THE AGRICULTURAL REVOLUTION IN ANTIQUITY

Agrarian Systems Based on Fallowing and Animal-Drawn Cultivation with the Ard in the Temperate Region: The Agricultural Revolution in Antiquity

'So they will live pleasantly together; and a prudent fear of poverty or war will keep them from begetting children beyond their means. ... The community I have described seems to me the ideal one, in sound health as it were [limited to what is strictly necessary], but if you want to see one suffering from inflammation [populous and luxurious], there is nothing to hinder us. ... The country, too, which was large enough to support the original inhabitants, will now be too small. If we are to have enough pasture and plow land, we shall have to cut off a slice of our neighbors’ territory; and if they too are not content with necessaries, but give themselves up to getting unlimited wealth, they will want a slice of ours. ...We need not say yet whether war does good or harm, but only that we have discovered its origin in desires which are the most fruitful source of evils both to individuals and to states'.1

           —PLATO, The Republic

The agrarian systems based on fallowing and cultivation using the ard in the temperate regions are derived from systems of slash-and-burn cultivation that occupied the forested environments of these areas since the Neolithic period. They first developed in the hot temperate countries of the Mediterranean region, then in the cold temperate countries of Europe as they were deforested. This deforestation progressively expanded from east to west and from south to north in the age of metals, from 2500 B.C.E. to the first centuries of the common era. The development of systems using fallowing was around 2,000 years after that of the hydro-agricultures of the arid regions (Mesopotamia, Nile, and Indus Valleys). In the hot temperate regions, the predominance of systems based on fallowing did not exclude the limited presence of hydro-agricultures.
Undertaken in environments receiving enough rain to make possible the rainfed cultivation of cereals and deforested enough to allow the development of pastoral animal herding, these systems rest on the combination of these two activities. Cereal crops are concentrated on the most fertile arable lands (the ager) where they alternate with the natural growth of grass during a fallow period, thereby forming a rotation of short duration, generally biennial.2 The livestock exploit the relatively extended peripheral pastures (the saltus) and play a role in fieldwork and in the reproduction of the fertility of the cultivated lands. They supply the necessary energy for pulling the ard and for transport with the packsaddle, instruments of labor characteristic of animal-drawn cultivation using an ard. Moreover, pasturing during the day on the saltus and during the night on the fallow lands, the livestock ensure a certain transfer of fertility from the pastures to the arable lands by means of their manure.
However, despite the decisive role played by the animals, the productivity of systems based on fallowing and cultivation using the ard remained limited due to the inherent weakness of the means of plowing and transport. Indeed, the ard, which scarifies the soil without turning it over, does not accomplish a true plowing. That must be carried out manually, with a spade or hoe. But manual plowing is long, hard work, with such low productivity that it cannot be extended to all of the fallow lands. As a result, the soil is generally poorly prepared before the sowing.
Beyond that, transport using pack animals does not make it possible to move large quantities of organic matter (fodder, manure) from the saltus to the ager. Since transfers of fertility by simply penning the livestock every night on fallow land are not very effective, the lands cultivated with cereals are not well fertilized. The cultivated lands are not extended and are poorly prepared and manured. As a result, the yield and overall production are low. Moreover, as the area cultivated per worker is limited by the deficiencies of the tools, labor productivity is hardly adequate to cover the needs of the population. This poor performance is the origin of the chronic subsistence crisis of the Mediterranean and European societies of antiquity. This crisis appears to us as inseparable from the development of war, the formation of militarized city-states, colonization and slavery that characterized these societies up to the end of the first millennium of the common era.
In fact, it is only after the year 1000 that these inadequacies were remedied. In the cold temperate regions, cultivation using the ard was replaced by cultivation using the plow, properly speaking, and the wagon. At the same time, in the hot temperate regions, animal-drawn cultivation with the ard was perpetuated for centuries, while a whole series of improvements appropriate to these regions were implemented, such as terracing of slopes, irrigation, arboriculture, planting of associated crops, all of which were already practiced in antiquity. Even today, systems based on fallowing and cultivation with the ard persist in diverse forms in several regions of northern Africa, the Near East, Asia, and Latin America.
This chapter aims to explain the agricultural revolution of antiquity, i.e., to discover how and why, in the temperate regions, deforestation generally led to the development of systems based on fallowing and animal-drawn cultivation using the ard, with associated pasturage and animal breeding. It also has the objective of explaining the structure and functioning of these systems, that is, the type of equipment, productive practices and cultivated ecosystem that characterize them, as well as the resulting outcomes. Finally, it attempts to relate the agrarian and food crisis of societies in antiquity to certain traits in their social organization and politics.

1. THE ORIGIN OF THE SYSTEMS BASED ON FALLOWING IN THE TEMPERATE REGIONS

In the semi-arid regions close to the Fertile Crescent, deforestation and desertification goes back to the sixth millennium before the present. But in the Mediterranean and European regions with a temperate climate, the original denser and less fragile forests resisted the ax and fire for a much longer period of time. The slash-and-burn systems of cultivation lasted until much later.
However, beginning with the Bronze Age, around 2500 B.C.E., deforestation was already well advanced on the eastern rivers of the Mediterranean and, during the 2000 years that followed, spread to the whole of the hot temperate regions of the Mediterranean from east to west. Subsequently, deforestation gradually extended to the cold temperate regions in the northern half of Europe, up to the first centuries of the common era. It is commonly accepted that systems of cultivation using the ard with a biannual fallow period and pastoral animal herding became predominant in the temperate regions beginning in antiquity. But little is known about the manner in which such systems gradually developed in a region that was undergoing deforestation.
It is precisely this movement from slash-and-burn systems of cultivation to systems of cultivation based on fallowing that we want to try to reconstruct here, by examining the following questions: How and why did the new constituent elements of the cultivated ecosystem (the ager and the saltus) acquire distinct identities? How did the new tools—the ard, the spade, the hoe—appear and why did they become widespread? Why did the biennial rotation of fallow land become predominant? We will treat first of all the case of the hot temperate regions, before examining the case of the cold temperate regions.

The Case of the Hot Temperate Regions

The Mediterranean climate is a hot and dry temperate climate in summer, with a short, mild winter, and moderate rainfall concentrated primarily in autumn, although it also rains in winter and spring. Under this climate, the period of plant dormancy always occurs in summer, but a slowing down of vegetation also takes place in winter. The Mediterranean climax is a forest of average biomass consisting of three levels of vegetation. The wooded level is typically made up of oaks combined with other species such as pines and maples. The holm oak, which withstands dry conditions better, is adapted to different terrains, including chalky ones, while the cork-oak is more widespread on sandy terrains. The shrubby sublevel is composed of pistachios, carobs, laurels, and junipers and the undergrowth is made up of heather, lavender, rockrose, etc.

The Formation of a New Post-Forest Cultivated Ecosystem

Once attacked by ax and fire, then subjected to cycles of frequently repeated cultivation, forests of this type evolve toward degraded plant formations, such as the maquis and garrigue, types of scrubland typical of the hot temperate regions. The maquis is a rather dense, closed formation, on sandy soil, composed of bushes and shrubs, while the garrigue is an open formation on chalky terrain. In fact, the garrigue is a species of discontinuous shrubby steppe where the vegetation occupies fragments of brown soil, red soil, and rather small amounts of rendzina, and where portions of the skeletal terrain deprived of vegetation show on the surface as large slabs or as piles of fallen rock. In areas that are not too hilly and subjected to erosion, these scrub formations become less and less favorable to cultivation.
They are most often reserved for pasturing domestic herbivores and subjected to periodic burning, which, while favoring the regrowth of grass in the spring and autumn, makes the regeneration of trees difficult. These grassy and bushlike formations, set aside for grazing and subject to fire and erosion, formed what is called in Latin the saltus, the first constitutive element of the new post-forest cultivated ecosystem. Next to this generally uneven and eroded saltus, valleys, depressions, basins, dolines—in sum all the hollows of the terrain—benefit from increased sedimentation from the hills. These lands with deeper soils, which are continually rejuvenated and enriched, are reserved for the cultivation of cereals.
Since they are often not extended, the cultivations must be repeated all the more often as the population increases. As a result, each cereal crop ends up alternating with a grassy fallow period of short duration, lasting hardly more than one year, with which it forms a biennial rotation. This grassy fallow land grazed on by domestic animals and fertilized by their manure is also plowed.3 The plowable cereal lands, composed of a set of contiguous fields, formed what is called in Latin ager, the second element of the new cultivated ecosystem.
But there also exist wooded lands not propitious for cultivation, because they are too high, too hilly, rocky, permeable, wet, dense, or even quite simply too far from dwellings. On these lands, the forest was hardly subjected to slash-andburn and persisted even if it were more or less degraded by wood harvesting. Thus, next to the saltus and the ager, some portions of the territory preserved a population of trees large and important enough to merit the name forest, woods, or grove, depending upon whether their surface areas were large, medium, or small. The generic Latin term silva is used to designate all of the lands that form the third element of the new cultivated ecosystem. Silva and saltus were not, moreover, always distinct from each other: the saltus remained cluttered with trees, and herds used the partially deforested silva as well.
Lastly, the garden-orchards formed the hortus, the fourth element of this ecosystem. They were the successors to the permanent crop enclosures adjoining the houses in a village. These enclosures already existed at the time of slashand-burn cultivation.
The residual silva, the grazed saltus, the ager dedicated to cereal cultivation in rotation with a grassy fallow period of short duration, and the hortus, such were the four parts of the new cultivated ecosystem resulting from the process of deforestation in the temperate regions. However, in order for the cultivation of cereals to be possible in such conditions, it was necessary to resolve a problem: clearing the grassy fallow lands and renewing the fertility of lands planted in cereals.

The Adoption of New Equipment

If the ax and fire are the appropriate means to clear a forest or wooded fallow land, they are ineffective for clearing the natural grass cover of plowable fallow land. That requires other tools. Therefore, the farmers of antiquity used manual tools, the spade and the hoe, and a tool pulled by animals, the ard. The spade and the hoe both make it possible to plow the soil, i.e., to turn the soil over and then bury and, in large measure, destroy the wild grasses of the fallow land. But this long and difficult labor could not be carried out on all of the fallow land. It was necessary to complete that work by using the ard. The ard, conceived originally to bury the seeds after a sowing, is a tool that uses animal traction (ox, donkey, mule) and is provided with a simple point, hardened by fire, or fitted with a metal tip, which scarifies the soil without turning it over and incompletely destroys the weeds. But as the ard-tilling is relatively quick, one can repeat it several times.
In fact, the ard, spade, and hoe were not invented as a response to the needs of the new systems based on fallowing: they were borrowed from the hydro-agricultures of Mesopotamia, where they were in use for a long time, by farmers of neighboring regions affected, in turn, by deforestation. The ard appeared, in fact, in lower Mesopotamia and it spread to the Near East in the fourth millennium B.C.E. Then it reached the Nile Valley, the Mediterranean region, and Europe, where its presence is attested from the third millennium in several regions by stone carvings, terra-cotta models, and traces of the tool exceptionally well preserved and dated, under burials for example. The presence of the ard, which cannot be used in heavily wooded terrain, leads one to think that at least a portion of the cultivated lands were deforested and an embryonic ager already existed in this period, at least in some regions.

A New Mode of Renewing Fertility

In contrast to wooded idling of long duration and grassy idling of medium duration, both of which existed in the early years of deforestation, grassy fallowing of a little more than one year produces too little biomass to play an important role in renewing the fertility of cultivated lands. In a hot temperate climate, at least three years are required to reconstitute a relatively dense grassy groundcover.
The saltus, on the other hand, a type of extended and permanent idled land,3 produces enough biomass to reproduce the fertility of cultivated lands, on condition that it has a means to transfer a portion of the biomass to the ager. This transfer is not easy if carts and wagons are uncommon, as in antiquity. It is essentially carried out, then, by herds of domestic herbivores, based on the appropriate management of cultivation, grazing and animal breeding. The animals are led early in the morning onto the saltus close to the village to graze there all day long. Then they are led onto the fallow lands in the evening where they remain during the night and deposit their manure. In this way, a part of the grazed biomass from the saltus is gathered (in the form of excrement) on the fallow lands, while the reverse transfers of biomass, from the fallow lands to the saltus, are sufficiently reduced.
But, in the Mediterranean region, the slow growth of grass during the summer limits the size of the herds, such that it is indeed difficult to have enough livestock to consume all the biomass produced in the autumn and spring. Failing that, the transfers of biomass and fertility from the saltus to the ager are inevitably limited. Diverse arrangements for managing herds and grazing make it possible, however, to maximize year-round the number of animals grazing on the nearby saltus and ensure transfers of fertility by penning them at night. One of these arrangements involves grouping the births at the end of winter and end of summer so as to increase the number of animals grazing during the seasons in which there is the strongest growth of grass, in autumn and spring.
But the most important arrangement is undoubtedly transhumance, which involves temporarily removing a surplus part of the herd to distant summer pastures (located higher up or farther north) as to have a sufficient number of livestock to consume the entire grass production from neighboring pastures during the rest of the year. Lastly, since the Mediterranean is dry enough during the summer to make it possible to preserve uncut, without too many losses, a portion of the overabundant grass from spring, it is also possible to make a portion of the pasture close to the village and cultivated lands off-limits for grazing in spring but available for grazing during the summer, when the grass is still consumable.
It remains the case, however, that penning animals at night on fallow land as a method of transfering fertility is altogether ineffective. It is necessary to have an extended saltus and numerous herds in order to succeed in fertilizing a very small area of ager, and even then it works rather poorly. The fact that penning the animals at night was the mode of manuring characteristic of systems of cultivation using the ard does not mean people at that time did not know about the advantages of manure produced by animals in stables.
These advantages were known since early antiquity but, lacking wagons and carts, the quantities of hay and manure that could be transported by hand or by animal were inevitably reduced, and the manure was often reserved for the gardens.4 Nor were people at that time unaware of the advantages of rotations alternating cereals with legumes, but there again, as we will see, the obligation to practice fallowing was, in animal-drawn cultivation using the ard, practically inescapable.

The Case of Cold Temperate Regions

In central European regions with a cold temperate climate, plant dormancy and the fall of leaves takes place in winter and a certain slowing down of vegetation growth occurs in summer. The climatic forest, composed of hardwoods, includes three levels of vegetation: the arboreal level of oaks, beeches, and hornbeams which can rise to thirty or forty meters; a shrubby sublevel made up of hazels, willows, hollies, dogwoods, etc.; and a bushy undergrowth of varying composition. The total biomass of such a forest, which can reach 400 tons of dry matter per hectare, is one of the highest there is. It is thus denser, stronger, more resistant to the ax and fire than the forest of the hot temperate regions.
However, the population growth at the end of the Neolithic period and beginning of the Bronze Age and, consequently, the more and more frequent repetition of slash-and-burn cultivations led to deforestation here too. In these regions, as in the Mediterranean area, a silva, a saltus, and an ager were formed, but their relative proportions varied from one region to another. On the great silt-laden plains and in the large alluvial river valleys, with a rich, deep, and not very heavy soil, all land is potentially cultivable with the ard and other equipment associated with animal-drawn cultivation. However, it is necessary to preserve an adequate area of silva in order to support the wood needs of the population. The longer and more severe the winter, the larger this area must be. It is also necessary to devote an adequate area to the saltus, in order to feed herds that are large enough to fertilize the cereal lands of the ager adequately.
Without effective means to harvest hay, the longer the cessation of growth during the winter the more extended was this area. Even when there are no lands unsuitable for cultivation, the new cultivated ecosystem must consist of one part silva and one part saltus proportional to the needs for wood and pasture. In other regions, by contrast, some parts of the originally wooded land, cultivable by slash-and-burn methods, became unsuitable for cultivation after deforestation. This is particularly true of sandy lands low in fertility, which are covered by moors of heather and gorse, or indeed of the most skeletal and thinnest rendzina soils, on hard limestone, which are covered by meager prairies and calcicole heaths. These lands are exploited as saltus, while the ager must be concentrated on the deposits of silt-laden soil, on the colluvial deposits at the bottom of slopes, and on alluvial deposits in the river valleys.
In some regions the silva remained largely predominant, because the terrain is uncultivable using the ard and associated equipment. This was the case for the Nordic forests, high-altitude forests, and forests on hilly, rocky, permeable, humid, compact, etc., terrain. On the margins of regions settled because they were cultivable with the means of the time period, there persisted vast, heavily forested and little-populated mountains and “deserts,” some of which were only put into cultivation in the Middle Ages, using the animal-drawn plow.

The Case of Non-Forested Temperate Regions

Originally, there also existed in the temperate zone grassy climatic formations, with some bushes, in which the forest could not develop. Some were not fertile, such as the moors, meadows, and high-altitude steppes situated above the conifer forest and the moors on the podzol soils of the wet Atlantic regions, on permeable, sandy soils or on skeletal soils, etc. Unsuited for cultivation, these grassy formations formed a sort of natural saltus from the beginning, exploitable by local herds of those that migrated with the seasons.
Other climatic grassy formations were, on the contrary, very fertile, such as the large prairies in regions with a continental climate (Danube Valley, Ukraine, etc.). In these regions, the heat and the dryness of summer caused a pronounced cessation in vegetation growth, which impeded the development of trees. These same conditions also favored evaporation and the capillary rising of the soil solution. By preventing the leaching of fine particles and the leaching of soluble mineral salts and the input of organic matter into the soil by the massive root systems of prarie vegetation, this mechanism lead to the formation of black soils (chernozem), among the richest soils in existence. For a long time, these continental prairies were the reserved domain of European pastoral societies or those coming from Asia. They were, however, more widely cultivated when larger populations had tools (spade, hoe, ard) for tilling the soil, making it possible to clear a thick, grassy groundcover.

The Agricultural Revolution in Antiquity

The preceding analysis shows that the development of systems based on fallowing and cultivation using the ard was an appropriate response to the problems posed by deforestation in most of the hot and cold temperate regions. But this “response” is revealed to be quite complex: the separation of the ager and the saltus, the organization of the short-term rotation with a grassy fallow period, the development of new tools, herding the livestock onto the saltus and the fallow lands to transfer the most fertility possible for the benefit of the cereal-growing lands are many new organizational structures, means, and procedures. Their general development and particular adaptations in each locality took dozens of years. The development of systems based on fallowing and animal-drawn cultivation with the ard was not therefore the automatic and immediate result of deforestation but the product of a true agricultural revolution, the agricultural revolution of antiquity.
What’s more, it required a rather significant capitalization in farm implements and livestock, which necessarily took much time. All indications are that the negative consequences of deforestation were felt for several centuries before the new systems developed. Beginning in the Neolithic era, erosion, the drying-out of lands, the difficulty of clearing lands that were more grass covered than forested, and low yields appear to have been instrumental in the abandonment of heavily deforested areas and the migration of entire populations to search for lands with enough forests to continue practicing slash-and-burn methods of cultivation. These phenomena are difficult to discern with precision, but they appear to be well attested. Thus many Mediterranean areas (Palestine, Anatolia, Cyprus, Malta) experienced a succession of periods of population, abandonment, and repopulation during the Neolithic period.
Since the first farmers in these regions practiced slash-and-burn cultivation, one can conclude that the population increase gradually led to the deforestation of these areas, then their abandonment. After the regeneration of a secondary forest, these same regions could once again be cultivated and colonized, then deforested again, and so on. Furthermore, at the end of the Neolithic period and beginning of the Bronze Age, between 1800 and 1250 B.C.E., middle European areas were also affected by this type of exodus, in particular those that had been cultivated and deforested the earliest, i.e., the most fertile silt-laden plains and alluvial valleys. These areas were then partially abandoned and people moved into areas of mid-elevation mountains, initially less favorable and which, as a result, were less populated and still had rather abundant cultivable forest reserves.
At the end of the Bronze Age, around 1000 B.C.E., these fertile regions, after several centuries of abandonment, experienced a veritable agricultural revival, thanks no doubt to the agricultural revolution of antiquity. Once perfected, the systems based on fallowing and animal-drawn cultivation with the ard made regions that had formerly been exploited by slash-and-burn methods, leading to heavy deforestation, once again exploitable.
Finally, at the end of this long period of deforestation and transition, in the last centuries B.C.E., the systems based on fallowing and cultivation with the ard extended from North Africa to Scandinavia, and from the Atlantic to the Urals and the eastern shores of the Mediterranean. Certainly, slash-and-burn cultivation was still present in some areas that were still forested, pastoral systems occupied some deforested regions without plowable lands, and entire regions, forested or not, were still nearly deserted, because they were too cold, too hilly, rocky, marshy, in brief, inhospitable. It remains the case, however, that beginning in the Iron Age the new systems based on fallowing were predominant in this immense area, and for more than a millennium they supplied the basic essentials of subsistence for circum-Mediterranean and European societies. They set the tone for the agricultural economy of this part of the world.

Notes


1 Epigraph: The Republic of Plato, rtrans. Francis MacDonald Cornford (London: Oxford University Press, 1941), pp. 60–62 —
2 The variety of idling of long and medium duration referred to here is la friche in French, i.e., formerly uncultivated land allowed to return to a natural state. The shortterm fallowing is la jachère, i.e., that type of formerly cultivated land subject to human labor during the uncultivated part of its rotation.—Trans.

3 The saltus is of the friche variety of fallow land, i.e., it is not plowed.
4 Auguste Jardé, Les Céréales dans l’Antiquité grecque (Paris: Boccard, 1979).
5 In the French, the authors are discussing the proper use of the term jachère versus use of the term friche. I have changed the sentence so that the emphasis is on the conceptual distinction and not the term used to denote that distinction, since in English there is just the one term, i.e., fallow. The original reads: “Il est donc impropre, soit dit en passant, d’employer le terme de jachère pour designer une friche boisée de moyenne ou de longue durée défrichée par abattis-brûlis, ou pour parler d’un pâturage naturel en rotation non encore labouré.”—Trans.


By MARCE L MAZOYER and LAURENCE ROUDART (Translated by JAMES H. MEMBREZ) in the book 'A HISTORY OF WORLD AGRICULTURE: From the Neolithic Age to the Current Crisis', Earthscan, London, 2006, p.217-229. Edited, illustrated and adapted to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.