“Hmm,” said Steve, his memory beginning to return.

It’ll use phpBB, so it will take some time to set up. I’d expect it to appear sometime over the next month or so….

Is there any way we (that is to say, you) can set up a specific area of the site where we can discuss them in more depth?

I don’t mean a debate-proper where we each set up our positions and then attack, of course…but…something where we, and anyone else who wants can compile as much evidence on various agricultural and foraging practices, resource management/intensification techniques and their consequences, “aftermath societies,” permaculture, and so forth…?

…cause that would be really helpful.

Horticulture is fine. Horticultural civilizations are not possible, and most horticultural societies are tribal and egalitarian. The problem is, I doubt its stability.

In the Yucatan, it worked out all right (at least on the limited timeline we have before the Spanish showed up), because the environment would not allow complexity beyond that level. What happens if we’re content with horticulture in other, more verdant areas?

Foraging has systemic barriers against civilization. For foragers, the wilderness is not just sacred, it is that which they depend on for life. Destroying the wilderness is for them as unspeakable and unthinkable as for us to burn down all our own churches, groceries and restaurants. Add to that tabboos like the !Kung “cursing of the meat,” and you have a cultural environment where hierarchy is damn near impossible.

But horticulture breeds hierarchy almost as often as it does egalitarianism. All the world’s Big Man societies are horticultural. I don’t see it as deterministic–a horticultural tribe could remain tribal–but if the environment permits intensification, what’s to stop an emergent Big Man from doing so?

Your take on the fall of Rome isn’t too far from the truth, and from my own study of Teotihuacan, I agree with your assessment. But, it’s also the Maya, isn’t it? Only they never got their chance to return, and maybe they never would have. They also never collapsed as severely–Rome and Teotihuacan’s heirs always had at least chiefdom-level societies.

It’s a very tricky question, but I still fear horticulture may be a slippery slope. It’s a great stepping stone, but as an endpoint, it makes me wary.

In the Southern Lowlands, which had been the center of Classic Maya civilization, the Maya did return to a tribal, non-Agricultural way of life. They didn’t become foragers as Quinn suggests, but they did adopt swidden horticulture, which is perhaps even more inspiring, as it shows that horticulture does not need to be a transitory stage between foraging and farming.

Those parts of Maya country which did reemerge as centers of civilization, like Mayapan and Chichen Itza, had been periferal areas during the Classic period and thus hit less hard by the Collapse. It’s not so much that there were still Maya around, as that those Maya who didn’t learn their lesson as well as the others tried it again.

I don’t think he’s right at all about Teotihuacan. A few years ago I had a class in Mesoamerican archaeology where we examined settlement patterns in the Valley of Mexico from the earliest adoption of agriculture to Toltec times. When Teotihuacan collapsed, a number of smaller centers emerged. They weren’t grand empires as Teo. had been, but they were still centralized, hierarchical, agricultural societies - and soon they were part of an empire again under Toltec dominion. Then the same thing happened again, and Tenochtitlan emerged. It was far more like the Roman collapse, if I understand the Roman collapse correctly (and I don’t, but you do, so correct me if I’m wrong), with civilization retreating to a less complex state for a time, only to reemerge as soon as it could.

In the Southern Lowlands, on the other hand, it was replaced by a stable alternative–negative-feedback-driven swidden horticulture.