Abstract
This article reports the results of a collaborative effort to estimate agricultural productivities in past societies using Seshat: Global History Databank. We focus on 30 Natural Geographic Areas (NGAs) distributed over 10 major world regions (Europe, Africa, Southwest Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia, East Asia, Central Eurasia, North America, South America, and Oceania). The conceptual framework that we use to obtain these estimates combines the influences of the production technologies (and how they change with time), climate change, and effects of artificial selection into a Relative Yield Coefficient, indicating how agricultural productivity changed over time in each NGA between the Neolithic and the 20th century. We then use estimates of historical yield in each NGA to translate the Relative Yield Coefficient into an Estimated Yield (tonnes per hectare per year) trajectory. We tested the proposed methodology in two ways. For eight NGAs, in which we had more than one historical yield estimate, we used the earliest estimate to anchor the trajectory and compared the ensuing trajectory to the remaining estimates. We also compared the end points of the estimated NGA trajectories to the earliest (the 1960s decade) FAO data on crop productivities in the modern countries encompassing Seshat NGAs. We discuss the benefits of this methodology over previous efforts to estimate agricultural productivities in world history.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 1055-1065 |
| Number of pages | 11 |
| Journal | The Holocene |
| Volume | 31 |
| Issue number | 6 |
| Early online date | 22 Feb 2021 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - Jun 2021 |
Bibliographical note
FundingThe author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by a John Templeton Foundation grant to the Evolution Institute, entitled “Axial-Age Religions and the Z-Curve of Human Egalitarianism,” a Tricoastal Foundation grant to the Evolution Institute, entitled “The Deep Roots of the Modern World: The Cultural Evolution of Economic Growth and Political Stability,” an ESRC Large Grant to the University of Oxford, entitled “Ritual, Community, and Conflict” (REF RES-060-25-0085), a grant from the European Union Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 644055 [ALIGNED, www.aligned-project.eu]), an European Research Council Advanced Grant to the University of Oxford, entitled “Ritual Modes: Divergent modes of ritual, social cohesion, prosociality, and conflict,” and the program “Complexity Science,” which is supported by the Austrian Research Promotion Agency FFG under grant #873927. We gratefully acknowledge the contributions of our team of research assistants, post-doctoral researchers, consultants, and experts. Additionally, we have received invaluable assistance from our collaborators. Please see the Seshat website (www.seshatdatabank.info) for a comprehensive list of private donors, partners, experts, and consultants and their respective areas of expertise.
