot net offers "barbarian, hunter, savage" as its first three suggestions for synonyms to "hunter gatherer," and I think that streak of prejudice is clearly showing when Pascoe talks about them.
Now it's time to go into the weeds a bit. Professional archaeologists and anthropologists were also disgruntled by the "hapless... mere hunter gatherers" characterization in Pascoe's book. Some articles and at least one full book argue against Pascoe's thesis. The counter-book is "Farmers or Hunter-gatherers? The Dark Emu Debate," by Peter Sutton (anthropologist) and Keryn Walshe (archaeologist), and (judging from reviews) it spends some time talking about the problematic aspects of Dark Emu being about aboriginal people without ever talking to them or letting them have a say... but is much more concerned with arguing that no, pre-colonial Australians were "hunter-gatherers plus" rather than farmers.
(Reviews of the "Dark Emu Debate" that I've read: https://www.smh.com.au/culture/books/forensic-critique-of-bruce-pascoe-s-dark-emu-presents-a-different-view-20210719-p58ayt.html and
https://theconversation.com/book-review-farmers-or-hunter-gatherers-the-dark-emu-debate-rigorously-critiques-bruce-pascoes-argument-161877
plus an aboriginal scholar's take: https://theconversation.com/how-the-dark-emu-debate-limits-representation-of-aboriginal-people-in-australia-163006 )
There's also an article about which more later: "Foragers or Farmers: Dark Emu and the Controversy over Aboriginal Agriculture" by Ian Keen (full text here: https://surplusvalue.org.au/Misc%20Articles%20and%20Poems/Keen.Pascoe.2021%20%281%29-1.pdf )
What do we know about the pre-colonial Australian food economy? First of all, Pascoe seems to have overstated his case - some Australians might have been practising agriculture or something agriculture-adjacent, but others (particularly those living in the huge desert areas in the northwestern parts of the continent) definitely were not. Even today huge chunks of the western core of Australia have few if any towns, and a few thousand Western Desert Aboriginal people continued to live there as traditional food collectors well into the 20th century, when anthropologists studied them extensively, and used them, along with a few other groups, as the basis for the definition of what "hunter gatherers" are. Life in the Western Desert involved constant movement from one water source to another, with small groups of people with few possessions collecting what food was available in one place before moving on to the next. Few food sources were abundant enough to make preservation and storage worthwhile, and the population density was extremely low. But life was not on a small scale - each camp of 10-30 people would see massive turnover as individuals and families travelled from one camp to another, and there were regular festivals in which multiple camps totalling hundreds of people would come together for several weeks. The economic unit was a tiny camp, but the social unit was everyone who spoke the same dialect and lived in the same geographic region of the desert. ( see https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004724841830157X , paywalled but available with my Toronto public library card).
On the other hand, it's pretty uncontested that all over the non-desert parts of the continent, Australians altered the landscape on a large scale, using fire to thin out trees and brush to create large meadows. In some places, they manipulated water, damming streams to create shallow ponds and wetlands. All of this to increase the supply of game, fish, and especially edible plants. They transplanted, weeded, and possibly seeded to create large stands of wild yams. In the south, they replanted small yams when harvesting the field to ensure it would continue to be productive, and in the north, they cut off the tops of harvested yams and replanted those. Finally, in some places they maintained huge meadows of edible wild grasses and harvested them on a pretty large scale. Regarding that, here are some quotes from colonist Thomas Mitchell's journals:
[[In the neighbourhood of our camp the grass had been pulled to a very great extent, and piled in hay-ricks so that the aspect of the desert was softened into the agreeable semblance of a hay-field. The grass had evidently been thus laid up by the natives, but for what purpose we could not imagine. At first I thought the heaps were only the remains of encampments, as the aborigines sometimes sleep on a little dry grass; but when we found the ricks, or haycocks, extending for miles we were quite at a loss to understand why they had been made. All the grass was of one kind, a new species of Panicum related to P. effusum R. Br.* and not a spike of it was left in the soil over the whole of the ground. A cucurbitaceous plant had also been pulled up and accumulated in smaller heaps; and from some of the roots the little yam had been taken, but on others it remained. The surface, naturally soft, thus appeared as bare as a fallow field.]] - Three Expeditions into the Interior Vol. 1 (1838)
[[The Panicum loevinode of Dr. Lindley seemed to predominate, a grass whereof the seed ("Cooly") is made by the natives into a kind of paste or bread. Dry heaps of this grass, that had been pulled expressly for the purpose of gathering the seed, lay along our path for many miles. I counted nine miles along the river, in which we rode through this grass only, reaching to our saddle-girths, and the same grass seemed to grow back from the river, at least as far as the eye could reach through a very open forest.]] - Journal of an Expedition into the Interior, 1848.
Which brings us to the question of settled living. Some Australians were not nomadic, especially in places with abundant fish. Others, including those grass harvesters, were semi-nomadic, moving seasonally from one village of permanent homes to another. Pascoe in his chapter on agriculture says that Thomas Mitchell could not speak to the people who left behind all those hay-ricks because they had "only just left." (Pascoe's words - there's no separate citation and I failed to see the bit where this was mentioned in the passage that is cited). So, the grass harvesting Australians moved infrequently from one village to another. Pascoe has an entire chapter talking about those villages and their well-built, permanent houses. The agriculture-adjacent people who harvested all that grass were living much more densely than their desert cousins, and were able to enjoy at least some of the benefits of (semi) settled living, like investing in infrastructure.
We also know that the people who harvested those wild seeds also stored them for later use, often in containers (sacks of hide or baskets) which may have been sized to be portable (the largest are reported as holding around 40 or 50kg of seed - about the upper limit of what a person could lug around). In the article linked above, Ian Keen in one breath agrees that caches of stored seed are well attested to, in at least one case amounting to a ton of seed in all, and in the next breath insists that since the seeds were often harvested while unripe (before the bit that holds the seed to the stem could become brittle), that meant that they could not be stored for very long since unripe seed has a high moisture content and tends to rot.
There's a lot of that kind of doublethink and special pleading going on throughout the Keen article. He quotes an account of aboriginal yam harvesting that says "when a woman dug up a wild yam, she would scold a shoot of the plant, command it to grow a bigger tuber next time, then replace it and cover it with soil," and says that contrary to the source, this cannot be called "gardening" - it's just "conservation." (page 3). Likewise, the replanting of the top part of a harvested tuber "could more accurately be regarded as conservation of a wild crop rather than cultivation." (p 7). Basically, when white people do it with domesticated plants, it's gardening, but when indigenous Australians do it with wild plants, it's just conservation.
Here's another bit of special pleading:
[[‘[T]his regime of firing, gathering and digging might well be regarded as a form of “natural cultivation” on the part of the southern Australian Aborigines’ (Gott 1982, 65) Perhaps this is so, but the process did not include all the procedures required to constitute horticulture, in particular the deliberate selection of plant varieties for planting, and the reservation of seed for propagation.]] (p 4-5)
Somehow the goalposts are always positioned so that what precolonial Australians were doing doesn't count as gardening or farming (just a page or so before, Keen says that the gardening of tubers usually doesn't involve any seed at all, with some tubers being cultivated for long times without becoming domesticated - p 4. Kinda hard to select varieties when your tuber refuses to alter from its wild form). Those Australian yam harvesters had no way of knowing that they were supposed to be selecting only the best tubers for replanting and weeding out the smaller, worse ones from the fields so that their yams would become bigger and better over time. Since they didn't do the right things, though, we can't possibly call what they were doing gardening.
Keen makes a big deal of how Australians were not storing nearly as much wild seed as full blown agricultural people do domesticated grain (where a small village would need to store many tons of grain over a year and built granaries to suit that need). His comparison point is always modern agriculturalists dealing with fully domesticated crops. The earliest farmers in the Levant 20,000-30,000 years ago were dealing with wild grasses as well, and almost certainly weren't eating hundreds of pounds of grains per person per year either - wild wheat was one of many food sources for them, and only became the foundation of anyone's food economy after the wild wheat had become domesticated (see an earlier post I did: https://glaurung.dreamwidth.org/28040.html and also https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rstb.2016.0429 ). But there's never any scholarly argument there - everyone agrees that those ice age grain collectors in the Levant were proto-farmers.
The key difference to Keen and his colleagues seems to be that early farmers in the Middle East planted seeds, and, they say, Australians did not, except for token amounts in fertility rituals. Which might be more special pleading - when faced with undeniable evidence that aboriginal people planted seeds, call it a ritual and claim it was not done on a large enough scale to qualify as agriculture. But let's accept the claim that Australians did not plant those huge meadows of grasses, and that they mostly harvested those meadows when the seed was still unripe. The Australian Panicum grass is, after all, a perennial, so it didn't have to be reseeded every growing season like the Mideastern Triticum which eventually became wheat. As long as the people harvesting Panicum didn't pull up the roots, and as long as they left enough unharvested bits each year to naturally re-seed any patches where the grass had died, there was no need for large scale annual planting.
Humans have been collecting and eating seeds for a very long time - currently the earliest evidence of processing seeds into food are residues of sorghum found on 100,000 year old stone tools in Africa (https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/humans-feasting-on-grains-for-at-least-100000-years/ ). And humans have been using fire to turn forest and brush into grassland for at least 125,000 years (https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/scientists-find-the-oldest-evidence-of-ancient-humans-altering-the-natural-landscape-180979251/ ).
If Keen could magically bring together one of those ice age Levant proto-farmers and a pre-colonial Australian grain harvester and tell them that there was a vital difference between the two of them because one planted harvested seeds and the other didn't, they would have been baffled. Planting seeds vs letting the grass self-seed? Ripe vs unripe? surely these are distinctions without a difference, they might have said.
In the ice age mideast, the best seeds for eating came from a grass that you wanted to harvest when it was ripe. You had to hit a narrow time window - collect too early, and the seed wasn't edible without a bunch of troublesome processing. Too late, and all the remaining seed fell off the stem onto the ground at the slightest touch. Because the seed you collected was ripe, any that you didn't eat could be planted in bare spots of the meadow at the start of the next growing season. As people became better at harvesting all the seed they could, they gradually moved from planting a few patches to planting the whole meadow, because the grass they were harvesting was annual.
In Australia, the best seeds for eating could be harvested when unripe, which made the whole collecting process much easier and not time sensitive, although it did mean that the seeds they collected could only be eaten, and not planted. Then again, making sure the meadow remained productive was never all that big a deal since the grass was perennial, so you didn't have to leave that much seed unharvested. Planting (separately collected ripe) seeds was a minor aspect of maintaining the meadow, if it was something that had to be done at all.
Each group started out with the same 100,000+ year old knowledge of how to harvest and process seeds into food. They both adapted that knowledge to fit the specific characteristics of the grasses they were harvesting, to maximize the amount of food they could collect and minimize the amount of work involved in processing it. The people in the Levant had no way of knowing that they were pursuing a virtuous cycle that would lead to ever-increasing harvest sizes as their activity selected for plants where the bit that held the seed onto the stem would not shatter, leaving more and more of the seed on the stem and making the plant more and more dependant on humans planting it. And the people in Australia has no way of knowing that future scholars would look down their noses at them and declare their activities could not possibly be classed in the same category of proto-agriculture as that of those people in the Levant.
In sum, anthropologists and archaeologists need to admit that there's such a thing as agriculture-adjacent, and that it's fundamentally different from food collecting. And stop being such racist jerks about the rules by which some people get classed as farmers and others get shoehorned into the ill-fitting category of "hunter gatherers."
I originally planned to say something about forest gardens and some of the other people in the world who get classed as (adjective) hunter gatherers instead of farmers or farming-adjacent, but this post has grown too long, so there will be a part 2.