Archaeologica.org

Forum Monk wrote:

Minimalist wrote:Dever suggests that the "Israelites" arose from Canaanite refugees (city dwellers and agriculturalists) who were displaced by the upheavals at the end of the Bronze Age.

What upheavals Min?

The Sea Peoples, mainly. The whole eastern Med was engulfed in turmoil.

Whatever the other merits of the argument, the pastoral tradition seems to predominate in the surviving texts. Pastoralists are good, city dwellers are bad, Abel's blood sacrifice was accepted while Cain's grain sacrifice was not....the farmer Cain killed the shepherd Abel.....yada, yada, yada...

I don't see the connection between city dwellers and farmers. I think in this case, KB is right. Its a religious thing dealing with the shedding of blood for forgiveness. Not city/farmers vs. pastoral herders.


You would have had to watch the Cain - Abel program.

So this conflict is well represented in the texts. I wonder if the story is told elsewhere with a different outcome in an area in which the farmers prevailed?

I'm not aware of any off hand but I think the point is missed anyway because, that area is more suited to pastoral lifestyle than farming. There just isn' enough rain to support farming and famines were all to frequent.

Dever's point is that with cisterns and terracing farming is quite possible and that forms the basis of his argument for the technological edge that the city dwelling Canaanites would have had over Finkelstein nomads.

I think that both of them need to realize that this was not an "event" but a "process." No doubt some of the nomads would have kept tending the flocks while others settled down to grow grain.

btw - I did see the Cain and Abel video. You sent it to me. Thanks. I thought the whole point of blood sacrifice was left unsaid but understand they were trying to making a much more sweeping statement.

I never know which ones you were able to get and which you couldn't.

Monk:

I am thinking there already was a priestly, scientist, astronomy, astrologer class before the event. When whatever happened, did happen, the dispersing groups took with them those of that class they understood. Right at the 2800 BC time period (remember my “give or take 500 years rule), there seems to be a lot of commonality in the constructions. But as time goes by, we see regional differences crop up.

As far as the hedges being “over engineered”, remember there was a whole lot more going on then watching the Sun. You also had Moon worship, the Zodiac, various individual stars like Venus or Mars. You had to be able to know when who was going to interact with what.

It is hard for those of us that come from a monotheistic culture, even if we don’t recognize a god as such, to realize the interrelationships that automatically come in a polytheistic culture. It is just foreign to our upbringing. Sometimes a single tree was worshiped because it was kind enough to mankind to allow bees to have a honey nest in it.

Just like people, the gods had to get along with each other. And it might be nice to know where in her cycle Venus was.

I agree with what you say Kb, but allowing for all that sort of complexity you do not require structures like Stonehenge to to achieve it. Remember, before you can construct something like Stonehenge you have to already have achieved the information from plotting celestial motions to align your stones. Therefore the massive stones are not necessary purely for checking solstices etc.
They were built to impress I think.

That goes back to my argument that the class with that kind of knowledge existed before 2800 BC. When the dispersion came, they took the knowledge with them around the world.
Knowiwng this sort of thing would be a nice way to maintain your status.

BTW has everybody seen this?

http://www.megalith.ukf.net/bigmap.htm

I had no idea they were this common! And this is just in the UK!
I guess size does matter. The big guys get all the attention.

You can't move round here without falling over 'em KB.
Stonehenge has a ring of holes known as the Aubry holes if my memory serves me correctly and supposedly used to adjust for the 19yr? Lunar cycle. To have established that would require observations spanning at least 19yrs, and achieved without the stones.

Minimalist wrote:I never know which ones you were able to get and which you couldn't.

I got every one you sent. There were a few you didn't send because I didn't ask for them. iirc, Cain and Abel, I did NOT ask for but you sent it anyway. But Im not complaining, I still watched it.

I am thinking there already was a priestly, scientist, astronomy, astrologer class before the event.

Again, all generalizations are wrong - even this one - but we are generally led to believe that it was the introduction of agriculture that led to such class structures as it was not until agriculture produced surpluses that could enable some members of a society to specialize without having to spend all their time gathering food.

I've seen all sorts of estimates about the introduction of agriculture into Britain but we do seem to have plenty of evidence that agriculture was well established in the Middle East by 8,000 BC...let alone 2,500.

I'm not following the logic here. If KB is thinking there were class structures before the event in 2800bc and you are saying class structures emerged with the agrarian society and that emerged as early as 8000bc; you two are in agreement. Or am I missing something?

I still think something caused a shift in religous thinking which coincided with the migration and subsequent building of monolithic structures.

I'm not sure I buy the theory that the Britain which built Stonehenge was some sort of neo-lithic collection of hunter/gatherers. I can't think of any place else on earth where that sort of society has built monumental structures. So, I do agree with kb that the institutions relative to agriculture had to have been in existence.

The greatest proliferation of Henge type structures in Britain is on the south midland plains, as is Stonehenge. The same applies to burial mounds. This area of Britain is mainly on chalk, and as I posted earlier, it was the chalk that saw the earliest settlements in southern England.
I at one time lived near Birmingham in the English midlands and fought a 4 yr battle to build a garden on clay that was over 600ft thick and removed all surface water very rapidy in a dry spell, and flooded in wet ones.
In Bedfordshire there are clearly visible terraces dug into the chalk hill sides to deepen the usable soil level and to reduce the run off. These date back to the late stone age apparently.
These structures, and their locations, suggest at least a semi-static population and quite advanced agrarian activities and the ability to command a sizeable work force.

Is this a fair summery?

We have a well established class system, an agriculture based economy to support them, and the priest class have a long (multi thousands of years) history of watching the stars, sun, moon, planets, etc. And, of course, they record all that they see, so they are pretty good at what they do.

Then something big and bad happens. Bad enough that a whole lot of people want to “get out of Dodge” and start over someplace else. For whatever reasons, some groups go one way, others another. But they don’t start over completely. To stay in a certain “comfort zone”, they bring some of their cultural baggage with them. Things like religion. Which needs priests. But because they deal with the angles of star and planet alignments, priests make pretty good engineers, so even the more practical minded guys don‘t mind bringing them along.

Somehow one group ends up in the Midlands, or wherever, and thinks it is a good place. Maybe the priests say so. (I don’t want to get into Lat/Long alignments, power lines, etc. etc….. )

As a group, you have a cultural history of farming, but this is a whole new world. Different dirt, different weather, different crops because of these changes. But the basics are still the same. You have to know when to plant, not just climate wise, but also star alignment wise. (I remember my Grandmother in Illinois planting different parts of her garden in accord with different phases of the moon. This would be in the 1950’s. And she was a well thought of school teacher. And she wasn‘t the only one.)

It takes time to get the kind of farming community you are used to set up. There is land allocation, water control projects, crop selections, etc. etc… So now we get to division of labor. You have to eat, so some are told to go hunt, or gather berries and honey. You have to plan for the future, so some become terrace builders and ditch diggers. And someone has to engineer, and then oversee, this whole thing, both physically and socially.

In the end, in a real short period of time, you have some spots all over the Earth that went from a human habitation of real primitive to real complex. These were not locally grown progressions. These were settlements.

And according to Dr Masse this all started soon after May 10, 2807 BC

I don't buy the date.

Well, I don’t want to make it a deal breaker.
(Remember my “give or take 500 years” rule)

But he does have a little more going for him than Ussher.

And keeping the events in a Biblical time reference sequence, this would have been the date of the Flood. The Tower of Babel, and the resulting dispersion, would have been a few generations later. (But still within my somewhat sloppy tolerances.)

BTW, now I am going to have to start checking the dates for the West Coast of SA. There was some terracing, irrigation attempts, etc. going on there. They didn’t always work out as planed, if I remember, but they may be part of a pattern.

And does anybody know the date of the underground water tunnels in North Africa? They showed some pretty good social and pratical engineering.