Last night Joan Marler of the
Institute of Archaeomythology
— gave a fascinating talk about the likelihood Europe’s first agricultural
peoples had developed writing 8,000 years ago, long before Sumer.  It is called the “Danube Script.”   The evidence she offered was persuasive to me.  But fascinating as this was, the point
Marler made about their farming is what led to today’s post.

These early agriculturalists
apparently farmed successfully in Southeastern Europe and Turkey for many
thousands of years.  There is no
evidence of war, certainly none of weapon production or social hierarchies like
those that came later.  There is plenty of evidence for their living well beyond simple subsistence, with art, beautiful pottery, solid houses, and decoration everywhere.  Speaking
for myself, they represented a wonderful balance between the egalitarian
societies that characterized most hunting and gathering cultures and the
possibilities for settlement that agriculture opened up.  It was a balance that lasted a long
time, longer than the time from Socrates to now.

They had developed a deeply
sustainable agriculture unlike the rape and pillage approach of modern corporate
agriculture, that is to farms what the ‘religious’ right is to religion.  Based on altars and other
objects found on sites where these communities existed, Marler argued they had
done so by integrating farming into a ritual order – that is, by placing our
utilitarian need for food into a larger sacred context.

Marler’s comments reminded me of
another example from our own continent. 
Northwestern Indians had the technology to take nearly all salmon from
any rivers other than perhaps the very largest, like the Columbia.  They also had a motive.  Dried salmon was an important trade
good  in much of the West.  Yet despite archaeological records of
salmon fishing for at least 9,000 years, they did not do so. They also enmeshed their fishing into a larger ritual context.

I suspect we will continue to
destroy our world until we, like those tribes and perhaps those farmers of so
many thousands of years ago, learn to subordinate our technological power to
larger contexts of the sacred.