Are there any regions in Europe that were so blessed with food resources that they can support a sedentary society without the need for agriculture? One example from the Americas would be the Tlingit in the Alaskan Panhandle that could support permanent settlements based on the harvesting of marine resources. Aside from this, were there regions where range management through fire and eventually arboculture of nut-bearing trees could create a hinterland that could support a city of ten thousand? The POD for this would be sometime in the Neolithic.
Sedentary non-agricultural civilization in Europe?
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AFAIK, the Vinča culture practiced agriculture, but alongside other forms of subsistence; it'd be interesting for it to birth a full-fledged civilization, with its proto-writing (whether it was actually a writing system or not, it's irrelevant, even if it wasn't, those symbols could become actual written characters) becoming actual writing.
This was parts of Northern Europe in the Upper Paleolithic/Mesolithic, especially Scandinavia. They relied on acorns and nuts along with fishing plus wild game and gathered plants. A large population was sustained. Incidentally, this is akin to the lifestyle of the Jomon culture and a few contemporary ancient cultures of Northeast Asia (i.e. ancestral Nivkh and Itelmen).
Their growth was cut short because outside cultures transmitted pottery and eventually agriculture and metalworking and they eventually were overran by the Proto-Indo-Europeans. And while I'm not entirely sure if this is the case, there may have been issues in creating such a complex culture since Northern Europe has only one salmon species compared to several found in Western North America and Japan/Northeast Asia. Salmon species run at different times of year, several weeks to months apart, so lacking these predictable migrations would affect the lifestyle hunter-gatherers lived.
I doubt that's possible because waterborne disease, exhaustion of local game, year by year variation in nut trees (i.e. acorn mast), and the challenge of obtaining sufficient firewood would prevent such gatherings from being more than a few days per year. The Keatley Creek site in British Columbia (whose inhabitants were Salish-speaking hunter gatherers in rather rich terrain) could not expand any more because of those factors with sanitation being the most important. The stretch of rapids from The Dalles to Celilo Falls along the Columbia River in the Pacific Northwest sustained 10,000 people according to indigenous accounts, outsiders like Lewis and Clark, and archaeology, but this was clearly due to a yearly trade fair related to the arrival of salmon. The actual complex of villages could not have been much more than 1-2K people along what is a relatively long distance--even on the modern Interstate, it's still several minutes of driving between end to end.
In the Americas, Neolithic agricultural sites also faced these issues. The Mississippian site of Etowah in Georgia was the second largest Mississippian city and likely faced issues of finding game and of sanitation and never grew beyond 2,000 at most (and was usually much smaller). Cahokia's huge size (which is exaggerated by some archaeologists) is probably is due to its status as a major religious site and it too had very numbered days. Large and long lasting cities are products of agricultural civilisations, not hunter gatherers.
Yes @Arkenfolm is correct, we know that Denmark, southern Sweden and northern Germany was home to a semi-sedentary culture with coastal summer settlements and inland winter settlements (the Ertebølle culture)
Of course it only existed in a few thousand years, as agriculturalist moved in, but in the period afterward we see overlapping culture with both groups living in fortified settlements.
As urbanization it’s next to impossible to imagine, even with the introduction of agriculture we need to go around 1000 AD to see an urban settlement with a thousand people on the Baltic coast. Northern Europe doesn’t lend itself to the same degree of urbanization as Mediterranean and the Middle East.
I think a way to make Ertebølle culture stronger versus farmers is to have them domesticate pigs, ducks and geese. It would allow them a denser annd more permanent inland population. They could also invent or adopt pottery earlier than they did (first sign of pottery in Denmark is in the mid period of the Ertebølle culture) . Pottery allow people to extract more resources from food (by boiling) and also make it easier to keep food long term).
Of course it only existed in a few thousand years, as agriculturalist moved in, but in the period afterward we see overlapping culture with both groups living in fortified settlements.
As urbanization it’s next to impossible to imagine, even with the introduction of agriculture we need to go around 1000 AD to see an urban settlement with a thousand people on the Baltic coast. Northern Europe doesn’t lend itself to the same degree of urbanization as Mediterranean and the Middle East.
I think a way to make Ertebølle culture stronger versus farmers is to have them domesticate pigs, ducks and geese. It would allow them a denser annd more permanent inland population. They could also invent or adopt pottery earlier than they did (first sign of pottery in Denmark is in the mid period of the Ertebølle culture) . Pottery allow people to extract more resources from food (by boiling) and also make it easier to keep food long term).
Were there extensive coastal wetlands that would be suitable for constructing fish traps like the Gunditjmara did in New South Wales? Managed wetlands also seem like a good way to add more protein into the local diet by also increasing the waterfowl population, which could lead into domestication. Were oaks and ash extensive in the Ertebolle territory? An earlier invention of pottery could lead to more food security by allowing for longer storage of acorns and seed pods possibly.
None of that would get the population over a few hundred people before the issues of sanitation, overcollecting natural resources, and finding fuel set in.
Not really a relevant issue to acorn storage. The natural tannins in acorns keep them edible for years, provided one leaches the tannins before consumption and stores them away from insect pests. Baskets can be woven incredibly tight, and some plants can actually be woven into water-tight baskets (I am not certain of which European plant might, but this occurred among some acorn-collecting cultures of indigenous California).
80 percent of Novgorodians were sedentary farmers (and most of the rest were craftspeople and merchants). The Republic exported a lot of furs, but actual full-time hunters were a small minority of its population.
Wetlands management certainly isn't a silver bullet, just one of a constellation of techniques I'm speculating about to raise the productive capacity of the surroundings of a settlement. Since a population of ten thousand seems undoable for the Neolithic, let's reduce the population to settlement sizes to the 500-1000 range, or to whatever is sustainable for a sedentary population. I was wondering about acorns and other tree nuts as fodder for animal husbandry, such as for an ATL Muscovy duck and for rabbits, anything to bolster protein consumption in the population.
Sorry for moving the goalposts, but what I'm really exploring is revamping the plant/animal domestication pathway so that when wheat/barley does arrive, it is supplemented by a greater suite of European domesticates that bolster health, agricultural productivity, and food security. As far as population goes I'd like to see an increase in settlement size in the Neolithic so the issues you mentioned are wrestled with at an earlier date to stimulate the finding of mitigation techniques (like coppicing for the fuel issue).
If you consider only the coasts and include Aquaculture outside Agriculture (I know, it is within), then I think you could get a sizeable state in Europe that survives on Fish Farming with a reasonable calorie count per a low number of workers involved, which is what you need to build a successful kingdom/empire.
I have talked about this in the Industrial Byzantium thread, a couple of months ago, I believe.
I have talked about this in the Industrial Byzantium thread, a couple of months ago, I believe.
How? Fish farming is only possible on a small-scale in premodern times. When it was used on a larger scale, it was always in tandem with agriculture since the fish would eat the weeds and pests that surrounded fields and ponds.
You can then change it to Mariculture, not Aquaculture. Talking about the Current World, this is one of the most promising methods of food production that might improve our condition in food security and to an extent, solving the climate issue (which cannot overlook other solutions like Nuclear Energy and Space, but can certainly be supplemented by Mariculture. Let's discuss this later).
However, this would likely be limited to the coasts, but likely enough to sustain a city state or a small state.
You might want to take a look at the TL A Dog Went Left by @Tessitore - there's some discussion of other food possibilities there (and it's a good read too, though unfortunately now on hiatus).
The sort of mariculture you're discussing involves scenarios like massive ocean thermal energy convertors which artificially do the upwelling job ocean currents do in certain areas. And on a smaller scale, very precisely built artificial reefs for seaweed, shellfish, and fish farming.
While it is true that artificial shellfish beds existed among Neolithic-level cultures like the Coast Salish, they involved a lot of investment in labour and maintenance relative to their yield and would be suboptimal by today's standards. Seaweed/other sea plants and shellfish are not sufficient for supporting a large number of people because of relatively low calories and especially lack of carbs. Carbohydrates and too much protein is actually a major limit in these sedentary hunter-gatherer societies. The wild plants and nuts they gather, even those whose growth they maintain, are insufficient for the population size so they rely heavily on fats and oils to supplement it but that only works to a certain extent. This was the case among the indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest, it happened in late Jomon period Japan, and it presumably happened in pre-agricultural Europe.
The problem with making a city-state out of a system like this is that resources are too easy to collect and certain tribes or lineages will lay claim to certain beaches, fishing sites, gathering sites, etc. The institution of a state seems to rely heavily on stored surplus, and in a system like this, every village can store its own surplus so you end up with a large village of a few hundred people with some authority over a dozen or so smaller villages of 50-200 people and usually all within the same drainage basin (i.e. where the salmon runs are and weirs are maintained). This was the political structure in the Pacific Northwest, precolonial southern Florida, and among the 17th century Ainu. Your chiefdom probably does not have more than 8-9K people (although the chief will be extremely prestigious regionally), and the political structure is unstable enough that villages can easily switch loyalties to a nearby tribe on the basis of family ties or an unjust ruler.
That said, I could imagine that theoretically if you had a culture perfectly suited for it, you could have a city-state of maybe 1-2K people survive a few generations before exhausting local resources and being hit with repeated epidemics because of the sanitation issue. It would probably rule a conventional chiefdom like I described above (but probably with smaller subsidiary villages because of the food issue) and maybe stretch into nearby chiefdoms and command perhaps 10-15K people.
If I had to pick an area, then Southern Norway would be the best for this since it's hemmed in by mountains (which as seen in the Pacific Northwest and among the Ainu is a good factor for encouraging complex chiefdoms) and isn't too far from the Baltic and mouth of the Elbe. They could be indirectly trading with people as far south as the Alps and Carpathians through visiting the deltas of the Elbe and Vistula. This would give the ruling clans of this city some serious status which they could use to attract other local elites to settle in their city, bringing with them their followers. This is the sort of "ritual complex" state which admittedly is usually associated with farming societies (i.e. some Puebloan city-states, or Cahokia) but I don't think it's totally impossible a hunter gatherer society could build such a state. Probably all it takes is the right cultural conditions, a string of lucky marriages and a wise chief born from it, a bit of vision (i.e. erecting some monument that becomes a cultic site), and plenty of luck.
I'd also love to see a Doggerland-based culture doing this in the 7th millennium BC period with the ruling chief's authority based on maintaining primitive dikes to keep the water levies low. Doggerland has the environment to sustain a sedentary hunter-gatherer culture, so it would work too. Obviously it's still going to be utterly screwed when the island is flooded, but they could probably be a successful and wealthy maritime culture until that point. Theoretically if they were into building large earthworks like the Indians of the American South, they could build a structure that would extend above the sea even after it drowns. The highest points of Doggerland are 15 meters below sea level--the largest mound at Poverty Point is 22 meters (and was built by hunter gatherers unlike later mounds). Most likely these mounds (I imagine maybe 3-4 would remain above sea level) would gradually be eroded and vanish over the centuries (as many actual islands and entire cities did), but perhaps remnants of Doggerland's elite flees to England or the continent and occasionally revisit their homeland, and even when the Indo-Europeans overwhelm them, it's maintained as some sort of ancient tradition. Maybe these Celts/whoever put enough maintenance into the remnants that they survive into the modern day (maybe even Christianised as shrines to some saint associated with fishermen).
In both cases, the challenge is that such a city would inevitably depopulate the surrounding countryside to use as a reserve for wood (fuel) and game and the issue of sanitation. Both factors limit the size such a state can expand to and limit its population, but it would still be a very impressive city and one which would undoubtedly embed itself into local myth and religion long after it was abandoned. I said 1-2K people, and that still makes for an impressive size if you consider the level of technology of those who built it and what they might leave behind.
I intend to get back to it. I just encountered the awkward problem of finding information that contradicts something I already wrote that was major enough to mess up my plans and then I got distracted because I'd lost forward writing momentum.