This sounds like a pretty fun "learning" experience
. One thing that might interest people here are the 'New Obsidian' sections from Jane Jacobs'
The Economy of Cities. She gives a really good account of how early cities probably formed - and most importantly, how they in fact came
before agricultural innovations that created a 'food surplus'. Things like farming and animal husbandry started in cities, because that's where you would have had the conglomerations of people and things (seeds/animals) to figure this stuff out.
Here's a decent, but less detailed, summary (from
here):
Exchange Created Cities and Agriculture
In a remarkable insight, reminiscent of Carl Menger's insight on the origin of money, Jacobs presents a theory that the origins of cities, agriculture, and animal husbandry lie in exchange. Her theory is fully cognizant of the principles of human action and what we can realistically imagine the situation of those first urbanites to have been, as they would have understood it.
Jacobs contends that both animal husbandry and agriculture were most likely to have originated in the earliest urban settlements. Further, those settlements were the result of Paleolithic trade, and it was the intensification of trade in those early cities that paved the way for the development of agriculture and animal husbandry. To illustrate her theory, Jacobs tells the story of a fictional Paleolithic city she calls "New Obsidian." New Obsidian arose at a site near a tribe living close to a volcano, where a great deal of obsidian could be found. Because obsidian was such a valuable material to a stone-age culture, that tribe was sitting on a great natural source of wealth and had an impetus to trade.
Jacobs supposes, though, that it was in the area of a tribe near the volcanic tribe where New Obsidian actually arose. (The supposition is not crucial to her theory.) The tribe living near the volcano is not anxious to allow others into its valuable territory, so it brings its obsidian to the nearby tribe, and relies on it as an intermediary in the obsidian trade. As traders from more distant tribes gather to trade in that central location, establishing at first temporary and later more permanent dwellings, people, ideas, and goods from a diversity of backgrounds and cultures mingle. From this not only tolerance of other tastes and beliefs emerges, but also new ideas, religions, and products. Such creativity and opportunity attract ever more traders and immigrants to New Obsidian, continuing a virtuous circle in which new ideas in arts, commerce, and culture are brought forth in creative bursts over time.
As noted, the trade in obsidian with neighboring tribes led to an increased variety of goods entering New Obsidian. The vast majority of those goods were food-related. Since the traders might have had to travel some distance to New Obsidian, they would want to trade with goods that kept well. The most likely food items would have been live animals and edible seeds.
Menger and Mises pointed out that it is absurd to suppose that one day, a king thought to himself, "let's have a standard medium of exchange," prior to anyone having experience with a medium of exchange. Employing similar reasoning, Jacobs notes that it makes little sense to suppose that a person or a group of people one day simply decided to domesticate animals: "The stewards [of animals used for trade in New Obsidian] are intelligent men, and are fully capable of solving problems and of catching insights from experience. But experience has not provided them yet with any idea that can be called 'trying to domesticate animals'" (The Economy of Cities, p. 26). Rather, the rational desire to slaughter those animals brought in that are the hardest to maintain (males and the more rambunctious) and to keep those easier to maintain (females and the more docile) for longer periods, had the unintended consequence of initiating the art of animal husbandry.
Likewise, the accidental mingling of seeds and grain from diverse regions stored in common bins resulted in the unintentional hybridization of new forms of harvestable crops, some of which were tastier or more fruitful than others. These would fetch higher prices so that warehouse tenders would have an incentive keep an eye out for them and store some for future planting. Thus were the beginnings of agriculture.
It is a combination of self-interest, alertness, and trade that constitutes the genesis and emergence of cities, and it is a similar combination of factors that give rise to husbandry and agriculture. Indeed, Jacobs argues that it can only be in very large settlements, such as her imaginary New Obsidian, that the serendipity that is the genesis of such practices (and probably also the higher crafts, writing, and the sciences) could ever hope to occur. Thus, she concludes, somewhat counterintuitively, that cities had to precede, not follow, rural development (The Economy of Cities, pp. 3–48).
Also of interest, a game which my girlfriend played in one of her high school classes,
Steve Jackson's Tribes. The game isn't bad, but really requires at least 8 people (and preferably twice that) to add enough depth of choice.
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Topic: My history class is awesome(gospel of armok added!!) (Read 17056 times)