By James Scott
( I never read directly his works, so it may not be a valid reflection.)
As the flyer summary implied, this was a lecture about the significance of Neolithic Evolution, in which the speaker focused on the impact of using fire, plant and animal domestication, and the subsequent effects such as centralization and emergence of states. The use of fire had transformed human subsistence in the first place (mmm, because I came into the lecture room from this part). It enabled early human beings to enlarge the range of food choices. Although I am not sure how it connects to the next part, together with plant domestication, e.g., rice and millet, the use of fire contributed to the centralization of human population and a sedentary life style in which this evolution could not be reversed and continued to develop toward "elaboration" and complexity.
Many expected, unexpected, and surprising impacts, of course, brought by this Neolithic Revolution. Dr. Scott compared many aspects, i.e., nutrition, physical anthropology, landscape, and disease, of agrarian lives with that of hunter-gathers'. This definitely reminds us of Marshal Sahlins' "Original Affluent Societies"(to me, I believe you can connect to more other works). Unfortunately, the agrarian societies, though succeed in population size, distribution, and density, also have created human beings with lower life span (in Neolithic), poor nutrition (especially women were lack of iron), shorter in stature, and basically "domesticated" or "slaved" by not only the animals and plants that us cultivate but also by the other people that emerged to rule us in the early state societies. Other interesting side effects of Neolithic Revolution include almost all the diseases that we suffer today, and the new mutations of A (c. 10,000 BP), B (?), as well as AB (500 BP) -blood types.
Well while it sounds like a lecture of "Man Made Himself"(Childe 1936) plus "Original Affluent Societies" (1966), Dr. Scott ended it with some spaces for human agency. That is, after all these human-environmental and ecology-style discussions (which I have made myself to agree these days that environments and climate were, are, and will be the most essential factors of social transformation), we have to consider why homo sapiens chose agriculture, rather than the hunting-gathering, regarding the poor nutrition and all the other disadvantages. Although Dr. Scott did not mention this clearly, I would say, for one thing, is that once the population pressure increases, social evolution will push toward the direction of complex societies (i.e., warfare, irrigation, kinship...). The individual aggrandizers (e.g., rulers and elites) would also desire the concentrated production for maintaining their social statuses. For another, (although this is my most-hate way: to "personalize" political economy or society) humans, speaking in a general and macro perspective, prefer this stable, low-risk, and safe way to sustain our species.
Last but not least, what I impressed most by listening to these public lecture should be the clarity and non-jargon style of the speakers. "Map is not the territory" and us, as scientists, are aiming to seek the map/interpretation/model for territory/data, or to create map for territory. I think there is a third layer of academic research that we need to achieve, that is, use our logicality and plain language to speak for your map as you are telling the truth. If this logicality is impeccable, then very possibly, you portray the truth.
For archaeologists, it will be like this
Indicator
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Indication
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Where does we use it
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Who does it
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Territory
|
data
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All the boring excavation reports you ever read
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Most who wrote reports in Taiwan
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Map
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Theory
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1.
All the things that confuse
you during research
2.
what you have to frame in
comps
3.
All the literature review
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Most
scholars try to do it, but this may not be a good direction
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Good writing directions
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A General and Logical
fact?
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A public lecture or a good book
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So far I read from Scott, Gosden, and Wolf
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