James Blaut's Critique of Diffusionism through a Neolithic Lens:
Animal Domestication in the Near East
Christine M. Rodrigue
Department of Geography
California State University
Long Beach, CA 90840-1101 USA
rodrigue@csulb.edu
This is a preprint of an article accepted for publication in Antipode
© Editorial Board of Antipode
Antipode is a journal published by Blackwell
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Introduction
I first met Jim Blaut in 1976 when I started the graduate program at Clark
University. I learned about Jim's views on diffusionism and diffusion and
European exceptionalism through conversations I had with him during his visits
to Clark from 1976 to 1979, during AAG meetings from 1978 to 1985, and during
a visit to his and Meca's home in Chicago in 1978. He was kind with his time,
helping me with my dissertation on the origins of animal domestication in the
Near East (Rodrigue 1987). He gave me a few manuscripts he thought might be
helpful, one which would later be published in the Annals of the AAG:
"Diffusionism: A Uniformitarian Critique" (Blaut 1987), integrating concepts
in these conversations and other articles and conference presentations.
Diffusionism and Diffusion: A Uniformitarian Alternative
Jim differentiated diffusion (the movement of an idea across space and the
geography of its adoption) from diffusionism (the search for [an] original
hearth[s] of concentrated inventiveness and tracing innovations across a
cultural landscape of imitators). Jim defined diffusionism as a "...belief --
that changes are produced by diffusion rather than (ordinarily) by independent
invention and that certain places are the permanent centers of innovation"
(1987, p. 31). Diffusion is a legitimate focus of geographical analysis;
diffusionism is an ideology that disparages human intellectual abilities in
general and those in marginalized lands in particular. By implication,
diffusionism creates a tacit blame the victim framework for present-day
underdevelopment and marginalization, racist apologia for neocolonialism and
the neoliberal prescription.
His uniformitarian alternative describes a normative process of innovation and
diffusion, to various aspects of which he refers as "cellular diffusion,"
"crisscross diffusion," and "ultra-rapid diffusion." Innovations sprout up
randomly in a cellular region populated by interacting communities and
individuals. A beneficial innovation spreads contagiously from one community
to another throughout the region, even as other innovations and modifications
are diffusing back. Such crisscross diffusion quickly produces change in the
cultural region from one not containing a particular innovation to one in
which it is fairly ubiquitous, resulting in its ultra-rapid diffusion
throughout a region.
Having outlined a normal state, Jim encouraged geographers to analyze abnormal
states critically. For example, in situations in which an innovation fails to
make any inroads whatsoever in a region, the geographer should look for
inhibiting forces, such as suppression of information by powerful interests.
The diffusion of one invention often implies an anti-diffusion: the
obsolescence of alternatives (e.g., tractors displacing draft horses), with
sometimes tragic dislocations for those dependent on the older technologies.
Diffusion of cultural traits, too, has often been accomplished by the
displacement or extinction of populations by incoming or invading groups,
resulting in what geographers politely call "sequent occupance."
Jim warns about illusions that can waylay the unwary. The diffusion of one
trait may be a trivial side effect dependent on and disguising another, more
important, deleterious, and less obvious process. Particularly galling to Jim
is phantom diffusion, an assertion that an autonomously invented local culture
trait was invented elsewhere or that an imposed or forced diffusion is the
voluntary local imitation of a trait invented elsewhere.
After laying out an alternative framework within which to analyze diffusion,
Jim proposed five empirical tests to differentiate it from diffusionism. His
first hypothesis is relevant to my dissertation project, namely, the Old World
agricultural revolution may have effectively happened virtually simultaneously
in large portions of Asia, Africa, and Europe, in the time between about
11,000 BP and 9,000 BP, due to rapid crisscross diffusion.
In my opinion, Jim missed an historical irony about diffusionism: It was
originally developed in the nineteenth century as an antidote to social
evolutionism (Eriksen and Nielsen 2001, ch. 2). Evolutionism gave rise to
three-stages-of-civilization schemes (savagery, barbarism, civilization;
magic, religion, science; general promiscuity, matriarchy, patriarchy;
gathering-hunting, pastoral nomadism, agriculture), with unflattering
placement of non-Western societies. Diffusionism represented all cultures as
locally variable accretions of cultural innovations that had diffused to them
from diverse and probably unknowable sources, thus inviting concrete local
observation, grounded in cultural relativism and the "psychic unity of
humanity." Indeed, diffusionism represented an empirical flight from the
theoretical excesses of evolutionism. Ironically, the two hybridized to
create the kind of diffusionism Jim attacked: The psychic unity of humanity
lost in the search for enduring hearths of innovation.
Premises of the Cultural Geography School on Domestication
Influenced, then, by Jim's ideas on how diffusionism, unilineal social
development, and racism interact to reinforce one another, I began to question
the premises of the quirky cultural geography school on the domestication of
plants and animals. This tradition in geography traces back through Frederick
and Elizabeth Simoons (1968), George Carter (1977), Erich Isaac (1970), Carl
Johannessen (1981), and Carl Sauer (1969) to Eduard Hahn (1896) and, through
him, to such influences as Johann Jakob Bachofen (1861), Friedrich Ratzel
(1896), and other nineteenth century students of diffusion and social
evolution. It is loosely built around the following common ideas.
Well-Provisioned Sedentary Folk
First, as Sauer argued, the early domesticators had to be well-provisioned,
sedentary people in a diverse natural environment, supported by stable fishing
and a storable abundance of easily obtained plant and animal foods. This
reflects a belief that roving gathering-hunting peoples live on the margin of
starvation, devoting most of their time to the food quest and being forced to
move on frequently because of their inefficient food-collecting methods. The
cultural geographic school has not yet processed the finding from ethnographic
work in the 1960s that such peoples enjoy enviable amounts of leisure time,
even in the most marginal habitats today (Lee and DeVore 1968). Sauer's
settled folk were less likely to have the requisite leisure for domestication
experiments than migratory collectors!
A New Three Stages Model
Second, Eduard Hahn questioned the then-dominant "three stages" view that
human society had progressed from roving gathering-hunting through pastoral
nomadism to settled agriculture, without, however, abandoning evolutionism's
unilinear notion of human progress. He argued that pastoral nomadism
presupposes settled agriculture and is a specialized derivative dependent on
it. He, thus, substituted a new "three stages" scheme in some ways as rigid
as the original scheme. The consequence for the cultural geographic school is
a belief that the domestication of plants preceded that of animals. This
argument about the prior domestication of plants then bolstered Sauer's
reasoning that the original domesticators of animals already had domesticated
plants and reliable sources of fish protein, so that they did not need to
domesticate animals but chose to for non-economic reasons.
Religious Motivations for Animal Domestication
Third, the cultural geographic school is anxious to debunk any economic or
ecological context for the domestication of animals. Given the abundant and
secure food supply, these geographers ask what could have motivated early
settled horticulturalists and fishers to bother capturing and domesticating
animals, especially such large and dangerous ones as cattle. Feeling they had
convincingly eliminated economic or ecological necessity as motivation, the
only sufficiently compelling motivation left for this school is religion,
notably the ritualized sacrifice of animals.
Primitivity, Religion, Superstition ... and Matriarchy
Fourth, this sometimes strident emphasis on ritual and religion is rooted in a
German nineteenth century social evolutionism, in which human society
progressed from a primitive, religion- and superstition- permeated mindset
towards the enlightened scientific rationality of Western European society in
the Age of Empire. In these ruminations, the "primitive mind" was religious,
superstitious, ritualized, and tradition-bound.
Additionally, in a tradition going back to Johann Jakob Bachofen, early
society was depicted as matrifocal, leading to matriarchal societies, whose
matriarchal character exposed their primitivity. As society progressed into
city-states and empire, it became patriarchal, its religion centering on male
deities and, in the most "advanced" religions, on a patrifocal monotheism.
Influenced by this intellectual milieu, the cultural geography tradition
focussed on religion, ritual, and the Mother Goddess in the early, "primitive"
societies, the societies which effected the domestication of animals.
Diffusionism
Fifth, diffusionism is a hallmark of the cultural geographic school in
domestication studies. The cultural geographic school is replete with
domestication hearths and diffusion routes, singular inventions and the
passive adopters along the path. Methodologically, diffusion of traits is the
default against which innovation would be measured: One must conclusively
demonstrate that there could not have been any contact whatsoever, no matter
how tenuous, between two cultures before similar traits found in both could be
accepted as potentially independent innovations (Ratzel 1896, p. 82). There
is a persistent search for evidence of overland diffusion and quite some
interest in pre-Columbian transatlantic and transpacific contacts.
Unilineal Social Evolution, Diffusion, and Racism
Sixth, unilinearity is common in the cultural geographic school. Human
society progressed from roving gatherers-hunters through
horticulture/fishing/intensive wild plant collection to seed-based agriculture
and animal husbandry. The seed agriculture and herd animal based societies
then produced urbanization and civilization. Any "primitive" society anywhere
looked like a snapshot out of Western society's past, raising questions about
why some societies were stuck on the back end of the timeline and others were
on its leading edge. For this group of cultural geographers, such questions
are approached from a belief that most humans are actually rather lazy,
uninventive if given the choice. An innovation, then, is seen as a rare
thunderclap of genius, especially in primitive, slowly changing societies.
The implication is that, for any given complex of innovations, there is but
one or maybe a few hearths with unusual concentrations of genius, tacitly
evoking racial superiority or cultural superiority. The rest of the world,
mostly passive recipients of distant genial largesse, are by dint of that
receptivity lesser contributors and somehow racially or culturally inferior.
Results of My Dissertation Research
With an increasingly critical view of the cultural geographic school in
domestication studies, I started wondering what could induce a society to
elaborate religion to sacrificial extremes compared to other domestication
contexts commonly cited in other disciplines (notably exchange relationships
and storage of surplus food or plant resources not normally consumable by
humans in animal bodies). I built a model of the social preconditions for
these three contexts for animal domestication -- exchange, surplus banking,
and religious sacrifice -- which became the centerpiece of my dissertation
(Rodrigue 1987) and an article based on it (Rodrigue 1992). I tested the two
models, the cultural geographic school model and my own, against
archæological site reports from 60 sites in the Near East dating from about
20,000 years ago to about 5,000 BP.
Exchange: Fewest Prerequisites and Earliest Context for Domestication
The context with the fewest preconditions is trade. Trade presupposes nothing
more than slight sedentarization among roving gatherer-hunter bands, such that
needed resources found away from a seasonal home base had to be obtained
through social encounters with other, related or neighboring bands (e.g.,
shells, obsidian, flint or chert, storable plant foods or meat products).
Signs of exchange appeared in Epi-Palæolithic sites as early as 17,000 years
ago and include seashells found as far as 400 km inland, small amounts of
obsidian found as many as 400 km from source volcanoes, and progressively more
items as time goes on.
Storage: Another Very Early Context with Few Prerequisites
Localization and sedentarization, or the lengthening of stays in one spot for
a season or longer, are widely evidenced in the archæological record from
areas all over the world around 14,000 to 15,000 BP. There is little agreement
over what caused people all over the world to settle down more: the drastic
environmental changes of the post-Würm/Wisconsin glaciation? population
growth so that human bands increasingly constrained the mobility of others?
and/or the diffusion of new technologies (e.g., bow and arrow and
microlith-studded composite tools) that made it easier to meet a group's needs
in one area for a longer time by enabling it more easily to exploit a broader
spectrum of resources?
By settling into and committing themselves to particular landscapes, people
now experienced the full variation in environmental conditions possible at any
one of these places but without the option of moving along, the time-honored
way of dealing with environmental downturns. The situation demanded other
responses to environmental variability: trade and mutual aid arrangements
with groups in different environments and storage of surpluses collected in
good times to tide people over rough patches. Storage was now meaningfully
possible with sedentarization: People had places to store their "stuff," and
it now made sense to expend effort on the construction of shelters, houses,
and storage systems, among them animals.
Many wild animal species practically self-domesticate around human
settlements, seeking food stores and spills, handouts, and salt. Animals
consumed surplus food that would otherwise spoil and, by grazing or browsing
in lands not directly exploitable by humans, brought those lands' biological
productivity within the human dietary compass in a highly palatable form.
Animals became surplus banks and storage facilities, a complement to storage
pits, silos, and storage rooms, which began to manifest in Mesolithic sites
about 12,000 years ago.
The Downside of Sedentarization: Risk and Conflict
For these early sedentary gathering-hunting-fishing peoples, the settled
lifestyle introduced or intensified some unpleasant experiences. Among these
were witnessing the full range of environmental variation possible at a single
location in the variable and changing environments of the early Holocene ...
and struggling to get through them with such emergency measures as broadening
one's concept of acceptable foods, asking for help from groups in somewhat
better circumstances, or raiding other groups. Experiencing such downturns
would suggest storing food against future such disasters, focussing attention
during good times on foods that are highly storable (e.g., cereal grains,
which were migrating into the Near East about 15,000 to 13,000 years ago;
nuts; processed acorns; and smoked and salted meat).
Another really unpleasant new experience was the amplification of intergroup
conflicts into outright wars in order to steal resources or expropriate
territory. The atrocities committed in these incidents themselves encouraged
vendettas and wars of revenge.
A third unpleasant new experience was the tension growing within groups as
they become more dependent on a surplus and as that surplus was increasingly
centrally managed, at least in part: There is a conflict of interest between
producers and managers of collective stores. The transformation of hunters
into warriors no doubt led to abuses of the power of arms. Gender rôles
changed with the advent of systematic warfare. Certain lineages became more
influential and others more marginalized, destroying the rough egalitarianism
of many roving gathering-hunting societies (Marx's "primitive communism").
Religion and Ritual to Ameliorate Risk and Conflict:
The Last Context for Domestication
I believe it is the intersection of these many unpleasant and often tragic new
experiences upon sedentarization, exchange, and storage that led to the
elaboration of religion. Ritual was expanded to baroque levels by peoples
desperate to ease these new tensions and anxieties. Sooner or later, the
killing of earmarked victims occurred to most settled societies, whether
intensive fishers/hunters/gatherers or agriculturalists. Compared with the
sedentarization that sets off these cascades of unintended consequences,
elaborate sacrificial ritual follows, not precedes.
Very importantly, animals were used as sacrificial offerings only if the
society needing to sacrifice them already possessed animals. If they did not
already have ready access to such animals, sacrifice focussed on human beings.
Indeed, human sacrifice is suggested along with animal sacrifice in six of the
sites in my sample, going back about 8,500 years ago, quite a bit later than
exchange relationships, storage, and the sedentarization that set off all
three. Ritual sacrifice, then, is implausible as the context for the earliest
domestications.
Conclusion
How have Jim's ideas held up in the rapidly evolving literature on the
earliest domestications? Jim's first hypothesis has held up quite well in
some ways and not so well in others.
More species have been pushed into the 9,000-11,000 BP timeframe that Jim
specified. Pig and cattle domestication have been pushed back in time as far
back as sheep and goats (10,000-11,000 BP for pigs [Rosenberg et al. 1998] and
10,000-10,800 BP for cattle, with North Africa emerging as an early center for
their domestication [Hanotte et al. 2002]). Many animal species thus appear
to have been domesticated virtually simultaneously throughout the Near East
and North Africa.
Also supporting Jim's first hypothesis in this region are the rather far-flung
earliest signs of goat husbandry about 10,000 years ago in western Iran (Zeder
and Hesse 2000) and barley domestication about 9,500 BP in the Jordan Valley
in the Levant (Badr et al. 2000), while cattle may have been domesticated in
northeast Africa (Hanotte et al. 2002). Jim expected that independent
innovations would be going on throughout a large region and then rapidly
disseminated through crisscross diffusion.
Less happily for Jim's first hypothesis and more in accord with the
diffusionist outlook, some of the recent DNA-based analyses of grain
domestication actually do pinpoint a very particular area as the source of two
domesticated wheat species, einkorn and emmer, roughly 10,000 BP: the
Karacadag Mountains and Tigris and Euphrates upland areas of southeastern
Turkey and northern Syria. This is the same small area where the wild
distributions of several pulses (e.g., chickpea, lentil, pea, and bitter
vetch) overlap. This locale also produced the earliest signs of pig
domestication and is not far from the area of earliest sheep domestication in
northern Iraq. Quite a few domesticated species in this particular
agricultural complex, thus, originated in a geographically very circumscribed
area (what the cultural geographers would call a "hearth"), with diffusion
outward from there throughout the Mesolithic and Neolithic Near East and North
Africa (Heun et al. 1997; Lev-Yadun, Gopher, and Abbo 2000; Özkan,
Brandolini, Schäfer-Pregl, and Salamini 2002).
So, the jury is still out on the empirical differentiation of Jim's first
hypothesis and the diffusionist view he opposed with regards to the
domestication of plants and animals in the broad Near East and North Africa
region. His timeframe is holding up remarkably well for an increasing number
of species, lending support to his idea of rapid crisscross diffusion. While
his multiple-nuclei model of independent innovation seems valid for three
species, it is not reflected in eight others, the domestication of which can
be constrained very narrowly to a kind of small hearth.
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first placed on the web: 03/13/05
last revised: 03/14/05
maintained by C.M. Rodrigue