- about the Norse interchange: what are Norse without mead? and then how could it not spread to the Thule? (even setting aside the cliché with native Americans and alcohol) As you said earlier, water sanitization depends on either boiling or alcohol, and the former is impracticable given the scarcity of wood available to the Thule. That's one point for mead. Moreover, the tundra seems to have enough flowering plants to sustain bees (not sure about the climate though) and a pollinizer would be a useful addition to the agricultural suite.
I actually thought about that.
The principal norse drink was beer, made from fermenting grains. In fact, most of the grain growing in Iceland was barley for beer. I don't think that grains were grown by this time in Greenland, so I suspect that their potable was a weak beer from fermented root vegetables. Pretty rancid stuff I'd bet, and on that basis unlikely to cross over in any big way.
About mead. Here's the thing, you know how the Norse got their honey? They'd slice off the top of a hive. Essentially, they'd have to destroy the entire hive to get at the honey. That made mead an extremely expensive and difficult to procure drink, it was restricted to special occasions, ceremonial occasions, and often to the wealthy. By this time, the Greenland colony was pretty impoverished, I don't think that mead would appear except as a very occasional drink by this time, and the likelihood of transmission is low.
I think that for a lot of cultural transmissions, generally you need recurrent exposures, some clear accessibility to the underlying technology, and an opportunity for welcome and spread. It's not like someone sees something good once, and it spreads. I just don't see meeting that threshold. At best, it might pass into stories as some sort of magical drink of the vanished moss-faces.
You are correct in that there are a lot of pollinating plants, and there are arctic species of bee. But from what I can tell, they're not particularly notable for forming large hives or producing honey. And Norse beekeeping doesn't seem to have been particularly sophisticated.
So, sadly, mead doesn't become part of the interchange. Pity.
- the idea of a Norse undercaste, ("protected" by the Ellesmerians for example) is excellent: their main activities (metal tinkering, soapstone carving, maybe bog iron harvesting and wool trading) are all suited to a nomadic, Romani-like lifestyle (as the demand for all of these is very spread and not enough to sustain a sedentary lifestyle). Plus these blond, moss-faced guys are likely to become novelties by themselves (think for example of the demand for exotic slaves, whether Numid or Cimmerian, in the Roman empire), so some of them will be "pets" of local chieftains, which will help the diaspora form in all the Thule domains. (To help the few hundred Norse form a sizeable diaspora: interbreed them with Thule and assume hypodescent, which seems reasonable).
It's a fun idea, but unfortunately, the Norse don't survive to form a viable undercaste. Most of them remain in southern greenland where their continued decline is reinforced by Thule immigrants taking up space, and by unwise involvement in the Thule displacement wars. There's a small colony of perhaps a dozen or couple of dozen Norse males who are established for a time up at Cape York, but these either return south, or get absorbed into Thule families.
In any case, its not clear that the social window is open to them, or how able they are to access it.
The Romani and Jews were already a nomadized people, driven from their homes, and lacking lands or stability. This doesn't strike me as being the Greenland Norse. Indeed, their few and diminishing advantages dealing with the Thule, or surviving in the worsening climate, lay in holding close to the lands.
As for the Thule, I'm not sure that their culture at the time has available open space for this sort of undercaste. I'm thinking of Bantu moving into Pigmy and Khoi territories. The Bantu were a relatively sophisticated agricultural and herding culture, mostly they displaced or drove out their hunter-gatherer rivals. I don't believe that at the window of contact, the Thule around Greenland are sophisticated enough to endorse an underclass, and while other aspects of Thule elsewhere are able to sustain a network of displaced and transients (the emerging trading networks, particularly Ellesmere) these roles are being filled by Thule groups themselves.
It's a conundrum. An earlier contact involves a more robust Norse, but a less sophisticated Thule. A later contact involves more sophisticated Thule but a more attenuated Norse. So, interesting idea, but my decision was not to go down that road.
- the speed of emergence of new, domesticated forms of cultivated plants also seems a bit fast in a purely empirical context... is there any data about the yield of Sumerian grain vs. wild variants?
Wish there was. I didn't find a lot of literature assessing how rapidly plants shifted from wild to domesticated forms, or how wild and domesticated forms compared. It's a complicated area, complicated more so by the issue of cross pollinations. Where agriculture is widespread, it becomes difficult to say that wild forms are truly wild, or merely feral, or to assert that there's no contamination by domesticated traits.
What it comes down to is that domesticated froms will tend to diverge from wild forms in several different possible ways - larger yields in the form of larger seeds or fruit, more accessibility in that there's less toxicity or that such things as shell's or skins become thinner, more reliability in that maturity or ripening tends to happen all at once or within a shorter period of time, and a greater tolerance of density. There are more, but those are some of the key ones.
How quickly does the divergence happen? I don't think that there's any real guideline. Rather, I think that this is a factor of the phenotypical diversity of the wild species. The more genetic diversity within the wild species, the more diverse expression of traits. If you have a wide variety of traits to select from, then harvesting and cultivation will start to intensively select for certain traits, which become dominant, and your 'domesticated' plant starts to emerge.
What's a good marker for genetic diversity? My thinking is geographical distribution. The more widely a plant is distributed, the likelihood is that the longer it has been around. ie, a plant whose range is a million square miles has likely had more time to spread than a plant with a few thousand square miles range. A million square miles distribution also means a much greater population of plants which encourages diversity, and remoteness of plants from each other at different parts of their range, which allows for diversity.
Further, as agriculture itself spreads geographically, there's more opportunity for farmers to encounter different wild phenotypes, and to 'harvest' positive or useful traits from local wild populations. These then spread rapidly through the domesticated population.
So as I assessed things, plants like sweetvetch and bistort seemed to offer a lot of potential for developing domesticated forms rapidly.
On the other hand, plants like claytonia, with a very limited and delicate range in North America likely sported less diversity - they were likely asian imports drawn from a small transplanted 'founder' population.
My assessment was that sweetvetch and bistort would tend to be rapidly developed into productive domesticated forms, claytonia would develop more slowly... at least until eastward flow from siberia started introducing those genes and traits and allowed for more divergence.
Other plants, like fireweed, posed problems for domestication simply because their method of reproduction - light windborn seeds made it difficult to reinforce domestic friendly traits, except under certain circumstances.
Anyway - how fast does it happen? Well, we don't have a lot of empirical data, but from the work of amateur plant and dog breeders, toodling around with very limited populations and short windows of time... I'd say it can happen very fast. You don't have the deliberate intent and genetic knowledge and selectiveness of the modern breeder. But you do have is hundreds, thousands of people doing de facto selection over possibly large ideas, so you've got a rough sorting process going on, year after year, of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of specimens.
Assuming good distribution and diversity of phenotypes, I think that perhaps within a few years, easily within a generation, you'd have a divergence sufficent enough to start driving selection choices, and an early 'pseudo-domesticated' variety. Within a few generations, perhaps a couple of hundred years, you would have something that had reached a significant portion of its domesticated potential, say 50 to 80 %, and that would be good enough for the farmers.
All the evidence I've seen suggests that you generally get to an early form of domesticated plant pretty rapidly. Closing in on that last 10 or 15% of domesticate productive potential is a lot longer process and a lot more difficult. In this ATL, I'd bet that you'd continue to see refinements into the 20th century.
But having said that, a few hundred years into their Agricultural revolution, I think that the Thule are mostly harvesting relatively mature domesticates that are signficantly more productive or easier to manage than their wild counterparts. This is one of the reasons why there will be some spread into European realms - the Europeans are getting mature plant varieties with productive capacity superior to the wild varieties that they know.
But I'm yammering. It's an interesting topic to me, and one that I can dwell on while everyone's eyes glaze over.
Suffice to say, I respect your objection, but I think my reasoning holds.
- it seems a given that Caribou are generally too small for them to be mounted, especially for military uses. However. Remember that for this very same reason, horses were harnessed more than 1000 years before being mounted... Caribou-drawn war sleds? or even more ferocious: dog-drawn war sleds?
Generally so. Mostly, sleds are ridden up to the edges of a battle, the warriors disembark and then run at the enemy or shoot arrows at them. I think that the tactic is similar to dragoons, who would ride horses but dismount to fight.
It's probably difficult to persuade caribou or dogs pulling a sleigh to go right into a dangerous scary situation. Not a lot of fine control, and too much opportunity for the animal to decide to go elsewhere. And if two or more animals pulling a sleigh have different ideas about where elsewhere is... well, you're screwed.
Or if one of the sleigh pullers are killed... well, you may have just screwed up the rest of them... and yourself.
There may be situations, and there may be an evolving tactic of shooting arrows or throwing lances from moving sleds, and even some form of jousting in certain circumstances, where combatants glide past each other or glide past victims, and launch things at them or at each other.
But mostly, actual fighting warfare is on foot, or stealth or ambush, derived from hunting tactics.
Doesn't mean that caribou and dog sleds are useless in war. In fact they're essential at getting warriors, including large numbers of warriors to the site of battle, in scouting out territory, and in carrying large volumes of supplies and weapons.
On an unrelated topic: I find the expansion of the Thule, from Norse contact onward, to be unrealistically fast, in both geographic and demographic terms...
I respect that. Personally, I find the OTL expansion of the Thule culture pretty implausible. I mean, essentially, you had an Alaska based tribe, and within a couple of centuries, they've overrun a territory the size of Europe - moreover, its an appalling inhospitable territory full of geographical barriers. But we're kind of stuck with that, what with it being reality and all.
But back to your issue: I can treat this as a dispute, in which case we can disagree. Or I can treat this as a question, in which case, its up to me to come up with a plausible answer.
So I will treat this as a question, the question being: Why do fast and so many?
Okay - let's go back to the OTL model of what happened. What I believe was going on was that you had a hunter-gatherer population in Alaska that reached a population density where it (or portions of it) was forced to move. This may have not been just a matter of accumulating population density, but of weather or climate factors or resource depletion that significantly reduced carrying capacity, but so be it.
Anyway, they move into new virgin territory, living is good, they have babies. But sooner or later, they kill all the low hanging caribou, the territory starts to deplete, and some of them have to move on, with the remainder hanging on in perhaps a less productive territory. Rinse and repeat, and you've got the Thule sweeping all the way out to Greenland in a mere couple of centuries.
The same process is happening in the ATL, with a couple of differences. First, because of a minor cultural shift, the population density in Alaska is greater - so the expansion starts a little earlier (assuming driven by climate shift or depletion) - and it has greater momentum (there's a larger population which is moving outwards).
Moving into new territories, a larger population spreads further and faster. The model gets similar at this point - hunter gatherers, living off a bountiful land, and reproducing, and depleting it until the population has to spread.
There's a small wrinkle here, in that while the small cultural shift to harvesting plants allows greater population density, in the new lands, there's not that much harvesting opportunity. Rather, harvesting capacity is built up gradually with proto-agricultural practices. So the depletion model is a bit more complicated, and its got a couple of slopes. The end result is that you have higher overall population densities moving along.
So the Thule hit Greenland, more or less on the same schedule, or slightly earlier, and with slightly more density than OTL.
Now, thing with population density, is that it is regulated by carrying capacity. Things fill up real fast. Take a number, double it every generation , and keep on doubling it, you would be surprised how fast you get up to big numbers. A starting population of 10,000, assuming doubling every 25 years, will give you about 1,280,000 people in about 200 years. This usually doesn't happen because there are limiting factors, but where there is virgin territory for expansion, it can fill up with breathtaking speed.
In this ATL, the Thule have evolved a set of lifestyles - herding, herding horticulture, and agriculture, and even trading, along with a suite of plants and animals, which have allowed for much greater population densities.
So Greenland is, necessarily, much more heavily populated than ATL, and that density establishes in a relatively short time.
Now, the other thing that you have to keep in mind about Greenland and the Norse Interchange, is that it has with the Norse Interchange - experienced a 'gold rush', literally and with intensity in the form of Iron - (starting in Cape York with meteor Iron, down to Disko Bay with telluric iron, and the down to the Eastern Settlement with norse Iron.
Wealth draws people, and at this time, the Thule are densely populated enough, and advanced enough, that a 'gold rush' will draw people in, and support local population's natural expansion.
Nor is the gold rush confined to Iron. As the iron craze stabilizes, you've got the emergence of secondary products - wool and woolen goods, and soapstone carvings, and the emergence and spread of a new suite of plants and animals.
The bottom line is that the effect of the Norse Interchange is to produce a population boom in Greenland. Greenland's not actually that big - although the island is huge, 90% of it is glaciated, so the actual land is only about 80% square miles - smaller than England, a fraction the size of France. Not all of that is useable, even by the Thule, and its spread out in a ribbon.
Anyway, by the time the effects of the Norse Interchange flatten out, Greenland is not only populated, its overpopulated. A problem which is worsened by the fact that climate is getting worse.
And there's not a lot of place to go to. There are no new expansive lands waiting south, just more Thule, themselves overpopulated and facing worsening climate, but more able to defend themselves. Go north, things get worse, and even leaving Greenland to go down Ellesmere is tough slogging.
The East Coast Thule don't have a lot of options to leave, which is why they are forced to exploit their environment in novel ways - like whaling. When Svalbard and Iceland are found, there are already population surpluses willing to take the chance on new lands.
Svalbard's carrying capacity, to start with, isn't that great. It's pretty barren and mostly glacier. Over time, you can build that carrying capacity up, by gradual mound building, microclimate engineering, importing ptarmigan, plants, caribou, etc. But if you discover Franz Josef, it's just as easy to go there. So the leapfrog and colonizations take place fairly quickly, and the populations build pretty fast.
There are some near-historical precedents. Take Iceland, that reached its medieval maximum - maybe 70,000 people, within a century of discovery, to the point where it was able to found or support secondary colonies in Greenland and Vinland. Iceland, in terms of what the Thule were encountering further north, is huge, but it still fills up very fast.
The other precedent is the Polynesian expansion, and the near stunning way that the Polynesian islands were discovered, filled up, and became the site of new colonizations which rapidly filled up new Islands.
The expansion of the Sea Thule is rapid, but overall, takes a couple of hundred years. It's not out of step, in my view with what we saw happen elsewhere.
So... my response. I believe its plausible. Now, perhaps I've persuaded you, perhaps not. But if not, let's say that I've made an honest attempt, and at least hold an arguable position, and we'll agree to disagree.
How's that?
As Greenland, esp. the Eastern coast, is only a fringe territory of the Thule culture, and moreover the weather is hitting them quite hard (leading to slower population expansion), I don't see how they will find the manpower to expand to new islands. Furthermore, with harsher climate, the problem is not a too small territory, but rather more manpower will be required to refine the planting terraces (a la Ellesmere).
I've spoken at length. I'll just add a thought. Bad weather won't slow population expansion. Starvation will. People as a whole don't enjoy starvation, and if there's a way to avoid it - embracing new lifestyles, or exploiting new lands, they will. Once they've avoided starvation, they tend to expand to the point where starvation becomes a haunting prospect.
In the long run, it all balances out. In the short run, it can get messy and complicated.
Moreover, even in the medieval warm period, one imagines that the demographic expansion will not so much result in geographic spreading as in internal growth. Look at the European clearances in the same period:
Well, yes and no. In situ in most places because there were not a lot of opportunities to expand. Most places you could conquer or move to were filled with Europeans using the same technology and techniques. But in fact, if you look to Northern Europe, you'll find that Iceland fills up very fast once discovered, as do the Hebrides. In Scandinavia and the area of the White Sea, you have the expanding Norse and Pomors pushing the Samoyed out of their territories, or reducing them to marginal presences.
That said, even in Europe, where the various peoples were at much more equal levels of technology and production, there was quite a lot of pushing back and forth.
Especially with the slow-growing Arctic plants, I don't see how geographic spread could be that fast. You documented yourself that southward spread was slow and difficult, due to this slow growth.
The difference in spreading south though was not just slow growth, but the fact that people were already living there. Once you had established your three year production cycle, you could sustain a population that would guarantee your mastery of a territory.
The trouble was that it was extremely difficult to build that three year population production cycle from scratch with people shooting arrows at you.
Think of it in terms of comparative population densities. A hunter gatherer group could sustain a density of 1, agriculturalists sustain a density of 10. So Agriculturalists overwhelm and drive out the lonely hunter gatherer.
But Thule agriculture needed a bit of time to gear up. During that time, its only looking at a population density of 2 or 3. Well, that's competitive, and a dedicated hunter gatherer population is not overwhelmed. Their own population density is such that they're in a position to resist. And the commitment to agriculture brings with it downsides (lack of mobility and flexibility) that make them more vulnerable, neutralizing their small numerical advantage.
Doesn't mean southward expansion doesn't happen, but under normal circumstances, its quite difficult and slow. The big southern expansions of the Thule came from massive demographic dislocations - when huge population densities of Thule showed up, overwhelmed the hunter gatherers completely, and then proceeded to starve in large numbers while their infrastructure and productivity tried to catch up.
It's much much easier when there's no native population to contend with, as they found on Franz Josef, Svalbard, etc. Or easier when you've already obliterated your rivals, as the Thule had done with the Dorset.
Likewise, describing Alaska as feudal a mere 300 years after it developed (a low-density version of) agriculture seems extremely fast. Are New Guineans feudal? Were ancient Egypt and Sumeria feudal a few centuries after developing (extremely productive) agriculture? I don't think so. The closest example I can think of is Germany in late Antiquity, but feudality was largely imported at the same time as agriculture from the late Romans.
I see what you're getting at here, and I certainly respect your point. Alaska is not truly feudal in the way we know, but it's got enough analogous features that we can apply the term somewhat. Call it 'feudal-like' or 'pseudo-feudal.'
Essentially what's happened in Alaska is a form of delayed cultural transition. Alaska was richer territory than most of the lands the Thule moved into, it was more conservative and had less driving need to innovate. It could sustain a greater population, and the tradition for excess population was to leave. So it tended to delay the tipping point into agriculture. That didn't happen until much later, with much larger population densities, and in different circumstances.
But what's Alaska like in the meantime. Basically, they remained modified hunter/gatherer societies, at higher population levels. These societies tend to be dominated by headmen, ie, chiefs or chieftains who lead bands around, and who follow or subordinate to greater or more influential chiefs, and who have their own subordinates. It's got an element of fluidity, but it's quite hierarchical, and relative status is often handed down through generations.
At the same time, because people are mobile, there's a lot of emphasis on kinship, bridges and linkages among bands and communities. For more settled populations, local identity takes priority. But when you are constantly moving through territories, and rubbing shoulders with other groups, then concepts of identity, alliance and obligation are more diffuse.
I'm going off on my historical reading of cree and oji, who I'm familiar with, but from what I can tell, this point generalizes to the inuit.
Now, elsewhere, the evolution of Agriculture or proto-agriculture is accompanied by a cultural evolution, the two develop sort of hand in hand, and you've got farmers and farming communities evolving gradually, transitioning from different mind sets from hunter gatherers.
But in Alaska, things happen differently. Rather, hunter-gatherer lifestyle is much more persistent, and more particularly, hunter-gatherer ways of organizing society and relationships. These are persistent, and increased population density in this circumstance has increased and intensified this form of organization, rather than weakening it as has been happening elsewhere.
When the late transition to agriculture happens, and happens rapidly, you've got a hunter-gatherer form of social organization adapting itself to a new enviroment, rather than a proto-agricultural community taking the next step.
This, come to think of it, is not to dissimilar from the process that lead to feudalism in Europe, which involved dramatic shifts by the goths from nomads and hunter-gatherers to agricultural stability, where they simply adapted their traditional forms of social organization to the new circumstance.
That's a simplification, but the parallel is there. In that sense, analogizing the Alaskan situation to feudalism is not misplaced.
Maybe we should give an idea of the population of the various parts of the Thule culture at various dates, taking into account also the negative effects of internal wars, epidemics, and bad climate (for example the initial spread of Bruce and the displacement wars likely took a heavy toll on the population). I'm also concerned about access to water for all these people, and about local deforestation...
LOL! Guy, I'm dancing as fast as I can! I'm trying to do all these things, and in sufficient levels of detail, but here we are at 65 pages and 1300 posts. I'll never get to leave!
To respond briefly. Local deforestation isn't really an issue because in much of the Thule realm, there are no trees. Or at least, none you can't step over.
In the south, the Thule are penetrating into the treeline, and there's a huge demand for wood. There are local deforestations, and the native cree and dene are generally not happy with the interlopers.
In terms of Fresh Water, the North American arctic contains more fresh water than pretty much any place on Earth that's not an ice cap. The big rivers beyond the Mississippi - the Nelson, the Churchill, the McKenzie, etc., are all draining north. The place is lousy with post-glacial lakes and permafrost (used to be under an ice cap). Thule agriculture tends to follow the model of gathering around rivers and streams, the way it does the world over, and its a more drought tolerant agriculture because of arctic conditions. Similarly, almost all of the Siberian rivers are draining north as well. So overall, not much of an issue.
There are places where water is an issue. The Canadian archipelago - Banks, Victoria, places like that, are extremely dry. Going by precipitation, those islands are a desert. There's exploitable water in permafrost to sustain the local ecology, and even ramp it up a bit, but not nearly enough for heavy use. Agriculture, even the hardy Thule variety, failed there. It was the place that they just couldn't make their model work. It was so dry even Caribou found it tough going. Instead, subsistence there shifted to Musk Ox herding and light horticulture. Population density is low, and the agricultural technology is going on at low levels, mainly to maintain and improve musk ox habitat.
In terms of climate, that's an ongoing battle for the Thule. I've written about the ongoing effects of the little ice age in several ways.
(1) as a continuing race between Thule innovation and nature, where the Thule keep pulling new things out of the hat to adjust - new domestications, improving domestications, more sophisticated mounds and mound technology, new food gathering techniques like whaling, etc.
(2) there are northern dislocations which result in things like the Ellesmere diaspora which evolves into the Ellesmere trading network, and other incremental shifts.
(3) the big crunch when nature finally outruns innovation, and leads to substantial population movements south - bad news for Innu, Cree and Dene, and ultimately bad news for many starving Thule, but which results in an expansion of southern territory... at the cost of very hostile neighbors and border war.
Displacement wars I've touched on a few times, but I really don't plan on spending too much time. It's essentially the violent mechanism for local adjustments as different subcultures optimize land use. Usually the agriculturalists win, pushing back or converting the herders and rapidly building up population density, sometimes the herders win holding or reclaiming territory not sustainable or which loses sustainability for agriculture. It can make things interesting locally, and in some places like Southern Greenland, it gets pretty ugly. But its not widespread or sustained enough to impact the population significantly. Displacement wars are mostly about flux, not crisis.
Bruce? A nasty STD to be sure, and it has impacts rippling through. But it is not near the comparative scale of HIV in OTL, and not likely to really undercut expansion.
In the same vein, the Shamans look like a coordinated class of geniuses.
Well, I've allowed the Thule a single genius - the woman who domesticated Ptarmigan. Grandfather is pretty smart, but definitely not a genius.
The class has probably accumulated a few geniuses who have failed to do anything revolutionary, and a large handful of very smart guys who have helped move things along.
The Shaman's come across looking better because I've tended, in writing about them, to ignore much of the mysticism that animates their world view and actions, and confine myself to writing about the effects of that mysticism and world view. So my fault.
That said, its not about being a class of coordinated geniuses. Rather its about a class of people who are dealing with randomness. Which way does a rabbit turn - left you eat, right you starve. Will a seal come to the breathing hole. When will caribou come, and will you be able to kill one. We live in a rational world of certainties. Hunter-gatherers lived in an irrational world of uncertainties, or randomness, of pure and simple luck.
There are two ways to deal with that. In the mainstream, you could just get good at things - become a good hunter, a good fisherman, a good harvester. But no matter how good you were, it still comes down to luck, to the intangible unseeable world. To the world of spirits, sometimes friendly, sometimes very unkind.
Spirits got to be the domain of shaman's, the irrational world of luck, that they had to wrestle with. Now, when you're trying to persuade spirits to be nice to you and yours ... well, that drives a special sort of irrational trial and error. You're basically trying all sorts of stuff in the hopes that the spirits will take to it, often based on fairly loopy theories of what spirits do or don't like. When you stumble onto something that seems to work, you hang onto it, your colleagues copy you, and the practice spreads.
Over the course of centuries, and over a few thousand practitioners, it doesn't take a coordinated class of geniuses. Just a coterie of bumblers, averages and brights, trying things out and picking things up.
The trouble with the origins of agriculture, is that there's no literary cultures around for any of the seven or eight times its independently discovered, and these events are so remote for us that it its hard to say how it happened. But my impression for archeological records and writings is that it appears that early or even founding agriculture was intimately associated with the supernatural and supernatural practitioners.
So I think its reasonable to argue for mystical traditions and magicians and shamans to be central to the emergence of a huge cultural shift like agriculture in this case, and to continue to be important.
Given that information diffuses slowly (esp. pre-Grandfather), the "coordinated" part is a bit much. Likewise, it seems likely that most Shamans, particularly in the more stable core territories, will mostly be concerned with preservation of their individual status, and therefore quite conservative.
Well, in a stable environment, conservatism works better than innovation, simply because trial and error generally produces poor results. I've written about that previously somewhere in this thread.
Any Shaman who innovates takes a risk, which means that its confined either to the relatively desperate in marginal areas, or the relatively comfort with the luxury to make an occasional try. What goes on with Shamans is that when someone stumbles onto something that actually works, that spreads.
Basically, its a mugs game trying to come up with a good idea. But its a hell of a lot easier and more profitable to steal a good idea once someone has come up with it (and there I give you the history of 85% of capitalism).
Shaman's have enough investment in their personal status, vis a vis their colleagues and rivals, that if a good idea comes along, they can't really afford not to steal it, and once they've stolen it, they can't really afford not to show it off.
This also applies to the individual farmers, given cultivation methods that are extremely labor-intensive.
Farmers are often conservative for very good reasons. As I've said, innovation unless proven out, is a dicy proposition. But innovations, once they take, do spread like wildfire. There's a lot of very interesting work out there charting the tensions and circumstances of innovation and conservatism among agricultural societies.
Phew, that's all. But mostly, I enjoyed your(*) work a lot, and hope the few last pages that I did not read yet will be as fun as the beginning!
(*) (I mean of both original TL authors and all useful comments)
Well, I hope that you found the response worthwhile. You tired me out.