An excellent post, as always! Your post hints at the key differences between flood irrigation agriculture and. plow agriculture. When it comes to the mysteries of Çatalhöyük, the introduction of the iron plow may have transformed their more egalitarian flood farming society to hierarchal plow farming, which, as you mentioned, requires land ownership and partitioned land. Also, planting went from "women's work" of sowing the ground to "man's work" working cattle and plows. I wish I could find the sources, but I've read several articles about this dynamic.
Do we understand why it took so long for humans to discover metallurgy? I know iron smelting requires more advanced technology, but bronze shouldn't have taken as long as it should have, intuition would say.
Yes, this was Ester Boserup's insight, which has been largely accepted. I mentioned it in the post on Schismogenesis. Large-scale irrigation also played a role too. Once nature no longer did the work for you, there was an incentive to partition fields to make sure you got your share of the water, and to make sure that your portion of work in creating the irrigation system is adequately rewarded. This post makes some of those points:
So, while flood-retreat is important in understanding how agriculture first developed, I think the Davids do a disservice by ending it there and not following through the changes that happened afterwards, especially if you're implying that agriculture and inequality aren't related.
As for metals, not sure why, except that every discovery is always obvious in retrospect and raises the question of why it didn't happen sooner (see the copious literature on the Industrial Revolution for evidence of that). The pattern with metals seems to be that the easier it is to get your hands on it and the easier it is to work with, the earlier it is used. So gold is the earliest metal, because you can find it in rivers and it's very malleable, etc. Copper needs to be quarried and--more importantly, smelted--to get at. The Wikipedia article on Copper Extraction notes that some of the earliest copper in the Old World comes from Çayönü Tepesi in eastern Anatolia, which would put it in the Davids' "highland zones" of the Fertile Crescent. The earliest bronze is also made with arsenic, which is pretty nasty stuff, so maybe you need a degree of inequality for it to get made in the first place. Who knows?
An excellent post, as always! Your post hints at the key differences between flood irrigation agriculture and. plow agriculture. When it comes to the mysteries of Çatalhöyük, the introduction of the iron plow may have transformed their more egalitarian flood farming society to hierarchal plow farming, which, as you mentioned, requires land ownership and partitioned land. Also, planting went from "women's work" of sowing the ground to "man's work" working cattle and plows. I wish I could find the sources, but I've read several articles about this dynamic.
Do we understand why it took so long for humans to discover metallurgy? I know iron smelting requires more advanced technology, but bronze shouldn't have taken as long as it should have, intuition would say.
Yes, this was Ester Boserup's insight, which has been largely accepted. I mentioned it in the post on Schismogenesis. Large-scale irrigation also played a role too. Once nature no longer did the work for you, there was an incentive to partition fields to make sure you got your share of the water, and to make sure that your portion of work in creating the irrigation system is adequately rewarded. This post makes some of those points:
https://www.draliceevans.com/post/did-irrigation-entrench-the-patriarchy
So, while flood-retreat is important in understanding how agriculture first developed, I think the Davids do a disservice by ending it there and not following through the changes that happened afterwards, especially if you're implying that agriculture and inequality aren't related.
As for metals, not sure why, except that every discovery is always obvious in retrospect and raises the question of why it didn't happen sooner (see the copious literature on the Industrial Revolution for evidence of that). The pattern with metals seems to be that the easier it is to get your hands on it and the easier it is to work with, the earlier it is used. So gold is the earliest metal, because you can find it in rivers and it's very malleable, etc. Copper needs to be quarried and--more importantly, smelted--to get at. The Wikipedia article on Copper Extraction notes that some of the earliest copper in the Old World comes from Çayönü Tepesi in eastern Anatolia, which would put it in the Davids' "highland zones" of the Fertile Crescent. The earliest bronze is also made with arsenic, which is pretty nasty stuff, so maybe you need a degree of inequality for it to get made in the first place. Who knows?