Ned wrote:
<<The mechanisms used to maintain these long-distance contacts might include
establishment of regular market relations, but could include other means as
well- exogamy, annual festivals, etc.>>
There are those who would argue that festivals, fairs, rendezvouses, sacred
centers that were not used year round and other such occasional communal
events were essentially "market days" that served as a way of integrating
widely spread out populations of food producers or even foragers. These
would evolve into the agoras -- permanent marketplaces around which cities
would be built.
Exogamy - especially incest-tabooed exogamy systems such as the Navaho
practice - can also be seen (along with various biological and political
advantages) as systems for extraterritorial economic relations. Where access
to a market was restricted (as it was for example to most German tribes to
the Roman markets of Tacitus' day) exogamy conveys membership (civitas) and
also the ability to legally own property beyond one's own borders.
<<Also, remember that the article claimed there was a correlation between
tropical horticulture and linguistic diversity. That might still be true,
even if the proposed explanation is not valid.>>
Well, there's an article on the web that claims that 80 different languages
were spoken in Byzantium of the middle ages, but that was a different kind of
"linguistic diversity". The isolation of "tropical horticulturalists,"
whether due to self-sufficiency, lack of surplus or the simple difficulty of
travel, also would need a good deal of isolation time to create a high degree
of linguistic diversity.
Isolation for long periods of time is a lot easier to achieve in the back
bush of the Amazon or New Guinea than it is on the great plains or along sea
shores. But distance and sparsity of population can do the same thing and
there was the potential for a lot of distance between settlements in
mesolithic Anatolia. So I remain pretty comfortable with the analogy.
Regards,
Steve