by Brian Fagan
The domestication of goats and sheep changed the dynamics of human life in fundamental ways from the beginning. Some values remained the same. Respect for animals endured, for flocks and herds were small. Every beast was valued, and each was recognized individually. These gregarious creatures became part of the family in a real sense. They were guarded carefully, driven to pasture daily, shorn for their hair and wool, with their surplus males culled for meat to control the size of the group, and their pens kept close to or even as part of human dwellings. There was a strong element of sustainability. Those who herded goats and sheep were well aware of the dangers of overgrazing, of stripping vegetation promiscuously from the landscape. At the same time, a profound sea change was afoot. For tens of thousands of years, game was there for the taking, the property of everyone; the hunter’s only obligation was to share his kill with others. The animal-human relationship involved respect and ritual that treated beasts as vibrant players in the cosmos. Even when domesticated flocks and herds were small, they represented something new in the subsistence equation. Goats, pigs, and sheep became property in ways that game animals never were. They were owned and cared for and passed on to one’s children and relatives. These were the creatures, other than game, that provided meat and raw materials and tied people to fields and grazing grounds. The investment of time for herders was entirely different, devoted as they were almost entirely to animal care and protection, activities that often dovetailed with cereal cultivation. Almost immediately, these new responsibilities caused changes in what were now village societies anchored to their land by their animals and crops. New undercurrents coursed through society—issues of inheritance, of grazing rights, and of ownership came into play. Inevitably, too, respected members of herds and flocks became social instruments used to seal marriages and other relationships. In due course, they became wealth, counted by the household head, and, inevitably, symbols of prestige and power.
CHAPTER 5
Working Landscapes
Domestication changed the world, its landscapes, animals—and humanity. About ten thousand years ago—the precise date will never be known—numerous deliberate acts, such as the corralling of young ungulates, turned animal-human relationships on end. Over a surprisingly brief compass of generations what had been a symbolic partnership involving giving and taking became one of dominance, of mastership. Humans were now the masters, so the role of animals changed. They became objects of individual ownership, tangible symbols of wealth, and powerful social instruments. But in so becoming, they cast a profound influence on the nature of changing human societies. Let’s explore some of the parameters. (I’ve left cattle until later, as they changed history, in the long term, in different ways. Being larger, sometimes ferocious beasts, wild oxen were harder to domesticate and far more demanding to herd.)
Gregarious Communities
Many early farming settlements engaged in subsistence herding, where the primary concern was feeding one’s family and kin, as well as acquiring individual wealth in animals, with all the social implications that involved. At this point, the relationships between sheepherders and their flocks or herds were relatively intimate. Owners enjoyed a familiarity with a fairly small number of individual beasts, perhaps to the point of giving many of them names and recognizing them individually. Sheep are ardently gregarious and accustomed to close relationships. They tend to stay close to fellow members of their flock, for an individual sheep can become stressed if separated from the others. Flock behavior, which is the secret to managing sheep, develops with four or more sheep. The relationships within flocks are closest among relatives, so ewes and their descendants often form a unit within a larger group.
Unlike gazelle, sheep do not form territories, although they have home ranges. They are not only gregarious, but each flock also tends to follow a leader, often the first animal to move, despite well-developed dominance hierarchies among the members. Shepherds take advantage of this behavior. They know that their beasts can recognize individual human voices, as well as the cries of fellow sheep, and recall them for years. Most important of all, flocks can be “hefted” to a specific pasture, or series of pastures, small areas where they are comfortable grazing for long periods. Sheep are entirely herbivorous. They prefer grass and short roughage and do well in areas with uniform grass coverage, which makes herding them easier. Goats consume branches, leaves, and other vegetation some distance off the ground with ardent voracity. A combination of both sheep and goats could have devastating effects on the landscape, as they eat from dawn to dusk with only short pauses for digestion. So managing them carefully soon became a paramount concern. We can only imagine the ecological damage wrought on fragile, semiarid landscapes by uncontrolled grazing, which must have become apparent within short order to herders living in denuded landscapes.
In a sense, one’s sheep flock was an animal community, not accessible to everyone, as was the case with game, but managed and owned by an individual, a family, or a kin group. Most early flocks or herds cannot have been much larger than a few dozen beasts, given the small size of villages, the limited number of shepherds to manage the animals, and the scarcity of winter fodder. In order to protect one’s flock, one always lived with the realities of management: the need to keep constant watch when the animals were out during the day, to establish times for milking them, and to guard corrals carefully during the night hours.
Like growing crops, herding goats and sheep is a matter of carefully managed routines—overseeing seasons of breeding and giving birth, rotating grazing so pastures are never denuded, protecting the beasts against predators, culling surplus animals before winter or for important feasts. Behind this endless rhythm—dictated in large part by the passage of the seasons and, in warmer climates, by the availability of water and graze—were practical strategies that continued with virtually no change through thousands of years, regardless of the rise and fall of societies and civilizations. Human life revolved around the life and death of the animals, unexpected diseases that decimated flocks or herds, and the ever-changing demands of kin and social obligation. Simple, utterly pragmatic, and refined by countless generations of experience, subsistence herders, whatever their animals and wherever they lived, relied on practical experience when it came to their beasts. England’s Fengate sheep farmers of thirty-five hundred years ago provide dramatic proof.1
Fengate and the Realities of Sheepherding
Eastern England, summer, 1500 BCE. The rising sun casts long shadows an hour after dawn. Light mist hovers near the ground, soon to vanish in the face of warm sunlight. Another long, hot day lies ahead for the herd boys clad in skin cloaks. Their charges huddle together in the byre, mothers and growing lambs crowded by the narrow gateway. One of the youngsters opens the hurdle. The flock pushes forward as the other herd boy urges them gently with soft calls; a dog hovers nearby. The sheep follow their leader, as they always do, to the small pasture, a familiar place where they know they can feed comfortably. As the sun sets hours later, the boys will steer the beasts back to the safety of the homestead in a routine that has never changed over many generations.
Francis Pryor, both an archaeologist and a sheep farmer, has investigated Fengate, a thirty-five-hundred-year-old sheep farming landscape in the low meadows and wetlands of the Fens, in eastern England, near the cathedral city of Peterborough. He believes that the ancient sheep farmers lived amid a “landscape of the mind,” a dynamic landscape peopled with the deeds of ancestors and the symbolic associations that populated fields and meadows with benign and hostile spirits, with the unpredictable forces of the supernatural world. Theirs was also a “working landscape,” an ever-changing environment that encompassed both physical features such as ditches and hedgerows and intangibles such as the behavior of sheep, herding dogs, and cattle.
People modified the working landscape. They repaired hedges, deepened and maintained ditches, and kept fences and paddocks in good condition. The positioning of fields and trackways, and
even of houses and yards, depended on far more than the altitude and slope of the land. Drainage, shade, and soil types were critical factors, so much so that most farmers kept a remarkably accurate map of their land in their heads—they do to this day. For instance, in the flat Fen country of eastern England, farmers had several types of land. Some was floodplain; other areas flooded regularly during the winters. You needed a diversity of land and soil if your beasts were to thrive on good summer pasture in flooded areas and keep dry in the winter. This led to often confusing arrangements for handling stock, which could include establishing and using droveways (trackways for driving animals) that followed field layouts and allowed animals to pass in an orderly fashion from one form of grazing to another.
The same droveways separated individual landholdings and served as boundaries that subdivided what eventually became an organized landscape, seemingly a patchwork of fields, ditches, hedges, and tracks, but easily decipherable to those who used and maintained it. The working landscapes of ancient times, wherever they were located, were both material and social landscapes.
Efficient stock raising relied on carefully monitored grazing that used barriers of all kinds. Hedges and ditches may have kept out wild animals and predators, but they were far more important as a means of controlling grazing, especially in crowded landscapes. Such devices would have allowed individual plots to recover, and permitted dung lying on the surface to break down and become incorporated into the recovering, grazed vegetation. Allowing land to lie fallow for a while also offers some relief from microscopic parasites, such as fluke, that can cause serious problems. If the quality of the grazing was good and abundant, then herds and flocks would have wandered quite widely, with only children or young men controlling them.
Enclosed grazing land tended to develop when flocks became larger, graze was of poorer quality, and land in shorter supply. Much closer control was necessary. For thousands of years, earthworks, sometimes including burial mounds—as was the case in southern Britain—may have served as territorial markers that delineated landholdings, perhaps by kin groups. These mounds, or tumuli, dotted an open landscape where herds and flocks grazed, tended by young men and boys, and watched over by the revered ancestors lying under conspicuous burial mounds. As farming populations rose in number, so the importance of boundaries increased, not just shallow banks and ditches, which even a young lamb can traverse, but substantial hedges. Francis Pryor believes that winter hardwood cuttings taken from nearby forests formed such hedges for thousands of years—tough, easily geminated, and often with their own natural protection in the form of thorns. He points out that such hedges were commonly used many centuries later, during the days of the infamous Enclosure Act of the early nineteenth century CE.
At Fengate, the herders practiced what Pryor calls a carefully “structured mobility.”2 The mobility was vital, but it was far from random. Each winter, the farmers lived on high, flood-free ground, in small farms dominated by a single round house. Both the land and the dwelling might have been occupied for only a generation or so. Come late April or May, the water levels in the nearby marshland fell slowly. Part of each family would move out into the lush, open fen pastures, taking most of their sheep and cattle with them. Young men and children would supervise the herds. In autumn, the now-fattened and well-fed beasts would be driven back to higher ground. This was the season of feasting and ritual, when people gathered from a wide area of surrounding countryside. Animals would be culled, marriages arranged, and livestock exchanged between different families.
The Fengate excavations revealed a landscape divided into a series of blocks separated by ditched driveways (or droveways) that ran perpendicularly down to the flooded land, giving each farmer access to both higher- and lower-lying ground, just as their descendants possessed in medieval times. At first the excavators were unable to follow a driveway to water’s edge, but fortunately the construction of a large power station gave them a chance to trace two driveway ditches to the water, where the ditches bifurcated and ran along the boundary between wet and dry terrain. Here was convincing evidence that the people had driven their flocks. Phosphate analyses of the soil in what Pryor was now calling the Main Drove provided evidence of large quantities of deposited manure. This proved that large numbers of animals had passed through the Drove. There were clear signs of extensive trampling by animals where it terminated.
Francis Pryor manages his own sheep within small areas, so he has, effectively, firsthand experience of what it must have been like herding sheep in Fengate times. It was a crowded working landscape, but sheep and other stock are easier to manage when closely confined. This is why modern farmers jam as many animals as possible into a truck. Both cattle and sheep are herd animals, for being a member of a herd gives them a sense of security. Confining the animals within a small space also makes it easier to work with them, and to sort them into different categories. The methods of working different animals vary considerably. Pigs, for example, are often best handled individually, using a piece of wood to push their heads and to steer them in one direction or another. Sheep respond well to dogs, both in the open and in enclosed areas, where wild and domesticated sheep have a tendency to gather into close-knit groups when they sense a threat. Modern-day shepherds call the process of introducing a dog to a herd “dogging.” Basically, the shepherd puts the fear of a dog into the sheep so they are clumped and easier to handle. The behavior is entirely natural for the dog and goes back to wolf-pack days, when the junior members of a pack would drive animals up to a top wolf, who would kill them, eat some flesh, and leave the rest for the pack. Pryor believes that dogging goes back deep into the past, to long before the days of medieval monks and the time when Britain supplied wool to much of the European world.
Most traditional ways of managing sheep and other farm animals take advantage of the beasts’ instinctive behavior. Droving, batching, confining, inspecting, and sorting sheep was part of herding routine probably long before Fengate times, and surviving field systems reflect this. The farmers of thirty-five hundred years ago were, above all, practical managers who knew that well-nourished, carefully managed animals were the foundation of good stock keeping. Behind their expertise was an intimate knowledge of what sheep and other animals would and would not do, unless one tricked them. A case in point is the placing of gateways in fields. Place them in the middle of the edges, and the sheep will balk. Build the exit at a corner, where the converging fences funnel the animals through the defile, and the flock will pass through readily. From such an exit, the farmer, if he or she wished, could steer the herd into a narrow “race,” funneled in by wooden hurdles or some temporary structure. There the flock could have been inspected for age, condition, and so on. The beasts would have passed through the defile and emerged in a three-way gate, which would have allowed the farmer to separate the herd into different categories, perhaps with the help of children using hurdles.
The size of the race would have depended on the number of sheep. Pryor uses a seven-meter (twenty-three-foot) race to handle some two hundred fifty beasts, but there is no means of estimating flock populations in Bronze Age times. He estimates that the entire Fengate field system handled “considerably less than ten thousand animals—even at the height of summer when all lambs were present.”3 The figure for the excavated area of the field system may have been between two thousand and three thousand animals. This, says Pryor, is a reflection not of small-scale subsistence farming, but of something more intensive, perhaps akin to the level of production during the height of the medieval wool trade.
This was an impressive achievement, possibly based on an ancient version of the small and hardy Soay sheep, which behave well in large flocks and yield excellent wool and high-quality meat.
All this worked because of the availability of seasonal grazing and extremely nourishing summer pastures. Between 1800 and 600 BCE, the margins of the Fens provided a superb environment for intensive sheepherding, the farmers using simple me
thods that form the basis for much sheep farming to this day. This abundance of sheep might have triggered changes in local society, perhaps differences between individuals and kin groups in terms of wealth in head of sheep. Larger flocks gave their owner greater social influence, in that he or she had the ability to throw feasts, use gifts to reinforce obligations and ties with other people, and create advantageous marriages and other alliances. But when sudden epidemics could wipe out entire flocks in days, wealth in animals was volatile, often transitory. The only protection was to distribute animals across the landscape with fellow kin.
Figure 5.1 Excavations at Fengate showing the general topography. Courtesy of Francis Pryor.
Social differences may have played out in numerous ways, especially in a context where meat consumption was a sign of prestige, and where feasting was an important part of the annual round. At Flag Fen, close to the Fengate field system, Francis Pryor recovered a remarkable series of bronze artifacts, including axes, swords, and a flesh hook that had been cast into the marsh as offerings; these were often bent before being cast into oblivion.4 We’ll never know the significance of these offerings, but they may well have been made to the powerful ancestors, guardians of the land, whose spirits lurked in the dark, symbolically charged waters of the Fenland marshes. Here, as elsewhere, the ties between the living and those who came before, between the supernatural realm and the material world, must have lain at the very core of human existence, defined in part by the flesh of beasts raised on farm and marshland.