{"id":12354,"date":"2021-08-11T20:30:55","date_gmt":"2021-08-12T02:30:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=12354"},"modified":"2021-08-12T15:05:19","modified_gmt":"2021-08-12T21:05:19","slug":"happy-lammas-slaves-now-get-to-work","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=12354","title":{"rendered":"Happy Lammas, Slaves, Now Get to Work"},"content":{"rendered":"

Lammas season((Northern Hemisphere)) has come, which means bloggers and social media users posting their photos of amber waves of grain<\/a>. But there is dark side to our love of grain. It lies at the root of many evils: deforestation, environmental damage, slavery around the world, top-down imperial bureaucracies, epidemics, poor nutrition . . . pretty much everything that makes us human, right?<\/p>\n

\"\"

Located in what is now Syria, Ebla was an important city-state of the Bronze Age Middle East.1<\/a><\/sup><\/p><\/div>\n

The photo shows 15 grinding stones \u2014 “querns” is an old medieval term. Maybe there were more. A woman knelt in front of every one<\/strong>. Maybe she was a palace slave \u2014 or an orphan, a foundling, or a widow with no family \u2014someone of low status, however you look at it.<\/p>\n

Back and forth she worked the upper stone, turning wheat into flour to make the bread. Bread for the king, bread for the royal court, bread for the temple priests and priestesses, bread for the royal guardsmen.<\/p>\n

Archaeologists today can look at her toe bones, how they were shaped by kneeling for long hours at the grindstone.<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"

Woman at a quern, drawing by J. Sylvia.2<\/a><\/sup><\/p><\/div>\n

This is not a blog post about the Paleo diet;<\/strong> in fact, before there were towns, people were harvesting wild grasses along with many other things.<\/p>\n

There is a version of human prehistory what “most of us (I include myself here) have unreflexively inherited,” writes Yale political scientist James Scott in his recent book Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States<\/a>. <\/em>In this “narrative of progress, “agriculture, it held, replaced the savage, wild, primitive, lawless, and violent world of hunter-gatherers and nomads. Fixed-crops, on the other hand, were the origin and generator of the settled life, of formal religion, of society, and of government by laws.”<\/p>\n

Doesn’t this remind you of another “narrative of progress,”<\/strong> in which anarchic animism and shamanism were replaced by polytheism and then by a more pure monotheism \u2014 and then by atheism, particularly if you are a Marxist.<\/p>\n

In chapters covering domesticaion, epidemics, slavery, war, barbarian-city rellationships, environmental destruction, and the fragility of city-states, Scott draws on examples from Bronze Age Egypt, Mespotamia, China, and other areas to contend that “the standard narrative” is wrong to suggest that people chose sedentary town life voluntarily.\u00a0 Yet archaeologists and historians pay more attention to the sites with stone ruins and writing than to those without, even though the early city-states represented only a tiny fraction of the Earth’s population.<\/p>\n

I can’t help but see a parallel<\/strong> to the way that the study of religion focuses on large, text-oriented religious organizations and on the interplay of specialists within them rather than on the “lived religion” and the personal spiritual experiences of average people.<\/p>\n

The “standard narrative,” Scott writes, holds that it is “nconceivable that the ‘civilized’ could ever revert to primitivism “\u2014 yet it happpened again and again. People often fled rather than be forcibly incorporated into city-states: “Fixed settlement and plough agriculture were necessary to state-making, but they were just part of a large array of livelihood options not be taken up or abandoned as conditions changed.”<\/p>\n

Maybe being “spiritual but not religious” is like slipping past the royal guardsmen to take up a life of hunting, gathering, and easy feral agriculture once again.<\/p>\n

  1. Reproduced in James C. Scott, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest State <\/em>(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), 163. [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  2. Elizabeth Lang, “Maids at the Grindstone,” Journal of Lithic Studies<\/em> 3, no. 3 (2016): 282. [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li><\/ol>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Lammas season((Northern Hemisphere)) has come, which means bloggers and social media users posting their photos of amber waves of grain. But there is dark side to our love of grain. It lies at the root of many evils: deforestation, environmental damage, slavery around the world, top-down imperial bureaucracies, epidemics, poor nutrition . . . pretty […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[237,68,20,115,100,377,40,276],"class_list":["post-12354","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-agriculture","tag-animism","tag-archaeology","tag-food","tag-history","tag-indigenous-religion","tag-polytheism","tag-religious-studies"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6xQTg-3dg","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":8727,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=8727","url_meta":{"origin":12354,"position":0},"title":"On Getting Reaped at Lammas","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"August 8, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"A friend in Poland has a small farm, and he has been teaching himself to mow the meadows with a scythe. We have email conversations sprinkled with words like \"snath\" and \"peening,\" which I know only from reading.((He is an American expatriate, but I suppose that he has learned the\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"herbs\"","block_context":{"text":"herbs","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=herbs"},"img":{"alt_text":"large hailstone in palm of hand","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/08\/oles-hail.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":698,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=698","url_meta":{"origin":12354,"position":1},"title":"The corner of the year","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"August 3, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"When is Lammas?Predictably, Lammas\/Lughnasadh postings popped up on Pagan e-lists and blogs on the 1st of August. But that is just what the calendar says. Astronomically, according to the online astronomical calculator, it comes at 1541 hours GMT on August 7.But I think it's when the hummingbirds start to leave,\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":8151,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=8151","url_meta":{"origin":12354,"position":2},"title":"In Praise of Harvest Time","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"July 27, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"Some (Northern Hemisphere) Harvest\/Lammas celebrations, only not called that. This one, I think, is from Iran: This one comes from the island of Cyprus: And while we're in the mood, let's not forget Whitman McGowan's \"White Folks Was Wild Once Too,\" with video that is NSFW if you work in\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"dance\"","block_context":{"text":"dance","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=dance"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":919,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=919","url_meta":{"origin":12354,"position":3},"title":"And the Corn Palace Too","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"August 3, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"Victorian Slind-Flor puts the \"Loaf\" in Lammas, with photos of the Palouse region and, even closer to my heart, the sacred Corn Palace of Mitchell, South Dakota, one of the great Roadside Attractions of the northern Plains.A quick flashback to a 1980s cross-country drive with M.: camping in the Black\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"Lammas\"","block_context":{"text":"Lammas","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=lammas"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":13722,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=13722","url_meta":{"origin":12354,"position":4},"title":"Step Aside, John Barleycorn","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"August 4, 2024","format":false,"excerpt":"See the Shaggy Parasol mushrooms? They were not there two or three days ago. Yet Lammas comes and they burst forth, full of fungal goodness. Here just north of the Colorado-New Mexico line, August is the heart of mushroom season. You can find them at other times too, but your\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"Lammas\"","block_context":{"text":"Lammas","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=lammas"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/08\/shaggy-p-ground-level.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/08\/shaggy-p-ground-level.jpg?resize=350%2C200 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/08\/shaggy-p-ground-level.jpg?resize=525%2C300 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/08\/shaggy-p-ground-level.jpg?resize=700%2C400 2x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/08\/shaggy-p-ground-level.jpg?resize=1050%2C600 3x"},"classes":[]},{"id":7368,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=7368","url_meta":{"origin":12354,"position":5},"title":"Lammas, Wild Harvest, and “the Notch”","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"August 1, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"Many of the Pagan bloggers are putting up their \"Happy Lammas\/Lughnasad\" posts. My archaeoastronomical friends who study mysterious ancient solar alignments point out that \"real\" Lammas is still six days away. But there is \"the notch.\" In 1986, when I moved to this part of Colorado, a friend told me,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"Colorado\"","block_context":{"text":"Colorado","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=colorado"},"img":{"alt_text":"nibbled bolete","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/08\/nibbled-bolete.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/08\/nibbled-bolete.jpg?resize=350%2C200 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/08\/nibbled-bolete.jpg?resize=525%2C300 1.5x"},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12354","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12354"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12354\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12380,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12354\/revisions\/12380"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12354"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12354"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12354"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}