The origins of agriculture could be explained to the satisfaction of twentieth century materialists as resulting from a series of accidental discoveries, refined by natural selection. However, other achievements of the Neolithic, like the construction of cities and the rise of complex states, were not so easily dismissed as unintended adaptations to circumstances. It is very hard to build a city by accident.
In order to complete their mechanistic model, the archeologists were thus forced to turn from Darwin to Karl Marx.
In Marx’s theory of historical materialism, all social change starts with changes in the mean of production. Everything else, from government to religion, is merely a cultural superstructure erected upon the hard foundation of economics.
From this point of view, once the “Neolithic Revolution” had altered the way in which people met their basic needs, a whole array of other changes became inevitable, including all aspects of the “Urban Revolution.” It was just that simple.
However, this ultra-deterministic view of historical causality, which always involved a certain amount of hand-waving, has now been completely undermined by new data. It is becoming obvious that people were already living in villages before they began taming wild plants, and that even a few fair-sized cities were built by people who practiced relatively little agriculture. It is beginning to seem as though subjective factors, such as an active desire for the advantages of urban life, may have preceded and been the cause of the shift to farming, rather than its outcome.
