This weekly feature is a place to discuss new developments in fields of history and archaeology. This can be newly discovered documents and archaeological sites, recent publications, documents that have just become publicly available through digitization or the opening of archives, and new theories and interpretations.
New Scientist recently had a rather grim re-imagining of the origin of city-states. Not so much to do with the rise of agriculture as humans being unpleasant to one another:
Scott describes the creation, from around 4000 BC, of what he calls “late-Neolithic multispecies resettlement camps”. Faced with a shortage of wild resources, these made use of domesticated animals and plants. Life in these settlements was much tougher than foraging, and the daily drudgery, chronic illness and epidemics brought on by increased reliance on domesticated species are apparent in skeletal remains and sudden collapses in population.
As the Danish agricultural economist Ester Boserup and some anthropologists have noted, there is little reason to imagine foragers would have adopted this way of life unless they were hungry, afraid or coerced.