Thursday, July 10, 2014

Active tectonics -- a cultural stimulant in antiquity

https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781498514279/Impact-of-Tectonic-Activity-on-Ancient-Civilizations-Recurrent-Shakeups-Tenacity-Resilience-and-Change

This posting is now revised and incorporated in a published book as of Aug. 2015 (link above)


Active tectonics -- a cultural stimulant in antiquity

Eric R. Force (eforce@email.arizona.edu)

Is it possible to imagine a world in which the development of each human culture is tied to its plate-tectonic position?  In which tectonism functions as a cultural stimulant producing complexity and innovation?  What if we humans were only fully alive culturally where the earth keeps us that way with constant activity?   If innovations diffuse largely from cultures located along the tectonic boundaries into more static environments in plate interiors away from tectonic plate boundaries?  And if the cultures themselves are unaware of any such factor?
It’s quite a stretch viewed from the world we live in, so this thought experiment might seem fanciful and fruitless.  For anyone reminded of the latest destructive tectonic event, it’s counter-intuitive if not bizarre.  But a remarkable number of lines of evidence seem to converge on just the hypothesis offered above for a previous time interval of our cultural development, of about 4000 years duration, that we refer to as antiquity.
How could we have missed this?  Perhaps because ancient history had no way to record the clues in a way that fit into plate-tectonic theory (1); because in the modern world such clues are obscured behind many layers of other concerns; and because they were already obscured long before any of the precursors of modern tectonic theories were born.  But it’s time to focus our new knowledge on our past with an open mind.
There is a good practical reason to do that. If tectonism was a cultural stimulant in antiquity, it probably still is, though less visible in our more complex world.  And indeed, once the structure of tectonic influence is traced through the ancient world, that structure can be recognized in our own.
In this book I propose to take the reader through those converging lines of evidence that tie tectonism to cultural development in the ancient world.  Many factors are required for complex cultures to thrive, of course, and the literatures that cover those—climate, soil, water, etc.--seem adequate.  They have been apparent all along.  Here I will treat them as mere prerequisites in a framework of more global dimension. 
I once thought that some combination of the obvious factors actually produced the apparent tectonic relation, so I started circling that relation looking for the “real” connection.  When the evidence consistently pointed to tectonism itself, I started thinking of tectonism as a minor factor, a mere thread in the fabric of relations between natural and cultural phenomena.  Now I think the evidence is too strong for such a modest claim.  A minor factor would not produce a spatial relation (fig. 1) so obvious that its random probability is one in several billions.  A minor factor would not explain how independent cultural experiments and geologic variations show similar but not identical results.  A minor factor would not explain the rich texture of response to tectonism in ancient religions, philosophies, and literature.  Nor would a minor factor explain the lack of the innovation and resilience of ancient cultures in tectonically quiescent cratons of plate interiors, or the evidence that cultural complexity preferentially propagates from site to site along tectonic boundaries.  Without disparaging the already-obvious factors, I think we instead are looking at an essential component of our cultural makeup.
            In some ways my thesis is predictable.  The influence of plate tectonics on human evolution and distribution is not in dispute, supported by evidence from both geologic (Molnar 1990, King and Bailey 2006) and anthropologic (Malin and Christensen 2007, Bailey and others 2011) authors, and a transition from evolutionary to cultural aspects can be traced (Sherratt 1996, Force and McFadgen, 2012).   In this book, however, I’m tracing it farther into the cultural realm. 
The ancient cultures that had both robust literatures and the most active tectonic environments did describe tectonism in whatever terms they had for it.  It is these cultures whose influence is most strongly felt in our modern world.  Other ancient complex cultures have recorded tectonism via their archaeological records.  Balancing the recorded destruction resulting from tectonism with the obvious vigor of these cultures, active tectonic environments look like an exercise program these cultures bought into by virtue of their location, an expensive one in terms of pain and cost, but producing a sort of cultural athleticism.

Acknowledgements—Following chapters will acknowledge information and suggestions pertinent to their subjects.  Here I would like to acknowledge those who have encouraged the entire work being presented.  It’s been cooking for ten years now; in some sort of chronologic order these include Jane Brandon Force, George Davis, Victoria Brandon, the late John Dohrenwend, Claudio Vita-Finzi, Henry Spall, Blake Edgar, Gary Huckleberry, Iain Stewart, the late E-An Zen and Norman Herz, Ed Wright, Wayne Howell, Bruce McFadgen, Germaine Shames, Ghasem Khosravi, Bob Tilling, Alastair Gill, Dingzhao, Mohammad Ramesht, and Jelle deBoer. 

Note
1. To give a sense of how far they had to go, the ancient literature does not seem to describe strata or bedding in sedimentary rocks.

Figure 1

Map locations (after Force 2008) of original sites of thirteen prominent ancient complex cultures of the eastern hemisphere relative to plate boundaries.  Numbered cultures (and sites) are 1 Roman (Rome), 2 Etruscan (Tarquinia&Veii), 3 Greek (Corinth) and Mycenaean (Mycenae), 4 Minoan (Knossos-Phaestos), 5 and 6 SW Asian (Tyre and Jerusalem), 7 Assyrian (Ninevah), 8 Mesopotamian (Ur-Uruk), 9 Persian (Susa), 10 Indus (Mohenjodaro), 11 Aryan India (Hastinapura), 12 Egyptian (Memphis) and 13 Chinese (Zhengzhou).  As shown here and discussed in chapter 6, the average distance from these sites to an active tectonic boundary is less than 100 km. 

References

Bailey, G. N., 2011, Reynolds, S. C., and King, G. C. P., 2011, Landscapes of human evolution:  models and methods of tectonic geomorphology and the reconstruction of hominin landscapes:  Journal of Human Evolution v. 60, p. 257-280.
Force, E. R., 2008, Tectonic environments of ancient civilizations in the eastern hemisphere:  Geoarchaeology v. 23, p. 644-653.
Force, E. R., and McFadgen, 2012, Influences of active tectonism on human development: a review and Neolithic example, in Climates, landscapes, and civilizations, L. Giosan and others, eds.:  American Geophysical Union,
Geophysical Monograph 198, p.  195-202
King, G. C. P. and Bailey, G. N., 2006, Tectonics and human evolution:  Antiquity v. 80, p. 265-286.
Maslin, M., and Christensen, 2007, Tectonics, orbital forcing, global climate change, and human evolution in Africa:  Journal of Human Evolution v. 53, p. 443-464.
Molnar, R., 1990, The rise of mountain ranges and the evolution of humans:  Irish Journal of Earth Sciences v. 10, p. 199-207
Sherratt, A., 1996, Plate tectonics and imaginary prehistories: structure and contingency in agricultural origins, in The origins and spread of agriculture and pastoralism in Eurasia, D. R. Harris, ed.: University College London Press, p. 130-141