UDC 903 ' 12
V. A. Rakov 1, D. L. Brodyansky 2
1 V. I. Ilyichev Pacific Oceanological Institute, Far Eastern Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences
43 Baltiyskaya St., Vladivostok, 690041, Russia
E-mail: rakov@poi.dvo.ru; vladimir.rakov@mail.ru
2 Far Eastern State University
Sukhanov str., 8, Vladivostok, 690000, Russia
E-mail: hist@deans.dvgu.ru
The article is devoted to a discussion on the problems of ancient aquaculture on the example of oyster farming as one of the important areas of the producing economy. After a detailed study of shell heaps of several Neolithic and Early Iron Age settlements, as well as fossils and modern oystercatchers preserved in the bay, the authors obtained numerous and irrefutable proofs of the existence of primitive forms of oyster cultivation in the coastal zone of Peter the Great Bay.
Keywords: ancient aquaculture, oyster farming, cultivation, domestication.
The archaeologist's View
We have been publishing works on ancient aquaculture for more than 20 years. A. V. Tabarev's article [2007] is the first response in all these years: serious, benevolent, and debatable. The author sees in our arguments [Rakov, Brodyansky, 2007] evidence of exclusively cultivation, i.e. effective technologies and methods of exploiting an important food source-oysters Crassostrea gigas [Tabarev, 2007, p.56], but denies the thesis about ancient aquaculture as a productive economy. According to A.V. Tabarev, evidence of "domestication (the appearance of new species with previously non-existing properties) and socialization (cardinal changes in the way of life and the structure of society under the influence of a new type of economy)" is not enough to recognize oyster farming as food production [Ibid.].
Consider the arguments of our opponent. In the modern world, aquaculture is a powerful, ever-expanding branch of food production. Most of its objects are by no means new, genetically modified, although there are also species bred by humans. Only a hydrobiologist can distinguish scallops, mussels, oysters, and human-bred clams by their flaps. Even a hydrobiologist cannot say the same about seaweed and other algae. Aquatic organisms live in the same environment, in the usual natural niche. Human care is reflected in the protection from pests, in the standardization of ripe individuals by size and age. All these features are also present in Boisman and Yank oysters, and there are also noticeable morphological changes (see arguments under N 4, 5 [Rakov and Brodyansky, 2007, p. 41]). The introduction to the north could not have been accidental; the larvae attached to the bottom of the boat would have died from the low water temperature.
Many of today's agricultural facilities are indistinguishable from wild forms. When buying sea buckthorn, honeysuckle, and actinidia berries (seaside kishmish), we will not determine whether they are garden or forest berries. Many species easily go wild, mustangs are even in the inhabited Kuban.
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In the Altai Mountains, it is customary to drive pigs into the taiga for the summer, where boars grow tusks; when it becomes impossible to get food from the ground with the onset of cold weather, the herds return to the villages, where the owners leave the sows and breeding boars, and the rest are slaughtered. The history of the invasion of rabbits in Australia is famous: the colonists brought domesticated animals, and received wild ones that multiplied. Yes, and dingo dogs penetrated the continent with people, they went wild in Australia.
The New Guinea village of Bongu is world-famous; N. N. Miklukho-Maklay visited it three times, and 100 years after his first expedition, a group of Russian ethnographers led by D. D. Tumarkin and N. A. Butinov visited it [On the Shore..., 1975]. The main occupation of the Bonguans is agriculture; constantly cutting down and uprooting areas of the tropical forest, armed with stone axes, they prepared vegetable gardens with sharpened stakes and wooden shovels, growing taro, yams, sweet potatoes, bananas, sugar cane, breadfruit, coconut palms, etc. The protein component of the diet was provided by pig breeding, dog and chicken breeding, fishing and, to a lesser extent, hunting. There was no social differentiation in Bongu. The influence of agriculture on the social structure of society there is expressed in the enlargement of the community - the unification of tribal communities into a heterogeneous one, only at the same time the constant uprooting of the forest and the preparation of new vegetable gardens is possible. Respect in the community was enjoyed by men who were able to achieve high yields of garden crops. The Papuan economy is mainly productive-you can't call it fishing.
The example of bears (Tabarev, 2007, p.56) is incorrect: the Amur peoples kept them for the bear festival; they did not become domestic animals at all (Kreinovich, 1973, p. 438-439). To obtain feathers, eagles were tamed. "Game" animals are known among many peoples; it is not necessary to confuse such forms with economic ones.
A.V. Tabarev compares oyster farming with a well-developed salmon fishery [2007, p. 56]. Yes, it has achieved the highest productivity in North Pacifica, America, and the Far East, and has had a powerful impact on social structures. But neither the Far Eastern peoples, nor the Indians anywhere went beyond the protection of spawning grounds and regulation of the fishing regime, so as not to undermine its foundation. They did not switch to fish farming, this element appeared in the XX century.
In general, domestication in aquaculture is often not associated with the introduction of new species. The core of this industry is precisely cultivation. As for agriculture, it is by no means limited to socialization. First of all, it is a system of agriculture: garden, perelozhnaya, terrace, rainfed or irrigation. The Boysmans and Yankovites created a bottom system with artificial oyster beds (reefs), and it survived in the world until the XX century.
As for the degree of socialization of Boysmans and Yankees, this is really a little-studied topic. It is unlikely that only representatives of the tribal nobility are buried in the two Boysman burial grounds, burials of the Yankovo culture: there are many children's graves; prestigious items (neck hryvnia, spearheads, daggers) are quite rare. Oysters were eaten at the wake, a layer of sashes was laid over the burial, but there is also a section with 106 thin (seasonal?)ones. layers of flaps, and the volume of shellfish obtained clearly exceeds the "delicacy" component of the diet; the latter is more likely to include a rare accumulation of meretrix and very rare scallop flaps. Oyster meat was not a major food resource in either the Boisman or Yankee cultures, but even among the Bongu people, pork and chicken are holiday food; no one will deny the presence of animal husbandry in their economic activities or consider it a trade.
The economic "weight" of a particular industry is a special area of paleoeconomics. Here, the calculation of resources and the share of each species in the diet are useful.
A.V. Tabarev touched upon the theme of the "Neolithic revolution", believing that the duration of the transition to a productive economy makes it" non-revolutionary " [2007, p.55]. In the most ancient centers of world agriculture, in the zone of ancient civilizations, from the emergence of developed agriculture to the emergence of civilizations - cities, temples, irrigation systems, easel ceramics, writing - 2.5 - 3 millennia pass [Brodyansky, 1995]. It is clear that in comparison with political upheavals, which the victors will call a revolution, and even with industrial revolutions-a huge period, but on the scale of human history - not a very long period. But in terms of its consequences, the "Neolithic revolution" is the greatest scientific and technological revolution in the history of mankind. Today's billions of people have become possible as a result of the creation of food production in its intensive forms [Shnirelman, 1989; Vavilov, 1987; Munchaev and Merpert, 1981; Bashilov, 1984].
Aquaculture appears on the periphery of ancient agricultural centers, which include Primorye, Korea, Japan, Southeast Asia, the Persian Gulf coast [Tosi, 1985; Milton, 1986] and the centers themselves, where fish farming occurs [Kramer, 1965, p. 156-160; Mellart, 1982, p. 27; Royce, 1975, p. 229].
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The biologist's View
Thousands of scientific books, articles, and presentations are devoted to the problems of oyster farming, including the domestication of the Pacific oyster Crassostrea gigas (see, for example, Lapegue, Boudry, and Goulletquer, 2006). Therefore, our publications on aquaculture are based both on numerous facts from the literature and on the results of our own long-term research, experimental and pilot-industrial work on the cultivation of Pacific oysters in Peter the Great Bay. I would like to thank A.V. Tabarev for a complete analysis of our published works on primitive aquaculture, based on the study of shell heaps of various archaeological cultures of Primorye. However, the author questions the possibility of using the concept of "aquaculture" in archaeology.
In our opinion, one of the main reasons for this misunderstanding is the rather frequent divergence of views of archaeologists and biologists on the same terms, which does not always contribute to fruitful cooperation between different specialists. There are quite a lot of examples, including from the article by A. V. Tabarev. Thus, when discussing the domestication of plants and animals, the author repeatedly emphasizes that this biological process leads to "the emergence of new species" that possess "those qualities that are only indicated in the wild, but are isolated and repeatedly strengthened by humans during breeding" [Tabarev, 2007, p.55]. Further, he writes about the lack of domestication of oysters, since there is no "evidence that in the biological classification there is a special type of mollusk bred by humans and existing exclusively thanks to humans" [Ibid., p. 56]. From the biologist's point of view, these arguments are fundamentally wrong; they give incorrect ideas about the species and speciation, as well as about oysters. In other words, we can safely say that in the entire history of human existence as a species of Homo sapiens, they have not received or bred a single new species of animals and plants.ch. domestic, by their domestication. This is still impossible to do even today using modern biological methods, including genetic engineering, not to mention the more primitive and" ancient " methods of breeding and hybridization.
The main criteria for the concept of a species, as any biologist knows, include the ability of individuals from populations to cross with the creation of fertile offspring, and not the possession of common morphophysiological features or "qualities", as A.V. Tabarev believes [Ibid., p. 55]. During the microevolutionary process, new species are usually formed gradually during genetic divergence, when individuals of the original species ' populations become unable to interbreed with individuals of other populations and the new isolated form gives fertile offspring.
Morphological features of the species are not the main ones. Thus, there are known double species that look exactly the same, but are unable to interbreed and produce fertile offspring, i.e. outwardly they were taken for one species for a long time even by specialists, and then it turned out that there were several of them (for example, within the previously single species of the polychaete Polydora ciliata). Conversely, there are species with an extremely high degree of morphological variability (including the oyster Crassostrea gigas). Previously, many taxonomists, relying only on morphology, identified whole series of new species, which were later combined into one. Therefore, both domestic animals and their wild ancestors belonging to the same species are designated by biologists by the same Latin names. For example, dog and wolf -Canis lupus, domestic pig and wild boar - Sus scrofa, domestic and wild goat (roe deer) - Capreolus capreolus, domestic and wild donkey-Equus asinus, domestic chicken and Bankiv rooster - Gallus gallus, etc.There are also groups of domestic animal species that correspond to the same groups of wild animal species (some sheep, cats, ducks, pigeons, etc.). Man had nothing to do with their origin, and many of them existed long before the appearance of man as a species.
Millions of years pass from the original "ancestor" to the appearance of a new species of higher plants (flowering plants) and animals (mammals, birds, fish, mollusks, etc.). And it does not form if there are no reasons for this, for example, in the form of isolation of a part of the population in greatly changed conditions for the existence of the original species. First, new traits appear at the intraspecific level : morphophysiological races, subspecies, etc. appear. If large changes in the conditions of existence do not occur, then the species can live on our planet indefinitely - tens and hundreds of millions of years. A person can accelerate the speciation process purposefully mainly for lower organisms (bacteria, fungi, etc.). As for the higher domestic animals, this is not yet possible due to the too short period of existence of man himself as a species. If it were so easy to accelerate speciation, then, in our opinion, man would start creating new species from himself. As you know, unsuccessful attempts to create "homunculi" were made in Europe in the Middle Ages, and improvements to the "breed of people" - in ancient Sparta, Nazi Germany.
The fact that domestic animals and their wild ancestors belong to the same species does not exist.
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there are many scientific examples: a single chromosome set, free crossing and the emergence of resilient offspring, examples of feral domestic animals, etc. In feral domestic animals, many morphophysiological features of their wild ancestors appear over time, and only those that do not interfere with their existence in new natural conditions are preserved.
Very many domestic animals do not differ in appearance from their wild "ancestors", and only their high number and age structure indicate that they have long been domesticated. For example, the number of domesticated reindeer is many times greater than that of wild ones. The long-domesticated Indian elephant cannot be distinguished from a wild one, the domestic bee Apis mellifera from a wild one of the same species, etc.
Most likely, by "emergence of new species" during domestication, A.V. Tabarev [2007, p.55] refers to the breeding of various breeds of domestic animals and plant varieties by humans. At the same time, a person usually pursues a certain goal: by selecting through a number of generations, the necessary characteristics are fixed in animals. Some biologists distinguish among hybrids subspecies, races, lines, forms, morphs, and other groups that are not the main taxonomic units in the biological classification. At the intraspecific and even closely related interspecific levels, hybrids can also occur, which often occurs in nature without human help. For example, after the recent appearance of the Mediterranean mussel Mytilus galloprovincialis in the Sea of Japan, hydrobiologists began to find quite a large number of hybrids of this species with the local Pacific mussel Mytilus trossulus. A person has no direct relation to their occurrence, except for unintentional transplantation (there are cases of transportation of mussels on the bottom of ships or their larvae with ballast water).
However, hybrids obtained by closely related crossing with or without human assistance, as a rule, do not produce viable offspring, i.e. they are infertile. For example, a mule is a hybrid of a donkey and a horse, a bester is a beluga with a sterlet, and so on. As for the numerous and diverse breeds of domestic dog, all of them are obtained by humans from one species-the wolf Canis lupus.
Our research focuses mainly on one species of oyster, Crassostrea gigas, and not on oysters in general, of which there are about 100 species that differ greatly from each other not so much morphologically as in their physiological and ecological characteristics. Among them, there are those whose reproductive strategy is completely different: they have low fecundity; they do not sweep their eggs into the water, but carry them in special brood chambers (European, New Zealand and other oysters); they do not form oysters, but live, for example, on the roots of trees (mangrove oyster); they live at very low salinity of water (in rivers) or, conversely, at high, relatively deep depths, etc. Therefore, not all types of oysters can be easily cultivated using the primitive methods used to grow the Pacific oyster.
Finally, C. gigas in ancient times had a very narrow range - it was distributed only off the coast of modern Southern Primorye, southern Sakhalin, the Japanese Islands and the Korean Peninsula. A little later, it appeared off the coast of China. It was only in the 20th century that this species was acclimatized for cultivation in many other parts of the world (in the 1920s, near the Pacific coast of the USA, in the 1940s-in Australia, in the 70s-in European countries, off the coast of Africa, South America, and New Zealand). Therefore, we have never even thought about the Pacific oyster as a special type of mollusk bred by humans during domestication [Tabarev, 2007, p. 56], since this is impossible for the reasons mentioned above.
Further, in the discussion about oyster farming, A.V. Tabarev reproaches the authors of the article that "the framework of 'gathering' and 'fishing' seemed unworthy for such a developed industry " [Ibid.]. Here again we come across a different understanding of terms among archaeologists and biologists. Thus, by" fishing", hydrobiologists understand the extraction of objects related to aquatic bioresources, including through "gathering". Currently, the gathering of some aquatic bioresources in our country is even more developed than the extraction in the sea. For example, in the Southern Primorye region, the main volume (up to 1 thousand tons per year) of red alga anfel is collected in storm discharges (i.e. on the shore) (only a few tens of tons are extracted in the sea). Here, along with cultivation and extraction from the seabed, seaweed - kelp-gathering is also developed (in storm discharges on the shore and in the so-called pre-discharge zone in the water).
As for the Pacific oyster, in the conditions of the Southern Primorye, the Korean Peninsula, and the Japanese Islands, its collection is almost impossible. This colonial type of mollusk forms clusters (oystercatchers)in storm-protected bays and sea lagoons, so they are almost never washed ashore in their living form. At low tide, they are also never exposed, because the difference in water levels in the Sea of Japan is insignificant (from 0.3 m in Primorye to 1.0 m in the Japanese Islands). Therefore, oysters can only be obtained by diving
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in the water or from boats using special tools (forceps, dredges). The efficiency of such fishing is low, because the search for oysters in the muddy water of bays and lagoons requires a lot of time and effort. At the beginning of the 20th century, annual oyster production in Primorye did not exceed 33.5 tons and was usually in the range of only 3-16 tons. As noted in our publications, these facts do not explain the presence of numerous and powerful shell heaps on the coast of Southern Primorye, consisting mainly of oyster flaps, but only indicate the existence of oyster farming.
According to A.V. Tabarev, the lack of evidence of" full-fledged domestication " (?) of oysters is the reason for the removal of aquaculture outside the producing farm [Ibid., p. 57]. This obviously applies not only to oysters, but also to mussels, scallops, many other farmed mollusks and marine invertebrates in general, whose cultivation biotechnologies are similar. Therefore, the author tries to argue with the multi-million community of specialists engaged in aquaculture.
For Peter the Great Bay, the significance of the ancient salmon fishery, compared with oyster farming, was clearly exaggerated by A. V. Tabarev [Ibid., p. 56]. It is based mainly on ethnographic data related to the northern part of the Far East, where not only a large species composition of salmon, their mass visits to rivers for spawning, but also suitable conditions for their existence. In Peter the Great Bay, as well as to the south - off the coast of the Korean Peninsula, the southern Japanese islands (Honshu, Kyushu, etc.)-the species composition of salmon is very poor, and even further south these cold - loving fish disappear altogether. In the warmer historical periods of the Holocene, their numbers in the Peter the Great Bay were even lower than in our days. This is confirmed, for example, by the materials of archaeological excavations of Neolithic Boisman culture sites (Boisman-1 and -2), in which the bones of salmon (genus Oncorhynchus) are represented in small quantities. So, in the shell heaps of Boisman-1, only six out of six individuals were collected, while almost 5 thousand bones from 185 individuals of the Mugil so-iuy pilengas, which is the same size as salmon, were found here [First Fishermen..., 1998, p. 277]. In Zaisanovka-7, salmon are not represented at all, although the general list includes at least 26 fish species. On the monuments of the Yankovo culture, their bones are either absent or found in scanty quantities. At the same time, there are relatively many bones of heat-loving or subtropical fish species, such as dogfish, pilengas, Japanese mackerel, yellow sea bass, Pacific gill, as well as teeth and bones of white sharks, red stingrays, etc. [Rakov and Brodyansky, 2004]. It can be argued that in the diet of ancient people who lived at different times on the coast of Peter the Great Bay, salmon was much less important than oysters.
We have to go back to the terminology, because the concepts of "produce" and" production " have several meanings. From a biologist's point of view, aquaculture is related to the production, or rather, reproduction, of aquatic organisms. At the same time, there are always producers (i.e., females and males) who give offspring, and human participation in this process consists in applying various methods or technologies to obtain the necessary products. So, if in nature an oyster always lives only on the bottom (in two-dimensional space), and with the help of humans it can be grown above the bottom (on reservoirs) or in the water column (in three-dimensional space), then this is undoubtedly related to aquaculture. In this case, a person changes and increases the living space for a mollusk, as a result of which he receives (produces) an order of magnitude more products than is possible in nature. In addition, some of the reared offspring always remain in the aquatic environment as producers and annually replenish (reproduce) the larval pool of oysters. This whole field of human activity fully corresponds to the concepts of a productive economy and a productive economy.
In conclusion, we would like to note that both oyster farming and archeology are producing industries. Oyster farming allows a person to regularly and in large quantities produce the most valuable nutritious and medicinal product. Archaeology produces new knowledge from previously unknown sources, as well as the most valuable museum collections. Ancient aquaculture is one of the results of "archaeological production" in collaboration with hydrobiology, paleoclimatology, oceanology and a number of other disciplines.
List of literature
Bashilov V. A. Nekotorye obshchie aspekty "neoliticheskoi revolyutsii" [Some general aspects of the "Neolithic Revolution"].
Brodyansky D. L. The Far Eastern hearth of ancient agriculture - a problem after a quarter of a century // Vestn. Far East. Department of the Russian Academy of Sciences, 1995, No. 5, pp. 105-116.
Vavilov N. I. Proiskhozhdenie i geografiya kul'turnykh rasteniy [Origin and geography of cultivated plants], Nauka Publ., 1987, 440 p.
Kramer O. N. Istoriya nachinaetsya v Sumer [History begins in Sumer], Moscow: Nauka Publ., 1965, 256 p.
Kreinovich E. A. Nivkhgu: Mysterious inhabitants of Sakhalin and Amur, Moscow: Nauka Publ., 1973, 496 p.
Mellart J. Smith Ancient civilizations of the Middle East. Moscow: Nauka Publ., 1982, 150 p. (in Russian)
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Milton P. On the question of the composition of food of the ancient inhabitants of Levisa / / Archeology of Cuba. Novosibirsk: Nauka Publ., 1986, pp. 66-71.
Munchaev R. M., Merpert N. Ya. Early agricultural settlements of Northern Mesopotamia: Studies of the Soviet expedition in Iraq. - Moscow: Nauka, 1981. - 320 p.
On the bank of Maklay: (ethnographic essays), Moscow: Nauka Publ., 1975, 327 p.
The first fishermen in Peter the Great Bay: Nature and Ancient Man in Boisman Bay. Vladivostok: Far Eastern Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, 1998, 390 p.
Rakov V. A., Brodyansky D. L. Catalog of fauna from archaeological sites of Primorye. - Vladivostok: [B. I.], 2004. - 59 p.
Rakov V. A., Brodyansky D. L. Ancient aquaculture (oyster cultivation in the Boisman Neolithic culture) // Archeology, Ethnography and Anthropology of Eurasia. -2007. - N3. - p. 39-43.
Royce V. F. Vvedenie v rybokhozyaistvennuyu nauku [Introduction to fish management science], Moscow: Pishchevaya promyshlennost Publ., 1975, 250 p.
Tabarev A.V. Oysters and archaeologists (on the term "aquaculture" in Far Eastern archeology) / / Archeology, Ethnography and Anthropology of Eurasia. - 2007. - N 4. - p. 52-59.
Tosi M. K tainam drevneyshikh moravatelei [To the secrets of the oldest navigators]. 1985, Issue 18, pp. 259-271.
Shnirelman V. A. The emergence of a productive economy. Moscow: Nauka Publ., 1989, 446 p.
Lapegue S., Boudry P., Goulletquer P. Pacific cupped oyster - Crassostrea gigas // Genetic effects of domestication, culture and breeding of fish and shellfish, and their impacts on wild populations [Электронный ресурс]. - Viterbo, 2006. - 6 p. - URL: http://genimpact.imr.no/ (accessed: 15.05.08).
The article was submitted to the Editorial Board on 17.07.08.
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