How did the first rich people get rich?
In: 0
Some in the thread are positing that farming was the beginning of wealth and stratification but that’s not true though it does dominate pop-history discussions of pre-history. The period before which we have written records. Archeological evidence however shows that it was more commonly “Hunter Gatherer’s” who engaged in monumentalism that early farmers, that the earliest towns and cities even those that were did not engage in intensive agriculture as we generally understand but relied on year-round or seasonal superabundance and whose residents managed the landscape and engaged in horticulture in addition to more traditional hunting and gathering (as opposed to intensive farming). And that these early prehistory societies from what we can tell from what remains in the archaeological records and from records of the societies most similar to them closer to the modern day such as Native Americans demonstrate a level of depth and scale that is not reflected in discussions of pop-history. Early intensive farming closest to what we understand it today thus initially seems to have popped up in less desirable areas where superabundance could not be relied upon because with good land and land management super abundance without agriculture was very possible.
But as to your question about wealth:
*“It’s worth mentioning here that settlers in different parts of North America referred to a whole variety of things as ‘Indian money’. Often these were shell beads or actual shells. But in almost every case, the term is largely a projection of European categories on to objects that look like money, but really aren’t. Probably the most famous of these, wampum, did eventually come to be used as a trade currency in transactions between settlers and indigenous peoples of the Northeast, and was even accepted as currency in several American states for transactions between settlers (in Massachusetts and New York, for instance, wampum was legal tender in shops). In dealings between indigenous people, however, it was almost never used to buy or sell anything. Rather, it was employed to pay fines, and as a way of forming and remembering compacts and agreements. This was true in California as well. But in California, unusually, money also seems to have been used in more or less the way we expect money to have been used: for purchases, rentals and loans. In California in general, and its northwest corner in particular, the central role of money in indigenous societies was combined with with a cultural emphasis on thrift and simplicity, a disapproval of wasteful pleasures, and a glorification of work that – according to Goldschmidt[…]”*
*Excerpt From David Graeber & David Wengrow. “The Dawn of Everything.” Chapter 4*
The simple answer thus seems to be it would have varied.
The vast majority of prehistory is lost to use due to a lack of written records but by studying temporally closer groups to hunter gatherers such as Native Americans and by peering into the past as much as we can with archeology we can fill in some gaps. In Chapter 4 of their book Graeber and Wengrow discuss, how geographically and climatically proximate regions with similar access to resources and climate thanks to the coast could produce such different societies. One highly stratified and slave holding, that did not collect wealth, and the other that rejected slavery but saw wealth as the highest thing one could aspire too.These are radically differently configured societies of ‘hunter-gatherers’ with diametrically opposed outlooks on wealth and appropriate means for labor in close proximity to one another.
So again the answer is it varies on society.
Latest Answers