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SILENT SPRING ARRIVES

Silent Spring Arrives: The Collapse of Bird Populations in Riverside, California

E. N. Anderson, June 2024

Abstract

            Silent spring is here. Several mornings this spring I have walked out into my yard and heard nothing. Eventually a mockingbird sings, a dove coos, and slowly a few birds call, but birds are dramatically down in just two years. Rachel Carson’s sad prediction in Silent Spring (1962) has become reality. In 1962, walking out on any California morning was an amazing experience of bird calls and song. It is now almost or totally silent.

            Almost all species are declining in Riverside now. Many species flourished with the spread of agriculture and suburbs, which brought water, fruit trees, sheltered gardens, and other blessings. Unfortunately, they have lately brought more deadly chemicals, supposedly to kill pests but actually killing all living things. Strong rodenticides are wiping out our natural rodent controls, the hawks and owls. Insecticides and other poisons have decimated insect-eating birds. Most seed-eating birds must feed their young on insects at first, so this loss of insects has greatly reduced birds like goldfinches. Herbicides and fires destroy natural habitats. Introduced epidemics, such as the H5N1 bird flu and West Nile virus, have devastated some species. Climate change has brought unprecedented heat and drought. The drought of 2019-22 was particularly serious. Birds have not recovered after two subsequent wet years.

            Natural habitat has largely vanished. Fires and other factors eliminated what little chaparral the area had, and have almost eliminated the coastal sage scrub. It is replaced with nonnative grasses and annuals. The riparian strips are increasingly fragmented, or eliminated outright. Sycamore Canyon Park and Box Springs Mountains Wilderness Park preserve a large amount of excellent habitat. So does the March Base ammunition storage facility and an associated ecological strip east of the facility, but this area is now slated for warehouses.

            It is likely that there will be almost no birds in Riverside in 20 years. Only concerted, dedicated citizen action can save any significant populations. 

            Birds are sharply declining worldwide, with a very conservative estimate of 29% decline over North America since 1970 (Rosenberg et al. 2019), and a more local study showing dramatic declines in the Mohave Desert since early naturalists studied it (Iknayan et al. 2018). Declines in many species in Riverside, California, has been obvious for years. On the other hand, so have some increases. The record deserves some attention.

            This status and distribution account covers the Box Springs Mountains, Sycamore Canyon Park, and immediately adjacent suburbs. The limits are the footslopes of the Box Springs Mountains in Moreno Valley, a couple of miles south of the south boundary of Sycamore Canyon Park, and the Riverside Freeway (Highway 91) between Alessandro and Columbia Avenues.

            This area is about half suburbs, about half open land. The entire Box Springs range, a small hill range rising from 1000’ at base to a bit over 3000’ at the top, is protected, much of it by a wilderness park. Sycamore Canyon Park protects 1500 acres, now surrounded by suburbs, warehouses, and busy streets, making dispersal hard for mammals but not interfering with flying birds. The University of California campus has a large agricultural operations and experiment area, with ponds, and a large and lush botanic garden.

            This is strictly a personal and informal record. I have not dealt with casual records. Most of the eastern warblers have turned up in Riverside at one point, and almost all regular California migrants have occurred, but this list concentrates only on species that are regular and whose population changes, if any, are significant. (I do include a few once-only records too weird or interesting to neglect.) Notably missing are the extremely thorough records for the University of California, Riverside, campus. I have taught there all my adult life, and seen most the bird species that have shown up, but many of them were seen only on campus as strays from far away. I have seen such oddities as Pine Warbler and Ovenbird, but will confine the following account to birds common enough to have a dynamic history of interest to conservationists.

I am grateful to John Green and David Rankin for constant help in all things bird-related. The species order below follows the convenient Sibley guide, 1st edn. 2000, where the scientific names can easily be found.

            I have lived in northeast Riverside or just across the mountains in Moreno Valley since 1966, keeping records of birds observed. I have lived in southern California since 1955, first birding Riverside County in 1956, so have a sense of earlier changes. The bird life has changed dramatically during that time. Many birds have gotten rare, others common. Birds of the old agricultural environment have disappeared. Others, urban in association, have appeared and become established. Some have appeared and then gone.

            The droughts of the 21st century have had major effects. The great drought of 2019-2022 led to several sharp declines, some not evident until the wet year of 2023. This coincided with a huge epidemic of bird flu that caused enormous die-offs in the eastern and central United States; how much the flu had to do with decline in Riverside remains obscure. Very few birds showed up to breed, compared to previous years. The most obvious damage was to the “annual crop” species like goldfinches, which crashed. Longer-lived birds like American Kestrels did better, but most birds showed a sharp decline relative to 2019. Two wet years in a row—2023 and 2024—stabilized many birds, but others, including House Finches, goldfinches, Song Sparrows, and other small common species, continue to be dramatically down relative to 2019.

            Overall, the pattern fits with the models of Victor Cazalis (2022), who has shown on the basis of worldwide studies (largely of tropical forest environments) that the first to go are “habitat-specialist, sensitive, endemic, and threatened” species; these are “losers.” Then “winners” take over: “non-specialist, large-range, human-tolerant, anthropophilic, and non-native” (Cazalis 2022, abstract). Then the winners begin to give way, as disturbance increases, until only the most anthropophilic (human-associated) are left. Species richness of the area can increase at first, then usually decreases, though other patterns exist. In Riverside, long before I came, major predators were gone, and open-country and wetlands birds were decreasing. I have seen the agricultural landscape largely replaced by city, except for the University of California research fields.

The major factor in decline is the loss of brush-loving birds, due to fire and drought and the consequent replacement of native sage scrub and chaparral by weedy annuals. Most of the hills in our area have now become grassfields. This has led to near-disappearance as breeding birds of the Lazuli Bunting and Black-chinned Sparrow, decline in such species as Costa’s Hummingbird, Wrentit and California Thrasher, and lesser declines in birds that can adjust to human-planted shrubbery such as Bewick’s Wrens and Spotted Towhees. On the other hand, the Rufous-crowned Sparrow, which actually prefers a brush-grass mix, stayed almost as common as ever until donkeys became so common that the sparrows cannot nest undisturbed. The Say’s Phoebe has increased along with the open hill grasslands.

            Next most important are suburbanization, eliminating open-country and agricultural species; pesticides, largely by eliminating food; and the general slow decline caused by night lighting, tall buildings, and other factors that endanger migrants. A deadly toll of pervasive poisons, cats, cars, polluted air, and human-vectored epidemics makes suburbs as hostile an environment for birds as all but the harshest deserts.

Disease was certainly a major factor in the early days of the West Nile virus in the 2000s, but populations seem to have stabilized now. Other mysterious declines seem so rapid and large that they are most reasonably explained as the result of disease, but no data exists (see Spotted Dove and Brewer’s Blackbird below).

            One other factor in decline was the Brown-headed Cowbird, which lays its eggs in the nests of smaller species. The young cowbird outcompetes the smaller nestlings, and they usually starve. Small cowbird flocks routinely flew through riparian areas in spring, searching for nests. A female lays many eggs and rarely misses a nest. This led to the decline of several species and the complete extirpation from our area of several, including Willow Flycatcher, Swainson’s Thrush, Warbling Vireo, and Purple Finch. All the small riparian birds have been affected. Eventually the cowbirds too disappeared, partly for lack of victims, but of the birds they parasitized, few have even begun to recover.

            The increases are all due to expansion of suburbs, providing new habitat for birds that like such environments. There is one exception: Say’s Phoebe, formerly rare, has become one of the commonest birds. Burning of the native brush created the short-grass habitat preferred by the phoebe.

            Some interesting contrasts would seem to demand more research. Evergreen forest warblers, formerly abundant migrants, are almost gone, while other warblers continue without so much decline; this certainly has something to do with logging of their nesting areas, but the decline is so great that there must be more to it. The cliff swallow, formerly the commonest swallow, has become one of the rarest. Some flycatchers increase while others die out.

Caused by factors outside our area are the declines in migrants, especially warblers. The reasons for this are multifarious and not always clear. General decline of insect life, as the world gets saturated with pesticides, is probably the major one; it is the insect-eating birds that have declined most. Northerly species may simply be staying farther north (American Robin being a clear case), but the neotropical migrants are simply gone. The declines in some species, such as Townsend’s Warbler and Olive-sided Flycatcher, are horrific throughout their entire range, not just California. Clearcutting of breeding habitat and wintering habitat has been taking place and must be involved. Insecticides on the wintering grounds are also a probable factor.

An extremely disturbing change, since it has strong implications for human health and survival as well as for wildlife, is the collapse of the large-insect-eating guild: Poorwills, Western Kingbirds, Ash-throated Flycatchers, Loggerhead Shrikes, Western Meadowlarks, etc. Another guild collapse, involving far more individuals though without (so far) eliminating whole species, involves the aerial foragers. The Cliff Swallow has declined from thousands to ones and twos in our area. All other aerial foragers have declined sharply.

The major cause of these declines is the collapse of insect populations. It is really rare to see a butterfly (especially anything other than the Cabbage White, Pieris rapae complex) in the Box Springs Mountains, where they used to swarm and occasionally go through migrations or outbreaks of thousands. Grasshoppers are uncommon where they used to swarm. Flies and mosquitoes are no longer the maddening, insufferable problem they were. One indication of the level of decline is the lack of need to clean one’s windshield; once one had to clean one’s windshield every time one filled the gas tank. Now there are rarely any “bug spots.”  Another indication is the lack of fauna at the porch light in the evening. In the 1960s, the amazing quantity and variety of insects attracted to lights was breathtaking—the weirdest forms would turn up. Almost everything in a basic insect guidebook was there to see. Now there is almost nothing. The decline in insects is worldwide (see series of articles in Nature for 11 April 2024). It results from heavy pesticide use, habitat destruction, and climate change.

Obviously, with no insects, insectivorous birds will die out. Currently, only the phoebes, with their almost supernatural ability to see, chase, and capture the tiniest gnats, flourish and thrive. Cassin’s Kingbird hangs on by falling back on berries when necessary; apparently the Western Kingbird does not do that.

Among migrants, we have few shorebirds and no sea ducks, but it is worth noting the horrific decline of these species worldwide. Southern California’s shores and surf are empty.

A happier reason for decline is environmental sanitation. Cleanup of dead animals, closing of garbage dumps, and dramatic reduction in human littering has led to an extreme decline in Turkey Vulture numbers (they no longer breed anywhere near here) and a sharp decline in gulls, Rock Dove (Pigeon), Starling, House Sparrow, Brewer’s Blackbird, and possibly other species in our area.

Another happy effect of change is that the decline of large-scale stock farming has led to a reduction Brown-headed Cowbirds.

Conversely, suburban birds do well. Many are increasing along with suburbs. Black Phoebes, Mockingbirds, Hooded Orioles, and some other species are far commoner than they once were. (Unfortunately, this has apparently peaked; Black Phoebes and Hooded Orioles are down relative to 2019.) Within the last 50 years, Band-tailed Pigeons, Acorn Woodpeckers, and, very recently, Allen’s Hummingbirds and the nonnative Collared Dove and Nutmeg Manakin have colonized the area.

The Habitat

            The area consists of uplands formed of granodiorite (locally grading into tonalite), emplaced around 90-110 million years ago, deep below the earth’s surface. It is cut by many “veins” (dykes and sills) made up of quartz, feldspar, and other minerals that cooled slowly and filled in cracks in the granodiorite. The major ones often show prospectors’ diggings, vain attempts to find gold at the rock contacts. Darker spots indicate lumps of much older schist partially absorbed by the granodiorite under conditions of enormous heat and pressure miles below the earth’s surface.

            The whole area has been uplifted by tectonic action, which still goes on, with small earthquakes being a familiar feature of local life. The area is thus cut by hundreds of faults, large and small. The larger ones define the major slopes, including the spectacular west scarp face of the Box Springs Mountains.

            They also determine the major lines of drainage. Several large permanent springs and a greater number of temporary ones (flowing after heavy rain) provide water. Two Trees Canyon provides the major westward drainage of the Box Springs Mountains, and has a large permanent spring and several small transient ones. The well-named Big Spring also feeds into it. The name “Box Springs” derives from a spring complex at the southwest corner of the range, boxed by the railroad in the 19th century to prevent cattle intrusion; it supports another extensive riparian strip of woodland. Sycamore Canyon, a very large and deep canyon, drains the western part of Moreno Valley, and is thus a large permanent stream. It is joined by many small streams, some permanent, many within the park. South of Sycamore Canyon Park, across Alessandro, the ammunition storage facility of March Base comprised a square mile of fenced land surrounded by open space. This protected grassland supports the only meadowlarks and Western Kingbirds left in our area. An ecological corridor east of it, between Alessandro and Van Buren, includes several stringers of riparian vegetation along transient creeks. This is extremely rich and lush habitat, a lifeline for riparian species. Tragically, the March Base facility was sold by the government to a warehouse construction company, with the result that the wildlife there (which includes jackrabbits and Long-tailed Weasels) is doomed. One hopes the ecological strip can be protected.

            The natural vegetation of the area is now almost entirely eliminated by fire. It was largely coastal sage scrub, dominated on sunny slopes by brittlebush (Encelia farinosa), on shady ones by buckwheats (Eriogonum spp., mostly fasciculatum), black sage (Salvia apiana), white sage (Salvia apiana), and California coast sagebrush (Artemisia californica). Chaparral covered the Box Springs Mountains slopes above 2500’ as well as the more sheltered slopes of Sycamore Canyon. It was basically chamise (Adenostoma fasciculatum) and mountain lilac (Ceanothus crassifolius) with many other species including sumacs, currants, brush cherry (Prunus ilicifolia), and other species. Buckwheats and deerweed (Acmispon glauca) were the main successional plants. A distinctive habitat covered the rolling mesa area of Sycamore Canyon Park: scattered California junipers living in open sage scrub. Wet canyons support a dense riparian flora of California sycamore (Platanus racemosa), willows (largely Pacific Willow, Salix lasiolepis), cottonwood (Populus Fremontii), and rarely other species.

Dry and seasonal canyons and moist spots such as seeps and rockfoot areas were usually dominated by Mexican elderberry (Sambucus mexicana—for now; it gets reclassified every couple of years), whose berries are an essential food for many birds. Sumacs (Malosma laurina, Rhus glabra), penstemon species, monkeyflowers (Diplacus spp.), and other small bushes also occupy these water-concentrating rock formations.

The margins of the riparian strips are marked by dense stands of mulefat (Baccharis pilularis), poison oak (Toxicodendron diversifolium), threeleaf currant (Rhus trilobata), and much less often some other species. In one place in Sycamore Canyon, a salt meadow has developed, bringing saltbushes (Atriplex spp.), saltgrass (Distichlis spicata), and other saline species to the area. The canyon also has rare stands of yerba mansa (Anemopsis californica) and Indian hemp (Apocynum cannibinum), the latter quite likely introduced by Native Californians in pre-settlement times.

            Fire has eliminated or greatly degraded almost all the chaparral and coastal sage scrub, and every year large new areas burn over. Once, the natives regrew, but now introduced weeds choke out the shoots and steadily increasing drought and heat makes renewal impossible. Also, nitrogen from fossil fuel combustion has fertilized the area, benefiting the grasses and mustards and losing the natives their former advantage of being able to thrive on low-N soils. The burned areas have been taken over by various introduced weedy grasses, mustards, and small flowers such as filaree (Erodium, largely cicutarium) and stinknet (a new invader, Oncosiphon pilulifera).

Some native annuals persist, notably fiddlenecks (Amsinckia intermedia) and tarweeds (Deinandra spp.), but drought has reduced most annuals to the vanishing point, though there was a spectacular showing of poppies and Phacelia spp. in 2019. The riparian strips are preserved from most fire by moisture, but invaded by fan palms (Washingtonia filifera and W. robusta), which at least are native to Riverside County (the former) and the wider California floral world (robusta, common not far south of the US border). More serious invaders are castor bean (Ricinus communis, a major pest), giant reed (Arundo donax), and other species. Even California walnut (Juglans californica) occurs in Sycamore Canyon.  Fortunately, most of the riparian areas are still in good shape, unlike the scrublands.

            The suburbs and much of UCR campus are covered by introduced ornamental trees, shrubs, lawns, and flowers, of very wide variety. Many are beneficial to wildlife, producing nector-rich flowers or good fruits, or providing nesting habitat and protective cover. The suburbs thus abound with life—but only the few organisms that can tolerate traffic, dense cat populations, and enormous doses of deadly poisons. Saturating one’s property with many times the legal safe doses of toxic chemicals is a way of life. When buying our current home, we found a shed in the back absolutely filled with deadly poisons for every imaginable organism from mammals to molds. We promptly took all to the county toxic waste disposal, and then tore down the shed and took all its woodwork there too—the whole shed was drenched in poison. The boards showed the characteristic slits that mark injection of “protective” chemicals. We could easily have murdered a large number of people with what was in that shed. This is all too typical of surburban life. It impacts birds largely through eliminating insects and other invertebrates, but rodent poisons also get into the owl and hawk populations, probably causing the recent reduction of barn owls in the city.

Other wildlife

            Coyotes, raccoons, opossums (introduced from the US South in historic times), gray foxes, and smaller fauna abound, all happily entering the suburbs to feed. Striped skunks moved in and completely replaced spotted skunks during the 1970s.

            Two rare mammals of conservation concern occur. The Bryant’s woodrat (or pack rat; Neotoma bryanti) has recently been split from the desert woodrat. It is local to southern California, and has been reduced to rarity by fire, drought, and suburbanization. Formerly abundant in the area, it is now almost gone. The Stephens’ kangaroo rat (Dipodomys stephensi) is a rare, local species of level areas, largely in western Riverside County. It still abounds in the more level parts of Sycamore Canyon Park and the open areas around the March Base ammunition dump (as well as in March Base itself).

            Many lizards and snakes occur, including the rare and declining Orange-throated Whiptail (Aspidoscelis hyperythrus). Vast numbers of insects and other invertebrates, including many native bees, once occurred, but now not only are most insects gone, but many of the survivors are nonnative.

BIRDS

Canada Goose. Common migrant overhead, mostly Nov.-Dec. and Feb. Has become a common breeding bird in Fairmount Park.

Mallard Duck. Occasional flyover. A few nest on ponds not far from mountain foot, e.g. UCR Agricultural Operations reservoirs, occasionally golf courses, and probably the Eastern Municipal Water District waterworks adjacent to Sycamore Canyon Park. More nest in Fairmount Park, where they are heavily mixed with domestic ducks. 

Most duck species are observed in winter on the Agricultural Operations ponds and the golf course ponds. Common ones include Ring-necked Duck, Ruddy Duck, and Hooded Merganser (most years).

Mountain Quail. Very rare wanderer to area. Noted after winter storms in the Box Springs Mountains.

California Quail. Abundant till the droughts of 2001-2, 2006-7, and 2019-22; now much less so, but still common in riparian and chaparral areas. Completely disappeared from lower Two Trees Canyon in 2015, because of a combination of drought and an exceptionally active Cooper’s Hawk nest that raised two young. Recovered substantially after wet years of 2018-19, then decreased again with drought. Survives very locally in suburbs, but does not do well.

Ring-necked Pheasant. Formerly fairly common in the orange groves of the area, rarely appearing around the foot of the Box Springs range. Eliminating the groves has eliminated this bird. It was completely gone before 1990.

Double-crested Cormorant. Erratic but sometimes common migrant; large flocks often fly overhead. As with the other waterbirds, this species is common and regular at Perris Reservoir and the San Jacinto Wildlife Area, and the very commonly used migration routes from these to the coast or over Cajon Pass takes these birds directly over the Box Springs Mountains area. Flocks of water birds, and also migrant hawks, often avoid flying over mountains by flying over Pigeon Pass (on the east side of the Box Springs), or over Box Springs Pass and then over UCR.

White Pelican. Uncommon migrant, but flocks sometimes move northwest from the reservoirs and Salton Sea, flying over Moreno Valley and Pigeon Pass. Much less common than formerly.

Great Blue Heron.  Uncommon migrant and drop-in, usually at ponds, sometimes flying over or in fields. Common at ponds and lakes around Riverside.

Great Egret. Fairly common migrant or year-round visitors at Riverside lakes and ponds.

Snowy Egret and Green Heron show up more rarely.

Black-crowned Night Heron. Migrant. Now very rare, formerly much more common.

Turkey Vulture.  Uncommon migrant. Much less common than formerly. Migrant numbers steadily decline. Used to breed in Riverside area; declined with sanitation, disappearing as breeder with loss of garbage and rapid clean-up of dead animals.

Osprey. Rare migrant.

White-tailed Kite. Rare in the early 20th century, but established in the Santa Ana River bottom. Became steadily commoner, peaking in the 1970s, when it was a common bird. Steady decline since, and now almost completely gone; very rarely seen. The theory in the 1970s was that new suburb construction chased lots of mice out of their holes, and then final suburbanization eliminated open habitat without chasing any more mice.

Bald Eagle.  Rare migrant, mostly February. Winters at Lake Mathews nearby.

Northern Harrier. Rare migrant, very rare wintering bird; formerly common migrant and fairly common winterer. This bird has declined dramatically everywhere in its worldwide range.

Sharp-shinned Hawk. Common, migration and winter.

Cooper’s Hawk   Common resident. Pairs breed every year in Two Trees Canyon, Sycamore Canyon, and the ecological strip south of the latter. Others breed elsewhere in the city. This bird was very rare in the mid-20th century; DDT and probably other factors had almost eliminated it. With banning of DDT, it slowly began to increase, and is now very common here, with consequent devastation of easy-to-catch prey species. Cooper’s Hawks love pigeons, which are big, meaty, fairly easy to catch, and presumably as tasty to hawks as to humans, so where Cooper’s go the pigeons and doves thin out.

Red-shouldered Hawk. Always (since 1950s at least) a substantial and increasing breeding population in Riverside city, until 2023. Only rarely forages outside the suburbs, but has nested near Two Trees Canyon mouth and routinely forages up to the western foot of the mountains. It has spread with suburbs, where it enthusiastically catches rats and other animals. Unfortunately, some decline in 2023 coincided with a savage bird flu epidemic in the US and with the increased use of extremely strong rat poisons. Since the Red-shoulder feeds around houses, it is much more vulnerable than the Redtail, which hunts in open country where poisons are not usually spread. Some recovery in 2024, but still less common than formerly.

Swainson’s Hawk. Very rare migrant, mostly spring. Formerly commoner; appears to be steadily declining as local migrant.

Red-tailed Hawk. Most birds of prey are declining, but the redtail seems to increase slowly but steadily. Hunts for rats and ground squirrels along freeways and seeks out burns to hunt mammals that cannot find much cover. A dramatic situation was created by a major fire in Two Trees Canyon around 1988; the mammals had no cover and up to 8 red-tails hunted constantly over the burn all winter. Ground squirrels never recovered in the area. Breeds wherever there are tall groves. The Two Trees Canyon pair is particularly site-faithful, nesting every year in the central part of the riparian strip. Pairs in Sycamore Canyon and elsewhere are similarly faithful. The mercifully preserved ecological strip south of Sycamore Canyon Park (across Alessandro) has several pairs. The total population of the area is large.

Ferruginous Hawk. Formerly uncommon but regular migrant and rare winter in Pigeon Pass and south from there; now extremely rare. Never seen by me on the Riverside slope of the mountains until an immature appeared in upper Two Trees Canyon in fall 2017 and went on to spend the winter. None seen since.

Golden Eagle   Rare wanderer. Formerly much more common, breeding not far away (in Colton and all the higher mountain ranges) and common in winter. By 1970 it was gone as a breeding bird from most areas, and rare as a winterer. A pair nested on the Box Springs Mountains in 1979 and successfully raised one young, a female. Wind farms in the San Gorgonio Pass have killed many golden eagles, contributing to decline.

American Kestrel. Steady decline, as in most of the US, but not so bad here as in many (or most) areas. Until recently, a fairly common resident. However, following the drought of 2019-22, many pairs failed to breed in 2023. Considerable recovery in 2024.

Merlin. Very rare migrant. (Winters some years at UCR.)

Peregrine Falcon. Has occurred on UCR campus and was briefly regular on tall buildings in downtown Riverside in early 2010s.

Prairie Falcon. Rare migrant; once many migrants on the east side of the Box Springs and in the Pigeon Pass area, including the headwaters of Two Trees Canyon. One spent late fall and early winter in and near southern Sycamore Canyon Park in 2023-4.

Virginia Rail. A marsh formed at the mouth of Two Trees Canyon in a wet spring (1999) and a pair of these rails actually nested there (information from John Green).

American Coot. Common in winter on ponds and lakes throughout Riverside, but not as common as formerly.

Killdeer. Rare migrant and winterer, heard calling overhead on rainy nights. May still breed in UCR Agricultural Operations. Bred until recently in the large protected pond areas of the Eastern Municipal Water District. Steady rapid decrease during my entire time in California, especially with draining of wetlands in the mid-20th century. This formerly extremely abundant bird has shared the fate of many shorebirds. It has decreased at least 95% in our area as winterer.

Solitary Sandpiper.  I try to avoid one-shot sightings, but this one is too weird to miss. One spent several days, Sept. 16-20, 2014, at a transient rainpool left by rains from Hurricane Norbert, at the foot of the Box Springs Mountains, where the railroad blocked a wash channel.

Bonaparte’s Gull. Rare migrant (common where lakes and ponds occur, nearby).

Ring-billed Gull. Abundant in the old days. Steady rapid decline (even more dramatic in Los Angeles) after about 1990. This tracks the rise of recycling and better sanitation and garbage pickup, and probably also the greater charms of Lake Perris luring them away from our (cleaner) area. Closing the landfill north of the Box Springs Mountains greatly reduced gull numbers in our area.

California Gull. As for Ring-billed.

Rock Pigeon (Rock Dove). Extremely common 50 years ago, now almost extirpated from this entire area except for Riverside downtown, because of environmental sanitation and the Cooper’s Hawk population rebound. The very active Cooper’s Hawk nests since 2000 seem to have finally exterminated it from the entire eastern part of our area; Rock Doves occur only casually in the northeast corner of the city. They remain common in downtown Riverside, though Peregrine Falcons occasionally hunt them there.

Band-tailed Pigeon. Uncommon winterer as of 1966. The extreme wet year of 1968-69 drove huge flocks out of the mountains due to heavy snow, and kept them out. Many started breeding in oaks all over southern California, including Riverside suburbs and UCR campus. They stayed, and are still here. Populations rapidly climbed, and one could see flocks of 50 or more in the 1990s. Then Cooper’s Hawk populations recovered, and the band-tails declined in lockstep with the Cooper’s increase. Band-tails are declining in much of their range, so this phenomenon may be widespread. The band-tails and Cooper’s have now apparently reached an accommodation, with band-tails still found in every part of Riverside that has many large live oak trees. Combination of drought and very active Cooper’s hawk breeding in 2013 till present lowered numbers somewhat, and they have stayed down. Now that Rock Doves are essentially gone, the pressure on Band-tails is greater than ever, and they will probably not survive. Band-tails flock to the Box Springs Mountains in large numbers during elderberry season in early summer, with flocks of dozens (formerly) and at least 5-10 (now) often rising from elderberry bushes. The populations in the higher mountain ranges nearby are declining, partly due to poaching (information from Norm Lopez). Sharp decline in 2023-4, possibly due to the bird flu epidemic.

Eurasian Collared Dove. This introduced European bird spread through North America from the 1930s onward, appearing in our area by the early 21st century. Began to show up rarely but regularly by 2010. Now a regular but quite uncommon resident, though it is now common in much of the southwestern US. Our Cooper’s Hawks may be, once again, responsible for keeping it uncommon.

Spotted Dove. Introduced from south China to Los Angeles around 1890-1900, this species spread rapidly and steadily. It was extremely common in Riverside by the 1960s, its loud coo being one of the most characteristic suburban sounds. It suddenly began to decline in the early 1990s and totally disappeared by the early 2000s. It then disappeared from Los Angeles too, and is now extirpated completely from California. Cooper’s Hawk population recovery is almost certainly one part of the story, but the speed and completeness of population collapse, even in Los Angeles where Cooper’s Hawks are rare, implies a disease epidemic of some sort.

Common Ground Dove. Expanded from the deserts into the Riverside area with the expanding orange groves, and contracted as the groves did. Formerly not uncommon around groves, including the lower fringes of the Box Springs range, but gone by about 1980.

Mourning Dove. Much commoner when barley was farmed in Moreno Valley and when north Riverside was mostly orange groves. Part of the reason is probably the recovery of the Cooper’s Hawk population. However, this hardy survivor has adjusted, and remains one of the commonest birds in the area. No recent decline noted.

Parrots. Various escaped cage birds show up now and then. Species seen in the suburbs include Lilac-crowned Parrot, Cockatiel, Budgerigar, and Canary-winged Parakeet. Others will surely appear.

Greater Roadrunner. Formerly commoner, but still fairly common in all more or less wild areas, with about one pair per canyon. Regularly seen in suburbs.

Barn Owl. Remained common till about 2010, after which decline, very notable since 2014. The decline seems to track decline in human-commensal mammals (rats, etc.) due to tough plastic garbage bins and reduction in littering, and probably also to stronger rodenticides; the state has now banned the strongest rodenticide because of devastating effect on wildlife. Still fairly frequent in suburban areas, but sharp decline since 2022-3, probably due at least in part to continuing use of extremely strong rodenticides.

Flammulated Owl. One record near mouth of Two Trees Canyon, Sept. 1992, too unusual to ignore.

Western Screech Owl. Still not uncommon in suburban areas with large oak trees. Rarely observed, because it calls primarily in the wee hours of the late night, but sleepless nights reveal it was and is regular everywhere I have lived in Riverside.

Great Horned Owl. This powerful predator maintains several nesting pairs in the Box Springs Mountains, Sycamore Canyon, UCR campus, and suburbs—it is a common bird for a predator. It is probably a main reason for cat disappearances that get blamed on “coyotes.”  A pair has always lived and nested in Two Trees Canyon. Pairs occur in every major canyon, and in many old and large suburban trees.

Burrowing Owl. Rare migrant. Formerly common breeder in the interior valleys, even in quite urban areas around Riverside. Now eliminated, probably from all of western Riverside County, by suburbanization. I saw it as a breeding bird in Norco, in 1956. It is long gone.

Spotted Owl. One spent the first part of winter in Two Trees Canyon, first noticed 1-26-1988 (but surely there earlier) to 2-28-1988. Frequently photographed.

Long-eared Owl. Rare migrant. Regular, even common (at least formerly), in winter in old orchards in the San Jacinto Wildlife Area, but declining everywhere (as it is throughout North America). Formerly nested in riparian areas of the Inland Empire (Dawson 1923), likely including the Santa Ana River wetlands; nested at Morongo Reserve till fairly recently. Now altogether gone as a breeding bird in southern California.

Lesser Nighthawk. Said to have been common in open valley areas in the old days; now gone as a breeding bird from the Inland Empire. Occasionally seen in migration.

Common (Booming) Nighthawk. Rare wanderer from San Bernardino Mountains, where it breeds (but very much less commonly than formerly). Seen over Moreno Valley and Box Springs range, but not for many years.

Common Poorwill. Rare but regular migrant; slopes of the hills, e.g. in Two Trees Canyon. Much less common than before, when probably summer resident.

Vaux’s Swift. Uncommon spring migrant. Formerly much more common. Usually seen only when heavy cloud cover forces it to fly low. Steady decline over decades, throughout its range.

White-throated Swift. Much less common than formerly. Still fairly common migrant into the 2000s, but now definitely uncommon everywhere. Probably was once a fairly regular breeder in rockier areas. Formerly nested under highway bridges near Box Springs (the springs themselves) and may occasionally still. Rare nester elsewhere.

Black-chinned Hummingbird. This aggressive hummingbird succeeded well until the droughts after 2012. Growth of planted and wild sycamores led to an increase, especially where planted sycamores were near households with hummingbird feeders. Peak around 2011-2012; fewer in 2013; final, total collapse in 2016, when only migrants were observed in the canyon and in most of northeast Riverside. A displaying male in May 2018 indicated there was at least one pair in the lower canyon that year. It has now apparently completely deserted the whole area for breeding. Over the state it has been declining at 1-2% per year (English et al. 2022).

Anna’s Hummingbird. Always common resident. Now commoner than before, spreading with suburbs and feeders. Largest of hummers, it dominates the feeders and also most flowers.

Costa’s Hummingbird. Formerly abundant. Considerably less common now, because fire has turned the flowering bush areas into cheat grass and because drought has reduced the native flowers even more since 2001. Still found, but in steadily shrinking numbers, in the Box Springs wherever there are reliable summer flowers. Costa’s has taken to civilization, but Anna’s and Allen’s beat it out from feeders. It survives especially where humans have created desertlike habitat. Its adaptation to suburbs has led to its meeting the Anna’s and hybridizing; hybrids were apparently extremely rare before 1970 but are not so rare now.

Rufous Hummingbird. Far less common than formerly. Was a very common spring and late summer migrant in the 1960s. Now rare. Still a common summer migrant (July-August) around red flowers in the hills. There is a massive decline rangewide, probably from pesticides etc. on the wintering grounds. Statewide, Rufous/Allen’s hummingbirds declined at 7% per year from 2009 to 2019, indicating a horrific population crash, not fully explained (English et al. 2022).

Allen’s Hummingbird. Dramatic invader. Formerly in southern California (at least south and east of Ventura) confined to Channel Islands and Palos Verdes Peninsula. Spread in recent years, reaching Riverside at some undetermined point possibly in the 1990; first known nesting in 2008. Now common resident of the city, wherever there are many red flowers. Does not occur in wild areas, except briefly as a migrant; strictly a yard and garden bird. Its rapid spread and success in southern California cities, starting from a small population in Palos Verdes Hills (probably augmented from other sources), contrasts dramatically with the decline of most species, and of this species in particular in much of its range.

Calliope Hummingbird. Very rare migrant.

Belted Kingfisher. Uncommon migrant and winter visitor at ponds.

Acorn Woodpecker. Expanding as a suburban bird, as planted oaks grow and flourish. This bird did not occur in the area as a breeder before the late 1960s. There were no oaks here in the old days. By the late 1960s it had colonized areas of the city that had old (human-planted) live oak trees, and it has steadily increased in range and numbers since. Strictly a suburban bird, it almost never appears in the wild areas. Some decline appears to have followed the serious drought of 2020-22; some stabilization since.

Red-breasted Sapsucker. Rare, winter. Rarer than formerly.

Downy Woodpecker. Formerly common in winter, possibly breeding in Santa Ana River bottoms. Now essentially gone, though wanderers may occasionally appear.

Hairy Woodpecker. Rare wanderer. One appeared in fall 2017 and stayed through the winter in Two Trees Canyon.

Nuttall’s Woodpecker. Common resident; no change, perhaps even some increase with growth of trees. A common suburban bird, occurring also in all riparian areas. Readily comes to feeders, thus augmenting its success.

Northern Flicker. Uncommon winter visitor. Formerly common resident, no change noted from 1966 to 2011—but in the spring of 2011 all the flickers in the area, from Two Trees Canyon to the whole of Riverside city, disappeared, apparently simultaneously. They are now uncommon winter visitors. Drought and decline in ant numbers seem likely causes.

Olive-sided Flycatcher. Formerly uncommon migrant. Now very rare. The decline of this bird from one of the commonest in North America 40 years ago to extreme rarity now has been very striking. Factors identified in the literature include changes in forest composition that make its nests more findable to predators, and cultivation on its very limited wintering grounds in South America. There is also the tremendous decline of large insects everywhere, and the abundance of pesticides on the bird’s migration routes as well as its wintering area. Possibly it is given to population fluctuations; it was not scientifically described until 1831, and Audubon considered it extremely rare. Yet in the 20th century it was abundant in evergreen forests throughout North America.

Western Wood Pewee. Formerly very common migrant, now uncommon. Much less common than formerly.

Willow Flycatcher. Uncommon migrant. Formerly an extremely common nesting bird in riparian areas of southern California (Dawson 1923), now completely extirpated except for tiny, local relict populations (not in our area). Cowbirds appear to be the cause, along with destruction of much of the riparian woodlands.

Hammond’s Flycatcher. Rare to uncommon migrant. Empidonax flycatchers are notoriously hard to tell apart. All are seen locally. Pacific-slope is the most common and regular; Hammond’s may be next, or Willow. Definite decline in Empidonax flycatchers of all types in recent decades.

Gray Flycatcher. Rare migrant and very rare winter bird.

Dusky Flycatcher. Rare migrant, much rarer than formerly.

Pacific-slope Flycatcher. Fairly common migrant; has bred in Two Trees Canyon’s densest riparian area. No longer breeds and is much less common than once.

Black Phoebe. Abundant resident. Expanding steadily with suburbanization and sprinklers. Usually stays in the suburbs, but appears anywhere that has any water at all, natural or piped. Population leveled off and has declined recently (since 2020, sharply since 2022).

Say’s Phoebe. Common, winter; breeds in higher dry areas nearby, including the Box Springs Mountains (now from top to bottom). Has actually increased, with conversion of brush to grass over most of the Box Springs Mountains and Sycamore Canyon Park.

This is the only bird that has clearly increased for reasons other than suburbanization. It has taken over the vast areas that were formerly coastal sage scrub but are now weedy grassland. Doubtfully bred in the area as of the 1950s, but now is one of the commonest breeding birds of the open areas, and has even invaded suburbs where there are open patches to forage. Its astonishing ability on the wing, which give it the Indigenous name of “wind’s grandchild” in Arizona, allows it to engage in long chases of even tiny prey. Population has leveled off since 2020.

Ash-throated Flycatcher. Rapidly decreasing migrant, perhaps still rare summer breeder in the hills. Formerly common migrant and breeding bird. Replacement of chaparral and coastal sage scrub with cheat grass has cost it most of its breeding habitat here. However, most of its habitat in the western US and in Mexico is intact, and the key to its decline is the steady decline in large insects. It is one of the fast-disappearing guild of large-insect-eaters.

Cassin’s Kingbird. This is an interesting story. A few years after the Westerns largely disappeared, the Cassin’s began to expand, presumably to fill the niche. They often hunt from the very same trees the Westerns used. Most if not all the expansion is since 2000. Numbers of both kingbirds leveled off around 2011, with the Cassin’s common but no longer increasing, and the Western rare but hopefully stable. Nests abundantly in suburbs and wild riparian woodland. The extreme droughts of 2015-16 and 2020-22 led to abandonment of some of these nesting points, however. Decrease in 2024.

Western Kingbird. Formerly abundant summer breeding bird in all open grassland and field areas. Now almost gone as a breeder, as it is from almost all of southern California. (Statewide, it survives mostly in places with extensive not-very-disturbed grassland.)  Still fairly common migrant. Survives, or did until recently, as breeder in the wilder parts of Moreno Valley badlands and elsewhere—ironically, occupying the newly created grasslands resulting from replacement of chaparral by cheat grass. A couple of pairs survive and reproduce in the March Air Force Base ammunition storage facility south of Alessandro, where the birds are protected by chain-link fencing and razor wire. Successfully bred in the UCR agricultural fields in 2011 and apparently in 2013, and apparently at head of Two Trees Canyon in 2013. Most interestingly, a family appeared and successfully nested in the trees in the open country at the end of Manfield St. in 2015—the same trees being occupied by a family of Cassin’s. In spite of the high drama inevitable in kingbird families, the two families apparently got along well. Unfortunately, the droughts of 2015-16 and 2020-22 reduced the already-small population.

Loggerhead Shrike. Now rare migrant. The last breeding pair I saw in the area lived at the mouth of Two Trees Canyon. It nested every year, and usually raised young; it disappeared in the early 1990s. The young never seemed to establish themselves. This bird is now almost gone from southern California, as from most of its range. One of the more depressing worldwide events of the last 20-30 years has been the decline of many, if not most, shrikes. (Birding in Hong Kong reveals the same decline in the once-abundant Brown Shrikes that we see in Loggerheads here.) Declines of large insects, loss of grassland, and direct poisoning by insecticides, are causes.

Warbling Vireo. Formerly abundant migrant, now uncommon. This bird used to be an abundant breeding species of riparian forests in southern California. Cowbirds and habitat loss have wiped it out. It now appears completely or almost completely extirpated from southern California.

Bell’s Vireo. Formerly common migrant and summer breeding bird (at least nearby); declined due to nest parasitization by cowbirds. With the decline of cowbirds, this vireo expanded again, becoming common in riparian areas nearby, though so far not in the Box Springs Mountains (except as a rare migrant). However, several breed around Box Springs. Breeds abundantly in Sycamore Canyon Park and the riparian areas south of it across Alessandro Blvd. Supposedly saved in the Santa Ana River bottoms due to volunteers and paid staff systematically going through the willow thickets and throwing cowbird eggs out of vireo nests. Alas, higher-nesting vireos like the Warbling Vireo did not benefit from this.

Plumbeous Vireo. Very rare migrant.

Cassin’s Vireo. Uncommon migrant. Formerly much more numerous, though never really common. This bird has suffered extreme declines in the mountains where it breeds, tracking the rapid rise of cowbird numbers there as well as drought and fire.

Western Scrub-Jay. Some reduction from West Nile in 2010, but now about as common as ever. Largely a suburban bird now; natural habitat is so degraded by fires and cheat grass that the birds have taken to the suburbs. Seems to have shared in the widespread and rather mysterious decline of birds in 2023-4.

American Crow. This bird has taken a terrific beating from West Nile virus. The population declined well over 90% in the first 2 years of the virus (by my counts), and declined further since. However, they are rapidly recovering, and are common again, though nothing like their former abundance. There used to be many thousands breeding in the river bottom. Many streamed over to feed at the now-closed garbage dump between Blue Mountain and Pigeon Pass. Successive waves of West Nile keep knocking them back, however, with a serious outbreak in 2014. It might seem hard to be sorry for a bird that eats so many other birds’ eggs and young, but the highly social crow must be seriously and sadly affected by seeing the death of young and of flockmates.

Northern Raven. Very abundant resident. Increasing, as garbage and roadkills get commoner and competition from crows and vultures disappears. Lives mainly in the wildlands, but forages all over the city, seeking anything live or dead that has high nutrient value.

Horned Lark. Formerly common breeder in wide open fields, at least in Moreno Valley; now gone. Migrant in grassfields of Sycamore Canyon and occasionally UCR fields. Still bred in large numbers in the Eastern Municipal Water District lands until the late 20-teens, but this colony abandoned (a few larks in the area in spring 2022 seem not to have stayed). This tracks a general decline of the species in California, where its habitat is now suburbanized, overgrazed, or used by off-road vehicles and the like.

Purple Martin. Formerly very rare migrant. Not seen in recent years. This bird was always rare in southern California. It has declined steadily for the last 50 years, apparently throughout its range. Starlings out-competing martins for nesting holes have had at least something to do with this, but decline of large insects is clearly a more important factor.

Northern Rough-winged Swallow. Common but erratic migrant; some breed in lower parts of the Box Springs area, especially under freeway overpasses near Box Springs itself. Ironically, this once rarest of local swallows is the least affected by decline, though it too is fading slowly.

Violet-green Swallow. Formerly common migrant, but, as for Tree, much less so than once. Visible decline since drought became serious in 2020, and, as with other birds hard hit by drought, not recovering since. Very few in 2024.

Tree Swallow. Common early migrant, but far less common than even two decades ago. Very rarely seen in spring 2024. May still breed locally, but evidence is scarce.

Cliff Swallow. Major decline. Huge population as of 1966, nesting—among other places—under the cornices of the Citrus Experiment Station buildings (now the Business School) and on the agricultural buildings at UCR. The species has declined throughout California, with habitat loss (especially loss of reliable mud supplies for nest-building) and with loss of aerial insects. Some still nest in UCR’s agricultural fields. In 2014, the birds established a flourishing colony under the freeway bridge over University Avenue, showing that no amount of traffic can discourage them; in 2016 a few still nested there, but then no more. A large colony of barn and cliff swallows persisted in the Eastern Municipal Water District waterworks and nearby March Base ammunition storage facility, a large area with much water that is securely protected, until drought (probably) led to decrease, but some rallying by 2024.

This bird occurred in millions in southern California in the 1960s, with up to 100,000 counted at nesting season at San Juan Capistrano Mission. None has nested there for many years now. The bird was once a major part of the local bird fauna, but is now facing extirpation. No other swallow has declined so much, and indeed the numerical decline of this swallow is the greatest of any species except (probably) the Brewer’s Blackbird. The need for quality mud and probably a need for large colonies (for protection and socializing) are factors.

Barn Swallow. Erratically common migrant. A few (formerly many) pairs breed in the Riverside area and erratically forage over wildlands. The last significant colony, in the EMWD grounds and nearby, is greatly reduced. Formerly abundant.

Mountain Chickadee. Formerly casual, usually after winter storms with heavy snow in the mountains. Now a fairly regular winter bird, especially in the UCR botanic garden but sometimes in pines nearer the mountains. Probably tracking the growth of planted conifers.

Oak Titmouse. Formerly at least occasional, in suburbs and canyons, but very susceptible to West Nile, and thus now rare. Probably gone or nearly so, except as a casual visitor.

Bushtit. Still common everywhere that natural brush or extensive planted shrubbery occurs, but much less common after the extreme droughts of the 2000s, and gone from the vast areas of cheat grass where it abounded when those areas were coastal sage scrub. These birds can fluctuate in numbers dramatically from year to year and even from season to season, depending on conditions, making the level of decline hard to estimate, but it is certainly down at least 90% from the 1960s, largely because of loss of habitat to fire and drought. Visible decline throughout our area after the extreme 2021-2 drought.

Red-breasted Nuthatch. Rare wanderer in migration and winter, (but fairly regular winterer in pines on UCR campus). Irruptive, more common some winters.

White-breasted Nuthatch. Occasional wanderer, turning up in suburban areas.

Brown Creeper. Rare migrant or wanderer.

Rock Wren. Formerly abundant on the Box Springs Mtns. and Sycamore Canyon rocky areas, and indeed anywhere with extensive rocky outcrops. Less common after droughts since 2015. Sharp reduction from 2020 on, with drought, burros, and probably other problems.

Canyon Wren. Common in canyons of the Box Springs Mtns. Also in Sycamore Canyon. Declining, however, apparently tracking drought.

House Wren. Common, summer; slightly less so in winter. In spite of its name, it is confined to wild riparian areas in our area, and any wren seen around houses here is almost certain to be a Bewick’s. Much more common as migrant than as breeder. Apparent decline after 2020.

Bewick’s Wren. Common, but gone from pure-grass areas of the hills. Survives wherever some dense brush exists. Formerly abundant in the chaparral and sage scrub, so replacement of these by grass has meant a major population reduction—at least 90%–in the hills. It has, however, successfully colonized suburbia, and remains one of the commonest birds.

 Cactus Wren. Rare wanderer. A pair set up house in a large cactus garden (owned at the time by Jerry Gordon) at the mouth of Two Trees Canyon in the late 1980s and early 90s and bred, and indeed there was some spread, with records all along the west edge of the range, but the birds disappeared in the early 2000s. Otherwise, very rare visitor.

Blue-gray Gnatcatcher. Formerly fairly common winterer and migrant, now much less common. Probably bred locally in the old days.

California Gnatcatcher. The species was first described from “Riverside,” and occurred in our area; its nearest current breeding station is in the Gavilan Hills, if it still survives there. There are a few recent reports from the Box Springs Mountains area. My only observation in this area is of one near the end of Blaine St., Nov. 6, 2020.

Ruby-Crowned Kinglet. Common, winter. Possible decline noted; probably, individuals are staying farther north.

Wrentit. Still common, but drastically reduced by burning of hills and replacement of brush by introduced weedy grasses. Survives only where dense brush exists, but at least stable there, especially in poison oak thickets. Always commonest in riparian brush, which has expanded somewhat, but has lost almost all its habitat on the hills.

Western Bluebird. Common, winter. Formerly, usually did not show up till snow closed off mountain feeding areas. Now it appears early and stays late, and since about 2011 it nests (uncommonly) on and near UCR campus and erratically in Sycamore Canyon Park. A lovely addition to our fauna. Probably could not have nested without the recent decline in starling numbers. In the 1960s and 1970s it was eliminated from much of its lowland habitat through starlings pre-empting the tree holes it needs for nesting. Part of the increase may be due to the bluebirds being forced out of the mountains by drought and fires.

Swainson’s Thrush. Formerly common migrant, now uncommon. Largely (though not totally) eliminated as breeding bird from southern California, by riparian habitat decline and by cowbird parasitization of nests.

Hermit Thrush. Fairly common fall migrant and winterer. Less common than formerly.

American Robin. Still common wintering bird. Much less common in winter than it used to be. Global warming is letting them stay farther north. Breeds in the urban areas, though much less often than formerly. Robins, however, apparently did not breed in the lowlands at all until permanent watering, shade trees, and lawns entered the picture. Apparently wintering birds from the mountains or farther north simply decided to stay around. Numbers nesting in Riverside peaked in the 1980s-90s and have recently declined sharply.

Varied Thrush. Formerly extremely rare winter visitor to area. In the winter of 2014-15, hordes of them descended, with up to a dozen a day seen in the Botanic Gardens and one or two in Two Trees Canyon. This was a winter when several northern and eastern species appeared for the first time or in unusual numbers. No reason is apparent for this phenomenal migration. Since then, it is back to rarity.

California Thrasher. Still fairly common wherever natural brush occurs. Fire and subsequent replacement of brush by weedy grasses has reduced the population probably 90%. However, it has stabilized, remaining very common wherever even small patches of natural brush remain.

Sage Thrasher. Formerly rare to fairly frequent migrant, mostly March and April; now almost gone, due to decline of overall numbers as sagebrush disappears from the Great Basin.

Northern Mockingbird. Abundant resident, commoner than ever. This bird is now purely a human commensal in southern California, and increases with suburbia. Commonly observed in the wilder areas, also, foraging up from suburban nesting grounds, often to eat elderberries in the hills.

European Starling. Not here in the 1950s. Showed up mid-60s and common by late 60s. Kept increasing till peak around 1980s, then slow decline. Environmental sanitation seems to be the cause; the bird forages for insects but eats much human food wastes, and may depend on the latter. Now almost gone from the wilder areas. Pairs persist in Riverside city, commoner in denser suburbs near fast-food outlets.

American Pipit. Winter visitor. Much less common than formerly. Decline tracks loss of open fields. Still erratically common in the open grasslands on the higher parts of the Box Springs range, on UCR campus, and in grasslands of Sycamore Canyon Park.

Cedar Waxwing. Common winterer. Very much less common than before. This bird appears to be declining all over the west.

Phainopepla. Common migrant and occasional summer breeder in canyons and washes with elderberries and/or other small-berried bushes. Even manages to breed in suburban small parks.

Orange-crowned Warbler. Common migrant, rare winter. Less common than formerly, but has declined much less than most warblers.

Nashville Warbler. Fairly common migrant, much less so than formerly.

MacGillivray’s Warbler. Fairly common migrant, much less so than formerly.

Common Yellowthroat. Fairly common migrant, rare winter, occasional local breeder. Unlike other warblers, seems to be holding its own.

American Redstart. Very rare migrant.

Yellow Warbler. Formerly abundant migrant, breeding in riparian habitat. Now much less so, but may be recovering somewhat, though numbers seem erratic. Like the Warbling Vireo, this bird has been almost wiped out of southern California by cowbirds and riparian habitat loss. It was back on UCR campus as an apparently successful breeder in 2011 and since. An impressive population expansion led to its being downright common in summer 2014. Drought has thinned it out since, however. Breeds around Box Springs (the actual spring), and in other riparian areas nearby, but not in the riparian strips in the mountain range. Breeds in Sycamore Canyon Park riparian strips and the ecological strip south of it across Alessandro.

Yellow-rumped Warbler. Common migrant and winterer, but was much commoner once. Steady decline from about 1990, becoming a rapid and serious decline after 2010. The Myrtle type was a regular winterer in past years, but is now very rare.

Black-throated Gray Warbler. Now rare migrant. Very much less common than formerly; well over 90% decline, tracking horrific declines of its numbers in its mountain breeding areas. Drought probably has much to do with this, but perhaps insecticides on the wintering grounds are the real problem. Much of its range in California has burned out and become impossible for breeding purposes.

Townsend’s Warbler. Regular migrant, once seasonally common in Two Trees Canyon and UCR campus. Very much less common than formerly; overall decline over 90%. Formerly fairly common winterer in live oaks and similar trees in the suburbs around the Box Springs range and on UCR campus now much less common. The wintering population here is apparently all from the Queen Charlotte Islands, British Columbia. Much of its forest habitat in California has burned out in the last 10 years, greatly reducing breeding.

Hermit Warbler. Rare migrant, formerly much more numerous though never common. This bird depends on old-growth dense forest for breeding, and has lost most of its habitat to logging and forest fires. It is probably vulnerable on the wintering grounds also.

The Black-throated Gray, Townsend’s, and Hermit Warblers represent some of the most extreme declines of any migrants in our area.

Wilson’s Warbler. Formerly common to abundant migrant, now declined but still fairly common. Still, there seem to be fewer every year.

Yellow-breasted Chat. Summer visitor. Breeds at Box Springs (the actual spring). Has tried breeding elsewhere, and at least formerly was common breeder in the Santa Ana River bottoms. Otherwise uncommon migrant.

Western Tanager. Fairly common migrant. Far less common migrant than formerly. It is not clear why this bird has dramatically declined in the last two or three decades. Much of its California range has burned in the last 10 years, and drought has affected all the range. Large flocks were often seen in spring migration; now seeing even one or two birds is rather unusual. This bird nests in the same areas as the Black-headed Grosbeak, has somewhat similar feeding patterns, and was once at least as common, if not more so. The grosbeak has held its numbers, and is thus now much more common than the tanager. This needs explaining.

Black-headed Grosbeak. Common migrant, only slightly less common than formerly.

Blue Grosbeak. Breeds at least occasionally at Box Springs. Breeds regularly and commonly in Sycamore Canyon and nearby riparian strips. Has bred casually at other springs, but drought has probably ended this. Otherwise, rare migrant. This bird nests only in dense willow thickets near open grasslands. Despite cowbirds and suburbanization, it remains a common breeder in that habitat. Some reduction, presumably due to drought, from 2022; dramatic rebound in 2024.

Lazuli Bunting. Common migrant; formerly bred in the higher Box Springs (probably not every year; largely after fires), but drought has eliminated it in recent years. Breeds in ecological refuge strip and March Base ammunition storage facility south of Alessandro.

Indigo Bunting. Rare migrant; I saw one over several days in May 1994, Two Trees Canyon, and have suspected others in other years. Also Sycamore Canyon Park, April 13, 2021.

Green-tailed Towhee. Rare but regular migrant and winterer. Usually in urban areas, very rare in wild ones.

Spotted Towhee. Eliminated from the high parts of campus and from much of the Box Springs Mountains by post-fire replacement of native brush with introduced weedy annuals, with decline around 90% in such areas. Remains common where there still is brush. Uncommon but widespread in suburbs, wherever there are extensive areas of dense shrubbery.

California Towhee. This indestructible bird is commoner than ever. They even survive in areas where introduced weedy annuals have replaced sage scrub and chaparral, as long as there are any bushes at all. They are always the first birds to come back after fires, sometimes returning to their territories before the ground cools. Extremely abundant in the suburbs; few yards are without their pair. One key to its success was revealed when I watched a pair drive a hungry cat away from their nestling. The weight ratios are comparable to those of a human driving off a tyrannosaur.

Rufous-crowned Sparrow. Better able than other species to accommodate to the vegetation change from sage scrub to grass; still common on the hills. Less so than formerly, but nothing like the declines of the Bewick’s Wren, Wrentit, etc. Harder hit in Sycamore Canyon Park (which is more level and more thoroughly burned) than in the Box Springs Mountains. Unfortunately, overgrazing and general environmental damage by burros has eliminated this otherwise hardy, and very attractive, species from most of the Box Springs Mountains and other burro-infested hills.

Bell’s Sparrow. Greatly reduced in number by replacement of sage scrub by annuals, but they hang on wherever brush continues to exist. Gone from Two Trees Canyon and at least some other areas by 2011, but remains common all along the lower pediments of the Box Springs Mountains and in comparable habitats in Sycamore Canyon Park and south of Alessandro, wherever there are sizable tracts of coastal sage scrub surviving. Sage sparrows may occasionally wander here and should be watched for (the desert race of Bell’s is almost indistinguishable; our common one is the easily distinguished coastal race).

Black-throated Sparrow. Very rare migrant or wanderer.

Black-chinned Sparrow. Common migrant; still breeds in the higher parts of the Box Springs range; numbers steadily and greatly reduced by fires and droughts.

Brewer’s Sparrow. Formerly common migrant, mostly in spring; now greatly diminished in numbers.

Chipping Sparrow. Formerly common migrant and occasional winterer; now almost gone.

Grasshopper Sparrow. Formerly erratically and locally common breeder in Moreno Valley but hard to find; now gone from at least the west and central parts of Moreno Valley, because of urbanization. Spring migrant (and presumably fall migrant, but impossible to find unless singing) in grasslands of Sycamore Canyon Park, so presumably at least occasional in other grasslands.

Savannah Sparrow. Very common migrant, fairly common through the winter, in extensive grasslands and open areas, including all open level areas around the Box Springs Mountains, in Sycamore Canyon Park, on UCR campus, and elsewhere. Some reduction in numbers, but one of the least hard hit of our birds.

Vesper Sparrow. Common migrant in grasslands, such as the outwash area of Two Trees Canyon and the Sycamore Canyon Park grasslands. Regular in winter.

Lark Sparrow. Rare migrant; rarer than in previous decades. Formerly common migrant in Moreno Valley, fairly common winter; now much less common. Common breeder in grasslands in and around March Base ammunition storage facility, and possibly still in or near Sycamore Canyon Park, but requires protected ground areas for nesting.

Golden-crowned Sparrow. Common migrant and occasional winterer wherever there is dense brush. Much more often heard than seen.

White-throated Sparrow. Very rare wanderer, migration and winter.

White-crowned Sparrow. Abundant migrant and winterer (Gambel’s). Dark-lored birds, presumably oriantha, occasionally seen late in spring migration and very rarely in winter. No reduction in numbers noted.

Fox Sparrow. Rare migrant and wintering bird. Remains common in local mountains.

Song Sparrow. Abundant everywhere in dense riparian brush. Also extremely successful in suburbs, where any area with dense shrubbery will have its resident one. Probably has increased with suburbanization. Major decline in 2022-3 probably follows on the 2019-22 drought, but may indicate ravages of bird flu or the like, since two wet years have not reversed this decline.

Lincoln’s Sparrow. Uncommon but regular migrant and winterer wherever there is dense riparian brush.

Dark-eyed Junco. Migration and winter. Much less common than formerly. Almost all are the Oregon subspecies, but Slate-colored and Pink-sided have been seen. Less common in nearby mountains, also.

Western Meadowlark. Formerly extremely abundant winterer and frequent breeder, anywhere that was at all open. Conversion of high Box Springs Mtns to grass has brought a sizable wintering population, but even this population is sharply declining. A few sometimes stay around through the summer and may breed. This bird has crashed all over the west, with population declines of over 99% very widely in California. This decline tracks suburbanization, fencerow-to-fencerow cultivation, heavy pesticide use, conversion of native brush and grassland to weedy nonnatives, and heavy stocking rates of cattle. The only places where meadowlarks nest now are the few places with extensive grassland subject to light grazing, or controlled burning, as in the Santa Rosa Plateau reserve, or in protected areas that are open, like the San Jacinto Wildlife Area. A small population persists in the extremely closely guarded March Base ammunition storage facility.

Brown-headed Cowbird. Fairly common, especially in spring. Much less common than formerly, and declining due to trapping and decline of cattle raising, but still too common for the welfare of riparian birds. Its decline correlates with some rebound of breeding populations of Bell’s Vireo, Yellow-breasted Chat, and goldfinches (but then the goldfinches crashed again with drought).

Red-winged Blackbird. Occasional in migration and summer, where there is water. Once a common migrant, now very rare. (Tricolor and Yellow-headed have been seen in the past, but only as stragglers.)

Brewer’s Blackbird. The most spectacular and mysterious decline in our area. In farming days, this bird occurred in flocks of thousands in the area. Now it is totally gone from northeast Riverside. It has declined all over southern California. My observations suggest that foot pox (avian pox) is one reason; many birds on UCR campus were heavily infected. Cleaner farming is another, urban sanitation another, starling competition probably is another. There are no doubt other problems. The bird has been essentially a human commensal for decades; its natural habitat was probably damp areas near water. It early deserted these for farms, and in its heyday it was largely a farm and ranch bird associated with dairies and other farm environments with much water and food. The last population in northeast Riverside hung on by scavenging in the Stater Brothers parking lot north of campus. It faded out by 2020. The species is still a town bird in Los Angeles.

Great-tailed Grackle. This bird invaded San Bernardino and other California communities, becoming abundant at Glen Helen Park and nearby golf courses. However, it stopped increasing by the late 20th century, and has not become established in our part of Riverside. My only observation is April 25, 2022, over the southern part of Sycamore Canyon Park. More apt to occur at Fairmount Park.

Bullock’s Oriole. Always a fairly common migrant, but much less so than formerly due to loss of nesting habitat in California. However, unlike the smaller riparian birds, it is still seen, due to its being rather large for cowbird parasitism (cowbirds prefer smaller birds, and more open nests) and because this oriole has adapted itself to suburbs. Occasionally still breeds not far from our area in open stands of trees in grassland country. Seems to be declining steadily.

Hooded Oriole. Common summer resident in fan palm trees; an obligatory fan palm nester. Thus, probably not native to the area, appearing only with palm plantings. Dawson (1923) considered it much less common than Bullock’s, a situation now reversed. The Hooded faced a decline when starlings moved into the area and took over the palm trees, but it survived and has rallied considerably, as starling population declines. It is now commoner than ever, expanding with suburbs and growth of taller palms. Hummingbird feeders help this oriole. Unfortunately, the urban areas now trim palms excessively, to their major damage and to the cost of the orioles. Some visible reduction in parts of Riverside in 2024 clearly followed extreme palm pruning.

Scott’s Oriole. Very rare migrant and wintering bird. Extreme droughts in the desert have greatly reduced the population of this species in recent years. One noted near foot of Box Springs Mtns., May 6, 2018.

Purple Finch. Formerly common in migration and winter. I recorded it on almost every morning walk in spring through the 1980s. Now mostly gone, probably largely because of cowbird parasitism on its breeding grounds. Still occurs erratically in winter. Greatly reduced in breeding in the surrounding lower mountains where it once was abundant.

House Finch. Became commoner in early and mid 20th century, due to orchards and suburbanization. Some decline recently, especially since 2011. This is probably because of droughts and the slow decline of home and commercial fruit growing, but also because of an eye disease first noted in 1994 that has now swept the continent, affecting house finches. Sharp reduction in 2023, with stabilization but no increase in 2024, almost certainly due to disease, possibly bird flu.

Pine Siskin. Occasional, winter, often after storms in the mountains and in irruption years.

Lawrence Goldfinch. Formerly uncommon but regular in Riverside, common in parts of Moreno Valley; now rare, as it is in most of southern California. The usual combination of factors that devastate riparian birds—cowbirds and habitat destruction—is presumably the cause. This bird’s entire habitat is being urbanized. With cowbird decline, there was considerable recovery. The birds were abundant in 2010 and 2011. However, they declined after that, almost certainly because of drought, and by 2015-16 were rare again, with continued decrease since.

Lesser Goldfinch. Remained abundant till recently; still common, but sharp decline since the droughts since 2001, especially from 2013 on, with real collapse in 2023. Decline tracks the decline of home fruit growing and of orchards, as well as the droughts. Hard to explain the recent crash without postulating an epidemic, perhaps bird flu, in 2023. Stabilization but no increase in 2024.

American Goldfinch. Like other small riparian birds, extreme decline in southern California. Still fairly common wintering bird through the early 2000s, but became increasingly rare. With decline of cowbirds, this bird appeared to be recovering, but then came drought. Population very low in 2013 and even rarer since. One in south Sycamore Canyon Park on April 27, 2021, is the last I have noted locally.

House Sparrow. Not as common as it used to be. Declining widely. This scavenging human commensal has declined steadily with environmental sanitation, but still succeeds by eating bird seed handouts and what crumbs still fall. More rapid decline in the recent droughts.

Nutmeg Manakin. Invasive; a southeast Asian bird propagated by escapes or releases from cages. Common locally, and rather erratically, in suburbs around UCR.

Pin-tailed Whydah (Vidua macroura). Escaped cage birds wander over southern California, and turn up in suburbs here, notably Andulka Park. They do not seem to have a resident population at present.

Major declines of breeding birds:

Turkey Vulture

American Kestrel

Rock Dove

Mourning Dove

Lesser Nighthawk

White-throated Swift

Costa’s Hummingbird

Ash-throated Flycatcher

Tree Swallow (major decline)

Cliff Swallow (extreme decline)

Scrub Jay

American Crow (extreme decline, then some recovery)

Oak Titmouse

Bushtit

Bewick’s Wren

Wrentit

Robin

Starling

Blue-gray Gnatcatcher

Yellow Warbler

Lazuli Bunting (possibly all gone)

Spotted Towhee

Bell’s Sparrow

Black-chinned Sparrow

Grasshopper Sparrow

Western Meadowlark (extreme decline relative to 1950s)

Brown-headed Cowbird (extreme decline)

Bullock’s Oriole

Lawrence’s Goldfinch

Lesser Goldfinch

American Goldfinch

Most of the neotropical migrants have suffered declines ranging from minor (e.g. Black-headed Grosbeak) to extreme (Olive-sided Flycatcher), and many wintering birds too, including the Townsend’s Warbler.

Totally extirpated as breeders in the immediate area and more widely:

White-tailed Kite (increased, then declined, now apparently completely gone)

Ring-necked Pheasant

Spotted Dove

Common Ground Dove

Burrowing Owl

Black-chinned Hummingbird

Northern Flicker

Loggerhead Shrike

Warbling Vireo

California Gnatcatcher? (early status uncertain)

Brewer’s Blackbird

Significant increases, all stopped or reversed as of 2024:

Cooper’s Hawk

Band-tailed Pigeon (increased, then declined again, but still commoner than formerly)

Anna’s Hummingbird

Allen’s Hummingbird

Acorn Woodpecker

Cassin’s Kingbird

Black Phoebe (recent decline)

Say’s Phoebe

Northern Mockingbird (steady)

House Finch (recently reversed or stabilized)

Nutmeg Manakin (new, introduced species)

References

Carson, Rachel. 1962. Silent Spring. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Cazalis, Victor. 2022. “Species Richness Response to Human Pressure Hides Important Assemblage Transformations.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States 119:e2107361119.

Dawson, William Leon. 1923. The Birds of California. San Francisco: South Moulton Company.

English, Simon G., et al. 2022. “Demography of Two Species and One Genus of Hummingbirds with Contrasting Population Trends in California, USA.” Journal of Field Ornithology 92:475-484.

Iknayan, Kelly, and Steven R. Beissinger. 2018. “Collapse of a Desert Bird Community over the Past Century Driven by Climate Change.”  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 115:8597-8602.

Rosenberg, Kenneth V.; Adriaan M. Dokter; Peter J. Blancher; John R. Sauer; Adam C. Smith; Paul A. Smith; Jessica C. Stanton; Arvind Punjabi; Laura Helft; Michael Parr; Peter P. Marra.  2019. “Decline of the North American Avifauna.”  Science 366:120-124.

Sibley, David Allen. 2000. The Sibley Guide to Birds. New York: Knopf.

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China Food Updates

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Stand Straight and Never Bend:

Twelve Thousand Years of Feeding People in the Face of Drought, Flood, Fire, and War

E. N. Anderson

This post consists of material on Chinese food that I have assembled over a lifetime, and not published because I haven’t had enough time or energy to finalize the work. I think this material will be useful, especially to food historians of China. I have organized it, more or less, by historic period, and then by topic, following the outline of my book THE FOOD OF CHINA (1988).

A Chinese proverb says: “Freezing to death, stand straight and face the wind; starving to death, never bend” (Rohsenow 2012, proverb D183).

This work is dedicated to the memories and the continuing lives of billions of farmers, in East Asia and throughout the world, who froze, starved, suffered, and continued to feed the world.

“Let us now praise famous men….

There be of them, that have left a name behind them, that their praises might be reported.

And some there be, which have no memorial; who are perished, as though they had never been; and are become as though they had never been born; and their children after them.

But these were merciful men, whose righteousness hath not been forgotten….

Their seed shall remain for ever, and their glory shall not be blotted out.”

Ecclesiasticus 44:1, 8-13

Chapter 1. Introduction

For thousands years, the Chinese world has fed an increasing population.  For the last ten thousand, more and more of the food has come from cultivation. Domesticated crops and animals replaced wild foods. More intensive methods of agriculture appeared. Today, China feeds over one and a quarter billion people, mostly from domestic production, despite rapidly increasing imports.

The Chinese rural proverb above explains, with perfect adequacy, how they did it. This book fills out the details.

Success has come at a cost. The natural environment is profoundly altered. Charismatic megafauna is largely gone. Even relatively small, innocuous species are at risk. More serious is the danger to the whole food production system. Environmental problems mount, ramifying through a complexly linked system, destabilizing it.

The time has come to do a full evaluation of the system’s development, in order to see what can be done to save it and save the future. We need to evaluate what worked and what failed. Several excellent works have appeared, such as Robert Marks’ China: Its Environment and History (2012) and Brian Lander’s The King’s Harvest (2021). These need extension over longer time, and into the future.

China’s most basic and important secret of success is perfectly captured in the proverb at the head of the chapter. For ten thousand years, billions of farmers, fishers, herb gatherers, food workers, and ordinary Chinese in all walks of life stood straight in the wind, and starved without giving way. Their incredible, quiet heroism sustains us all now. It deserves full recognition. We need to know how they did it: how they chose what crops to grow, how they domesticated these, how they developed whole agroecosystems from them.

A key realization is that they did not do it alone. From earliest times, the people of the land now called China had contacts stretching across Eurasia. They were in touch with peoples of central Asia, northeast Asia, southeast Asia, and, eventually, points farther afield: Europe and Africa from early imperial times, the Americas after 1500. Thus, a study of Chinese cultural ecology must range over the entire world, simply to get adequate coverage. Another reason for world perspective is comparison. Understanding the origins and development of agriculture in China requires comparative examination of such matters throughout the world. This book is thus a study in human ecology, focused on China but encompassing the entire planet, focused on ecological theory but encompassing theories from agricultural development, world-systems sociology, and sociopolitical history.

I am enormously indebted to a many friends who have assisted in my search for Chinese food lore. First of all, I thank my lifelong coworker Paul Buell. Going back in time, my mentors included above all Edward Schafer, and then much more briefly, but very significantly, K. C. Chang, Yuanren Chao, Wolfram Eberhard, G. William Skinner, and Arthur Wolf. In the field, I worked most with Chao Hungfai and Chow Kwoktai. More recently, major ongoing help has come from Jenny Banh, Katy Hung Biggs, Miranda Brown, Fuchsia Dunlop, Brian Landor, Erica Peters, Carolyn Peters, Francesca Sabban, David Schak, James and Rubie Watson, and many others.

            This book completes a lifework of studying China’s food system. Many years ago I wrote a book, The Food of China (1988), intended as a modest contribution to a cultural ecology of east Asia. This book has remained one of the few accessible studies of Chinese food, and as such has achieved a rather undeserved status as a reference book. It is now far out of date for such a purpose. In particular, archaeology has made enormous strides since the 1980s, dramatically pushing back the dates of Chinese agriculture, and greatly increasing our knowledge of early millennia.

Many readers of the earlier work became captivated by descriptions of wonderful food, and missed the fact that I was largely concerned with describing a highly successsful agricultural system, and crediting its success to the billions of anonymous farmers and food workers who created it. The world now needs more than ever the insights of traditional East Asian agriculture.

In the period since The Food of China appeared, serious studies of Chinese food have greatly increased. My book was soon followed by Frederick Simoons’ encyclopedic Food in China (1991). Meanwhile, several brilliant studies by the great French scholar Françoise Sabban brought a whole new level of sophistication to the field.

Then, with the new millennium, came several truly magistral syntheses of selected areas. Hu Shiu-Ying, an amazing ethnobotanist whose career spans over 70 years of research, produced her own life synthesis, Food Plants of China (2005). Dr. Hu passed away in 2012 at the age of 102—surely a testimony to the virtues of Chinese food and medicinal herbs.

H. T. Huang’s life work on Chinese fungal and fermentation technologies reached fruition in the enormous volume (Huang 2000; Dr. Huang passed away in 2012 at the age of 95). Chinese ferments also received their fair share of attention in Sandor Ellix Katz’ The Art of Fermentation (2012), another magistral work. Fermented foods can now boast that two of best books in world food literature are written about them.

Lillian Li completed a similar life project in her definitive study of famine in Chinese history (Li 2007). The French scholar Georges Métailié (2015) contributed a long volume on the history of botany to the Needham series, Science and Civilisation in China. It discusses food plants along with other works, but is focused on the history of plant books and bencao (“basic herbal”) literature, so has little on food. Needham’s own introductions to botany (Needham, Lu and Huang 1986; Needham and Daniels 1996) are much better at concepts and on food.

The German sinologist Thomas Höllmann has written a fine general introductory book, beautifully illustrated, translated as The Land of Five Flavors: A Cultural Hisory of Chinese Cuisine (2014). A pleasant and accurate new history of Chinese food is The Emperor’s Feast, by Jonathan Clements.

Göran Aijmer continues a 60-year career of studying Chinese festivals and rituals, which always involve highly symbolic food (Aijmer 1965, 2003, 2018—a mere thin sample of an enormous bibliography). His 2018 paper compares ritual use and ideas about rice in south China and the Shan groups of Myanmar and India.

Food in art is covered in a volume edited by Stacey Pierson (2022).

I have written several obscure publications on Chinese food since 1988 (notably Anderson 1990, 1991, 2004, 2007, 2009, 2011a, 2011b, 2013a, 2013b), and two books that brings together recent findings and old data on early and medieval Chinese food (Anderson 2014, 2019).

The other, and more often studied, face of cultural ecology is the change and development of human ecological systems over time. Environmental history of China, once an arcane topic (Elvin 1973, 2004a, 2004b; Elvin and Lui 1998), has exploded as a field, with major works coming out literally every day. Mark Elvin’s morbid assessment of long decline in the environment and the welfare of the people and my own more upbeat analysis in The Food of China is well balanced by Robert Marks in two superb studies (1998, 2012; see also Marks 2009). His careful accounts show indeed a rapid and depressing environmental decline, but also China’s success in feeding a rapidly expanding population. None of us disagrees on the facts; the difference is that Elvin and Marks are more impressed by the loss of biodiversity and environmental riches, while I am more impressed by the success of a huge, diverse empire in feeding its people reasonably well without totally destroying its entire life support system. Europe coped with rising population by conquering weaker lands, genociding or enslaving their inhabitants, and exporting millions of people to them. China did not have that option, except for relatively small migrations from southeast China. I have discussed these issues at more length elsewhere (Anderson 2014, 2019).

            Brian Lander’s The King’s Harvest (2021) stands out as an insightful synthesis of the development of the Chinese state and its environmental policies from the Neolithic through Qin. Lander has also done thorough studies of the animals of the Neolithic (Lander 2020; Lander and Brunson 2018). Lander has also provided an excellent oversight of the steady replacement of wetlands by fields and cities in the Yangzi Valley (2022a). Kathryn Linduff and coworkers have produced an excellent analytic history of China’s early intereaction with neighbors (2018).

Gang Deng’s major opus The Premodern Chinese Economy (1999)chronicles the long process of developing a rural economy based on free small-scale farmers and an agriculturally conscious and sensitive state that did a great deal to aid that sector. He chronicles the successes of many small landowners in passing civil service exams, thus allowing upward mobility, but also documents the enormous number and seriousness of famines. Like others who have written histories of Chinese agriculture, he sees the steady shrinking of farm sizes, forcing harder and harder work and innovation by the farmers just to stay at the same level. The government was willing to help, possibly all too willing, since it trapped farmers in an endless cycle rather than giving them other opportunities. Indeed, but I agree with most historians that the reason for the trap was increasing government autocracy, and thus hidebound reaction, in Ming and Qing, rather than a structural matter.

All these works note the increasingly rapid decline of large wild mammals, and this has been put on a solid footing with dates, maps, and numbers by Shuqing Teng and associates (2020) and Xinru Wan and others (2019). They record the disappearance of elephants and rhinoceroses (once common), the near disappearance of bears and tigers, the reduction of wild camels to a tiny handful (now threatened by roads; Yang et al. 2019), the loss of most deer, and other sad losses. These declined along with the rise of human agriculture, but the rhinos were hunted into extinction even before that got out of hand. Even the little muskdeer is about gone, doomed by its valuable musk, a scented oily compound in a gland on its back. On the other hand, Père David’s Deer has been reintroduced. It survived in Qing only in royal parks. From here it went to England, surviving there in parks. It died out in China. (It is properly milu in Chinese, but often called xiangsi, “resembles four,” because it looks like a mix of deer, horse, donkey, and goat—or sometimes other animals.)

Among more specialized recent works we may count three excellent books on the Yellow River:  David Pietz’ Yellow River (2016), Ling Zhang’s The River, the Plain, and the State (2016), and Ruth Mostern’s The Yellow River, A Natural and Unnatural History (2021). Both biographize this center of China’s history. The river heads high up on the Tibetan plateau, then flows through mountain and desert country, making a huge bend around the Ordos Desert. It then flows south through the loess plateau, then turns east, cuts through mountains, and opens onto the North China Plain. Here it is blocked from flowing directly to sea by the Shandong mountains, so it must turn north or south to get to its fate in the ocean. Over time, it has shifted back and forth, with catastrophic effects in the historic period. Mostern provides an amazing array of graphics, from her own beautiful color photographs to charts and maps of every period’s management, settlements, and disasters. The book is not only a historical account, but an atlas.

The river became “China’s Sorrow” after the deforestation or grassland destruction for agriculture of the loess plateaus along its middle course, a process well begun by Han and catastrophic by Song. Earlier, much of the country included in the Great Bend had been rather fertile, with lakes (cf. Fan 2018 for even earlier good times). In Tang it deteriorated, especially during and after the great rebellions. Brushy and dry in cold dry periods, forested on higher ground in warmer and wetter ones, the loess plateau became more and more damaged by human-caused fires as well as agriculture from about 3000 years ago (Mostern 2021; Tan et al. 2018).

The wars of Song and Yuan led to violence and chaos, which, among other things, led to massive deforestation to build fortifications in the loess region, a center of violence and strife. In Song, the North China Plain also became devastated. The river broke its banks in 1048 and cut a whole new channel, debouching north of Shandong. Then in the 1120s came enormous floods (Zhang 2016). In 1128, the local governor, Du Chong, made what may be the most disastrous mistake in all military history: he opened the dykes to flood the land in a foolish and hopeless attempt to stop the southward advance of the Jin forces. The river cut a new channel again, moving south, and devastated millions of peoples’ homes and farms. The loss of life reached astronomical figures.

The Yuan briefly tamed the river, during a period of mild weather, but renewed rains and storms broke it out again. Ming saw not only more and worse flooding, but an earthquake in the Wei River area killed an estimated 830,000 people (Mostern 2021:185), many buried when their homes, caves excavated into the loess, collapsed. Enormous famines and other disasters from then till the mid-twentieth century are chronicled by Pietz (2016) and Mostern.

Many excellent understandings of the problem were aired, and many good ideas on fixing it were written up. Some were even tried: distributory channels, dredging, canals, multiple levees, dams. The problem was insuperable in preindustrial times. Only late 20th century technology could do the job, by a combination of big dams, small dams, reforestation, terracing, levees, diversion, and rechanneling. Even now, erosion is a problem and flooding is a danger. The dams are rapidly silting up, so the problem will be as bad as ever in the near future. Diversion of water for irrigation, however, lowers the river significantly, such that it sometimes fails to reach the ocean, so extreme floods are less serious than once.

The silt load has been reduced more than 90% recently, by a combination of checkdams, reforestation, reservoirs, and diversion of much of the water for irrigation upstream from the loesslands (Y. Liu et al. 2020). This may or may not be sustainable. The river carries less and less water—now only 3% of China’s overall fresh water—but still irrigates 13% of China’s cropland (Y. Liu et al. 2020).

More local are studies of lakes. A saline one in far north China shows cooling at 8.2 thousand years ago, dry at 6.9-5.9, and—like almost all records from the northern hemisphere—cooling at 4.2-4 (J. Li and Y. Liu 2018). Solar forcing is responsible for these widely-seen changes. Another case is Lake Bosten at China’s far northwest corner, almost in Kazakhstan. It gets its precipitation from the Atlantic, not the monsoon. A large fish-rich lake with much cultivation around it, it was a farming center from Han, and even supported wet-rice agriculture in the wetter times of Ming (Fontana et al. 2019; the Little Ice Age forced the Atlantic storm tracks south, leading to more rain for China’s far northwest). Another local lake study concerns Kunming Lake, at Kunming, Yunnan, which flourished as a rich, productive, beautiful lake with incredibly fertile shores through much of China’s history, but shrank due to encroaching farms, and finally has become polluted beyond all measure (Hillman et al. 2019).

Endymion Wilkinson’s monumental Chinese History, A New Manual (new editions every couple of years) contains a long section, “Agriculture, Food and Drink” (in the 2012 edn., pp. 433-466), which covers the basic historical, anthropological, and culinary literature very well. It is followed by a section on “Technology and Science” (467-479), but this section is brief and concentrates on modern times.

Starting from Han but continuing through Qing is a record of famines, assembled and analyzed in the Chinese literature and recently analyzed by Yan Su et al. (2018). They found 4186 famines in the 2117 years of their study—about two per year. The famines were slightly worse in colder areas, but nobody escaped. Cold areas were more than twice as likely to report economically depressed years, partly because they depended heavily on one or two species of millets, usually reliable and tough but vulnerable to bad years. Far more famines were reported in bad harvest years, but even the best years had a few local ones. Periods of sharp improvement (from famine to good times) were 70-90 CE, 580-590, 1140-50, 1280-1300, 1400-1410, 1680-1760 (note that the last is much longer, but after it conditions steadily deteriorated). Good governance was almost as important as climate in making a decade good. Note, however, that all but one of those recovery periods come shortly after a major cold spell (536-580, 1120s, 1300s, early and mid 1600s; see Anderson 2019). The exception, 1280-1300, was an exceptionally warm period. Cold years were deadly.

The sociology of Chinese food has also advanced. A number of Chinese scholars have devoted time and energy to interpretive studies, revealing the social and cultural complexities of food, eating, and food ideologies in the Chinese world. Among these are Sidney Cheung, Rance Lee, Ambrose Tse, David Wu, Yan Yunxiang, and many others. Western anthropologists such as Sidney Mintz and James and Rubie Watson (Watson 1997; Watson and Watson 2004) have also contributed greatly. The medical aspects of Chinese foodways have received much attention, with outstanding work by Elisabeth Hsu, Vivienne Lo, and many others.

Jacqueline Newman has not only contributed introductory works, but has also done yeoman service editing the food journal Flavor and Fortune. Dr. Newman has chosen a “popular” approach and style, but her scholarly knowledge of Chinese food is orders of magnitude greater than that of many scholars who write in proper academic venues. Newman gave her collection of over 4000 Chinese cookbooks to SUNY-Stony Brook. She has described regional cuisines, as have many contributors to the journal. She finally retired in 2021.

Historian Miranda Brown of the University of Michigan has a food blog at https://mudadong.wixsite.com/website?fbclid=IwAR3tv2oSPndwRyej1YTwgBAAQJyE0pxcEl5Uwj0beHhCnFrT6UmKzoVjZJ0 that introduces her highly original and thoroughly researched findings. She is emerging as the United States’ leading scholarly historian of Chinese food. Her opposite number in England may be Fuchsia Dunlop, chef and food expert, who has moved from writing cookbooks to writing increasingly scholarly works on Chinese food.

Chinese food has to be served on something, and from earliest times the ceramics and metalware of China have been famous as among the most beautiful in the world. Rose Kerr and Nigel Wood (2004) wrote a particularly thorough and scientific history of Chinese ceramics for series Science and Civilisation in Chnia. Ceramics connoisseurship included beliefs about the value of certain wares for protecting the food as well as for highlighting its beauty.

One sour note in the rise of Chinese food is the continual use of sloppy mistranslations. Even the best modern food studies, cookbooks, and translations use “wine” for jiu (alcoholic liquors in general), “lotus root” for lotus rhizomes, “plum” for mei (sour apricot), and so on. One would think scholars and cookbook writers would try not to mislead. Similarly, in spite of accurate linguistic transliterations for Cantonese and Hokkien, food writers routinely use old-time missionary approximations that mutilate the words and guarantee mispronunciation by naïve outsiders. Indeed, even the standard transliteration of Mandarin (and, for that matter, Korean) are often misleading.

Chapter 2. Some Basic Background

            China’s food and everything connected with it depends heavily on the monsoon. It, in turn, depends on the winds and sea currents around, Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ), the place where southern hemisphere and northern hemisphere winds and waters diverge from a hot, fairly calm equatorial zone. The ITCZ can shift well to the north of the equator, and when it does China gets more rain. This comes from the hot, wet air that rises from the heated seas and is driven north. Hadley cells evolve as the hot air rises, flows north, and then sinks again. In most of the world, this sinking air produces deserts at the edge of the tropics. The air is dry, but still hot. In China, however, it just flows on, driven by the massive heat engine of the South China Sea, and gives out only over north and northwest China (Beck et al. 2018; Clift and d’Alpoim Guedes 2021). It still produces most of what little rain comes to Gansu. North and west of there, other air currents cut in: far west China gets the last feeble dregs of the Atlantic storms, especially when the Atlantic is cold, driving the storm belt south (Anderson 2014). North China gets winter rain from Siberia, and even Hong Kong can have miserably cold winter drizzles from north winds that pick up further water from the China Sea.

            The Himalayas block the monsoon, making northeast India and Bangladesh incredibly rainy but Tibet extremely dry. When Tibet is cold, it depresses the temperature and rainfall quite widely over China. More sun in north China is also costly, heating the land and reducing the monsoon (Beck et al. 2018).

            Another factor is the Walker circulation, the grand pattern of circulation over the oceans. It gives us, among other things, the alternation (erratic, every 5 to 50 years or so) of El Niño and La Niña. Trade winds (from the east) blow warm water from the rest of the Pacific to its western area, especially just south of the Equator, which causes cold water to well up on the west side to make up for it, one reason for the California and Humboldt Currents. La Niña makes for a dry east (California and the coasts of Peru and northern Chile) and a wet west, mostly in Indonesia and Australia but also a bit of support for the Chinese monsoon. El Niño occurs when the warm water sloshes back to the east, giving California and sometimes even north Chile some rain but causing drought in southern Indonesia and in Australia.

            Lately, global warming has added to the picture, giving Australia and California historic droughts. China has slightly more reliable rain but also heat and flooding.

            China’s climate has had massive ups and downs over time: warm and wet till 6200 BCE, then somewhat cooler and drier, then sharply cooler and drier in 2200-1800 BCE, with coolness marked till 1500 (B. Yang et al. 2021). The far northeast, which gets winter rain and snow, remained wet till 3100 (X. Liu et al. 2019). Long dry periods alternated with warm, wet ones during the period from the decline of the Ice Age glaciers to the dawn of agriculture (Weiwei Sun et al. 2019). These track the release of vast amounts of cold, fresh meltwater as glacial lakes drained. Such events affected especially the north Atlantic. Warm water, and thus warm air and rain, were forced south. The Atlantic Meridian Overturning circulation, which causes a huge percentage of the climate and weather in the northern hemisphere, was weakened. Even the intertropical convergence zone (ITCZ) moved south. The Indian monsoon weakened at such times. Other than these periods, which included especially the Younger Dryas, the entire time range was warm and wet in China.

            The climate turned warmer and wetter during the Han Dynasty, turning worse near the end of Han—probably a major factor in that demise. Then volcanic eruptions elsewhere in the world led to a terribly cold and dry period after 536 CE and especially after 550, lasting till about 650 and clearly affecting the rise and fall of Sui. Climate improved sharply, climaxing in the Medieval Warm Period of 900-1300, which gave very good times to the Song Dynasty, except for a cold wet period in the early 1100s that greatly damaged Song rule (Zhang 2016). The MWP allowed the rise of the Mongols, as their subarctic habitat got warmer and wetter. They took China, but the rise of the Little Ice Age after 1300 caused cold and flooding that helped end their rule there. However, they were by then established in warmer parts of Asia, and continued rule over central and western Asia for centuries.

            The Little Ice Age hit China extremely hard, hurting Ming and probably encouraging the Manchus to move south and take China (Pei 2021). The modern period went with warming after 1800, and of course the recent extreme warming due to release of greenhouse gases by human action—including vast amounts of coal burning and some oil and natural gas use by China, as well as release of methane by rice agriculture (Anderson 2019; Pei 2021). The role of climate in Chinese history and prehistory is usually best seen as an accelerator and trigger for events that would probably have happened anyway (Anderson 2019), but sometimes seems to have really caused things that would not otherwise have happened, such as major damage to Northern Song (Zhang 2016) and the timing and violence of the Sui-Tang and Ming-Qing transitions (Pei 2021). A more detailed study shows that the Little Ice Age was particularly cool in the northeast and east, and was wetter there; it was drier in the west, and sometimes even a bit warmer than usual, as in the Tarim area (Xuecheng Zhou et al. 2019).

            Taiwan, unusually for China, gets considerable winter rain, especially in the north. This is directly a result of the winter north winds blowing over the China Sea, but more remotely it is connected with Arctic sea ice, and thus increased with cooling weather in the last 3000 years (T. Lin et al. 2021), especially the Little Ice Age.

            Tibet had similar dynamics. One study (C. Liang et al. 2019) of vegetation near the great Qinghai lake shows rapid change from 10,500 to 9000; increase in amount and diversity to 6500; decrease to 4000, then increase to 1500, then fluctuations after that as people become numerous. The increase at 4500 to 1500 is dramatic, with a real crash around 1500. There was a fairly even balance of grassland and evergreen forest (pine, spruce, etc.). This tracks temperature and precipitation, but not very well; note the increase after colder times (4000-4200 BP). Vegetation cover drops suddenly about the time of the 536 shock but then never recovers, thanks to human pressure (overgrazing and overharvesting of fuel).

            In China’s far western deserts, similar things were happening. They were even drier than usual some 6000 years ago. Glacial melt after the Little Ice Age led to much more water for a while in the last couple of centuries (J. Liu et al. 2019), but now all is drier than ever. Faunal changes confirm the broad contours of climate change there (T. Zhang and Elias 2019; X. Zhang et al. 2018). The extreme northwest corner of Xinjiang, in the Altai mountains, is under the influence of the Atlantic and gets its rain on the westerly winds from there, thus contrasting dramatically with the rest of China. This area was warm and dry in the early Holocene, then cool and wet 8000-6300 years ago, then warm and dry till 5500, cold and wet till 4000, warm and dry till 2500, colder and wetter till a thousand years ago, then gradually warmer and drier. This tracks Atlantic temperature shifts, but is nothing like the rest of China. Note the key shift at 4000 that made the rest of east Asia cold and dry, but made the Altai warmer (Y. Zhang and P. Meyers 2016; Y. Zhang and P. Yang 2018).

            In the farthest northeast, sediments from a lake in Heilongjiang reveal that the area was warm and wet 13,400 to 8700 years ago. It was warm and dry for a while after that. A cooler dry period set in 8200 years ago, but the Intertropical Convergence Zone shifted north in that period, which spared this area. The 4200-4000 BP event was more dry and cool, with the ITCZ shifting south and making everything worse (S. Zhang et al. 2020; Zuo et al. 2018).

Farther west, near Dunhuang but up on the high plateau above it, the small Tian’E Lake shows wet periods 1270 BC-AD 400, AD 1200-1350, AD 1600-near present, with dry in between. Vegetation there was sagebrush and other desert shrubs, and dryland grass. Spruce was nearby, but not after 1420 BCE. Nearby lakes had similar records, with some minor differences. This is near the extreme west limit of the monsoon and the extreme east limit of Atlantic-origin rainfall, so it is not only extremely dry, but the rainfall is erratic (Jun Zhang et al. 2018).

Later, a cave record from south China shows fairly consistent good monsoon till 860, then a dry period, followed by a very dry one 910-930, a dramatic rise in monsoon activity to 980, high rainfall till 1020, then sharp drop 1340-1380, and weakness till 1850, with extreme minimum 1580-1640. It then rose and stabilized. The correlation with dynastic events is obvious; note especially the dry periods at the fall of Tang, Yuan, and Ming.

            In the tropics, the Little Ice Age was wetter, as the ITCZ contracted and concentrated the rainy monsoon there (W. Zhang et al. 2018).

            China’s flora now reaches 31,200 vascular plants as of 2017 (M. Lu et al. 2017; W. Xu et al. 2018), with 26,978 that can be analyzed as to timing of origin, with many still to be described. Famously, China includes such “living fossils” and the ginkgo and dawn redwood, in the east and center, but evolution has been rapid, especially in the west and especially for the non-tree species (Li-Min Lu et al. 2018). The breakdown as of 2018 is “2308 ferns, 2105 annual herbs, 12,721 perennial herbs, 2295 climbers, 5690 shrubs, 3642 trees” (W. Xu et al. 2018).

Chapter 3. New Syntheses of Prehistory

China’s prehistory goes far back in time, to specimens of Homo erectus up to a million years old,and later forms that resemble Neanderthal people. (For convenience, the area now in the Chinese state is called “China” herein, though this chapter discusses things that happened thousands of years before the Chinese state began.)

Some are samples of the mysterious Denisovans, a human species or subspecies first known from Denisova Cave, Russia, and found in genetic dilution in east Asia and above all in New Guinea and Australia. A 34,000-year-old woman’s skullcap from Mongolia and a 40,000-year-old bit of bone from near Beijing are Denisovan. Denisovan genes from this population survive in small amounts in Chinese, Cambodians, Koreans, Tibetans, Mongolians, and Altai people, but are not detected (so far) in Japanese or several Siberian groups (Loesch et al. 2020). This Denisovan genome is rather different from the one leaving several traces in the genomes of New Guineans and Australian Aboriginals

            The Chinese people descend from various strains of Homo sapiens that moved through south and southeast Asia and worked their way north, and from other strains that came via central Asia. These long-vanished migrations are as shadowy as the ancient human forms. They left genetic traces, but the timing and routes are obscure, with estimates of arrival between 50,000 and 70,000 years ago. Related, but distinct, north Asian groups appeared in Siberia well before 20,000 years ago, and some went on to cross Beringia and settle the New World.

            The people of east Asia today exhibit a north-south cline, visible in steadily lightening skin and more evident eyefolds and high cheekbones as one goes north. This is at least partly an adaptation to cold: the light skin allows more sunlight to work on dermal layers to produce vitamin D, the eyefolds protect the eyes from extreme chill, the rounder cheeks provide padding and insulation for further cold protection. Conversely, dark skin in the south guards from excessive sunlight, and the small size of some tropical Asians is probably an adaptation to difficulty of finding protein and calcium in tropical forest environments. 

A Paleolithic site in Henan that is 30,000-40,000 years old revealed bones of tapir, rhino, cheetah, deer, raccoon dog, lynx, fox, etc. Presumably people were eating many of these. Wild millets of both common types were being harvested and processed by 28,000-24,000 years ago, along with wild roots and tubers (Li Liu et al. 2018).

At the site of Xiamabei in the Nihewan Basin has ochre prepared as paint, microblades that were hafted, and bones of horse, deer, and zokor (Myospalax, a gopher-like rodent), in a steppe environment with chenopods, sagebrush, and scattered pines (F. Wang et al. 2022). The site dates to 40,000, right at the beginning of modern Homo sapiens sapiens in China—the point at which modern humans replaced Denisovans and/or whatever “archaic” humans were there. The early Paleolithic in China is poorly understood, and this is a major find.omHo

As to the Neolithic itself: An excellent review is Gina Barnes’ Archaeology of East Asia (2015). A thorough overview of the origins and rise of agriculture, best in its coverage of prehistory, is found in Clift and d’Alpoim Guedes (2021). A very thorough up-to-date review of the transition from hunting and gathering to early agriculture has been provided in a two-part paper by Shengqian Chen and Pei-lin Yu (2017a, 2017b). They cover all major sites, crops, pottery and stone manufacture, and related concerns. They point out that intensified foraging preceded and merged with agriculture. Hunting was important in the north, but plant use always dominated the center and east (see also Bar-Yosef and Wang 2012). There is still much more to be done on food in early Chinese ritual, as more and more tomb materials allow us to test reports in the early writings (such as Xunzi; Tang and Yue 2013:5).

An enormous Ph.D. thesis by Wing-tung Ko (2022) covers animals from the Neolithic through the early Bronze Age in the middle Huai river valley. Ko synthesizes an enormous amount of archaeological data. The usual animals are present. Deer were the major game in early times. They gradually became less common while domestic animals became more so, but the Huai was behind many parts of northern China in this. Ko goes on to update the record by providing the recent history of the major tame and wild animals. A whole chapter concerns the giant softshell turtle Rafelys swinhoei, now down to three known individuals. Ko not only studied it archaeologically, but sought out the three survivors (two of which are a pair in Vietnam), and carried out a thorough ethnozoological study of the place of the species in Vietnamese culture, interviewing many locals on memories and experiences with this animal.

Pottery from ninth millennium BCE in Henan is associated with pre-agricultural settled communities (Wang et al 2015). Pottery was first invented in East Asia. It was later independently invented in the New World and possibly elsewhere. Pottery up to 19,000 years old, possibly 20-21,000 (Sato and Natsuki 2019), has been found in China. By 16,000 years ago it was common and widespread, and moving out to Korea and Japan. By 17,000 it was in the far northeast and what is now neighboring Russia but was historically part of China; here it had an uneven course, with local abandonment by hunting specialists who had little use for it (Terry 2021).

Clearly, by 18,000 years ago, life was settled and affluent enough in China to make pottery bowls and jars worth the trouble of manufacture. Wandering foragers have little use for such heavy, breakable objects. Early finds of pottery in China and Japan (where it was only slightly later, certainly there by 16,000 years back) often show residues of cooking fish. Settlement at good fishing and shellfishing spots is evident. These early dates on pottery are unique in the world. In the Near East and the Americas, pottery comes in about the time agriculture begins, with settling down and cooking grain as probable correlates. In eastern Asia, agriculture lagged pottery by thousands of years. Even what is now northeast China and the Russian Pacific had pottery by 14,000 years ago, though agriculture never reached some parts of those regions until early modern times. The pottery is fairly crude—low-fired and gray—but it served well and spread far.

By 9000 years ago they were firing it up to 1050 C in Cishan and Peiligang (Barnes 2015:93, 102). They thus must have already invented the simple ancestor of the “dragon kiln,” a kiln built up a hill slope at a carefully calculated angle. High caloric value firewood burned at the bottom, with a vent that sucks in oxygen as the wood burns. This produces extremely hot air that flows upslope at an even rate. I saw such a proto-dragon-kiln at Banpo, the neolithic village near Xian, in 1978. It was dug into a slope, extended several feet up, and would have done the job. Dragon kilns later produced enough heat to melt iron, allowing the Chinese to invent cast iron (in Zhou, by the 8th century BCE; Barnes 2015:145-147), long before anyone else could get such heat. It requires over 1500 C.

A famous traditional dragon kiln still operates in Okinawa. I saw it in full cry in 1966, when it was simply one more old kiln producing standard traditional pottery for the town. I assumed it was closed long ago, but it is still operating, as a living museum, producing the old classic Okinawan styles for avid tourists as well as locals.

Before agriculture, people in east and central China often depended on acorns. Grinding stones and pottery from the Shangshan culture, which flourished from 8000 to 6200 BCE in the lower Yangtze region, reveal largely acorn residue. Like Koreans and Native Californians, they processed acorns extensively. Acorn eating has become rare in China, however, though persisting in those other areas. 

The Environment as Agriculture Began

We return to the early Neolithic to pick up the story from the invention of agriculture. The warm post-Pleistocene “thermal maximum” or “optimum” gave good rain even to Inner Mongolia (M. Jiang et al. 2020). It came to a sudden but not dramatic break at 6200 BCE. Far more serious, in fact a major worldwide shift, came at 4200-3800. Climates widely turned colder and drier. These two changes were evidently a major shock to Neolithic populations, forcing them to work harder and smarter for a living. Shifts in the direction of increasing and intensifying agriculture appear in local records (Barnes 2015:121; Anderson 2014).

            Charcoal from archaeological sites reflects choice. A revealing study by Hui Shen et al (2020) shows that in the Guanzhong Basin in Yangshao times it ran to elm, oak, tamarisk, and jujube. From the eastern plateau, basically Shanxi, in Longshan, there was much oak and Prunus (peach, possibly mei, and others). In late Longshan and after, there was more maple, also willow, pine, fir, Rhamnus, etc. and some bamboo. More northern sites in Longshan had pine, oak, elm, sumac, Prunus. Later, in the early dynastic period, there was pine, oak, hackberry, elm, sumac, willow/poplar, etc. Western areas in Shaanxi, including the Majiayao culture of Yangshao times, had considerable spruce, from the mountains of the Tibetan frontier ranges. There was oak and some fir, not too much else. Spruce drops off and oak comes in over early times. Platycladus, a warm-weather conifer, occurs. Increases in oak and Prunus probably show deliberate selection; pine increases where fire became common. Warm temperate to subtropical woodland in the southeastern part of the study area (roughly the Tianshan mountains) grades into dry pine in north and west. This boundary shifted northwestward during mid-Holocene, then back southeast after 4000 years ago. They thus found woodland, where others find grassland with scattered trees and groves; this is due to the sampling method—burned wood from fires. Only trees get much attention. Another group around Hui Shen found evidence of fruit collecting, including Prunus padus (cherry), Pyrus, Sorbus, Cotoneaster (a red berry), from 2300 BCE, wild; then cultivated mulberry (not native there) appears from 1500 BCE—the first evidence of tree cropping in the Xian area.

             The Luoyang area near the Yellow River had broadleaf deciduous forest 9230-8850 BP (not BCE), steppe-meadow 8850-7550, steppe with sparse trees 7550-6920. The floodplain stabilized after 8370. Millet-based agriculture arose in Peiligang, 8500-7000. The Yangshao period peaked 7000-5000 in this area (Junna Zhang et al. 2018).

On the Mongolian plateau, millet agriculture was already moving in from the southeast by 6500-5300 BCE. Hunting of aurochs, deer, raccoon dogs, and other game was important for food. Drier times after 4000 BCE impacted this rather edenic world (C. Zhao et al. 2021).

In central China, what is now the Yangtse Delta was drowned by rising sea levels at 9000 BP. Sea levels fell enough by 7000 to begin exposing it again, and a paradise developed (L Li et al. 2018). River deltas, especially subtropical ones, are high-energy, high-nutrient environments that maximize food production, especially with the moderate and fluctuating salinity, which maximizes production of such food factories as oyster beds. The land continued to grow, and still does so; Shanghai was open ocean a very few thousand years ago.

Farther upriver, rice was harvested by the Shangshan culture (10,000-8200 BP), using tiny stone finger knives ancestral to the half-moon-shaped metal ones still used in traditional parts of southeast Asia. These are used to cut the stalk just under the head, leaving the straw in the field, where it now feeds water buffaloes and then rots back into the soil, unless it is harvested separately for use in sandals, rope, and the like. In Shangshan times, long before water buffaloes came into use, the value lay in catching the heads before they shattered and dropped the rice into the water of the marshes where it grew. Wild rice ripens unevenly, and the heads shatter with ripening; very early, rice was bred to ripen simultaneously across fields and to hold onto its seeds (one mutation of the rachis—the stalk that holds the grain to the plant—is enough).

In Shangshan times, rice beer was invented (Liu, Zhang et al. 2024). Using a qu starter, presumably with Monascus (and maybe Aspergillus and Rhizopus) molds and yeast (including apparent Saccharomyces cerevisiae), the people brewed beer from cooked rice. Cooked starch and traces of mold and yeast were found on vessels. The beer also contained some Job’s tears and something from Panicoideae and Triticeae grass groups, and acorn and lily. The Shangshan culture lasted 10,000 to 9,000 BP. Rice chaff was used to temper pottery. Pollen from various grass species was found. “Predomestication” by 13,000 and actual domestication by 11,000 led to this.

The following Kuahuqiao culture (8200-7000 BP) brought in sickles. The stone tools are identifiable by the characteristic wear, rather similar to sandpapering, that the silica-rich rice stalks produce on the stone tools. At Kuahuqiao and the nearby Jingtoushan site, 8300-7800 BP, rice was cultivated. Deer, pigs, dogs, and alligators were found. The pigs showed tooth crowding (sign of beginning domestication) and had been eating cooked food. They also had human whipworms Trichuris trichiura, necessarily acquired from people. This is possibly the earliest evidence of domesticated pigs in China, though they are also early in the middle Yellow River area.

The subsequent Hemudu culture, from 7000 BP, continued and probably completed the domestication of rice, which then fueled the Liangzhu culture (this paragraph is summarized from Jiajing Wang, Jiangping Zhu, et al. 2022).

Early Prehistory

Li Liu and colleagues have synthesized the coming of agriculture to Tibet: “Recent genetic and linguistic studies have traced its origin to Neolithic millet farmers in the Yellow River region of China around 8,000 y ago.” This is presumed to be related to the Yangshao culture and its expansion west and southwest. When they moved into the highlands, they mixed with locals, probably hunter-gatherers, and continued a tradition: “They prepared qu starter with Monascus mold and rice for preparing alcoholic beverages,” for ceremonies “which to some extent have survived in the skorbro-zajiu ceremonies in SW China….” The skorbro is a vigorous circle dance of the area today. The zajiu ritual involves drinking from a common pot, using straws, and this is archaeologically attested. [It is still done much more widely than just SW China.] The earlier Dadiwan, Peiligang, Cishan, and Houli cultures preceded the Yangshao and may have included even earlier ancestors of Sino-Tibetan. The Dadiwan site had a large public building with plaza, and large jars probably for alcoholic drinks. Early Yangshao, 7000-6000 BCE, was centered in the Wei Valley. With Miaodigou (from 6000) and later (to 4700) it spread over a wide area in the Yellow River drainage. Then the Majiayao culture (5300-4500) expanded into the west, and all these expanded into eastern Tibetan Highlands. Drier conditions from 7000, along with rising population, led to stress and migration. The first Neolithic evidence from the highlands is from 6000-5000.

            These early Tibetans lived on the usual millets, as well as rice, which is interesting, since these highlands are cold and dry. Some did not have domestic animals except dogs. They continued to hunt. Beans (Vigna and Vicia) are attested. Lily bulbs were eaten, and snake gourd roots were used, probably for medicine and brewing. Acorns were eaten—these sites are low enough to be in deciduous forest. Bracken fern rhizomes were used, and kudzu was used, presumably for various purposes. Potentilla anserina roots, a common food in the highlands of central Asia, were eaten.

            In the Huai River drainage, dependence or near-dependence on wild plants in Peiligang times, in spite of developed agriculture, gave way to full agriculture with dependence on millets and rice around 6400 BP, at the beginning of the Yangshao period, there dating to 6400-5300 BP (Y. Yang et al. 2023 from research at Shigu).

            At 5300 to 4800 BP, the Qujialing and then the Shijiahe cultures flourished in central China, growing both millets and rice, intensifying production. In the upper Huai river area, foxtail millet and rice outranked broomcorn millet (Li et al. 2024), as one would expect from the climatic situation.

Later Neolithic Sites

At Liangzhu in the lower Yangzi Valley, where towns almost reached urban size, pigs show the expected increase from 5500 to 4300, but then a decline sets in, because of global warming. It led to a major sea level rise from 4480 to 4315 BP, causing flooding and abandonment of Liangzhu city around 4480 BP (W. Zhang et al. 2022). The Liangzhu culture drastically shrunk down by 4000. What was left was buried by a flood around 3800. Liangzhu produced much ale, ancestral to modern jiu; other cultures of the time produced a great deal too(M. Li 2018:62ff).

Liangzhu covered 300 ha, and had perhaps 23,000-35,000 people, as well as dams, rice paddies, levees, canals, and in general a managed landscape (B. Liu et al. 2017; L. Xie et al. 2015). It may have been the source of the Austronesian migrations that reached Taiwan and the south coast of China—or it may not. What art we have looks somehow more Thai, less Austronesian, but that is mere impressionistic gaze. Alas, buried rice paddies do not speak, and inferring language from them is a dubious endeavor.

By contrast, north China flourishes up till 3800 BP, after which centripetal tendencies concentrate development more and more in the central Yellow River area, where full civilization begins, pigs and all.

In the far northeast, the Hongshan culture flourished till 2800 BCE. At the site of Niuheliang, the Hongshan people built a near-urban agglomeration of houses and public buildings, with a temple noted for its goddess figure with blue stones set in for eyes. This is not likely to mean the Hongshan people were blue-eyed; blue eyes have always been a symbol of the uncanny and ghostly or spiritual in Chinese iconography. The whole culture has an alien feel, unlike anything else in the Chinese record. It left no identified legacy.

Also thoroughly different in culture from the core Chinese realm was the extreme west of Xinjiang, which was occupied by Indo-European peoples at some early point. Far northwest Xinjiang received west Asian foods earlier than the rest of east Asia (Dodson et al. 2022). Wheat, barley, and west Asian domesticated animals came by 5000 years ago. Agriculture got considerably more serious after the harsh weather of 4200-3800 years ago. The central-Asian Andronovo culture brought very early bronze. The same group has found agriculture back to 3400 years ago, expanding after that, in the Qinghai area; this is the highest agriculture on record at that time (Dong et al. 2016). The usual crops and animals appear: barley, wheat, millet, sheep, other animals. It is worth noting here that barley varieties kept migrating to China throughout history, with some coming by sea or via the Silk Road in fairly recent historic times (Jones et al. 2016).

 Yuan Jing and collaborators (2020) review the data. The West Asian domesticates had providentially come in just in time to save the north from collapse. The animals in particular—sheep, goats, and cattle—supplemented the pigs, while wheat and barley slowly became visible, though never common until the rise of urban civilization. The cattle soon became heavily C4 in diet, indicating grazing in millet stubble and probably being fed on millet hay.

By the 3rd millennium BCE, huge settlements had arisen in north China. They tend to be in rather unexpected places, cold and dry. Perhaps the need to secure a lot of food, for emergencies, led to such early cities. Much bigger towns arose soon after. Shimao in the northern loess plateau of Shaanxi flourished from 2300 to 1800 BCE, covered 400 ha, had a huge wall and palace, was beginning to work with bronze, and was in every way a city except for lack of writing or other record-keeping. Another large walled community of the time in the northwest was Taosi in the Jinnan valley of Shanxi, at 280 ha, which, among other things, developed a musical ensemble of alligator-skin drums and suspended chimestones (lithophones). Lithophones continued to develop and flourish into Zhou Dynasty times (M. Li 2018:126). Taosi was conquered or at least strongly influenced by Shimao in 1900 and ceased to be important (Jaang et al 2018). Wars of conquest at considerable distance may have begun by this time, or may not (Jaffe et al. 2022 are skeptical). Erlitou, the capital of the Xia dynasty, rose a bit later than these early cities, but overlaps with them for one or two hundred years.

The relatively enormous and very complex sites of Shimao and Taosi flourished during the worst climatic time of all, 4300-3800 BP (2300-1800 BCE), in northwest China, at the same time that the previously more impressive Liangzhu culture was collapsing. (Taosi started a bit earlier than Shimao, and may have collapsed by 3900.) Shimao at 400 ha was possibly the biggest site in east Asia up to those dates, though large sites are now turning up to the east. Taosi was in the next bracket. Both were in the loesslands, and depended on the usual millet-pig base. Food animal bones recovered from Shimao were 20% cattle, 44% sheep or goat, 28% pig. Taosi was much more pig-dependent (52% of bones), with many dog bones, indicating use as food (as in many other early sites), and had 9,000-15,000 people (Campbell et al. 2022). Shimao had very large amounts of jade, often beautifully worked, and not confined to obviously elite houses, though social differentiation was well advanced. There was also a bone needle workshop (Jaffe et al. 2022) and extremely well-made bone mouth harps (Li Jaang and Zhouyong Sun, comment within Jaffe et al. 2022, pp. 110-112), similar to ones found today in southeast Asia. They appear to have had a good deal of cultural importance, but so far are rather anomalous.

Shimao was only first among many large sites; the more China is explored, the more turn up. Recall the Liangzhu site of comparable time and size. However, the climate event at 4200-4000 BCE triggered a massive collapse, probably involving other factors besides cooler and drier weather; epidemics have been proposed. The population of north China shrank, locally by up to 75%; the lower Yangtze area was ruined. The Luoyang basin was less hard hit, which probably explains the rise of Erlitou to relative dominance (Jaffe et al. 2022, including commentary). In the Tao River area of southern Gansu, where wet forested mountains alternate with very dry valleys, complex cultures arose, also hit hard by the 4200-4000 event. This set back farming and led, or encouraged, a shift to more herding of livestock (Jaffe et al. 2021).

Central north China from 3500 to 2600 BCE, the late Yangshao phase, was rapidly diversifying crops, with rice and soybeans increasingly supplementing the millets. Here too, larger settlement were emerging, including the near-urban site of Xishan, with rammed-earth walls. Other sites had moats and smaller walls (Tao et al. 2022).

A route along the eastern foothills of the Tibetan ranges emerged, with transmission of the millets and rice from the upper Jinsha (Yangtse) by 5000 BP to northern southeast Asia a couple of thousand years later. Transfer was rather slow and gradual, into an economy of mixed hunting and gathering. Soybeans, chenopodium, adzuki beans, perilla, brown pepper, and other food plants were present in small amounts, probably eaten but not cultivated. The cold dry event from 4200-4000 BP would have made millet a better option, rice less good (B. Wang et al. 2023).

The adzuki bean was domesticated in central Honshu, Japan, about this time, by the Jomon people (Chien et al. 2025), supposedly “nonagricultural” until recently but now known to have been growing or managing many plants. Domesticated adzukis spread to China fast, though actual times are unclear.

Chenopodium album continued to be an important crop for seeds and leaves throughout Chinese archaeology and history. A large form giganteum has developed and is often used for walking sticks (Duan 2025). The goosefoot or pigweed staff is a cliché in Chinese poetry, standing for extreme rusticity and simplicity. A proper sagely poet carried one. Poets from Du Fu to Han Shan immortalized this humble plant, as did Korean poets.

Millet was a staple in the Liangshan area by 5000-4800 BP (Guo et al. 2024).

Languages and Prehistory

Proto-Tibeto-Burman (Proto-Sino-Tibetan) has words for rice, the millets, and beans. Possibly, a word for wheat reconstructs (Bradley 2011), but this must show early borrowing, with wheat words spread through the language phylum. The Tibeto-Burman (or Sino-Tibetan, or Trans-Himalayan) phylum is more and more clearly derived from original stock of some sort spoken in the central Yellow River drainage and possibly as far south as Sichuan, in or just before Yangshao times (Sagart et al. 2019; Menhan Zhang et al. 2019; and see above on Li Liu and colleagues, 2022). Stories among some South Chinese Tibeto-Burman minorities record a homeland in mountains to the northwest, a perfect fit for the mountains of Shaanxi and Gansu. The phylum has picked up astounding linguistic diversity in its far south and southwest, especially in the northern Indian subcontinent, but this is largely by mixing with local languages, many now lost.

The main Tibeto-Burman stem, largely in China (broad political sense), is a fairly coherent group with many words for agriculture (Sagart et al. 2019). The spread of millets evidently accompanied the expansion and spread of the Sino-Tibetan (or Tibeto-Burman) language phylum, which centers in the same origin area and southward into Sichuan and has a comparable time depth. It has been fairly closely nailed to the middle Yellow River area, home to the Yangshao cultural tradition and the huge late Neolithic settlements (Bellwood 2023; Van Driem 2021). Some Tibeto-Burman groups in southern China have origin myths telling of a spread from mountains far to the north and west, and this would fit the Yellow River hypothesis (Wang 2013).

By 2000-3000 BCE, people genetically like modern Tibeto-Burmans (as far as Nepalese Tibet) expanded rapidly from the central Yellow River area (C. C. Wang et al. 2021; S. Q. Wen et al. 2016). Also, people with western Eurasian genetics moved in from the west; at least some of them were probably Indo-European speakers. Interesting is a boy buried about 2000 BCE in far west China is fully east Asian genetically, but the burial goods all represent the Afanasievo culture, a west Eurasian one often assumed to be carried by Indo-European speakers. Evidently central Asia at that time was as mixed as it is now. The famous mummies of the area were dressed in western-style clothes. Some were light-haired, but some others were genetically East Asian.

North of the Tibeto-Burman phylum are several languages traditionally called “Altaic,” from association with the Altai Mountanis. These traditionally include Turkic and Mongolic languages. Recently, Marina Robbeets has made a powerful case for a “Transeurasian” grouping: the Turkic, Mongolian, Tungus, Korean and Japanese families all deriving from a common source (Robbeets et al 2021). She reconstructs words for sowing, millet gruel, pigs, and other cultivation words. In her major article (Robbeets et al. 2021) she provides an enormous list of words cognate to all or some of the languages. (Alas, it is available only to the fortunate few who can call it up online; it is “supplementary online material” to the major published document.) She also traces the origin of the phylum to the Liao River drainage in northeast China, where the Xinglongwa culture flourished around 5900-5600 BCE, with domesticated millets and pigs. She strongly suspects it to be the source culture for the language group. With the caveat that the source culture was probably more widespread, general, and long-lasting than the Xinglongwa specifically, I can only agree.

The list does provide compelling evidence for the initial unity of at least Tungus, Korean, and Japanese (the Tungus-Korean link was already well known), and for a homeland where she pinpoints it. The connections of Turkic and Mongol to each other and to the wider grouping are very tenuous. Carefully working through Robbeets’ materials convinces me that early borrowing cannot be ruled out as the source of the similarities. Borrowing was rampant, with such basic terms as “seven” and “name” spreading from language to language with viral fluidity (Bjørn 2022). Resemblances of languages as disparate as Korean and Turkic are quite likely due to this.

Some Russian linguists argue further that these languages relate onward to the Indo-European, Uralic, and even Semitic and Caucasus languages, in a giant “Nostratic” or “Eurasian” phylum. This is definitely pushing the evidence—the few similarities could be pure chance—but it cannot be ruled out.

Genetic evidence runs strongly counter to some of the above scenarios. There is no genetic commonality (besides generic Asian) between the Liao farmers of ca. 3000 BCE and the Mongolian and Amur peoples of the time. On the other hand, Robbeets’ ideas are confirmed for Korea and Japan: they are today overwhelmingly descended from (or at least closely related to) the Liao farmers. I suspect the Tungus are also in this category, and the unrelated Amur people known archaeologically spoke a different language, possibly Gilyak (a language of uncertain relationship spoken on the Amur today). At least, the Russian “Nostratic” phylum is impossible to square with the enormous genetic diversity of modern and archaeological Eurasia. Sharing of a single language group across vast stretches of genetically unrelated people is a feature of modern armed military conquest; it is hard to imagine it happening any other way. Conversely, we know a great deal now about the movements of peoples in Eurasia, and they would account quite neatly and precisely for the similarities between, for instance, the Indo-European, Uralic, and Altaic languages (see e.g. Bellwood 2023).

The Silk Road, then as now, was a whole complex of routes carrying all sorts of commodities. Among other mysteries, the Tokharian languages entered at some point, probably from Yamnaya and Afanasievo cultural backgrounds around 2000-3000 BCE. They are historically attested from Xinjiang, but the languages died out in early Medieval times. These are Indo-European languages. Three survive in a few texts archaeologically found in Central Asia. The Tokharian languages represent an early branch of the phylum, later than Hittite but earlier than the great radiation of the surviving IE languages (Bellwood 2023). The Tokharian languages presumably arrived in the east at about the same time as early western-derived genetic signatures.

At the other end of the Chinese world, evidence continues to pour in confirming the progress of Austronesians from south China to Taiwan, and then later the radiation of the Malayo-Polynesian branch to the whole Indo-Pacific region, from Madagascar and East Africa (see Beaujard 2009, 2012) to Oceania. Genetics confirm massive mainland migration to Taiwan from before 1300 BCE till many centuries later; they were genetically like modern Austronesians, but also a good deal like Tai and “Austroasiatic” (presumably Vietnamese and Cambodians), showing a good mix of early rice farmers (C. C. Wang et al. 2021). They also show similarity to a very early northeast Chinese genetic strain that exists today only in dilution, as a component of east Chinese genomes.

A thorough review of the early evidence shows an earlier occupation, not known to be agricultural, but possibly so. Then came the Austronesians, farming rice and millet. They apparently came from the lower Yangtse and the Fukien coast, which is known as one possible area for rice domestication and differentiation. Skeletons reveal a southern East Asian genetic identity, in contrast to the northern East Asian genetics of the millet growers in the north, who soon migrated south and mixed in (Wang et al. 2025).

Austronesian sites in Taiwan are now very numerous and cover all the island (Hung and Carson 2014). Conversely, Neolithic people of Fujian show close relationships to the Austronesians, but later Fujianese are largely descended from migrants from farther north (M. Yang et al. 2020).

Peter Bellwood argued a few decades ago that the Austronesian languages spread along with agriculture. He has continued to research this, summarizing a lifetime of work in First Farmers (2nd edn., 2023) The Austronesians were probably among the first domesticators of rice. Starting with rice in the lower Yangtse, where they may have been the people of the huge neolithic sites there, they expanded to Taiwan, and diversified there. One branch, the Malayo-Polynesian language family, exploded into the seas. It first moved to the Philippines, then out to Malaysia, Indonesia, Micronesia, northern Melanesia, and ultimately Polynesia and Madagascar.

Archaeology and genetics tend to confirm this scenario, but people, languages, and crops mixed along the way, so Malayo-Polynesian speakers in Madagascar often have a great deal of African ancestry; those in New Guinea are heavily Papuan in background; and so it goes. The exact timing and course of the move to Taiwan remains controversial. It is probably linked with the sudden appearance of intensive agriculture there, possibly with the Liangzhu culture. It was largely Bellwood’s work that inspired Van Driem (2021) and others to look to Sino-Tibetan’s expansion with millet, and then these and other studies, as well as Bellwood’s actual mentorship, inspired Marina Robbeets’ more adventurous hypothesis, noted above, of the expansion of Transeurasian languages from the Liao River area (Robbeets et al. 2021).

In general, the migration of north Chinese to the south is classically a world-scale demographic shift, but there was also some migration from south to north in southern China (M. Yang et al. 2020), possibly involving Tai and Vietnamese people.

Rice agriculture also led to expansion of the Thai-Kadai language phylum from the middle Yangzi area. This extremely important linguistic aggregation certainly spread south—we have recorded history for the latest millennia—and became the language of much of southern China and, later, southeast Asia. So, if current hypotheses are correct, early rice agriculture was shared—perhaps jointly developed—by Thai and Austronesian ancestors, and possibly by the smaller Mien and Hmong phyla.

Many would even add the Austroasiatic languages: Mon, Khmer, Vietnamese, and many relatives, including the Munda languages of India (Van Driem 2011). Some rice agricultural terms have been reconstructed for proto-Austroasiatic. The center of diversity, variety, and complexity of this phylum is eastern India, among the Munda, but Van Driem has shown that these languages are probably mixed with local now-lost tongues. The Austroasiatics involved may have even come by sea from Myanmar (Bellwood 2023). Van Driem (2021) convincingly argues that Austroasiatic differentiated somewhere near the China-Burma-Laos tripoint, or north of that; this puts it at an early center of diversity. Its spread very possibly introduced rice agriculture to India.

This speculation was solidly confirmed, with striking timeliness, in a major survey of Yunnan individuals between 7100 and 1500 years old. This study was carried out by Tianyi Wang and others (including the genomics leader Mark Stoneking) in Science (Wang et al. 2025). They studied one person from the site of Xiaodong who was fully 7100 years old, and who had a very ancient and totally distinctive basal East Asian genotype previously known only as a “ghost lineage” in Tibet. Tibetans are basically children of the Sino-Tibetan radiation from Northeast China, but in southeast Tibet they met and mixed with this previously lost lineage, leaving a genomic legacy unlocated till now. (The Xiaodong rock shelter has materials going back 43,500 years, with similarities to later Hoabinhian materials.)

After 7100 years ago, this lineage disappears in Yunnan. It was replaced by an East Asian lineage, again previously unknown, but identifiably close to the northern East Asian type that unites the Sino-Tibetan and Korean-Tungus peoples and to the southern East Asian type found among Austronesians and Thai-Kadai (Kra-Dai). This new “Central Yunnan” lineage turns out to be abundantly present in Austroasiatic people, and is fairly obviously within their original genetic ball park. It is found in Central Yunnan but not, so far, very much in the west or north, which show northern influences by the time skeletons appear to study. Farmers in northern Southeast Asia between 4000 and 3000 years ago are strongly Central Yunnanese by heritage.

Modern Austroasiatic peoples, especially the small minorities of southeast Asia generally, show this ancestry. So do neighboring groups from the Karen (Sino-Tibetan) to the Laotians, and especially the southern Yunnanese Sino-Tibetan groups like the Hani (Sani, Akha), though these various groups are all mixed, with strong northern East Asian genetic heritage.

 The Vietnamese language and people are clearly a recent intrusion into the northeastern fringe of the phylum’s distribution. Its vocabulary is swamped with vast borrowings from Thai and Chinese languages, including the entire Thai tonal system.

Rice agriculture appeared in Yunnan and (probably) in extreme northern Southeast Asia by 4000 years ago. This means it spread slowly from its hearth, compared to agriculture in Europe, which, once introduced from Anatolia, spread at a quite steady rate of one kilometer a year. Spreading to the Yunnan-Laos border, a thousand miles from the lower Yangtse fountainhead, took about 4000 years, or ¼ km/year.

Agriculture was well established in southeast Asia by 2000 BCE, at least in the north. This spread was accompanied by linguistic expansion (Bellwood 2023). The Tai seem very definitely involved in this. I strongly suspect that they were the main drivers in the east, but it now looks as if the Austroasiatics may have been key in the central areas, following Wang et al. (2025).

The spread of rice agriculture goes with spread of northern genes, from what is now China, and the dilution or even displacement of the local people, who were related to the surviving “Negritos” of southeast Asia and more distantly to the Melanesians (Bellwood 2023).

             Tai customs and loanwords survive in Cantonese culture today, and the Cantonese and Vietnamese tonal systems appear borrowed from Tai. (“Tai” here represents the Thai languages, related to the obscure and now rarely-spoken Kadai languages of south and central China; these two branches had a common ancestor around the time of the rise of rice agriculture, and presumably spread with it, as Tai/Thai was certainly doing in historic times.) The North Chinese are quite different from the southerners in genetics. This fits the known intrusion within historic times of the Chinese language into Tai, Austronesian, and other linguistic strongholds around and south of the Yangtse. Modern South Chinese are rather poorly studied genetically, but appear to be an amalgam of ancestral northerners, local people, and southerners. Evidently there was much moving around then.

Katy Hung, a Chinese investigator working in Taiwain, has found that the Saisiat, an Austronesian group of Taiwan, has a legend of “little black people” living there before the Saisiat came in from the south (which fits with the Pearl River origin). The “little black people” taught them a good deal about agriculture (Katy Biggs [Hung], Facebook postings and emails, Nov.-Dec. 2014). It seems likely that the pre-Austronesians of Taiwan were related to the Philippine Negritos and other small, dark peoples of south Asia (such as the Andaman Islanders), and were absorbed by the taller, lighter-skinned Austronesians; this is what has happened, but only partially, in the Philippines and southeast Asia. If the Saisiat are right, the Austronesians did not introduce the first agriculture to Taiwan. Recent work casts some doubt on the whole question of migration of agriculture from the mainland and its association with proto-Austronesians. The basic model still works, but inevitable complications have appeared.

Prehistoric Agriculture

The Millets

Agriculture began twice in China, perhaps as a linked process, perhaps (though less likely) as independent invention. Millet agriculture, based on foxtail millet (Setaria italica) and broomcorn or proso millet (Panicum miliaceum), developed around 8000 BC in the Yellow River drainage, possibly the middle part of it. “Millet” is a general term for any small-seeded grain crop. There are many species of millets, originating in East Asia, South Asia, Africa, and the New World; the two most important ones worldwide are these two original Chinese species, but others such as barnyard millet (Echinochloa spp.) soon joined them, and other species came later from other regions. Pigs and dogs were added to the picture almost immediately; pigs were probably domesticated in China, independently from separate domestication in western Eurasia.

In at least some parts of central north China, broomcorn millet dominated early periods, from the dawn of agriculture around 8000 BCE to perhaps 4000 (see Lander 2021). It was apparently domesticated in the dry northwestern loesslands, not the Yellow River valley or plain (Hunt et al. 2018), though this requires confirmation.

Broomcorn millet yields a harvest in as little as 45 days, and is the fastest-maturing and most water-efficient of grains (Hunt et al. 2018). It has been a good crop for nomad tribes. It also makes a fine catch crop if a major crop fails.  It spread from China over Central Asia from 2500 to 1500 BCE, its characteristic isotope signature (of C4 metabolism) appearing in bones by then (Hunt et al. 2018; Spengler et al. 2016). It reached Kyrgyzstan and Kashmir by the 3rd millennium BCE, but has not been discovered yet in Xinjiang before about 2000, indicating we are missing something (Motuzaite-Matuzeviciute et al. 2022). This helped develop multicrop agriculture in cooler areas (Popular Archaeology 2015), since, though the plant is very tolerant to heat and prefers hot conditions, it will grow in a very short summer. It spread to Mesopotamia by 1100-1500 BCE (Rutgers University 2022).

Its use declined slowly over time, then rapidly with the coming of the New World starch crops, especially maize. It still is useful in central Asia (Wang et al. 2016:333). Early broomcorn millet from northwest China is genetically close to samples from India and Europe, showing where they originated (C. Li et al. 2016).

Foxtail millet rose to dominance after civilization started; it was a clear leader by Shang. It is somewhat resistant to salt as well as drought, though not as drought-tolerant as broomcorn millet. It prefers the warm, moist climate of eastern China, and thus did not spread through Central Asia, though it did reach India early.

An interesting insight into the rise of millet agriculture is that wild cats and rats by the middle 6th millennium BCE had been eating a great deal of C4 food, the only common ones in the area being the millets. The rats had been raiding fields and stores and the cats had been eating the rats (Barnes 2015:124).

Often grown with millets is buckwheat, which is native to China, specifically the southwest—Yunnan and eastern Tibet. Two species exist: the commonly grown Fagopyrum esculentum and the more cold-tolerant F. tataricum, bitter but tolerating harsh conditions. Both tolerate cold and drought well, but esculentum, the one now grown worldwide, does best in north and northeast China (and only locally in its southwestern home; Krzyzanska et al. 2022). Russia is the leading buckwheat producer today, but China is close. The time of domestication of buckwheat is unknown. The crop has not benefited greatly from the revival of “ancient grains,” in spite of its many advantages.

On the eastern North China Plain, the Houli culture grew millets and had possibly-wild rice and domestic dogs and pigs from 6500 to 5000 BCE, to be followed by the more agricultural Beixi culture (5000-3900), which added more pigs. At this time much or most food was still gathered: acorns and hazelnuts, grapes, jujubes, wild cherry (Cerasus japonica), water chestnut, euryale, elderberry, wild soybean, perilla, Physalis alkekengi, crabgrass.

Wild foods stayed important into the Yangshao period (7000-4500, contemp w Qujialing, 5300-4500, elsewhere, and roughly with Dawenkou in the east). Miaodigou with its beautiful pottery is a middle phase of Yangshao, Majiayao (5300-4000 BP) a late phase (Li Liu 2021). Majiayao was succeed in the west by the Qijia culture, running about 4200-3500 BP; it was in this time that horses, sheep, and goats enteresd the area (Womack et al. 2021).

The Xinglongwa culture in northeast China was on the verge of full Neolithic status. In Chahai village south of the Liao River, around 5900-5600 BCE, with pigs kept but not domesticated, and both wild and domesticated millets present. Houses were simple and were the units of the economy (Tu et al. 2022). This is all suspiciously close to the place, time, and economy identified by Martine Robbeets as the original homeland of the Transeurasian languages, and Robbeets et al. (2021) indeed so designate it, as noted above.

Wei Wang and colleagues (2025) review the early agricultural story of the Liaoning-Inner Mongolia border area, in Robbeets’ Transeurasian origin area. The Xiaohexi culture, before 8500 BP, shows no real sign of agriculture. The following Xiniglongwa 8200-7200 BP had millet, and is considered by Robbeets to be a good candidate for the original Korean-Japanese-Tungus ancestral stock. It was followed by two local Neolithic cultures: Zhaobaogou 7000-6400, and Fuhe 7200-7000. After this, some metal appears, in chalcolithic Hongshan, 6500-5000 with its huge towns; also Xiaoheyan 5000-4000. The Bronze Age in the area is represented by Lower Xiajiadian 4000-3500 and then  Upper Xiajiadian 3000-2500. The climate was warm and humid till the 4200-4000 BP event, after which cool and dry.

No livestock are found much before Hongshan and most meat came from hunting even then. After that, most came from domestic animals. Millets were grown throughout, and were the only staple. Deer (red, roe, water) overwhelmingly dominant the hunting picture through Hongshan. After it, there is a sudden near-total change to pig dominance, with substantial sheep/goat, cattle, some horses and chickens. In hunting days, raccoon dogs, badgers, Myospalax, swans, pheasants, and other game were hunted.. Dogs were domestic throughout the record, at least from the later Neolithic.

Plants gathered include mountain apricot Prunus sibirica, local walnut Juglans mandshurica, hazelnut Corylus mandshurica; by Xinglongwa, cultivated apricots show up. Wild plants gathered include Artemisia annua, chenopods,and various other useful plants. By lower Xiajiadian, hemp, soybean, Sichuan pepper Zanthoxylum bungeana, sweetclover, mallow Malva sylvestris, and other plants were grown.

These cultures preceded the better-known and fully agriculture-dependent and rice-farming Dawenkou (4100 to 2000) and Longshan (2900 to 1900) cultures. The Beixin culture in the Longshan group seems to have invented the tripod dish, a constant of Chinese art from humble ceramic beginnings in Beixin to the spectacular cast bronzes of the early dynasties (G. Jin, Chen, et al. 2020; G. Jin, Wagner, et al. 2019). Rice made it to the middle Yangzi only about 3000 BCE, and to Hainan Island by 2600 BCE (Yan Wu et al. 2016).

By 3000-2000 BCE, a pattern of broomcorn millet in the driest northwest and foxtail millet, with increasing rice, in moister areas arose in north China (Sheng et al. 2018).

Rice

Rice appears as a wild or semiwild food by 8,000-10,000 BCE, but cultivated rice may not be older than 6000, with abundant cultivated rice before 5000 (Luo et al. 2019, Huai River area; Yangtse dates are a bit earlier). It was domesticated in the middle and lower Yangtse valley, spreading rapidly to the Huai and much more slowly to the south. In warmer periods it spread north to Shandong.

Rice seems to have been domesticated a bit later than millet. As of 7000-5000 BCE, people of the south China coast lacked agriculture, and lived mostly by fishing and seaside foraging where possible (Zhu et al. 2021). Wild annual rice grew in natural seasonal marshes and ponds; wild perennial rice has wider habitat preference. The annual was the type domesticated, beginning around 8000 BCE (Huan et al. 2021) but not fully domesticated for a couple of further millennia (Clift and d’Alpoim Guedes 2021). While it was almost certainly domesticated in the middle and lower Yangzi Valley, it spread north by 8600-8500 BCE to the Huai and Han valleys (the area between the Yellow and Yangzi rivers), there to mix very soon with millets. They came south to this area by 7000 BCE, and crossed the Yangzi by 5800 (Huan et al. 2022). Mixed farming of rice and millets, and possibly other crops, developed, with rice dominating in the Yangshao sites of that area. Foxtail millet was in the Han region by early Yangshao, but rare; broomcorn does not turn up till middle Yangshao (Huan et al. 2022).

Timing, especially for rice, is controversial, due to difficulties in telling wild grains from the earliest domesticated ones. Domestic rice, Oryza sativa, exists in two broad classes of varieties: japonica, with short, roundish grains that cook somewhat sticky, and indica, with long grains that cook dry. Japonica is more cold-tolerant, flourishing in Japan and California; indica requires warmer conditions. The original domestic rice was japonica, domesticated from Oryza rufipogon in the lower to mid Yangtze valley. It spread slowly through China and then to India, where it mixed with native Indian wild rices, again O. rufipogon. This produced indica rice (O. sativa var. indica), and, independently, aus rice, which is more resistant to heat and drought. These two crossed, giving rise to intro-indica, which spread widely (D. Guo et al. 2025). One strain of it—with further genetic adventures—became the basmati rice of northwest South Asia (D. Guo et al. 2025), with its distinctive long grains and nutlike flavor.

 Indica and intro-indica spread back through southeast Asia to China, where they variously remixed with japonica, producing a spectrum of modern rice varieties adapted to all sorts of conditions. Until recently, japonica flourished in central China and reached somewhat into the north; indica dominated the south. Today, breeding for conder conditions has moved the lines well to the north.

Indica spread back throughout southeast Asia and north into southern China, but they are less cold-tolerant, so japonicarice monopolized north China, Korea, and most of Japan until recent development of hardy varieties. Clift and d’Alpoim Guedes (2021) provide an extremely important account of the development of rice agriculture in Asia.

At first rice was grown wet. It was probably planted in drying waters after spring floods, as African rice (Oryza glaberrima) is today in so-called “decrue” agriculture. Later it was irrigated, and also planted dry in areas with reliable heavy rain. At the Xiaohuangshan site in the lower Yangtze Valley, rice was eaten from 7000-5000 BCE, but was just coming into possible domestication, and competed for attention with root foods and acorns (Ling Yao et al. 2016). A well-preserved rice paddy has been excavated at the huge and long-occupied Chengtou Mountain site in Hunan (Facebook posting by Chinese Archaeology—the Tiger Meets the Dragon [Facebook page], Jan. 26, 2022). Wet-growing developed as paddy fields became more general in the 5th through 4th millennia BCE (Weisskopf, Qin, Ding, Ding, Sun and Fuller 2015; Weisskopf, Qin and Fuller 2015).

Rice spread from two centers, Hunan and the Yangzi Delta, and these may represent independent domestications. They may even represent different language phyla; they are at the inferred origin areas of the Tai-Kadai and Austronesian phyla, respectively. Rice spread throughout East and Southeast Asia at a speed averaging .8 km/yr (Cobo et al. 2019). This rate implies strongly that most of the diffusion was by farmers actually spreading into new territory, rather than by hunter-gatherer groups picking up the art (Cobo et al. 2019). Cobo et al imply the linguistic connections by noting the spread of those linguistic groups and their clear association with the spread of rice in later millennia.

            Since 8500 BP, with a strong monsoon, rice flourished north to lat. 36, in the Peiligang (8500-7000 BP) culture. Acorns were more important than cultivated foods at that time. Rice agriculture was trimmed back by the 4200-4000 BP event during Longshan (4500-4000) to lat. 33.29. But after that the rice and farming methods improved and it expanded north again. It was at least present, possibly through trade, in the early dynastic Erlitou (3800-3500) and Erligang (3600-3400) periods. Over time, rice grew along rivers, in low basins; foxtail millet dominated on pediment plains; broomcorn dominated in high valleys  (Jia et al. 2021).

The dry period around 4200-3800 years ago hurt rice farming, but caused it to spread and be adopted more widely, as other sources of food dried up. Early impacts on vegetation were low, but soon became visible. A series of papers by Ma Ting and coworkers have traced its relationship with climate in east and central China (Ma, Rowlett, et al. 2020; Ma, Tarasov, et al. 2019; Ma, Zheng, Man, et al. 2018; Ma, Zheng, Rowlett et al. 2016). Rice agriculture was strikingly slow to spread to Taiwan (around 3000-2000 BCE) and Japan (only a few centuries BCE), leading Qin Ling and Dorian Fuller to maintain that “rice farmers don’t sail” (Qin and Fuller 2016). A bit exaggerated—the rice did get to those islands eventually—but their explanation, the difficulty of getting out of the paddy and sailing with rice and the needed skill package, rings true.

Rice agriculture may have led to China’s famous communalistic yet individually responsible philosophy of life (Talhelm et al. 2014), because of the need to work together while still remaining individually responsible for one’s share. Today, and also in the past so far as literature can tell us, South China shows more communalism, the north more individualism. Small farms managed by independent farmers but requiring a great deal of cooperative labor would strengthen this idea of the proper society. Ruan et al. (2014) cast doubts on this, pointing out that the study used thin sampling, straw-man alternatives, and rather little awareness of traditional Chinese views. In fact, the basic communalist-individualist philosophy is already visible in and indeed basic to the writings of Confucius, and he lived in a millet-dependent area where rice was uncommon. On the other hand, the difference between south and north remains clear, and southern groups that do not cooperate on a large scale to grow rice do not show the high levels of communalistic values (Anderson 2007). Rice agriculture seems to have had some share in values creation, though millet agriculture brought its own responsibilities.

Millets reached the south coast by 5500 years ago, an expectably early date (Dai et al. 2019). However, much of the coast resisted agriculture, apparently because they were doing well as mobile fishers and foragers. Agriculture would have been too massive a shift to appear desirable. On the Fujian coast and Taiwan, agriculture barely made a dent before 3000-2500 BCE, when presumed Austronesian expansion brought advanced rice agriculture. Before that, people lived on fish and seafoods, sago, yams (Dioscorea spp.), Job’s tears, acorns, Cordia fruits, arrowroot, and Canarium nuts (Hung et al. 2019).

Inner Mongolians were consuming millets, beans, nuts, and yams at the same time and even earlier (Guan et al. 2021). Strikingly different is the finding from a site in the Chengdu Plain that shows no occupation at all until 2700 BCE, when millet agriculture appears (d’Alpoim Guedes et al. 2013).

Rice was locally present by 6000 BCE, and remained rare but available (C. Wang et al. 2017). A very early site in Shandong had rice by then, as well as millets. Probably still wild were soybeans, perilla, and chenopods (Crawford et al. 2019).

At Dadiwan, an early site (5500 BCE), many bones were reported as chicken bones, but turned out to be local pheasant (Nuwer 2020). So did the “chickens” reported from other Neolithic sites (Peters et al. 2022). The chicken had apparently not gotten that far north yet. It is native to far south China and southeast Asia, and linguistics strongly implies that it was domesticated by ancestral Tai-Kadai, since the Tai word for it, kai, has gone worldwide (e.g. Cantonese kai; Mandarin ji, derived from kai). The first unquestionable record of domestic chickens that we have so far is of a large number of them at Ban Non Wat, Thailand, 1650-1250 BCE. They are in north China soon after. This is clearly late, and chickens must have been under domestication earlier than that; they appear in the Near East only a few years later (by 1200 BCE)! The problem is that chickens in southeast Asia kept back-crossing with wild jungle fowl, which tame themselves in forest environments, as I have seen in Malaya. There is thus no reliable difference between domestic and wild birds until quite late. Or perhaps one might better say that people kept wild-type but quite tame chickens, breeding them into docility but not separating them from wild birds, who were themselves becoming docile from breeding with tamed stock. 

Wheat, Barley, Oats

Deng (with Fuller et al. 2019) has also reviewed archaeological finds of wheat. Wheat and barley were delayed in acceptance for quite a while, because of local preference for boiling grain into porridge (Archaeology News Network 2020); wheat is terribly slow and hard to cook that way, and barley not very tasty or nutritious (though barley gruel was a staple of old Europe). They were present, and used, by 2500 BCE in northwest China (earlier in east Central Asia, later in central China), possibly popularized by the harsh climate of 2000-1800 BCE, which would have made them popular as a winter crop alternating with the summer-grown millets (Cheung 2019). Millets came late to western China, but wheat and barley were fairly early there, established by 2000 BCE (Xinying Zhou et al. 2016). However, wheat and barley did not take off as foods till the introduction of superior milling technology in Han or slightly earlier (Anderson 1988; Lander 2021). Central China did not really adopt wheat till 1500 BCE (Barnes 2015:417). Cold, dry periods inhibited their spread, after warmer times before the 2000 BCE event helped them (d’Alpoim Guedes and Bocinsky 2018).

New Shandong and Liaoning Peninsulas data show wheat there by 2600 BCE. There is no data from Gansu until 1900. It reached the middle Yellow River and Tibet by1600 (Long et al. 2018). It was probably in Xinjiang well before 2100-1700.

Wheat and barley spread from the west at about the same rate they did in Europe, a kilometer or so a year, reaching China 3000 (northwest China)-2000 (north-central) BCE (Spengler et al. 2016). Millets spread the other way, but more slowly, reaching India and Europe around 2000 BCE or later. Agriculture came very slowly to the northern central Asian reaches, where the climate is hostile. Flax came to China from Europe, but not until the Han Dynasty. Going the other way, peaches and apricots reached northwest India and Pakistan by the second millennium BCE, having been domesticated in China perhaps as early as 4000 BCE (Stevens et al. 20).

These food habits persisted. The more nomadic area of Goukou in Xinjiang subsisted rather steadily on meat, dairy foods, millets, and some wheat and barley from the Late Bronze Age right through the Tang Dynasty (W. Wang 2017). In fact, the area subsists on those foods today, with less millet and some recent growing of maize.

Oats came to China from western Asia by 3400-3000 BCE (Barnes 2015:417), but remained an extremely minor and obscure crop in the far north and northwest (see Buck 1937). Elsewhere, millet outcompeted them as a high-protein, easily boiled grain.

Jiu (liquor)

Best of all, ale residue and brewing equipment have been recovered from the Qiaotou site at fully 9,000 years ago (Dartmouth College 2021). It was made of rice, Job’s tears (a grain still used for beer locally in southeast Asia), and roots (unidentified). The pottery in which the residue was found was painted red and white—some of the earliest painted pottery in the world. Ale then occurs Mijiaya site at 5000 years ago (Wang et al. 2016), as well as from the better-known Jiahu site. The ale from there is something of a fruit mead, including the earliest honey so far noted in China; it comes from the east Asian honeybee Apis cerana. Broomcorn millet, barley, Job’s tears and tubers were fermented together. This is the oldest barley in the traditional lands of China, though equally old barley has turned up in what is now Chinese Central Asia.

From Taixi near Xi’an came other early drinks. A good deal of yeast was found in a jar; another contained peach, plum (?), and jujube pits and sweet clover, as well as jasmine and hemp (!). The earliest known  brewery in China was near the Wei River, at about 3400-2900 BCE. Beer was brewed from barley w broomcorn millet, Job’s tears, yam, lily, snake-gourd root, which occurs in other early brews (McGovern 2017:60). Monascus and Aspergillus molds were and are used as well as yeasts.

Li Liu, one of the top archaeologists studying China, has done a major study of brewing in the Yangshao period (Li Liu 2021). Neolithic farmers brewed using what is now called caoqu, “herbal starter,” of herbs and moldy grain. Most important as a fermenting agent was the worldwide brewing yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, which is most diverse in East Asia (there are fascinating ancient strains from Hainan Island). She looked at brewing of millet ale with sprouted wheat or maize starter in steamed millet flour, and found mostly that species. She gives a quite amazing list of ingredients in 19 Neolithic beers, almost all including snake gourd (Trichosanthes kirilowii) root, often other tubers, and sometimes foxnut (Euryale). Barley shows up late, but Yangshao at 5000 BP is the oldest known in China. Many of the Yangshao vessels look almost exactly like Mediterannean amphorae (and are called so in this paper). The narrow necks are easy to seal.

At Jiahu in the Huai River area, fruit and honey were used to produce fermentation of a rice beer. At Lingkou and Guantaoyuan in the Wei Valley, and Qiaotou and Xiaohuangshan near Ningpo, Aspergillus and Rhizopus spores indicate a great deal of brewing of millet and rice beers. These fungi in cooked rice produce qu, the ferment basic to brewing in China ever since. Monascus, the red mold that makes the famous red ferments of Fujian and Zhejiang, was found at Xiaohuangshan at 9000 BP. The other sites are roughly contemporary. Rice was already domesticated at Xiaohunagshan (Liu et al. 2023). Brewing there was done in globular jars, and appears to have been served in ritual contexts, possibly to the ancestors.

The northern and western Neolithic ales are made from millet. Beer at Jiahu and Xiaohuangshan was made of rice. Often other grasses (many Triticeae) also appear. Glutinous broomcorn millet was preferred because the amylopectin has a higher conversion to ethanol rate. (Modern millet ales generally use foxtail.)  Li Liu quotes a late Han source on stages of fermentation (from a commentary on the Zhou Li). She has photographs of modern Qiang doing zajiu, a ritual that involves drinking with straws from a communal jar. (This is also very widely found in modern Southeast Asia, among highly traditional small-scale societies.) Few drinking cups occur in Yangshao, so she suggests they used the communal-straw ritual then, and she found marks on amphora necks that look like rubbing by straws, hollow grain stalks whose silica granules leave a distinctive smooth spot. Zajiu is mentioned in the Huayang Guo Zhi of 348-354 CE. Some modern groups have associated dances similar to ones shown on Yangshao bowls. At some point that red Monascus ferment came, probably from east, and spread with rice—even in western China, rice and probably the associated semisolid ferment technique were used.

Ale has also turned up at the great late-Neolithic town of Shimao, in the loesslands of northern Shaanxi. It was made with millet, plus snake gourd root, rice, lily (possibly L. lancifolium) bulb, ginger, some sort of barley-like grass, and beans, all in one lot. It was served in pitchers, whence residue was recovered for analysis. Shimao survived the 2200-2000 BCE cold dry event, but finally gave way at the end of it, around 1800, and was abandoned. However, the ale went right on. It survives today as hunjiu, rather porridge-like, made from barley and broomcorn millet, and using a yeast called Pichia kudriavzevii along with the familiar Saccharomyces cerevisiae (Y. He 2021).

It should be repeated that ale is fermented but not distilled grain-based alcoholic liquor. Beer is the same with hops or other additives to protect it from spoilage; and wine is fermented, undistilled alcoholic liquor made from fruit, flowers, roots, or the like. All are covered by the Chinese word jiu, which was expanded to include distilled alcohol when that came along (probably in the Tang Dynasty). Jiu includes any alcoholic liquid, even tincture of iodine. Sinologists love to mistranslate it as “wine,” and even get defensive about this flagrant error. This could be excused as a “cultural” thing, since ale in old China had the association with song and romance that wine does in European lore, but unfortunately mistranslation is an infuriatingly regular thing in Chinese studies, and carries over from bad biology to mistranslation of basic philosophical and social concepts (“peasant” for free farmers, “caitiff” for villainous enemies, and so on endlessly).

Red yeast remnants have been found in a Peiligang culture site, from around 8,000 years ago—by far the earliest evidence for this classic Chinese fermentation source (Facebook posting by Keith Knapp on Facebook, Dec. 23, 2021).

Other early plants

Peach pits showing evidence of cultivation go back 7500 years in the Yangzi Valley (Griggs 2014). Archaeological records of canarium use have been reviewed by Deng, Huang, et al (2019). One wonders. This tropical tree barely reaches south China and was rather uncommonly used in historic times.

Hemp, a.k.a marijuana (Cannabis sativa), originated in China, though the Indian form (var. indica) may be an independent domestication (see Metcalfe 2019, but his claimed domestication date of 12,000 years ago is preposterous; the truth may be closer to 7,000). A huge amount of it was found in what was suspected of being a shaman’s grave from 700 BCE (Nature 2015b).

The rise of agriculture came slowly in China, especially in areas with rich nut tree forests, because acorns were easier to get. This was even more true in Japan. Agriculture spread surprisingly late there. The reason was the extremely successful adaptation to a tree-nut and fishing economy. Forests of chestnut, acorn, hazelnut, and similar trees were drawn on from earliest times. These were obviously being managed, probably by selective burning, and clearing undesirable seedlings, in the Jomon period (Barnes 2015:112). More evidence is accumulating that there was also management of, and some planting of, annuals. There was also intensive fishing and shellfishing; by analogy to the Pacific Northwest Coast, the shellfish too were probably being intensively managed. All this kept the Japanese from bothering with serious agriculture until massive immigration from Korea brought the joys of rice agriculture around 1000 BCE, with the first known rice paddy in Japan dating to the 10th century (Barnes 2015:271; see also Graeber and Wengrow 2021 on Jomon’s deliberate avoidance of agriculture). Cultural and skeletal remains had already made the Korean immigration clear, but DNA has fixed it beyond doubt (Robbeets et al. 2021).

Domestic Animals

            Brian Lander and coworkers have written a history of pigs in China that extends from the Neolithic to today (Lander, Schneider and Brunson 2020). Pigs were exceedingly important in China from earliest agricultural times onward. A recent study by Ningning Dong and Jing Yuan (2020) shows that they rapidly increased from their first appearance at Jiahu in 8600 BP to the difficult period from 4200 to 3800, when the climate turned cold and dry, largely due to volcanic action. This was probably the worst climatic period China faced from the end of the Ice Age up to 536 CE. Up to that point, agriculture had been rapidly developing in north China, with Yangshao sites recording up to 90% pig bones among all animal bones, as at Xipo (5800-5500 BP). From 7000 to 5000, the pigs show more and more C4 diet, i.e. millet feeding as opposed to just foraging.

            A related study by Tao Shi et al. (2022) surveyed animal remains in the entire frontier zone between farmland and what was historically grazing land, from far northeast Tibet (Qinghai Province) to the Liao River area. Agriculture was widespread in the moister parts by 5000 BCE, but wild animals dominated; pigs and dogs were domesticated, but not heavily used. Wild steppe animals prevailed in the southwestern parts of this transect. The northeast was still dominated by forest and little-grazed grassland. Sheep and cattle came around 3000 BCE, horses and goats around 2300, and these came steadily to dominate animal assemblages in the Longshan period. By then, they surpassed pigs as stock and food.

A history of cattle in China by Brunson, Lander and Schneider (2022) notes a rather equivocal jaw find from the northeast dating to 2500-2300 BCE, and more clear evidence soon after, with earlier dates in Central Asia. Wild aurochs were still around as of 1900 BCE. At some completely unknown point, zebus came in from India, and managed to hybridize with regular cattle, producing hybrids in the south and especially southwest. These species do not easily hybridize. In the far southwest, even banteng (Bos javanicus) and gayal (Bos frontalis), local semidomesticated species, got into the mix. Yaks were also domesticated at some unknown point, and hybridize more freely with cattle, producing cattle with more altitude resistance and yaks with more varied coat colors. The hybrids are very commonly created today and in the past, because of their mule-like hybrid vigor, including superior milk production. At Xiaohe in Xinjiang, lactose-destroying fermentation is demonstrated very early.

Sheep/goats and cattle came to China along with, or shortly after, wheat and barley, about 4000 years ago. They probably came via the Hexi Corridor (and possibly elsewhere), and no earlier dates are found there (Ren et al. 2022).

            It now seems even carp aquaculture can go back 8000 years (Archaeology News Network 2019; Nakajima et al. 2019). Many common carp (Cyprinus carpio and C. longzhouensis) up to 75% larger than normal have been found at Jiahu in central China. The local carp is mostly crucian carp (Carassius sp.), a different species, so somebody was raising those common ones, probably from fingerlings caught and transferred to a rearing pond. For further notes on early domestication, including those carp as well as cats, see Dodson and Dong (2016).

Chapter 4. Earliest History: Xia and Shang

Yu the Great tamed the Yellow River by diverting it into many channels and shoring these up, thus eliminating extreme flooding. According to legend, he was a giant, with powers enough to rechannel whole rivers. He was said to pass his parents’ door repeatedly without stopping in to greet them, a breach of filial piety that showed how desperate the floods were. He then, according to tradition, founded the Xia Dynasty. Extensive flooding at the time he supposedly lived confirms at least that part of the story, and the rest seems a greatly exaggerated but not unreasonable record of early accomplishments. One assumes that various unsung leaders tried hard to do what was alleged, and their stories were combined into one superhero (see Li Min 2018:400ff for the latest information).

            At about the time Yu supposedly lived, the site of Erlitou on the middle Yellow River reached urban size and sophistication. Bronzeworking, large-scale architecture, urban planning with districts, and sophisticated crafts mark it as a city. More and more evidence goes to confirm that the Erlitou culture was indeed the Xia Dynasty, with Erlitou itself as capital. The Central Plains Metropolitan Tradition was born.

Erlitou depended largely on pigs and millet, but already had much rice, as well as “small quantities of soy and a few wheat seeds” (Jing et al. 2020:912). A woven grass basket from the time produced residue of soured milk—either yogurt or cheese (Xie et al. 2016). Fruits were known, probably including peaches and cherries.

            “The presence of large, dangerous game such as tigers, rhinoceros and water buffalo suggests the practice of elite hunting known from later Central Plains Bronze Age sites” (Jing et al. 2020:911). Brian Lander (2021) chronicles the enormous amount of hunting in neolithic China and the steady reduction afterward, with game already getting scarce by Xia times. Sika deer, hunted with abandon in previous eras, were more carefully managed, with only adult males being taken—partly because their antlers were prized, for tools and probably for medicine (C. Zhang 2021). They were evidently getting rare enough to make hunters more careful about killing females and young.

            Erlitou was the first city and culture in China to cast bronze ritual vessels, which dominated Chinese art and monumental display for centuries. The city had an inner royal quarter with extremely lavish royal tombs—an ancestor to the “forbidden city” of later times. The city was no larger than the huge late-Neolithic sites, but had 18,000-30,000 people. High-quality kaolin clay was brought from the nearby site of Nanwa, showing that local trade in important materials was well established (Campbell et al. 2022).

            The first city of the Shang Dynasty was Zhengzhou, which still continues as one of the greatest cities in China. The ancient city is under the modern center, making archaeology difficult. One memory I can never stop repeating is from my seeing and photographing beautiful ash-glazed pottery kettles with three small, stubby feet in the marketplace there in 1978—then going to the city’s Shang Dynasty museum and seeing identical kettles, literally unchanged in 3500 years. They may be the oldest ash-grazed pottery in the world. Ash-glazing is simple: as I have seen it in traditional kilns, one takes the ashes from the kiln fire, mixes them with water and usually some dissolved pottery clay, and whirls the vessel around quickly to get an even coating. Then the vessel is fired; the ash-clay-water mix turn to a beautiful green-brown glaze. These were the universal cheap pots of my early days in east Asia; they are now collectors’ items.

Population estimates for Shang Zhengzhou run from 39,000 to 65,000 or even more (Campbell 2022). After a brief time in another city area, the capital moved to Anyang, much more available to the modern spade and now one of the best-known ancient cities in the world. It served as capital around 1250-1050 BCE. It grew even larger, covering 30 square km and reaching 100,000 people. There were many specialized craft areas. Trade flourished; spiced millet ale was identified with merchants. Royal tombs included many sacrificed human victims, totaling many thousand over the term as capital (Campbell et al. 2022). The Chinese city was set in a pattern that lasted for centuries, and, without the sacrifices, for millennia.

            The Shang oracle bones allow a good, if unbalanced, ethnography of Shang China, and the great oracle-bones scholar David Keightley provided one (Keightley 2000). The oracles were often taken in response to disasters, from floods to locusts. Typically, one of the former Shang kings or royal family members had been slighted in the latest round of sacrifices, and was causing trouble to send a message; put another way, the oracles were good excuses to rack the farmers for more food to sacrifice and consume in elite feasts. The focus on disasters led Keightley to conclude that the Shang “may have been nature worshippers [sic]—or, more precisely, worshippers of certain Powers in nature—but they were unlikely to have been nature lovers” (p. 116). On the other hand, many oracles simply asked about hunting, rain, crops, and other mundane and more nature-loving concerns. Cattle were important as food and for transport, and naturally their shoulderblades were popular oracle bones (Brunson et al. 2016; Brunson et al. 2022).

            One king, Wu Ding (1250-1192), did not speak for three years, meaning that communications to and from him were written, leaving us with an enormous record of the time (M. Li 2018:276).

            Officers of the court included a Many Horses Officer and a Many Dogs Officer, in charge of the royal stables and hunting hounds. The latter title was duochuanshi (in modern Mandarin), using an Indo-European term that may have still been recognized as an elite foreign word. (Chuan from something like *kiwon in early Indo-European, the source of our word “hound”; the indigenous Chinese word for “dog” is gou. Both are probably meant to represent the sound of a bark.)

            Jiu of the time was sometimes flavored with such things as peach, plum, jujube, sweetclover, and jasmine; more interesting perhaps was jiu infused with cannabis (M. Li 2018:285-286). By this time, jiu was enormously important in society. From the early Neolithic on, it had grown in importance and ceremonial use. Li (M. Li 2022) has studied the libation ritual as it grew from late Neolithic times into Shang and Zhou. It was the all-important unifier of Bronze Age rule, bringing together the king and the elite. His landmark study draws on contemporary research into food and drink sharing in ritual contexts to produce a major work of alcoholic-beverage research. The complex microbiology of Chinese food, including the ale, and also sourdough millet bread, was already established (Warriner 2022).

Further lore on early foods is found in Adam Schwartz’ study of Shang sacrifices (2019). The vast majority are the usual domesticates, as well as turtles, but wild boar are noted, and—more strikingly—chi, a term later referring to a mythical creature, but here considered to refer to ling, Tibetan antelope and gazelle (Schwartz 2019:40-42), largely on the basis of stylized but identifiable representations on Shang bronzes; the taotie monsters on those bronzes are modeled after real creatures, and some display the long, thin horns and long, thin faces of the Tibetan wild fauna. Bulls were sacrificed, leaving the cows, who had to do the heavy work (M. Lin 2022).

Sika deer were heavily hunted in Shang, but no notable decline was evident, showing the hunt was more or less sustainable (Y. Li et al. 2021). Later loss of the deer may owe more to deforestation than to hunting (see Lander 2021; Mostern 2021).

Cheese dating to about 1615 BCE has been discovered in the Taklamakan Desert, in association with mummies. The material was excavated years ago, but only recently tested. It is a low-lactose cheese made with a bacterial and yeast starter, not rennet (Archaeology, online, Feb. 26, 2015; Harris 2014; Warriner 2022).

Chopsticks have been found in Yin Xu, capital of the Shang Dynasty, dating from later Shang, over 3100 years ago (Warrant and Honten 2008). Chopsticks now have a full, detailed, excellent history of their own (Q. E. Wang 2015).

Chapter 5. Zhou and Warring States

            In the Zhou Dynasty and the centuries of disunion that followed it, millet, pigs, and greens were more and more universal and basic. A few foreign spices seem to have come in late in the time; cloves and black pepper are mentioned. In eastern Zhou, in the central Yellow River plain, women ate more of wheat and barley, still a bit strange and uncommon, while men ate more millet and meat (Y. Dong et al. 2017). The significance of this is obscure; no such gender difference has been noted from earlier periods.

Taxes were low, but not as low as they often became in later times. Mencius held they should not go as low as 5% of agricultural product, since that level was too low to sustain much of a government (Li Feng 2013:193).

Fertilizer in the form of animal manure and plant compost was used. It was later to become a major concern. Human waste, the “night soil” of later times, was probably already used. As David Bello puts it, “China’s urban population, and its attendant rural domesticates, stimulated agricultural production not just by consumption, but by digestion” (Bello 2022:260).

Food was a highly political matter in China. The statesmen and political writers of Zhou and its disunited final centuries constantly emphasized this. The great 4th century philosopher Mencius said of the common people:  “Those with constant means of support will have constant hearts, while those without constant means will not have constant hearts” (Mencius 1970:97). “The common people cannot live without water and fire, yet one never meets with a refusal when knocking on another’s door in the evening to beg for waer or fire. This is because these are in such abundance. In governing the empire, the sage tries to make food as plentiful as water and fire. When that happens, how can there be any amongst his people who are not benevolent?” (Mencius 1970:187; “benevolent” translates ren, literally “humane”).

            Yan Ying, somewhat later, had a different but revealing insight: “The lord said, ‘Are harmony and unison different?’ Yan Ying replied: ‘They are different. Harmony is like a stew. Water, fire, jerky, mincemeat, salt, and plum vinegar are used to cook fish and meat. These are cooked over firewood. The master chef harmonizes them, evening them out with seasonings, compensating for what is lacking, and diminishing what is too strong. The noble man eats it and calms his heart…. Thus, it says in the Odes, ‘There is a well-harmonized stew….’” (Durrant et al. 2020:217-218; the “Odes” refers to the Shi Jing, “Classic of Songs”, compiled supposedly by Confucius in the 5th century BCE, and consisting of folk and court songs from Zhou; shi means “songs” specifically not “odes” or “poems”).

            The philosopher Xunzi, a cynical but sharp-minded counterfoil to the ever-optimistic Mencius, gave a memorable definition of nature (ben xing, lit “basic inborn”): It “is what is impossible for me to create but which I can nonetheless transform” (Xunzi, p 199).

            Yet another thinker, Mozi, advocated frugality and thrift. He could be downright puritanical about such matters as wine, meat, and feasting in general (Mozi 2010). China rejected Mozi, with even the relatively abstemious Confucians arguing that eliminating grand feasts would also eliminate society as they knew it. Feasting, or at least good food, were necessary for hospitality and good fellowship. America’s Puritan tradition, by contrast, strongly discouraged such pleasures as good eating. Raised in that environment, I found the debates around Mozi to be quite liberating.

A very different light on food and culture was thrown by Lü Buwei: “One adept at learning is like the king of Qi who, when eating chicken, was satisfied only after he had eaten a thousand feet; if he were still unsatisfied, there would always be another chicken foot to eat.”  -Lü Buwei, from his Lüshi Chunchiu, ca. 220 BCE (Lü 2000:129).

            Food was also a religious matter. Roel Sterckx has carved out a niche as authority on its use in Zhou. His book Food, Sacrifice, and Sagehood in Early China (2011) has a self-explanatory title; it covers religious uses of food and philosophical issues deriving from those in the Zhou period. Also, Sterckx, with Martina Siebert and Dagmar Schäfer, have edited a major work, Animals in Chinese History (2019). It includes data on sacrifices, cats (probably new in Han), pigs, and other animals, but most of the articles are on cultural issues, not food. An interesting exception is David Pattinson’s article on bees (2019). He notes that bees and wasps were lumped as feng in old China, species were not differentiated. The larvae were eaten. Honey was poorly known. It became known around Han times and popular since Tang, possibly under Buddhist influence. Bees were (and are) known as mifeng, “honey wasps”; significantly, mi for “honey” is an Indo-European loanword, cognate with miel in French. Honey became important medicinally, but has never caught on as a major food, though China now produces much of the world’s honey. The native bee Apis cerana has been domesticated for the purpose, but I think (but do not know) the standard west Eurasian A. mellifera dominates today.

            Francesca Bray, later in the same volume, notes that domestic animals figure less and less large in Chinese agricultural manuals and similar books throughout history, showing an increasing shift to dependence on vegetable food. There was a “golden age of animals” between Han and Tang, when north China was dominated by Turkic and Mongol peoples, with their fondness for animal-keeping and animal foods. Thus the Qimin Yaoshu has considerable material on this. Beef avoidance was popularized by Buddhism, maintaining an uneven but notable role from Song (Bray 2019b; Brunson et al. 2022). Many people still avoided beef to at least some extent when I worked in Hong Kong in the 1960s. Japan almost totally avoided it until very recently. The Qimin Yaoshu also describes a milk drink fermented to destroy lactose; it sounds like modern soured buttermilk (Brunson et al. 2022).

Armin Selbitschka (2018) has contributed an exhaustive and extremely important study of food sacrifices in tombs in Zhou and early Han times. He finds that the usual assumption that food was for the individuals’ consumption in the afterlife is too simplistic. Food was indeed offered for this reason—typically, small amounts, or even empty but labeled vessels, were left, evidently with the assumption that they would turn into an endless supply in the other world. Sometimes, food was simply sacrificed, either to feed the spirit or simply to placate or console or pay respect to it. Food was apparently both sustenance for the dead and respectful homage to their spirits. Sometimes food was explicitly offered to other deities, those that guarded or were otherwise involved with the dead. What does not stand out is any evidence for feasting at or in the tombs. Food in tombs is neatly placed in proper vessels, rather than being the litter from a feast. Feasts may have been held outside the tombs, but there is only thin and equivocal evidence for that. There is also no good evidence for sacrifices outside the tomb.

            Production of food was also complex in ideology. “Overgrown courtyards and tilled fields” occur as a frequent image in Warring States texts, and Tobian Zūrn (2018) has found that the more Daoist-leaning texts tend to use these as symbols of proper rule. Mengzi uses carefully tilled fields as a frequent symbol of civilized life and good governance. The Zhuangzi material includes some cynical comments indicating preference for a more anarchic, wild, unmanaged state.

From the early Zhou Dynasty comes a bronze vessel from around 800 BCE with a fascinating inscription that records the myth of Great Yu and goes on to record ideas about filial piety, virtue (de), the Way of Heaven, and resulting blessings of longevity and blessings (Chen 2013, esp. 153-154). These ideas later became foundational in Chinese philosophy; apparently they were already foundational that early, and in remarkably “modern” phrasing.

            Zongzi, China’s equivalent to tamales, had already appeared. A Chu tomb from the mid-Warring States period, around 300-400 BCE, contained 40 more or less intact and some broken ones. They consisted of rice wrapped in oak (Quercus) leaves. 39 were stuffed with unhusked raw rice, one with millet. They were uncooked, presumably to turn into properly cooked food in the afterlife (China.org.cn, June 21, 2023).

Eastern Zhou infant feeding has been studied by archaeologists, focusing on the site of Xinzheng, a city near Zhengzhou. They found a shift toward more introduced grains, notably wheat, and the tendency of men to eat more millet and meat while women ate more wheat. Teeth show that breastfeeding was universal (in their sample, and probably in general). Weaning was gradual, and at different ages in different individuals. Children, like adult women, ate more wheat and other foods (possibly beans), less millet, than adult men. One suspects that the preference for wheat among women and children indicates that flour milling was already important, since if the grain was being made into whole-grain porridge, millet would surely have been the choice, since it cooks much faster and becomes softer and easier to eat and digest.

Meanwhile, in Yunnan, where civilization was just beginning and spectacular bronzes were coming into style, food was rice, millet (probably foxtail), acorns, and some water plants, barley, and beans (N. Zhang et al. 2017). Wheat became more popular between 1600 and 300 BCE, at least at the Haimenkou site, probably due to drying climate (Xue et al. 2022). The same site revealed many Chenopodium (goosefoot) seeds, probably gathered for food, as well as perilla and cannabis seeds and peach and apricot kernels.

In central Asia, urbanization began in the Tarim Basin around 750 AD, with the usual crops of the time: wheat, barley, and the millets (Dang et al. 2022).

            Critically important is a new tea find: 2,400-year-old tea, a good lump dried up in a cup from the capital of Zhu (Jiang et al. 2021). This shows tea was definitely known and drunk long before Han, and the connection with the southwest is probably significant. Tea shows up in tombs in Tibet and near Xi’an by early Han (Farrer 2017).

Chapter 6. Han and Just After

High-tech wheat milling came to China in Han, allowing the production of dumplings, noodles, fermented wheat sauces, and the like. Wheat noodles appear around 100 (Huang 2000). Thus, wheat began to gain against the classic millets. Sheep, goats, and cattle were slowly gaining against pigs.

The Simin Yueling, an agricultural book from around 160 CE, describes making qingjiang from fermented grain and soybeans—an ancestral soy sauce.

The famous Mawangdui tomb of a marquess contains a final meal: meat skewers, grain, jiu. She was buried with meats, fruits, vegetables, millet, herbs including Sichuan pepper, sugar, salt, pickles, sauce, and various other items (Dunlop 2019b:123).

Water control in Qin and Han included moderately large-scale public projects, including irrigation canals for the dry but fertile Wei Valley, but newly discovered wood and bamboo slips show that small-scale local works were common and that the government took care of repairs in many cases (Lander 2022b). However, the vast majority of waterworks would have been local rice-paddy systems, not yet known to be maintained beyond the very local level. Local maintenance is the rule in wet rice, since fine-tuning at small scales is critical.

Starting from Han but continuing through Qing is a record of famines, assembled and analyzed in the Chinese literature and recently analyzed by Yan Su et al. (2018). They found 4186 famines in the 2117 years of their study—about two per year. The famines were slightly worse in colder areas, but nobody escaped. Cold areas were more than twice as likely to report economically depressed years, partly because they depended heavily on one or two species of millets, usually reliable and tough but vulnerable to bad years. Far more famines were reported in bad harvest years, but even the best years had a few local ones. Periods of sharp improvement (from famine to good times) were 70-90 CE, 580-590, 1140-50, 1280-1300, 1400-1410, 1680-1760 (note that the last is much longer, but after it conditions steadily deteriorated). Good governance was almost as important as climate in making a decade good. Note, however, that all but one of those recovery periods come shortly after a major cold spell (536-580, 1120s, 1300s, early and mid 1600s; see Anderson 2019). The exception, 1280-1300, was an exceptionally warm period. Cold years were deadly.

An ambiguous Han tomb painting shows a kitchen process that may be the making of tofu, or perhaps mash for an alcohol brew. Alcoholic drinks were very well known and widely used (Elias 2020), though drinking was not as fashionable as it later became. Actual tofu is first unequivocally mentioned in the 10th century by one Tao Gu, in “Anecdotes Simple and Exotic”; he says a magistrate recommended it as a cheaper substitute for meat (Dunlop n.d.:67). This implies it was already well-known and common enough to be cheap, so it had obviously been around for a long time. As Dunlop there points out, it was probably invented as a substitute for cheese. That commodity was familiar in the Tang Dynasty because of heavy Central Asia influence.

            More old tea has just been identified in the tomb of Han Jing Di, 141 BCE (Keys 2016). It was buried with him, along with some rice, millet, and, oddly, chenopod seeds (not known as a food at that time). Victor Mair (email of Jan. 11, 2016) thinks the tea was there as a medicine.

In Han, a large maritime trade developed, extending to India and thus indirectly to Rome via the India/Rome shipping pathways. A major terminus was Hepu, on the Guangxi coast, near the Vietnamese border. It is a good deal closer to the Nanyang than Guangzhou. But Guangzhou had access to the hinterlands via the Pearl River system, and soon ecliped Hepu. A number of fine trade beads made from Indian and other foreign stones are found at Hepu (Xiong 2014). Foods must have been exchanged too. The Indian Ocean was a very busy thoroughfare by then (Beaujard 2009, 2012). Boivin et al. (2013) report on a huge range of domestic and wild animals—including pests stowing away on ships—that spread at this time or soon after it all round the Indian Ocean.

The Huainanzi, predictably enough, combines Confucian and Daoist ideas on government and food supply. The good ruler is removed and “acts inaction” (wei wuwei), stabilizing the universe by his presence but acting as little as possible, even to allowing his courtyard to be overgrown with brush and weeds. The common people, in this idyllic near-anarchist state, will till their fields with great care and diligence. The Huainanzi, an amazing and until recently a most underappreciated work, was compiled by the group that very likely put the Zhuangzi in a largely final form, at the court of Liu An in the middle early Han. The Zhuangzi got its final editing by one Guo Xian (d. 312 C.E). The same group seems to have done the same for the equally underappreciated Guanzi material. What might have been the beginning of really serious science in China was cut short by the rebellion, or alleged rebellion, of Liu An against Emperor Wu (Sima Qian 1993:321-346.) The whole body of materials apparently assembled in Liu An’s court comprises a brilliant and underappreciated collection of political-economic works (Anderson 2014; Liu 2010). Having treated them elsewhere (Anderson 2014), I quote only one line: “when people are in the majority, they eat wolves; when wolves are in the majority, they eat people” (Liu 2010:650). It should not escape the reader that the wolves are not necessarily the four-footed kind.

            Monica Zipki (2018) has shown that the goddesses important in the Chu Ci, an early song collection from late Warring States times, lost ground steadily as male commentators reduced them to commoner or mere symbolic status; the male deities suffered no such demotion. The Chu Ci, “Songs of Chu,” originated from a state probably heavily Thai in culture, far less patriarchal than the Chinese. They came up against a “Han Confucianism” that “consistently elevates yang over yin, heaven over earth, the ruler over the ministers, and male over female, and tends toward strong gender essentialism” (Zipki 2018:345). This connects to food via the intense absorption with foods, tastes, flavors, scents, and sensations in the poems.

Han Confucianism was itself a striking creation. Thinkers at the Han court combined Confucian ideas with Legalistic ones (Sima 1993), producing something of an “iron hand in velvet glove” ideology. Combined with traditional sacrifice cults that shored up imperial power, it was elaborated into a full-scale ideology of expanding empire. Han Confucianism remained the ideology of empire, and still colors Chinese thought today.

             The cynical and realistic Han thinker Wang Zhong provided some insight into Han food in a line about not wasting effort and skill on minor matters: cooking mallow pods with onions does not require Yi Di or Yi Ya, and “to the Village Mother one does not sacrifice a whole ox” (Wang 1907:69, as “Wang Ch’ung,” translation by Alfred Forke). The mallow pods with onions would be the most humble side-dish imaginable; small mallows (Malva verticillata complex) were the coarse but flavorful and nutritious food of the very poor, and I remember nibbling on the pods when I was young. The Village Mother was also a humble and rustic deity, deserving of a small pig at best. The insight into animal sacrifice is worth note: Han continued the vast sacrifices of earlier times, but was beginning to realize they were an awful waste, and cut back. Human sacrifices, already on the wane in much of China, became infrequent.

            Less believable, but still possible, is the hermit described in Liu Xiang’s Shuoyuan (Garden of Eloquence; 2021:219): “In the winter he lived in the mountain forests and subsisted on chestnuts; in the summer he lived in the marshy lowlands and subsisted on lotus root and water chestnuts.” Liu also retails a story from the 7th century BCE (but almost certainly invented long afterward and embellished by Liu himself): a Lord Xian blew off advice from a poor man with the comment (via an underling, at that): “Those who eat meat are already looking after these matters; of what concern are such matters to those who eat vegetables?” The poor man, Zu Chao, responded with such a brilliant lecture on listening to everybody that Xian made Zu a court tutor. This is very much in line with Liu’s constant emphasis on the importance of listening to everybody, even the poorest, and selecting the good advice. Anyone can be a teacher.

            At the other extreme of credulousness is the tallest story I have encountered in Chinese food lore: Liu An’s discovery of bean curd when he was eating soybean mush in a cave and a stalactite dripped limewater into the dish, precipitating the bean curd (Joo 2022; Dr. Joo is a first-rate food anthropologist and does not take this story seriously). Almost as tall is a story that dumplings were invented by the great medical authority Zhang Zhongjing about the same time. Frostbite, especially of the ears, was common in a hard winter, so he wrapped chopped mutton and healing herbs in dough skins and boiled these dumplings in soup (this odd tale was ferreted out by Jenn Harris of the Los Angeles Times, 2022). Of course, there is no actual record of this, and it implies the dumplings and skins were already known. Some types of dumplings are still called “ears.”

Another fantastic legend about dumplings concerns the origin of the word mantou. According to the Three Kingdoms Romance (uncertain Ming date—long after the episodes it describes, or invents), Zhuge Liang intended to sacrifice 49 people to calm a storm. He was too humane, and made heads of dough instead (Tang and Yue 2013:6-7 quote the whole story; H. T. Huang 2000 also relates it). Of course, the real origin of the word is from Turkic manty, and steamed cakes were well known long before, but a good story is still a good story. Apparently this particular story arose after mantou had become large and unfilled doughballs raised with sourdough starter or equivalent; in Tang they were the small, meat-filled ones we now call baozi (large, raised buns) or jiaozi (small dumplings). Mantou still refers to stuffed buns in Japan, Korea, and some parts of North China. These filled dumplings became baozi in the center and south. (Katy Hui-Wen Hung, Facebook posts, Jan. 4 and Feb. 2, 2021).

Another tall tale concerns the founding lineage of Han: Liu Lei, according to legend the founder of the lineage that later became the Han royal one, not only raised dragons but made fine stews from them (Cook 2013:76).

An entire genre of rhapsodies on imperial hunting parks developed, with famous writers like Sima Xiangru, Pan Yue, and Yang Xiong contributing. These were collected in the Wen Xuan, an anthology dating around 530 CE (Knechtges 1987). These give long and much exaggerated accounts of the beasts and birds in these parks, the enormous size of kills from hunting, and the variety of trees. Imaginary beings reminiscent of the west’s phoenixes and unicorns appear. More to the point is the fact that the writers condemn tying up so much land and resources for sheer luxury, and praise the emperors whenever they release land for farming. Thus Yang Xiong writes in praise: “He opens the forbidden parks, Distributes the public stores…releases pheasants and rabbits, Stores nets and snares; Elaphures and deer, fodder and hay, He shares with the common folk” (Knechtges 1987:135). A later, beautiful ode on a ruined city laments the replacement of exotic luxury items like ostriches by “marsh moss…wild kudzu…snakes and beetles…deer and flying squirrels…field rats, wall foxes,” and overgrowth by poplars, grasses, scrub (Knechtges 1987:257). These poems exhibit what Karen Laura Thornber (2012), in writing about more recent Chinese literature, calls “ecoambiguity”: love and appreciation of the wild, but seeing the need and moral rightness of taming it when people need food and security. The love of both wild and tame, and the regretful awareness of necessity when the wild is sacrificed, has always characterized Chinese literature, though admittedly the “wild” is often a hunting park rather than a wilderness.

            Han developed the changpingcang, “long-level(ed) storehouse,” borrowed by the United States as the “ever-normal granary” in the 1930s—rather a long lag for a desirable cultural borrowing. Henry Wallace, Franklin Roosevelt’s liberal expert on agriculture, introduced the idea. Wallace got the idea from a Columbia University thesis by Chen Huan-Chang, “The Economic Principles of Confucius and His School” (his Ph.D. thesis, 1911). Chen returned to China in 1912 and worked there. He was a militant Confucian (Bodde 1946).

            Some “mispronunciations” turn out to be more interesting than they seem. Sharp-eared foodies may have noticed that wolfthorn berries, now so popular in the western world as an antioxidant “nutraceutical,” are called either goujizi or gouqizi (American markets sell them as “goji berries”). This is reflected in, and may in fact come from, the fact that the phonetic element of the character for ji is actually pronounced qi, even though the full character (the phonetic plus the “tree” radical) is pronounced ji. The linguist David Prager Branner discusses these cases and others (Branner 2011:107). The same misreading, or perhaps simply a dialect variant that is reflected in the character, affects some other food plants:  qianma “nettle” gets read as xunma, jicai “shepherd’s purse” (a very good cress-like vegetable) as qicai, and pielan  or piela “kohlrabi” as pilan—in all cases the variant pronunciation following the phonetic without the “plant” radicals.

            Goji berries now come from the desert species Lycium barbarum and are produced largely in Ningxia, with rapid expansion, spreading into other dry areas (Dunlop 2019a). There is now even a ceremony for them in Ningxia (Newman 2017b). L. chinense, the common garden plant of the rest of China,is now grown mostly for leaves. Goji berries are literal vitamin pills; they have among the highest vitamin and mineral values of any plant material, as well as being high in antioxidants. They are therefore thrown in handfuls into traditional Chinese strengthening and healing foods. They expanded worldwide as a major “functional food” in the early 21st century, thoiugh this has leveled off now. Lycium species with superb berries—some as flavorful as raspberries—abound in the United States, and could easily be domesticated; they grow easily in gardens (personal observation). They are said to have less vitamin content, however.

A fine collection of papers edited by Isaac Yue and Siufu Tang (2013) is especially good and complete on “wine” (jiu, actually ale, as the writers know, but they follow the common translation that pays more attention to its cultural status—more comparable to “wine” in Europe than to “ale”). Several papers focus on the rise of drunkenness as an ideal state for the proper sage. Laozi and Zhuangzi did not have this idea, except for brief references to people whose basic nature was to drink and thus did it in spite of social conventions. After 250, the conventions changed, and drunkenness was the expected and idealized behavior of poets; the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove, Tao Qian, and other poets of the early interregnum started this, and Li Bai perfected it and modeled the sublime drunkard for all time. Few went as far, even when imitating him—he seems to have been a genuine alcoholic—but later writers from Su Shi to the Korean and Japanese imitators of Chinese verse all immortalized their muzzy states. One hopes for further work on the social aspects of this; Yue and Tang provide much excellent social history of it. Charles Kwong’s paper in their book (2013) is particularly noteworthy not only for its history but for Dr. Kwong’s translations of drinking poems; he gives us a whole anthology of them, genuinely well translated (Chinese poetry is notoriously difficult to turn into readable English).

Three Kingdoms and Northern and Southern Dynasties

            To begin on a light note: “When the first emperor of Eastern Jin set up his government in Jiankang, there were no luxuries; when a pig was slaughtered, the neck meat was reserved for the emperor, the ‘forbidden fillet.’” (Stephen Owen, in footnote on Du Fu’s collected poetry, Du 2016, vol. 5, p. 391). So the emperor was happy with pork neck bones—the stereotypic black poverty dish (along with chitlins) in my childhood!  I love them, whether Chinese-style or African-American-style.

            Early in the period, Ge Hong wrote: “It is not that the Dao is located [exclusively] in mountains and forests, but one who would seek the Dao must enter the mountains and forests, drawing near to their clarity and purity, in his earnest desire to distance himself from the rottenness” (Campany 2001:130-131). Strange stories of the period record immortals feeding humans on moutain-goat jerky, sesame seeds, and the like, and describe thoroughly shamanistic visions, soul-travels, and transformations (Campany 2015).

            And yet another story, told here by Fuchsia Dunlop: “The name of the soup, ‘thinking of perch and water shield’, refers to an old story about an official from these parts, Zhang Han, who was posted to north China in the 4th century AD. There, surrounded by dry millet fields, an entirely different landscape and foodscape from those of his native Suzhou, he became so consumed with yearning for the sliced fish and water shield of his hometown that he abandoned his post. Ever since, ‘thinking of perch and water shield’ has been not just a poetic name for a soup, but an expression of homesickness” (Dunlop n.d. 59).

We know domestic ducks were common from the fate of Wang Sengda (423-458), who was fired for shamming sick so that he could go to watch a duck fight (Wallace 2017). Duck fighting was not uncommon at the time.

            More serious was drying up of some west Chinese oases in the 500s, probably after 536, when volcanic eruptions massively affected the whole Northern Hemisphere. They were not reoccupied till wetter times in the Medieval Warm Period (K. Li, X. Qin and L. Zhang 2018).

Albert Dien’s work Six Dynasties Civilization (2007) discusses tomb finds, including some notes on food (pp. 359-363). As usual, millet, millet ale, greens, and pork dominated. Bread like Persian nan and dumplings similar to mantou were found in a tomb.

The first Turkic record in China is a single sentence of the otherwise lost Kir language, from the fourth century CE (Shimunek et al. 2015). The authors of the study that reports this find suspect that Turkic peoples, not the Xiongnu, were the “Huns” of early medieval Sogdian record, though the word “Hun” (Hunnu) is almost certainly derived from the word now written as “Xiongnu” (with characters giving it an unsavory meaning, as “slaves”) in Chinese.

            Around 300, Shu Xi (263-302) wrote the famous Bing Fu—a long, rhetorical poem. Bing today means “cakes,” but David Knechtges in his new study and translation (2014, in Swartz et al. 2014) finds it covered all kinds of flour foods in Shu Xi’s time. Thus Arthur Waley’s famous translation of this poem as “Hot Cake” (Waley 1946:86) is too narrow. Shu Xi walks us through the seasons, with filled dumplings, bread, boiled noodles, flour cakes, and all, and then climaxes with a mouth-watering recipe for making the filling and stuffing the filled dumplings—what were mantou then but would now be called jiaozi. Shu notes that bing are of recent origin. Knechtges (2014:449) finds the first reference in the Warring States text Mozi, but the Mozi has had various bits and pieces inserted in it over time, so this could be as late as a Han reference. Shu lists a great number of obscure flour-cake terms, in obvious parody of the arcane and obscure language of more formal fu. (He was criticized for his “vulgar” fu, for which he established a style.)  As he says,

            “some of these names originate in the villages and lanes,

            and some of the methods for making them come from alien lands.”  (Knechtges 2014:453.)

            He reports sifting the flour twice (as my mother used to do, to take out bits caked by moisture), and then describes making filled dumplings by chopping mutton with ginger and onions, spicing with cassia and Chinese brown pepper, adding salt and black beans (presumably fermented soybeans), and stuffing this mix into skins. (Knechtges refers to “thoroughwort” but thoroughwort, Eupatorium, barely occurs in China. A species of the genus occurs, but, like thoroughwort elsewhere, is used as medicine rather than food. Thoroughwort is useless as a spice. Possibly artemisia was meant; it is still used to stuff dumplings in Korea, and it resembles thoroughwort and is related. Less likely, but a known spice of the time, is smartweed, Polygonum odoratum.)

            Knechtges notes that many varieties of bing were already described in Han, as well as ci, dumplings of rice or millet flour. Shu introduces more of the wheat dumplings and cakes. He notes some come from foreign lands, and a couple have strange names, angan and butou (small dumplings like spaetzle pressed out into strips), that may be loanwords from some unknown source (Knechtges 2014:450). Shu describes seasonally eaten cakes, including what may be pancakes for summer and leavened bread for autumn. Spring is for mantou. This is actually the first certain mention of mantou. Coming at a time when western influence was strengthening, in a poem with foreign influence acknowledged, this Turkic loanword (Turkic mantu, manti) is not a surprise. Winter brought tang bing, noodles. Shu waxes ecstatic over laowan, meat-stuffed dumplings. These have the spices noted above, and their wrappings were made with meat stock instead of water. They were eaten with hai, fermented meat sauce. Bing were also made in the shape of pigs’ ears and dogs’ tongues, like the “cow ear” cookies of today.

            Another treasure is a festival and ritual calendar (Chapman 2014) from around 550. It describes all the seasonal festivals, often with the foods traditional at that time. New Year began with sacrificing chickens, then progressed to drinking peppered wine, eating eggs, drinking peach soup, and eating teeth-gluing toffee—teeth knocking together might bring trouble (p. 475). Others prepared the five pungent vegetables: garlic, leek, garlic chives, mustard, and cilantro—Zhuangzi said these opened the viscera, and they apparently protect against bad air. (Garlic may not have been around in Zhuangzi’s time, and cilantro almost certainly was not, coming to China much later.) But Buddhists ban them (p. 476). Cold Food Day was then two days before the spring festival of Qing Ming (it is now shortly after new year). People ate things like malt syrup, sticky rice and barley pastries, and apricot-kernel gruel (477). On the ninth day of the ninth month, people ate pastries and drank chrysanthemum-flavored wine (481).

Another area receiving attention has been the mutual mockery of southerners and northerners that I commented on in The Food of China. Lu Sidao, in the 6th century, was mocked as a northerner; a southern poet taunted him that in the north “Elm trees thrive with the desire to feed men; Grass grows tall so as to fatten donkeys.”  Elm leaves and fruits were and are a famine food in the north. The south lacked donkeys and apparently found them derisory. Lu Sidao immediately shot back his own couplet, mocking southern stinginess:  “Sharing the rice steamer but not the rice; Using the same frying pan, each cooks his or her fish”—images of selfishness quite similar to mocking lines I have heard myself in south China. (The quotes are from Choo 2014:72.)

The Qimin Yaoshu continues to attract attention, but amazingly little considering its importance. Bray (1984) drew heavily on it for her history of Chinese agriculture. Huang (2000) and Sabban (1988) have examined its fermentation technology. I have described the cooking of the period, including the Qimin Yaoshu and the Tang dynasty, in a recent article (Anderson ms), and need not redo it here. The Qimin Yaoshu is an enormous agricultural encyclopedia, compiled by one Jia Sixie around 544. The book’s name literally translates as “ordinary people’s needed skills.” It has been variously translated and mistranslated; some translations are far from the actual meaning. The book’s accounts of agriculture are detailed and intelligent. They reveal an incredible amount of highly sophisticated, technical, accurate knowledge, comparable to but rather more advanced than such Latin counterparts as Columella. The book describes making all sorts of pickles and fermented foods, making soy sauce and vinegars. Itprovides us with the first account of oil pressing in China (Bray 1984:519), but obviously that skill was well known long before, since oil is repeatedly mentioned in earlier works. Rapeseed and less often hemp, and perhaps sesame, were the feedstocks.

Francesca Bray’s superb accounts of the Qimin Yaoshu (1984, 2019a) are among the very best studies of Chinese food. She translates a recipe for stir-fried eggs: “To stir-fry (chao) hens’ eggs: break into a copper bowl and stir till white and yolk are mixed together. Finely shred the white bulb of an onion, add a pinch of salt and stir-fry in a mixture of soy sauce and hemp [sesame?] oil. It smells and tastes delicious” (Bray 2019a:366). This is still an extremely common Chinese recipe. Green onions (scallions) are normally understood. Sesame is “Persian hemp” in Chinese, hence the question about it; it produces a much better oil than hempseed.

The work also tells us a great deal about dairying and various ways of processing milk. At this time, the north Chinese were heavy dairy consumers. Jia lived under the Northern Wei dynasty, ruled by the Tuoba (Tabghach, Taghbach), a central Asian people speaking Särbi, a language in the Mongolian family. They popularized all manner of central Asian cultural forms, including dairy. He gives recipes for brewing ale, including use of 180 bushels of grain for one batch of “spring ale,” making it clear he was writing for large estates. He lived in a world where slaves, serfs, and peasants (low-status, unfree small farmers) abounded. However, there were very large numbers of free yeoman farmers too. The popularity of his book shows that many of them could read. The old image of traditional China as a handful of Confucian literati in a vast mass of illiterate people is a cartoon. Already in the Han dynasty, common soldiers were writing and receiving letters on the frontier. Literacy in Wei times was not close to 21st century levels, but was quite appreciable.

Huang (2000) draws heavily on the book for his history of fermentation in China. It describes bean curd, and several types of jiang (fermented pastes), made from beans, wheat, elm seeds (edible and good, from Ulmus sinensis), and meat. Zha, fermented meat or fish ancestral to Japan’s original sushi, is described. Soymilk was known. Artemisia was used then as before to preserve ale and other foods, since its strong alkaloids kill bacteria and insects. (It was also used to line granaries.)

Chapter 7. Tang and Just After

            Beginning, as so often, with a story: Perhaps the greatest insight into Chinese food, and everything else Chinese, is provided by a story from the Jiu Tang Shu (Older Tang History) by Liu Xu (887-946). The emperor found that a man named Zhang Gongyi was patriarch of a family with dozens of people, some connected by ancestors nine generations back, living happily and peacefully together in one great house compound. “When asked how his family managed to reside together for nine generations, Zhang Gongyi (fl. 665) wrote on a piece of paper the character ren…more than a hundred times” (Knapp 2003:17). Ren means “to endure, to forbear.” A similar and much commoner character, ren “humaneness,” is often confused with this in folkloric versions of this story like the English word, it is derived from the word for “person” (ren; originally it used the same character, but was early differentiated by adding the character for “two,” to indicate it is how two or more people should act toward each other). Zhang was only more dramatic about it than millions of other Chinese. The values of forbearance and humaneness are, by widespread agreement over millennia, the core of Chinese moral culture. Without them, China, including its food system, would have been very different.

Treating the Tang Dynasty must begin with citing the great work of Berthold Laufer (1919) and Edward Schafer (1963, 1967, 1977), who established the foundation of Medieval Chinese food history. However, this material was covered so thoroughly in Schafer’s books and my earlier Food of China that it needs little treatment here.

Those who write about Chinese environmental policy love to quote a poem by Liu Zongyuan (773-819) about deforestation; various translatons are cited in the Needham series, Elvin’s magnum opus (2004), and my own work. A notably better translation has appeared, done by Bill Porter (Red Pine, 2019:45-46) and is too good to miss:

“The court sends woodsmen into a thousand mountains

with orders to choose pillars and beams

in ancient groves they cut ten and keep one

shattering the axles of hundred-oxen teams

blocking roadways with piles of logs

leaving hills in ruins and mountains in flames

and nothing that remains intact

no creek or gorge survives the trampling

and most of the lumber isn’t used

Slopes are stripped and ridges left barren

then there’s an armory or a palace fire

and builders look nervous expecting to be blames

don’t you see

the great trees of South Mountain becoming scarce

and those who care even scarcer”

            The fact that this is a general comment on late Tang governance, not just on forestry, is particularly obvious from this notably literal translation. Tang readers would instantly remember Mencius’ story of Ox Mountain, deforested and ruined, used as a parable of how poor upbringing ruins humans. Forests and people have ganying, mutualresonance. This means they share some essential or vital qualities, which may be mystical, or, as here, may simply be that they respond similarly to similar management. The poem, like Mencius’ story, goes beyond simple analogy into a whole philosophy of governance. Unfortunately, the government did not listen; it is from this time that the mixed deciduous and evergreen forests of central China begin to be rapidly degraded (F. Lu et al. 2019, and see Campbell’s account below in Ming).

The indefatigable Tang and Yue quote a strange but very Tang poem I can’t miss here, a description of a pig dish, supposedly written by a monk dressed in purple (presumably a Daoist):

Its snout is long and its coat is short,

With a bit of fat it is raised on mountainous herbs;

It is wrapped in a layer of banana leaf and steamed,

When cooked it is eaten with an apricot sauce;

Its colour is red and it is served on a golden plate,

Its texture is soft enough to be picked apart by jade chopsticks;

To compare it to a dish of lamb,

The lamb is as fitting as the rattan.”

            (Tang and Yue 2013:8.)

I have no idea what the rattan is about.

      A sadder poem comes to us from Pi Rixiu, a farmer turned poet:

Deep into autumn the acorns ripen,

Scattering as they fall into the scrub on the hill.

Hunched over, a hoary-haired crone

Gathers them, treading the morning frost.

After a long time she’s got only a handful,

An entire day just fills her basket.

            The poem goes on to blame high taxes for taking all her grain and reducing her poverty (Nienhouser 1979:79-80). Ennin, the Japanese traveler, also noted acorn-eating about this time (Nienhouser 1979:79-80; Reischauer 1955), as well as eating filled dumplings then called mantou but now jiauzi. Recall that acorns were a staple food before agriculture. They are still eaten in China.

            One Huangfu Shi (777-835) was highly aware of varieties of jiu. He noted occasions (snow-viewing to flowers etc), colors, and tastes. These, following tradition, were gan (sweet), chun (mellow), ku (bitter), lie (refreshing), bo (light), and hou (heavy). He wrote:

            “As to [the taste of] drinks, those having rich but refreshing flavors and a sweet aftertaste can be compared to the sages; mellow but bitter and with a golden color can be compared to the worthies; sour and light with dark color can be compared to simpletons. [Furthermore], the hosts who intoxicate guests with glutinous rice-based homemade drinks are gentlemen; with millet-based homemade drinks are middlemen; and with unclean ashed drinks bought from the market are villains” (cited in Guo 2021). In modern terms, we might think of Belgian ale, microbrewery IPA, and “lite” beer.

            Tang did better than Han in grain production and transport (Z. Wei et al. 2018). This was apparently due to better governance, since the climate was similar.

            Charles Benn, in China’s Golden Age (2002), has provided a thorough account of Tang food. It was simple and bland by modern standards. Millet continued to be the staple of ordinary people, but wheat rose spectacularly in importance, as central and west Asian foodways flooded in over the vast complex of channels rather vaguely lumped as the “Silk Road.” Jiu also diversified, with grape wine imported and occasionally made within China, and distillation beginning to enter the picture. The height of gastronomic delight, judging from the poetry of Du Fu and others, was raw fish, sliced and variously seasoned. Freshwater fish was the usual source, at least for the poets, living along rivers and lakes (Anderson ms).

            What Tang and Yue and Charles Kwong (2013) do for alcohol, Ronald Egan (2013) does for tea in the same volume; he focuses on the Song Dynasty, when tea was particularly favored as a subject for song. His translations too are fine and readable, often being the best available, and should be duly quoted in any work on tea or on medieval Chinese food (I wish they had been available when I wrote my 2014 book, which was actually completed in 2013).

            On a different note, Han Shan wrote of luxurious recipes in terms that seem quite familiar now—as is his militantly vegetarian condemnation of them for taking life:

            “The unfortunate human disorder

            A palate that never wearies

            Of steamed baby pig in garlic

            Of roast duck with pepper and salt

            Of deboned raw fish mince

            Of unskinned fried pork cheek

            Unaware of the bitterness of others’ lives

            As long as their own are sweet”

                        (Han Shan 2000:173)

            A Shiliao Bencao “Basic Herbal of Food Cures,” was written by by one Meng Shen, 621-713. Only fragments exist. Ute Engelhardt (2001) reviewed in an outstanding article what we know of Tang dietary medicine. Nutrition was important and widely studied, but knowledge of it was young and not deep. It was to increase over time.

            An Arab source from 851-852 notes foods that voyagers encountered in China. The Arabs knew mainly Guangzhou (known to them as Khanfu):  “Their food is rice. They often cook a sauce to go with it, which they pour on the rice before eating it. Their ruling classes, however, eat wheat bread and the flesh of all sorts of animals, including pigs and other such creatures [i.e., unclean in Islam]. They have various kinds of fruit—apples, peaches, citrons, pomegranates, quinces, pears, bananas, sugarcane, watermelons, figs, grapes, serpent melons, cucumbers, jujubes, walnuts, almonds, hazelnuts, pistachios, plums, apricots, serviceberries [hawthorns], and coconuts…. Their drink is a wine made from rice…. Grape wine is not to be found….” (Abü Zayd al-Sīrafī 2014:37). It would appear that the ancestral form of the modern Cantonese contrast of fan “cooked rice” and sung “sauce for cooked rice” already existed. The almonds, hazelnuts and pistachios would have come from the Near East, traded by the seafaring merchants who supplied the information. Evidently they were common enough in late Tang to seem regular foods in the port cities. Weirdly, this source says the Chinese for tea is sākh (p. 49).

            Tang history relates that the Gopi kingdom in India presented “yu gold aromatic” to the Tang court in 647—the first mention of saffron in China (Yan Liu 2018). Buddhists then took to using it for scenting and purifying.

Chapter 8. Song and the Conquest Dynasties

Song saw the development of the Chinese agriculture familiar since: intensive wet-rice agriculture with improved varieties; multicropping everywhere; more use of manure; better water control (Feuerwerker 1995:54); more rationalized integration of silk with food production; rationalized, market-oriented production of such local specialty crops as sugar; and intensive urban marketing. This all led to the development of a middle class with bourgeois culture, and the famous “sprouts of capitalism” (zibenzhuyi mengya) that never grew into capitalism but did grow into a state-mercantile type of economy. Banqueting in this period and later is notably shown in art (Kwok 2019).

A detailed study of agriculture in Fujian, from Song through Yuan, is provided by Billy So (2000). The fast-growing rice from Champa came, but yielded less well than local rices, and thus did not catch on until later. Population was dense, causing people to turn increasingly to the ocean, starting Fujian’s career as a major trading center and a major exporter of people to the Nanyang (Southeast Asia) and later the world.

China fought the Xixia (Tangut) state, with no success until the great statesman, thinker, and outspoken reformer Fan Chengda was put in charge. He quickly forced the government to provide decent armor and resources. He went on to mentor the major political reformers of the following period. Fan, one of the more sympathetic characters in Song history, was a brilliant, far-traveled diplomat and scholar with superb literary talent. He also wrote important texts on statecraft, including agricultural policy, the importance of which he stressed (P. J. Smith 2017). He had an insightful grasp of ecology, seeing the erosion caused by deforestation (Bello 2022:280). The mountains of Guizhou proved particularly erodable.

Joseph McDermott and veteran Japanese Sinologist Shiba Yoshinobu contributed a book-length chapter on Song economy to the Cambridge History of China (2015). They report that this was the time when China truly became a yeoman nation. Serfdom was declining. Bondservants could now own property. Slavery was about gone. Small-scale private landholding was the rule. From this point on, it is even less correct than before to refer to China’s farmers as “peasants.” They were free farmers, not entailed cultivators with limited rights (p. 350f.).

The shift to the south continued, with some areas registering 1200% increases in population while parts of the north declined up to 10% (p. 330-332). “In 609 the four key northern provinces of Sui dynasty China had held 73 percent of the empire’s populace…in 1290 it was 20 percent” (p. 434).

Population of northern Song reached about 100 million, and the total of southern Song and Jin regained that level after conflict, reaching 110-120 by 1215 (Mote 1994). Among government measures to help with rising population and pressure on resources were issuance of important agricultural manuals. The Nongsang Qiyao, “Needed Knowledge of Agriculture and Sericulture,” was a government manual from 1273, but early editions are lost (Bray 1984:71). In 980 China had only 35 million people, according to an admittedly conservative estimate. Population reached 124 million in the 13th century, but dropped to 75 by 1391, after the rise and fall of Yuan (Cao 2022).

The Medieval Warm Period greatly benefited Song’s enemies, making inner Asia from Mongolia to Tibet warmer and wetter. Song did not benefit. The north was warmer but drier, keeping yields down (Bello 2022:263). The south was wetter, causing floods.

Terrible famines occurred widely in north China in 1075 and the 1100s (see also Zhang 2016), often resulting from flooding perhaps associated with northward movement of the monsoon in the Medieval Warm Period. Infanticide is mentioned as a problem for the first time in Chinese history (McDermott and Yoshinobu 2015:411). Part of the problem was the famous deforestation for ironmaking and other industrial uses requiring firewood. Tools improved; the modern Chinese plow developed, and harrows, rollers, and other farm implements were widespread (p. 353-355). The fast-growing, high-yielding rice from Champa (central Vietnam) spread rapidly and was an important crop; earlier claims to the contrary turn out to be wrong (p. 394-402).

Ling Zhang (2016) has examined in detail the problems caused by the Yellow River to Northern Song. She sees the river as a major actor in a drama; the government frantically tried to control the river, but it proved uncontrollable, constantly flooding and changing its course. Centuries of deforestation and intensive farming had allowed massive erosion, which led to silt aggradation of the riverbed, filling in and overwhelming of wetlands, and flash floods from the mountains and hills. At this time, winter wheat was becoming an important crop, but need for irrigation limited its extent in most of northeast China. Famines were regular and population declined. The book is a brilliant tour-de-force of analyzing the role of rivers and of human failure in the wake of human irresponsibility. The Yellow River remains a problem today. Research by Guodong Li and associates (2019) has confirmed her story: the climate in Northern Song was slightly warmer than now, but erratic, with cold periods and erratic flooding.

Some degree of the hard times can be gauged from the fate of the Imperial family. Of the 183 recorded children of Song emperors, two died in war, 83 died young, 99 survived childhood, and one is lost to the record—a child mortality rate around 48% (Zhang 2017a). This is probably typical for imperial families, given the number of child emperors and of emperors who died without children. The most prolific Song emperor, Huizi, had over sixty children, none of whom survived. (See Anderson 2019. Modern China’s infant mortality rate is 1%. The United States is half that. Presumably the deceased imperial children did not all die as infants, but still the rate is sobering.)

One relief came from forestry. Song created enormous needs for timber, because of construction, iron-smelting, and even writing—ink was made by low-oxygen burning of pines (it later was made from vegetable oil). Creative forest communities took to tree-farming, and developed a genuinely scientific forestry, almost exactly like that which Germany developed in the 19th century (McDermott 2013). Cunninghamia lanceolata, China fir, wasthe most valued. It grew straight and clear to 50 mt. A later book, the Nongzheng quanshu (Complete Book on Agriculture), by Xu Guangqi, 1630, tells how to plant and care for them (McDermott 2013:384). This stands as one of the more amazing cases of China long preceding the west in technical achievements. The forests also produced other commodities, including chestnuts and other nuts, medicinal herbs, orchids, wild fruit, wild vegetables, and mineral resources (McDermott 2013:278-279). Second only to timber was tea, rapidly becoming a major crop in Song.

Ian Miller takes up the story in his book Fir and Empire (2020). Tree farming continued, and does so still. This story will be picked up again in the Qing section.

Patricia Ebrey’s detailed biography of Emperor Huizong of Song (2014) has some notes on food. “1,069 cooks and cooks’ helpers working in the palace. Feeding everyone in the palace require several thousand pounds of flour a day, and each year tens of thousands of sheep and thirty-two tons of sugar” (pp. 7-8).

 “One dumpling restaurant had more than fifty ovens and dozens of workers…. Large restaurants might specialize in regional cuisine, such as the Sichuan restaurant that served ‘noodles with meat, noodles with preserved meat; noodles with various forms of meat or vegetable topping, stewed meat, fried giblets of fowl, and rice served with toppings both raw and cooked’” (p. 23; the quote is from S. West in the Hawai’i Reader).         

            In late Southern Song times, Wu Zimu listed the absolute necessities: “the things that people cannot do without every day are firewood, rice, oil, salt, soybean sauce, vinegar, and tea. Those that are just slightly better off cannot do without hsia-fan [xiafan, ‘food to help get the rice down’] and soup.” (Freeman 1977:151). Another list says “oil, salt, soy sauce paste, salted fermented beans, ginger, wild pepper and tea” (Wang 2016:83). Tea may have been “essential” only to well-to-do people in tea-growing areas, but the text does not say that, and clearly tea was widespread and popular. The phrase xiafan is interesting; it was later replaced by cai in Mandarin, sung in Cantonese. It reminds one of similar phrases worldwide, as in the American “potatoes and with-it,” the Latin cumpanagium (modern Italian companaggio), the Malay lauk, and the modest sentence that a rural cook used when he taught a particularly fine sauce to Escoffier, “it helps the bread go down.”  The references to soy sauce are probably to solid paste, but modern-type liquid soy sauce begins to appear at this time. It was then a specialized product, most popular in the lower Yangzi, and remained relatively more common in that area until modern times (Leung 2021).

Wang Zengyu (2016 [originally in Chinese, 1998]) has given a wonderful and thorough account of food in Song times, based largely on literary sources: poetry, literary records, miscellaneous discourses, and similar source materials. (I would love to know more about one called “Chicken Rib Discourses.”)  The essay is ornamented with copious quotes from these sources, reminding the reader that Song writers were second to none in their ability to report sharp observation with literary skill. Many quotes are from the intrepid Fan Chengda.

Wang finds that millets were still staple foods in north and northwest China, though wheat was widespread. Rice was the unquestioned staple in the south. Meat, vegetables, and fruit were as now, except for the lack of New World foods. (The English version mentions “papaya,” but that is a translator’s error for quince.)  Vegetables included many varieties of Chinese cabbage, as well as lettuce, spinach, ginger, scallion, shallot, chives garlic, eggplant, the usual gourds, taro, yam, burdock root, radish, wild-rice stalk, alfalfa, perilla, seaweed, wormwood shoots, fern, celery, arrowhead, arrowroot, lotus rhizome, and various mushrooms. Several wild greens were used, and were painstakingly and commendably identified in text (Wang 2016:67).

Pickling preserved most of these, especially the greens and radishes. Pickles were eaten widely, and were evidently a major part of diet. Sean Chen’s excellent translation of Madame Wu’s Song-dynasty cookbook (Chen 2023; see also Anderson 2023) confirms most of these vegetables, and the importance of pickling. In fact, the Chinese original is one of Wang’s sources. Madame Wu’s 75 recipes include no fewer than 51 for pickling and preserving, ranging from long-term preservation down to marinating to keep food fresh for a few days. Meat, fish, bamboo shoots, eggplants, and many other items were preserved, as well as greens. Clarissa Wei’s excellent cookbook of Taiwanese foodways (2023) includes a recipe for pickled mustard greens that is virtually identical to Madame Wu’s. Sean Chen envisions the Song kitchen as well stocked with jars of all sizes, to hold all the preserved goods.

Fruit included many forms of apricot and peach, a huge variety of pears (including very large ones), apples, cherries, pomegranates, mei, lotus, loquat, tangerine, kumquat, orange, pomelo, wolfthorn berries, grape, chestnut, hazel, ginkgo nuts, jujubes, carambolas, melons, quinces, torreya nuts, water caltrop, water chestnuts, and the like (Wang 2016:74). There was a modern-sounding gourmetship of tea and alcohol. Distilled alcoholic drinks were known (Wang 2016:80; the “not” is a mistake) and included some known today, such as “rose dew” (rose-flavored vodka). The usual ales were made, but true wine was made from grapes and several other fruits. Tonics included alcohol infusions of rose, chrysanthemum prickly ash, foxglove, wolfthorn berries, and even vipers (Wang 2016:80); these survive today. Malt sugar and cane sugar were both widely used and sometimes mixed. Varied and wonderful sweets were produced. Sugar milling was highly developed (Mazumdar 1998).

Cooking methods were as today. Court cuisine was famous, and famously expensive. Restaurants and catering flourished. Holidays were celebrated with fine foods, as usual. Many have noted that China’s elaborate, meticulous, diverse cuisine began in Song. Tang records show no trace of it; from Song onward it is everywhere. In fact, a self-conscious counter-tradition arose, influenced by Buddhism as well as Chinese thought, that idealized elegant simplicity. Andrea Montanari (2020) has recently written a superb study of simple soups from Su Shi onward in Song thought and ideal. She quotes many poets of the time on the virtues of a simple soup of shepherd’s purse (a tasty but minor roadside herb) and the like.

Wheat foods were important everywhere. Baked cakes were shaobing, boiled ones (similar to modern year-cakes) were tangbing, steamed ones zhengbing (Wang 2016:60). Dumplings were already as important and almost as varied as they are today. Stuffed buns, mantou-like solid breads, wontons, and baozi abounded (Wang 2016:62). Noodles were particularly creative: there were noodle soups with pork, lamb, chicken, bamboo shoots, and others. Shaobing (a.k.a. hubing, “Iranian cakes,” removing all doubt of their Iranic origin) could be stuffed with anything from pig pancreas to sesame to marrow (Wang 2016:61).

The custom of feeding sweets to the kitchen god two weeks before New Year, so he would say only sweet things when he went to Heaven to report on the family for the year, was already established; it is recorded by Fan Chengda (Wang 2016:418-419).

Duck fighting was common at the time. Somewhat outside the range of food, but important, is the note that, while constructing the town of Pingxia, “residents saw three lizards there and built a shrine for them.” The lizards eventually became the “Marquis of Favourable Resonance, Marquis of Favourable Bestowal, and Marquis of Favourable Protection….. It is certainly beyond modern people’s imagination that three lizards could be apotheosized and given noble titles” (Wang 2016:423).

Pregnancy involved a whole realm of avoidances, to prevent marking the child. If the mother ate rabbit meat, the baby would have a harelip (a common belief in the west, even within my memory). If she ate lamb, the baby might be weak. If she ate turtle, the baby would have a short neck. If she ate donkey meat, the pregnancy would go on too long (donkeys carry their foals for about 11 months). And so on (Zhang 2017a:266). After a death, people were supposed to fast for three days, then avoid meat and alcoholic drinks for 25 months—into the third year (Zhang 2017b; he relates a non-ghost story of a skeptical monk who was detailed to guard a house against ghosts, and saw none until a strange creature appeared out of the dark, moaning, and capped by a pottery jar; he soon discovered it was the house dog, who had got his head stuck while foraging in a food jar).

Minorities in the south ate what they could get, especially the usual grains and root crops, and fish along rivers and coasts. There were already boat people in the far southeast, living on their watercraft and subsisting largely on fish and seafoods, often eating the fish raw (Wang 2016:91).

The custom of “buying water” from the river, to wash the corpse of a parent, was already established, among the Zhuang (Zhang 2017c:348). This recalls an experience from my field work in 1965. We had to purchase water from a nearby pumped well. When asked the standard Cantonese greeting “where are you going?” I at first said “to buy water.”  I got very strange looks. Obviously, something was wrong, so I asked my field assistant. I learned that one uses the phrase “buy water” (maai seui) only when one is obtaining water to wash one’s parent’s corpse!  This now turns out to be a Zhuang custom, carried right over into 20th-century Hong Kong; the Cantonese are basically Sinicized Zhuang, after all.

To Wang’s survey, there is rather little to add. Crabs were the subject of two works, Monograph on Crabs in 1060, Discourse on Crabs in 1080; neither has recipes, alas, but Jacqueline Newman has made up for it by providing a huge number of wonderful ones in her article noting those books. Such monographs were known as pulu, and were a genre beloved of Su literati. They further inspired a subgenre of punned accounts in which the description of sea food, or other commodity, could also be read as a description of a human. Possibly the ultimate in this form was achieved by the great writer Su Shi. In his time, scallops were popular enough to inspire him to create a fictional discourse in which the scallop appears as a human scholar. The ambiguity and frequent double or multiple meanings of classical Chinese allow the entire essay to be read two ways: as a description of the scholar’s career and as an actual description of a scallop. Such perspective-taking is not unusual in Chinese fiction (Mai 2020), but few if any could do such a sustained and perfect job of it as Su.

A Song work, Records of Home Cooking by one Madame Wu, said to be from Pujian in Zhejiang, was the first cookbook by a woman (probably in the world). Her cookbook has received an able scholarly translation by Shen J. S. Chen (2023), who we will meet again below as translator of Yuan Mei’s famous food book. Madame Wu’s given names are unknown, and even her existence has been questioned, her name being perhaps a pseudonym.

In any case, she wrote a fine food book. It is not simply a cookbook; 51 of the 80-odd recipes are for preserving food, not preparing it directly for the table. Most of the recipes are as simple as those of Tang, but a few reflect the more elaborate, spicy cuisine that was emerging in her time. Six recipes are for central Asian wheat-flour items, one even bearing the name saboni, from Greek sapouni “soap” via Arabic sabuniya “soapy” and Turkic sabuniye—a very unusual linguistic chain for Chinese, though typical of Central Asian medicinal name borrowings. Wu’s book also has several fish, shellfish, and crab recipes (Newman 2016a).

            The great poet Lu You gave us a poem about eating sheep yogurt with cherries in Hangzhou, thus showing that yogurt, a thoroughly northwestern food, was eaten even in the lower Yangtze (Miranda Brown, Facebook posting, Aug. 28, 2021).

            Pure Offerings in the Mountains (Shanjia qinggong) by Lin Hong (1224-1263) is “the only extant book-length text devoted to food appreciation with detailed descriptions that has survived to the present” (W. Wang 2024:94) from the Song. It includes recipes, anecdotes, descriptive appreciation, and poems by Lin and his friends. Like many Song gourmets and aesthetes, he idealized the plain, natural, and simple. Wandi Wang, in a noteworthy article on his work, quotes this couplet:

            “Delicately I chew apricot buds by the little window,

            Fresh verses issue from my mouth, every word fragrant.” (Wang 2024:110, corrected). This article was extracted from a longer Ph.D. thesis (Wang 2025), filled with details on food writings in Song, with historical references from earlier and follow-up notes from later dynasties. Lyrical cookbooks—books with brief recipes in rhyme—were a rare but noted feature of the period. The recipes are not very adequate for preparation, but the poetry was liked in its time. Wang notes that these cookbooks merged into miscellaneous-note collections, occasional verse collections, and other somewhat casual formats. Still, Wang feels they deserve consideration as a separate genre. The thesis also includes a long passage on qing, “pure,” a fascinating word. The character by itself means cool and pure colors (green, blue, gray); with the water radical, “pure, clean, simple”; with the grain radical, “nature”; with the word radical, “please” (the standard word for “please” in Chinese); with the ice radical, “cool”; with the heart radical, “true feelings.” These are all etymologically related, but the links need more teasing out.

The flowers of the mei (sour apricot) have a wonderful carnation scent, and can perfume the breath. These flowers were much in vogue in late Song poetry. Hans Frankel (1952), in his excellent and valuable monograph on this plant in Chinese poetry, says “practically every poet felt obliged to devote some poems” to them (quoted Wang 2024:110). Lin goes on to provide a dozen recipes for the flowers and fruit. The flowers were infused in water to flavor various recipes. They were actually eaten, not just sniffed. The great Song poet Yang Wanli loved to eat them, candied among other ways (Wang 2025:114). We will later meet  Cao Xueqin’s description of making tea with melted snow that has fallen on these flowers. Snow did once fall on a flowering apricot of mine, and I was able to try this. The carnation scent does indeed come through. Lin Hong gives a recipe for the flowers and fruit macerated and fermented together in snow water (Wang 2025:124).

Lin’s recipe for fried imitation meat recommends decorating this vegetarian pleasure, and one’s home, with apricot flowers. Other recipes are equally simple, such as rabbit slices cooked hot-pot style in boiling water and eaten with the resulting soup (Wang 2024:112). Not even one peppercorn. Another recipe involves “green essence rice” (qingjing fan), plain rice flavored with the juice extracted from stems and leaves of an obscure wild plant (Wang 2024:114-5), or other green items, including “green stone fat,” which I take to be green algae growing on rocks; it has an earthy savor. He was not averse to real meat; he gives what may be the first clear reference to hotpot in China, in his poem work. Rabbit, pork or lamb slices were marinated in jiu, soy sauce, and brown pepper (presumably ground), and held by the eaters in boiling water till done. Then as now, much of the pleasure came from the communal activity (Wang, quoting Lin, 2024:151). A modern “influencer” whose public name is “Between Mei and Food” (Meishijian—homophonous with “no time,” a deliberate irony) has re-created Lin’s recipes on social media (Wang 2025:230).

            Wandi Wang also deals with the Chinese olive (Canarium album). This fruit was an exotic item of the far south in Song times, and to some extent still is. The fruit is pickled, resulting in something like a Greek olive, but with a sharper, more bitter, more complex taste and aftertaste.

“Olives” 橄欖

江東多果實,East of the River, there is an abundance of fruit,

橄欖稱珍奇。Olives are regarded as precious and rare.

北人將就酒,Northerners pair them with ale,

食之先顰眉。Eating them first leads to a furrowed brow.

皮核苦且澀,The rind and seed are bitter and astringent,

歷口復棄遺。And they pass through the mouth, then are cast aside.

良久有回味,After a while, there is a lingering taste,

始覺甘如飴。Eventually sweetening like malt sugar.

我今何所喻,What now shall I compare them to?

喻彼忠臣詞。To those words of loyal ministers—

直道逆君耳,Direct words which oppose the emperor’s ears,

斥逐投天涯。Resulting in banishments to the ends of the earth.

世亂思其言,In a chaotic world, their words are recalled,

噬臍焉能追。Gnawing one’s navel, it is too late to turn back.

寄語採詩者,A message to those who gather poems:

無輕橄欖詩。Never underestimate the poetry of the olive.

Wang Yucheng (954-1001). Gnawing one’s navel is a Zuo Juanism for facing the impossibility of fixing a missed opportunity. Tr. Wandi Wang (from Wang 2025). She adds that Ouyang Xiu compared Mei Yaochen’s poetry to olives:

“Recent poetry is especially antique and hard,

when you chew it, it’s bitter and tough.

It’s also like eating olives,

the true flavor grows richer with time.”

Huang Tingjian also wrote a similar couplet: “Just like tasting olives, / only after the bitterness does the flavor endure” (Wang 2025:102). The kernel of Canarium spp. is also edible, and is a choice food from southeast China throughout southeast Asia and Indonesia.

“Coarse tea and insipid rice” were snubbed by the elite, but praised by some devotees of simplicity and plainness, an aesthetic convention of the time, stimulated by Daoism and Buddhism (Yue 2017). Plain, simple food was adulated by hermits, Buddhists, Daoists, and poets at mountain retreats. The latter were possibly recovering from the great feasts that pleased the affluent.

            In Song, one Zhu Yijong was took on a hermit persona, calling himself dayin weng (great graybeard hermit), and wrote a lot on booze. His instructions for brewing are interesting. Tumi was boiled and mashed rice or similar grain; qu and maybe some wheat malt were added to it; then a sweet rice paste made; then the whole refermented (touru) together. Cocklebur (canger), spicy knotweed (laliao), or golden hop (shema) could be added [presumably to keep from spoiling, though the knotweed would flavor it]. He noted that dianle meant failed fermentation (Guo 2021).

Toward the end of Song, one Wu Zimu wrote a book called Menglianglu, “Account of a Gruel Dream” (1274; the reference is to an old story of a man who dreamed he had a long and adventurous life and awoke to find it had all taken place in a time so short that the gruel that was cooking before he went to sleep was not cooked yet). Wu also recorded the above list of necessities, and also recorded foods in the pleasure houses of Hangzhou: they “sell unusual teas and curious soups…powdered tea, pancakes, onion tea, and sometimes soup of salted beans.” In summer “plum-flower wine with a mousse of snow,” and cooling herbs (Lane 2019:83).

In Central Asia, the Turpan Depression (where temperatures range up to 49 C and rainfall is less than 2 cm./year) in Tang and Song was consuming wheat, barley, millet, grapes, walnuts, and desert plants and animals. It now raises cotton, melons, sorghum, and jujubes as well, most of those appearing and developing as crops during or soon after Song (Li-Feng Yao et al. 2020).

The Khitan, Jurchen and Tangut (of Liao, Jin and Xixia respectively) ate wheat products and meat, and especially reveled in dairy products. (See Franke and Twitchett 1994.) They did a great deal of hunting and fishing. The Khitan first-fish rite was famous—a vitally important state ritual. The fish was a huge sturgeon caught by ice-fishing (Wang 2016:95). Game meats included deer, raccoon dog, bear, marmot or ground squirrel, and game birds. Wild fruits and nuts included hazelnuts, chestnuts, pine nuts, cornels, pears, and the like; salt could be used to preserve foods (Wang 2016:97).

Surprising detail exists on Liao and Jin foods and feasting, since Song courtiers often traveled to and from their courts, recording useful or interesting lore. A Song travel writer named Fu Bi described a feast held near Liao’s southern capital:

“Decorated wooden bowls brimmed with [slavish] food. First came camel gruel, consumed with a ladle. There was stewed bear fat, mutton, pork, pheasant, and rabbit, and there was dried beef, venison, pigeon, duck, bear, and tanuki [raccoon dog], all of which was cut into square chunks and strewn onto a large platter. Two hu youths in pristine clothing, each holding a napkin and a knife and spoon, cut all of the various meats for the Han envoys to consume” (Tackett 2022:143). “Slavish” here translates lu, a traditional slur-word for central Asians. Hu is another word for central Asians, less derogatory and implying more urban, less nomadic people.

Yuan

            The Mongols at first had little respect for the Chinese. Yelu Chucai, a descendent of Liao  royalty, took on the role of advising them on how to deal with their conquests. A commemorative stela to him provides a surely exaggerated account: “Thus, the imperial commissioner Bekter and others all said, ‘Although we have conquered the Han men, they are really of no use. It would be better to get rid of them all and let the vegetation flourish to make pasture grounds.’  Yelu Chucai answered: ‘So large is the civilized world, and so rich are the lands within the four seas, that there is nothing you might seek that you cannot obtain. But you simply do not seek it. On what grounds to you call them useless?’” He pointed out that those Chinese farmers could pay a great amount of taxes, and thus memorialized for more taxes on them! Also, he quoted from the story of the first emperor of Han the advice given him by a sensible minister: “You conquered the empire on horseback, but can you rule it from horseback?” (Atwood 2021:140). The Mongols got the message, and though they were harsh masters, they did not convert north China into pasture.

            However, the conquest was deadly. Population dropped to 60 million by 1290, and did not recover unitl well into Ming (Mote 1994:661). The siege of Kaifeng in 1234 led to at least a million deaths, with epidemics, possibly including plague, breaking out. Famine was so great that people exhausted their leather goods and turned to eating the dead, possibly even killing children for food (Hymes 2021). Actual bubonic plague was spread by the Mongols into Europe, as is well documented, but Robert Hymes shows it was part of this story too, breaking out in China in the 1200s; only one book, little noticed, describes it well enough to identify it, which is why many scholars (myself included) did not see it as epidemic in old China (Hymes 2022; cf. Anderson 2019 and references there).

            Stephen Haw (2006) has written a notably well-researched study of Marco Polo. Among other things, it ends forever any serious argument that Polo never got there. Haw notes many details that Marco could not possibly have known without seeing them. I might add that Polo’s descriptions of cranes are perfectly identifiable to species, which would be impossible unless he was speaking from direct observation (Anderson 2016b). The types of “mice” eaten by the Mongols are also described in the travel literature, and I have identified them (Buell and Anderson 2020).

            A social change involved considerable restriction of women, tracking Neo-Confucian thinking in late Song and then Mongol introduction of west and central Asian policies, influenced by Islam and more restrictive. Women lost rights to property, among other things, with ramifying bad effects on food in the coming dynasties; they followed the Yuan code (Birge 2002).

            Irrigation associations existed before; they flourished under the Mongols. They were locally organized, often with help of the monasteries and other religious institutions, which were big landowners and major local forces for political and economic organization (J. Wang 2018:166-214). They were organized in ways similar to village-level irrigation systems elsewhere, from Peru to Yemen (see my post, “Water,” www.krazykioti.com). The village or group of villages owns the water. Elders are charged to administer it, with, in the Chinese case, help from literate people—scholars and clergy. The clergy were largely Daoist and Buddhist, worshiping high deities, but they bent here to worshiping local water gods, and often the monasteries were turned into water god temples. Water bosses and, if necessary, seconds-in-command are designated to patrol the system and open or close sluice gates. Major gates open or close canals. These branch into feeders, ultimately reaching every field in the village. Individuals are allowed so many hours of water, generally controlling their own beds. Since everybody depends on the system, and neighbors in particular depend on each other, the incentives for everyone to police everyone else are great. Such bottom-up systems can work smoothly for centuries, surviving disasters and reorganizing after wars. This was a time when “village worship associations, Buddhist and Daoist temple communities, popular cult shrines, and large kinship associations had begun to compete for swealth and influence” (Wang 2018:281, citing Joseph McDermott), with the water gods showing more cooperation than competition with the Daoist and Buddhist ones. Yuan heavily favored the latter two faiths, freeing them from taxes. Yuan also decentralized control, allowing the monasteries to step into the power vacuum and wield great power. Ming reversed all this, and the religious institutions shrank. Irrigation systems, however, have to be managed, so the water gods and village societies went right on delivering. Wang notes in passing that all this refutes Wittfogel’s long-dead “irrigation civilization” hypothesis; it is mercifully too thoroughly buried to need much refutation any more (see Anderson 1988 for the full story of its downfall in China).

            Yuan loved to compile food and agricultural books. Wang Zhen’s enormous Nung Shu (“Agriculture Book”) of 1313 summarized farming knowledge of China, but has been little studied (see Bray 1984:59-61 for an easily-available account in English). Other works followed.

            Sources on Mongol food have been enormously expanded by Christopher Atwood’s book The Rise of the Mongols: Five Chinese Sources (2021). Zhao Gong, in “A Memorandum on the Mong-Tatars” (pp. 71-92), describes their staple foods: “They live only by drinking mare’s milk to slake their hunger and thirst. The milk of a single mare can satisfy three people. Whether going out or staying home, they only drink mare’s milk or slaughter sheep for food. [This is flagrant exaggeration; horses foal in spring, the milk must be saved for the foal till it can graze, and then dries up in fall, so mare’s milk is only available in summer.] [T]hey shoot rabbits, deer, and wild boar for food…they have seized as slaves people from China who must eat grain to feel full, and therefore they seize rice and wheat as plunder…Their country also has one or two places where black broomcorn millet grows, and they also boil this to make gruel.” (More exaggeration. The Mongols grew a good deal of it, and had other sources; they always ate a good deal of grain; Atwood 2021:83.) Zhao also noted that they rarely wash, wiping their greasy hands on their robes. Like European writers on the Mongols, he maintains they wear clothes till the cloth falls apart (Atwood 2021:87). They foretell the future by scapulimancy. When he left Mongolia, he and his companions were told by the Prince of State: “Whenever you come to a good walled town, stay a few days longer. If there is good wine, drink it, or good tea and food, eat it, or a good flute of a good drum, blow it or bang it” (Atwood 2021:92).

            Peng Daya and Xu Ting provided a particularly detailed account as early as 1233, “A Sketch of the Black Tatars” (Atwood 2021:93-130). They noted the stock, including the camels, and the dependence on milk—but they are not so ignorant of the variety and processing methods of milks. They provide detailed descriptions of the ger (the Mongol felt house or “yurt”). They did not kill their cattle, saving them for milk. They used dried dung for fuel, referring to it as “steppe charcoal.” They even used it for lamps, adding sheep fat to make it burn well. They called scapulimancy “burning the lute.) Those who illegally broke grazing land for cultivation, or allowed fires to escape, were executed. “Those who, when pouring out milk or kefir, empty the vessel completely are said to be cutting off their descendants” (Atwood 2021:115). They begin to ride at three years of age, a fact still observable in modern Mongolia. Their arrows can pierce armor. Ting observed a Mongol woman give birth, wipe off the infant, wrap it in a sheepskin, sling it in a cradle, and go riding off with it . For mountain or stony ground, their horses were shod with iron or wood. Stirrups were made carefully to allow full range of motion in the saddle. Provisioning the army involved being very sure there would be enough milk; a great deal of detail is supplied on mare’s milk, with clarified milk for the elite. (From other sources, we know that Mongols traveled to war with a string of milk mares when possible, thereby tending to restrict campaigns to the summer. Winter campaigns were appalling, and spring was lambing and foaling season and the herds needed care.) They had some grape wine from central Asia. Ting describes melons “two men’s arm spans in circumference,” which must be a misunderstanding or exaggeration, though watermelons were coming in at the time,  and were strange to north Chinese, who never saw such gigantic melons in the homeland (Atwood 2021:100-120, 127).

            Related is a study of Mongol-era distilling, including of kumys (Luo 2012). At this point it is appropriate to cite the history of soju, Korea’s vodka (Park 2021). It appeared about this time, very likely learned from the Mongol conquerors, since the traditional Korean still is similar to that of the Mongols. It has become a gourmet drink in recent years.

            Back in Mongolia, a noble lady had consumed yak milk. She was found, richly dressed in a five-clawed dragon robe indicating nobility, and duly analyzed (Ventresca Miller et al. 2023).

            As was true throughout Chinese history, food was used as medicine. Thus, studies of medicine in the day, including Reiko Shinno’s excellent The Politics of Chinese Medicine under Mongol Rule (2016) as well as Paul Buell’s and my work (Buell and Anderson 2010, Buell et al. 2020), discuss food at great length. In particular, our work Arabic Medicine in China (2021) provides a translation of the Huihui Yaofang, a Mongol-era encyclopedia of western medicine translated into Chinese for Chinese use. (The Chinese text and good annotations are given in Kong 1996.) It did not catch on; almost no influence from it is traceable in Chinese medicine.

Chapter 9. Ming

Brook (2005, 2010) has chronicled the development of rice in Ming, including vast construction of polders, even in inhospitable north China. He also provides a thorough account of the disastrous climate events associated with the Little Ice Age that terribly stressed the dynasty (Brook 2010, 2016). The worst was in 1645-1715, the Maunder sunspot minimum that produced probably the coldest weather since the Ice Age. Extreme famines occurred with droughts in 1450 and 1625-50 (Lee and Yue 2020). A final fatal blow was a huge volcanic explosion in the Philippines, which darkened the skies and caused the worst drought in recorded Chinese history, 1641-43 (Chen et al. 2020). Poyang Lake fluctuated wildly in extent, more than at other times, with all these dynamics of precipitation (He et al. 2022). The treeline in Tibet dropped by a huge amount in the Little Ice Age, and has not recovered even now in places (K. Li et al. 2019).

New World food crops entered China in the 16th century, coming from the Portuguese in Macau, the Spanish in the Philippines, and across the southwest mountains from India. Tobacoo was probably the first to spread, showing that people often prefer drugs to food. Maize, chiles, peanuts, sweet and white potatoes, and other crops revolutionized agriculture and food, but did so slowly; they did not become widespread and important until Qing, perhaps not until after 1700 (Anderson 1988; Bello 2022; Mazumdar 1999; Pomeranz 2022).

Zheng He’s famous voyages to explore the Nanyang and onward throughout the Indian Ocean brought back many spices, popularizing them and helping to fuel a huge spice trade and consumption; the imperial court used “over 3,500 kilograms of spices every three years on religious rituals and sacrifices to gods and ancestors. In 1456, the Imperial Hospital made a one-off request for 2,500 kilograms of spices for use in medicines” (Yan 2023).

            The timing of the horrible droughts and famines from 1625-50 spans the fall of Ming and rise of Qing, a point whose obvious significance is remarked on by Brook, Lee and Yue (2020), and many others (Anderson 2019). This is one time when weather did have a share in bringing down a dynasty, though Ming was rotting and giving way already, and famine was probably more a last straw than a full cause (Anderson 2019).

            Wars, rebellions, and civil uprisings followed floods, and in wheat areas also droughts (Lee et al. 2017). The team of Harry Lee and David Zhang, with their students, notably Qing Pei, have rewritten the history of China, from the point of view of climate and its effects. They have produced an incredible number of brilliant articles and books, showing correlations of climate with famines, wars, and epidemics (see Pei 2021; I drew on them heavily for my book on dynamics of Chinese history, Anderson 2019).

            Beginning in Ming and continuing to the present, the vast Dongting Lake in the lower Yangtse area has suffered increasing loss of area and wetlands, through reclamation for agriculture. Only 5.7% of it was lost by the end of Ming, but now three-quarters of the wetlands are gone, and the lake is reduced to a narrow, dyke-circumscribed shadow of its former self (Y. Li et al. 2020).

            In Ming and Qing, epidemics were frequent, and correlated with famines, locusts, and droughts; all these were notably more common in cool dry times, of which there were many in this Little Ice Age period (H. Tian et al. 2017).

            Li Bozhong has argued (e.g. 2003) that the coming of the famous Champa rice and other new varieties of crops only slowly made a difference. This is contradicted by McDermott and Yoshinobu (2015), but the difference may be a matter of “glass half full vs. glass half empty.” New technology, including better pumps to dry out paddies quickly for crop rotation, had to come in. Yields 2/3 to 1 shi of rice per mu, occasionally up to 2; they rose during Ming from an average of 1 to 1.6 in the Jiangnan region. Population grew after the disastrous Song-Yuan-Ming transitions.

            The Xuande Emperor (r. 1426-1436) imported from Korea many “female cooks to satisfy the emperor’s appetite for Korean delicacies” (Chan 1988:301).

            Pig-raising and pork-eating in Ming and Qing have been studied and monographed by Chung-Hao Kuo in a meticulous study (2013). Then as now, most of the world’s pigs were probably in China. He notes, though, that pigs rose greatly in abundance, and lamb relatively declined, with the progressive southernization of China after Han.

            Gao Lian’s detailed on medicinal uses of foods includes a long section of Central Asian sweets, including halwa under that name (transliterated hai luo, lit. “sea radish”). Paul Buell and I have used this material, quoting the main sweets recipes, in Crossroads of Cuisine (2020, with translations by Sumei Yi; see also “Gao Lian” on my website, www.krazykioti.com). Diverse and contested attitudes existed toward alcoholic drinks in late Ming and early Qing, ranging from Gao Lian’s purity to Yuan Mei’s more hedonistic take to outright banqueters and revelers. Gao Lian called himself a shanren, a “man of the mountains,” but one Li Zhi (1527-1602) said the shanren were a bunch of hypocrites. Wandi Wang has discussed this in her thesis (2025:207-8). He was not alone. Gao’s encyclopedic Zunshen Bajian (Eight Treatises on Following the Principles of Life, 1591) was thus rather lowly regarded. Gao retooled some of Lin Hong’s refined recipes, and pieced together some instructions for preserving mei flowers so that they would open beautifully in tea long after flowering season (Wang 2025:207). This was the sort of preciousness that got him judged for being a bit over the top. Gao and one Tu Long ate flowers, cited Lin Hong’s Pure Offerings phrase, and lived simple, refined lives, building a reputation for it, to the ironic scorn of others (Wang 2025:210-212).

            The first mention of chiles in China is in this work, according to Wee Kek Koon (2019) writing in the South China Morning Post. It is described as having “white flowers and a fruit that resembles the blunt tip of a writing brush. It is spicy in taste and red in color. It looks very attractive.” He notes that it was well established in Sichuan and Hunan by the late 19th century. Little seems known of it otherwise (Dott 2020).

There is a Shiwu Bencao (“Food Things Basic Herbal”) from 1550, with many later editions. A huge work, Nongzheng Quanshu (“Agricultural Complete Book”) by Xu Guangqi (1562-1633), surpassed even Wang Zhen’s earlier work, and includes some new lore from the west; it describes sweet potatoes, on which he wrote a short separate work, now lost (Bray 1984:64-70).

            The greatest of all herbals—the one that became definitive in Chinese medicine—was the Bencao Gangmu, by Li Shizhen (2003; Chinese original, 1593-96). Li’s careful scholarship was enriched by his personal observation and experimenting, and his judicious and balanced insights. In addition to a workmanlike translation by a Chinese team (Li 2003, a more scholarly translation by Paul Unschuld and his group is ongoing. They began with Vol. 9, Fowls, Domestic and Wild Animals, Human Substances (2021, P. Unschuld, tr.) More volumes are appearing. Zhang and Unschuld (2015-18) have produced a dictionary of the work, with their considered translations of Chinese medical and biological terminology.

Portuguese observers added greatly to our knowledge, as recorded by C. R. Boxer (2004, orig. 1953). He quotes Galeote Pereira as writing (in translation from his time): “the Chins are the greatest eaters in all the world, they do feed upon all things, specially on pork, the fatter that is, unto them the less loathesome” (p. 9).

Deforestation continued, and Aurelia Campbell (2020), in What the Emperor Built, a rather amazing monograph on Ming megalomaniacal building, showed that taking huge nanmu trees (Phoebe nanmu) for the capital opened up the forests, established logging infrastructure and finance, and led to massive deforestation of all sorts in the wake of the imperial despoilers. The conventional wisdom on China’s deforestation is that it was done for agriculture to feed the starving masses, but in fact a great deal of it was done for imperial construction, for ironworking, for ceramics firing, and even for ink (formerly made by closed-in combustion of pines for soot—fortunately rapeseed oil replaced this).

In Ming, as in Song, there were those who idealized simplicity and remoteness, and of course had to eat accordingly. The Buddhist mountain hermit known as “Stonehouse” wrote a great deal of excellent eremitical poetry, beautifully translated by Red Pine (Bill Porter; Stonehouse 1999). He may well be exaggerating for effect, or at least recording only his most abstemious moments. He reports eating wheat-bran gruel and pigweed soup (p. 39), and a lunch of preserved bamboo, “blue-cap mushrooms fried in oil, purple-bud ginger pickles,” and rice (p. 35). He ate parched wheat, pine seeds and meal, and buds of local vines (63). He grew or gathered all these, as well as some vegetables. Not surprisingly, he reports being thin and unable to resist cold weather very well.

            Drinking was rampant (Jackson Guo 2021, 2023). One Gu Qiyuan (1565-1628) chronicled a whole range of drinks: yellow millet drink (huangjiu) from Beijing, Cangjiu from Cangzhou, yiyi jiu (pearl barley or possibly Job’s-tears liquor)from Jizhou, autumn dew white liquor (qiulu bai) from Jinan, lychee drink from Guangdong, lamb liquor (yanggao jiu) from Fenzhou, wujiapi jiu from Gaoyou, and snow drink (xue jiu) from Yangzhou (presumably white in color, not made from snow), sanbai jiu (three whites—made from wheat, rice, and clear water) from Suzhou, honeyed crabapple drink (milinqin jiu) from Yangzhou, and plain baijiu from Hangzhou. There were several more. By this time distilled spirits—shaojiu, baijiu, alaji (or halaji) were well known and widely appreciated. Alcoholism was well known. Lamb liquor and other medicinal tinctures were known.

            A mid-Ming story tells of a poet, Zhang Yuyuan, who was asked at a banquet to write poems for the peonies. He dashed off 50 and said he was running out of inspiration; the host gave him distilled liquor and he dashed off 50 more. Another mid-Ming drinker, Song Xu, made a cocktail with 40 catties of liquor (apparently distilled), 100 walnuts, 200 red jujubes, and four catties of cooked honey. One Xu Guangqi records making brandy from mulberries—apparently real brandy, not just baijiu flavored with mulberries. Another record describes fermenting grain and lychees, then distilling.

            Drinking was connected with courtesans and sex, of course. Food items were compared by rather uncouth drinkers to the classic Han Dynasty ideal of beauty, Xishi. Globefish were compared to her breasts, oysters to her tongue, and both consumed at singing-house drinking parties. This was usually at the opposite end of the spectrum from connoisseurs like Yuan Mei and reveling but elite banqueters like Zhang Yuyuan (Guo 2021, 2023).

            Not directly connected with food, but too important an insight into Chinese culture to miss, is the journal of Huang Xiangjian (1609-1673). He was caught in Suzhou in the horrors of the Ming collapse. At the time his father was serving at a government post in remote Yunnan. Huang, a filial son beyond even Chinese norms, set off through the horrific chaos of dynastic transition, into an area so wild and remote that even locals barely dared to venture on its roads. A soft city aesthete, he endured travel hardships that would have killed almost any hardened fieldworker. He survived, found his father, and they returned together; his father, in fact, survived him by a few years (Kindall 2016). This is as amazing a record of sheer human toughness as anything I have read.

Chapter 10. Qing

            Under Qing, China’s population grew spectacularly. It had risen during Ming to about 150,000,000. The fall of Ming came with appalling bloodshed and famine, leaving a population not much over 100,000,000. Under Qing, it rose to the famous 400,000,000 of American stereotype in those days. Readers may recall Carl Crow’s infamously titled book 400 Million Customers (Crow 2008, orig. 1937), which is actually a quite knowledgeable and sympathetic work, but clearly aimed at American businesspeople!

            In late Qing, China became known in the west for its “teeming millions” and “population pressure.” Grave thinkers calculated that famine would simply worsen, as the dense population rose more. They theorized that democracy could never come, or endure, in such a mass society. Today the United States has almost exactly the same population density as late Qing, and indeed its democracy is in desperate shape. Meanwhile, China’s population has more than tripled, and almost everyone is eating well. Democracy, however, does not exist except in Taiwan.

            China’s great accomplishment was to maintain fairly constant levels of income, per capital agricultural production, and even life expectancy from Song to 1800, in spite of this huge increase in population, and the levels of living were higher than the all too familiar picture of famine and desperation after 1850 (Chen and Peng 2022; Pomeranz 2022). Only the interdynastic wars and a few other major catastrophes (such as the floods of the early 1100s and 1300s in north China) temporarily disrupted this pattern for the worse. They may have provided Malthusian relief, but ultimately China coped with its huge and increasing population.

Chinese were well aware of the Song historian Sima Guang’s line: “The wealth of heaven and Earth is fixed in amount” (Zanasi 2020:18). In the late 18th century, Hong Liangji wrote: “Nature cannot stop the people from reproducing. Yet the resources with which Nature nourishes the people are finite”; land and resources “have only doubled, or at least, increased only three to five times, while the population has grown ten to twenty times…M. Nature’s way of making adjustments” were “flood, drought and plagues” (Bello 2022:298). Such views earned him the name “China’s Malthus,” though he differed somewhat from his English contemporary.

            This was actually far too bleak. China had in fact kept up with rising population (Bello 2022; Chen and Peng 2022). However, the increase in population led to agricultural involution (Huang 1990), as more and more people tried to make a living off less and less land by working harder and harder. Average farms shrunk to the size of an American suburban lot (about 1/6 acre, roughly a Chinese mu) in the most densely populated areas. “Popular wisdom had it that it required 4 mu of land (about two-thirds of an acre) to feed one person. With rapid population growth, this ratio had worsened under Qianlong from 3.5 mu per person in 1766 to 3.33 mu [half an acre]per person in 1790” (Elliott 2009:148). Of course, it was even smaller in the 19th century. This forced people to focus on silkmaking and to export workers to cities (Bell 1997). Mulberry trees to feed the silkworms grew on the levees between rice paddies.

            Desperate hardship ensued, leading to rebellions in the 19th century, and also to emigration from southeast China to southeast Asia and then in the 20th century to the entire world. North China suffered less crowding, but had major famines, partly due to rain-based agriculture (Huang 1985). Lillian Li’s Fighting Famine in North China (2007) is a definitive history. Mallory’s classic China, Land of Famine (1926) remains indispensable. Even difficult climate, including the Little Ice Age in the 1600s and 1700s, did not slow this growth, “owing to the tremendous increase of subsistence brought about by land reclamation policy and the introduction of foreign food crops” (Lee et al. 2016), as well as excellent famine relief provisions, among the best in the world for that time (Will 1990; Will and Wong 1991).

            Lee and Campbell (1997) traced the microdynamics of life, death, and reproduction in northeast China, finding an incredible amount of complexity and resourcefulness instead of the grim tale of inexorable famine and rampant overpopulation beloved of western colonialist observers in the 19th century. Chinese controlled their births, planned for the children they had, coped by diverse and rational methods when famine struck, and lived their lives successfully in spite of all.

            At the other end of the socioeconomic scale, the same team researched the demography of the Imperial family (Lee et al. 1993). They found a depressing, even appalling, fact: the infant mortality rate was as high as in the general population, which in old China was extremely high. Even the Emperor was not isolated from epidemics; in fact, the Emperor was at high risk because of the thousands of people that circulated through the court. The Imperial diet may have been luxurious, but it was not well-balanced nutritionally, and if there was any problem with breastfeeding, the baby was apt to be fed on rice congee, a fairly good predictor of quick demise. Also, most of the Imperial children were the offspring of concubines, who got rather cursory care and attention. The tough farmers of the remote northeast could thank their lucky stars that they were better equipped to raise strong children.

            The same group summarized their early findings in One Quarter of Humanity:  Malthusian Mythology and Chinese Realities, 1700-2000 (Lee and Feng 1999). The key finding is that Chinese controlled their population fairly well and were proactive about food management, famine relief, and expanding food producting, contra the early Malthus and his grim idea of population inevitably outrunning food supply. China was well fed for an agrarian empire in 1700 and a great deal better fed in 2000, in spite of population increase—which itself was under control by then.

            The cause of this huge population growth is under some debate. China had 60 million people by 2 CE, but that was when it controlled much less of the region than now; the total population in what is now China would have been 70-80 million. There were only about 100 million at the start of Ming. The huge increase in Qing seems largely due to peace and order, allowing longer lifespans and more trade and commerce. New World food crops, however, also had a huge role. They may have been the major cause (see e.g. Mazumdar 1999). Maize, sweet potatoes, and white potatoes allowed great expansion of cultivation into previously low-production landscapes. Peanuts, chiles, and various fruits and vegetables added critically important nutrients that had been scarce in many diets (Anderson 1988; Zhohong Shi, Agricultural Development in Qing, 2017).

            Matthew Sommer (2015:151, 160) reveals that in late Qing “a shi [133 lb.]of unhusked rice…cost about 1100 cash,” with an exchange rate of about 750 cash per tael (1.3 oz) of silver.  Rice was up to 1700 cash per shi by 1827 (ibid.).between 1703  Silver today (Jan. 2016) costs $14/oz., so a tael would be worth $18.50. 1100 cash would thus be about $28, enough to buy 56 pounds of white rice at today’s bulk-retail prices, and thus several times that much unhusked raw rice, wholesale. Thus, prices are roughly comparable then to those today. Sommer notes that a day laborer could work for as little as 50 cash per day (Sommer 2015:161). A man would need at least 1 1/3 lb./day to survive, and more than that to do any work. He would thus need to spend 11 cash for minimal food, plus whatever surcharge there was for husking and milling the rice. We also learn that a wife (bought from another man, usually in desperate straits) would cost an average of 24 taels, or $442, a low enough price. A magistrate might get 30,000 taels, a governor six times that (Sommer 2015:162), but these huge sums were more in the nature of budgets than of salaries, for these officials had to pay many expenses—including paying lower-level staff—out of the sums.

            Another interesting note is that between 1753 and 1908, revenue from land taxes almost doubled, [but] its share of total revenue fell from roughly 73.5% in 1753 to a mere 35% in the twentieth century” (Dykstra 2022:3, citing figures from Wang Yeh-chien). Nonagricultural enterprises had risen from comprising a small minority of the economy to making up the majority of it. Dykstra points out that this led to more political power by merchants and other local entrepreneurs, with consequent decentralizing form the Qing state.

            A huge literature, with many debates, has emerged on the rise of Qing economy, which rivaled Europe’s by 1700, but then fell behind (Anderson 2016a; Pomeranz 2000; Wong 1997). Kenneth Pomeranz (2000, 2022) held that China still had about the same per capita income as Europe at that period, a claim challenged by others (see Huang 2002) and hard to resolve. Some think China fell behind as early as late Song (which seems extremely unlikely, given all other sources), or in Ming (The Economist 2017). The proper comparison is also debatable, since Holland and England, certainly far ahead of China by late Ming, are much more comparable with the lower Yangzi than with all China: “In Qianlong’s day, Jiangnan accounted for 16 percent of the total agricultural land in the empire, but provided 29 percent of the governments land tax revenue in cash (paid in silver) and 38 percent of its revenue in kind (paid in grain), as well as 64 percent of the tribute grain sent to feed the capital” (Elliott 2009:78-79). A Europe that includes Russia seems much more comparable with the whole Ming or Qing empire, in size and development level.

            Land ownership and power over workers was complex. Mio Kishimoto (2022) explains the land tenure system, which included an increasing tendency for landlords to lease out cultivation rights on long terms, with the tenant able to buy and sell his rights and acting almost like a freeholder. The system is confusingly known in English as “subsoil” and “topsoil” rights, “topsoil” being a bad translation of the Chinese term tianmian, “field face.” Even tenants on short lease or rent had considerable rights. Often they paid rent on only the first crop, though double-cropping was now the rule in much of China (Pomeranz 2022).  Humans could be held in different levels of bondage, from debt service down to real enslavement of criminals and a few others (Kishimoto 2022).

            Qing economic thinking also paralleled Europe’s, as shown by Margaret Zanasi in a landmark book, Economic Thought in Modern China (2020). Sophisticated ideas about the free market were close to those of Adam Smith. Economists were aware that consumer spending drove the market, and advocated liberalism at first, but the population increase without much chance of increasing cultivated land led to need for more and more government intervention to deal with famine. Chinese are relatively free of the “limited good” or “zero-sum” view of the world so common in other traditional and modern societies, but they certainly are not unaware of it. A tension between free markets and government planning and aid was always there, intensifying with population growth in Ming, Qing, and after.

A debate between free-marketeers and statists developed in the 18th century (Dunstan 1996, 2006, 2022). The statists had the better case, and ultimately won, but not until many modern-sounding free-market arguments had been made, and had had some effect. The ever-normal granaries (changping cang, lit. “long-leveling storehouses,” i.e. leveling prices over the indefinitely long term) were somewhat scaled down and freer markets locally allowed to flourish in grain and in copper/silver conversion in money. Hoarding was discouraged by any and every means possible. Debates also dealt with the quality of rice for salaries: low-level functionaries had to make do with shaky-quality rice (chengse mi) or even “old and suo [low-grade] rice” (Dunstan 2006:65).

Qing toyed with many versions of the “free market” philosophy, including testiness toward welfare recipients and expressions of cold free-market morality (Dunstan 1996, 2022). Old-fashioned Confucian caretaking of the poor prevailed, but was never enough, given the corruption and pigheadedness of much Qing government. Indeed, China governed with a lighter hand than the west, partly because it could afford to; China did not have dozens of little rival states at its doors.

Local officials could be incredibly hard-working at Confucian causes, however, such as Yang Tingwang, who rearranged several rivers to help his district. In his few spare minutes from flood and irrigation control, he repaired the local hall of learning, so that “the wine jugs, the vessels, round and square, for holding sacrificial rice or millet, the serving dishes for the salted vegetables and meat, and for the pure meat broth..and fresh meat” were all pure and properly arranged (Dunstan 1996:39). Other officials provided famine relief and memorialized about it to the emperors. (The subject of famine relief in late imperial China is complex and specialized; see Y. Deng 2020. Suffice it to say there was a huge effort, not at all unsuccessful but eventually overwhelmed by the levels of population and catastrophe in the 19th century.)

These debates influenced the west. Missionary reports in the16th and 17th century made Chinese policies familiar to learned readers. François Quesnay in the mid-18th century coined the term laissez-faire (Von Glahn 2022:109), presumably with some reference to the Chinese free-traders. He was convinced by the Chinese focus on agriculture. He began the physiocratic school of economics, taking agriculture as the basis of the state and of all human economy. The school did not last long, but its influence is still felt. Among others, Thomas Jefferson was influenced by it, taking the family farm to be the basis of American society. The United States indeed became an agrarian society. Agriculture remains disproportionately important today.

            Business, trade and commerce enormously expanded through the 18th century (Rowe 2009:132ff.). The old idea of international trade as “tribute”  and internal trade as minor and repressed is largely wrong. Trade continued to expand after 1800, but, especially after 1840, trade with the west incurred increasing disadvantage.

This was in large measure because of opium, long known but explosively expanding its tentacles in the 19th century. It was used moderately and reasonably before the 19th century, but then the British began “dumping” it on China in order to get silver and to get a local foothold on trade. David Bello has recently updated the history of this drug (Bello 2003 and references therein—a comprehensive bibliography). The Qing Dynasty tried, not without success, to prohibit it, but the western powers—finding little else they could sell at a profit—forced it on China. By the end of China’s last dynasty, in 1911, millions of Chinese were addicted to this debilitating curse. The result of the British pressure was a rise in demand and in addiction, and eventually a serious problem, as I had plenty of opportunity to observe in Hong Kong in the 1960s.  The effect on food production was serious, as more and more laborers succumbed. Attempts to eradicate opium in the early Communist years were quite successful, but, with the opening of the market after the 1970s, heroin and other hard drugs flooded in (Dikötter et al 2002).

China began to fall behind as Europe conquered and exploited much of the rest of the world. This not only brought riches to Europe, but, more importantly in the eyes of many, stimulated science, learning, and progressive thinking there. It brought little but misery and suffering to the conquered peoples. China certainly fell behind once the Industrial Revolution really set in, but it did not start improving livelihoods till after 1800. James Lee and collaborators (2004) also found welfare often comparable to Europe as late as 1700, but a great deal of desperate poverty, often among widows, who could not normally remarry. Larger farms did not make much difference, since farm size was by this time generally set to keep a small family alive; bigger farms were in poorer areas.

David Bello, in Across Forest, Steppe, and Mountain, chronicles the westward expansion of Qing and its many contacts with central Asians. The Manchus felt kinship with the Altaic and even Tibetan peoples, though this did not stop them from colonialism including the ruthless genocide of the Dzungar Mongols. The Manchu emperors kept huge hunting grounds in northeast China, and had hunting parks in north China too. Ecoambiguity continued; criticism of these parks and liberating them to farming went on (p. 70). Game continued to decrease. Pine trees were being cut down to harvest pine nuts, a behavior condemned then as now, with the Jiaqing Emperor himself intervening in 1796 (104). Expansion of pioneers into the southern mountains, typically poor Han Chinese referred to as “shack people,” greatly spread maize agriculture (185-244). A group of Torghut Mongols fleeing Kazakh attacks settled in Xinjiang in 1771, were directed to farm, and settled into poverty and hunger, not being familiar with the trade (Bello 2018).

The Qing embarked on a colonialist program, occupying Tibet, southern Siberia, Mongolia, and above all the area that had been known as “eastern Turkistan” in most of the world. Qing conquered as far as Tang had done, but took over and occupied the whole vast region, rather than controlling only the strategic Silk Road routes and oases. This became Xinjiang, “New Borders.” Qing conquest involved genocide of the Dzungar Mongols, a radical (though not wholly unprecedented) departure from China’s usual policy of subduing and assimilating minorities without exterminating them. The government tried to “civilize” the Xinjiang people, i.e. make them like Han Chinese, without much success; they rebelled instead (Schluessel 2020).  The project goes on, brutally.

The new lands produced vast amounts of fruit and vegetables, from the riverine oases, as well as grain and livestock. The whole story has been told in Peter Perdue’s China Marches West (2005), a classic in Qing studies. Zuo Zongtang, the general and statesman for whom “General Tso’s Chicken” was named, was active in Xinjiang in the late 19th century, stimulating agriculture and sericulture (Lavelle 2020).

Among new features that now became part of the Chinese food-producing world were karez, the qanats of the Arab and Persian worlds. These water tunnels were dug back into river outwash fans, where flowing rivers from the mountains disappear into the vast deltas of dirt, rocks, and sand that they develop when they debouch into the valleys. The water is still there, flowing underground, and the near-horizontal wells tap it. Qanats are difficult to make, requiring expertise—one reason they are dying out, now that anyone that expert in engineering can get a good urban job instead of working in the dangerous, uncomfortable qanats. In China, they are especially common in the Turpan (Turfan) Depression. On Google Maps one can easily find the long, straight or sinuous lines of doughnut-shaped holes ringed with guard mounds that provide access to the underground tunnels. Zuo Zongtang led the reconstruction of many karez in the Turpan area. Attempts to spread the technology more widely failed, because soils in much of the area are crumbly, not strong enough to hold up when tunneled (Lavelle 2020:126-140).

            Qanats used to abound in Iran, central Asia, much of the Arab world, and even (thanks to Moorish occupation) Spain. Converted Moors carried them to Mexico, where they possibly still exist in the Tehuacan Valley. Thanks to immigrants from there, “water tunnels” even made a brief appearance in San Bernardino, California, according to old-timers I have known.

            Relatively good times could be found in the far northeast (Feng et al. 2010), because the former Manchu grazing and hunting lands were opened to cultivation. People had sizable families and populated the realm rapidly.

            Meng Zhang has produced extremely careful, thorough, and interesting studies of the timber industry in Qing China (M. Zhang 2017, 2021). Once again we see Karen Thornber’s “ecoambiguity” at work, with the Qing government trying to save forests while encouraging logging. Some selective logging and silviculture saved small areas. Timber was especially easy to get in the Yangtze River areas, such as up-country Sichuan, Hubei, Hunan, and Anhui. Often it was rafted down the rivers. Huge rafts could be assembled, and floated down to lower Yangtze markets. These could be “more than 100 feet wide, hundreds of feet long, with a draft depth of 7 feet” (M. Zhang 2021:116). The raftsmen would live for months on these, raising chickens and even taking some soil on board to grow vegetables. (An American parallel occurred in the early 19th century in the Ohio-Mississippi drainage, when timber rafts floated down to New Orleans, chickens and all.) One Chinese raftsman even wrote a book about his life (M. Zhang 2021:125). Private plantations and silviculture were ahead of the west until the late 19th century. Collectivization and rampant exploitation under Communism finished the destruction of the forests. However, reforestation has substantially restored them in recent times.

            Tree farming continued, and we pick up again Ian Miller’s story in Fir and Empire. The business by Qing was a multi-million-dollar enterprise.Speculation in tree futures, litigation over rights, feudal-type family holdings, temple and fengshui groves, and other complications entered the picture. This attracted a wave of petty lawyers and sharks, nicknamed “hairpin-brushes” because they held their hair up with their writing brushes. One writer on tree matters called himself (literally translated) “small peach-stream revealer-of-lies mountain-man,” or as Miller translates it “the falsehood-revealing hermit of a small utopia” (p 94). He concludes: “Ultimately, the institutions that emerged were not inevitable, nor were they the simple products of high-level decisions; they were compromises, conditioned by the communities they governed and the repeated attempts of rulers to graft and prune these local forms into a coherent whole” (p. 170). Food enters the picture via tea plantations and other agroforestry.

A fascinating insight into early Qing environmentalism is provided by Wang Hongdu, in “A Record of Comprehending the Essentials of the Yellow Mountains,” translated by Jonathan Chaves in Every Rock a Universe (2013). The mountains in question are in central Anhui, and are among the peaks that are famous through Chinese landscape paintings. The larger, older pines were so revered that they had traditional names. Wang lovingly described every step of every trail, every peak, every spring, all with full attention to the spiritual and religious dimensions, from Zen temples and monks to visionary dragons and Immortals seen in the swirling mists.

Unfortunately, “ignorant woodcutters cut the pines down for firewood or charcoal…. Yes, the unfortunateness of the pines’ fate has reached such a point!  Would one not rather that before the mountains had been opened up, their light could have been sheathed in the primordial beginnings…even if the pines had never come to be known at all” (p. 108). In other words, better have the pines unknown to the world than to have them cut. This level of preservationist sentiment is almost unknown anywhere in the world before Thoreau and Emerson, and is certainly rare in China. Wang also laments the travelers who miss the Yellow Mountains, or who go there but merely gawk without deeply entering into the spirit of the place. “For human life is like that of a louse living in somebody’s pants. Few are the good aspects of it.”  We should therefore fully experience the beauty we can find. “Sirs, if you do not love the place, then either simply cover your mouths and mock, or, if not, hang your heads in shame and depart!  Ah, one wishes they could put aside their petty-mindedness…. What difference, indeed, is there between what they do and exchanging the Black Dragon’s Precious Pearl for a dung-beetle’s dung-pellet!” (p. 130). This view of the mountains, rooted explicitly in Daoism and Zen, corresponds surprisingly closely to the Romantic view that was to develop in Europe in the early 19th century. Daoism has been described as “China’s green religion” (Miller 2016; see also Miller et al. 2014 for major considerations of religion and ecology in China).

Game abounded in the 18th century. Matteo Ripa, one of the Jesuit missionaries, wrote in the early years of the century of the vast amounts of incredible cheapness of stags, boars, pheasants, and fish. Others added similar accounts, including an incredibly precocious eleven-year-old Manchu boy who recorded masses of deer, boar, pheasants, hares, geese, and ducks, and notes his own fondness for sturgeon and crane (Schlesinger 2017:40-41; the boy’s journal also has insightful comments on the politics and culture of the time; see Schlesinger 2018). Of course it was all too good to last, and China’s expanding ring of destruction—which has now encompassed Africa—eliminated the cheap game long before 1900.

Fish suffered also. Muscolino (2009) tells the story of declining fisheries. On the other hand, China and its seas still had plenty of fish by 1900. These were devastated by overfishing and pollution by 2000. China now depends on sending fleets around the world, where they are decimating local stocks, leaving nothing for local people.

Huge rebellions—the Taiping, Nian, and Hui rebellions—devastated China in the 1840s and after. The Taiping Rebellion devastated central China, leading to tens of millions of deaths, largely from famine due to scorched-earth warfare and destruction of supply lines. The ground was said to be white with bones in many areas, and greatly exaggerated reports of packs of “thousands” of wolves circulated (Lavelle 2020:67-80). An illustration of the time shows not only dogs and pigs, but also rabbits, eating unburied corpses, while gravediggers work to keep up (Lavelle 2020:70). The rabbits show that the illustrator had no idea of animal fooways, but they give a surrealist, macabre touch to the scene.

            An unprecedently devastating famine in 1876-79 followed, pursuant to the famine-ruined landscapes and a sharp drought (Janku 2018). International attention followed, leading to stereotypes of China as desperately poor, famine-ridden, overpopulated, and ruined by environmental overdraft. The missionary Timothy Richard was a relief administrator in the years 1876-1889, organizing and providing help (Bohr 1972). He noted people eating husks, clay, roots, buckwheat stalks, grass, and worse, and even selling them. Prices rose substantially,grain up to four times the usual price, but generally less than one might expect, since the poor were already unable to buy decent food. Suicide was common and cannibalism reported. Drought was a main part of the problem, and it not only ruined the crops but dried up the canals, making both flight and relief impossible for many. At least nine and a half million died, probably many more, in the north Chinese core provinces (Bohr 1972:113). Officials not only tried to relieve the famine, but even developed plans that sometimes anticipated Chinese Communist practice. Richard himself advocated economic development and modernization, water conservation, industry, science, and education, with some attention to China and its realities but a tendency to echo standard western lines.

Yet, in spite of all this, China’s cities were quite modern, having active trade and commerce that naturally led to food imports and a wealth of teashops, restaurants, and attendant food-related amenities. Trades were organized into guilds that did considerable urban management (Rowe 1984, 1989, 2002).

Commonly-owned lands were widespread, involving much area. Usually they were lineage-owned and managed by lineage elders. Village ownership and management was also common, and caused conflict over different use and management strategies. Wesley Chaney (2020) records fighting due to different ideas of rights to common lands in the far northwest.

Among the first New World foods to become popular was the chile pepper. The name comes from Nahuatl chilli. It spread to China along with other New World foods in the 1500s. Its record there has been told by Brian Dott in The Chile Pepper in China (2020) and by Gerald Zhang-Schmidt in Red Hot China: Cuisines, Chillies, Culture (2022). By 1621 it was in the Shiwu Bencao, “Basic Herbal of Foods.” It is first mentioned in Hunan in the 18th century, but was surely there earlier. It fit into an already-spicy cuisine, and found a true home; Hunan food makes Mexican seem bland. The Hunanese general Zuo Zongtang (1812-1885) surely deserved the honor bestowed on him when a Hunanese chef in Taiwan named a blazing-hot dish in his honor in the 1950s (Dott 2020:170). “General Tso’s Chicken” is now worldwide, with countless blander variants, usually given imaginative parodies of the name to avoid infringement of rights.

Many varieties soon appeared, but our record of its spread and early use is poor. Chiles normally get called by some variant of la jiao (hot brown-pepper), but the vernacular name in Taiwanese is huana kiun, “barbarian kids’ ginger.” (Huan, Mandarin fan, means “barbarian”; –a is a slangy Hokkien diminutive, exactly equivalent to the idiomatic use of  “kid” in English, as in “Billy the Kid.”) Katy Hung, expert on Taiwanese food, assures us that the term huana is not derogatory on that island, but it certainly is in Malaysian Hokkien! In any case, an entertaining name.

Chiles soaked in oil produce chile oil, a flaming-hot condiment. Many sauces are made with chiles, including the famous doubanjiang of Sichuan, necessary for the cuisine of that province. Every firm and many a restaurant has its own variant of this and other sauces. The idea of a chile-enriched fermented sauce has spread widely, notably to Korea and Vietnam, where excellent ones are made. Thailand, Indonesia, and other southeast Asian countries have their own equivalents.

A standard sauce in China today is made of dried chile flakes fried quickly and mixed with oil and flavorings. This is identified with Laoganma (“old grandma”), commemorating its invention by Tao Huabi of Guizhou (Zhang-Schmidt 2022:144-148). Countless variants of it now exist. Many have been invented in Chinese diaspora communities such as the Los Angeles area.

The other standard newcomers from America spread widely in Qing, with major effects on nutrition. Maize, sweet potatoes, and peanuts were the most important in this regard, but tomatoes, squash, frijol beans, pineapples, and many other crops began to enter the food system. They were usually named by combining fan (“barbarian”) with the name of the most similar local crop; pineapples, for instance, were fan bolo, the latter word applying to jakfruit. Tomatoes were barbarian eggplants, maize was barbarian millet, papaya was barbarian quince, and so on. Often, the fan was dropped in common usage, leaving later writers confused about the ancient Chinese origins of plants like maize and papayas. Not all coinages were so derogatory. Mexican squash became nan gua, “southern gourd.” Allspice, another newcomer from America, became known as gan jiao, “sweet pepper.” The spectacular Maya cactus fruit became huolongguo “fire dragon fruit,” or just “dragon fruit.” Largely after the fall of Qing, the more complimentary yang “ocean” was used instead of fan.

Jiu continued to be a source of solace and trouble. Jackson Guo’s recent Ph.D. thesis (2023), hopefully to be soon published, chronicles further connections with literati, artists, actors, taverns, singing girls, prostitutes, and the underworld. Alcohol allowed mediation between these realms, which should have been kept strictly separate according to Confucian puritanism. The Hongli Emperor tried hard to ban shaojiu (now called baijiu), distilled liquor, which was having serious impacts on life. It was connected with working-class people, the underworld, and rough living in general. Alcoholism became common as shaojiu became more and more cheap and available. Guo records a long history of crime, violence, family fights, and other social pathologies involving alcohol and drunkenness. Chinese tend to be mellow, happy drunks, as readers of classic poetry and prose know well, but when they become angry they can be as violent as “mean drunks” anywhere. Alcohol and sex were a particularly deadly mix, as elsewhere in the world.

Western alcoholic drinks made slow headway at first, but were popular in the early 20th century. Loyal Chinese, and brewers whose loyalty in this case was predictable, argued strongly for China’s own jiu, but spoilage, quality control, and spotty availability of good jiu made the effort a hard sell until more recent times (Guo 2023). One notes that baijiu that sold for a few cents in the 18th century was only up to about $2.00 by the 1960s, but the best grade now commands prices in the hundreds of dollars per bottle, comparable to fine brandy.

            Tea has its own stories. Robert Gardella (1994) compared China’s smallholder production with the rise of plantations in the colonial world; Qin Shao (1998), in a fascinating article, showed that China vilified teahouses as dens of freethinking and other iniquities—just as Turkey and later Europe attacked coffeehouses, and just as “espresso joints” were attacked as hotbeds of “beatnikism” in America within my own memory. Exports of tea to England “grew exponentially, from around 200 pounds eper year in the late seventeenth century…to over 28,000,000 pounds in the early nineteenth century” (Rowe 2009:166; see also Mair and Hoh 2009), with the average English household by then spending as much as 5% of its income on tea. England at first paid in New World silver, but eventually only opium was valuable enough to trade to offset the buying of tea, porcelain, cloth, and so on. So opium spawned the famous colonialist wars, which had much to do with “underdeveloping” China.

China kept developing more and more elaborate dishes, and became more and more committed to what we now recognize as “Chinese cuisine”—no more Central Asian and Near Eastern borrowings (Anderson 2005b).

The great Chinese gourmet Yuan Mei (1716-1798) flourished in Qing (Anderson 1988; So 35-43; Waley  1956). His birthday, set at March 25 in the western calendar, has recently been declared International Chinese Food Day. It could be an arbor day, too; he planted a tree on his 70th birthday, saying:

“Seventy, and still planting trees….

Don’t laugh at me, my friends.

I know I’m going to die.

I also know I’m not dead yet.”   (Tr. J. P. Seaton, 1997:92.)

His cookbook is thoroughly Chinese (Schmidt 2003; So 1986; Waley 1956). No central Asian or western influences here. It has finally been translated, in a superb bilingual edition by Sean Chen (Yuan 2019)—a major and long overdue event in Chinese food history.

Food receives attention in A World Trimmed with Fur: Wild Things, Pristine Places, and the Natural Fringes of Qing Rule, by Jonathan Schlesinger (2017). Qing vastly expanded the size the Chinese empire, especially into Siberia—only to lose most of that expansion to the Russians in a series of unequal treaties. Especially before the loss, the Manchus, Mongols, and Han Chinese mined the Siberian and Mongolian frontiers for steppe mushrooms (Tricholoma mongolicum, Agaricus bisporus, and possibly others), furs of all sorts, game, fish, and other wildland goods. The Manchus tried to keep much of this realm wild. Many of their nature reserves and hunting parks are now national parks in China and Mongolia. Unfortunately, they could not keep from depleting the resources drastically. They almost eliminated the larger fur-bearers and the pearlshell freshwater mussels. They almost elminated wild ginseng, to the point of being forced to farm it, producing what was (and still is) thought to be an inferior product.

While the exploitation was good, they had a fine time. Before conquering China, Manchu rulers ate “tiger, bear, roe deer, elk, montain goat, boar, wild duck, and pheasant; recipe books record how palace staff cleaned a cut the meat into big hunks, then prepared it in stews of sea salt, soy sauce, green onhion, ginger, Sichuan peppers, and star anise (Schlesinger 2017:22). After conquering China, they tried to keep up their habits. The Kangxi emperor advocated that, and wrote that older Manchu people should eat “’unrefined milk, pickled deer tongues and tails, dried applies, and cream cheese cakes’”; deer were almost totally used, from antlers (for medicine, when in velvet) to tail (Schlesinger 2017:23). A recipe for steppe mushrooms with deer tendons includes, also, soy, salt, hot bean oil, white sugar, distilled alcohol, flavor powder (a spice mix), onion tips, ginger, and starch, the whole to be sprinkled with fragrant oil for serving. The recipe reads quite like a Yinshan Zhengyao recipe, and shows that Central Asian foodways were still alive (Schlesinger 2017:25).

At this point I may mention two great historians of sugar in China: Françoise Sabban (1994) and Sucheta Mazumdar (1998). Mme. Sabban is the leading western expert on Chinese food history, and needs no introduction. Her work on sugar placed it in world context, with Central Asia and Portugal being relevant. The Portuguese influenced Chinese milling technology. Sucheta Mazumdar is something of a one-book historian. Her work Sugar and Society in China (1998) is one of the greatest studies of food history in all world literature. In addition to providing a thorough history of the commodity over time, she showed that China escaped the sugar trap of high-capital processing but low-paid workers. This trap led to plantations owned by the rich but worked by enslaved or virtually enslaved and impoverished people everywhere but China. China maintained small farms, on which farmers did their own work, cutting and preparing cane; it was then hauled or shipped to plants. In the Canton Delta, processing plants were based on boats, which cruised the channels from farm to farm. (A side note is that my city, Riverside, California, was started as an orange-growing community, and the growers found that orange-growing experts could be brought in from one such community, known to the growers as “Gom Benn,” from Cantonese kam ben “sugarcane bank,” Mandarin gan bian.)

Imperial cuisine has received a good deal of attention, including a good book with many Qing court recipes, assembled by Zheng Tingquan (1998).

The great novels, notably The Story of the Stone (Cao and Gao 1973-1986) and The Scholars (Wu 1957), are full of food images (Anderson 1988). Classical cookbooks appeared, to be mined in our time (e.g. So 1992). The Qianlong Emperor loved birds’ nests, though, oddly, Li Shizhen did not refer to them (Rosner 1999:7).

Many Qing scholars developed a surprisingly strong feminist streak in its early popular culture (see esp. Idema and Grant 2004). Male writers like Cao Xueqin, Zheng Xie and Yuan Mei extolled the value of women, their intellectual equality with men, and their potential. Yuan Mei not only advocated educating women along with men, but actually educated many of them himself, serving as tutor and mentor to over fifty women—a whole generation of brilliant female writers (Waley 1986). Cao Xueqin’s great novel The Story of the Stone (Cao and Gao 1973-1986) portrays elite women who had the benefit of such education and often turned out to be brighter and nobler than the men in their lives. (On these matters see Idema and Grant 2004; Widmer 2006.) Obviously this all had significance to food, since such men were not only gourmets themselves but fully conscious of the trials and triumphs of women as cooks and food providers. This informed their writings.

There were various motives involved. Cao and Zheng were intensely moral men, were concerned with fairness and ending abuses, but Yuan, who had the mores of a tomcat, made no secret of a less moral motive: he wanted lovers he could talk to. Women themselves wrote countless poems, stories, and especially tanci, prose-poetic works thought to be largely a female medium; not surprisingly, tanci routinely portray women as “smart, learned, physically active, and the equal of any man in the examination field, imperial court, and sometimes even in physical combat” (Epstein 2011:7). They also pulled no punches on the cruelty to women that occurred in China as elsewhere. One tanci, Tianyuhua, has a familiar plot: a father who is well-meaning but excessively moral to point of cluelessness and a daughter who is brilliant, beautiful, and winds him around her finger (Epstein 2011). It will be recalled that women did not get this kind of fair shake in western literature until the late 18th and early 19th centuries. (Sappho anticipated the trend by a few millennia, and Christine de Pisan by a few centuries, but two swallows do not make a summer.)  One wonders, as so often, why China did not go on to parallel the west. Neo-Confucian morality reasserted itself.

A significant insight into both Qing tolerance for minorities and Qing acceptance of women:  A Muslim Uyghur concubine in the court of the Emperor Qianlong in the 1760s and 1770s managed to avoid pork, eating mutton instead, and to eat sweets—probably with a Central Asian flavor (Millward 1994:435).

An odd sidelight into food in remote Taiwan comes from the career of He Bin, an outrageous rogue in the grand tradition of scoundrels (Andrade 2007). Among other things, he misappropriated the taxes on mullet, very popular common fish that could be caught wild or farmed. Working for (and simultaneously against) the Dutch, who occupied Taiwan in the 17th century, he managed, among other things, to channel a great deal of the mullet tax into his pockets. A tax of 10% on mullet and their roe, during the season for fishing them, was charged, and little of it got past He Bin.

            A final note from late Qing has to do with a major destroyer of good nutrition. The rice polisher was invented by Sampson Moore in 1861 (Wikipedia). Earlier, polishing had to be done by hand, laboriously, with grinding substances. Moore’s machine and later ones used talc to grind and whiten the rice, hence need in old days to wash rice very carefully. Careful souls still wash it, to get loose starch off, and because in the old days rice often came with a good deal of dirt and insects in it. One must still freeze imported rice to kill meal moth eggs, though modern processing has generally eliminated such passengers. Far more serious was stomach cancer caused by the talc, and even more serious still was the damage to nutrition by grinding off the last vestiges of the nutrition-packed seed coats of the rice. Beriberi—lack of Vitamin B1—and other vitamin-deficiency diseases followed the rice polisher. The problem was discovered in Indonesia around 1900, when scientists and others noted that well-to-do people were getting beriberi but not the prisoners in the jails. They were fed on a miserable diet, without polished rice. Scientists fed polished rice to chickens, who promptly became ill; the chickens were then fed rice polishings, and even water in which the polishings had been soaked, which cured them. Thus came about the first realization that food was more than protein, carbohydrates, and oils.

Chapter 11. Modern China

Republic, and Hong Kong

            Farming in the Republic era was classically described by Fei Xiaotong, who reflects on it in a final book (Fei 1992). The great scholar of agriculture Li Bozhong has updated the analysis (B. Li 2020).

The leading anthropologist of Chinese marketing systems, G. William Skinner, got his start by studying rural Sichuan in the 1940s. He had a difficult time dealing with warring Nationalist and Communist forces. His field work was increasingly hampered and eventually shut down. However, he got much detail on agriculture, and also lists of foods available in local shops, from noodles and dumplings to swan eggs (Skinner, ed. Stevan Harrell and William Lavely, 2017).

            I have described in some detail the success of the old south Chinese wet-rice ecosystem at producing incredible amounts of food in a broadly sustainable way (Anderson 1972, 1973, 1988). This system lies behind Permaculture and many other modern systems of more or less sustainable. scientific agriculture. (Of course, nothing in sustainable forever—the sun will explode in about two billion years and vaporize the earth—but meanwhile anything that helps prolong feeding people is a good idea.) The traditional system was best at conserving nutrients, especially nitrogen. Hugh Baker, who did superb studies of social structure in old Hong Kong, in a review of The Food of China (1988), commented that south Chinese agriculture “must make nitrogen atoms unfortunate enough to be in other parts of the world feel unloved” (Baker 1989).

A story that spans Qing and the Republic, and especially the Japanese occupation of Manchuria, is told by Sakura Christmas (2019), as a parable for the time. In one of those amazing articles that starts with a tiny subject and expands to comment brilliantly on the world, she describes the fate of Chinese farmers who displaced Oirat Mongols in the 19C. “The reclamation that had started with Bagmedorje led to a sinking spiral of renting and selling Mongol lands in order to rescue banner finances, but these pastures had been the very source of economic wealth for the area. Less land meant fewer herds and a diminished income; as debts mounted, so too did the pressure to rent or sell property, and this cycle would begin anew” (p. 820). The Chinese turned range into soy fields, but the soil was selenium-deficient, and human deficiency problems started showing up. Then the Japanese took the area and greatly intensified the soy farming, almost entirely for export, so the selenium was lost to the entire system. Disease then flared up, especially tuhuangshui (“vomiting yellow-water”) disease, an extreme selenium deficiency that leads to death, especially of women and children. The sex ratio got as bad as 5:1. People were misshapen and dwarfed from bone non-growth and pathology. The Japanese tended to see this as mere proof of the degeneracy of the Chinese, and treated people as animals—taking photos including topless photographs of women to show breast pathologies. Nothing was done; the deficiency was not understood or investigated. The author makes this a parable of dispossession followed by ecological overdrive, and then colonialism at its worst leading to real system collapse.

            Hong Kong’s oyster industry has received a superb, comprehensive, wonderfully detailed historic study by James Watson (2021), covering its development and practice as far as he could trace it along the Guangdong coast.

            Francesca Bray et al. (2015) have updated us on modern production and trade of rice.

Among other things, soymilk was promoted in the 20th century, from the Republic on into Communist decades (Fu 2018). It remains popular, but cows’ milk is now common and widespread, and sometimes contaminated with melamine and other dangerous adulterants.

This may be the place for some rustic proverbs:

In a melon patch don’t tie your shoes; under a plum tree don’t adjust your hat (Rohsenow 2002:G167). (The instruction here is to do nothing that will arouse suspicion.)

Better one mouthful of heavenly peach than a whole basket of rotten apricots. (N50)

When people hit bad luck, a mouthful of cool water will get stuck in their teeth. (R31)

If the country has no muddy legs, in the city starvation kills the oily mouths. (S35; no farmers, no eating rich food in the city.)

One day no work, one day no food. (Y254; the classic Zen monastery commandment.)

Communist Period

            Mao initially bought the Marxist line about the innate backwardness and hopelessness of peasants, which Marx memorably compared to potatoes in a sack (Mitrany 1951). Mao called Chinese farmers by the proper term nongren, “farmers,” but in Communist English they were always “peasants” unless they were relatively well off, in which case they could be rich farmers or, worse, landlords—having a tiny farm but producing enough to require some hired labor was enough to make one a landlord. Of course, China by then had no peasants, but Marx always talked of “peasants,” and his word was divine. Mao initially dismissed them. Fortunately for them, he came to learn better, but still never developed very rational views about them or how to revolutionize them (Day 2013). Overly fast collectivization led to the disaster of the Great Leap Forward. More recent Chinese scholarship does not fully correct the mistakes of the past. They may be hostile to such western economic bad ideas as xin ziyouzhuyizhe (neoliberalism; Day 2013), but they usually maintain loyalty to Marxist dogma.

            An important history of the Great Leap Forward, Yang Jisheng’s Tombstone (2012), calculates 36 million died, a minimal figure. Frank Dikötter (2010) calculated 45 million, a much more likely sum. Harrell (2020, 2023) has also weighed in on the mindless bureaucratism that shored up Mao’s wild ideas, and turned disaster into total catastrophe. Part of the problem was that Mao ordered families to stop cooking their own foods and to eat in canteens, in 1958. This led to theft, cheating, and other problems.

Worst problem for the whole nation was the constant overestimate of production, because Mao wanted to hear only high figures. Food fell more and more short. People resorted to bark and other famine foods. The canteens have been re-created in a perverse outbreak of nostalgia, or perhaps shuddery tourism (Wong and Thuras 2021:123). Science was not wholly banished, as shown in detail by Sigrid Schmalzer (2016), but it took a back seat. Chinese counties and districts continue to exaggerate their agricultural production, sometimes up to 100% (G. Liu et al. 2020).

Mao’s properly Marxist “struggle against nature” (Shapiro 2001) almost succeeded in destroying China. It was fortunately stopped after Mao passed. Nature has all the cards in that game. Bryan et al. (2018) record in detail the reversal of Mao’s insane policies and the recovery of much of the country since. Stevan Harrell (2023) sounds a darker note, showing how much the lunatic policies continue. There are still enormous problems with coal-burning, desertification, pollution and poisoning of soil and water, wetlands loss, and biodiversity loss (see R. Smith 2015, 2020). Wing-tung Ko (2022) records much of this, including the murderous campaigns against pet dogs, sparrows, tigers, and all sorts of other animals; China was devastated with very little benefit. Nothing now can stop the tailspin of tiger and reptile populations, and many small bird species were virtually wiped out by the sparrow campaign, which went far beyond actual sparrows to kill every small bird that could be easily eliminated. Many reptile species are rushing to extinction. One ironic threat is their popularity; the pet trade is wiping out whole species of geckos.

At least the country is actively moving in some better directions. Reforestation is especially impressive (my personal observation in China and by surveying satellite images), but sadly balanced out by China’s plundering of Southeast Asian and African forests. China is outsourcing deforestation.

As of 2021, China uses 32% of the nitrogen fertilizer in the world, allowing a 44% increase in crop production between 2000 and 2018. Even so, China still imports a great deal of its food, notably 83% of its soybeans. These come largely from Brazil, and have led to massive deforestation there, including destruction of the unique and biologically diverse and important cerrado areas. China uses 13% of the agricultural water (i.e., basically irrigation) in the world, at 48% efficiency, far less than Europe’s (H. Zhao et al. 2021). China spares water in the north by bringing more and more rice and other food from the south, where water is abundant for growing it (X. Zhao et al. 2015). Like many other countries, China wastes about ¼ of its food (Nature 2021).

China continues to try to be green yet affluent, but sorely underinvests in preserving natural capital (Ouyang et al. 2016). Sensible environmental measures, such as local recycling, conserving water, and keeping food safe, are common (Schmitt 2016), but still far from universal. China surpassed the United States as the leading greenhouse gas producer in the world in the mid-20teens, with dismal results, but, again, much is being done to change this (Fang 2018).

            An important collection of papers on the environment, including excellent studies of food production and land cover, was assembled by Abe and Nickum (2009). Robert Marks’ study of the formation of the Pearl River Delta is particularly valuable for food studies; he assembles meticulous detail on the vast extent of land extension by creating polders (sha tian, Cantonese sa tin, “sand fields”), shellfish farms (which slowly fill in), and other devices. A further study by Ma Jianxiong et al. (2016) adds much detail. Many of the polder creators were former boat-dwelling fisherfolk. These boat-dwellers were often the descendents of shoreline farmers who lost their land; from Qing on well into the 20th century, they began to get it back, or rather to create new land for themselves.

            China’s water is depleting. Rampant withdrawal of groundwater goes on in the dry areas and is not being replaced. Dalin et al. (2015) recommend giving up irrigation entirely in areas where it depends on groundwater overdraft, notably around Beijing and in Inner Mongolia. China spares water by importing water-demanding products like beef from elsewhere, but its dryland areas are still facing collapse.

One lake, Dianchi in Yunnan, was totally ruined by mismanagement and pollution, but a monastery saved the golden barbel, a choice fish worth more than $100/kg, while other agents saved a few other items such as some mussels and the edible water plant Ottellia, making restoration possible (Stone 2008). In Sichuan, the Sichuan taimen (Hucho bleekeri), a huge relative of salmon and trout, is critically endangered; a proposed dam will wipe out its last spawning grounds, dooming it to extinction (Di Tong 2022). (There are 5 species of taimen, all in Eurasia, all in desperate shape; being big, slow-growing, and eminently edible, they are even more overfished and poached than other game fish.)

Overfishing gets worse every year, as Chinese fleets scour the world’s waters, taking virtually anything and everything, leaving extreme depletion. This often devastates not only the economic future but the present nutrition of countries that allow Chinese fishing or cannot stop illegal fishing. This even extends to aquaculture.  Glass eels—larval forms of edible eels—are imported and raised to adulthood on fish farms in China and Hong Kong. Critically endangered European eels (Anguilla anguilla) come from North Africa and maybe Europe, are imported illegally under CITES. A. japonica and A. rostrata, treated similarly, arealso endangered but not critically. Oyster reefs cover 1904 ha of China’s marine foreshore, but are under the usual attacks, and are vulnerable (Wei et al. 2023).

The future may be bleak, but much more hopeful are the statistics on what China is currently doing to feed its people today. China manages to feed itself—almost—by combining traditional, modified traditional, and new agricultural methods. Aquaculture has exploded, producing most of the world’s aquacultural production. China has also maintained the traditional silk-fishpond, rice-fishpond, lotus pond, and other water/land interface methods, so unique and brilliant. China’s fine-tuned carp farming system, involving several species with complementary feeding habits, was developing by Qing or earlier (Anderson 1988).

Stevan Harrell’s magistral work An Ecological History of Modern China (2023) gives many statistics on the stunning successes, as well as grim details of the environmental costs. “In 1952 ‘coarse grains’ were estimated to constitute around 70% of the grain eaten in China, but by 1992 they had decreased to 16%” (Harrell 2023:232, with citations), and they continue to decrease today. The main coarse grain that has paid the cost is maize, now an animal feed almost exclusively, but sorghum, sweet potatoes, and other items shrank too. Millets were already a relic by 1952; they are being nostalgically revived in some places, being really quite tasty and nutritious (see below). Still, from 1952 to 2008, they shrank from 9.8 million tons produced to 814,000, but increased again to 3 million tons. Sorghum shows a parallel track, 1.1 million tons to 183,000 and back up to 2.5 million), but the recovery is mostly for animal feed. As of 2021, China produced 213 million tons of rice and 137 of wheat, largely for human food, and 273 million of maize, almost entirely for animals or industrial uses (figures from Harrell 2023:232, 242).

Other elements in the diet increased faster. As of 2015, 86 percent of surveyed adults had eaten red meat within the previous three days; 20% had had some poultry; 29% seafood (Harrell 2023:233, quoting Chinese figures). An accompanying table (p. 234) shows China eating more pork, seafood, lamb, and eggs than the United States, per capita—an astonishing figure to any old China watcher. The US continues to eat more poultry and beef, but the gap is closing. Vegetable consumption is not up very much since earlier times, but the vegetables are much more varied and of much better quality now (my personal observation, as well as Harrell’s). Fruit has increased much more, with orchards expanding from 1.6 million ha in 1998 to almost 11 as of 2017 (Harrell 2023:237); they had already expanded greatly by 1998, though extensive orchards already existed before 1949.

Harrell records the changes in several local regions, from Xinjiang to his own research areas in the southwest; diets vary with local culture, but the same overall changes stand out. Restaurant, takeout, and packaged-food eating has expanded spectacularly, from a luxury of the affluent to a near-daily experience for the vast middle class and urban working class.

Feed for animals requires major imports of maize and especially of soybeans, with Brazil the major supplier. This has caused devastation of millions of acres of forest and savannah in that unfortunate nation, all to supply the Chinese meat industry. Countless species of animals and plants face extinction there, and the very climate is changing, with the country facing hotter and drier conditions as the forests disappear; they produced rain and coolness from transpiration. Eventually, lack of tree roots bringing nutrients to the surface will lead to major soil degradation.  Importing of alfalfa for cattle feed led to major water losses in California (Harrell 2023:242), and this has become a political football in that state, as the government desperately tries to deal with drought.

Efforts are being made to stop the conversion of farmland to urban uses (Harrell 2023:243-44), a step the United States and many other countriesdesperately need to take. The Chinese government wants to maintain at least 120 million ha under agriculture; as of 2021 there were only 128 million ha (Harrell 2023:244, using government figures). The danger is clear. As elsewhere, the best land is first to go. Ironically, cities naturally develop where conditions are best for producing food (though not only there). Thus, from Shanghai and Chengdu (especiallyhard hit; Harrell 2023:244) to Baghdad, Mexico City, and Los Angeles, urban sprawl takes out the very best land.

“From antiquity through the 1980s, feeding China required the labor of the majority of Chinese people” (Harrell 2023:246). Harrell goes on to tell of a rapidly diminishing segment of the population is involved in farming, as China follows the world in subsituting machines and chemicals for human work. Direct genetic modification is the latest to come, following much of the developed world with a lag of a few years (Harrell 2023:250).

There is considerable pressure to follow the Euro-American model of huge monocrop farms managed by very few people. Experience shows, however, that small diverse farms are much more efficient, productive, flexible, and able to withstand stresses, if they have decent access to capital (see e.g Wood 2020, to cite only a particularly good source on a well-known fact, but my own research and experience in this area, in China, California, and Mexico among other places, are quite enough to make the point). Large-scale industrial agriculture often pays only because of the massive subsidies, direct and indirect, that it receives, and the major disadvantages that this and other government policies impose on smaller, more intensive farms. Certainly Harrell’s accounts of rising specialization go dramatically against the huge advantages of diversity recorded from Frank King’s early and memorable studies (King 1911) down to the present.

From p. 256, Harrell details the increasingly awful effects of industrial agriculture: soil contamination, water loss and pollution, huge algal blooms in lakes, siltation of reservoirs and channels, and the rest, and meanwhile increasing diabetes, heart disease, and other diseases of worsening nutrition. Statistics on inefficient use of fertilizers and agricultural chemicals show that China’s high-tech farming is poorly managed. For instance, about 10 to 14 percent of nitrogen fertilizer applied to rice just runs off, polluting the water (Harrell 2023:258). Pesticides are an even worse problem. As elsewhere, farmers often “used many times the amounts that pesticide manufacturers recommended” (Harrell 2023:260). Often they do not realize the dangers, lulled into a false sense of security by both government and manufacturer minimization of the risks.

During most of the period since 1949, China’s slogans included the line “First rich, then green.” The idea was that countries like the United States had not worried about conservation or pollution until they were rich and everyone was well off. This was a deadly belief for two reasons. First, it was flatly wrong. Conservation rose along with waste and pollution in the United States. Forest conservation got serious at high governmental levels in the 1880s. Wildlife conservation was a national cause, with major legislation, by 1904, when the Migratory Bird Act was passed. Pollution control was a serious issue even before the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1910. These and many other major pollution control measures were passed before 1920. Further legislation of the US was passed in the 1960s and 70s, well before the US reached its current levels of affluence. Second, the pollutants of the 1800s and early 1900s were not even remotely close to the levels of amount or of deadliness seen in modern industrial and agricultural production. Even without the major legislation that did in fact occur, the US could not have done the damage that China has done.

Animal diseases, especially viruses, have always been a huge problem in China. The spread of flu from ducks to pigs to people is the most familiar, since it has worldwide effects, generating new strains of flu every year. The combination of ever-changing strains and the total helplessness of traditional cures probably explains the focus of Chinese medicine on strengthening the body rather than on identifying and fighting disease (Anderson, ongoing research). In any case, swine flu, poultry diseases, and many other viruses are rampant in China’s industrial production system (Harrell 2023:262-264).

World fishery depletion by ruthless Chinese fleets has long been documented, and is mentioned here (Harrell 2023:269-270), but the reality is worse, with Chinese fleets poaching or corrupting governments, either way getting ruinous access to fisheries of small, defenseless countries. The atoll countries of Oceania, which control vast areas of ocean but have tiny populations and helplessly frail governments, are especially victimized. Coastal countries with small populations also suffer.

Food safety issues include the world-famous case of milk powder contaminated with melanine. Animal foods full of deadly ingredients have also been exported, as well as poisoning pets at home. Adulterated and contaminated foods are hard to control (Harrell 2023:271-278).

In response, organic, small-scale, and safe-food movements are flourishing, having started recently but proving very attractive in a country that now has a high standard of education, literacy, and awareness (Harrell 2023:278-283). It remains to be seen whether this will succeed. Departing from Harrell’s book and working from wider political findings, experience with other countries shows that to the extent that a country falls into dictatorship—as China has done under Xi Jinping—it suppresses such efforts, since the giant agribusiness interests can easily corrupt an apical, authoritarian government, and insist on having any opponents crushed. If China reverses course on what can only be described as a drift into fascism, these movements for better farming and food may yet save it. Continued centralization of government, agribusiness, and power can only worsen the situation.

A beautiful, detailed, but thoroughly propagandistic article by Janus Dongye Qifeng (2019) gives the Chinese government view, including some gratuitous and dishonest swipes at Tibet—said, for instance, to have subsisted entirely on milk and meat till the Chinese got there and brought vegetables. The article fails to mention the fact that massive intensive agriculture is unsustainable as currently praticed, due to the huge pollution it generates both from chemical inputs and from agricultural wastes such as pig manure. Even so, the article is worth investigating for the photographs alone. Some statistics there:  China eats 45% of the world’s consumed seafood—65 million tonnes (metric tons; 1000 kg) a year; 50 million of these are from aquaculture, including shrimp, crabs, fish, shellfish, and so on. China produces 66% of the world’s farmed fish. The integration of silk-raising with water fields (mulberry trees grown on the dikes, as of old) allows China to produce 84% of the world’s silk. Much of the power is solar; China produces 25.8% of the world’s solar energy. China also produces 90% of the world’s lotus rhizomes (miscalled “roots” in the article), unsurprising since almost no one but Chinese eat them. China produces 22% of the world’s rapeseed (this presumably includes traditional Chinese oil mustard as well as canola), using much mud from ponds.

            China produces about 30% of the world’s honey—543,000 tonnes. This honey is sometimes polluted (as even Qimeng admits).

China produces 79.2 million tonnes of watermelon, out of the total world production of 111 million. I recall some of us asking a group of ordinary Chinese at a market in 1978 what they would do with a yuan; they all answered “buy a watermelon.”  China leads in many other fruit, but quality control remains a major issue. China produces 56.3 million tonnes of tomatoes

            China has 1,086 million hectares of agricultural land to India’s 1,579; USA 1,631; EU 1,091. 208.l million tonnes of rice are produced; 257.3 of maize; 134.3 wheat. The USA figures are 9.2 (we aren’t a rice culture), 366.2, and 47.3. However, this otherwise relentlessly upbeat article admits that China is losing about 3,000 square km of agricultural land a year, to urbanization and degradation. The article notes this problem is being addressed by soil conservation, but that devoting marginal land to reforestation instead of farming produces yet another cost to agricultural land—though with an overall increase in welfare as the trees grow and fix carbon.

            China now leads even in beer, with over 46 million kilolitres produced per year, about twice the US level. Some 13.6 kilolitres of baijiu (Chinese vodka) is produced, with the article (inevitably) singing the praises of baijiu as superior to vodka or whiskey. (This is a matter of taste.)  China, as always, has most of the world’s pigs, and produces 54,650 million tonnes of pork, vs. the USA’s mere 12,166.

Schneider, Lander and Brunson (2019) bring us up to date on pigs in China, with discussions of the pork factories of modern China, where American-style factory farming has unfortunately taken root. China’s wonderful, tough, flavorful landrace pigs are being replaced by western varieties that put on fat and meat fast but have low quality.

Dairying is rationalized similarly: Mongolian milk is sealed in tetrapaks and sold as “green,” though current policy is destroying the grasslands and the Mongolian way of life (Tracey 2013). Beef production has increased greatly, but dairying is even more successful, with vast amonts of milk now produced (Brunson et al. 2022). Apparently not enough is produced to give people doses big enough to make them sick from lactose; a glass or two is harmless to most people. The usual environmental costs of cattle rearing show up extensively.

Western pests have invaded China in vast numbers, just as Asia’s worst pests (such as the chestnut blight and the emerald ash borer) have devastated American trees. America’s pine bark beetles, for instance, are now working through forests there as they have destroyed millions of acres here (Qiu 2013).

Biodiversity continues to decline. The other freshwater dolphins are following the white-flag dolphin into extinction. The Yangtse giant softshell turtle (Rafetus swinhoei) was down to three individuals, all male, in 2019, and is now extinct or doomed (H. Liu et al. 2019). Other riverine life forms are in similar danger (Jian Wang et al. 2021), including many other turtles (Jun Wu et al. 2020) and the Chinese alligator. Fishing was banned in the Yangzi River in 2020. The Chinese paddlefish is extinct. Catches of other riverine fish were down “from 420,000 tons in 1950s to less than 100,000 tons now” (Science 2020). The five species of giant salamanders, the world’s largest amphibian, are disappearing. They are apparently tasty, and thus depleted in the wild; an extremely ill-advised plan to collect wild individuals and farm them has failed (they grew but would not reproduce), leaving them in desperate shape (Yong 2018).

Even the Baer’s pochard duck, an ordinary, formerly common duck that has no exotic requirements, is down to a few hundred birds, thanks to drainage of marshes and local hunting (Tong 2020). Many mammals, birds, and reptiles are about gone. Measures are worthy but inadequate.

Under Xi Jinping, moves toward political and social liberalization were sharply reversed. Hong Kong was crushed—a leading democracy turned into a highly repressed and unhappy city. On the other hand, Xi has had the sense to realize that China was committing suicide, and not just in the long run, by destroying its environment, and he has done a great deal to reverse Mao’s insane policies (Esarry et al. 2020 and Glover et al. 2021 are collections of excellent, important accounts). The problem is that autocrats usually fall into the trap of believing they are infallible while also striving for short-term gains (Ben-Ghiat 2020). Making enormous environmental mistakes is thus normal for such regimes, from Brazil to China and from Trump’s America to Stalin’s USSR. The future is thus dusty indeed.

The Qing genocide of the Dzungars is being repeated in the genocidal campaign against the Uyghurs (Roberts 2020). Many killings have been reported, but worse is massive cultural suppression: destroying mosques and historical monuments, destroying whole neighborhoods of traditional houses, banning the language quite widely, and massive “re-education” campaigns to force Han Chinese culture on this Turkic Islamic minority. China is very quiet about it, but someone got access to the supply orders for the “re-education” camps, and discovered massive orders for spiked clubs, handcuffs, cattle prods, and other torture implements (SBS News 2018).

The Chinese Communist constitution guarantees protection of minorities and forbids this sort of discrimination, but protests have been brutally suppressed. Genocidal suppression of Tibetan and Mongol culture is only a bit less dramatic; actual genocide of Tibetans was widely practised in the 1950s.

            Mayfair Yang’s Gifts, Favors, and Banquets (1994) is one of many excellent ethnographies of modern China. It describes the political uses and manipulations of those acts. Her more recent Re-enchanting Modernity (2020) is a very detailed description of how religion—including its feasting and foodways—survives despite irregular and erratic Communist persecution. The regime blows hot and cold on religion to keep it cowed and manipulable. Directly relevant is her editorship of a collection of papers, Chinese Environmental Ethics (2021), with many exceptionally good studies. Most go well beyond the trite “China’s concepts of nature are different from ours,” to discuss actual events in anthropological perspective.

A paper by Jeffrey Nicolaisen (2021) notes that Han Chinese may have eaten parts of Taiwan Aboriginals in the old days, on the theory that they were not human. In any case, Taiwanese certainly sacrifice and eat pigs, even Buddhists who are otherwise vegetarian (Nicolaisen 2021:48-49).

The Portuguese sinologist Gonçalo Santos has summarized almost 30 years of research, including years of field time, in northern Guangdong province, in an important book, Chinese Village Life Today (2021). The village is slowly depopulating as more and more working-age people are forced to move to cities, or to farming areas close to cities, to make ends meet. Food is urbanizing in consequence. Popular influences have arrived. Breastfeeding is less long-continued, being reduced to 2 years or less from 2 to 3 or even 5 before (p. 140; I saw the same thing take place over years in Hong Kong).

            In the meantime, Western astrology has caught on in China, and many believe it, and Virgo got associated with the downvaluing of virgins above marriageable age in China, so now women Virgos are shunned and not dated. This proves that development and propagation of negative stereotypes can happen without any reality or traditional belief behind it (J. Lu et al. 2020). The application to food is that human foolishness is boundless, and lies behind countless food beliefs new and old.

Chapter 12. Modern Chinese Foods, and Ancient Foods in New Times

            We now move from more general understandings of Communist China to specific foods in the Chinese world.

To begin, as usual, with basic starches: Broomcorn millet, as neglected a major crop as the world affords, has finally received some attention, from Ruiyun Wang et al. (2016). They describe many uses. It is parched as chaomi, dry-toasted in a pan, in central Asia. It is made into suanfan “sour cooked grain,” a fermented concoction with a yogurt-like taste. It is used for the usual noodles, cakes, and buns. A waxy variety is used for gao cakes, including yougao, oil cake, a deep-fried gao traditional at the Spring Festival and at weddings. It is also brewed into jiu. Wedding uses also include limu gao, “cake for leaving mother,”and use of jars of millet in dowries(in Hequ, Shanxi; Wang et al. 2016:333). It is widely cultivated in China, but mostly in the interior north. The seeds are usually yellow or white, but can be red, brown, gray, or black. Many other traits vary too. The crop is in need of further study.     

Rice is, of course, the most important single food in China, as it is in the world today. Rice is so productive that it requires only .24 ha. of land to produce a tonne, if the best technology is used, but maize is down to .21, and wheat .34. Thus, most rice-growing countries, even incredibly densely populated ones like Bangladesh and Vietnam, can export some (Elert 2014).

            Sticky rice, miscalled “glutinous,” is sticky because it has almost no amylose; the starch it does have, amylopectin, cooks up stickier. It also brews better, and is thus the usual feedstock for rice “wines” and sakes. Rice varieties have varying proportions of amylose and amlopectin, and are thus sticky to varying degrees. The textbook separation of indica, japonica, and glutinous rices does not survive well; there are too many subvarieties, intermediates, and dubiously related sticky forms.

A major hero who, for a change, deserves every honor ever given to him, was Yuan Longping, the “father of hybrid rice.” He was born in 1930. Honors including being proposed for a Nobel prize. His rice has vastly increased yields in China, with rices now yielding over 10 tons/ha per crop (see e.g. Shellen Wu 2021; Yuan 2002). He used conventional breeding, not genetic engineering. He supported the latter eventually, however. Toward the end of his life, he was breeding up the salt-tolerant rices of China’s old-time seacoasts to produce rice that can be grown in seawater (Qimeng 2019). He passed away in 2021 at the age of 90.

Rice breeding continues apace; a gene for longer, better-quality, less chalky rice has been found, and is being bred into other rice varieties (Nature 2015, reporting an item in Nature Genetics). A gene from barley allows rice to produce starch more efficiently, meaning more grain and much less methane production; this gene could reduce world methane production 2% if it became universal in rice (Su et al. 2015). Rice is said to be getting tastier in China, especially in the fertile and well-educated southeast, where rice breeding and cultivation are at a high point (Lu et al. 2025).

            Noodles are made in several ways. As noted, low-gluten grains like corn and buckwheat are made into a rather wet dough and forced through holes in a colander, directly into boiling water. If those 4000-year-old noodles are real, this is presumably how they were made. Bean starch and some wheat/egg noodles are made into lumps or flat sheets and hand-cut. High-gluten wheat noodles are made in many ways, the most dramatic of which are “pulled” or “swung noodles” (la mian). For these, the dough is stretched and then swung like a jump-rope, then doubled and re-swung, then doubled again, and so on. This develops the gluten so much that it produces an extremely chewy noodle. Swinging the dough without having it neck down and break requires extreme skill. (Not long ago, the one expert at this in Los Angeles was a Mexican chef working in a Korean restaurant. Globalization is real.)

Closely related to noodles are dumplings, which exist in countless forms. Xiao long bao, “little dragon wraps,” are notably popoular and widespread. Dumplings became known in the western world via Cantonese wonton soup, “won ton” being a local pronunciation of hundun, “primeval chaos.” The soup with dumplings floating in it does look like a primordial cosmic scene, perhaps a few million years after the Big Bang. The dumplings, or eating them, are known as yun tun “swallowing clouds.” In Sichuan some are chao shou “folded arms” (Dunlop 2016:279). Countless other names for filled dumplings are known, but most are unrecorded so far in the canonical literature. Thick Northwest Chinese bread is mo, cf. Tibetan momo.

            Related is gluten; wheat dough is kneaded, then thinned with water to dissolve out the starch. Eventually only the gluten is left, to be made into imitation meats and other items. Seitan is wheat gluten used as imitation meat. One can get gluten powder now in the United States (Bob’s Red Mill makes it). Mix, knead, simmer in broth.

            Tangzhong is a roux-type starter for Chinese baked bread. One mixes flour and water, heats, whisks, then mixes into the flour, yeast, water, etc. for the bread. It provides the fluffy but chewy texture that Chinese prefer in bread. It may be from Japanese or possibly from Portuguese usage; Portuguese sweet bread influenced Chinese baking, via Macau.

            Chinese sweets very often turn out to be Near Eastern, as pointed out by Sean Chen (2021). Some are obviously so, from their names, such as the medieval saboni, which is Turkish saboniye (from the Arabic and Persian words for “soapy”), a flour and sugar sweet that looks like soap. Less obvious is the origin of mooncakes from maamoul, the stuffed Arab tarts or cookies. Mooncakes are said to derive from hubing, “Iranian (or West Asian) cakes,” in the Tang Dynasty. Like mooncakes, they consist of sweet paste (usually of dates in the case of maamoul) in a hand-sized wheat crust often imprinted with designs pressed onto the top. Persian koolocheh are similar. Yutiao, fried dough strips identical to Mexican churros but rarely sweet, are derived from similar dough strips in the Near East (variously lokma, jalebi, or tulumba). Chinese walnut and date candies are derived from the same general background as lukum (“Turkish delight”), but lack the thickening mahaleb gum from a cherry species (Prunus mahaleb). We have already noted Chinese halva and other obviously Near Eastern sweets. Chinese simply are not dessert-oriented; they have borrowed most of their more complicated sweets.

Jiu today includes not only mutton “wine” and “red rose dew” (vodka with rose petals steeped in it), but ng ka pei (Cantonese equivalent of wujiapi), vodka flavored with a medicinal herb, Acanthopanax, that gives it a cider flavor. Jiu is also flavored with other herbal, such as arbutus fruit. Jiu good enough to save for daughter’s wedding is known, as is done with wine in France. Er guo tou, “two pot head,” is cheap white lightning. On a different note, there are now maotais costing over $200 per bottle.

Salt in Chinese culture has been the subject of a major monograph by Hans Ulrich Vogel (2009); he reviews every aspect of its production and consumption in late Imperial times, and compares these with the contemporary European world. Vogel notes, sympathetically, that Chinese add deep-drilling—perfected for salt wells—to the list of the greatest inventions China has given the world, along with paper, printing, the compass, and gunpowder (Vogel 2009:185).

            Doufu zha is the residue from making bean curd (Japanese okara); it is  locally eaten in north China.

Eggplants, domesticated in India, were apparently independently domesticated in what is now southern Yunnan (Meyer et al. 2012; the domestic plant Solanum melongena and its purported wild ancestors, S. incanum and S. undatum, turn out to be genetically pretty much the same—all one species). They go back about as far as any plant records are found, in both China and India. The garden egg—the variety whose fruit really looks like an egg, oval and white—is apparently yet a third domestication, from southern Southeast Asia. Many other useful fruits are gathered in Yunnan (J. Chen et al. 1999).

Qing gan cai is green-stemmed bok choy as opposed to the usual white form.

Passion fuit is bai xiang guo, 100 fragrances fruit.

Luohan guo is now Siraitia grosvenorii. Gac fruit, a Vietnamese delicacy, is a species of bitter melon, Momordica cochinchinensis.

Myrica rubra, yangmei (“strawberry apricot”) or strawberry tree, is a local fruit.

Yuan Mei used gun, “turn,” a cooking time meaning a turn-over of the boiling liquid—a mere second or so. Longer timing methods in the old days included time taken to say a phrase, and above all the time taken to burn incense stick. Incense sticks were all made the same, and the time it took to burn one was thus reasonably standardized. Incense sticks were burned every day by most households, for religion or simply good luck. The old-time western equivalent was to use the commonest prayers: kitchen process durations were described by the time it took to say the Lord’s Prayer, or the Hail Mary, one or five or however many times. Illiterates and people without clocks could always use these.

Boiling and steaming remain the commonest ways of cooking in China. Stir-frying became well known in Song, and waxed commoner over successive centuries, especially the last one or two. Deep-frying and roasting/baking have become common in recent decades. The result is not always good for health; fat consumption has soared. Complex cooking involving several processes has become common in restaurants. Vegetables are more and more often parboiled before being stir-fried, instead of cut up, stir-fried, and then finished in added liquid. The latter was the traditional method, at least in the households I knew; but the parboiling step was a gourmet touch, making the result a bit more cui and thus worth the trouble. Cui refers to a mouthfeel: the vegetable is crisp but then succulent, slightly resisting but then yielding, a texture familiar to westerners in well-cooked new peas, string beans, and carrots. It is a desired height of Chinese gourmetship. Other such mouth textures include nen “soft” and lao “old,” i.e. more tough. Nuo “sticky” can be seen as a mouthfeel term (see Dunlop 2019a:25), and other mouthfeel terms cover slippery, rubbery, brightly refreshing, and so on (Dunlop 2019b:128); there is a term for every imaginable mouthfeel. This is a major side of Chinese gourmetship that is almost unappreciated in the west, even by foodies, but one eventually learns it. (I admit to finding Ms. Dunlop’s memoir fascinating because so much of it perfectly parallels my own learning curve decades earlier, from discovering the critical importance of flame height to learning mouthfeel connoisseurship.)

Food to eat with rice has its own special word in Cantonese: sung. Mandarin simply uses cai, “vegetables,” extended to mean “made dishes.” A common phrase for foods to eat with rice is xia fan, “downing the rice.” Another phrase for these foods (what Americans sometimes called “with-it”) is guo fan, “pass grain,” i.e. “helps the food go down,” the precise equivalent of the phrase “it helps the bread go down” recorded by Escoffier from rural France. This adds to the many words worldwide for “food to eat with the starch staple,” such as Latin companagium, “with bread.”

Tea is the subject of many books. There has, in fact, been a sudden explosion of books about tea, ranging from brief popular accounts to Heiss and Heiss’ encyclopedic and highly authoritative reference work (2010) and James Benn’s superb history of tea in early dynasties (2015). Okakura Kakuzo’s Japanese classic The Book of Tea (1964 [1906]) remains valuable. An incredibly beautiful book, issued in Thailand, is Tea Horse Road by Michael Freeman and Selena Ahmed (2015); Freeman’s exquisite and scientifically detailed photographs are set off by Ahmed’s unique expertise in tea ethnobotany. Another recent tea book is Chow and Kramer (1990). Victor Mair and Erling Hoh have also weighed in with The True History of Tea (2009), much better on the Imperial Chinese historic side than the other works. The art of tea implements in China and elsewhere was the theme of an exhibit at UCLA, whose catalogue (Hohenegger 2009) is a wonderful resource.

The extreme in tea books is reached by George van Driem’s The Tale of Tea (2019), an encyclopedic work, 900 packed pages on every aspect of the drink. The book starts with the origins of tea in the area from northeast India to Yunnan. It continues with the history of tea in China and Japan. Most of the book is absorbed by the European “discovery” of tea and the consequent trade and connoisseurship. The coming of coffee and chocolate and their development in the European world is added as a comparative section. The book ends with particularly valuable chapters on the chemistry and cultivation of tea.

Van Driem, a linguist and philologist, is best when he writes on philological matters: the correct words for tea in dozens of languages, the origins of our words for tea, and the classification of the languages involved. Our European words are derived from Cantonese and Hokkien Chinese, and rarely from Japanese. Van Driem has actually gotten the exceedingly difficult original Chinese words nailed down, even to tracing particular dialects of Hokkien, their correct tonal shifts from dialect to dialect, and how that fed into European languages. He is next best on biology. The sections on chemistry and on tea cultivation are magistral. Lists of tea pests (pp. 839-842) and diseases (849-850) are amazingly comprehensive. The sections on history are solid and reliable, but largely from standard sources, though the heavy use of contemporary writings—always in the original languages, with translations—is valuable. Van Driem is no political economist, and attempts to deal with such matters at more than standard-source levels are uncompelling. Summarizing the work is beyond possibility here, and most of it does not concern China, so I leave it with the recommendation to go to it for reference for all linguistic matters.

Tea continues to be more and more important as China’s drink and a major export. According to one myth, it was discovered by the ox-headed agricultural deity known as the Divine Farmer (shennong) around 2700 BCE, when tea leaves blew into his cup of hot water. He supposedly sampled all the herbs in China to tell which were good for you, which poisonous, and which neutral. An herbal under his name was produced in the Han Dynasty and edited by the great polymath Tao Hongjing in the 6th century (Wilms 2016). It and other such sources have a good deal of material on food plants.

            An excellent book about tea, with many beautiful illustrations, is Luo Jilian’s The China Tea Book (2012). A scholarly tract is Mair and Hoh (2009). Tea has received its own art magazine:  The Art of Tea, up to issue 9 as of the end of 2010 (I have not seen it since; it has apparently gone under). Unsurprisingly, it was supported by the Taiwan tea industry. It is beautiful and detailed.

            A superb, encyclopedic book about tea by Mary Lou and Robert Heiss (2007) covers Chinese tea especially. It is by a couple who are long-established merchants of top-end tea, so the book is unashamedly promotional; no gritty reporting on the seamy side of the tea industry. On the other hand, the combination of overwhelming knowledge and deep insight into the tea business produces a quite unique account of the top side. A study of tea in Yunnan’s economy was done by Po-Yi Hung (2015).

Tea has caught on worldwide, of course, more than ever. The abstruse and esoteric language of tea connoisseurship, involving cha qi “spirit of tea” and cha yun “tea beauty,” has been unpacked by Jinghong Zhang (2023). A major art exhibit has chronicled its rise and spread over historic time and over the world (Hohenegger 2009). The latest fad, as of this writing, is for aged Puer tea from Yunnan; excellent ethnographic and historic research has revealed much about this delicacy (Yu 2010; Zhang 2010).

The tea house as ordinary people’s office, a social institution I described in the book, has finally received proper and deserved historical attention (Wang 2008).

Going well beyond tea merchandising is Frederick Dannaway’s essay (2010) on the world-in-miniature and tea in China and Japan. He notes, correctly, that the Chinese do not say “microcosm” or “world-in-miniature” for their bonsai landscapes and compressed urban gardens. In fact they simply call them mountain landscapes or gardens or even worlds, as if they were the real thing. And, indeed, they are…you need only look closely (as shown by Stein’s excellent study, 1990).

Historian Miranda Brown has sought out traditional milk processing that still goes on today. China’s love affair with dairy foods peaked in medieval times, but yogurt, soft cheese, and other products continue rather widespread. Learning from central Asia continued during Ming. Dairy foods turn up in odd places, including Shenzhen, the border town with Hong Kong, where a traditional cheese-like product survives. Brown has also reported on foreign foods in traditional Chinese cookbooks (Brown 2019) and other matters of Chinese history, and runs a very active food blog. Kumys is known in Chinese as ma nai jiu, “horse milk jiu.” Milk and milk products used in the past include butter in offerings and milk products consumed by Buddhist monks, among other things (Newman 2011a). Related are the sweets, often milk-based, in Kristina Cho’s Mooncakes and Milk Bread (2021).

Breastfeeding, formerly done till the child was two or three (or even till 5; Santos 2021:140, but this may have been a problematic case), is now sharply reduced, because of the pressures of work. Women now labor in factories and other urban jobs, leaving children with grandparents or other relatives. Breastfeeding is recommended by the government but hard to manage.

            Bean starch has an ancient lineage, and jelly made from it goes back to Song. It gelatinizes in hot water. Mung bean starch known and written about since the Qimin Yaosho described how to make the starch: boil beans, leave in water to ferment, mash, soak and stir to separate starch—fenying, “powder essence.” The jelly does not appear in writings till Song but may have been around earlier. Several good Song recipes given, including lungs stuffed with it along with ginger, nuts, sesame paste, and wheat flour. A similar mix, with pine seeds, walnuts, and dill as well as the mung beans, flour, and sesame, was made into a vegetarian “lung” by cutting it in that shape and serving in spicy sauce. Mung bean starch jelly was used in many other mock-meat and mock-seafood dishes. It was compared to jade in appearance. A Ming writer compared mung bean starch with lotus rhizome, kudzu root, and bracken rhizome starches. The jelly is now cut into broad kuanfen noodles, and fensi (bean jelly vermicelli) are common (Liang 2021).

            This reminds us of the many ways to make noodles out of gluten-free materials, a concept totally alien to the west. Forcing dough through the holes in a colander directly into boiling water is the principal way. One can also simply press out noodle shapes and then put them into the water (Dunlop n.d.:172).

Modern Chinese condiments include countless chile sauces, often with fried onions (and sometimes garlic) to make them crunchy. The flavors are variously complex and refined. The heat ranges from strong to incandescent.

Many forms of soy sauce and soy-based flavored sauces have evolved, often with back-and-forth stimuli to Korea and Japan, which have their own soy traditions.

Insects, rarely mentioned at length in Chinese food books, have been treated along with various annelid and other worms by M. Leung (2000). Cicadas, waterbugs, silkworms, and others are eaten. Caterpillars and grasshoppers, in particular, saved countless people from starvation in earlier times. Locusts were so popular they inspired a religious cult (Hsu 1969). Insects are a major component of southeast Asian fare, occupying e.g. much of the space in the public markets of Cambodia, where deepfried tarantulas are also a delicacy. Pond snails are popular, and Chinese introduced at least one genus, Viviparus, to the United States, via markets; it still is found therein, but has escaped and gone wild as well (Paul Chace, personal communication, 1987; see also Hanna 1966:37 on V. stelmaphorus). More exotic is “winter frog”—the fat, with part of the reproductive system, derived from one species of frog in north China (Newman 2000). One suspects that other frogs are used, because this and other frog dishes are available even in far Los Angeles. This is contributing to the worldwide disappearance of amphibia. Turtles are not only popular food, but medicinal, and their fabled longevity makes them a possible candidate for a long-life food (Newman 2004b). Unfortunately, turtles, like many other animals, are threatened with extinction in China because of their popularity as food and because the Communist government destroyed the traditions of conservation and resource management that had protected China’s and southeast Asia’s environment for centuries. Deer antlers in velvet may not quite qualify as a food, but are a major product of the deer-raising industry in Taiwan and New Zealand; the antlers are cut off, leading to much pain and loss of blood, but at least sustainably (Tseng 2017).

            Among the saddest cases of failure of conservation is the supply of edible birds’ nests. These are the nests of a swiftlet, Collocalia esculenta, which makes “white” nests of protein secreted from glands in its mouth. (Related species produce “black bird’s nests,” not purely mouth secretions, therefore inferior and in need of considerable cleaning.)  The nests are highly regarded as food and medicine, strengthening yin and lungs, good for digestion, and generally tonic. They actually are made primarily of indigestible long-chain proteins, but include growth stimulants and a unique glycoprotein with immunomodulating value (Kong et al 1990; Langham 1980). The supply is, however, endangered by overcollecting; increasing demand and breakdown of local social rules on harvesting have led to wiping out the swiftlet in China and making it rarer and rarer throughout its range in southeast Asia (Chiang 2011). Fortunately, the creative farmers of southeast Asia have discovered a workaround: retooling abandoned houses and buildings as swiftlet caves. This has become a big business, and is saving the swiftlets (Wong and Thuras 2021:160). China’s environment and agriculture are collapsing fast (see e.g. Johnson 2014), and failure to conserve resources is the worst of many problems.

Mushrooms of many species are important foods in China (Newman 2010b, 2011c, 2019) and especially among minorities. Many are also exported to Japan. A huge trade has developed in the Tibetan frontier lands. Daniel Winkler has chronicled this, and could not resist the temptation to refer to “mushrooming trade” (Winkler 2008, 2009). Species include shiitake, now Lentinula edodes; maitake, Grifala frondosus; enoki,k Flammuline velutipes;  bamboo fungus, now commercially raised, Phallus indusiatus; and the old usuals (Newman 2019c).

One recent article describes mushrooms of China, with references to early Chinese sources (J. Newman 2010b), and including such unusual species as chicken-of-the-woods (Laetiporus sulphureus), enoki (Flammulina velutipes), and lion’s mane (Hericium erinaceus), and followed by an enthusiastic article by her husband Leonard on how to grow shiitake (Lentinula edodes; L. Newman 2019c). 

            An odd item unrelated to cooking as such is the use of restaurant density and quality to assess the wealth, population, and business activity of cities. Lei Dong and associates (2019) used number and type of restaurants and local ratings of their quality to assess daytime and nighttime populations, businesses, and the like, and checked this against other data. The restaurants turned out to predict the contours well, so the authors constructed a way of using such data to assess neighborhoods rapidly.

            Western concerns with lactose, gluten, “junk” food, ethical eating, and other such food issues have entered Chinese consciousness, often via food packaging. David Machin and Ariel Chen (2023) have thoroughly reviewed this phenomenon, with many photos of the packages.

Stray Notes on Foods

Cannibalism, always fascinating to humanity, continues to receive attention. As noted in my book, famine drove people to eat human flesh on many occasions, but literature fantastically exaggerated the extent of this, and Yenna Wu has analyzed the issue (Wu 1996).

The classic meat dish “Buddha jumped over the wall” (it smells so tempting that a Buddha would break his vegetarian vows and leap for it) is made by very slowly braising sea cucumber, shark fin, deer sinew, fungus, abalone, dried scallops, snow fungus, fish swim-bladder, turtle, and medicinal herbs such as ginseng. Other, less exotic ingredients are often substituted for the rarer ones.

Moon cakes are evolving; heavy, sickly-sweet, and doughy, they are unpopular today, so low-calorie forms are evolving, as well as variants using new ingredients. They too have spread to the United States and become liberated from traditional contexts (Langlois 1972).

            The Maya-domesticated pitahaya cactus is now universal in east Asia under the name “fire-dragon fruit” or just “dragon fruit” (long guo). The latest New World fruit (as of around 2010) to arrive in China is the passion fruit, bai xiang guo, “100 fragrances fruit.” 

            A mangosteen-like fruit (Garcinia sp.) of south China is monographed by B. Liu et al. (2017).

            Seafood gourmetship gets ever more arcane, and ever more fatal to the world oceans (Fabinyi 2012; Fabinyi et al. 2012). The fisheries of China and the seas around it are depleted, and a zone of extreme overfishing is expanding rapidly through the Philippines and Indonesia and out into the Pacific. Even American coasts are depleted, by overfishing of things like sea cucumbers and sea urchins. Jellyfish, both inner and outer parts of the main body, are eaten with enthusiasm.

            Vegetarianism has received some attention lately. Chinese Buddhists are supposed to be vegetarian, and some non-Buddhists are too; this has led to the development of a vegetarian cuisine. Buddhist vegetarianism and avoidance of alcohol have received noteworthy attention and excellent review in two articles (Benn 2005; Kieschnick 2005; both in Sterckx 2005). The drive to create imitation meats for vegetarians and vegans is so strong that there are even vegetarian intestines; the indefatigable Fuchsia Dunlop gives a recipe (Dunlop 2016:324). Most of the imitations strike the present writer as dreadful. It seems preferable (by far) to give up the ersatz, and simply eat vegetables for their own excellent natural tastes. There is also nothing wrong with leaving the meat out of dishes like mapo doufu.

Ducks may not be raised from the egg with loving care any more (though some probably still are), but the Quan Jude restaurant—Beijing’s classic “Peking duck” place—has flourished and even franchised out. The owners were sent down to the countryside for being bourgeois, during the Great Cultural Revolution, but they returned (Ni 2004).

Preserving eggs has received brief but thorough monographic treatment from Fuchsia Dunlop (2006), who points out that it was westerners who started calling pi dan “hundred-year” or “thousand-year-old” eggs. They are aged a few days or weeks.

Sweet potatoes are less important than elsewhere in China, but are incorporated into sweets (p. 447) and other dishes.

Basella esculenta, a green vegetable oddly known as “bean curd vegetable” (doufu cai), is eaten in southwest China.

There is also leek flower sauce, made with salt and ginger and fermented.

Tonghao cai, chrysanthemum greens from the chrysanthemum relative Glebiornis coronaria (formerly Chrysanthemum coronarium) comes in two forms: tong hao  and hao cai (Dunlop 2016:44). The species has gone wild around San Diego, CA, and in Florida, escaping (at least in the San Diego case) from Chinese gardens.

Yet another odd vegetable is the swollen stem of wildrice, Zizania caducifolia, a very close relative of the wildrice of Native North America. Note the spelling as one word, “wildrice,” to distinguish this plant from actual wild rice (nondomestic strains of Oryza sativa). The stems in China become infected with gibberellin-rich fungi (supposedly Ustilago esculenta, common smut)that makes them swell and become succulent, like asparagus. They are called lusun “reed shoots,” and thus asparagus is “foreign lusun.”

            One of the large smoky-flavored cardamoms, Amomum villosum, is distinguished (and long has been) as sha ren, not tsaoko.

A new medicinal food is snow chrysanthemum, Sanvitalia procumbens, aka creeping zinnia. It makes an excellent, flavorful tea. It grows in the Kunlun Mountains, and presumably elsewhere. It was subject to wild speculation in 2011, but quickly returned to moderate price. It benefits from the usual claims of cureall: it is said to reduce cholesterol and blood sugar, and so on.

The Golden Cicada (Cryptotympana atrata) is a popular delicacy in northern China, and is overcollected to the point of rarity. Hong Yang and colleagues report on this, and add: “Approximately 220 cicada species have been identified in China” (Yang et al. 2023). They do not mention others as food. I have seen people catch cicadas to feed chickens, and small boys catch them for noisemaking. I suspect other species are eaten. Chinese traditionally ate the silk pupae those cocoons they unreeled for silk, or fed them—again—to the chicks. Crickets and many other insects are locally eaten.

Chinese names for dishes continue to delight. Thin noodles with ground meat and oil (and lots of chile) are “ants climbing on trees,” because the bits of meat stick to the noodles and look like ants on trees—if one has considerable imagination. A Beijing sweet delicacy is “ass rolls about” (or “donkey rolling in sand”)—a sweet glutinous rice cylinder rolled in crushed bean meal. The rolling process reminds one of a donkey rolling on sand to scratch his back.

            “Across the bridge noodles” is a Yunnan dish in which noodles are poured from one pot into another to finish cooking; the name may come from that, but there is an origin myth involving an elite boy forced to study all the time, and isolated for the purpose on an island in his parents’ garden, food being brought “across the bridge” by his family (Lo and Lo 2003; see ref. in preceding section) or by his long-suffering wife (Freedman 2018, who makes this a theme of her book; also Phillips 2016:302). Such cute stories explaining the name of a dish are not to be taken on faith, since the Chinese love nothing better than to make up such tales. Another story concerns “Ignored by the Dog Filled Buns,” One Gao Guiyou, nicknamed Gouzi (a pun on gouzi, small dog), made superb buns and was so busy selling them that he ignored people (Phillips 2016:48).

            “Lonny” (Leonard Newman) has made up a whole list of wild names: “Buddha’s navel” is a sesame sweet with fruits and sweets, from Wuxi. “Bright Pearl in the Hand” is “deboned duck feet topped with shrimp paste and a quail egg, from Anhui.” “Cats ears” are “stir-fried flat pieces of wheat or sorghum pasta” from Shaanxi. “Dragon plays with a pearl” is “breaded whole shrimp wrapped with fish, from Shandong; “Dragon Playing with Cold Coins” is “eel and shrimp patties with oil, fom Beijing.” “Dragons Fight Tigers” are snake, cat, chicken, and fish-maw in a soup, from Gunagdong. I know a version of this as “dragon, tiger and phoenix”—snake, cat and chicken in a soup. “Four Stars longing for the Moon” is a carp in a spicy sauce surrounded by four other dishes, from Jiangxi. “General Takes Off His Cape”: eel stir-fried with mushrooms and bamboo shoots, from Hunan. “Hundred Birds Bowing to Phoenix: Chicken and soup with dumplings, from Hunan. Lady’s Jade Hairpin: Green stuffed chili peppers with pork and shrimp, from Guizhou. No More Time: Banana, candied orange, and melon batter-fried, from Chaozhou.”  (This is probably a pun, but too arcane for me.)  “Red Cliffs Burning: Turtle with chicken, ham, and Steamed egg cake: from Shanghai.”  (“Burning” is sure to be an allusion to the ham, which is “fire leg” in Chinese.)  “Toad Spits Honey: Sesame wrapped biscuit stuffed with red bean paste; from Beijing. Wok Brushes: Open-topped pork dumplings with frilly edges: from Guiyang. Xixi’s Tongue: Dough filled with date and nut paste and seeds; from Hangzhou.”  (Presumably a reference to the legendary beauty Xishi; “Lonny” 2016:9.)

Another great name is shenxian cai, “spirit mountain-dweller vegetable,” for a dish of radish stewed with pork. Shenxian were men—rarely women—who resorted to the mountains, cultivated spirit powers, and eventually might become immortal, fly on clouds, and otherwise transcend the ordinary. Less romantic is Dongpo pork, named after the great poet and statesman Su Shi, who once in a period of exile for speaking truth to power reclaimed a rough, weedy lot on the east side of the hill and thereafter called himself by its name, Dongpo, “east slope.” Some of his better times were spent in Hangchou, and thus the city created a superb pork dish in his name. It is a fairly straightforward variant on lower Yangzi stewed pork, with pork, onions, ginger, sugar, soy sauces, jiu, and perhaps a spice or two. (The immortals’ radishes are more or less the same dish, plus radishes.) Su Dongpo’s love of pork was surpassed by his love of looking at bamboo: “A man may become thin without pork, but without bamboo, he will become vulgar; and while a thin man may regain his plumpness, there is no cure for the scholar who has lost his refinement” (quoted Dunlop 2016:262). This reminds me of a Chinese folktale of an artist who stopped for one night at an inn and planted bamboos. Someone said: “You are staying here only one night! Why are you planting bamboos?” The artist turned to the bamboos and said: “What is the use of talking to such a person?” (Don’t ask me for a source for that one. It’s one of countless stories I picked up in the China world somewhere.)

Related, somehow, are the beliefs about food and luck. Jenn Harris (2023) counted up several in celebration of Lunar New Year in 2023. Her mother is Chinese and she was raised with these ideas. Perhaps the most widely known is the use of fish to symbolize abundance, both being yu in Chinese. She cites Grace Young for many. Clams and scallops are shaped like coins, and thus bring wealth. “Roast pig… symbolizes purification and peace.” The word for oysters sounds like “good things.” Mushrooms grow like fortune. Cilantro somehow represents compassion. Napa (Beijing) cabbage sounds like “100 wealth.” Shrimp represents fun in Cantonese culture, because the Cantonese word for them, ha (Mandarin xia), sounds like a laugh. Egg rolls look like coins. Radish cake sounds like rising fortune. Sesame balls symbolize wholeness. Long noodles bring long life. Ordinary dumplings (Mandarin jiaozi) also look like coins, or like some coins. I can add from my own experience that hair vegetable (a fresh-water alga) is lucky (various explanations given), peaches symbolize fertility (the blossoms and fruit are reminiscent of female genitalia). Citrus is lucky; the fruits were and are sacred in local traditions, probably going back to Thai beliefs. Tangerines are even called “lucky” in Cantonese (kat, not like the Mandarin word qie for the fruit) and are obligatory at New Year. Nuts and seeds represent fertility and many children. New Year rice cakes are made in the shape of old coins. Pun choi—a mixed dish of meats—is traditional, and is cooked in large amounts by men as a macho culinary thing, like barbecue in America and Australia. And so it goes. Few believe all this; the customs are fun, and there is some insurance value to them, according to consultants. One is reminded of Pascal’s (or Spinoza’s) Wager: Might as well believe in God, because if He doesn’t exist, no harm done, but if He does exist, it’s gravy for you.

Naomichi Ishige, probably the foremost ethnographer of Chinese food, has produced a fine review article on dining behavior around East Asia (Ishige 2006).

Jacqueline Newman has assembled a set of interesting etiquette notes about chopsticks:  Never knock them on the table, ‘because these are the sounds of beggars asking for food”; do not stir food in the dish with them or dig into a dish with them; “do not stand them upright in a dish” because that is too reminiscent of incense sticks or chopsticks in the bowls of sacrificial food for the dead (Newman 2017a:13).

China is, as always, quick to follow global trends. Thomas DuBois and Xiao Kunbing (2021) report on the rapid rise of supermarkets, starting with international chains (including Walmart) but rapidly imitated by locals. Similarly, MacDonald’s and KFC spawned countless imitators, franchising shops for tea, noodles, meat skewers, dumplings, and other staples, with the usual range in quality. TV cooking shows, mass merchandising, name brands, and everything else western has been enthusiastically adopted. Chinese eating will never be the same.

DuBois (2021) has also flagged the importance of culinary nostalgia. Old-time brands and local restaurants are wildly popular in China as of this writing. The items sold and the dishes in the restaurants are not always what they were, but few complain. Food nostalgia is well known throughout the world, and China was sure to follow eventually, though it lagged America and Europe.

Chinese food in Asian context is treated in a series of books by Cecilia Leong-Salobir (2011, 2019; Leong-Salobir ed., 2019).

More on Cooking Strategies:  Some Thoughts for “Slow Food” Devotees

Chinese food is the original fast food. Stir-frying takes seconds, or at most a very few minutes. Food was sliced very thinly and evenly, with maximum surface area exposed, to allow it to cook at maximum speed. Tender young ingredients are used, partly for taste, but partly—again—for quick cooking. “Small eats” (xiao shi, the collective term for snack dishes) are sometimes slow to make, but they are sold on the street for eating on the run. Even slower processes like steaming and soup-making are done fast in the Chinese kitchen. Baking was speeded up by making the baked items extremely small. Persian nan, typically about 30-50 cm long, shrank in China to become the shaobing, only about 10 cm. Baking was done at high heat in very efficient, fuel-sparing ovens or large pots (derived from the Indian/Central Asian tandur).

All this has everything to do with the incredible difficulty of obtaining fuel in the old days. I well remember the scarcity and high price of wood and other fuels, even after kerosene and bottled gas came in. All Chinese cooking is shaped by the need to cook everything with the absolute minimal amount of fuel. I have seen a full meal for a family cooked with a handful of grass. Stoves, dishes, and recipes are all exquisitely adapted to this. The Chinese traditional bucket stove has now spread worldwide into fuel-short areas; I have seen it sold widely in Madagascar, among other places. I have also seen an ancient Greek pottery stove that is almost identical; apparently it was an independent invention, but one wonders.

The only really slow cooking in Chinese tradition is the stewing and braising used for tough cuts of meat and fish. This could be very slow indeed—some restaurants kept pots of stock constantly simmering, and put into them anything that needed long cooking. According to legend, some of these stock pots had been simmering for centuries. Admittedly this is highly improbable, but certainly some stock pots had been there at the back of the stove for years.

A pair of sessions in Boston in 2018-19 (at the second of which I was present) produced a series of articles on Chinese food and society (Zhang and Schneider 2022). Jin Feng (2022) continues her detailed and insightful accounts of the food of Jiangnan (see Feng 2019), describing five women who manage (or once managed) restaurants, one of which serves French-style foie gras along with lower Yangtze delicacies. Caroline Merrifield (2022) records people in Hangzhou talking of the good old days when food was simple and not so processed, and tasted like food; today the meat and vegetables are tasteless. Shaohua Zhan (2022) provides a history of concerns over food adequacy since 1949. Alexander Day (2022) reports on tea-raising in one district. Emily Yeh and Fan Li (2022) describe the rise of crayfish raising in Sichuan, and the branding of a local rice as “crayfish rice” because it is raised as the crayfish are, on clean fresh water, thus avoiding the fear of contamination that is now general, and thoroughly realistic, in China.

Chapter 13. Current Foodways around China

Our knowledge of cooking in the various provinces of China has been enormously advanced by many culinary ethnographies.

A great deal more about Chinese food and caixi—“systems of dishes,” i.e. regional and local cuisines—has come out since 1988. H. T. Huang’s huge book—the labor of a lifetime—goes into detail on wheat products, including alum-raised ones, such as yutiao and some bao, and on flavoring pastes.

 There are also many cookbooks with ethnographic detail going far beyond simple recipes. (A few examples from a large, good literature are Lo and Lo 2003, see previous section; Dunlop 2016, 2019; Phillips 2016; Yee 1975; Young and Richardson 2004).

            Fuchsia Dunlop (n.d.:193-195) records that the whole idea of regional cuisines in China is only about 100 years old, though everyone earlier could discuss differences between north and south, and every city had its specialty dishes. The early and mid 20th century saw lists of four or five major cuisines. Then in the 1980s an eightfold classification became popular, but it excluded deep-interior areas. Arguments go on endlessly, and cannot be resolved, since there are countless local differences and overlappings.

Carolyn Phillips counts 35 cuisines in China, classified under 5 regions: north, “elegant Yangtze River environs,” “savory coastal southeast,” “spicy Central Highlands,” and “arid Northwest” (Phillips 2016:xiii). These are simply the familiar north, lower Yangtze, south, and west, plus a far west including ethnic cuisines. Under these, the 35 are largely provinces, with some provinces divided, plus major cities, Hakka, Chaozhou, and, interestingly, “Taiwan Military Families”—they have developed their own fusion cuisine, heavily Yangtze-drainage-based. Phillips’ enormous and encyclopedic cookbook has probably the best instructions for cooking, setting up a kitchen, buying ingredients, and dining of any English-language source, but she makes all the standard errors of biology, from “plum” for mei to “lotus root” for the rhizome (though she has that one correct in the ingredients section at the end). She is also a wonderful and delightful storyteller, having provided a romantic and adventurous memoir (Phillips 2021). Her origin myths of dishes like mapo doufu and across-the-bridge noodles are good fun and historically documented.

            Local foodways are covered in a major collection of papers, edited by David Holm (2009). Sidney Cheung has edited an important volume, Rethinking Asian Food Heritage (2014), with papers on the origins and modern fates of several important, and often little-studied, local food traditions in China and south and southeast Asia; notable, for instance, is James Farrer’s brilliant analysis of the rise and decline of Western-style food in Shanghai during its golden age in the 1920s and 1930s. The western-type food available then was apparently of a very low standard, but it was romantic, exotic, and an important part of the city’s image, so old Shanghai hands clung to it. They re-created it in Hong Kong (as I well remember from my 1960s time there), only to have the rising young generation scorn it, unmoved by its hallowed tradition. Among other outstanding articles are one by May Chang and Cordia Chu on mullet roe in Taiwan.

            Particular distinguished mention goes to Fuchsia Dunlop for her stunning work on Sichuan food, Land of Plenty (2001). A “new and updated edition” is titled The Food of Sichuan (2019a). This book not only includes recipes for almost all the Sichuan specialties, but a set of glossaries that give the characters, transliteration, and definition for just about every common Chinese cooking and culinary term, as well as Sichuan localisms, including very obscure ones. The recipes are, as she says, authentic: they are the way the better Sichuan chefs actually prepared them when she was there in the 1990s. They are properly rich in garlic, Sichuan brown pepper, and chile, just as I remember real Sichuan food in the old-time cafes in Taiwan that catered to Sichuanese.

These and other works have established Dunlop as perhaps the leading ethnographer of actual Chinese food. (A later book by Dunlop, Every Grain of Rice: Simple Chinese Home Cooking, 2012, goes over relatively familiar ground, but has some very unusual but simple recipes; it is, however, a photograph book, not an in-depth study.)  Dunlop has also sought out the full story of Gongbao Chicken, the “kung pao chicken” of worldwide menus. It was created for Ding Baozhen (1820-1886), the Gongbao (Palace Guardian) for “his honorary title of tutor to imperial princes” (Dunlop 2019c:F1). He came from Guizhou, one of the chile-loving provinces since the 18th century, and later spent much time in Chengdu, Sichuan, where the chicken dish was created for him. It involves chicken white meat with dried chiles, Sichuan brown pepper, garlic, ginger, white spring onions, peanuts, and “a glossy sauce mixed to a particular degree of sweet-and-sour known as ‘lychee-flavored’” (Dunlop 2019a:F4). Today, different forms of gongbao chicken and many other gongbao dishes are made in Guizhou, in honor of Ding’s memory. The chicken there can be made with dark meat; it uses the local ciba chiles, in red oil, without the peanuts or Sichuan pepper. Fuchsia Dunlop continues to produce blogs, recipes, and articles at a monumental rate.

Dunlop also confirms my long-standing point about the sexual double meaning of brown pepper. The berries grow twinned at the base of a short stalk; the whole appears like miniature male genitalia. This symbolism is obvious in the Book of Songs, (Song 117) and the Songs of the South (Chu Zi). Ms. Dunlop reports this symbolism is still vibrantly alive in Sichuan (Dunlop 2008:220). Pepper is even exchanged as a love token.

In The Food of Sichuan (2019a:475-478), she lists fully 56 recognized and named ways of cooking a dish—a wonderful folk taxonomy. Many are variants on such basic terms as hungshao “red cooking” and baishao “white cooking” for stewing in liquid, but some are regional terms new to my south-Chinese training. I learn that mapo doufu is not stir-fried (as I thought it was) but du, cooked in a wok in a more stew-like way, so it makes a noise like “du-du-du.” She also provides taxonomies of sauces, flavors, and almost everything else. Thus, flavor types include xiang “fragrant,” extended to more sensory experiences than the English word; yiwei “odoriferous”; xingwei, “fishy”; sauwei “foul”; shanwei “rank, muttony.” (Wei means “flavor”; Dunlop 2019a:23. Xiang means “fragrance,” and appears in the name Hong Kong, local Cantonese for Xianggang, “fragrance harbor”; incense, called “fragrance” in Chinese, used to be exported from it.) The last of these is one of the Five Flavors of Chinese medicine, along with our more familiar salt, sweet, sour, and bitter. This brings it close to the umami flavor now added by Japanese taste scientists to the classic Western four. One famous flavor is yuxiang, “fish fragrance,” a mix of ginger, green onions, Chinese jiu, and other flavors usually used on fish. (Dunlop 2019a:24 lists some other possible origins for the term, but the standard one is clearly correct. The dishes called yuxiang do not taste at all like fish, but they use that mix of ingredients.) Dunlop lists even more, a full 23 flavors, late in the book (471-474). This work bears serious analysis as a taxonomy of sensory experience, comparable to very few descriptions in literature. Complex, detailed taxonomies of flavor, scent, and mouthfeel are rarely noted worldwide.

Another taxonomy applies to slicing. Cooks in China in the old days started their career by learning to slice properly, a skill taking years to perfect. (Having spent many years trying to slice food with a Chinese cleaver and with western knives, I can attest to the difficulties.) Dunlop (2019a:57-41; 2019b:84-85) gives one of her thorough taxonomies of slicing types, culminating with “horse ears,” slicking long thin vegetables into horse-ear-like diagonal slices. Types of fire and flame also receive attention, with due attention to the fact that ancient writers already worried about this (Dunlop 2019:105-6). Good cooks attend to the sound of the food; shrimps, for instance, slightly change their hissing in the pot when properly done, as I learned in Hong Kong in the 1960s.

Fuchsia Dunlop’s books go well beyond cookbooks and provide both a total regional ethnography of food and a personal record. Dunlop lists the standards of Sichuan cuisin (2019a:44-58), and gives recipes for the main dishes, as well as many highly obscure and local specialties.

 The numbing and spicy taste of Sichuan food is known as mala, “hemp and piquant,” the hemp referring to the numbing quality of marijuana; the drug side of the hemp plant (China’s Cannabis sativa) is not as pronounced as that of its Indian relative C. indica, but was quite well known in ancient times. The classic mala dish is mapo doufu, a dish that began (probably in the 19th century) in Sichuan and as swept the world (Erway 2020). The name may mean “the beancurd of the Ma family women,” but there are countless other theories. Ma means “hemp” and can refer to smallpox marks, which are vaguely similar to hemp seeds, and perhaps the commonest story says the dish was invented by a pockmarked woman. It appears that “a pockmarked woman (which is what mapo means) named Chen invented this bean curd dish at her stand outside the northern gates of Chengdu” Phillips (2016:268). Dunlop also tells this story (Dunlop 2019a:245). Dunlop locates Ms. Chen to “the Bridge of Ten Thousand Blessings in the north of Chengdu.” That cooking stall would surely have received a Michelin star if such things had been known then. (A Bangkok back-alley cooking stall lady had one, as of 2020.)

Chongqing hot pot involves a stock (based on bones unless vegetarian) so spicy that 30 dried hot chiles qualifies it as “medium,” coupled (often) with a healthful stock without chiles but with goji berries and red jujubes. One dunks uncooked food in these to cook it, and then eats it with various sauces even hotter and more rich in Sichuan brown pepper than the stock. Crushed garlic is one standard, and the whole cuisine is redolent of this ancient import from western Asia. Black tofu, made from black soybeans and looking and tasting like gray chalk, is a staple. Various “variety meats” are standard and popular for this dish. Desserts, pickles, and snacks are available on the side. The whole is a memorable feast, but the tastes of chile, brown pepper, and garlic overwhelm most others, so they are of interest primarily for texture. Fuchsia Dunlop reports a very high density of hot pot restaurants in Chongqing and Chengdu. She provides a long ethnographic description of hot pot and its rituals in Sichuan (2019:404-412). However, she laments the replacement by hot pots of actual chef expertise in cooking.

Rabbit is a common food, but newly so. Traditionally eaten as an usual game find, it was farmed in the early Communist period because the USSR wanted the fur and meat. As relations with the USSR cooled, the Sichuanese took to eating the rabbits themselves, and the taste continues (Dunlop 2019a:116; other meats are monographed on pp. 126-129). The standard “twice-cooked pork” appers on pp. 132-133. Blood is less common in Sichuan than in Fujian, but still a regular item (170-171). Tofu is not ignored; she provides a recipe for making it yourself (247-248). Pickled and preserved foods are staples in Sichuan, even more than elsewhere in China, and of course a full taxonomy is provided (416-417), with recipes following, including smoking your own bacon (424-426). You can even make your own sweet aromatic soy sauce, starting with regular soy sauce (459), and your own fermented rice jiu (460; also Dunlop 2016a:326).

Dunlop has also given us a memoir (Dunlop 2008, reissued with new foreword 2019), narrowly focused on food. Ms. Dunlop is possibly the most adventurous eater since Anthony Bourdain, having tried every Chinese food short of human flesh (a last resort in old-time famines). She admits to having been defeated by a breakfast of pig lungs with liver and chitterlings, plus sheep stomach (Dunlop 2019b:211). She has been in all parts of  China, being intrepid enough to brave arrest and detention by hitching her way into remote parts of Tibet. She went through a chef school in Sichuan, not only the first foreigner but almost the first woman to do that. This involved learning some very local terms (Dunlop 2019b:82). Her memo ends on sad notes, however, as she chronicles the appalling contamination, pollution, infection, and outright poisoning that hit the Chinese food economy in the late 20th and early 21st centuries (Dunlop 2019b:273-290). Forunately, the situation has improved recently, though not enough. She also confesses grief about the number of endangered animals killed for food, and regrets consuming more than a few of them herself (Dunlop 2019b:255-272). Indeed, China is eating itself into biological collapse. The ecosystem cannot survive elimination of almost all biodiversity.

Jiangnan, classically the home of China’s most prestigious and refined cuisines, has received excellent studies by the indefatigable Fuchsia Dunlop in Land of Fish and Rice (2016) and by Jin Feng, Tasting Paradise on Earth (2019). The books are studies of the hallowed traditions, their great restaurants, and the recent commercialization of both in that affluent, tourist-oriented, accessible part of China. The food is not always what it used to be. Dunlop is ever British-polite, but Jin Feng is a remarkably forthright reporter on quality.

Related is the food of Shanghai, which includes a number of very local specialties. Jiangnan cooking in general, and Shanghai in particular, runs heavily to long, slow cooking, often of stews with sugar, star anise, and dark soy sauce. Anyone who identifies “Chinese food” with the lightning-fast, ballet-delicate cooking of Guangzhou learns with astonishment of a Chinese cuisine more deeply into slow simmering than any in Europe. Mark Swislocki (2009) has provided a fine study of Shanghai food and its local meanings—heavily nostalgic, of course.

Shanghai’s special variant of Jiangnan tradition has also found a superb chronicler

in Betty Liu, in My Shanghai (2021). This book is truly exemplary among recent Chinese cookbooks in beginning with a thorough, accurate account of major cooking methods and ingredients, giving the Chinese characters and pronunciation along with English-language description. I have never seen this better done, and for a cuisine surprisingly little known in the US it really matters. (Most “Shanghai” restaurants in the US, in my experience, are actually eclectic, serving Sichuan, Canton, and Beijing dishes with glorious indifference and aplomb). My first acquaintance with Shanghainese food was in the hotel where my wife and daughter and I first stayed in Hong Kong, in 1965. Downstairs was a stunningly good Shanghai restaurant, where we frequently ate after moving into our own quarters (which consisted of a small boat, since we were studying the boat-dwelling fisherfolk). Their signature dish was beggar’s chicken, unfortunately not found in Betty Liu’s book. This is a chicken cleaned and stuffed with herbs, then encased in mud and baked. The chicken can be wrapped in fragrant herbs inside the mud shell. Originally, it was stuck into the beggars’ campfire to hide it from the chicken’s rightful owner if he came searching for it. (Compare “bandits’ lamb,” pit-buried to cook over hot rocks, in the Mediterranean world.) Today, it is legally acquired and baked in an oven. The clay was broken off with an empty bottle, to our amusement.

Some other traditional Shanghainese items salted duck eggs (mild, with slightly runny yolks; very good); small river shrimp with Chenkong vinegar; finely slivered baby bok choy with mushrooms and meat threads. Extremely small baby bok choy is “chicken feather” bok choy. Chenkong vinegar comes from a local town; it is aged and has a distinctive flavor. It looks like balsamic vinegar and has a similar gourmet cachet, but does not taste similar to balsamic.

Wenzhou, an isolated port city in southern Zhejiang, has a distinctive dialect of Wu, or separate language in the Wu group, and an equally distinctive cuisine, with its own dumplings, salads, and sother usual types of dishes. Being on the sea and cut off from the rest of the world by mountains, it specializes in sea foods, ranging from edible fish skin with garlic to crab and pork dishes. The indefatigable Jacqueline Newman has chronicled this cuisine as well as many others (Newman 2012d).

Another food-famed city in Zhejiang is Shaoxing, whose fermented jiu is a standard of quality everywhere. More obscure are the lees that remain from making jiu, known as jiu zao, and used to produce zao lu (Dunlop 2016:22), a pickling or preserving medium known since ancient China. Preserving food in zao lu has been a major part of Chinese thrift for at least a couple of millennia.

Hangzhou is famous for many foods, including cat’s-ear pasta amazingly similar to Italian orecchiette (Dunlop 2016:266). It appears to be independent invention.

Also famed in Zhejiang is ham from Jinhua, which ranks close to Yunnan ham in popular esteem. More widespread in the lower Yangtze area is “squirrel fish,” scored and fried so that supposedly looks like a cooked squirrel (the resemblance escapes me). Filled dumplings in the area are sometimes still called mantou (Dunlop 2016:30), though that word has come to mean small solid-dough loaves elsewhere in China.

Acorns are still an important food in remote and mountainous parts of Zhejiang, as chronicled by M. Wang and colleagues (2025). They studied three widely-separated villages in Zhejiang. Four categories are recognized: Q. glauca and Lithocarpus glaber (trees); Castanopsis sclerophylla; Q. fabrei & Q. serrata (shrubby); Q. acutissima & Q. variabilis (trees, montane). They are usually made into acorn tofu, which involves rinding, leaching, soaking (3+ days till water is clear), boiling, and solidifying. This gets rid of bitterness. They used to depend a lot on them and even made jiu and soy sauce out of them. The “tofu” is not coagulated with gypsum or anything else; it naturally gels. Essentially the same thing is dotorimuk in Korea. Starch jelly is also made. A review of the archaeology is included in their article. Different tannin levels were separated out in some sites.

Finally (as far as Zhejiang is concerned), on a literary note, a humorous short performance by storyteller An Zhongwen of Hangzhou has been translated (Simmons 2011:476-477). It is a marketplace dialogue between a dried ribbon fish and a winter melon. They slang each other in dialect like a couple of peasants. The ribbon fish boasts not only of his taste but of “containin’ phosphorus, protein, and fat”—An Zhongwen was having some fun with modern nutritional advice. The winter melon answers that it is “thrifty and practical, moreover easy to cook.”  As well as available for candying and soup. Also, it could roll over and squash the fish with its sixty-eight catties—88 pounds, a most unusual weight indeed for a winter melon.

Jiangsu cuisine has been chronicled by Li and Ma (2022). Its high cuisine traces back to Tang and Song. Subtypes include Jinling, Suxi, Huaiyang, and Xuhai. The mitten crab Eriocheir sinensis is a favorite seasonal item. Crayfish is also a specialty, with “thirteen-spiced crayfish” being a particularly elaborate recipe. Better known is “squirrel fish,” not a squirrelfish but a fish that is fried and sauced so that it (vaguely) resembles a squirrel. Another unique localism is “fish hiding in mutton,… fish wrapped in deboned lamb ribs and stewed with spices.” Lionhead meatballs and salted and stewed duck are less unique but locally characteristic. The high level of seafood and vegetable consumption makes this a very healthy cuisine; one vegetable, watershield (Brasenia schreberi), has antibacterial action, though possibly not when cooked in soup. It is a classic local food with many literary allusions.

Henan, previously a rather blank spot on the culinary map, has had its food chronicled by Jacqueline Newman (2011d—with recipes). It is noted for fairly plain, straightforward cooking, running heavily to pork, onions, and noodle dishes. Another blank filled by the intrepid Jacqueline is the northeast (the former Manchuria; Newman 2019b). She notes its history of game, including deer tails, which have to be soaked to make fur removal easy, and then stewed “for at least two hours with several Korean pastes and lots of cinnamon” (Newman 2019b:15). Saqima (Manchu sweets) and sanzi (glutinous rice dumpling “wrapped in perilla or linden leaves” (Newman 2019b:14) are eaten.

In Shanxi, jujubes are made into a true wine—they are mashed and fermented. Buckwheat is important there, and is made into noodles, as in Korea and Japan. Shanxi possesses a huge salt lake, the Yuncheng Dead Sea, that has produced salt for 4000 years. It contains sulfates, which nourish colorful algae blooms. Today it is more a tourist attraction and health spa than salt supplier, but salt ponds still flourish (Wong and Thuras 2021:118).

In Shaanxi especially (but widely in north China), a sandwich, rou jia mo (“meat in bun”), is a common snack. It is more or less a flattened equivalent of a stuffed bao (see Wong and Thuras 2021:121-2). The cuisine of Shaanxi and Gansu preserves much of the Yinshan Zhengyao cusine, including noodles with lamb and large cardamoms, various breads and dumplings, and cabbage dishes. Noodles include biang biang noodles, a.k.a. you po mian (“oil slapped noodles), whose dough is slapped hard on a hard surface such as a metal or marble counter top, presumably for the same reason that beaten biscuit dough in beaten in the U.S. south—to develop gluten rather dramatically. With lamb tripe and similar ingredients, they are a Xi’an specialty.

Fujian food involves, besides the famous red ferment on rice, a flavoring mix often lacking ginger—odd in China (see below). Raw sea food in wine lees or red ferment is not to the outsiders’ taste, especially since the sound and feel of crunching the shell is part of the pleasure. Pitahaya, a Mexican cactus fruit, has come to Fujian and elsewhere in southeast China, under the name of “fire dragon fruit” (huo long guo)—a creative name for a scaly fruit of shocking pink and electric green. New world foods often came first to Fujian, and some odd ones occur, such as a purple field corn similar to rare Mexican varieties—and very good (I met with it in remote rural Fujian in 1999). Green tea powder is used there, as in Japan. Fukien “water liquor”—made with yeast, often including the red ferment so beloved there (Huang 2000), and water—is mixed with highly distilled raw alcohol to produce a drink significantly called “tiger piss” (lao hu miao). Hakka people of the area sometimes skin and smoke-dry field mice for food.

In Fujian, dumplings stuffed with meat and flattened are called bian shi, “flattened eats.”  A round bread baked in a tandur-like oven is kompyang or kompia (nasalized), said to have been invented in 1562 when Japanese pirates were spotting pursuers by their kitchen fires and a storable, precooked food was needed. Of course this could be one of those delightful Chinese dish origin myths. The bread is bagel-shaped and could be hung on a pole. It is native to northern Fujian and apparently other areas (Wikipedia, “Kompyang,” with additional information from Katy Biggs [Hung] on Facebook, June 3, 2015). Reported from Malaysia is a strange cake made with lye: ki-a-kueh, “lye cake” (ki is lye, a the Hokkien diminutive, kueh is “cake”); Victor Yue, Facebook posting, Dec. 24, 2021). This is evidently of Fujian origin, since the name is pure southern Fujianese (Southern Min).

In Quanzhou, tea was once common, became rare, and is now common again, thanks to the boom in the Chinese tea industry; this is a case of “re-invented tradition” (Tan and Ding 2010).

In Guangxi, barnyard millet (Echinochloa) is an important grain; its name has spread to maize. The foods of Guangxi have been described by David Holm (1999).

In Yunnan and elsewhere, a bitter tuber of a water plant, sa pi, comes from a Homocharis sedge. Pteridium and Osmunda fern shoots are also eaten. Mallows, chayotes from Mexico, and mushrooms abound. Yogurt is still widespread. Lima beans have become very common in Yunnan, and known locally elsewhere.

The minorities of Yunnan traditionally lived largely by swidden farming, though there are several in the south who terrace hillsides for paddy rice. Shaoting Yin (2001) carried out a long and detailed study of swiddening (translated by Magnus Fiskejö, an authority on Yunnan minorities who could add his own knowledge). Yin defends Yunnan swiddening as being extremely sensitive ecologically (see also Jianhua Yang 2013). For one thing, many minorities have planted alders in abandoned swidden fields. Alders rapidly and heavily fix nitrogen from the air, since they have root-knot microbiota symbionts, as legumes do. Thus the swiddeners refertilize their fields while growing valuable timber. They also know that deforestation dries up mountains. Some groups sow eleusine (Eleusine coracana), locally called “dragon claw” millet; this is a plant from Africa that came via India. The usual millets, vegetables, and rice are grown; the Jinuo have over 71 kinds of it (p. 242-244). Recent replacement of swidden by tea and rubber plantations has been ecologically disastrous (Fiskejö 2021; Wang 2013).

            Yunnan cooking still includes dairy products, including thin sheets of goat cheese (ru pi “milk skin”), said to be from the Bai people. Related is deep-fried soft goat cheese cubes. Yogurt survives among Tibetan and related minorities. The extension of milk products to southeast Asia, and their subsequent contraction from much of the region, was chronicled by Paul Wheatley (1965). He pointed out that they spread with Hinduism and Buddhism, which use milk products ritually, and contracted with the spread of Islam. An excellent water-buffalo yogurt survives among the Toba Batak of Sumatera, as a local but important food (personal observation; Richard Lando, personal communication).

            Highland minorities in western Yunnan grow three species of quinces: the familiar Chaenomeles speciosa and also C. cathayensis and C. tibetica. They provide much vitamin C, and are medicinally used (as elsewhere in China) for their tannins, soothing value, and ability to sweeten other medicines. They are pain medicines in Yunnan. They provide valuable ecosystem services, like other tree and bush crops (Yang et al. 2015).

            Notes on mushrooms are surprisingly rare in Chinese sources, but Anna Pechova (Facebook posting of July 20, 2023) reports an entry on chanterelles from the Diannan Bencao (Yunnan Herbal)of 1436, warning that they have very damp properties and must be cooked with ginger to correct this. It adds that local people believe poisonous mushrooms turn garlic black when cooked with it, but this is not necessarily true; ginger, however, will blacken. Modern science does not uphold either of these home tales. Fortunately, chanterelles are nonpoisonous and hard to mistake for anything that is.

            Wuhan food, judging from a very inadequate sample in a restaurant in San Gabriel, involves very chile-rich chopped meat dishes cooked in a pan over the stove; I have seen this in Hunanese restaurants elsewhere. In my experience, there is not much taste except the basic ingredient and the chile. The Tasty Dining Restaurant also offers sweet glutinous rice-squash cakes with sesame seeds on top; good, and supposedly loved by Mao Zedong. Noodles with sesame and soy sauces, dumplings with rice and mushrooms as well as pork, and other small items are major parts of the cuisine.

            Jacqueline Newman (2014a) has spent some time in Dongbei—Manchuria—and provided some notes on the cuisine. Bears’ paws were traditional, with the left front one preferred, but now the paws must be emulated in bean curd, for bears are rare and protected. Local game in general is so rare that Newman could never find out what a feilong—flying dragon—was; apparently some kind of pheasant-like bird. Moose nose was popular there, as in Siberia and aboriginal Canada. Forest mushrooms and herbs remain available. Various breads show Russian influence, up to and included sausage baked into a bun and known as pork khleb (Russian for “bread”).

            Guizhou’s cuisine, previously almost unknown to the outside world, has finally received a short monograph. The indefatigable Jacqueline Newman (2010b) reports both regular and glutinous rice, the usual vegetables, nuts including walnuts, wild sour fruit, and game. Pickled vegetables are popular, and Newman gives an elaborate recipe (2010b:10). Dog meat is eaten for strengthening (see also Newman 2011a). Recipes include a marvelous one for fish in sour soup. Many snacks and fish dishes occur. I remember once seeing in a Chinese cookbook a Guizhou recipe for pangolin—an animal eaten because its weird appearance makes it suspect of having powerful qi. The recipe involved stewing it with every strong-flavored thing in Chinese cuisine, obviously to kill the taste; the animal lives on ants. (I was reminded of the classic American folk recipe for cooking a coot:  Put the coot in water with a brick; boil till brick is tender; throw away the coot and eat the brick. I am told that Australians use the same recipe for the cockatoo.)

            In Hubei, the mountainous southern district of Enshi is an outlier of minority groups; people of Tujia, Miao and Dong ancestry live there, though they have now Sinicized and blended into the local Chinese population. A distinctive cuisine of uncertain origin is locally called “Tujia,” but is really a general local cuisine, eaten by all groups in Enshi. The local anthropologist Xu Wu (2011) has devoted an entire book to this cuisine—the first scholarly book in English on a Chinese local folk cuisine. Apparently it is a development of the whole mixed-origin population, since it is based on introduced New World crops and is thus clearly a relatively recent development. Early account mention millets (including eleusine—now forgotten in the area), barley, buckwheat and bracken fern rhizome starch instead of the New World foods. A watershed for the area was 1735, when the Qing Dynasty worked to open up the area for farming; settlers including minority peoples moved in, land was cultivated, game was hunted out, and the New World crops began to take over.

The distinctive Enshi cuisine is based on maize flour. Maize is now thought to have been there since ancient times, and the locals refer to themselves as maize-eaters in contrast with the people of the plains, who are rice-eaters; by humorous analogy, jeeps are “maize-eaters” and autos are “rice-eaters.” Rice is, however, important, and all the ritual grain dishes are made of it. As elsewhere in China, maize has remained very much an outsider in this regard.

Local vegetables are staples, including wild greens. The “fish flavor vegetable,” Houttuynia cordata, is popular; the root is eaten with the inevitable chiles. Wormwood (Artemisia sp.) is another. The people also eat what the Japanese call konnyaku:cakes of the root starch from Amorphophallus riveri. One dish is made of smoked pork, smoked sausage casing, sticky rice, regular rice, wild wormwood, and wild garlic.” It is eaten at the Spring Sacrifice in the second month. Another green is Camellia oleifera, traditionally used not only for soup but also for tea in place of C. sinensis. There are said to be 2000 kinds of medicinal plants. Famine in the Great Leap Forward led to reliance on sweet potato, fern starch, and even loquat tree bark, which is somewhat poisonous.

Pork and bean curd are as popular as elsewhere. The rivers have fish, once abundant but now depleted. Game was once important; old accounts even mention smoked tiger meat as well as hunting with hawks and hounds. Even today, meat (now pork) is often smoked, harking back to the days when preserving game was a regular activity.

This cuisine, at least the folk form of it, is called “hezha.” It was once considered low, but is now popular, with its own specialty restaurants. Hezha refers specifically to soybeans ground with water as for making tofu, but it is used as a drink or soup in Enshi instead of being processed into tofu. It is usually cooked with chopped vegetable leaves for soup. Sometimes red peppers, garlic, and other hot spices are added, or meat is ground with the soybeans to make a very rich hezha. Its name has come to be the term for the whole cuisine. Rice is sometimes cooked with white potato cubes as a starch staple. This is washed down with the local white lightning, made of maize. Potatoes—often a staple—are also sliced and stir-fried, then eaten with vinegar-chile sauce. Sweet potato too can be a staple, sometimes made into a ball of mash.

The people love sour flavors including pickled vegetables. They especially love sour-and-hot foods (“hot” with chile—la—not necessarily hot in temperature). They make chile sauces, both with chiles alone and with chopped chile mixed with maize flour. The latter can be stir-fried with smoked pork or cooked into mush. Chile is used in everything and is wildly popular, and is pieced out with spicebush (Lindera glauca), a spicy-flavored wild plant; it is said to regulate qi. Sweetening came from glutinous rice, sweet potatoes, maize stems, and other natural sources, including honey. The local variant of “five spice” involves brown pepper, star anise, cinnamon, clove, and fennel (five spice can also include ginger, cardamom, black pepper, and other items, and can range from four to six or seven ingredients, despite the name). The methods of cooking are the usual ones, but they add “dressing raw vegetables with sauce (liangban). A banquet is known as “eating wine” (chi jiu). Another unique trait (so far as I know) is their category of “rising” (fa) foods, those like konnyaku, egg, sticky rice, and kelp, that stimulate and can exacerbate skin outbreaks (allergy rashes)—more or less a blend of the wider Chinese concepts of supplementing (bu) and hot-wet (yitsap in Cantonese) foods.

New Year is celebrated as usual, but many families eat the banquet a day or two before the actual new year. This is said to be a Tujia custom, but is in fact rather widely distributed. Many different explanations are given, showing how many “origin myths” for a common custom can coexist in even a small community. Often the meal involves a pig head and tail, so the year will have “a good beginning and a good end.”

A large number of taboos and avoidances for pregnant women are known, and the usual high-nutrient postpartum foods are recommended (Wu 2011:193).

Xu Wu has also studied eating of Artemisia in Enshi. It is eaten in shefan, or haozi fan (hao means “artemisia”), a dish for the spring sacrifice festival. Wild wormwood is cooked with the local wild garlic (Allium macrostemon) and other wild greens. An artemisia meal will involve such other items as smoked pork, smoked pork intestines, dried tofu, shepherd’s purse (wild greens), and so on (Wu 2014a). Only tender young leaves of wild plants are used. This can be compared with the widespread use of wormwood in Korean cooking.

Wu has extended her concern to other villages, and their revival of local foods in nongjiale—“Farmers’ Joy”—restaurants. These provide more or less authentic local traditional foods, but to varying degrees modified for the tourists. “Stinky”—fermented—foods are generally ruled out, for instance. The Chinese Communist government’s bureaucratic attitude toward classifying ethnicity is revealed in the change of one village from Han to Tujia to Dong (Wu 2014b:170), all with no change in the people. They are, in fact, culturally Han and mostly Han by ancestry, but classifying them as minorities helped them get a tourism industry started, with—of course—food.

Wu has also done a fascinating article (2015) on food and pilgrimage on Wudang Mountain. Here, local gathered foods were ignored and considered uninteresting, but pilgrimage tourism has now made them a hugely popular local specialty. Farmers and cooks have opened restaurants along the pilgrimage route. Some have started to cultivate plants formerly gathered in the wild.

China’s traditional contempt for rural and minority cultures has changed to nostalgic love for them, with a newly discovered reverence for “original ecology,” i.e. a romanticised version of the traditional adjustment of local people to their landscapes. This is partly western-derived, partly derived from China’s own strong and ancient counter-tradition of loving rural landscapes and people. Communist “modernizers,” who mix modernizing with Han chauvinism, have variously judged negatively the eating of wild animals and plants, eating in a different pattern from standard urban Chinese, drinking much rice wine, drinking with straws, and of course those “stinky” foods (Wu 2014b:164)—though Han foods include some stunningly fragrant ferments, from fermented bean curd to Sichuan pickles and bean pastes. Wu provides a long, detailed, and well-referenced discussion of Chinese cultural attitudes toward traditional foodways.

From Hunan, we have “the strange tale of General Tso’s chicken” (Dunlop 2005). General Tso’s Chicken is a common Hunanese dish today, but does not fit the usual Hunanese cooking style, and is not known in Hunan itself outside the capital. Fuchsia In fact it was created by an innovative Hunanese chef who invented it in Taiwan (after the Nationalists took refuge there) and then moved to New York, where he Americanized the recipe. It now bears more resemblance to American Chinese restaurant fare than to anything native to Hunan. Dunlop points out that it fits a common pattern of naming a dish after a general or other famous individual who might have enjoyed it. In this case as in some others, it was invented long after the actual General Tso passed on. The dish has mutated now into many variants, often named after quite imaginary generals with similar-sounding names. Anglo-American foodies love to demonstrate their knowledge of Chinese food by saying it is not a “real Chinese dish,” but of course it is as real as any other, just not as hoary with antiquity.

More truly Hunanese are a cold dish of cucumbers with garlic and red pepper flakes, marinated in soy sauce; thin-sliced mutton stir-fried with cilantro, garlic, and cut-up fresh jalapenos; pork intestines; smoked duck; and, in general, incredible amounts of cut-up jalapenos or similar chiles in just about every dish.

Fujian cuisine includes a jelly made from the nuts of Castanopsis spp., very bitter chestnuts. The nuts have to be ground, leached with water, and the resulting mush pressed through a strainer; the result is made into jelly. The process is similar to Korean acorn-jelly production. The trees are saved in fengshui groves, which often become largely this genus, another proof that fengshui groves are working forests, not some result of bizarre and idle belief.

A sort of extension of Fujianese cuisine is the cuisine of Taiwan, now enriched by north Chinese, Shanghainese, Hakka, and other immigrants. An amazing paean to the humble noodle and dumpling houses of Tainan has been penned by S. J. Ren, a true gourmet in his awareness of perfection in cheap breakfast and snack cuisine, in a bilingual book descriptively titled The Rise and Fall of Some Small Noodle Shops in Northern Tainan: A Historical Survey (2014; thanks to my erstwhile student Toni Snyder for finding this wondrous item). It is a fine introduction to the really traditional food of the island.

Fishing by burning sulfur to attract fish to the light is a dying art in northern Taiwan (Wong and Thuras 2021:129).

More substantial is an amazingly thorough and expert work, A Culinary History of Taipei by Steven Crook and Katy Hui-Wen Hung (2018). It is in fact an introduction to the food of the whole island, including Aboriginal food, otherwise almost undescribed in western-language sources. Various fermentation techniques are used. Rodents are eaten, sometimes intestines and all. Snakes and mushrooms are foraged, and wild boar regularly hunted. Sweet potatoes were the poverty food and often the staple in the old days, and remain popular, partly from nostalgia (103-104). Dutch influence is seen not only in the name for peas (ho lan dao, “Holland peas,” as elsewhere in China) but also in a local name for cabbage, ko le cai, the first syllables being Dutch cool (“cabbage,” cf. German kohl, English cole).

Agriculture continues its sad decline, as cheap food imports become ever more available, but specialty farming flourishes (97-118). Rice is still grown, but Taiwan’s formerly great production of sugar and pork is long gone. The local ponlai rice was one of the genetic sources of the high-yield, short-straw Green Revolution rice.

Interesting plant foods adopted by the Chinese from the Austronesian aboriginals include pickled fruit of pobuzi, Cordia dichotoma, a plumlike tree (p. 17-18; the Maya of Yucatan pickle a very similar fruit from a closely related tree) and seeds of Litsea cubeba, a peppery spice from another tree (p. 21). Hung reports that it is magao (also shanhujiao, mujiangzi, or douchijiang) in Mandarin, mai chang in Taiwan, and mac khen in Vietnamese, and maqaw in Atayal, all from an early Chinese word (Facebook posting, Dec. 2, 2022).

Perhaps the most interesting is a native Taiwanese quinoa, Chenopodium formosanum, with reddish seeds; it is generally known by the Paiwan (Austronesian) name djulis (118) and is becoming popular with the wider population. It has medicinal value, under study currently. Another oddity is leaves of a Chinese brown pepper relative, Zanthoxylum ailanthoides, known as tana to some Aboriginal groups and cicong in Mandarin (21). The young leaves are high in vitamins. Another Aboriginal special plant is a mint, Chinese mesona, scientifically Platostoma palustre, used for a jelly called “grass jelly” (154). Wikipedia informs that it is xiancao in Mandarin, sian-chhau in Taiwanese Hokkien, leung fan chou in Cantonese.

Among other vegetables rather strange to most of China are “crested floating-heart of white water snowflake…Nymphoides hydrophylla; a daylily Hemerocallis disticha; a fern, Diplazium esculentum, guomao in Chinese; areca palm flowers; and chayote, whose young shoots are excellent eating and are known in Taiwan as “dragon’s whiskers” (longxu) (Crook and Hung 2018:102-103). Chayote shoots are also popular in their native Mexico. Most obscure is jabuticaba, a South American fruit (Plinia cauliflora, syn. Myrciaria cauliflora) superficially similar to grapes, but growing on the trunk of a large tropical tree. How it got to Taiwan remains obscure, but it is now popular there (107). The native fig Ficus pumila has a choice local variety, gathered wild; it is a traditional food of the Austronesian groups, with many local names (107).

Among the Chinese, salted mustard greens are a major staple. A sad Hokkien proverb describing the sad fate of women is cha-bo-gina-a, ku chhai mia; cha-bo-gin-a, lu chhai chi mia—”a girl child, a chive’s fate; a girl child, a mustard seed’s fate.”  Cut down or mashed without thought (p. 14). They note (p. 31-32) that Chinese satay sauce (Hokkien sa te, which became Mandarin and Cantonese shacha) is now fairly different from the Indonesian original; in Taiwan it now has soy oil and Chinese spicing instead of peanuts and Indoneesian spices. Hong Kong’s form is closer to the original, but sometimes includes spiced soybean pastes. Pork floss and geng stews are common—a bit of ancient Chinese food ways surviving today (35). Bean curd is popular, incliuding the infamous chou doufu, “stinky tofu”—fungal fermented until it greatly resembles the most extreme German soft cheeses. Vegetarianism is popular in Taiwan, with its Buddhist heritage and western influence. Many fruits have names that pun with desirable things, as youzi “pomelo” and “to have a child” (with a tone difference).

            A fad word as of their writing is “Q”—just the English letter. It is actually the Hokkien word k’iu, designating the texture for which the Mandarin word is cui—a succulent but somewhat resistant bite, slightly chewy but moist, like ripe fruit or tender young greens or glutinous rice preparations (Crook and Hong 2018:74; also from Victor Mair, email post). Ideal Q is the texture or mouthfeel of good rice cake—springy and elastic, then chewy (Qin 2018). There was a current fad for Q foods at about the time of their book.

Crook and Hung give the whole festival calendar with its appropriate foods (pp. 76-83).  These defy summary, but the account of mooncakes (p. 80) deserves special note. Mooncakes have been getting smaller and lower in calorie lately, as elsewhere. Warming foods for winter include lamb hot pot, ginger duck, and sesame chicken in wine; cooling foods for summer include mung bean porridge (with its cool green color), lotus-leaf porridge, and the lower-calorie, more sour vegetables (83). Celebratory roadside banquets, open to the neighborhood, are bando (84). Austronesian festivals are rarer, but feature millet, the ancient crop among these groups (82).  

The traditional Chinese custom of “sitting the month” after childbirth involves highly nutritious, protein-rich foods, as elsewhere, but also includes rice wine (94-95).

Cannibalism, so often alleged without evidence in China, was occasionally practiced in Taiwan, as actually observed by at least three outsiders. As in mainland China, parts of executed criminals were eaten as a strengthening or courage-giving medicine. Headhunters ate the brains of victims (Crook and Hung 2018:57).

Western food came rather early, via Japan or via Russian refugees (p. 67). Bakeries selling western-type goods now abound, as of course do the international chain eateries. Beer, wine, sake, and award-winning whiskey have been added to traditional white lightning (baijiu made from kaoliang, or, for cheaper forms, sweet potatoes and the like; 160). The Aboriginal groups prepare a cloudy millet wine (like that of the Wa and other southeast Asian minorities), sometimes fermented by chewing like Andean chicha, and sometimes mushy enough to be eaten with a spoon, like Southeast Asian tapai.

A particularly fine study of Aboriginal life, provided by Scott Simon (2015), discusses dog and pig keeping by the Atayal people of Taiwan. The dogs are used for hunting, and are also beloved pets. The Atayal have a comprehensive moral ecology reminiscent of similar systems in other small-scale traditional societies (Australian tjukurrpa, for example).

Yamamoto and Nawata have provided an extremely detailed and well-documented study of Taiwan aboriginal food, including Tabasco chile pepper use by these groups (Yamamoto and Nawata 2009). Names and genetics show varieties in the southern areas of Taiwan were introduced from the Philippines (and often to the Philippines from Indonesia). These small hot chiles are used not only for food, but for ornament, medicine, and ritual. Young leaves as well as fruits are eaten. This all indicates a long and interesting history. The plants must have been introduced soon after the Spanish occupied the Philippines in the 16th century.

            To Katy Hung (Biggs) and Tammy Turner I am deeply indebted for information on Litsea cubeba, known as may chang, mu jiang, or shan hujiao (“mountain black pepper”), or in Atayal, a Taiwan Aboriginal language of the Austronesian phylum, as magao or maqaw. It is so important to the Atayal that a park is proposed, with that name, to save it.  It is also widespread on the mainland, in tropical areas. It is valued for its berries, which have a lemony flavor that Ms. Biggs finds exquisite. The scientific name shows its use as a substitute for cubeb pepper (Piper cubeba), formerly imported to China from Southeast Asia. Another flavoring food there is Rhus javanica, whose sour berries are used for salt. (Information by email exchange, Dec. 6, 2014.)

            The indefatigable Ms. Biggs, who is Taiwanese in spite of her Irish name (she now usually goes by Katy Hung), reports that in southern Taiwan noodles are made from catfish meat (Facebook posting, Dec. 14, 2014). Dumpling skins are made from fish meat mixed with sweet potato flour. This adds a whole new dimension to Chinese noodle cuisine. The snakehead catfish is referred to as “dog mother fish” (gou mu yu, or kiau mu yu in Taiwanese) from its resemblance to a lizard, “dog fish snake” in Taiwan Chinese, which is considered lowly. She also reminds us that mudskippers are good food, and I can add walking gobies from experience eating them with Chinese in Malaysia. Mudskippers (fei yu seems to be the name) are apparently fancy restaurant fare in southern Taiwan.

            Taiwan food received another major boost with Clarissa Wei’s book with Ivy Chen, Made in Taiwan (2023). This book covers Mandarin, Hokkien, Rukai Aboriginal, and Hakka recipes from the island, all very carefully documented. Stories and text provide a full ethnography of Chinese eating and foods. Clarissa Wei was born in California to parents from Taiwan, but returned to the island, first for study, then permanently—largely for the food, to judge from the book. She comes from a younger generation than Katy Hung, and thus documents a younger world, used to convenience foods, not well connected with old-time rural life, but often eager to learn. Particularly useful is her transcription in Chinese characters and romanization of names in the relevant languages: Hokkien, Rukai, and Hakka. The vast majority of local recipes are Hokkien, providing a delightful introduction into that beautiful, evocative, distinctive language. Its fondness for nasals (try nng for “egg”) comes out clearly. The book is a total delight for a painstaking and perfectionist cook. The present writer fears he will seek out restaurants in the San Gabriel Valley, or just go back to Taiwan, where he spent many happy days in the 1960s and 1970s, when life was simple and food was fresh and superb.

Hakka food, long obscure and poorly described, finally found a serious and worthy champion in Linda Lau Anusasananan (2012), a California Hakka (married to a Thai, hence the notably un-Hakka last name), in The Hakka Cookbook. She was raised in northern California, where her father had a Chinese restaurant. She became a food writer, and later traveled the world to explore her heritage and its transformations. Hakka speak a distinct language. They immigrated from the north to southern China in successive waves—she lists five—around one to two thousand years ago; they localized in a wild upland area where Zhejiang, Fujian and Guangzhou meet, which, as G. William Skinner pointed out, was something of a dead zone between the downstream-oriented and coast-oriented centers of those provinces. She cites Lo Hsiang-lin (Luo Xianglin) as holding the Hakka came from north China from the Han Dynasty on, and also challenges by others who maintain that they are semi-assimilated local minority groups. I interviewed Lo in Hong Kong in 1966 and have high respect for him as a scholar, and I agree with him; however, of course the Hakka have mingled over time with local minority people and assimilated them.

The Hakka were forced to work hard to survive, and to defend themselves against older-established groups that felt the Hakka were interlopers (“Hakka” means “guest households”—Mandarin kejia). They developed a simple but exquisitely flavored cuisine that runs heavily to pork (stewed or minced), mustard greens (often salted or pickled), and other vegetables. Stretching the pork by stuffing vegetables and tofu with it is a trademark. Spinal cord of a cow is a delicacy. I have always loved Hakka food, which manages to be surprisingly subtle and complex in spite of its mountain simplicity. Their poor homeland made them quick to adopt New World plants that would grow in rough hill country, from maize and peanuts to chiles and sweet potatoes, and these are now an important part of Hakka life.

Linda Lau Anusasananan provides all the classic recipes (though sometimes more “modernized” that I like). She also gives an amazing kaleidoscope of recipes from all the places the Hakka have gone. Their montane homelands are poor and barren, so the Hakka have dispersed over time, first to Hong Kong and other coastal areas near their home, then to the whole world. There are now said to be 75 million Hakka scattered over the world (p. 6). They have learned to do everything from pickling chiles and lemons (neither of which are native to Hakka-land) to making full-on Indian curries and Peruvian ceviche. Anusasananan provides recipes from Mauritius, Peru, Hawaii, Malaysia, Singapore, India, and elsewhere, often involving blends with local cuisine. India/Hakka food is particularly amazing, but all the adaptations are testimony to the incredible creativity of Chinese cooks in general and Hakka ones in particular.   

A major ethnography is Bitter and Sweet by Ellen Oxfeld (2017), a study of food and its social meanings in a Hakka village in rural Meixian, the Hakka center, in Guangdong. She has watched over two decades the changes from real want to considerable luxury. Older people remembered real starvation, first in pre-Communist days and then again in the Great Leap Forward. They revel not only in better food, but in the fact that proximity to the county seat lets them work at better jobs than agriculture. Many of the young have white-collar jobs, and are buying food rather than raising or even cooking it. A fascinating contrast of home cooking and city food appears in lists of two Midautumn Festival celebrations put on by host families. The first is home-cooked:  sea cucumber, chicken and duck feet, squid with chive flowers, pig stomach with celery, lotus rhizome soup, braised dog meat, chickens with ginseng in soup, pomfret (steamed), braised duck, steamed shrimp, red-cooked pork with mushrooms, frog with gren peppers, fragrant veined vegetable (xiangmai cai), and fish and meatball soup. Another family got the feast catered:  Sea cucumber, pigeon, sweet-sour pork, shrimp with snow peas, duck feet, greens (unidentified), custard-filled sweet dumplings, steamed chicken with ginger, red-cooked pork, chicken and ginseng in soup, fried rice flour balls, steamed fish (Oxfeld 2017:68-69). Note that many dishes are the same. This was a county-seat caterer who evidently knew what was appropriate. But the other dishes are more interesting: home cooking gives us pig stomach, dog, and frog; the restaurant provides sweet-sour pork (presumably a backwash from overseas communities) and other standard restaurant dishes like shrimp with snow peas. The catered meal reflects less flavor, less effort, more worldliness. Another feast that “consisted of a number of standard Hakka country dishes: braised pork…, fried noodles, soup with beef and daikon radish, dog meat, stir-fried peapods and pig liver, fish ball soup, fried lettuce…and steamed chiken with ginger and red chiles” (p. 160); another added shrimp and celery and one or two other items (162). The hotpot is well known and a special treat (168). People criticize the “liquor and meat” of the cadres in the same terms that Chinese have used for 2000 years.

Another Hakka tradition exists in Nanxiong county, at the north end of Guangdong, bordering Jiangxi (Lin and Waley 2022, 2025). River crabs, field rats, spiny frogs, spicy goose, duck, and the usual Hakka stuffed bean curd are important. A yellow dumpling is stuffed with pickles. Chiles abound, chopped up and stir-fried before other ingredients are added, or made into sauce. They go into meat dishes; not the stuffed bean curd or soups or vegetables. Wild meats remain important. All hunting and selling of wild animals was prohibited in China in 2020, pursuant to the COVID-19 pandemic, but this has not slowed hunting and consumption in Nanxiong (Lin and Waley 2025). Local people note that meat is rarer now, but conservation is not mentioned. A belief exists that any part of a wild animal’s body will supplement (bu) that part of a human.

Cantonese food is more elaborate than ever, but the simplest of its dishes, “yat ka mien,” remains with us on American menus. The name simply means “one order of noodles” (Gray 2011). Another simple food that persists is pun choi, “basin dish,” a large stew-up of meats, traditionally prepared by men, in quantity, for ancestral feasts and commemorative rites and for weddings. James Watson (1987, 2011) provided a classic study of its important role in village life; it was a core of the festivals that brought village people together and created solidarity. It has more recently caught on as a restaurant dish (Cheung 2012) and tourist attraction (Watson 2011). It involves once-inexpensive village foods:  “dried pig skin, dried eel, dried squid, radish, tofu skin, mushroom and pork stewed in soybean paste” (Cheung 2012:4). Fancier ingredients are now added.

A Cantonese restaurant in Ohio advertised “too hard to translate soup”—the dish was a homemade dough drop soup (dough in small balls dropped into water), but the Chinese for these dough drops literally means “pimples” (from Victor Mair’s Language Log blog, Sept. 1, 2018). I have also seen a menu item, for a dish with very unusual characters in its name, “No Google translation but the dish is delicious.”

Another Cantonese touch is referring to carrots as “the ginseng of the poor” (Z. Liang 2013).

Another food of interest is waai san (Mandarin huai shan) a true yam, Dioscorea polystachya (information from Q. Yao on a fascinating exchange about this plant on Facebook’s Cantonese Food Recipes page, July 13, 2023; the exchange provided enormous information about this and similar medicinal roots). It appears in medicinal soup, and is apparently much loved. The superficially similar burdock root is niubang in Mandarin, gobo in Japanese.

Simpler yet is rice, but its role in Cantonese life is important enough to inspire a major book, Gourmets in the Land of Famine by Seung-joon Lee (2011).

A fascinating email exchange in August of 2011 between Andrew Coe, Fuchsia Dunlop, myself and several students and Chinese cooks revealed half a dozen unrelated and mutually incompatible origin myths for the name gu lou yuk, the Cantonese for sweet-sour pork (see Dunlop n.d.). It literally means “murmuring and muttering meat,” probably with reference to the sound of cooking the dish. Some say this could come from a homonymous phrase meaning “ancient-old meat,” but this is unlikely, since there is nothing ancient or old about the dish. There is a persistent myth that it is a euphemistic way to say guai lou yuk Cantonese for “foreign devils’ meat,” because the dish was devised for westerners. (It is based on traditional recipes used for pork ribs and for yellow croaker fish, but  was created in the 19th or early 20th century for foreigners, who love sweets and do not want to deal with bones.)  Non-Chinese who are would-be sophisticates take delight in bashing this dish, but a team of leading Chinese chefs who visited Los Angeles in 2013 evaluated one high-line restaurant by its sweet-sour pork, and said this is a standard dish to test a cook’s skill (Gold 2013). It is not at all easy to make well; it can range from superb to inedible.

Ha kaau (Mandarin xia jiao), the shrimp dumplings that may be the most beloved Cantonese snack, came originally from the village of Wufeng in the Haizhu district (Leo Lok, Facebook post of July 24, 2021). Their almost inevitable companion siu mai may be Mongolian; it is shumai or shaomai in Mandarin, mai meaning “wheat” (Katy Hung, Facebook post of Jan. 4, 2021), though Cantonese uses a different character that in Mandarin is mi.

            The famous taan t’a or “dan ta,” “egg tarts,” are derived from pastel de nata, famous exemplar of the pasteis de Belém, the latter word referring to a monastery in Portugal that made them famous. An anticlerical liberal administration took over Portugal in 1820, and a company was set up to save the Belém monastery and its foods. The pastry had probably spread to Macau long before that. In any case, from Macau it spread to the entire Cantonese world, and thus the entire globe today.

Shunde (Sun Tak) has a distinctive cuisine, very rich, with mild and subtle flavors; many fish dishes. It is very popular in Guangjou. Delicacies include sandworms, snake belly meat (various species of rat snake are on the menu), turtles, chestnut cake (stuffed pancake), all sorts of fish. Pork hocks are cooked in a sweet sauce much like an American ham sauce. Cheese is made, astonishingly, in Shunde. It is made from water buffalo milk, and is fully traditional there. Miranda Brown has documented and filmed three women making it (Brown, Facebook posting, Dec. 11, 2017). Excellent, thorough research by Sau-wa Mak (2014) found that water buffalo fresh cheese used to be eaten with rice congee for illness, but that stir-fried milk, deep-fried milk, milk in ginger juice, and other modern Sun Tak delicacies are relatively or quite modern inventions, created as sophistication and refinement came to Sun Tak and led to elaborating traditional dishes for fun and profit (a very Cantonese thing to do). At least in my experience, deep-frying milk involves freezing milk in ice cube form, battering the cubes, and deep-frying them before they can melt. They remain somewhat liquid inside.

Fish are still raised in rural Hong Kong—protected heritage fish ponds present an unchanged landscape contrasting strangely with the high-rises of Yun Long. The fish bring 12-15 HK dollars per catty but cost 12 per catty to raise, so it is not very profiatable. The young of the area are not picking it up as a profession.

Chen Village fen is rice paper with pork bits and soy and other saucing; it is simple but great. A really good sweet is glutinous rice cake with jujube mashed with some brown sugar.

Graham and Elizabeth Johnson spent a lifetime chronicling the town of Tsuen Wan in Hong Kong. During this time, it changed from a cluster of old-fashioned brick houses to a skyscraping city of highrises. The last old-timers persist in the last brick homes. Among foodways recorded are the ceremonial cakes for Chinese New Yeark, a local specialty. These are chahgwo and goubaahn, sweet rice cakes with or without peanuts. There are also “year cakes,” nonsweet sticky rice cakes with radish, green onion, preserved meat, mushrooms, and the like. Small cylindrical chahgwo for Qing Ming Day (3rd day of 3rd lunar month) were called jeuijaibaahn, “little boy’s penis cakes.”  Types of chahgwo occurred at some other festivals, incl black herbal ones for Dragon Boat (Johnson and Johnson 2019:36-37). The book is a beautifully written and highly nostalgic account of the changes in a wonderful, close-knit, friendly little community that is on the verge of being finally absorbed into the vast urban mass of Hong Kong.

Western food came into Hong Kong not only with the British and Portuguese, but with Chinese and White Russians moving down from Harbin and Shanghai. Chinese cooks opened western-style restaurants as early as the 1860s. The flight of Russians from eastern Russia to China after the 1917 revolution and 1917-21 civil war cretaed a huge Russian population, often food-conscious and able to cook. Russian restaurants became a Christmas tradition in Shanghai and then in Hong Kong. (The last of the Russian colony largely moved to San Francisco in the later 20th century, merging with the Russian settlers in the west-central city.) A western cuisine known as “soy sauce western” arose from a fusion of Russian, British, and Cantonese, the Cantonese toning down strange spices, adding soy sauce to soften flavors such as gamy meat, using more vegetables, and otherwise nativizing the cuisine (E. Cheung 2021). I well remember the old Russian restaurants of Hong Kong in the 1960s, already drifting away in a Cantonese direction. They are gone now. “Soy sauce western” restaurants, such as the well-known Tai Ping Koon, lasted into the 2010s, but they too have largely vanished, in spite of nostalgic visits by old-timers.

Hong Kong’s famous floating restaurants are largely gone, but a huge one, the Jumbo Kingdom, survives at this writing. These began as Boat People eating places, but caught on with tourists and were turned into floating palaces by land-dwelling entrepreneurs. The food in the old days was overpriced and cooked for volume feeding; I hope the Jumbo is better (see Wong and Thuras 2021:125).

The boat people themselves are almost all on shore now, not only in Hong Kong but even in Guangzhou (Dixon 2018). Boat-dwellers are said to exist still on remote rivers and coasts.

In a market in Guangjou I noted several new items to me in January of 2013. One was “cow milk jujubes,” huge jujubes as big as apples and green in color. Another was gobo root, huai shan. Passion fruit was sold as hundred-fragrance fruit, and enoki as golden-needle mushroom. Snow lotus was a crisp root, somewhere between a yam and a radish. A real yam was called fen ge. Tiger head chile is California chile. A new fruit is jitan guo (chicken egg fruit), apparently yellow sapote.

Rosemary is now available in Guangjou herb shops. So are all too many dyed gouji berries and Cordyceps; phony or low-quality cordyceps, dyed orange, is a staple. The real thing is worth more than gold, and rather hard to find. Live scorpions, however, abound. Crocodile meat may be found, and soup of it is taken for asthma (xiao chuan bing). A new herb is snow chrysanthemum, a bright orange dried daisy flower. It makes the best herbal tea I have ever had. It is in Hong Kong too, as are huge thick slabs of Vietnamese cinnamon bark, used to treat allergy to meat, among other things.

In Hong Kong tea rooms, new tim sam include a baxing jiaozi stuffed with peanuts, and very small bits of carrot, cabbage and meat, and a fen kok with very succulent and well-spiced thin-sliced roast or steamed beef wrapped up in the noodle skin, then decked with cilantro. We learn from Dunlop (2019:192) that the famous and venerable Luk Yu Teahouse was named for the author of the “Tea Classic,” Lu Yu. I remember early morning tim sam at that teahouse when it was in its original and long-standing home in the old Garment District of Hong Kong Island. Urban renewal took out that street, and the Luk Yu moved uptown, but never recovered the unbelievable levels of gourmet cooking of the old place.

            Cantonese use of food for insulting people never ends. Haam jyu sau, “salty pig’s hand,” is Cantonese for a groper. Mandarin zhu shou “pig’s foot” means the same, and led to some embarrassment when a Chinese market posted a sign “German Style Sex Offenders” over a display of smoked pork hocks (photo widely circulated on Internet).

            Cantonese shrimp sauce, made of shrimps in salt such that they autodigest, has expanded in Beihai, Guangxi, to include ghost crabs caught on the beach. Pollution is controlled to keep them flourishing. The sauce is extremely popular there (Wong and Thuras 2021:121).

Cantonese hot non-vegetarian dishes are yitfan “hot staple-food” (see So 1992:136ff). Cantonese soups and related foods are chroniced by Teresa Chen (2009).

Yak meat may now be had in Guangjou as well as Tibet and west China; it tastes like good beef.

Macau has its own cuisine (see Sales Lopes 2010). This went unchronicled, partly because Macanese tend to be quite secretive about it, holding tight to their special family recipes. Finally, it found a devoted historian in Annabel Jackson (2003, 2020). She records wonderful stories and family records, discusses the place of cuisine as critically important heritage and ethnic marker, and provides histories of the incredibly complicated origins of the cuisine. Basically the effect of Portuguese setttling in a Cantonese area, the cuisine was enriched from the start by foods from all the other places the Portuguese colonized, even Brazil, which contributed everything from chiles to specific dishes. Africa provided a surprising amount of ideas, including “African chicken,” a famous Macanese specialty that was invented in Macau by a Chinese chef but with true African antecedents. Another major influence came from Goa, the Indian colony that was a major focus of Portuguese activity in Asia. Melaka also contributed, providing Malaysian foods. Of course, Portugal’s own contributions, from Belem egg tarts—now Cantonese taan ta—to sausages. I remember old-time Portuguese markets in Macau, and goods reaching Hong Kong. One could buy vinho verde, the wonderful “green wine,” as well as Portuguese cheeses, sausages, and canned fish. Bacalhao, the dried salt cod that is Portugal’s signature food, was in evidence. Macanese food has now gone worldwide, with the dispersal of Macanese following Communist Chinese takeover in 1999.

Teochiu (Cantonese Chiu Jau or “Chiu Chow”; Mandarin Chaozhou) cuisine remains little known in the English-speaking world, but apparently is covered by Chinese cookbooks. There is said to be a cookbook: Jia! The Food of Swatow and the Teochew Diaspora, by Diana Zheng, but I can’t locate it so far. Newman (2015) reminisces about feasts of duck soup, braised goose, soupy sweets, oyster omelettes sometimes wrapped in bean curd skin, and other items. She knows this food mainly from Singapore, where they have adoped shacha sauce. The word is pronounced sa te in Hokkien, revealing its origin from Indonesian satay. I have encountered all these dishes in Teochiu places in Hong Kong or California. Newer to me is “hot pot made with many leafy vegetables, yams, and tapioca flour. The yams are sliced very thin” (p. 10). Another new dish to me is “a fish salad made with fried or fresh fish and fried shrimp. It has five-spice powder, plum [mei] sauce, preserved vegetables, radishes and carrots, and fish balls they call dumplings” (ibid.). This sounds wonderful. Yet another is spring rolls in bean curd skins, and a congee made with sour mei, among other things (p. 11). (Wikipedia has directions on how to salt, pickle, and make sauce from mei.) 

A recent study of food shops in Shantou (Swatow) by Guang Tian et al. (2018) describes five famous and long-established shops, selling, respectively: taro cakes and soup; various foods and meat products; bamboo shoot cake with dried shrimp and other cakes; dry noodles with pork and onions and soup with pig parts and fish balls; and stuffed pig intestines, horseshoe crab cake, and zongzi. The last three are now state-owned, the first two remain private. Shantou and Teochiu are adjacent. They are culturally and linguistically similar.

Chapter 14. Foods of Non-Han Peoples Living in or near China

            Foodways of the Muslim ethnic groups of Xinjiang, largely Turkic-speaking, have been beautifully documented in an encyclopedia, Zhongguo Qingzhi Yinshi Wenhua (Chinese Islamic Drink and Food Culture), issued in Beijing in 2009. Many illustrations and recipes are provided. Interesting is the strong European cast of many of the groups, especially the Tatars (p. 202ff), who are quite East European-looking and sometimes brown-haired and blue-eyed.

            Turkic food includes the dried milk solid qrut (qurt, qurut), usually dried yogurt but often dried skimmed milk. It is aaruul in Mongolian, kūru in Manchu, and one of the milk solids covered by rubing in Chinese (Bello 2016:140).

            Jen Lin-Liu, a food writer and cooking school teacher, traveled the Silk Road from Xi’an to Rome and wrote a delightful travel book about it, On the Noodle Road (2013). She was obsessed with noodles, and learned to cook every noodle dish she encountered along the way. She notes that noodles were called tang bing, “soup cakes,” in early medieval China. In China, la mian dominated, under various names, becoming laghman in Turkic languages. Other noodles and breadstuffs were found. She reports that the large breads of northwest China are mo, but were earlier tuturma, from Turkick tuturmashi (Lin-Liu 2013:49-52).

Chinese chives are popular, as in Afghanistan. Dumplings are manta, but small soup dumplings are chuchurma, both Turkic words (see Lin-Liu 2013:86). Humoral “hot” (Chinese re) is yel (Lin-Liu 2013:89). Gushgerde are buns baked in a tonur, the local pronunciation of “tandur” (Lin-Liu 2013:95). From Uyghurland, Jen Lin-Liu proceeded westward, describing noodles and other foods as she went through Central Asia, Iran, Turkey, and Italy. She continues to produce food blogs, with an emphasis on China. To this it is worth adding that the tandur is called nangkeng “nang pit” in Chinese (Phillips 2016:362), and polo (pilaf) is zhuafan, “grabbed rice,” because it is eaten by hand (Phillips 2016:369).

Uyghur food includes yang’aq halwasi, “walnut halva” (-si is the possessed Turkic ending, denoting the noun covered by the adjective). The Chinese name is ma tang, short for hu ma tang, “sesame sugar” (i.e. “sesame sweet”). It is actually, at least as sold in Beijing, a large cake, up to a meter or so in diameter, made of sesame, peanuts, and dried fruit as well as walnuts and probably other items to bind it. It is sold by the half kilo by Uyghur vendors from villages near Kashgar; they are often illegal migrants and selling illegally, so they have a complex relationship with police and informal market areas (Sullivan 2016). Halva made of lamb oil and sugar exists. They admit that laghman was originally la mian (Lin-Liu 2013:72).

Persian nan is the standard bread, pronounced nang. Holuq nang is paper-thin and used for roll-ups. Qatlama nang is layered, like Indian parathas.It is leavened with yeast, and often has cheese filling.  Toqash is a small version.It is traditionally baked in a tanur (tandur) jar. Güsh nang is meat-filled. It is cooked in a regular oven, not a tanur. Lots of vegetables are eaten, including cucumber, squash, carrots, onions, and the other usual Central Asian items, including cilantro, ashköki. Chile is laza, from Chinese la jiao. Läng men is Chinese la mian. Persian samosa appear as samsa. They are baked in the tanur, and resemble similar dumplings in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. Kababs are popular. Fish are not eaten and were at least sometimes taboo in old times.

Sweets and the traditional Iranian nibbles of nuts and dried fruit are popular (Dunlop 2019b:248). And she finally found good-tasting lungs (Dunlop 2019b:251). Drinks can include dried peaches steeped in water, and yogurt (qıtaq) with salt; this drink is dohap. Dried milk solids are qurut, the universal Central Asian Turkic word (more usually qurt). 

            The indefatigable Jacqueline Newman has added a compact description of Kashkar (Kashgar) food (Newman 2017c). It is typical central Asian fare. She says the city name means “place to find jade.” She too describes ma tang, describing it as “nut nougat covered in creamy yogurt curds drizzled with brown shugar syrup.”  A spice mix called tetitku is noted. Bread is naan (Farsi, and general) or nang (Uyghur); she gives a recipe, which is more or less the typical Persian one. Lagmen and similar noodles are as popular as elsewhere in the center. Whole lambs are served with caraway in their mouths. “Chicken was cooked with carrots and onion, mutton called polu came fried with onion, rice steamed with carrots and onions, too. Kebabs were called kawaplar [Uyghur pronunciation of “kabab” with –lar, the Turkic plural], and made with beef or lamb, seasoned with salt, pepper, sesame seeds, and sometimes chile and cumin, then grilled after soaking them in milk, butter, salt, and sugar” (Newman 2017c:13). A “big plate chicken” was served (Phillips 2016 has a recipe). Fish was available and was eaten with rice. Sangza, “crispy twisted fried bread, or baked buns called kao baozi” (Newman 2014:14) were eatenat breakfast. The former is thoroughly Chinese as well as central Asian. The latter—the word means “roasted little bao”—is Chinese but adapted to ovens; Chinese traditionally did not bake bao (though they now do in western countries and westernized bakeries in China). Lamb soup was shorpa, as elsewhere (ultimately the familiar Arabic root sh-r-b, “drink”). Kumys was a preferred drink. Black tea, Russian-style kvas, and “a non-alcoholic beverage made with honey…called gewasi” were also drunk.

            All this sounds properly Turkic-Central Asian, with expected Chinese additions. The words are a mix of Turkic, Chinese, and generic Arab-origin Middle East (shorba, kabab/kawap). Sometimes, one cannot quite figure out where a word started; lagmen is probably Chinese, from la mian, but Iranic speakers claim it as an Iranian word.

            Mongol food is covered elsewhere in my writings (Buell et al. 2020), so I note here only a recent thorough account of dairy food preparation by Mongols in Xinjiang (Chan 2017). The intrepid Jacqueline Newman has chronicled Inner Mongolian food too, with recipes for buuz dumplings (rather like jiaozi), rather Chinese-style meat, and the Mongol version of hot pot. She mentions “maichan, a boiled lamb and onion dish with bulmuk, a flour-based gravy” (Newman 2017d:11).

            Mongolian food also includes boodog, animal cooked in its own skin. One skins the animal, cuts the meat off the bones, seasons it to taste, puts it back in the skin along with hot stones. The hot stones cook the food, while the hair is singed off over fire (Wong and Thuras 2021:144-145). This is a classic technique among hunters all around the Northern Hemisphere, known as skin-boiling. For large animals, the stomach is used instead of the skin.

            China’s neighbors and ethnic minorities have very complex foodways of their own. Paul Buell and I, with collaborators Montserrat de Pablo and Moldir Oskenbay, have written up Central Asian food (Buell et al. 2020), including a thorough run-up on Korean food, owing much to Michael Pettid’s superb account of it (2008), and much to research in Los Angeles Koreatown as well as in Korea itself.

            Central Asia shows itself in mandu, large dumplings similar to meat pies, stuffed with minced meat or vegetables. They came in from the Turkic world far back in the early Medieval period.

Korea’s national dish, kimchi, continues to propagate worldwide. In Korea, it is still homemade; only 7% of that consumed is comercial (Wong and Thuras 2021:154). Koreana magazine has glorified it as a perfect health food (Young 2008). Indeed, it has plenty of antiseptic garlic and chile, vitamin-rich cabbage, antioxidants in all the vegetables, and so on, but its high salt content is associated with Korea’s high stroke rate. Pickling destroys its vitamin C content. I was amazed to find in France, in the heights of the Auverne, a mixed winter pickle virtually identical to kimchi but apparently a purely local invention.

An extremely refreshing soup consists simply of kimchi in water, nabak kimchi or mul kimchi (mul means “water”). The word “kimchi” escapes my philological dragnet, but I may point out that kiam chai is Hokkien for “pickled green vegetables.”

The usual vast range of noodle dishes is found. Nangmyeon is buckwheat noodles, usually served cold. Often there is a light topping and otherwise just the noodles in water, mul nangmyeon, but sometimes a strikingly varied and usually chile-rich topping is added, pibim (“mixed”) nangmyeon. Pibim also extends to rice, pibimbap being just cooked rice (pap) with various mixed toppings. A common breakfast form includees an egg. As elsewhere in eastern Asia, pap by itself can stand for food in general.

An interesting Korean dish is ssam-bap. This consists of rice with chopped meat in sauce, eaten by being wrapped in leaves, like some Vietnamese rolls. The leaves include tender young collards, mustard greens, perilla, Beijing cabbage, mizuna (for garnish—it won’t do for wrap), and others. The best thing about the dish is the variety and contrast of raw leaf flavors. Ssam is in fact a general term for wrapped food.

A large range of healthful congees, bonjuk, treats every condition. The king and court could get abalone congees and other valuables. Ordinary people could still manage with congees enriched by jujubes, medicinal herbs, fermented beans, and other products. Another widespread soupy food is sundubu, tofu boiled in a spectacularly spicy sauce, rich with chiles, fermented foods of various kinds, and typically some meat or seafood. Koreans still eat a great deal of wild or semiwild herbs, from ferns to burdock root.

One important Korean food not known in China (as far as I can find) is acorn mush. Chinese do eat acorns, however—usually roasted—as well as a pecan-like nut called a “mountain walnut.”  Hu Shiu-Ying (2005) identifies this as referring to both the Chinese hickory, Carya cathayensis, and the Manchurian walnut, Juglans mandschurica. For the Korean dish, acorns are ground, the tannic acid is soaked out of them, and the meal is then boiled while stirring until it forms a jellylike mush known as dotori muk (the meal is dotori muk karu). It is tasteless, but is sliced and eaten with seasonings or other foods. It is similar to the acorn mush of California’s Native American peoples, but more thoroughly leached. It was independent invented in California and Korea—there are no intermediate steps to connect the two.

Since Korea is a peninsula with an irregular coastline and countless islands, fish, shellfish, and seaweeds are extremely important in the diet. Mackerel, needlefish, and other strong oily fish are greatly relished, though Chinese do not like them much. Pollack is popular not only for the flesh but for the guts, which are made into stew with much chile and some vegetables, and are definitely an acquired taste. Seaweeds, squid, cuttlefish, and shellfish abound in the diet. An unusual food is hagfish, a primitive lamprey relative; it is cooked in extremely pungent and complex chile sauce, and is crisp and a bit chewy, like cuttlefish but more so; the texture is a major attraction. (No references for this or most of the last several paragraphs—I had to do all the field work myself on this, in Korea and in Los Angeles’ Koreatown, though see Pettid 2008 for general description.)

Beware of ordering a sundae in Korea; it is Korean for blood sausage. A gourmetship for this product exists, with specialty restaurants, famed manufacturers, and other appropriate accoutrements.

A duck lunch eaten at a Los Angeles duck specialty restaurant—so Korean it had signage only in hangul—consisted of thin slices of duck grilled on the usual tabletop grill, but in a grill pan that saved the fat. The duck slices were eaten on lettuce, with various pickles, plus salt, to make up a bite. Then rice was fried in the remaining duck fat, and eaten by those of us who still had space.

Korean drinks include makgeolli, unstrained rice beer—a wonderful, sparkling, yeasty-flavored, milk-white drink that can incorporate chestnut powder and other fascinating additions. Strained, it becomes more ordinary (and less popular) jiu. Distilling Korean jiu of any sort results in soju, a vodka, as tasteless as others of that breed, but usually much less strong; it can be potent, but usually runs around 16-20% alcohol. It has been lovingly monographed by Hyunhee Park (2021), who finds it was probably introduced by Tang times, but made much more available and popular by the Mongols. It is now generally made of grain, but was often made of sweet potatoes in the past, especially when it was of the bootleg order.

Korean ceremonies still use ancient Confucian sacrifice rites, involving offerings of foods adapted to the Korean context (Kim 1999). These include jujubes, pine nuts, walnuts, and ginkgo nuts, as well as the usual meats and fish, but also kimchi, including things like Chinese bellflower and wild dropwort (these are medicinal herbs). Rice cakes and various wines are used, as well as meat minced with soy and other ingredients. Meat items include something rather mysteriously defined as “swine’s armpit” (Kim 1999:8; the Chinese characters supplied makes things even more mysterious—the character translated “armpit” means “to pat” in Chinese). Korea now proves to have a very long, complex prehistory (Nelson 1993, 1999). Millet cultivation began (probably introduced from northeast China) around the 6th millennium BC (Nelson 1999:150). Recall that the Korean people very likely stem from the Xilongwa culture of the Liao River drainage. Rice was introduced, already domesticated, from China, by 2000 BC or earlier (Nelson 1999:150). Pigs and other animals came early, before rice, and pigs became major domesticates.

A complex agriculture evolved in Korea, spreading eventually to Japan with the Yayoi culture (intrusive from Korea to Japan around 200 BC). Japan had some agriculture earlier, but it stayed very simple and minor; only with Yayoi did Japan become truly agricultural. A quick note suffices for Japan: recent comprehensive, detailed, and excellent work by Eric Rath (2010, 2016; Rath and Assman 2010) and Charlotte von Verschuer (2016) makes further description unnecessary.

Manchu food is more or less Chinese, in recent centuries, but traditions of venison and distinctive noodle dishes survive. Newman (2006) provides recipes. Large dumplings are bobo, presumably linguistically related to Tibetan momo.

A detailed account of foodways in Vietnam (Ngo 1994) notes that the heating/cooling system and the five-elements system flourish there. Cooling foods, including many vegetables and fruits, were favored, because of the hot climate. About 1500 medicinal plants make up the traditional herbal canon; some 150 are food plants (p. 77). An 18th-century physician, Hai Thuong Lan Ong, wrote a book, Culinary Art, with 152 recipes for healing foods, with recommendations of foodstuffs. “For instance:  glutinous rice related to sweet and tepid, strengthened spleen, lung and kidney and cured urobilinury whereas ordinary rice related to sweet and healthy, kept up the body and regulated the temperament. Regarding beans, soya related to sweet and tepid, strengthend the bone, boosted the temperament and detoxicated whereas green beans related to sweet and cold, dissipated the heat, detoxicated and cured diabetes” (Ngo 1994:77). Lemon balm, ginger, and other plants were noted. “[W]omen in delivery should use glutinous rice wine, with hen-egg…” (Ngo 1994:77). Papaya promoted milk, as did soup of pork leg.  The giant waterbug Lethocerus indicus is important in Vietnamese cuisine (Packard 2003; Smith 2003), as in northern Thailand, whence it has been imported into the United States (Pemberton 1988; also my own observations). The pheromonal gland produces a scent that is greatly relished. Insecticides have made the insect rare. It is traditionally made into sauce with chiles, lime, and sometimes dried fish or fish sauce.

Chan Yuk Wah (2011), in a brief but brilliant article, tells of investigating whether the Vietnamese rice roll known as banh cuon was derived from the Cantonese cheung fan roll. He realized that both are variants of a local food that seems to be one of the many regional things—foods, words, ideas—linking Cantonese and Vietnamese culture as opposed to north Chinese or (other) southeast Asian. He reasonably refers to this as Yueh culture—Yueh being the ancient Chinese state occupying what is now southeast China. “Vietnam,” which is “Yueh nan” in Mandarin, simply means “south of Yueh.”  (Nam Viet, “southern Yueh,” was attested historically too.)  It is definitely time to realize that Cantonese and Vietnamese cultures do comprise, in some ways, a unity over and against their neighbors; one can fold the Thai and Muong cultures of north Vietnam into it, too. Chan, again correctly, notes that “southeast Asia” is an awfully vague term—it links together a large group of countries that share nothing except their agricultural system (wet rice and tree crops) and some degree of Indian and Chinese influence. Southeast Asia is much less a cultural unity than, say, Europe, Latin America, or East Africa. One can easily deconstruct it and make the cultural links go in quite other directions. Chan’s article is a really wonderful example of starting with something deceptively minor, writing a deceptively short and simple article about it, and using this to establish conclusions that shake the received wisdom on a whole region!

Nir Avieli has described in detail the food of Hui An, a town in central Vietnam that formed around a core of Chinese merchant settlements and thus has a strongly Chinese-influenced cuisine with several distinctive local innovations (Avieli 2005, 2012). Among these are adding raw herbs—beloved of Vietnamese eaters—to Chinese dishes. These raw herbs can, however, carry diseases that Chinese cooking would prevent—as I was reminded, to my cost, in Hui and Hui An!

One of the common herbs there and elsewhere in southeast Asia is Tabasco parsley, not a parsley but a lettuce relative, Eryngium foetidum. It comes from Mexico (especially, of course, the Tabasco area) and how it got to southeast Asia is a real mystery. Around Hoi An it is known as ngo gai.

            In Yunnan, dozens of local ethnic groups continue interesting foodways. A marvelous cookbook of local Yunnan food comes to us from Georgia Freedman:  Cooking South of the Clouds (2018). The recipes are excellent and the photographs are exceptional even for this modern age of photo-cookbooks. From limited experience in Yunnan I can vouch for at least several of the recipes. Freedman usefully recommends substitutes for ingredients hard to get outside Yunnan, while still listing the proper ingredients for those who can find them (though failing to explain that “sawtooth herb” is that Eryngium foetidum). She traces the best of the famous Yunnan hams to Xuanwei county, near the Guizhou border (and recommends—properly—that you can use Spanish Serrano ham if you can’t find good Yunnan).

            Wild fruits are still very important (Chen et al. 1999). Slightly over the international border, Yunnan Chinese in northern Thailand have set up highly successful, stable, intensive farming systems, based on subsistence food cropping plus orchards of lychees, tangerines (with a juice processing factory), and other trees (Huang 2005). They also use an amazing and wondrous variety of wild plants for medicine, including for childbirth (Wang et al. 2003).

            Yunnan food, and some other Chinese foodways, have migrated to Burma, where Chinese food in Mandalay has become inextricably mixed with Burmese food. A Burmese tamarind soup, typical of the sour soups of India, Burma and Thailand, is Yunnanized with chile and pronounced a “Yunnanese” food (Duan Ying 2011).

            Tibetan food and medicine are still poorly known in the west (though see Dorje 1985). The Shuhi people, a Tibetan-related group in Yunnan, rely heavily on walnuts, for food and oil, and not surprisingly give them a major place in religion and ritual (Weckerle 2005). This links them with scattered long-resident ethnic groups around the Himalayan region; perhaps there are ancient relationships, though we cannot know. In any case, deteriorating rural and forest conditions in China bode ill for this adaptation.

            The Tibetans of Yunnan now produce a rapidly increasing quantity and variety of medicinal herbs (D. Anderson et al. 2005; Glover 2005; Salick et al. 2005), which is greatly improving the local economy, and, one hopes, world health. However, it is clearly unsustainable; plants are getting smaller and rarer. The future can only be one of crashes of major species. Cultivation is occurring, but a belief that wild plants are more effective than domestic ones makes this a shaky proposition.

            Especially interesting is the caterpillar-parasiting fungus Ophiocordyceps sinensis, known as yartsa gunbu in Tibetan and xiacao dongchong (“summer herb, winter worm”) or simply chongcao (“worm herb”) in Chinese. It grows in the bodies of ghost moth caterpillars (Thitarodes spp., 37 known host species).The first known mention is in a fifteenth-century Tibetan medical text. It appears in Chinese medical writing in 1757, but did not catch on as a mass fad until 1993 (Zahler 2016).Believed to have magical cure-all effects, it is collected in vast quantities in Tibetan grasslands and sold throughout China and among overseas Chinese. The supply is rapidly depleting. Zelda Liang (2012, 2013) records that it is now hyped as “viagra”-like (it does not work), and has become a super-rich status consumption good, now that the traditional luxuries such as abalone, shark fin, sea cucumber, and fish maw are affordable to the upper middle class. Illegal bu pin (strengthening foods) such as pangolin are also super-status.

            The effects of this new affordability on the luxuries in question is, of course, devastating. Many shark species are now endangered because of shark fin exploitation; often the fins are cut off and the shark thrown back into the water, there to die (it requires fins to swim and survive). Even the Gulf of Maine is losing its sea cucumbers. Fish maw (swim bladder) is overexploited to the extent of endangering several fish species, notably the totuava of the Gulf of California, and as bycatch the vaquita dolphin that lives with it; the scaly croaker of Papua-New Guinea is also getting rare, with desperate local people in the Kikori delta forced to exploit it as other fish disappear (Chandler 2024).

            A Tibetan community renamed “Shangri-La” by venal Han Chinese publicists has not only become a tourist designation, it has become a major wine terroir, with the publicists doing everything possible to hype its special virtues. It is said to be reasonably good. Unfortunately, mass tourism and French-style wine culture do not mix well with local reverence for mountains, forests, wildlife, and nature (Galipeau 2016).

            The Naxi of northern Yunnan are the subjects of a brief note by Jacqueline Newman (2018), providing only one recipe, but it is complex and stunning.

            The Yi peoples (Harrell 2001) may have ruled Yunnan in its independent days as the state of Nanchao. They now occupy a vast swath of highland territory from Sichuan to Thailand. Among the northerly groups are the Nuosu of the Liangshan (Cool Mountains), famous for having remained de facto independent of the Chinese state right up to the 1950s. Their staple food is buckwheat; they grow both bitter (Fagopyrum tataricum) and non-bitter (F. esculentum, the species familiar in the west—to which it spread from west China). They prefer the bitter, in spite of its taste, because it has more nutritional value (at least they say it does; Bender et al. 2019:144). They also grow wheat, barley, and potatoes, the last entering the picture since 1700 but very well established. They have a turnip-like vegetable called voma that is said to be watery and unsubstantial but very popular (Bender et al. 2019:144). They raise pigs, sheep, goats, cattle, chickens, and horses, and sacrifice and eat the first five of those species. They formerly ate a good deal of game, subject to a number of taboos that guaranteed sustainability, but now the game is shot out as taboos go by the wayside in a populous, mixed-ethnic world. With other Yi peoples, they have a cosmology of forests and wilds (the domain of spirits) and cultivated, thoroughly managed lands (the domain of people), and maintain sacred groves that conserve biodiversity (on conservation, see Urgenson et al. 2010, and countless writings by Stevan Harrell). Their origin myth (Bender et al. 2019) teaches respect for all beings; it does not explicitly order conservation, but it provides the context of beliefs that allow taboos, sacred demarcation, and ritual management systems to conserve a sustainable system. They maintain a wide and deep knowledge of edible plants and fungi (Li, Stepp, and Tilt 2022).

            Other Yi peoples include the Hani and Akha. The Hani of Yunnan grow “rice and corn; the rice is often but not always purple rice. They grow lots of…peanuts, tea, and sugar cane…..they love foods tasting acidic and/or spicy” (Newman 2015:29). They eat a rice dumpling cooked in banana leaves. Special dishes include baiwang, coagulated “blood of one or more animals: pig, goat and dog are favorites; and mix it with salt, radishes, leaves of the garlic plant, and chili peppers. Then they season it and grill it” (Newman 2015:30). They often top it with peanuts. Another favorite is “fish mud,” “minced fish with deer, goat, any wild bird, some eel, hot peppers, and chili oil…grilled over charcoal” (ibid.). An infertile woman “is given a leg of pork to hold”; it is called “dragon meat” and eaten with bean curd, fish, celery, sticky rice cakes, peanuts, etc., and the leftovers buried with rice seedlings (ibid.).

            The Sani of central Yunnan are a detachment of the Hani; the name is a variant. The Sani have an ancient tradition of rice agriculture, both upland (slash-and-burn) and wet, but they have more recently adopted New World crops with enthusiasm. Their villages consist of adobe houses, on and around which are hanging maize, chile peppers in strings, green beans drying, and Mexican squashes. Even epazote (Chenopodium ambrosioides) has made it there as a pot-herb, called ki chr kimi. It slotted into the C. album niche as a pot herb. A Sani village looks like a central Mexican one, even to the clusters of maize ears hanging in trees. This amazed and delighted the Mexican representatives at the International Congress of Ethnobotany held in Yunnan in 1990.  

Sani dispenses with vowels in many words. Ng pan mo is “chile.”  The odd small eggplant—a local species, Solanum khasianum—is a dz, a water buffalo an ng (cf. Chinese niu, Cantonese ngau). Dog is chrzh (the last three letters being used here to write something like the buzzed r in Czech). Simplest of all was “horse”:  m. (The Chinese is ma.

The Akha, related linguistically (but much more fond of vowels, of which they have many), practice slash-and-burn cultivation and some wet-rice agriculture in southern Yunnan (Sturgeon 2005, 2021). They eat a typical southeast Asian diet of rice with greens, fish, fruit, peppers, and forest products. My student Ayoe Wang, an Akha from Yunnan, carried out detailed ethnobotanical researches on the Akha (Wang 2008, 2013). He found the same general cosmological beliefs as those reported for the Nuosu, with more explicit conservation and more self-conscious differentiation from the surrounding groups. The Yi world is part of the Southeast Asian world of intensely conservationist and highly sustainable agriculture, a model for the world. Tragically, the Akha have suffered the usual fate of minorities under de facto colonialism. They were dispossessed of most of their land on the patently false claim that they ruined the forest by their shifting-cultivation practices, which are actually extremely careful and conservationist. They were then “given the opportunity,” without choice in the matter, of growing tea to survive. They wound up cutting down even their sacred groves (Sturgeon 2021). This will lead to ruin, according to both Akha religious belief and modern ecological wisdom. Whether the cause is ancestral punishment or lack of resilience in the face of global climate change, the ruin of Akha lands in the near future is assured.

Another related group, the Lisu, are little known to the food world. A few dishes are described by a Lisu writer, Bai Chingshun (2015). Bai reports that a thick unleavened wheat bread is one staple; it is cooked on a flat pan and then in the ashes of the fire. Sweet twisted wheat pastry is a simple delicacy. Another food is tamales: maize kernels taken off the ear, ground, mixed with chiles and salt and steamed in corn husks or Erythrina variegata leaves. I suppose they are an independent invention based on something like Chinese zong, not direct borrowing of tamales. Streaky pork with bean paste (mashed beans) and garlic leaves are a delicacy. Another is wild fennel boiled, tied in a circle, filled with beaten egg, and cooked in soup. In no case are full directions given, and apparently the author has been long away from home. We need more ethnography of groups like this.

Wang Si, an ethnologist in Yunnan, has described the Bai (Wang 2012), who are also fond of raw pork. She supplies details on pig butchering and raw meat preparation and use. Newman has also contributed a brief account of the Bai of Yunnan, whose cuisine is not strikingly different from other Yunnan Plateau food (Newman 2012).

Dai food of southern Yunnan has been chronicled by Newman, and is described as often being sour, with pickled vegetables important. They share a fondness for minced, highly spiced raw meat with other Thai-speaking groups (Newman 2012b). Water bugs continue popular. They are a main flavoring in Thailand, especially in the north, and are occasionally shipped to California, and eaten there (Pemberton 1988). Lethocerus indicus is the species recorded in California. In Thailand, they are prepared .with fermented shrimp paste, galric, Tabasco chile, lime juice, a bit of cilantro, and a small eggplant of the Solanum khasianum type, or more simply with chiles, shile paste, dried minno, and a bit of cilantro (Richard Lando, pers. comm.).

Also related are the Lahu, evocatively described by Shanshan Du (2002), a Chinese ethnographer. They live a similar lifestyle in the same general area. Du emphasizes the importance of women, who maintain that “chopsticks work only in pairs,” and men and women equally need each other.

Nearby are the Wa, an Austroasiatic-speaking group (like their neighbors the Palaung). They have a well-deserved reputation as ferocious headhunters, protecting their wild and remote but lush and rich land by living in large villages hedged by thorns, guarded by gates, and defended by implacable warriors. They were conquered by the Chinese Communist government in the middle 1950s, but in Burma they remain semi-autonomous. Their staple is rice. They grow foxtail millet for beer, an exceedingly popular item, used ritually like other millet beers of southeast Asia. As in much of the world, meat is highly favored. Cattle, buffaloes, pigs, and chickens abound, and some other domesticates and game animals are consumed. Sacrifices and feasts were once common, especially to celebrate heads taken. The skulls were ritually placed in pillars lining the main road to the village, a fairly good warning of what invaders could expect. The Wa, previously known largely from scary rumors, have been the subject of sustained and excellent ethnographic attention by Magnus Fiskejö (2021 and references therein).

The Mian of southern China and neighboring southeast Asia traditionally ate bland, simple food, but use southeast Asian basil varieties, cilantro, mint, and lemon grass, at least in their southeast Asian villages. Minced beef with basil, eaten in a lettuce leaf, is a favorite dish, and resembles Thai and Vietnamese dishes. Sticky rice has also spread from the north Thai world (Jeff McDonald, pers. comm.).

The Mian are also called Yao, and some groups are described under that name. They have varied foodways, many of which are being lost. The Ao Yao of Guangxi used to salt down small birds with rice powder to dry them off; this is no longer done. They pickled many foods. Otherwise, their diet was, or at least now is, more or less the standard diet of impoverished mountain dwellers: sweet potatoes, maize, and such, with rice and pork the luxuries (Huang 2009). Huang gives a recipe for blood sausage—blood and rice in a pig’s intestine, with salt and flavorings.

The Tujia (Newman 2014b) are a large but strikingly little-known group, living in central China. They now speak a Chinese language, but many live near Miao and speak Miao dialects, so one wonders if they have some Miao ancestry. Over a million are scattered widely from north-central to south China. Little is recorded of their food, except that it seems hot, spicy, and sour—they love pickles—and related to Sichuanese cooking; they maintain they originated in Sichuan. This is not the same as the Hezha cuisine above. The group appears to be broadly the same, but it has no corporate identity, and no consistent cuisine is reported.

China’s largest minority is the Thai-speaking (now often Han Chinese-speaking) Zhuang, who live in Guangxi Province and neighboring areas; there are perhaps 30,000,000 of them. Their food remained mysterious until recently, but now an article (Newman 2005), among other sources, opens them to the world. They eat both sticky and nonsticky rice; nonsticky seems to be usually (not always) the staple. They are fond of cassia and fennel, and flavor their tea with orange flowers. Black rice soup flavored with cassia and fennel is a typical dish. Eggplant is cooked with rice vinegar, white pepper, cinnamon, sugar, fermented sticky rice, and oil.

A restaurant in San Gabriel (near Los Angeles) served Guangxi Zhuang food. A  specialty is luosifen, snail noodle soup. The snails are boiled in the water but then taken out. They give a strange earthy or pond-like flavor. The soup is based on spaghetti-like rice noodles with tomatoes, Chinese cabbage, bamboo shoots, meat or fish of any kind, and flavorings. Other soups with sour vegetables exist. (The same restaurant—run by a couple from China’s northernmost and southernmost extremes—served Harbin specialties from north Manchuria. These are largely dumplings stuffed with pork and fennel leaves or other meat-and-vegetable stuffings. Cumin is a common spicing, indicating Near Eastern antecedents. Lamb stir-fried with sour cabbage is also a delicacy there as elsewhere in the far north.)

Dr. Newman, who is systematically chronicling the minority foodways of China, has gone on to describe the foods of the Dong (Tung), another Thai minority very close to the Zhuang (Newman 2007, 2012b, 2012c). (In fact, “Dong” and “Zhuang” are routinely confused. The languages are very similar, and are close to Thai. Speakers are called “Dong” or “Zhuang” indifferently, depending on local history. Newman reports that some people of apparent Tibeto-Burman origin are also called Dong locally.)   A characteristic Dong flavor is tea oil, from fruits of Camellia species including C. oleifera, C. sasanqua and C. kissi (but not from true tea, C. sinensis). This is often made into a sauce with mustard, vinegar, salt, and sugar. A raw-shrimp paste with chile, rice, ginger, cinnamon and salt is also made and stored; it would salt-cure (autodigest) in the jars. Sticky rice is common as a staple. It is also the staple food in northeast Thailand and neighboring areas. Vegetables are marinated in a mix of sugar, salt, Chinese hard liquor (technically a vodka or unaged whiskey), and rice wine.

Newman’s latest foray has been to the world of the Gelao (Kelao), a group so obscure that they appear never to have been well described in print in English. They live in the far south, in Guizhou, Yunnan, and Guangxi. Their language is distantly related to Thai, but in a separate branch (Kadai) of the Thai-Kadai phylum. It is poorly known. Their food was even less well known till now. Newman (2016) reports:  “Their staple diet is corn supplemented with ricewheat, millet, sorghum, buckwheat, and sweet potatoes.”  They like sweet-sour tastes. “They make a condiment called ‘chili bone.’ It is actually ground pork bones mixed with chicken meat, lots of chili powder, sugar, wine and/.or vinegar, and Sichuan pepper and salt. This they seal in jars for two weeks or more…it is a sweet and sour sauce-like item used as a dipping condimentor spread on dumplings or rice cakes.”  They worship on Ox God with sacrificed chicikens, wine, and rice cakes (Newman 2016b:13). Newman provides recipes for maize and shrimp congee with vinegar, and ginger, glutionous rice cakes with brown sugar, black vinegar, sesame oil, preserved vegetables, and fried dough sticks, and presed tofu and rice cakes with ginger, black vinegar, sugar, and chile (Newman 2016b:14). These resemble Cantonese breakfast items.

            Yang Zhuliang has chronicled mushrooms in Yunnan (Yang n.d.). Mushrooms also figure large in Tibet, where they are collected by Tibetans and minorities as food. Sale of them has made many people quite well off (Arora 2008). The caterpillar-parasitizing fungus Cordyceps sinensis complex is an extremely important medicine, sale of which actually is the biggest single moneymaker in rural Tibet (Winkler 2008, 2009). It is used for almost anything by Chinese and Tibetans, but is not known to have any empirically demonstrable benefits. Many other mss. on mushrooms, as well as taro, herbal medicine, edible insects, wild game animals, pine nuts, dogs, and other edibles have crossed my desk, but in preliminary or partial forms that cannot be cited here.

            Southeast Asian food and its history has been reviewed in an excellent historical study by the Japanese scholar Akira Matsuyama (2003). This book is particularly good on fermented foods, and provides an opportunity for someone to do a really major study by comparing them with those documented in Huang (2000). Ties with China are very clear.

Chapter 15. Globalization and Diaspora:  Chinese Food Outside China

Much research on Chinese food in recent years has focused on the process of globalization. This has led to questioning just what Chinese food is (King 2020). In most arenas, globalization has meant the spread of American pop culture at the expense of everything else. It is currently a bit politically uncorrect to say this, but look at any photograph of any street in any city in the world, and think where the clothing styles, sign styles, building styles, car styles, and other styles originated. The only serious exception to Americanization, outside of local scripts on the signs, is the religiously-entailed women’s clothing in the more conservative Muslim cities. In foodways, however, the Chinese have more than held their own. Chinese food has been going global for centuries, since it spread along the Silk Road and along land and sea routes to Southeast Asia.

China’s most far-flung restaurants have been chronicled by the intrepid researchers of Gastro Obscura. They now occur in northern Alaska, Easter Island, the south tip of South America (in Ushuaia), over 14,000 feet up in Cerro de Pasco, Peru, and in Greenland (Wong and Thuras 2021:126-127). Old railroad and mining towns all over western North America have very old Chinatowns, dating from the use of Chinese labor building the railroads, mining, or servicing other workers. Many very old buildings survive, as well as treasure troves like the medical records of a frontier Chinese doctor in Idaho. The food was classic chop suey house fare, and often still is, though now often cooked by recent immigrants who can also produce more upscale dishes.

One result of the food diaspora has been the rise of white experts on Chinese cooking and the neglect of Chinese experts. Mea culpa, of course, but I have tried to acknowledge, cooperate with, and coauthor with Chinese experts. Clarissa Wei (2017) has written an insightful article on the problem. (She is willing to forgive competent experts, but not the newspapers and the white chefs. I am more forgiving—but I am not a disinterested observer here.)

            The long process of blending Chinese and Southeast Asian food thus commands attention, and has received it in several excellent studies (Tan 2011). Notable is one on Chinese food in Singapore. Chinese settled in southern Malaya by the 1500s, and a fusion cuisine, “Nonya” food, arose as they married into local communities.  It influenced both parents:  returning migrants brought Sinicized versions of Malay foods back to China, and Malay food has adopted countless Chinese ingredients and techniques. It differs from both parents in a strong emphasis on turmeric and lesser galangal; it uses more hot spices than Chinese food, but less than Malay. A very similar evolution has taken place in Indonesia, where the peranakan (Indonesian-Chinese) communities developed fusion cuisines and influenced Indonesian food profoundly. (Ultimately, they influenced the whole world, through such inventions as ketchup.)  “Nonya” cuisine (“nonya” is a local word for a Chinese woman of status) has been self-consciously revived and modernized in Singapore (and to a lesser extent in Malaysia). Thus, it has progressively changed. However, Chinese identity is still marked. Holvor Helland (2008), studying Penang, found about what I found in 1970: Chinese food reinforced Chinese identity, with pork a particularly strong ethnic marker because it is banned to the Muslims who form most of the rest of the population there. Chinese have adopted local ingredients but cook in Chinese ways. At least in 1970, that meant Hokkien ways, but I suspect the same thing has happened in Penang that has happened in Singapore: a blurring of Chinese ethnic lines and a spread of Cantonese cuisine across Chinese ethnicities. (One may argue that there is a good reason for that, given the contrasts in cooking between flavorful Cantonese and the often bland and lardy Malaysian Hokkien foodways of the old days.)

            Meanwhile, invasion from a very different direction has occurred: California cuisine has come to Singapore, an arrival making the front page of the Los Angeles Times (Pierson 2022). This cuisine is basically French plus standard western American, using fresh farm-sourced produce and meats (often from high-quality specialist producers). Typical are inventive and surprising combinations of ingredients, but not the multiple combinations of spices and flavorings found in Asia; California cuisine will add truffles to ice cream or berries to shrimp but not half a dozen spices to a dish. The freshness and relative simplicity seem to have caught on in Singapore.

            The initial diaspora of Chinese food was almost entirely from the south coastal provinces, Fujian and Guangdong (Anderson 1988; Tan 2011). Southeast Asian Chinese food is primarily from Fujian, with varying degrees of Guangdong and other influences. The names for foods show this. In Southeast Asia, they are almost entirely in Hokkien (Southern Min), the language of southern Fujian and neighboring northern Guangdong (Anderson 1988; Tan 2011). The Philippines seems slightly more complicated, with some highly Tagalog-influenced Chinese words that do not always show clear Hokkien roots. Carolyn Ang See (2011) provides an excellent account with full food vocabulary; words can be Tagalog, Hokkien, Cantonese (e.g. siomai for siumai) or even possible Mandarin with much Tagalog influence. Sometimes the etymology is astonishing:  the standard Philippine noodle dish pansit is from Hokkien pian sit (Mandarin bian shi), “fast or convenient food.”  On top of this, Philippine languages have borrowed many Spanish words for dish types and ingredients. Sometimes these Spanish words were in turn borrowed from native American languages; for instance, various pronunciations of the Nahuatl (“Aztec”) word camote have become the usual namesfor the sweet potato.

            Fishing went with Chinese settlers to every coastal area they settled. In North America, Chinese got into fishing quite early, dominating some fisheries. This did not totally satisfy demand, so much was imported from China, especially since certain gourmet items like salt croakers and dried squid were hard or impossible to produce in the new land.

            J. Ryan Kennedy (2017) has studied the mix of Chinese-caught, Anglo-caught, and imported fish available to early Chinese Californians. San Francisco Chinese firms (jinshanzhuang, “Golden Mountain firms”) imported dried fish, including the southeast Asian snakehead catfish Channa micropeltes (Kennedy et al. 2021). This catfish was possibly imported as a health aid, since ability to breathe air and squirm through wet grass between ponds gives the various snakehead catfish the reputation of being sheng yu, “living fish,” whose flesh makes one resist cancer and other such diseases. However, I was gravely assured in Hong Kong that some are “bone-transforming dragons” (fa kuat lung in Cantonese), that if eaten will make the eater disappear completely, even his bones. The catfish are thus cooked with a piece of pork, to see if it disappears. I was told of people who had seen this happen, but never met any or heard believable accounts.

            Chinese moved quickly into the abalone fishery, since that snail is among the most valued gourmet health foods in eastern Asia. Todd Braje (2016) studied abalone fishing camps on the Channel Islands, where particularly well-preserved ones on San Clemente give insight into Chinese and western fishers. Kennedy and Braje summarize a long literature on these subjects.

In the Western Hemisphere, Chinese food meant Cantonese food—from central Guangdong—until recently. The standard food names are Cantonese, sometimes in the Taishan (Toisan) dialect; most of the early Cantonese migrant were from Taishan or the nearby “four districts” (the sei yap of California Chinese history) that speak a closely related dialect. (The sam yap, “three districts,” spoke a more Guangzhou-like form of Cantonese, and often warred with sei yap and Toisanese in the 19th century.)

Only in the last 40 years have Sichuanese, Shanghainese, north Chinese, and other regional cuisines spread much beyond China’s borders. Another aspect of the mix has been the recent emigration of vast numbers of ethnic Chinese from Vietnam and other southeast Asian countries. They have started restaurants that not only reflect the fusion cuisines of their homelands, but also reflect fusion in their new homes with local traditions. It is thus common in the United States to find “Vietnamese” restaurants that serve sinicized Vietnamese staples, standard south Chinese dishes, and American Chinese dishes like beef broccoli and ginger beef.

An eclectic cuisine has developed and become almost universal. “Chinese” restaurants in North America and Europe, for instance, typically serve the more famous dishes of several regions. This regional fusion was looked upon with some disquiet by traditional gourmets, but it is now quite standard in Hong Kong and Taiwan as well as in diaspora communities (Wu 2011 gives excellent descriptions and provides his full share of the disquiet). Sidney Cheung has written on the assimilation of Shanghai foodways into Hong Kong life (2020) and on Hong Kong food in general (2022).

            Americans first learned of Chinese food in China itself, and developed a stereotype of it (based on Canton experience) as a lot of unsavory dishes of cut-up cats, dogs, and such (Coe 2009; see pp. 32 ff for colonial racist quotes; also Dunlop 2023). Chinese emigrants came to America in the Gold Rush and in much larger numbers in the late 19th century, bringing rural Cantonese food, especially from the Taishan (Toisan) district of Guangdong. This food was not necessarily China’s finest, and only slowly won acceptance. Coming of more variety and quality led to an explosive growth of acceptance, making Chinese food universal and beloved (Coe 2009; Newman and Halporn 2004).

            Tofu was brought to America by a rather striking individual, Dr. Yamei Kim. She was born in Ningbo in 1864, orphaned, adopted by American missionaries with medical background, raised in Japan and the United States, and became a doctor. She worked with new foods in WWI for the United States, introducing a variety of soybean products including tofu (Roth 2018). She was obviously not the first to bring it, but she seems to have made it more visible to the American elite world. She lived a colorful life, being very much a showperson and champion of both modernity and Chinese tradition.

            More recently, Chinese restaurants from Korea and Japan to America and Europe have developed local versions of Chinese food. (On this, there are several excellent recent studies, notably Arnold et al. 2018; Banh and Liu 2019; Newman and Halporn 2004; Roberts 2002; Wu and Cheung 2002; Wu and Tan 2001. For Korea, a superb article by Kim Bok-rae, 2009, chronicles in detail the changes involved. Here the main influence was from Shandong, not south China. For France, see Sabban 2009.)   They accommodate to local tastes by changing spices, substituting local ingredients, etc. Many stories of particular restaurants, and memoirs of restaurant families, have been collected recently (see Banh and Li 2019 and references therein).

They also, alas, often use much cheaper and worse ingredients than they would dare to use at home, though this is rapidly changing. American Chinese food has gone through several stages in my lifetime. When I was young, most American Chinese came from impoverished backgrounds, and cooked (by necessity) rather cheap, simple food. Accommodation to American ways led to making this cuisine even cheaper and simpler, resulting in the food of the “chop suey joints” of old (Coe 2009). These were small local restaurants that served very humble food.

The oldest one surviving is probably the Chicago Café in Woodland, a small farm town near Sacramento. The region was settled by lare numbers of Chinese workers from the Gold Rush on, and a large Chinese farm worker population existed in the Sacramento Valley and Delta, including Woodland. The café was founded by Young family in 1903, and continues in the ownership of their descendant Paul Fong and his wife. They are growing old, and the future of this historic café is uncertain (Garrison 2024).

“Chop suey” is from Cantonese tsap sui, “miscellaneous leftovers.” In California, it is widely believed to be a California invention. According to folk legend, it was created when a restaurant was invaded by clients who would not be turned away. The desperate chef just stir-fried the day’s leftover, and the clients were happy. In fact, chop suey is a widespread Chinese dish that occurs in many forms. The direct ancestor of California’s form is a dish from the Toisan and Sei Yap area of Guangdong province, originally made by vegetable growers. At the end of the day, they would cook up the “miscellaneous leftovers” that were too small or odd to sell (information from former vegetable growers in Hong Kong, 1975). In America, it first appeaed in New York, then appeared in San Francisco around 1900, becoming famous there (Coe 2009; Peters 2013).

The Mandarin pronunciation is za sui. “Leftovers” is more often used to refer to the odd bits of animals, and the dish has another past as a way of using up chicken gizzards, intestines, lungs, and the like, as pointed out by Hai-Ming Liu (2009) and Miranda Brown (2021). This makes the dish comparable to Mexico’s menudo (“little parts”) and birria (“leftovers”), made from tripe and from the leftovers of sheep and goat butchering respectively.

The dish is venerable. The first mention is in China’s great fantasy novel, Journey to the West by Wu Cheng’en. The trickster-hero Monkey threatens to make chop suey from the organs of a demon if it swallows him. The demon gives up the project (vol. 1, p. 75, reference from Facebook posting by Jim McClanahan, Jan. 2022).

Recently, this once-humble dish has occasioned a publishing explosion. Major authorities have devoted books and articles to it. These include Miranda Brown (2021), Andrew Coe (2009), Haiming Liu (2009, 2015), Anne Mendelson (2016) and Yong Chen (2014) have chronicled the progress of chop suey and other Chinese-American foods; Yong Chen gives some recipes.

Other memorable foods of the old chop suey houses were chow mien (chao min, fried noodles, with sauce), egg foo young (fuyong, omelet-like stirred eggs), tofu dishes, won ton soup, and stir-fried meat with vegetables. Often this consisted largely of undercooked vegetables with tiny shreds of meat. At best, it would have oyster sauce added. “Beef with broccoli” was one standard, substituting American broccoli for kai laan choy, often called “Chinese broccoli” though actually a form of Chinese cabbage.

Another standard was yatka mien, from Cantonese yat ko mien (or min or men), “one bowl of noodles.”  This normally meant just regular noodles, with some green onions, barbecued pork, and the like, but the irrepressible culinary genius of New Orleans has made it into a whole new dish, yakamein. This is a hangover cure, sometimes known as “Old Sober,” and made of “spaghetti, chopped beef, green onions, and chopped hard-boiled eggs, drowned in a tangy beef broth, spiced up with hot sauce and soy sauce, and sprinkled with liberal amounts of Creole seasoning” (Gastro Obscura, online newsletter, 2019).

Ever-present was the fortune cookie, based on the Japanese tea wafer, but converted in the United States to something like a sugar cookie; it was and still is folded (when still pliable) around a slip of paper bearing a “fortune” or a wise saying. They were invented in San Francisco (though San Franciscans like to blame them on Los Angeles). The fortunes were apparently added during the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in 1915, by the Benkiyodo bakery, possibly in relation to the Sperry Flour Company’s huge display at that fair (Peters 2013:179-180). They were quickly picked up by Chinese restaurants.

San Franciscans tend to blame it on Los Angeles and vice versa (McDermott 2000). One Anglo-American man in San Francisco made a career of writing the fortunes for the restaurants there. The fortune cookie found chroniclers in Jennifer 8 Lee (2009; yes, 8 is her middle name), and in Terry McDermott (2000), who researched it thoroughly for an article (a very humorous one) in the Los Angeles Times. Many of the fortunes are recycled bits of Western wisdom literature, and many of the fortune-writers are not Chinese.

            It turns out the fortune cookie does indeed come from Japan (Peters 2013). It is a cut-down, Americanized version of a Kyoto temple cookie. Makoto Hagiwara started the trend around 1900, at the Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park. Apparently it converged there (or near there) on the American sugar cookie. The fortune in the cookie goes back to the Golden Gate Park tea garden, and is found in Kyoto at least in recent years. Fortune cookies were a new and strange item in Hong Kong when I was first there in 1965; restauranteurs could not imagine why American tourists were insisting on them as inevitable Chinese restaurant trappings.

Fuchsia Dunlop has discovered in Shanghai a wafer of batter “pressed between two round irons” and then folded ovr a stuffing of “crushed nuts and sugar” (Dunlop 2016:293). This resembles the fortune cookie and is probably related to the Japanese tea wafer, but more interesting is its obvious relationship to central Asian sweets, including baklava. We are almost certainly dealing here with another central Asian sweetmeat survival. The “glutinous rice buns stuffed with candied rose petals” that Dunlop records for Suzhou (Dunlop 2016:292) are also of likely central Asian or Turkic relationship.

New waves of ever-more-affluent, ever-more-educated immigrants brought higher standards, and now the best restaurants in Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco are as good as any (except perhaps the very best) in Hong Kong or Taiwan. The Los Angeles area now has highly specialized restaurants; one excellent one specializes in hui tou, a shallow-fried dumpling like a pot-sticker but larger and juicier, with a rather thick wheat-flour skin surrounding finely minced, highly flavored pork or beef. Vegetarian and Buddhist restaurants exist, as do ones specializing in Zhuang minority food, Manchurian food, medical food, and countless other items. Dumplings are so popular that non-Han experts are emerging. Christopher St. Cavish, from Florida but now resident in China, has made a study of the xiao long bao (“little dragon dumpling,” a big meat dumpling boiled in soup, a Shanghainese specialty). He found that the ideal skin was thinner than 1.36 mm (which is very thin), 20% soup within, and folded with many pleats at the top (18-20 seems ideal but perhaps excessive; see Makinen 2015).

The southeast Asian immigration to America has brought thousands of ethnic-Chinese Vietnamese, Cambodians, Thai, and others, many of whom start complex fusion restaurants. For one example, the Mien Nghia Noodle Express in the San Gabriel Valley is Teochiu-Vietnamese. It serves almost exclusively noodle dishes, with all sorts of noodles: fine rice to wide rice, small egg-wheat noodles to large ones, and so on. The food is a Vietnamese-influenced fusion of Cantonese and Teochiu. The menu is in Chinese characters, English, and Vietnamese (in that order). Similarly complex blends, involving many Chinese and Southeast Asian traditions, abound in the San Gabriel Valley.

Far from all restaurants come up to this standard. Even the old-fashioned “chop suey joint” survives in rural communities; it has become all but extinct in urban America.

An odd side note on China in America is the development of the Bing cherry by Ah Bing, a six-foot-tall northern Chinese man working for the Quaker farm family of Lewelling in the late 19th century in Oregon. Seth Lewelling generously named the cherry after Bing (Newman 2019a).

Similar progress is documented for Australia, Japan, England, and elsewhere, with perhaps less eclipse of the low-end (Cheung and Tan 2007; Wu 2011; Wu and Cheung 2002). David Wu, anthropologist and self-described Chinese gourmet, has traveled widely in the world, and eaten at every sort of Chinese restaurant from the humblest New Guinea émigré shack to the finest and most expensive restaurants in China and Taiwan. He provides us a memoir (Wu 2011) with his reminiscences and frank opinions of Chinese food around the world—finding it very lacking indeed in many of the émigré communities.

In western South America, Chinese restaurants are known as chifa. The Chinese immigration to Peru came in the late 19th century, with Chinese labor imported for the worst and most unpleasant jobs, such as mining guano on bird islands. Chinese restaurants soon appeared in Lima, Peru, especially near the Santa Rosa cathedral and market at city center; a few blocks there became a Chinatown.  The word chifa is apparently a Spanish corruption of Cantonese jyu faan, “cook rice” (Siu 2022), but may be from Cantonese sik faan “eat rice.” The food is typical of the old “chop suey joint” style. It provides cheap, filling food. Peruvian items such as guinea pig slowly began to appear on the menus, and now a real fusion cuisine exists. New “wine palaces” in the central cities have not displaced the old chifas.

            In Hawaii, the old “chop suey joints”—fondly remembered by working-class sand student-class Hawaiians—have given way to “all you can eat buffets” that provide modernized but bland fare (Wu 2008; similar restaurants exist on the mainland, but are not so common). There are many Native Hawaiian and mainland Anglo-American influences in the cuisine. Emphasis has been on providing cheap, filling food to a varied but typically nonaffluent clientele. David Wu, veteran of countless meals in the Chinese diaspora and long resident in Hawaii, concludes that, in Hawaii, “[i]t is very difficult at this time to identify any Chinese restaurants that provide a fine dining and exquisite culinary experience” (Wu 2008:23). Fortunately, this is not true of the Pacific Coast mainland, nor any longer of Hawaii.

            Saimin noodles—from Cantonese for “small noodles”—have become rather Japanified, leaving the Hawaiians in doubt as to whether they were originally a Chinese or Japanese dish, but very clear that they are now a Hawaiian dish (Hino 2017).

            Chinese overseas continue to celebrate with traditional foods—long-life noodles for birthdays, cakes and sweets for life-passsage rites and at New Year, buns, dumplings, roast meat (Newman et al. 1988). In general, as Chinese immigrants acculturate to receiver societies, drinks and snacks change first; traditional festive dishes change last.

Noodles have received their own excellent and thorough history, Slippery Noodles by Hsiang Ju Lin (2015). This book actually tells the whole story of Chinese food, but focuses on the rise and development of this favorite item. An odd recent fad was knife-shaved noodles, cut off a block of dough (Wank 2015). These briefly went worldwide in Chinese restaurants. Chinese food is as prone to fads and fashions as any other, and always has been, as have fashions; “changeless China” did have some slow-to-change aspects, like the reliance on millets and rice, but some things change fast. (Serventi and Sabban, Pasta, 2002, remains the basic work on the history of noodles and pasta in the west; it has much on China also.)

And, last but not least, we learn that in New Zealand the Cantonese have invented “beetroot kau yuk,” meat in alternate slices with beets, with cooked-down juices poured over—basically the classic meat-and-taro dish with beets instead of taro (video from “Sik Fan Lah!” Cantonese cooking program, with Nathan Joe, shared by my niece-in-law Cassandra Naleileihua, 2023).

I have developed an interest in cultural ways that “swim upstream,” i.e. that not only survive in the face of Americanization but actually invade America itself. Chinese food and Italian food are the clear winners in this sweepstakes, though Andean and Celtic music, Australian Aboriginal art, French and Australian wines, and various other cultural entities are noteworthy as well.

In general, things that “swim upstream” have to be really good, and they have to be actively merchandised. It helps if they are purveyed by prestigious urban communities, but this is obviously not necessary, given the success of Australian Aboriginal art and Andean indigenous music. Some things fail simply because they come from cultures that do not like high-pressure salesmanship. A comparison I did between Finnish food and Chinese food in America revealed that Finnish restaurants failed not because the food was bad but because traditional Finnish hospitality requires that guests be fed without charge! 

Other immigrant communities (the Ethiopian, for instance) were less charitable and did well, but kept restaurants going just long enough to put their children through college, whereupon the children became engineers, lawyers and other white-collar workers. A brief burst of Ethiopian restaurants in major American cities has narrowed to a small number of dedicated survivors in areas where some immigration still goes on.

By contrast, the Chinese, even when college educated, love to start restaurants. The distinguished Sinologist and anthropologist Vivienne Lo, for instance, continues to carry on the family tradition; her father was the famous chef and restauranteur Kenneth Lo. Now, she helps her sister Jenny Lo with professional cooking and cookbook writing (Lo and Lo 2003). Chinese food is taking over the world more surely than American fast food. One reason is the dedication of Chinese in all walks of life to good eating. Another is the popularity of Chinese food with virtually everybody.

            Meanwhile, American food, inevitably often at its worst, has invaded East Asia. A superb collection of studies edited by James Watson (1997) records the progress of McDonald’s Hamburgers in Asia. Yan Yunxiang (1997), writing in Watson’s book, records how McDonald’s in China became the “in” place for sophisticated, worldly young people to be seen—a far cry from its identification in its homeland with more humble social realms. I have seen the same thing in Hong Kong. It always amazed me to see Hong Kong citizens, arguably the most food-conscious gourmets that have ever existed on this planet, flocking to a restaurant of this nature. (Incidentally, McDonald’s started in the next city to where I live: the hardscrabble city of San Bernardino, California. The McDonald brothers first opened a roadhouse a few miles to the west of the town, then settled in San Bernardino and began to branch out. The real spread of the chain, however, took place after they retired and sold out to Roy Kroc, who internationalized the chain. See Schlosser 2002. Roy Kroc and his wife became leading philanthropists, investing the huge profits of the chain in many good causes.) 

            There was in 2012 a vast potato chip boom in China. Lay’s had the largest market share, but there were local imitations. Growers displaced grassland and herders in Inner Mongolia to grow the potatoes. Quality control was a problem—only 1 out of 3 big potatoes usually makes the cut (!). The sustainable grassland-herding economy gave way to an unsustainable potato boom (K. D. Anderson and Isenhour 2012). The boom wilted, and one hopes the grass could return.

With globalization, international influences have also influenced Chinese food in its homeland. First, the worldwide mid-20th-century fondness for meat, oil and sugar influenced Chinese food, which became far less healthy than it had formerly been. This process ran from about the middle 1960’s to the 1990’s. By the 1980s, a reaction was beginning, again tracking trends elsewhere. The emphasis returned to healthier fare, with smaller portions, more vegetables, more delicate cooking, more attention to fresh high-quality ingredients, and above all less fat and sugar.

This may have been “nouvelle” cuisine in France and America, but it was, for China, a return to the status quo ante. It has certainly led to what almost anyone would describe as a marked improvement, if one compares a good Chinese restaurant today with one 20 years ago. But the great restaurants of 40 and more years ago remain, in my opinion, unequalled today. The biggest difference is in the ingredients. Few if any restauranteurs today raise their own chickens and feed them entirely on sesame seeds, for instance. And, more tragically, the superb sea foods of the old days simply do not exist any more. They have been fished to extinction.

            On the other hand, nouvelle cuisine is alive and well in China’s newly opulent cities with their nouveaux riches desperate for status consumption (see e.g. Farquhar 2002). Cantonese cuisine has benefited, or suffered, depending on one’s taste, and the resulting challenge to Cantonese tradition has been the subject of a stunningly good and thorough review by Jakob Klein (2007). Klein documents the rise of expensive nouvelle Cantonese restaurants in Hong Kong and Guangzhou; meanwhile the traditional food suffers some eclipse, partly because of the difficulty of getting good ingredients in these environmentally-sad times. Klein’s investigation of the sociological and personal experiences that result defies summary and needs serious reading. Klein has also given wonderful accounts of the revival of traditional Cantonese food in Guangzhou; some old-timers are not satisfied, but at least they have something of the good old days back (Klein 2006, 2007). Klein tells of Old Uncle Lu, who complains of sloppy cooking but still eats at the venerable teashop in the center of town.

            “Fusion cuisine” has become a fad in California and some other multicultural environs. Chinese food is often blended with French, Japanese, Italian, and other “great” cuisines (D. Wu 2012). The results are always striking and sometimes (!) successful…. One remembers that this is no new phenomenon; fusion cuisine at its most fused (so to speak) is documented in the Yinshan Zhengyao and many similar medieval works.

            All this raises the question of “authenticity.”  Obviously, by now, “authentic” Chinese food is a very slippery concept. Hamburgers are not authentic Chinese food, but what do you say about the split bao buns stuffed with flattened Chinese meatballs that were popular a few years ago in teashops?  They were thoroughly traditional in taste, but made to look like the prestigious hamburger. And what of the thousands of species of fish and shellfish now used in Chinese restaurants round the world?  Most were unknown in old China, but they are now cooked in thoroughly Chinese ways, and they taste just fine. And it always makes me feel a bit weird to eat hot-and-sour soup (suanlatang) that doesn’t have dried daylily buds or coagulated blood in it. But, in much of the world, you can’t get daylily buds, and people won’t eat blood. So, hot-and-sour soup adapts. Some westernization is a total disaster, such as using sherry instead of Chinese jiu in cooking, or thickening sauces with flour. Other westernization works fine, such as adopting asparagus and other newly-Asianized western vegetables. One has to look case by case. (Lo and Lo’s 2003 cookbook talks thoughtfully about such matters; see also David Wu 2008) 

            So I prefer to talk about what is traditional—what has been around for generations—and what is new. Then I care about whether the result tastes good. I let someone else worry about “authenticity.” 

Chapter 16. Food as Medicine

            As usual, Joseph Needham’s magisterial Science and Civilisation in China series is the place to start. Needham’s own contributions to the medical sections (Needham and Lu 1974; Needham, Ho and Lu 1976) are basic, not only at grounding the medical tradition, but at comparing it with European medicine. Needham lacked only a knowledge of the Near Eastern and Central Asian contributions, a gap that Paul Buell and I have tried to fill (Buell, Anderson and Perry 2010; Buell and Anderson 2021). Needham and his team provided a full introduction to incenses and elixirs, including the eating of poisons in the hopes of achieving immortality, an area of research vastly expanded and updated by Yan Liu in Healing with Poisons (2021).

Needham’s comparisons of China and Europe stress intellectual parallels and similarities. He saw China, Europe, and other civilizations working toward a common goal of understanding the world through science—broadly defined. Anyone who looked at the world and engaged in serious, ongoing attempts to understand it and predict reality would count. Nathan Sivin famously countered by stressing the basic, essential differences of these civiliations, and the lack of a common project.

Needham answered Nathan Sivin’s various claims that Chinese medicine is a totally separate, intellectually closed world, thus making comparisons with the west irrelevant. Time has not been kind to Sivin; Buell and I closed the circle by documenting the enormous influences from the west to China over millennia (Buell et al. 2020; Buell and Anderson 2021). Needham suspected, but did not realize, the extent of connection. The problem goes deeper than Sivin’s lack of knowledge. Sivin had a wrong-headed notion of “culture” as a closed system, a steel-walled sphere, structured so as to be impregnable. For him, Chinese medicine was a neat, consistent intellectual creation. In fact, “culture” in this sense is a scholars’ creation. Ordinary people have knowledge systems, but these are messy, constantly changing, and not necessarily internally consistent. They are dynamic. They are means of coping with the world, not philosophic creations intended to be timeless. They are thus made up of science in Needham’s sense, since ordinary people must understand reality enough to make a living, and genuinely different beliefs and principles that are distinctive, though never independent from neighboring cultures

Bernard Read’s classic studies have been drawn on for The Food of China (Anderson 1988, but I may now add “The Dragon in Chinese Medicine” (Read 1939). We need all the dragons we can get. The main medicinal use, of course, was in the form of “dragon bones,” i.e. fossils; they were a good source of calcium, and used for that was often identifiably calcium shortage.

Judith Farquhar’s classic studies of Chinese medicine included a fine essay, “Eating Chinese Medicine” (1994), which even deals with gourmet aspects of Chinese medicinal foods.

A huge study of Chinese medicinal foods was done by Ute Engelhardt and Carl-Hermann Hampen (1997), but I have not seen it. The same goes for a shorter work by Heine (1988).

            Since Pillsbury’s classic article (1978) there have been several studies of “doing the month”—recovering from childbirth. Pregnant women are at first cold for three months, then neutral, then hot,  and have to eat accordingly. Women after childbirth still stay warm and quiet and eat high-protein, high-iron foods; the custom, so valuable if restricting, has not changed as much as most traditions in this modern world. Pork liver is a favorite for this and for building blood. It works, being the richest in iron and vitamin B12 of any common food. Pigs’ feet cooked with vinegar and Chinese wine provide calcium and other minerals. Also valued are eggs—often in incredible quantities—and greens. Red foods such as red jujubes, peanuts (Chinese peanuts have red skins), and red wine are used for buillding blood, but with less excuse—they have some value, but their color is the main draw. By similar magical thinking, black foods—black jujubes, black chickens, black dog meat, Guinness Stout (called “black dog” in colloquial Chinese)—are used to build body. Their saturated color is thought to indicate their strength. Variants of “doing the month” occur widely in Eurasia, from Bangladesh to Spain and thence to the New World, so it may be a part of the Greek humoral medical tradition that shares that distribution. Some scholars have seen it as part of the repression of women common in those cultures, but the fact is that “doing the month” involved rest, warming, and diet that was necessary to the survival of mothers and infants in the old days. It now receives some support from modern medical writers—at least the milder forms involving rest and good protein-rich food, not the mother-roasting and restriction to the house. Those made sense in the old days of rampant infection, but no longer do.

            Infant feeding methods in old times were studied by B. S. Platt and S. Y. Gin (undated separate from Archives of Disease in Childhood, ca. 1938). In the 1930s, Chinese (largely Yangzi Delta people) breastfeeding was almost universal. Thirty-six families had used a wet nurse; otherwise, mothers nursed their infants, though six mothers used powdered milk (having been apparently unable to nurse) and one claimed, unbelievably, to have used only rice powder. Rice powder was used as supplement from very early. From five or six months, soft rice supplemented the milk, and from about eight months, soup, eggs, and the like. Chinese jujubes often came in at this point to promote blood and body; the jujubes do have iron and vitamin C. Mothers ate pork, dry beans, cuttlefish, chicken, shrimp, sea cucumber, Chinese wine, wheat cakes, and millet to produce more milk. They were aware of the nutritional value of silkworms, which are indeed very rich in vitamins and minerals. The pupae are a standard food after the silk is reeled from them. Interestingly, soymilk was not used for feeding babies.

            Burton Pasternak and Wang Ching did another look at this much later (Pasternak and Ching 1985). They found that mothers in urban China still breastfed their babies up to 20 months or more. China was thankfully free from ads for formula. Boys and girls got equal nursing time and amount, in spite of continuing attitudes favoring boys n most ways.

The myths die hard. I heard in Taiwan in the 1970s that certain rich and powerful individuals abstained from rice noodles, humorally dry foods (such as peanuts), etc., eating instead a good deal of easily digested, nutritious food like chicken and vegetables and fruits. They drink honey and use little oil. This enables them to enjoy many lovers, which in turn built more vigor, since they could absorb yin energy from them. They even eat ground pearls to supplement yang force.

            Of course, some plants really are nutritionally superior. In addition to the pine seeds noted above (and now threatened by overharvesting; Allen 1989), the berries and leaves of Chinese wolfthorn (Lycium chinense; go qi zi and go qi zai respectively) are so rich in vitamins and minerals that they have served as de facto vitamin pills for millennia.

            The dietary combinations (shiwu xiangfan or shiwu xiangke—“food things that mutually dominate”) so feared in Chinese tradition have received some further attention since my coverage in The Food of China; see Lo (2005). Incompatibilities between medicine and food have a different name, fuyao shiji.

            Tea is proving itself; green tea, in particular, turns out to be preventive of heart disease, and other degenerative conditions. It may help with cancer (or may not; Eisenstein 2023). This confirms the long-maligned enthusiasm of the famous Dutch “tea doctor,” Bontekoe, who was long ridiculed for insightfully making these claims in the 17th century. This is apparently because of the catechin tannins and other bioflavinoids and polyphenols that tea contains. “White tea”—tea leaves steamed at picking and then dried, so that they retain more of their chemical compounds—is better still. It slows bacterial growth and kills fungi (Conis 2005).

            Soy sauce is, on the one hand, a superb source of vitamins and amino acids, but on the other it is high in salt. This was once necessary—there were few other sources—but today it adds to a highly salted modern diet, with bad effects for sensitive people. Tofu, on the other hand, reduces risk of heart disease (Eisenstein 2023).

Then there are other medicinal matters…. Cockroaches, boiled to treat colds and pimples, found a more subtle yet direct use in the Castle Peak Bay community where I lived for two years. When a child was “shamming sick” to get out of going to school, his or her mother would quickly brew up some cockroaches and say, “All right, here, take this.”  The usual response was, “No, no, I’m fine, I’m going to school!” 

More serious is the use of endangered species as bu pin (supplementing foods; supposedly strengthening and tonic) or other uses. Pangolins are now endangered worldwide because of the alleged, but wholly imaginary, medicinal value of their scales. The Yellow-breasted Bunting (Emberiza aureola; huangxiong wu) formerly occurred in tens of millions. It is now down to tens of thousands. Always a popular food but able to survive heavy hunting, it was first hit hard by Mao Zedong’s anti-sparrow campaign. That campaign quickly died when huge insect outbreaks followed the slaying of sparrows, buntings, and other small birds, but then the bunting came increasingly (at least since the 1990s) to be seen as a bu pin, and massacred accordingly, though it is now protected. The world population is down to a few tens of thousands, and the bird may soon be extinct (Yali Wang et al. 2019).

            Several hallucinogenic plants were known to Chinese traditional medicine, including henbane (Hyoscyamus niger), datura (Datura spp.), marijuana (Cannabis sativa), and toxic mushrooms including Amanita and a “laughing mushroom” that may have been a Panaeolus (Li 1977). These plants made people see ghosts or “devils.”  Some plants that are toxic but not really hallucinogenic were classed with them; Phytolacca and Ranunculus, for instance.

            Moving from historical research to China today (see e.g. Farquhar 1993, 1994; Kleinman et al. 1975):  A brilliant new group of experts on Chinese medicine has arisen, many forming a network based around the Needham Institute at Cambridge. Their research has focused largely on clinical treatment practice (Hsu 1999, 2001), but food cannot be neglected in any study of Chinese medicine, and they do not neglect it (see esp. Engelhardt 2001; Engelhardt and Hempen 1997).

Livia Kohn has reviewed much Daoist practice (Kohn 2005). The Newman and Halporn (2004) anthology noted above has several articles on food and medicine, including one by myself (Anderson 2004). Chinese traditionally focused on trying to maximize longevity—not a surprising concern in a country whose traditional life expectancy was in the 25-30 range. Equally unsurprising, given China’s history of famine, was the fact that they were most concerned with nutrition. Poetry reflected health beliefs; Taoist poetry is full of medical views (Cheng and Collet 1998).

            Chinese food is indeed very healthy, or once was. Ironically, much of the health value comes not from the foods believed to be good for you, but from the humble, often-despised everyday grains and greens. Studies by T. Colin Campbell and associates at Cornell University in the 1980s and 1990s showed that Chinese under traditional rural conditions had incredibly low levels of cholesterol (average 127—vs. over 200 in the contemporary USA), were lean and in good shape, and had very low rates of heart disease, many cancers, and other circulatory and degenerative ailments (Campbell and Campbell 2005; Campbell and Chen 1994; Chen et al 1990; Lang 1989). Some areas, at least, had rather high rates of cancer. Cancer incidence can increase from having too low a cholesterol level (Barbara Anderson, personal communication). But, in general, traditional Chinese food was healthful. Some “long-life villages” in south China—often Thai-speaking villages—have especially long life expectancies (as do villages in parts of southern Japan, notably Okinawa, which has the highest life expectancy in the world). The secret seems to be mountain air and water, mountain exercise, and a diet of whole or nearly-whole grains, vegetables, some fish, and little meat.

            Chinese women traditionally breastfed for a long time, sometimes three years (but usually half of that). Frequent pregnancy and long lactation, and frequent spells of malnutrition, meant that women rather rarely menstruated, which may explain Chinese beliefs about menstruation as a rather strange and dangerous state (Harrell 1981). A large number of fascinating medical beliefs about breasts, breastfeeding, and breast health went—in general—to support breastfeeding in traditional China, but some were complex medical beliefs with obscure origins (see Wu 2011).

            On the other hand, liver flukes abounded of old, thanks largely to eating raw or undercooked carp and similar fish. Opisthorchis viverrini is particularly common today. “Many still believe that the O. viverrini parasite can be killed through fermentation, preparation of raw fish with chilies or lime, or consumption with alcohol” (Ziegler et al 2011). No, and even freezing, salting and drying do not kill it. There is no solution except thorough cooking.

Today, the situation is changing, and not always for the better. Eating more meat, fat, and sugar, and less vegetables, bean curd, and unprocessed grain, has led to skyrocketing rates of obesity and diabetes. Longevity increases with modern medicine, but heart attacks are commoner. Moreover, the Chinese government has turned away from its spectacular early successes in medical care, which more than doubled life expectancy from the 1940s to the 1980s. Health spending as a part of total government spending declined “from 28% to 14% between 1981 and 1993, allocation to the rural ‘cooperative medical-insurance system’ decreased from 20% to 2%,” while rampant corruption and price-gouging have denied care to the poor (Dong, Hoven and Rosenfeld 2005:573-574). Given the epidemics of SARS, AIDS, and COVID-19, as well as the drastic decline in healthy eating, China is in deep trouble. Problems for the future include not only obesity and diabetes, but specific deficiencies, such as anemia (chronic in China for millennia) and folic acid deficiency (an emergent danger with the decline in eating vegetables and whole grains). Folic acid deficiency is probably the major cause of birth defects round the world, and is problematic though now rather uncommon increasing in China.

This is not without effect. Xu Lin, a Chinese nutritionist who had studied under Campbell, says: “Before the 1980s, the diabetes rate in China was lower than 1%. Now it’s over 12%.” (Quoted in Ye and Leeming 2023:S14.) The rate is up to 20% in the elderly. In 1980, the disposable income of urban residents was less than 500 yuan each year (US $294 at the time). Rurual residents, who then accounted for 80% of the country’s population, each had only 190 yuan” (Ye and Leeming 2023:S14). As of 2023, disposable income is over 100 times as high. Much of it goes for meat, often fatty, and sweets. The old grain-and-vegetables diet is rare now. Heart disease and obesity have increased accordingly.

On the other hand, life expectancy continues to increase (so far), and the Chinese live almost as long as Westerners. In Taiwan, and parts of south China, they live as long as do the inhabitants of many European nations or the United States. Food and medical care continue to be reasonably adequate, and the scale of differences from two generations ago are almost unparalleled in world history. However, public health care is declining seriously in rural areas (Arif Dirlik, talk of May 26, 2005, UCR), threatening the future.

            Meanwhile, Chinese medicinal food has spread to the western world, not only via books but also via such restaurants as the TT Chinese Imperial Cuisine of San Gabriel, CA—a restaurant serving medicinal foods to the local Chinese community. In China itself, restaurants serving yaoshan—“medical dining,” traditional medicinal dishes—have been growing in number and elaborateness since their beginning around 1980 in Sichuan. They use variously-updated recipes from the medical-nutrition classics.

            And the Chinese were right about one thing: there are five tastes, not four. To the west’s classic four tastes—salt, sweet, sour, and bitter—they added a fifth, shan, “meaty.” A Japanese researcher in the early 20th century confirmed this, finding that the human tongue has receptors for glutamate, giving us the taste known in Japanese (and now in English) as umami. This gives the spark to MSG and many Asian ferments. And to end this ms with a correction: In 1988 I reported that MSG could cause flushing and discomfort, the “Chinese restaurant syndrome.”  This seems to be a rare allergy, not a normal event; the syndrome was usually psychosomatic. It was depessingly hyped by racist attitudes.

            Chinese medicinal cooking is a fine art in its own right. Medicinal food restaurants, usually specializing in bu pin, now abound. The Nature Pagoda in San Gabriel, a small café, has been enduring since 1997, serving herbal soups and nutraceutical sand pots (clay pots) and desserts, as well as more ordinary snacks. Soups generally pair a medicinal herb like ginseng with such bu pin staples as “old chicken” (advertised as such), dried scallops, duck, pig’s tail, black chicken, and even ox penis. The base is usually broth from those old chickens. (Older ones are more strong and vigorous, so more bu.) One adds chingbuliang—“cleansing, strengthening, and cooling,” chingpouleung in Cantonese—herbs to the chicken. The mix is a classic Cantonese cooling herbal soup. The clay pots have the same basic meats, plus salted fish of various kinds, ground pork, and a bed of white rice. The food is clear, simple, refined, and very mild in flavor, as is typical of such medicinal restaurants.

            Healing Herbal Soups, by Rose Cheung and Genevieve Wong, is a wonderful introduction to Cantonese folk medicine. The authors explain hot, cold, damp (wet), and dry, the values of bu pin (pou pan in Cantonese) and chingpouleung soup, the many virtues of “monk gourd” (their name for lohan guo), and all the virtues of the many excellent herbal soup recipes they provide. Many of these include pork and other good foods; one avoids the herbs but eats the regular foodstuffs. They are aware of the virtues of goji berries, the need for warming and restorative soups after childbirth, and the alleged wonders of ginseng. They recycle the classic Cantonese belief that male poultry are “poison,” i.e. bring out poisons in the system. They also advise not using the head and neck of poultry, and of seeking out black chickens (which are for sale in Chinese markets in southern California). They have a great deal of information on the seasons; each season has its special herbal soups. They also have a quite amazing guide to what activity and rest to do in each two-hour period of the day, starting, as Chinese days do, at 11:00 p.m. Each Chinese hour (two western hours) has its particular organ associated, and particular levels of rest or activity to keep it healthy. The advice is excellent, though of course the organs do not really change suddenly when the clock strikes the hour; it is a gradual shift with much overlapping and slow change. Their Cantonese folk medical advice and basic Chinese herbal and medical lore all seem perfectly traditional. They also provide what they can of international biomedical findings, but here they are a bit spacy—not always able to separate Chinese claims from proven facts. A very minor problem with a wonderful book.

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Appendix: Korean food, mainly what is not covered in Crossroads of Cuisine

            The definitive book on Korean food, so far, is Michael Pettid’s Korean Cuisine (2008). I draw on it heavily below.

            Korean is related to the Tungus languages, and almost certainly to Japanese, though the split from that language was very ancient. Resemblances are confused by countless loanwords going back and forth. Korean has also borrowed heavily from Chinese, but is not even remotely related to it.

It should be noted that there are two transcription systems of Korean script into English. The older McCune-Reischauer system more accurately represents the sounds of the language, but the new Korean national system has taken over, following Korean diaspora around the world. Many terms below will be given in both systems, the older one recognizable by using p, t, k for the stop consonants that become b, d, g in the new system (and ch becomes j). I try to give the commoner form and then the other one, but tend to prefer the older, since it represents the actual spoken sounds better.

The Korean script is the only phonemically and phonetically precise script in ordinary use anywhere in the world. It was based rather freely on the Phagspa script, invented by the Tibetan monk Phagspa for the Mongols. It was invented in the time of King Sejong (1397-1450), and refined since. According to tradition, it is based on the three layers of the Confucian cosmos, Heaven above, Humans in the middle, and Earth below. It is also said to be based on the shapes of the mouth as it enunciates (Lee and Ramsey 2011). One must use some imagination to see this in the neat, geometric forms of the script, but they are perfectly set up by modern phonemic standards. The Koreans had previously used Chinese characters, transliterating their own language, and Chinese continued to supply most of the substantive words until modern times.

            Agriculture has been traced back to 4800 BCE. It is surely older. Early Neolithic chŭlmun pottery dates back to 6000 BCE, and probably went with agriculture (Seth 2011:11). A cruder pottery is even earlier, but was used to cook sea food, and is not associated with agriculture (Shoda et al. 2017). Broomcorn and foxtail millets both appear from then on. The Eurasia-wide (and probably worldwide) cold and dry period around 4000-4200 years ago shows up clearly (Park et al. 2021). Barley and wheat appear about 2000 BCE, the same time they reached northern China. Adzuki beans go from wild to tame from that period onward. Barnyard millet is a late arrival. Perilla may be cultivated very early, and certainly is known by the Mumun period after 1000 BCE. Wet rice and soybeans are found in Mumun and may be earlier (Crawford and Lee 2003). Archaeologists turned up beaver bones in Pleistocene Korea, though beaver don’t occur in E Asia now.

Rice increased from 1500 to 600 BCE, the grains changing from small and narrow to big and plump. New rice varieties came in. The ancient semilunar havesting knife was replaced by iron sickles (M. Kim et al. 2013). This allowed rapid harvest but making it more difficult to select special head for seed and ritual. Settlements grew and nucleated, apparently producing conflict, but conflict waned after 200 BCE, as cooperation was needed to produce rice paddies and other irrigation works (M. Kim et al. 2019). Another dry period seems to have occurred around 800-300 BCE, possibly explaining this (Park et al. 2021). Early kingdoms in Korea show more genetic relationships with Japan than we find today (University of Vienna 2022).

In the Koryŏ (Goryeo) Dynasty (918-1392, Korean food became sophisticated. One Xu Jing traveled from China to Korea in the early 12th century, and found the Koreans surprisingly civilized for “eastern barbarians,” eating food that was simple but decently served by Chinese standards (Vermeesch 2016). Tea culture flourished, and was related to the magnificent Koryŏ celadon ceramics, which have been called the most beautiful ceramics ever made in the world. Their pale green color sets off tea perfectly. They were made partly with this in mind.

Rice became less rare at this time. Rice cakes became important food, in many varieties. Vegetables at the time included: “Radish, turnips, lotus roots, taro, leeks, dropwort, lettuce, hooyhock [mallows, Malva parvifolia complex], green onions, water shields [Brasenia], garlic, shallots, cucumbers, and eggplants” (Yun1993:10). Kimchi and relatives already existed. So did sullongt’ang, bone and tripe soup, still popular.

In the following Chosŏn (Joseong) period, the New World crops came to Korea, providing a desperately needed relief from crowding on a mountainous and often infertile peninsula. Squash, white and sweet potatoes, tomatoes, and most important of all, the chile pepper, came over time, white potatoes possibly not until after 1800; sweet potatoes had been there since 1753, supposedly introduced from Japan by one Cho’ŏm (Yun 1993:11), though I am sure they were there long before (as they certainly were in China).

Korean food is as dependent on grain staples as other East Asian foods. Rice was traditionally the prestige starch, but was a luxury everywhere, the more so as one went north from subtropical Jeju Island to the subarctic cold of the northern mountains. Usually, people depended on barley, millets, and buckwheat, in various combinations. These often became noodles. Lacking gluten, they were variously prepared; I assume they were often forced through a sieve into boiling water, as in China.

A long passage from around 1500, quoted by Pettid (2008:27), describes an elite meal of the time, with fresh herbs, boiled vegetables, kimchi and the like, rice, soup, soy sauce, broiled fish or meat, and trimmings. Ordinary people made do with some sort of boiled grain and some soup or vegetables. A royal banquet could typically run around 30 courses, counting pickles and sauces, as well as several drinks (Pettid 2008:135-136 lists the whole array).

            Rice is pap (or bap). As elsewhere in eastern Asia, this term—focally denoting cooked rice—can mean a grain staple, or a meal, or food in general, by extension. Sticky rice—short-grain japonica—is preferred. Its stickiness is exploited in the countless rice cakes (ttŏk), made of rice flour either mixed with other flours (such as chestnut or mugwort) or made into wrappings around stuffings of the same and other ingredients. Rice cakes with mugwort are a traditional spring delight. Mugwort (Artemisia vulgaris) is bitter in a refreshing way, It is also slightly poisonous in heavy doses, and used to kill worms, repel insect pests, and clean up possibly septic situations, so its use as food has some medicinal value. The Chusŏk festival, East Asian New  Year’s Day (around early February), particularly features rice cakes, including the mugwort ones, as well as other rice dishes and special foods.

            Congee—rice gruel—is chuk (juk). It is not only a common everyday food, but it takes on special forms, often medicinal (bonjuk). A vast range of medicinal foods and herbs find their way into these. Abalone congee was an Imperial delicacy.

Food to accompany the grain staple has its own special word, as elsewhere. Side dishes with a meal are served in small separate plates and known as banchan (panch’an). Originally this meant anything eaten with rice (like sung in Cantonese), but now it applies solely to these side dishes. Traditionally, only the Emperor and his family could have an even number of these. Today, anyone qualifies.

A meal is bapsang (bap for rice of course), soup kuk (guk). Jang is the more traditional term for the salted side dishes that now are just banchan. Chopped spices and herbs as banchan are yangnyom. A main meal will have about seven of these—less for a minor occasion, more for a feast. One restaurant in Los Angeles, famous for its banchan, provides 18 small dishes for a single individual’s light lunch. The inevitable kimchi is supplemented with boiled vegetables, dressed greens, mushrooms, sea food, a+nd various pickles and spicy preparations.

A standard breakfast or lunch dish is pipim pap (bibimbap), cooked rice with various toppings including kimchi or the like and an egg. It is very well known to travelers on Korean Airways, as their standard breakfast option.

Meat was a luxury in the old days, but was consumed in large quantities when available, and today Korean food is meat-heavy. Do-it-yourself barbecue on metal cones over a live fire is overwhelmingly popular, and has gone worldwide. Pulkogi (bulgogi) is particularly famous, but short ribs, pork belly, and other delights certainly rival it in taste. The meat is marinated in highly spiced mixes. Hot pot, noodle dishes, and various dumplings are also extremely popular. The dumplings betray Central Asian origin by their Turkic name, mantu (mandu).

Korea being a peninsula with many islands, sea food is abundant and popular. Almost anything marine is eaten, up to and including stew of pollack guts, an acquired taste. Squid cookery is notably diverse and outstanding.

Blood sausage (sundae) is popular. Sohui Kim, in a beautiful photo-cookbook with fine recipes (S. Kim 2018:176), tells you how to make it, a long process that will probably remain confined to Korean experts. She also provides instruction on making your own Spam (pp. 188-189). Like Hawaiians, Koreans leaned to love Spam in the hard times during and after WWII, and again during the Korean War. The dwindling number of us who remember the US home front in WWII have distinctly less loving memories of that item, and are always amused to see how choice it is in Hawaii and Korea. Nostalgia extends to pudae chigae, “military-camp stew,” a stew including Spam and hot dogs—items available from US military installations during and after the Korean War.

            Korean food depends heavily on fermentation. Kinchi, pickled Chinese cabbage with chiles, is the most famous (the following information on it comes from Surya and Lee 2022; Surya and Nugroho 2023). It involves Lactobacillus fermentation, heavy salting being used to prevent spoilage. Kimjang is the process of making it, specifically the huge fall rush. It is most often made from baechu, white cabbage. Sea food in kimchi or chile sauce is jeotgal (chotkal). The sea food may be fermented as well as the sauces (Pettid 2008:93). There is a whole philosophy around kimchi and the making of it.

            At least 95% of South Koreans eat kimchi more than once a day, often at all meals. Two million tons are consumed annually, working out to ½ to 1 cup per person per day, 1/3 of their vegetable intake. It can have some vitamin C, though pickling usually destroys this. Meat/fish and fish sauce in it appear only since Choson, and nappa cabbage only got to Korea then too, around the 16th century, like chiles. Soy sauce ferments came in Choson, were popular, have pretty much died out. A 1760 cookbook already has many recipes, plus 61 kinds of jiu (Cho 2020). In 2021 a Chinese pair of characters was invented for it, pron xinqi.

Kkakdugi is kinchi with white radish, chonggak includes the variety called ponytail radish, yeolmu (yŏlmu)is the product from fresh young summer radish. Tongbaechu uses whole cabbages (mak is the usual cut-up one), yangbaechu green cabbages. Pa is made with green onions, gat with mustard leaves, buchu with garlic chives, kkaenip with perilla leaves. Green pepper and cucumber stuffed with chopped carrot and chives make gochu sobagi and oi sobagi. Dongchimi and nabak use more mul—water, brine.

Sohui Kim has a thorough and well-photographed guide to making standard and variant kimchis (pp. 110-129). One is perilla-leaf kimchi, kketnip kimchi; perilla is indeed related to catnip, but the word resemblance seems accidental. (The perilla plant, Perilla frutescens, is deulkkae; the leaf is kketnip or khaennip. It is shiso in Japanese. It is often mistranslated as sesame in Korean and Japanese menus and other sources, apparently because of vague similarity of the seeds; the plants are not related.) The journal Koreana in 2008 had an entire issue on kimchi, including an article extolling it as a miraculous cure for ailments (Young 2008).

Kimchi is often used in stew, kimchi jjigae. Kimchi in pancakes gives us kimchi buchimgae. Kimchi soup is simply named kimchi guk, guk meaningsoup  Kimchi fried rice is kimchi bokkeumbap. Gochugaru, red chile powder, generally gets into kimchi. Over 16 bacteria species, plus yeasts etc., are involved, including Lactobacillus kimchii and Weisella kimchii. Even Leuconostoc and Candida get into it. There is even a philosophy of kimchi, which includes the usual East Asian ideas of yin and yang, the five elements, balance and harmony, beauty, filial piety, and patience. In short: Bogi joeun tteogi meokgido jota, “what looks good tastes good” (Surya and Lee 2022).

            Soy sauce is kanjang, red pepper sauce is koch’ujang, the familiar gochujang of Korean restaurants and markets. A fermented soy paste is toenjang (Pettid 2008:35).

More complex is jang (different from the word for a meal), the Korean form of the Chinese word jiang and the item it describes: fermented soybean paste. Not only Lactobacillus, but a large number of other bacteria, as well as yeasts and other fungi, go into the various forms of jang. The beans are steamed, dried, and then fermented in brine. Ground with chiles, they become gochujang, the famous Korean sauce for many purposes. It has a strong soy paste flavor as well as varying but often high levels of capsaicin “heat.”

            Pickles, generally Lactobacillus ferments, often with other agents, accompany, or used to accompany, every Korean meal. They still appear at every major occasion among the banchan.

            Dependence on pickles for vegetables during the harsh Korean winters was associated with high rates of stroke (cerebrovascular accident); Korea long led the world in this cause of death. Cold storage and good transportation reduced the need for pickles, and the stroke rate has rapidly and steadily dropped.

All the above pickles require incredible amounts of chile peppers. Korea must be far ahead of Mexico in chile consumption per capita. Chiles are first noted in 1614 (Pettid 2008:45), but were surely there before then. They probably came with the Portuguese, possibly via Japan, about the time of the Imjin wars, Japan’s attempted conquest of Korea around 1592. The Korean word for chile is gochu, but that term is found in older texts. so must have been used for some other plant.

            Maangchi (Emily Kwang-Sook Kim) provides another wonderfully illustrated and extremely useful photo-cookbook, Maangchi’s Big Book of Korean Cooking, with Martha Rose Shulman (2019). Among many other things, she gives directions for dosirak, the Korean version of the Japanese bentō. The bento is an elaborately planned and packed lunchbox. Japanese mothers try to outdo each other, or more often imitate an impossible standard of perfection, in packing these boxes for their children, to the point at which bento have become gourmet items in high-priced and thoroughly adult restaurants. The dosirak has yet to achieve such fame, but may soon. More nostalgia for the old days (besides Spam) is shown in the fish-soy-starch sausages of the poverty days, as “Good Memories Sausage” (Maangchi 2019:274).

            Chapch’ae (japchae) is a mixed stir-fry, of fairly obvious ancestry: chapchai is the name of the same dish in Hokkien. Many other Chinese foods have been borrowed over the years (Pettid 2008:172-173). One is chajang-myŏn, which will recall the superb jajiang mian of China, but I have experience it, alas, as a dismal cook-up of noodles and black beans.

            The national distilled drink is soju, monographed by Hyunhee Park (2021). It is a low-alcohol vodka, made from grains and distilled fairly gently, and often diluted, so its alcohol content is usually closer to 20% than true vodka’s 40%. It has gone worldwide, its popularity spreading outward from Korean restaurants. The best forms have the advantage of a pleasant grain taste along with lower alcohol than hard liquor. Samsu (from Chinese sanshu, “triple-distilled”) is stronger, more directly comparable to vodka, and is often made from sweet potatoes instead of grain. A drink whose popularity is still largely confined to Koreans is makkolli (makgeolli), a mild rice beer, carbonated and wonderfully flavorful. It is the perfect soothing and cooling accompaniment to Korean food fiery with chiles. I expect a boom in its popularity soon.

I actually much prefer makkŏli (makgeolli)—Korean rice beer. It is like southeast Asian tapai, and is somewhat carbonated. It is sometimes made with chestnut flour in addition to rice; this is sambam makgeolli; it has a sweet nutlike yeasty flavor. Kook Soon Dong is a good brand for the regular cloudy sort. Makgeolli was the ordinary drink of the old days, easily brewed at home in a few days or even hours. Sikhye was similar (Pettid 2008:126-127); lightly fermented, it was enjoyed cold in summer as a cooling drink.

Filtered, it becomes yakju, which is distilled to produce soju. The ferment starter is nuruk. Makkŏli is often served with jeon, mungbean or similar pancakes. Makkŏli is often made from wheat these days, because of a ban on rice in a hungry period some decades ago, but rice is coming back now (Swanson 2019).

Grape and flavored wines existed in Koryŏ times (Koreana 1993:10).

Korean for Chinese jiu is suk. Sake is also used, sometimes pronounced hake. A whole panoply of flavored, scented, fruit-infused, and otherwise modified ales (ch’ongju, or yakchu “medicinal wine”) is described by Pettid (2008:116-117). He calls them “wines.” They are clear and fairly strong, and are elite drinks, thus corresponding socially to wines in Europe. Pettid quotes or cites several poems to these various drinks.

Tea was a luxury. Ordinary people drank, and almost everyone still seems to love, barley tea (pori ch’a; note the Chinese loanword for tea). It is indeed refreshing, especially cold in summer, with a delightful grain taste. This delicate, otherwise hard to describe taste is typical of koso hada, subtle flavor (Pettid 2008:127).

            Some discoveries in the Korean markets of Los Angeles, plus a few from the literature:

Changatchi, pickles in soy preparations

Dotori-muk (tot’ori muk): acorn jelly. Muk means jelly and usually implies this (Wikipedia). It is a solid cake, with a texture like rice cakes. It lacks the bitterness of Indigenous California acorn mush, and is not grainy and soft like that commodity. It is made from acorns soaked to remove tannin, ground, then heated with water to make jelly, which is sliced and served with seasonings (Pettid 2008:106 and my observations).

Durup: an herb, crisp but chewy, very good with garlic.

Hoe, seasoned raw fish or meat

Kuksu or myŏn, noodles; the latter term is from Chinese mian.

Mandu are like little meat pies, a lot fatter and thicker-shelled than jiaozi. They can be filled with chopped meat, kimchi, etc.

Nabak kimchi: very watery and chile-rich. Sohui Kim provides instructions.

Namul, cooked vegetables, usually dressed with sharp or hot dressing of some sort

Omija are goji berries, “five flavor,” because they have sweet, sour, salt, bitter, and spicy notes (Maangchi 2019:384).

Pat, beans; used in kimchi.

Pŏndegi are silkworm pupae (Pettid 2008:173).

P’o, jerky or dried fish

Saengch’ae, salad; Chinese xing cai, fresh vegetables

Ssam pap (bap): rice and chopped meat in sauce wrapped in leaves. Lettuce, and various forms of Chinese cabbage, including the ferny mizuna of Japan, are standard. Herbs can be added.

Tchigae (jjigae): stew

Tul kirum is perilla oil, from perilla seeds (Pettid 2008:45).

Yukpap, sweet rice.

Korean royal food was saved from oblivion by finding one old woman who had in youth worked for the royal court (abolished in 1910 or so). It is super refined but not weird stuff. E.g. red beans each one hand-peeled.

Jeju Island is Korea’s deep south, roughly parallel with South Carolina. It thus could produce abundant rice even in the old days, before cold-tolerant varieties were developed, making the rest of South Korea more productive of that grain. A large number of other crops were grown. Sweet potatoes were very important. Native plants were heavily used. It is now a major tourist destination. There is still considerable agriculture, a huge expansion at the expense of woodland and grass, but it is mostly commercial, often to grow foods for the tourists. Local small farming and homegardens are rapidly disappearing, as local people turn to urban economies. Old people keep the gardens up, very often transplanting wild food and medicinal plants into them from the wild (Hong and Zimmerman 2022).

As elsewhere, traditional foods accompany life cycle rituals. Taesun Park (1993) provides a detailed account. Birth, and many milestone days after it up to the first birthday, are celebrated with several foods. Rice cakes are featured. Coming of age, in late teens, was recognized with “wine,” meat, noodles, and the like. Marriage was far more elaborate, with a long series of ceremonies involving food and alcohol. Funerals and memorial services offered food to ancestors.

            As in China, dietetics—the whole traditional science of using food as the first line of medicine—is well established. A great deal of it does indeed come from China, but Korea has plenty of its own herbs, and may have taught the Chinese the virtues of ginseng. Sikchi is the term of art (Ko 2023). The infamous dog meat, now finally banned in South Korea (though possibly not with total enforcement), was used in China to provide warmth in winter. It is a rich, gamey, fatty meat well adapted for the purpose. However, in Korea, it is eaten in summer, heat controlling heat; similarly, cold or cooling foods are eaten in winter (Pettid 2008:85-86).

Cho, Hae Jung. 2020. Talk on kimchi to Culinary Historians of Southern California.

Crawford, Gary W., and Gyoung-Ah Lee. 2003. “Agricultural Origins in the Korean Peninsula.”  Antiquity. Pp. 87-95.

Hong, Yooinn, and Karl S. Zimmerer. 2022. “Useful Plants from the Wild to Home Gardens: An Analysis of Home Garden Ethnobotany in Contexts of Habitat Conversion and Land Usse Change in Jeju, South Korea.” Jouirnal of Ethnobiology 42:261-281.

Kim, Minkoo; Sung-Mo Ahn; Youjin Jeong. 2013. “Rice (Oryza sativa L.): Seed-Size Comparison and Cultivation in Ancient Korea.”  Economic Botany 67:378-386.

1500-600 BCE, grains from small and narrow to big and plump. New rices came in. Semilunar knife (thus gradual harvest) replaced by iron sickle (thus all at once).

Kim, Minkoo, et al. 2019. “The Tethering Landscape: Dispersion and Nucleation in Early Agricultural Communities in Southwestern Korea.”  Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 53:174-185.

Kim, Sohui, with Rachel Wharton; photography by Zach and Buz. 2018. Korean Home Cooking. New York: Abrams.

Ko, Byoung-Seob. 2023. “The Sikchi and the Recorded Cases of Seongjeongwonilgi.” Journal of Ethnic Foods 10, article 8.

Lee Ki-Moon and S. Robert Ramsey. 2011. A History of the Korean Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Maangchi with Martha Rose Shulman. 2019. Maangchi’s Big Book of Korean Cooking: From Everyday Meals to Celebration Cuisine. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Park, Hyunhee. 2021. Soju: A Global History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Park, Jinheum, et al. 2021. “Holocene Hydroclimate Reconstruction Based on Pollen, XRF, and Grain-Size Analysis and Its Implications for Past Societies of the Korean Peninsula.”  The Holocene 31:1489-1500.

Park Tae-soon. 1993. “Life’s Milestones: Ceremonies and Food.” Koreana, autumn, pp. 28-35.

Pettid, Michael J. 2008. Korean Cuisine, an Illustrated History. London: Reaktion Books.

Pratt, Keith, and Richard Rutt. 1999. Korea: A Historical and Cultural Dictionary. Richmond, Surrey, England: Curzon.

Seth, Michael J. 2011. A History of Korea, from Antiquity to the Present. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.

Shoda, Shinya, et al. 2017. “Pottery Use by Early Hunter-Gatherers of the Korean Peninsula Closely Linked with the Exploitation of Marine Resources.”  Quarternary Science Reviews 170:164-173.

Surya, Reggie, and Ann Ga-Yeon Lee. 2022. “Exploring the Philosophical Values of Kimchi and Kimjang Culture.” Journal of Ethnic Foods 9, 20.

Surya, Reggie, and David Nugroho. 2023. “Kimchi throughout Millennia: A Narrative Review on the Early and Modern History of Kimchi.” Journal of Ethnic Foods 10, article 5.

Swanson, Susan. 2019. “The Secret History of Makgeolli.”  Los Angeles Times, May 1, https://www.latimes.com/food/la-fo-homemade-makgeolli-korean-alcohol-20190501-story.html?fbclid=IwAR1A9DYj0ZK7GYrpFh0cyH7YqgtBc_ZhwME9HypXPq_2yDicRx4Gl9e6fiM

University of Vienna. 2022. “1,700-year-old Korean Genomes Show Genetic Heterogeneity in Three Kingdoms Period Gaya.” Press release online, June 21, 1,700-year-old Korean genomes show genetic heterogeneity in Three Kingdoms period Gaya (phys.org).

Vermeersch, Sem. 2016. A Chinese Treaveler in Medieval Korea: Xu Jing’s Illustrated Account of the Xuanhe Embassy to Koryŏ. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press and Korean Classical Library.

Young, Park Kun. 2008. “Kimchi, Ideal Health Food for a Well-being Lifestyle,” Koreana, winter, pp. 12-15.

Yun Seo-Seok. 1993. “History of Korean Dietary Culture.” Koreana, autumn, pp. 6-11.

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Many and Varied Worlds of Food

MANY AND VARIED WORLDS OF FOOD

E. N. Anderson

www.krazykioti.com

gene@ucr.edu

This post consists of material left out of my various books on food because I haven’t had time or energy to pursue the topics enough. It consists of various reading notes and odd observations. They could be useful to food experts and researchers, so here they are. Many of them concern the early history and prehistory of foods in various regions of the world.

Note that China is covered separately in the post “China Food Updates” on my website.

Contents

PART I. SPECIAL TOPICS

Early Human Food

Good Farmers

Gut Microbiota

Fermentation

Fad Diets

PART II. FOOD AND FOOD REGIONS

Near East

Europe

Africa

South Asia

East Asia

Southeast Asia

Oceania

Central America and Mexico

South America

North America

PART I. SPECIAL TOPICS

Early Human Food

Modern human hunter-gatherers eat least meat in vegetation-rich, game-sparse areas like many brushlands. They eat the most meat and fish in the Arctic and near-Arctic, where the scanty vegetation is mostly indigestible to humans. Our insulin metabolism, stomach acid balance, and other metabolic signs show long adaptation to meat (Ben-Dor, Sirtoli and Barkai 2021).

We may be able to recapture some of the prehistoric experience. Vow, a company in Australia, has now made meatballs by using frozen woolly mammoth DNA to grow lab meat, and another company has made gummy bears with gelatin similarly derived from a mastodon (Chandler-Wilde 2023).

Early prehumans in East Africa ate a great deal of grass, as well as other vegetation (Uno et al. 2016). Australopithecus suffered from seasonal food shortages (Johannes-Boyau et al. 2019). Tooth wear shows that that genus and the closely related Paranthropus ate a varied diet, with both C4 (largely grasses) and C3 (other plants).

Hunter-gatherers are also rather casual in defense of territory. Their groups have fluid boundaries. Rich resources (often those exploited by women) and, above all, stored resources are staunchly defended (Codding et al., and following articles, 2019), but the typical hunting-gathering group wanders over a vast area, most of it little used, and this area is generally open.

They also share game, often according to complex patterns, which keeps men hunting even when they do not appear to need it (Gurven and Hill 2009). Many modern hunter people are devoted to the chase in spite of being wage-earners in modern enterprises (Ready and Power 2018). Even in rural white America, much hunting is for such social reasons. Game gives prestige, can be traded, and above all can be shared widely, maintaining personal networks.

The Hadza of Tanzania still hunt and gather, though they are rapidly losing their land to encroaching farmers and herders. Big game was once brought down once a month by an average group, but now people are lucky to get one in a year. When they were hunting, the men would devour the best meat in the field, and bring back what was left (if any); they also foraged honey and ate most of that when found. Women and children provisioned themselves, eating berries and root foods, small animals, some honey, and anything else available. Men used meat to consolidate reputations, and to make sure they could thus maintain a household, but they shared meat with each other or the whole group, not with their families. Grandmothers were critical to child and group life, helping mothers to get enough to raise the children (O’Connell, Hawkes and Blurton Jones 2025). Survival long beyond menopause was probably necessary for humans—the famous “grandmother hypothesis” of Kristen Hawkes. It has stood the test of time and a good deal of challenge.

Related to this is the idea of cultural keystone species. Oaks were critical in the life of Californian peoples (K. Anderson 2005), salmon in the Northwest Coast, wild roots in the interior Northwest. These were ritually and ceremonially marked as well as providing staple foods. They were not always dominant in nature, and often were not even the most important food; they were simply species that mattered a great deal (Coe and Gaoue 2020).

Like hunting, gardening and simple agriculture are socially embedded. Crops are shared in neighborhoods and even in much wider linkups. Most of us in the modern world live, or at least have relatives living, on a bit of land that can produce food, and we network constantly with it. This leads, thoughtfully, to considerations of what gives “value.” For Marx, it was labor invested (though he was aware that labor invested in fertile soil produces more than labor invested in rocks). For David Graeber, however, value “appers when individual acts become socially meaningful”; gardens are dynamic loci of value creation, resistance, identity, and action (Peña et al.2017:43ff).

Eventually, intensive agriculture can lead to states, when extremely fertile soil, productive agriculture, and large open areas without defensible space force people to band together under a war leader and eventually under a king. Hobbes (1657) was right that conflict leads to kings, but was wrong about “savages” (he meant hunter-gatherers) feeling the need; it happened in the most productive but open agricultural areas.

Good Farmers

            Traditional small-scale agricultural people and societies have a mixed, but generally good, record as efficient, resourceful, clever, successful farmers. They tend to practice mixed farming, and to leave wild breaks that harbor predators. They favor intercropping, which is generally a good idea (X. Li et al. 2021), though there are, of course, exceptions.

Consider shifting cultivation: cutting down and burning a small section of forest, farming the resulting ash-enriched opening, then abandoning it after a few years and letting it grow back to forest. This can be done with extreme care and expertise: leaving valuable trees, cutting firebreaks to prevent fire escape, reforesting with nitrogen-fixing or fruit-bearing trees, planting mixed and productive crops, and otherwise managing the enterprise with care. Or it can be simply burn-plant-leave. I have seen both. The Maya of Yucatan represent the highest ideal (Anderson 2005), but the minimalist form is also known in the world. The same goes for every type of cultivation.

            The near-universal tendency of European and American scholars and scientists before the 1950s was to write off traditional small-scale agriculture as backward, unproductive, and even “primitive.” This attitude began to change in the early 20th century, but awaited major works to disprove it.

The first to succeed at this were two studies: Harold Conklin’s Hanunoo Agriculture (1957) and J. E. Spencer’s Shifting Cultivation in Southeast Asia (1966). Shortly after this, Gary Klee edited World Systems of Traditional Resource Management (1980), which finally put traditional cultivation on a serious footing in international scholarship. This was followed by many works on local systems, such as Gene Wilken’s Good Farmers (1987) on Mexican and Central American best practices, and by Robert Netting’s superb Balancing on an Alp (1981)and Smallholders, Householders (1993) which demonstrated in great detail the virtues of small mixed farming, whether in the Philippine outback or in the center of Europe. By this time, thoughtful agronomists realized that the traditional farmers knew a thing or two. Excellent books drawing on traditional practices applied to modern farming began to appear, such as David Cleveland’s Balancing on a Planet (2014; note that his title refers back to Netting’s book; Cleveland and the present author were friends with Bob Netting, who died sadly young).

A major breakthrough was the development of permaculture (Holmgren 2002, 2012; Mollison 1988, 1997). This system was developed largely from the best practices of southeast Chinese and Southeast Asian cultivators. It used a very wide range of plants and animals, an extremely efficient use of water and nutrients, and a nearly closed system such that these inputs are re-used and recycled constantly. It is modernized by use of machinery and chemicals, but these are kept to a minimum.

            Meanwhile, theories arose on farming and subsistence. Thomas Malthus (1960 [1798]) famously argued that food production increased linearly, while population increased exponentially, until lack of food led to starvation, war, and epidemics. This is true enough of some natural populations, limited by such “density-dependent factors.” It did not have much to do with humans, who can always invent a new dodge or domesticate a new crop, and can also figure out how to limit populations without violence. Malthus began to acknowledge this is the later editions of his work, but the crude and merciless theory had gone ahead of him. An irony was that he was writing just as the “agricultural revolution” took off in his native England, eventually leading to the present world of plentiful food. A billion people are going hungry right now, but the world food system wastes 30-40% of the food produced, so minimal civil responsibility would eliminate hunger and waste in one swoop. Food-short Nigeria wastes by far the most, over 3500 tons. India, also seriously troubled with hunger, comes next with 2500, then the United States with 2000. Brazil follows with 1000, Russia ca 800. Related are greenhouse gas emissions: Meat and animal products are by far the worst source—130 kg of CO2 emissions per kg of food. Roots and oil crops produce about 38, cereals and pulses only 10-15, fruits and veg about 3 or 4 (Padmanaban 2023).

            An extreme counter was Ester Boserup’s claim that “population pressure” would force people to work ever harder, raising food production at the price of exploitation, often self-exploitation. This theory is at least as dismal as Malthus’. Fortunately it is equally wrong. People are as good at inventing labor-saving devices as they are at developing new crops and farming techniques.

The gluten in bread wheat is particularly abundant and sticky, allowing us to make good leavened bread that rises with appropriate fluffiness; the sticky gluten traps the bubbles of CO2 gas released by the metabolism of the yeast or sourdough ferments used for leavening. The wild wheats emmer and einkorn do not have much gluten; it was bred into wheat when some village women in what is now Azerbaijan observed that some odd wheats from the edges of their fields produced an extremely superior bread. The wheats had been hybridiziing with a local grass, a subspecies of Aegilops squarrosus, that has ideal gluten for baking. The result, hexaploid bread wheat, has revolutionized the world. It is now the commonest and most widespread domestic plant, the staple food of billions, and the basis of a fantastically elaborate and complex baking culture worldwide. We owe a very great deal to those Azerbaijani women, and we have no idea of their names or ethnicities. Never was Ecclesiastes’ passage about unknown but great people more appropriate.

Orchids and Ericaceae have their own very specific species and genera. Ectomycorrhizae dwell on pines, oaks, myrtles (including Eucalyptuses, which are in the myrtle family), Caesalpiniae (paloverdes and pride-of-Mexico). Endomycorrhizae are also widespread. Only a few plant groups, including the mustard family, amaranths, chenopods, sedges, pinks, and docks (Rumex, Polygonum) lack them. These plants must therefore find highly fertile soils. But if they do, they can flourish exceedingly, since they do not have to transfer resources to the mycorrhizae. They have thus become common weeds in gardens and in uplands fertilized by nitrogen in car exhaust and other air pollution.

Gut Microbiota

            Gut microbiota turn out to have major effects on eating and metabolism. They profoundly affect digestion. Ours evolved along with us, so are as close to those of chimpanzees and gorillas as we ourselves are to those apes (Moeller et al. 2016).

Those in the lower gut even digest some cellulose and other long-chain molecules unavailable to us otherwise (Gentile and Weir 2018). Some encourage their host humans to eat more. Some signal pleasure in consumption of fat, others delight in sugars, amino acids, and food in general; thus the gut biota greatly influence consumption (Li et al. 2022). Many, many, are known to be there and to interact with us and with each other, but we do not know how or why; probes demonstrate an incredible wealth of little-known interactions (Sonnenburg and Bäckhed 2016; Sonert et al. 2024).

We once had many more cellulose-digesting micros, but domestication and then industrialization have led to a steadily declining number of species and individuals; at least we have gotten some new ones from domestic livestock (Morais et al. 2024).

Some affect the circadian rhythm cycle. Some may even make us exercise more. Mice with certain microbiota (species unclear) exercise five times as much as ordinary mice, and inoculating germ-free mice with exercise-prone mouse microbiota make the (previously) germ-free ones exercise vigorously (Pennisi 2022).

Related to this is the fact that the gut’s nerves connect directly to the brain, telling it the state of nutrition and digestion, and what the gut microbiota are up to (Kaelberer et al. 2018). We literally think with our intestines. They order the brain around. They have the same neurochemical signallers we do—GABA, serotonin, dopamine, etc.—and that hits the vagus nerve. Mice with cut vagus gut nerves do not get the effects (Sanders 2016). Thus, the gut microbiota have a significant share in our thoughts, a fact that should be of interest to philosophers.

            Gut microbiota are profoundly influenced by lifestyle and food. Aashish Jha and colleagues (2018) found that in groups that shifted from hunting-gathering to agriculture in recent centuries, the gut flora tracks the shift. Those that are still basically hunter-gatherers have a distinctive flora, totally lost by those settled for a couple of hundred years, with those more recently settled being intermediate. Water matters as much as food; drinking from wells versus drinking from streams has much to do with it. Seasonal changes in diet also cause variety; the Hadza of Tanzania, who have an extremely rich and diverse microbiota, change it with the seasons as their diet seasonally shifts from berries and fruits to game and honey (Smits et al. 2017). The microbiome is shared widely, and people in nearby villages have similar biota, though this differs with the amount of contact (Beghini et al. 2025).

Malnutrition leads to weakened, imbalanced gut flora that makes the situation worse; transplanted into mice, gut flora from malnourished human children leads to malnutrition and poor growth in the mice (Blanton et al. 2016; Blanton, Barrett, et al. 2016). Mice raised germ-free and undernourished children both benefit from having healthy gut microbiota introduced, and then from eating food that nourish this healthy biota, including chickpea, banana, soy, and peanut flours (Gehrig et al. 2019).

Sugary drinks, among their other bad qualities, stimulate the wrong kind of gut biota. `They feed Erysipelotrichaceae bacteria, which kill the good bacteria that increase helper cells that reduce gut absorption of lipids (Nature 2022). Melissa Gutschall, among many others, warns us against “fruit juice” that is really mostly sugar. She notes that 37% of American children have cavities, rising to 58% by adolescence (Gutschall 2024:124, 133)..

Babies raised with the diverse microbiota of traditional upbringing (including vaginal birth and nursing) are healthier generally and have fewer allergies, with gut microbiota as a clear factor (Denworth 2024).

Gut microbiota can turn hostile in conditions of malnutrition. Poor nutrition also gives unpleasant microbes a foothold. Kwashiorkor (an aggravated form of protein deficiency) in particular seems associated with bad-acting microbiota (Ley 2013). The immune system actually recognizes the “good” microbiota and protects them from immune responses (Lyu et al. 2022).

It now appears that they can even damage the children of fathers with bad biota. At least in mice, major damage (experimentally induced by laxatives and antibiotics) led to “impaired leptin signalling, altered testicular metabolite profiles and remapped small RNA payloads in sperm. As a result, dysbiotic fathers trigger an elevated risk of in utero placental insufficiency, revealing a placental origin of mammalian intergenerational effects.” Young had increased risk of “low birth weight, severe growth restriction and premature mortality” (Argow-Demboba et al. 2024). In other words, the father’s contribution to the embryo leads to poor development of the placenta (the downstream half of which is produced by the embryo), and possibly even to the baby itself, which in turn leads to poor nutrition of the embryo and poor development thereafter.

Fermentation

            The Great Book of fermentation in food is Sandor Ellix Katz’ monumental work, The Art of Fermentation (2012). This bookcovers the entire world, and all the dozens of microorganisms that people use to turn inedible resources into edible ones, save edible ones by pickling, make more nourishment, or otherwise improve on natural gifts. Fermentation is indeed one of humanity’s most impressive arts.

            Apes have consumed fermented fruits for millions of years, explaining our high tolerance for alcohol. We probably came early to other fermented tastes. Preservation by pickling, leavening, souring, and other fermentive processes is universal in agricultural societies and far from unknown among hunter-gatherers. Keeping meat by putting it in a cold stream or spring preserves it but allows some pleasant fermentation.

Lactobacillus delbrueckii var. bulgaricus and Streptococcus thermophilus, the main bacteria in yogurt, are domesticated–genunely transformed by artificial selection. So are Aspergillus oryzae¸ a fungus critical to East Asian ferments; Saccharomyces cerevisiae, wine yeast; and other fungal fermenters. The extreme importance of these domesticated microorganisms in human nutrition has never been properly assessed, though Katz’ book goes a long way to filling the need.

Yogurt is made from milk that is heated and then cultured; the bacteria thrive on heat. Milk for buttermilk originally was churned to remove the butter, then sterilized but cooled, and fermented by more cool-tolerant bacteria. It was a common drink from Europe through the Middle East to India. It is now, in the western world, produced by sterilizing milk and then fermenting it with Lactococcus lactis as well as Lactobacillus delbrueckii var. bulgaricus and various other ferments (Mendelson 2022; Wikipedia). The ferments produce lactic acid, which both inhibits spoilage and provides a sour taste that most of us enjoy.

In India, it and related products are lassi in Hindi, and are beaten up with a bit of salt to produce a wonderfully cooling drink. Mango lassi was once mango slices beaten up in buttermilk, a heavenly drink if there ever was one, but now in American restaurants serving India’s food it tends to be commercial yogurt blended up with commercial mango juice—oversweet and low on taste.

Buttermilk and other sour milk products were the ferment of choice in western Europe and America until the mid-20th century, when yogurt swept the field. It was popularized initially by Elie Metchnikoff (1845-1916), the discoverer of the functioning of the immune system (for which he won a Nobel prize in 1908). One Stamen Grigorov, a Bulgarian, introduced him to yogurt and its health potential, and Metchnikoff became a convert. A pioneer of gerontology, he publicized it in his book The Prolongation of Life (1908), and further publicity came from his widow’s adoring biography of him, The Life of Elie Metchnikoff (1921). It slowly gained traction as a health food, and then exploded in the 1950s as health faddists and hucksters got wind of its potential for attracting many dollars from the gullible and the enthusiastic. It turned out to accord with world tastes, and soon developed many varieties, as well as the now-universal sweetened and flavored forms, most of which are essentially yogurt-flavored sugar.

Another widespread sour milk product is kefir. The word probably derives from one or more languages of the Caucasus (Wikipedia, “Kefir”). This is similar to yogurt, using the same basic L. delbrueckii, but contains various other ferments, depending on the region. Wikipedia mentions L. kefiranofaciens and other Lactobacilli, Kazachstania turichensis, and yeasts including Candida kefyr and the familiar Saccharomyces cerevisiae. It dominates the sour milk scene in much of the Middle East and central Asia. It is often dried, and then used as a starter for more kefir or as a food in its own right. It makes an excellent portabl food with high nutritional value and long storage capability. Under its Mongolian name of aarul, it fueled the Mongol hordes as they rode out to conquer the world, and is still a basic staple of Mongolia—one of the main protein sources. Concentrated kefir, with much of the moisture drained out, is lebni (laban, labni, etc., depending on dialect; the word is Arabic). Chopped garlic and herbs, and often chopped cucumber, is added to produce a side dish wildly popular from Greel tzatziki to Indian dehei raita, dehei being the word for curds in general. These resemble kefir but are complex beyond description in microbiota—are dehei in Hindi.

Kumis (koumiss, kumys, from Turkic qymyz or kımız) is a Central Asian drink, basically buttermilk made from mare milk, or in a pinch donkey milk. It is the classic drink of the Turkic and Mongol horse nomads. Since it depends on the mares’ giving birth and raising their foals, it is largely confined to summer; the mares foal in spring, and for a few months the milk must go entirely to the foals. Today, there is a dairying industry, and kumys is somewhat liberated from its tie to summer. The basic fermentation is by Lactobacillus spp., but yeasts are introduced in the starter, and thus the beverage is mildly alcoholic and also somewhat carbonated. It resembles buttermilk mixed with weak beer. Concentrating the alcohol by freezing, distilling, or otherwise produced “black” kumis, with higher alcoholic content. “Koumiss” was popular in the United States around 1900 (Mendelson 2022), but failed to catch on.

Penicillium roqueforti, the organism that grows in Roquefort cheese and gives it its flavor and color,goes back to the Bronze Age in Euro caves. Roquefort is produced at only one place: the village of Roquefort, halfway down a huge limestone cliff in south-central France. The drive down to it can be hair-raising. Here, natural caves in the limestone have been enlarged and shaped into cheese-making sites. Local sheep milk is cultured, and the cheese is aged, improving notably with aging.

Aspergillus oryzae is the national microorganism of Japan; it and closely-related Aspergillus spp. are the basis of koji. They hydrolyze raw starch, which Saccharomyces does not do. Saccharomyces cerevisiae may have started on oak trees. Saccharomyces and Lactobacillus show up in 2500-year-old millet breads in China. Grape wine is at least 7000 years old. The Chinese mummy cheese has the usual yogurt-type microbiota (Warriner 2022).

Lactobacillus is the wonderful workhorse of human fermentation technology. It is basic to everything from soy sauce to salami, from cheese to sourdough bread, from sauerkraut to kimchi. Life would be far less tasty without it, to say nothing of its value in preservation, due mostly to its production of lactic acid, a very effective preservative agent. Many species exist; new ones keep turning up. San Francisco’s famous sourdough bread uses its own species, described as Lactobacillus sanfrancisco. (Alas, this bread has fallen on evil days; it has lost popularity to whole-grain breads, and the real old-time sour loaf is very hard to find.)

            The long-standing problem of lactose tolerance remains with us. All mammal infants produce lactase, to break down lactose (milk sugar) into easily-digested glucose and galactose. After infancy, most animals—obviously not cats, or some others—lose their lactase production, and can no longer get benefit from lactose. In humans, the ability is lost around age 6, following which drinking more than about 250 cc of milk at a time is apt to produce bloating, gas, and diarrhea, though this depends on poorly-understood individual factors. In Europe, Arabia, and East Africa, over the last 5000 years or so, people evolved lifelong production of lactase, as a way to live to a great extent on fresh milk.

The mystery is that this ability never arose in most of the Near East or in India or Central Asia, in spite of dependence on dairying and a great deal of gene flow from the west, allowing a gradient of adult lactase production from almost 100% in west Europe to almost zero in China. China once had a major dairying tradition, though, and still has a considerable one, even using fresh milk; people space consumption to avoid getting more than 250 cc at once (my observation, plus consulting with Miranda Brown, the expert on Chinese traditional dairy products).

            The Near East, Central Asia, and India depend for dairying on processing techniques that break down lactose, usually into lactic acid. Lactobacillus bacteria do that, most famously L. delbrueckii ssp. bulgaricus. So do a few other microorganisms, including Streptococcus thermophilus and the yeast Kluyveromyces lactis (Rosenstock et al. 2021:S257). The one that matters is L. delbrueckii ssp. bulgaricus, involved in producing yogurt, most cheese, sour cream, and many other products. A problem with it is that the form of lactic acid it produces (the levo form) is not available to digestion by human infants, though adults can manage it. This raises the question: Why didn’t all Europe buy into this technology and avoid the human costs of evolving lifelong lactase? Presumably, a lot of people died, or at least failed to reproduce, in the process of such rapid evolution.

            In 1975, Frances James proposed that north and west European dairy fermentation specialized in sour milk, as opposed to yogurt, because of temperature: the sour milks of that area are prepared at room temperature, often of cool rooms, while yogurt requires at least initial heating of the milk to 40 or 50 C, and often continued heat.

            Beginning with this insights, Eva Rosenstock, Julia Ebert, and Alisa Scheibner (2021) wrote a monumental paper on dairying in west Eurasia. The paper requires detailed summary here. First the milks of available animals are considered. “The characteristic caseins in sheep and goat milk produce firmer curds than cattle milk” (S257), but cattle milk has larger fat globules which cause the separation of cream at the top. Horse and donkey milk has more lactose and does not form curds. They omit reindeer milk, but it is high in sugars and fats.

            The hot, dry southeast European and Near Eastern climate causes milk to spoil unless thus treated. North and west Europe are cool enough (except, often, in summer) to allow souring cultures to develop without the milk spoiling if left unheated.

            Any raw milk, anywhere, can carry Brucella, cause of the deadly disease brucellosis—formerly common in Europe and still common in Ethiopia. Tuberculosis can also be spread in milk. Louis Pasteur discovered the bacteria, and solved the problem by getting people to heat the milk, not enough to cook it but enough to kill the bacteria; pasteurization remains universal today in industrial settings.

            The various lactic-acid microorganisms are selected and propagated. Domestication of Lactobacillus was as important as the domestication of many food crops. Our friend L. d. bulgaricus does best at 40-50 C, so a marriage made in heaven is using it to treat milk that could not be left in any case. Conveniently, Lactococcus lactis will not only thrive at lower temperatures, but will even provide a small amount of lactose breakdown, and since the resulting lactic acid is both levo- and dextrorotary, it is available to all (Rosenstock et al. 2021:S259).

            Lactose tolerance evolved independently in Arabia among bedouins, who herd camels and used to live largely on camel milk. It will not solidify with Lactobacillus treatment, so does not make good yogurt or cheese; people had to evolve the ability to drink it straight. Urban and farm people of those areas usually lack the ability. Still other genes evolved in East Africa among the cattle nomads there, such as the Maasai, who depend heavily on fresh milk (Reilly 2013).

            At some point in the history of stockraising, cheese was invented. It can be either acid-set or rennet-set. The former uses lactic acid, or introduced acids like vinegar and lemon juice, to coagulate the protein fraction in the milk. Rennet uses nature’s way: the enzyme rennet is used by animals to coagulate milk in their stomachs. It is thus extracted from calf stomachs or from the abomasum (forestomach) of a ruminant animal, usually a cow. (Rennet cheeses are banned in strict kosher diets, because the rennet comes from meat; S266.) Most of our familiar cheese are rennet cheeses. They must be salted in preparation. Cheese is usually made from whole milk, but sometimes from milk after the butter is churned out.

            The remaining liquid after cheesemaking is whey, usually fed to animals, but in the Near East and Central Asia generally dried and made into a hard substance known as qara qurut in Turkic languages. Qara means “black,” qurut or qrut refers to dried milk. Dried (but often full-fat) yogurt qrut, called aaruul in Mongolian, is a standard food in the Near East, Central Asia, and northwest China. It is often offered to guests in hospitality. Dried whey products include whey cheeses like low-fat ricotta and Swiss sig (Rosenstock et al. 2021:S61).

            Rosenstock and her group point out that milk, and infant animals feeding on it, are—like carnivores—at a higher trophic level than adult herbivores. They take the herbivores’ food and go further, producing new protein from it.

            They shift to archaeology, which has been revolutionized in recent decades by development of ways to analyze milk products in ancient pots, boxes, baskets, and other items. (They have a long list of the advantages and disadvantages of various methods, S262.) Milking probably goes back to early domestication of animals, around 10,000-12,000 years ago, and can thus be demonstrated back to 8400 years ago, in Mesopotamia (S 263). It was probably common by then. Agriculture and herding came early to southeast Europe, but “Europe witnessed a major standstill of the Neolithic expansion until around 4000 to 3500 BCE,” when it spread rapidly to previously marginal areas in the north, west, and mountainous center. About this time, wooly sheep were developed; wild sheep do not have wool—it was developed by selective breeding. Bees were domesticated. Figs and olives were grown as tree crops (S264). In the next millennium, lifelong lactase may have come to central and western Europe with massive immigrations from the east, but it has not shown up in genetic studies until the 1st millennium CE.

            About this time, history kicks in, with written records of dairying providing names for milk, cheese, and the like in ancient Egypt, to say nothing of archaeological finds of the cheese itself (S264). After this, dairying, milk processing, and cheesemaking all developed rapidly. The origin of butter making is obscure, but one suspects it was early; churning is not really necessary—one can simply shake a bag of milk for a long time. Butter provided a soft fat otherwise hard to get in cold parts of Europe, where animal fat got hard fast and vegetable fats could not grow. This is why chicken schmaltz and goose grease are famously identified with East European Jewish cooking; they could not use butter in meals with meat involved. Jews in the Mediterranean had olive and sesame oils.

            So, to return to our initial problem, heating milk and making yogurt was hard to do and not really necessary in north and central Europe, so lactase persistence evolved. People without lactase persistence can drink milk without too much suffering, and get the benefits of the protein, vitamins, and water, but in a famine they are in trouble; their problems with digesting milk sugars might spell doom in a milk-dependent society. This goes double for sick people, and still more for sick children above weaning age. Drinking milk persisted for thousands of years before lactase persistence started to become common, 5000 years ago; it then very rapidly spread to near-universality in west, central and north Europe, as well as East Africa, and became common in Europe and parts of the Middle East. Famine, disease, and extreme milk dependence are strongly suspected (Handwerk 2022).

There was also the benefit to infants, who could not get full nutrition from yogurt. A few groups in northern central Asia use largely cool-weather souring, yet mostly lack lactase persistence; they cope anyway, by spacing consumption and probably by gut flora adaptation (S269). Lactase persistence is found in 15 to 54% of people in eastern Europe, 62-86% in central and western Europe, 89-96% in Scandinavia and the British Isles. In India, 63% in northern India show persistence, but it is down to 23% in the south and east, where hot weather makes milk almost impossible to keep except as yogurt, so no reason for lactase persistence ever surfaced. In northeastern Africa one pastoral group shows 64% persistence (and probably some run well above that), while a neighboring agricultural group has only 20% (Gerbault et al. 2011).

Lactose fermentation also gives us sausage, at least the sour-tasting ones like salami; Martin Adams notes that the spicing typical of sausages has empirically been developed to assist: “Extracts of clove, cardamom, ginger, celery seeds, cinnamon, and turmeric, all with relatively high manganese content, have been shown to stimulate lactic acid fermentation…it is thought that manganese helps protect LAB, lacking the enzyme superoxide dismutase, from the damaging effects of reactive oxygen species….” Sausages are preserved by creating an environment in which bacteria and fungi/yeasts develop, each of which has some level of spoilage prevention (Adams 2010:314-316).

Other fermentations involve a whole host of yeasts and other fungi, as well as various bacteria. Alcohol is largely the product of various strains of Saccharomyces cerevisiae, wine and beer yeast. The winemaking strain, like the wine grape, is native to the eastern Black Sea, allowing the Georgians to make a believable claim for inventing wine as we know it today. Wine from cactus and other fruit was independently invented in the New World by Native Americans. Many other species of Saccharomyces, as well as other yeasts and fungi, enter into brewing. Euro-American ferments are usually simple, but Asian ones, from Himalayan local beers to Chinese soy pastes, involve many species and genera, some poorly known.

Brewing involves mashing up the item in question with water. This holds for making wine, where the simple juice of the fruit is enough. For soybeans (to brew soy sauce and paste) or other hard seeds, boiling is necessary first. Barley for beer requires yet another step: sprouting, to get the barley shoot to convert starch to maltose. Then the barley is baked to stop further growth, boiled or steamed into a mash, and brewed with introduced beer yeasts. Beer is also made from any grain, starchy root, and even starchy fruit like bananas; banana beer is extremely widespread and popular in Africa.

A further step is distillation—heating the fermented alcoholic drink till the alcohol evaporates and can be condensed by a cooler. Ideally, this will be some form of long tube or coil, allowing the “heads and tails” to be discarded and only the middle distillate kept. The lightest fraction—poisonous methanol—evaporates first, and must be eliminated. Then the ethanol, which is what we want, comes off. Last come the “tails”—heavier alcohols such as isopropyl—again bad for humans. They must be thrown out.

Distilled grain makes vodka if not aged, whiskey if aged. (The story that vodka is made from potatoes is true only of some home brews.) The original whiskey, or whisky if Scotch (the Scots must insist on their own spelling), is made from barley and sometimes oats. American whiskey is often made from rye, but Bourbon and other central-United States whiskeys are made from corn. Some makers add wheat for softness or rye for flavor. Chinese grain alcohol, generally made from millets and sorghum, is technically a vodka, but is known as bai jiu, “white [ie. clear] alcoholic liquor.” The stronger forms are san xiu, “triple distilled,” pronounced samsu in several languages. Aged whiskey commands a market, and C14 dating is now used to expose frauds. A whiskey said to be made in 1863 turned out to have been made between 2007 and 2014 (Nature 2020a).

Sugar cane alcohol is technically rum, but gets sold as vodka or whiskey by dealers cutting corners. It is produced widely in sugar-growing areas. Dark rum is colored and flavored with molasses from the sugar refineries. Distilled fruit alcohol is brandy, usually made from wine but often from apples, such as the calvados of Normandy and the apple jack of America. It is also made from peaches, cherries, pears, and potentially any sweet fruit—even tropical fruits have often been used.

Fad Diets

            The modern diet is notoriously bad for you. As noted above, it includes far too much sugar, especially fructose. It includes more fat than we need, It is based on highly processed foods. Worst of all, it includes a vast range of chemicals quite alien to the supposed foods. Some are artificial flavorings, but at least these are usually based on real flavors. Some are preservatives, in quantities enough to get some foods described as “embalmed.” Some are colors, many of which turn out to be carcinogenic; they are sometimes banned when this is found, sometimes not, and new untested compounds often appear in spite of laws forbidding untested ingredients. The most highly processed foods, involving not only processing in the narrow sense but also adding lots of fat, sugar, and salt, are baked goods. Cookies top the list, followed by muffins and eventually bread. At the other end of the list of grain foods comes pasta, which is processed in that it is ground and shaped, but at least has no added evils (Youmshajekian 2025). Seafood and spices are not usually much processed, nor is meat except for butchering.

            The modern diet is all too well known as a cause of metabolic syndrome, leading to diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and various deteriorative conditions. The most forthright critic, Marion Nestle, has devoted a lifetime to exposing the ugly underbelly of the American food industry, which tends to sell bad nutrition and bad foods with an unhealthy dose of dishonesty about their safety and the dangers of the alternatives. (From a whole library of Nestle books, we may note only the most recent, Nestle 2015 and 2018. Out of a vast further literature, one may note Outlive by Peter Attia, 2023, as a pretty good introduction to why the modern diet is especialy bad when combined with lack of exercise and other modern shortcomings.)

            One result has been powering up the ancient art of inventing fad diets. The first fad diet was probably invented in the Pleistocene by a shaman a couple of hundred thousand years ago. By the time of the ancient Greeks, we had Pythagoras forbidding beans (possibly because of favism), others advocating meat, others revering bread as sacred, and Porphyry concluding that we should be vegetarians because eating animals makes us act like predatory beasts. The ancient Chinese had already thought of the idea that everybody who depends on grains dies, so maybe we should simply not eat grains—especially since the alternatives, pine seeds and other nutrient-packed seeds, did sometimes provide better health. Unfortunately, the eaters of these died too eventually, in spite of countless legends of people achieving immortality or at least very long life. (As the saying goes, “everyone who confuses correlation with causation eventually dies.”)

            Fad diets never stopped. In the United States they hit a high point in the 19th century, when people got enough white flour and white sugar to realize such processed foods were not ideal. Whole grain, vegetarian, and abstemious diets came into play (Deutsch 1977). My wife worked for decades at a Seventh-Day Adventist instution, and though not an Adventist she had to live and eat by the code a good deal of the time: whole grains, minimal or no meat and certainly no pork, no alcohol, no tobacco, no indulgents of such sort. There is a great deal to be said for this diet, and we still shop at the market and eat a lot of whole grains, beans, and vegetables. In practice, Adventists tend to use a great deal of sugar, to skimp the vegetables, and to cheat on the meat, but that’s not the diet’s fault.

            Then in the 1950s came Frances Moore Lappé and many imitators, promoting essentially the same diet (vegetarian, whole grains…) but also making a gospel of organic food. Lappé had less than ideal knowledge of either ecology or nutrition, and her “diet for a small planet” (Lappé   ) produced many a vitamin deficiency, particularly in devotees’ children, and did only some good (but, indeed, real good) for the environment.

It did spread the already-known ideal of organic food. Organic food is raised without artificial fertilizer or pesticides, and is indeed an extremely good idea ecologically (see above). In the markets, though, it differs from conventional food mainly in being more expensive. Unless you know and trust your dealer, it may not even be organic. Or it may be saved from pests by pesticides blowing in from a conventional farmer’s land. Conventionally produced food is now usually grown without heavy pesticide use before marketing. Still, organic is safer, on balance, though dubiously worth the extra money, especially for crops like wheat that are raised with minimal chemicals in any case.

            What these critiques of fad diets fail to realize is that the modern diet worldwide really is pretty unhealthy, and getting worse over time. The fad diets take a good idea and run too far with it. They often become far more unhealthy than the ordinary American diet, largely by limiting foods to the point at which adequate nutrients can only be gained by heavy use of vitamin and mineral supplement pills. One can move along a continuum from apologists for the ordinary diet (Deutsch, Chrzan and Cargill) to critics who still follow science and recognize we need to eat a variety of foods (Appia, Nestle) to mild faddists who still allow us decent nutrition (the more sane Paleo advocates) to outright faddists who restrict diet so much that followers cannot maintain adequate nutrition.

PART II. FOOD AND FOOD REGIONS    

The great food regions of the world can be defined by staple foods: the dominant foods—not just one, but a complex—in each area. Famously, the Native American agricultural system was and is defined by the “Three Sisters,” maize, beans, and squash. Similar integrated complexes define other regions.

This is to some extent arbitrary, and of course the systems grade into each other, blending at the boundaries. Any sharp lines drawn around our systems are arbitrary if necessary mapmakers’ conventions.

For this book, I define the following agricultural regions:

  1. The classic wheat-barley-livestock realm of the Near/Middle East, first in time and first in worldwide spread as a system. This system moved slowly into Central Asia, a hunting-gathering world, which persists in Siberia.
  2. Inevitably, I need to separate out Europe as a separate section, since its food history has been treated so extensively, and all too often with very little reference to the Middle East. Agriculture spread first to the south, then to the center, finally to the north. Also, extensions of the Near Eastern system to European colonies in the Americas and Oceania are treated with those regions, since in the Americas they necessarily came to terms with local foods and adopted them; North America produces far more maize than wheat.
  3. Next in line, the East Asian system, based on rice, millets, and soybeans. This system began as two separate systems in north and south China; these fused early and spread to Korea and Japan.
  4. The Indian subcontinent, which adopted both the above systems, integrated them, and added their own touches. Many variations on spicy themes emerged in the different regions.
  5. Southeast Asia, originally based on root and fruit crops, later adding rice. A very special extension of this is the root and tree system of Oceania, covering the most area of any agricultural system except the first, but supporting relatively few people on small islands scattered over the vast Pacific Ocean.
  6. Sub-Saharan Africa, based on its own local grains and roots.
  7.  Native Mexico and Central America, based on the aforementioned “three sisters.” Many variants arose, and hunter-gatherer cultures persisted at the margins in the north.
  8. South America, which added the all-important root crops: manioc, potatoes, sweet potatoes, and others. Highland and lowland South America had quite different systems, each with variants.
  9. North America north of Mexico, with its own domesticated grains and vegetables in some areas, hunting-gathering maintained and intensified elsewhere.

To these we may add the hunting-gathering cultures, which preserve even today the way of

life that supported all humans for millions of years. Hunter-gatherers eat almost anything edible in their environments, but usually live on plant foods, especially seeds and roots, and on small animals. Only those in the far north live mostly on mammal meat. Many coastal groups live mostly on fish. These cultures will be discussed in the relevant geographic sections.

I will focus largely on the areas I know best: China, Europe and the Middle East, and Mexico. Comparative notes on other regions will be included, but I make no attempt to be exhaustive or even close.

Near East

            This area comprises dry Asia and neighboring North Africa, from Iran and Afghanistan west. The present chapter includes special sections on central Asia and Siberia.

Over a million years or more, during periods when Arabia was moist and cooler, people radiated out and settled widely. This occurred aroud 400, 300, 200, 130-75, and 55 thousand years ago, as shown by stone tools datable by type. In moist times, central western Arabia and the Salalah area had woodland, as well as high Yemen, and most of the peninsula was grassland (Groucutt et al. 2021).

During this period, and even earlier, hominins immigrated from Africa in successive waves. First, so far as we know, were Homo erectus, who appear in Georgia about 2 million years ago, and then in China and Indonesia not long after, indicating successful colonization and rapid spread. They are associated with huge, heavy hand-axes in the west, choppers and chopping tools in the east. The latter are heavy cobbles chipped to a simple edge, useful for bashing game or for working wood and bamboo; it seems likely that much better and more complex tools were made from those materials after initial working by choppers.

Homo erectus was a large, tough human with heavy skull bones. Brain size developed slowly from not much more than half modern size to about ¾ of our brain size. The species seem to have died out without issue in Asia, unless they engendered the tiny island hominins with small brains in island Southeast Asia, Homo floresiensis on Flores and Homo  in the Philippines. These persisted until relatively recent times.

In Africa, Homo erectus evolved into later humans with larger brains and less heavy skulls, classified under several confusing names. These also radiated into the Near East and thence the rest of Eurasia. Homo antecessor and Homo heidelbergensis are the names used, the latter one for extensively found relics with much more sophisticated tool types. Heidelbergensis even made very good spears from hard wood; some survived for over 300,000 years, to be discovered in a bog in Germany a few years ago.

The evolution of these mid-Pleistocene hominins into more modern types is still mysterious, but probably took place in Africa, like the other advances in human evolution. In any case, the later Pleistocene saw the Near East dominated by Neanderthal humans, Homo sapiens neanderthalis. (They could and did interbreed with modern humans, thus showing they are the same species, in spite of usual terminological differentiation.) This large, bony, muscular human successfully hunted huge elephants and other Pleistocene megafauna in Europe, the Near East, and Siberia. They also created diverse and beautifully crafted stone tools, and some early cave art.

In central Asia they met a related but quite different hominin. This latter is new to science. Neanderthal remains were being excavated from Denisova Cave in south Siberia. A young girl’s finger bone turned up, and was duly sent to Svante Paabo’s lab, the leading site at the time for analyzing fossil human genetics. They ran a test, expecting another Neanderthal. The result was truly weird. They assumed an error in the process (such readings were few and innovative at the time), so they ran it again. Same result. Something must be contaminating the lab…but another run and then another produced the same weird reading. By now “a wild surmkise” had entered the lab: We may have a totally new type of human here. And so it proved. Denisovans have now turned up as genetic remnants, and one or two fossils, all over eastern Asia.

Neanderthals and Denisovans contributed to modern human genetics, via  a good deal of mixing. They contributed possibly some disease resistance, and other traits. In Tibet, Denisovans adapted to high altitudes, and passed some of these adaptive genes on to modern East Asians.

Modern humans, Homo sapiens sapiens, got into the Near East before 100,000 years ago, but little is known of their early presence. Perhaps they did not persist. More likely, the record was fragmented by such events as the spectacular eruption (or eruptions) 74,000 years ago, that dug the trench now filled by Lake Toba in Sumatra. In any case, by 70,000 years ago, people abounded in the warmer parts of Asia and were beginning to probe north toward Europe. They became a visible presence there somewhat after 50,000 years ago, and extended in the meantime throughout eastern Asia, into the Indonesian islands. By 20,000 years ago they were not only in Siberia but had reached the New World, moving rapidly south; of this more in the relevant chapter.

A long period of hunting and gathering followed. In the Near East, game was till abundant, partly because deserts were less extensive than now. Much of the land was green, varying considerably according to glacial and interglacial periods. Here we meet the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), the vast ocean dynamic that creates much of Eurasia’s weather. Warm water flows north in the Gulf Stream, warming north Europe. Cold water flows south in the Labrador Current and other cold subsurface streams. Being heavier, it sinks under the warm water, to surface again far downstream (mostly in the South Atlantic or even farther afield). Meanwhile, cold water wells up off Morocco, from the deep sea. Warmth moves north over the ocean, from the tropics, with warm air and rain. The temperature of the ocean from France to Morocco can fluctuate. The important result for humans is that the extent of warmth southward determines rainfall over all western Eurasia and North Africa. A warm south means more rain in the southerly parts of west Eurasia, including the Near East. If the warmth shifts north, so does the rain, and Europe gets a very wet year. The prevailing strong west winds of the temperate latitudes drive the rain far inland; even far west China (the western mountains of Xinjiang) benefit from a southward extension of the rain.

Hunting cultures in Eurasia created, among other things, some of the world’s greatest art. The cave paintings of Europe are often anatomically accurate, and more often stunningly beautiful. It has been observed that in terms of sheer beauty and effect on the viewer, art was as “fine” in those days as at any time since.

The Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) is usually capitalized, because it was such a dramatic event in human affairs. Temperatures sank to one of the lowest points seen since the “snowball earth” days hundreds of millions of years ago. The worst time was about 20,000-18,000 years past. Atmospheric CO2 now worries us because it is rising above 400 parts per million. In the LGM it was less than half of that. Cycles of warming and cooling had persisted through the Pleistocene, with CO2 peaking around 300 or a bit less during interglacials and sinking to or below 200 in glacial phases. It stood around 270 in historic times. During the LGM, ice sheets covered all northern Europe and the mountain regions of Asia. Sea levels were hundreds of feet lower, with so much water tied up in land ice. Rain was greater in many temperate zones, but worldwide it was less, for the same reason: so much water was frozen. Much of dry Eurasia was wetter, but the Sahara was even larger and drier than now. Arabia, at least in the south, was wetter, and served as a human refugium, but much of the Near East was dry, cold, and barren.

Hunting in the nonglaciated parts of Europe was good, because moist steppe conditions created ideal habitats for mammoths, rhinoceroses, giant deer, and other megafauna, as well as smaller animals.

The Near East and Central Asia were generally less well off. Central Asia was drier than today. The Altai and Tibetan Plateau were frigid desert where not under ice; they cooled the lowlands. Hunting megafauna, a way of life in Europe, was inadequate; people chased gazelles and other smaller game, ate acorns and almonds, and foraged for seeds.

Warming after 18,000 years ago was fairly rapid. Even more rapid, in fact extremely sudden, was its reversal in the Younger Dryas event, from 12,900 to 11,700 years ago. (The name refers to the re-expansion of the arctic plant genus Dryas as cold conditions returned.) Temperatures in Greenland fell by 4-10 degrees C (Wikipedia, “Younger Dryas”). Outside of the North Atlantic world, the period was less dramatic; it may have been caused in part by cold fresh water from melting of the North American ice sheets, flooding into the North Atlantic and overriding the warm circulation of the Gulf Stream. In any event, Europe and the Near East were whipsawed: extreme cold, sudden warmth, then extreme cold again, then almost immediate rewarming to modern conditions, and then onward to even warmer years from 8000 to 6000 years ago.

This, combined with heavy hunting pressure by well-armed humans, destroyed the megafauna. People are usually reasonable about hunting, and come into a loose equilibrium with the game, but this wild fluctuation stressed the game and the hunters both, making it impossible to find an easy balance.

However, all was not lost. The Near East, unlike temperate Europe, had not been lush enough to have many megafauna at best. When it warmed and moistened after the Younger Dryas, the main effect was on plants, which poured in from refugia in the south. A combination of cooling and drying with human mismanagement has made almost all the Near East into desert, steppe, and brushland today, but much of it was downright lush in the early postglacial period, with extensive oak, cedar, and mixed forests on the uplands. Pathetically tiny relics of this forest in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco and the high mountains of south-central Anatolia show what once was.

At Tel Tsaf, Israel. 14,000-year-old beer was found; this is the oldest drinking party on record (Archaeology News Network 2021).

With plants more numerous, people became much more dependent on them. Coinciding perfectly with the end of the Younger Dryas was the most momentous event in human history: the invention of agriculture. Anthropologists used to think that the wipeout of the megafauna made people turn to farming, but we now know that the megafauna die-off in Europe (and America, for that matter) did no such thing. Agriculture was invented in areas where the megafauna had been in short supply. Farming coincided with the rise in plant abundance.

People became dependent on gathering seeds, including wheat, barley, rye, peas, lentils, and other familiar plants. These naturally became the first to be planted. They also ate plenty of fruit, including pears, jujubes, olives, and, in the desert, dates. In cooler mountains grew wild almonds and other nuts. All of these were domesticated too, but more slowly, in view of their much longer generation times.

            Domestication of grains is usually first seen in selection for nonshattering rachises. The rachis is the tiny stalk attaching a grain to its stalk. In nature, it usually breaks when the grain is mature, so that the grain will roll or be carried by animals away from the parent plant, and thus grow without too much competition. Humans carried the stalks and grain back to their homes, thus automatically selecting the few nonshattering rachis bonds. Eventually, all domestic grains had nonshattering heads. Lentils, peas, and beans—the leguminous crops—have an equivalent in naturally breaking pods. Humans select for pods that stay closed.

            These marks of domestication show up around 10,000-12,000 years ago in the Near East. They are first recorded in the dry interior slopes of the Levantine mountains. Often, they occur near springs and streams, where people would naturally settle for the good water supply, and much later come to stay for the good soil and irrigation opportunities.

            Farming is notoriously a lot of work. Hunting and gathering is so pleasant that it remains a favorite hobby all over the world. The first two chapters of Genesis show very clearly what early Near Easterners thought of the matter. They are a story, compressed into a tale of two people in finite time, of expulsion from the paradise of hunting and gathering into the dreadful suffering of farming, where old Adam must win his bread by “the sweat of his brow.”

            Many grave minds have wondered why people would leave paradise for such a hell. The Bible implies it was the development of culture. The “tree of knowledge of good and evil” is not a real fruit tree. The Bible does not use imaginary things as images of real things, but always does the reverse. Eating the fruit of this metaphoric tree means developing a self-conscious moral code, independent of the happily innate self-regulation of wild primates.

            Modern speculations have generally done even less well. Most 19th-century speculations were based on the idea that hunting and gathering paid so badly that people would naturally turn to agriculture as soon as they realized plants could grow from seeds. The problems with this are that, first, all hunter-gatherers know plants grow from seeds (one cannot miss that in the wild), and, second, hunting-gathering pays so well that many groups still do it, and manage a good living. A 20th-century version assumed people were living off megafauna, hunted them out, and then had to turn to farming; we have seen why this idea fails. In no place in the world is exterminating megafauna followed by turning to agriculture; agriculture was always invented in areas that either had little to start with (not only the Near East, but also South America, New Guinea, and elsewhere), or preserved much of what they did have (China, southeast Asia). Many other ideas were proposed. It was even suggested that it was all an accident, because of the possibly accidental selection for nonshattering rachises (Rindos 1984). This did not explain why people kept planting more and working harder.

            For one thing, early agriculture does not pay well. It took thousands of years for grain in the Near East, China, and Mexico to be domesticated thoroughly enough to yield better than wild grain, if the wild grain was growing in ideal conditions. Early cultivated wheats and barley yielded the same 300-400 kg/ha as wild ones.

Two agreements were generally accepted. First, agriculture arose in what archaeologist Robert Braidwood called the “hilly flanks” of the interior Near East. Early sites stretch in a band from south-central Anatolia to Palestine and Jordan. Second, people found it desirable to concentrate more and more on small annual seeds, and eventually cultivate and then domesticate them.

A critically important site was Göbekli Tepe in southern Anatolia. This was an enormous community, almost a city, of hunter-gatherers, living by gathering wild wheat, barley, chickpeas, and other crops that would soon be domesticated. (It was probably only seasonally inhabited.) The wild ancestors of two of these—chickpeas and einkorn, an ancestral wheat—have been traced to the immediate area. This brought back memories of the long-ignored idea of Jane Jacobs (1984) that cities invented agriculture to feed their people. This idea had been dismissed at the time, because no large early settlements were known; cities arose, to everyone’s knowledge, well after 5000 years ago, when agriculture was already highly advanced and productive. Göbekli Tepe, and other large sites that began to turn up, suddenly made Jacobs’ idea look much better. However, very early plant domestication occurred widely in the Fertile Crescent, often in areas with extremely small settlements and low population densities.

There are two clues in the above brief summary. First, that note about “ideal conditions.” If ideal conditions are not met, selecting the right strains of crops and planting them in managed situations allows having them at hand. Sure enough, many small early farming settlements are in dry areas where they could take advantage of soils around springs and streams.

Second, if ideal conditions are approximated but settlements are really dense, it pays to plant grain as close to them as possible. You can have them ready to hand, and, probably more important, you can protect them from raiders and wild animals. Many habitats are folded together closely in the Middle East: woodland, conifer forest, riverine wetlands, lakes, marshes, deserts, steppes, shrublands, and intergrades between all these.

 This allowed a great deal of exchange and interdependence, as people shared products across ecological gradients, moved to protect what they had, learned about other zones, and above all found it very easy and tempting to plant items from one zone in another. Certainly, a part of domestication involved growing wheat, barley, and the other crops around oases in areas hotter and drier than the grasslands where those species were native.

This provides a neat explanation that fits the evidence. We await further research.

The classic “founder crops” of the earliest agriculture in the Near East were einkorn wheat, emmer wheat, barley, lentil, pea, bitter vetch, chickpea, and flax (Zohary and Hopf 1988; Zohary 2012).

It now appears that this was too specific. Slow progress toward agriculture involved long experimenting with these and other plants. Crops important later, such as fava beans, rye, and oats, were already being used and apparently subjected to some experimentation. The oats were wild; domestic oats came later, when two wild species, diploid A. longiglumis and tetraploid A. insularis, hybridized to produce our familiar A. sativa, a protein-rich grain with much potential. It is, for instance, a major source of soluble fibre, useful in fighting metabolic syndrome(Kamal et al. 2022; Paudel et al. 2021).

Tree crops were already used and managed; they have always been critical to Near Eastern farming. Domestication was a leisurely process (Arranz-Otaegui and Roe 2023).

Some early bread was found dating to 14,000 BCE, a time well before the origins of agriculture. Bread was made of the seeds of club-rush (Bolboschoenus glaucus), with small legumes, barley, oat, andeinkorn wheat. The flour was apparently carefully sifted, since no chaff appears in the bread, which has gas holes as if kneaded—certainly carefully made (Arranz-Otaegui et al. 2018).

A monumental neolithic village developed at Çatalhöyük, Türkiye, in a marshy area where a mountain stream flows out into the lowlands and spreads out in a delta. The area is now dry, but was wet in Neolithic times. The population was sizable over times, but probably only about 600-800 in any given year, not thousands (Kuijt and Marciniak 2024). It and other Neolithic early villages probably had many unoccupied houses at any one time, as modern villages do. The town lived on wheat and barley, with a few of the usual attendant crops.

Most of the languages in Europe, the Iranian world, and northern India are related, in the vast Indo-European language phylum. It first appeared in Anatolia, but recently there is a move to use Indo-Anatolian for the earliest ancestral form, which gave rise to Hittite and related languages. (To give some idea how close these languages all are, the Hittite for “water” is wadar. An unusual case, but you get the idea.) This early phylum may have started in Turkey south of the Caucasus, and broken up into the Anatolian languages around 4400-4000 BCE. There was already some mixing with Caucasus Mountains groups; a long genetic cline stretched from there to the Ukrainian steppes and then to the Volga River. Its genetic signature shows up in Anatolia by that period. Possibly the mix of Caucasus-Volga people, intruding into Anatolia, sparked the birth of the phylum. Farmers evidently moved up to steppes, already settled by rather mysterious farming cultures of the Trypillia and other cultures (Haggerty, Paul, et al. 2023; see also Ghalici et al. 2024).

By 4000 BCE, a mix of Caucasus-Volga people with local people of northern affinities created the Seredny Stih and then the Yamnaya (or Yamna) cultures. From 3700, climaxing around 3300, the Yamnaya exploded from their Ukraine source area, rapidly reaching Hungary on the west and Kazakhstan in the east. This appears to be the real Indo-European expansion. Indo-Anatolian had presumably been evolving rapidly into Indo-European forms. TheYamnaya mixed with locals—many derived from earlier Anatolian farmers—along the way. The Corded Ware and Bell-Beaker cultural groups emerged, almost certainly speaking the ancestors of our modern Indo-European languages: Germanic, Greek, Albanian, Slavic, Romance, and so forth. An earlier stream moved all the way across the steppes to establish the Tocharian languages of what is now western China. (The foregoing is a drastically simplified version of the involved story told in Lazaridis et al. 2025 and Nikitin et al. 2025. The senior figure behind both is the leading human geneticist David Reich.)

            Alcohol continued to be produced. Wine developed in the east Black Sea area, where the wine grape and the wine-making strain of the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae are native. The Georgian word for wine, ghvino, is clearly related to Hebrew wainos, Latin vinum, and all the modern cognates. The earliest wine so far known from Georgia dates to 6000-5800 BCE, identifried from residue in a jar (McGovern et al. 2017). Many similar jars like it occur from then onward, showing widespread winemaking. Presumably they are the ancestors of the large ceramic qvavri now used for quality winemaking. Grapes and winemaking spread very fast, being well known in the ancient Near East. The Hebrew Bible records its extreme importance by the Bronze Age.

Another word that has lasted is buza, of very ancient origin, surviving in “booze.” A noteworthy history of alcohol in the Near East, Joseph El-Asmar’s The Milk of Lions (2020), concerns itself more with distillation, a much later event, but recognizes the early roots.

            The ancient Mesopotamians developed date wine, called shekaru in Akkadian, whence modern Hebrew sheker for ale and Yiddish shikker for “drunk”; the same Akkadian root may give us the word “cider” (Jurafsky 2014:75).

In ancient Mesopotamia, barley was the staple; einkorn, emmer and hexaploid wheat were used; pea, grasspea, chickpea, broadbean (rare), lentil, onion, garlic and other vegetables existed (Potts 1997). Sizable settlements developed by 4000 BCE, cities by 3000.

Early documents actually provide a number of recipes for ancient Mesopotamian food, as recorded by Jean Bottéro in The Oldest Cuisine in the World:  Cooking in Mesopotamia (2004).

            New data on this appeared in Food & Drink (online, Nov. 4, 2019), including recipes. One simple example is:

“Meat is used. You prepare water. You add fine-grained salt, dried barley cakes, onion, Persian shallot, and milk. You crush and add leek and garlic.”

Newly-found tablets add four dishes to those known to Bottero. “The four dishes culled from the list-style tablet also each have unique uses. Pashrutum, for example, is a soup one might serve someone suffering from a cold, Lassen said, though the meaning of this bland broth accented by leek, coriander and onion flavours translates as “unwinding”. Elamite broth (“mu elamutum”), on the other hand, is among two foreign (or “Zukanda”) dishes listed in the tablets….”

A full recipe is worth reproducing here:

“Tuh’u recipe

Ingredients:
1 lb leg of mutton, diced
½ c rendered sheep fat
1 small onion, chopped
½ tsp salt
1 lb beetroot, peeled and diced
1 c rocket, chopped
½ c fresh coriander, chopped
1 c Persian shallot, chopped
1 tsp cumin seeds
1 c beer (a mix of sour beer & German Weißbier)
½ c water
½ c leek, chopped
2 garlic cloves, peeled and crushed

For the garnish:
½ c fresh coriander, finely chopped
½ c kurrat (or spring leek), finely chopped
2 tsp coriander seeds, coarsely crushed

Instructions: Heat sheep fat in a pot wide enough for the diced lamb to spread in one layer. Add lamb and sear on high heat until all moisture evaporates. Fold in the onion and keep cooking until it is almost transparent. Fold in salt, beetroot, rocket, fresh coriander, Persian shallot and cumin. Keep on folding until the moisture evaporates. Pour in beer, and then add water. Give the mixture a light stir and then bring to a boil. Reduce heat and add leek and garlic. Allow to simmer for about an hour until the sauce thickens.

Pound kurrat and remaining fresh coriander into a paste using a mortar and pestle. Ladle the stew into bowls and sprinkle with coriander seeds and kurrat and fresh coriander paste. The dish can be served with steamed bulgur, boiled chickpeas and bread.”

            The characteristic beehive oven was already known long before civilization. It is made from clay or brick. The fire is built in the oven and then raked out; the breads, stews, pizzas, and other foods cook in the residual heat. They start extremely hot, hundreds of degrees in temperature, and then cool slowly, Ths result is a crusty, even charred top and a slow-cooked interior, much liked by old-fashioned-oven enthusiasts. There are many of those; modern civilization has not even displaced them from New Mexico, where the Spanish introduced them in the 17th century. There, they once produced sourdough bread of amazing quality, but the cultures are now hard to find. In west and central Asia and Mediterranean Europe, beehive ovens survive abundantly. They gave rise to the modern pizza oven, which has imitated with electricity the blazing start and slow cooling.

            One early invention, probably long in use by the time the above recipes were written, was the tinuru. The word evolved into the modern tandur (Sen 2016:31). This is a large oven, often sunk into the ground. A fire is built at the bottom. Ideally, the ash must be removed somehow. Breads are stuck to the walls, and later peeled off with a peelboard, a long-handled wooden paddle. Tandurs are usually pots about a metre deep, but they can be huge. I saw one in Bamiyan, Afghanistan, in 1974 that was almost as big as a room. It was sunk into the ground. Retrieving breads from it was a true art. One had to use a very long and heavy peelboard, and any bread that fell was lost forever. There was nothing else to eat in town, but the bread was made from freshly-ground hard mountain wheat, and was among the finest bread I have ever tasted.

            The tandur became universal in Iran and Central Asia. It also spread to China along with the characteristic tandur bread, which became shaobing (“roasted cakes”) in Chinese. This bread is made from white flour and usually sprinkled with sesame seeds. Shaobing became small early on—a miniaturized Persian naan. The classic naan itself is small loaf size.

Contacts with the rest of Asia were already important in Mesopotamia from early times. Soybean, banana (probable), millet (unident. Panicoid), and turmeric, are found in dental calculus at Megiddo and Tel Erani, dating to the 2nd millennium BCE. Staple foods there were wheat, sesame, and dates; the new exotic foods must have provided exciting variety (Scott et al. 2021).

Zebus—a separate species from the European and Near Eastern ox—appear in the Near East by the 3rd millenn BCE; they are common in Egypt by the 16th  century BCE. Chickens, originally from south China and southeast Asia, appear in the Near East about the same time. Citron, presumably from India, was common by the 1st millennium. Pepper appears by 1300 BCE and cloves by 1700 BCE in Egypt and the Near East (Scott et al. 2021).

In ancient Egypt, the period just before the dynasties began was characterized by building subsistence on emmer, barley, peas, and lentils. By dynastic times (after 3100), flax is important; the Egyptians were famous for their linen clothing from then onward until cotton came to rule. Condiments like dill and oregano were used, becoming more important over time (Marinova et al. 2024).

The Epic of Gilgamesh (Nayeri 2018) records a good deal about ecology. Gilgamesh (the name belonged to an actual Sumerian king) was the quintessential city man, sophisticated, well-dressed, well-educated. He acquired a sidekick, Enkidu, who was the prototypic “wild man”—described in terms almost identical to those used for the yei, sasquatch, Bigfoot, and other imaginary forest fellows. He is, in fact, the first portrayal in literature of the stereotypic “savage.” The contrast of urban and rural is overdrawn to the point of satire. Both of them then go to raid the Cedar Forest, protected by a monstrous guard. We know from many sources that cedar forests were among the most valuable properties in the Near East, since the wood was by far the best in quality, necessary for ships and other goods. We even know the name of one actual forest guardian. King Nehemiah, in the Bible, ordered “…a letter unto Asaph the keeper of the king’s forest, that he may give me timber to make beams for the gates of the palace…and for the wall of the city, and for the house that I shall enter into” (Nehemiah 2:8). Making these real, important, very human guards into monsters is another bit of urban arrogance in the Gilgamesh epic, otherwise one of the great literary achievements of all time.

       The importance of the Bible as an ecological text has been greatly underappreciated, thanks to poor knowledge of ecology by divines and poor knowledge of divinity by too many ecologists. What could be done was shown many years ago by a former shepherd, Phillip Keller, in a book called A Shepherd Looks at Psalm 23. He explained how incredibly deep was the knowledge of sheepherding displayed in that short poem. Every verse of it required a chapter of explanation. The shepherd really does lead his flock beside still waters and to green pastures.

       In the Bible we first hear of tabooing many animals, notably including pigs and dogs, not only for food but, in the case of pigs, even for contact. They are unclean and polluting. Many reasons have been given for the suite of animals condemned.

       The earliest, and major, source for this is the Book of Leviticus, supposedly revealed by God to Moses, and incorporating much ancient material, though probably put in modern form around 500 BCE. The taboos on animals are found in Chapter 11 (repeated in Deuteronomy 14), which appears to preserve very old material. The taboos are of animals that chew the cud or similarly linger over vegetable food, but do not have cloven hoofs, like camels (they have pads, not hooves), “coneys” (hyraxes), and hares. Next come animals that have cloven hooves but do not chew the cud, like swine. Then come water creatures: those with fins and scales are clean, those without are not. Of birds, including bats, a list is provided that consists basically of eagles, hawks, vultures, and other predators. Finally, all animals that “creep, going upon all four” and close to the ground, are taboo, with the explicit exception of grasshoppers, locusts, and crickets, which are fine.

       A range of explanations have been offered for these taboos, and clearly they cannot be covered by one single explanation. The taboo on cuds and hooves is clearly part of a general ban in Leviticus and Deuteronomy on anything that seems to mix up two categories or violate categorization rules, as shown by Mary Douglas (1966). (The same rule outlaws wearing mixed-fibre garments, plowing with a mixed-species team, and homosexual activity—seen as a category violation.)

       The rest of the rules, and also the pig taboo, are neatly predicted by one factor: the tabooed creatures are all eaters of meat or carrion, as shown by Eugene Hunn (1979). Elsewhere in Leviticus it is made clear that blood is sacred to the Lord, and must be shed in ritual fashion. Otherwise it is intensely dangerous and polluting. This is why kosher butchering is such an extremely important aspect of Jewish rules, and also why halal butchering is so important in Islam, which maintained many of the Jewish food rules. Animals that live by eating other animals, or blood, or carrion—which pigs do, with enthusiasm—are tabooed. After that, a miscellany of crawling things is tabooed simply because they are not obviously clean feeders—as grasshoppers are.

        The pig taboo has been extensively discussed over time, notably by Frederick Simoons (1994) and Max Price (2021). They argue for multiple factors. Carleton Coon (1958) pointed out long ago that pigs are hard to herd, don’t like desert vegetation, are not useful for milk, need water and mud, and otherwise do not fit well with mobile desert-dwelling nomads. Wild pigs thrive and flourish in the riverine and forest lands of the Near East, however, and can be kept and herded there, but the nomadic tribes had little love for the settled pig-herders, as Egyptian records tell us. Very likely, such rivalry was involved.

            In any case, the pig taboo goes far beyond ancient Israel. In fact, it extends throughout the Near East and India (though very “low caste” Indian groups sometimes keep pigs). Several Christian groups maintain the ban. Everywhere, it is justified by the filthy habits of pigs, which notoriously eat garbage, excrement, snakes, and the like, and wallow in mud. The Bible nails two unclean animals in one saying: “As a dog returneth to his vomit, so a fool returneth to his folly” (Proverbs 26:11) amplified by St. Peter to “The dog is turned to his own vomit again; and the sow that was washed to her wallowing in the mire” (II Peter 2:22). One wonders how a good Jewish thinker knew that much about dogs and pigs….

            A quite different taboo goes all the way back to Exodus: “Thou shalt not seethe a kid in his mother’s milk” (Exodus 23:19, repeated verbatim in Deuteronomy 14:21). This has long been explained by stating that such a dish was a ritual dish of enemies of the Israelites. This explanation is found in Moses Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed (1948, Hebrew original ca. 1190 CE), one of the greatest religious and philosophical works of all time, and that satisfies me, at any rate. Other explanations have been raised, including Mary Douglas’ category-violation theory, which seems much less persuasive here. Indeed, “kid boiled in its mother’s milk” is a known dish in non-Jewish parts of the Near East, morbid name or no. Naturally, the milk is usually from some quite other animal.

            Other food taboos are discussed extensively by Simoons (1994). It seems that almost every culture has taboos, or at least avoidances, and they usually concern animals, not vegetables. The Buddhist rule against eating onions and garlic has more to do with their bad scent and exciting nature than with uncleanness per se.

       The Biblical Land of Canaan was a land of wine. In a Canaanite city, 40 jars were found, dating to 1700 BCE. They were a meter high, total 2,000 liters (about 3000 bottles’ worth). The wine, some red and some white, was “sweetened with honey and infused with juniper berries, mint, cinnamon and myrtle.” Apparently they had cinnamon then. The whole operation was standardized; evidently the Canaanites had real quality control on a large scale (Netburn 2013).

       Dates were domesticated in Mesopotamia, and became a staple food quite early. Date syrup was produced by piling the dates on a clean floor and taking the liquid pressed out (Høglund 1990). Date syrup remains important, though now produced in more sanitary means. Dates must be pollinated, and many bas-reliefs from Assyrian times show the process, often done by angel-like winged figures.

The early Nubians, in southern Egypt, managed to treat their illnesses, apparently without knowing why; they brewed beer with Terramycin as part of the starter culture. Apparently it was abundant enough to cure bacterial ailments. The beer was a sour porridge, like modern African homemade brews (McNally 2016).

Near Eastern food historian Charles Perry has told me that the first reference to boiled noodles is in the Babylonian Talmud, 5th C CE.

Medieval Near Eastern Food

            Medieval Near Eastern food is abundantly recorded. Arabs, and people of other backgrounds writing in Arabic, were enormously fond of good food. Many long and detailed recipe books survive. More impressive is the huge literature on food, from daily bread to feasts to famines. Food was medicinally evaluated, according to the classic humoral theory that goes back to Hippocrates (Buell and Anderson 2022). It spread from Greece to Anatolia and Syria, thence to the entire Arabic and Persian world. Persian hot/cold medical evaluation of food may be as old, reaching back to a very ancient common origin with the Hippocratic ideas. In any case, Arabic became the language of medicine by the 700s CE. Among Syro-Arab innovations is the idea that sweet, dulcet, pleasing food must be health-giving and strengthening, or at least digestive (Buell and Anderson 2022). These include sweet drinks, candies, cookies, small cakes, and the like (Yungman 2024). The English words sherbet, sorbet, shrub (the drink, not the plant), and similar words all go back to the Arabic root sh-r-b, “drink,” and were borrowed, mostly via Italian and French, because so many of these drinks were medically important.

Another valuable insight is captured in the saying: “When you sit with good company, sit long, for God does not count against your lifespan the time spent eating in good company” (attributed to Ja’far ibn Muhammad as-Ṣadīq, the Sixth Shi’a Imam, but not reliably nailed to him; see Buell and Anderson 2022 for discussion of this and the whole Medieval Arabic medical context). This remark captures a truth: enjoying good friendly company does prolong life, in proportion to the time spent.

Particulary impressive recent translations and studies by Nawab Nasrallah cover her own Iraqi heritage, and several early Arab cookbooks, translated in great detail and with notable accuracy (Nasrallah 2017, 2021, 2025, etc.). She discusses the medical issues in detail.

Serena Aneli and colleagues (2022) have tracked food and genetics across Central Asia. Genetically, Armenians and Georgians are largely descended from Caucasus hunter-gatherers, plus fair amounts of early Anatolian farmers. They have almost no Yamnaya-related steppe ancestry. Azerbaijan is similar, but has more Yamnaya heritage. Central Asia is broadly similar but has more genetic inheritance from farther east, mainly China: 41% among Kazakhs, 27% in Uzbekistan. Kazakhs, Tajiks and Uzbeks have 15-25% Yamnaya genetics, but very little early Anatolian farmers.

Food choices do not correlate with these genetic influences. They track Islam and Persian culture in Central Asia, though young males were and are more apt to drink than Islam allows. Skeletal data indicates they got few vegetables in the past.

Words traveled far: Farsi and Arabic Psikbaj for vinegar-sour foods became escabeche and ceviche in Spanish, for different foods. In Moorish Spain it evolved into a battered and fried fish dish eaten with vinegar, which was brought to England by Sephardic Jews and became fish and chips (Jurafsky 2014). Portuguese temperar (to season) and tempero (seasoned) were brought to Japan the same way, as batter-fried food, and became tempura (Jurafsky 2014:46).

One fascinating Medieval Near Eastern food was murri, fermented barley dough. The dough was inoculated with starter, wrapped in leaves, and left in a warm place. After much wondering about this substance, Charles Perry, leading scholar of Medieval Near Eastern foodways, decided to follow surviving recipes and create it. To his astonishment, the result was, basically, soy sauce. It disappeared from texts around 1400 (Perry 2012). This is not surprising; the fungi that do the fermenting turn out to be pretty much the same. Kevin John Qiu writes me (email of Feb. 27, 2024) that the starter, burdaj, is basically the same as the Chinese technology for making jiaqu (wine starter), and for Korean nuruk and Indonesian tempeh (fermented boiled soybean cakes). All involve paste wrapped in leaves—fig in the Near East; lotus, hibiscus, mugwort, or mulberry in E Asia. These leaves mostly inhibit wild fungi and bacteria that could spoil the ferment.

Modern Near Eastern, or Middle Eastern, Food

            Persian, or Iranian, food has a very long history. Iran was settled by Indo-European speaking nomads from the steppes, who assimilated whoever was there before, including Elamites in the southwest. The original center of power was Parsa, just north of the Elamites and in the low mountains—a dry, barren area, though with streams that concentrate water from higher peaks. The name gave us “Persia,” and later “Farsi” for the language, as p turned to f in such contexts. Iran always referred to the entire region, roughly the modern nation.

            Iran is basically a vast desert. Better conditions exist in the Zagros Mountains, the spine that runs along the western side of the country, but even they are dry and thinly vegetated. The only lush part of Iran is the Caspian Sea coast and the mountains behind it, which soar over 18,000 feet. They catch rain, and moisture from the Caspian Sea blows over the coast, making it a vast and rich oasis. It produces rice and other wet-climate products.

            The rest of the country is desperately short of water. Mountain chains produce small rivers, which flow into the surrounding basins, there to dry up and die without coming anywhere close to the sea. Cities arise where the rivers leave the mountains. Here, mountain drainages come together. Below the cities near the mountain feet, the rivers spread out into delta fans, and disappear in the sands.

            Water is captured by qanats: tunnels dug back into the outwash fans, to tap underground flow. These can be identified on satellite photographs by the neatly spaced rows of holes—wells that allow access for maintenance. Such management is exceedingly skilled and dangerous work, and is the realm of specialized experts, usually with long family histories. The qanat was probably invented in the borderlands of Mesopotamia. Few are left in Iran, but Afghanistan still has several. The great contemporary home of these water tunnels, though, is Xinjiang, where they were introduced—probably by speakers of Indo-European languages—many centuries ago. They are known there as karez.

            Moving westward, qanats were introduced by the Arabs to Spain, by the Spanish to Mexico (especially the Tehuacan Valley), and by Mexicans to California, where “water tunnels” were dug in the 19th century to water San Bernardino. This bit of water lore was related to me by old-timers, many decades ago.

            Returning to Iran: current overdraft of rivers and groundwater, plus hotter and drier weather thanks to burning fossil fuels, is a deadly menace to Iran’s survival. An example of how bad things can get is the fate of the province of Sistan. It depends on the Helmand River, which flows from the mountains of Afghanistan, barely reaches Iran, and ends in what was once a huge and wet inland delta. Afghanistan now takes more and more of the Helmand water, and the Taliban government is not interested in the fate of Iran. 

            Far more pleasant is diving into the actual foods. Many foods and food words known all over the Middle East and Mediterranean have Iranian (Persian/Farsi) origins, such as kofta, from Farsi koftan, “to grind.” Nan, for bread, is the familiar Indo-European word pan, this time with n rather than f replacing the p. It has been borrowed from China to North Africa. Less well known, but found all over Central Asia, is kaleh pacheh, “heads and feet,” a stew of those parts of a goat or sheep, usually with other bits and pieces added. Liver, heart, and other organs are possible. (The result tastes much better than it sounds.) This food is eaten in one or another form, under recognizable derivatives of the Farsi name, as far east as the Uyghur cities of China.

            Historical records include a cookbook from 1521 (surviving in later additions; Hassibi and Sayadabdi 2018) that records a cuisine very much like today’s, including a heavy focus on flavorful stews. In it, pilaf did not involve frying the rice first before boiling it, but briyani did; this is the opposite of some modern usages. Pilaf in particular varies all over the map today, with different areas frying or not frying, and often acting differently with different materials (rice, bulgur…there are even fonio pilafs in Africa).

            Iran produces almost all the world’s saffron. This spice consists of the stamens of the saffron crocus (Crocus sativus). There are only three per flower, and they must be collected by hand, so the spice is expensive—often worth more than its weight in gold. It is disinfectant and digestive, but hardly available in enough quantity to make a medicine. Its intense flavor lights up Iranian cuisine and that of neighboring countries, but it is too expensive to have caught on widely. It is perhaps at its best in the meat-and-fruit dishes so typical of Iranian cuisine. It also figures heavily in their rice cookery. Iran grows it on about 50,000 ha of land (Koehler 2013). Spain and Morocco produce tiny amounts.

            Turkish food is a marvelous mix (not fusion; not all has fused) of Central Asian, Greek, Armenian, Persian, Arabic, and others. The Turks came from Central Asia in the 11th century, and the Osmanlı (Ottoman) Turks completed the conquest of the moribund Byzantine Empire in 1421. Taking over its capital, Byzantion, they renamed it “Istanbul” (from a local phrase for “to the city”) and made it the crown and glory of Near Eastern architecture. It already had the magnificent Santa Sophia church, which became the grand mosque and set the style for further developments. The brilliant architect Sinan in the 17th century repaired it and went on to build or oversee dozens of mosques, town halls, bridges, and other works all over the Empire, creating a distinctive and beautiful style

            Turkish food is based on a range of grains, vegetables, fruits, and meats (Işin 2013, 2018; Jianu and Barbu 2018). Wheat is the staple, providing not only bread but also bulgur, wheat parboiled and then dried and cracked. This is a rather rice-like staple, found originally in the more remote, mountainous, and poor parts of the Empire, but now worldwide as an excellent and convenient dish. Bulgur could substitute for rice in pilafs, which reached a level of glory in Turkey, now officially Türkiye.

            A major class of dishes consists of stuffed vegetables and fruits, called dolmas, which is Turkish for “stuffed.” This is an old type of dish, native to the Near East rather than Central Asia, and well attested in Medieval Arabic cookbooks. The Turkish Empire brought it to full glory. Not only vegetables such as squash, tomatoes, eggplants, onions, peppers, and even carrots, but also fruits including quinces and apples, are stuffed, usually with a mix of rice, ground meat, pine nuts, and herbs and spices. A striking eggplant dish is a lukewarm or cold salad, with the hollowed-out roasted eggplant holding a mix of chopped eggplant flesh, tomatoes, garlic, onions, pine nuts, herbs, and whatever else seems appropriate, dressed with lemon juice and olive oil. This is known as “The Imam Swooned,” the Imam being the head of the congregation of a mosque; depending on what folktale you hear, the imam swooned with joy at tasting it, with sorrow at not getting it, or with horror at the expense of the top-quality olive oil required. 

Armenian food includes ghapama: pumpkin stuffed with rice, nuts, seeds, honey, etc., and baked. It can also be stuffed with the usual stuffing mix of rice, pine nuts, spices, herbs, and sometimes tomatoes.

The food of the Levant—the eastern Mediterranean coastlands—is broadly similar from Greece through Syria and Palestine. Palestinian food has been chronicled by Sami Tamimi in Falastin and The Gaza Kitchen, and Reem Kassis, The Palestinian Table.

            Georgian food is one of the miracles of the human spirit. This tiny country on the east Black Sea coast has its own language family, unrelated to any other. It has a fair claim to being the true home of wine. The wine grape and the relevant strain of Saccharomyces cerevisiae (brewers’ yeast) come from there. The wine tradition is ancient, and after pressure to go into lowest-level industrial wine production in USSR days, traditional winemaking has returned (Capalbo 2017). The wine is aged in huge ceramic jars known as qvevri, which develop a particularly rich flavor.

            The staple is bread, but wheat is also made into many other products, the favorite of which is khinkali, dumplings. These are the local variant of the standard Near Eastern and Central Asian tradition. They are stuffed with ground meat or cheese, appropriately seasoned. Otherwise, stews abound, some preserving the ancient mix of meat and fruit that characterizes the Iranian cultural world. Also similar to Iran is the near-invariable serving of fresh herbs, including tarragon, green onions, and others, with the food. This is an art of which I am particularly fond.

            Georgian feasts are memorable and unforgettable. They are chronicled by Darra Goldstein (1999), to say nothing of Georgian literature. Food and wine, and often vodka, keep coming until the diner has lost all track of time (and probably everything else). Toasts are offered, and must be accepted, which involves downing a glass. My introduction occurred at a wine pairing feast, comparing French and Georgian wines, to show the superiority of the latter. I lost count of the courses at ten; each was followed by a full glass of each nationality’s appropriate wine. I had not been so drunk since graduate student days. I managed to get back to our hotel, fortunately only a block away.

            An odd Georgian delicacy in rural areas consists of green pine cones boiled in syrup.

A Near Eastern food that has gone worldwide is qaliya. The word is Arabic for “fried” (root q-l-y), so it can mean anything. It has been borrowed into languages from India (for curries based on fried meat) and Tibet to Sicily (calia, roasted chickpeas). All sorts of spicing and cooking methods occur. (Tom Hoogervorst’s 2022 article on it is possibly the most mouth-watering article in recent history). Sometimes the meat starts by boiling and then winds up frying, as the fat cooks out of it and the water boils away. This medieval Near Eastern method seems to lie behind Mexican carnitas, if they are not an independent Native American invention, which is possible; in any case, they use that method.

Central Asia

            Among many myths about Central Asia is the story of nomads preparing meat by putting it under their thighs, on the horses’ backs, and eating it thus raw. This story goes back to Ammianus Marcellinus, and appears to be anti-Hun war propaganda rather than reality, in spite of its being retailed by Bernard de Joinville in his life of St. Louis (1928).

            A tomb of a noble woman in Mongolia in the 13th century contained yak milk (Ventresca Miller et al. 2023).

Europe

Perhaps “as much as 20 percent of the Neanderthal genome” persists in modern people (Shipman 2015:29). A huge eruption of Campanian crater covered cent Eur w ignimbrite around 39,300 years ago (Shipman 2015:52). Neanderthalss lived on big mammals and preferred cold. They apparently withdrew from the Levant around 70,000 years ago, then reinvaded when it got really cold again, persisting till 42,000 years ago. They preferred big game whenever they could get it, though they were flexible when necessary. They had higher caloric needs than we do today  (Shipman 2015:55-83).

Pat Shipman (2015:215-16) notes that humans and wolves (and coyotes and jackals) have conspicuous whites of the eyes and thus can show gaze direction to others. Other social canids too, and/or distinct fur patterns around eyes to emphasize. Other primates, and loner canids, do not have this feature.

Modern humans arrived in Europe around 45,000 years ago. “A single founder lineage” accounts for all before 14,000. It broke into groups in different areas. Neanderthal genes declined steadily from 4.3-5.7% to current 1.1-2.2, indicating selection against some genes.

Food processing was already happening. People were grinding oats into flour in Italy 36,000 years ago (Lippi et al. 2015)—some of the oldest known flour in the world.

Complex population moves took place in western Europe around 14,000 years ago (Posth et al 2023). There were new lineages, and more mixing from central Europe into western genetic pools. After 14,000, there was more and more Near Eastern input, especially after agriculture spread into Europe. There was even some East Asian mixing, notable even in far western Europe (Fu et al. 2016).

               Around 7000 years ago, all were overwhelmed demographically by the Anatolian farmers moving in, and later steppe people probably bringing Indo-European languages. The western group was dark-skinned but with lightish eyes, the later eastern in-migrants had lighter skin but darker eyes. From 2000 BCE, people from the steppe-derived groups became still more prevalent in Iberia, with dominance of Y chromosomes proving it was mainly males.

From 7500 to 3500 BP, Neolithic migrants from the Near East came in relatively small numbers, mixed with local hunter-gatherers, and formed very persistent and rather isolated local population (Valdiosera 2018).

A “ghost lineage”—previously unknown, totally absorbed into the general population now—brought a new genome to Europe 4000-5000 years ago, more in Scandinavia and extreme northeast Europe, where it goes back to 8000. Timing and are right for this being the bearers of the Corded Ware culture. The genetics are similar to that of the Mal’ta boy from 24000 years ago in Siberia. Some of this genome also occurs in Native America, so spread in both directions (Reich et al. 2019).

Earlier genomes in Europe include people “among the first people to split from the modern human population that swept out of Africa ome 60,000 years ago” (1107). The hunter-gatherer group had blue (or light) eyes, dark hair, dark skin; the farmers had brown eyes, dark hair, and lighter skin [classic Alpines]. Nobody knows about the third group’s colors (Gibbons 2014; Olalde 2014). There was selection for lighter skin color after 5000 BP, give or take several centuries, and for lactase production. This was associated with agriculture, which drastically reduced vitamin D consumption as compared to hunting and fishing (Wilde et al. 2014).

Agriculture probably came to North Africa from Iberia about 7400 years ago. Farming people mixed with local hunter-gatherers. Then Levantine immigrants brought stockraising around 6000-6500 years ago (Simões, Luciana, et al. 2023).

There was much aquatic food in over 1000 pottery shards analyzed from one site on the way into Africa. Fishers learned from local hunter-gatherers. Dairying is also attested by residues on the pottery (Lucquin et al. 2023).

A spread of farming from Anatolia occurred in 7000-6000 BC, possibly as early as 7500. These Anatolian farmers spread rapidly across Europe, expanding at about a kilometer a year. They introduced farming in most areas. Local hunter-gatherers were sometimes quick to pic it up, but sometimes stayed refractory and distinct for centuries. This expansion has been thought to be due to spread of Indo-Anatolian and/or Indo-European peoples, but took place improbably early for the phylum to have risen, or at least become identifiable as the linguistic world we know. Possibly Basque is a last holdout of the original farming languages.

Anatolia developed “proto-industrial exploitation of copper, gold and salt,” after 4600. Nomads came from the steppes after 4500 BC, but some had probably come earlier, mixing with the locals.

Older Southeastern European villages fell around 4400-4250. They were soon replaced by the huge towns of the Cucuteni-Trypillia (Tripolye) culture, largely or entirely of the Trypillia culture during the middle period, flourishing by 4300-3650. These depended on wheat (largely einkorn and emmer), barley, legumes (peas, broad beans, vetches), and animal husbandry, with heavy use of dung for fertilizer. The communities were democratically organized in neighborhoods with assembly halls. Some towns held around 15,000 inhabitants, on spacious lots in beautifully organized and laid-out communities.

These towns maintained a striking amount of equality, as shown by houses and burials; there is little difference in possessions. Consolidation of political power and rise of inequality in later Typillia, as well as Yamnaya incursion, led to more dispersal and smaller settlements (Hofmann et al. 2024; Kirleis et al. 2024).

The Trypillia-related cultures stemmed largely from the diaspora of farmers from Anatolia at an earlier time. Expected mixing with local people occurred, but was slow to become important (Nikitin et al. 2025). These cultures, with their large and peaceful towns and settled farming and herding life, were transformed by the Yamnaya expansion after 3700. Marija Gimbutas famously saw this as patriarchal, ferocious chariot-drivers attacking and devastating settle matrilineal farmers (Gimbutas 1965, 1974). Possibly; evidence is thin, but enough to indicate that Yamnaya did indeed replace the peaceful villagers (Nikitin et al. 2025). It is also important to note, however, that in Europe as elsewhere, a sharp cooling and drying took place from 4200 to 4000 BCE. It had local effects: serious in China, spottily in Europe (Marshall 2022). The fact that it comes at about the time of Trypillia decline is surely significant.

Full-scale steppe herding societies flourished by 3300 BC. New techniques for working land, dairying, making arsenical-copper alloys, etc. arose during all this time. The Chernavoda and Usatove cultures transferred a lot of knowledge from Cucuteni and Trypillia eastward, ca. 4000-3200 BC. Dairying arrived with the first Linearbandkeramik people around 5400 BCE.

There was very little lactose tolerance at that time; it increased enormously in later millennia. There is no evidence for selection for lactase persistence at the time when dairying comes in and becomes important. Instead, it appears after hard times, when subsistence was stretched. Richard Evershed and colleagues (2022) conclude that famine and disease make digesting lactose important and, especially, failure to digest it often fatal. Mild diarrhea in good times becomes major fatal diarrhea in bad ones.

Dairying reached the British Isles and north and west Eur about 6500 BCE, getting common by 5500, by which time clearly a major food source all over Europe. Selection for lactase persistence started in the southeast, the home of intensive livestock production, and spread. In Finland dairy foods were not a major food source until the early 3rd millennium BCE. Lactase persistence dates back to 4700-4600 BCE, but was rare until around 2000 BCE, becoming common from then on.

Significantly, milk words, including “milk” itself, go back to proto-Indo-European, and converge on the steppes. Possibly the Yamnaya culture brought them (Garnier, Sagart, and Sagot 2017). It was almost certainly an Indo-European-speaking radiation, and certainly depended on stockraising.

Dairying restored Europeans to Paleolithic size. There had been a steady shrinking in height and body mass since 33,000 years ago. It leveled off around 9000 years ago, reversed 6000 years ago, and brought Europeans back to Paleolithic bulk by 3000, but with some decline again since then. Dairying is clearly associated, possibly the whole cause. A growth factor in milk, destroyed by fermentation, made unfermented whole milk particularly significant (Stock et al. 2023). No such decline appears in the Near East.

The huge sites “suddenly disappeared and were succeeded around 3300 BC by fully established pastoralists associated with the Yamnaya cultural complex” (Penske et al. 2023:359).  These were genetically a wild mix. There was some continuity from much older Mesolithic cultures, lots of genes from the Anatolian farmer expansion, much ancestry from earlier steppe nomads.

Very little genetic diversity existed in southern Southeast Europe; people were largely of Anatolian farmer ancestry. There were, however, many genes from local preagricultural people. The great steppe expansion of the Yamnaya culture showed a complicated and locally-varying mix of steppe, Caucasus, East European, and other genes on the steppes around 3000 BCE. Moreover, there was “a resurgence of HG [hunter-gatherer] ancestry observed widely in Europe during the fourth millennium BC… This indicates the presence of remnant HG groups in various non-farmed regions, for example, highlands and uplands or densely forested zones and wetlands…” (Penske et al. 364).

In what is now Moldova and Ukraine, the Trypillia towns had up to 15,000 people by 6000 years ago. They covered up to 320 acres. These were the biggest settlements in the world at the time. Grain and peas were the staple foods. Livestock were penned; the dung was used for fertilizer, especially on the peas (Kiel University 2023), which fix their own nitrogen but can profit from the compost and mulch and get some additional nitrogen.

Dairying was basic to these communities, and one assumes that milk was prepared in many ways, including yogurt and cheese. The lactase-persistence gene was rare in these groups, so they had to do something. Cheesemaking appears in Europe by the 6th millennium BCE, but was already in Anatolia by the 7th, as shown by residues in pots (Salque et al. 2013). The earliest cheese in Central Asia comes much later, but associated with probable Indo-European speakers. In Europe it was extremely important from early times. A history by Paul Kindstedt, Cheese and Culture (2012), focuses on its importance in ancient Greece and later.

Meanwhile: “Genetic diversity in west Eurasian human populations was largely shaped by three major prehistoric migrations: anatomically modern hunter-gathers (HGs) occupying the area from around 45,000 BP…; Neolithic farmers expanding from the Middle East from around 11,000 BP…; and steppe pastoralists coming out of the Pontic steppe around 5000 BP….” (Allentoft et al. 2024:1). These trends were pan-European. West European, east European, and Caucasus Mountains hunter-gatherers were genetically rather different.

The Anatolian farmers spread to south Europe around 6700 BCE, reaching all Europe over the next 3000 years. The steppe people, associated with the Yamnaya culture (in a broad sense), had eastern European and Caucasus hunter-gatherer ancestors. While expanding west, they also expanded eastward, begetting the Sintasha and Andronovo cultures in Bronze Age Central Asia (Allentoft et al. 2024).

The western hunter-gatherer groups largely disappeared, but genes from them are not rare among modern Baltic and Belarus populations. Eastern hunter-gatherers survive largely in the Central Asian mixes that followed Yamnaya. Caucasus hunter-gatherers did better, leaving a large genetic legacy in Iran. The Anatolian farmers make up anywhere from 60% downward in Europe today, with the steppe people supplying the rest (Irving-Pease et al. 2024). Lactase persistence increased especially after 3000 BCE. Heavy dependence on grain came earlier, with genetic markers. Lighter skin and hair color probably tracked need for vitamin D manufacture in skin as people moved into the foggy northwest and ate less animal food (which contains D) (Irving-Pease 2024).

In Denmark, Mesolithic hunter-gatherers depending heavily on fish were almost entirely replaced by Neolithic farmers of Anatolian derivation after 3900 BCE. This was a thousand years later than similar Neolithic invasion farther south. Then came the people of steppe origin (again with much Yamnaya ancestry) from 2600 BCE. After this, Denmark remained about half steppe by ancestry, near half Anatolian, and a small but stable bit tracing back to pre-Neolithic hunter-gatherers. During this time, hair color got lighter, and blue eyes somewhat commoner; Mesolithic people were generally dark (Allentoft et al. 2024; Allentoft, Sikora et al. 2024).

Some of the oldest beer in the western world turned up in southwest Germany, ca. 2,550 years old, thus associated with Celtic people. It had lactobacilli as well as yeast, and probably tasted as the Romans said: “like a billy goat” (from a poem by Emperor Julian, ca. 400).

Beer has continued to be the drink of much of Europe, and later the world (Schiefenhövel and  Macbeth 2011).

The debate between water and wine achieved classic form in the Middle Ages, and persisted in countless forms, declining from scholarly poetry to folklore (Hanford 1913). Water leads by saying that wine drives men mad and they often kill each other or lose their wealth. Wine responds that water is full of garbage and sewage, and kills people through disease, showing that sanitation was a very real concern in the Medieval period. The best version may be the earliest (Whicher 1949:238-247). The corresponding Chinese debate is between water, tea, and ale, with similar arguments, but water wins by pointing out that the other two are made from it. Wine, of course, is not made directly from water, but from grape juice; the grapes do the job of cleaning the water in the process of taking it up through their roots.

Around 1200 BCE, the climate grew somewhat dryer after a wet period. There wa a major sociopolitical crash in the Aegean area and the Near East. Mycenean forts and cities fell, Hittites declined, and Dark Ages set in. There was decline in the Pannonian Plain, with large forts abandoned, and in Scandinavia. Outside of those areas, Europe kept on without much change It certainly seems that the climate does not explain the level of decline in the Anatolia-Greece axis (Molloy 2023).

            Major ancient sources on European food include Xenophon’s Oikonomos, the source of our word “economy” (Xenophon 1990, Greek original ca 300 BCE). Xenophon was a student of Socrates, and gives us a Socratic dialogue about farming. It is an excellent guide, as well done as a modern gardening manual. Xenophon also wrote about horses, Persian culture, and many other matters. The modern word “ecology”—“household study”—was coined from “economy,” literally “household naming,” i.e. describing the household. Around 330 BCE, Archestratus of Sicily wrote a poetic treatise on luxury that survives in fragments (Archestratus 2011). It relates the delights of fish above all.

            Another major source was the poet Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura (1928, Latin original ca. 55 BCE). It is a very long poem on the universe—its creation and form.

            Later came Geoponika, a Byzantine-era farming manual made up of quotes from earlier sources (Dalby 2011). It reveals a mix of good advice and classical mythology. It explains Apollo’s link with the laurel tree by the laurel’s value as hot-burning firewood, which connects it with the sun and thus the sun god—an odd attempt to make sense out of a myth that originally had Apollo chasing the nymph Daphne until she prayed to be saved from his lust by turning into a tree. The book explains how to make many medicinal wines, including rose-infused wine, and claims one can grow medicinal wine by inserting medicine into the vine slip (p. 117). It quotes a story that Bactrian camels are born from mating a male wild boar with a female dromedary. In spite of such oddities, most of the book is actually excellent advice on planting and growing Mediterranean foods and trees.

            Popular in the Roman Empire was garum, a fish sauce made by allowing fish to autodigest in salt, like southeast Asian sauces such as patis, nuoc mam, and nam pla. Some fermentation took place in some forms. As in southeast Asia, there were many types of garum, made from various fish parts including entrails, and various species of fish, and by various methods (Grainger 2016).

            The Romans famously used spices heavily. Spices were medicinal, but also a way to show off wealth and ability to get rare, exotic trade goods. They were imported in enormous quantities from south and southeast Asia, many of them coming via the Egyptian port of Berenike. This town lay at the mouth of an east-flowing wadi that could be tapped for underground flow of water, and headed near a west-flowing wadi reaching the Nile, allowing for caravans to carry goods back and forth to that great river. Black pepper was basic to the trade, but cinnamon, cloves, and other foreign spices. Produced at home were fennel, coriander, caraway, celery, summer savory, black mustard, parsley, and dill. Of these, coriander and possibly caraway were native to the Near East, but the rest were Italian. They dispersed with empire to the rest of Europe, but shrank back again during the Dark Ages (Livarda and Van der Veen 2008).

            The Avars, known in China as Rouran, were defeated by Turkic and Mongolic peoples and chased from today’s Xinjiang in China in the 500s AD. They settled in what are now Hungary and Austria around 567-8, remaining a distinctive and independent people until conquered by Frankish troops around 800, after which they dispersed and are lost to history (Wang 2025). They were among many “wandering folk” of the period, known to German historians as the Völkerwanderung. They and others from the east introduced many foods, probably including varius dairy and dumpling preparations.

Knotgrass seeds were used for porridge in the Dark Ages. Seeds of gold-of-pleasure, Camelina sativa, were used for oil. White-leaved spear orach was used for food and purge. Yields of grain 2 ½ to 3 ½ times the seed sown (compare to hundreds for maize today). In 16th-century Sweden, beer consumption was 40 times what it is at present, partly because so much food was salted. (The beer was weaker than today, probably quite a bit weaker.) 835 cal/day/person from beer was typical, from a total around 4000/d/adult. Early beer used myrtle, rosemary, costmary, etc. instead of or along with hops. In the Harz Mountains, a harvest ration of beer was 7 litres/day. Buckwheat came to Netherlands by 1394-5 (earliest documentation). (Slicher von Bath, B. H. 1963).

Less choice was the raw or undercooked fish of eastern Europe. It transmitted tapeworms and other intestinal parasites (Yeh et al. 2014). This was still a problem well into the 20th century (Desowitz 1981).

Meanwhile, Spain was ruled by Muslim Moorish dynasties, who conquered northward from Morocco in the 800s. They declined slowly, as Christian states expanded southward at their expense. The conquest was completed with the fall of Grenada in 1492; the loot allowed Ferdinand and Isabela to finance Columbus.

An archaeological window into the time is provided by Sarah Inskip and colleagues (2019). In the small city of Ecija, people lived on wheat bread. Barley was used, and after about 1200, sorghum. Sugarcane had come by the high Medieval period. Meat was from sheep and rabbits. The domestic rabbit is native to Spain; by this time it had been introduced widely in western Europe.

Such a roster was typical. During the time, however, not only sugarcane but many other crops came with the Moors. Arab culture spread rapidly to northwest Africa after the Muslim conquest in the 700s. Morocco has become a center of cooking, much of which is based on styles of cuisine going back to very early times in Iran and Arabia. Some traits include use of fruit in meat dishes, sweet-sour combinations, and complex spice mixes based on coriander, cumin, black pepper, cinnamon, and other warm spices. Only some of this caught on in Spain, but more widespread were new foods such as bitter (and much later sweet) oranges, lemons, limes, and other citrus, as well as useful plants like cotton and alfalfa (Watson 1983). Foods like almonds, pomegranates, wine grapes, and the commoner spices were already well known.

The linguistic effects were enormous. Just in the last paragraph, we have seen several words that came to English from Arabic via Spanish: orange (naranj), alfalfa, cotton (qutun, qoton in Andalusian Arabic). Less direct is sugar, from French sucre, Arabic sakkar, Persian shakar, ultimately Sanskrit (or derivative) sharkara. We can add tapas, from Andalusian Arabic tapashur, “tidbit, delicacy,” in spite of the delightful folk etymology that the snacks were used to cover (tapar) wine glasses. Sephardic Jewish adafina for cholent, the stew set up Friday to cook for the Sabbath when cooking is forbidden, is from Arabic al-dafina, buried (Schwartz 2001).

Catalan Medieval food was recorded by one Joan Santanach in the Llibre de Sent Soví, recently translated by Robin Vogelzang (Book of Sent Soví, 2008). It too has many Arabic influences.

Famines struck Europe in the 14th century, because of population growth colliding with the cold, wet weather of the Little Ice Age. There were huge rains in 1315-16, up to four or five times normal. These not only caused famine but often eroded the soil to bare rock all round the North Sea; maybe half the topsoil loss in all history there; about 5 to 12% of the population of northern Europe died between then and 1322 (Rosen 2014:110-133). France fell from 17-20 million people to around 10 million after 100 yrs’ war and then the plague. Incidentally, Rosen provides data on terms. assarting was the process of a group clearing land, taking it over, and cultivating it—parceling it out. An acre was, originally, the area “that could be plowed by one man behind a single ox in a single day.”  A virgate was that which could reasonably be plowed by two oxen in a season. A hide was four to seven virgates, and made a reasonable estate (Rosen 2014:150-155). forestalling was selling to new clients and thus depriving your regulars.

People ate 2000-2100 cal/day, a very low level, and much of it was beer (Rosen 2014:155-160).

Then disease hit hard. Not only did humans die, but rinderpest, a virus related to measles, struck the animals.  Anthrax (Bacillus anthracis), hoof-and-mouth (a viral disease), glanders (Burkholderia mallei), and liver flukes (Fasciola hepatica) all struck the livestock (Rosen 2014:185-275) at about the time the bubonic plague struck humans in 1346-48.

Ken Albala’s wonderful book The  Food History Reader provides short selections from the classic food writing of the world, from ancient Mesopotamia and China to modern classics. It samples Benedict’s Rule, Charlemagne’s Capitularies with incredible directions on what to grow in gardens (233), Al-Ghazzali on manners (251f), Avicenna (256f), Moses Maimonides (266-7), Islamic agriculture (272f), Taillevent’s instructions to Medieval French households (284f), the Menagier de Paris of the same general order (292f), Montezuma’s feasts as described by Bernal Diaz de Castillo (318f), More’s Utopia (332-3), Erasmus on good manners (very modern and proves they were as civilized as now, 339f), and dozens of other sources, down to modern times.

More odd terms and data come to us from Donald McDonald’s collection Agricultural Writers (1908), an anthology of early English texts. Aver was a cargo horse, as opposed to cheveau, a plow or riding horse; the name comes from haber,“to have” in Latin. The word can also refer to farm gear, and in this capacity it is the source of our word “average.”  Estates were very hierarchical—Lord, seneschal, then bailiff below him, then provost, then the various dairymaids (one was head), shepherd, cowherd, plowmen, etc. Yields were 1:3 or even worse. A typical sheep estate had around 400 wethers (castrated rams), 300 ewes, 200 hoggets (one- to two-year-old sheep), etc. (p. 99). Sheep that died of a murrain or the like were promptly skinned—saving the wool—and salted heavily. Herders were expected to sleep with their animals—grooms with horses, cowherds with cows, shepherd “and his dog” with the sheep, “dog boy” with the hunting hounds. They could not go home except on holidays (pp. 114-115).

Following that passage is a quote from John Worlidge, late 17th century: “In several places in Germany whenever they fell a tree they always plant a young one near the place, and no young farmer is permitted to marry a wife till he brings proof that he hath planted and is a father of a stated number of trees” (p. 116). Clearly, the Germans had sense; no wonder they later became the guiding spirits of forestry in Europe. 

Among medieval writers was Walter of Henley (Lamond 1890).

A later writer, John Worlidge, commented in the late 17th century: “In several places in Germany whenever they fell a tree they always plant a young one near the place, and no young farmer is permitted to marry a wife till he brings proof that he hath planted and is a father of a stated number of trees” (Lamond 1890:141). We desperately need this law.

            Among drinks were braggot: beer brewed with honey and sometimes spices (McGovern 2017:41-42).

            Wine arrived in France by 525 BCE, possibly introduced from Etruria (McGovern et al. 2013). At that time, it was preserved with pine resin, of which traces are found in the ancient jars. Modern Greek retsina maintains this tradition simply for the flavor.

            Spices came in Renaissance centuries to the far north. The first evidence of diverse spices in Scandinavia is provided by a wreck. King Hans of Denmark and Norway in 1495 sailed to a council meeting, hoping to play politics with the goal of taking over Sweden (Larsson and Foley 2023). His ship blew up (he was not on it at the time, but one suspects something…), preserving in deep water a record of the first saffron and ginger recorded in Scandinavia. There were also pepper, mustard, raspberries, hops, henbane, grapes, cloves, cucumber, dill, caraway, and a sturgeon, barrelled. High living.

            Early Scotland lived mainly on foods made from oatmeal and barley. They were usuallymade into bread, cakes (nonsweet), and porridge. Other, more mysterious, preparations included “sowens, lithac, drammack” (Bain 1973:20). Lithac is so obscure that it is not even in the OED, let alone in any online source. Drammock (sic) is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as “raw meal mixed with water.” Surely this means parched grain, like tsamba; raw meal is inedible. Sowans turn out fascinating—the bran and husks from milling were saved, soaked, strained, and the resulting starchy stuff soaked with salt, which caused lactic fermentation, resulting in swat (the liquid) and sowans (the precipitate). Families would have a sowan-bowie (small barrel) for making and keeping it. Yule sowans was a custom. Apparently, the stuff was about as near to gourmetship as old Scotland could offer (Bain, Robert, 1973, with additional information from Wikipedia).

Problems of modern management are well described by John McNeill (2003). The superiority of older ways are well described by Grove and Rackham (2001). Replacement of sound management by capitalist exploitation devastated many of the mountain regions, and many lowlands.

Bread was the staple food of all Europe in early times, and is still so today in some areas. Jim Chevalier (2019, 2020) provides a detailed history of bread and baking in France. >GO FILL THIS OUT< Chevalier (2021) has also reconstructed the foodways of early Medieval France, before the days of heavy Italian influence. The food was, unsurprisingly, much like that of the late Roman Empire. Polenta (grain gruel; maize was not there yet) as well as bread were staples. Wine was the drink of choice, but beer and water were common. Olive oil was common in the far south, but elsewhere animal fats were used.

Nutritional medicine followed Galen, but his work was far from well known. A great deal of it had been lost in Europe, to be discovered later in Arabic translations and re-translated into Latin in the late Medieval period.

Nuts, fruits, and some vegetables were widely available. Presumably people did a great deal of foraging for wild foods, as they did in England and elsewhere. Enough folksongs turn on the dangers of women out in the forest harvesting nuts and wild fruits to show that this was a common thing but did expose women to raiders.

Pasta evolved in western Asia and south Europe independently from that of eastern Asia. (The stories of Marco Polo introducing it are fiction.) Early terms include the Iranian lakhsha for possibly for pasta in general, and rishta for long, thin types (noodles). These terms are still used, and lakhsha has been borrowed as far as Indonesia and China, where it fused with China’s own pasta dishes to beget laksa mian with southeast Asian spicing.

A worthy case study to illustrate many points about food history is A Short History of Spaghetti with Tomato Sauce, by the Italian food historian Massimo Montanari (2021), profitably combined with the classic work Pasta: The Story of a Universal Food,by Silvano Serventi and Françoise Sabban (2002). All these authors are outstanding food historians of long experience.

Flat dry cakes were called laganon in ancient Greek, which became lagana in Latin (Montanari 2021:31). Another Latin word, tracta, appeared later, from trahere, to pull (Montanari 2021:32). Finally, a widespread word, itria (variously itrium, tria, tri, etc.; Arabic itriyya), appeared in late antiquity. The Arabic word fidawsh appeared in early Arabic society. It has spread into European languages, e.g. Italian fedelini (Montanari 2021:36). Spanish uses a straight borrowing, fideos, reflecting an Andalusian dialect of Arabic, which, like many Arabic vernaculars, converted short a to e and w (or short u) in o. It continues to be standard Spanish for thin noodles, and is often taken wrongly as a plural form. By Medieval times, pasta came into use as a general term in Italian, and macharoni for the dried types (Montanari 2021:40-43). More and more terms for specific types appeared. Spagho applied to “a wire for piercing the dough,” and did not give its name to spaghetti until the 19th century (Montanari 2021:43).

Pasta was normally eaten with cheese, and often butter. Of course, it still is; for many, no pasta dish beats cacio e pepe, pasta with just salt, pepper, and the classic cheeses. In Sicily, primarily during the Arab reign (ca. 800-1100), the dish of macaroni and cheese evolved, strikingly similar to the modern form—one of the oldest dishes in the world. They also seem to have invented lasagna. Recall that Sicily was Greek before it was Arab, and laganon was a known word. Interlayering lagana (the plural)with cheese was an obvious idea. Toasting cheese on bread was also an easy thing to image, evolving into ancestral pizza. Pizza is apparently an Italian form of the widely used east Mediterranean term pita for bread or pie. Greece invented tyropita, cheese pie, pastry stuffed with good Greek cheese (tyically sheeps’ cheese). I recall staying in Greece many decades ago on very limited money and living largely on tyropita.

Being hot and slippery, string pastas called for forks, which were brought in as table ware probably for that very purpose in the Renaissance (Montanari 2021:57-58). Previously, they were large and heavy, their purpose being for cooks’ use to fish hot meat from stew. In ancient Ireland, cooks had their own flesh forks as prized possessions, but eaters used their hands.

Pasta became a staple food in Naples in the 17th century; the rest of Italy joined on much later. Naples was identified as pasta country. Pasta machines and high costs of meat combined to produce this change (Montanari 2021:62). This may also have been the time that people took to cooking pasta a short time, to leave it al dente (Montanari 2021:65-67).

At present, a single factory in Parma, Italy, produces a wondrous 93,200 miles of spaghetti per day (Benton 2024:107).

One major advantage of pasta is that it is made of hard, protein-rich durum wheat (a form of emmer, not of bread wheat). It is thus slow to digest, resulting in a low glycemic index, much lower than such foods as potatoes, white bread, or white rice. It is relatively safe for prediabetics.

Tomato sauce, of course, had to await the exploration of Mexico. Tomatoes and chiles came in the 16th century. Chiles were quickly accepted as spice, fitting into the pepper niche, but tomatoes were feared, being nightshades and similar to eggplant—a disliked vegetable regarded as unhealthy or worse (Montanari 2021:73-89). The revisionist idea that tomatoes were not regarded as poison is shown wrong by several quotes from the 16th century (Montanari 2021:74).

The long-standing claim that tomato sauce is first noted in Italy, as “Spanish sauce,” is correct: it occurs in “Scalco alla Moderna (The Modern Steward) by Antionio Latini,” who had worked for a Spanish family. His sauce used tomatoes, roasted and skinned, cut up; chiles, onion, thyme, salt, oil, and vinegar (Montanari 2021:78-79). This is recognizable Mexican salsa (tomatoes, chiles, onion) converted into a salad. Later sauces are similar; more herbs were gradually added, from rosemary to—finally—basil. Garlic and other ingredients came soon. Montanari found no clear origin point for spaghetti with tomato sauce. It is an obvious enough thing to invent. It may have had multiple origins.

The meatball so identified in America with Neapolitan-style spaghetti and tomato sauce is an American addition, though likely by Neapolitan immigrants. Heavy immigration from Naples shaped American ideas of Italy and Italians, from food habits (pizza, spaghetti with tomato sauce) to songs, stereotypic costumes, and cusswords. Many of us born in mid-twentieth-century America got our introduction to Italian food from Chef Boy-ar-dee cans; Chef Boyardi was a real person, an Italian-American, and his canned food was not that bad.

Most of Italy is wheat country, but the central Po River Valley is rice country. Mile after mile of rice paddies occupy the horizon. Towns are devoted to rice; they are bare, stark places where finding a restaurant, even one specializing in rice dishes, is surprisingly difficult. Risotto is the local dish. It is apparently derived from pilaf, being based on rice fried in butter and then boiled in stock. The classic risotto rices, Carnaroli and Arborio, were developed in Italy surprisingly recently: in 1945 and 1946, respectively. Mussolini had pushed for growing more rice. Unlike most of his heritage, this was advantageous and persisted (Moyer-Nocchi 2015).

Pizza, the other world-famous carbohydrate dish, was a Naples specialty, with a low reputation (Moyer-Nocchi 2022). It was considered an unclean, disreputable street food, associated with cholera-ridden Naples (Nowak 2014). Workers bought slices of it as quick bites. Eventually, quality pizzas appeared, and the pizzeria got some degree of respect. But when I was in Italy as recently as 1988, pizza was despised outside of the Neapolitan area. My then-teenage daughter asked for it in northern Italy and drew scathing contempt for such an order. I warned her it wouldn’t be very good, and it wasn’t. Pizza’s conquest of the United States was also a matter of swimming upstream. When I was young and living in Lincoln, Nebraska, it was regarded as a lowly Italian food of dubious merit; a letter in 1954 to the local paper said that it was foreign and therefore Communist and therefore should be banned. Its success had much to do with the fact that the pizzeria filled an empty niche for a place for quick, filling food, relaxation, good times, eating with the hands, and generally unwinding. Even hamburger joints had become too staid for the rising younger generation. We of my generation thus betook ourselves in our teenage years to pizza joints and submarine sandwich shops, subs being the other great Italian introduction in the post-WWII era. It was part of the liberalization that gave us rock’n’roll and other abominations to our elders.

Like many Italians, Montanari casts a somewhat askance eye at “the Mediterranean diet,” noting there is nothing remotely close to one Mediterranean diet, and the various things that non-Italians mean by the term were assembled late and from various sources. Possibly more sensible is the folkloric division of Europe into “potato Europe and tomato Europe,” the line being roughly similar to the divide between north-draining and south-draining rivers (plus Iberia), though one notes that most of the Alps are potato country whichever way the rivers run. And a Hungarian would surely protest “We love both!

Wine and beer have a long and distinguished history in Europe.

Lager beer resulted from a cross between a German brewers’ strain, Saccharomyces pastorianus, apparently a hybrid of S. cerevisiae and S. eubayanus, this apparently taking place in Munich, where the original lager apparently originated at the original Hofbräuhaus, between 1602 and 1615 (Gibbons 2023). It involves a long cool storage (lagering) process during which the beer matures and develops flavoring.

Champagne was an ordinary though good wine till the 18th century. It rarely had gas bubbles. Then English taste, English access to corks, and English superior glass conspired to move it to the bubbly. There were three French gourmets in the 17th century who would drink wine from only Champagne slopes (Van Dyk 2015; see esp. p. 84).

A whole class of fermented products occurs in Albania (Quave and Pieroni 2014). These include fruit drinks and other products as well as a range of dairy products. Many are regarded as medicinal.

British food has a somewhat unfair reputation for blandness. It was spicier in the past. It also had many vegetables from early on (Thick 2014), in London and other areas with relatively wide-ranging tastes, even Scotland.

The British Isles developed a dish notable for tastiness, “Welsh rabbit,” cheddar (or similar) cheese on bread, toasted together. No rabbits; the word was originally “rare bit.” This was long a staple food in our house, my older son depending heavily on it during teen years. It is sometimes flavored with Worcester sauce and the like, but he and many others prefer the pure form.

That great Scottish dish, the haggis, was originally English and more varied and good than now. Many variants existed, with cream, eggs, currants, spices, and more. They were all in a stomach of some kind but not all with lungs or other innards used in the proper Scottish classic. That form today consists of finely-chopped lungs, liver, heart, and possibly other bits, in a matrix of oatmeal, steamed in a sheep’s stomach. It nested in Scotland at some unspecified early time but did not become the Scottish national dish till Burns immortalized it and England dropped it (Brears 2015). It is traditionally served with Scotch whisky (note there is no “e” in Scottish spelling), sometimes flambé in it but always consumed along with it. Some say a good deal of Scotch is necessary to make it palatable. Actually it tastes like a meatloaf, with quality depending on the cook.

The potato was soon introduced to Europe after being encountered in the western hemisphere, but did not catch on quickly. Contrary to myth, it was not widely rejected because it looked leprous or was not in the Bible (Earle 2020); the problem was that the original potatoes are tropical, and could not adjust to Europe’s exceedingly long summer days and short winter ones. The spread of the potato awaited introduction of potatoes selected by the Mapuche of Chile to flourish under such temperate regimes (Salaman 1949). Chilean potatoes reached Europe before 1700 (Knapp 2008). Chiloe Island was, and remains, the great source of temperate-zone potatoes. The Mapuche and mixed-ethnic farmers of Chiloe continue to grow a vast variety of potatoes, because the people and potatoes are routinely sought out by breeders needing new genes for resistance against potato blight and other diseases.

Nevertheless, there was initial resistance to an unfamiliar crop (Salaman 1949). Parmentier established a seedbed and put heavily armed guards around it—the guards instructed to ignore anyone trying to steal planting stock. Soon the garden was heavily looted, and potatoes were growing more and more widely in France. For this he became the nominate individual of many potato dishes in French cuisine. Supposedly (but dubiously), Catherine the Great wore wreaths of potato flowers in her hair.

Acceptance finally came with a rush. By the 1840s, the potato was the staple food of the colder, wetter parts of Europe. Then came the even colder and wetter weather of the 1846-48 years. Crops failed everywhere, and the potato was devastated, especially by late blight carried by Phytophthora infestans. This plant is usually called a “fungus,” but is in fact a seaweed; its closest familiar relative is kelp. It thus depends on water, and thrives only in very wet weather when the potato beds cannot dry out. A strain from Mexico (Goss et al. 2014) reached Europe and proliferated. By 1848, it had killed hundreds of thousands and driven millions to desperation, often migration to America (Lang 2001; Salaman 1949; Woodham-Smith 1962). England stood by, providing some relief (grain and more potatoes; see Geber et al. 2019) but very little, on the assumption that the “free market” would lead to plentiful supplies. This failed to occur, and Ireland never forgave the English, breaking away in independence in 1921. Today, in one of history’s more amazing ironies, Ireland has the highest per capita income in the world, far exceeding that of the UK.

Not only Ireland, but also all of northern continental Europe, was devastated. This had much to do with the Europe-wide revolutions of 1848, which inspired the Communist Manifesto and the whole Marxist movement. The United States was demographically and culturally transformed by thousands—ultimately hundreds of thousands—of Irish and German immigrants. There are now many times as many people of Irish descent in the United States than there are in Ireland. Latin America also received heavy immigration, the linguistic unfamiliarity offset by the familiarity of the Catholic religion. As late as 1916, potato blight led to 700,000 hunger deaths in Germany, war having taken the copper used for fungicides (Walters 2017). The blight continues to devastate crops in Asia.

The potato continues to evolve and develop. The domestic plant is tetraploid, making it hard to breed, so diploid varieties have been bred. Europe long remained the center of potatoes, but they are now more important in Asia (especially montane areas) and North America (Stokstad 2019). Ironically, they are possibly least important in their South American home, where they have never overcome an identification with the Indigenous people, who until recently were despised, oppressed, and as thoroughly ignored as possible in that continent.

Faroese food runs heavily to meat and fat. Among the delicacies are fermented mutton. Skerpikjøt is wind-dried mutton, raestkjøt the fermented form. These have a very complex bacteriology, but Lactobacillus is the key to preserving and providing taste. A gourmet tourism is now featuring it (Svanberg 2021, 2023). One recalls pinikjøt, dried sheep’s thorax, a delicacy I have enjoyed in Norway.

Michel De Certeau’s fascination with everyday life has led to some wonderful food ethnography in Lyon, France (De Certeau et al. 1998). Bread is still respected to almost sacred level. Wine is of course the complement, routinely consumed. White wine is sometimes flavored with blackcurrant liqueur, but not to the point of a Dijon Kir or a Lyonnaise Communard (red wine and blackcurrant mix).

            Russian food history is its own universe, covering a vast tract of Eurasia. It was a realm of scattered hunter-gatherers until agriculture slowly spread north and east via the Caucasus and the Pontic steppes. Stockraising nomadism developed in what are now Ukraine and Kazakhstan in the 3rd and 4th millennia BCE, as horse domestication progressed. Horses were first kept for meat and milk, then for pulling carts, finally for riding, and with that invention the steppes were open for long-range nomadism. Indo-European speakers were in at the birth of this, and spread the new technology rapidly into a land inhabited by Uralic, Turkic, and various less-known and distinctive langauges such as Ket and Yukaghir. Reindeer were domesticated possibly in the upper Yenisei drainage, possibly in far north Europe; either way, they were evidently domesticated in imitation of earlier domestication of livestock, and probably by people who already had herds (Vainstein 1980). Reindeer are thoroughly domesticated in those areas, but as one moves northeast, the reindeer are less and less domesticated, until in the extremely remote wilds of far northeast Siberia the Chukchi and Koryak try to manage wild or almost-wild herds.

            Early agriculture was, as elsewhere in west Eurasia, based on wheat and barley, with legume crops. By 2000 BCE, broomcorn millet was moving into central Asia from China. Between about 2000 and 1000, it became a staple crop, since it can tolerate drought and cold better than the western crops. It was the main crop in northern Russia until the early Medieval period.

            In the early Medieval centuries, the Vikings, locally called Rus, moved via rivers from Scandinavia to the Caspian Sea, and set up local states. Kiev became the main capital, and the country took the name Russia.

Arab travelers from the 10th and 11th centuries, notably Ibn Fadlān, report millet as the main crop, and introduced some superior strains of it (Ibn Fadlān 2012). They also note the making of birch beer from birch sap, in such a confusing way that the suffering modern editor concluded they were describing palm wine far from its real home. (Ibn Fadlān’s description is, however, perfectly clear to anyone familiar with the region; Ibn Fadlān 2012:34.) Ibn Fadlān and others were fed some hilarious tall stories. One was told that beavers keep enslaved weaker beavers, consigned to lower parts of their lodges, and this explains mangy skins; also that Christianity was better than Islam because it allows wine but only one wife, and women weaken but wine strengthens (Abū Hāmid in Ibn Fadlān 2012:83). The Arabs, and later writers (Goldstein 2020), report enormous numbers of beehives in the forest, and thus great consumptioin of honey. Bees, and honey-hunting bears, were common enough to be a danger. The Russians share the widespread fear of calling bears by name, and thus the word medved, “honey-eater,” came to be standard (Goldstein 2020:65ff).

Russia soon found rye to be superior to millet, leading to the rapid increase of the former at the expense of the latter. Darra Goldstein’s superb history of Russian food is even titled The Kingdom of Rye (2022). From her we learn that rye took over after 900—evidently considerably after, given the Arab accounts. It became the major food crop in the colder parts of Russia, though wheat and barley were grown as luxuries and continued to dominate the warmer south. Later, the Russians, and Germans in Russia, developed the extremely cold-tolerant wheats that took over much of the steppes. These are hard red wheats, superior for bread making. Many of the Germans were religious minorities, especially Anabaptists, encouraged by Peter the Great and Catherine the Great to come to Russia, escape intolerance at home, and introduce modern farming practices. They moved in large numbers to the Plains of North America in the 19th century, and thus the hard red cold-loving wheats came to dominate wheat production in the Dakotas and the Canadian Prairie Provinces.

They also introduced the “mammoth Russian” sunflower, which now dominates vast acreages in the Plains—an ironic case of a plant “not without honor save in his own country” (as Jesus said), since the sunflower is native to central North America and was domesticated there and in north Mexico, but was perfected as a major crop far away in Russia and Ukraine, and then returned from that distant realm to its native home. (A good deal of the above is from narratives I heard in youth; I was raised in Nebraska and went to school with many children of Russian German families, and later learned more about their stories.)

Bread was the staple, and was considred sacred, as elsewhere. The Russians picked up Near Eastern bread types, and with them the widespread taboo against letting a crumb fall and be stepped on. Bread, however, was a luxury in really hardscrabble areas like Belarus in the old days. Grain porridge and potatoes were daily fare (Bolotnikova et al. 1979).

Then as now, river fish were important, often the main source of protein. Some in eastern Russia are anadromous, living in the Pacific and running up rivers to breed. Huge runs of sturgeons formerly ran upriver from the Caspian Sea. These included the enormous beluga or huso (Huso huso), which could weigh over 1500 kg. Female sturgeons produced up to hundreds of pounds of eggs, and given Russia’s pickling culture, caviar resulted. It was at first a local staple food; it became a luxury in urban Russia, and then a super-luxury when rich Russian landlords and nobles introduced it to France in recent centuries. Alas, its popularity was its destruction. Sturgeon fishing soon went out of control. Now, the rewards of poaching in Russia, Iran, and other bordering countries, as well as for Pacific sturgeon in eastern Russia, are enough to tempt poachers to ignore high risks, and wild sturgeons will certainly be extinct in Eurasia before 2100 unless a miracle happens. The beluga is critically endangered. Sturgeons survive in North America, in tiny fractions of their former numbers, but the only real hope for caviar comes from sturgeon farming, perfected at the University of California, Davis, and catching on worldwide as disease problems are addressed.

Beyond sturgeon, many forms of carp, pike, and sander (Sander spp.) occur, as well as other more obscure species. Catfish grew to enormous size in the past. The wels or sheatfish (Silurus glanis), found in major rivers throughout eastern Europe and into Central Asia, may grow to almost 3 meters in length. It too is getting rare.

Cabbages grow well into the far north, producing enough vitamin C to sustain life. Vitamin C also comes from wild forest foods. The forest produced not only greens, berries, and medicinal herbs, but game and protein-rich mushrooms; hunting and gathering were thus often necessary to life in the old days. Fireweed was an important source of greens rich in vitamin C (Goldstein 2022:39), as in North American Indigenous societies.

Potatoes came in the 18th century but still met resistance in the 19th (Goldstein 2022:49). They were inevitably accepted, and became a staple food, necessary to survival in the many subsequent famines.

            Another cold-tolerant crop was the beet, which prospered in the warmer southwest. Russian cooking depends heavily on the sharp, intense flavorings that manage to grow in a cold climate: dill, horseradish, celery, wild greens and mushrooms. Also, fermentation comes into its own, to make those sharp intense flavorings out of ordinary foods. Sour cream, sourdough bread, pickled cucumbers, pickled mushrooms, pickled beets, pickled fish, and anything else easily fermented by Lactobacillus provide much of the flavor of Russian and East European food.

            One of the ferments is kvass, basically bread beer. Bread, or some similar cooked grain food, is left in water, sometimes with a starter, and kept warm. It produces a sour, slightly alcoholic drink. Far more serious is vodka, usually made from grain in spite of the legend that it is made from potatoes. (It can be, but rarely is.) Vodka (“little water” in Russian) is essentially unaged whiskey. Basically raw alcohol cut with water (some), it usually has no taste, but is often flavored with anything from chile peppers to lemons. In Poland, the traditional flavoring is buffalo grass, more or less similar to American sweetgrass. Yorsh, vodka and beer (Goldstein 2022:26), resembles the American boilermaker (whiskey with beer either mixed in or as a side shot).

A final alcoholic drink is mead, brewed from the honey that abounds in eastern Europe. It was a major indulgent before vodka entered the picture. Other drinks include a wide range of nonalcoholic fruit and honey drinks, to say nothing of pickle juice.

            Russian dumplings clearly derive from the Iranian-Turkic universe, but they have local names. Pel’meni comes from the Komi-Perm language, an obscure tongue related to Finnish, and means “dough ears.” Vareniki derives from an old Russian root, var-, for boiling (Goldstein 2022:27, 36). Kreplach is the Yiddish word, going back to older German krapfe “pastry.”

             The Tatars, a Turkic minority widely distributed in Russia and locally in Finland and elsewhere, have their own dumpling, pärämäts or peremech. It is a flat, circular dumpling with the usual variety of stuffings—meat, mushrooms, cheese, berries, and so on—which is baked or fried. Like dumplings throughout the Turkic, Russian, Chinese, and other realms, they have an enormous cultural significance (Ståhlberg and Svanberg 2025). They are a symbol of home, family, and good times, and thus have become major ethnic markers in the multiethnic world of the Tatars. As with pel’meni, and as with Chinese jiaozi, they are made in large quantities by the whole family or even groups of neighbors. Rolling out the dough, making the stuffing, and finally pleating the dough to make the necessary folds on top, is a good-time activity. The whole cult of dumplings and the good times that families and groups of friends have in making them together is a major part of life in central Asia and areas influenced from it.

Ukrainian cooking is like Russian, but with more ingredients, and fairly luxurious use of some that were scarce in Russia. and Ukraine. Borscht centers in Ukraine. It not always made from beets, but typically is. There are probably more borscht recipes than there are Ukrainian and southwest Russian cooks; everyone seems to have their own favorites, not just one favorite. My Ukrainian cookbook (Georgievsky et al. 1975) includes 24 borscht recipes, and a couple for holodnik, more or less borscht without beets. Varenitzi is the dumpling word.

            An example of how a culinary myth can begin and propagate is provided by the word “brunch.” For decades, the invention of this word and concept was credited to one Guy Beringer in 1896. Hannah Reff (2016) finally ran him down, and found he existed only in a short story in the British humor magazine Punch. Someone took the story seriously, probably from a joke reference, and the same line with the same attribution was solemnly repeated from author to author for decades. Reff found that the word was actually invented by English college students at about that time; Oxford blames Cambridge and Cambridge blames Oxford.

            This is all too typical of what passed for culinary history before recent decades. The claim that Marco Polo introduced spaghetti to Europe also originated in humorous fiction. French food history is full of myths, most of them enthusiastically propagated in the 20th century by the Larousse Gastronomique, a food dictionary. It has taken much effort to run down and correct these stories.

            I have personally watched a few errors creep into the literature through mistranslations of Chinese. The Chinese, like other people in this world, oten named foreign crops after their own local equivalent. Just as English has “Tahiti apple, “rose apple,” and for that matter “pineapple” for fruits nothing like an apple (or a pine cone—“pineapple” originally meant “pine cone”), Chinese named the pineapple the “foreign jakfruit,” guava the “foreign pomegranate,” asparagus “foreign wildrice-shoot,” sunflower the “foreign mallow,” and so on. These tend to lose the “foreign” qualifier over time, and then westerners think the plant was found in China centuries before it could have been there.

Africa

            Africa is the home of humanity. We evolved from ape ancestors there, over the last two million or more years. Most of the action seems to have taken place in east and south Africa, but conditions for preserving fossils are poor in the central and west, so expect exciting results from those areas someday.

Africa still has large numbers of people dependent on hunting and gathering. Most are genetically different from cultivators around them.

The most famous groups are the San (variously named locally) of southern Africa, the “Bushmen” of past colonial naming. They have been made famous by the work of Richard Lee (1979) and many others. Also famous are the Hadza, a tiny group that still hunts in the wild, rugged, and difficult country east of Lake Eyasi and west of Lake Manyara in Tanzania. Most are now settled, but a stalwart group of a few hundred refuses to give up their free lifestyle. They live largely on meat, wild roots, and on honey from wild bees, which are smoked into calmness and seem used to being robbed.

Herman Pontzer’s wonderful book Burn (2022)provides a great introduction to the Hadza. His own introduction was dramatic enough: in their tents, he and other researchers new to the area heard lions growling and scuffling around their tents. The researchers cowered in fear. When morning came, they were treated to a wonderful fresh meat breakfast by their new Hadza friends. “You guys heard th elinons list night, right?….Well, we figured they were up to something, so we went and checked it out. Turns out they had just killed this kudu…so we took it” (Pontzer 2022:5). People who think nothing of taking a fresh kill from a pair of lions are definitely tough. I have watched hyenas try to do it and be terrified into retreat.

I have never met the Hadza, but I had a strong sense of homecoming when I first went into their country, coming down to Lake Manyara. It is high enough to be pleasantly cool compared to the burning plains of much of Africa. It is a large fresh lake, surrounded by marsh, swamp, riparian forest, and grassland. You reach it by dropping from a high plateau through savannah country with grass and scattered trees. The whole picture is exactly the sort of mixed ecosystem where you would expect humans to evolve. We re-create such landscapes in gardens and parks, from Japan to Renaissance Italy and from old Persia to modern California.  Most of the land on the high plateaus above Manyara was Maasai country when I was first there, and I have spent some time with the Maasai. Cultivation is now rapidly encroaching on the Maasai and Hadza, as Tanzania’s population rapidly expands. One hopes for a bearable future.

In spite of getting a lot of meat, the Hadza live to a large extent on roots and on honey. An odd bird, the Indicator, whose scientific name is Indicator indicator, often leads them to beehives, and then eats the larvae and wax—it can digest beeswax. I have had the experience of being led in a beehive direction by an indicator bird; it is a rather surrealistic experience.

Rainforest areas of central Africa have their own hunter-gatherers, in the richest forests. They are small people, adapted to a world where protein is largely unreachable in the treetops. They preserve genetic differences from the cultivators around them, who moved in from the northwest in the last few thousand years. Connectivity of hunter-gatherer populations in the forest zones diminished during ice ages, but got back to current levels between. They have been around for at least 120,000 years. Connectivity increased around 105-110 thousand years ago, again at 68-87 thousand, and yet again at 17 to 12, because of drastic reduction in forest range due to the Ice Ages. This reduction forced them into small areas and brought them into more contact with settled farmers. The current population of hunter-gatherers in central Africa is about 200,000 people (Padilla-Iglesias et al. 2022).

            The San (with their Khoi or Khoekhoe relatives, who herd livestock) and the Hadza both speak isolated languages without surviving relatives. Both stocks are click languages, making phonemes by implosion, unlike all other world languages. San is also extremely phoneme-rich. One suspects many such languages are long lost.

            Outside of these, modern Africa has only three great language phyla: Afro-Asiatic, Nilo-Saharan, and Niger-Congo. These are all native to the continent. Afro-Asiatic has a center of diversity in the southern highlands of Ethiopia, and I am fairly sure it developed there. Its most famous branch is Semitic, which probably started in the central highlands of Ethiopia, where Amharic and several relatives survive, but soon reached the Near East and differentiated there. Babylonian and Assyrian go back more than 4000 years, and the Semitic languages were probably already in the Near East by 5000 BCE. Sumerian, their predecessor language in Mesopotamia, was completely replaced by Semitic languages, which soon gave rise to Hebrew, the Arabic languages, and relatives. It has occurred to several that the Biblical Eden is a paradise surronded by desert and watered by four rivers draining north, east, south, and west—a perfect description of the Ethiopian highlands, with the rivers being the Awash, Webi Jubba, Omo, and Blue Nile.

            The Nilo-Saharan phylum goes back more than 10,500 years, to an ancestral language somewhere near Lake Chad or in the southeast Sahara. Most of the Nilo-Saharan languages are incredibly obscure, spoken by small groups in remote areas. The best-known groups to the outside world are the Maasai and their cattle-herding neighbors in interior East Africa.

            The Niger-Congo languages center in west Africa, where a fantastic diversity exists from Senegal through Nigeria. 2000 to 3000 years ago, one branch, the Bantu, grew in one of the most amazing expansions in linguistic history. Within a few centuries, the world from Nigeria to South Africa was speaking Bantu languages. Swahili is the one best known to the world. I have some experience with both ends of the phylum, knowing a tiny bit of Wolof from the far west, and having studied Swahili briefly in the far east.  

            Agriculture apparently did not begin in Africa, but it acquired wheat, barley, chickpeas, lentils, and other major cultigens from the Near East almost as soon as those were domesticated. Nilo-Saharan does not have a shared agricultural vocabulary, but its main branches do (especially for livestock; these are herding peoples), showing that agriculture came about the time they were differentiating, some 10,500 years ago (Ehret 2017). Afro-Asiatic has many shared terms going back at least that far. Niger-Congo’s earliest agricultural words appeared about the same time, around 5000 BCE (the proto-language had a word for fonio [Ehret 2017:72), but it was probably gathered wild). Agriculture moved rapidly into the African world. By the time the Bantu began their epic migrations, they had words for oil palm, groundnuts, goats, gourds, yam, and black-eyed peas (Ehret 2017:76), among other things.

The Nile Valley of Egypt became the heartland of African agriculture, and served as a corridor for it to move rapidly south. As the Ethiopian highlands were reached, new crops were domesticated at some uncertain but probably early time. Beer spread with the Near Eastern crops (Arthur 2021). A beer in Nubia around 3000 years ago proved to contain terramycin—the mold was one of the fermentation agents—and the people of the day were presumably healthy.

            In general, northern Africa was populated from Europe, northeast Africa was always more or less part of the Near East demographically, and sub-Saharan Africa was a different world genetically, with intergrading only in Ethiopia and along the Nile. Little is known about the Sahara, now largely uninhabitable. But in the early Holocene, it was all woodland and grassland, except for a small area of desert around the Nile. Lake Chad was as big as Germany.  Recently, two mummified women who lived 5000 years ago in Takarkori, in the middle of the Sahara, were genetically analyzed. The two are representatives of a lineage known previously only as a mysterious component in the genomes of a few individuals from Morocco. It is not related to sub-Saharan people, and only distantly to Mediterranean populations (Salem et al. 2025). By this time sheep and goats were herded there, but they were ordinary Near Eastern ones.

Herding appeared by 5000 BP in Kenya. It was highly specialized, with heavy milk dependence and probable lactase persistence gene, by 3000 BP. In 5000 BP the cattle were largely for meat, though milk was used. Milk dominated by 3000 (Grillo et al. 2020). The timing is similar to that for central Asia and a bit later than that for eastern Europe. 

Ethiopia and neighboring areas were characterized by agro-pastoralism from 1600-900 BCE, then agriculture. The usual Near Eastern crops appeared: emmer, barley, flax. Tef, millets, and possibly sorghum had also appeared by then (Beldados et al. 2023).

Chief among these was tef (Eragrostis tef), a species of weeping lovegrass that is adapted to the cold, moist climate there. It became the staple food, which was fortunate, since it is high in iron, otherwise desperately short in many African diets. It is made into injera, a large sourdough pancake. Food is placed on this pancake and eaten by hand with further injeras. A bite of food picked up by a small piece of injera is a gursha in Amharic, and gurshas are exchanged between family members as a bonding ritual. New barley varieties suited to the climate also emerged. An oilseed, Guizotia abyssinica, was developed and remains important. A range of minor crops appeared. Ethiopian food, in sharp contrast to most African food, is one of the great gourmet cuisines of the planet.

Injera at its best is as good as any bread on earth. It is eaten with highly spiced stews of beef, mutton, goat, and chicken, as well as many leguminous crops, green vegetables, and other foods. Spiced butter, extremely hot chiles, and a range of spices from the Near East and India add flavor; turmeric, cumin, cinnamon, and black pepper are widely present. A unique touch is provided by red onions sliced very thin and slowly caramelized in a dry pan.

Shiro flour is made of yellow split peas, often with fava beans (of which Eth is the world’s 5th biggest exporter), grass peas, field peas, and spices. (Favas are called by the Arabic name of fuul.) Mitin shiro has vetch, garlic, ginger, salt, and chile powder and other spices, and is used in shiro alich’a, yellow split pea stew. Shiro powder can include all sorts of spices, incl black cumin, hell (whatever that is), coriander, kemune (unident.), onion, sunflower, nutmeg, long pepper, thyme, etc. They have chem analyses. The commoner spice powder is berbere, blazing hot with chiles, but also including bishopsweed, fenugreek, cardamom, basil, garlic, rue, rosemary, cumin, cinnamon, etc., to taste. Enkulal firfir is scrambled eggs with berbere. (Zeru et al. 2023).

            Farther south and in hotter climes, a range of heat-adapted grains developed. Sorghum (Sorghum biocolor) was the most important, going worldwide by 2000 BCE as it spread through Egypt, Ethiopia, and India. Its weedy relative S. halapense (Johnson grass) is a hated weed, but sometimes used for forage and erosion control.

            All along the Sahel—Arabic for “shore”—the Sahara grades slowly into the cultivatable lands of rainfed Africa. The Sahara is the province of camel nomads. The Sahel is disputed, or sometimes cooperatively managed, by stockraisers dependent on cattle and by cultivators dependent on tough, drought-resistant millets. One, the bulrush millet Pennisetum americanum, can grow on four inches of rain. It is a tall, beautiful, impressive plant that deserves more attention. The name comes from its superficial similarity to cattails (bulrushes in England). Fonio, a domesticated crabgrass (Digitaria exilis and the less appealing D. iburua), is comparably tough. Finger millet (Eleusine coracana and relatives) is slightly less drought-resistant, but high in yields. These are now promoted as “ancient grains,” which they are, but to me they taste rather like dust. The Senegalese chef Pierre Thiam has enthusiastic words about fonio in his cookbooks (Thiam 2008, 2015), but I am less than excited.

Their great limit is their susceptibility to birds. My experiments with growing bulrush millet in desert California ended summarily when house finches and goldfinches discovered the seed heads. The African equivalent is the red-billed quelea (Quelea quelea), which occurs in millions and can be almost as devastating as the locusts that also infest the Sahel. Bulrush millet remains the staff of life in regions too dry for anything else. Bulrush and finger millets and sorghum reached India by 1700 BCE. Fonio has stayed in West Africa.

            Also domesticated about 2000-4000 years ago were the Bambara groundnut (Vigna subterranea) and the similar Hausa groundnut (Macrotyloma geocarpum), which like the peanut plant their fruits in the soil—the flower grows downward and into the earth.

            In tropical Africa, a whole suite of plants adapted to hot, wet conditions was added. The major ones were yams, lily relatives of the genus Dioscorea—similar to, but not related to, the tuber-bearing morning glory from South America that was assimilated to “yams” by enslaved Africans and still bears the name in the United States. Dioscorea of many species—Asian as well as African—still grow in the Western Hemisphere tropics, but are rare in U.S. markets. Less well known in the African pumpkin or ash gourd (Telfairia occidentalis), grown for its large and highly nutritious seeds rather than for its flesh. It has enormous potential, but somehow has never caught on anywhere outside of west-central Africa. (On all these crops, see the wonderful accounts in National Academy of Sciences 1996, 2006.)

            Finally, and much more hopeful from a gourmet standpoint, was an independent domestication of rice that took place by 2000 years ago in the Niger River valley, especially the internal delta in Mali. This is a different species (Oryza glaberrima) from Chinese rice, not close enough to hybridize easily, though hybridization is now under way in a search for resistance to pests and other problems. It was grown widely in interior and coastal West Africa. Carried to the New World by enslaved people, it spread widely (Carney 2001).

            James Webb (1995) describes the interaction in his book Desert Frontier: Ecological and Economic Change along the Western Sahel, 1600-1850, and makes it sound very much like Mongol-Chinese relations in north China in old times, and Roderick McIntosh (2005) has made the comparison. Interesting is that in some parts of the zone “white” meant herder, “black” meant farmer, as if skin color sorted with lifestyle—which it does not. The old Chinese classification into “barbarians” and “civilized” is quite comparable.

            More wide-ranging is Tadeusz Lewicki’s major work West African Food in the Middle Ages According to Arabic Sources (1974). This book stresses the importance of the native rice and millets, and of livestock, and the lack of other foods, though indigenous spices were important not only in food but in trade. Grains of Paradise (a native cardamom, Aframomum spp.) was a major staple of international trade, largely replaced in later centuries by Asian cardamom and other spices. It continues to have some medical use.

Roderick McIntosh (2005) gives a striking account of the interior delta of the Niger. This is a vast tract where the river is obstructed and spreads out in a huge channeled wetland. The soils arepoor and most areas are either too dry or too wet or flood-prone for much agriculture, but there enough wet channels and marshes for cultivation. The area has had some bursts of serious urbanization with high culture including Jenne-Jeno which rached 42,000 people or more in 1200-1400 CE (McIntosh 2005:210), but no large citadels, monumental construction, or huge sculptures. Dense and close-spaced settlements cultivated fonio, bulrush millet, sorghum, Guinea millet Brachiaria deflexa, Bambara groundnut Vigna subterranea, and African rice, which very possibly was domesticated there (McIntosh 2005:80-94). 80-84, climate history; complex, only broad outlines same as elsewhere. Ethnic groups specialized in the old days: Marka raised the rice, Bozo net-fished, Somono fish big channels, Bambara (who invaded in the medieval period) farm millet, Tuareg and Fulani herded. Jenne-Jeno and area ca 1200-1400 covered 190 ha and had some 42,000. McIntosh intriguingly talks of a high philosophic tradition in the Mandingo world, but says very little about it.

Rice dominates the far west coast from Sierra Leone north to Senegal. This became known as the Rice Coast. Today, the true African rice is rare, being replaced by the Asian species. Most of the area was once dominated by the Mandingo Empire. The Mandinka language and the empire’s high culture are still widespread. A great range of languages, distantly related but often strikingly different, is spoken, and people tend to be multilingual. Our principal friend in Senegal was fluent in his own language (a tiny minority speech), Mandinka, Wolof (the country’s lingua franca), French, and English; we can vouch for his near-native-speaker competence in the last two. He was learning Spanish.

The empire excelled in music. The traditional, highly distinctive music of this area not only survives and flourishes today, but it developed into the blues in the United States. It contributed the banjo (bania in Mandinka) to America and the world. The blues, the old-time ring shout, and United States gospel music are derived from this musical world, with various contributions from Europe, and in the case of the guitar from Mexico and the Caribbean. The reason that only the United States had the blues (originally) was that American plantation owners had trouble growing sugar north of Florida, switched to rice, and needed enslaved people who were experts at growing it. These introduced not only rice technology but also okra and watermelon, among various natives of their homeland. Watermelon has recently been discovered to have been developed by local people in the central Sahel. the rest of the story is told below in the North America section.

Senegal can stand as an example of the foodways of the region. Since most of the population lives along the coast or along rivers, rice and fish are staple foods. The fish is often smoked, producing a characteristic pleasant scent throughout markets and along shorelines. In the dry interior, the millets take over. Animals are largely sheep and goats; the area is largely Muslim. Cattle are common in some areas. The Fulani, a nomadic or seminomadic herding people, herd vast flocks of sheep, goats, and some cattle over the dry grasslands where agriculture is shaky or impossible.

A signature dish that more or less anchors the cuisine is thibou djenn (variously spelled tibu jen, etc.), fish stew. It consists of large chunks of sizable white-fleshed fish boiled with okra, carrots, onions, tomatoes, eggplants, and sometimes greens and herbs. Rice is cooked in the broth and served separately. Thibou yasa is stewed meat, similar except that the rice is not usually cooked in the stock. Thibou yapp is the lamb or goat version. Mafé is food stewed with ground peanuts, a very common and widespread technique all over West Africa. Black-eyed peas, niébé, are common, often added to stews and soups, or made into the universal West African fried dumpling known as akara, more or less a falafel made with blackeyes instead of chickpeas. A notable vegetable of the region is “sour tomato,” actually a local species of eggplant with a wonderful sharp flavor, somewhat like the round green eggplants of southeast Asia.

The French colonial regime had its main headquarters for all of northwest Africa in Dakar, which is now an extremely sophisticated, vibrant, active, and lively city. French bread, pastries, and salads are universal. Senegalese food is not highly spiced, but has distinctive and rich flavors from the local greens, herbs, and grains.

Gambia, a small country completely surrounded by Senegal except for a small coastline, is said to be the home of Jollof rice, a dish of rice cooked with chicken and/or shellfish and the usual vegetables. It is the ancestor of jambalaya. “Jollof” is a variant form of Wolof, associated with the old Wolof state, and “jambalaya” is Wolof for “mixed grain stew,” so the ethnic base of this dish are clear. In the New World, it added tomatoes and chile pepper—typically cayenne—and these have made it back home, to become part of Jollof rice. In New Orleans, it acquired French herbs and sausages.

More general and basic is red rice or Spanish rice, rice cooked in tomato stock with various vegetables, and usually with sea food or sausages or bacon. Usually the stock is made first, then the rice is cooked in it. It is a Caribbean development of rice cooked in stock, typical of the Rice Coast. Various forms have spread throughout the Caribbean, Mexico, the United States (especially the south), and elsewhere. Typically, red rice is simply rice in tomato stock, but elaborate forms verge on or become identical with jambalaya (e.g. Cross and Crawford 2023:163-164). Rarely, the rice is fried, then the stock poured in, as is the case in some forms of pilau; I assume this technique was learned from Indian immigrants.

Moroccan and other Arab influence shows itself in the very widespread use of cumin ni all these dishes, and the frequency of cinnamon, black pepper, and coriander. Coriander greens (cilantro) are widespread. The most famous native West African spice is malagueta pepper, also known as Grains of Paradise, alligator pepper, and various other names. It was once universal in the southern part of the region and influential throughout. It is a local species of cardamom (Aframomum melegueta). It even spread to the Mediterranean and became important and widespread there in Medieval and Renaissance times. It was often used medicinally as a stimulant. It has been largely replaced by chiles and black pepper, but it has not gone totally away. Medieval medicine and cooking re-enactors know it as Grains of Paradise, and seek it out by mail-order.

West African staple foods from farther south than the Rice Coast are largely root crops. Whether you depend on rice, millets, or roots is ultimately driven by what grows best in your area, but cultures institutionize one or another as staple. There is rumored to be a place where two rivers join, dividing three ethnic groups, each dependent on one of those staples—but none eating all of them. The roots, traditionally local yam (Dioscorea) species but now usually manioc, are pounded into a soft, gooey mass known as fufu. It is consumed in bits called “swallows” in English. These are picked off the main lump and dipped in stew or otherwise combined with a relish. They are insufferably bland and stodgy to some outsiders, but there is a connoisseurship of swallows in their native home. They may be “soft, stretchy, and fluffy (pounded yam) to slightly gritty [maize cooked down to a solid, like polenta], chewy (tapioca starch) and sticky [rice cooked down]” (Sokoh 2025:211).

Foods eaten with the staple include egusi, a stew of goat, tomatoes, garlic, ginger, and sometimes other spices; puff puffs: doughtnut-like fried dough; eforiro, a Nigerian dish with greens and smoked fish; and dodo: bits of soft, cartamelized plantains. Moi moi or moin moin is the Yoruba word for a black-eyed pea puree.

Nigerian food is ably introduced to the world by the chef Ozoz Sokoh, from the Yoruba southwest corner of the nation. Her book Chop Chop: Cooking the Food of Nigeria not only provides recipes and stunning photographs, but provides a whole ethnography of foodways in that large and diverse country. Spices include Monodora myristica, ehuru. Oil bean is Pentaclethra macrophylla. Xylopia aethiopica are grains of Selim or uda; uziza is Piper guineense. Telfairia seeds are important, as egusi. Ogbono are seeds of local mango species, ground. A range of local greens, some spicy and flavorful, is described, but not always identified. Moringa, basil, and squash leaves are among the identifiable. A linguistic note is that “sweet mouth” has the same double meaning that it has in United States Black English, showing a very likely origin for the American usage (p. 287). Her Jollof rice adds tomato paste early, then tomato stew base later, for a truly tomato-rich dish; it does not include meat or sea food, allowing improvisation.

Farther southeast, in Central Africa, Cameroon (Leypey 2018) is typical in depending on root crops, often made into fufu, a paste created by beating cooked roots until the starch turns unctious and slippery. Slippery textures are enjoyed widely in Africa. Palm oil from the fruit and kernels of the oil palm (Elaeis guineense) is the standard oil. Palm wine is a standard drink. The sap of the oil palm or other palms—many species are used—is fermented quickly.

            Meanwhile in East Africa, the Swahili coast became a major distination for trade. Even the Chinese came to call, in the massive voyages of Zheng He in the early Ming dynasty. The Swahili traded all manner of foods, as well as ivory and other African commodities. Medieval Swahili towns became prosperous and refined, with good food. Excavations by Quintana Morales and others (2022) in a town in southern Tanzania revealed stone houses and simpler wattle-and-daub ones. People in the stone houses ate better than those in daub. Millets, bananas, coconuts, rice, fish, sheep, and goats appeared, but fish were more of a staple. Some people ate turtles and dugongs, shakily legal in Islam. They note that Ibn Battuta recorded the food of Mogadishu (Somalia) as involving rice cooked in ghee and topped with stews of meat and chicken, fish, etc., plus bananas and “chillies”—a plant unknown in Africa at the time, and clearly a mistranslation, possibly for long pepper.

Persian traders were settling in large numbers, marrying into the community, and leaving many descendants. The old Swahili trading communities of the  island and port cities of Kenya and Tanzania in medieval times had Persian male ancestors and African female ones, as shown by recent genetic research. The African women appear to have been mostly Makwasinyi, already a mix of “pastoralists” and (mostly) “Bantu,” which I assume means they were a mix of possibly Nilo-Saharan herders with Niger-Congo (largely Bantu) farmers. The Persians did not get south of central Tanzania. South of there, genetics reveals some late Arabian mixture and slight Indian mixture, though not in the farthest south. The Kilwa Chronicles, Swahili texts long dismissed as legend, stated that the Swahili were a Persian-African fusion. Swahili has about 3% Persian loanwords and 16-20% Arabic. Modern Swahili, compared to the medieval ones are much more African on paternal side, over 50% vs only 17%; they are essentially the same—basically African—on maternal side (Brielle et al. 2023).

Outside of the ports, though, East Africa is no gourmet paradise. The staple in most areas is ugali, originally (and locally still) millet or sorghum mush, but usually maize mush cooked solid. It was memorably described in an old Lonely Planet guide to Kenya: “it weighs on your stomach like a royal corgi.” (The reference is to the Pembroke corgis traditionally raised by the British court; they wax exceedingly fat.) It is flavored with whatever is at hand: milk, berries, wild fruit, bits of meat or fish, anything. It is rarely in a class with grits or corn meal mush, let alone polenta. It also accompanies Vitamin B3 (niacin) and mineral deficiencies, because the phytic acid in the grain is not processed away.

Most of the land is under grazing, with local cattle. Food is milk, usually soured, often with astringent tree bark that acts as preservative and health-giving addition. Meat is eaten by traditional herders only when an animal is sacrificed for a major ritual occasion. It is then distributed so widely that few get more than a bite. The Maasai traditionally do not eat anything they do not raise themselves. Thus, Maasai country was once a vast game refuge; in fact, the famous African refuges, such as Ngoro Ngoro Crater and the Serengeti, were Maasai country (sometimes used by others). Alas, today, the Maasai have been pushed off much of their homeland to establish hunting parks for rich tourists—the ultimate hurt and insult to a noble people. Moreover, population growth on their remaining lands has been harder and harder on the wildlife, which can catch diseases from domestic stock. Overgrazing, formerly controlled by very rigid—indeed model—standards, is now inescapable (the above from my personal research and from friends).

Other herding peoples of East Africa have been hit by drought as well as population increase, and have entered into more and more savage wars with each other, leading to tragic desolation.

            Genetic engineering may yet save Africa from some of its worst problems. Crispr-editing is introducing resistance to witchweed (Striga hermonthica), a terrible plant parasite, from wild sorghums into domestic strains. Similar attempts may soon make maize more resistant, pearl millet flour spoil less fast, groundnuts resist the aflatoxin fungus, and cattle do better in Africa’s heat and dryness (Ledford 2024).

            Chocolate is native to the New World, but now West Africa produces most of it. A great deal is produced by child labor, often under slavery-like conditions. This has been an open scandal for decades. Cadbury and Hershey used to produce slavery-free chocolate, but now the giant corporations wink at the situation. In Ghana and Cote D’Ivoire, 2.1 million children work on some 2 million cocoa farms. Wages of $400 a year are considered good. These countries produce 2/3 of the world crop (Pilling 2020).

            Wild foods are extremely important in Africa. In Tanzania, nibbling on wild foods as one works in the fields is a major source of vitamins and minerals, which abound in the wild foods but are far too sparse in the daily ugali (corn meal or similar mush). Moving to town and eating higher-status food can thus cause malnutrition (Sakamoto et al. 2023).

South Asia

            South Asia was settled from several directions, with groups entering from the west (including African influence), the northwest, and the northeast. The main northwestern influence has been from Indo-Iranian language speakers; Sanskrit and its modern descendants such as Hindi and Bengali are from that family. The Dravidian languages, which are completely unrelated, may also have come from that direction, emerging in southern Iran while the Indo-Iranian family was developing in the Russian and Kazakhstan steppes. The northeastern influence is largely associated with Tibeto-Burman langauges, which originated in northwest China and spread in all directions.

Finally, the mysterious Munda languages, spoken by very large “tribal” communities in central-eastern India, are included in the Austroasiatic phylum. It may have originated in India, but a strong argument has recently been made by George van Driem that the phylum originated in the general area now mostly included in Myanmar, with the Munda being very likely a mix of Austroasiatic speakers with speakers of lost, unknown languages (van Driem 2021). The languages of the Andamans may be related to these, but are quite distinctive.

Van Driem has received spectacular confirmation from genetics: a distinctive genetic profile has been discovered in central Yunnan in remains of persons who lived around 5000 years ago, and, with increasing dilution from in-migrants from northern and eastern China, until today (T. Wang et al. 2025). This “Central Yunnan” variant of the broad East Asian spectrum is conspicuously present in Austroasiatic minorities all over southeast Asia (though not the Munda). It is also found, somewhat more mixed with recent Northern East Asian and sometimes Southern East Asian genomes, among neighboring Sino-Tibetan and Thai-Kadai groups. It is clearly a marker of Austroasiatic heritage, and dramatically confirms van Driem from a quite independent line of research. 

Genetics loosely tracks languages, with gene flow from the relevant directions quite clear, and the linguistic groups showing vague but discernible correlations with languages spoken (Basu et al. 2016; GenomeAsia100K Consortium 2019). In general, the subcontinent shows influences from almost everywhere: Africa in the south, southeast Asia in the east, China in the northeast, Iran and the steppes in the northwest, and so on. The Andamans are extremely different genetically from the mainland.

            Naturally, the food reflects this diversity (Acharya 1998; Antani and Mahapatra 2022). Many varieties of wheat and barley came from various parts of the Near East and central Asia. Foxtail millet and also domesticated rice, came from China, the rice hybridizing in India with native rices that may already have been somewhat cultivated (Clift and d’Alpoim Guedes 2021). By 1700 BCE, African millets and sorghum were coming in, probably via Iran but also directly by sea; we have no evidence of the millets in the Near East.

            Rice diversity is threatened, but is being maintained by the heroic efforts of people like Deb Debal (2019), who are saving and growing out heritage varieties—small, local equivalents of the vast International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines, with its hundreds of thousands of rice varieties.

            Dairying is attested by the mid-3rd millennium BCE (Chakraborty et al. 2020), but was surely far older. At that particular site, cattle were killed only when old, indicating they were used for dairying and work; sheep were killed young, for meat. 

Indo-Aryan tribes depending on herding, including dairying, came in soon after.

Alcohol in India has been covered in an outstanding book, An Unholy Brew by James McHugh (2021). It began with ales (grain brews) of various kinds, called surā. Sugar cane ferments were very common from early times. Honey, fruit, and other sweets were also brewed into alcoholic drinks, but not distilled. Madhu, from the Indo-European root for honey (cf. “mead” in English), was used not only for mead but for these various sweet drinks, also called āsava. These were consumed in the usual settings, from weddings to the equivalent of Saturday nights. Drunkenness was not particularly downvalued in early centuries. Young women were considered sexy and appealing when a bit high. Plays and poems attest to this. Moralists, on the other hand, were sour about such goings-on.

Meat was slowly but surely erased from cookbooks and food writings over time. An extreme case is The Delight of the Mind, a Sanskrit record of court culture in poetic form, ascribed to King Somesvara III (r. 1126-1138) and released in 1131 (Gutiérrez 2024). It records cooking and eating everything from hedgehogs and curlews to water monitors and tortoises. A fine recipe for barbecuing bandicoot rats is included. As a king, of the kshatriya caste, Somesvara would have eaten a lot of meat and enjoyed highly spiced dishes (as the recipes show). Over time, editions, summaries, and later works lost more and more meat recipes, as upper-caste Hindus were more and more influenced by vegetarianism. Recent summary and encyclopedic works on medieval food eliminate meat totally.

A 17th-century work records medical and food traditions of India at the time (Pandey 2014).

By far the major external influence on South Asian food, over time, has been the Near East. Persian is closest and thus the most important source. The basic staples, such as wheat, barley, chickpeas, and lentils, came via the northwest before 2000 BCE. Herbs and vegetables presumably came about the same time, but leave less record. Later, the rise of sophisticated cuisine in the ancient and Medieval Near East quickly affected India.

Meanwhile, foods came from China; first were apparently foxtail millet and japonica rice, by about the same time. India duly domesticated its own native indica rice, and that quickly hybridized with Chinese, though they are genetically different enough to present some initial problems. Today, most rice is hybrid. Pure or fairly pure japonica remains the rice of Japan, and of California, where cool and often dry growing conditions favor it; it also dominates much of Korea, and sticky forms of it are used for many purposes all over east Asia. Otherwise, the hybrids dominate. India and Pakistan have a particularly distinctive group of rices, the basmati rices, growing in the Punjab and neighboring Himalayan states. Basmatis are fragrant, with a wonderful grainy scent, and cook up to a very long grain. India and Pakistan had a hard fight protecting the name, which is a somewhat vague descriptive term rather than an actual genetic variety; American growers were trying to pass off their local rices as “basmati” in spite of lacking the true qualities (see Shiva).

Today, the subcontinent has a whole range of dishes with Near Eastern names. Colleen Taylor Sen lists their origins: “Arabic (halim, harissa, halwa, sanbusa), Persian (kashk, shirbirij, pulao, zard birinj, dampukht, bandijan) and Turkic (qutab, qima, boghra, shulla)” (Sen 2016:185). We can add briyani, now a rice dish with stewed meat mixed in or cooked with the rice, from a Farsi word meaning “roasted” (Sen 2016:185). To unpack these somewhat, harissa is meat stewed with grain, a rather stodgy dish; halwa is anything sweet and cakelike; sanbusa became samosa, stuffed dumplings, deep-fried; pulao (pilaf) is rice cooked with various spices and anything else the cook feels like adding; dampukht is a word for stewing; qima is minced meat; shulla is a rich grain dish. 

Much of the most recent and sophisticated fusion was done at the courts of the Mughal emperors. “Mughal” is a derivative of “Mongol,” and the Mughals did have a very slight degree of Mongol ancestry, purportedly from Genghis Khan himself, but in fact they were Central Asians of largely Turkic and Persian ancestry. They thus favored a classic Persian-influenced cookery. It was established in the early Medieval period in the northwest; it did not spread to Bengal until the 1300s, and then only slightly, becoming more popular after 1700 (Sengupta 2023). There and elsewhere, it slowly became Indianized, with many more spices but many fewer fresh green herbs than in Iran. Thus “the blatantly exogenous became prototypically authentic” (Sengupta 2023:146).

This cookery was increasingly confined to local royal courts under the British raj, but it emerged into the world limelight when Kundan Lal Gujral opened the Moti Mahal restaurant in Old Delhi in the mid-20th century (Sen 2016:282-284). He revived the classic cuisine, and added his own inventions, such as butter chicken. His signature dish was tandoori: meats marinated and then cooked in a tandur. I managed to dine in the Moti Mahal in 1978. It was a large, cavernous, barnlike structure, with fairly basic tables, chairs, and other appointments, but the food was superb.

The Moti Mahal was imitated worldwide. In the United States, the vast majority of Indian restaurants recapitulate its menu with considerable fidelity. (If they are Punjabi, it will be less spicy than the original; if south Indian, more spicy, and probably with some southern dishes added.) The UK, with its very heavy Indian and Pakistani immigration, has a greater variety and more originality in its Indo-Pak food, but still shows considerable Gujral influence.

New World crops transformed India after 1500 (Mazumdar 1999). The Portuguese were probably the main introducers. Chiles may have been the most transformative to the food. They were enthusiastically accepted and incorporated into every type of spicy dish. Over time, potatoes (especially white), maize, peanuts, squash, beans, and other staples made far more contributions to calories and health, but chiles remained the most visible and tasteable New World contribution. In India there arose an apparently spontaneous hybrid of habanero and tabasco chiles, the ghost pepper, which was even hotter than its parents. It has been bred to new heights of incandescence, as breeders vie to create the hottest pepper.

Indian food actually varies greatly in spiciness, especially in its use of chile. There is a rough cline from northwest to southeast. Punjabi food is straightforward and relatively simple, with less spiciness than most other traditions. At the other extreme is Tamil Nadu, in the far southeast, whose foods can be beyond even a hardened chile-lover’s ability to consume. Andhra Pradesh is also high in fire. There is a scurrilous and highly dubious rumor that this has something to do with invitational feasts and stingy feast-givers. If the food is too hot to eat, not much will be eaten, but of course the eaters try to develop a high tolerance level.

A major exception to the north-south gradient is the use of some of the world’s hottest chiles in the Himalayas. The akubari chiles of the Bhutia of Sikkim (the peppers are dalle khorsani in Nepali) are habaneros, or a cross of habanero and Tabasco chiles. They are the parents of the ghost and Carolina reaper chiles of the United States. They are regarded by the Bhutia as kinfolk (Bhutia 2024), other-than-human persons who are actual relatives.        Controversy continues to surround the coming of Green Revolution palnts to India. They certainly allowed an enormous increase in grain production, saving countless lives, but they also led to enormous increases in use of fertilizer, pesticides, machinery with its fossil fuels, and other modern inputs. The costs of these ruined many poor farmers. Ironically, the pesticides proved all too available for suicide, and many farmers in desperate economic straits died. The question of local improvement vs. imported technology with expensive inputs remains a vexed one, not helped by a government that is more concerned with Hindu supremacy and Muslim suppression than with feeding the people.

            It turns out that even the super-productive new wheat, maize and rice varieties of the post-Green Revolution era do not outproduce millets and sorghum under some of the more difficult Indian field conditions (Davis et al. 2019). An international center for developnig these “coarse” grains has been established, by parallel with the International Rice Research Center in the Philippines and CIMMYT in Mexico.

            An apotheosis of curry recipes is found in Raghavan Iyer’s 660 Curries (2023). This amazing encyclopedia contains, indeed, 660 recipes, all superb and many gathered from his family and friends. A major sorrow of my life is that will not live long enough to work my way through all of them.

Rajasthan food, as found in the vegetarian Bhookhe restaurant in Artesia, California, is heavily dependent on chickpeas. Gatte ke sabzi is a thickened soup with chickpea flour (besan) dumplings (like veggie franks); kadhi pakoda is a thickened yellow vegetarian soup with more chickpeas; bati are hard whole wheat dumplings to break up in dal. The food is accompanied by very hot and good chile-onion-oil chatni. Dahi (yogurt) came with cooked chickpeas, fried onions, and wondrous spices in it. Sweets were bland.

The breadstuffs are interesting. Corn chapatis resemble thick tortillas. Bajri roti (pearl millet tortilla) is tasteless and dry.

Kashmir has pink tea—boil green but fermented tea w soda and it turns red; then milk, salt, chai spices.

East Asia

            Pottery was invented first in East Asia. China had it by 18,000-16,000 years ago, Japan by 15,000 (Lucquin et al. 2018). It spread almost immediately to northeast China and thence to Siberia, and westward to Europe and the Near East. It was independently invented in the Western Hemisphere later, but it seems to have been invented only once in Eurasia.

            Widely throughout the world, there is a word for “staple food” and another word for “things to eat with the staple.” In Mandarin Chinese, fan is staple cooked grain: rice, millet, locally barley and others. Cai, pronounced “tsai,” means “vegetables,” but by extension it means “cooked dishes,” and by even further extension it means “stuff to eat with fan.” In Cantonese, fan is also the staple and essentially always means cooked rice, but there is a special word, sung, for anything eaten with the rice as topping or accompaniment. Korean (CHECK…).

            Elsewhere in the world, the same distinction is made. Ancient Greek sitos meant the staple: bread, porridge, meal cake. Opson (or hopson; it begins with an aspiration) meant cooked food to go with the staple. American dialectic English has usages like “potatoes and with-it.”

Culinary nationalism has grown in eastern Asia and elsewhere (King 2019). Countries are increasingly proud of their distinctive foodways, and increasingly eager to sell them. Flashy restaurants and huge world trade fairs are only one result. More and more books, articles, and prideful cooking programs appear all the time. The relevant foods can even be moral (Leung and Caldwell 2020). Rice as staple, milk as superfood (the west having convinced Asians to use formula and cows’ milk), and other items take on moral qualities.

Rice may become better for the planet; a gene brought in from barley allows it to grow with less methane production (Su et al. 2015).

The Chinese, throughout history, got fatty acids from meat, fish, grains, and seeds, including soybeans. In spite of the last, the Chinese generally got a good balance, since they used the soybeans for bean curd and fermented products, not for oil. Most food oil came from lard and other animal fats or from mustard and cabbage seed oils. Over time, as farming got more intensive and animal meat more expensive, more and more fat came from the mustard seeds. This was equivalent to our modern “canola oil” (canola is a mustard), overwhelmingly made up of monounsaturated fatty acids.

            Korean food is as dependent on grain staples as other East Asian foods. Rice was traditionally the prestige starch, but was a luxury everywhere, the more so as one went north from subtropical Jeju Island to the subarctic cold of the northern mountains. Usually, people depended on barley, millets, and buckwheat, in various combinations. These often became noodles. Lacking gluten, they were variously prepared; I assume they were often forced through a sieve into boiling water, as in China.

            Rice is pap (or bap). Food to accompany the grain staple has its own special word, as elsewhere. Side dishes with a meal are served in small separate plates and known as banchan. A meal is bapsang (bap for rice of course), soup kuk. Jang is salted side dishes. Chopped spices and herbs as banchan are yangnyom.

A main meal will have about seven of these—less for a minor occasion, more for a feast. Meat was a luxury in the old days, but was consumed in large quantities when available, and today Korean food is meat-heavy. Do-it-yourself barbecue on metal cones over a live fire is overwhelmingly popular, and has gone worldwide. Hot pot, noodle dishes, and various dumplings are also extremely popular. The dumplings betray Central Asian origin by their Turkic name, mantu or mandu.

            Korean food depends heavily on fermentation. Kinchi, pickled Chinese cabbage with chiles, is the most famous (the following information on it comes from Surya and Lee 2022). It involves Lactobacillus fermentation, heavy salting being used to prevent spoilage. Kimjang is the process of making it, specifically the huge fall rush. It is most often made from baechu, white cabbage. Sea food in kimchi is jeotgal. In 2021 a Chinese pair of characters was invented for it, pron xinqi. Chile was introduced about the time of the Imjin wars, Japan’s attempted conquest of Korea around 1592. The Korean word for chile is gochu, but that term is found in older texts. so must have been used for some other plant. Kkakdugi is kinchi with white radish, chonggak includes the variety called ponytail radish, yeolmu is the product from fresh young summer radish. Tongbaechu uses whole cabbages (mak is the usual cut-up one), yangbaechu green cabbages. Pa is made with green onions, gat with mustard leaves, buchu with garlic chives, kkaenip with perilla leaves. Green pepper and cucumber stuffed with chopped carrot and chives make gochu sobagi and oi sobagi. Dongchimi and nabak use more mul—water, brine.

Kimchi is often used in stew, kimchi jjigae. Kimchi in pancakes gives us kimchi buchimgae. Kimchi soup is simply named kimchi guk, guk meaningsoup  Kimchi fried rice is kimchi bokkeumbap. Gochugaru, red chile powder, generally gets into kimchi. Over 16 bacteria species, plus yeasts etc., are involved, including Lactobacillus kimchii and Weisella kimchii. Even Leuconostoc and Candida get into it. There is even a philosophy of kimchi, which includes the usual East Asian ideas of yin and yang, the five elements, balance and harmony, beauty, filial piety, and patience. In short: Bogi joeun tteogi meokgido jota, “what looks good tastes good” (Surya and Lee 2022).

More complex is jang, the Korean form of the Chinese word jiang and the item it describes: fermented soybean paste. Not only Lactobacillus, but a large number of other bacteria, as well as yeasts and other fungi, go into the various forms of jang. The beans are steamed, dried, and then fermented in brine. Ground with chiles, they become gochujang, the famous Korean sauce for many purposes. It has a strong soy paste flavor as well as varying but often high levels of capsaicin “heat.”

            Pickles, generally Lactobacillus ferments, often with other agents, accompany, or used to accompany, every Korean meal. They still appear at every major occasion among the banchan.

            Dependence on pickles for vegetables during the harsh Korean winters was associated with high rates of stroke (cerebrovascular accident); Korea long led the world in this cause of death. Cold storage and good transportation reduced the need for pickles, and the stroke rate has rapidly and steadily dropped.

            (On Korean food, see Maangchi 2019.)

            The national distilled drink is soju, monographed by Hyunhee Park (2021). It is a low-alcohol vodka, made from grains and distilled fairly gently, and often diluted, so its alcohol content is usually closer to 20% than true vodka’s 40%. It has gone worldwide, its popularity spreading outward from Korean restaurants. The best forms have the advantage of a pleasant grain taste along with lower alcohol than hard liquor. Samsu (from Chinese sanshu, “triple-distilled”) is stronger, more directly comparable to vodka, and is often made from sweet potatoes instead of grain. A drink whose popularity is still largely confined to Koreans is makkolli (makgeolli), a mild rice beer, carbonated and wonderfully flavorful. It is the perfect soothing and cooling accompaniment to Korean food fiery with chiles. I expect a boom in its popularity soon.

            Japanese food has been chronicled in the west by Eric Rath (2010a, 2010b). HERE ADD

            Like the rest of eastern Asia, Japan depends heavily on pickled foods, though far less than in the past. Within living memory, remote parts of northern Japan, especially the “snow country” of the northwest, had no other way of obtaining vegetables in winter. The vegetables were cut up and heavily brined, then fermented by Lactobacillus and other microorganisms into tsukemono. As in Korea, depending on such heavily salted foods was associated with high incidence of stroke, and also with stomach cancer. Modern cold storage and shipping led to precipitous decline in these conditions in recent decades.

Japanese food has substantially conquered the world (Stalker 2018). Japanese restaurants are everywhere (Farrer and Wank 2023). Sushi and sashimi have run well beyond the restaurants, and are borrowed freely by non-Japanese eateries. Most dramatic of all is the spread of instant ramen (Gewertz et al. 2013). The original ramen is a Japanese version of Chinese la mian; the Chinese original is often extremely spicy, and variously flavored but always dramatic in taste, though the simple base of beef-noodle soup is simple enough. The Japanese version cut down the spice considerably, and of course the international instant form has little beyond a lot of salt and soy powders. But all it requires is hot water to convert it into a meal, so it is the starving students’ food worldwide.

Southeast Asia

            Homo erectus reached southeast Asia about a million years ago, flourishing and populating the region widely, as shown by huge choppers and chopping tools made from large hard-stone cobbles. These were presumably used not only to kill and cut up animals, but to prepare more specifically targeted and designed tools from wood and bamboo. The specialized stone tools of the western world never developed in erectus days; apparently wood was more versatile. Homo floresiensis, the hobbit-like people of Flores, may be derived from this early migration. Later, Neanderthal and Denisovan genes reached southeast Asia early. The Denisovan genes fall into two groups, one in the Australia-New Guinea axis, the other in East Asia. People managed to get as far as the Solomon Islands by 42,000 years ago, showing astonishing seafaring ability (O’Connell et al. 2018).

            Homo sapiens is first recorded, so far, from Laos, about 77,000 to 86,000 years ago. Small, dark-skinned people moved in early, with groups widely scattered, surviving on islands and remote uplands. Later migrations from Africa along the coasts are evident. This hunter-gatherer substrate remains genetically detectable, particularly on islands (Lipson et al. 2014, 2018).           A series of very early skeletons, analyzed for genetic relationships, showed contacts literally all over the map. By several thousand years ago, influences from all directions were already visible (McColl et al. 2018). A trend of migration from west to east, and another from north to south, was established, and continued into historic times, reaching the most remote islands. Only central and southern Australia remained uninfluenced.

Once eastern Asia was fully populated, north-south movement became important, and dominated the demographic history of eastern southeast Asia as China became the regional superpower. Chinese first displaced other groups south, thus adding to a tendency already evident for groups like the Thai to move in that direction.

            Then in historic times the Han Chinese themselves moved down. They reached northern Vietnam early, and traded widely for 2000 years, but came to the Philippines and Malaysia largely after 1400 CE, when trade and commerce led to massive immigration.

            Southeast Asian agriculture has been summarized as “root, fruit and shoot.” The roots are taro and related tubers and corms, of which more below. The shoots are largely from bamboo, but many local species provide theirs. The fruits are an amazing riot of food, ranging from protein-rich coconut to starchy breadfruit to sugary mangosteen. The extent of southeast Asian use of plants is shown in the vast compendium of local products assembled by I. H. Burkill for British Malaya (1966). Hundreds of crop and wild plants are detailed. Agriculture reached a stunning level of sophistication and complexity, with ordinary farms growing dozens of species.

            The widespread cooling and drying period around 2200 BCE hit southeast Asia hard (Griffiths et al. 2020). It must have stressed what agriculture was there, but also induced people to put more effort into it, to keep food available.

            Agriculture reached southeast Asia from China and India before 2000 BCE. I suspect strongly that root agriculture was very long established. It certainly was in New Guinea, where we have evidence going back many thousand years. The mainland was surely not far behind, but we have no record so far.

Once it came, there were periodic lulls in development, around 1200 BCE and 300-500 CE (Chew 2018). Millet was in Yunnan by 2600 BCE, in Thailand by 2300. Bronze reached Thailand by the late 2nd millennium BCE (D’Alpoim Guedes et al. 2020; Higham 2021). Rice was there by then, but possibly not earlier; wild rice occurs widely, so one cannot be sure. When clearly domesticated rice appears, it is the Chinese japonica form. Pomelos, tangerines, citrons, various legumes, and other crops appeared. The earliest rice in Indonesia occurs at 1500 BCE, but it is far out in Sulawesi, and rice must have reached more accessible parts of the archipelago long before that.

Chickens were domesticated in southeast Asia (possibly including what is now south China). The oldest clearly domesticated ones so far are from Ban Non Wat, Thailand, around 1650-1250 BCE (Peters et al. 2022), but it is impossible to tell early domesticated chickens from the wild Red Jungle Fowl, Gallus gallus, that is their parent. Many of us who were in upcountry southeast Asia a few decades ago will probably remember the indeterminate birds that scratched around hill villages—self-taming jungle fowl, or chickens little removed from that status and constantly mixing back with their parentage. I am sure this situation existed for hundreds or thousands of years before the Ban Non Wat birds. Significantly, Thai has a shared word, kai, for chickens, but it probably was used for jungle fowl long before true domestication. The word has traveled: it was borrowed straightforwardly into Cantonese, spread to Mandarin where it is now pronounced ji, and then traveled farther to produce a wide range of “chicken” words throughout Eurasia.

Joris Peters and his group traced out the travels of the chicken (Peters et al. 2022). The Ban Non Wat site was a large site with a defensive moat, showing much sophistication for the time. Over 95% of bird bones were chicken, making it clear that they had been domesticated for a long time. Grave offerings witho pigs, dogs, and bovines also appeared (“bovines” because several species of cattle occur in southeast Asia, all domesticated at some point). In India, chickens about after 1500-1200. In northern China, they are clearly present only by late Shang, around 1100 BCE. In Japan they do not occur until the Yayoi culture moved in from Korea and then nativized, around 100 BCE-100 CE. Central Asia shows no certain evidence till 800-500 BCE. In Oceania, chickens reached Tonga, the Solomons, and Vanuatu by the early 1st millennium BCE, Hawaii by 1200 CE. They had reached the Near East by 1200 BCE, and are often mentioned in the Bible. They got to Ethiopia around 800 BCE, but elsewhere in Africa not until many southeast Asian crops came, around 200-300 CE. They reached West Africa by the mid-1st-millenn BCE. In Europe they were widely present by 800-600 BCE,

Details of climate, climatic history, and early agriculture have been meticulously detailed by Peter Clift and Jade d’Alpoim Guedes (2021). The region is dominated by the monsoon, but is tropical enough to show much less seasonality than India or China. Basically, winter is a bit cooler, especially in the north. Spring heats up, leading to a sharp and blistering-hot dry season in May and June—longer in the dry center of Myanmar and some other areas. Summer is wet, with huge thunderstorms. Typhoons sweep the region in fall, hitting the Philippines especially hard. Global warming has increased their number and ferocity.

The pervasive rain allows rice to be the dominant crop everywhere. It is usually paddy-grown, but the rain is so heavy that even dry rice does perfectly well on hills and uplands, though it yields only 500-1000 pounds per acre at most, as opposed to 2500 (traditionally) to 10,000 and more today in wet fields. Even dry central Myanmar has no lack of water, from streams draining nearby mountains, and thus irrigation allows rice to be the dominant crop. In early times—and still in many areas—Chinese foxtail millet was the major crop of uplands. Root crops such as taro and yams (Dioscorea spp.) grew in moist lowlands and hills. An incredible variety of minor crops supplemented these.

On the other hand, grain agriculture peters out in far eastern Indonesia, and is absent from New Guinea and Oceania. The limit coincides with the limit of highly reliable rainfall, necessary to rice (Dewar 2003). There are clearly cultural factors at work—Oceanic people love their root crops and fruit trees—but rainfall sets a firm limit. On small islands, there is the additional factor that typhoons and storms regularly sweep over, destroying any and all grain in their path. Only the toughest trees and the safely-buried root crops survive.

Maize was a major addition to the roster, allowing intensive cultivation of hills and mountains—and thus devastating soil erosion over time. Sweet potatoes revolutionized New Guinea agriculture after 1800, and contributed to farming everywhere. More interesting was their introduction from South America by Polynesians who reached that continent well before 1400. Bringing back the kumara (from a native South American word), they introduced it to the Polynesian islands, where it became the staple food of the New Zealand Maori. It remains very important there, with dozens of varieties.

Traditional agriculture in southeast Asia was highly successful, adapted to local conditions, and sparing of inputs. It usually surpassed traditional European agriculture in yields and variety, produced highly nutritious foods, and was easy on the environment (Marten 1986). Rice production involves serious risks in this environment, with heavy rains, droughts, typhoons, blights, and other dangers. Farmers are highly competent at calculating and managing risks without the need of computers, mathematical simulations, or other modern arrangements (Roumasset 1976). Their religious dedication to the crop is one reason. Knowledge is part of sacred lore. In addition to risk awareness, saving good seed is religiously constructed. Among many groups, the spirit of the Rice Goddess is a beautiful young girl, sometimes seen hovering over the ricefields on misty nights. She plans her reincarnation every year by moving into the rice heads at harvest time. These heads are identified by their superior beauty, productiveness, and healthiness, and are thus saved for seed instead of being eaten like the rest of the crop (Hamilton 2003). This belief has minimized risk and selected for better and better seed stock over thousands of years.

Throughout southeast Asia, there is ongoing complementarity between wet-field farmers, growing rice and water-demanding root crops like taro, and the dry farmers. The latter are usually swiddeners, cutting a field, burning the cut vegetation, cultivating for a year or a few years, and moving on. The old English word “swidden” was introduced to anthropology by the Swedish ethnography Karl Izikowitz, who used it to describe the agriculture of the Lamet of Laos (Izikowitz 1951). The field may be abandoned if the soil is particularly infertile, but very often a large number of fruit trees and other useful perennials are established, and these are tended, often carefully, as the forest grows up. Depending on soil fertility, local taste, and local strength of tenure over many years, a former swidden will range from total abandonment to careful and regular management, with everything in between being attested somewhere.

Swidden fields range from purely rice, in wet and fertile hillsides, to wildly varied farms that reproduce to a limited extent the multispecies and multilayer structure of the tropical forest. Vegetable fields in the lowlands do the same, with dozens of crops growing, and a multilayered structure. Emergent trees include coconut and durian. Below them is a layer of medium-sized trees: citrus, mangosteen, and many others. At sunny edges, there will then be a layer of tall shrubby plants, such as guavas and the smaller citrus. Finally, annual and herbaceous plants grow near the ground, though they cannot grow in the shade of a full two- or three-layer grove. Where they are intended to live, only a high layer of coconuts and sometimes other species is usual, though shrubs are often interspersed with them (on these matters see Conklin 1957; Spencer 1966).

Swiddeners are notoriously independent. James C. Scott (2009) has even idealized northern southeast Asia as Zomia, a home of freedom-loving or even anarchist people who reject the state to live in blissful liberty. This is a bit romantic, but sober research confirms the general picture (e.g. Wang 2013). Jean Michaud, for instance, agrees that the Hmong try to maintain freedom, disagreeing even over use of scripts to write their languages. They maintain they once had writing and books, but during a famine they had to eat these, thus losing writing but acquiring superb memory (Michaud 2020). Edmund Leach showed in a famous study that many parts of that area oscillated back and forth over time between small states and kinship-based chiefdom systems (Leach 1973), which fits well with Scott’s model (in fact, Scott relied heavily on it). However, resistance to the state may be due to sheer fear. The Semai and Temiar of Malaysia are famous for nonviolence (Dentan 1979), but this is explained by their need to flee slave-hunting (and in the past, head-hunting) Malays and others. Resistance may also be simply a function of moving frequently. Whole communities have to move at regular intervals, sometimes for long distances. Independence leads them into frequent conflict with lowlanders (see e.g. Dentan 1979; Geddes 1976; Hickey 1982).

Another factor is the exquisitely careful management of resources practised by many of the swiddeners. The image of the wasteful, destructive swiddeners who burn down forests for a few bushels of rice, without care for the biota or the future, is not entirely wrong. I have seen it in remote parts of the world. However, it is almost totally wrong for southeast Asia, so far as my observations and readings go (see Conklin 1957; Dove 1985; Pinkaew 2001; Spencer 1966; Wang 2013; Yos 2003, 2008). Some up-country groups are models of managing forest farming and regrowth (Pinkaew 2001 on the Karen and Wang 2013 on the Akha are really exemplary). The rare exceptions are groups that have moved as refugees into new and often already-occupied areas. They are forced onto marginal land, often high-altitude and very fragile, and they are often forced to move rapidly to escape tensions (Geddes 1976 describes Hmong in this situation). Long-established groups like the Akha (Wang 2013; Yos 2003) are model land managers.

The first know city was Oc Eo, which once covered some 2500 ha in the Mekong delta. It depended on sophisticated paddy rice agriculture, fairly new in that area at the time.

A recent study revealed early curries there. A footed spice-grinding slab from about 300 CE still retained starch grains. This type of slab was widespread in India and SEA since around 500 BCE (W. Wang et al. 2023).

The grains include relics of turmeric, ginger, fingerroot (Boesenbergia rotunda, a ginger relative), sand ginger (Kaempferia galanga), clove, cinnamon, nutmeg, galangal (Alpinia galanga), and, no surprise, rice. Several of these also show up in the sites noted just above (D’Alpoim Guedes et al. 2020).

The authors of the study provided a brief history of early spices in south and southeast Asia. Turmeric was known from Harappan sites from 2000 BCE or earlier. Ginger was found there, and in Warring States and Han sites in China. There is no archaeological record of galangal, but lesser galangal (Alpinia officinalis) is in the Mawangdui tomb from ancient China. Cloves go back to early Han China; they appear a bit later in Rome, a bit earlier in India. Nutmeg goes back a few centures BCE in India, and known much earlier from its native Banda Ids, back to perhaps 1500 BCE on Pulau Ay. An actual nutmeg was found in Oc Eo, dating 120-248 CE. Cinnamon was known widely by 1000 BCE. Previous southeast Asia research had revealed long pepper, cardamom, black pepper, mustard seed, clove, and nutmeg before Oc Eo rose.

Slightly earlier, two sites in far south Thailand were occupied around 400 BCE-20 CE. Rice, foxtail millet, and, fascinatingly, finger millet (eleusine, originally from Africa) were found. Also found was the oldest known pomelo (at both sites). Mung beans (green and black), grass pea, pigeon pea, horse gram (Macrotyloma uniflorum), rice bean (Vigna cf. unbellata), occurred, along with cotton and sesame. All this indicates major contact and trade with India. The reach of African eleusine, long known in India, had extended itself surprisingly far (Castillo et al. 2016).

The great Khmer civilization in Cambodia flourished from early Medieval times until the 15th century. The main occupation of Angkor Wat and the great cities was the 11th to13th centuries. Some lasted till the 14th and 15th centuries, and even into the 18th, but by then the communities were only the barest shadows of their former selves. Changes were slow and erratic (Carter et al. 2019).

The coming of chaotic weather with the Little Ice Age probably had much to do with its decline and the abandonment of the great cities. The Intertropical Convergence Zone shifted south (Buckley et al. 2010; Day et al. 2012). Droughts became frequent, being particularly extreme around 1400. Floods also occurred. War with Thai and Vietnamese spreading southward was also a major problem. The Vietnamese conquered the Cham, who had adopted a Khmer-inspired culture, and then went on to conquer the Khmer in the Mekong Delta.

In all these matters, southeast Asia was a single region. Victor Lieberman’s superb history (Lieberman 2003, 2008) shows that the effects of the Medieval Warm Period, the Little Ice Age, and other climatic events were similar from Myanmar to Vietnam, and of course had influences worldwide. Moreover, from the Roman Empire onward, Eurasia was tied together by trade and communication. Political and social developments were increasingly related over time. The effects of the Little Ice Age in the 17th century, for instance, were felt throughout, and the responses of different polities were not made alone. Responses at one end of the Eurasian system influenced the other ends. The Khmer cities were dispersed, with trees and probably rice paddies among the buildings. Such dispersed cities existed from Sri Lanka to Indonesia, and they all went down then the dorughts came (Lucero et al. 2015).

Trade in the Indian Ocean has been the subject of rapidly increasing research in the last 150 years. The Indian Ocean proves to have been an enormous highway, involving southeast Asia in world trade to a far greater extent than anyone thought in the early 20th century (Beaujard 2009, 2012; Chaudhuri 1985; Reid 1988, 1993). This trade led to rapid adoptions of introduced foods, from rice in earliest times to chiles and other American crops in the 16th century. The region proved open to influences, taking the old name “Indo-China” from the mix of Indian and Chinese cultural developments that local people added onto their already rich cultures.

Medieval contacts brought Indian and Chinese foods to Southeast Asia (Wheatley 1961). In particular, dairying and yogurt making came from India (Wheatley 1965), and in northern Southeast Asia from Tibet. This led to a striking extension of yogurt to unexpected places. Most of Southeast Asia shares the Chinese aversion to dairy foods, but yogurt persists in remote areas. I found it among the Toba Batak in Sumatera, who normally do not use dairy products, but still make water buffalo yogurt as a luxury.

Widely in Asia, trees are worshiped. In south and southeast Asia, the banyan (Ficus religiosa) is especially venerated, as the tree under which the Buddha was enlightened. Other similar trees, such as the small-leaved banyan (F. microphylla), substitute where Buddha’s banyan is not present.

However, sanctity is not confined to banyans. Any tree, especially any large old one, is venerated. This has enabled conservation movements in modern India and Thailand to designate local shade trees, groves, and even whole forests as sacred, to save them from the axe. In India sacred groves abounded already, but in Thailand, Buddhist monks have led the movement to designate new groves, for ecology. Susan Darlington gives a thorough account of this movement in her book The Ordination of a Tree (2013). Leslie Sponsel (2012) has written extensively on religious protection of the environment in Thailand and elsewhere, and has consequently launched a movement of spiritual ecology to try to involve more religious effort in the cause.

Farther upslope, the Akha are a typical case of hill people who regard forests as the domain of protective tree spirits. Forests range from sacred ones that cannot be disturbed to ones available for swidden farming, with intermediate cases (Wang 2013; Yos 2003, 2008). The woods are the realm of forest spirits, the gardens and villages are the domain of domestic ones. This is a pattern very common among southern Chinese minorities. It encourages a pattern of respect for the land (Wang 2013). Such respect is religiously taught, and is very widespread in Asia, from the Near East to Siberia.

In the 19th century, the British took over Burma (now Myanmar), and did very little with it. They governed it indirectly, via local kings, and treated it rather as a lost stepchild of the Indian Empire. This neglect has handicapped the country to this day, but it had one important effect: it released the restrictions on settlement that had kept farmers from developing the vast Burma Delta. This was an enormous swamp where the Irrawaddy, Yangon, Sinang, and Salween Rivers and minor side streams all pour sediments into the sea. It swarmed with tigers, crocodiles, and poisonous snakes. Even so, thousands of farmers poured in, turning the delta into a huge rice bowl (Adas 2011). This was one of the greatest settlement moves of all time, comparable to—if far less extensive than—the opening of the American west at the same time. It is the ultimate proof that traditional small farmers can take the initiative in development, face enormous risks, and prevail. Nothing comparable was undertaken by the British or by post-Colonial governments. Small farmer initiative did all.

Throughout Southeast Asia are highly spiced pastes used for flavoring foods. These go by the Indian name of sambal in Malaysia and Indonesia. They are rich in chile peppers, and often involve fermentation. Countless forms exist, with local variants of each (see Surya and Tedjakusuma 2023).

Vietnam has a long history, closely connected with China’s (Kiernan 2017). It is, in some sense, the modern incarnation of the Hundred Yue of ancient Chinese history, later subjected under the Kingdom of Yue in the 3rd century BCE. This became modern Fujian and Guangdong. Viet is the same word as Yue, subjected to different changes in pronunciation over time, and “Vietnam” (Yuenan in modern Chinese) means “southern Yue.” The Vietnamese people, presumably originating among those Hundred Yue, speak a language basically close to Khmer in the Mon-Khmer language family, but so influenced by Thai and Chinese that it not only consists largely of loanwords, but it has borrowed the Thai tone system. (Khmer and related languages are not tonal.) Vietnam was formerly inhabited by Cham people in the center; they were conquered and absorbed in the Medieval period. Khmer occupied the south, and many still live there. A large range of groups, speaking languages in the Thai or Mon-Khmer families, live in the mountainous interior.

The name was given to the country in 1804 by the Nguyen Dynasty, the emperor recording that it meant “southern Yue” rather than the alternative interpretation “south of Yue” (Dutton et al. 2012:258-59).

Vietnam, at least the northern part, spent a great deal of time under Chinese rule. It became independent when China was weak, and then permanently independent after the Ming Dynasty. It is worth recording, from the country’s checkered history, that there appeared in the 10th century a white dog with black spots on his back that were interpreted as spelling out the characters for “Heaven’s Son,” implying a new emperor was at hand. Indeed, the Le Dynasty gave way to the Ly Dynasty (Dutton et al. 2012:61).

The Medieval Warm Period brought good rain, “rice from the sky,” but the Little Ice Age brought disastrous drought (Kiernan 2017:153, 177).

Vietnamese life in the early 19th century is recorded in a fascinating document. One Cai Tinglan, a Chinese official, was shipwrecked in the dangerous waters near the border of China and Vietnam, and welcomed by Chinese and local people in the latter country until he could make his way home. He recorded with care and sensitivity the modest affluence of the country, including details of food and farming (Cai 2023). For instance, along one main road, “jackfruit trees were planted on both sides. There was one tree every ten paces. Their leaves and branches intertwined…. People cultivated bamboo all around their houses with many banana and betel plants….” (Cai 2023:70).  Bandits would sneak poison into travelers’ food in one wild disctrict. “The antidote is foreign ginger. (Also called chili pepper, the seeds are from Holland, the flower is white, and the stigma is green, when the fruit is cooked it turns bright red. It is filled with spicy seeds. One can eat it with the hull. Some are long and ponited, some are round and slightly pointed.) People add them to their food to guard against poison” (Cai’s italics; Cai 2023:89). He notes their fondness for raw or rare meat and fish (p. 123).

Later, the French took Vietnam, more because of nationalist urgings than because it wsa of great value to them. Peters (2012) finds that famines and mismanagement ensued. Pho was invented when the French took so much of the beef that people were left with bits and pieces to flavor their noodle soup; the classic form includes tendons, bones, and other odd bits. It was invented in Hanoi, where the classic beef form survives robustly. Elsewhere, more and more variety has entered.

Modern Vietnam has managed not only to feed its incredibly dense population, but to become a food exporter, by an adroit combination of communist services and overall planning with relatively free enterprise on the farm (Avieli 2012). It logs 875.4 people per square mile, according to the World Almanac for 2024, which makes it about as dense as an American suburb (Riverside, CA, where I live, has 3953 per square mile). Much of Vietnam is too mountainous for intensive farming; most farming is in coastal river valleys and deltas, especially the deltas of the Red and Mekong Rivers. Typical Vietnamese farms are about the size of Riverside city lots, yet the country exports rice and other agricultural products. Pierre Gourou (1955) described traditional farming on such tiny plots; rice covered the ground, fruit trees extended production into three dimensions, animals lived in and around the paddy fields, and everyone worked all the time. The situation was similar to that described by Geertz for Java (see below). Bamboo is exceedingly important, and is the subject of detailed modern study (Hieu and Poisson 2023).

One notably pleasant feature of traditional Vietnamese food is the garnish of fresh herbs once served with almost everything. Leaves used include mint, perilla, Vietnamese/Thai basil, rau ram (Polygona odorata), and sometimes tender young collards, mustard greens, Peking cabbage, mizuna (a beautiful Japanese mustard-green variety, and other herbs. This custom is, alas, disappearing. One is lucky now to get mint and basil. Persian and Georgian food also comes with fresh garnishes, but they are totally different and the custom seems unrelated.

Even so, food insecurity and anxiety inevitably exist (Ehlert and Faltmann 2020). Policy overshoot and sheer pressure of people on resources—especially wild-caught fish—cannot be avoided. Farming fish has become common, as elsewhere in eastern Asia.

            Feasting is a huge part of traditional Southeast Asian and Oceanian society. Feasts are given for every occasion (see Hayden 2016 for summary account, but every detailed ethnography of the area describes them). They are highly ritualized. In many of the small-scale societies of southeast Asia, this involves drinking beer from the same pot, using straws, an idea that may come from ancient China. The main dish is usually a pig or water buffalo, but can be anything. Small feasts involve chickens, domesticated in southeast Asia, in an area probably including what is now south China. The chicken was probably taken into domestication partly for feast use. In parts of Oceania it is a human; cannibalism is occasional in New Guinea and known as far as Fiji and Tonga.

The general purpose of ceremonial commemoration of ancestors or great events affords the occasion, but the actual social importance includes group solidarity, and most certainly display by the feast-giver or givers. In Melanesia, “big men”—local leaders—must give feasts to show their generosity, reward their backers, and indicate their wealth and power. They gain followers and support, partly by showing how many contacts they have and can use to gain resources.

The Philippines were settled from both north (via Taiwan) and south (via mainland southeast Asia and the Indonesian islands). They acquired rice very early, and eventually became famous for the rice terraces of Luzon, among the wonders of premodern agriculture. Involving countless hours of work and irrigation canals miles long, these were constructed in societies where kinship was the only organizing institution. No states were needed.

Fishing has always been important, and involves exceedingly complex and sophisticated decision-making (Randall 1977).

Among fruits, king of all is the durian (Bahasa Malaysia for “thorny one”), a huge thorn-covered fruit born on a gigantic rainforest tree. Fresh off the tree, its large, meaty arils have a heavenly flavor of peaches and chestnuts. Within a few hours, it takes on an oniony flavor. In a day or two, it was memorably described in early British Colonial times as smelling like “a sewer full of rotten onions.” True durian addicts learn to love it even in that stage. Various preserving techniques convert into tempoyak (dried and fermented) and other preparations, which have the spoiled-onion aroma.

In the late 20th century, one Tan Eow Chong snitched a graft from a lady with superior durians and brought them back to his farm on Penang Island. Now the trees are mature, and he managed to attract the attention of Stanley Ho (the gambling billionaire of Macau) and Li Ka-Shing. Tan became successful, and sells countless durians in China (and elsewhere). He called the variety Rajah Kunyit (“turmeric king”), but: “Growers on the Malaysian mainland developed an identical hybrid, but called it the Musang King, which means Mountain Cat King. The latter name stuck” (Pierson 2019; the musang is actually a civet, not a mountain cat).

            Bali’s rice terraces are famous for their beauty, but also for their efficient agriculture. The island is one huge volcano. At its 10,000-foot top is a crater lake. From this lake drains the basic water supply of the island, augmented by heavy but seasonal rains. The water is allocated by the priestly hierarchy of Bali, headed by the head priest of the main water temple at the high outlet of the crater lake. In one of the best-known projects in cultural ecology, J. Stephen Lansing showed by a succession of computer models that the water allocation is close to ideal, not only for distributing water fairly to the many cultivators, but also for suppressing insect pests. Draining the fields at specific intervals disrupts their life cycles (Lansing 1991; Lansing et al. 2017). Bali’s traditional government consisted of small kingdoms that often fought and rarely managed anything very thoroughly. Clifford Geertz called them “theatre states” (Geertz 1980), since they indulged in magnificent shows of art, music, and drama, but seemed to do little else. This was rather unfair, since they did fight and collect taxes and otherwise do what governments do. They heroically resisted the Dutch colonial takeover in the early 20th century. But they sensibly left the irrigation system to the priests.

            Java’s intensive rice agriculture led to rapid population growth under the Dutch colonial regime, and later in modern Indonesia. The Dutch repressed modernization and change, for their own reasons, which forced the rice farmers to work harder and harder on smaller and smaller plots to produce enough rice to feed the growing population. This led to what Clifford Geertz memorably called “agricultural involution” (1973). The concept has been widely misinterpreted as “blaming the victim,” since Geertz’ extensive account of colonialism and its effect—and his citation of Dutch scholarship that made the point even more strongly—was widely ignored by readers. In any case, the term has been widely applied elsewhere, to forced intensification without progress or benefit. Independence changed the situation somewhat, with modern factor inputs moving in rapidly. The situation is being slowly ameliorated, also, by falling birth rates. The whole issue is discussed with real brilliance by James Wood in The Biodemography of Subsistence Farming (2020).

            Farther out, in Sumatera, land is more easily available, and agriculture can be more extensive. The Toba Batak of the Lake Toba area, however, intensify, because they must terrace their steep crater-wall habitat to farm it. Lake Toba is a huge crater lake. The explosions that created it occurred about 73,000 years ago, autoclaving a good deal of southeast Asia and blanketing much, if not all, the world with dust. The human species was concentrated in the areas affected, and was reduced to a small population. Fortunately for us but unfortunately for the rest of the world’s biota, people survived in less affected zones. The ultimate result included extremely fertile soil around the lake. This allows the Toba Batak to cultivate rice and other crops with great success. Labor is organized by patrilineages, a striking example of simple kinship literally moving mountains. The old nonsense that a state is required to organize large-scale and highly sophisticated irrigation works is disproved by this case (Lando 1979), and by many others in southeast Asia. In fact, if anything, the reverse is true: irrigation there was traditionally organized along local kinship lines, which could be patrilineal, matrilineal (as among the Minangkabau), or cognatic (drawing on all sides of the family). Vast irrigation works from Thailand to Luzon were done this way.

            In Borneo, the Punan Batu are now one of the many groups in the Punan ethnicity, but they show evidence of a different and strange history. They retain a ritual language, found only in songs and chants, very different from the Punan language. They also differ genetically from other inhabitants of Borneo (Lansing et al. 2022). Their affiliations remain unknown.

            A signature food of southern Sumatera, especially of the Minangkabau people, is rendang, beef cooked in coconut cream and spices. The true rendang is blistering hot with chiles, enough to deter even those used to other Indonesian food. It has been the subject of a major monograph by Fadly Rahman (2020), who sees Portuguese influences in its heavy-duty meat focus and its spicing; the Portuguese introduced chiles to the area.

            The Philippines were evidently the first place settled by Malayo-Polynesians radiating out from Taiwan. They were, however, not the first people there. A little-known small hominin, Homo luzonensis, predates Homo sapiens there. Later, modern humans related to the dark-skinned peoples of the Andamans, Nicobars, and Melanesia reached the islands. Some of their ancestry survives in the “Negrito” populations. Other groups from parts of the mainland came also (Larena et al. 2021). The Malayo-Polynesians arrived a few thousand years ago.

Southeast Asia produces edible birds’ nests, very popular in soup in China. They are the nests of the swiftlet Collocalia esculenta and its relatives. That species produces the best; lesser species produce nests not entirely edible. (They are not “swallows’ nests.” The mistranslation is due to the Chinese language having one word for swifts and swallows.) They are tasteless, but absorb flavors of the soup and provide a wonderful succulent texture. The claimed reason for eating them, however, is their alleged health value. They are an easily digestible protein, produced by the birds’ salivary glands, with a fair amount of calcium, and thus quite nutritious, though far too expensive to be much of a medical source. They are eaten largely as a status food, obligatory—at least in the past—at formal banquets. In the late 20th century, this led to overcollecting. Previously, conservation had been strictly enforced, but it crumbled in the face of skyrocketing demand. One response has been to set up artificial nesting venues (Thorburn 2014).

            Malaysia’s and Indonesia’s foodways include a highly distinctive tradition, the “Nonya” cuisine developed by Chinese settlers from the 16th century onward (Oh et al. 2019). “Nonya” is an old Bahasa (a.k.a. Malay) word for a Chinese lady (i.e. a woman of some substance). Much of the vocabulary is derived from Hokkien (Southern Min), specifically the dialect spoken around Xiamen. This city, known as Amoy (long a, and moy nasalized) or Emng in Hokkien, is the main port in southern Fujian, and was the port of embarcation for many Chinese headed for the Nanyang (“south seas”).

Hokkien so dominated the Nanyang that Hokkien literary readings of Chinese—based on court pronunciation over a thousand years ago—became the learned language. Speakers of Mandarin were often surprised to find in Singapore and Penang that what the local people thought was formal official Chinese had no resemblance to Mandarin. This old tradition died in the late 20th century. The Amoy region sent out most of the Chinese who reached the Nanyang from the 1500s to the late 19th century, but after that large numbers of Hakka, Cantonese, and Teochiu (the last speaking a dialect of Hokkien). Among Chinese, Amoy Hokkien remained the language of general trade and communication until Mandarin and English took strong hold in the 21st century. However, the Nonya cooks usually spoke Bahasa Malaysia/Indonesia as a first or second language.

Food words were widely borrowed from Hokkien into Malaysian and Indonesian languages. Thus fermented soybeans are tausi, bean cake is tauhu, spring rolls are po pia (the –ia strongly nasalized), fish sauce is ke jiap (the source of English ketchup), noodles are mi (with nasalized i replacing the –ien of other Chinese languages), and so on.

            The food is flavored with soybean ferments: soy sauce, fermented beans and pastes, and the rest. A unique Indonesian contribution is tempeh, a cake of boiled soybeans inoculated with a fungus starter that makes them into a delicius cake. It has the great advantage of being rich in vitamin B12, lacking in vegetable foods but found in fungus and yeasts. Other popular flavorings include ginger (of course), rice and palm-sap vinegars, white pepper,

            Otherwise, the food is a blend of Malaysian, Indonesian, and Hokkien traditions. Rice is the usual staple, but noodles are exceedingly important, often outranking rice on some days. Vegetables are basic. The usual cooking oil in the old days was lard, making the food inaccessible to the majority of Malaysian and Indonesian people, who are Muslims, but from very early there were vegetable-oil alternatives.  Noodles fried in lard with bits of vegetables (mi goreng) are a popular food. 

            One staple is kueh, Hokkien kue’, sweet cakes. These are made of sticky rice and sugar, variously flavored. Traditionally, a major flavoring was Pandanus odorifer, sweet pandanus, a treelike spiky-leaved succulent native to the region. Sugar was often raw sugar from palm sap, but from very early times, sugar from sugar cane was also available. Cultivated sugar cane is native to New Guinea and possibly Southeast Asia. Countless varieties of kueh are available (Karuzaman et al. 2020). They have a most unfortunate effect on many children. They are constantly available and cheap, and young children cry for them. They become a major part of childhood foods. The combination of sticky rice and sugar makes them stick to the teeth and cause tooth decay, which in turn spreads through the system. Dental care being sporadic at best for the less affluent, this leads to disastrous effects on health in general. They also are pure calories of the most easily assimilated forms—sugar and white rice starch—and thus lead to obesity and metabolic syndrome. Diabetes rates skyrocket in areas with many kueh.

            Coffee is kopi, as Bahasa Malaysia/Indonesia has no f. It is made with strong coffee, condensed sweetened milk, and a spoonful or two of added sugar, and is thus sugary enough to be almost a solid. Asking for kopi o kosong—unsweetened black coffee (o is Hokkien for “black,” kosong is Bahasa for “empty”)—was once not only necessary but very difficult to achieve, since people usually assumed that foreigners who asked for such a nightmarish drink were simply making a verbal mistake. Traditionally, coffee was made and sold by people from Hainan Island, an island in China’s deep south whose language is a dialect of Hokkien quite different from Amoy’s.

Cynthia Fowler studied burning on Flores (2013). Flores is seasonally dry, and controlled burns are used to create fields (swiddening) and to open the forest up and drive away poisonous animals. The Komodo Dragon, a huge monitor lizard with a poisonous bite, still survives very locally on Flores, and is not the sort of animal one would like to meet in the woods.

Nearby, the island of Roti is also seasonally dry, to the point of being hopeless for rice, taro, or most grains. Some millet and large quantities of beans are grown, but the staple food in traditional times was palm sugar, made from the sap of local palm trees. This unusual diet should have been incredibly unhealthy, but no bad effects are recorded. The island was the subject of an outstanding ethnography by James Fox (1977), who moved to Australia and trained a couple of generations of Indonesian anthropologists, enormously influencing social science in that country.

Michael Alvard with David Nolin studied cooperation in Lamalera, a whale-hunting village in Indonesia. They hunt sperm whales, and face all the horrors portrayed by Herman Melville in Moby Dick. Cooperation is so vital, since crews have to work as a near-perfect team or die. They thus test well above any other population studied anywhere in the world for sheer cooperation, interpersonal generosity, and sharing.

Oceania

            Oceania was settled from Asia, but by different groups at different times. Early humans (Homo erectus, Homo floresiensis, others) managed to reach quite remote islands early. Homo sapiens got as far as New Guinea and Australia at least 60,000 years ago. These were dark-skinned people, ancestors of today’s Melanesians and Australian Aborigines, and they had a fair amount of Denisovan admixture, of a different branch of that group from others known from genetic traces. Later migrations clearly occurred, but are obscure until East Asians began to move down from Taiwan—and surely from other places—by 2000-1500 BCE. The results are unclear. Taiwanese-derived Malayo-Polynesian languages are now spoken throughout Indonesia, Polynesia, and Micronesia, except for New Guinean (Papuan) languages of several families on New Guinea and a few neighboring islands.

Genetically, there has been more mixing than this linguistic uniformity would suggest. Even the linguistic uniformity is only relative, since the Malayo-Polynesian languages are exceedingly numerous and diverse. Micronesia’s small population derives from at least two distinct migrations from the Philippines, another from the south but still clearly Malayo-Polynesian, and a couple from Melanesia (Liu et al. 2022)’ there is surely yet more to learn about this, let alone the more complex migrations elsewhere. People speaking Malayo-Polynesian languages range from looking like Chinese to looking like southeast Asians to looking like New Guinea and Australian people, and genetics shows this has a migration history.

Australia has its own unrelated language families. Most of the continent spoke languages of the Pama-Nyungan family, which seems to have radiated from the east about 3500 years ago. It has mixed enough with other languages to make its history and radiation unclear. Indeed, the old conventional wisdom of dark-skinned people coming early and Malayo-Polynesians coming later has been made more complex by genetics (Choin et al. 2021). Other, virtually unknown migrations appear in the record.

            Falling and rising sea levels importantly affected the spread of people, since many of the island groups sink under water during times of high sea level (Sefton et al. 2022). Whole island nations are threatened today by global warming. Kiribati, Tuvalu, and many Micronesian island groups will disappear.

The islands of the western Pacific have produced a highly disproportionate number of the best ethnographies of food and agriculture. The most famous studies of the Pacific islands in anthropology are the early classic ethnographies by Bronislaw Malinowski, who went from Poland to England, and his New Zealander student Raymond Firth. Their documentation of the Trobriand Islands and Tikopia, respectively, are the most thorough and intensively analyzed ethnographic records from the early period of anthropology (Firth 1936, 1940, 1959, 1961; Malinowski 1961 [1922], 1935).

This was a world of root crops. The Trobriand Island staple was the greater yam, Dioscorea alata. Other yam species occurred in the region. Taro (Colocasia antiquorum) was a widespread staple, originating from the southeast Asian mainland. The Trobrianders vied to produce the biggest yam. Malinowski’s book Coral Gardens and Their Magic (1935) has a romantic title, but consists of a meticulous record of agriculture in the islands, including the many magical practices used in hopes of getting the yams and other crops to grow bigger and better.

Many more recent works are at least as good in ethnographic quality, though much less extensive in terms of sheer documentation. Among these we may single out Hanunoo Agriculture by Harold Conklin (1957), a classic of ethnobotany and of studies of shifting cultivation.

Another notable work is The Banana Tree at the Gate: A History of Marginal Peoples and Global Markets in Borneo by Michael Dove (2011).

Paul Sillitoe’s From Land to Mouth: The Agricultural “Economy” of the Wola of the New Guinea Highlands (2010), is less well known and deserves some special note. Sillitoe examines the degree to which our economic concepts transfer. “It is an indisputable fact of life—even for navel-dwelling postmodernists—that all human beings are mortal, and that for everyone (Wola, Inuit, English, or whoever) there are no more or less than twenty-four hours to each of our days” (p. 253).though he admits that hours are a western concept and time can feel longer or shorter depending on whether one is working the field or relaxing with friends. He goes on to say that people economize it in different ways, and some have plenty of spare time, but still there is a single limit.

The Wola were still using stone tools when he started to work there.  Stone vs steel did not make much difference (contra early, wrong claims by Salisbury and others); they just cut fewer trees with stone, and then and cut them up less. It was horribly hard work making a garden. However, they likde it, and he quotes a more extreme earlier New Guinea team (on p. 361) that a New Guinean’s “attitude towards his gardening is more like that of an amateur rose-fancier” than a commercial one.

Burning released nutrients but they quickly leached, so first-year crops usually do best. Crops included the vital staple sweet potato (fairly new in New Guinea), Nasturtium schlechteri, amaranths of three species, squash, Chinese cabbage, taro, maize, and Setaria palmifolia (pitpit), grown for shoots. The area has returned to local autonomy and self-sufficiency with the decline of local governance. People exchange garden produce all the time, with taro and pandanus figuring especially. Taro was hard to grow and hedged with taboos and spells. Also, it crops all at once instead of being harvestable daily on a land-to-mouth basis as sweet potato was (Sillitoe 2010:399).

Polynesia was the last area on earth to be settled before modern European expansion after 1450. Voyagers reached Hawaii and New Zealand around 2000 years ago or less. In New Zealand, the classic tropical crops such as taro did not flourish south of the northern parts of North Island (Prebble et al. 2019). People lived by fishing and hunting, exterminating the moas in the process, and by eating fern roots, not a great diet. The sweet potato, introduced from South America a few hundred years before Columbus, revolutionized agriculture there.

Rapa Nui (Easter Island), known for its enormous stone sculptures, was in contact with South America by 1,000 years ago. Obsidian blades revealed starch grains from taro and yam (known there historically), breadfruit, ginger, and Tahiti apple (common in Polynesia but not previously documented from Rapa Nui), and, much more interestingly, manioc, sweet potato, and achira (Killgrove 2024). These are South American root crops, not native to Asia or occurring there before contact. Sweet potato was known all over eastern Polynesia and as far as New Zealand, where the Maaori depended heavily on it, well before modern European contact, but manioc and achira were not known from ancient Oceania before.

Chickens spread through most of remote Oceania along with the Melanesians and Polynesians. They are a distinctive breed, or group of breeds, characterized by unique haplotypes. These are not shared with South America, a bit of evidence against the long-debated question of whether Polynesians introduced chickens there (Thompson et al. 2014). Chicken breeds known among the Mapuche in Chile have fairly clear Southeast Asian input, but it probably came via the Spanish after 1500.

Central America and Mexico

            Mexican agriculture is famous for its incredible inventiveness in pre-Columbian times. Most important was its invention of the crop combination that became known as the Three Sisters: Maize, beans, and squash. Maize (Zea mays) was domesticated in Mexico, a brilliant and creative development from teosinte, a most unpromising-looking wild grass. Beans of several species were domesticated, with the common or frijol bean Phaseolus vulgaris becoming the world success. Several species of squash were also created, with winter squash Cucurbita maxima, butternut squash and kabocha C. moschata, and cushaw C. mixta most important. The most important one worldwide today is C. pepo, pumpkins, summer squashes, and ornamental gourds. Butternut squash in many forms is more successful in the tropics, and is thus the squash or pumpkin throughout the tropical world and northward throughout eastern Asia.

            The Three Sisters are a perfect combination. The maize provides the calories, the beans the protein, and the squash the vitamins and minerals—especially if you eat the flowers and tender young stems, as Mexicans do. Chiles, really a fourth sister, also exist in several species, and provide further vitamin and mineral enhancement. The beans grow up the maize plant and fertilize the whole field by fixing nitrogen. The squash kills pests by shading out weeds and by chemically combatting insects, weeds, and predators; the cucurbitins that make wild gourds too bitter to eat are powerful insecticides, to the point of being occasionally used commercially.

Even underground they all complement each other: maize has shallow roots, beans medium-length ones, squash very deep ones. My Maya farmer friends would test the soil with a digging stick to see how deep it was, and thus what they could plant. This was especially valuable in the soil-filled pockets in Yucatan’s limestone landscape. A shallow pocket would grow maize, and so on. Deep, rich soil would grow not only the Four Sisters, but papayas, eggplants, tomatoes, and other necessities. The best soil was saved for these mixed plantings.

            One problem for ancient Mexicans was getting salt. Salterns along the coasts are well known (Andrews 1983). A Maya city got rich by controlling the salt trade from the salt stream by the city (Woodfill et al. 2015).

            Two species of chile peppers (Nahuatl chilli; Capsicum annuum, ordinary chiles and bell peppers,and C. frutescens, Tabasco pepper) were domesticated in Mexico, and at least two more in South America (C. chinense, habanero, and C. pubescens, rocoto or manzano). They are ancient domesticates, at least in Mexico, probably in South America as well. They appear to have been independently domesticated in both continents. The North American ones spread south, especially C. annuum, the ordinary common chile. It gave rise to many less hot varieties, eventually being bred into the heatless and greatly enlarged bell varieties. The South American varieties spread north early. The habanero spread through the Caribbean islands, hence its name connecting it with Havana. The rocoto reached west Mexico at some indeterminate point, and remains focused there as well as in the Andes.

Their active ingredient in causing pain is the oleoresin capsaicin, which exists in at least five forms in chiles. It directly stimulates the heat receptors in the body. The capsaicin is there to kill fungi—it is particularly defensive against fusarium wilt, a major problem for peppers (Tewksbury and Nabhan 2001; Tewksbury et al. 2001). Chiles in less fungal parts of the genus’ range have less of it (Haak et al. 2008). It is, however, also useful to keep mammals from eating the fruit, and to increase rapidity of throughput in digestion, to speed delivery of seeds. Like many berries—chiles are berries, technically—these plants depend on dispersal by animals that eat the fruit and then excrete the seeds packaged in fertilizer. Birds are not susceptible to capsaicin, and thus eat the fruit happily (Tewksbury and Nabhan 2001). As noted elsewhere, they are loved for their flavor and stimulant quality, not for the pain they produce. Eaters quickly habituate to the pain, and confine their eating to varieties to which they have habituated.

They appealed to Europeans right away. Columbus thought them a spice of the Indies, which he continued to maintain he had reached. Spanish and Portuguese took them around the world. The Portuguese suppressed them in the homeland, to maintain their black pepper import business, but propagated them widely in Asia, as a substitute for black pepper—they could thus lower the price of black pepper and import more of it (Tripodi et al. 2021)!

            The plague that devastated the Aztec Empire before the Spanish, and made it easier for them to conquer, was called cocoliztli, and now turns out to be Salmonella enterica var. Paratyphi, which also decimated Europe at more or less the same time (Warriner 2022). The Native Americans also had to contend with tuberculosis, apparently brought to them by migrating seals long ago—it is a a different strain from European one, which may be from cattle. Meningitis (Neisseria menigitidis) and gonorrhea (N.

gonorrhoeae), there and elsewhere, are both from a harmless oral-cavity N. lactamica (Centeno et al. 2023).

A wonderful description of life among the Nyahnyu people of Mexico was provided by local teacher Jesus Salinas Pedraza (Bernard and Salinas Pedraza 1989).

A modern problem of some importance is the rise of sun-grown coffee at the expense of shade-grown. Coffee is best grown in the shade, which has the side benefit of preserving natural cover and wildlife. Sun-grown coffee is inferior in quality and a biological desert. A good discussion by Perfecto and Armbruster (2003) has the advantage of showing (p. 163) a shade-grown plot in Chiapas that is so similar to ones I have studied there that I suspect it is in fact one of them.

The dreadful role of sugar in American history is all too well known. The plantation economy brought slavery by the early 16th century. It peaked in the 18th, with importation of millions of enslaved Africans. Poverty continued in much of the old sugar region and in the later realms of cotton, rice, and other goods produced by enslaved labor. These areas become dependent and peripheralized, economically subservient to urban importing countries—first western Europe, then the American states (Beckford 1972; Mintz 1985).

Cooking and identity is as much an issue in Latin America as elsewhere (Ayora-Diaz 2016, 2019, 2021). Traditional cooking technology is part of this; definite regional and local styles exist. (Ayora-Diaz 2016). Grinding on a metate or in a mortar is widespread, especially in Mexico and (formerly) North America generally. Grinding in a lava mortar, molcajete, is a Mexican art, and the final dish—after grinding and adding anything needed—is often served in the molcajete itself.

Manioc is ground to meal, made into bread, and baked, allowing it to be detoxified. Heat drives off the poison as a gas, so well-cooked—especially ground and baked—products are safe. The large (sometimes huge) tubers are used. They and the old leaves are high in cyanogenic glycosides, which become deadly hydrocyanic acid on damage of the root. Though “sweet” (nonpoisonous) strains exist, people have actually selected over millennia for even more bitter (poisonous) ones, since these are immune to predation and are easily prepared. In parts of Africa, the roots are not quite totally detoxified, since it turns out that a small amount of cyanide in the blood discourages malaria organisms.

Sometimes the young leaves are used, the old ones being poisonous. They are much more used in Asia and Africa where the plant was taken by colonial Portuguese and others in the 16th and 17th centuries.

Mexico received a great deal of its modern cuisine from the Arabic conquest and 800-year occupation of much of Iberia. The reconquista was finally concluded by the conquest of Grenada in 1492. The loot from Grenada financed Columbus’ voyage.

Irredentist Jews and Moors were expelled, and went to Morocco, Tunisia, and the Turkish Empire, but countless conversos remained—Moorish and Jewish families that had converted to Catholicism, sincerely or for survival. (Their cooking and survival are described by Hélène Piñer, 2021 and 2022.) The “Catholic sovereigns” Ferdinand and Isabela grew increasingly repressive; the conversos rebelled; this led to more distrust, more oppression, and more rebellion. Ultimately the Spanish Inquisition became really deadly, murdering perhaps 200,000 people over the next 200 years. More charitably, a very large number were expelled, or allowed to migrate, to New Spain. (The same thing occurred in Portugal, with Brazil as destination.) Many were relocated in the most remote parts of empire, including New Mexico, where a surprising amount of Medieval Iberian Moorish and Jewish culture survives to this day (Gary Nabhan and Carlos Velez-Ibañez, personal communication over many years; see Nabhan 2014, Velez-Ibañez 1996). Traveling in New Mexico years ago, I was surprised to find classic Arabian dishes in a local cookbook compiled by Cleofas Jaramillo (1981, orig. 1942). Gary Nabhan ran it down, and found that the Jaramillo family did indeed descend from converso ancestors (Nabhan 2014:13).

Many, however, managed to stay in the central core, perhaps especially Puebla. Here they fused classic Arab cuisine with New World ingredients (Pilcher 1998). One result was the famous mole poblano, a well-known Moroccan chicken dish with Aztec chile, tomatoes, and chocolate added in a perfect blend that is one of the world’s great dishes. Another blend is chiles en nogada: Poblano chiles—named for the region—stuffed with a thoroughly Levantine mix of fruits, nuts, and spices, with chile sauce over all. The spicing in this cuisine—black pepper, cumin, and coriander seeds and leaves—is classic Arabic.

Among other odd introductions is the tandur oven, a big ceramic jar buried in the ground or in a stove setup (Magaña González 2016). It was probably invented in ancient Mesopotamia, and has gone everywhere that Iranian and Iran-influenced civilization has gone, from China to America. It is found in Oaxaca under the name comixcal, probably an earlier word for an earth oven. The thick tortillas known as totopos and gendarmes are stuck to the walls, and then taken off with a peel (a long-handled paddle), as in a regular tandur.

A fascinating story concerns the vita-migas of Tepito (Hernández 2009). Tepito is the old poverty district of Mexico City, south of the old urban core. Migas means “crumbs,” but is much more; it is a Spanish development of the classic Arabic dish tharīd, bread soaked in meat stock, supposedly the Prophet Muhammad’s favorite food. The good citizens of Tepito took to making cheap migas by salvaging bones from butchers and restaurants and cooking them into stock, then making migas with stale bread and tortillas. With inevitable chilango (Mexico City resident) pride, this got idealized as a marker of the tough, resourceful Tepito chingón (politely translatable as “tough guy”), and thus called “vita-migas.”  The Tepito motto is comer bien, coger fuerte, y enseñar los huevos a la Muerte (eat well, fuck hard, and show your balls to Death), a typical Mexican rhyming refran.

Possibly the best single book about a single nation’s food is a classic monograph on the food of Jamaica, by B. W. Higman (2008). He documents at enormous length how Indigenous Caribbean Island cookery was combined over historic centuries with European food, and above all with African food introduced by enslaved Africans and foods of India brought by indentured laborers. The result includes many cases of Indigenous foodstuffs used in African ways and then often adapted to European and Indian dishes or tastes. Sweet potatoes were assimilated to the unrelated African yams and then used for European pastries. Indigenous butternut squash became a replacement for African and European gourds and pumpkins, and then was made into soup flavored with Indian spices; the result has gone worldwide now in expensive restaurants. Indigenous beans and peanuts were used in African, European, and Indian dishes, all of which blended into each other over time. Indian chicken curry picked up Caribbean chile peppers and other spices. The many Indigenous fruits were used in all possible ways. An extreme of Jamaican fusion is jerking: preparing meat for storage. It is smoked over the barbacoa, a wooden frame used by Indigenous people for smoking and roasting, but is previously (and sometimes also later) marinated in a fantastic mix of spices from all over the world. Higham tells the story of every ingredient and dish, with full historical documentation. A darker note is the horror of the sugar industry, from slavery days to modern poverty and malnutrition. Jamaica also faces the loss of its once-lavish fishing industry, with overfishing depleting stocks and global warming wiping out the corals that once were the home and refuge of the fish and shellfish.

South America

            Native Americans of greater Amazonia have inspired much of the best research on human food. Much of this is due to the work and theorizing of Claude Lévi-Strauss (1962, 1969) who did research in the wilds of Brazil in the early 1930s. He found that the local people, mostly speakers of Ge languages, differentiated humans from nonhumans by the human use of cooking. Ants had much more impressive societies; leafcutter ant nests can have over a million workers, integrated into a model social order. The Bible saw clothing as the great watershed, but the Ge people wore little or none. Only cooking was uniquely and indisputably human.

            This insight had a bit to do with inspiring Richard Wrangham’s long-standing study of cooking as a critical aspect of, and even driver of, human evolution (see above). Lévi-Strauss went on to theorize that roasting was more “nature”-like, while boiling modified the food more and thus humanized it more. This idea has not stood the test of time.

Native Americans in the Amazon rainforest sometimes increased forest areas, possibly into areas previously deforested by fires (Bush et al. 2021).  More often, they increased the number of useful trees, including araucarias, yerba mate, all sorts of fruits, and various palms. Palms were often cut and left to grow larvae; up to 5 kg. of edible larvae could grow in a metre of rotting palm trunk (Silva Noelli et al. 2022).

Planted trees like Brazil nut, Inga, Pourouma cecropiifolia, Pouteria caimito, and chocolate (cacao) trees are all over the Amazon. Planted-type trees are most diverse near the Peru border but most numerous in the center. Levis and colleagues (2017 mapped the whole Amazon Basin and found enormous evidence of human planting and/or management.

            Deforestation in tropical South America peaked in the late 300s CE, followed by reforestion, especially after 750 and then, dramatically, after 1500, when violence and introduced diseases reduced the Indigenous population by 90 to 95%. Abundant pollen of Cecropia, an invasive tree of open spaces, shows that the reforestation was real, not an artifact of surveying. Maize pollen was not particularly abundant before or after the 300s, showing that people were relying on a mixed farming system with heavy reliance on root crops and fruit (Bush et al. 2021).

In the Llanos de Moxos, Bolivia, archaeologists detected extensive networks of canals and fields in pre-Columbian times. This turned out to be far more extensive and impressive than first expected. Here the Casarabe people flourished from 500 to 1400 CE. They “built hundreds of monumental monds interconnected by canals and causeways across a flat forest-savannah mosaic landscape dominated by seasonally flooded savannahs, with forests restricted to non-flooded…levees” (Lombardo et al. 2025:119). Maize was the main crop and the field crop. They grew manioc, lleren, squash, gourds, and other crops. They lived in large settlements on forested levees along rivers draining otherwise marshy fields, and grew maize in the marshy level areas, draining them with canals and irrigating in the dry season from ponds. The canal system was enormous, with small tributaries leading to large ones and then one giant canal into Lake Francia. Even the small canals were 4 meters wide and 25 cm deep. The next level up was 8 meters wide and 70 cm deep. The enormous canal into the lake was fully 14 m wide and 1.8 to 3.2 m deep, deepening as it came closer to the lake. This is a literally monumental achievement for a society lacking metals, the wheel, or draft animals.

One Native invention is cassareep: boiled-down manioc press liquid, becoming thick and black. It has the umami taste from glutamates (Balston 2020). In Venezuela it is heavily dosed with chile. In Guyana it goes into pepper pot with clove and cinnamon.

The Enawene, a tiny group in central Brazil, depend heavily on this manioc drink. They never drink unboiled liquids. From this beginning, researcher Chloe Nahum-Claudel (2020) went on to a brilliant study of the role of fire and cooking in humanizing food (following Lévi-Strauss’ ideas), and the importance of cooking in human evolution (following Richard Wrangham). Indeed cooking makes us human.

Among South American hunter-gatherers, the Ache share food on the basis of reciprocity. So do the culturally similar Hiwi, who have to hunt long and hard for food (it repays effort) The vital important of reciprocity says much about human evolution and society (Gurven 2006).

The usual Native American attitudes toward conservation—protection and wise use based on respect—are amply documented in South America (e.g. Reed 1995, 1997; Reichel-Dolmatoff 1971, 1976, 1996).

Modern Brazil relies heavily on fermentations (Mayrink Lima et al. 2022). There is a great variety of local cheeses, using many little-known local microorganisms. Marajo Island, a huge island at the Amazon mouth, produces cheese from water buffalo milk. Italian influence shows up in Lactobacillus-fermented meats, such as socol, local to one city, made from pork loin. Charqui (jerky) is brined, salted, and dried, with some important salt-tolerant microorganisms. There are several fermented manioc products: paste, flour, fermented juice, and others.

Aluá is a beer made of most anything (grain or fruit), is of African origin. Other local beers include calugi, tarubá, and yakupa, Indigenous beers (mostly made from manioc). Caiçuma is an Indigenous peach palm beer. Cauim and caxiri are more manioc or grain or sweet-potato beers. Tiquira, distilled manioc beer, is an Amazonian delicacy.

The common Brazilian rum, cachaça, is actually based on a very complex ferment of the sugar mash. They use the same terms we do, heads and tails, for the throwaway of distillation, and keep the “heart” (coração).

A number of wild berries are commonly used in Chilean and Argentinian Patagonia: Calafate, Berberis microphylla, superb and widely used for drinks and jam; murtilla, Empetrum rubrum, chaura, resembles cranberries and crowberries; Gaultheria mucronata is a close relative of the salal berry (G. shallon) of the Northwest Coast of North America.

Peru, inspired by the success of tequila and mezcal, is producing chawar, a new agave drink.

Guinea pigs, generally known by the Quechua name cuy, are a standard food in Peru and neighboring Andean countries. They have about as much meat as a very small chicken, and tend to be rather tough. They are eaten roasted or stewed, often in a spicy yellow sauce. They achieved artistic fame when Marcos Zapata in 1753 painted a Last Supper for the Cuzco cathedral, with the disciples eating a guinea pig instead of a lamb and drinking from Inca-style qero cups (personal observation, Cuzco, 1997; see Benavente Velarde 1995:139-140). This is part of a significant trend in colonial Andean art to show the victimized apostles and saints as Indigenous and, often, their persecutors as Spanish.

The Spanish did manage to introduce the characteristic European Easter bread. It is known as t’anta wawa, “baby bread,” and is made on All Saints and All Souls’ Days in memory of babies lost. It takes the shape of babies, with baby faces sometimes added (GastroObscura, online, Aug. 29, 2019).

An important article on local crops has a self-explanatory title: “Semi-Domesticated Crops Have Unique Functional Roles in Agroecosystems: Perennial Beans (Phaseolus dumosus and P. coccineus) and Landscape Ethnoecology in the Colombian Andes” (Locqueville et al. 2022). The vines live 3-6 years and climb up into the trees. They need no annual sowing, produce in the worst years, and are good eating. Both are called cacha (Locqueville et al. 2022).

The Cashinahua, or Hunikuin, “real people,” are one of a number of groups that believe that peccaries and other game animals can reincarnate as people, and that people reincarnate as these animals. Zeca, a Cashinahua thinker, recognized different views of reality, and could hold forth to ethnographer Cecilia McCallum (2014) about skepticism, alternative views to keep in mind since we don’t know which is right. He understood cultural differences, personal differences, ontology vs ontologies, epistemology and epistemologies, and differences in standpoints. Zeca appears one of the sharper minds in anthropology.

Similarly, dogs dream the future, among upper Amazon groups, and their owners are very surprised when the dogs die, since they should predict and avoid their fate (Kohn 2007).

North America

            Most of North America lacked agriculture at the time of contact. The north and the Great Basin west were lands of hunting and gathering.

The Arctic and Subarctic are too cold and wintry for agriculture; most of that land is unfarmed even today. People lived by following caribou herds, or by fishing, or by hunting various animals. Gathering provided berries, mushrooms, and locally other foods, from lichens to nuts. Food was often preserved by storing it in cold places, which of course were abundant. Warm weather led to thawing and fermentation, often producing monumentally aromatic or maggot-infested results, which were eaten with relish. This is also true in Siberia (Yamin-Pasternak et al. 2014). They are definitely an acquired taste.

A survey of these shows that many could potentially carry pathogens of various sorts (Stemmelmayr and Sheffield 2022), but people of the region understood this, and were usually careful to avoid the dangers. Sealed and stored salmon eggs in the Pacific Northwest, for instance, were called “stink eggs” with good reason, and could potentially kill, but rarely did in traditional times when people knew how to assess dangers.

            Along the Pacific Coast, lack of agriculture did not mean lack of cultivation. Wild plants were widely tended and managed. Tobacco was the only domesticate, grown by the Haida, Karuk (Harrington 1932), and many other local groups, but plants like camas (Camassia quamash) were semi-domesticated—so intensively cultivated by digging the roots and replanting them that they became used to human management. Trees and bushes were transplanted to new areas. Groves of Oregon crabapple (Malus fusca) and other native fruit trees are found at former habitation sites in the Northwest Coast forests.

            Much of the continent was managed by fire. The far north, high mountains, deserts, and Northwest Coast rainforests do not burn, or burn only locally, but other regions were burned at fairly regular intervals. Much of the lore is lost, because of the incredibly foolish custom of suppressing all fires. This idea was introduced in the late 19th century and peaked in the mid-20th. It led to fuel buildup and senility of brush and trees, so that when fire did come—as it must, thanks to lightning if not human carelessness—forests, brushlands, and grasslands were devastated. Previously, regular burning occurred thanks to lightning, and Native Americans increased the frequency by deliberately firing small patches to open the landscape. This was especially done for berry and nut stands. Many of these bushes and trees are naturally fire-followers, especially the berries. They require fire to keep them growing and to prevent encroachment of less useful but more shade-loving trees.

            Many of these berries and fruits deserve more attention. Serviceberries (Amelanchier alnifolia)—basically tiny wild plum-colored pears—are grown as dooryard fruit in Canada, and you can find selected varieties there; few fruits are better. The southern species (A. utahensis) is good eating too, but has not been cultivated or selected—another potential garden fruit.

The native California plum (Prunus subcordata) has evolved an exquisite variety in the Warner Mountains of the California-Nevada-Oregon tripoint, and this plum has been grown in orchards near Lakeview, OR, for preserves, jam, and wine. It is unsurpassed for all these purposes, narrowly beating out the beach plum of New England (at least to this observer, but no New Englander would ever admit their beach plums are less than the finest, and they have a case).

A vast wealth of wild currants, gooseberries, blackberries, raspberries, huckleberries, blueberries, bush cranberries, and other berries gives almost year-round harvests in the more temperate areas. The thimbleberry, a wild raspberry (Rubus parviflorus), is often as good as any domestic raspberry. I once found an abandoned patch of domestic raspberry that had been invaded by wild thimbleberries. I spent a long time eating; it was the best berry feast I ever had. Wild strawberries are also wonderful, and I have grazed happily on them in many a forest. We in California have all the domesticated species as wild plants: Fragaria chiloensis, F. vesca, and F. virginiana. F. vesca extends to Europe, and is cultivated there; ordinary commercial strawberries are hybrids of the other two, which occur very widely in the Western Hemisphere. The wild ones are a very great deal better than the tame ones, which have been bred for size and appearance and have lost almost all flavor.

Root crops other than the Jerusalem artichoke have been much less popular with settlers. Camas is the highline root, and is very good eating. “Wild carrots” (Perideridia spp.) and countless species of Lomatium (sometimes called “wild parsley”) are widespread, and eaten when available. They and other roots are often baked in earth ovens. They are rather tasteless and woody. A range of bitterroots, balsamroots, wild lilies, and other root, bulb, tuber, and corm crops are enthusiastically consumed. For the record, a bulb is a layered thickening of the base of the stem. Lilies and onions are are typical. Their Chinese name “hundred together” describes their appearance. Tubers are underground stems, like potatoes (white and sweet), and have no such structure. Corms are underground or ground-level swollen stems, resembling bulbs but lacking the layered or scaled structure.

Berries and roots are eaten all over the Americas, but roots are particularly important in the interior Northwest—the Columbia Plateau and the vast high areas around it. There, they are the staple food. A wondrous variety exists, so there can be harvesting in many places at many times of year, and people can enjoy different eating experiences.

Nuts include a vast range of acorns from oaks of many species. Chestnuts were one of the most abundant trees in eastern North America before introduced blight from Asia killed virtually all of them; a few resistant ones survive, and are being bred in hopes of restoring this important crop. The walnut family supplied not only walnuts from many local species, but also hickories and pecans. Pinyon pines supplied vast amounts of seeds in good years. Native Americans propagated nuts locally and burned forests (at least near their villages) to preserve the health of the nut trees by eliminating competition, killing pests, clearing brush, and reducing the danger of bigger fires. Thus the nut groves of America were managed to various degrees, often quite intensively. Debate continues on how much was managed at this level, with anthropologists emphasizing intensive management at significant scales (K. Anderson 2005; Delcourt and Delcourt 2004) and biologists often casting a skeptical eye.

            North America received its agriculture largely from Mexico, but probably began experimenting independently from a very early time. A range of crops appeared in the Mississippi drainage, including sumpweed (Iva annua), goosefoot (Chenopodium berlandierii, especially var. jamesii), and others. Sunflowers were domesticated in North America or nearby northern Mexico. So were pumpkins (Cucurbita pepo, orange pumpkins and ornamental gourds, as opposed to winter squash).

Some of the minor crops of the Americas deserve further looks (Minnis 2014). The chenopods and other seed crops, and the many Indigenous-domesticated root crops, are particularly promising. The Jerusalem artichoke, a species of sunflower that has nothing to do with Jerusalem or artichokes, is probably Mississippi Valley domesticate. It produces huge stems and incredible numbers of tubers on very poor soil. Research at the University of California at Davis showed it to have enormous potential for producing biofuel—free fuel from poor land. The tubers are edible after long cooking at high heat, but their starch is mainly inulin, which causes acute indigestion if not thus broken down. They were traditionally prepared in earth ovens.

The Iroquois and their neighbors took up maize agriculture rather late, but came to depend heavily on it. Their fields were extremely productive and could be cropped repeatedly, because they cultivated the best soils and allowed a large number of nitrogen-fixing plants, cultivated and wild, to grow among crops or between cropping years. They grew plants in mounds, which protected the seedlings from early freezes; the seedlings did not break out of the ground till late, and the mounds were above the coldest air at ground level. This allowed permanent cultivation that was as productive as European agriculture of the time, if not more (Mt. Pleasant 2015; Mt. Pleasant and Burt 2010). They processed corn into hominy by using wood ash. A common food, cooked in pots, was sagamité, “hominy corn pounded into meal, boiled in water, and enhanced with meat, fish, berries, or oil if available” (Taché et al. 2025:168; Campanella 2013).

Native American environmental morality is now well known as a major contribution to the world. Respect for animals and plants, knowledge of the resources, and ability to set and enforce limits are vital. Also vital is a real grasp of ecology. Native Americans are generally quite aware of food webs, networks of mutual dependence, predator-prey relationships, and, in generqal, the broader picture. They conserve resources as part of awareness of the wider world (Anderson and Pierotti 2022; Brandt 1953; Davis 2000).

            Native American conservation ideas influenced the United States from the late 19th century. George Bird Grinnell, a top-notch pioneer ethnographer, was well connected with the New York elite, and managed to convince them of the need to conserve and the wisdom of Native American ways to do it. Among his converts was Theodore Roosevelt, probably the most strong conservationist among American presidents. Also influenced were George Shiras, father of the Migratory Bird Protection Treaty of 1918, which has saved migratory birds ever since—though they are now succumbing to pollution and global climate change. Yet another was William Hornaday, long head of the Bronx Zoo and the New York Zoological Society, who wrote a passionate and fiery work of conservation, Our Vanishing Wild Life (1913).

North America today

            United States farm subsidies are an international scandal and an international tragedy. Huge industrial farms are paid vast sums to plant, or not plant, sugar, soybeans, wheat, maize, cotton, and one or two other items. The environmental effects of this are appalling. Sugar, for instance, is grown by a few huge industrial farms in Florida, who take the water that should go to the Everglades to keep that unique ecosystem functioning. The firms pollute the water heavily with dangerous chemicals before releasing some of it. The sugar is farmed solely for the subsidies; it does not make money by itself.

Reforms in 2014 failed to stop flagrant abuse. At least, subsidies are no longer paid to nonfarmers with no crops. However, inflated prices led to oversupport. Now around $9 billion is spent on commodity subsidies. Most of the money goes to the rich agribusiness companies, not small farmers. The top 1% of recipients got an average of $116,501 in 2016, the median ones got only $2479 (Britschgi 2017).

This applies worldwide. The world subsidy level is at least $700 billion a year, possibly over a trillion. Only 1% of this money is at all good for the environment. Most goes for cattle, deforestation, and heavy use of fertilizer—about the most environmentally destructive things humans do. Some 75% goes to farmers, 15% to research, the rest for other purposes (Carrington 2019, using data from International Food Policy Research Institute and Food and Land Use Coalition). Interestingly, these revelations come from a right-wing and a left-wing journal, respectively; nobody likes farm subsidies except giant agribusinesses.

Food insecurity in the US is astonishingly high, around 12% of households. It rose in the 2008 recession and did not drop back for years, only to rise again in the COVID-19 epidemic (World Almanac 2025:161).

US food consumption changes since 1970 reflect a startling drop in consumption of oranges, peaches, spinach, lettuce,veal, and potatoes, and a huge increase in avocados, broccoli, garlic, high-fructose corn syrup, and chickens (World Almanac 2025:161). Beef consumption has increased only 15% since 1910, but chickens have gone up 520%; butter is down, pork slightly up, fish way up (p. 164). Most crop production is up, but oats have crashed even since 2000, as horses become less prominent. Cotton is somewhat down. Maize production has doubled even since 1980, but wheat and barley are down (p. 165). Soybeans have doubled in production. Beans are down but dry peas are up (165).

Sweet drinks are the major source of sugar and high-fructose corn syrup; sandwiches are the major source of saturated fasts and salt (p. 162).

Restaurants are also in trouble. “Of the nearly 647,286 restaurants in the U.S., chains account for 301,183,” (Peterson 2020). Independent restaurants are squeezed by costs and by local factors. The chains can absorb local failures by compensating from other locals that succeed. The bland, unhealthy food of the chains is a total abomination from the points of view of both taste and health, but they succeed by consistency, flashy advertising, and having all too well-known images and brands.

            Teenagers notoriously eat badly, but do not have to. Most of them realize the food corporations are making huge profits selling junk food, and they resent being suckered by the slick ads and taste sensations. This can motivate them to avoid such food (Bryan 2016; Burris et al. 2020). Many are terribly food-insecure, however, coming from troubled or impoverished households. They often lack easy access to good food when they need it.

Teens need enormous amounts of food. Peg Bracken, in her wonderful I Hate to Cook Book (1960), memorably ended a recipe for a hearty casserole with “Dinner for six, or an afternoon snack for a teenage boy.” All of us who have raised teenage boys will understand.

Ethnic Food Cultures

            Stamdard American food is, after all, an ethnic culture, a synthesis made by white European-ancestry settlers from many sources. One fascinating story is that of ketchup, traced by Claudia Kreklau (2025) in an extremely thorough and well-referenced article. She takes it from its roots in Fujianese fermented fish sauce (ke tsiap) to a mixed anchovy-based category of sauces in 18th-century England. It led to Worcestershire sauce (vinegar, sugar, spices, onions, garlic, anchovies) and even more fascinating mixes—walnut ketchup had walnuts, anchovies, shallots, mace, pepper, cloves, and garlic, and was then combined with cayenne, soy, etc. in some applications. These spread in due course of time to America, where ketchup generally meant the walnut form. Meanwhile, thanks to spread from the New World to the Mediterranean countries, tomatoes got more and more popular. Tomato ketchup was invented. It then spread over central Europe. Then the migration of Anna and John Henry Heinz from Germany to America brought a new enterprise. Their son Henry John (1844-1919) went from a humble start to spectacular success. He started making ketchup on a large scale in 1876, with more sugar, vinegar, and pulp than others. The recipe changed and simplified over time, becoming the now-universal commodity.

North American Anglo food was heavily influenced by religion, often highly deviant cults, as most recently chronicled by Christina Wang in Holy Food (2023). Most of these banned, and still ban, alcohol, tobacco, and hot spices. Many ban meat and encourage consumption of whole grains and beans. The Seventh-Day Adventists, a particularly successful group, are one such, though most now eat meat and processed grains. They also consume very high amounts of sugar (personal observation), neutralizing some of the advantages of their diet, but they have a noteworthy life expectancy.

The United States forms of African American food have been mentioned above in the Africa section. It is a wildly creative and complex mix. The pies, cakes, breads, and most of the ordinary “made dishes” are British Isles transplants. So are chitlins (chitterlings), traditionally eaten with mustard in England, but presumably intestines were eaten in Africa too. As most people know, African Americans were forced to learn to use the “odd bits” of animals, because the slaveowners took all the good parts. Neckbones was as good as it got, for Blacks in the old south. “Nose to tail” eating was universal in the British Isles, Europe, Africa, and pretty much everywhere at the time. No one could afford the choosiness of modern diners, who reject even excellent “body parts” like liver, oxtails, shanks, and sweetbreads.

A fondness for greens, especially strong-flavored ones, persisted from Africa. Turnip greens and collards were English in background, but filled the bill, and became identified with African American culture: “Corn bread and pepper sauce and good old turnip greens” (in one song). The greens were cooked with bacon or salt pork, if you could get any, and often a chile or two. The pot liquor was delicious, sopped up with the corn bread.

Maize was the staple food in the United States, for southerners of all backgrounds. Native processing into hominy has been noted. Corn bread with white flour was an English invention.

Beans of many sorts were critical to life. The classic African dishes were made with black-eyed peas, an African native. Most famous among these is the thoroughly African dish Hoppin’ John: blackeyes cooked with rice, spiced with chiles to taste, and made with bacon or salt pork if available. No one knows where the name came from. One of many origin myths refers to a lame vendor in old Charleston, whose wife or relative, Limpin’ Susan, gives her name to a rice and okra dish (Cross and Crawford 2023:160-165). Hoppin’ John is traditionally eaten with collards or similar greens on New Year’s Day for good luck, a tradition I religiously maintain. (I am a small but significant part African American, and keep the foodways going.)

Blackeyes are usually cooked in mixed stews or made into falafel-like fritters in Africa, and are used in soups in the United States. Pigeon peas are another African import, possibly originally from India. They have become definingly important in the Caribbean, but remain largely tropical. More common were Native American beans of all possible colors and patterns, with white “Navy” beans probably most common. They were acquired from the Indigenous people immediately, and became the protein staple of the poor and even the middle class of all “races” throughout the old south and southwest, and even as far as Boston with its famed white baked beans.

The other member of the Three Sisters, squash, was adopted immediately, due to its similarity to gourds and to the native West African pumpkin Telfairia occidentalis. In the United States, the native species, Cucurbita pepo, was the source of pumpkins, summer squash, and ornamental gourds. In the Caribbean, the “pumpkin” was butternut squash, C. moschata. The famous Jamaican pumpkin soup is thus “butternut squash soup” on United States menus.

Barbecue, probably the signature African American food complex, is originally Caribbean, but has come a long way since the Arawak and Carib peoples set up simple wooden frames for roasting, smoking, or drying meat over an open fire. The frames were the original barbacoa. Another word for it, boucan, produced the buccaneers—people who may have been pirates when opportunity offered, but normally lived by hunting, fishing, and foraging, cooking their meat on a boucan. They often smoked and dried it and sold it to ships.

In the Caribbean and then in the United States, the term “barbecue” quickly spread to meat cooked over an open fire, grill or no, and then to the pit-cooked meats well known in both African and Native American cultures but not common in Europe. Cooks used increasingly spicy and complex sauces to baste the roasting meats. Smoking survived as a dominant method of preparation. From these origins, barbecue has evolved into one of the most complex, diverse, and elaborate cooking styles in the world.

Wonderful accounts of the golden age of barbecuing and its modern fate may be found in Zora Neale Hurston’s writings on Florida food (Opie 2015) and Black barbecue chef Adrian Miller’s Black Smoke (2023). Hurston, a great and still underappreciated Black author, does a notable job of capturing the life of old-time large-scale barbecues. Any book on African American foodways is bound to touch on the tradition. It has, of course, been enthusiastically adopted by white, Latino, and even Asian-American cooks, with constantly growing diversity.

The Native American contribution was overwhelmingly important in one way: it contributed the staple food of the old south, maize. The Native Americans had developed ways of cracking corn into cookable-sized bits, and of making hominy by boiling kernels in wood ashes. This eliminated the phytic acid and thus eliminated the pellagra problem—which resurfaced, especially among Whites, as milled maize flour and meal became available. People no longer made or lived on hominy. Hoecakes were essentially a Native American food, as were various corn drinks and preparations, but cornbread is English-influenced, usually depending on some white flour and chemical leavening. It is still eaten African and Native American style, sopped in cooking liquids, but more often is eaten English style, with butter and jam. 

I have touched on the rice cookery above. Rice cooking in the American South began as a straightforward transplant from the Rice Coast. The history has been traced by Judith Carney in Black Rice (2001; Carney and Rosomoff 2009), and early by Karen Hess in Carolina Rice Cookery (1992). Pilaf or pilau from India reached America almost as soon as rice did, and morphed into the “perloo” and “peloo” of the South. New Orleans famously added French herbs, sausages, and sophisticated techniques like preparing a roux. But the basic cooking is African, as shown by names like “jambalaya”  (Wolof for “mixed grain stew”) and cala (a West African word for rice), used for rice dumplings that are unbelievably light and flavorful when fresh-cooked.

Native American influence appears in gumbo filé, ground sassafras leaves. They provide a wonderful spicy flavor that quickly caught on with African transplants. Also Native American is the fondness for crayfish, to say nothing of muskrat, alligator, garfish, turtles, and other wild meats.

These more exotic game items are largely eaten by the Cajun people. Supposedly descended from French exiled from Acadia (now New Brunswick) after the English took it over, they are a mixed group, very possibly more Native American than anything else. The original Acadians were described as blond and blue-eyed; modern Cajuns tend to be black-haired, brown-eyed, and olive-skinned. Census figures show a sharp drop in Native American population and an equally sharp rise in French population in Louisiana in the middle 19th century.

Louisiana cuisine remains one of the great local cuisines, with influences wide-flung over North America. The classic source is the Picayune Creole Cook Book (1901, current available edition by Dover, 1971; the name refers to the main newspaper of the time, which originally cost a picayune, the New Orleans equivalent of a French sou). Among countless modern cookbooks, we may single out Cookin’ with Queen Ida (Guillory 1990), written by a lady whom many would indeed consider the unquestioned queen of Zydeco music, the upbeat Cajun musical tradition. It is basically French Canadian accordion music, with singing, but made a great deal wilder than anything Canadian by the West African rhymic miracles so typical of Louisiana music. (Zydeco itself is a food word; it is a somewhat parodied version of the Cajun pronunciation of les haricots, “the beans,” both green and dried beans being associated with Cajun lifeways.)

One does not have to go to the wilds of Louisiana to eat alligator, however. In the southeast coastal lands, from Florida north to the Carolinas, settlers also learned from Native Americans how to hunt and cook gators. They were a major food in the Okefenokee Swamp in the old days. They are still universal on menus serving local specialties, in Florida and in the Low Country (coastal Georgia and the Carolinas)

Jewish-American food has entered American foodways abundantly. Almost all the signature dishes are Ashkenazic; the Ashkenazim are Jews from north, central, and east Europe, supposedly descended from a small founder group that migrated from Italy to Alsace, originally the valley of Ashkenaz, in the early Medieval period. Genetics more or less confirms the story, but with many additions from local people. (Contrary to a persistent story, the Ashkenazim are not descendants of the Medieval Khazars, whose leaders converted to Judaism.)

The classic American Jewish foods radiated from New York in the 20th century. They are largely East European foods, taken up by the Jews there during the “Pale of Settlement” period when the Polish-Lithuanian Empire welcomed them and much of western Europe was expelling them. Bagels and lox are possibly the most widely known, involving smoked salmon, as non-Levantine a food as can be imagined. People are fond of pointing out that “lox” is the oldest word in the English language; it is identical to the Indo-European *laks for salmon or large fish. Challah is simply a kosher form of the old European and Near Eastern ritual bread, with milk and butter replaced by oil to satisfy kashruth (kosher requirements). Knishes are Jewish versions of classic East European dumplings. Smoked and pickled herring and other preserved fish preparations are from the Polish-Lithuanian area. And chicken soup is possibly the most universal food on earth.

One American Jewish food that stands out is pastrami: cured, smoked, and steamed beef brisket. Brisket (from the foreparts of cattle) is the traditional Jewish cut, because removing the veins in the abdomens of cattle is difficult but is required by kosher law. In the United States it is considered a New York delicatessen invention. In Canada, however, a very similar commodity—usually salted and dried rather than pickled in brine—is known as “Montreal smoked meat,” and regarded as indigenous there. The Montreal Jewish community is as venerable, well-established, and culturally important as that of New York, though smaller.

All have noted the similarity of the word to Romanian pastrama (smoked mutton, or salted dried meat in general) and its ancestor, Turkish bastırma (beef air-dryed after salting and covering with paprika to preserve it). Yet American pastrami is clearly a descendant of the Alsatian dish pickelfleisch (pickled meat). The Irish scholars Angela Hanratty and Diarmuid Cawley (2024) show convincingly that Romanian Jewish immigrants brought the word pastrama, which in New York was applied to what elsewhere was variously called smoked meat or pickled meat.

Cowboy cooking was an odd mix of traditions. Mexican influence was strong enough to provide the word “coci,” from Mexican cocinero, “cook,” used in southwestern cow camps. Naturally, every part of a butchered animal was used. Of uncertain origin was “son of a bitch stew,” based on the “mar gut” (milk-filled small intestine of a calf; Harris 2011:148). “Son of a gun stew” was more general and less gut-based. In contrast to the lily-white cowboys of movie fame, cowboys were very often Black, Mexican, Native American, or a mix of some of the above with the more stereotypic Scots-Irish wanderers. A fair number still are. The food reflected this. It also reflected field conditions; coffee was supposed to be “black as night, strong as an ox, and hot as hell.” Cowboys were militant in ways not known to Hollywood; they formed an active and fairly successful union in the 19th century.

            Mexican-American cooking is another tradition with great antiquity and countless variations. Its origin in Spain and Mexico is noted above. In New Mexico, farming in old-fashioned ways continues, either because of local conservatism (as I have often seen) or because of revival. My anthropologist friend Devon Peña comes from an old Colorado Hispanic land grant family, and as he moved toward retirement from the University of Washington he came more and more attached to the old place, where he now lives and works on restoring the system. He put together a wonderful collection of stories by revivalists like himself and local old-timers among his neighbors (Peña et al. 2017). Some of them bake bread and dry corn kernels in the old beehive ovens the Spanish introduced—ovens that go back to the ancient Near East.

Asian-American food also took on a life of its own. The most famous of American Chinese foods, chop suey, has found itself used as the title of more than one book, and the subject of many imaginative, and imaginary, origin myths. It was not invented to get rid of restaurant scraps, or because a restaurant found itself short of food when a visiting dignitary appeared, or to cheat the foreigners. It is, in fact, a venerable and universal Chinese dish. The name—za sui in Mandarin, tsap seui (or “chop suey”) in Cantonese—means “miscellaneous leftovers.” That being a rather general descriptor, the dish ranges from the “odd bits” left over from butchering an animal, in the north, to leftover small vegetables and chicken meat, in the south. The Californian form appeared possibly earlier in New York, but was certainly established soon after the gold rush of 1848. It was a dish of vegetable growers in the Toisan and Seiyap districts of Guangdong province. (Toisan is Mandarin taishan, “terrace mountain,” and Seiyap is “four districts.”) They spoke a slightly different dialect of Cantonese from the familiar one of Canton and Hong Kong. They would sell their vegetables and then cook up for dinner the ones too small or misshapen to sell. Often, these were the tenderest and most flavorful of the lot. They were flavored with ginger, garlic, and soy sauce. These were, of course, the “miscellaneous leftovers” of the dish title In the United States, any available vegetables and meat were used. (See Peters 2013, but most of this paragraph is based on my own research in Hong Kong and California.)

California’s great contribution to Chinese cuisine was the fortune cookie, actually invented in a Japanese tea room in San Francisco, and based on a Japanese cookie (Peters 2013). I suspect also influence from the American sugar cookie. It appeared in the early 20th century. Who thought of folding it around a “fortune” seems unclear, but for a long time a single white man was responsible for all the fortunes in San Francisco. Some were Confucian taglines, many were folk wisdom. Today, they are bland nonsense, though sometimes someone gets assertive enough to have a quiet joke; one I received said “You will live in interesting times,” with reference to the fake-Chinese curse “May you live in interesting times” (which actually surfaced in England in the 1930s).

One of those odd stories of immigrant success in new-land foodways concerns the pink doughnut box. A Cambodian refugee named Ted Ngoy got a start in the new land by setting up a doughnut shop. He and other Cambodians succeeded mightily as franchisers or renters of doughnut shops, and soon the field was dominated by them in much of southern California. Ngoy found pink boxes were cheaper than white ones, and the result was an identification of doughnuts and pink boxes in the south; when it reached Hollywood, their movies and TV shows made the box go worldwide (Sanchez 2023).

California’s fusion cuisine extends to truly exotic blends, such as Punjabi-Mexican food. Many Punjabis, often Sikhs, emigrated to California in the 19th and 20th centuries, establishing communities in the far south and the center. Intermarriatge and fusion cooking were natural consequences. Roti quesadillas are a known item, and curries have blended with chile stews (Chopra 2019). Corn bread is a Punjabi staple, and tortillas were an easy borrowing.

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Early Ethnobiology: Historical and Personal Notes

Early Ethnobiology: Historical and Personal Notes

E. N. Anderson

University of California, Riverside

gene@ucr.edu

www.krazykioti.com

Abstract

To me, the critical moment in ethnobiology was the point at which anthropologists began to specify what words meant in traditional small-scale languages, instead of “translating” words by finding an English or Latin equivalent. Self-conscious use of “native categories” began with Lewis Henry Morgan and Frank Cushing in the 1870s, and won its way slowly against some opposition. The term “ethnobotany” was coined by John Harshbarger in 1895. By the time of John Peabody Harrington, indigenous categories were focal to research, and “ethnozoology” appeared as a term. Harrington had much to do with spreading the idea. I got into the field in 1960, by which time “ethnoscience” had just been added to the mix. My personal experiences at the dawn of that field may be useful to historians of ethnobiology.

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            To me, the critical moment in ethnobiology was the point at which anthropologists began to specify what words meant in traditional small-scale languages. The near-universal pattern before had been to use an English or Latin equivalent. Earlier translators of all forms of literature were often quite careless about this. Apparently Mary, the mother of Jesus, became a virgin by mistranslation: the Aramaic for “young woman” was translated early into Greek parthena, “virgin,” and even later Biblical writers followed this. More clear are the mistranslations of Asian writings into western literature in the 18th and 19th centuries. At that point, most of the translators were missionaries, and they cared little about biology or even philosophic concepts. They had been concerned largely with translating Christian concepts into Asian languages. Thus, translating in the reverse direction, 18th and 19th century translators rendered Chinese mei “sour apricot” as “plum,” Japanese tanuki “raccoon dog” as “badger,” and so on. This continues. Chinese qing, the comprehensive term for green, blue, and light gray, is translated with glorious indifference to context into English; I have seen references to a “green fox,” a “blue buffalo,” and so forth. Non-anthropological writers in general cannot seem to understand that many languages lump these colors, and it does not mean that the people could not see the differences in actual hue. Chinese, in fact, has distinctive words for pure green and pure blue, derived from dyestuff names. Such mistranslation extends to philosophy. Missionaries often could not resist pushing their favorite Christian words onto the Chinese. Thus the famous pair of ren and li, literally “humaneness and principle,” appear as “benevolence and righteousness”—good forthright Victorian Christian virtues.

            On the other hand, scholars since the earliest times often worked to find the right words to translate alien concepts. This was perhaps especially true in religion, where exact translations of the Bible were required from earliest times. Even so, countless errors crept in, such as “eagles” for “vultures” in the King James Bible (see Hunn 1979). Islam reduces the problem by holding that the Quran was revealed in 7th century Arabic and must stay that way. Students must learn it in the original, hopefully with good glosses to explain the meaning. Chinese classics are also read and studied in classical Chinese, with commentaries to explain them. Translations into modern vernacular Chinese are a new thing. The characters are the same, but grammar and usage are different, and the classics are in a telegraphic form that would have required unpacking even in their own time. Greek and Latin classic presented much deeper problems, because their main modern readers were people speaking daughter languages or wholly different languages. Concepts like kalon agathon “beautiful and noble” had implications far beyond their literal meaning.

            The problem of translating concepts to and from unwritten languages of small-scale societies confronted Bible translators from the beginning. Trying to discuss deserts, camels, lions, and such in Inuit or Paiute posed obvious difficulties. Trying to understand what the Inuit or Paiute were saying was often even harder. Countless mistakes are enshrined in modern placenames. “Arequipa” means “yes, you may rest here,” an answer to the Spanish request expressed by pointing to the ground and making questioning noises. Similarly, when Columbus on one of his voyages stopped a canoe full of Maya north of the Yucatan peninsula and asked about the name of the land over there, the person he questioned looked blank, and somebody helpfully said “Ma’ u’ yu’u’ ka t’aan ih”—“he didn’t understand what you said.” Columbus took the accented syllables and everyone was happy. The Spanish then compounded the error by thinking tan was the Nahuatl locative ending tlan or tan, and thus started to refer to the inhabitants as Yucatec, tek being the Nahuatl ending for “people a place ending in tan.” Some scholars have now taken this to a truly ridiculous level by assuming “Yucatec” is a genuine indigenous term, and spelling it Yukatek. Such is linguistic evolution.

            Seriously translating unwritten languages became a real scholarly concern with the rise of kinship studies, and especially the landmark work of Lewis Henry Morgan. He was far from the first to realize that traditional kinterms do not map onto English or Latin ones, but he was the first to realize how much it mattered for understanding society. His monumental compilation kinship systems, Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family (1871), remains unparalleled. It came out in the same year as Darwin’s Descent of Man and Edward Tylor’s Primitive Culture—surely the true birth year of anthropology as a serious discipline.

            Morgan’s students and correspondents were quickly converted. He and they expanded the interest in what would come to be called “native categories.” He applied them to Iroquois terms (Morgan 1954 [1851]) and house terms (Morgan 1882), but it was left to his follower Frank Cushing to invent what we now consider real ethnobiology. Cushing was a New York boy who became fascinated with “Indians.” Discovering the work of Morgan, he was converted, and became an anthropologist, without at the time needing much teaching. He attached himself to research trips in the southwest, and was influenced by Jesse Walter Fewkes, who started so much in southwest studies; Fewkes was already working on Indigenous plant names and uses. Cushing nested in Zuni Pueblo, and spent several years there. Here he invented participant observation, leading an entirely Zuni life—farming, hunting, and eventually being initiated into the highly respected Bow Priesthood. Unfortunately, he was always sickly, as well as being a bit erratic, and he died before publishing most of his work. (According to Zuni tradition, he was disclosing some secrets of the Bow Priesthood, and thus was struck dead.) Enough survives to produce profound respect for his ethnographic skills.

His most impressive work appeared in an odd fashion: during one of several periods of needing money, he wrote a series of articles for a milling company’s house magazine. These were collected after his death, and published as Zuni Breadstuff by the Museum of the American Indian in New York (Cushing 1920). This is possibly the most anthropologically sophisticated and thorough report on a small-scale culture’s staple food in early anthropological literature. Almost all the articles concern maize. Cushing not only wrote down all the practical knowledge he could collect, but also all the Zuni rituals and religious and ideological ideas about maize. They were an integral part of maize production and consumption.

In this and in his articles on Zuni ethnobiology (see Cushing 1979), he was meticulous about explaining the Zuni words rather than providing a simple translation. For this, he was taken to task by Matilda Cox Stephenson, who had written a Zuni ethnobotany conspicuously failing in that regard. Cushing responded with a reasoned argument for getting the Indigenous concepts right, rather than merely approximating.
             Morgan and Cushing continued to inspire authors. The next generation included Frank Russell, who taught briefly at Harvard before being consigned by ill health to the deserts of Arizona. Here he completed a superb ethnography of the Pima (now Akimel O’odham) before passing away (Russell 1908). The book is the first ethnography to take the Indigenous perspective consistently in all aspects of culture. At about the same time appeared Alice Fletcher and Joseph La Flesche’s enormous ethnography, The Omaha Tribe (1906), compiled largely by La Flesche, who was himself an Omaha. Franz Boas’ enormous ethnographic compilations of Northwest Coast lore similarly involved reliance on Indigenous consultants. His work with George Hunt (part Anglo, part Tsimshian, but raised from early childhood by and as a Kwakiutl) is famous as perhaps the most utterly comprehensive ethnography from a largely Indigenous point of view. It includes a vast number of recipes, collected with the help of George Hunt’s Kwakiutl wife. She also supplied a range of respectful sayings used by women for such acts as asking permission of trees to take bark from them, and then thanking them for the gift.

The other major development of the time was the beginning of John Peabody Harrington’s epochal work. He dedicated his life to documenting Native American languages, working on dozens of them, focusing most on Chumash, a nearly lost language family. He and his wonderful Chumashan consultants had a great deal to do with saving the languages and culture, now being robustly revived by tribal members. Unfortunately, he became more and more paranoid, hiding his work and refusing to publish. A few early researches on Pueblo groups and on the Karok saw the light, and in these he and his coauthors argue for full exploration of Indigenous categories in linguistics (Harrington 1932; Henderson and Harrington 1914; Robbins, Harrington and Freire-Marreco 1916). Cushing is duly acknowledged in the Pueblo work, and his influence clearly lies behind it. It is worth noting that these books popularized the fairly new coinage “ethnobotany” (Harshberger 1896) and introduced the companion word “ethnozoology.”

The scene now shifts to England. British ethnography had rarely taken Indigenous perspectives. Bronislaw Malinowski was to change all this. Apparently Cushing was the ultimate source of Malinowski’s ideas. As nearly as I can reconstruct it from the histories (Kuklick 1991; Kuper 1983; Stocking 1995), A. C. Haddon met Cushing in New York and was told how and why to seek out Indigenous categories rather than simply using loose translations. Haddon told his co-explorer W. H. R. Rivers, who was Malinowski’s main teacher in anthropology. Rivers tried some work with Indigenous categories, but was pulled back by his main field, psychology, working with “shell-shocked” soldiers in World War I. His work laid the foundations of what we not call post-traumatic stress disorder and its treatment. Meanwhile, Malinowski found himself interned on the Trobriand Islands by Australia; being from Poland, at that point occupied by Germany, Malinowski was classed as an “enemy alien.” With nothing to do but ethnography, Malinowski compiled what may still be the best single corpus of ethnography ever done on one group of people, in spite of Malinowski’s thoroughly Colonial and unregenerate attitude. (He was to reform later, and train Jomo Kenyatta and other rebels against the British Raj.) His classic book was Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1961, orig. 1922), which greatly elaborated on Morgan’s analysis and understanding of kinship. His work Coral Gardens and Their Magic (1935) was his major contribution to ethnobiology, and here he meticulously documents the full meanings of all terms for crops, garden tools, processes of gardening, and so forth. Following Cushing again, he details the rituals as an integral part of the gardening process.

The next major event was the birth of ethnobiology and ethnoscience, new coinages that rose along with the union of cognitive, linguistic, ethnological, and biological research in the 1950s. This union was effected by students of George Peter Murdock at Yale. Many had worked on Murdock’s enormous project to study Micronesia, newly acquired from Japan after WWII. The first on the post, however, was Harold Conklin, who had been researching the Philippines. Here the veteran botanist H. H. Barnett introduced him to ethnobotany and the need to get the names right. The result was Hanonoo Agriculture (Conklin 1957), still a landmark in the field. His papers (the major ones collected in Conlin 2007) discuss in detail his ways of studying language.

The other great ethnobiologist and linguistic analysis of the Murdock lineage was Charles Frake. He wrote little, but his papers (collected by Anwar Dil, 1980) remain the best introduction to semantic analysis of words for things, specifically in Indigenous languages. It is revealing that Conklin’s and Frake’s main contributions to the field were dictionaries, not ethnographies. Among Frake’s students at Stanford was Brent Berlin, who quickly became the leader of semantic analyses of traditional terminological systems for plants and animals. His work Ethnobiological Classification (1992) remains the definitive study of that field. It has never been surpassed, and findings since then have largely confirmed his analysis, though qualifying it substantially in some areas.

In particular, we have rediscovered Cushing’s finding that religious and spiritual dimensions are often embedded in traditional words and concepts, and must be considered part of the definition of a term. (See, for various perspectives on this observation, Anderson 1996; Berkes 2008; Kohn 2013; Sponsel 2012).

A large number of publications in ethnobiology and ethnoscience followed, and the field acquired increasing sophistication in cognitive psychology and in linguistics. Some pushback developed, from people who opposed such detailed study of people’s actual concepts and words. Marvin Harris (1968) attacked the entire enterprise as a waste of time, since he considered simple comparative ethnology to be the only real purpose of anthropology. His mission was to ground the field in functional studies of how cultures guide people in getting calories and protein. Among other things, he was largely responsible for the misuse of “emic” and “etic” to mean “insider’s view” and “outsider’s view,” a mistake that still bedevils the field. Kenneth Pike generalized the terms from “phonemic” and “phonetic,” to mean “given by the structure of the language itself” as opposed to “given by analysis using a generalized grid suitable for all languages.”

An example I always use of how clueless Harris was even about his own chosen area (calories) was his attack on Metzger and Williams’ study of Tzeltal firewood (1966). He considered it too trivial a topic. He should have known that firewood was at the time the principal use of wood by humans, and probably still is today. I had to spend serious time in the field with the Maya learning which woods to use and how dry they should be. In an area with dozens of tree species, ranging from worthless woods that flash off in a minute to the rock-hard, slow-burning, coal-forming jabiin (Piscidia piscipula), firewood gathering is a major subject, and getting firewood can absorb two or three hours of a Maya woman’s day.

The earlier work could now be rooted in knowledge of how humans classify and how language is constructed. Findings on traditional biological classification were brought together in Ethnobiological Classification (1992).

People with similar anthropological, linguistic, cognitive, and biological backgrounds formed a tight group, coalescing around the Society of Ethnobiology and the Society for Economic Botany, which eventually changed its name to the Society for Ethnobotany. Impressive ethnographies, comparable in scope to the earlier works of Russell and Malinowski but drawing on far more sophisticated social science, included Eugene Hunn and James Selam’s ethnography of the Sahaptin, N’Chi-Wana, the Big River (1990), and Russell Bernard and Jesús Salinas Pedraza’s Native Ethnography (1989). From many non-United States examples, we may simply mention Ian Saem Majnep’s magical books with Ralph Bulmer (1977, 2007).

This type of tightly constructed, meticulously detailed, scientifically grounded ethnography continues today. Eglée and Stanford Zent’s work with the Venezuelan Nï Jotï y Jodena U (2019) is exemplary (but hard to find and solely in Spanish).

Berlin, Hunn, Conklin, and other stalwarts set standards that cannot be totally neglected, and all serious ethnobiological research now takes account of the need to document Indigenous linguistic usage, as well as both practical ceremonial associations of plants and animals in the cultures in question.

Unfortunately, I am seeing a drift away from the standards of the late 20th century. Several factors have conspired to thin out the use of Indigenous categories in current ethnobiological work. One is the steady rise of academic silos. The easy cross-disciplinary days when we could merge anthropology, biology, psychology, and linguistics are gone. Specialized knowledge is now required to make significant contributions to any of these areas, and no one can stay current enough to be functional in even two of them. This, in turn, leads to loss of focus on the essential cross-disciplinary nature of the field. We can fix the problem up to a point by working with people from different disciplines, but even this is getting hard to do.

Under such case, the disciplines are drifting apart. More and more biologists are attracted to ethnobiology, but they are not always well trained in eliciting and recording Indigenous categories and worldviews. More and more anthropologists are interested in “animal studies,” “plant studies,” “multispecies ethnography,” and similar newly-evolving subfields, but they are often quite ignorant of biology. They can write at length about people who live with animals, but they are not always in a position to say much about the animals. There is a new field of “critical plant studies,” but apparently it has nothing to do with ethnobiology; it seems to be about modern people’s attitudes toward plants. A notable exception is Anna Tsing (e.g. 2015), who does her homework on biological as well as ethnographic issues. Similarly, there is a new and exciting trend in environmental history to combine standard history with extremely competent and well-deployed biology, allowing for major new insights in that area (some good new examples are Hoffmann 2023 for Europe, Lander 2021 for China).

            It is thus useful to recapitulate the reasons for wanting more accuracy in these matters. First, it should be common scholarly convention to at least be accurate in identification. Blue buffaloes and plums that are really apricots should absolutely not be allowed. Second, there is point made by Cushing and echoed by his many followers: We are trying to understand Indigenous culture, including language, and we obviously are not understanding those matters if we insist on using simple glosses for words that cover complicated realms. Working on China, I have found that sloppiness in translating simple plant and animal names goes with sloppiness in translating more serious philosophical and religious terms. Understanding is not served by that. Third, there are serious issues of psychology and linguistics at stake here. There are even philosophical questions to address, as David Ludwig has been telling us for some years now (Ludwig 2018; Ludwig et al. 2023). Brent Berlin has been so much the authority for years that few think of going beyond his work.

            Fourth, the world’s languages are among the most amazing creations of the human spirit. Every language is a masterpiece of brilliant innovation. The classifications of the world embodied in biological terminology are stunning works, like the masterpieces of portraying nature that one finds in medieval manuscripts (e.g. Phebus 1998). We should pay them the highest respect. This, at the very least, means getting the names right.

Appendix

Some examples of why you need to look at local categories: What happens to words.

            Other categories can be really different. In Tahitian East Polynesian, there is no concept of “water.” Salt water is a totally different thing from fresh. Salt is “white people’s seawater”—so seawater and salt are classed together, but fresh water has a totally different word.

            Words can be polysemous—having more than one meaning. “Wood” in English means both the material and the grove that produces it. “Tree” once had a similar extension, meaning “wood” as a material, but this has been lost, and “tree” means only the living plant itself.

            Words very often get used metaphorically, and then the metaphoric meaning may become commoner than the original meaning. Only dog breeders now use “bitch” in its original sense.

            Words can get expanded over time. Chinese wen “marks” originally meant spots on an animal, tally marks made by people, and the like. When writing was invented, it was used for characters. It thus came to mean “literature,” and then “culture in general,” and by extension “civil” as opposed to “military”: wen vs. wu, people who write vs. people who fight. Something similar happened with English “score,” originally meaning to scratch something, thus expanded to mark a win in a game, and on from there. “Current” extended from streams to electricity, to say nothing of current events.

            Words can contract in meaning over time. “Man” was the original gender-neutral term for “person” in English (cf mann in German). It has only recently come to mean “male.” One of Frake’s examples of semantics is the multiple-level contrast of “man” in English: Person vs animal; male vs. female; adult vs child (man vs boy); stalwart tough guy vs meek one (“Are you a man or a mouse?”). Thus the word has four levels of contrast (Frake 1980).

            A Chinese example is fan “cooked grain,” which originally meant any grain or even root staple crops, and still does in North China, but has become restricted to cooked rice in South China, parallelling Southeast Asian words for cooked rice (e.g. Indonesian nasi).

            And, speaking of rice, in English we call the semidomesticated aquatic grain Zizania “wild rice,” though it is not very closely related to rice. However, in China, real rice (Oryza sativa) occurs in both domesticated and wild forms, and so does Zizania. Worse, Zizania has now been fully domesticated in US. Thus, we now speak of “wildrice” to mean Zizania, even when it is domesticated, and “wild rice” to speak of wild Oryza. So, China has both wild rice and domesticated wildrice. Clear?

            Another process famous in ethnobiology is marking reversal. Newly introduced animals, foods, etc., are very often called “foreign X,” “new X,” or something like that, “X” being the local equivalent. Thus, in English, chiles get called “red pepper,” using the term for a completely different and unrelated plant that is similarly spicy. Chinese does this a lot: “foreign jakfruit” for pineapple, “foreign pomegranate” for guava, and so on. Often, the foreign item becomes more familiar than the local, and thus the “foreign” gets dropped. So pineapples are jakfruits in China now. Maize is called by a name formerly applied to a kind of millet. Similarly, anyone learning Maya might wonder why there are native Maya words for horses and guns, in spite of those being very new to Maya experience, coming with the Conquest. The answer is that the Maya soon saw the resemblance of horses to tapirs, and called the horse the “Castilian tapir”—kaaxlan ts’iimin. Soon the horse became much better known than the tapir, so the horse is now just ts’iimin, while the tapir is k’aaxih ts’iimin, “forest tapir.” The word for gun originally meant “blowgun.” So the Spanish gun was at first a Castilian blowgun.

            All these processes are common in most languages. Thus, pinning down the meaning of a word often means following up metaphoric extensions, expansions, restrictions, changes over time, marking reversals, and much more. It is not a simple or easy process. Ethnobiologists must spend a great deal of time in the field hearing people actually talk about plants and animals.

References

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

E. N. ANDERSON

Just about 8400 pages as of 2021 (after bk 32, article 51, chap 61).  Splitting the difference on coauthored books.

PUBLISHED      

  Books and Monographs

 1.  1970.  The Floating World of Castle Peak Bay.  Washington, DC:  American Anthropological Association, Anthropological Studies Series, Vol. 3, 274 pages.

 2.  1972.  Essays on South China’s Boat People.  Taipei: Orient Cultural Service.  146 pages.

 3.  1973.  Eugene N. Anderson and Marja L. Anderson.  Mountains and Water.  Taipei:  Orient Cultural Service.  179 pages.  

 4.  1978.  Eugene N. Anderson and Marja L. Anderson.  Fishing in Troubled Waters: Research on the Chinese Fishing Industry in West Malaysia.  346 pages.  Taipei: Orient Cultural Service.

 5.  1978.  A Revised, Annotated Bibliography of the Chumash and Their Predecessors.  Socorro, New Mexico:  Ballena Press.  82 pp.

6.  1983.  Coyote Space.  Shelter Cove, CA: Holmgangers Press.  26 pp.  (Poetry.)

7.  1988.  The Food of China.  New Haven: Yale University Press.  263 pp.

7a.  1997.  One chapter, “Traditional Medical Values of Food,” reprinted (from above) in a book of readings in nutritional anthropology: Counihan, Carole, and Penny Van Esterik (eds.): Food and Culture: A Reader.  New York and London: Routledge.  Pp. 80-91.

8.  1996.  Ecologies of the Heart.  New York: Oxford University Press.  xiii + 256 pp.

8a.  1999.  One chapter, “Chinese Nutritional Therapy” (pp. 29-54), reprinted in a book of readings in nutritional anthropology: Alan Goodman, Darna Dufour and Getel Pelto (eds.), Nutritional Anthropology:  Biocultural Perspectives on Food and Nutrition.  Mountain View, CA:  Mayfield.  Pp. 198-211.

9.  1996.  Ed./introduction to:  Duff, Wilson: Bird of Paradox, the Unpublished Writings of Wilson Duff.  Surrey, B.C.: Hancock House.  (Introductory material, pp. 1-117, and editorial matter, pp. 281-313, plus overall editing, of posthumous work by a leading Canadian anthropologist.)

10. 1997.   Coyote Way.  Pleasant Hills, CA:  Small Poetry Press.  100 pp.  (Poetry.)

11.  2000.  A Soup for the Qan.  By Paul D. Buell and E. N. Anderson.  London:  Kegan Paul International.  715 pp.  (Chinese text [ca. 160 pp.], translation, and book-length editorial matter, scholarly commentary, and annotations.)

Second edition, 2010.  Xviii, 662 pp.  Leiden:  Brill.

12.  2003.  Those Who Bring the Flowers:  Maya Ethnobotany in Quintana Roo, Mexico.  By E. N. Anderson with José Cauich Canul, Aurora Dzib, Salvador Flores Guido, Gerald Islebe, Felix Medina Tzuc, Odilón Sánchez Sánchez, and Pastor Valdez Chale.  Chetumal, Quintana Roo:  ECOSUR.  323 pp.

Spanish edition:  Las Plantas de los Mayas:  Etnobotánica en Quintana Roo, México.  Tr. Gerald Islebe and Odilón Sánchez Sánchez.  Chetumal:  Colegio de la Frontera Sur (successor to ECOSUR).

13.  2004.  Introduction to Cultural Ecology, by Mark Q. Sutton and E. N. Anderson.  Walnut Creek:  AltaMira (division of Rowman and Littlefield).  Xiii + 385 pp. 

Second edition, 2009.

Third edition, 2013.

14.  2004.  Rights, Resources, Culture, and Conservation in the Land of the Maya.  Ed. by Betty B. Faust, E. N. Anderson, and John G. Frazier.  Westport, CT:  Greenwood.

15.  2005.  Everyone Eats.  New York:  New York University Press.  Viii + 294 pp. 

2nd edn., 2014.

16.  Chase-Dunn, Christopher, and E. N. Anderson, eds. 2005.  The Historical Evolution of World-Systems.  New York:  Palgrave MacMillan. 

17.  2005.  Animals and the Maya in Southeast Mexico, by E. N. Anderson and Felix Medina Tzuc.  Tucson:  University of Arizona Press.  Xviii + 251 pp.

18.  2005.  Political Ecology in a Yucatec Maya Community.  Tucson:  University of Arizona Press.  Xx + 275 pp. 

19.  2007.  Floating World Lost:  A Hong Kong Fishing Community.  New Orleans:  University Press of the South. Ix + 206 pp.

20.  2008.  Mayaland Cuisine: The Food of Maya Mexico.  St. Louis: Mira Publishing Co. 

2nd edn., 2013, 213 pp.

21.  2010.  The Pursuit of Ecotopia:  Lessons from Indigeonous and Traditional Societies for the Human Ecology of Our Modern World.  Santa Barbara, CA:  Praeger (imprint of ABC-Clio).  Xiii + 251 pp. 

22.  2011  Ethnobiology, ed. by E. N. Anderson, Deborah M. Pearsall, Eugene S. Hunn, and Nancy J. Turner.  Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell.  Viii + 399 pp.

23.   2013  Warning Signs of Genocide, by Eugene N. Anderson and Barbara A. Anderson.  Lanham, MD: Lexington Books (division of Rowman and Littlefield).  Xiii + 213 pp.

24.   2014.  Caring for Place.  Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press.  305 pp.  (Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Book for 2014; about 1/10 of books they review, and thus about 2.5% of all academic books, make this cut)

25.  2014.  Food and Environment in Early and Medieval China.  Philadelphia:  University of Pennsylvania Press. 338 pp.

Reviews: Robert Hart, Economic Botany 70:94; Kaori O’Connor, Journal of Anthropological Research 72:1, http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/685268

26.  2016  Barbara Anderson and Gene Anderson:  A Power of Good: Language of a Midwestern Childhood.  Chesterfield, MO: Mira Publishing.  95 pp.  (Popular booklet.)

27.   2017  K’oben: 3,000 Years of the Maya Hearth, by Amber O’Connor and E. N. Anderson.  Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.  203 pp.

28.    2017  E. N. Anderson and Barbara Anderson.  Halting Genocide in America.  Chesterfield, MO: Mira Publishing.  91 pp.

29.    2019  The East Asian World-System: Climate and Dynastic Change.  Cham, Switzerland: Springer Nature.  Xii + 248 pp.

30.     2020  Paul D. Buell, E. N. Anderson, Montserrat de Pablo, and Moldir Oskenbay.  Crossroads of Cuisine: The Eurasian Heartland, the Silk Roads, and Foods.  Leiden:  Brill. xi + 340 pp. 

31.     2020  E. N. Anderson and Barbara Anderson.  Complying with Genocide: The Wolf You Feed.  Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.  172 pp.

32.     2021  Paul D. Buell and Eugene N. Anderson.  Arabic Medicine in China: Tradition, Innovation, and Change.  Leiden: Brill.  1005 pp.

Refereed/Scholarly Journal Articles

 1.        1963    “Tahitian Bonito Fishing,” Kroeber Anthropological Society Papers 28:87-113. 

 2.        1964    “A Bibliography of the Chumash and Their Predecessors,” University of California Archaeological Survey Reports 61:25-74. 

 3.        1967    “Prejudice and Ethnic Stereotypes in Rural Hong Kong,” Kroeber Anthropological Society Papers 37:90-107.

 4.        1967    “The Folksongs of the Hong Kong Boat People,” Journal of American Folklore 80:285-296.  Reprinted in Essays on South China’s Boat People, 1972.

 5.+      1968    “Changing Patterns of Land Use in Rural Hong Kong,” Pacific Viewpoint 9:1:33-50.  Reprinted in Mountains and Water, 1973.

 6.        1969    Eugene N. Anderson and Marja L. Anderson.  “Folk Medicine in Rural Hong Kong.”  Ethnoiatria II:I.  Reprinted in Mountains and Water, 1973. 

 7.        1969    Eugene N. Anderson and Marja L. Anderson.  “Cantonese Ethnohoptology.”  Ethnos, pp. 107-117.  Reprinted in Mountains and Water, 1973.

 8.        1969    “Sacred Fish,” Man 4:3:443-449.  Reprinted in Essays on South China’s Boat People, 1972.

 9.        1970    “The Boat People of South China,”  Anthropos 65:248-256. Reprinted in Essays on South China’s Boat People, 1972.

10.       1970    “Traditional Aquaculture in Hong Kong,” Journal of Tropical Geography 30:11-16.

11.       1970    “Reflexions sue la cuisine.”  L’Homme 10:2:122-124.

12.       1970    Eugene N. Anderson and Marja L. Anderson.  “The Social Context of a Local Lingo.”  Western Folklore XXXIX:153-165.

13.       1971    “Beginnings of a Radical Ecology Movement.”  Biological Conservation 3:4:1-2.

14.       1972    “Radical Ecology:  Notes on a Conservation Movement.”  Biological Conservation 4:4:285-291.

15.       1972    Eugene N. Anderson and Marja L. Anderson.  “Penang Hokkien Ethnohoptology.”  Ethnos 1-4:134-147.

16.       1972    “Some Chinese Methods of Dealing with Crowding.”  Urban Anthropology 1:2:141-150.  Reprinted in Mountains and Water, 1973. 

17.       1972    “On the Folk Art of Landscaping”  Western Folklore  XXXI:3:179-188. 

18.       1973    “A Case Study in Conservation Politics:  California’s Coastline Initiative.”   Biological Conservation 5:3:160-162. 

19.       1974    “On the Need for Studies of Food Consumption Ideas.”  Journal of the New Alchemists 2:128-132. 

28.       1975    “Songs of the Hong Kong Boat People.”  Chinoperl News 5:8-ll4. 

21.       1977    “The Changing Tastes of the Gods.” Asian Folklore 36:1:19-30. 

22.       1980    “’Heating’ and ‘Cooling’ Foods in Hong Kong and Taiwan.” Social Science Information 19:2:237-268.

23.       1984    “`Heating’ and `Cooling’ Foods Re-examined.”  Social Science Information 23:4/5:755-773.

24.       1985    “The Complex Causation of South Chinese Foodways.”  Annals of the Chinese Historical Society of the Pacific Northwest, pp. 147-158. 

25.       1985    “Two Chinese Birds Among the Golden Mountains.”  Annals of the Chinese Historical Society of the Pacific Northwest for 1984, pp. 257-259. 

26.       1987    “Why is Humoral Medicine So Popular?”  Social Science and Medicine, 25:4:331-337. 

27.       1987    Eugene N. Anderson and Chun-Hua Wang. “Changing Foodways of Chinese Immigrants in Southern California.”  In Annals of the Chinese Historical Society of the Pacific Northwest, 1985-86, pp. 63-69. 

28.       1990    “Up Against Famine:  Chinese Diet in the Early Twentieth Century.”  Crossroads 1:1:11-24.   

29.       1991  “Chinese Folk Classification of Food Plants.”  Crossroads 1:2:51-67. 

30.      1992  “Chinese Fisher Families: Variations on Chinese Themes.”  Comparative Family Studies 23:2:231-247. 

31.  1992  “A Healing Place: Ethnographic Notes on a Treatment Center.”  Alcoholism Treatment Quarterly 9:3/4:1-21. 

32. 1993  “Gardens in Tropical America and Tropical Asia.”  Biotica n.e. 1:81-102. 

33.  1993  “Southeast Asian Gardens: Nutrition, Cash and Ethnicity.”  Biotica n.e. 1:1-12. 

34.  1998  Teresa Wang and E. N. Anderson.  “Ni Tsan and His ‘Cloud Forest Hall collection of Rules for Drinking and Eating.’”  Petits Propos Culinaires 60:24-41. 

            34a.  Reprinted with additions and corrections by Victor Mair and ENA:  Eugene N. Anderson, Teresa Wang, and Victor Mair.  2005.  “Ni Zan, Cloud Forest Hall Collection of Rules for Drinking and Eating.”  In Victor Mair, Nancy Steinhardt and Paul R. Goldin (eds.), Hawai’i Reader in Traditional Chinese Culture.  Honolulu, HI:  University of Hawaii Press.  Pp. 444-455.

35.  1999  “Child-raising among Hong Kong Fisherfolk: Variations on Chinese Themes.”  Bulletin of the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica, 86:121-155. 

36.  2000  E. N. Anderson, Teik Aun Wong and Lynn Thomas.  “Good and Bad Persons: The Construction of Ethical Discourse in a Chinese Fishing Community.” Bulletin of the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica, 87:129-167. 

37.  2000  “Maya Knowledge and ‘Science Wars.’”  Journal of Ethnobiology 20:129-158.

38.  2002  “Some Preliminary Observations on the California Black Walnut (Juglans californica).  Fremontia 30:12-19.  (Nonrefereed  scholarly journal of the California Native Plant Society).

39.  2004  Barbara A. Anderson, E. N. Anderson, Tracy Franklin, and Aurora Dzib-Xihum de Cen.  “Pathways of Decision Making among Yucatan Mayan Traditional Birth Attendants.”  Journal of Midwifery and Women’s Health 49:4:312-319.

40.  2007  “Malaysian Foodways:  Confluence and Separation.”  Ecology of Food and Nutrition 46:205-220 (Special Issue:  Tribute to Christine S. Wilson (1919-2005), ed. by Barrett P. Brenton, Miriam Chaiken, and Leslie Sue Lieberman.)

41.  2011  “Yucatec Maya Botany and the ‘Nature’ of Science.”  Journal of Ecological Anthropology 14:67-73.

42.         2012  E. N. Anderson and Barbara Anderson: “Development and the Yucatec Maya in Quintana Roo: Some Successes and Failures.”  Journal of Political Ecology 18:51-65.

43.  2012  “Anthropology of Religion and Environment: A Skeletal History to 1970.”  Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture 6:9-36.

44.   2012  Hiroko Inoue, Alexis Alvarez, Kirk Lawrence, Anthony Roberts, E. N. Anderson and Christopher Chase-Dunn.  “Polity Scale Shifts in World-Systems Since the Bronze Age: A Comparative Inventory of Upsweeps and Collapses.” International Journal of Comparative Sociology 53:210-229.  (I contributed only about 1% of this.)

45.   2012  “Religion in Conservation and Management:  A Durkheimian View.”  Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture 6:398-420.

46.    2013  “Conquest, Migration and Food in Mongol China: Yuan Food in Chinese Context.”  Journal of Chinese Dietary Culture 9:1-51.

47.     2016.  “Birds of the Mongol Empire.”  Ethnobiology Letters 7:1:67-73. http://ojs.ethnobiology.org/index.php/ebl/issue/view/23/showToc

48.     2017  “Birds in Maya Imagination: A Historical Ethno-ornithology.”  Journal of Ethnobiology 37:637-662.

49.     2017  Chelsey Geralda Armstrong, Anna C. Shoemaker, Iain McKechnie, Anneli Ekblom, Péter Szabó, Paul J. Lane, Alex C. McAlvay, Oliver J. Boles, Sarah Walshaw, Nik Petek, Kevin S. Gibbons, Erendira Quintana Morales, Eugene N. Anderson, [8 others], Carole Crumley.  “Anthropological Contributions to Historical Ecology: 50 Questions, Infinite Prospects.”  PloS One, doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0171883.  Ca. 40 pp.

50.     2019  Christopher Chase-Dunn, Peter Grimes, and Eugene N. Anderson, “Cyclical Evolution of the Global Right.”  Canadian Review of Sociology 56:529-555.

51.     2021  Fernández-Llamazares, Álvaro, et al. and 29 others.  I am #14.  “Scientists’ Warning to Humanity on Threats to Indigenous and Local Knowledge Systems.”  Journal of Ethnobiology 41:144-169.

Invited Book Chapters and Working Papers

1.         1972    “The Life and Culture of Ecotopia,”  in Reinventing Anthropology, edited by Dell Hymes.  New York: Pantheon Press, pp. 264-283.  Reprinted in paperback, Vintage, 1973.

2.         1975    “Chinese Fishermen in Hong Kong and Malaysia,” in Maritime Adaptations in the Pacific, edited by Richard Casteel and George I. Quimby, pp. 231-246.  Hague:      Mouton.  (In “World Anthropology” series.)

3.         1975    Eugene N. Anderson and Marja L. Anderson.  “Folk Dietetics in Two Chinese Communities and its implications for the Study of Chinese Medicine.”  In Medicine in Chinese Cultures, edited by Arthur Kleinman, Peter Kunstadter, E. Russell         Alexander, and James E. Gale.  USHEW, pp. 143-176.

4.         1977    Eugene N. Anderson and Marja L. Anderson.  “Modern China: South.”  In Food in Chinese Culture, edited by K.C. Chang, Yale University Press, 1977, pp. 319-382.

5.         1978    Eugene N. Anderson and Marja L. Anderson and John H.C. Ho.  “Environmental Background of Young Chinese Nasopharyngeal Carcinoma Patients.”  In Nasopharyngeal Carcinoma: Etiology and Control, edited by G. Dethe and Y. Ito.  Lyon, France:  WHO, International Agency for Research on Cancer.  Pp. 231-240. 

6.         1979    “Social History of Hong Kong Boat Folk Songs” in Legend, Lore and Religion in China: Essays in Honor of Wolfram Eberhard on His Seventieth Birthday,” edited by Sarah Allen and Alvin Cohen, CMC Asian Library Series No. 13. San Francisco: Chinese Materials Center, pp. 155-175.

7.         1981    “The Changing Social Context of Hong Kong Fishermen’s Songs.”  Proceedings of the 30th International Congress of Human Sciences in Asia and North Africa: China, Vol. I.  Mexico City: El Colegio de Mexico.  15 pp.

8.         1982    “Cuisine,” invited article for The Cambridge Encyclopedia of China.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 382-390.

           Reprinted with some revisions in the second edition of the encyclopedia, 1991, pp. 368-377.

9.         1983    “A View from the Bottom: The Rise and Decline of a Malaysian Chinese Town.”  In The Chinese in Southeast Asia, Vol. 2, Peter Gosling and Linda Lim, eds., pp. 147-169.  Singapore: Maruzen Asia.

10.       1984    “Ecologies of the Heart.”  In Proceedings, International Chinese Conference, Michael W. Gandy, Mason Shen and Effram Korngold, eds., pp. 205-230.  Oakland: Michael Gandy.

11.       1985    “A Mosaic of Two Food Systems on Penang Island, Malaysia.”  In Food Energy in Tropical Systems, Dorothy Cattle and Karl Schwerin, eds.  Food and Nutrition in History and Anthropology Series, Vol. l4, pp. 83-104.  New York: Gordon and Breach. 

12.       1987    “A Malaysian Tragedy of the Commons.”  In The Question of the Commons, McCay, Bonnie, and James Acheson, eds.  Tucson: University of Arizona Press.  Pp. 327-343. 

13.       1987    Eugene N. Anderson and Harry Lawton.  “Chinese Religion, Temples and Festivals in the San Bernardino Valley.  In Wong Ho Leun: An American Chinatown.  The Great Basin Foundation, editors. San Diego: The Great Basin Foundation.  Vol. 2, pp. 25-44. 

14.       1989    “The First Green Revolution:  Chinese Agriculture in the Han Dynasty.”  Food and Farm, Christina Gladwin and Kathleen Truman, eds.  New York:  University Press of America and Society for Economic Anthropology, pp. 135-151. 

15.      1994  “Food and Health at the Mongol Court.”  In: Kaplan, Edward H., and Donald W. Whisenhunt (eds.): Opuscula Altaica: Essays Presented in Honor of Henry Schwarz.  Bellingham: Western Washington University, pp. 17-43. 

16.      1994  “Fish as Gods and Kin.”  In: Dyer, Christopher, and James R. McGoodwin (eds.): Folk Management in the World’s Fisheries.  Niwot, CO: University Press of Colorado,  pp. 139-160. 

17.      1994  “Food.”  In: Wu Dingbo and Patrick Murphy (eds.): Handbook of Chinese Popular Culture.  Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, pp. 35-54.

18.      1995  “Prinz Wen Huis Koch–Einfuhrung in die chinesische Nahrungs-Therapie.”  In: Keller, Frank Beat (ed.):  Krank Warum?  Ostfildern, Germany: Cantz (for Swiss Ethnological Museum), pp. 3-22. 

19.      1995  “Natural Resource Use in a Maya Village.”  In: Fedick, Scott, and Karl Taube (eds.): The View from Yalahau.  Riverside: Latin American Studies Program Field Report Series #2.  Pp. 139-148.

20.      1996  “Gardens of Chunhuhub.”  In: Hostetler, Ueli (ed.): Los Mayas de Quintana Roo: Investigaciones antropologicas recientes.  Universitat Bern, Institut fur Ethnologie, Arbeitsblatter, #14.  Pp. 64-76.

            20a.  1998.  Republished in slightly different form in Tercer Congreso Internacional de Mayistas, Memoria.  Mexico City: Universidad Autónoma de México and Universidad de Quintana Roo.  Pp. 291-310.

21.     2001  “Flowering Apricot:  Environmental Practice, Folk Religion, and Daoism.”  In: N. J. Girardot, James Miller, and Liu Xiaogan (eds.):  Daoism and Ecology: Ways within a Cosmic Landscape.  Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University, Center for the Study of World Religions, Harvard Divinity School.  Pp. 157-184.

            Translated into Chinese for Chinese edition of this book, Beijing, 2008.

22.      2001  “Comments.”  In: Richard Ford (ed.), Ethnobiology at the Millennium.  Ann Arbor, MI:  Museum of Anthropology, University of Michigan.  Anthropological papers No. 91.  Pp. 175-186.  (Comments on a series of papers from the Society of Ethnobiology annual conference, 2000, published here in book form.)

23.     2002  “Biodiversity Conservation: A New View from Mexico.”   In:  John R. Stepp, Felice S. Wyndham, and Rebecca K. Zarger (eds.):  Ethnobiology and Biocultural Diversity.  Athens, GA:   University of Georgia Press.   Pp. 113-122.

24.     2003  “Traditional Knowledge of Plant Resources.”  In:  A. Gomez-Pompa, M. F. Allen, Scott Fedick, and Juan J. Jimenez-Osornio (eds.): The Lowland Maya Area: Three Millennia at the Human-Wildland Interface.  New York:  Haworth Press.  Pp. 533-550.

25.      2003  “Caffeine and Culture.”  In:  William Jankowiak and Daniel Bradburd (eds.):  Drugs, Labor, and Colonial Expansion.  Tucson: University of Arizona Press.  Pp. 159-176.

26.       2003  “China,” subentries “Ancient and Dynastic China,” “Beijing (Peking) Cuisine,” “Guangzhou (Canton) Cuisine,” “Sichuan (Szechuan) Cuisine,” “Zhejiang (Chekiang) Cuisine,” Encyclopedia of Food and Culture, ed. by Solomon Katz and William Woys Weaver.  New York:  Charles Scribners’ Sons.  Pp. 379–396.

27.       2003  “Ess- und Trinkkultur.”  Das Grosse China-Lexikon, ed. by Brunhild Staiger, Stefan Friedrich und Hans-Wilm Schütte.  Darmstadt, Germany:  Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft.  Pp. 194-197.  (Encyclopedia entry.)

28.      2004  E. N. Anderson, Betty B. Faust, John G. Frazier.  “Introduction:  An Environmental and Cultural History of Maya Communities in the Yucatan Peninsula.”  In:  Betty B. Faust, E. N. Anderson, and John G. Frazier (eds.):  Rights Resources, Culture, and Conservation in the Land of the Maya.   Westport, CT:  Praeger.  Pp. 1-30.

29.      2004  “Valuing the Maya Forests.”  In:  Betty B. Faust, E. N. Anderson, and John G. Frazier (eds.):  Rights Resources, Culture, and Conservation in the Land of the Maya.   Westport, CT:  Praeger.  Pp.  117-130. 

30.      2004  “Heating and Cooling Qi and Modern American Dietary Guidelines:  Personal Thoughts on Cultural Convergence.”  In Jacqueline Newman and Roberta Halperin (eds.):  Chinese Cuisine, American Palate.  New York:  Center for Thanatology Research and Education, Inc.  Pp. 26-33.

31.      2004  Barbara Anderson, E. N. Anderson, and Roseanne Rushing:  “Violence:  Assault on Personhood.”  In Barbara A. Anderson:  Reproductive Health:  Women and Men’s Shared Responsibility.  Sudbury, MA: Jones and Bartlett.  Pp. 163-204. 

32.       2005  E. N. Anderson and Christopher Chase-Dunn: “The Rise and Fall of Great Powers.”  In Christopher Chase-Dunn and E. N. Anderson (eds.):  The Historical Evolution of World-Systems.  New York:  Palgrave MacMillan.  Pp. 1-19. 

33.       2005  “Lamb, Rice, and Hegemonic Decline:  The Mongol Empire in the Fourteenth Century.”  In Christopher Chase-Dunn and E. N. Anderson (eds.):  The Historical Evolution of World-Systems.  New York:  Palgrave MacMillan.  Pp. 113-121.

34.       2007  E. N. Anderson and Lisa Raphals: “Taoism and Animals.”  In Paul Waldau and Kimberley Patton (eds.):  A Communion of Subjects:  Animals in Religion, Science, and Ethics.  New York:  Columbia University Press.  Pp. 275-290.

35.       2009  “Northwest Chinese Cuisine and the Central Asian Connection.”  In David Holm (ed.), Regionalism and Globalism in Chinese Culinary Culture.  Taipei:  Foundation of Chinese Dietary Culture.  Pp. 49-78.

36.     2009  “Cuisines” and “Health, Nutrition, and Food,” Berkshire Encyclopedia of China (online), pp. 529-535 and 1010-1012.

37.     2010  “Indigenous Traditions:  Asia.”  Berkshire Encyclopedia of Sustainability, vol. 1, The Spirit of Sustainability.  Pp. 216-221.

38.       2010  “Food and Feasting in the Zona Maya of Quintana Roo.”  In John Staller and Michael Carrasco (eds.), Pre-Columbian Foodways:  Interdisciplinary Approaches to Food, Culture, and Markets in Ancient Mesoamerica.  New York:  Springer.  Pp. 441-465.

39.      2010  “Managing Maya Landscapes:  Quintana Roo, Mexico.”  In Leslie Main Johnson and Eugene S. Hunn (eds.), Landscape Ethnoecology:  Concepts of Biotic and Physical Space.  New York:  Berghahn.  Pp. 255-276. 

40.     2010  “Food Cultures:  Linking People to Landscapes.”  In Sarah Pilgrim and Jules Pretty (eds.),  Nature and Culture: Rebuilding Lost Connections.  London:  Earthscan.  Pp. 185-196.

41.     2011  “Emotions, Motivation, and Behavior in Cognitive Anthropology.”  In David Kronenfeld, Giovanni Bennardo, Victor C. de Munck, and Michael D. Fischer (eds.), A Companion to Cognitive Anthropology.  New York: Wiley-Blackwell.  Pp. 331-354.

42.   2011  “Introduction.”  In E. N. Anderson, Deborah Pearsall, Eugene Hunn and Nancy Turner (eds.),  Ethnobiology.  Hoboken, NJ:  Wiley-Blackwell.  Pp. 1-14.

43.   2011  “Ethnobiology and Agroecology.” In E. N. Anderson, Deborah Pearsall, Eugene Hunn and Nancy Turner (eds.),  Ethnobiology.  Hoboken, NJ:  Wiley-Blackwell.  Pp. 305-318.

44.    2011  “Drawing from Traditional and ‘Indigenous’ Socioecological Theories.”  In Helen Kopnina and Eleanor Shoreman-Ouimet, Environmental Anthropology Today.  London:  Routledge.  Pp. 56-74.

45.   2011  “War, Migration, and Food in Mongol China:  Yuan Dynasty Food and Medicine.”  In Proceedings of the 12th Symposium on Chinese Dietary Culture.  Taiwan:  Foundation for Chinese Dietary Culture.  Pp. 1-32. 

46.    2011  “China.”  In Food Cultures of the World:  Encyclopedia.  Vol.:  Asia, Ken Albala, ed.  Santa Barbara, CA:  ABC-Clio.  Pp. 61-72.

Access electronically:  http://ebooks.abc-clio.com. User B5342E, password abccomp.

47.     2013  “Culture and the Wild.”  In The Rediscovery of the Wild,Peter H. Kahn, Jr., and Patricia H. Hasbach, eds.  Cambridge, MA:  MIT Press.  Pp. 157-180.

48.     2013  “What Shapes Cognition?  Traditional Sciences and Modern International Science.”  In Explorations in Ethnobiology: The Legacy of Amadeo Rea, Marsha Quinlan and Dana Lepofsky, eds.  Denton, TX:  Society of Ethnobiology.  Pp. 47-77.

49.     2013  “Foreword.”  In Environmental Anthropology Engaging Ecotopia: Bioregionalism, Permaculture, and Ecovillages, Joshua Lockyer and James Veteto, eds.  New York: Berghahn.  Pp. xi-xviii.

50.     2013  “Learning Is Like Chicken Feet: Assembling the Chinese Food System.”  In International Conference on Foodways and Heritage, Conference Proceedings, Sidney C. H. Cheung and Chau Hing-wah, eds.  Hong Kong: Government of Hong Kong, Leisure and Cultural Services Dept.  Pp. 3-20.

51.     2013  Stand Straight and Never Bend:  How China Fed Millions of People for Thousands of Years.  Working Paper #1, Dept. of Anthropology, Sun Yat-sen University [Zhongshan University], Guangdong, China.  24 pp.

52.      2013  “Tales Best Told Out of School:  Traditional Life-Skills Education Meets Modern Science Education.”  In Anthropology of Environmental Education, Helen Kopnina, ed.  New York: Novinka.  Pp. 1-24.

53.      2014  “China.”  In Food in Time and Place: The American Historical Association Companion to Food History.  Berkeley: University of California Press.  Pp. 41-67.

54.     2016  “Agriculture, Population, and Environment in Late Imperial China.” In Environment, Modernization and Development in East Asia: Perspectives from Environmental History, Ts’ui-jung Liu and James Beattie, eds.  Houndsmill, Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave MacMillan.  Pp. 31-58.

Translated into Chinese, Taipei  2018, pp. 55-96

55.     2017  “Ethnobiology and the New Environmental Anthropology.”  In Routledge Handbook of Environmental Anthropology, Helen Kpnina and Eleanor Shoreman-Oiuimet, eds.  Abingdon (Oxford) and New York:  Pp. 31-43.

56.     2017  “Traditional and Nontraditional Medicine in a Yucatec Maya Community.”  In Plants and Health: New Perspectives on the Health-Environment-Plant Nexus, Elizabeth Olson and Richard Stepp, eds.  New York: Springer.  Pp. 1-16.

57.     2018  “Chinese Cuisine.”  In Asian Cuisines: Food Culture form East Asia to Turkey and Afghanistan, Karen Christensen, ed.  Great Barrington, MA: Berkshire.  Pp. 3-11.

58.     2018.  “Traditional Chinese Medicine and Diet.” In Asian Cuisines: Food Culture form East Asia to Turkey and Afghanistan, Karen Christensen, ed.  Great Barrington, MA: Berkshire.  Pp. 12-15.

59.     2019  “Traditional Intensive Organic Farming.”  In Organic Food, Farming and Culture: An Introduction, ed. by Janet Chrzan and Jacqueline A. Ricotta.  London: Bloomsbury Academic.  Pp. 31-43.

60.     2019  E. N. Anderson, Jacqueline A. Ricotta, and Janet Chrzan.  “Conclusion.”  In Organic Food, Farming and Culture: An Introduction, ed. by Janet Chrzan and Jacqueline A. Ricotta.  London: Bloomsbury Academic.  Pp.293-300.

61.     2020  Chelsey Geralda Armstrong and Eugene N. Anderson.  “Ecologies of the Heart.”  In Archaeologies of the Heart, Kisha Supernant, Jane Eva Baxter, Natasha Lyons, and Sonya Atalay, eds.  Cham, Switzerland: SpringerNature.  Pp. 39-58.

62.     2021.  “Ecology: Environments and Empires in World History, 3000 BCE-ca. 1900 CE,” by James Beattie and Eugene Anderson.  In The Oxford World History of Empire. Vol. 1, The Imperial Experience, edited by Peter Fibiger Bang, C. A. Bayly, and Walter Scheidel.  Oxford: Oxford University Press.  Pp. 460-493.

Electronic Publications

1.       1998  “Managing Maya Commons: Chunhuhub, Quintana Roo.”  Proceedings of the International Association for the Study of Common Property, annual conference, Vancouver, Canada.  One of several papers selected by the organizers of the conference for electronic publication.   (Book chapter 35 above is a greatly expanded and rewritten version.)

2.      2015  China’s Water Problems.  Nottingham University, China Policy Institute, Policy Paper Series, issue 6. http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/cpi/documents/policy-papers/cpi-policy-paper-2015-no-6-anderson.pdf

3.  2018   Articles for Wiley International Encyclopedia of Anthropology, online: E. N. Anderson and Kristen Sbrogna,  “Agroecology”;  Mark Q. Sutton and E. N. Anderosn, “Cultural Materialism” (i.e. Cultural Ecology); E. N. Anderson, “Motivation.”

4.     2019  The Cyclical Evolution of the Global Right, by Christopher Chase-Dunn, Peter Grimes, and E. N. Anderson.  Irows working papers 134, at https://irows.edu.ucr/papers/irows134.htm.

COMMENTS, POPULAR ARTICLES, POETRY, ETC..

1.         1966    “Coyote Song,” Coyote’s Journal, #4.  (Refereed, poem)

2.         1966    “Bird Selling in San Hui,” Hong Kong Bird Report, 1965 pp. 49-51.

3.         1968    “The Chumash Indians of Southern California,” Malki Museum Brochure #4.  Malki Museum Press.  (Popular writing) Reprinted 1975.

4.         1969    “The Kingfishers” and “The Duck Farm,” In Transit: The Gary Snyder Issue, pp. 24-25.  (Two poems)

5.         1969    “The Social Factors Have Been Ignored,” Harvard Educational Review, 39:3:581-585.  (Commentary, unrefereed, in major journal.)

6.         1969    “Caucasian Genes in American Negroes,” in Science, 166:3911:1353.  Reprinted in Human Population, Genetic Variation and Evolution, by Laura Newell Morris.  1971, pp. 446-447.  (Letter, reprinted in reader on human genetics.)

7.         1970    “Lineage Atrophy in Chinese Society,” American Anthropologist 72:363-365.   Reprinted in Mountains and Water, 1973.  (Unrefereed research note in major journal)

8.        1970     Invited Comment on: “Mannerism and Cultural Change: An Ethnomusicological Example,” by Ruth Katz, Current Anthropology, XI:469.  (Note)

9.         1970    “Hoklo Boat People,” Urgent Anthropology, Current Anthropology, XI:I:82-83.  (Brief comment in major journal.)

10.       1970    “Toward a Planner’s Guide to Ecology,” Ecology: The Journal of Cultural Transformation, 1:6-11.  (Popular writing)

11.       1970    “Notes for the Biosphere,” Ecology: The Journal of Cultural Transformation, 1:2-5.  (Popular writing)

12.       1971    “A Food Tract,” Ecology: The Journal of Cultural Transformation, 1:3:5-18 and 1:4:6-13.  (Popular writing)

13.       1971    “A Design for the Tropical Center,” The New Alchemy Institute Spring Bulletin, pp. 16-20.  (Scholarly but unrefereed journal.)

14.       1971    “A Design for the Tropical Center” (in Spanish).  Leaflet distributed by The New Alchemy Institute.  6 pages.  (Largely a translation of the previous item.)

15.       1972    Western Riverside County: A Natural History Guide, E. N. Anderson, Riverside.  33 pages.  (Popular writing, booklet)

16.       1972    Man on the Santa Ana.  Tri-County Conservation League Riverside.  10 pages.  (Popular writing, booklet)

17.       1972    The Living Santa Ana River.  Edited and majority written by E.N. Anderson.  Tri-County Conservation League, Riverside.  3l pages.  (Popular writing, booklet)

18.       1972    Herbs.  Jurupa Cultural Center, Riverside.  32 pages. (Popular writing, booklet)

19.       1973    The Edible Forest.  Jurupa Cultural Center, Riverside. 26 pages.  (Popular writing, booklet)

20.       1973    Vegetables.  Jurupa Cultural Center, Riverside.  26 pages.  (Popular writing, booklet)

21.       1977    Comment on Marvin Harris’ “Cultural Ecology of India’s Sacred Cattle.”  Current Anthropology 18:3:552. 

22.       1977    Comment on R. Winzeler.  Current Anthropology 18:3:552.

23.       1977    Will Staple, Gene Anderson, Lowell Levant.  Coyote Run: Poems by Will Staple, Gene Anderson, Lowell Levant.  Anderson Publications, Riverside.  (Book; my poems, pp. 27-56)

24.       1978    “Sea Birds Off Tahiti” Western Tanager.  Journal of Los Angeles Audubon Soceity, p. 6.  (Popular.)

25.       1978    Invited Comment on Paul Diener and Eugene Robkin, “Ecology, Evolution, and the Search for Cultural Origins: The Question of Islamic Pig Prohibition.” Current Anthropology 19:3:509.

26.       1979    “Chinese Food: First Million Years.”  Wok Talk III:5:1, 8.  (Popular.)

27.       1979    “Beijing and Delhi.”  Western Tanager 45:10:6.  (Popular.  Reprinted in Bird Watcher’s Digest.)

28.       1980    Invited comment on Paul Diener, “Quantum Adjustment, Macroevolution, and the Social Field: Some Comments on Evolution and Culture.”  Cultural Anthropology 21:4:431-432.

29.       1980    Comment on Daniel E. Moerman, “On the Anthropology of Symbolic Healing.”  Current Anthropology 22:1:107.

30.       1980    “Food and Philosophy in Ancient China.”  Wok Talk IV:3:1-7.  (Popular.)

31.       1980  “A Closer Look at Hakka Cooking.”  Wok Talk IV:5:1-7. (Popular.)

32.       1980    “Teochiu Cuisine.”  Wok Talk IV:4:1 and 8.  (Popular.)

33.       1980    Eugene N. Anderson and Dexter Kelley.  “Birding in Nearer Baja.”  Western Tanager 47:4:1-3.  (Popular.)

34.       1981    “On Preserving Seafood.”  Wok Talk V:3:2-7.  (Popular.)

35.       1981    “The Foods of China’s Golden Age.”  Wok Talk VI:1:9-10.  (Popular.)

36.       1982    “Wisdom Literature as Prayers to Coyote.”  Coyote’s Journal, P. 64.  (Poem; major journal of poetry and literature)

37.       1983    The Inland Empire: A Natural History Guide.  Jurupa Cultural Center, Riverside.  (Booklet, 62 quarto pp.)

38.      1983  Nunez, Christina; Michael Hogan; E. N. Anderson.  Food Banks and the Anthropology of Voluntary Organizations.  California Anthropology 13:2:23-39.  (Minor unrefereed journal.  I was responsible for about 1/3 of this article.  The other two authors were students here.  Item missing from previous files, because the senior author published it without telling me.)

39.       1984    “Plant Communities and Bird Habitats in Southern California, Part II: The Chaparral.”  Western Tanager 52:3:1-4.  (Popular.)

40.       1985    Three poems in Reflections, Iain Prattis, ed. Washington: American Anthropological Association.  (Collection of poetry by anthropologists about anthropological themes) pp. 211-217.

41.       1985    Invited comment on Cecil Brown, “Mode of Subsistence and Folk Biological Taxonomy.”  Current Anthropology 26:1:53-54.

42.      1986     Invited comment on Cecil Brown, “The Growth of Ethnobiological Nomenclature.”  Current Anthropology 27:1:11-12.

43.       1986    Comment on “The Social Context of Early Food Production”  Current Anthropology 27:3:262-263.

44.       1988    Jean Gilbert, Claudia Fishman, Neil Tashima and Barbara Pillsbury, Fred Hess, Elvin Hatch, Barbara Frankel and Gene Anderson.  “National Association of Practicing Anthropologists’ Ethical Guidelines for Practitioners.”  American Anthropological Association Newsletter 29:8:8-9.

45.      1992  Invited comment “On Training and Certification,” CommuNiCator (Newsletter of the Council on Nutritional Anthropology), 16:1:1-2.

46.      1992  “Can Ancient Maya Wisdom Save Our Favorite Birds from the Cows?”  Western Tanager March 1992, pp. 1-4.  (Popular.)

47.      1992  “Four Fields in Ecological Anthropology,” long contribution to ongoing debate on the “Four Fields in Anthropology,” Anthropology Newsletter (official newsletter of the American Anthropological Assn.), Nov. 1992, p. 3.

48.      1993  “Teaching Philosophy,” statement to accompany Honorable Mention for Distinguished Teaching award from National Association of Student Anthropologists, Anthropology Newsletter, Feb. 1993, p. 18.

49.      1993  “A ‘Blue-Headed’ Solitary Vireo from Baja California,” The Euphonia 2:1:22.  (Brief note)

50.      1993  “How Much Should We Privilege ‘Native’ Accounts?”  American Anthropologist 95:706-707.  (Commentary, unrefereed, in major journal.)

51.      1994  “Caught in the Flood of Urbanization.”  Western Tanager 61:4:1-3.  (Popular.)

52.      1995  “After the Fire: Bird Use of a New Burn.”  Western Tanager 61:7:1-3.  (Popular.)

53.       1995  “On Objectivity vs. Militancy.”  Current Anthropology 36:820-821.  (Commentary.)

54.      1997  “Vegetables, Roots, and Wisdom in Old China.”  Journal of Ethnobiology 17:1:147-148 (Short Communication).

55.      2000  “On an Antiessential Political Ecology.”  Current Anthropology 41:105-106.

56.      2000  “On ‘Are East African Pastoralists Truly Conservationists?’”  Current Anthropology 41:626-627.

57.      2000   “Brief Notes on Observations in Spain.”  Anthropology Newsletter 41:9:41-42.

58.      2001   Folk song text (collected and translated by myself), five photographs I took, and summary of my research writings on Hong Kong, published in Elizabeth Johnson:  Recording a Rich Heritage: Research on Hong Kong’s ‘New Territories.’  Hong Kong Heritage Museum, Hong Kong.  Pp. 82-88.

59.      2001  “Psychology and a Sustainable Future.”  American Psychologist 56:5:457-458.  (Comment on a series of articles on psychology and the environment.)

60.      2001  “Tropical Forest Game Conservation.”  Conservation Biology 15:791-792.  (Edited comment; major journal.)

61.      2002  Comment on “Maya Medicine in the Biomedical Gaze” by Ronald Nigh.  Current Anthropology 43:789-790.

62.        2003  “Tropical Multiple Use.”  Journal of Conservation Ecology 7:14.  (Comment on earlier article:  Victor Toledo, B. Ortiz-Espejel, L. Cortes, P. Moguel, M. D. J. Ordonez, 2003, “The Multiple Use of Torpical Forests by Indigenous Peoples in Mexico:  A Case of Adaptive Management,” Journal of Conservation Ecology 7:article 9 online.)

63.       2008  Comment on “Reason and Reenchantment in Cultural Change:  Sustainability in Higher Education” by Peggy Barlett (Current Anthropology 49:1077-1098).  Current Anthropology 49:1090.

64.      2009  Comment on “Cultural Relativity 2.0” by Michael Brown (Current Anthropology 49:363-383).  Current Anthropology 50:251.

65.      2010  Comment on “Attachment and Cooperation in Religious Groups” by Carol Popp Weingarten and James S. Chisholm.  Current Anthropology 51:421-422.

66.     2010  “Ancient and Modern Foods from the Tarim Basin.”  Expedition 52:3:5-6.

67.      2011  “AAA Long-Range Plan.”  (Letter.)  Anthropology News, Feb., p. 3.

68.      2011  “Salt Water Songs of Hong Kong.”   In The Columbia Anthology of Chinese Folk and Popular Literature, Victor H. Mair and Mark Bender (eds.).  New York:  Columbia University Press.  Pp. 145-147.

69.      2012  “Cooking with Kublai Khan.”  Flavor and Fortune 19:4:13-14.

70.      2013  “Folk Nutritional Therapy in Modern China.”  In Chinese Medicine and Healing: An Illustrated History, TJ Hinrichs and Linda Barnes, eds.  Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press.  Pp. 259-260. 

71.     2013  “Are Minds Modular?”  (Letter, with answer by Michael Shermer and comment by Steven Pinker.)  Scientific American, May, 8-9.

72.     2-13  “Happiness Now or Later.”  (Letter, with answer by editors.)  Scientific American Mind, July/August, p. 4.

73.     2013  “Foreword.”  In Environmental Anthropology Engaging Ecotopia:  Bioregionalism, Permaculture, and Ecovillages, Joshua Lockyer and James R. Veteto, eds.  New York:  Berghahn.  Pp. xi-xviii.

74.     2013.  Preface and two poems, “Desert in Fall” and “Nocturne.”  In A Poet Drives a Truck: Poems by and for Lowell Levant, Ronald Levant, Carol Slatter and Caren Levant, eds.  Copley, OH:  Truck Stop Press.

75.     2016  “Foreword.”  In Shen Nong Bencao Jing: The Divine Farmer’s Classic of Materia Medica, translated and edited by Sabine Wilms.  Corbett, OR:  Happy Goat Productions.  Pp. xxiii-xxx.

76.     2018  Comment on Ludwig, David.  2018.  “Revamping the Metaphysics of Ethnobiological Classification.”  Current Anthropology 59:415-438.

77.     2019  “Afterword.”  In American Chinese Restaurants: Society, Culture and Consumption, Jenny Banh and Haiming Liu, eds.  New York: Routledge.  Pp. 301-303.

78.     2020  “Archaeologies of the Heart: People, Land, and Heritage Management in the Pacific Northwest,” by Chelsey Geralda Armstrong and E. N. Anderson.  In Ecologies of the Heart, K. Supernant, K.; J. E. Baxter; N. Lyons, S. Atalay.  Pp. 39ff.

UNPUBLISHED (BUT CIRCULATED AND AVAILABLE) TECHNICAL WRITINGS

 1.        1967    “The Ethnoichthyology of the Hong Kong Boat People,” Ph.D. Dissertation, University of California, Berkeley. Printed in Essays on South China’s Boat People, 1972. 105 pp.

2.         1987    Eugene N. Anderson and Evelyn Pinkerton.  “The Kakawis Experience.”  Kakawis Family Development Centre, 68 pp. + appendices.  (Contracted technical study and report to Kakawis Family Development Centre.)

3.         2007  Sun Simiao.  Recipes Worth a Thousand Gold:  The Food Sections.  Tr. Sumei Yi, ed. E. N. Anderson.  Ms circulated electronically.  56 pp.

4.         2007   The Tropical Food Security Garden.  On website, www.krazykioti.com.

5.        2015   Sycamore Canyon Natural History.  A report to the Riverside Municipal Museum.  Available on website, www.krazykioti.com.

REVIEWS:                

Review Articles

1.         1977    The Chinese by C. Osgood.  Reviews in Anthropology 4:1:17-24. 

2.         1981    Review article of Arthur Kleinman: Patients and Healers in the Context of Culture: An Exploration of the Borderland between Anthropology, Medicine and Psychiatry, and Margaret Lock, East Asian Medicine in Urban Japan.  Reviews in Anthropology 8:1:45-58. 

3.         1984    Cooking, Cuisine and Class by Jack Goody.  Reviews in Anthropology 10:2:89-95. 

4.        1994  Islands, Plants and Polynesians ed. by Paul Alan Cox and Sandra Anne Banack, and Traditional Plant Foods of Canadian Indigenous Peoples: Nutrition, Botany and Use by Harriet Kuhnlein and Nancy J. Turner.  Reviews in Anthropology 23:97-104. 

5.        1995  Human Ecology as Human Behavior by John Bennett, and Radical Ecology by Carolyn Merchant.  Reviews in Anthropology 24:113-122. 

6.        1999  “Native American Cultural Representations of Flora and Fauna.”   Ethnohistory 46:373-382

7.        2000  The Ecological Indian by Shepard Krech.  Journal of Ethnobiology 20:37-42. 

8.        2002  “ New Textbooks Show Ecological Anthropology Is Flourishing.”  Reviews in Anthropology 33:231-242. 

9.        2007  Behavioral Ecology and the Transition to Agriculture, ed. by Douglas Kennett and Bruce Winterhalder.  Journal of Ethnobiology 27:277-280.

10.     2009  Trying Leviathan:  The Nineteenth-Century New York Court Case that Put the Whale on Trial and Challenged the Order of Nature, by D. Graham Burnett.  Journal of Ethnobiology 29:362-365.

11.      2014  E. N. Anderson and Seth Abrutyn:  “Robert Bellah’s Religion in Human Evolution.”  Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture 8:111-127.

Short Reviews

(Probably not a complete list, since I think I have missed some announcements from Choice that my short reviews for them were published)

 1.        1966    “La peche au grand filet a Tahiti,” by Paul Ottino. Journal of Polynesian Society 75:1:130-131.

 2.        1967    The Sea Nomads, by David E. Sopher.  Oceania 37:4:313-314.

 3.        1974    Tai Yu Shan: Traditional Ecological Adaptation in a South Chinese Island, by Armando de Silva and The Men and Women of Chung Ho Ch’ang, by Mary B. Treudley.  American Anthropologist 76:3:610-611.

 4.        1975    December’s Child, by Thomas Blackburn.  Journal of California Anthropology 2:2:241-244.

 5.        1975    Chinese Symbols and Superstitions by H. T. Morgan, Journal of American Folklore.  Spring 1975.

 6.        1976    California: Five Centuries of Cultural Contrasts by J. Nava and B. Barger.  Journal of California Anthropology 3:3:100-102.

 7.        1977    The Eye of the Flute by T. Hudson et al. Journal of California Anthropology 4:1:1-141-142.

 8.        1977    Migrants of the Mountains by W.R. Geddes  Ethnopharmacology Society Newsletter 1:1:5-6.

 9.        1977    Fig Tree John: An Indian in Fact and Fiction by P. Beidler, Journal of California Anthropology 4:2:322.

10.       1978    Food in Chinese Culture by Charles W. Hayford, Journal of Asian Studies XXXVII:4:738-40.

11.       1978    Edible and Useful Plants of California by Charlotte Clarke, Journal of California Anthropology 5:1:139-140.

12.       1981    Chinese Village Politics in the Malaysian State by Judith Strauch, Newsletter of the Association for Political and Legal Anthropology 5:3:17-19. 

13.       1981    Manna: An Historical Geography by R.A. Donkin, Journal of Historical Geography 7:3:329-330.

14.       1983    “Cities in China” film series (three films: “Xian,” “Suzhou,” Biejing”).  American Anthropologist 85:2:491-492.

15.       1984    Shenfan by William Hinton, American Anthropologist 1986:1002.

16.       1984    Nourishment of Life by Linda Koo, Social Science and Medicine 20:3:350-354.

17.       1985    Living the Fishing by Paul Thompson, et al, Urban Life 14:3:350-354.

18.       1987    Wives and Midwives by Carol Laderman, Medical Anthropology Newsletter.

19.       1987    Man and Land in Chinese History by Kang Chao, American Asian Review V:3:105-107.

20.      1987     Medicine in China History, Vol. 1: A History of Ideas.  Vol. 2: A History of Pharmaceutics.  Vol. 3: Nan-Ching: The Classic of Difficult Issues by Paul Unschuld, American Asian Review V:3:115-118.

21.      1988     The Cambridge History of China, vol. I: The Ch’in and Han Empires, ed. by Denis Twitchett and Michael Loewe, American Asian Review VI:1:78-82.

22.      1990     Disputers of the Tao by A. C. Graham.  American Asian Review 8:4:135-139.

23.      1991     Cannibalism in China by Key Ray Chong.  American Asian Review 9:2:109-112.

24.      1991     Native North American Interaction Patterns by Regna Darnell and Michael K. Foster, eds.  Culture: Journal of the Canadian Anthropological Society, pp. 92-94.

25.      1991  Nch’i Wana: The Big River by Eugene Hunn.  American Anthropologist 93:4:1002-1003.

26.      1991  With Bitter Herbs They Shall Eat It by Timothy Johns.  Journal of Ethnobiology 11:2:184-186.

27.      1992  Origins of Agriculture and Settled Life by Richard S. MacNeish.  Journal of Ethnobiology 12:198-26.

28.      1993  Coyote Stories and A Salishan Autobiography by Mourning Dove.  Anthropology and Humanism Quarterly 18:2:84-85.          

29.      1993  Tangweera by C. Napier Bell.  Anthropology and Humanism Quarterly 18:2:85-86.

30.      1994  The Flowering of Man by Dennis Breedlove and Robert Laughlin.  Economic Botany 48:1:101-102.

31.      1995  The Cuba Commission Report: A Hidden History of the Chinese in Cuba ed. by Dennis Helly.  Journal of Caribbean Studies 10:99-101.

32.      1995  Chumash Healing by Phillip L. Walker and Travis Hudson.  Journal of Ethnobiology 14:184.

33.      1995  Environmental Values in American Culture by Willett Kempton, James S. Boster, and Jennifer A. Hartley.  Choice 33.2.

34.      1995  Prophets of Agroforestry:  Guaraní Communities and Commercial Gathering by Richard K. Reed.  Choice 33:3.

35.      1995  Memoirs of an Indo Woman: Twentieth-Century Life in the East Indies and Abroad by Marguerite Schenkhuizen, ed. and trans. by Lizelot Stout van Balgooy.  Anthropology and Humanism 20:172-173.

            1995  Prehistoric Cultural Ecology and Evolution, by Donald Henry.  Choice 33-4589.

36.      1996  Earth’s Insights by J. Baird Callicott.  Journal of Ethnobiology 16:130-131.

37.      1996  Eat Not This Flesh (2nd edn.) by Frederick Simoons.  Journal of Ethnobiology 16:128-130.

38.      1996  Guest People: Hakka Identity in China and Abroad ed. by Nicole Constable.  Choice 34:4.

39.      1997  Green Guerrillas ed. by Helen Collinson.  Choice 34:6.

40.      1997  Humanity’s Descent by Rick Potts.  Choice 35:1.

41.      1997  Hunting the Wren by Elizabeth Atwood Lawrence.  Journal of Ethnobiology 17:67-68.

42.      1997  The Animal World of the Pharaohs by Patrick F. Houlihan.  Journal of Ethnobiology 17:135-136.

43.      1997  Wild Men in the Looking Glass and The Artificial Savage by Roger Bartra.  Journal of Ethnobiology 17:136-138.

44.      1997  Eco Homo by Noel T. Boaz.  Choice 35:4.

45.      1997  Greenlanders, Whales, and Whaling by Richard Caulfield.  Choice 35:4.

46.      1998  Shamanic Songs and Myths of Tuva by Mihaly Hoppal.  Choice 35:5.

47.      1998  Bhutan: Mountain Fortress of the Gods ed. by Christian Schicklgruber and Francoise Pommaret.  Choice 35:7.

48.       1998  Uncommon Ground by Victoria Strang.  Choice 35:7.

49.       1998  Knowledges: Culture, Counterculture, Subculture by Peter Worsley.  Choice 35:10.

50.       1998  Contested Arctic ed. by Eric Alden Smith and Joan McCarter.  Choice 35:10.

51.       1998  Natural Premises:  Ecology and Peasant Life in the Western Himalaya, 1800-1950 by Chetan Singh.  Choice 36:5.

52.       1998  Our Babies, Ourselves: How Biology and Culture Shape the Way We Parent, by Meredith Small.  Choice 36:2.

53.       1999  Golden Arches East:  McDonald’s in East Asia, edited by James L. Watson.  Anth rpos 94:307-310.                

54.       1999  Wisdom from a Rainforest, by Stuart Schlegel.  Choice 36:8.

55.       1999  Siren Feasts, by Andrew Dalby.  Journal of Ethnobiology 18:2:188.

56.       1999  Building a New Biocultural Synthesis, ed. by Alan Goodman and Thomas Leatherman.  Choice 36:10.

57.       1999  Rebuilding the Local Landscape:  Environmental Management in Burkina Faso,

by Chris Howorth.  Choice 37:3.

58.       2000  That Complex Whole:  Culture and the Evolution of Human Behavior, by Lee Cronk.  Choice 37:5.

59.       2000  Anthropology of Food: The Social Dynamics of Food Scarcity by Johan Pottier.  Anthropos 95:1:296-298.

60.      2000  Plants for Food and Medicine  ed. by H. D. V. Prendergast, N. L. Etkin, D. R. Harris, and P. J. Houghton.  American Anthropologist 102:50-51.

61.      2000  Ruins of Identity: Ethnogenesis in the Japanese Islands by Mark J. Hudson.  Choice 37:7.

62.       2000  Sustaining the Forest, the People, and the Spirit by Thomas Davis.  Choice 37:10.

63.       2000  Las Plantas de la Milpa entre los Maya by Silvia Teran and Christian Rasmussen.  Journal of Ethnobiology 19:219-220.

64.       2000  The Ambonese Curiosity Cabinet, by Georgius Everhardus Rumphius.   Journal of Ethnobiology 19:258-259.

65.       2000  The Great Maya Droughts, by Richardson Gill.  Choice 38:3.

66.       2001  In One’s Own Shadow: An Ethnographic Account of the Condition of Post-Reform Rural China, by Xin Liu.  Choice 38:3.

67.       2001  Indigenous Environmental Knowledge and Its Trasnformations: Critical Anthropological Perspectives, ed. by Roy Ellen, Peter Parkes, and Alan Bicker.  Choice 38:10.

68.        2001  Portraits of “Primitives”:  Ordering Human Kinds in the Chinese Nation, by Susan Blum. Choice 38:10.

69.        2001  Between Mecca and Beijing:  Modernization and Consumption among Urban Chinese Muslims, by Maris Boyd Gillette.  Choice 38:10.

70.        2001  Feeding the World, by Vaclav Smil.  Journal of Ethnobiology 20:217-221.

71.        2001  El Bosque Mediterráneo en el Norte de África, by Jesús Charco.  Journal of Ethnobiology 20:237-238.

72.         2001  The Age of Wild Ghosts:  Memory, Violence, and Place in Southwest China, by Erik Mueggler. Choice 39:02. 

73.        2001  Environmental Anthropology:  From Pigs to Politics, by Patricia Townsend.  Choice 39:1.

74.        2001  New Directions in Anthropology and Environment: Intersections, ed. by Carole Crumley.  Choice 39:4.

75.        2001  Imperfect Balance: Landscape Transformations in the Precolumbian Americas, ed. by David Lentz.  Journal of Ethnobiology 21:53-55.

76.        2001  The Ecological Indian:  Myth and Reality, by Shepard Krech III.  Journal of Ethnobiology 20:37-42.

76a.        2002  A Society without Fathers or Husbands, by Hua Cai.  Choice 39:5.

77.        2002  The Hmong of China: Context, Agency, and the Imaginary, by Nicholas Tapp.  Choice 39:5.

78.        2002  Cocina indigena y popular, by CONACULTA.  Petits Propos Culinaires 69:124-125.

79.        2002  Chinese Gleams of Sufi Light, by Sachiko Murata.  Philosophy East and West 52:257-260.

80.         2002  Hosts and Guests Revisited: Tourism Issues of the 21st Century, ed. by Valene Smith and Maryann Brent.   Choice 39:08.

81.         2002  Black Rice, by Judith A. Carney.  Journal of Ethnobiology 21:53-54.

82.         2002  Changing Chinese Foodways in Asia, ed. by David Wu and Tan Chee-Beng.  Journal of Asian Studies 61:2:689-691.

83.         2002  Mayo Ethnobotany, by David Yetman and Thomas VanDevender.  Choice 39:11.

84.         2002  Feasts: Archaeological and Ethnographic Perspectives on Food, Politics, and Power, ed. by Michael Dietler and Brian Hayden.  Anthropos 97:573-574.

85.          2002  The Cambridge World History of Food, ed. by Kenneth Kiple and Kriemhild Ornelas.  Journal of Ethnobiology 22:163-164.

86.          2002  Ways of Being Ethnic in Southwest China by Stevan Harrell.  Choice 40:03.

87.          2002  Culture, Environment, and Conservation in the Appalachian South, ed. by Benita J. Howell.  Choice 40:3.

88.           2002  Appetites:  Food and Sex in Postsocialist China, by Judith Farquhar.  Choice 40:04.

89.           2003  When Culture and Biology Collide, by E. O. Smith.  Choice 40:3479.

90.           2003  The World and the Wild, ed. by David Rothenberg and Marta Ulvaeus.  Pacific Affairs 75:4:588.

91.           2003  China to Chinatown:  Chinese Food in the West, by J. A. G. Roberts.  Journal of Asian Studies 62:569-571.

92.            2003  Changing Chinese Foodways in Asia, ed. by David Wu and Tan Chee-beng.  Anthropos 98:620-622.

93.            2003  Crafting Tradition, by Michael Chibnik.  Choice 41-1618.

94.            2003  New Year Celebrations in Central China in Late Imperial Times, by Goran Aijmer.  Choice 41-2554.

95.            2004  Moral Politics in a South Chinese Village:  Responsibility, Reciprocity and Resistance, by Hok-Bun Ku.  Choice 41-5442.

96.            2004  Indus Ethnobiology, ed. by Steven A Weber and William R. Belcher.  Choice 41-5993.

97.            2004  Food in the Ancient World from A to Z, by Andrew Dalby.  Journal of Ethnobiology 24:163-164.

98.            2004  Political Ecology:  An Integrative Approach to Geography and Evnironment-Development Studies, ed. by Karl Zimmerer and Thomas J. Bassett.  Choice 41-6682.

99.             2004  Social History and African Environments, ed. by William Beinart and JoAnn McGregor.  Choice 41-6689.

100.            2004  The Nehalem Tillamook:  An Ethnography, by Elizabeth Derr Jacobs.  Choice 41-1026.

101.           2004  The Retreat of the Elephants, by Mark Elvin.  Journal of Ethnobiology 24:352-354.

102.           2004  Anthropology of the Performing Arts, by Anya Royce.  Choice 42:3518.

103.           2004  Miniature Crafts and Their Makers:  Palm Weaving in a Mexican Town.  Choice 42:6669.

104.           2005  Political Ecology, by Paul Robbins.  Choice 42-5341.

105.           2005  Miniature Crafts and Their Makers:  Palm Weaving in a Mexican Town, by Katrin S. Flechsig.  Choice 2004:10393.

106.           2005  Collapse:  How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, by Jared Diamond.  Journal of Ethnobiology 25:143-145.

107.          2005  The Origin and Evolution of Cultures, by Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson.  Choice 43:1027.

108.         2005  Facing the Wild:  Ecotourism, Conservation and Animal Encounters, by Chilla Bulbeck.  Choice 43:1641.

109.         2005  Intelligence in Nature:  An Inquiry in Knowledge, by Jeremy Narby.  Choice 43:2765.

110.           2006  Tending the Wild:  Native American Knowledge and the Management of Calfornia’s Natural Resources, by Kat Anderson.  Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology 25:255-258.

111.           2006  Survival Skills of Native California, by Paul D. Campbell.  Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology 25:262-263.

112.          2006  Food Plants of China, by Hu Shiu-Ying.  Journal of Ethnobiology 26:165-167.

113.          2006.  Where Rivers and Mountains Sing:  Sound, Music and Nomadism in Tuva and Beyond, by Theodore Levin.  Choice 44:0226.

114.          2006  Miraculous Response:  Doing Popular Religion in Contemporary China, by Adam Yuet Chau.  Choice 44-0394.

116.         2006  People and Nature: An Introduction to Human Ecological Relations, by Emilio Moran.  Choice 44:2770. 

117.        2006  As Days Go By:  Our History, Our Land, and Our People—The Cayuse, Umatilla and Walla Walla, ed. by Jennifer Karson.  Choice 45-1077

118.        2007  Be of Good Mind:  Essays on the Coast Salish, ed. by Bruce Granville Miller.  Choice 45:2204.

119.         2007  The Earth Only Endures:  On Reconnecting with Nature and Our Place in It, by Jules Pretty.  Choice 45:4461.

120.       2007  Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Natural Resource Management, ed. by Charles R. Menzies.  American Anthropologist 109:571-572.

121.        2008  “An Anthropology of Chocolate.”  Review article on Chocolate in Mesoamerica:  A Cultural History of Cacao, ed. by Cameron McNeil.  American Anthropologist 110:71-73.

122.        2008  Chumash Ethnobotany:  Plant Knowledge among the Chumash People of Southern California, by Jan Timbrook.  Choice 45-6271.

123.        2008  Chumash Ethnobotany:  Plant Knowledge among the Chumash People of Southern California, by Jan Timbrook.  Journal of Ethnobiology 28:136-138.

124.        2008  Animals the Ancestors Hunted:  An Account of the Wil Mammals of the Kalam Area, Papua-new Guinea, by Ian Saem Majnep and Ralph Bulmer.  Journal of Ethnobiology 28j:134-136.

125.        2008  Wild Harvest in the Heartland:  Ethnobotany in Missouri’s Little Dixie, by Justin Nolan.   Journal of Ethnobiology 28:139-140.

126.       2008  Life in a Kam Village in Southwest China, 1930-1949, by Ou Chaoquan, tr. by D. Norman Geary.  Brill, 2007.

127.        2008  Kinship and Food in South East Asia, ed. by Monica Janowski and Fiona Kerlogue.  Copenhagen:  NIAS press, 2007.  Anthropos 103:2:598-599.

128.        2008  The Nature of an Ancient Maya City:  Resources, Interaction and Power at Blue Creek, Belize, by Thomas Guderjan.  Choice 46-1659.

129.        2008  Environmental Anthropology: a historical reader, ed. by Michael R. Dove and Carol Carpenter.  Choice 46-1566.

130.       2008  Koekboya (and) Nomads in Anatolia, by Harald Bőhmer.  Journal of Ethnobiology 28:318-319.

131.      2009  The Fishermen’s Frontier:  People and Salmon in Southeast Alaska, by David F. Arnold.  Choice 46-4615.

132.      2009  State and Ethnicity in China’s Southwest, by Xiaolin Guo.  Choice 46-5188.

133.      2009  Christmas Island:  An Anthropological Study, by Simone Dennis.  Choice 46-6282.

134.      2009  Against the Grain, ed. by Bradley Walters, Bonnie J. McCay, Paige West and Susan Lees.  Journal of Ethnobiology 29:360-362.

135.     2010  Spirits of the Air:  Birds and American Indians in the South, by Shepard Krech.  Choice 47-3251.

136.     2010  California Indians and the Environment:  An Introduction (2nd edn.), by Kent Lightfoot and Otis Parrish.  Choice 47-3252.

137.     2010  Biocultural diversity and indigenous ways of knowing: human ecology in the Arctic, by Karim-Aly Kassam.  University of Calgary Press,  2009.  Choice 47-5105.

138.     2010  Terres de Vanoise:  Agriculture en Montagne Savoyarde, by Brien Meilleur.  Journal of Ethnobiology 30:173-174.

139.     2010  Material Choices:  Refashioning Bast and Leaf Fibres in Southeast Asia and the Pacific, edited by Roy Hamilton and Lynne Milgram.  Ethnobiology Letters 1:3.

140.     2010  Trying Leviathan, by D. Graham Burnett.  Ethnobiology Letters 1:4-6.

141.     2010  Grass Roots:  African Origins of an American Art, edited by Dale Rosengarten, Theodore Rosengarten, and Enid Schildkrout.  Ethnobiology Letters 1:7-8.

142.     2010.  Spirits of the Air:  Birds and American Indians in the South, by Shepard Krech III.  Ethnobiology Letters 1:16-17.

143.     2010.  Naming Nature:  The Clash between Instinct and Science, by Carol Kaesuk Yoon.  Ethnobiology Letters 1:30-32.

144.     2010  After the first full moon in April: a sourcebook of herbal medicine from a California Indian elder, by Josephine Grant Peters and Beverly R. Ortiz.  Choice 48-1558.

145.     2010  Jungle laboratories: Mexican peasants, national projects, and the making of the pill, by Gabriela Soto Laveaga.  Choice 48-2255.

146.     2011  Different truths: ethnomedicine in early postcards, by Peter A. G. M. de Smet.  Kit Publishers, 2010.  Choice 48-2759.

147.     2011  Biocultural diversity conservation: a global sourcebook, by Luisa Maffi and Ellen Woodley.    Earthscan Publications Ltd., 2010.  Choice 48-2767.

148.     2011  Indigenous Knowledge, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, by Raymond Pierotti.  Ethnobiology Letters 2:3-5.

149.     2011  Feeding the People, Feeding the Spirit:  Revitalizing Northwest Coastal Indian Food, ed. by Elise Krohn and Valerie Segrest.  Ethnobiology Letters 2:45.

150.     2011  Dark Green Religion, by Bron Taylor.  Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Cultue 5:2:244-245.

151.  2011  Troubled Natures, by Peter Wynn Kirby. Choice 48-6986.

152.     2012  The Banana Tree at the Gate, by Michael Dove.  Ethnobiology Letters 3:13.

153.     2012  From the Hands of the Weaver, ed. by Jacilee Wray.  Choice 50-2152

154.     2012  Walking the Land, Feeding the Fire: Knowledge and Stewardship among the Tlcho Dene.  Choice 50-2267.

155.  2012  Swamplife: People, Gators and Mangroves Entangled in the Everglades, by Laura Ogden.  Choice 49-3461.

156.  2012.  Our Nelson Island Stories, ed. by Ann Fienup-Riordan. Choice 49-3334.

157.  2012  Instituting Nature: Authority Expertise, and Power in Mexican Forests, by Andrew Mathews.  Choice 49-5757.

158.  2012.  Crude Domination: An Anthropology of Oil, ed by Andrea Behrends, Stephen P. Reyna, and Gunther Schlee.  Choice 49-5152.

159.  2012  The Modern Maya: Incidents of Travel and Friendship in Yucatan, by Macduff Everton.  Choice 50-0365.

160.     2013  Spiritual Ecology, by Leslie Sponsel.  Current Anthropology 54:245-247.

161.     2013  Stealing Shining Rivers, by Molly Doane.  Choice 50-5663.

162.     2013  The Ordination of a Tree, by Susan Darlington.  Choice 50-6248.

163.     2013  Environmental Anthropology, ed by Helen Kopnina and Eleanor Shoreman-Ouimet.  Choice 51-1575.

164.     2014  Environmental Winds, by Michael Hathaway.  Choice 51-2805.

165.     2014.  How Forests Think, by Eduardo Kohn.  Choice 51-2744.

166.     2014  Uses of Plants by the Hidatsas of the Northern Plains, by Gilbert Wilson.  Choice 52-2068.

167      2014  Native Art of the Northwest Coast: A History of Changing Ideas, ed. by Charlotte Townsend-Gault, Jennifer Kramer, and Ki-Ke-In.  Choice 51-3635.

168      2014  The Ecology of the Barí: Rainforest Horticulturalists of South America, by Stephen Beckerman and Roberto Lizarralde.  Choice 51-4520.

169      2014  The Bushmen, by Jiro Tanaka.  Choice 52-1491.

170      2014  Uses of Plants by the Hidatsas of the Northern Plains, by Gilbert Wilson.  Choice 52-2068.

171      2015.  Hunters, Predators and Prey: Inuit Perceptions of Animals, by Frederic Laugrand.  Choice 52-4291.

172.     2015  Islands’ Spirit Rising: Reclaiming the Forests of Haida Gwaii.  Choice 52-4414.

173.     2015.  The Sea Is My Country: The Maritime World of the Makahs, an Indigenous Borderland People, by Joshua Reid.  Choice 53-0957.

174.     2015  Tikal: Paleoecology of an Ancient Maya City, by David L. Lentz, Nicholas Dunning and Vernon Scarborough (eds.).  Choice 53-1796.

175.     2016  The Relative Native: Essays on Conceptual Worlds, by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro.  Ethnobiology Letters 7:1:42-44, http://ojs.ethnobiology.org/index.php/ebl/article/view/651/292

176.     2016  The Invention of Science: A New History of the Scientific Revolution, by David Wootton.  Ethnobiology Letters 7:1:55-58, http://ojs.ethnobiology.org/index.php/ebl/issue/view/23/showToc

177.     2016  The Ecology of the Barí: Rainforest Horticulturalists of South America, by Stephen Beckerman and Roberto Lizarralde.  Human Ecology 44:393-394.

178        2016  Embodying Ecological Heritage in a Mayan Community: Health, Happiness and Identity.  Choice 53-5298.

179       2016.  Introduction to Ethnobiology, by Ulysses Paulino-Albuquerque and Rodrigo Romeu Nobrega Alves.  Choice 54-0648.

180.     2016.  Why the Porcupine Is Not a Bird, by Gregory Forth.  Choice 54-0747.

181.     2017  Tracing China: A Forty-Year Ethnographic Journey, by Helen Siu.  Choice 54-3876.

182.     2017  Handbook on Ethnic Minorities of China, ed. by Xiaowei Zang.  Choice 54-4838.

183.     2017  Radical Territories in the Brazilian Amazon, by Laura Zanotti.  Choice 54:3895.

184.     2017  Science and Civilisation in China.  Vol. 6, Biology and Biological Technology.  Part IV: Traditional Botany: An Ethnobotanical Approach, by Georges Métailié.  Translated by Janet Lloyd.  Ethnobiological Letters 8:1:43-45.

185.     2017  Rural China on the Eve of Revolution: Sichuan Fieldnotes, 1949-1950, by G. William Skinner, ed. by Stevan Harrell and William Lavely.  Choice 54-5679.

186.     2017  Empire of Cotton: A Global History, by Sven Beckert.  Ethnobiology Letters 8:1:97-100.

187.     2017  The Patterning Instinct:  A Cultural History of Humanity’s Search for Meaning, by Jeremy Lent.  Choice 44-1414.

188.     2017  Moral Ecology of a Forest: The Nature Industry and Maya Post-Conservation, by José Martinez-Reyes.  Ethnobiology Letters 8:1:142-143.

189.    2018  Chow Chop Suey: Chinese Food and the American Journey, by Anne Mendelson.  Gastronomica, Spring. 2 pp.

190.     2018  Le Monde d’océan indien, by Philippe Beaujard.  Journal of World-Systems Research 24, http://jwsr.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/jwsr/article/view/777

191.     2018  Bitter and Sweet: Food, Meaning, and Modernity in Rural China, by Ellen OxfeldAgricultural History 92:271-272.

192.     2018  Rice, Agriculture, and the Food Supply in Premodern Japan by Charlotte von Verschuer, tr. Wendy Cobcroft.  Ethnobiological Letters 9:105-106.

193     2018  Indigeneity and the Sacred, edited by Fausto Sarmiento and Sarah Hitchner.  Choice 55:2132.

194     2018  Social Memory and State Formation in Early China, by Li Min.  Choice 56, issue 3.

195     2018  Bitter and Sweet, by Ellen Oxfeld. Pacific Affairs 91:351-352.

196     2018  Secwepemc People, Land and Laws, by Marianne Ignace and Ronald Ignace.  Ethnobiology Letters 9:2, http://ojs.ethnobiology.org/index.php/ebl/issue/view/27

197     2018  Poisonous Pandas: Chinese Cigarette Manufacturing in Critical Historical Perspectives, ed.by Matthew Kohrman et al.  Choice 56:1250.

198     2018.  Social Memory and State Formation in Early China, by Li Min.  Choice 56:1171.

199     2018  Histoire et voyages des plantes cultivées à Madagascar avant le XVI siècle, by Philippe Beaujard.  Ethnobiology Letters 9:2:245-246.

200     2018  The First Domestication: How Wolves and Humans Coevolved, by Raymond Pierotti and Brandy R. Fogg.  Ethnobiology Letters 9:2:247-249.

201     2018  Domestication Gone Wild, ed. by Heather Swanson, Marianne Lien, and Gro Ween  Choice 56-3191.

202     2019  Coastal Heritage and Cultural Resilience, ed. by Lisa Price and Nemer Narchi. Choice 56-G140.

203     2019  Energy at the End of the World, by Laura Watts.  Choice 56-TJ808.

204     2019  The Southeast Asia Connection: Trade and Politics, by Sing Chew.  Journal of World-System Research, Winter-Spring (online).

205     2019  An Inconstant Landscape: The Maya Kingdom of El Zotz, Guatemala by Thomas Garrison and Stephen Houston.  Choice 56:4382.

206     2019  Anthropomorphizing the Cosmos by Prudence Rice.  Choice 56-4760.

207     2019  Energy at the End of the World by Laura Watts.  Choice 56-4348.

208     2019  Taste, Politics, and Identities in Mexican Food ed. by Steffan Igor Ayora-Diaz.  Choice 57-0144.

209      2019  Beyond Repair: Mayan Women’s Protagonism in the Aftermath of Genocidal Harm, by Alison Crosby.  Choice 57-0702.

210      2019  Ambient Temperature and Health in China ed. by Hualiang Lin, Wenjun Ma, and Qiyong Liu.  Doody reviews online.

211     2019  Gao Village Revisited: The Life of Rural People in Contemporary China, by Mobo C. F. Gao.  Choice 57-1416.

212     2019  Oral Health in America: The Stain of Disparity, ed. by Henrie Treadwell and Caswell Evans.  Doody reviews online.

213     2019  Fruit from the Sands: The Silk Road Origins of the Foods We Eat, by Robert Spengler III.  Ethnobiology Letters 10:109-110.

214     2019  Philosophical and Methodological Debates in Public Health, ed. by Jordi Vallverdu, Angel Puyok and Anna Estany.  Doody Enterprises, review online.

215     2019  Multiple Nature-cultures, Diverse Anthropologies.  Choice 57-2320.

216     2020  Foundations of Physical Activity and Public Health, 2nd edn, ed. by Harold W. Kohl III, Tinker D. Murray, and Deborah Salvo.  Doody Enterprises, review online.

217     2020  Violence and the Caste War of Yucatan by Wolfgang Gabbert.  Choice 57-3752..

218     2020  Culture, Environment and Health in the Yucatan Peninsula: A Human Ecology Perspective, ed. by Hugo Azcorra and Federico Dickinson.  Doody Enterprises, online.

219     2020  Suckling: Kinship More Fluid, by Fadwa el Guindi.  Doody Enterprises, online.

220     2020  Commercialisation of Medical Care in China, by Rama Baru and Madhurima Nundy.  Doody Enterprises, online.

221     2020  Global Climate Change, Population Displacement, and Public Health: The Next Wave of Migration, by Lawrence Palinkas.  Doody Enterprises, online.

222     2020  Understanding Collapse by Guy Middleton.  Cliodynamics, summer 2020.

223     2020  Asian Fruits and Berries by Kathleen Low.  H-net, https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=55500

224     2020  Cultivating Nature: The Conservation of a Valencian Working Landscape by Sarah Hamilton.  Environment and Society: Advances in Research 11:148-149.

225     2020  The River That Made Seattle: A Human and Natural History of the Duwamish, by B. J. Cummings.  Choice 58-0856.

226     2020  Theology and Evolutionary Anthropology: Dialogues in Wisdom, Humility, and Grace,ed. by Celia Deane-Drummond and Agustin Fuentes.  Choice 58-1084.

227     2020  Health of People, Health of Planet and Our Responsibility, ed. by Wael K. Al-Delaimy, Veerabhandran Ramanathan, and Marcelo Sanchez Sorondo.  Doody Enterprises, online.

228     2020  Ecological Integrity in Science and Law, ed. by Laura Westra, Klaus Bosselmann, and Matteo Fermeglia.  Doody Enterprises, online.

229     2020  The Real Business of Ancient Maya Economies: from Farmers’ Fields to Rulers’ Realms, ed. by Marilyn A. Masson, David Freidel, and Arthur A. Demarest.  Choice 58-2036.2

230     2021  Implications of the California Wildfires for Health, Communities, and Preparedness, by National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, Workshop on Preparedness.  Doody Enterprises, online.

231     2021  Ethical Water Stewardship ed. by Ingrid Stefanovic and Zafar Adeel.  Doody Enterprises, online.

232     2021 Animals through Chinese History: Earliest Times to 2011, ed. by Roel Sterckx, Martina Siebert, and Dagmar Schäfer.  Ethnobiology Letters 12:1:14-15.

233     2021  Feeding the People: The Politics of the Potato, by Rebecca Earle.  Ethnobiology Letters 12:1:55-57.

234     2021  Ancient Maya Politics by Simon Martin. Choice 58-3234.

235     2021  Salt in Eastern North America and the Caribbean: History and Archaeology, ed. by Ashley A. Dumas and Paul N. Eubanks.  Choice 59, issue 2, HD-9213, 59-0489.

236     2021  Social Medicine and the Coming Transformation, ed. by Howard Waitzkin, Alina Perez, and Matthew Anderson.  Doody Enterprises, online.

237    2021  The Story of Food in the Human Past: How We Ate Made Us Who We Are, by Robyn E. Cutright.  American Anthropologist, online, doi.org/10.1111/aman.13641.

238      2021  Deconstructing Health Inequity: A Perceptual Control Theory Perspective, ed. by Timothy Carey, Sara J. Tai, and Robert Griffiths, eds.  Doody Enterprises, online.

Categories
Articles

Cool quotations

Cool stuff

“Cool” is remarkably enduring as a word.  It comes from the West African concept, according to Robert Faris Thompson (Jessica Ogilvie, “You Know It,” LAT, Nov. 10, 2012, p.E7).  Chevere is South American Spanish for “cool.”


Traveling light….

The train done gone and the Greyhound bus don’t run

But walkin’ ain’t crowded and I won’t be here long.

                        Traditional blues verse

Got the key to the highway, I’m booked out and bound to go,

Gone to leave here runnin’ cause walkin’ is mo’ slow

                        Traditional blues verse

Categories
Articles

The Wolf You Feed

The Wolf You Feed

E. N. Anderson

gene@ucr.edu

www.krazykioti.com

**

Abstract

            Studies of genocide find that once killing is started, almost everyone joins in.  People suddenly change from peace and order to violent murder, and often back to peace when the dictator falls.  This can be explained only by the existence of both potentialities within people.   Human evil is here defined as gratuitous harm to people and other lives.  It very often comes from simply following orders or doing a job, or from “greed” (gain by predatory taking from others), but most often it comes from hatred and defensiveness.  At worst—and very commonly—it causes people to hurt themselves simply to hurt disliked others.  At root, it can be traced to irrational, overemotional responses to fear and threat.  These are common among people abused as children and subsequently, and among people raised in disempowering, oppressive, intolerant environments.  They become resentful, frustrated, and personally weak—lacking in self-efficacy.  They often bully or scapegoat others, usually even weaker persons.  Social hate is especially damaging, seen in genocide, bigotry, warfare, allowing people to starve or die of disease when they could have been saved, and other mass destruction.  Empowerment, rational coping with stress, and comprehensive morality based on “we’re all in this together” are the major cures.  These general cures can be applied to specific social issues.

**

“Son, it’s time to teach you the most important lesson about life and people.  It is that everyone has within him, or her, two wolves:  a good wolf that wants to help everyone and do what’s best for all, and a bad wolf that wants to do evil and hurt people and the world.”

“Father, that’s scary.  It really worries me.  Which wolf wins out in the end?”

“Son: the wolf you feed.”

                        Native American folktale

**

Preface

            This story—perhaps more Manichaean than Native American—captures much of what I have learned in my life.  I was raised to think people are good, and that evil is merely ignorance.  The people around me gave the lie to that.  They were often quite deliberately bad.  Many ordinary people, perhaps most at one time or another, hurt themselves just to hurt others.  They ruin marriages and friendships because of imagined or trivial slights. They vote their own destruction by electing people who promise to crush “the others.”  They sacrifice their lives for violent and extremist causes.  Humanity has a sorry record.  Despite claims of moral progress, the genocidal dictator and the suicide bomber are the emblems of the late 20th and early 21st century.

            Yet, obviously, many people are good, some are saintly, and almost everyone is good some of the time.  Even mass murderers and psychopaths usually have a history of decent behavior when not having a psychotic break. 

            Jesus said:  “Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted?  It is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden under foot of men” (Matthew 5:13).  The salt of the earth—as opposed to sea salt—came from salt springs, and was contaminated with ordinary dirt or carbonate.  Over time, aerial moisture would leach the salt out, leaving only the residue.  Natural human goodness and sociability is subject to similar leaching.  This was, of course, Jesus’ real message.  (One wonders what Biblical literalists make of verses like this one.) 

            Most people are in a rather neutral, everyday state most of the time, not thinking of acting saintly or demoniacal, but they are still torn between virtuous ideals of helping, sheltering, and caring, and vicious ideals of excluding, ignoring, and hurting. They are either working for and with people, or working against people.  We are constantly forced to decide.  As Pascal Boyer (2018:33) says, “Observers from outside our species would certainly be struck by two facts about humans.  They are extraordinarily good at forming groups, and they are just as good at fighting other groups.” 

            The nature and promotion of good have been addressed by every religious writer in history, as well as countless psychologists and other scientists.  Covering this literature is neither necessary nor possible in the present brief essay.  Evil is less well studied.  Outside of religious imprecations against sin, there are rather few studies, mostly by psychologists.  Of these, particularly valuable are Roy Baumeister’s Evil (1997), Aaron Beck’s Prisoners of Hate (1999),  Alan Fiske and Taj Rai’ Virtuous Violence (2014), Ervin Staub’s books (1989, 2003, 2011), the Sternbergs’ The Nature of Hate (2008), and James Waller’s Becoming Evil (2002) and Confronting Evil (2016).  Simon Baron-Cohen’s Zero Degrees of Empathy (2011), Steven Bartlett’s The Pathology of Man (2005), Gavin de Becker’s The Gift of Fear (1997), Fiske and Rai’s Virtuous Violence (2014), Robert Sapolsky’s Behave (2017), and Kathleen Taylor’s Cruelty (2009) cover some important psychological terrain.  Zeki and Romaya (2008) review the physiology of hate.  Albert Bandura’s book Moral Disengagement (2016) exhaustively treats that aspect of evil. 

            Most of these books, as well as the literature on genocide, spice up their texts with horrific stories.  Baumeister is especially graphic.  I have absolutely no interest in transmitting such stories here.  If you need to know how bad people get, seek out those sources.

             By evil, I mean a very specific thing: deliberate harm to people simply because one wants to harm them, because of what they are or might be.  It is the state described by words like “murderous,” “malevolent,” and “cruel.”  Ordinary everyday selfishness is bad enough, but it is part of the human condition; most of us give ourselves the benefit of the doubt, cutting corners, being stingy, cutting ourselves some slack.  This is no doubt deplorable most of the time, but it is not what I am considering in this book; I have devoted two previous books (Anderson 2010, 2014) to the problem of overly narrow and short-term planning and acting, and need not go into it here.  Selfishness becomes more evil as it moves into violent robbery, gangsterism, and raiding.  There is obviously a transition zone.  Similarly, violence in defense of self and loved ones is not evil, and is often praiseworthy.  A transition zone exists between clearly necessary violence—resisting Hitler in 1941, for instance—and clearly excessive use of force, as when police gun down an unarmed boy and claim “defense.”  Transition zones make moral decisions difficult—“hard cases make bad law”—so I will confine this book to issues like genocide and intimate partner violence that are clearly unacceptable in functioning societies.

**

Part I.  Human Evil in Context

  1. Starting with Genocide

            Visiting Cambodia together, we saw the relics of genocide and the devastation it had wrought.  We resolved to study genocide seriously.

            At that time, little was known about genocide in general.  Thousands of historical sources covered Hitler’s Holocaust, and a much smaller but still important literature covered the mass murders by the Young Turks, the USSR leadership, and Mao Zedong.  Much more recent genocides, such as those in ex-Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and Cambodia itself, were only beginning to be visible in scholarly sources. 

            Very few generalizations had come out of this work.  Rudolph Rummel had just written a book, Statistics of Democide (1998; see also Rummel 1994), arguing that genocide was the natural result of totalitarian regimes.  His oft-repeated conclusion was direct: “Power kills, and absolute power kills absolutely” (Rummel 1998, passim; a rephrasing of Lord Acton’s famous quote about corruption.) 

            We quickly realized that this was not far wrong, but that it was not quite true or adequate.  Hitler was democratically elected, though he committed genocide only after taking total power.  Several other notorious genociders have been democratically elected.  They usually seized absolute power in the process of killing, but often not until the killing was under way.  We thus set off on a long voyage of discovery, comparing all documented genocides since 1900 to find common themes. 

            When science reaches this stage—several teams working on a problem—one expects simultaneous discoveries, and they occurred in this case.  Barbara Harff (2012) and ourselves (Anderson and Anderson 2012, 2017), and shortly after us Hollie Nyseth-Brehm, developed broadly the same model of genocide, and James Waller, in his great work Confronting Evil (2016), has developed it further.  Gregory Stanton’s well-known list of traits (2013) is another independent invention of a similar, but more developed, model. 

It is quite a simple one.  A would-be leader wins by developing a whole ideology based on ethnic or ideological hate, but going beyond mere hate to promise a utopian world—usually, harking back to a lost golden age and promising to recall it and improve it–if we can only eliminate “certain people.”  He often flourishes only when difficult and uncertain economic times give people economic incentives to look for radical solutions, but many such leaders take power in good times; mobilizing antagonism is always available as an easy and straightforward way to win in politics.  All that is required is that the existing administration is either fighting a war and not doing well (as in Russia when Lenin took power), or widely perceived as corrupt and incompetent.  People then work for change.  Most commonly, the country in question had a long record of ethnic and political killing, but this was not always the case.

Many dictators simply rode popular movements to victory, but many were installed by large economic interests, almost always rentiers—landlords, natural resource owners, and others who make their money from controlling primary production rather than from enterprise.  Oil has been the greatest single backer of modern autocratic states, from fascist (several in Africa and elsewhere) to feudal (Saudi Arabia) to socialist (Venezuela).  We will examine this link in due course.  In the early 20th century, most dictators were puppets installed by fascist or communist regimes when they conquered countries, and in the mid-20th the United States installed or backed several genocidal fascist regimes, most notably in Guatemala and Chile (on the history of 20th century genocides, see Anderson and Anderson 2012; Kiernan 2007; Rummel 1994, 1998; Shaw 2013).  Since then, however, genocidal and autocratic regimes have come to power through coups, local wars, or, very often, elections.  Corrupt and weak regimes create conditions where many will vote for strongmen.

John Kincaid says of American far-right politics, “right-wing movements are successful when they deploy rhetorical frames that synthesize both material and symbolic politics” (Kincaid 2016:529), and this finding summarizes a fact that seems well documented worldwide.  Oliver Hahl and collaborators (2018) have shown that “lying demagogues” succeed with disaffected voters who feel disrespected by elites and cultural brokers; lying, violating norms, openly expressing widely-held prejudices, and economic populism are a particularly successful (and deadly) combination.  Trump in the United States was only one of many leaders who triumphed in the early 21st century by using this technique.

            When he (such leaders are male, so far) takes over, he quickly moves to consolidate power. He can usually bring about a brief return of prosperity, by cracking down on crime and by “making the trains run on time” (as the proverb claims for Mussolini), but the prosperity may be illusory or short-lived.  Alternatively, the leader may take over during a war, in which case he may lead the people to victory—or may simply make things even worse, as in Cambodia.  He suspends whatever democratic or institutional checks exist, and becomes a dictator or functional equivalent.  Many small genocides have taken place in democracies, but, in almost all such cases, the victims were not citizens and were under de facto authoritarian rule.  Native Americans in the 19th century constitute a prime example.

            A dictator begins by consolidating his power.  As Rudolph Rummel often reiterated, “power kills, and absolute power kills absolutely.”  Almost inevitably, a dictator begins to consolidate his rule by killing “certain people”—whether they are Jews, bourgeoisie, political enemies, educated people, “heretics,” or any other salient group that seems opposed in some way to the new order.  I term these “structural opponent groups.”  The savagery and scope of the killing sometimes depends on the number of targeted groups, which in turn depends on the extremism of the dictator.  Hitler’s indiscriminate hatred extended from Jews to handicapped people to gays to modern artists, totaling over six million dead.  The Khmer Rouge killings in Cambodia included people defined by ethnicity, education, foreign influence, and other broad variables.  The Rwandan genocide began with Tutsi, but quickly moved on to eliminate many Hutu (Nyseth Brehm 2017b).  At the other extreme are mass political killings that eliminate the opposition and anyone related to it, but at least stop there, such as Agustin Pinochet’s in Chile, which killed about 10,000 people.  These political genocides blend into the sort of mass political elimination characteristic of medieval empires.

            Usually, there is then a lull in the killing.  The leader has his power.  However, eventually, unrest challenges his position.  In some cases, he is forced out by popular movements.  Dictators often fall.  Frequently, they come to believe their own personality cult, think they are infallible and can do anything, and decline into something hard to tell from madness (Dikötter 2019).  Often, however, a leader meets the new challenge by another wave of mass murder.  The challenge is often external war, as in Hitler’s Germany and the Khmer Rouge’s Cambodia.  Sometimes it is power jockeying within the ruling party, as in the USSR and Mao’s China.  Sometimes it is civil war or revolt, as in the Indian subcontinent when successive episodes of violence accompanied the breakaway of Pakistan from India, the later breakaway of Bangladesh from Pakistan, and the failed revolution of the Tamils in Sri Lanka.

            The most important thing to note is that the people go along.  Humans are prone to anger and hate, and even the most incompetent politician can whip up hatred and direct it against enemies. 

            This simple model—exclusionary ideology, dictatorship, consolidation, and challenge—turns out to be 100% predictive.  We concentrated on genocide under the strictest construction of Raphael Lemkin’s definition of the term—actual mass murder of innocent citizens or subjects by their own government—as opposed to general killing of civilians in war.  Some of the best work on genocide has used that wider definition (e.g. Kiernan 2007, Shaw 2013). Our model does not work for this extended use of the term.  One would have to have a predictive model of all war—something that has so far defied scholarship, despite literally thousands of attempts.  Wars are notoriously multicausal; it usually takes several reasons to make leaders decide to go to war.  Economic gain (or plain loot), political power of the state or its leaders, land, ethnic and religious conflicts, maintaining warrior culture, and other factors all operate. 

            By contrast, genocide is usually rather simple: when autocratic leaders feel they are in a shaky situation, they kill.  Very often—famously with Hitler, Stalin, and Mao—they come to depend more and more on the level of hatred of their backers, and thus must whip up more and more hate to stay in power; this makes them take still more power and kill still more minorities, to provide red meat to their “base.” 

There are four ways to hate: hate upward (hating the elites), down (hating the less fortunate, from the poor to the less abled to the minorities), laterally (real enemies or social rivals), or not at all.  Bad leaders, and often even relatively good ones, move more and more toward getting their followers to hate downward—to hate the weak, the powerless, the minorities.  Even those who took power by marshaling upward hate, such as the Communists, soon find it pays better to get their followers to hate downward.

            A marginal sort of genocide is “cold genocide”:  Slow and not very sure elimination of an ethnic group by selective killing over a long time, coupled with every effort to destroy the group as a distinguishable entity possessing its own culture or ideology.  The term “cold genocide” was coined by Kjell Anderson to describe the Indonesian pressure on West Irian (West Papua).  It has been applied to the far larger and bloodier repression of the Falun Gong movement in China since the late 1990s.  This movement, a spiritual discipline that by all accounts except the Chinese government’s was utterly inoffensive, seemed dangerous to the Communist leadership, because of its size and rapid growth.  Suppression included propaganda wars, but also mass torture, imprisonment (“reeducation” in “camps”), and killing by extracting body parts for transplantation or the international black market (Cheung et al. 2018, citing a huge literature).  The Falun Gong has become the major source of hearts, livers, and other vital organs in China, a practice that may seem even more ghoulish than most genocidal atrocities. 

            The Chinese government has now expanded its reach to include the Muslim Uighurs of Xinjiang.  Approximately a million have been placed in concentration camps (“vocational training centers”) and subjected to intense pressure to acculturate to Han majority norms (Byler 2018).  Children have been removed from homes and parents, and educated according to Han patterns.  Islam is attacked in particular.  The Uighurs’ sin appears to have been agitating for minority rights guaranteed by the Chinese constitution.  The Chinese government has accused them of ISIS-style terrorism because of a very few extreme individuals.  Recently, government agencies in Uighur territory have been ordering thousands of clubs, stock probes, tear gas canisters, spiked clubs, handcuffs, prison uniforms, and other instruments of suppression and torture (SBS News 2018).  This constitutes “culturocide,” the form of genocide that involves destruction of an entire culture by restriction of personal freedoms and forced removal and re-education of children—one of the forms of genocide specifically addressed by Lemkin.

            Most genocides have been propagated by elites: ruling governments or powerful groups that whip up hatred to consolidate their power.  However, these groups may have started as small popular movements, like the original fascists.  Moreover, settler genocides are largely bottom-up phenomena, and so are many small-scale religious massacres and revolutionary bloodlettings like the French Terror.

            Mobs, genocides, and wars do not just happen, and they are not the result of blind forces.  They are invoked by individuals.  People do not spontaneously go into orgies of murder, unless some leader or leaders are profiting in important ways.  Whipping up hatred in others is not confined to leaders—anyone can do it—but ordinary people doing it at grassroots levels can do only so much damage, though if they form a large organization like Hitler’s Nazis or the Ku Klux Klan they can have devastating effects.

            Further work since 2012 has extended the models backwards, to look at the factors behind the final extreme abuse of autocratic power.  From Waller’s Confronting Evil, Frank Dikötter’s How to Be a Dictator (2019), among other books (cited below), we learn that the vast widely-targeted genocides of modern times accompany the decline of traditional societies and communities and the rise of mass communication and mass top-down society.  Links evolve from networks of local people, only somewhat influenced by governments, to top-to-bottom chains of authority by huge governments that take more and more power, even in peaceful and democratic societies.   When a dictator seizes control in such a mass society, he can quickly draw on his power, on loyalty, and on the lack of countervailing horizontal forces.  He can rapidly turn a peaceful, orderly society into a killing machine. 

            He will do it only if he has not only public but also financial support, and many genocides are enabled by specific firms or economic interests.  These turn out to be primary-production interests—extractive, often rentier, often export-oriented—in most cases (see below, part 3).  Large agrarian interests—landlords—are often involved, and more recently the oil industry has been notorious (Auzanneau 2018).  Sometimes industries come on board, as in Nazi Germany.  Some communist genocides have taken place with support from peasants and workers rather than giant firms, but some others had the support of giant state-owned economic interests.

            The dictators who invoke genocides are also a special selection (Dikötter 2019).  Many genocidal leaders fall into two types.  Most are elites, often military, but a surprisingly large number of them are marginal—subalterns or regional-derived, educated in metropoles or big cities, and educated in contexts that are also somewhat marginal, ranging from military academies (very often) to extremist mentoring by other radicals or lovers of violence (for details, see, again, Anderson and Anderson 2012; Waller 2016; this has been noted before, e.g. Isaiah Berlin noted a correlation with origin in border regions; Rosenbaum 2019:7).  The range is from Napoleon (Corsican), Stalin (Georgian), and Hitler (Austrian) to Mao (educated in Japan) and the Cambodian genocide leaders (educated in Paris with mentoring by the Egyptian Samir Amin).  Very many of the genociders have been military men: Napoleon the corporal, the Argentine colonels, General Rios Montt in Guatemala, Idi Amin in Uganda, and many more.  Leading in mass killing is, of course, the job of military officers.

            Usually, the ideologues of these exclusionary ideologies are not themselves killers.  Karl Marx dreamed revolution, but actually spent his time studying and writing in the magnificent reading room of the British Museum.  Friedrich Nietzsche for Germany and Gabriele d’Annunzio for Italy were the major thinkers behind fascism, but they led scholarly lives.  It was left to lieutenants, and lieutenants of lieutenants, to become the hard-nosed opportunistic toughs that led the movements and were also the initial followers and fighters.  They were often animated more by hatred and ambition than by attention to doctrine.

            These leaders all shared a quite specific ideology of the purity and superiority of one group over the abysmal badness of another, with the further concept that all members of each group have those respective essences.  This can be broken up into 20 specific ideas, carefully extracted from an enormously extensive analysis of the rhetoric of genocide leaders in 20 of the major historic cases by Gerard Saucier and Laura Akers:  “tactics/excuses for violence, dispositionalism/essentialism, purity/cleansing language, dehumanization, dualistic/dichotomous thinking, internal enemies, crush-smash-exterminate-eliminate

[language]

, group or national unity, racialism in some form, xenophobia/foreign influence, uncivilized or uncivilizable, attachment/entitlement to land, body or disease metaphor, revenge or retaliation language, traitor talk (treason, treachery, etc.), conspiracy, subversion, something held sacred, nationalism/ethnonationalism, threat of annihilation of our people” (Saucier and Akers 2018:88). 

            They add some other frequent themes, including “placing national security above other goals,” wanting to move fast and thoroughly, and thinking “individuals must suffer for the good of the collective” (Saucier and Akers 2018:90). They find all of these in many cases, from Hitler’s and Stalin’s rhetoric to the less widely known writings of the Serbian and WWII-Japanese leadership and the propaganda of mass murderers of Indigenous people in Australia and the United States.  Dehumanizing terms like “rats,” “cockroaches,” and “insects” appear to be universal.  One can, for instance, note the Communist Chinese leadership’s invocations against Falun Gong and dissidents as “rats” and “subversives” (Cheung et al. 2018).

            The worst genocides are usually associated with extreme ideologies: Leninist communism, fascism, extremist religion, or nationalist and ethnic fanaticism.  Extremist ideologues must be a strange combination to succeed: ideologically zealous, yet utterly amoral and opportunist in the ways they take power (Dikötter 2019 provides valuable case studies).  More pragmatic military dictators like Egypt’s, and economic hardliners like Pinochet in Chile, usually kill their opponents and anyone suspected of opposition, but do not engage in the vast orgies of extermination that almost always follow from ideologues taking power.  They too are opportunist and amoral, but they usually make little secret of it.  

            On the other hand, the people must be susceptible.  As Mao Zedong used to say, “a spark can ignite a prairie fire,” but that depends on the availability of dry grass.  Humans are easily enough turned to evil to give any credible leader a chance.  Understanding such events involves working back from the event to the direct perpetrators and their mindsets, and then on to the back stories.  The casual tendency of modern historians and other scholars to attribute causes of historical events to abstractions (“the economy,” “politics,” “culture,” “climate”) is wrong.  Marx is often blamed for it, because of vulgarization of his theory of history, but he was careful to specify that real people must lead the revolution, even if it is “inevitable” sooner or later because of economic forces.  Marx was also aware that those economic forces were themselves caused by the choices of real people.  Other thinkers from Ibn Khaldun to Max Weber and Anthony Giddens (1984) have made the same general point: structures emerge from individual actions and interactions.

There is no definite link between genocide and any particular economic system, organization, interest, or condition.  Capitalist, socialist, and communist countries have all done it.  Claims that genocide is most likely during economic downturns or is associated with deprivation do not hold up (Anderson and Anderson 2012; Nyseth Brehm 2017a, 2017b).  International war generally dominated mass bloodshed before 1945, but since then genocide has far overshadowed it, causing more deaths than all wars, murders, and crimes combined.  One suspects this has something to do with the dispensability of labor.  Kings of old could not afford to decimate their own work force.  Now, with rapid population growth and machines displacing workers, governments can deal with problems by thinning out their own people, saving the price of war.

Genocides fall into three types: settler, consolidation, and crisis genocides (our classification, but see Waller 2016 for much fuller but similar typology).  Settler genocides occur when a large, powerful society takes over land from small or scattered groups, especially when the powerful society is technologically advanced and the smaller victim groups are less so (“Whatever happens, we have got / the Gatling gun and they have not”—Hilaire Belloc; also quoted as “Maxim gun”).  The most famous cases are the United States (Dee Brown 1971; Madley 2016), Brazil (Hemming 1978), and Australia (Pascoe 2014), but the same story can be told of societies from Russia to China to Japan (Kiernan 2007).  It goes far back in time.  Ancient Babylon and Assyria exterminated captives.  The Romans and medieval Europeans exterminated rebellious subject peoples and took their possessions.  The Bantu took southern Africa from the Khoi-San with attendant exterminations.   Settler genocides depended on convincing a large part of the citizenry to kill the Indigenous peoples, and to threaten protectors and dissidents into silence.  A particularly good study of this is Benjamin Madley’s study of California in the 19th century (Madley 2016). 

This counts as genocide only if the victims had been conquered and subjected.  Extermination of enemies who are fighting back with everything they have is normal war, not genocide.  The dividing line is obviously blurred, but extremes are easy to see; the wars with the Apaches and Comanche (Hämäläinen 2008) in the United States and Mexico in the 1870s were initially fair fights with little quarter given by either side, and thus not genocide, but the extermination of the Yuki in California in the mid-19th century was genocidal massacre of helpless conquered people (Madley 2016; Miller 1979). 

Modern genocides fall into four categories: communist, fascist, military dictatorship, and random cases of rulers who lack ideology.  The last are usually military, since military men have an advantage in seizing power, but almost as often they are democratically elected politicians.  Sometimes an initially able ruler becomes more and more extreme (or even demented) with age.  The one common thread is that they come to power by marshaling hate.

Some genocides have direct corporate backing.  American corporations acting through the CIA established genocidal regimes in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Chile.  European colonial powers sometimes established murderous successor regimes in liberated colonies, or, conversely, set up a hopeless government that soon fell to genocidal rebels.  Former colony status is a fair predictor of genocide. 

Many genocidal regimes have survived and flourished despite mass murder because states support business interests that are benefited by the regimes in question.  Cases range from early fascist Italy under Mussolini to more modern states such as Nigeria and Equatorial Guinea.  The oil industry is notorious for this, but armaments merchants are interested, for obvious reasons.  One also recalls “blood diamonds,” blood coltan (columbium-tantalum ore, source of conflict in DR Congo), and other commodities deeply stained. 

Plantation slavery or serfdom is one back story.  Developed in ancient Mesopotamia, it was the first institution based on cruel treatment of disenfranchised multitudes by ruling elites.  It grew steadily, especially in the west, peaking in the Atlantic slave trade and the indentured-labor plantations of Asia in the 18th and 19th centuries. It led to a vast amount of murder. 

Consolidation genocides are the commonest and often among the worst.  They occur when a rather shaky totalitarian regime based on exclusionary ideology takes over full control of a country.  They usuallyoccur in that situation, but the kill totals range widely, from rather small-scale politicides (like Marcos’ in the Philippines and Pinochet’s in Chile) to vast mass murders like Mao’s in China.  The scale depends on the extremism of the new government, especially its exclusionary ideology.  Ideology was not a huge factor in the pragmatic (though murderous) Marcos government; at the other extreme, the indiscriminate hatreds of the Nazis led to the vast massacres of the Holocaust.

Crisis genocides occur when genocide is brought about or exacerbated by war, either international or civil.  Very minor local rebellions can serve as excuses for already-planned genocides, as in Guatemala in the 1980s (where violence continues; Nelson 2019), or international war can vastly escalate already-ongoing genocides, as in Hitler’s Germany in the 1940s.  Sometimes consolidation and crisis occur together, as in Cambodia in the late 1970s, producing the most extreme of all genocides. 

Almost all genocides fall into one of these three types.  The only exceptions are cases in which an extreme (if not downright psychopathic) dictator continues to kill whole populations without let or stay.  Stalin and Mao are the major cases in history, but other apparently demented monarchs from Caligula to Tamerlane might be mentioned.

            Genocides range greatly in the numbers and percentages of people killed.  The Cambodian genocide, which killed perhaps ¼ of the total population, is unique.  Rwanda’s genocide killed 10% of the population—a million people—in only 100 days, a rate of killing calculated at 333.3 murders per hour, 5.5 per minute (Nyseth Brehm 2017b:5).  Most genocides are fortunately smaller; many are “politicides,” confined to classes of political enemies of the dictator.  Mere political killings do not count as genocides, but mass political murders by people like Agustin Pinochet of Chile and Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines threw far wider nets.  Not only actual opponents, but families of opponents, ordinary protestors, children who seemed somehow opposed to the regime, and random suspects were killed.  The scope of genocide depends on the size and range of targeted groups, which in turn depends on the extremism of the exclusionary ideology of the leaders.  Hitler targeted a huge and, at the end, almost random-looking assortment of peoples.  Pinochet narrowly targeted suspected liberals and leftists.

            Recent attacks on “social media” for being platforms that amplify hatred (e.g. Zaki 2019:146-150) made me aware of an important and previously neglected fact: the greatest genocides, the ones in which whole nations seem to have gone mad and collapsed in orgies of blood, were propagated by print media and radio.  The first, the Turkish massacre of the Armenians and other Christian minorities, was even prior to radio.  The others—notably Germany and central Europe under Hitler, the USSR under Stalin, China under Mao, Nigeria in the Biafra War, and the Indonesian, Cambodian, and Rwanda-Burundi genocides—were driven by newspapers, radio, and public appearances.  Social media allow discussion, argument, persuasion, and grassroots movements.  Radio in totalitarian societies is the ultimate in faceless, top-down communication to people who have no way of answering or commenting on any scale. Public appearances by leaders, and propaganda pictures and films, are not much better: they show the leader in crisp uniform, from a distance, generally high above the masses.  It is surely significant that there have been no huge, out-of-control genocides in societies with good social media.  The worst recent genocide in terms of mass participation by ordinary people is that in Myanmar, where access to modern media is limited.  Even TV has the value of showing the leader up close, making him look less than respectable.  But the real value of Facebook, Twitter, and the like is that allow us to answer back.  They are often compared to face-to-face encounters, to the disadvantage of the social media, but the real comparison is with the passivizing and alienating radio and its cousins.

            Genocides have become much commoner and bloodier since 1900.  Earlier genocides were largely religious persecutions (such as the Inquisition) or settler genocides.  Since 1900, genocides have targeted wider groups, often huge segments of society.  This tracks the decline of community and the rise of mass hierarchic society, as we have noted.

            Through history, genocidal regimes just kept killing till conquered by outsiders or popular movements.  Then they often returned to bad ways unless they underwent decisive political changes—sometimes forced on them by conquest, as with Germany and Japan after WWII.                       Slavery, though not genocide by our definition, is very close to it, and requires a similar mentality: the basic idea that one whole group of humans does not deserve human consideration.  By establishing that mind-set, it helped the progress to modern genocide.  The slave trade was notoriously bloody.

            Genocide and war always include far more than mere killing.  Victims are routinely tortured.  Women and girls are almost always raped.  People are burned or buried alive.  The deliberate sadism goes beyond anything an ordinary creative torturer could devise; there have been instruction books on torturing for centuries, and there are now websites on the “dark web.”  Ordinary people are as prone to do all this as the leaders themselves.  Similar findings are common in studies of warfare, criminal gangs, and perhaps above all the whole history of heresy persecution in religions.  Even domestic violence often involves unspeakable torture and humiliation of spouse, children, or other family members.

Ordinary people caught up in even the most mundane street gangs soon learn to commit unspeakable acts without second thoughts.  Psychological explanations of this range from direct explanations in terms of conformity, anger, learned hate, and social antipathy (Baron-Cohen 2011; Baumeister 1997) to the elaborate Freudian-Lacanian framework of Edward Weisband (2017, 2019).  Animal models (of which there are many in Clutton-Brock 2016, esp. chapters 8 and 13) suggest that competition for control of resources and of mates and mating bring out the worst in all mammal species, turning otherwise meek and inoffensive animals into demons.  Human domestic violence usually (if not always) turns on control and relative power issues (B. Anderson et al. 2004).  Rage over shakiness of control certainly lies behind much genocide and genocidal behavior.  Exploring the full scale of this phenomenon, and of other causes for rage, remains an urgent task for the future.

The universality of the phenomenon, especially perhaps in street gangs, suggests that it is all too normal a part of human potential, but many of Weisband’s cases (such as the Nazi death camp leaders) seem to be genuinely psychotic or brain-damaged.  Whatever the explanations, the performative sadism of human violence is a particularly horrific thing to find so universally.

            Genocide (aside from settler genocide) is a particularly interesting case because ethnic genocide is a relatively new form of evil.  Outside of religious persecutions—the real font of genocide–huge-scale elimination of vast numbers of peaceable fellow citizens, simply because they fall in some arbitrary category, is new enough that people have not adjusted to it as a matter of ordinary life since time immemorial (as slavery was considered to be).  Conforming to genociders is, or was in the early 20th century, a new way to be bad.

            The Enlightenment gave rise to ideas of peace and freedom.  War was reduced, and slavery slowly but surely was outlawed everywhere.  However, the Enlightenment was founded not only on rapid expansion of trade, commerce, communication, and science, but also on the slavery and exploitation that it eventually fought. 

            As the world filled up in the 20th century, problems of overpopulation, pressure on resources, and competition for goods became more salient.  Leaders by this time tended to be old and not battle-hardened, so they did not always deal with such problems by international war, as almost everyone had done before 1800.  Often, either during war or instead of war, the modern leaders turned on sectors of their own people, waging genocide campaigns.  Wars and slaving were partially replaced by internal mass murder.  Genocide developed from religious persecution and settler colonialist practices. 

            Genocide, like other violence, must ultimately reduce to hatred.  The government must be able to whip up mass hatred, to get support and help in its project of mass murder.  To the extent that people are hateful and angry, they are susceptible to this persuasion.  On the other hand, they may simply be “following orders” and “doing their job,” becoming callous to the whole enterprise (Paxton 2005, Snyder 2015). The genocidal leader or leaders mobilize an insecure or downward-mobile majority, or fraction of the majority, against the most salient or disliked minorities.

            Genocide seems to sum up the other forms of violence.  Like war, it is often about loot and land (Kiernan 2005).  Like intimate partner violence, it always involves some issues of control and insecurity about control and power.  Like civil war, it often begins with rebellion, driven by class or religious or ethnic conflict.  Finally, leaders of genocidal regimes are often classic bullies, a point elaborated below.

  •  Mass Killing in General

            The forms of mass killing are international war, civil war (which differs from interpolity war in causes and usual course; see Collier and Sambanis 2005), revolution and rebellion, genocide, structural violence on large scales, mass poisoning by pollution, denial of medical care, and mass starvation through refusing to take action on agriculture, welfare, or food security (on famine as mass murder, see Howard-Hassman 2016).  Large-scale human sacrifice, once a major part of religion and kingship, has fortunately been eliminated, but sacrificing millions to the cults of guns, automobiles, and oil continues.  These form something of a continuum. Genocide sometimes grows from bureaucratic neglect.

            These all have different risk factors.  International war is hard to predict and almost always multicausal.  The War of Jenkins’ Ear (1739-1748) was not just about Jenkins’ ear.  Usually, desire to capture a neighbor’s territory and resources, a desire to support one’s own military machine and sometimes one’s armaments industry, pressure by hot-headed males hungry for glory and loot, claims of wounded national pride, and ideological differences with the enemy are all involved.  Traditional or manufactured hatreds are always conspicuous.  Small incidents are typically taken as excuses.  (In the case of Jenkins’ ear, the war was a complex fight between Britain and Spain over New World territories and other issues).  Nations such as the medieval Turks and Mongols may have war as their major economic activity and even their whole lifeway.  Rivalries within families forced rivals to compete to see who could amass the most loot and glory (Fletcher 1980:238). 

War seems to have been around forever, if one counts the local raids and small wars typical of small-scale societies.  War seems to have been especially common in chiefdoms and early states.  Population growth, rivalry for land and loot, and hierarchic institutions had run ahead of peace-keeping mechanisms.  Typically, neighbors come into conflict over land and resources, but such conflicts can almost always be settled by negotiation.  When they get out of control, however, traditional rivalries may develop, as between France and England through much of history.  Then, honor, nationalism, and eventually real hatred come into play, increasing the danger.  Specific histories are almost invariably complex and highly contingent on hard-to-predict events.

            With the state, maintenance of order slowly developed.  Even so, the incidence of violence and war varied widely within tribal and early state societies.  Just as there are violently aggressive people and saintly ones, there are bloodthirsty and pacific groups.  Particularly interesting are profound changes over time.  Scandinavians changed from Vikings to democratic socialists (Pinker 2011).  English changed from Shakespeare’s blood-drenched warriors to today’s peaceable folk.  Germany changed from the most demonic country in history to leader of a peaceful Europe in only one generation.  Most dramatic was Rwanda, where gradual increase in hate and violence built up to the genocide of 1994 that killed 1/10 of the population—but then ended suddenly and was followed by amazingly peaceful, tranquil, well-regulated recovery (as shown by brief research there by ourselves, and much more detailed ongoing research on the ground by Hollie Nyseth-Brehm). 

            Lies are universal in war; “truth is the first casualty,” and George Orwell’s analyses remain unsurpassed.  People believe lies against all evidence when their political beliefs are served thereby, as several modern studies have shown (Healy 2018).  Patiently pointing facts can work, but only when the truth is inescapable and unequivocal (Healy 2018).  The endless circulation of repeatedly discredited fictions about Jews and blacks is well known.

The ability of people to change dramatically from war mode to peace mode, from bad wolf to good wolf, is truly astounding.  Recent studies have shown that this is heavily contingent on social pressure.  Michal Bauer and coworkers (2018) found that in an experimental setting, Slavic high school students in Slovakia were twice as likely to play hostile toward Roma in a game than toward other Slavic students—but only if someone started it.  They would all play peacefully unless someone made a hostile move, but if that happened all the Slavic students generally joined in.  It was easy to flip the group from tolerant to ethnically discriminatory.

            Today, a range of violent engagements are common.  International war is still with us, though current ones all grew from local civil wars.  Civil wars abound, and merge with local rebellions.  Civil wars stem from rebellion, revolution, or coup, or—very often—from breakaway movements by local regions, as in the United States’ Civil War (Collier and Sambanis 2005). 

Criminal gangs dominate whole countries; the governments of Honduras and El Salvador are particularly close to their gangs.  Gangs kill for loot, rivalry, “honor,” turf, women, and other usual causes.  Individual murder for gain, revenge, or hate blends into gang killings and then up into militias, armies, and nations; there is no clear separation.  A murder in a gang-dominated country like El Salvador may have individual, gang, and national overtones.

Finally, ordinary, everyday murders are usually over issues of control.  The commonest murders are within the family; next, within the neighborhood.  The mass murders of unknown (though usually local) victims that dominate the media are relatively rare, though much commoner in the United States than in most countries.

Genocide continues, in Myanmar, Sudan, South Sudan, and several other countries.  China is committing genocide against its Uyghur population; it has imprisoned a million and killed countless more (Byler 2018; Stavrou 2019).  China is also repressing Tibetans, Mongols, Kazakhs, and Hui, apparently for no reason other than a desire to crush religious and cultural minorities, since China’s world-leading security and surveillance system has surely established these minorities are not a security risk.  Turkish repression of Kurds and Brazilian massacres of Indigenous people have now reached genocidal proportions.  Violent, genocidal or potentially genocidal regimes now control about 1/6 of the world’s countries.  It is highly contingent.  In many cases, the dice could easily have rolled the other way.  Evil ranges in extent; Hitler had real power, his American imitators very little before 2017.  The degree of evilness is not well correlated with its success.

Today, with warfare constant and technologically sophisticated, militarism is on the increase, dictatorships are becoming common again (as in the mid-20th century), and whole societies are becoming militarized.  An important special issue of Current Anthropology, the leading anthropological journal, is devoted to this; an important introduction by the issue editors, Hugh Gusterson and Catherine Besteson (2019), details the rapid rise and current pervasiveness of the new hi-tech militaristic world and worldview.  Military bases around the world have led to virtual slavery of local hired workers, as well as dispossession of local farmers and others (see also Lutz 2019; Vine 2019).  Besteman’s article (2019) details the progressive conversion of the world into an armed camp, with the rich routinely attacking the poor nations—no new thing that, but more and more a worldwide unified effort, rather than a country-by-country issue.  Gusterson (2019) recounts the use of drones to create terror; there is no one to fight—only a strange, buzzing object that brings random death and chaos.  As Gusterson shows, drones are claimed to hit actual individual terrorists and military targets with pinpoint accuracy, but of course they do no such thing; they are used to terrorize whole populations with large-scale random strikes on soft targets.  Militarized cultures develop in zones of war and conflict, as they have throughout time (e.g. Fattal 2019; Hammami 2019).

            Another set of cases of people turning violent and destructive is provided by the well-known cycles of empire.  Every preindustrial state had cycles of rise and fall, usually at vaguely predictable intervals, with a 75-100 year period and a 200-300 year period being common.  The great Medieval Arab thinker Ibn Khaldun (1958) first isolated, described, and explained these.  Recently, Peter Turchin (2003, 2006, 2016; Turchin and Zefedov 2009) and I (Anderson 2019) have elaborated on Ibn Khaldun’s theory.  There is thus no reason to go into it here; suffice it to say that internal processes make dynastic crises inevitable, over the long run, in such societies.  At such times, rebellion, local wars, banditry, and sometimes international wars break out, and societies often dissolve into chaos.  Basically, it is a process in which a society based on positive-sum games (cooperation, law-abiding) dissolves into negative-sum games, in which groups and power brokers try to take each other out. 

On rare occasions, a whole empire may completely collapse, as Rome did in the 5th century.  This represents yet another society-wide set of cases of fairly rapid change from peace and order to violence and mass death.

  • Slavery

            At the slave museum in Zanzibar, built on the old slave quarters there, one can see the hellholes were slaves were confined, read their stories, and see many excellent exhibits with contemporary accounts, drawings, and even photographs.  The most disquieting, and the most pervasive, message is that the slave trade was an ordinary business, like selling bananas.  Hundreds of people routinely raped, murdered, tortured, brutalized, and oppressed their fellow humans, for eight hours a day (or more), simply as a regular job.  These slavers no doubt felt like any other workers—bored, annoyed by trivial problems, angry at the boss every so often, but indifferent to the subjects of their effort.  They were not singled out for being violent, or psychopathic, or intolerant; they were simply locals who happened to be available.  Anyone could do it.

            Mistreatment of enslaved people involves minimalizing them—not denying their humanity, but denying that it matters.  They can be treated brutally because they do not count.It is perhaps harder to imagine the mind-sets of people who worked in the slave trade, day after day, for a whole working lifetime, than to imagine the mind-sets of genociders.  Today, most people in developed countries are repelled even by bad treatment of farm animals.  I remember when people treated animals worse than they do today, but even in my rural youth, animals were never treated as badly as slaves were treated in Zanzibar, Byzantium, the American South, and other places where slavery occurred.  The animals needed to stay healthy to turn a profit.  By contrast, the whole goal of slaving is to reduce humans to helpless, terrified victims, through intimidation and brutalization.  Their health was a secondary concern at best.  It was easier to get new slaves than to deal with well-treated ones.

            Slavery has cast a long shadow over America, influencing American politics profoundly to this day (Acharya et al. 2018).  Many, possibly half, of Americans believe slavery was happy blacks playing banjos and occasionally picking a bit of cotton under the benevolent eyes of the plantation owners.  The rest usually think of slavery as the work of a few utterly evil men, like Simon Legree of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.  The fact is that slavery involved thousands of men and women brutalizing other men and women, simply as a regular job, carried out with varying degrees of racist hate but with little thought about the whole issue.  In America the brutalizers were white and the victims black, but in most of history—and today in countries like Thailand and Ukraine—the slaves were the same race and very often the same culture and society as their oppressors.  Roy Baumeister, in his book Evil, comments on how repugnant most people find evil acts, but how quickly they get used to them and see them as routine.  There is no evidence that slavers found even the initial phases of their work particularly unpleasant.  They put in their eight hours (or more) of rape, torture, and murder with a “just doing a job” mentality.

            John Stedman wrote a classic 18th-century account of the horrors of slavery in Surinam (Stedman 1988 [1790]).  Stedman was a mercenary in the service of the plantation owners, so at first he was biased in favor of slavery and against slaves; his horror at what he saw convinced him that slavery was an evil practice.  He reports a great deal of real hatred by slaveowners of their slaves, and a great deal of torture simply for torture’s sake, often because of extreme (and not wholly unjustified) fear of slave rebellions, and the fear-driven belief that only brutality could prevent those.  His writings became foundational to the antislavery effort, first in England, then worldwide.  Most interesting, though, is his extremely extensive documentation (confirmed by every other early report) of the matter-of-fact, everyday, routine brutality.  It simply never occurred to most people of the time that this was monstrous.

            One also recalls John Newton’s conversion, at about the same time, from slaving captain to extremely repentant Christian; after years of depression, he felt divine forgiveness, and wrote the hymn “Amazing Grace,” which, somewhat ironically, became a favorite of African-American churches.  As with resisters of pressure to commit genocide, repenters of slaving are rare in the archives.

            Slavery in traditional societies (from the Northwest Coast of North America to pre-slave-trade Africa), was sometimes less murderous and torture-filled.  But it was never other than cruel and oppressive.  All records from all societies speak of rape, terrorizing, and brutalizing.  Yet, no one in history—not Buddha, not Confucius, not Jesus—opposed slavery as an institution, until the Quakers in the 18th century concluded it was against God’s law.  The tide then turned with striking speed.  Enslavement of Europeans was basically over, outside the Turkish Empire, well before 1800.  Enslavement of Native Americans was theoretically banned in the Catholic countries, and was actually reduced to a rare and local phenomenon by 1800.  Enslavement of Africans continued well into the 19th century, being legally abolished between 1820 and the 1880s.

            Illegal slavery continues today.  The Council on Foreign Relations (2019) estimates that there are 40.3 million slaves in the world.  Few are chattel slaves like those in Zanzibar; most are forced prison laborers (e.g. in North Korea), persons enslaved for debt, or sex slaves (including forced marriage sufferers).  Sex slavery, with all the attendant horrors, is carried out in the familiar spirit of “all in a day’s work,” by thugs and pimps from Thailand to Hollywood.  Reading reports of child sex slavery shows how low humans can sink, all the time thinking they are doing what culture and economics require.  As always, there is no evidence that most of these people are especially evil to begin with.  Some child-sex slavers are clearly psychopathic, but others simply drift into the life and do what they believe is necessary.  Many were sex slaves themselves. 

  • Structural Violence and Callousness

            Millions of deaths today come simply from the bureaucratic attitude that people are merely things to move around, like rocks.  One of the most chilling books I have read is The Future of Large Dams by Thayer Scudder (2005).  Scudder spent his life studying refugees from huge dam projects.  In almost every case, people displaced by big dams were simply ordered to move.  Their homes were bulldozed, their livelihoods flooded.  There were usually token “relief” efforts, but these were so trivial as to be more insulting than helpful.  Millions of refugees were left to shift for themselves, and in poorer nations that meant many of them died.  Scudder bends over backwards to be fair, which makes the stories sound even worse; one cannot write him off as biased..  The bureaucrat perpetrators are cut from the same cloth as the cold “doing my job” slavers and Nazi executioners.  There is a huge subsequent literature on dams and displacement; suffice it to cite Sunil Amrith’s Unruly Waters (2018), which puts India’s and China’s megadams in historical context while describing their social and ecological devastation.  Almost always, the displaced are poor, and often from minority groups, while the benefits go to the relatively rich: landlords, urban power-users, and the like. 

Similarly, pollution is generated by giant firms producing for the affluent, but the pollution is almost always dumped on the poor and vulnerable (Anderson 2010 covers this issue in detail).  The populations sacrificed for the greater good of the giant firms are the stigmatized ones; Erving Goffman’s classic work Stigma (1963) is highly relevant.

            Related are the horrific famines invoked by governments against their own people, as described in State Food Crimes by Rhoda Howard-Hassmann (2016) and for specific, particularly horrible cases by Anne Appelbaum (2017) for Ukraine in the 1930s and Hazel Cameron (2018) for Zimbabwe in 1984.  Not only totalitarian governments, but the British in 1840s Ireland and 1940s Bengal, and most settler societies in their campaigns to get rid of colonized peoples.  In the Irish potato famine, aid was denied although Ireland was exporting food and England was rich (Salaman 1985; Woodham-Smith 1962)  Many countries have deliberately invoked famine as a form of state policy.  The Holodomor in the Ukraine and Russia in the 1920s was an extreme case (Howard-Hassman 2016).  America’s 19th-century extermination of the buffalo was explicitly done to starve the Native Americans, and thus was genocidal. 

            Johan Galtung (1969) coined the term “structural violence” to describe destruction by the cold workings of the social system, ranging from the results of institutionalized bigotry to bureaucratic displacement and refusal to provide famine relief.  Structural violence is usually a matter of passing public costs onto those held to deserve no better, usually poor and vulnerable people.  Again, ethnic and religious hate is very often involved.  The targeted victims—selected to pay the costs of industrial development, public works, crop failures, and the like—are almost always poor, and very often from minority groups.  Robert Nixon has used the term “slow violence” for this. 

            There is, however, a range from clearly and deliberately murderous and unnecessary structural violence, such as the Holodomor and the Ethiopian famine under the Derg, down to the tragic results of incompetent and irresponsible planning.  Famines before 1900 were usually due to genuine crop failures in societies that did not have adequate safety nets, and often could not have had.  The gradation from such tragedies to deliberate mass murder by starvation is not an easy one to unpack.  There will always be controversial cases.  Lillian Li’s classic Fighting Famine in North China (2007) goes into detail on a society that was desperately short of food but did have a well-developed safety net; the famines reflected a complex interaction of crop failures, local violence, and government success or failure at deploying their extensive but shaky relief infrastructure.  Such cases remain outside the scope of this book, which deals only with cases such as the Holodomor and the buffalo slaughter, in which famine was deliberately created for genocidal reasons.  On the other hand, massive displacement of people without preparation for resettlement or rehabilitation is herein considered intrinsically genocidal, even if done—or supposedly done—for good economic reasons.

            I hereby introduce the word “bureaupathy” to describe the associated attitude and mindset.  It is a mental state as sick and destructive as psychopathy and sociopathy.  It is quite different from greed; the bureaucrats are usually following orders or truckling to rich clients, rather than enriching themselves.  It does, however, merge into corporate murder-for-gain, which is done with similar cold-blooded indifference.  Tobacco companies continue to produce a product that causes up to ¼ of deaths worldwide, and no one in those companies seems to feel either genocidal hate or moral compunction.  Similarly, big oil and big coal preside not only over thousands of pollution-caused deaths per year, but over the creation of a global-warmed future that will lead to exponentially increasing deaths.  Unlike the innocent, uneducated rural American voters, oil executives know perfectly well that climate change is real, and what it will cost.  They read the journals and are trained in science.  Many documents, leaked or quite open, show they are aware.  They continue to produce oil and lie about its effects on health and the ecosystem.

  • Hate vs. Greed

            This alerts us to two very different kinds of harm.  Hatred causes genuinely gratuitious harm: no one benefits.  In fact, the hater usually harms himself or herself just to hurt others; suicide bombing is the purest case.  It is a negative-sum game: both sides lose.  Selfish greed, however, does benefit the doer; by the definition used here, it harms the other people in the transaction more than it benefits the doer or doers.  Big dams benefit the rich and urban, but usually hurt the displaced people and the total economy more.  The cost-benefit ratios of big dams are notoriously bad.  More pure cases of selfish greed, such as drug gang violence and medieval Viking raids, are even clearer: the thugs get some loot, but the entire polity suffers, especially but not only the looted victims.  Professional gambling is another case in point: the house always wins in the end, since it is there to make a profit.  Casino owners get rich.  They do it at the expense of victims, often nonaffluent and often compulsive, who are ruined and often commit suicide.  The total cost-benefit ratio is negative.  But the victims choose to gamble, so it is hard to stop the industry.  In this case, as in “the right to bear arms” and many others, individual liberty is traded off against social costs.

            Simple rationality—ordinary common sense—would stop hate as a motive for harm.  Stopping greed is more difficult, especially when the greedy have the power to force their will on the rest of society, as oil interests do today.  From a regulator’s point of view, there is also the problem of defining exactly where reasonable cost-benefit ratios turn to unreasonable ones.  Big dams do sometimes benefit the whole of society, or at least they have in the past.  Simple morality directs that displaced persons should be compensated, but other cases of “takings” are less clear.  If some suffer because they were selling poisons and the poisons are finally banned, should those sellers be compensated?  Or penalized for selling the poisons in the first place?  Much of politics is about such issues, which seriously problematize the whole issue of evil.

            In war, genocide, and murder that most harm is usually clear-cut.  So much, however, is due to greed—the entire tobacco economy, most of the oil economy, most of the dam-building, and so on—that looking far more seriously at cost-benefit accounting is a major need for the future.  On the other hand, the role of hate, or at least of infrahumanization, in even these cases cannot be underestimated.  The case of dams is, again, the best example: those displaced are almost always poor and rural, and thus “do not count.”  They can be ruined and even reduced to starving to death, without any of the rulers or engineers or construction bosses caring—sometimes without even noticing.  The oil industry, also, typically dumps its pollution on poor rural areas, such as rural Louisiana and the Indigenous communities of Canada.  When oil pollutes a well-to-do urban area, there are protests and political and legal action.  Moreover, oil, tobacco, and other harming industries have made it a practice to whip up hatred to get the public to oppose valid science, as will be discussed below.  Thus, hate, or at least discounting whole communities, is central to the wider and more general applications of greed. 

  • How Much Violence?

Several recent studies attempt to quantify deaths by violence in human societies.  Stephen Pinker (2011) famously concluded people kill much less than they used to.  This is apparently wrong (Fry 2013; Mann 2018), but small-scale societies kill at a relatively high rate.  Many small-scale farming societies, especially chiefdoms, are particularly bloody.  The human average seems to be about 1% dying by violence per year, but it varies from insane meltdowns like the 100 Years War, the fall of Ming, and the Khmer Rouge genocide to total lasting peace. 

            In a recent comparative study of war, Kissel and Kim (2018) define it as organized conflict between separate, independent groups.  They note that the terms “aggression” and “war” cover a vast range of very different behaviors.  “Coalitionary” killing of enemies is confined to ants and people and chimpanzees and maybe a few other mammals; only humans do it on any scale.  The genetics of aggression are as ambiguous as ever.  They note some archaeological massacres, including one in Kenya 10,000 years ago, and cannibalism evidence in many areas of the world—possibly during famines.  They see a big change after agriculture and settlement growth, but more in the size and organization of war than in the commonness of aggressive killing.  They see war as cultural.

            A recent study by Dean Falk and Charles Hildebolt (2017) finds a wide range, from small-scale societies that have essentially no violent killings to those where a large percentage of deaths are violent.  Variation is much higher than among state-level societies.  In general, it appears that small-scale societies do have a somewhat higher percentage of violent deaths than large state societies, but the margin is not great (if it exists at all).  The genocides, slaving deaths, and mass murders of modern states go well beyond Pinker’s estimates (Mann 2018).  In few societies is murder and war the norm; such a society would quickly self-destruct.  In fact, there are records of societies that did so.  Something very close happened to the Waorani, but they were persuaded by missionaries to become more peaceful (Robarchek and Robarchek 1998). There is a range in states from Afghanistan and ancient Assyria to relatively peaceful Tokugawa Japan and Yi Korea, or, today, Scandinavia and Switzerland.  Most states through history have been undemocratic and repressive, with many political murders. 

Among the Enga, one of the most violent societies in Falk and Hildebolt’s sample, powerful self-made leaders—“big men”—often whip up war for their own advantage, but may also make peace for the same reason; the oscillation from peace to extreme violence that has characterized Enga society is heavily determined by these self-aggrandizing maneuvers (Wiessner 2019).  Popular will often forces peace on disruptive young men or would-be leaders, however. 

An “average” is hard to calculate and probably meaningless, since most societies swing back and forth between war and peace, conflict and stability.  The average may be close to urban America’s less privileged neighborhoods.

            Since death is forever, the consequences of murder are irreparable, while good is easily undone.  (The same goes, in general, for environmental damage; it is rarely, if ever, fully reversible.)  A society requires countless small good acts to make up for a terminally bad one.  Human nature must average positive to keep societies functional. 

            Human tendencies to defend social position, defend the group, and defend or seize land and resources continue to keep violence at a high level in most societies.  From the books cited above, a clear pattern emerges of why people kill.  As individuals, if not killing in simple defense of self and loved ones, they kill either for gain (as a paid job or for loot) or for social control.  Most often, they kill to maintain social position: control over a spouse, “honor” in local societies, revenge on a neighbor, dominance over minority members, or control of a personal position of some kind.  Even psychopaths who kill compulsively usually wait for such opportunities.  Probably most killing is done for “defense.”  Even aggression in war becomes “preemptive strikes.”  Genocide is occasioned by extreme fear of minorities. 

            Targets change over time.  In agrarian societies, the groups were very often rival branches of ruling families, clans, or lineages.  There was also, usually, an opposition of “us” versus “barbarians,” i.e. semiperipheral marcher states or semiperipheral invasive groups.  In the west, intolerant monotheist religions powered up hatred of other religions and of “heretics,” and this tended to spill over into hate of all “others.”  Opposition of men vs women, old vs young, and rich/powerful/elite vs poor always create tension points.  Toxic conformity takes over.

            Gavin de Becker (1997) provided many accounts of psychopaths and mass murderers.  All turn on the obsessive need of the killer to control someone—the woman he is stalking, the parents who have tortured him growing up, the owner of a valued good who has tried to protect it. 

            Killers in such situations either commit suicide or are fairly easily caught, but gangsters who kill randomly may not be.  In particular, many gangs in the United States and elsewhere require a new recruit to commit a murder, as a rite of passage.  Such initiates seek out homeless mentally ill individuals who will not be missed (or even identified, in many cases) and whose death will not be investigated seriously.  This murder-for-position leads to further crime.  In the United States, a killer usually is jailed eventually, but in much of Latin America he (or sometimes she) will often be accepted by society and escape the law. 

            As groups, humans kill largely to maintain the power of the group over perceived and hated rivals.  These structural opponent groups may be traditional enemies, new rivals, or ideological or ethnic opposites.  The hatreds lead to international war, religious strife, civil war (most often between regions), ideological murders and genocides, and other types of group violence.  War for land is also extremely frequent.  This led Ben Kiernan to title his great study of warfare and genocide with the old Nazi phrase Blood and Soil (2007); he saw identity and land as the two great reasons for mass killing. Nationhood and religion, both sources of a fictive or socially constructed identity, are deadly, much more so than actual blood relationship.  I am far from the first to remark on the human tendency to kill real people in the service of vapid dreams.

            War for loot (portable wealth) seems largely limited to Viking raids, Turkic wars, Caucasus Mountain feuds, and banditry in general.  It is the moral norm, and often the livelihood, of classic “barbarians,” for whom it is a way of life rather than considered an evil or an exception. On the other hand, wars to acquire land and mineral resources, to help one’s national armaments industry, and to support its military, are universal throughout history.  Still, group hatred remains one great reason for war, just as individual social control is apparently the commonest reason for murder.  Greed, even for land, is controllable; the deadly mix of social fear, social hate, and need for social control is the real “heart of darkness” within humans.

  • People Almost All Join In

            One thing is common to all genocides and wars:  Some individual or individuals whip up hatred, and the public goes along.  Usually, the leaders are desperate for power and are not particularly restrained by morals.  The masses, however, can be almost anyone, anywhere, any time, though most sources agree that genuinely threatening and unsettled conditions make it easier for tyrants to whip up enmity.  There are on occasion mobs that spontaneously riot and destroy minority neighborhoods, but even these normally have a single instigator or small group of instigators. 

            Normally, this involves a flip from peaceful, economically rational behavior to behavior that is violent, destructive, and economically, personally, and morally irrational according to normal standards of the group and of humanity.  The bad wolf suddenly takes over.  Genocide leaders are men—they are almost all men—who are geniuses at making people do this psychological flip.  They can manipulate social fear, using a mix of charisma and exaggerated group rivalry.  They can whip up the hatred that is latent in people, and mobilize it.  They are masters of redefining groups to make them smaller, tighter, more defensive, more closed.  They can get people to circle the wagons.  They can make people see it is an “exception” when moral rules are broken to harm a rival group, something people all too often figure out without help (Sapolsky 2017, summarized p. 674).  The human ear and brain reduce their processing of ordinary peaceful messages, and become more sensitive to ominous messages and less sensitive to people or to rational considerations; people can be reduced to blind rage (Monbiot 2019).

            It is particularly clear that a certain type of narcissistic, cocksure, extremist leader can often manage to take advantage of human loyalty, religion, or ideology to reduce a whole nation to near-hypnotism, adulating him (he is always male—so far) with worshipful adoration.  Frank Dikötter (2019) has investigated this in the case of several 20th century dictators, including Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin, and found many common threads.  All consolidated power ruthlessly and came more and more to depend on a cult of personality.  They became strongmen, above the law, above tradition, above any restraint—even the restraints of their own claimed ideologies.  The more they did, the more the loyal citizens adored them, until they miscalculated and caused actual ruin through war or economic collapse.  The sad fact is that the tendency of humans to conform with society and follow its leaders—usually useful traits, preventing chaos—can be and often is misused in the most horrific ways.

            In all genocides, the mass of the population is susceptible to messages of hate.  It is astonishingly easy to make ordinary “decent” citizens into mass murderers.  People go along with the evil leaders.  The public follows the leaders as loyally as they do in international wars or in actual defense of the nation.  The leaders are power-hungry and hateful individuals, but their followers are not; yet their followers do appalling things on command.  Detailed interviewing over time in Germany, China, the USSR, Rwanda, and other states showed that people were swept away by the rhetoric, and then strengthened in murderous resolve by the fact that everyone else was involved in the killing.  Most people simply did what they were told, or what their neighbors were doing.  They often took a sort of pleasure or satisfaction in doing it, but often found it simply a job that had to be done.  It is often pointed out that Hitler killed only one person: himself.  It was the people “just following orders” that did the real work.

            This mass conformity is very extensively documented.  (Particularly good recent reviews of it are found in Paxton 2005, Snyder 2015, Staub 2011, Tatz and Higgins 2016, and Waller 2016.)  It seems particularly common where hatreds are traditional, as with the Jews in “Christian” Europe, but it is reported everywhere.  The same is true of criminal gangs, slave procurement, police work in less lawful parts of the world, and indeed every situation where ordinary people get caught up in violence.  They almost always conform (see esp. Baumeister 1997; Waller 2016).

            Finally, the testimony of many anthropologists (e.g. Atran 2010, 2015), psychologists (Baumeister 1997), criminologists (De Becker 1997), and other experts all confirm that perfectly normal people can and do become terrorists and murderers in any social situation that puts a high value on such behavior as serving the group.  Scott Atran’s accounts of Islamic terrorists are particularly revealing: the terrorists and suicide bombers are usually young persons who have experienced traumatic events in their own small worlds.  They are not particularly violent, certainly not psychotic.  They are very often recruited through intensive influence by leaders of local extremist organizations—leaders who rarely endanger themselves. 

            Otherwise, worldwide, accounts of recruits to violent gangs often speak of neighborhoods where the only alternative to membership in a violent gang is being killed by one.  Criminals who are not part of gangs are far more apt to be genuinely demented—usually psychopathic.  Even among such loners, however, writers like Roy Baumeister and Gavin De Becker stress the number who seem superficially normal.  For the record, the pirates, smugglers, and sometime killers I knew on Asian waterfronts in my youth were largely a perfectly normal lot; they got caught up in an ugly world and had few or no alternatives.  By contrast, the one American mass killer I have known was a deeply troubled individual, bullied and treated cruelly for his obvious mental issues until he finally snapped. 

            There are, in short, some people whose inner demons drive them out of control—though they can be identified and stopped (De Becker 1997).  Far more common are ordinary individuals: we normals who have within us the two wolves, waiting for food.  The relevant works are surprisingly silent on what makes one or the other wolf take over.  The old Victorian clichés—coming from bad seed or a broken home, falling in with bad company, taking to drink—are echoed to this day in one form or another.  They have much truth, and we now know more, but there is still much to learn.

            Older literature often described such behavior as regression to “animal” or “savage” behavior, but no other animal does anything remotely close.  Nonhuman animals fight and kill when threatened or when vying for mates or territory (Clutton-Brock 2016), but they rarely kill without those immediate motives, they rarely torture (though cats and many others will toy with prey, cruelly by our standards), and they certainly do not make social decisions to starve millions of their fellows to death.

 “Savages” in the old sense of the term do not exist and never have.  The small-scale societies of the world do about the same things that modern states do, but on a very much smaller scale, and they lack the technological ability to carry out the mass tortures and murders so common now.  They could not force mass starvation on their societies even if they wanted to.  Claims of greater violence among early, small-scale societies and early states, e.g. in Pinker (2011), are based on outrageous sampling bias (Fry 2013; Mann 2018).  Pinker compares the most warlike of documented small societies with the most peaceful modern ones, which does show we are capable of being better than we often are, but says nothing about what social levels are most murderous.

            In fact, virtually anyone can be converted, rather easily, into a monster who will torture, rape, and murder his or her neighbors and even family members for reasons that no rational person could possibly accept after serious consideration.  Religious wars over heresies provide extreme cases.  In such conflicts as the Albigensian Crusade, the 13th-century genocide that gave rise to the infamous line “kill ‘em all and let God sort ‘em out,” probably not one in a thousand participants could explain the differences between Catholic and Albigensian Christianity (see Anderson and Anderson 2012).  Yet the murders of neighbors and friends went on for decades.  The same endures today, as in the persecution of Shi’a by ISIS (Hawley 2018).

            Such phenomena raise the question of how and why normal, peaceable human beings can so easily flip into genocidal states, and then back into peaceful states after the genocide is stopped.  Many of the most horrible genocides were committed in countries long known for the tranquility, peacefulness, cooperativeness, and even tolerance of their citizenry.  Cambodia and Rwanda were particularly clear examples.  On the other hand, some genocidal countries had a long and bloody history of independence and conflict.  No pattern emerged from this line of enquiry.

            In most genocides, those who resisted and worked to save victims were astonishingly few.  Tatz and Higgins (2016) have recently collected the data from the Holocaust and other genocides.  They find that even when there was no penalty for refusing, ordinary people went along with mass murder.  This was as true in the United States and Australia in the 19th century as in Hitler’s Gemany and Pol Pot’s Cambodia.  It is sobering for modern Americans to read how otherwise normal, reasonably decent, “Christian” Americans could perform the most unspeakable and unthinkable acts on Native Americans—often neighbors and (former) friends—without a second thought (see e.g. Madley 2016).  Colin Tatz’ harrowing summary of settler genocides in Australia reveals the same (Tatz 2018).  Nor did more moral citizens do much to restrain the killers.  The “Indian lovers” like Helen Hunt Jackson and James Mooney who agitated to protect Native Americans in late 19th century America were few.

            Hollie Nyseth Brehm (2017b), in a particularly thorough analysis of the Rwandan genocide, found that killing was clearly top-down-directed, with a concentration around the capital and major cities and among well-educated (and thus elite) people, but also was commoner in areas with low marriage, high mobility, concentration of Tutsi, and political opposition—especially by Hutu themselves—at the grassroots.  The areas in and around the capital, Kigali, were far more deadly than areas at the northern margins of the country.  This is the opposite of the pattern seen in settler genocides, where murder was far commoner on borders where settler populations were expanding at the expense of Indigenous people. 

            Accounts from China’s Cultural Revolution indicate that people were swept up in mass hysteria, but were also afraid of appearing to be neutral, since lack of enthusiasm in persecuting victims led to substantial trouble, up to being made a victim oneself.  A few of the many memoirs indicate that the writers were unreconstructed Maoists, but the vast majority worked under orders, from fear or social pressure or conformity.  Many repented, and write agonizing stories of their internal sufferings as well as the sufferings they inflicted and endured.

  • Anyone, Anytime, Can Turn Evil

          The alternation between peace and rage is typical of animals, especially carnivores; we see it often in dogs and cats.  Chimpanzees show it too.  Humans are different in two ways.  First, many humans are always “on the fight” or “in your face,” seemingly looking for imagined slights, threats to their honor, and excuses for a fight.  This is both individual and cultural.

          Arguably the biggest cause of slights, anger and hate is ranking out: arrogance, putting others down, open insulting superiority. This is particularly touchy if A really does outrank B and has to show it, as in the military, in hierarchic business firms, and in traditional societies with hereditary nobility.  A display of modesty can go too far, but a display of arrogance is disastrous.  Soldiers and bureaucrats have to game this.  It is a minefield, even more than romance, let alone ordinary civility.  Every day brings new outrages by minorities insulted—sometimes unintentionally—by people in power.  The sheer advantage of the priviledged, in everyday discourse, makes even “niceness” seem a putdown.  As with other forms of slight and offense, the Scottish ballads and Shakespeare’s plays are full of this: people are outraged at failures to recognize superior status, but even more outraged at having their noses rubbed in someone else’s social superiority.   

Some cultures and subcultures teach violent response to offenses as normal behavior (Baumeister 1997).  Such “honor cultures” always track societies with a bloody, unsettled, poorly controlled past.  Killing, however, goes far beyond such societies.  Humans fall into rage states not only when fighting immediate rivals for food or territory or mates, as dogs and cats do, but also over issues that do not directly concern them: war with remote enemies, malfeasance in distant countries, terrorist attacks in far-off cities, political injustices to other groups of people.  Humans specialize in offense, outrage, antagonism, and hate, and will take any excuse. 

            Antagonism is the opposite pole to Agreeableness on the Agreeableness scale of the widely used Big Five personality test.  Worldwide, people range between the two extremes, and there is a substantial inherited component, though much (I believe most) of one’s level of agreeableness/antagonism is learned.  Highly antagonistic people are, of course, heavily overrepresented among doers of evil, and are very susceptible to inflammatory rhetoric (Kaufman 2018).

            People, even quite antagonistic ones, are usually peaceful in ordinary everyday life, and even helpful, generous, and tolerant.  Many are curmudgeons, even snappish or bigoted, but at least not violently cruel.  It takes some effort to make them do deliberate harm to those who have not harmed them.

            However, it does not take much effort.  Following discovery of this fact among Nazi survivors, psychologists experimented with students, seeing how easy it was to make them be cruel to other students.  Stanley Milgram’s famous experiments with faked electric shocks, Philip Zimbardo’s with students acting as jailers and prisoners, and many subsequent experiments showed—to the horror of psychologists and the reading public—that it was very easy indeed. 

            Zimbardo’s experiment with a mock prison, at Stanford, had to be stopped within a week, because the students took their roles too seriously (Blum 2018 criticized this experiment, but has been effectively answered by Zimbardo, 2018).  This led to major reforms of experimental ethics, as well as to much soul-searching (Zimbardo 2008).  Contrary to published accounts, Zimbardo did not initially allow the “prisoners” to leave the experimental situation, and in any case privileged white and Asian young men (as these students were) hardly provide a realistic prison situation, given America’s racist and brutal prison system (Blum 2018).  However, Zimbardo’s main finding stands: people, even the “best” young men, can turn into evildoers with astonishing ease if they are following orders.

            People flip easily from a normal state—mild and peaceable—to an aroused state of anger, hatred, aggression, brutality, or rage.  There is a continuum, but phenomenologically it often feels as if we are dominated by either the good wolf or the bad one—not by an intermediate, neutral wolf.  Our enemies are not always external.  Suicide is the commonest homicide. Next most common is killing family members.

            We have a choice.  We must choose to be angered, and can always choose to “turn the other cheek.”  A punch in the face is hard to ignore (though some can manage it), but by far the most anger we feel is over trivial slights that can easily be ignored, or over social issues that may not concern us directly.  I am much more frequently angered by reading about injustice, murder, or war in places I have never been and involving people about whom I know nothing than I am by threats to myself.  Reading the political literature, one realizes that some people are outraged by the very existence of African-Americans somewhere, or by the fact that not everyone worships the same way.  An excellent column by Ron Rolheiser (2018) talks with some ironic detachment about the human proclivity to moral outrage.  Humans love to work themselves up into anger, or even hysteria, about perfectly trivial issues irrelevant to their own lives.  Most of us in the scholarly world know teachers who turn red in the face at such things as bad grammar in student papers. 

            Indeed, almost all the evil discussed herein is deliberately chosen because of outrage over something that does not directly or seriously concern the chooser.  The Jews were not really destroying Germany, nor were the Tutsi causing much trouble in Rwanda, nor were the victims of Mao’s purges doing anything remotely worthy of national outrage and mass murder.  All of us have encountered a great deal of everyday prejudice, bigotry, and open hatred of people for being what they are, as opposed to what they may have done.  This too has been studied; Gordon Allport (1954) reviewed early sources.  Since then a huge literature has accumulated (see below).

            Robert Louis Stevenson’s story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is uncomfortably compelling.  We sense, somehow, that we could all go there.  Hannah Arendt’s famous phrase “the banality of evil” (Arendt 1963) is also compelling.  Indeed, evil is banal, for the very good reason that it is usually done by the kid next door, or his equivalent.

            Peace came to Colombia after more than 50 years of conflict between the government—often via paramilitary gangs—and FARC, which began as a rebel organization but became largely a cocaine ring.  The paramilitary groups were little if any better.  Both sides accommodated to and dealt with the organized drug cartels.  Thousands of people were involved, and they committed the usual torture, rape, and murder associated with such activities.  With peace came rehabilitation.  Sara Reardon (2018) investigated the process.  She quotes one of the rehabilitation psychologists, Natalia Trujillo: “I realized not all of them are sociopaths. I realized most of them are also victims.”   In fact, it is obvious from Reardon’s account that the vast majority were closer to victimhood than to pathology.  They were local people, some originally idealistic, swept up in a nightmare.  Many were forced to fight to save themselves and their families.  Most of the combatants have returned to ordinary life with varying degrees of success; some have been killed by revengeful farmers and others who were devastated or had loved ones murdered. Unfortunately, but predictably, the peace did not hold.

The way that ordinary people can be caught up in senseless civil war is clearly shown.  Similar stories from Liberia, Sierra Leone, and other civil wars, back to the United States’ own, show this to be typical. 

            In short, the vast majority of killing and harming in the world is done by people “just following orders.”  They range from people mindlessly conforming, or even hating what they do, to enthusiastic perpetrators who needed only the excuse.  Especially successful are orders to kill or oppress minorities or to ignore their suffering when displaced.  Orders or requests to care for people and help them meet far more resistance.  The United States has faced continual protests and objections over its exiguous and miserable government safety nets, but no trouble finding soldiers for wars in the Middle East, and Trump had no trouble whipping many of his followers into frenzies of violence and hate.  For better or worse—usually for worse—people are easily mobilized by antagonism, but difficult to mobilize by religious teachings of love and care for fellow humans.  People are too apt to be spontaneously antagonistic and destructive, simply due to overreaction to the negative.  They hate trivial enemies, callously neglect valuable but less-noticed people, and take too little account of the good.

The average human is pleasant, smiling, friendly, and civil most of the time, but when threatened or stressed he or she becomes defensive.  This usually begins with verbal defense or with passive-aggressive sulking.  It escalates if the threat escalates—usually matching the threat level, but often going beyond it, in preemptive strike mode.  This is a necessary and valuable mechanism when genuine defense is needed. 

The differences between people and cultures then matter.  The average human seems easily persuaded to wad up all frustrations, irritations, threats, and hurts into a ball, and throw that ball at minorities and nonconformists.  This displacement and scapegoating comes up over and over again in all studies of human evil, especially genocide. 

            The world is far from perfect.  Wars, crimes, and genocides happen.  We must deal with them.  We are rarely equipped with perfect ways of doing this.  Cool, rational action in the face of hostility requires both courage and the knowledge of what to do. 

            Failing that, action is difficult.  The most available and simple option is to follow the orders of those who do know, or to conform with cultural norms that provide strategies for dealing with problems.  The next most available option is to maintain a front of hostility: to be touchy, aggressive, or fearful.  Ideally, one can seek out the knowledge to cope better, but this requires effort and time.  One can also flee, hide, become a hermit, act as virtuous as possible in the hopes that virtue will prevail, or simply die. 

            Recognizing this choice matrix makes the victory of the bad wolf more understandable.  Facing a hostile world, people are prone to let the bad wolf roam, or to follow the orders of those who do.

The model that emerges, then, is one of ordinary people dealing with ordinary everyday frustrations, slights, trivial hurts, and difficulties, who can easily be persuaded by extremist leaders to direct their frustration at scapegoats.  Scapegoating minorities to maintain control by venting diffuse anger is the food of the bad wolf.  Violence comes from directing diffuse hate to a specific target.  This is the common theme of the books on evil listed at the beginning of the present work. 

Such violence sums up into war and genocide when human agents with their own damaged agendas are swayed evil leaders who are willing to go beyond normal social rules.  This is the human response that evil leaders from Caligula to Hitler to Trump have whipped up.  The immediate cure is minimizing offense-taking, but the ultimate cure is finding enough good in the world to balance out the offenses.

Often, though not always, these leaders, in turn, are the creatures of landlord or rentier elites wishing to maintain control over income streams and resources.  The deadly combination of propertied interests, evil leaders, and frustrated masses is the common background of modern mass killings.

Part II.  Roots of Human Evil

1. Human Nature?

            Speculations on human nature have taken place throughout the ages.  The classic Christian and Buddhist views are that people everywhere are basically good; evil is a corruption of their nature by bad desires.  The problem, according to Buddhist theology, is giving way to greed, anger, and lust.  The Christian tradition is similar; “love of money is the root of all evil,” according to Paul (I Timothy 10).  Most Confucians follow the great Confucian teacher Mencius in seeing people as basically prosocial, corrupted by bad or inadequate education.  Many small-scale and traditional societies hold that people are basically sociable and well-meaning, but must develop themselves through spiritual discipline and cultivation.  Quakers speak of the “Inner Light.”  Modern biologists and anthropologists have found it in the social and proto-moral inclinations now known to be innate in humans.

            Conversely, the commonest western-world view is probably that of Niccolo Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes and Sigmund Freud: people are basically evil, selfish, competitive, and out for themselves at the expense of others.  This view goes back to the ancient Greeks; Marshall Sahlins (2008) provides a full history of it.  Social behavior must be forced on them by harsh training.  Hobbes saw “man in his natural state” as being in a permanent condition of “warre of each against all” for resources (Hobbes 1950 [1657]:104).  Freud had a darker view:  Innate human nature was the Id, a realm of terrifying lust, murderous hate, and insatiable greed.  Both men thought “savages” showed “man in his natural state”; they believed travelers’ tales rather than real descriptions, and thought “savages” were bloodthirsty, cruel, and driven by the lusts of the moment, with no thought of the future.  In fact, even without modern anthropology, they should have known from actual accounts that small-scale societies are about as peaceful and orderly as our own. 

These dark views come from traditional folk wisdom, which incorporates a good deal of cynicism based on the common observation of people hurting themselves to hurt others more.  A worldwide folktale tells of a man who is granted one wish (by an angel, godmother, or other being) but on the condition that his neighbor will get twice what he gets; if the man wishes for a thousand dollars, his neighbor gets two thousand.  The man thinks for a while, then says “Make me blind in one eye!” 

            Machiavelli, Hobbes, Freud, and their countless followers assumed that society will force people to act decently through powerful discipline.  This is impossible.  One cannot make mountain lions form social contracts, or teach crocodiles to cooperate.  An animal that is naturally individualist, each animal competing with others, cannot create a society capable of enforcing rules.  Joseph Henrich (2016), among many others, has pointed out that only an animal with cumulative culture, natural sociability, and an innate tendency to cooperate could have social norms and expect conformity to them.  Hobbes, Freud, and others expected far too much of human rationality.  Rationality is notoriously unable to restrain emotion.  Ask any teenager, or parent of one. 

            A serious cost of the Hobbesian view is that by assuming people are worse than they are, Hobbesians excuse their own tendencies to act worse than they otherwise would.  Hobbesian views have always been popular with hatemongers.

            The other classical and mistaken view of humanity is the rational self-interest view.  The briefest look at humanity instantly dispels that.  People do not act in their self-interest, and rarely act rationally in that restricted sense (see e.g. Kahneman 2011).   The “irrational” heuristics that people use can be highly useful as shortcuts, creating mental efficiency (Gigerenzer 2007; Gigerenzer et al. 1999), but they constantly cause trouble when cool reason is needed.  Human limits to rationality are now so well documented that they need no further notice here. 

            The rationalist view is a far more positive view of humanity than Hobbes’ or Freud’s.  It does not give much space to evil; evil would occur only when it really pays in material terms, which is not often.  Unfortunately, irrational evil appears much commoner in the real world.  Tyrants may often die in bed, but they often do not.  Suicide bombers and other front-line fighters for the wrong are obviously not advancing their rational self-interest.  Straightforward shortsighted but “rational” calculation does explain some bad acting, but does not explain people going far out of their way to be hateful and cruel, or the common human tendency to resist improving themselves and their surroundings.  Over the 5000 years of recorded history, countless people around the world have chosen, over and over, to suffer and work and make themselves miserable simply to hurt others.  Technology has often developed for war.  Rational choice could be believed as a general motive only because hate, vengefulness, overreaction to slights, and irrational hate of nature are so universal that they are not even noticed, or are considered “rational.” 

             The contrasting view also goes back to the ancient Greeks, who wrote of human abilities to love, cooperate, and found democracies.  Christianity later built on a view that people could love each other; the line “love thy neighbor as thyself” goes back to Moses.  However, few could see humanity as innately good, or believe in virtuous utopias.  There were always a few, but on the whole belief in a “noble savage” view is largely a straw man.  Rousseau did not believe any such thing (the phrase actually comes from John Dryden), nor do most of the others accused of having it.  In so far as it is taken seriously, it does not survive the many accounts of war in small-scale societies.  Even relatively “noble”-believing sources (e.g. Fry 2013) cannot gloss over the frequency of killing in almost all societies.

            A more realistic, but still dubious, take on humans comes from the Zoroastrian-Manichaean tradition.  This tradition sees correctly that people are a mix of well-meaning, helpful, prosocial good and cruel, brutal evil.  It further holds, less believably, that the good comes from the immaterial “spirit” realm, evil from the flesh.  This view, which entered Christianity with St. Paul (see his Letter to the Romans), lies behind the extreme Puritanism of much of western society—the view that sees sex, good food, good wine, and dancing as Sins with a capital S.  Everything of the flesh tends toward corruption.  Good sex is the door to hell.  “The fiddle is the devil’s riding horse,” according to an old American saying.  I was raised in a time and place when this view was widespread.  The social revolution of the 1960s cut it back sharply, but it keeps resurfacing.   Yet, a great deal of human good comes via those “sins.”  Condemning these is regularly used to distract people from the real sins: cruelty, oppression, gratuitous harm, selfish greed, hatred.

            A deeper problem with the Manichaean view is that people are usually neither saintly nor demonic.  They are just trying to make a living and then get some rest and relaxation.  Their forays into proactive goodness or proactive evil are extensions from ordinary low-profile getting along.             This leaves us with the Native American folktale: the two wolves, like the “good and bad angels” that folk Christianity took over from Manichaean belief, are symbols of the prosocial and hostile sides of humanity, of working with people versus working against them.

In this sense, people are not bad or good; they are good to kin and culturally constructed fictive kin, bad to rivals, and neutral to everyone else.  There is a very slight positive bias, enough to have saved the human race so far.  But people will kill vast numbers of distant strangers without thinking much about it, as King Leopold of Belgium did—indirectly—in the Congo.

In general, people are far better than the savages of Hobbes and Freud, but not as good as idealists or rationalists assume.  The hopeful dreams of “positive psychology” and “humanistic psychology” have turned to dust.   Ordinary everyday human life is full of minor slights and disrespects, and of misfortunes interpreted as personal attacks when they were not meant as such.  It is also full of minor kindnesses and helpful moves.  From this constant low-level evil and good, it is easy to move suddenly and unexpectedly to much greater evil or good. We are always poised near the edge of flipping into violence or heroism.  Everyday hurt and disrespect can be exploited by evil leaders who whip up hate and deploy it against their victims—usually the weak.  Everyday good and care can be stimulated by situations or by moral suasion, and people can be heroic. Often the contrast is between “realism”—the cynical realism of evildoers—and hope, often the unrealistic idealism of the best. People must often choose the ideals or be lost to the cynics.

            At worst, intergroup competition leads to cruelty, viciousness, nastiness, greed (here defined, recall, as hurting others by taking their goods for oneself, without fairly compensating them), and other vices.  We are still not sure how much these are inborn tendencies—like minimal morality—and how much they are learned.  Most authorities think they are learned.  Others concentrate on the learned aspects.  However, broad capacities to fight, hate, and destroy are clearly innate in all higher animals.  Humans seem to have more of these innate cruel tendencies than do other animals, at least as far as “proactive” violence goes.  But real wolves—as opposed to the ones inside us—have their own fights; normally peaceful and calm, they erupt into violence when a new wolf threatens an established pack, or when a bear or human or other enemy attacks (Clutton-Brock 2016).  Dogs, domesticated descendants of wolves, still engage in “resource guarding”; an otherwise peaceful dog, especially if leashed, will attack anyone that seems to menace its owner.  We are a predatory mammal; we can be expected to act accordingly.

            We are gifted by our mammalian heritage with the ability to love, care, fear, hate, and fight.  These we share with all higher mammals.  We are also gifted with the uniquely human ability to form complex, diverse social and cultural systems that construct care, fear, aggression, and other natural drives in ways that can amplify both good and evil out of all bounds.

            People are abjectly dependent on their societies.  We live in stark terror of rejection and ostracism.  They therefore overreact, negatively, to any challenge to their social standing.  Therein lies the problem of the human condition.

2. Evolution?

            Any animal must divide its attention between avoiding threat and getting necessities of life.  Thus, all animals have a fight-flight-freeze response repertoire for dealing with the former, and ways of dealing with the latter to obtain food, shelter, territory, reproduction, and other needs with minimum danger.  They may be jealously protective of mates and homes.  Animals compete for these, and social animals compete for place in the group.  Humans, with far more complex social lives than other animals, add socially constructed identifications with groups, their basic principles, and their identifying flags (from skin color to religious beliefs). 

Overreaction to threat is selected for; thinking a poisonous snake is a rope is far less adaptive than thinking a rope is a snake (to use the classic Indian example).  Failure to find food in a day means a better hunt tomorrow, but failure to identify a deadly threat means no tomorrow ever again, for oneself and often for one’s genetic investment in young.  Even plants react with fear; a chainsaw can end in a few minutes a few centuries of investment in growth.  

This is the ultimate biological substrate of human reactions, including the human tendency to overreact to perceived (and even imagined) threat.   Humans seem about half dedicated to crushing opposition, from criticism to competition, and half dedicated to peacefully obtaining what they need and wish.  Feedback in perceived threat—deadly spirals—is made probable by the need to react to even mild threat as potentially serious.  Contingent variation in personal, situational, and cultural factors prevents better prediction than a rough 50-50.

It is now well established that humans are innately “moral,” in the sense that they have natural predispositions to fairness, generosity, tolerance, welcoming, acceptance, sociability, friendliness, and other social goods.  (There is now a huge literature on this; see e.g. De Waal 1996; Bowles and Gintis 2011; Henrich 2016; Tomasello 2016, 2019.)  It is basically a rediscovery of what Mencius knew in the 4th century BCE.  People are naturally interested in the world and the other people in it.  More neutral are anger at real harms, and desire to satisfy basic wants, including a desire for pleasure and beauty.  Bad traits that appear universal, but possibly not inborn, include hatred of nonconformists and structural opponents, a tendency to grab desired stuff from others, a tendency to resent real or imagined slights, and above all weak fear. 

Excessive need for control is notably a part of the picture, especially in intersex violence.  In many species of mammals, will kill other males and even their own female companions to maintain it (Clutton-Brock 2016: Heid 2019 for applications to humans).  Intraspecific aggression and violence are universal in higher animals, highly structured, and shaped by evolution (Clutton-Brock 2016). Even meerkats, regarded by many humans as particularly cute, are murderous to rival groups; females will hunt out and kill pups of neighboring packs (Clutton-Brock 2016:303). The rapid transition from harmony, empathy, playfulness, and cooperation to cold-blooded murder of weaker “others” is not confined to humans, or even to large predators like wolves.

A few recent writers have made important contributions to the study of human nature as producing good (prosociality and cooperation) and evil.  Two stand out in particular for very recent work: Michael Tomasello and Richard Wrangham.

Michael Tomasello, in A Natural History of Human Morality, postulates that morals evolved in three steps.  First came natural sympathy, developed from the loving emotions that all higher mammals feel for their mothers and siblings; these are extended to other kin and ultimately to any close associate, in human society.  Infants display this from birth.  Second, as humans evolved cooperative hunting and foraging, they learned to respect, help, share with, and support their partners.  Apes do not do this; they may co-hunt but they do not share or cooperate more than minimally.  Wolves and meerkats do, however.  Third, and uniquely human, all social groups have cultural moral repertoires.  They have long lists of “oughts,” almost always said to be divinely sanctioned. 

Tomasello follows almost everyone in arguing that the human tendency to cooperate evolved in foraging.  Cooperative animals could hunt big game, find isolated honey trees and share the news, and work together to catch fish.  A bit of evidence he misses is the parallel with wolves.  Canids scaled up from fox-like animals to hunt big game.  However, their need to run fast denied them the chance to develop the formidable claws that allow cats to be solitary hunters of big animals.  Wolves thus learned to cooperate to chase and bring down large animals.  This skill is seen today in the incredible skills of herding dogs at coordinating their efforts.  They not only have to know exactly what each other dog is thinking and planning; they have to put themselves in the positions of the humans and the sheep.  I once watched two shepherds and some muttish sheepdogs negotiate a herd of sheep through a difficult traffic intersection in the Pyrennees.  The shepherds did almost nothing; the dogs had to work together, trusting each other to keep order in a deadly environment, while understanding what the shepherds wanted and what the sheep would do.  They managed this three-species balancing act perfectly. 

A good Kantian, Tomasello looks to abstract rules founded on basic principles of cooperation and mutualism.  Tomasello is fond of citing Christine Korsgaard for this approach, and she does indeed argue powerfully for the Kantian view (Korsgaard 1996).  Kantian “deontological” ethics deduce rules from basic principles.  In contrast, utilitarian “assertoric” ethics hold that ethics are practical solutions to everyday problems (see e.g. Brandt 1979).  It is fairly clear, ethnologically, that both these methods of creating moral rules happen in the real world, and every culture has a mix of high abstractions and pragmatic rules-of-thumb.  Moral philosophers tend to emphasize one or the other.

No other animals have anything remotely like cultural rules that regulate whole large groups that are not only not face-to-face but many involve millions of people who never meet at all.  As Tomasello points out, children raised in human families learn these rules very early, but family pets do not (Tomasello 2016:154, 2019; pets do learn to act differently in different cultures, but only through simple training).  Tomasello admits that he emphasizes conformity and cooperation and that people are frequently immoral (Tomasello 2016:161), but does not take into account the actual alternatives within moral systems that allow people to murder each other for purely moral reasons, from Aztec human sacrifice to capital punishment.  In a later publication (Tomasello 2018) he admits that conflict must have had something to do with shaping human moralities.  Tomasello’s Rousseauian view keeps him from addressing hatred, but one can assume, from his work, that nonhuman animals can’t really hate; it takes too much long-view and abstraction.

Tomasello sharply contrasts apes and human infants.  Even before they can talk, human infants show a vibrant sociability more complex than chimpanzees.  By the time they are three, children have reached not only a level of social sensitivity that outdoes the ape; they also can thnk morally, reason according to what they see others doing and thinking, and react on the basis of knowing that others will expect moral or conventional or socially appropriate responses.  Apes barely do anything like this; they show awareness of others’ thoughts and fear of punishment and domination, but they do not understand abstract social rules.  By the age of six, human children are rational, reasonable beings who know how to apply the moral and pragmatic rules of their cultures (Tomasello 2019).  

In fact, going Tomasello one better, those of us who have raised children in other cultural settings are aware that children know by three that there are other sets of social rules, and by six they are masters of language-shifting, rule-shifting, and norm-shifting depending on what group they are with.  It was almost spooky to watch my young children quickly learn that a mass of undifferentiated words must be separated into “Chinese” (tonal, rhythmic, spoken with those outside the family) and “English” (a very different-sounding language used with the family and a few friends). 

Tomasello continues to see humans as basically cooperative, helpful, generous, and moral (according to their societies’ codes, but never normalizing hurt or cruelty).  They show astonishing levels of fairness by three years of age, in contrast to apes, who simply grab anything they want from weaker apes.   He has plenty of evidence, and has shown that such virtues are universal among children.  However, much of his sample derives from child-care centers in college towns, and this gives it a rather irenic balance.  We who grew up in what my wife calls “the real world” are aware of less harmonious child environments.  They force children to choose right from the start between the two wolves.

            Recently, Richard Wrangham has brought this issue to the foreground in his book The Goodness Paradox (2019).  He contrasts reactive aggression—ordinary anger and rage leading to violence—with proactive aggression, which evidently started out as hunting, but was retooled far back in our evolution to become planned, deliberate, often cool-headed violence.  Compared to other primates, humans have much less reactive violence.  We are far less violent than chimpanzees, in particular.  Even the peaceable bonobos rival us.  On the other hand, we display far more proactive violence—our raids, wars, genocides, organized crimes, and the like are at least planned and premeditated, at worst truly cold-blooded rather than passionate. 

He then questions how we could have evolved to do this.  His answer lies in our ability to cooperate to take down excessively violent individuals.  Even chimpanzees do this to some extent.  Humans do it quite generally.  Anyone reading old ethnographies and accounts is aware of the extreme frequency of stories of a psychopathic or hyperaggressive man (it is almost always a man) being quietly eliminated.  Often, four men will go out hunting, three will return, and no questions are asked.  Wrangham follows Christopher Boehm (1999) in seeing this sort of take-down of a dominant or domineering individual as basic to traditional societies.

Wrangham hypothesizes that this happened enough to influence human evolution.  It selected against reactive aggression, but selected for proactive aggression.  Other factors, such as the needs of foraging and food preparation, selected for cooperation.  Once cooperation was established and used in proactive aggression, it was available to allow a group to devastate the neighboring group that shows less solidarity in war. 

This theory is neat, consistent, and plausible, but there is no real evidence for it.  No one has counted the number of males eliminated by cooperative execution.  Moreover, Wrangham weakens his argument by showing that cooperative execution is very often—perhaps usually—invoked against nonconformists, often meek and innocent ones, rather than against bullies and psychopaths.  In fact, it appears from the accounts that bullies and psychopaths very often invoke the violence themselves, and execute the weak—especially weak potential competitors.  This would select for violence, not against it.  It seems that we will have to get better data, and to explore other possibilities.

In any case, Wrangham seems to have at least some of the story.  Truly inborn is a strong tendency to form coalitions that act against each other and, in the end, against everyone’s best interests.  Samuel Bowles and others have explained this as developing in feedback with solidarity in war.  Those who stand together prevail, wipe out the less cooperative enemy groups, and leave more descendants (Bowles 2006, 2008, 2009; Boyer 2018; Choi and Bowles 2007).  This is known as “parochial altruism.”  Individuals may not be locked in “warre of each against all,” but groups very often are.  Richared Wrangham (2019:133-134) dismisses this, finding too little evidence of self-sacrifice for the group or large-scale pitched battles in hunter-gatherer warfare.  This is not exactly relevant.  The only requirement is for groups to be solidary and mutually supportive; individuals do not have to go out of their way to sacrifice themselves.  Moreover, Wrangham has not adequately covered the literature.  There is much evidence for large-scale raiding, small but bloody battles, and defensive aggression among hunter-gatherers (see e.g. Keeley 1996; Turney-High 1949).  Serious and dangerous war is found in all the well-studied sizable nonagricultural groups, such as the Northwest Coast, Plains, and California Native peoples.  Wrangham was apparently misled by his focus on tiny hunter-gatherer bands that do not have the manpower to support large wars.

A different view is provided by Samantha Lang and Blaine Flowers (2019).  They begin from the other extreme: the phenomenon of individuals caring for others who have terminal dementia and thus can never pay back any debts (material or psychological) to their caregivers.  The vast majority of such caregiving is within the family—60.5% from children, 18% from spouses, most of the rest from other relatives—but even this is “irrational” in economic terms, and even in biological terms, since it costs the caregivers and prevents them from investing more in their children.  Moreover, the residual 5% of care is often given by devoted volunteers, who simply want to help others.  They note that all this can simply be seen as an “exaptation” from inclusive fitness—if we are selected to care for kin, we have to care for all kin—but also note that no nonhuman animal is known to do this (though there are some anecdotal records of group-living predators supporting disabled members).

Yet another view comes from work of Oliver Curry, Daniel Mullins, and Harvey Whitehouse (2019).  They hold that people evolved through cooperation, and that cooperation was then constructed as morality.  In their “morality-as-cooperation” theory, there are seven basic values:  “Allocation of resources to kin (family values)…, coordination to mutual advantage (group loyalty)…, social exchange (reciprocity)…, contests between hawks (bravery) and doves (respect) [that is two things]…, division (fairness)…, possession (property rights).”   These they break down into a list of specific values that are very widely held; for instance, family values start with “being a loving mother, being a protective father, helping a brother, caring for a frail relative,” (Curry et al. 2019:54).  They look at 60 societies around the world, finding all that are well reported have some form of all these, except for fairness, which is spottily attested.

To a biologist, the only reasonable explanation is that selection originally operated as it does in all higher animals, through inclusive fitness:  mutual care is deployed among families to maximize genetic success over time.  This then can be extended along ever-wider kinship lines, and to increase in scope to include in-marrying spouses (typically women, in traditional human societies, though in many agricultural societies it is the men that move).  Then further increase of scope takes in whole communities, perhaps via in-laws and distant cousins.  The defining moment (or long period) in the history of humanity was when we extended kinship to include culturally constructed relatives.  This in turn derives, at least in critical part, from the need to marry out—not only to prevent inbreeding but to build solidarity with neighbor groups. 

By this time—the time in the past when kinship extended so widely—the link with genetics is essentially lost.  The huge groups characteristic of modern human societies can form.  We can freely adopt strangers’ children, marry people from other countries, and devote our lives to helping humanity.  However, perhaps the most universally known social fact is that we continue to privilege close family members, and to build solidarity by self-consciously using family terms: Bands of brothers, church fathers and mothers, sisterhoods, fellow children of Adam and Eve.  A very widely known proverb (I have heard and seen it in countless forms) summarizes the normal human strategic condition: “I against my brother; my brother and I against our cousin; my cousin, brother, and I against our village; and our village against the world!”  The closer we are to others, the more solidary we feel with them.  Aggregating along kinship lines allowed Genghis Khan and his followers to build world-conquering armies by widely extending kin claims and tolerance of difference.  On the other hand, the closer we are to others, the more they can hurt and anger us.  They are around us more, and we are psychologically involved with them.  Their opinions matter, and their help is necessary.

            Solidarity in the face of attack by an enemy group is a human norm.  It is probably an evolved behavior, selected for by that situation occurring frequently over the millions of years.  Samuel Bowles (2006, 2008) held that it came from the tendency of larger groups to kill out smaller ones.  Since these groups had cores of relatives, kin selection operated, and gradually wider and wider circles of kin would be solidary, as people evolved or learned the ability to demand loyalty, detect disloyal members, and punish them.  By that model, violence against outgroups would have evolved along with detection and punishment of nonreciprocity within groups.  So long as it is actual defense against an attacking enemy, group loyalty in violent confrontation is a matter of necessity. 

            Most groups are peaceful internally but often at war with neighbors.  These are impossible to explain from old, simplistic models of human behavior.  How could Hobbesian savages or Freudian ids differentiate so cleanly?  How could virtuous “noble savages” be so bloody to their neighbors?  The only view of humanity that allows it is one in which humans are usually living ordinary low-key lives, but can easily be motivated to support their group in conflict, and somewhat less easily motivated to be peaceful and proactively helpful. 

            This makes evolutionary sense.  Groups need to exchange mates, to avoid inbreeding.  This means that selection cannot totally favor one’s own genetic investment all the time.  In fact, there is a paradox: one can maximize one’s own genetic advantage only by having children with a genetically quite different mate.  The classic arguments for genetic determination of selfishness all founder on this rock.  On the other hand, groups also compete for scarce resources, such as hunting grounds.  If there is enough food, larger groups will outcompete smaller ones, and will also have enough genetic diversity within themselves to allow endogamy.  The ideal group size seems to be around 50-100, which, in fact, is the size of the usual human face-to-face group (Dunbar 2010).  Such groups tend to be parts of larger associations, typically around 500, a figure consistent from the number of speakers of a given language in hunting-gathering societies to the number of Facebook friends that a moderately sociable person has; very often, the groups of 50 are exogamous, but the groups of 500 are largely endogamous (Dunbar 2010). 

            In modern societies, groups cross-cut each other, and an individual may have one reference group that is “neighbors,” another for “workmates,” another for “religious congregation,” another for “hobby,” and so on.  This makes it possible to shift groups and loyalties, a point highly relevant to genocide, where an individual can suddenly change from highlighting “neighbors” to highlighting “ethnicity” and killing such neighbors as are suddenly shifted from one to the other.  Such individuals often shift back after the genocide.  This is notably attested for Rwanda (see e.g. Nyseth Brehm 2017a, 2017b).

            Recently, Mauricio González-Forero and Andy Gardner (2018) set out to test what model fit best with what we know of the evolution of the human brain, which more than tripled in size in a mere 2 million years—incredible speed for the evolution of a basic organ.  These authors needed to take into account the origin and dispersal of humans from east Africa between 150,000 and 70,000 years ago.  Their enterprise was highly speculative, involving assumptions that may be wrong, but at least they had considerable data on the genetics, dispersal rates, and behavior of the humans in question.  They conclude that conflictual models of human evolution are not supported.  Conflict is too costly.  Animals that fight all the time would not develop large brains—in fact, they probably would not survive at all.  Human conflicts are indeed costly, reducing cooperation even against the others (Aalerding et al. 2018; see also De Dreu et al. 2016). 

            Simple sociability as a cause of complex behavior is even less well supported.  They found that highly social animals generally have smaller brains than closely related, less social species.  Care substitutes for thinking.  They conclude that only ecology can account for it.  A positive feedback loop exists between finding more and better food and having a bigger, better brain.  More brain enables us to find, select, and prepare highly nutritious food.  Humans have adapted increasingly over time to seek out rich patches of good food. 

            Graeber and Wengrow (2018) hold that humans probably evolved in larger and more complex groups than usually thought, and that problems of equality and conflict are endemic to such groups, which then develop ways to cope.  Such coping may be successful or may not be.   As I have pointed out (Anderson 2014), an animal that can find rich patches of food can support a large group.  Best of all, we can talk, and thus tell the group that there is a dead mammoth behind the red hill, or a lion in wait beyond the stream.

            González-Forero and Gardner have not explained how humans became so violent.  The obvious answer, avoiding the high costs of conflict, is that humans evolved to move rapidly into new habitats, displacing smaller groups they found in the way.  The resulting gains would outweigh the costs of conflict.  This has happened countless times in history; it surely happened countless times in prehistory.  Human hatred of opponent groups and disregard for nature must come in part from predatory expansion.

            People also have rather poor innate controls on killing off their food supply.  Most human groups have learned how to manage sustainably, but they often overshoot, and in any case the learning was originally done the hard way, if local myths and stories are any guide.  Traditional peoples usually have tales of overhunting and then starving.  Children are told such stories with the morals clearly spelled out.

            The nearest to a common thread in the evolution of human badness is “my group and I at the expense of others.”  One’s group usually comes first.  Cross-cutting and nested allegiances make groupiness problematic, however, affording hope for more solidarity.

The imperative human need for society—without which we cannot normally survive—makes ostracism and rejection the most frightening of possibilities.   People become defensive at the slightest hint of it.  Antagonism, aggression, and stark fear result.  Anger and insecurity lead to defensiveness and sour moods.

3. Human Variation

All humans must satisfy basic physiological needs, including genuine physical needs for security, control of our lives, and sociability.  Beyond that, people are highly variable.  They vary along the now-classic five dimensions of personality—extraversion, openness, conscientiousness, agreeableness, and neurosis—from total introverts to total extraverts, from rigid closure to expansive risk-taking, and so on.   Some of this is known to be highly heritable.  Much is caused by culture and environment.  Early trauma actually changes gene activity (epigenetics).  Even gut microbiota are credited for affecting behavior.

From what has been said above, one would expect the most relevant variation to be in weakness, insecurity, and tendency to anger, and that is what we find.  The combination makes people defensive.  They become the people who “have a chip on their shoulder” and “have an attitude.”  Being weak and insecure makes one highly reactive to threat or harm, and apt to be passive-aggressive about it.  Being insecure and angry leads to the barroom brawler and similar folk characters.  Being weak, insecure, and angry, whether dispositionally or situationally, leads to overreaction: escalation of defensive behavior, often to violence. Note that “situationally”; individuals can be very different at different levels of threat and harm.  Yet disposition always matters.  Some people have enough strength of character to stay unbroken in tyrants’ prisons.  At the other extreme, the tyrants themselves are often living proof that a weak, insecure, hostile person who has assumed total power will still be weak, insecure, and hostile.

Beyond that, whether they are violent are not depends on what they have learned—culturally, socially, and personally.  Individuals violently abused in childhood very often become violent adults.  Mass murderers and major bullies are virtually 100% certain to have been abused physically (see Batson 2011; Baumeister 1997; Zaki 2019; and other sources on the good).  Similarly, cultures constructed by people who have long been weak, insecure and subject to abuse (and thus anger) naturally put a high value on defensiveness and “honor.”  Such is the history of the border-warrior cultures at the fringes of old and oppressive civilizations, of oppressed subcultures within dominant cultures, and of subcultures of anomie and alienation. 

Conversely, the more people are self-confident, secure, and self-controlled, whether dispositionally or situationally, they can damp down responses to challenge, and react rationally and coolly.  The human average seems to be toward the more weak, insecure, and angry end, if only because we all start that way as infants.  Self-efficacy (Bandura 1982) must be learned and developed. 

Competitive distinction is challenged easily, and social disrespect and slighting become pretexts for revenge up to and including deadly force.  Anti-intellectualism follows when people insecure about their own lack of self-improvement and education are rendered really uncomfortable about it, either by direct insults or by seeing better-qualified but “inferior” people rise.  Much of America’s all too well-known anti-intellectualism and anti-“elitism” comes from people in dominant groups who see people from less prestigious groups moving up the educational and cultural ladders.

Deviation from the mythical-average person described above occurs because of cultural and social teachings, specific insecurities, general perceived level of threat, and personality traits such as openness, conscientiousness, and agreeableness.  More specific learned themes, such as how to show anger, how to be violent, and whom to hate, then come in as the final stage of shaping the bad and good wolves.  

            A few resist the pressures to kill during mass genocides.  They have strong internal controls on aggression.  Others are less constantly moral, but most humans have a great deal of innate empathy—abilities to feel others’ emotions and sensations, understand them, and act accordingly (Denworth 2017).

            Some few, on the other hand, seem genuinely evil.  They seem almost incapable of acting without harming someone.  These are generally called sociopaths or psychopaths:  people who appear to have been born without a moral compass and without a way of acquiring one.  Others seem moral enough most of the time but apt to lapse into uncontrollable violence.  These are not insensitive individuals.  Unlike autistic people, who are usually well-meaning despite lack of social abilities, psychopaths and hyperaggressive persons often seem to have preternatural social skills.  “A person with autism spectrum disorder has little ability to assume the perspective of someone else.  Psychopaths, on the other hand, understand what others are feeling but have a profound lack of empathetic concern” (Denworth 2017:61; cf. Baskin-Sommers et al. 2016).  They may have anomalies in neural connections in the brain.  Serious killers may be far more troubled than ordinary psychopaths.  The one mass murderer I have known was both mentally deficient and severely disturbed.  By contrast, people I have known who killed in war were perfectly normal.  They were also traumatized by the experience. 

            Sociopaths seem residents of a different world.  They lie without a second thought, and, even when it clearly is against their better judgment, they seem to prefer dealing treacherously and unfairly with others.  Ordinary rational self-interest simply does not work for them.  I have known several who regularly wrecked their lives by wholly gratuitous betrayal.  They simply could not understand why betraying others brought outrage. On the other hand, one of the sociopaths I knew was a prominent politician, and—though rather notorious—has never been singled out as being worse than many colleagues. 

            Psychopaths and sociopaths are, in fact, notoriously successful in business and politics.  Published descriptions of genociders make many of them seem psychopathic, but tests are obviously lacking. 

            There are also extremely aggressive individuals, sadists, and others who verge on psychopathy; most have a background of brutal abuse in childhood, by parents and peers, or of major trauma.  Some may simply be “born that way,” others appear made by environment; a harsh, hostile, critical environment worsens all.  

            Mass shooters are so common in the United States that profiles of them have been assembled by researchers.  The shooters are very often white supremacists targeting ethnic minorities (Cai et al. 2019).  Jillian Peterson and James Denaley (2019) report a more specific set of findings: “First, the vast majority of mass shooters in our study experienced trauma and exposure to violence at a young age.  The…exposure included parental suicide, physical or sexual abuse, neglect, domestic violence and/or severe bullying….Second, practically every mass shooter…had reached an identifiable crisis point in the weeks or months leading up to the shooting.”  This included things like job loss and relationship failure (often, I take it, related to progressive alienation of the shooter).  Third, most of the shooters had studied the actions of other shooters”—they were diligent students.  “Fourth, the shooters all had the means to carry out their plans.”  They could get guns, including illegal guns, though most simply bought guns at the store or used ones already in the home.  “Most mass public shooters are suicidal, and their crises are often well known ot others before the shooting occurs.  The vast majoirty of shooters leak their plans” but are not taken seriously, nor are they reported to authorities. 

            Most people, however, are peaceable, empathetic, and reasonable most of the time.  We can arbitrarily guess that at most 10% of humanity are deeply evil—not always acting badly, but doing evil on a regular enough basis to produce serious net harm to their communities.  This 10% figure is supported by crime rates, vote totals for extremist candidates, and common experience.  Others show social dominance orientation (see e.g. Altemeyer 2010; Guimond et al. 2013), looking favorably on high levels of social and economic inequality in society and to patriarchal social organization.  Dominance is not a human need, but certainly is a widespread want, and the simple desire for it is a major source of evil.  Most mammals have dominance hierarchies.  Humans are notably lacking in innate tendencies in that direction (Boehm 1999), but very often develop them anyway, especially via top-down hierarchic systems.

            These dubious actors can be balanced by the best 10% or so:  the individuals who never say an unkind word, are unfailingly sensitive and considerate, give gifts and donations freely and save little for themselves, and devote their lives to careers in healing, teaching, charity, and aid.  The sad evidence of the genocide literature suggests that even such people can be corrupted, though only with difficulty.  The reasons for such variation in mentality are partly unknown, partly developmental.  The latter shall be discussed below.

            The other 80% (approximately) of us are the people within whom the two wolves constantly compete.  Common experience suggests that there is a straight and unbroken continuum from the most evil through the bloody-minded to ordinary middling souls, and then to the 10% who are near sainthood.   There are continua from acceptance to rejection of groups, from positive to negative-sum gaming, from laudable ambition to power-madness, from necessary defense against enemies to defensiveness based on cowardly fear.  It is hard to cut these continua. 

Defensiveness attenuates as it moves up toward actual strength and reasonableness, the cures.  It also attenuates if people collapse into total fear.  It moves outward to callousness and then thoughtlessness.  The core mood is more or less that of a child’s temper tantrum:  a mix of violently negative emotions from which fear, anger, and rage slowly differentiate as the child grows or as the adult gets better control.

            The common ground is simple: wanting social and economic security, especially in social acceptance and position.  What matters is how rationally and cooperatively one seeks to satisfy those wants.

            One might think of a continuum from a clearly demented psychopath (like Mexico’s drug-gang leaders) to an ordinary criminal gangster, then to a schoolyard bully grown up to be a spouse abuser, then to an ordinary person who grumbles and scolds and occasionally fights but rarely harms anyone, and then onward to a basically good and honorable soul who loses her temper on frequent occasions but does no worse than that, and finally to a truly virtuous individual—say, the leader of a charitable medical group.  I have observed this continuum everywhere I have been, and through literature and psychological studies we can be sure it is essentially universal.  People everywhere range from very bad to very good, as they range from passive to active and from weak to strong (the classic three dimensions of agentive evaluation; Osgood et al. 1957). 

            Common experience also teaches that those of us in the 80% tend to weasel good and bad.  We drive too fast.  We eat at cafes that underpay their staff.  We take advantage of cheap deals when we know there is some dirty game on.  We skimp on public commitments.  We spend too much time giving nibbles to the bad wolf while trying to serve the good one.  We shirk, laze, dodge responsibilities, and commit the “deadly sin” of sloth.  We are, in short, frail and fallible humans—and require strong social standards backed up by law to keep us on the straight and narrow path (as discussed at length in Henrich 2016).  Religious and moral ideals must be enforced by social conventions.  Most of us have experienced life in communities where traffic laws were laxly enforced, and have seen ordinary “good” people slip into more and more dangerous driving until accidents make the police take better note. 

Allow that people are, on average, 50% good and 50% bad.  (Again, these are guesses.  We have no real measures.)   The worst 10% can win by mobilizing the 40% who are worse than average but not totally evil, and then getting enough of the relatively good to make a majority.  In fact, Hitler was elected with a bare plurality, not a majority, and the same is true of many elected evil leaders.  Trump was elected by 25.7% of the voting public, with almost half of registered voters not bothering to vote at all.

Half good, half bad predicts the institutions we see in societies: they are meant to preserve the good, and to redirect the bad to fighting “the enemy” rather than the rest of us.  And they never work perfectly.

            People vary from best to worst along several dimensions.  The most important of these from the point of view of explaining evil are agreeableness vs. hostility, tolerance vs. hatred, peacefulness vs. violent aggression, help vs. gratuitous harm, reasonable vs. unreasonable, open-minded vs. closed, and charity vs. greed.  Behind these are deeper continua: Individual to group; weak to strong; attacking weak to attacking strong; courageous to cowardly; greed to defensiveness; rational to irrational.  People can hate those richer and more powerful, or—more usually—the weaker.  They can be cold and callous or savagely furious.

All these are related.  All are consistent with the “Big Five” and “Hexaco” personality theories.  The Big Five personality dimensions—extraversion, openness, conscientiousness, agreeableness, and neuroticness—are predictive: individuals low on agreeableness and high in neuroticness are more apt to do evil than those who are the reverse.  People very low in openness become conservatives, and thus often involved in fascism; those very high in openness may become left-wing rebels.  There are, however, good or evil persons who are at the best or at the worst ends on many or all measures.  Social pressures as well as personality are determinative.  The Big Five (or Six) do not directly predict levels of violence, aggression, competitiveness, or hatred.  Genocide and other extreme mass-level evils come from hatred, so it must be considered the worst of the lot, and though it is probably commoner among the less agreeable and more neurotic it is well distributed over the human species.  Degree of scapegoating, and targets of scapegoating, are also hard to predict from basic personality factors; they are social matters, largely learned, though the tendency to scapegoat others seems part of human nature.

            Greed is often regarded in the US as the worst of sins, a belief going back to Paul on love of money.  However, selfish greed succeeds in mass politics only when it marshals support through whipping up hate.  The few rich must have the support of millions of less affluent; these can be persuaded to act and vote against their self-interest only by making them sacrifice their own self-interest out of intemperate hate.  We have seen this in every genocidal campaign in history, as well as in almost all wars, and many political and religious movements.

            Moreover, greed is often a social hatred issue; it is not really about material wealth, but about rivalry for power—for control of people and resources.  The normal expectation if one wants a material item (for itself) is to cooperate with others to work for it, or at least to work for others in a peaceful setting.  Smash-and-grab is not the normal or widely approved way to get goods.  Neither is crime, ordinary or white-collar.  The rich who desire endless wealth are not after wealth; they are after social position and social adulation. 

            Really extreme, high-emotion evil thus usually comes from social hatreds—whether due to psychosis, greed for position, “honor,” extreme defensiveness, extreme need to control others, extreme sensitivity to slights, or—most common and deadly of all—displacing hatreds and aggressions onto weaker people or onto defenseless nature. When not feeding from those troughs, the bad wolf tends to go to sleep, leaving the field to the good wolf.

            In other words, people will kill in competition for goods, but more usually negotiate; they kill for land in wars, but tend to negotiate there too.  They kill in competition for power, which is more dangerous since positions of power are necessarily limited.  Above all, they kill for reasons of social standing and honor.

            Genocidal killing goes further: it is usually focused on religion or political ideology—givers of fundamental morals and of security.  Where ethnicity is more the source of basic values, ethnicity is the ostensible cause.  A pathological leader, or indeed almost any dictator, will be sure to stress the links, identifications, group memberships, and reference groups that provide the best opportunity for stirring up hatred and violence.  This is the secret to extremist leadership: make the most deadly links the most salient.  Recruiters for jihad, for instance, stress the Islamic, and specifically Wahhabist, identification of people who might otherwise see themselves as French, or Moroccan, or factory workers, or soccer players, or any of the other cross-cutting loyalties we all have.  A genocidal leader will also do best to appeal to a majority that feels itself threatened or downwardly mobile.

            The reasons for violence and evil are, in order, security, power, greed, prestige/standing, and psychopathy (or basic aggressiveness), plus the critical ingredient: violence and/or cruelty as preferred coping strategy.  Anger and hate are the mediators, and hatred is generally defensive.  Even callous bureaupathy has to start with someone who makes a deliberate choice to destroy poor people to give more money to rich people.

Personal factors involved are concerns of power, control, social place, and greed and other wants.  The social and cultural contexts are all-important, telling individuals whom and how much to hate.  The worst individuals seek out each other.  They also seek out the worst cultural and social values and attitudes.  This produces a strong multiplier effect, highly visible in right-wing social movements.  Cowardly defensiveness, gain (not just greed but even routine jobs), power and control needs, and innate aggression levels all play into such attitudes.

            The same individual who is an angel of help and mercy within his or her group can be a formidable soldier, a suicide bomber, or a crazed killer when group defense is involved.  In fact, the same individual can be alternately angel and devil to his or her own significant other, as many stories of domestic violence tell us. 

            Revenge is often the most terrible of motives.  People tend to be at their very worst when thinking they are revenging selves for slights, disrespect, or actual harms.  This is when they cheerfully torture and murder.  Thus all genociders wind up focusing on a story of their group being victimized by the opponent group or groups.  This is absolutely key to understanding genocide and extreme violence.

            Revenge is often for betrayal.  Betrayal is another common response of the human animal to threat and fear.  Suspected betrayal can bring about real violence.  A vicious cycle can be established, as in Shakespeare’s Othello.

            Finally, different forms of violence seem to accompany different personality profiles.  Mass shooters are typically alienated young males, usually right-wing.  Domestic violence is associated with high control need, as noted.  Bullying, as we have seen, is associated with glorification of physical strength and devaluing of intellectual qualities as well as weakness.  Sheer aggressiveness can be a separate personality trait, as can the closely related “oppositional personality disorder.”  Spread over these types are the general qualities of alienation, excessive control need, excessive antagonism, resort to violence as first resort, and brooding or ruminating about real and imagined wrongs.  These are the real foods of the bad wolf—the human qualities that we must address to give the good wolf a chance. 

4. Cultural Variation

            Cultures also vary.  “Culture” is a general term for learned, shared knowledge and behavior within social groups, above the family level.  Cultural knowledge is constructed over time by interaction between group members.  It can change rather fast, as when a particularly violent period such as WWII forces people to confront issues they often try to avoid. 

Since humans will inevitably compete for scarce resources, conflict is inevitable.  All societies know theft, violence, and treachery.  All condemn these and have mechanisms for coping with them.  Especially touchy are issues with affection, social support, and control.  These may or may not really be limited, but people often perceive them so.  Power is particularly problematical, since there is less and less “room at the top” as one ascends a hierarchy.  Conflicts, especially over power and control, tend to escalate, creating fear and stress.  These in turn make people defensive, leading to still more conflict.  We need not be Hobbesian to see that conflict is likely in the human condition. 

This being the case, all cultures include a great deal of shared and often widely-accepted knowledge about anger, violence, conflict, conflict resolution, and other relevant matters (Beals and Siegal 1966).  All cultures include canonical rules for dealing with conflict and violence.  All cultures have storylines and plans about these matters.  All cultures include stories people tell to provide models of how to deal with violent conflict.  Children are raised on stories explaining how to defuse a fight.  Adults go on to Homer’s Iliad, Shakespeare’s history plays, China’s Three Kingdoms Story, Japan’s Tale of the Heike, and on down, from these epic works to the latest Hollywood action movie.  People constantly refer back to these model cases.  Genocide stories, especially the story of Hitler’s Holocaust, have become part of the world’s knowledge pool. 

            Knowledge from one realm is freely adapted to others.  We draw on knowledge of ancient history to understand modern war.  We draw on knowledge of animal conflict to understand the deepest roots of our own.  Drawing with the best judgment on the widest set of data is an ideal to strive for, but biases—often culturally constructed—interfere.  Clearly, changing cultural plans for dealing with violence, dissent, and conflict is basic to understanding such processes (Beals and Siegal 1966).

A pattern broadly visible in eastern Asia is one in which both individuals and societies can flip from extremely peaceful to extremely violent and back to peace.  Chinese dynasties exhibit this pattern: during times of strong government, they were very peaceful and orderly, but in dynastic breakdown periods, violence became universal and appalling.  Japan had similar flips, for example from the rather calm Ashikaga shogunate to the civil wars of the 16th century and then the peaceful and orderly Tokugawa shogunate.  A modern case is Cambodia.  The Cambodians were famously peaceful.  They dropped rapidly back to peaceful behavior after the meltdown in the 1970s that killed some 25% of the population.  Rwandans moved from genocide to peace and order with surprising ease.  Like Cambodians, they are usually gentle and tolerant people, far from the western media stereotypes of “savage tribal Africans.”

            Still other societies have chronic low levels of violence, fluctuating but never very high.  Still others, especially in the Middle East and northern Africa, have fluctuated over time from constant low-level violence to major outbreaks.  Some few, such as the Waorani of South America, are or were almost continually violent.  Clayton and Carole Robarchek studied the Semai of Malaysia, among whom violence is condemned and virtually nonexistent, and then for comparison studied the Waorani, who were rapidly killing themselves out until missionaries persuaded them to be more peaceful (Robarchek 1989; Robarchek and Robarchek 1998).  The societies turned out to be strikingly similar in economy, child-rearing practices, and other behaviors; they differed in that the Semai dealt with conflict by flight and avoidance, the Waorani by almost immediately escalating to violence. 

            Mountainous borderlands tend to be famous for violence.  Think of the Caucasus and the Appalachians.  Fertile plains are more easily pacified, both because farmers have more to lose and because control is easier to exert.  People in any setting may change.  The Scottish borders that were once infamous for violence—immortalized in some of the world’s greatest ballads—are now among the most peaceable places on earth.  We have already noted the example of the Vikings, to say nothing of the now-peaceful Waorani.  When threats from stronger neighbors were constant, and internal problems could not be solved because of constant trouble, these societies were violent.  When security within and without was possible, they pacified.

A different way of looking at society and culture concerns the form of economy.  Overall, rentier societies, especially those with servile labor, produce right-wing politics; ones dominated by secondary and tertiary industries and hopeful workers often produce left-wing activity.  The United States has generally been hopeful, so votes progressive in bad times, but often right-wing in good times, to keep taxes low and industries growing.  The rise of southern-style politics in the United States, and its spread to the northern midwest, tracks the rise of primary production and declining but still powerful heavy industry, and the rise of giant firms vs decline of small ones. 

In short, cultures and societies, like individuals, respond to insecurity by becoming more defensive, and to physical threat by becoming more violent.  With confidence and security—from strength and from secure leadership—they can and will change rapidly in more peaceful directions.  Of course, such facts deal a death blow to the myth of “human nature.”  If Hobbesian devils can convert to Rousseauian angels in a few years, and if whole societies can suddenly become violent and as suddenly stop, where are the primal drives?

Societies must also find ways to deal with the formation of sub-societies with different rules: feuding, mafias, corruption, etc.  Then there are two variables: how well the society can enforce the rules, and how well its members want to.  The rich and powerful are above the law to some extent in most societies, and they may be perfectly happy to let mafias terrorize the general populace.  On the other hand, a society as totally at the mercy of gangs as El Salvador and Honduras are today, or as riven by religious and tribal conflicts as Afghanistan, cannot long survive with a crisis.

            Social differences are often in the cultural construction of bullying, power-jockeying, and hatred.  These can become idealized and culturally taught, via religion and other ideologies.  Nazism is the most obvious and extreme case of a culture constructed from such bases, but it is only the most extreme of many movements.  World religions eventually construct power via hierarchies, initiations, and other institutions.  All cultures construct aggression through ideas about war and defense.  Religion usually includes peace, harmony, and nonviolence among its ideals, but it is also the source of foundational beliefs and foundational morals for many or most societies, and the most important source of security for many believers.  Devout believers who depend on religion for both certainty and security often feel deeply and directly threatened by challenges to their faith.  The same goes for true believers in any comprehensive ideology, from communism to fascism.  Gods are usually either benign or a human-like mix of creative good with all-too-human foibles (like Zeus and Coyote), but all religions also postulate a vast host of evil spirits who mean nothing but harm: demons, devils, bad winds, ghosts, demiurges, and countless more.  These projections of human fear and hate into the supernatural realm fit Durkheim’s view of religion as the collective representation of the community (Durkheim 1995 [1912]); they are the community’s worst—and most often hidden—feelings, displaced outward.

            Many of the cultural groups that committed the worst genocides were famous for their obedience to authority: Cambodians, Rwandans, Chinese, Germans, Indonesians…the list is long.  Many warlike and independent groups also became genocidal, but the link with obedience is clear enough to be thought-provoking  The great genocides—ones in which the populace in general seems to have gone mad with blood—were generally in such societies, though the Turks and several other exceptions can be mentioned.

            Since overreaction to negatives is the general problem, it follows that culture can establish the idea that one should overreact.  This regularly occurs in cultures of “honor” (Baumeister 1997; Henrich 2016).  Defensiveness can seem moral in highly unstable societies.

            Cultures provide scripts and storylines and schemas for action.  These cultural models (to use the technical term) provide canonical ways to deal with or adapt to life.  Most of them are adaptive and valuable, but every bad type of action has its model too.  Hitler’s anti-Semitism drew on centuries of pogroms and massacres, well scripted and following a set of plotlines.  Contemporary Islam provides accessible models for suicide bombing.  In the United States, there is now an all too well-known cultural model for mass shooting, followed in one form or another by hundreds of alienated, angry, often sulking individuals—most of them young men and many of them white supremacists or similar right-wingers (Cai et al. 2019).  There is another cultural model for spouse abuse; similar models of mistreatment exist in most other cultures.  Other cultural models exist for criminal gang behavior, robbery, suicide, and other violent acts.  A desperate person needs only to activate the model.  He or she will learn what weapons to use, how to obtain them, how to deploy them, and what to do next.  Planning is simple and kept to a minimum.

            We have also seen above how social and cultural pressures act on everyone—even the least alienated, and indeed especially the most conformist and well-socialized—to get the vast mass of individuals to go along with genocide.  Here, direct social pressure, including threats of ostracism or worse, is added to the cultural models.

            In ordinary everyday violence, the bad wolf wins when a particularly susceptible individual—aggressive, alienated, or simply angered beyond bearing—is subjected to social pressure to act violently, and has an available cultural model of how to do it.  In war and genocide, everyone is expected to join in and do their bit, and almost everyone does.  In bullying, terrorism, and domestic violence, only some do; they are alienated or desperate for control, and they nurse their sorrows until an available cultural model becomes salient.  Terrorists are usually persuaded by intense pressure from their social group.  In all cases, violence depends on a prior development of anger, hate, and need to assert control.  Individuals get into a tighter and tighter spin of negative emotions.

5. Inevitable Conflicts

An agent-based approach (in the tradition of Ibn Khaldun and Max Weber) allows us to see that humans do not just reflect their culture.  They balance family, cultural group, subcultural group, father’s people, mother’s people, spouse’s people, immigrant neighbors, and last but not least their own interests as individuals.  People are constantly faced with moral choices of whom to go with and how much to cheat selfishly. 

The hardest problem is how to deal with social criticism and disrespect.  The descendant of territorial defensiveness in animals is human defensiveness about social place and social position—“honor,” “face,” etc.  (Humans are not territorial in the sense most mammals are.  We socially construct space in all manner of free-form ways; see Lefebvre 1992.) 

The great Greek tragedies, the best of the medieval epics, the Scottish tragic ballads, and equivalent literature around the world (including many Native American tales), reveal people in crisis situations, where they are forced to reveal their deepest selves.  In the crises when ordinary life is disrupted, individuals are forced into extreme good and evil behavior.  Many of these dramas turn on inescapable conflicts between two loyalties.  Often, as in Scottish ballads and many Native American stories, the drama turns on loyalty to true love versus loyalty to family.    The heroes and heroines are powerful, but have the costs of their virtues, the fatal flaws that comes with their power. 

These stories may be the best ways to understand humanity and its conflicts. Great literature strips off ordinary everyday conformity and reveals the bare human in full glory or vileness.  Greek tragedies do this.  So do Medieval epics, Chinese classical stories, and other great works.  Folk literature always contains such stories. 

They are critically important for understanding humanity.  First, they show that people are agents, not mindless slaves of genes or culture or society; everyone has to deal with and, hopefully, resolve such conflicts.  Second, they show that cultures are not homogeneous, and mindless conformity cannot work indefinitely.  There are cultural models of different loyalties: loyalties to different groups that often come into conflict.  There are tradeoffs between long-term and wide-flung interests and short-term narrow ones.  There are conflicts over allocating resources.

            An inevitable conflict often recorded in song and story is between security and advancement.  Advancing in society requires taking some risks.  People usually and naturally act to minimize risk for maximum advancement, but there are plenty of exceptions, and they are often the leading entrepreneurs and inventors.  Managing to try to make advancement opportunities more secure is a major part of economic behavior for many of us.  Cutthroat competition is thus stressful.

            The conflict most relevant to the present book is the one between loyalty and morality.  When dictators whip up their populations to commit genocide, this conflict becomes agonizing.  Most people choose loyalty, as we have seen.  Many are perfectly happy with it—they wanted to eliminate the minorities anyway—but many are not at all happy, and have to be steamrolled into it.  Already noted is the inevitable conflict over rank and the resulting problems with arrogance, humility, ranking out, and insult.

            These songs and stories turn on courage and on failure, on individuals against the world, and on opportunity and challenge.  They are the corrective to dismissing and devaluing people.  The hero powerful against the storm, especially if the hearer or reader can identify with that hero, is humanity in compelling form and inescapable predicament.

            In modern society, traditional folk and elite societies, communities, and cultures are thinned down or extirpated.  People are left to the tender mercies of vast, impersonal governments and firms.  This not only disempowers them; it also robs them of those canonical stories that once modeled behavior in conflicted times.

 This out-of-control inequality, and above all the sheer bigness, makes people feel weak, out of control of their lives, and lacking in self-efficacy.  They become timid, and succumb all the more easily to toxic conformity and obedience.  Lost are such empowering and strengthening cultural forms as great art and literature, and even ordinary civility and decency.  Weakness and fear makes people desperate for security, including material security; the result can look like greed, but is actually cowardice.

6. Explaining It:  Fight, Flight, Freeze

            People are usually sociable, but react to threat as all large, strong animals do, by fighting back.  They are stressed not only by direct threat, but by threat to their social position, and their sense of control of their lives (Bandura 1982, 1986; Langer 1983). 

            The fight-flight-freeze response is wired into the nervous systems (Sapolsky 2017, 2018).  Faced with superior strength and an escape route, an animal will flee; with no escape, it will freeze; if it is cornered and attacked, it will fight, even against superior strength.  This response is mediated through the ancient limbic system in the lower back part of the brain.  A threat is first processed by the amygdala, which recognizes and catalogues it (the amgydala being also a center of memory, as well as the center of much emotionality).  A message goes to the hypothalamus, where the center of the fight-flight-freeze response occupies a small group of nuclei that release aggressive behavior, including speeding up the heart, raising blood pressure, and directing blood toward appropriate muscle and nerve systems (thus away from functions like digestion).  This area sends messages down to the pituitary gland, attached to the bottom of the hypothalamus.  Hormones are released from the anterior pituitary, and circulate through the body, stimulating—among other things—release of adrenaline and cortisol from the adrenal glands (Fields 2019).  Adrenalin and the bone-derived hormone osteocalcin drive the actual physiological responses that are the core of the fight-flight-freeze response (ScienceBeta 2019).

All this is under varying degrees of control from the frontal and prefrontal cortex—very little in a lizard, a great deal in a well-socialized human.  In a human, “the frontal cortex makes you do the harder thing when it’s the right thing to do” (Sapolsky 2017:45, emphasis his).  That can mean doing what is reasonable (foregoing a reward now for a bigger one later) or what is social (foregoing a theft because it is morally wrong).  Conversely, stress disorients.  Sustained stress and fear lead to chronic biologic responses that impair judgment and lead to heightened responses (Sapolsky 2017:130-1360).

Under such conditions, animals and people can flip almost instantly from peaceful, calm behavior to extreme violence.  This is the biological substrate of the change from good wolf to bad wolf. 

Humans have considerably complicated the response. We are faced, more than other animals, with a tradeoff between reacting emotionally and rationally.  The medial frontal cortex, home of social emotionality, dominates empathetic and sensitive choices, and—with other regions—cognitive empathy (Kluger et al. 2019; Lombardi 2019).  The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is more involved with “cool, utilitarian choices” (Kluger et al. 2019:12).  The ventromedial prefrontal cortex integrates many of these, and processes morality and its social applications, as well as cognitive interaction choices.  It is conspicuously absent in reaction of psychopaths to others’ pain (Lombardi 2019:20).  More interesting, in psychopaths, is their lack of connection between the reward processing center of the brain—the ventral striatum—and the center for examining outcomes and consequences, including emotional ones, in the ventral medial prefrontal cortex (Lombardi 2019:29). A quite different situation is found in people on the autism spectrum, who may be socially challenged but are generally well-meaning, trying hard but often failing to be social; damage to the anterior cingulate cortex is suspected.  It seems that differences in brain regions and connections lie behind a great deal of human good and evil.  This does not explain why the same individual can transition so rapidly from one to the other.

In people, because of the necessity to prioritize dealing with threat, hate is all too often stronger than love, viciousness stronger than caring, defensive resistance to change stronger than greed or desire for self-improvement.  Chronic threat and stress crystallize the fight response into hatred, the flight response into escapism, and the freeze response into conformity or apathy.  One result is that polls often mispredict how people will act: people generally answer that they want more wages, or better health care, or other positive things, but then vote or act their hate.  This led to massive misprediction of the 2016 election results. 

Flight can thus be into video games and daydreams, freezing can be labeled “depression” or “laziness” by psychologists or judgmental peers, and fighting is usually verbal rather than violent.  Still, all the limbic responses are there, underlying the prefrontal plans and cultural instructions that introduce the complexity.  (Much of what follows is derived from, or at least agrees with, Beck 1999 and Staub 2011; Gian Caprara [2002] has critiqued Beck’s model for being too narrow and not covering a wide enough range of situations and contexts, so the model is somewhat expanded here, following Caprara.)

            The most basic root of aggression is fear (on which see LeDoux 2015).  Any animal capable of fighting will fight when threatened or attacked, if there is no alternative.  Animals also fight for resources:  for mates above all, but also food, space, and other necessities.  This may involve fear of loss of necessary resources, but often—especially with mates—it is simply fighting to win desired goods.  Sheer discomfort—sickness, hunger, loss—can also make most animals more aggressive or fight-prone.  The order is:  Stressors; feeling of inadequacy or frustration; defensiveness; then, if the bad wolf wins, hatred and aggression.

            Grief can also be a source of stress and thus of violence.  The role of grieving in motivating suicide bombing has been addressed by Atran (2010).  In many cultures, from Appalachia to New Guinea, grief over previous killings leads to revenge, and is expected to do so.   

            The human difference is that humans are compulsively and complexly social (Henrich 2016).  They live by, through, and for their social systems: families, communities, neighborhoods, networks, and—in the modern world—states.  Humans feel fear when these communities are threatened.  Even humans not at all involved in a community will often feel fear or anger over seeing it attacked.  People willingly die for their communities.  We routinely observe the heroism of soldiers sacrificing themselves in war, parents dying to save children, suicide bombers blowing up supposed enemies (Atran 2010; Bélanger et al. 2014), and even gutter punks dying for their drug gangs. 

            Such fighting, fleeing, and freezing are structured along social lines.   The usual human condition, socially constructed on the innate bases described above, seems to be kind, friendly, and warm to one’s in-group, hospitable to strangers, hostile to opponent groups in one’s own society, and deeply hostile to individuals in one’s own society who seem to be a threat to one’s control or to society’s most fundamental beliefs. The real problem is threat to social place and position, which can lead to anything partner abuse to international war, depending on the scale.  Threats to social beliefs lead to savage persecution of “heretics.”  Heretics and minority religions are the victims of many of the very worst massacres.  They usually live mixed in among the orthodox.  Perhaps the intimacy is related to the extreme violence of such persecutions.  Cognitive dissonance can make people act worse than they might.

            It is also universally known that people are most easily united by being confronted with a common threat, especially a human threat—an invading army, looting gangs, or simply those “heretics.”  Leaders and would-be leaders thus tend to seek or invent enemies.

            Existential threat—simple fear of death—also exacerbates hatred.  In a fascinating study, Park and Pyszczynski (2019) found that making fear of death salient to experimental subjects made them become more defensive about their group identification and core values, and more intolerant and antagonistic toward others.  They found, moreover, that mindful meditation could reduce this, and eliminate it in practiced meditators, providing a rather unexpected and potentially important weapon against hate.

            Thus, natural human tendencies to deal with fear by fighting or escaping can be mobilized by leaders.  All they need to do is mobilize fear—whether it be fear of war, or economic problems, or change, or minority groups getting ahead, or any other stress—and convince an increasing sector of the population that this problem can be handled by removing some group.  Typically, people will redirect anger they feel against targets unsafe to criticize, or even just anger from stubbing their toes or having problems with the house, into hatred.  Hate of the strong is unsafe to act out, so it is displaced onto the weak.  Scapegoating—hating people or groups through displacement—is the most cowardly of the defense mechanisms.  Intolerance is a close second.  Denial, rigidity, and low-level escapism are among others.  

            Doğan and collaborators (2018) have found, studying modern Ethiopian societies, that war is much less likely in egalitarian groups, because everyone is at risk and no one gets a huge chunk of the spoils.  In hierarchic societies, the leaders are less at risk (young men do the dying) and yet get disproportionate shares of the loot, as well as increased power.  So they are happy to invoke war.  The current world situation, where national leaders are not only safe from fighting but often have never served in the military, is an extreme case of this.

            There is a whole decision tree in the fight-flight response.  Responding to stress, people must decide—at some level, usually preattentive—to fear it or not.  They then decide which of the three possibilities to choose, and at what level of response—from verbal confrontation to murderous attack.  They must then decide where to direct their efforts.  If they fight, they can direct action against actual enemies, as in war and revolution, or displace action against weaker parties instead of against the actual threat.  This is a strikingly common response among some animals, notably baboons.  It is clearly related to human bullying, and thus to the hypertrophied bullying that is genocide. 

            The basic principles of a cognitive-emotional explanation of evil can be summarized as follows.  First (and in this case going back to Freud’s defense mechanisms), people tend to blame other people—not fate, not the structures of the economy, not the weather, and most certainly not themselves—for whatever goes wrong in their lives.  The root of much evil is the belief that we can fix our problems by controlling or eliminating other people, rather than by rational means.  This is particularly true of people who have weak confidence in their control of their lives and situations.  (See especially Bandura 1982 on self-efficacy, and the rational-emotional psychology of Albert Ellis, e.g. 1962; the cognitive-behavioral work on evil of Aaron Beck 1999; also Baumeister 1997; Maslow 1970.) 

            Antagonism is the general cover term for the usual sources of evil.  It is usually mindless, coming from culture, conformity, or orders.  Its natural basis is the normal “fight” response to threat, but it is increasingly distorted by weak fear, especially when weakness is part of cultural norms.  The daily kibble of the bad wolf is frustration, resentment of trivial or imagined slights, everyday irritation, rejection, disempowerment, harassment.  This is especially true if one assumes the slights and minor rejections are due to malignant intent (Ames and Fiske 2015).  The raw red meat that gives it strength and power to take over is social hate.

Political anger—which appears to be the main anger in modern societies—is most certainly decided on: one learns who to hate and persecute and how angry to get, and one must decide to follow the leaders in this.  The steps one’s mind goes through in dealing with stress involve decisions at every point.  First, one must identify something as a threat.  Then one must decide whether to react with flight or fight.  One must decide how much flight or fight to apply. 

This requires attention to what is actually causing the threat.  If one is being chased by a bear, no questions need be asked, but dealing with widespread social problems is something quite different.  Reasonable alternatives include distancing oneself, resenting silently, turning the other cheek, being as pleasant or fearless as possible, and just bearing hardship.  From there, the next step is to actual caring: helping, enjoying, working.  

A more important realization is that we are dealing with two phenomenologically different kinds of emotionality.  The fight-flight-freeze response, and the fear and anger that are part of it, are normal.  Quite different is the weakness and consequent out-of-control fear that comes from personal lack of confidence, lack of support, and lack of courage.  Cowardly emotions differ from these normal equivalents.  Honest fear in the face of a real threat is not the same as irrational panic in the face of a trivial one.  Real anger—wrath at actual injury—is different from the fearful anger of a person who has no confidence in his or her ability to control a situation, and therefore hysterically overreacts.  Carelessness from sheer inattention to detail is not the same as defiant sloppiness or toxic irresponsibility.  Love is not the same as dependence and controlling clinginess, especially since the latter competes psychologically with real caring interest in the other person.

In violence in general, but especially in genocidal movements, these play out in different ways.  The initial leaders and revolutionaries are hard-nosed fighters, animated by hatred and opportunism but not scared of anything.  Very often they have been devalued through no fault of their own: they are poor, or from marginal regions (Napoleon’s Corsica, Hitler’s Austria, Stalin’s Georgia), or they are short or disfigured, or something of the sort (cf. Dikötter 2019 for several cases).  Far-right-wing acquaintances of mine (I have known hundreds, over a long life) follow a pattern: they arr males, from the dominant reference group (white in the US, land Cantonese in Hong Kong, and so on), but neither affluent nor well-educated nor very successful.  Accounts suggest that this is typical.  Such people, from Napoleon to my acquaintances, become resentful toward society, and make up in anger and oppositional stance what they lack in social prestige.  They are anything but weak and fearful.  (This compensation theory of problematic behavior has a long history and literature.  It has been abundantly qualified and nuanced; the simple form is not a total explanation.  See our usual sources, notably Baumeister 1997, Beck 1999.)

The vast majority of genociders and other killers, however, are weak and defensive—low in self-efficacy, in Albert Bandura’s terms.  (See the thorough and insightful discussion of such matters in Bandura 1982, 1986.)  They are the conformists who require only social pressure from the leaders to turn murderous.  Individual sense of weakness is much less of a problem if the self-doubting person feels he or she has family or community support.  This should be obvious, but requires some reflection.  The kind of support, the areas in which one is supported or not, and the people doing it (family or friends or the wide world), all matter greatly.  We all are weak at times, and defensive at times.  Most, perhaps all, of us feel weak and defensive in the face of overwhelming threat or stress.  It always sets a limit on our coping.

An important and thoughtful recent study by Robert Bornstein (2019) puts this in real-world situational perspective.  Studying domestic abuse (my prime model for genocide), Bornstein found sky-high rates in two mutual dependence situations.  First, when a man is dependent on a woman for personal validation and she is dependent on him for emotional and financial support, he feels a powerful need to control her and she finds it very hard to escape.  Second, when adult children are dependent for financial support on an elder who is dependent on them for physical care, elder abuse is highly likely.  In these cases, the problems of lack of control and desperate need to assert it become obvious.  

My sense is that the real back story of genocide and similar mass killing is precisely this weak defensiveness.  Ordinary fear and harm lead to the ordinary fight-flight-freeze responses.  Weak defensiveness leads to a quite different cluster of behaviors:  above all scapegoating and bullying, of which more below, but also to passive-aggression, taking extreme offense at trivial or imagined slights, extreme jealousy and envy, petulance, silent resentment, and similar mechanisms.  Brooding about these is the real food of the bad wolf.  If I am right, the back story of mass violence is the ability of strongman leaders who brag of being above the law to mobilize latent weak defensiveness, resentment, and frustration, and turn it against scapegoats.  They are the constituency that votes for such men, the passive citizens that allow coups by such men, and then the obedient subjects of such men. 

The worst of it is that the more overwhelming the situation, the more weak and defensive we all get.  Hard times and strongmen bring out the weakest and most defensive side of people.  This is the key reason why they are so easily mobilized to break from passivity to hatred of scapegoats. The break point where the good wolf gives way to the bad wolf, in every studied case of large-scale genocide and mass murder, comes when the leaders get enough power and social visibility to exploit weak defensiveness and other hatreds to flip the masses into genocidal mode.  As so often, Rwanda provides a particularly well-studied case (see Nyseth Brehm 2017a, 2017b, and references therein).

This explains the rarity of people like Oscar Schindler standing firm against genocide.  It requires a level of self-confidence, self-control, and community-supported morality that very few of us have.

This is one half of the explanation for political extremism.  The other will be discussed below: the conflict between groups that feel they are downwardly mobile and those that are moving up.  This classic Marxian conflict drives much of world politics today.

7. Power and Control

            It is notoriously easier to unite people against a perceived enemy than for a good cause (Bowles 2006; Henrich 2016).  Thus, evil tends to win, in the “real world.”   The larger the organization the more dangerous this tendency becomes.  An empire or a giant firm will attract the power-hungry, and they will often rise rapidly, since they are unencumbered by the scruples that restrain most of us.  Since people follow their leaders, history shows that people are considerably worse in aggregate than they are as individuals.

People often unite more easily against good others than against evil ones, because it is easier to go after weaker and milder than against the powerful and brutal.  Moreover, being good tends to be a small-scale, personal activity, while hatred gets extended to whole classes of people.  The weaker, more salient, and more physically and socially close perceived enemies are, the easier to go after them.  So evil often starts with domestic violence.  Even more often, it starts with attacks on weaker neighbors or on oppressed minorities.  Actual enemies are often the last to be attacked, since they will fight back.  It is easy to unite people through conformity to exclusionary norms (Henrich 2016).  Tolerance and openness, however, are a bit of a psychological luxury; they sharply decline when people feel their mental energy is exhausted (Tadmor et al. 2018).  Still more of a luxury is actual enjoyment; one must be out of threat zone to relax enough to cultivate the arts of life.

            The worst problems occur when power-mad people figure out how to use morality to sell their drive for power.  Religious hatred is the commonest way, but nationalism, militarism, and communist and other revolutionary ideologies have done as well.   In the United States we have seen hatred justified by opposition to illegal immigrants, by appeals to law and security, and even by opposition to “hate speech,” which seems always defined as strong speech by one’s opponents. 

            The rich often want power and status, not money per se.  (What follows is a skeletal outline of material on power reviewed in Anderson and Anderson 2012, 2017; see also Traverso 2019.)  They thus will play zero-sum and negative-sum games with the rest of us, because they want relative positions.  They want to be powerful more than they want money (not that they mind having more of it also).  Critical is that Success, or Power and Control, or Wealth and Status, is their whole life involvement, not just one thing they want. 

            Thus we may say that evil is usually done for four reasons:  callousness toward people who “don’t count”; anger toward people who do count—very often loved ones and family that one wishes to control but cannot control; hatred toward specific groups, almost always scapegoated minorities; and hatred of actual enemies.  Greed as a factor may lie behind these, but it generally acts through them; the selfishly greedy dehumanize or disregard their victims.  This produces some ambiguity.  In a war, one must maximize killing of the opposition, including civilians and ordinary unfortunates drafted by evil but personally safe overlords.             

            Another major background factor in evil is negative-sum gaming.  This often involves seeing the world as steadily declining, such that one can do better only by taking from others.  It views resources as limited.  This view tends to come from a focus on social power and status, where positions really are limited and one is controlling or controlled; economic welfare is more easily spread or increased for all, but it too often involves competition over limited goods.  Often, people who feel the world is getting worse see themselves as hopelessly downward-bound; they see no way to slow this except by taking more and more from weaker people and groups.  This was visible in much of the voting for Donald Trump.  His backing was concentrated among people who saw their groups as downwardly mobile.  They saw their best hope in getting what they could, while they could, at the expense of other groups.  Fear is abundantly obvious in such cases.  The resulting policies are hardly helpful; taking oneself down to take others down even more—the suicide bombers’ logic—is ruinous in the long run.

            Hate is successful at unifying society, blinding people to ripoffs and corruption, getting otherwise unmotivated people to fight for their exploiters, and otherwise allowing evil people to get the mass of ordinary people on their side.  The main generalization is that the more deeply important a social identification is, the more hatred it can mobilize.  Religion so often leads to especially irrational and extreme violence because it is about basic issues.  Yet, far less important matters can cause fighting; even sports team rivalries may lead to war (Anderson and Anderson 2012).

            The range of behaviors goes on to touchiness about “honor,” overattention to negativity, holding people to ridiculous standards, rage, overcontrolling, dominating, domineering, general antagonism, inimical attitude, and finally violence and murder.  Common or universal is an attitude that everyone’s bad traits are what count; their good does not.  People become rigid and judgmental.  Minor slights become cause for murder.  These can be at individual or group levels.  Mass shooters fit the profile: alienated, usually young, males, dealing with threats to personhood or social place by indiscriminate murder-suicide.  Ability to think rationally or morally suffers in proportion.  Ability to enjoy and love suffer too (Bandura 1982, 1986). 

            The common ground here is insecurity leading to irrational levels of harm to the “threatening group” or “the competition.”  The worst and commonest reason is direct threat to one’s personhood.  Following that come desire for wealth, power, control, prestige, status, lifestyle. 

Always, in group hate, there is either a massive devaluing of certain groups or a general defensiveness, and usually both.  The front story is actual evil or good; the mid story is the emotions and feelings that motivate; the real back story is destructive competition versus cooperation.  The ultimate back story is individual defensiveness, weakness, neurosis-psychosis, and other psychic factors.

Sidebar

The basic axioms of authoritarianism are:

Since I’m in power, I’m better than you.

My first need is to keep you under control.

Your differences from me—especially in such basic matters as religion and ethnicity—are bad: threatening, inferior, inappropriate, offensive.

You must be kept weak.

Since raw fear is the easiest and most straightforward way to do this, torture and cruelty are central elements of power and discipline.
But, since those attract resistance, in time they must be softened by an ideology of “good” and “ideals” plus development of a socio-political-economic structure that keeps the weak down. 

The rulers, or would-be rulers, are the Chosen People.  “Progressives” are often as bad in this regard as other bigots.

I’m more powerful than you, so I make the rules.  This holds all the way from “I’m the mom, that’s why” up to the dictator level.

            If people learn rational or common-sense ways of coping with fear and threat, they are less likely to fall into hatred and toxic conformity.  If they do, however, they may become authoritarians.  The “authoritarian personality” created by Freudian mechanisms (Fromm 1941) has not stood the test of time, but “authoritarian predispositions” leading to an “authoritarian dynamic” are now well attested and studied (Duckitt 1994, 2001; Stenner 2005).  They are called up or exacerbated especially by normative fear: fear of the breakdown of the social norms that give what the authoritarian mind considers necessary structure to society.  These norms typically involve norms that keep minorities and women “in their place,” and otherwise create a rigid top-down order.  Learned helplessness (Peterson et al. 1993) often leads to toxic conformity.

            Authoritarian predispositions and behaviors may include devotion to strongmen, hatred and fear of homosexuals and other norm-benders, love of stringent punishment for lawbreakers (especially those low on the social scale), militarism, and similar conditions.  There is, however, a great range of ideology here, from the near-anarchist violent right wing to the genteelly hierarchic older businessmen of a midwestern suburb.  It seems likely that we are dealing with several different responses to weakness in the face of threat, the common denominators being a need for a strong-man leader and a need for underlings to blame and oppress.  Authoritarianism is surprisingly common within societies and surprisingly widespread over the world (Stenner 2005).

            This rests on several observations about human responses to threat and stress.  Three other important ones deserve attention:  People hate in others what they dislike in themselves (especially if they feel guilty about it); they like in others what they want for themselves; they use their strengths to make up for their deficiencies.  These are all involved in bullying and authoritarianism.  Bullying can have permanent negative effects on bullied children’s brains (Copeland et al. 2014).

            The problems usually follow from cowardice and hostility, which reinforce each other.  In an isolated person, they come out as giving up, or as setting oneself against the world.  In the far commoner case of a social person, they come out in displacing aggression against the weak.  Fear forbids aggressing against actual offenders (if there are any); antagonism is displaced downward, to scapegoats.  This usually leads to bullying them.  Of course, as Robert Sapolsky points out, “You want to see a kid who’s really likely to be a mess as an adult? Find someone who both bullies and is bullied” (Sapolsky 2017:199).  That probably describes virtually all serious bullies.

Bullying involves belittling them: regarding them as low or worthless.  Underlings use malicious gossip to get back at powerful bosses. “I’m better than you” and “I’m worse than you” are bad enough, but the worst is “I’m worse than you, so I have to pretend I’m better, and if in power I have to bully you.”  The classic bully is resentful toward the world at large.  He attacks both the weak (“contemptible”) and those in authority; he revels in breaking laws and conventions (Sapolsky 2017:199).  Bullies resent civility; it interferes with their activities, and they brand it as “weakness.”  They resort to lying and “gaslighting” as routine methods of manipulating others, and to insults.  They tend to be violent and unpredictable.

            A standard bullying routine is to insult the victim, then take any response as an “offense” and “slight” that justifies attack.  Imagined slights are quite adequate.  The genociders’ version of this is the attribution of all manner of horrific but imaginary sins to the targeted group; Hitler’s claims about the Jews are the most famous in this regard, but all genociders—at least all those with a recorded history—do it.  Genocide is bullying writ large.

            Another very common aspect of bullying is that bullies are adulated as “strong” and “independent” by those who would love to be bullies but are too personally weak.  They become groupies, followers, toadies.  Women who are afraid to be violent themselves, but would love to be bullies, find male bullies irresistible, leading to a remark attributed to Henry Kissinger, “power is the best aphrodisiac.” 

            Evil people, from ancient Greek demagogues to Hitler and Trump, can most effectively get the least competent of the tier-just-above-bottom to hate the bottom tiers.  Failing that, they can always whip up nativistic hate of foreigners, especially immigrants. 

            Most movements that end in authoritarianism and genocide start by recruiting bullies and haters, then gather momentum.  Not until they win, and succeed in turning the polity into a dictatorship or turning a local community into one defined by hate, can they recruit the vast mass of ordinary people.  However, there are cases in which many followers are genuine idealists, not bullies, and then the picture is complicated by the restraint introduced by the idealists.  Stalin in the USSR was infamous for purging his movement of these idealists, leaving only those who were either bullies or saw repression as simply a necessary job to do.

            Following, again, Baumeister (1996), Baron-Cohen (2011). Beck (1999) and others, we can identify several subtypes of persons who despise or hate downward.  The widest and most general category is those who simply believe in the necessity of hierarchies and of maintaining those hierarchies through keeping those below firmly in their place (as described by Haidt 2012, and argued, in effect, by Aladair MacIntyre 1984, 1988).  An extreme form is the strongman philosophy that argues for rulers being above the law, or being the law, and often acting outrageously simply to show they have the power; this was the classic attitude of European royalism, and is similar to the politics of modern strongmen.  At the other end of power distribution are the weak and timid souls who desperately try to maintain their position by keeping firmly down anyone that seems to be below them.

            Opposed to these views are two types of philosophy.  First comes abjuring all anger and negative judgment, as advocated by many religions.  The second is directing one’s anger against the powerful, especially the powerful and lawless or harming, as advocated by revolutionaries.  This latter allows anger to be directed upward rather than scapegoated downward in a social hierarchy.  This is not necessarily a good thing, as we know from the sad ending of many revolutions. 

            We have now come to the core of what feeds the wolves.  The bad wolf is fed by fear socially channeled into scapegoating and bullying; by culture and society based on top-down power that is poorly restrained; and by personal grievance and offense coming out in hate and irrational harm.  This may be deployed in the service of greed, sadism, defense, or “honor,” but the basic animal is the same.  The good wolf is fed by the opposite: dealing with problems as rationally and peacefully as possible, in a society where equality and tolerance are values.  This too may be deployed for gain or defense or any other purpose.  The rest of this book will be dedicated to unpacking that simple formula.

            Fear and fight lead to three overarching social vectors: ingroup versus rival group; general level of hostility; and minimizing.  These are called “othering” today, and often considered to be a part of human nature.  This is not correct.  The actual direct causes of evil appear to be cowardice, hostility, and minimizing or infrahumanization.  The first two are overreaction (overemotional reaction) to fear, threat, and hurt, with structural opponentship (not just difference) seen as a threat.  The common ground is seeing people, or some people, as bad or unworthy.  All or some people are to be bulldozed, dominated, or preyed oneven family and friends, let alone real opponents. (On discrimination, see Kteily, Bruneau, et al. 2015; Kteily, Hodson, and Bruneau 2016; Parks and Stone 2010; Rovenpor et al. 2019.) 

            The third is failure to consider people as fully human, or even failure to consider people at all.  People become Kantian objects (Kant 2002): mere numbers on a spreadsheet, dirt to be bulldozed out of the way of construction projects, or underlings to be disregarded.   

            Such minimizing can be aggressive.  It can be cold and calculating. It can be simply mindless—just not thinking of the problems of the servants or workstaff.  It involves devaluing people: maintaining that they are unworthy of attention, concern, or care.  Sometimes it involves not noticing people at all.  It tends to go with callous indifference, as opposed to hostility and anger.  Anger shows at least some respect for the opponent; the opponent is worthy of being noticed and hated.  Not infrequently, the opponent is even considered superior, as when revolutionaries attack the state, or a David goes up against a Goliath.

            Othering without much hostility is typical of traditional people; they know the “others” are different, but have little to do with them.  Usually, strangers and travelers are welcomed, often very warmly.  My wife and I have traveled the world and almost never run into hostile reactions, nor have our students of all backgrounds and economic situations.  Exceptions are neighboring groups, often traditional rivals for land and resources.  Hostility without much othering—without displacing it to an outgroup—produces gangsters and aggressive loners. 

            The human norm seems to be occasional anger and aggression against even one’s nearest and dearest, great aggressiveness against structural-opponent groups, and indifference to the rest—the unknown multitudes out of one’s immediate ken.         One consoling lie that such people tell themselves is that we live in a just world (Lerner 1980), in which people get what they deserve.  The poor are lazy, the rich worked for their wealth.  People displaced by dams somehow deserve to be displaced.  Genociders come to believe fantastically overstated lies: the people they hate are truly evil, subhuman, the sources of all ills.  Thus, to the totally other, evil is done from callousness: coldly planned aggressive war, bureaupathy.  There is then a continuum through “different” members of one’s own society—internal others—to family members.  The closer people are socially, the more hatred is necessary, or at least usual, before harm is done.

            The most clearly established fact is that infants are born with some degree of innate fear of strangers, and the more different those strangers look and act from the parents, the more the fear. Thus, some degree of “othering” on the basis of appearance and voice sound is normal.  On the other hand, infants show acute interest in other people, especially faces, toward which they orient (Tomasello 2019).  They seem innately primed to recognize the more universal emotional expressions: smiles, angry looks, and so on.  Moreover, people differ at birth in how shy they are and how aggressive they are.  These vary independently, apparently. 

Infants react quickly to smiles, reassurance, gentle touch, and other marks of friendship, and react in the opposite way to frightening stimuli like shouts and rapid, dramatic movement.  Infants also look to their parents for signs of how to treat the stranger.  They are extremely reactive to parental moves and voices; the parents may be completely unaware of how strongly they are signaling the infant.

            From birth, people can react along a whole spectrum of ways, from initial fear but quick reassurance and friendliness to initial fear made worse by scary stimuli.  This is rapidly exacerbated by the reactions of parents, siblings, and soon other family members and friends.  Culture enters in right from the start, by conditioning the reactions of all these important people in the infants’ lives.  By three or four, children already know that certain recognizable groups are liked while others are disliked.  They learn gender roles, clothing associations, and other quite complex cultural messages to a striking degree (Tomasello 2016, 2019).  Much of this was learned quite unconsciously, with no one intending to teach, and without the children realizing they were learning.

            This means that any group of people will show a variety of reactions, not notably predictable.  The most predictable thing is that every group will have its structural opponent groups: groups that they feel are competing with them for power, land, jobs, resources, social recognition, political sway, poetry, art motifs, foods, and anything else that people compete about.  The word “rival” literally means “sharer of a river bank” (Latin rivus, riverbank), in recognition of the universality of arguments over water, especially for irrigation; in the western United States, “whiskey’s for drinking, water’s for fighting,” as Mark Twain said.  In the United States, the classic divide has been white vs black, and in much of the US today “race” and “diversity” means, basically, that antagonism.   In Canada, the same “worst structural opponent” attitudes are white vs Native American (First Nations to Canadians). Blacks in the US and Native Americans in Canada are notably overrepresented in “hard case” stories in the media.  (This struck me when I compared Seattle and Vancouver, BC, newspapers in the 1980s.)  Stories of substance abuse, crime, and welfare dependence often feature photographs of them, even where they are a very small percentage of such “hard cases.”

            Going back in history, one recalls the love-hate—mostly hate—relationship of England and France, of France and Germany, of Germany and Poland, of Poland and Russia, and so on forever.  And throughout Europe the Roma are victims of vicious prejudice; they are often the ones in the hard-case stories in the newspapers, even when they are a microscopic percentage of the national population.

            To my knowledge, every culture has prejudices like this.  Moreover, as we all know, different stereotypes go with different groups.  To white racists, blacks are “inferior” and “dumb,” “Mexicans” (by which they generally mean anyone with a Latin American heritage) are “rapists” and “criminals,” and so on.  To many American blacks, all whites are suspect and all or almost all are racist and dangerous.  These views are variously nuanced.  We have probably all encountered racists who hate “blacks” but sincerely like their close friends and neighbors who happen to be black: “He isn’t really a black guy, he’s old Joe.”

            One reason for such self-contradictions is the degree to which “old Joe” conforms to local norms and morals.  A complex field experiment in 28 German cities showed considerable bias against helping hijab-wearing women, but the same woman without the hijab but still obviously a Middle Easterner got about as little hate as a clearly native German woman. Moreover, and more importantly, if the hijab-wearer helped protest littering (by a confederate of the experimenters, of course!), she was helped in turn at the same levels as the non-hijab-wearers (Choi et al. 2019).  The general conclusion is that foreigners who mark their “difference” from the host society are accepted if they mark their “similarity” to the host society by proactive behavior. 

            Typically, individuals who regard a group as low or despicable put up with its members as long as they “keep their place,” but not when they try to assert equality or rights.  Racists who tolerate “old Joe” do not tolerate Al Sharpton.  Misogynists may love their docile wives (in a patronizing way), but hate feminists.  When I worked with fishermen in Hong Kong, I found the same phenomenon: fishermen were regarded as lowly by most of the rest of society, but were tolerated unless they tried to assert full equality.  The psychology seems essentially universal in stratified societies.

            Relations of power notoriously exacerbate hatreds.  This is so extreme, so obvious, and so universal that no one misses it.  Less obvious is the effect of specific kinds of power.  Blacks are notoriously in a particularly bad place in American society because they were enslaved.  “Mexicans,” however, are the structural opponents who are most devalued by South Texas white

racists, because of Texas’ history of breakaway from Mexico and later oppression of Mexican workers.

            Hard times sometimes make hatreds worse, but sometimes draw the country together and thus make hatreds recede somewhat; the Depression gave us Hitler in Germany and the New Deal in the US.  Good times can make hatreds worse, especially if a large percentage of the majority is left behind watching a tiny group get richer and richer, as in the US in the 1920s and since 2016.

            This being the case, it is inevitable that politicians invoke hatreds and usually do everything possible to whip them up and make them worse, the better to “lead” the “people” against the “foe.” 

To foreigners from realms too distant to be actively stereotyped, most people worldwide are welcoming and friendly.  There is a range from incredibly hospitable to quite suspicious and unfriendly.  The former is usually found in stable, secure communities.  The latter response is common in highly ingrown communities like the stereotypic European peasant villages, but also in highly unstable and insecure communities

            A common claim is that religious hatreds are often the worst.  This seems true especially in the monotheistic “Abrahamic” religions, though it is more widespread than monotheism.  In so far as it is true (it seems to be untested), the reason probably is that religion is about the most basic values, hopes, dreams, and beliefs that people have.  (It is not about how the world started!  The world-origin stories are there just to provide some validation.)  In China and historic Central Asia, much less intolerance was observed, because religions were not given such narrow and dogmatic interpretation, and value sets existed independently of faiths.  On the other hand, many of those who are extreme in religious hate are not deeply knowledgeable about their religion (see e.g. Atran 2010 and Traverso 2019 on Islam), and may fight only for meaningless tags instead of content, as Edward Gibbon accused Christians of doing in the war between homoousia and homoiousia.

            A final generalization is that othering relationships and stereotypes change fast.  We have observed immigrant groups to the United States get stereotyped by the media within a few years.  We have observed the rapid demonization of Muslims in the US. 

The common theme of all these matters, and of all evil, is rejection of people simply for being what they are.  In Paul Farmer’s oft-quoted remark, “the idea that some lives matter less is the root cause of all that is wrong with the world.”  (This line is very widely quoted, but I have not found a source citation.) They are condemned simply because they are poor, or Jewish, or female, or black-skinned, or rich, or any of the other things that give hateful people an excuse to dismiss whole categories of humanity.  However, extreme rage and hate are very often deployed against wives, husbands, children, parents, close friends, and other loved ones.  Family violence seems, in fact, to be a strikingly accurate small-scale model of genocide.  Assassination is even farther from Farmer’s general case; it involves targeting people because they are important.  Thus, while usually the targets of evil are downvalued, sometimes they are targets specifically because they are highly valued.

            Othering takes many forms.  One recalls the British stereotypes of “foreigners” and “savages” in the days of the British Empire: French ate frogs and snails and were effeminate, Germans drank beer and were big and dull, Italians were dirty and noisy and smelled of garlic, and so on for every group the British contacted.  American stereotypes of the 20th century were usually similar, though less well defined.  Children’s books reveal these stereotypes most clearly, and were one of the main ways they were learned.  Political cartoons often trade on them to this day.

            The same general rules apply to hate and disregard for other lives—for animals and plants.  Cruelty to animals and destruction of nature are common.  The mindset seems to be the same: either uncontrolled rage at the familiar, or displacement of hate and fear to weak victims, or sheer indifference backed up by social attitudes.  The Cartesian idea that animals are mere “machines” that have no real feelings has justified the most appalling abuses. 

            Summing up, evil occurs in four rough attitudinal clusters:  negative stereotypy; callousness (cold indifference, selfish greed, cold callousness, etc.); anger, rage, and hate, variously directed; and psychopathy-sadism. 

10 Groups and Group Tensions

            A final part of the back story is that humans everywhere dislike foldbreakers—people who conspicuously resist conforming to basic social rules.  Even people who are unusually good may be disliked because being so good is “different” (Parks and Stone 2010).  Usually, enforcing conformity serves to make cantankerous or poorly-educated people fall in line.  Very often, however, it simply makes people hate anyone conspicuously unlike the herd.  Individuals (including geniuses and artists) or groups (Jews in Christian countries, black people in white countries, and so on) are targeted.   A further cost is that members of devalued groups lose their sense of autonomy in proportion to the level of devaluing and repression of the group (Kachanoff et al. 2019).  They become less able to help themselves, precisely when they most need to do so. 

Groups cope with foldbreakers by trying to covert them, by ostracizing them, or by learning to live with them (Greenaway and Cruwys 2019), but all too often by killing them (Wrangham 2018).  The group may even break up, if foldbreakers form a large faction (Aalerding et al. 2018; Greenaway and Cruwys 2019).  All groups experience conflict, all have conflict resolution mechanisms (Beals and Siegal 1966), but when mechanisms are ineffective genocide often results.  Intergroup competition makes for solidarity—in fact it is famously the best way to develop that—but intragroup competition is deadly to solidarity, and must be resolved for a group to function, so available methods are sure to be used—even if fatal to minorities.  Intragroup deviants can be hard to spot, which makes them particularly frightening to the more sensitive group members (Greenaway and Cruwys 2019).  Particularly in danger are highly salient groups that seem relatively wealthy or successful to majorities, especially if the majorities feel themselves stressed or downwardly mobile.  Jews in Depression Europe, Tutsi in Rwanda in the difficult 1980s and early 1990s, and any and all educated people in Cambodia in the 1970s serve as clear examples.

The level of sensitivity to intragroup variation varies enormously from person to person, society to society, and culture to culture, something little studied.  Anthropologists have documented intolerance to deviance and consequent occasional breakup of communities among the Pueblo tribes of the southwestern United States, among small southeast European villages, and among Middle Eastern village societies, among others, while high levels of tolerance are documented for some—not all—urban trading and commercial communities.  More confusing still is a pattern, notable among some religious communities, for extreme tolerance of many kinds of behavior but extremely rigid observance of defining traditions of the group.  Intragroup deviance is a matter that needs more theoretical attention. All religions attack the major evils, but people do evil and then claim their religions made them do it.  There are always excuses.  Morality is never enough.  But, with laws, people can create peaceful communities.  Evil is not necessary.  It can be reduced to low levels. 

            Critically important is awareness that there is a continuum from good to evil, and specifically from actual enmity to utterly unprovoked genocide: from treating people with antagonism, as enemies, because they actually are so, to treating them as enemies because they might really be a threat, to treating people as enemies because they seem different and numerous enough to seem a threat to fearful leaders, to treating any different group as a threat simply because its difference is obtrusive or because it is in the way of settlement or “development.”  This tends to correspond very closely with the continuum from courageous fighting against attacking force to increasingly cowardly displacement of aggression to ever weaker targets. 

            People may believe that a currently weak group is secretly powerful, or might become so, and could be a threat.  Preemptive strikes then occur.  The Jews were a small, innocent, relatively defenseless minority.  Hitler directed against them all the anger stirred up in Germany by the loss of WWI and the Depression, and then revived and greatly extended the old image of the Jews as all-powerful and all-destroying. 

            A more local example is intimate partner violence.  This almost always involves a man, usually the physically stronger of the pair, beating a woman because he feels that he is somehow losing control of her (B. Anderson et al. 2004).  Very often, he feels generic anger against the world, or against stronger people in his life, and takes it out on the most vulnerable available person: wife, child, older parent.  Domestic violence is extremely close to genocide—it might even be called the individual-level equivalent (Anderson and Anderson 2012, 2017). 

11 Self-esteem and “Moral” Evil

            Roy Baumeister, in his book Evil (1997), documents at length the unexceptional nature of people who do evil things.  He also documents the degree to which they self-justify: they think they are doing the right thing, or the reasonable thing, or the expedient thing.  They rationalize to avoid guilt, and they use carefully disinfected language.  Most commonly of all, they think or say that they are only doing what everyone does.  In genocides and slave camps, they are right; everyone in their situation is indeed doing it. 

            Baumeister demolishes the old idea that evil people are those with low self-esteem; it appears that the worst problem in that area is with people who have “high but unstable self-esteem” (Baumeister 1997:149; his emphasis).  They are often bullies, because they think highly of themselves but are insecure enough to be wounded by challenges.  People need some degree of self-esteem and self-regard, so they concentrate on their strong points and minimize others’ lives and endowments.

            He also debunks the idea that evil people dehumanize their victims.  They most often see their victims as fully human—just not deserving of normal consideration.  In recognition of this, Castano (2012) suggests the term “infrahumanization.”  Baumeister runs through the standard explanations for violence (“greed, lust, ambition…” on p. 99—the classic land, loot, women, and power—as well as sadism and psychopathy), only to show how inadequate they are; crime rarely pays much, lust turned evil does not feel particularly good, and ambition served by evil rarely ends well.  Greed to the point of ripping others off, or crushing them, is not usually profitable in the long run.  It is normally done when society forces people into evil ways of making a living, such as raiding in Viking days or slaving in the 18th century.  He sees “egotism and revenge” as more important (Baumeister 1997:128-168).  People committing evil are often showing off their ability to maintain their power.  “Threatened egotism” (Baumeister 1997:377; Baumeister et al. 1996) is the deadliest of the factors he lists. 

            This, however, results from two things: basic predisposing factors of personality (threatened egotism, sadism, psychopathy) and immediate triggering factors (greed, idealism).  Moreover, “greed” is not desire for material goods; it is willingness to get material goods at the expense of other people, harming them in the process.  The same goes for social position, social acceptance, and even desire for power and control.  They are not bad in themselves, because they can be, and often are, used for good.  They become evil and cause harm when they are won at the expense of others.  

            Those triggers do not cause evil in people who are not in a state of hatred, bullying, or overcontrolling others.  In people who have fed the good wolf, desire for material goods is satisfied by working with others for the common good, or at least by healthy competition of the Adam Smith variety; desire for social acceptance and approbation is satisfied by being nice enough to be genuinely liked; desire for power and control is satisfied by being a good leader and administrator.  We all know people who are not particularly nice or pleasant people, but who make good administrators anyway, simply because it is the reasonable thing to do.  People are notoriously sociable, and do not need Immanuel Kant to explain that good social strokes are, in the end, more rewarding for most people than inordinate wealth or power.  We are left no closer to an explanation of why ordinary people without the basic personality factors of a psychopath become genocidal or become slavers.

            Baumeister also points out that much evil is done in the name of good—of idealism.  He is, like Ames and Fiske (2015), far too quick to believe that murderous “good-doers” (from the Inquisition to the Khmer Rouge) believe what they say.  My rather wide experience of those who talk good but do evil is that they are usually, and consciously, hypocrites.  At best, their willingness to do real harm in the name of imaginary good is hardly a recommendation for their morals.  Idealism that involves little beyond torturing people to death hardly deserves the name of idealism.  It is not an explanation for evil; it simply raises the question of why people sometimes think that torturing is idealistic, or that idealism can reduce to murder. 

            On the other hand, idealism that necessarily costs lives but really is for the greater good, like the fight against fascism in WWII, can be genuine.  Similarly, defensive war against invaders is often a good thing.   Of course, idealism can get corrupted fast, as in the French and Russian revolutions.  The boundary between good and evil is the point at which a reasonable person, independently judging the situation, would judge that there is clearly gratuitous harm occurring.  Rationality is hard to achieve in this world, but necessary in this case.  (Influence by Immanuel Kant, esp. 2002, and John Rawls, 1971 and 2001, is obvious here; I am following them on “rationality” in this context, thus avoiding the need to explain it.)

            Acting reasonably good seems the default option for most people most of the time.  It is even difficult to make people into killers.  Not only the Nazis, but also armed forces everywhere, have always had trouble accomplishing this (Baumeister 1997:205-212). 

            However, even the most trivial differences in feeding eventually allow the bad wolf to take over from the good one.  The strongest desire of humans is social belonging; therefore, people feel strong needs to conform to social norms and to whatever social currents are flowing (see e.g. the studies of Kipling Williams [2007, 2011] on ostracism).  The currents are not always good ones.          

            Albert Bandura’s book Moral Disengagement (2016) points out that evil is often done for alleged moral reasons (as in religious persecutions), or for openly immoral ones (as when a sadist psychopath kills), but most evil involves some degree of moral disengagement: minimizing, excusing, or justifying what is done.  Bandura covers the individual agency involved in this, and also the way society magnifies that by marshaling euphemisms, blaming others, playing the “you do it too” card, minimizing damage, dehumanizing or partially dehumanizing victims, personally disengaging and becoming callous or escapist, causal displacement, attribution of blame to the victims or to the wider society, and above all justifying one’s behavior by claiming a higher morality.  Bandura covers recent newsworthy events: gun violence and gun culture, terrorism, banking crimes, pollution and environmental damage, capital punishment, and others.  He thus spares us (most of the time) the citing of Hitler that tends to let moderns off the hook. 

            Moral disengagement, victim-blaming, and self-justification are indeed typical of almost all human activities that do harm and of almost all humans that harm others.  The problem with Bandura’s book is that he lumps evil morality (fascist ideology, Communist extremism) with disengagement, which is surely wrong.  Still, Bandura has done an extremely important task in covering with great thoroughness the ancillary mental gymnastics that allow people to harm and kill without much guilt.  Moral disengagement leads to bureaupathy.

            Alan Fiske and Taj Rai (2014) have argued that almost all violence is moral: it is justified by the moral teachings of the society in question.  They point out that violent behavior such as blood revenge, horrific initiation rites, war, raiding, human sacrifice, brutal discipline, and physical punishment have all been considered not only moral but sacred duty in literally thousands of societies around the world.  Steven Pinker (2011) reminds us that revenge killings, duels, killing of one’s own disobedient children, rape and killing of slaves, and many other forms of mayhem were not only accepted but approved in western society—including the United States—well into the 19th century.  Disapproving of such behavior is very recent.  Antiwar sentiments are also recent.  Taking over land by exterminating its occupants was universal, and broadly accepted, until the mid-19th century. 

            Fiske and Rai see societies as displaying relational models.  These come in four kinds, which can all be combined in one society:” communal sharing: unity… authority ranking: hierarchy…equality matching: equality [Rawlsian fairness]… and market pricing: proportionality” (Fiske and Rai 2014:18-21).   There are six “constitutive phases” of moral violence: “creation [of relationships]… conduct, enhancement, modulation, and transformation [again of relationships]….protection; redress and rectification…termination…mourning” (sacrifices, self-mutilation, and the like as mourning rituals) (Fiske and Rai 2014:23-24).  Violence follows the models: a result of group solidarity (usually against other groups) in unity-driven societies; keeping people in their place in hierarchic ones; maintaining equity in egalitarian societies; and “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” in market-driven ones.  Complex societies can be expected to have all four types of relational models operating inside people’s heads and in the cultural spaces, and thus to have violence for all those reasons and more. 

            Genocide, as we have seen, is moralized as necessary to eliminate the loathesome and hated groups within society.  Aggressive war is moralized by a felt need for land and loot—Hitler’s lebensraum, American settlers’ manifest destiny.  Murder is moralized as honor killing, or revenge, or any of many dozen other motives.  Brutal punishment is moralized as necessary to keep people in line and maintain proper behavior. 

            Fiske and Rai deal largely with cultural groups and cultural norms.  Unusual events like genocide are not quite in the picture, though, for example, Europe’s massacres of Jews go back many centuries.  Exceptional murder and violence for gain or from psychopathy or sadism are explicitly exempted from their theory, being immoral even to the perpetrators. 

            The problems with this work are numerous.  First, and most obvious, there is no explanation of where such morals come from, beyond the idea (almost universally agreed) that violence is necessary to maintain any social order at all.  We are left wondering why honor killings, cruel initiation rites, rape, incest, and the like are found in some places and not others.  (As for the rites:  John and Beatrice Whiting showed decades ago that they are found in societies where all children, including boys, are raised almost exclusively by women, and must transition to men’s roles at puberty.  They occur in almost all such societies and in few, if any, others.  See Whiting and Child 1953.) 

            Second, all societies, and especially all those more complex than a hunting-gathering band, have multiple moral alternatives.  One does not have to be a violent barroom brawler in the modern United States, even in the working-class white south (cf. Nisbett and Cohen 1996 on honor and violence in that milieu).  Very few Middle Eastern Muslims become terrorists or suicide bombers, despite western stereotypy.  Intimate partner violence is normal in some societies—19% of world societies, according to Fiske and Rai (2014:160), a strangely precise figure—but is uncommon and a “marked case” in most. 

            Third, Fiske and Rai do not distinguish between genuine cultural rules, individual moral poses, and outrageously lame excuses.  It is certainly a cultural rule almost everywhere to kill attackers who are trying to kill you and your family.  It is a cultural rule in all civilizations that if you are a soldier you must kill enemies when ordered.  It is a rule in all medically competent societies that surgeons can and should commit “violence” to save their patients (as noted by Plato and Aristotle).  It is an individual choice, not a rule, to beat your wife and children, murder your rival, or commit suicide.  Doing such things is sometimes done for deeply held moral reasons (murdering your wife’s lover in many societies) but is usually done for reasons that do not play well in courts of law.

            Political violence often is clearly due to hatred, however cloaked in rhetoric.  Much becomes clear when one listens to playground bullies (the following lines come from my own childhood):  “He was littler than me, so I beat him up.”  “I’m torturing this squirrel to death because it’s a varmint, it ain’t good for nothin’.”  “I hit my little sister to make her shut up.”  Fiske and Rai quote a number of young peoples’ justifications for killing that are no more persuasive, but sounded moral in some sense.  The grown-up forms of such excuses, “all the easy speeches that comfort cruel men” as G. K. Chesterton put it (in the poem “O God of Earth and Altar”), are no less lame for being suave and phrased in proper political language.

            My personal experience with violence—and I have known murderers, pirates, criminals, and other assorted perpetrators—is that almost all violence except obvious self-defense or defense of one’s country and loved ones is justified by excuses, and most of them are as lame as the schoolyard bullies’ offerings.  Reading the genocide literature is particularly revealing.  The actual sins of the Jews, Tutsi, Hutu, urban Cambodians, and so on were trivial or nonexistent.  The hatred was whipped up deliberately for the basest reasons.  The high moral justifications were blatant lies.  How many followers believed them remains unclear.  People usually say after a genocide is over that they conformed out of fear.  They are usually unwilling to admit any further belief in the propaganda, though a surprising number—including men of the calibre of Martin Heidegger and Ezra Pound—stayed faithful to fascism all their lives, and there are similar loyal Maoists in China today.  (On the case of Heidegger, see Pierre Bourdieu’s important work, 1991.)

            We are left with the near-universality of moral justifications for violence, but with a range from genuine, deeply held moral belief through serious but not-very-moral personal grievance down to the skimpiest of fig leaves covering crude hatred, rage, and greed.  Fiske and Rai have done a major service in focusing on these justifications and on the social poses that evoke them.  The claim that such moral arguments actually motivate violence must be evaluated case by case.               

12  Feeding Wolves Over the Life Track

            The roots of evil have a genetic component.  Psychopathy, sociopathy, and aggressiveness seem to run in families.  The fight-flight-freeze response is universal among higher life forms.  In humans, however, most evil is learned, as the enormous person-to-person, time-to-time, and group-to-group variation shows.  (Most of what follows is derived from or paralleled in Beck 1999 and Ellis e.g. 1962, with specifics about evil from Baron-Cohen 2011, Bartlett 2005, Baumeister 1997, Tomasello 2019, and other previously noted sources, tempered by my experience as a parent.  See also Sapolsky 2017:222 for coverage of this material.)  Most bad behavior is done in conformity with one’s immediate social group.  Most humans start out neutral: tending to wind up about half good and half bad, but actually winding up according to how they were trained. This, of course, is the real message of our two-wolves story.

            There is a clear genetic drive in infants to explore, engage, learn, socialize, communicate, and even create.  Babies are surprisingly interactive, and mostly in a positive way, trusting and smiling.  They cry a lot when they are uncomfortable, and can fear strangers, but they are basically a rather positive set of humans.  Allowing them to explore and interact in a secure, supportive environment is the key to feeding the good wolf pup.

            “Learning” may be too narrow a word for environmental influences.  Trauma even generations ago can affect the brain, via epigenetics.  Trauma in the womb and during birth can more directly injure brain tissue.  One common result of such trauma is reduction in control over violent emotions and actions.  It does not occur in all cases, but it is not rare.  The exact location of the trauma matters, but trauma is usually widespread enough to affect at least some relevant brain centers.  Fear is focused in the amygdala, aggression more widely in the limbic system, but interpretation of stimuli as frightening and reaction to fear by rational or irrational means are distributed over the brain, typically following neural pathways from the amygdala and other basal structures to the frontal lobes and the motor centers.  Eventually, all the brain is involved.  Any trauma can impact the fear-aggression pathways somewhere.  (See, again, Beck 1999; Bandura 1982.) 

            However, humans are tough.  They can adapt to terrible conditions, at least if they have support.  Werner and Smith (1982, 2001) studied children growing up resilient or otherwise.  They found that about ¾ of children raised in poverty and rough surroundings in rural Kaua’i in the mid-20th century did perfectly well.  These were the ones who had strong, reliable families.  Half the rest were redeemed by institutions—good schools, the military, and the like.  The final fourth were products of broken homes, and usually of abuse and neglect.  Abuse teaches children to abuse, and neglect teaches them to neglect.  Those children lived rough lives. 

            Resilience comes at a cost. Further studies have confirmed Werner and Smith’s findings about effective prevention, but have found that such resilience is accompanied by emotional fragility, physical stresses of all sorts including cardiovascular problems and metabolic syndromes, and sometimes a failure of resilience in key areas.  All are proportional to the difficulty of coping with the stresses in question.  Interventions are now able to help, but no one gets away unscathed from a harsh background (Hostinar and Miller 2019; see also Reynolds et al. 2019).

Infants have several states, including sleep and rest; fretting and whining; temper tantrums; and dependent loving and caring, combined with an exploratory interest in the world.  Adults break the fretting state into whining and complaining.  The temper-tantrum state develops into fear, anger, and hate.  Empowerment is always needed in education.

Infants start by feeling generalized discomfort when scared, wet, cold, hungry, or otherwise needy.  They cry for what they want.  Failing in that, they can bear it or become frustrated.  Over the first two years of life, frustration turns to anger.  Good parents teach children to bear when needs cannot immediately be met; bad parents punish the child for whining.  Young children quite normally throw temper tantrums if they are tired, frustrated, uncomfortable, scared, or in need of affection or a sense of control.  Ignored, these taper off; punished, they turn to lifetime anger.  This turns to hate if the child learns to hate from parents and peers.  Meanwhile, better-raised children learn to help, share, and be sociable. 

Adults usually acts from fear of losing social place, but the babyish causes—fatigue, discomfort, and the rest—still operate.  On the other hand, children learn to reason, to think things through, to obey, to be considerate, and to conform (for good or ill) at the same time they learn to throw temper tantrums (Tomasello 2019).   Security, especially security within a supportive circle of family, is the child’s greatest social need.  Children denied acceptance or other social validation lose security and become fearful, often acting out fear through anger.

            A human child with poor parenting may overcompensate, using learned but ineffective coping mechanisms to deal with weakness and fear, because of failure to learn other (and more appropriate) coping mechanisms.  Since humans are supremely social animals, the child learns to fear isolation, abandonment, hate, scorn.  Physical fears become less important; in fact, they are easily handled by a child or adult who feels that her social group “has her back.”

            Abusive childrearing produces adults who make up for felt deficiencies by using what they do have to bully others.  The unintelligent but physically strong schoolyard bullies beat up “smart kids” as a way of using what they have—strength to deal with ego threats caused by what they lacked.  The converse is the intellectual arrogance of many a physically less-than-perfect academic.  Weak fear due to failure to learn good coping mechanisms leads to abject conformity, especially conformity to ego-reinforcing notions like the superiority of “my” group to “yours.”  White supremacists are often those who fear or know that they have nothing else to feel supreme about.  Children, especially if female, may be exposed to sexual harassment, which is a form of bullying.  (It is not a form of romance or normal sexuality.  Men do it to dominate, control, and demonstrate power, not to be affectionate.) 

            In short, people begin as scared babies, who then, to varying degrees and in varying areas of their lives, grow up.  Most of us partially succeed and partially fail, and that is a dangerous combination.  We are fearful and defensive because of the remaining weakness and failure.  We use our strengths to defend—often to overdefend, and often to deflect our hostility downward, to those weaker than we are.  Caring for others is innate, but must be developed, and ways to be caring and considerate must be taught (see esp. Tomasello 2019)All cultures have rules about this, and all cultures have alternatives, including “nice” ones for everyday and less nice ones for dealing with actual threats and enemies.  The capacity to harm is also innate, and can be developed; harsh, unpredictable, gratuitously cruel environments bring it out.  Children as adults pay it forward: they often treat others the way they were treated as children.  This tends to be a default option.

            Learning when to use the appropriate coping mechanism is thus crucial.  Anything that empowers the growing child to take care of her own problems, by teaching proper and effective responses, feeds the good wolf.  This means that the child must be taught what to do—preferably as the situation unfolds; backed up for doing it; and backed up further in case the response is inadequate. 

            If the parent, peer, teacher, or elder then criticizes the child and takes over, “fixing” the situation that the child has “ruined,” the bad wolf gets a huge meal.  Few things feed the bad wolf better than deliberately weakening a child by telling her she can’t cope.  The resulting frustration and weakening turn into aggression eventually.  Widespread rejection follows, leading to still more anger. 

            Being raised by one highly critical parent and another parent who retreats and becomes passive is one common formula for producing a scared and defensive child.  Weakness and hypercritical judgment very often go together, either in the same parent or in a couple; perhaps hypercritical people attract weak spouses.  These couples can raise children who are hypersensitive and defensive, feeling that even the tiniest slight is a total attack on their personhood.  By contrast, if both parents are punitive but reasonably strong as persons, the child usually turns out well enough, but can become a bully; if both mild and gentle, the child becomes well-adjusted but often frail in the face of the world’s harshness.  Firm, but accommodating and open about communicating, seems to be the ideal parenting stance, but research is ongoing.

             A critically important point made by the psychologists is that a typical young child comes to depend especially on one specific immature defense mechanism, which then becomes the most stubborn and intractable problem in adulthood—the one thing most resistant to psychotherapy and life experience, and the one hardest to bring to full consciousness and self-awareness.  The bigot’s hatred and overreaction to threat are often the products of such deeply entrenched immature mechanisms.  Psychologists also find that it is challenges to precisely the most relied-on defense mechanism that bring out the greatest fear, anger, and reactive defensiveness in people.  If your favorite coping mechanism is racism, for instance, you will be more defensive about your racism than about other defenses.  Risk factors include a Manichaean worldview, and the idea that hierarchy is automatically appropriate and top-down control necessary.  In short, in ordinary life, much of the problem is that the default is always to stay with early-learned responses instead of self-improving, and with initial support groups instead of expanding one’s field to all humanity (on the above matters, the classic works of Ellis 1962 and Maslow 1970 remain useful).

            Conversely, nothing feeds the good wolf better than praising the child for doing what she could, while instructing her how to do even better next time.  Wolves feed on empowerment: empowering and supporting the child feeds the good wolf, empowering other people at the expense of the child feeds the bad wolf.  Empowerment means, among other things, teaching coping strategies that work (Cattaneo and Chapman 2012).  To work, they must be reasonable, which random violence and other evil behaviors are not.  (Adults can be coldly and rationally evil, but that usually comes later.)  Self-confidence and self-control, in particular, are the basic necessities to manage the weakness, insecurity, and anger that we have seen to be basic in hyperdefensive and scapegoating reactions.

            Somewhere in between is providing support without teaching proactive coping strategies.  A child who knows her parents have her back is in good shape.  But for coping methods she must rely on whatever methods are available.  She must copy or improvise.  These are rather random and unsatisfying methods, especially since copying without real instruction is not often successful.  The essential pieces of the strategy can easily be missed, or underemphasized.

Growing up with adult authority makes people tend to defer, adulate, and obey upwards in the age and status hierarchy.  This tends to cause them to displace hate downward, scapegoating the younger and weaker.  Abusive, erratic, cruel raising leads to adulating strongmen; usual parent-dominant tradional upbringing leads to conservatives.  Good parenting leads to children who develop into adults who can treat others as equals, and who are self-respecting and self-reliant. 

            Supportive and considerate parenting vs unsupportive and harsh parenting can be set up as a 2 x 2 table.  Supportive and considerate is ideal.  Supportive and harsh was the traditional European and frontier American way; it worked, in its way, for the time.  Unsupportive and undirecting yet gentle is more or less the classic “spoiling.”  Unsupportive and harsh is the abusive parenting that produces brutes. 

The normal order of learning a new skill is a very good one: from most simple and direct to most abstract.  Children learn to walk, talk, play musical instruments, and do homework by gradual steps, from simple and direct to abstract and complicated.  This is the way to learn civil behavior: from politeness formulas to basic considerateness and sharing, then to basic principles.  The simplest virtues are carefulness, civility, mutual aid, sociability, considerateness, and generosity.  Then they can move on to more abstract virtues. Teenage angst and misbehavior can be cured or alleviated by giving rights in proportion to responsibilities.  In teaching, exposure to real (and realistically taught) contexts (laboratories, field, great art) works; books and schoolrooms are slightly above neutral.  The result is that raising a child to be caring and sociable, but also to bear stoically the discomforts of life, feeds into a sense of justice, fairness, compassion, and social decency.  The family creates the basic psychodynamics.  The peer group provides the ways to express those—whether through bullying, random violence, and cruelty or through mutual help, support, and kindness (J. R. Harris 1998). 

            Finally, in a situation where control is lost, or where evil people are in control, everyone seems to regress not only into “following orders,” but into the combination of cowardice and hostility that drives brutality in the first place.  Post-traumatic stress disorder is very common among former soldiers, and more so among victims of genocide, and probably perpetrators also.  Post-traumatic stress is a risk factor for violence, but most PTSD sufferers do not become violent. 

13 Learning and Hating

Working back from a given violent act, we see it is grounded in anger, hatred, or callous doing-the-job.  The wellsprings are, most often, desires for material gain, or power and control, or social acceptance and respect, or desire to protect these, or—perhaps above all-desire to protect one’s group and self.  Sheer desire to kill can be a factor, in psychopaths and similar damaged persons.  Social pressures are extremely important and often determinant.  Cultural biases and cultural models of coping are also often determinant.  Factors exacerbating the situation can include anything from economic hard times to unsettled and chaotic social periods to ordinary irritants like hot days, smog, and confinement; these are outside our scope here.  Lest this all sound dauntingly complex, note that most evil can be explained by desire for goods, control, and respect, combined with unnecessarily harmful and hateful coping mechanisms taught by society or incorporated in cultural models.  The ramifications and manifestations of these are complex, but the basic framework is not inordinately so.

            One social and cultural force is pressure on young men to prove themselves by acts of social daring or self-sacrifice.  In warlike or violent societies, and sometimes even in peaceful ones, young men are under extreme pressure to be soldiers, fighters, or just “bad dudes.”  Young men are high in aggression and testosterone with or without cultural pressure, but they are peaceful enough in peaceful societies; their activity is used in work, or sports, or community service, or studying.  But in warrior societies it becomes “toxic masculinity.”

            Status emulation guarantees that the upper classes, elders, and superiors have more effect on this than the rest of us do.  “The people strive to imitate all the actions and mannerisms of their prince.  It is thus very true that no one harms the state more than those who harm by example…. The bad habits of rulers are harmful not only to themselves but to everyone.” Petrarch (as quoted by Sarah Kyle, 2017:157.)

            People clearly have a strong innate tendency to become hateful, cruel, and violent.  It is not a mere ability that society trains into us.  The generalized cognitive abilities to make computers, drive cars, and trap fish in weirs are all innate, in that any trained human of reasonable intelligence can do them; but humans do not have any innate tendencies to carry those specific tasks.  They do not make computers unless taught, within a society with a long history of technological development.  Evil is different.  Every known cultural and social group in the history of the world has had its cruel, brutal, murderous individuals, and the horrible record of wars and genocides proves that almost every human will act with unspeakable cruelty under social pressure. 

As long as humans are social animals with strong fight-flight-freeze responses, the chain from defense to hostility to evil is sure to be reinvented, and to become popular wherever displaced aggression is socially tolerated.  As long as human childrearing is imperfect, leading to weak but resentful children and adults, evil leaders will take advantage of that weakness and resentment.  Evil is not inevitable, and can be prevented, but it takes over when given even a small chance, due to the human fight responses to threat and stress.  Almost any person will become evil if pressured enough, but almost any person can be kept from evil if pressured in that direction.  Culture usually provides both good and bad models and teachings.

Part III.  A Bit of History

  1. Social evolution over time

All societies have three processes always operating: negative feedback loops maintaining the situation without change; cycles; and positive feedback loops producing slow progress or decline over long periods of time.  Progress has generally dominated throughout history, despite long declines like that of the Roman Empire.  Human groups in ancient times were generally patriarchal lineages with in-marrying women.  These developed into the vast fictive-ancestor lineages of nomad and mobile people from the Mongols to the Scots.  Much later, sedentary agriculture led to more association based on place, eventually leading to the nation-state.  It also led to many societies becoming matrilineal, with much more power to women, and often with the men doing the marrying-in. 

Over the last 50,000 years, there has been progress in science, arts, lifespan, food production, and other areas.  Complex large societies arose; they needed markets and government as well as norms—markets and political structures supplement norms in organizing at huge scales (here and below, see e.g. Christian 2004; McNeill and McNeill 2003; Morris 2010; Turchin 2006, 2016). 

Unfortunately, there has also been advance in the technology and practice of war, cruelty, and repression.  War is somewhat less common than it was in early civilizations (Pinker 2011), but bloodier and more technologically sophisticated.  Many technological advances were developed for war, and only later applied to civilian use.  More effort and money have gone into war than into almost any other sector of social action.  Violent death rates were always high (Wrangham 2018:238), ranging from less than 1 per thousand in peaceful modern societies to as many as 200 or more in some highly stressed tribes.  Wars and murders seem to have become less frequent (Pinker 2011; Wrangham 2018), but wars are far vaster in scope, and genocide has appeared as a major cause of death.  Evil leaders can appeal to group hate in a way not easily managed (though not unknown) in ancient societies. 

Also increasing is the extent and inequality of hierarchic social relations.  For countless millennia, people lived in small bands with little differentiation except by age and gender (Boehm 1999).  With the rise of complex societies came the rise of more and more unequal social relations, climaxing in the kings and emperors of old and the heads of state and CEOs of today.  This causes rapidly increasing competition for scarce positions of power, and more and more defensiveness on the part of those who gain such positions.

In agrarian societies, resentment and antagonism is directed against bandits and barbarians, as well as coups and religious deviants.  Early trade and commerce led to mercantilism and then freedom and democracy as the alternative, so the hopeful revolutions.  Early but full industrialization produced socialism and communism.  Later industrialization produced fascism, because elites were entrenched and powerful and good at oppressing and at divide-and-rule.  Resource squeezes made everyone worse off and less hopeful, thus easily turned to hate.

It thus becomes clear that hatred is a natural human response, but is socially engaged, manipulated, and deployed by the powerful to advance their own interests.  The most obvious case is war for gain—predatory invasion of the weak by the strong.  From the Assyrians to the European settlers of the Americas, and from the “barbarians” sacking Rome to the wars over oil in Africa in the 1980s and 1990s, loot has been the driver of war.  However, it is not the only one.  Family politics, religious hatred, and even minor slights can push a tense situation into outright war.  In the modern world, where genocide and civil war are commoner than international war, it is most often the giant primary-production interests that mobilize hate and decide who shall be the victims.  They usually go after local weaker minorities, but anyone can be fair game.  On the other hand, class hate, dimly related to Marxism, may be the driver, as in Venezuela today.  The point is that hate does not exist in a vacuum.  It is deliberately manipulated and targeted by the powerful

Warfare in premodern times took place between rival claimants to the throne (often different branches of the royal lineage), between rival states and empires, between rival ethnic groups, and between religious factions.  In Europe, for instance, we see a progression from warring tribes to city-states to the Roman Empire with its frontier generals and barbarians.  After the fall of Rome, rival nobles assembled loyal knights and dragooned peasants into being arrow fodder.  Then the wars of religion dominated until the Treaty of Westphalia substituted nation-states for religious factions, and war became a battle of nations rather than of faiths.  Meanwhile, racism and ethnic hatred became dominant.  The wars of empires and nations at least call forth courage and self-sacrifice; ethnic, religious, and class hatred seem largely mean spite.

Playing over this goes the more general tendency of humans to be too tightly social, leading to group hate, or too individual, leading to selfish greed and corruption—Kant’s principles of aggregation and differentiation applying to public morality.  We can see that the racism and religious bigotry paralyzing America today are merely the latest in an endless sequence of powerful, evil people taking or maintaining power, control, and wealth by marshaling their troops through antagonism and hate.

            Religious hate grew out of identification of religion with rival powers, and then crushing the conquered people, and thus hating and repressing their religion.  Conquered Persian dualists, Jews, and then Christians were harassed in Roman Empire times.  After Constantine, Christians crushed non-Christians and “heretics.”  Racism as a visible, significant force (beyond simple ethnic prejudice) began by the late Roman Empire, but was not serious until the 16th Century, with the conquest of the Americas and much of Africa.  The expansion of the slave trade drove racism to a high point in and after the 18th century. 

            Haves vs have-nots is a permanent opposition in society, as Marx pointed out, but real classes arose only with fully developed ancient civilizations, and did not get serious till highly developed empires appeared.  In China, hate was mobilized along kinship (especially within imperial families), political sectors, and to a lesser extent region and ethnicity.  Improvement in rationalizing bureaucracy, terror, and surveillance help explain the increase in longevity of Chinese dynasties, notably the success of Ming and Qing against all odds.  It is increasingly difficult to expect revolution to succeed.  Eventually, the elites will turn on each other.  If they are evil leaders, since they are amoral and only hate and greed hold them together; they betray each other the minute they can.  This happened repeatedly in historic times (Ibn Khaldun 1958).

            Traditional societies rarely committed genocide in the modern sense.  Tyrants killed political rivals and their families.  Wars were total, with civilians not excepted.  But wiping out whole groups of non-offensive subjects of one’s own government was not common, except in cases of religious crusades against “heretics.”  Typically, a dynastic cycle ended when the rulers had grown so weak and corrupt that no one could put up with them any longer, at which point a general or invader or popular leader would mobilize popular discontent and bring down the regime.  This happened over and over in Europe, west Asia, China, and elsewhere, and is well understood (Anderson 2019; Ibn Khaldun 1958). 

            Actual genocides were rarer, and generally confined to religion.  They tended to occur when forces of modernity directly challenged the landlords and rentiers of the old order. Not only did a new economy threaten them; new ideologies and sciences challenged their whole self-justifying worldview.  Genocide, based on hate and fear, is thus quite different from (even though it may grade into) normal warfare and dynastic cycling.  Those latter phenomena are based on rivalry, especially for power, also for land and loot.  They always include hate of the enemy, but not usually hate of one’s own weaker groups.  Indeed, they may unite the whole polity against the common foe.

            Large-scale killers were often highly selective about their massacres.  The Mongols and other Central Asian conquerors were famously indifferent to religion, and even ethnicity (at least outside their own); they were equal-opportunity massacrists.  The Americans of the 19th century committed genocide against Native Americans and repressed African-Americans, but were fiercely independent otherwise; the Cossacks of old Russia were similar, hating minorities while triumphing in indepencence.  Today, independence is neither so desired nor so possible.  Voters motivated by hatred vote for strongmen, and put themselves under a yoke of tyranny, from the Philippines and India to the United States and Brazil.  This deadly mix has appeared before in times of rapid change.

The late Roman Empire saw violent repression, first of and then by Christians. Later, Europe, challenged by aggressive spread of trade, commerce, and new scientific knowledge from the Islamic world, resorted to the Crusades and persecution of heretics in the 12th and 13th centuries.  Spain’s Reconquista descended into genocide after the final conquest of the Muslims in 1492.  Then Europe’s own progress and religious ferment challenged old regimes in the 16th and 17th centuries, leading to vast religious wars that involved genocidal murder of opposing religious communities (including the Irish Catholics in Ireland).  In the 19th century, following the Industrial Revolution and its political revolutions, the forces of modernity rolled into eastern Europe, where the result was anti-Jewish pogroms and Tsar Nicholas II’s persecution of serfs and minorities, and into China, where rebellions ensued and the Qing Dynasty met these with reactionary measures.  In the early 20th century, new ideas, arts, and sciences challenged primary production, leading—among other things—to fascism.

These periods elevated tyrants such as Philip the Fair, Ferdinand and Isabela,Oliver Cromwell, and Empress Cixi.  They represented landlords and other rentier elites against the forces of change.  As in later centuries, such negative leaders were often marginal persons: individuals coming from remote regions, and often subjected to poverty and hardship when young.  Genghis Khan, Zhu Yuanzhang (the leader who drove the Mongols from China), and several Roman emperors fit this pattern.

Following Adam Smith (1910/1776) and other political economists, and oversimplifying them somewhat for convenience, we find that improvements on this warlike pattern developed in expanding economies, especially those dominated by the trade, commerce, and human resources sector of the economy.  That sector must invest in people to survive; it depends on skilled workers and innovation.  Economies dominated by rentier primary production—plantation agriculture, mining, fossil fuels, and the like—are regressive, and often repressive.  Agrarian societies from the Inca to Sumer to China wound up the same: city, king, court, bureaucracy, vast mass of farmers from rich to landless. 

Between enlightened traders and reactionary plantation owners are the majority of people—the ordinary workers and businesspersons who have to make a living today.  They are thus more concerned with whether the immediate economy is going up or down than with vast forces of Progress or Return to the Old Days.  Especially if they are in business, they default conservative, but can shift rapidly and easily rightward or leftward.

Class is also, famously, a relevant factor; it has diminished from great importance in the mid-20th century in American voting to near irrelevance now, with almost equal shares of rich, middling, and poor voting Democrat or Republican.  This has tracked the rise of social issues such as racism and medical care at the expense of concern for immediate economic returns.

In many traditional societies, “honor” and distinction came from killing and looting, not from honest work or trade.  Not only warlike but even quite peaceful agrarian societies shared this attitude.  Fighting was honorable, compromising and peacemaking dishonorable.  

One can predict with considerable accuracy the amount of evil in society by assessing the amount of rentier or primary-production-firm dominance of the political economy and the level of warlikeness of the culture.  Within equally agrarian societies, Afghanistan, rampant with landlordism and steeped in a heritage of violence already noted by Alexander the Great, compares with more peaceable Bhutan.  The other dimension—from agrarian to late-industrial—is seen in the conversion of formerly warlike societies to currently peaceful ones.  The Vikings, ruled by landholding and slaveholding earls, contrast with their peaceable descendants in modern Scandinavia’s world of trade, commerce, and education.

The ancient Greeks saw a cycle: democracy gave way to autocracy (monarchy or oligarchy), which gave way to tyranny, which collapsed and left the way open for democracy.  This proved less than predictive, but cycles from relatively open to relatively totalitarian societies and back do appear in many historical records (Ibn Khaldun 1958).

Really new good ideas spread from rich cores of trade and communication-based systems.  Military technology seems to spread fastest of all innovations.  Next come innovations in communication; people want to be in touch.  Then comes ordinary production.  Last comes the spread of morality.  Then in the twentieth century, primary production, especially fossil fuel production, took over, and now rules most of the world. 

            Critical to progress were several steps, mostly taken in Europe or China.  One was rapid discovery science, foreseen by the ancient Greeks, then developing between 1100 and 1600 in Europe.  Rationalized property rights and freer markets followed, for better or worse, in the 17th century.  The Enlightenment then emphasized law and recourse, with ideals of free speech, press, religion, assembly, and conscience.  (It is not mere coincidence that this took place at the same time as the explosion of slavery.)  Equality before the law for full citizens, and expansion of the citizen concept, came a bit later in the 18th century.  The logic led to a rapidly growing movement to end slavery, beginning in the mid-18th century and continuing till slavery was legally ended, though not ended de facto, in the late 19th.

The Enlightenment succeeded not just because of the rise of trade, commerce, and science.  Another key was the development of world trade too fast for any nation-state to control it.  Opportunity exploded, and traders managed it themselves, through international networks.  They had to deal, without government supervision, with people of very different cultures, faiths, and technologies.  This was one breeding ground of concepts of liberty, self-governance, tolerance, freedom of conscience, and personal responsibility.  One can compare the rapid rise of enlightenment in multinational Europe with its relative failure in East Asia during the centuries when the Qing Dynasty imposed its crushing weight on the East Asian world-system.

The Enlightenment did not invent the rule of law or welfare-oriented governments; Europe and China already had those.  What the Enlightenment brought were science and participatory democracy coupled with the ideal of freedom of conscience.

Another milestone was free public education, an idea from the early 19th century.  Through all of this, popular demand by people rising in society but left out by the elites was the usual cause.  It was always a fight: entrenched interests always opposed good changes, and religious elites were often the worst.  When self-interest combined with needs for fairness and equality, progress occurred.  The more normal human tendency to weather down and adapt to the system was always used by the elites to repress the masses.  So were hatreds of all kinds, as we have seen.

2 American Ideas

The Founding Fathers worked with a strong sense that we are all in this together and that my rights stop where yours start, sometimes phrased as “your right to swing your arm ends at my nose.”   Finally, they were aware that a society and its laws and economy exist within a moral shell, and that shell must be embodied in the laws and indeed in the whole system.  (They got this thoughtful perception from Adam Smith’s writings on morals.)  These basic principles lie behind the Constitution.

This led to emphasizing freedom of conscience, thus of speech, religion, ideology, assembly, and voting.  It meant free enterprise, within reason.  It also meant freedom from torture, warrantless search, and other abuses of government power.  It meant equality in justice, opportunity, and law, with protection in oppression.  It meant rule of law, not of men.  It meant presumption of innocence, protection of all, and mutual defense.

These were seen as necessary because evil so often wins unless actively stopped.  A polity must have balances of power, equality before the law, universal voting rights, full recourse (rights to sue, etc.) in the event of direct harm, and the other rights the Founding Fathers thought—wrongly—that they had guaranteed in the Constitution.  It is amazing how easily Republicans now get around those rights.

The United States failed at the beginning, in allowing slavery and in refusing citizenship to Native Americans while taking their land.  It failed again in the Reconstruction by not enforcing full civil rights, and by letting the carpet-baggers cream off wealth from the south.  These ills were eventually corrected, but not the lingering racism and power abuses that resulted.  These failures have led cynics to dismiss the entire American program, equality, freedom, and all.  This is not a helpful approach.  The Depression was much better managed.  Fairness and, eventually, civil rights followed from bringing some degree of justice to the economy.

While the world was wide-open, when exploration and colonization were running wild, and then as long as technology was increasing wealth faster than population, freedom and Enlightenment values flourished.  Today, with closing frontiers, people are rushing to make all they can.  Failing that, they support and follow the powerful, in hopes of at least holding onto something.  The poor have given up hope of getting rich; they can only hope to cut other, weaker groups down and take what little those groups have.  This is a negative-sum game.  Some cultures are much more prone to see the world as a zero-sum or negative-sum game than are others (Róźycka-Tran et al. 2015; Stavrova and Ehlebracht 2016).  The United States was formerly rather moderate in this regard, but negative-sum thinking has increased. Reform in US history has been strongly cyclic. 

The course is highly consistent.  A few idealists will see a problem and a solution.  If they are right, and if the problem gets worse, more and more people will be attracted to the cause, until a majority is on board and can prevail.  This happened with the Enlightenment values that drove the Revolution and the US Constitution.  The next major crisis was slavery: anti-slavery was early dismissed as crackpot, but with the progressive damage to the whole US economy by plantation agriculture with enslaved workers, anti-slavery prevailed (through war).  Next came the mounting criticism of deforestation and wildlife loss in the late 19th century, climaxing in Theodore Roosevelt’s environmental reforms.  The next crisis was the Depression, which led to massive economic reforms.  Then came environmental and food production crises in the 1960s, dealt with (inadequately) by laws in the late 1960s and early 1970s.  Visionaries are always proposing new reforms, but these are picked up by the majority only if they are immediately practical ways of addressing real and worsening problems.  On the other hand, the opportunity allows the visionaries to pass many measures that the majority would probably not support otherwise.  The Bill of Rights, for instance, was added to the Constitution by Enlightenment visionaries; the Bill probably went beyond what the majority wanted at the time. 

All the crises after independence were caused by the reactionary behavior of the plantation and big-resource-firm sector.  Slavery at its worst led to the Civil War; suicidal levels of environmental destruction led to massive reform campaigns in 1890-1910 and 1955-1975; cutthroat speculative and rentier capitalism led to the Depression and resulting New Deal.

3  Progressive Erosion of Old Society

            The steady rise of giant firms has been noted, and protested, since the 1870s, but it continues.  It has had a steadily more distorting effect on the economy and on politics (this and what follows is largely common knowledge, but otherwise follows Anderson 2010; Anderson and Anderson 2012, 2017; Putnam 2000; Turchin 2016; Snyder 2018).

            As folk society and traditional elite society collapsed with the decline of local communities and the rise of mass society (Putnam 2000), people became more and more dependent on giant corporations to integrate their worlds.  Politics became less and less public and more corporate.  A worldwide shift from lateral and community-wide association to top-down hierarchies, separate or competing, appeared.

            The broad contours of politics in the early 20th century made sense: the Republicans were the party of business, ranging from family farms to local businesses and up to large firms; the Democrats were the party of labor.  This led to reasonable dialogue (though also plenty of bullying and cruelty by bosses).  The change beginning in the 1920s, but not serious till the 1970s, was toward a Republican party uniting racism and giant reactionary firms, and eventually a Democratic party also becoming absorbed with identity politics more than with economic issues.  This has led to nothing but hatred, largely Republican racism and religious bigotry, but also some real reverse racism on the left.  Serious discussion of economic issues is increasingly contaminated or lost in a welter of mutual accusations.

            One of the first effects of the shift from a farm-and-small-business America to an urban one dominated by giant firms was the disappearance of folk society.  The old-time world of folk, elite, and town forced people to work hard, cooperate, and toughen up.  Now, life is easy but frustrating, especially for those who aren’t succeeding.  Bereft of the support of old-time communities and the opportunity to work with different types of people, humans become alienated, weak, and hence cowardly.  This leads to fascism.

            In traditional agrarian society, life was short and usually ended violently.  People tended to escape into religion.  They also had songs and folk literature to teach them that individuals mattered—that life and death need not be in vain.  Now, few are in that position, so political action is commoner.  In small-scale societies, religion was about spirit power, since controlling the uncontrollable was desirable and any control of anything helped.  Now, fear and overoptimism are the problems.  So, pragmatic proactive help become the main alternative to giving up.

            The decline of that world also led to the decline of folk and traditional culture after 1950, and then to the dominance of popular culture and passive consumption.  Arts deteriorated.  Great literature made people confront tragedy, intense emotion, and social and personal complexity; it became less and less appreciated.  The burgeoning interest in nonwestern cultures that taught people tolerance and mutual appreciation in the 1960s and 1970s waned, leading to increasingly dispiriting identity politics after 2000. 

            Perhaps most interesting has been the disappearance of the self-improvement agenda.  The humanistic psychology and personal development movements of the 1960s-1970s collapsed and left little trace, outside of improvement in counseling practices.  They succumbed to a backlash by people who relied on thinking they were tough, and often on outright bullying, to maintain their self-image.  Weak and defensive individuals were threatened by the whole notion of self-improvement.  They attacked it with a vengeance. 

            The arts succumbed to dominance by giant “entertainment” corporations.  They became dominated by faddism, conformity with the widest number, enjoyment as simply watching TV and playing video games.  The Depression and WWII led to a lullaby culture, the soothing and mindless pop culture of the early 1950s.  That gave way to a range of developments, from rich and complex to trivial, but ultimately mass culture settled on “action” movies, video games, and other superficiality.  Much of ordinary life settled on the least emotionally and cognitively involving forms: mindless music, wallpaper art, fast food.

            Political organization peaked in the 1930s and again in the 1960s with the civil rights and antiwar movements; solidarity, voter drives, demonstrations, teach-ins, and other forms of resistance thinned out.  Utopian experiments such as communes had a silly side, but they at least expressed hope; they are few and far between now. Only the Great Depression and WWII solidified people around progress toward the good.  The 60s got most people motivated, but not enough. 

            This preceded political decline.  Traditional culture had kept Enlightenment values, including the Founding Fathers’ values, alive.  As traditional cultures and educational forms disappeared, and Hollywood filled the gap, American politics shifted rapidly from democratic to fascist.

            What happened in politics was similar to what happened to food.  Decline of food traditions and rise of agribusiness corporations led to the rise of sugar, salt, and soybeans, with resulting heart trouble and diabetes.  The same rise of giant corporations led to the discovery, first in the plantation sector and then in the fossil fuel world, that political power came from a mix of lobbying and whipping up hatred to get right-wing votes.  This led to a rise of racism, religious bigotry, intolerance, and incivility—not just in the United States, but worldwide.  Face-to-face community has been largely replaced by virtual communities.  Among the casualties are newspapers, local helpfulness, and Robert Putnam’s bowling leagues—Putnam’s book Bowling Alone (2000) used their decline as a marker of the widespread decline of civic and civil culture in America.  With folk and community cultures dead and ideas of artistic quality gone, people collapse into a mass—Tocquevillian “subjects” as opposed to “citizens,” as Putnam puts it.

            The result is a pattern in which environmentalism, concern for fine arts, liberal politics, and community all decline.  Real wages and returns to labor decline.  Deaths of despair—suicide, drug overdoses, and the like—increase.  Conversely, even in recent years, science progresses; medical treatment improves, but not access to it; comforts of ordinary life continue to increase.

            Sexual mores and other Old Testament values relaxed as old-time farming and rural folk society disappeared.  This has certainly had its good sides, but also has led to a constant renegotiation of norms, not an easy task.

            In short, the traditional world of rural and small-town America, of Christian churches and local folksingers, of factories and workshops, is gone or fading.  Its economic underpinnings are dissolving, as hi-tech and smart machines replace workers and farming becomes concentrated in a few corporate hands.  It had its wonderful side, but also a very dark side.  The worst features of it—racism, religious bigotry, class oppression, and gender biases—are still very much with us.  Increasingly, older and less educated whites take refuge in those pathologies of the older world.  So do ordinary suburban older whites, who see their privileges challenged by upwardly mobile minorities. 

            All this would be manageable if the hatred were not used by the giant but downward-bound productive interests, especially the fossil fuel corporations.  They have funded much of the hatred and anti-science activity of the last few decades. 

            The Republican party has been captured completely by these corporations, and has become a vehicle for subsidizing big oil, big coal, big agribusiness, the military procurement and arms industry, and their allies.  It has thus become a party of white supremacy and military right-wing Christian religious agitation.  The Democrats have moved from the party of the working class into a position as the party of relatively upwardly-mobile groups: minorities, women, urban young people, the education and health establishments, and to some extent the hi-tech world.

            This new party alignment gives the Republicans a perfect platform to mobilize the weak defensiveness considered above.  Everyone, progressive or regressive, has some weak defensiveness within, if only because we all start as babies and never quite get over it.  We never take full control of our lives and eliminate all babyish crumbling in the face of out-of-control reality.  The Republicans, however, are placed to take advantage of it, via scapegoating and repression.  The Democrats only lose by it.  Weak defensiveness takes the form of lashing out at “whites” and “males,” censoring right-wing speech, and otherwise playing into Republican hands.  Democrats will have to be the party of self-control or they will lose all.

4  Decline from 2000, collapse from 2016

            The real key to what happened next was the rise of corporations that live by out-of-date production processes and by deliberately harming humans and the environiment:  big oil, big coal, toxic chemicals, munitions and “defense,” and the shady sectors of finance and gambling.  These are the home industries of the funders and leaders of the political right.  The core has been the linkage of big oil and the munitions-arms-military procurement industries.  They support each other.  They naturally attract those rich from gambling, shady finance, private prisons, the mafia, and similar interests.  They naturally defend themselves.  They have defined themselves into a state of war with the American people.  They flourish only by polluting, selling guns, resisting clean power, digging up mountains, and generally damaging the public interest.

Leaders in the United States include the great oil barons such as the Kochs, who funded global warming denial as well as the Tea Party, ALEC, and other Republican agendas (see e.g. Abrams 2015; Auzanneau 2018; Cahill 2017; Folley 2019; Hope 2019; Klein 2007, 2014; Mayer 2016; Nesbit 2016; many of these sources detail the enormous sums paid to congresspersons for special favors).  Even more extreme are the Mercers, who fund the major white supremacist and far-right hatred organizations and media (Gertz 2017; Silverstein 2017; Timmons 2018), and the Princes, including Trump’s Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos.  These and their allies are the people who have most to gain from a government that lives by war and repression.  They are also the most heavily dependent industries on federal subsidies, contracts, sweetheart deals, loopholes, giveaways, and failure to enforce laws.  They are also the most in danger from a government that cares about people. 

Big oil, in particular, would be uneconomic without government support, because the costs of cleaning up pollution and dealing with damages would be insupportable (see Oil Change International 2017).  The CEOs would be in danger of prison time for their shady lobbying and deliberate release of pollution.  These industries that invest heavily in lobbying and campaigns.  Their fears and defensiveness are thoroughly understandable.  Fossil fuels receive over $649 billion in federal subsidies every year (Ellsmoor 2019; figures from International Monetary Fund), and plow a good deal of that back into the system via political donations, effectively bribing legislators to provide even more subsidies.  A vicious spiral is created.  They create another vicious spiral by investing much of the money in anti-science propaganda, from racism to global warming denial, and in whipping up hatreds.  They have been able to divide the voters and eliminate the chance of unity against the common threat that fossil fuels present.  Big Oil, and especially the Koch brothers, have spread their tentacles throughout the world.  Najib Ahmed, writing in Le Monde diplomatique, shows how “US climate deniers are working with far-right racists to hijack Brexit for Big Oil,” which “exemplifies how this European nexus of climate science denialism and white supremacism is being weaponized by US fossil fuel giants with leverage over Trump’s government” (Ahmed 2019).

            With this went an explosive increase in rent-seeking, quick money games, and financial shenanigans, leading to monumental inefficiency in the economy (Mazzucato 2018).  Corruption in government has greatly added to this.  The situation in which everyone is out for what they can get, at the expense of the system, is characteristic of the end phases of political cycles.

            Another casualty has been traditional conservatism.  The old union of small-government advocates, hierarchic law-and-order defenders, patriots, and security advocates has disappeared.  Most of them at least had some sense of honor and honesty.  They were also pro-environment, an attitude totally reversed now (as extensively documented by Turner and Isenberg 2018). The current “conservatives” favor big government interfering continually in people’s private lives (in sex, drugs, religion, media, and more), are indifferent to hierarchies (though loving strong-men), and make covert deals with Russia, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and other countries against America’s obvious interests.  Their main concerns are using racism and religious bigotry to whip up support for the giant primary-production firms.  As to honor and honesty, one may allow the record to speak.

            The decline of cultures and their ideals came before the political decline, and before any economic effects.  Economic growth continues.  It seems that the last thing to be affected by a change in economic organization is the economy itself. 

            All the worst things that progressives and liberals feared over the last 50 years came together in a perfect storm in the Trump administration: attacks on democracy, freedom, equality before the law, the environment, science, minorities, the press, the poor, the workers.  One main driver has been the rise of inequality—especially the rise in power and wealth of the rich.  The rich are literally above the law; it is almost impossible to convict them of anything, given their ability to pay lawyers and bribe politicians.  Nazism and fascism have been revived, with even more focus on Big Lies than in Hitler’s Germany, and with even more fawning surrender of America to the most reactionary of the giant corporations.  There is no question that Trump is directly copying Hitler; Burt Neuborne has listed eleven pages of close, highly specific similarities (Neuborne 2019:22-33).  Trump kept Hitler’s speeches by his bed for years (Neuborne 2019:20), and sometimes uses Hitler’s literal words. The Big Lie and other fascist methods of rule and control are manifestations of weak fear and take advantage of it.  Since 2016 they have become the government. Nor is the United States unique; this is a worldwide movement (Luce 2017; Snyder 2018).

            The worst of that process is that it allows truly evil people, who are often motivated by extreme greed and hate, to get ahead.  Contrary to tropes of “the 1%,” most rich people are reasonable enough.  The problem is that the few evil, sometimes downright psychopathic, rich—the Kochs, Mercers, Princes, Trumps, and their ilk—are highly motivated to seek power.  Since they are ruthless and not restrained by morals, they outcompete others easily, and then become more and more lawless and thus more competitively successful.  When they get power, they use it vindictively.  They do not merely increase their wealth; they attack the rest of us.  True Trump supporters channel all their fear, frustration, resentment, anger, and spite against the less fortunate.  The segment of the left that is racist and sexist (hating whites and males) differ only in that they are secure and privileged enough to hate up, not down. Democrats should realize that the right wing now represents only the reactionary fraction of the super-rich.  They do not want economic growth; it would lessen their control by making their industries more and more obsolete.  They want a decline from which they can benefit.

            Evil ideology in the United States perfectly tracks economic evils.  The slave-based plantation world began it.  Continued decline of the rural south has made it more toxic.  It has spread first into other declining rural areas, then into declining manufacturing ones.  The “Southern Strategy” of Lee Atwater and Karl Rove was perfectly timed to take advantage of this.  The situation appears to be comparable in other countries.  The ties to giant-corporate primary production are clear.  Extreme hierarchy of power and wealth, and economic and social stagnation, are endemic to such systems. 

Much of this is direct, face-to-face politics.  Investigative journalism (e.g. Mayer 2016; Rich 2018) reveals that Trump was tied directly to McCarthy’s right-hand man, Roy Cohn; that the Koch brothers started the Tea Party and other right-wing organizations; that all these are directly connected by personal ties, and are also tied to powerful Democrats.  The extent of actual friendship and mentorship on the far right is far too little studied and appreciated.  This is not “conspiracy”; it’s long-standing networks of friendship, political aid, mentorship, and power-sharing, going directly back to the pro-Hitler activists of the 1930s via such ties as the Koch and Coors family interests.

The political conversion of the border south, Idaho, Montana, and the Dakotas from “blue” to “red” between 1970 and 2016 came with the decline of labor unions and small farms and the rise of giant primary-production firms in those states.  It was directly precipitated by a steady stream of right-wing propaganda telling people that their problems were not due to economic unfairness or mismanagement but to minorities.  This led to a massive flip, especially in 2016, from voting self-interest to voting hate.  Many seem to have become convinced that the minorities rather than the system (or the rich) were the source of their problems; others thought there was no hope except to keep the minorities down; but surveys and comparisons reveal and many or most simply voted because hysterical hatred had been whipped up against particular groups and persons.  People who had been feeding the good wolf were feeding the bad one.

One must go back to Hitler and Stalin to find anything comparable in terms of the sheer number of groups attacked by the Republicans in the 2016 and 2018 campaigns.  It results in cruelty—deliberately going after not only the poor and weak, but everything that helps people: education, medical care, sustainable resource use, etc.  These new leaders support and are supported by the war and gun industry and the fossil fuels producers, the mega-polluters, and almost no one else. 

Trump voting has been analyzed by Bob Azarian in Psychology Today (2019).  He sees, among other things, immediate concerns over morality; sheer fear, conservatives being relatively fearful; overestimating of expertise by voters; authoritarian personality; Trump’s ability to engage people as celebrities do; and, of course, racism and bigotry.  One can add a real fear of immigrants and Muslims, due to exaggeration and lies by Republicans, and a real fear of change and process, especially among less educated white males, who see themselves threatened by the rise of other groups.  Immigrants, who tend to be highly motivated and enterprising, do present a threat to such persons.  So do upwardly-mobile women and minorities freed from open discrimination in hiring.  So does the steady decline in community and folk society in the rural United States.  The Trump voters have their reasons to want to stop and reverse progress.  Diana Mutz (2018) reports similar findings; perceived threat to economic and social position dominated Trump voting.

            Current problems in the United States include a full-scale frontal attack on democracy: on free press, voting rights, civil rights, civility, and equal protection under the law.  Brian Klaas, in his book The Despot’s Apprentice (2017), provides a thorough account of these attacks, with many important and thought-provoking comparisons to tyrannies and despotisms around the world.  This attack is supported by the Big Lie technique, by exploiting religious and racial bigotry, by attacks on the poor, and by anti-scientific lies and misrepresentations.  Huge subsidies and special favors for giant corporations are now the rule, in a climate of corruption.  Clearly, American democracy and freedom are doomed unless Americans unite to save their best traditions (see Klaas 2017).

            The United States saw regime change in 2016-17, with the collapse of the 240-year-old Enlightenment traditions and the commencement of a regime dedicated to eliminating those.  Corruption in the modern United States guarantees collapse.  Most of it is legal.  Firms donate as they wish to politicians who vote on the issues that are critical to those firms.  Legislators vote on subsidies for firms that fund their campaigns.  The interests that depend heavily on subsidies and that also harm the general good through pollution or dangerous speculation become the biggest donors. 

            In general, the more socially tightly bound and the more hierarchic a society is, the more people unite in hating and lowest-common-denominator social presentation.  Progress and individual tastes divide.  The far right has learned to unite followers not only by arousing bigotry, but also by providing lowest-common-denominator entertainment (video games, trash music, and the like) that debase individuals and make them conform at a bottom level.  George Orwell foresaw this in 1984 and commented extensively on it in his essays.

The war on science and public truth gets more serious as the Trump administration gains more and more control of departments and agencies, and censors speech, cuts funding for science, and denies scientific facts (Friedman 2017; Sun and Eilperin 2017; Tom 2018).  Many Republicans have come to hate and fear education, especially higher education; a poll show that most oppose and distrust it (Savransky 2017).
            The few giant firms that support right-wing politics to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars a year now control the United States, through the Republican Party.  The 2017 tax cuts, opposed by 75% of voters and appealing only to the rich, show this dominance clearly. 

            Suicide, opiate abuse, and Trump voting are all strongly correlated; they are at high levels in the same places, including rural counties in Appalachia and the northern Midwest (Snyder 2018).  They indicate a level of despair in these downwardly-mobile areas.  Since these areas are overwhelmingly white, much of the despair translates to anger against minorities who are supposedly taking the livelihood or at least the social status of the white workers. Diana Mutz (2018) found that voting for Trump tracked perceived threats to group status, not economic woes.  The suicidal tip of the iceberg reveals the degree to which rational self-interest, as normally understood, fails to explain right-wing attitudes, in the United States and elsewhere.  Mass shootings, suicide bombings, genocides, and voting for amoral strongmen are manifestations of a self-destructive level of hate and fear.

            In short, the United States faces a unique crisis, involving a shift far to the right of anything seen before except in the Confederacy before 1861.  Racist and religious prejudice financed by giant firms are taking over politics (Beauchamp 2018; Lopez 2017; MacLean 2017; Metzl 2019).  From the farthest right, there are calls for civil war and mass killings (Nova 2017).  Justice is corrupted at the highest levels (Eisinger 2017; Neuborne 2019).  Democracy is suffering from increasing distortion (Browning 2018).  The human costs are far worse than most people realize.  For example, American children are 76% more likely to die before reaching 21 than children in other developed countries; high infant mortality and enormous levels of gunshot deaths are the main causes (Kliff 2018).  Even Francis Fukuyama, famed for his overoptimistic views of the future, has recognized the darkness (Fukuyama 2016).

             Politics becomes more emotional, more passionate, and less civil, as shown by Lilliana Mason in her book Uncivil Agreement (2018).  An increasing number of young, uneducated white men have flocked to Trump’s standard.  They are frightened by the rise of minorities and immigrants, and of more educated workers, all of whom compete directly for economic position.  In a world where memories of the 2008 recession are still fresh and where wages are stagnant, these fears are expectable.

            An economic downturn or fear of losing the 2020 elections could precipitate dictatorship and its inevitable result (Neuborne 2019:227-228).  It is possible that the Republican administration will crack down around 2020, declare a state of emergency, suspend the Constitution, and begin full-scale genocide (on this possibility see Goitein 2019).  The Republicans, like Hitler (and apparently copying him), have engaged in widespread hatred.  Trump, in campaigning and in tweets, has attacked Muslims, Mexicans, Jews, African-Americans, Native Americans, liberals, poor people, feminists, and others beyond counting.  Followers have added their voices, sometimes advocating extermination of gays (as preacher Kevin Swanson and several other right-wing “Christians” have done).

The centrists, liberals, and moderate-conservatives of the United States have very little time to unite and stop this.  Without unity, it is unstoppable.  The stalwart unity of the reactionaries and disunion and mutual criticism on the left are expectable and typical of periods of declining empire.  The people who were dominant want it all back, and what should be the rising and progressive fraction are despondent and easily set against each other.

            The center and left in the United States have recently fallen back on being “the opposition”—opposing rather than proposing.  We need to borrow a leaf from parliamentary systems of government.  These usually have a government-in-opposition: a shadow cabinet made up of opposition figures who discuss policy and plan what to do if they cycle back into power.  The United States now needs a Democrat group who can develop policy and unite the party around it, via opposition figures serving as virtual cabinet ministers, heads of agencies, and the rest of the government machinery.  History teaches that people must go against something to unite successfully.  We can only do that in the name of a higher, nobler, more inclusive goal.  Even Hitler knew enough to do it.  We certainly should.

            We have seen how certain “progressives” of the 2010s failed disastrously by opposing their antagonism toward men and whites to right-wing antagonism toward women and minorities.  One does not fight fire with fire in a gasoline storage depot.

5.  A Dark Future

            We have a new mode of production, that unites China, North Korea, and Venezuela with the United States despite alleged differences between “communism” and “capitalism.”   The new mode is one in which giant primary-production corporations, especially oil, coal, and agribusiness, control the economy.  They are tied closely to government by subsidies and special favors and rules as well as by bribery and corruption.  In other countries, they are actually a part of government.  Big oil and big coal—the reactionary energy-suppliers that should now be displaced by solar and wind power—have an especially distorting effect, because they are in such desperate need of maintaining political reaction and fighting environmental protection.  Their role is like that of slavery and the slave trade in past times, not only the Atlantic trade of the 18th and 19th centuries but also the Byzantine and Genoese slave trade from the Black Sea region in the Middle Ages.  All these had enormous distorting effects on politics and culture, driving reactionary and anti-Enlightenment views and policies.  The thousand-year cultural stagnation of the Byzantine Empire seems due to this.  Relying on reactionary and harmful methods of getting basic energy is culturally fatal.

            Capitalism in the narrow sense—control of society by capitalists—is dead.  If “neoliberalism” ever existed, it does so no more.  (The term has been used so loosely that it has no established meaning; it once meant the extreme free-market view.)  Giant firms working through tyrannical governments are the future, or at least the foreseeable future.  Since the rapid growth of these extractive industries cannot go on much longer, a hard limit will be set within 100 years (and probably within 50), leading probably to mass starvation, hopefully to some search for solutions.

            Even the dinosaur firms are somewhat horrified at what is happening in the US, Turkey (Altınay 2019), Hungary, and elsewhere, but they cannot escape it now.  They depend on racists, religious fanatics, and other extremists.   The right wing worldwide has abandoned traditional conservatism in favor of an agenda that is anti-intellectual, anti-education, anti-science, anti-environment, anti-health-care, anti-poor, anti-young, anti-old, anti-minority, religiously bigoted in favor of extremist right-wing beliefs, anti-women, militarist, gun crazy, violent, pro-corporation and anti-taxpayer, corrupt, pro-unequal treatment and inequality, opposed to all human and civil rights, pro-dictatorship, anti-freedom of conscience, strongly hierarchic.  In their world, the powerful can do what they please and are above the law, the weak do what they are told.

            Primary production by itself is not the predictor of evil.  Evil does come from the primary-production end of the economy, but only from the fraction of it that is controlled by powerful landlord or corporate interests.  The evil done in the world for the last 200 years has been largely at the bidding of plantations, fossil fuel companies, agribusiness, and related interests.  The driver is the slave-worked plantation and its modern descendants:  an economy based on a tiny, rich, powerful elite ruling a vast servile labor force of which most are expendable and can thus be killed in unlimited numbers to maintain discipline or simply for convenience.  Very different were the old monarchies, even tyrannies, which could not kill at will—they usually could not spare so much labor.   

            In the future, worldwide, concentration of power and wealth will go on, while resources diminish and global warming runs on apace—unless the human race sees fit to stop fighting and hating and start working for the common good.  The economy remains one of throughput, as opposed to efficiency and recycling. 

            The Republicans, and equivalent parties in other countries from Russia to Turkey to Brazil, are now trapped.  They depend financially on a handful of giant corporations that are increasingly acting against the interests of the majority, and are increasingly dependent on bribing politicians for support—including exemption from laws, especially laws protecting people against physical damage.  China’s tobacco industry operates with the full support of the government, though tobacco kills 1.2 million Chinese a year, because the government depends on tobacco taxes and many individual politicians depend on bribes (Kohrman et al. 2018).  The oil interests occupy a similar position in the United States.

            The future after 2030-2050 is clear enough: the world will move toward emulation of existing top-down primary-production systems.  These are recapitulating the society of the old agrarian empires.  Some 20% of the population will be starving, 65% barely surviving, 10% secure but not well off, 4% well off, 1% ruling and super rich.  There will be a steady downward sift as population falls, first from starvation, then from disease as health care gets cut back. 

            The world has made a collective decision to have one final orgy of consumption, rather than converting to sustainability and assuring a future for our children and grandchildren.  This appears in the rise of fanatically anti-environmental regimes in the United States, Brazil under Jair Bolsonaro, and elsewhere.  The rise of strongmen—individuals who specifically and explicitly violate laws and morals to show they are above such things—has given us fascist leaders feeding on hate not only in those cases but also (currently) in Hungary, India, Israel, Kazakhstan, Philippines, Poland , Russia, Turkmenistan, Uganda, and elsewhere.  Such strongmen above the law are recorded in the most ancient texts; Nebuchanezzar was an early one, followed by a whole list of Roman emperors, then such conquerors as Tamerlane and Henry VIII.  The Greek and Roman historians already had the type thoroughly described.  They always have the support of publics who feel threatened by change and progress, especially the poorer members of majorities, but also the primary-production and rentier interests.  Today, big oil and urban mobs take the place of a team formerly made up of rentier landlords and rural laborers.

            Today’s strongmen share a whole range of characteristics.  First and foremost, they sanction their rule by appeals to extremist religion or its ideological equivalent (especially communism).  This religion is virtually identical whether called “Christian,” “Muslim,” “Jewish,” “Buddhist,” or “socialist.”  It sanctions total power in the hands of the ruler; repression of women, often to the point of rendering them passive vessels of men; violence in defense of the faith; denial of equal rights to those not in the specific cult in question; and extreme opposition to the messages of peace, love, harmony, forgiveness, and charity that are the hallmarks of the actual faiths claimed.  Second, they lead attacks on weaker minorities, whether political, ethnic, religious, or lifestyle. 

Juntas with similar amoral characteristics, but lacking the strongman image, control another few dozen countries.  Democracy is on the wane worldwide.  Strongmen sometimes limit themselves to military dictatorship (as currently in Egypt) but more often invoke full-scale fascist regimes, with ethnic hatred, fusion of government and giant corporations, militarism, glorification of force, and other fascist principles.  They are skilled at mobilizing otherwise peaceful, passive majorities against minorities.

            In all cases, the fundamental ideology is one of rigid hierarchy, with respect or adulation due to superiors and stronger individuals, contempt and oppression due to those below.  Callousness or contempt of the poor and of less powerful miorities shades over into outright sadistic treatment, of which the ultimate form is full genocide.  This ideology follows from the “conservative” reading of Nietzsche (which I accept as the correct one). Nietzsche did not inspire it—he properly credited it to the more authoritarian side of ancient Greek thought—but he expressed it, and his expression inspired the Nazis, the Randians, and others who went well beyond his glorification of power into outright glorification of mass deaths. 

This form of thought animates many a weak bully, who invariably calls out his opponents as “weak” or “snowflakes.”  It goes with dismissal of all well-meaning public projects as “fantasy,” but glorification of the military and of warlike adventuring.  It also, as pointed out repeatedly by George Orwell, goes with ferociously anti-intellectual, anti-nature, and anti-art attitudes.  Orwell’s portrayal of destruction of high culture and promotion of pop trash in 1984 and Animal Farm is expanded in most of his essays.  It turned out to be eerily predictive of the Republican preference for a reality-TV star and public buffoon over a whole slate of veteran politicians.

The difference from the old days is that with better means of surveillance and massacre, monitoring and genocidal elimination of dissidents will replace the wars and campaigns of old.  North Korea, China, Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and several Middle Eastern countries already display this regime.  Turkey, Thailand, India, the United States, Israel, Venezuela, Russia, Hungary, Poland, Brazil, and several other countries are moving rapidly toward it.  Many of these are oil countries; most have powerful primary-production interests dominating their politics.  Interesting exceptions include Hungary and Israel, which have diversified and progressive economies but have gone fascist.  More interesting are the countries with powerful primary-production interests that are not going fascist.  Norway and Canada depend heavily on oil, but are developed countries, so are more diversified.  Bolivia, Zambia, and a few other countries are anomalously liberal for countries dominated by extraction.

            The “base” for the leaders of these countries seems largely the same, especially in the cases of the United States, Brazil, Turkey, Hungary, and Russia, and it is similar to Hitler’s base in Germany.  Older people of the dominant ethnic and religious group, especially if involved in traditional occupations like farming and small business, make up most of it, so that rural areas are solidly right-wing even if cities are solidly liberal.  The big businessmen in dinosaur firms and the rootless young men (and some women) of the dominant groups are heavily involved.  Puritanical religion, as opposed to liberal or social-oriented religion, is heavily involved.  Less educated or more traditionally trained individuals from the dominant ethnic and religious groups are overrepresented.  The young, the minorities, and the occupants of socially oriented or new-type occupational roles are less involved.

            The common thread seems to be that wealth is rapidly increasing but is being captured by the top 1%, while the masses stagnate economically.  The most frustrated and resentful are the less progressive fractions of the majority ethnic groups, and they are the drivers of the fascist trend, as they often were in the earlier fascist wave of the 1930s (a point made by Edsall 2018).  Really rough times have sometimes led to fascistic or psychopathic leaders taking over, but real hardship often tends to make people unite behind a capable leader rather than a merely evil one.  The breakdown of the United States in 1860 gave us Lincoln; growth appropriated by the rich while working-class whites lost out gave us Trump.

            Democracy, in the end, may prove unstable—a brief interlude between the monarchies of the past and the fascist tyrannies rising in the present.  Resource crunches may simply make it impossible for the good to prevail.  However, this is not necessary at present.  We can stop the downward slide.

            There is one striking conclusion that emerges from all:  Evil is almost always due to power challenged.  Rulers consolidating dictatorship, totalitarian rulers under threat, schoolyard bullies dominating weak but smart kids, insecure and inadequate husbands beating wives, politicians facing trial, oil company bosses facing better energy generation and consequent loss of power and position, druglords facing upstart thugs all have this in common, and above all majorities facing imagined challenge by immigrants and minorities. 

            The only hope lies in eliminating total power and restraining by law and superior force those who abuse power.  This will not be adequate, but it is the basic first step.

6.  A Final Note

            Many people of the younger generation now appear to be giving up, saying “The United States has always been like this.”  They can point to a bloody history of slavery, genocide of Native Americans, internment of Japanese and (some) Germans, Jim Crow laws, denial of the vote to women, the Texas Rangers and their institutionalized harassment of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans, anti-gay violence, and much more. 

            However, those ills have always been challenged and all were eventually stopped, or at least made illegal.  Slavery and racism go on, but underground.  The campaigns to stop them were widely supported, and involved much heroism and sacrifice.  Slavery was stopped by a bloody war.  The women’s suffrage movement, the labor movement, the civil rights movement, the environmental movement, and other movements involved a great deal of bloodletting. They prevailed in the end.

Part IV.  What to Do About It?

1. Trying to Cope

            Most communities and states have systems of checks and balances.  It is when these break down, or are deliberately dismantled, that the psychopaths and hatemongers take over, and genocide can begin.  We have observed above that the two commonest reasons for murder, whether genocide or individual, are desire for power and desire for acceptance and approval.  Frustration of these leads to escalating conflict, especially when someone with an unusually high lack of perceived control or of perceived approval feels frustrated in those needs.  The more the perceived weakness and failure, and the more the frustration, the more the overreaction to a slight, and the more the resulting conflict spins out of control.

            Throughout history, people have had to cope with human evil.  Religion has been by far the main and most important way, over and above ordinary community solidarity.  Religion has produced countless saints, sages, holy men, holy women, teachers, and meditators, many of whom were genuinely virtuous people—though many were not, at least by most modern standards.  Religion has been the carrier vehicle for most of the moral messages in human history. 

            However, religion has, notoriously, been the excuse for many of the most horrific mass murders.  No religion has a notably better track record than any other.  Christianity became the excuse for the Crusades.  Islam moved all too quickly from a call for unity and peace to a call for jihad.  Monotheistic religions appear to have a worse record than others, but the others are far from perfect.  Classical Greek stoicism and related philosophies of ataraxia (suppressing desire) became excuses for expanding the Greek and Roman empires.  Even Buddhism, which explicitly bans violence and teaches compassion to all beings, became the religion of the samurai, and has been the excuse for countless killings over time, including two of the worst genocides in modern history: the long-continuing campaigns to exterminate the Tamils in Sri Lanka and the Rohingya Muslims in Burma.  There are many other cases in history.  The Rohingya massacres should end the stereotypes about peaceable Buddhism and violent Islam widely current in American society.

            The basic problem with religion is that it claims to have the one absolute truth.  This leads to intolerance for other claims, even obviously correct ones (see the fate of evolution by natural selection, as a theory, in religious societies).  Moreover, organized religions generally have organized hierarchies, often with a single apical leader, and such hierarchies inevitably reprise Rummel’s principle:  “Power kills, and absolute power kills absolutely” (Rummel 1998).  The same dismal fate occurs with religion-like ideological systems, notoriously including communism and fascism.  

Since all cultures and traditions include alternative morals and moral codes, religions that are founded on impeccable principles of love, care, justice, and empathy always develop countertraditions that teach hate, cruelty, and butchery, from human sacrifice to burning heretics at the stake.  These are then often held-especially by rulers consolidating power—to be the highest of moral goods, superior to the everyday care and help.  Ordinary selfish greed can be handled; sadism considered as highest morality is harder to control.

The alternative is not abandonment of religion or of truth, but of expanding the basic principle of intelligent enquiry: we are searching for truth but have not found it all, and the more people cooperate in searching for truths, the better we all do.

            There is a common theme of religion turned evil: it is obsessed with control, especially control over the more vulnerable and less dominant members of society.  The clearest and most obvious common theme of religions that harm is that they focus on harming and oppressing women.  This is the distinguishing feature between right-wing and liberal Christianity, extremist and ordinary Islam, ultra-Orthodox and reform Judaism, extremist and ordinary Buddhism, and so on throughout the world’s religions.  Repression of women usually carries over to repression and abuse of children (“Spare the rod and spoil the child,” a folk version of Proverbs 23:13-14).  Degree of intolerance for heresies, including the most minor and trivial divergences from practice, also tracks religion turned harmful; the opposite is ecumenism or tolerance.

            Religions all seem to fall into the trap of seeing ordinary innocent need-satisfaction and fun as “sin,” while social jockeying for position and control is taken for granted, and even put to evil use to promote the faith.  No religion seems to face the obvious fact that most evil in the world is done to maintain social position or control.  Religions have hierarchic orders, organized monasteries and priesthoods, and so on, thus leaving themselves open for the worst sins of all while fighting the trivial ones. 

            Killing desire, the goal of some religions and philosophies, frequently succeeds in killing desire for the morally good, while leaving hatred intact.  At best, it allows people to avoid confronting the world, including its evils.

            Some argue that religion is “the problem,” but the alternatives do not have a good track record.  Nationalism, fascism, capitalism, and communism are the leading ideologies developed as alternatives.  Stalin and Mao repressed religion (all religion) with even more sadistic enthusiasm than Christians in the 17th century demonstrated in repressing heretics. 

            The problem is clear: all these are social, all of them define groups, and it is social group hatred that is the main and usual problem.  Religions usually blame greed and lust, but cannot get rid of them.  The real problem is social hate, and the religions do not even try to get rid of it.  They often cause it.  Religion and its imitators provides communitas, but also unreal abstractions and unprovable visions.  People then commit to those, and carry out real murders in support of them.  In short, grand ideological frameworks are not going to save us.

2. First Steps to Policy: Evaluating What Helps

            From what went before, it appears that the current problems facing the world are best conceptualized under five heads, from more specific and immediate to general and deep-rooted:

            Saving the environment, especially from dinosauric interests such as Big Oil and Big Agribusiness.  This means protecting biodiversity, switching immediately and thoroughly to renewable energy, and being as sustainable as possible—by whatever measure is useful.

            Restoring the rule of law, at the expense of the fascistic despots that now run all the largest nations and many of the smaller ones.

            Fighting racist, religious and ideological bigotry and hatred, by teaching tolerance, valuing diversity, and social solidarity.

            Getting people to stop, think, learn, and make reasonable decisions, instead of going with exaggerated media-driven overreactions.

            Above all, the real back story: dealing with the chronic social fears and stresses that create most of the problem.  This requires fair, responsive, responsible governments and leaders.  Such are now exceedingly rare, and the worst sort of strongman leaders control dozens of countries.  Restoring fair, equitable governance is clearly basic to security and thus to reassuring people, reducing threat, making individuals feel capable of dealing with threat, and thus greatly reducing the drive to hate and harm.

            We also desperately need an educational system that will create and foster self-confidence, self-control, concern for quality of life, and dedication to self-improvement.  These are necessary to blocking hatred and defensiveness.  People need to see themselves as independent agents improving the world, or at least their own lives, rather than followers and mindless conformists.

Obviously, we also need to increase such basic amenities as medical care, education, and justice.

To do all this, we will have to work on technology, ideology, morality, and praxis.  What follows, for most of the rest of this book, is heavily moral.  It will sound sententious to many, but I believe there is a need to establish an agreed moral ground as well as dealing with practical issues and stopping violence.

            The rest of this section will be largely devoted to my ideas on these topics.  I claim no great originality, but will not be citing literature except where I am directly using someone else’s ideas.

            In general, social change comes from individuals working within existing structures, often modifying those structures in the process.  There is a front story of individual decisions, a mid story of human context, and a back story of demography, climate, existing rules and laws, and historical contingencies that create a “path dependent” situation.  Charismatic or brilliant leaders succeed, but only in hopeful times.  They cannot do much in reactionary times and regimes.  Democracy helps, but reactionary democracy does not.

            Good behavior does not come easily.  One must not only be moral, but—more importantly—able to deal rationally and as coolly as possible with actual harms and stresses. The innate impulses toward developing morality stem from human needs for warm sociability.  As we have seen, developing these requires at least some support, empathy, and empowerment of children growing up, and self-efficacy among adults.  Since people being much worse than many of us once thought, we need stricter laws and sanctions.  Recent events worldwide have proved that we most especially need laws against malicious lying for political reasons.  We also need much stricter sanctions against betrayal, bullying, and hate crimes.  We need far better civil rights protection.   The Founding Fathers lived at a time when politically active people could be assumed to be at least somewhat brave and responsible. Not now.

Violence normally requires weakness and irrationality to drive it, so strength and reasonableness help.  However, there are exceptions.  Violence is the default recourse and first recourse in warrior cultures, though mostly in intergroup relations.  Culture enters in to tell individuals when to be violent.  In any society, violence can be dealt with only by strict, fair laws, with no corruption.  A wider moral shell is necessary, but not sufficient.  There must be law and order with firm, impartial enforcement; norms of peace; conflict resolution mechanisms, formal and informal, general and specific.  Experience teaches that there must also be something adventurous but nonviolent for young men to do.  Ordinary sports appear to fail at this, but exploring, seafaring, and the like are available.  Peace is also helped by an expanding economy that raises all boats, or at least prevents groups from sinking.  This need not be ecologically ruinous; we can expand into sustainable energy and services instead of mass-produced bulk goods.

Recall that it is easier to unite people against a common enemy, and to get them to follow orders if those orders involve destroying a hated or despised group, than to unite people in the cause of love and care.  People are sociable, and usually loving and caring to their close kin and friends, but fear and hate dominate public interaction unless rigidly combatted.

The one thing that almost everyone agrees on, in politics, is that the first requirement for a government is that it protects its people.  Until now, that has been interpreted as military protection, with economic protection added to the list in the 20th century.  Today, the dangers to a given citizenry are, first, environmental (especially climate change); second, genocide and related corrupt and violent internal politics; third, preventable diseases and health risks.  The first and third were not manageable by government when the Founding Fathers wrote.  The second was, but was far less a problem than external invasion; such is no longer the case. 

The citizenry also has a right and a need to be protected from hatred and hate crimes, and from major loss in quality of life, as by loss in aesthetic opportunities, nature, historic monuments, and the like.  Protection of economic benefits by managing the economy well is clearly necessary, but now less important than preventing the catastrophic disasters that climate change and pollution are bringing about.

3.  A different kind of civilization

            An ideal to strive toward is a civilization depending on growth in environmental and cultural amenities rather than mass-production of manufactured goods.  We currently measure economic growth and development by the amount of value created by human activity, rather than by the amount of value overall.  Mining, manufacturing, and any form of resource-transforming count—even if all they are doing is producing pollution (Anderson 2010). Often, this means that pure destruction is highly valued on paper, though it brings nothing but harm to actual people.  Preserving nature, allowing environments to recover, and creating personal amenities not traded in the market do not count.  Art and craft production does not count unless it is counted in the manufacturing and sales statistics.  Singing songs for one’s children does not count, but polluting the air with hideous electronic music does. 

            An opposite model of how to run a civilization existed in old Southeast Asia.  Nobody assessed economic growth, though the governments did tax value created.  What mattered was saving forests and fruit trees, growing rich and complex crop assemblages, creating beautiful arts, living happily, and letting others live as they wished.  Societies were ruled by kings, but were astonishingly free and open.  The landscapes were beautiful, and got richer, lusher, and more diverse over time, because agriculture was devoted to producing human food rather than industrial goods.  There was some war and killing, but nothing remotely like what we have seen in the past 100 years in the world.  The one great problem was disease, which was rampant, but with modern medicine this has been stopped, and lifespans are comparable to the west.  The problems now are rapid population growth in a context of even more rapid shift to western industrialization and destruction.  Similar, if less materially successful, cultures existed in other areas worldwide.  The Maya of Mexico and Central America have been notably good at maintaining ecosystems, for instance.

            We are not going to return to Southeast Asia in 1900, but we can use their design principles: a world where people are helped by moving toward the more natural, more simple, more beautiful, and more sustainable.  Our current industrial civilization sets all its incentives, subsidies, and accounting in the opposite direction: valuing destruction of nature to make vast and complex amounts of ugly stuff by unsustainable practices.

We need to value trees, grasses, gardens, birds, fish, landscapes, clean water, health, good food, beautiful art and music, and other amenities, rather than sheer throughput of materials.  Bhutan, basically a Southeast Asian state in economy and ecology though culturally and linguistically Tibetan, has in fact done this, measuring its “gross domestic happiness” via such indices.  They show a genuine alternative, a way out of our rush to collapse.

4.  Education

To recapitulate:  the most direct and basic cause of evil is anger turning to hate and hate turning to violence.  This usually comes from strong reaction to social slights, threats, and harms.  Escalating anger leads to fighting.

In such cases, the food of the bad wolf is brooding on insults and personal offenses.  Weak and defensive individuals, especially those that have physical power (often in the form of guns) but lack of perceived self-efficacy in social life, are the most avid consumers of that food, and the most dangerous of people.

On the wider scale, genocides and mass killings occur when ruthless leaders take power through extremist ideologies, using those ideologies to whip up hatred that unites masses against victims.  In this case, there is an initial coterie of zealots and then a vast mass of weak, conformist followers who allow their everyday frustrations and resentments to be mobilized in the cause of destruction.  Once again: the food of the bad wolf is ruminating on minor slights and harms, in this case leading to weak and defensive persecution of scapegoats.  The weak and defensive conformists are the voters who vote for vicious dictators, the passive enablers of dictatorial coups, and then the easily-swayed subjects of brutal regimes.

Part of this food for the bad wolf is the insidious thought that some people don’t matter.  Education must also teach people to control hostility and aggression, the real problems in cases of hatred.  Teaching students that hatred and unprovoked aggression are unacceptable—morally wrong and socially destructive—is obviously necessary. To feed the good wolf, we need to feed the irenic and full-person sides of human nature.  The best food for good wolf is reflecting that every being is important, and every human deserves consideration.  Common decency and honesty would be enough to keep the good wolf fed and the bad one at bay.   Surely schools, media, and public life can teach that much. 

Education therefore needs to talk at length about domestic violence, bullying, genocide, and war.  All educators—including parents and, indeed, everyone—must teach young people not to hate, not to brood about trivial slights, and not to escalate conflict.  Anger and fighting have their place, but overreaction and hatred do not.  People need to be taught about bullies and the strongmen who are bullies writ large.  They also need to grow up in a world of enforced laws against such behaviors, to get a sense of the need for the rule of law.

Conflict resolution is thus important.  Children and adults need to learn how to deal with conflicts other than by angering and fighting.  This should be combined with teaching them not to displace their fear, stress, and aggression.  Specifics include better parenting and better advice and counseling.

Education must return to teaching civics and basic civil morality—not elaborate or puritanical rules, but simple common decency.  American history must go back to teaching the ideals that founded the nation and have continued to improve over time.  American education has suffered terribly from both jingoistic idolization of America, denying its past of racism, genocide, and slavery, and hypercritical focus on such ills at the expense of recording the ideals and the progress toward them.  One would hope for education in the great literature and arts of the past—the whole world’s past—but teaching the “classics” did not save Europe from fascism and communism, so perhaps something was missed in the old days of liberal education.

More serious is the need to require and demand that public and private education teach verified science and absolutely ban global warming denial, anti-evolution, anti-vaccination propaganda, and other outright lies propagated for the purpose of harm.  We are not policing education at all well.  When it teaches hateful lies, we are corrupting the nation.  Freedom of speech absolutely must not extend to freedom of schools to teach lies.  This is among the most immediate and critical of needs.

Schools need to change profoundly, to teach civility and ordinary decency and to deal with values.  Today, schools have come increasingly to drill students mindlessly in basic skills, to be assessed by endless standardized tests that kill thought and destroy creativity.  Some students report writing stories and poems surreptitiously because the schools discourage such behavior.  We need to go back to older ideals.  The most important thing to teach is civil behavior, not STEM skills.  Teaching students how to learn, how to do research or at least find out accurate information, is vital also.  Teaching truth is important, teaching how to tell truth from lies is even more so, but teaching students how to find out for themselves and improve their knowledge and accuracy of knowledge is most important of all. 

Traditional education, worldwide, usually taught skills through doing, in an apprentice role.  It taught values and abstract principles through stories and songs (see Kopnina and Shoreman-Ouimet 2011, especially my essay therein, Anderson 2011).  It taught ordinary declarative knowledge through taking young people out in the world and letting them experience what they were learning.  That last is no longer adequate—knowledge is not just local any more—but should be pursued as much as possible.  Certainly we need to return to these principles.  They worked; our modern system does not teach well, except when it uses them.  Nobody expects students to learn sports, or musical instrument playing, or doctoring, through lectures.  Nobody should expect morals to be learned without songs and stories.

The other point, building self-efficacy to prevent weak defensiveness and conformity to dictators, involves teaching students to do their own thinking and acting—to be independent and creative.  This involves making students (and everyone) do their own work, rather than rote memorizing and taking tests.  It also means moving people away from radio, television, and other passive-listener media, toward active interchange.  Even video games at least involve some effort.  Messaging, email, and the social media may yet save us.

People also need to know that someone, somewhere, is backing them up.  Education needs to deal with issues of alienation, isolation, prejudice, rejection, and marginalization.  This is a widely recognized point, but widely ignored in a world that will not spend money on schools or psychological help.

Clearly, education, therapeutic enough to cure people of weak defensiveness, hatred, and scapegoating, is the most important need in combatting evil.  Now that we know the basics of feeding good and bad wolves, we need to reform educational systems accordingly.

5.  Some Moral Principles

          The Seven Deadly Sins are all too well known, as identified by the early Christian church from late Greek thought, but no one seems to recall the matching set of Seven Virtues.  They are: Faith, hope, charity, justice, prudence, temperance, fortitude.  This seems as reasonable a place to start as any, but the following will highlight justice-as-fairness, following John Rawls, and tolerance, following none of the Seven.  Intolerance was not a bad thing in ancient times. 

If  people were really selfish, they would want what we know people really enjoy: happy, cooperative, mutually beneficial, warm societies and communities above all else—not self-aggrandizement at the expense of their friends and families and communities.  If people were not mean, they would hate disease and misery and unnecessary suffering—not each other or science or nature.  If they were interested in actual control rather than power to bully others, they would hate autocracy and unnecessary hierarchy. 

Caring is the nexus, the alternative for which we strive.  We seek especially the broad sense: wanting good for others and wanting a good and harmonious society (even infants want that).  The Bible calls this agapé or caritas.  Buddhists call it compassion.  Humans being so prone to domination by the bad wolf, we must err on the side of caution, caring, helping, reching out, and empowering. 

Viktor Frankl noticed that survivors of Hitler’s concentration camps were those that had something deeply important to live for and be responsible for.  Usually, this would be either families or work that was a real Calling rather than a mere job.  Sometimes it was religion.  He spent his life extending this observation, learning that almost all people need or want a deep meaning of this sort in their lives (Frankl 1959, 1978).  This is one basic counter to living for hate.  Unfortunately, and perhaps ironically, group conflict is one of the most powerful ways to give meaning to life (Rovenpor et al. 2019).  Nothing is more meaningful to people than fighting for a cause.   One must use caution in deploying the classic “work and love” in support of tolerance.

            The other counters are the opposites of excessive anger: reasonableness and peacefulness.  The opposites of hatred are tolerance and valuing diversity.  The opposites of callousness are responsibility, but above all empathy and compassion, which may in the end be the most important qualities for all good-doing.  The daily kibble of the good wolf is support, empowerment, caring, compassion, mutual aid, mutual responsibility, mutual respect, and mutual concern.  The red meat that gives it strength to win is conscious work to create and build social solidarity. 

            In dealing with evil, we need to attack it directly: to oppose rational truth to hatred, political lies, oppression, cruelty, abuse of power, and the summation of all these in fascism and similar political ideologies.  We need to call out such things directly, constantly, and explicitly. 

            Above all, we need to drive rational, reasonable thinking and behavior against the irrationality (sometimes downright insanity) of murderous harm.

            Nothing helps except dealing directly with it.  When your baby throws up all over you, all you can do is clean it up.  Prayer doesn’t help, good thoughts don’t help, meditation doesn’t help.  You keep loving the baby and do what is necessary.

            The only direct way to stop murder and mass violence is through appealing to reason and rational discourse while also enforcing strict laws within a rule of law.

            This, by itself, is not enough.  We need to oppose evil with cultural and social teachings of help and unity, sustained by the innate moral or premoral sense of mutual aid and generosity that seem to inhere in humans.  Directly relevant, also, are natural interest—especially active warm interest—and curiosity, and the urge to learn more in order to improve.  Natural toughness and innocent enjoyment are reasonable and useful.  

            The reason that advancing the good so often fails is not mere selfishness.  It is antagonism to cooperating and to working with others as equals, especially as seen in refusal to learn, change, and self-improve as part of the process.

            The cure is seeing all people as worthwhile and that we are all in this together.  The long first part of this book demonstrated at length that the root problem is rejecting people for reasons of “essence”: the false belief that “race,” ethnicity, religion, and the like are somehow basic essences that condemn whole groups of people.  The only cure is seeing all as not only tolerable but worthy of help and of civil behavior.  Ideally, they are all equal before the law, and equal in opportunity—a hope not approximated in modern societies.

            Seeing all as worthy requires checking excessive anger.  It also requires proactive compassion and empathy, to avoid callous bureaupathy and similar evils.  Studies on how to further such goals exist (Batson 2011; McLaren 2013; Zaki 2019).  Our authors, notably Beck (1999) and Maslow (1970), provide ideas and experiences.

            The task is to minimize both the level of anger and number of things that arouse it.  A fascist dictator will try to find as many reasons for anger as he can, finding ways to include almost everyone in the violent movement (see e.g. Traverso 2019 on recent successes and failures at whipping up hatreds in Europe).

I recognize the drawbacks of utilitarian calculation, but I cannot see any way to evaluate policies and politics except by net help to people and the environment versus net harm to same. Things like peace and freedom must be calculated within that shell.  There are times when peace is wrong, such as when one’s country is invaded.  There are necessary limits to freedom, such as denying people the right to bully others.  Proactive effective help is good, by definition, but can be worse than nothing when it is badly planned, or unneeded and intrusive.  The usual social-conformity measures are usually helpful, keeping society together, but they can be bad: being too conformist, going along to get along, and the like. 

            Helping requires self-efficacy, reasonableness, self-control, self-confidence, and courage (i.e. ability to go into unknown and risky, where self-confidence fails).  Obviously, parents and schools need to do everything possible to develop these.  Self-confidence, including confidence in one’s moral principles and above all confidence in one’s control of one’s life, is the key virtue for preventing collapse into blind conformity, including conformity to genocidal leaders.  It also prevents collapse into domestic violence and other individual violent acts. 

            The countervailing forces are indifference (resulting in callousness) and actual hate.  Hatred in particular must be fought wherever and whenever it arises.  If it becomes pervasive in society, violence becomes inevitable.  Genocide is the ultimate case of hatred spun out of control; it can only be stopped in advance by fighting hate and displacing evil leaders.

The usual moral touchstone, the Golden Rule, does not work perfectly.  My neighbors do not take well to being treated to Brussels sprouts, Scottish murder ballads, or displays of Chinese art.  Granted that such individual preferences are probably not what was intended by the Golden Rule, where do we draw the line?  I do not inflict my rather old-fashioned Christian morality on my kids, let alone the world at large.  Conversely, I would not accept the hierarchic social morality that works in and is highly popular in Singapore and China.  We simply cannot use ourselves as measures of all things and all people. 

            The only reasonable touchstone is helping people.  But what helps?  Is it help in their terms, or in mine?  One hopes for easy cases—things that are recognized by almost everyone as helping, such as feeding the hungry.  Not all cases are easy.  If I were in Singapore (where I lived and worked for a while many years ago), would I work to advance its quite popular but rigid moral code, which—then at least—banned chewing gum, rock music, and Playboy?  Or would I work to advance freedom and liberty of conscience, according to my own view of helping?  Such cases can only be decided by detailed consideration and consultation.

As David Hume said, “Reason is, and must ever be, the slave of the passions” (Hume 1969 [1739-1740]:462).  Reason is a good slave.  It is the only way to get things right so that we can survive.  It is the only possible route to change and improvement.  But it matters more to get the passions right, such that reason is a slave to the good ones.  It is at least as competent and hard-working a slave to evil as to good. 

One opposite to evil is the “universal positive regard” of the psychologists (Rogers 1961), but that is a process goal, not achievable in the real world.  Checking evil often involves direct fighting against real enemies, so life cannot be free from harming others.  This multiplies the need for rational thought, since any irrationality can lead to harming the wrong people.

The cure for misdirected aggression and rejection is action that is as helping as possible.  Most religions have come up with this idea, but only certain forms of the religion feature it.  It has been termed the “Social Gospel” in Christianity.  It also characterizes reform Judaism, Ahmadiyya, the Three Teachings tradition in China, various forms of Buddhism, and other traditions.  There needs to be a Goddess of Common Sense.   

The Southern Poverty Law Center has listed ten ways to fight hatred: Act, join forces, support the victims, speak up, educate yourself, create an alternative, pressure leaders, stay engaged, teach acceptance, dig deeper.  Desire for wealth, power, status, standing, and sociability can lead to positive-sum games and thus to goodness and progress, but all too often desire leads to zero-sum or negative-sum playing.  Then, when others push back, conflict escalates, eventually spinning out of control unless damped down.  To be evil, this must—by my definition, at least—reach irrational levels.   

Damping must start with desire (as religions have always taught).  It cannot end there.  We must teach and invoke policy to get people to play positive-sum games and to be reasonable.  We must put in place conflict-resolution mechanisms (Beals and Siegal 1966).   We must teach a morality of peaceful behavior instead of vengeance and predation.  Finally, we must outlaw actual harming, including indirect harms that are currently accepted, such as pollution damage.  Damping down conflict is the most immediate and direct need, however.  The greatest problem in conflict, always, is escalation.  Really successful ways to damp that down, all the way from playground fights and intimate partner violence to international conflicts and genocides, are not always deployed, and more research on them is seriously needed.  As we have noted above, the ordinary small-scale tensions, problems, and slights of daily life keep people in a state that allows sudden positive-feedback loops to emerge and lead to exploding conflict.

Since cowardice and self-doubt lie behind so many of the problems, there is a serious need to promote self-efficacy, self-reliance, and ability to act—notably including the knowledge of how to de-escalate conflict.

People are often too busy or defensive or simply lazy to work hard for the good; we cannot expect everybody to do it.  Dealing with indirect problems like environmental woes is especially difficult.  People discount the future, are too optimistic, and hate the endless small adjustments that fixing the environment entails.  It is easier to go for one big fix, such as a war. 

Since overreaction and misreaction are root problems, the start of the cure is facts.  We have to get science back to a place where people will accept scientific findings.  After that, the clearest intervention needed is demanding civil rights and civil behavior.

6. Background: A Wider Moral Shell

            This provides a guide for a moral shell involving solidarity with others above all, especially tolerance and valuing diversity, but also concern for self-improvement and quality of life, including a return to the civility, mutual respect, responsibility, and patience that we are losing. 

            Reasonableness is inadequate.  People cheat on their own morals; they fall short and provide excuses.  They fail to reason correctly, and err in predictably self-serving directions.

            Even without that, people must sacrifice to make community work.  They need to make up for cheaters, and they must be heroic in emergencies.  We cannot expect everyone to love and care much beyond the family and friendship circle. (What follows draws heavily on John Rawls’ doctrine of fairness as justice [Rawls 1971, 2001] but is informed by a range of ethical positions, from Kantian [Kant 2002] and neo-Kantian [Korsgaard 1996] to neo-utilitarian [Brandt 1979, 1992, 1996] to Aristotelian virtue ethics [Aristotle 1953]; see also Anderson 2010).

            Thus, every society on earth has had to develop a morality of self-sacrifice and service to others, enforced it by public opinion.  This was memorably argued by Adam Smith, who correctly saw it as a necessary shell around his economic utopia of free small-scale competition (Smith 1910, 2000).  They must conform up, to higher standards of behavior, rather than down into toxic conformity to evil norms.  This requires personal strength.

            From what has gone before in this book, we conclude that evil is due to extreme individuals—psychopaths, sociopaths, and the like—who often become leaders; to cowardice and failure to cope with hurt, stress, and threat; and to conformity with orders from people suffering from those two conditions.  Ordinary selfish greed is also a huge problem, but rarely gets out of control unless the other three conditions hold.  People are notably good at stopping each other from selfish greed.  Studies show that humans are good at “cheater” detection, and at stopping cheaters by shaming, ostracism, and outright punishment (Tomasello 2016; Wrangham 2019).  Ordinary people develop a conscience that restrains them from cheating even when they can get away with it, and a concern for people that makes them want to help others and do right by them.  It is hard to separate these good mental states from sheer fear of shame and punishment; all combine to keep most people only somewhat selfish.  We all cheat a bit, but most of us limit it to fairly innocuous matters.  The psychopaths are those who cheat in spite of being attacked, writing off the attacks as unfair and hypocritical. 

It is worth briefly noting that some “sins” are not what they seem: gluttony is a matter of eating disorders, themselves caused by problems usually apart from food; “sloth” is usually hatred for dull work, or physical illness, or psychological inanition due to fear and stress; and so forth.  Many early moralities foundered on the rock of condemning reasonable and normal desires, rather than the irrational reactions to fear and stress that made people seem sinful or immoderate in their desires.  It seems likely that puritanical condemning of normal desires did more damage by creating fear, stress, and guilt than it brought benefit to anyone. 

            We must maintain a consistent, oft-repeated ideology of unity, solidarity, mutual aid, mutual care, and tolerance.  From a general sense of “we’re all in this together,” the first personal virtues are openness, warmth, interest in the world, self-confidence, and ability to enjoy life.  These were highlighted by Aristotle (1953), but they have been amazingly neglected since his 4th-century-BCE days.  These imply a set of learned personal orientations: compassion, respect, responsibility.  These in turn entail civility, reasonableness, courage, patience, and hard work.  Social attitudes include empathy and egalitarianism—both equality before the law and the rough-and-ready sense that we are all here and thus have to take care of each other and take people as they are.

            Empathy and altruism are linked; psychological studies have unpacked both.  Humans are wired for empathy in ways unknown among other animals, and can build on that by learning to be much more empathetic than is “natural” from the genetic base.  We are experts at putting ourselves in others’ places, feeling what they feel, and understanding how they could react to situations.  Daniel Batson (2011), a leading expert on empathy, points out that these are different things.  Understanding others’ feelings, matching those feelings, and understanding how our own feelings can be different from others’, are all different agendas.  Lack of empathy is, of course, far too typical of bureaucrats and governments, and of many ordinary people who have either never learned real empathy or have suppressed what they know (Baron-Cohen 2011).  Batson went on to show that altruism goes beyond this: we need to value others.  We have seen that understanding the feelings of others can make cruelty worse; the sadist can use understanding and sensitivity to devise the most fiendish tortures.  This is well known from the annals of both crime and Hitler’s death camps (Baumeister 1997). 

            Batson further points out that empathy and altruism are not enough.  They can make people unfair.  One naturally has more empathy to one’s family and friends than to strangers, and thus tends to skew altruism.  The extreme is reached in those super-rich families that take care of their own very well indeed while giving nothing to charity.  Batson, a Kantian who follows Kant and Rawls into a realm of absolute ethics of fairness and principle, opposes such narrow empathy to his general principles of fairness.  However, in a particularly thoughtful passage (Batson 2011:220-224), he traces the limits of extreme fairness: not only can we not really do it—family ties are generally too strong—but we are also masters at rationalizing, excusing, justifying, and otherwise weaseling out of our principles, when emotions are strong.

            Jamil Zaki, in The War for Kindness (2019), takes up where Batson left off.  Summarizing Batson’s work, he goes on to detail a number of programs for dealing with real-world problems involving various kinds of empathy: reforming criminals, teaching police to be community servants rather than “warriors,” teaching autistic children, and simply helping ordinary people with problems.  We have the tools; we can go well beyond the remedies for hatred and lack of empathy suggested by Beck (1999) and our other basic sources.  The only problem is that all these remedies involve intensive one-on-one work, “saving the world one person at a time.”  Meanwhile, strongman leaders whip up millions with hateful rhetoric.  It is all too easy to turn nations of peaceable Germans or Cambodians into killers.  Fortunately, peace did reverse that process in those and other countries.

            Recall what was said earlier: the real food of the wolf is personal weakness or lack of self-efficacy, leading to taking offense easily, brooding on it, and escalating it in response.  The cure is to minimize offense-taking, but then to find morality, empathy, beauty, care, compassion, and goodness in the wide world and in humanity.  Both dealing with evil and separately appreciating and respecting the good seem needed.

            Religions have tried for millennia to make people love all humans, or have compassion for all living things.  This is difficult.  People love or at least feel solidary with their reference groups, which can be very large; many Chinese feel deep solidarity and passionate loyalty to their billion and a quarter compatriots.  But genuine love for all humans is rare indeed.  Unfortunately, it is demonstrably far easier to learn hate for targeted groups, even groups whose members the haters have never met.    

            The only philosophy that seems to have addressed this problem squarely is Confucianism.  Confucianism generally holds that people are innately compassionate, helpful, and prosocial.  However, first, they also have tendencies in other directions, particularly in the direction of selfish greed.  Second, they naturally and necessarily privilege family over strangers (Confucians long anticipated Darwin here).  Third, they do indeed rationalize away moral conflicts.  Thus, Confucianism sought to define what each category of people owes others, with family, friends, neighbors, the nation, and all humanity as the relevant categories.  Debate still rages among Confucians about the perfect balance, but the real message is that humans in the real world need to accommodate different levels of empathy and be as fair as possible under such circumstances.  (See Mencius 1970; I have benefited greatly from discussions with Neo-Confucian thinkers, especially Ben Butina, Dean Chin, Bin Song, and Tu Weiming.)

            All these result in ability to be socially responsible, and to carry out mutual aid, a highly desirable end-state (Smith 2000).  Basic to this are what I would consider the leading interpersonal moral needs:  caring, compassion, considerateness and civility, reasonableness, respect, and responsibility (4 C’s and 3 R’s).  It includes the values that create peace and unity in society: solidarity, tolerance, valuing diversity, mutual aid, and empowerment; thus, for society, peace, justice, fairness, equality, truth, and inquiry (as argued by Rawls 1971).  On these are built leadership, civic action, mutual aid, and social responsibility in general.  The short summary of all this is valuing people (Batson 2011; Zaki 2019), or at least taking them seriously, as fellow travelers on the planet. 

            The main stem of this runs from caring to actual help.  Ancillary to this stem are self-efficacy and learning.  Self-efficacy involves self-control, not trying to control others, courage, industry, and loyalty.  It includes self-improvement in appreciation, knowledge, and psychological functioning (Bandura 1982, 1986).

            Learning, knowledge, and wisdom are obviously necessary, and critical, for this enterprise.  That involves keeping an open mind about new findings, but no open mind about hatred or cruelty.  It also requires self-control (including giving up the attempt to overcontrol others), patience, and courage, but above all the ability to work hard, in focused and thorough way, for the common good.  Hypocrisy and toxic conformity are banished.  Education must follow accordingly.

            The good person will ignore slights and dislike, being fully civil in such cases.  Actual threats must be taken seriously, but rationally, by trying to talk things out, then seeking recourse, and only if that fails does one fight or flee.  The real opposite of hate is common decency, not love.  Seek positive solutions.  Act for the good.  Do your best at what you do best.  Remember also the airlines’ truth: “secure self first, then attend to others.”  Above all, look to long-term, wide-flung benefits, not to short-term and narrow ones.

            It pays to look at this with a medical gaze: see exactly what is wrong, why it is wrong, and what is the cure.  Moralizing in the abstract is of less use, though also necessary.         

“Process goals” are goals that can never be fully reached, but that make the world better the closer we approach to them.  The classic example is health.  Perfect health is impossible in this flawed world.  We could always be a little better off.  But striving for better and better health is obviously worth doing.  Similarly, we will never be able to feed everyone, but the FAO’s goal of secure, healthy, nourishing, accessible food for everyone in the world is a goal worth striving for; the closer we get to it, the better off we are.  Other such goals include learning, appreciation of diversity and beauty, and cooperation.  We might even list cleaning, fixing, and maintenance.

Freedom, tolerance, and wealth all stop at moderation.  Tolerance must stop before it reaches tolerance for rape, murder, and theft.  One should never be intolerant of persons as such, but certainly we must be intolerant of evil acts.  We must also frequently oppose actual enemies, even though they are persons and deserve respect and fair treatment as such.  Inequality and excessive wealth are notorious social evils.

There is a difference between goals that must be intrinsically moderate, like drinking (assuming one drinks at all) or exercising, and goals where the issue is targeting rather than moderation per se.  Tolerance is such a targeting goal: being tolerant of ordinary differences is close to a process goal (though it always requires some moderation), but being tolerant of Nazism is intolerable—the classic “tolerance paradox.”  Similarly, wrath is usually a bad thing, but wrath against leaders of genocide is appropriate and commendable. 

This gives us morals in pairs:  Caring vs indifference; courage vs. cowardice; peace vs. hate and hostility; proactive help vs. laziness; responsibility vs. irresponsibility; reason vs. irrationality; carefulness vs. carelessness; respect vs. scorn.  Courage comes before hate, though hate is the Problem, because hate comes from fear and thus courage is a prior and more basic virtue.

Another need is for proactive positive action, and that requires a vision of the Good and an ability to enjoy.  Cowardly defensiveness destroys enjoyment; it causes anhedonia.  If one can openly enjoy something, one is already moving toward the good.  It is natural for the social animals we are to want others to enjoy and to share in our enjoyments.  Puritans and constant complainers are notoriously easy to delude into genocidal evil.  Puritanism about anything—not just sex or alcohol—feeds the bad wolf. 

7. Towards a New Moral Order

            We need a new moral order (Anderson 2010), based on keeping the good wolves fed and the bad ones starved.  Morality exists because people are compulsively and necessarily social, and yet get offended and angry and then hateful and aggressive.  In this case, it should be the opposite of hatred, callousness, and irrationally violent response to perceived threat.

            Following Kant, the first rule of morality is to take all people, and ultimately all beings, as important, to value them (again following Batson), and to accept them as valid beings—fellow travelers on this planet.  As Kant said: they must be subjects of concern, not objects to be used. 

            This is one of the messages of epics like the Iliad, of the classic Scots ballads, and of great literature the world over.  The extreme opposite of the typical Hollywood “action movie,” in which cardboard characters are killed by dozens without anyone’s concern.  The slide from traditional literature to Hollywood thrillers is clearly related to the rise in genocide and violence; the latter tracks the former and other pop cultural forms that teach indifference to life.  The rise of inequality, especially the rise in power of giant multinational firms, is a much more obvious driver of indifference to people and of taking them as Kantian objects (Kant 2000).

            Great cultural productions can thus be used for self-improvement and for learning about the humanity and sensitivies of others.  If they are simply read for schoolwork, however, they do very little.  The depressing lack of empathy and humanity among well-educated leaders has often been noted.  Particularly sad is learning of the number of extremely intelligent, highly educated, creative people who sympathized with the fascists in Europe in the 1930s.  The most famous cases were Martin Heidegger, Ezra Pound, and Leni Riefenstahl, but there were countless more.  Poets from T. S. Eliot to e. e. cummings were sympathizers early on, and wrote viciously anti-Semitic poetry, though they cooled when they saw what was happening.  Fortunately, no significant thinkers or writers have seen fit to approve of fascism in recent decades (see Travserso 2019 for the nearest-to-exceptions). 

            The main pillars of that are caring, charity, and peace.  These can take us on to active help: feeding the hungry, healing the sick, and the other standard social goods.  We are called to be nice to all, but for life work do your best at what you do best to help.  St. Paul’s “gifts differing” (Romans 12:6) is a watchword: people have different strengths, and this allows a complex society to exist and to be far more productive and efficient than one in which everyone had the same skills. 

            Long-term, wide-flung interests should prevail above short-term, narrow ones.  In the real world, the short term must be considered, because failure to attend to immediate threats and concerns can kill before the long term is reached.  However, the world is now sacrificing more and more long-term interest to shorter and shorter benefits.  A classic case is overfishing.  At current rates of fishing, there will be no wild commercial fisheries by 2050 (Worm 2016; Worm et al. 2006).  This occurs largely because of overcompetition among fishers and subsidies by governments.  Another problem is the opposite: overplanning and top-down control. 

            A final need is more integrity.  Never humanity’s strong point, it has declined for the usual reasons, especially the loss of community to the rise of giant corporations and their passivity-creating media.  Ordinary lies are common enough now.  Even more common is a broader failure to keep commitments, as modeled all too well by our political leaders.  The highest integrity is working single-mindedly for more quality in life and thus real improvement of the world.  Quality ranges from better music to better environment to better leadership; everyone has some particular skill or calling, and can work for some cause, depending on innate and learned abilities.  The Japanese have a word, ikigai, “life value,” for living one’s calling in a satisfying way.

            Within this moral shell, the most important thing to do is avoiding hatred and rejection of people or any other beings on the basis of prejudice: imagined “essence” that is somehow bad.  Tolerance and valuing diversity are essential.  The costs of prejudice are substantial.  Subtly foregrounding “maleness” made African-American boys do better on tests, while foregrounding “blackness” made them do worse, because of internalized stereotypes (Cohen et al. 2006).  Similar results have turned up over a wide range of stereotypes, e.g. foregrounding “Asian” vs. “women” makes Asian-American women do better or do worse, respectively, on math tests (Clark et al. 2015).  A part of this is realizing that there are no pure races and no pure cultures, and there never have been.  The racist and culturist appeals to purity are major sources of evil.  Recently, even “progressives” have been seduced by pure-culture theories, as in the more naïve theorizing about decolonialization and cultural appropriation.  Decolonialization means fixing social inequalities, not rejecting all cultural change.  Cultural appropriation is bad when it involves insulting stereotypes of others, or stealing their livelihood—not when it is simply normal borrowing.  Some progressives are being lured into genuine right-wing thinking—the old fascist lies about pure cultures and their need to remain pure.  In fact, a social morality for the future would involve, critically, learning the best from all the world’s traditions about how to manage the environment, reduce conflict, and keep societies moral.  Every culture and society on earth has experiences with these problems and has something to teach us.

            Direct action should be to help, not harm unnecessarily; work for a living and some material comforts, but, beyond minimal personal comforts, only to share with others and help others in the world; constantly work to learn more, find more truths, and abandon more wrong views; defend, but only against real direct threats, not imagined or trivial social slights or indirect or potential enemies.  Morals thus cover social interaction, self-efficacy and self-control, learning, and public values.

            Religion teaches us to be as good as possible to sinners and lure them into a warm, supportive community.  Religions all idealize helping, concern, and peace, but often fail to encourage the interest, engagement, and love of beauty that are also necessary for the common good.  Puritanical religions in fact fear these, since they tend to make people think independently and want to change.

            Practical concerns and economic adjustments are not going to do all the lifting.  Economics has followed culture and ideology in the past, and will no doubt continue to follow.  Obviously, in the future, we will have to set up a society based on sustainable use of the earth, equality of opportunity, substantial public sector, and controls on inequality, but the immediate need is to unify behind a set of principles that will stop fascism and restart progress in those directions.

            The first step, since the root problem is hatred (in the broad sense—including deliberate dismissal), is to shore up civil and personal rights to provide maximal protection from abuse of minorities, women, children, and other vulnerable groups, and maximal recourse for those groups in case of injury.  Hate crimes (to say nothing of genocide) must be condignly suppressed.  That includes deliberate incitement to hate crime.

            Ideally, we will have physical neighborhoods held together by strands of mutual aid, co-work on projects, mutual responsibility, and general neighborliness.  Virtual and dispersed communities are also valuable and need all the encouragement they can get, but there is no substitute for face-to-face contact and mutual aid. This requires promoting tolerance; all traditional small communities had their experiences of intolerance and violence.

            We need to make our current values far clearer, but we also need to combine them with emotional and personal appeals, as religions do.  This takes us back to education and the media.  It also requires some resolutions, at the political level, about what kind of society we want.  The rapid descent of the Republicans from a party of business to a party of hate has been terrifying to watch.  It is similar to the evolution of fascism in Europe, and communism in the USSR and China.

            The old ideas of “economic determinism” do not work.  We have now seen genocide and other evils arising in every type of economic situation and every type of economic regime.  The classic modes of production are not helpful.  “Socialism” covers everything from Denmark and Norway to North Korea to Venezuela.  “Capitalism” covers everything from Germany to Equatorial Guinea.  This does not get us far. 

            We have, in fact, seen genocide arise in every type of system except true democracy with equality before the law and full equal rights for everyone.  And even true democracy has proved unable to get rid of war, violence, gangsterism, and everyday crime.  Obviously, we need all the laws we can have, to outlaw harming others gratuitously, but laws exist in a moral shell, and we need to work on that as well as on making the laws apply to all equally.

The nexus, always, is caring for and about others.  Only powerful self-interest combined with social pressure can lead to doing good.  Morals exist to drive people to do good even when scared. 

8. Rights and Rules

            The morality enshrined in the Constitution is based on the theory of equal rights.  If people recognize the need for equality before the law and equal opportunity under law, they must work from this principle above all.  Then, the clear moral order for the world is saving nature, promoting responsibility and mutual aid (with the more fortunate or strong helping those less so), promoting learning and truth, and nonviolence.

            It is important to understand that both this and other moral views can go with economic growth, wealth accumulation, and the other things that developers currently consider “good.”  There is no reason to pick one over the other except for common human decency.  In the long run, the Trumpian view is unsustainable, because it leads to dinosauric interests pushing the system into collapse, but in the short run, we have seen the lack of any real break from Obama’s growth economy to Trump’s.  “Capitalism,” whatever it is, can be range from rather benign to utterly malignant.  The socialist alternative is equally ambiguous; Norway and Venezuela are both “socialist” in some ways, but Norway has a morality based on social decency, Venezuela has a moral order based on Trump-style dictatorial violence and bullying.

            It is depressing to read how the British and Americans, good Christians and lovers of Shakespeare and Milton, ran most of the world slave trade that killed perhaps 100,000,000 people in the 18th and early 19th centuries.  It is similarly depressing (though less bloody) to read the sorry history of religious movements, communes, idealistic communities, grassroots utopias, and the hippie movement.  Good intentions not backed up by firm social rules led only to collapse.

            People being imperfect, progress comes from outlawing the bad and forcing minimal civil decency.  Appeals to inner virtue are not enough.  Historically, help has come from science and education, relative economic freedom within moral limits (as Adam Smith argued), and the Enlightenment program.  That program of democracy, equality, rule of law, separation of church and state, and civil rights has done wonders.  So has the idea of promoting people according to their knowledge and ability rather than according to their birth.  Meritocracy has a bad name recently, but any acquaintance with history shows that the alternatives were worse.

            Comparing societies and communities that minimize violence and cruelty with those torn by it shows that only strict and specific rules help.  Rights are general; if they are not backed up by specific laws and court judgments, they are empty.  All societies outlaw murder, and that ban has real effect, depending on how many ancillary rules are passed.  Above all, it depends on how much the societies in question frown on violence as a way of solving problems.  Some societies regard violence as the only “manly” or “honorable” way to deal with problems, and they have murder and warfare rates that are many times—sometimes orders of magnitude—greater than the rates in societies that privilege peaceful methods of coping (Baumeister 1997; Pinker 2011; Robarchek and Robarchek 1998). 

            The Founding Fathers of the United States were aware of the problems of hatred, autocracy, lack of checks and balances, and lack of recourse.  They instituted participatory democracy in hopes that people would pick the best, or at least the less awful.  They created a mesh of checks and balances that distributed power fairly well.  They separated church and state, to prevent the awful conflicts that had driven many of their ancestors from Europe.  Most important, they established a rule of law rather than a rule of men.  This worked well for a long time, but then the genocidal demagogue Andrew Jackson took over and began a long, bloody process of consolidating power in the hands of the president and then using that power to bad ends.  This process has now reached the very edge of fascist dictatorship, and American democracy may not long survive. 

            Absolutely necessary is the right to recourse.  People who are injured must be able to sue, to protest, to speak out, to vote evil leaders out, and to defend themselves in any reasonable way.  The success of democracies at preventing genocide and famine is notable, but even more important is the realization that in such democracies, only actual citizens avoid being killed or starved (Anderson and Anderson 2017; Howard-Hassmann 2016).  Noncitizens, such as Irish in the British Isles in the 1840s and Native Americans in the United States before 1924, are starved and killed without compunction. 

            Communities must have written and unwritten (customary) laws that strictly and thoroughly regulate violence and callousness.  These laws must be based on a principle of equality before the law, which requires at least some degree of economic equality, because otherwise the rich will simply buy their way out of enforcement.  Laws must be based on the principle that violence is the last resort in dealing with any problem other than direct personal attack.  They must also strictly forbid activity that destroys many solely to benefit a few, such as big dams, engineered famines, and exposure of impoverished workers or families to pollution.  There must be legal requirements to rehabilitate both victims and lawbreakers.

            Communities must extinguish specific bad behaviors by specific rules, but they go on to encourage general good behaviors and ideals by more broad appeals to morality.

            Above all, concentration of power in the hands of one person is always dangerous.  Even a long run of good administrators or autocrats comes to an end.  Sooner or later a bully or psychopath takes over.  I have seen this process on small scales in academia, where chairs and deans usually have enough power to devastate their units, ruin careers, destroy students, and corrupt or block research.  Academia usually picks better leaders, but one bad one does incalculable harm.  There are benevolent despotisms in the world—Singapore and Oman occur to mind—but they rarely last. 

            On national scales, the takeover of democracies by tyrants has been noted ever since ancient Greece, and the results were known to be awful even then, as Aristotle’s Politics tells us. Democracy works only so far as a way of picking good leaders; again, the ancient Greeks already knew of charismatic demagogues—in fact, they coined the words. Participatory democracy seems still the best way of picking leaders, but then they must be restrained by a mesh of laws that create checks and balances and prevent corruption.  The United States is hopelessly behind in these regards.  The extreme corruption and tyranny of the Trump presidency came after a long downward slide, visible since the Nixon presidency.  Similar devolution from Hungary and Brazil to Turkey and the Philippines characterizes politics in the 21st-century world.         

Today, to the classic rights, we need to add the right to a livable environment; a right to good education, at least to the point of literacy, basic science, basic math, and competence with technology; a right to free enquiry; a right to government honesty, with full recourse if the government knowingly circulates lies; and a right to decent medical care at little or no cost.  These all follow as entailed corrolaries of our natural rights to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness.

From what has gone before, the needs center on three areas: damping down conflicts caused by desire for wealth, power, and approval; balancing power so that it is distributed as widely and evenly as possible, with checks and balances at the top and equality before the law for all; and a widely distributed search for truth—science in a broad sense—instead of religious or ideological claims for absolute truth or nihilistic denial of truth’s existence.

In the United States, and increasingly in other countries, the rule of law has collapsed, and the first need if we can take the country back would be to restore that rule.  Second would be some sort of truth and reconciliation agenda for dealing with the hatred that has spun out of control in recent years, and not only on the right.  Rational and civil discourse must replace increasingly unhelpful confrontation and in-your-face insult.  Hate speech up to a point is protected as free speech, for the very good reason that “sunlight is the best disinfectant” (see below).  What needs to be stopped is actual incitement to violence.  Also, hateful lies should be checked by false-advertising laws.  I thouroughly agree with the proposal to make campaign statements and public speeches by leading politicians sworn testimony, with mandatory jail sentences for deliberate lies.

The simplest, cleanest model of mass violence is that a strongman backed and funded by sunsetting industries whips up hatred of minorities that have long been salient as weaker rivals or enemies.  Obviously, action must start by preventing evil leaders from rising, and preventing them from leading a charge by deploying ever more vicious rhetoric.

Individual violence is more complex, but turns on issues of greed, power, and social acceptance and respect.  Individuals are not, however, violent because of those motives; they are violent because they have learned that violence is the best way to get those goals under existing circumstances.  Alternatives to violence thus become needed.  Peterson and Denaley’s findings (see above, p. 33) show that mass shooters have a characteristic background, involving abuse, and usually announce their plans in some way before they act.  Proactive prevention of abuse and proactive listening, reaching out, and treating young people with violent and suicidal or murderous ideology is obviously needed.

From a wider social context, several obvious things need doing in the United States to accomplish any of these goals.  Among these are: making campaign statements sworn testimony to prevent outright lying, ensuring voting rights, ending gerrymandering and voter suppression, getting big money out of politics and making all political money fully transparent, fighting corruption, saving the environment, and cracking down on hate crimes and incitement of them. 

We need an entire new civil rights movement, focused immediately on putting a total end to gerrymandering, voter suppression, partisan purging of voter rolls, new Jim Crow laws, and similar games.  We need to limit money in politics, starting with a Constitutional amendment to end dark money, demand full disclosure, and force politicians to recuse themselves from voting to help, subsidize, or act in support of any direct economic interest (as opposed to public-interest and worker groups, and even trade organizations) that funded their campaigns. 

Freedom of speech must be defended, but does not include direct incitement to violence, or libel, or false advertising.  These provide enough of a platform to allow us to ban campaign lies, Fox News-style public lying for evil ends, and direct rabid hatred that cannot help but lead to violence.  A great deal of “hate speech”—ordinary racist rhetoric, for instance—must be protected, because if it is banned then those in power will ban anything that annoys them.  This is a “slippery slope” argument that is quite true.  We have hundreds of years of experience, in every realm from religion to education to politics to community “civility” and “political correctness,” to prove it.  The principle is, once again, my rights stop where yours start.

A major part of this must be vastly increasing research on social problems, especially evil as herein defined.  Both scientific research and investigative reporting are required.  The great newspapers are a shadow of their former selves.  We desperately need much more exposure of dark places.

We must ban subsidies as much as possible, and certainly ban subsidies to maintain dinosaur industries that cost more than they produce. We must block the chain from lobbyist to “regulator”; those who lobby for a polluting industry can never be allowed to regulate it.  Above all, we must take actual social and environmental costs—the hard cash people lose—into account in all social and political accounting.  Oil is profitable only because its real costs are passed on as externalities.  Many calculations have shown that gasoline would cost hundreds of dollars per gallon if those costs were internalized.  (For more, see Anderson 2010.)

The only way to get these goals accomplished is the tried and true combination of mass peaceful demonstrations, teach-ins, media campaigns with new media dedicated to the task, proposals for comprehensive legislation, and above all getting people voted into office at all levels of government from waterworks boards on up (see Chenowith and Stephan 2012 on what succeeds in people’s campaigns).  These are the measures that worked for the labor movement, the civil rights movement, the antiwar movements, the environmental movement, and every other popular cause that got beyond shouting.  Voting and media attention without demonstrations and other active measures are not enough.

Social pressures, leadership, and social behavior are critical, motivating most of the good and evil behavior; cultural models are critical in providing plans for how to act; and individual personality and environment factors finally determine what a given person will do.  The social, political, and economic environment provides a back story, but the direct motivation is typically social pressure by leaders and peers.  Improving bad situations requires full social change.  Revolutions rarely work; they simply bring other violent leaders to the fore to replace earlier ones.  Social and cultural change requires deeper and more systematic, and therefore more gradual, evolution.  This requires personal commitment.  The oft-heard argument that changing oneself is a waste of time because only vast social changes matter is self-defeating.  Without changing ourselves, unless we are already committed actors, we will never have the courage or drive to change anything.

            Bringing about all those changes will depend on teaching and otherwise carrying the word, on contributing to organizations that fight for justice and truth, and on modeling civil behavior.  People need to choose reasonably what groups to join and what groups to prioritize.  Joining extremist political groups is the order of the day.  We need centrist groups, community organizations, aid associations, and other groups that will bring people together to help and to meet each other—groups that will be unifying rather than divisive.

One cannot keep a totally open and tolerant mind.  As in eating and drinking, moderation is advised.  The ills I am addressing in this essay—genocide and its small-scale correlates such as bullying, callousness, and domestic violence—do not deserve “open minded” assessment.  They must be stopped.        

Very few ways of feeding the good wolf have worked in the past, but those few have worked very well.  Unsurprisingly (given the human condition), they largely add up to empowerment of individuals through provision of human rights.  We also need to go back to civility in society, as long argued by Jurgen Habermas (1987), and stop fighting each other over every change.

            By far the best way has been guaranteeing civil and human rights, equal for all, before the law, and enforced strictly by executive and court action.  This has eroded disastrously in the United States, but grown steadily in much of western Europe.

            Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and Nelson Mandela exemplify the most important: appealing to solidarity and natural human social goodness in the face of oppression.  Next most important and effective has been empowerment.  Doing scientific research to find out what improves the human condition is a strong third.  Forthrightly opposing evil is a long fourth, but still needs to be done. 

            Group hatred has traditionally been addressed by getting the groups together in positive situations, giving them common goals or working with the common goals they already have, affirming irenic and tolerant values, stressing the advantages of diversity, looking for common ground, striving to make groups as equal as possible (at least in opportunity and before the law), stoutly defending civil rights and explaining why those are beneficial to all, and other well-known methods. 

            All this does work, but not perfectly.  The most notorious case of failure was the heroic attempt made in Yugoslavia to get the various nationalities in that “united Slav” (“Yugo-“Slavia”) country to get along.  Unfortunately, it was counterproductive; the well-meaning majority tried too hard, alienated a vicious and noisy minority, and faced breakup, war, and genocide when Yugoslavia threw over communism (these insights come from my own questioning and observation in Croatia in 1988).  “Multiculturalism” in the United States has had some similar problems; when it emphases the classic American e pluribus unum, it works, but too often it emphasizes differences and even antagonisms without emphasizing the common ground and common goals. It often fostered the deadly mistake of seeing subcultures and ethnic communities as closed, steel-walled spheres, completely cut off from each other.  That view directly causes and fosters ethnic hatred.

            Some traditional societies have dealt with potential religious conflicts for centuries, and managed them by a number of social rules and strategies.  The people of Gondar, an Ethiopian city that is a traditional stronghold of Christianity but has a large Muslim population, have learned to get along, and have taken ISIS in stride, partly by casting it as non-Muslim or otherwise aberrant (Dulin 2017).  Similar accommodations have worked until recently in many countries, but the breakdown of very old and long-established ones in Iraq, Syria, and China bodes ill for the future.

            The standard methods of increasing happiness—gratitude, good thoughts, reaffirming values, and other mindfulnesses (Lyubomirsky 2007)—are also of some use, but never transformed a society.  Only uniting economic incentives, charismatic leaders, and common morality ever works to improve conditions.  We need positive and inclusive dialogue that is factual yet hopeful.  We need healing and rejuvenation.  Recall, also, that mindful meditation reduces existential fear and thus defensiveness and intolerance (Park and Pyszczynski 2019).

             Wayne Te Brake (2017), studying the decline of religious war in Europe, found that nation-states had to facilitate the process of getting people to live in harmony.  The bottom line was that people who were neighbors had to get along.  Where the cuius regio, eius religio rule held, the country had only one religion, and intolerance kept right on, but in areas where pluralism was established, governments finally realized they had to guarantee rights to religious minorities—ushering in the Enlightenment, by slow degrees.  It appears that government peacemaking led to philosophers and politicians coming up with ideas of religious freedom, which eventually led to ideas of liberty of conscience.  Something similar happened with civil rights in the modern United States in the 1950s and 1960s, but the results have been less satisfactory so far.  State and local governments have dragged their feet.  Still, the model is there.

            The good wolf is fed by empowerment, which brings confidence and hope, and allows rational assessment and coping.  Weakness and fear feed the bad wolf.  They lead to scared and defensive reactions, including sudden breakdowns into terror, rage, and violence, and allowing strongmen above the law to rule the polity. Society, especially social leaders protecting their stakes, almost always do the actual feeding.

            For having a decent world, and for having a future for the world, we must make moral choices, not simply economic ones.  We must make a moral choice to help people rather than hurt them.  That involves honesty with ourselves about the ways that weakness, resentment, overreaction to trivial or imagined slights, and overreaction to trivial harms combine to feed the bad wolf and thus feed displacing resentment onto weaker people and onto the natural world. 

            Then we must work to feed the good wolves, all of them, everywhere, out in the world.  The food of good wolves is caring and consideration for all, especially as shown through empowerment by decent, supportive, respectful behavior.

Appendix: Special Topics

            Freedom of speech is most at risk.  The Trump administration is attacking the media in exactly the way Hitler did in the 1930s.  Unfortunately, some of the misguided “progressive” camp is going after the media too, in the name of suppressing “hate speech.”  There are classic problems with this, all identified by the Founding Fathers, and by Tom Paine and John Stuart Mill.

            Since the people in power will naturally be the ones doing the censoring, all opposition to those in power will soon be censored, and everything that supports them will be permitted, no matter how vile it is.  This is, in practice, the greatest reason why censorship is generally bad. 

Hate speech is in the eye of the beholder.  No definition can be tight enough to stop people from insisting that what they say is not hate speech, and what their opponents say is always hate speech no matter how nicely phrased.  (Politeness can be a way of subtly maintaining white privilege, for instance.)  Hate speech can be educative–if not the speech itself, then from the fact that people say it, believe it, and act on it.

            Suppressing speech drives it underground, where it spreads like wildfire—as censored things always do—and is attractive simply because it was suppressed.  There is an Arab saying that “if you forbid people from rolling camel dung into little balls with their fingers, they would do it, because they would think that if it is forbidden there must be something good about it.”  Moreover, suppressing speech makes the suppressed people into instant martyrs, no matter how unsavory they seemed before.

            Last, it is immoral to shut other people up because you happen to dislike what they say.  They have a right to their opinions and their mouths.

            If what they say is downright libel, or a direct call to violence, or a lie that directly leads to physical harm to people (like a con game, or incitement to murder), that is something else.  Lying under oath is properly forbidden.  It has been suggested that campaign speech should be sworn testimony, at least when facts are stated, and thus lies like Trump’s would be illegal.  We also have no freedom to disclose proprietary secrets, or to plagiarize.  Freedom is not a matter of absolute freedom; it is a matter of considering others’ rights.  However, the wise activist errs on the side of liberty.

            All this we learned in the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley in the 1960s, but it has all been said before, ever since Voltaire and Jefferson.

            Similar conclusions apply to freedom of press, assembly, and religion.  However, religion has now been so thoroughly abused as a cover for political campaigning and even for money-laundering and profiteering that it must be restricted.  Taxing the churches seems an inescapable necessity if the US is to flourish.  Politics is probably protected speech, up to a point, but outright campaigning by churches—with donations of laundered or illegally-gained money—is banned in the US by the Johnson Rule.  It is inappropriate for churches and temples. 

            Preachers who are clearly in it for the money rather than the souls are all too common, and tax laws must recognize this.  The problem is not just one of politics; the rapidly escalating religious hate that has swept the world, and notably the United States, in the last generation is to a very large degree a product of preaching for money.  Corrupt and evil men posing as preachers find that the easiest way to make it pay is to preach hate and right-wing politics.  This is the story of ISIS and the Taliban as well as of Trump’s preacher claque.

            Thus, cleaning up the institution of religion would seem to be a part of assuring liberty of conscience.  Above all, though, liberty of conscience must be preserved.

            Tolerance, the most desperately needed and vitally important civic virtue, is also under an astonishing amount of attack from the left as well as the right.

            It really should need no defense.  Many of the same considerations as those above will apply.

            If you do not tolerate others, they will not tolerate you.  They may not even if you do tolerate them, but, in general, hate breeds hate, acceptance breeds acceptance.

            We are all in this together.  A functioning society must grow, change, and build, and can do that only by unified effort, mutual aid, and solidarity.  The alternative is mutual destruction.  The dominant group may win for a while by doing others down, but it merely hurts itself—first by losing those other groups and whatever they can offer, but second by starting a spirit of hate and rivalry that inevitably tears up the dominant group itself, in due course of time.

            As usual, there are limits.  Obviously, we do not want to tolerate rape, murder, or robbery.  The argument is for tolerating people as individuals—the essential personhood behind whatever unacceptable behavior they may sometimes present.  They deserve fairness and consideration, but if they are acting to harm others, they must be stopped.  Toleration of ideas is a good; we need to argue and negotiate and work them out.  Toleration of specific behaviors is allowable only in so far as those behaviors do not actively and unnecessarily harm people.  Not all harm to people is bad.  Plato and Aristotle were already pointing out 2400 years ago that surgeons “harm” people for their own good.  One wants to minimize hurt, but some pain is necessary. 

            In short, tolerance is a major goal, but must be qualified by common sense.  None of this affects tolerating people as human beings, or, for that matter, tolerating other life forms.  Essential acceptance of living beings, simply because they are fellow travelers on the planet, is the basic and essential need of a functioning society.

            It is therefore unacceptable to hate or reject anyone because of skin color, ethnicity, language, history, or the like.  No morality can justify that.  Total personal rejection of anyone for any reason is unacceptable.  We may have to kill a person in self-defense, but we are not given license to hate that individual simply for being.  We are also not given license to kill off his entire ethnic group just because he attacked us.  We know that “races” are not biological entities, and that all human groups are pretty much identical in potential, but even if we did find a group that was—say—less intelligent by some measure than the average, we would morally have to pay them the same respect and treatment as everyone else. 

            This is the real underpinning of the classic Enlightenment virtues: liberty, equality, fairness, justice as fairness, and civil behavior in civil society.  Never mind that the Enlightenment was financed by slavery and colonialism.  The point is that much of its content was explicitly directed against slavery and class discrimination.  No one in the history of the world had opposed slavery in general until 18th-century religious thinkers, largely Quakers, did so.   Fairness means serious attention to disadvantaged groups, not just even-handed treatment of all.  Equality before the law has been in sorry shape under Trump, with flagrant favoring of whites and rich people over the rest.

            Racism and religious bigotry are more open now than they have been since the 1960s or perhaps even the 1920s.  However, the real underlying problem seems to be a more general increase in hostility and antisocial aggression.  We have mass shootings in which the victims are country music fans (Las Vegas), Baptist churchgoers (Texas), Walmart customers, and other ordinary Americans.  By far the greatest number of mass-murder and terrorist killings in recent years have been of this sort; very few are either Islamic-extremist or otherwise religiously or racially motivated.  Ordinary murders are also increasing again after years of decline. 

            It thus seems that there is a major need for calming speeches and for ideas on how to reduce violence and antagonism in general.  Certainly, we still need to combat racism, and to defend freedom of religion, especially freedom from bullying in the name of religion.  We need even more to combat overall hostility.

            This brings us to solidarity:  Mutual aid, mutual support, mutual empowerment and strengthening.             It worked for the labor movement and for the old-time Democrats; disunion, carefully nurtured by the right wing and now by the far left, has led to the decline of both those institutions.  The war between Clinton and Sanders supporters took down Clinton in 2016, and will guarantee a Republican win in 2020 if it is not resolved.

            A major part of this is civility.  We are getting farther and farther from civil discourse.  The right wing is usually the leader and always the most successful in extreme, exaggerated, intemperate, and insulting remarks, and we should leave that to them.  We always lose if we try that tactic. 

            This brings up science and environment.  The Trump administration, including the Republicans in Congress, have launched a full-scale war against both.  They do not stop with dismissing science that is embarrassing to their corporate donors, such as research on climate change and pollution.  They have attacked everything from conservation science to Darwinian evolution.  This is perhaps the area where the Republican base—giant primary-production firms, racists, and right-wing religious extremists—shows itself most clearly.  “Scientific” racism and creationism are now supported; the genuine science that disproves these is attacked.  Budget cuts to basic science and to science education are planned; they are serious enough to virtually destroy both.  Republicans realize that promoting such a wide anti-scientific agenda—climate change denial, claims that pesticides are harmless to humans, anti-vaccination propaganda, anti-evolutionism, racism, and so on—can only succeed if the entire enterprise of science is attacked.  The whole concept of truth is a casualty, with the calls for “alternative facts.”  Ideas of proof, evidence, data, and expertise are regarded as basically hostile to Republicanism.

            Clearly, it will be national suicide ot allow this to go on.  Not only is further scientific research necessary to progress; a government that makes policy in defiance of the facts of the case will not survive.  We have already been afflicted with Zika, MRSA, and a host of other germs because of indifferent attention to public health.  Rising sea levels are eating away at coastlines.  Bees and other critically important insects are disappearing.  Foreign policy made in a fact-free environment has devastated the Middle East.  The future will be incalculably worse.  Attention to science education, moral education, and humanistic education remains small.

            Part of this is environmental concern, and there we need to draw on traditional moralities.  Most cultures, worldwide, have solved the problems of sustainability—usually by teaching respect for all beings.  Children absorb this at a very young age.  They go on to remember that trees, fish, grass, and future humans all need to be regarded as worthy of consideration—to be used only as necessary and to be protected for future uses or simply to keep them alive.  The western world has long been an outlier, worldwide, by treating resources as things to destroy without a second thought. 

            With a proper spirit of respect, we will be able to preserve species and environments and to avoid destroying the environment with pollutants and excessive construction.  In the short run, we will have to fall back on laws.  The framework existing as of 2016 was inadequate but was a good start; it is now lost, and we will have to start from scratch, hopefully with better laws to be designed in future.  There are countless books on solving the environmental crisis, and to go further into it here would be tedious.  What matters is recognizing that we must think of sustainability and respect.

            The Endangered Species Act has been under permanent attack by Republicans since it was proposed.  The ostensible reason is that the act saves worthless weeds and bugs at the expense of human interests.  The real reason is that it protects habitat that corporate interests want to use.

            Balancing environmental protection against immediate use is always difficult, and requires much more attention than it usually receives, but in this case there should be no question.  “Extinction is forever.”  Once a species is extinct, it can never be brought back (despite recent claims for reconstruction through DNA—still merely a vision).  Most of the species proposed for protection are economically and ecologically valuable.  A few “weeds and bugs” do get protection, but they are probably more important than they look.  We still have no idea what is important in nature.  Sometimes, loss of an apparently minor species has caused meltdown of a whole ecological system.  Beyond mere utility, there is an issue of respect for life and living things.  Individuals can be replaced; species cannot.

            We also need a mechanism for moving quickly to protect species that collapse suddenly.  A new pesticide, an epidemic, a rampantly multiplying introduced pest, or an ill-considered human action can rapidly change a species from common to endangered. 

            The need for environmental protection and conservation is now obvious to everyone except certain giant corporate interests, who persist in seeing everything natural as a problem to be eliminated.  Even far-right activists admit a need for some action.  Sustainability of resource use is obviously necessary when at all possible, given the rapid expansion of US population and economic activity.  Some things will inevitably be lost; we need to restore a great deal to make up for that. 

            Anti-pollution rules, wise use rules, and conservation in general are under full and total attack by the few corporate interests, however.  This has led to some extreme rhetoric on all sides.   Always, the worst problem is the fossil fuel industry, which not only causes most of the pollution and global warming, but is fighting for its life against cheaper, more efficient, ecologically preferable energy sources.  It now survives thanks to enormous taxpayer subsidies, so it plows vast sums into lobbying and into spreading disinformation.  The amount this industry spends on those activities could very possibly finance a full-scale conversion to clean energy.

            One huge problem that is widely ignored is loss of farmland.  Soil conservation has been quite effective in the US in recent years, leading to complacency.  The real problems now are urbanization and pollution.  Vast areas of productive soil and waters are lost to these.  California has urbanized almost a third of its farmland, including almost all the very best land, in the last two centuries.  Within my memory, “Silicon Valley” (the San Jose Valley) was probably the most productive orchard land in the world.  It now has no orchards at all.  Nothing is being done to halt the steady conversion of the best land to suburbs and parking lots.  Other states suffer less, but the problem is nationwide (and worldwide). 

            Conversely, there are some reasons to pull back on Obama’s new national monuments, and rather more reasons to look for more due process in future.  Obama declared vast areas of mixed-use land as national monument, without local consultation or input, and with some disregard for established interests.  In general, one can only sympathize with land protection, but more local input is highly desirable for both pragmatic and democratic reasons.

            Forestry has also suffered from a see-saw battle between lock-down preservation and totally destructive and wasteful clearcutting.  Wiser solutions (reforestation, controlled burning, thinning, etc.) have been well known for over 100 years.  They are too rarely invoked today.  A scan of satellite photographs of Oregon is instructive:  tiny pockets of overcrowded locked-down preserves, surrounded by vast moonscapes of badly recovering clearcuts.  Oregon has lost most of its songbirds, as well as its forestry futures.  There is a desperate need to maintain more wilderness, for reasons that have filled many whole books, but that would need to include some burning to preserve actual wild conditions.

            Specific conservation areas of major concern:

Biodiversity and endangered species preservation

Forest management: sustainable logging, controlled burning, disease control, etc.

Grasslands, wetlands and streams, brushlands, deserts:  sustainable management

Agriculture: getting away from deadly chemicals, continuing to fight soil erosion, saving farmland from urbanization, reducing meat and increasing vegetables, etc.

Pollution

Urban sprawl and urban crowding; urban blight; lack of parks, markets, etc.

Aesthetics

Park and recreation areas that are actually accessible to everyone

Environmental education       

Regulating imports: banning endangered species and hunting trophies, controlling dangerous pest importation, banning palm oil, banning or discouraging other ecocidal crops, etc.

            There is now no question that the world is warming rapidly, and that human-released greenhouse gases are the main reason.  The outright denialist positions are now apparently monopolized by public-relations people working for fossil fuel corporations.  (There is a long list of books and articles documenting this.)  Since not only all scientists, but all persons who have spent much time outdoors over more than a couple of decades, must admit that global warming is occurring, the denialists have fallen back on saying that it’s happened before.  Indeed it has; we know the causes, which were either the earth changing its tilt in regard to the sun (so the sun more effectively warmed the earth) or natural releases of greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide and methane.  The most dramatic well-known episode of that was a massive outpouring of CO2 from volcanoes, about 50 million years ago.  The Eocene world warmed rapidly and dramatically, and stayed warm for about 200,000 years.  Then it cooled so fast that trees growing in the high Arctic froze in place.  Explorers unthinkingly used some of them for firewood, only later discovering that their firewood was 50 million years old.  We are now releasing quantities of greenhouse gases comparable to those released by the volcanoes.

            The immediate consequences include slow but sure sea level rise, and increase in global temperatures to the point where major changes in biota and in human lives will occur.  In a bit of karma, the world’s main oil producing region, the lowland Middle East, will become uninhabitable in a few decades, as air temperatures soar into the 180s.  No one knows where this will end.  There is no reason to expect that the earth will not suffer the fate of Venus, with surface temperatures in the hundreds of degrees.

            The fastest and most effective way to deal with this is by leaving or restoring natural vegetation, especially forests.  That alone could blot up 20% of atmospheric carbon, given quite possible scenarios.  Other agricultural changes in the direction of less fuel-intensive, more biointensive farming would greatly help also.  There is a long literature on this, some reviewed in: Griscom, Bronson; Justin Adams; Peter Ellis; Richard Houghton; Guy Lomax; et al.  2017.  “Natural Climate Solutions.”  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 114:11645-11650.

            Ultimately, the solution must extend to clean power; power generation for electric grids, transportation, and industry accounts for the other 80% of greenhouse gas release. 

            The denial industry has been financed by the large fossil-fuel corporations, who have hired public-relations firms and in-house scientists.  The Koch brothers are the most conspicuous organizers and funders of the effort, but ExxonMobil, Shell, and other firms have been involved. 

  • Health

            All other developed countries, and many less developed ones, now have government health care systems: socialist, single-payer, or government-insured.  All these systems work better than the US system, but every normal measure: life expectancy, days lost to work, maternal mortality, infant mortality, and coping with illnesses in general.  The US mix of government, private insurance, and private or religious health care is a disaster.  American pay twice as much as Europeans for vastly inferior care.  The only reasonable solution is to expand Medicare and Medicaid to cover everyone, while also expanding the CDC and other government agencies that deal with health. 

            Health education is another problem, as is the level of nutrition in virtually all environments in the US (and, in this case, most of the rest of the world also). 

            Research should add more work on prevention and education to the ongoing research on actual pathology and treatment.  We are not doing enough to prevent conditions like substance abuse.   We are not doing enough to stop pollution and clean up polluted environments.

  • Education

            Another value in extreme danger under the Trump administration is education.  His Secretary of Education opposes the whole idea of education, in the usual sense, and totally opposes public education.  She is systematically planning to minimize schooling and turn it into indoctrination in right-wing views.  We need the exact opposite: education to produce genuinely better people—people who are not hateful bullies, but who want to help others.

            Americans are not getting the type of education they need.  This would be one that 1) teaches civics, including the Constitution and a non-whitewashed US history; 2) teaches actual science and how one can tell falsehoods and investigate truth; 3) teach the young about the depth and complexity of human emotions. 

            Humanistic education these days runs too heavily to comic books and other media that may be well enough in themselves, but do not have the sustained engagement with human feelings and thoughts that one gets from Shakespeare, Cao Xueqin, Dostoievsky, Thomas Mann, or Toni Morrison.  Serious music seems to have disappeared from most people’s lives; again, whatever is true or not about “quality,” music of Victoria or Beethoven engages much more deep and complex emotions than the popular stuff.  Whatever one likes or feels is appropriate, people need more insights into humanity than they get from American popular culture.  A reasonable order of teaching children would be starting them with civil behavior (considerate, respectful, sharing; responsible reasonable), then going on to teach compassion and helpfulness because we are all in this together and must follow something like the Golden Rule.  This should be done along with reading, writing, history, and math, if we are to survive.

            The Republican tax cuts have caused a massive and steadily increasing flow of wealth from the poor and middle class to the super-rich.  Cutting tax deductions that the middle class uses, while maintaining those for the rich, accompanies huge cuts to the highest brackets of taxing and trivial and temporary cuts to the rest of us.  The resulting rise in national debt will be managed by cutting Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and other programs that transfer wealth to the less fortunate.  The worst problem with that, from an economic point of view, is that money in those programs is immediately spent—it goes directly into circulation, to buy goods and services.   The rich, in contrast, hoard their money, waiting for ideal investment possibilities.

            This is bad enough in the current good times, but Republican policies will certainly cause a depression in the near future.  At that point the less affluent will lose their jobs and savings, and the rich will have every incentive to move their wealth offshore—investing in other countries or stashing their money in tax shelters like Bermuda and the Cayman Islands.  Other countries will be developing while the US is depressed; hence the rich will invest in the other countries. 

            By that time, also, education will have been devastated by Republican policies and funding cuts (see Kansas, currently leading in that area).  There will be no pool of young, educated people to re-grow the economy.  The depression will feed on itself, bringing the United States down, and letting other nations pick up the lead.

            The Democrats must unite, first of all, before doing anything else.  The current disunion (routinely described in the media as a “circular firing squad”) is suicidal.  Democrats will never win any close elections until they at least vote for each other. 

            Then, obviously, appealing to the former base—the great working class—is the next most important thing to do.  Democrats are perceived, with much reason, as having forsaken the workers to pursue other issues, many of which are of interest mainly to well-to-do, educated urbanites.  Populist issues like health care and tax fairness should be foregrounded.

            Third is getting out the vote.  This should be obvious, but Democrats have failed to do it for the last several elections.  Money is spent on lavish media campaigns—not terribly effective—instead of the proven doorbell-ringing and precinct phoning and activism.

            Fourth is a concentrated fight against voter suppression and gerrymandering.  Again, this should be obvious, but Democratic officials have been surprisingly quiet about it.

            Fifth is more aggressive calling out the Trump administration on their constant lies and misrepresentations, and above all naming names of their funders and backers who are really calling the dishonest shots—the Koch brothers on global warming, for instance.

            There are many other issues I could name, but those five, in order, seem to me the key ones.  Without attention to these five, the Democratic party is finished, and the US will be a one-party nation.

            First, the standard freedoms, including all human and civil rights, guarantee of impartial justice (especially impartial to dollars) and rights to organize.  Explicitly, money is not speech.

            Next, full rights to a decent environment—minimal pollution and waste, no subsidies for primary production, preservation of as much of nature as possible given the need to maintain a decent standard of living.

            Next, no offensive war; war only to defend the country from direct attack, but that can cover going after terrorists abroad.

            Then, firm graduated tax rate, written into the constitution.  No tax exemptions except for legitimate business and work expenses, and actual, effective charities. No exceptions for churches, for “charities” that do not spend over 80% of their incomes on actual charity work (as opposed to “overhead” and administration), or political outfits masquerading as “non-profits.”  Offshore tax havens and the like would be absolutely illegal, with extreme penalties.

No subsidies, no favoring specific businesses, minimal restriction of business and trade, but firm regulations such that harm and cheating do not happen. 

            Free universal health care (free up to a point—small deductibles possible, and no free discretionary treatment such as plastic surgery for looks).

            Free universal education with arts as well as sciences in the schools.

            Savage penalties for corruption, which would be defined to include donating campaign funds beyond a set low limit.

            Universal national service: a year in the military, a year doing environmental work, then a year of social work.  Lifetime emergency call-up, as in Switzerland.

            Discouragement of hate and hate speech.  Citizens see their duty as opposing it and damping it down.  No penalties, but extreme, savage penalties for violating civil rights and for hate crimes.

            Campaign fund regulations, especially in sensitive things like judicial elections.

            Aesthetics encouraged; national conservation in museums, sites, etc. 

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Barbara Anderson, Christopher Chase-Dunn, Peter Grimes, Hollie Nyseth Brehm, Jennifer Skornik, and Andrea Wilson for ever-valuable comments.

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Categories
Articles

Northwest Coast: Traditional Indigenous Relationships with Plants and Animals

Northwest Coast: Traditional Indigenous Relationships with Plants and Animals

E. N. Anderson

Draft of March 2019

This is a book in progress.  It is about half done.  What is needed is a search through old collections of “myths and texts” to find as much documentation as I can of traditional conservation and sustainability ideas.  I have also only begun work on the art section and some other sections.  I have been working on this book off and on for over 30 years, and at 78 I fear I will not live to finish it.  The press of events has made it impossible to work for the immediate future.  So here is half of it, for anyone that wants that much! 

You are free to use it, but cite it fully and list as “work in progress.”

Contents

Preface

Introduction

1.  Nature

2.  Traditional Culture Areas

3.  Cultural-Ecological Dynamics

4.  Traditional Resource Management

5.  White Settler Contact and Its Tragic Consequences

6.  Resource Mismanagement Since 1800

7.  The Ideology behind It All

8.  Respect

9.  Worldviews Underwriting Knowledge

10.  Teachings and Stories

11. The Visual Art

12.  Conclusions

Appendix 1.  A Note on Languages

Appendix 2.  The Old Northern Worldview

Appendix 3.  The “Wasteful” Native Debunked

Preface

            This work tells the story of traditional management of plant and animal resources by Native peoples of the Northwest Coast of North America.  There, management strategies are rooted in practice developed over thousands of years of living off the land.  A broad ideology of conservation, wise use, care, and respect has evolved. 

            There are many similarities between Northwest Coast views and those of other hunting and fishing peoples of the northern hemisphere, and one feature of this book is to trace resemblances and relationships—more suggestively than systematically, but at least with some grounding.

The book is the product of many years of thinking about experiences, many of them long ago.  I first visited the Northwest in 1960, driving major highways through Washington and Oregon.  Work exigencies have taken me back to the area, for at least flying visits, in most years since.  I did field research on the Northwest Coast in 1983-87, primarily in 1984 and 1985.  I lived in Seattle from 2006 through 2009. 

My research was rather varied in nature, and in the end focused largely on the writings of Wilson Duff, an anthropologist active in the mid-20th century (Duff 1996).  However, I did field work on ecological and environmental issues for about several months in 1984 and another three in 1985, largely among the Nuu-chah-nulth and Haida.  I have driven or hiked through every part of the region treated, covering every mile of major highway in Washington, Oregon and California, and a fairly thick sampling of British Columbia and southern  Alaska.  I can also draw on a great deal of field experience in Mexico and some in Mongolia, where I could live with Indigenous people who still fully maintained beliefs and ontologies similar to the ones described herein.

            This book is also a belated fulfillment of a promise:  to help Native people get fair treatment in their land claims.  Aboriginal title to land and rights to manage resources were not recognized in Canada.  They were finally given some standing from the late 1990s, but use and management rights are still controversial.  In the United States, Native peoples were recognized as “dependent nations” from the earliest years of the republic, but the interpretations of this have fluctuated, depending on whether “dependent” or “nations” was being foregrounded.  Treaty rights to fisheries were disregarded in Washington state, for instance, until Judge Boldt in 1978 ruled that they had to be enforced.  Title to land was recognized, but was signed away (often at gun point) through unequal treaties, or was simply stolen or acquired by duplicity.  Various claims and compensation have resulted, but in both Canada and the United States there is a long way to go.  In 1985 I promised to Haida friends that I would write what I could that would be useful.  I have since written several items about Northwest Coast human ecology, notably my introduction to Wilson Duff’s writings (1996) and relevant sections in my books Ecologies of the Heart (1996) and Caring for Place (2014), and the time has come to bring all together.

Earl Maquinna George, Nuu-chah-nulth scholar, has written:  “The work of a non-native is colored by the inability of the outsider to experience the context of the information collected…there are many parts of native life that have never come out in their work” (George 2003:38).  Of this I am painfully aware, and I am in no position to do any better.  Fortunately, I can often rely on quoting George and other First Nations writers.  Many Indigenous persons are now leading scholars of their traditions, and I will have much occasion to refer to them below.

The position of a person who has devoted his life to being a cross-cultiural interpreter is never easy.  Recently, people like me have been criticized far more severely than Earl George would do.  The point under it all is that we really do not have the lived experience of people who grew up with the label “Native American.”  We do not have the specific experiences of oppression, stereotyping, prejudice, and disenfranchisement.  On the other hand, we can use the data, and we can bring some comparative focus to the enterprise.  We can also bring a real desire to understand and help.  Above all, we can help get the word out.  I try to quote as much as possible, from both early collections and modern works. 

            There is a serious issue with making use of traditional stories recorded in collections of texts.  Many of these were recorded with full permission, for publication, and were told by people who had the rights to tell them.  Many were not.  I have tried to confine my citations of traditional stories to material in the first category, but to do anything like a proper job, I must cite materials that may be in the second.  I have, however, consciously tried to avoid using distorted, “edited,” bowdlerized, or otherwise “settler”-altered materials, and materials clearly recorded from shaky sources or published without even the pretense of permission. I ask forgiveness for errors.  I believe that the traditional teachings of the Northwest Coast are so important that they should be made available to the wider world if they are already out there in published form.

            In usage, I prefer the term “Native American,” though it has drawbacks.  Most of the people in question call themselves “Indians,” but often prefer to be “Native Americans” in formal contexts.  In Canada “First Nations” is now the polite term of reference.  “Indigenous” is a vexed term, but cannot be avoided.  “Local” and “traditional” have their usual vague meanings.  I am quite aware that while some traditions are thousands of years old, some are only a generation old; if their bearers think of them as “traditions,” I am not going to object.  

Similarly, we are stuck with “supernatural” to refer to spirit beings, though they are considered perfectly natural on the Northwest Coast, and include the immortal essences of ordinary animals, these having been “supernaturals” in ancestral times.  I try to avoid making irrelevant discriminations such as “natural” and “supernatural” (see Miller 1999), but most sources use the word, and better recent coinages like “supramundane” are just not current usage.  Finally, the term “authentic” has become so polarized in Northwest Coast studies that I try to avoid it altogether.  It has been especially problematic in art, where modern Native American works were often criticized in the past for not being like those of a hundred years earlier, these latter being somehow more “authentic.”  I apologize for any offense given by particular usages. 

            Native terms are spelled as they are in the sources I quote.  I am not a professional linguist, do not speak any Northwest Coast languages, and am in no position to decide what is “correct,” in a land with dozens of languages and hundreds of local variants.  Many different systems of linguistic transcription are in use, and many Native people prefer the old missionary syllabary system, despite its unsavory origins and implications, because it has been so familiar for so long.  See Appendix 1 for a quick guide to languages.

            I am grateful to a wide range of people, but owe a special debt to my coworker in the 1980s Evelyn Pinkerton, who is not only the finest ethnographer I have ever seen at work but a superb scholar and human being.  I have also had special help and support over the years from Marnie Duff, Leslie Johnson, Joyce LeCompte-Mastenbrook, Nancy Turner, and many other scholars.  My contacts with First Nations people were all too short, usually confined to brief interviews, but I need to acknowledge in particular Guujaw (Gary Edenshaw), Ki-Ke-In (Ron Hamilton), Nelson Keitlah, the late Ray Seitcher, and others.  For particularly valuable advice in the field work years and since, I am grateful to Ron and Marianne Ignace.  I thank also many people whose names I withhold for various reasons of privacy.

Introduction

            The Northwest Coast of North America is of interest for many reasons, not least being the careful management of plant and animal resources by Indigenous peoples there.  Thanks to care backed by an ideology of respect, the Native people supported dense populations with rich artistic traditions and complex stratified societies.  The environment was not just sustainably managed; it was managed to get better over time.  Burning for berries, stocking fish, cultivating root crops, and other techniques exemplified in real time the visionary goal of “sustainable development” that seems so hard to imagine in today’s world.

The characteristics of the Indigenous Northwest are so well described in so many books that it would be tedious to go into detail; see the classic cultural summaries in the Smithsonian Institution’s Handbook of North American Indians, Northwest Coast volume (Suttles 1990). 

            Defining the region is, however, briefly necessary.  The Smithsonian Insititution Handbook is divided into volumes by culture areas.  My “Northwest Coast” overlaps their Plateau (Walker 1998) and Subarctic (Helm 1981), and even makes incursions into California (Heizer 1978).  The problem is that the Indigenous people did not divide themselves into neat culture areas.  The classic Northwest is defined by large plank houses, monumental visual art, ranked societies with chiefs, commoners and slaves, dependence on fish for subsistence, and heavy use of wood in this thickly-forested environment.  The Plateau is defined by large pit houses, use of riverine fish (anadromous or not), heavy use of roots dug in semidesert lithic plains, less strongly ranked societies, and smaller settlements.  The Subarctic is a land of small lightly-built houses, seminomadic societies made up of small bands or groups, and heavy use of mammalian prey (though fish remained staple in many areas). 

Obviously, there will be border groups that partake of two or three cultural areas—sharing one trait with one area, another with another.  The Tsetsaut, Wetsuweten and other Athapaskan-speaking groups shared varying amounts of Northwest culture while being Subarctic in other ways, including linguistic affiliation.  The Wasco and Wishram along the Columbia mediated between Coast and Plateau; so did some other groups.  The little-known Calapuya and Molalla of Oregon do not seem to fit comfortably into any category.  The Yurok, Karok and their neighbors in California neatly bridge the gap between Northwest and California.  The Klamath and Modoc might be considered Northwest Coast, Plateau, California, or even Great Basin.  The areal classifications are modern constructs, not some sort of cast-iron reality. 

Given this ambiguity, I see every reason to draw examples and principles from the farthest extent possible.  Essentially, any group in a drainage basin whose outlet is on the Pacific is within my purview.  This lets me go far inland up the Columbia and Skeena rivers.  I will, of course, usashamedly take examples from even farther afield, where they are relevant (largely in the case of Athapaskan groups that are in other drainages but are very similar in culture to the ones in my area of focus, but also from as far afield as east Siberia).

Using river drainages to define areas has the advantage that the drainages are biologically real and important things, unlike the culture areas, which are somewhat arbitrary classification schemes imposed originally by museum scholars.  Moreover, the rivers provided trade and communication corridors.  Northwest Coast trading was long-range and extensive.  Routes led for hundreds of miles, and individuals often traveled hundreds of miles themselves.  Heavy-loaded canoes went up and down the coast, and there was even regular canoe traffic across Hecate Strait between Haida Gwaii and the mainland; this is such dangerous water that off-season kayakers are often lost today, and many a big boat has been wrecked.  Rivers unified peoples.  Individuals of totally unrelated languages could, and frequently did, meet at major fishing areas, trade, exchange ideas, and frequently marry.  It was evidently rather rare, in anything close to a border zone, to speak only one language.  Many people grew up with two languages in the home. 

The boundary between America and Asia is similarly meaningless culturally.  Since Franz Boas, anthropologists have realized that the northeast Siberian Indigenous peoples were culturally similar to the Northwest Coast ones, though the languages were different (except for Yuit, shared across Bering Strait).  Boas persuaded the wealthy New Yorker Morris Jesup to fund a major “expedition” to study societies on both sides of the Strait.  It was not an expedition in the normal sense, but funding for ethnographers and archaeologists to spend months or a year in a given area, finding all they could about it.  Some of the great classics of ethnography resulted, and some shall be considered below. 

Since then, studying the two sides of the North Pacific as one area has been an agenda pursued by William Fitzhugh and his associates (see esp. Fitzhugh and Crowell 1988), Ben Colombi and James Brooks (2012), and others.  Even farther afield, I encountered attitudes and practices in Mongolia that were essentially the same as what I have seen in the Northwest, and the connecting links via the Siberian societies prove a continuous cultural pattern, not independent invention.  I shall thus introduce Asian examples as occasion affords.

More tenuous are connections across the Subarctic to old Europe.  The Jesup Expedition found no lack of evidence of continuity.  Such things as skis/snowshoes, dogsleds, complex harpoons, skin tipis, and particular forms of sewn skin clothing prove conclusively that there was a “circumpolar” cultural area.  Since we also observe the same patterns of belief and practice in regard to hunting and animals prevalent throughout this area, we can safely assume that there has been at least some sort of ongoing contact, however indirect, thin, qualified, and tentative.  I have thus defined an “Old Northern worldview,” based on these patterns.  I have, however, relegated it to an appendix (Appendix 2), in the rather confident expectation that I will be challenged for vast overgeneralization.  Time will, hopefully, tell how much sharing matters in this case.

            Finally, I cannot stress strongly enough that all groups within this vast area are different, and the families and individuals within them are different from each other.  Generalizing at the level found in this volume is at a very general level indeed.  It blurs out countless major differences and minor nuances. I am concerned with very broad principles of environmental management.  These can be safely generalized, but only if they are kept at a high level of abstraction.  In what follows, I will make distinctions where necessary, but readers should remember that extensive quotes from individuals apply, in the last analysis, only to that individual and, hopefully, his or her ethnic group.  I quote to illustrate very broad and general points about northwestern North America or even the Old Northern worldview in general, but the quotes will have nuances and specific details relevant to the quoted individual’s own life and experience. 

            I, personally, am struck by the similarities across this vast area—the reverence for salmon and wrens that stretches from ancient Ireland to Haida Gwaii, the personhood of moose by the Yukaghir and Beaver—but readers should be aware that the ancient Irish are otherwise not much like the Haida, nor are the Yukaghir the Beaver in disguise.  We have had more than enough of the ascription of “shamanism” to all Indigenous peoples, of the myth of the Noble Savage (Ellingson 2001), and of the stereotype of the “primitive in harmony with nature.”   I am quite conscious of both the differences between groups and of the extreme danger of essentializing and overgeneralizing.  I am trying to tease out particular themes that are both widespread and valuable from a maze of cultural specifics.  Readers are warned not to take anything I say as essentializing some mystic unity among these groups. 

            I am not alone, though, in finding commonalities.  The Haida have been compared for over 100 years with the Vikings, and this has been put on a systematic footing by Johan Ling, Timothy Earle and Kristian Kristiansen (2018).  They define a type of society, the maritime chiefdom, based on seafaring, trade, slave-taking, and some on-shore production of goods and food.  They see close similarities between early Bronze Age and Viking Scandinavia, which is hardly surprising, but then observe that societies from the Haida to the Solomon Islanders display similar patterns: chiefdoms made up of fiercely independent people, united behind leaders of descent groups, living by fishing and seafaring, trading extensively, and taking, trading, and using slaves.  They compare these with nomadic herding peoples, who often have similar patterns of high mobility and extensive trading. 

            On the Northwest Coast, the Haida are certainly the best example.  Some of the Kwakwala-speaking groups, such as the Lekwiltok, come close.  The Nuu-chah-nulth, Makah, and other coastal groups are more local, less trade- and slave-oriented, more satisfied with producing for themselves.  There is, in fact, a smooth gradation from the Haida through these groups to the Salish peoples, perhaps more often targets of slaving than slavers themselves, and much more local in their journeys.  The interior groups often traded and had some slaves, but did not take long sea journeys.  This gradation from sea-raider to local producer makes one dubious of the value of inventing a “maritime mode of production” (as Ling et al. do).  One may better speak of a natural adaptation to local circumstances.  Be that as it may, the comparison stands.

Northwest Coast people and neighboring Siberians share certain ideas, just as westerners share ideas of individualism and individual rationality without losing cultural identity thereby.  These ideas are worth attention, but do not diminish cultural and personal uniqueness. These groups also share much more specific things: details of shamanism and vision quests, specific folktales and songs, specific traits of material culture, even games and clothing styles.  Also, trade kept links open; Anastasio (1972:169) provided a list of 53 classes of goods regularly traded in the Plateau, from abalone shells to yew wood for bows, and even that list is incomplete.  Turner (2014:137ff) similarly discusses the effects of trade on language; words were borrowed freely all over the region.  The cultural links are real and multifarious. 

However, I could write a whole book about the differences between all, and about the dangers of essentializing. This is not that book, but it is written with a lively awareness of that issue.

1.  Nature

The northwest corner of North America is a land of vast forests and high mountains.  It is difficult country for making a living, especially for hunter-gatherers.  Most of the biomass is tied up in wood.  Moreover, the trees are living chemical factories, producing compounds that discourage insects and other herbivores.  Thus, compared to the deciduous forests of eastern North America or the tropical rainforests, they are quite poor in wildlife.  One can hike for miles without encountering anything more than a squirrel or two and a flock of chickadees and nuthatches.  Old-growth mixed forests develop a richer fauna, but much of the region is covered with Douglas fir, famously well protected by its hardness and its chemical defenses against herbivores of all types.  After living in Doug-fir woods for years I am convinced it is about the most inedible tree on earth.  Nothing bothers it.

Food, from a human standpoint, concentrates along the rivers and coasts.  The fish resources are legendary, and even now have to be seen to be believed.  The major fish resource is anadromous (sea-running) salmonids of seven species.  Five species are called “salmon” by Anglo-Americans, two others are “trout.”  The “salmon” are—in rough order of popularity as food—the chinook or king (Oncorhynchus tschawytscha), sockeye (O. nerka), pink (O. gorbuscha), coho (O. kisutch), and chum or keta (O. keta).  The “trout” are the rainbow, which when sea-running is the “steelhead” (O. mykiss) and the cutthroat (O. clarki), which very locally sea-runs too.  Several other trout and char species occur, and a few of them occasionally sea-run.  (The Great Book on Pacific salmonids is Thomas Quinn’s The Behavior and Ecology of Pacific Salmon and Trout, 2nd edn. 2017, a must-read for all those interested in Northwest ecology.  Among many good accounts of salmon and Native salmon fisheries are Grabowski 2015, Hunn 1990, and Ross 2011 for the Columbia.)

Large rivers may have several runs of the major species, each run coming at a different time and being slightly different genetically from other runs of the same species in the same river.  Salmon smell and taste their way home; the young imprint on their place of rearing, and can detect the scent of their native river far out to sea.  Once in the river, they smell their way up to their origin stream.  Magnetic sense allows them to navigate by that method too.  They evidently recognize bodies and currents of water.  They often do, however, pioneer new homes, especially if—as often happens—landslides or other events have made old homes unreachable.  Salmon are famous for their ability to cross many obstacles—swimming up major waterfalls—but they cannot deal with a really high waterfall.  Also, making a river harder to negotiate may cause them to starve before they reach home.  Each run has evolved to store exactly the amount of fat it needs to swim upriver—they do not feed once in the rivers.  In the past, landslides sometimes blocked rivers and at least temporarily stopped runs.  Modern dam, railroad, highway and other construction that make rivers faster, rockier, more barriered, or otherwise more difficult lead to elimination of runs, through this unfortunate mechanism.

The amount of fish was enormous in the old days.  The Fraser River sockeye run was estimated to be around 160,000,000 fish in 1901, though in 1904 it was down to 6,500,000 due to cyclic variations.  Runs are subject to disastrous accidents that depress that year’s run for a long time without affecting other years’ runs.  The total Fraser salmon run may have produced 3 million to 60 million kg of fish (figures from Michael Kew as summarized by Ignace and Ignace 2017:515).  The Columbia and Yukon systems had many more.  Smaller but still enormous runs negotiated the other rivers.  Even tiny creeks had their own tiny runs.  The large rivers had runs of all six or seven species.  Smaller streams often had fewer.  Steelhead were particularly adaptible (even tiny California creeks have steelhead runs),  Tales of streams that appear “more fish than water” abound from the old days, and a photograph in Thomas Quinn’s book (p. 434) shows that this can be only a slight exaggeration for some streams even today.

Salmon must die after spawning, because their decaying bodies fertilize the water and provide the necessary nutrients for the young.  This sacrifice of life for the newborn is widely noticed and emotionally appreciated by Native peoples, who—in most areas—quickly learned to return all bones to the water to sustain the runs.  Bears take enormous quantities of salmon and eat them on the banks, thus fertilizing those banks as well as the water; thus, incredibly lush vegetation develops along the rivers.  Closing the cycle, much of that vegetation has evolved to dispersed by bears—typically, the bears eat the fruit and then excrete the seeds packaged in fertilizer.  Humans, by managing berry and root resources, took this natural cycle to a new level of sophistication.  

The odd scientific specific names of the salmon are Siberian local names for the species; “sockeye” is a straight borrowing from a Salishan language into English.  All the Native languages have different terms for each species.  Few have a general term for “salmon,” though some do (me in Kwakwala, for instance).  Many indigenous people find it ridiculous that Whites lump such dissimilar fish under one term.  Settler societies, in fact, soon acculturate, and refer to “pinks,” “sockeyes,” and so on, never using the word “salmon” again except in broad economic-statistical contexts.  Northwest Coast people are apt to laugh at outsiders naïve enough to refer to a given fish as a “salmon.”  The odd “Latin” species names of the salmon are the Siberian local names, showing that Siberia too has different names for all.

These species are ecologically differentiated.  Chinooks become huge, especially in the Columbia River drainage, where early-running “springs” were known as “June hogs” from their enormous size.  They run far up the rivers.  Sockeye are smaller, and spawn in small streams draining into lakes, and the young fish rear in the lakes before moving to sea.  Some populations have evolved to spend all their lives in lakes, never growing large or going to sea; these are known as “kokanee salmon.”  They are particularly typical of lakes far from the ocean.  Pinks run into the lower courses of rivers in enormous numbers.  Coho, usually rather small, run very far up into small tributaries and streams; they need particularly cold and clean water, and are thus rapidly dying out in drought-stricken California.  Chum salmon stay in wide lower river courses and estuaries.  Steelhead run into even smaller and more marginal streams than coho, and were the widest of all in distribution, with runs all the way to southern California.

The earliest known use of salmon by humans in North America occurred in central Alaska some 11,500 years ago; the salmon were chum (Halffman et al. 2015).  It is interesting that salmon had already reached that northern drainage by then; it had been totally frozen and unusable not many thousand years before.  Salmon generally return to their native rivers, but are also fast at pioneering when new habitat is available.

Recently, the Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar) has become a ranched or farmed fish in the Northwest, with locally disastrous consequences; it has escaped locally and competes with the native fish, but far more serious are the diseases and pests it brought with it, which have totally wiped out the pinks and decimated other species in the areas of farming (largely southern British Columbia).

Salmon were the key resource everywhere that major rivers or their tributaries ran.  Closely related fish, including trout and char of the genus Salvelinus and many whitefish of the genus Coregonus, abound in streams and lakes but do not normally enter the ocean.  They are locally the staple fish, especially in colder inland areas.  Interestingly, one thing the entire world seems to agree on is the superior eating quality of salmonids.  They are the height of gourmet dining more or less everywhere they occur, including areas where they have been recently introduced—notably the southern hemisphere, which has few of its own but which has taken to farming salmonds on a huge scale. 

A conoisseurship of salmon exists on the Northwest Coast, among both Native people and settler societies.  True salmon gourmets can not only tell the species, they can tell which river a salmon came from and sometimes even which run in a particular river.  (At least they claim this.  I have not seen a taste test done.)   One learns to tell the rich, subtle flavor of chinook from the deep, oily meatiness of sockeye and the ethereal, evanescent fragrance of fresh-caught pink. Cohos and farmed Atlantics are more modest but still excellent food, though true Northwesterners tend to abstain religiously from farmed salmon.  Chum or dog salmon is less flavorful, as the names imply; it was saved for use as chum (bits of fish thrown out to lure other fish to be caught) or for feeding the dogs.  Recent attempts to rehabilitate it as “keta salmon” have not met with much success.  Still, it was highly valued by groups like the Nuu-chah-nulth because it was abundant and easy to dry.  It is said to develop a fine flavor when properly dried.

Other riverine resources included sturgeon, which, like the salmon, are anadromous.  The white (Acipenser transmontanus) and green (A. medirostris) occur.  Both are large; the white can be mammoth, reahing 20 feet and 1200 pounds.  Both have suffered from overfishing even more than most river fish.

Another very important resource, especially in the Columbia River drainage, was “eels” (lampreys, Lampreta or Entosphenus, formerly called Petromyzon).  Especially important is the the Pacific lamprey Entosphenus tridentata.  These too are anadromous.  They have proved less popular with settler societies, possibly because of their strange appearance, but they are said to be superb eating.  Many Native groups still relish them and want to manage them for recovery, though they are notorious predators of salmon (see Jay Miller’s very important article on lampreys, 2012).  They too needed respect; Miller quotes Patricia Phillips on Oregon usage: “Night eels were only supposed to be cut with a knife made from freshwater mussel shell, otherwise the eels would feel insulted and fishermen might not catch any more of them.”  (Lampreys caught at night were supposed to be better and healthier than day-caught ones.  Miller 2014:130.)

Many other fish species occur, with suckers being locally very important, especially well inland where anadromous fish are available only during major runs.  Some suckers have huge spawning runs of their own, into shallows or spring areas, and these runs may be critically important to local groups.  The Lost River Sucker of the Oregon-California border, now acutely endangered, was so important to the Modoc that it was a religiously important fish.  The Achomawi similarly revere the suckers of Big Lake in northeastern California, and they have been able to get some protection for this run.  

An important article by Virginia Butler and Michael Martin (2013) points out that, at least in the Columbia River drainage, salmon were far from the only important fish.  They were probably the most important single resource, but, locally, other species could outweigh them in total importance.  Many small freshwater fish occur and could be used, but were probably insignificant resources (on fish in the Northwest, see Hart 1973; McPhail 2007; Wydoski and Whitney 2003).  In the Pend Oreille drainage, for instance, a wide range of local trout, whitefish and other species was important.  Kevin Lyons (2015) provides a very valuable study with complete lists, catching technologies, and life history data.

Elsewhere, open seacoasts afforded sea fish, sea mammals, and shellfish. Marine fish abound, and many strictly freshwater species are common enough to support indigenous communities around lakes in the interior.  Even the rivers had shellfish, including the formerly abundant, valuable, and easy-to-harvest freshwater mussels (Jones 2015). 

The candlefish (Thaleichthys pacificus), a smelt so rich in oil that dried ones can literally be used as candles, was a staple food, specifically an oil source.  It was so important that it is known on the coast as “eulachon,” pronounced and frequently spelled “ooligan,” from Tsimshian halimootxw, “savior”—the same term now used for Jesus (Daly 2005:113, 193).  Getting oil from it originally involved letting the fish decay in cold water till the water could be heated to cook the fat out.  This properly aged ooligan grease is an acquired taste (as the present author can attest).

Ocean fish were at least as important as salmon for the more maritime groups.  Herring were especially abundant, gathering to spawn in bays.  The roe was almost as important a resource as the herring themselves.  Halibut, rockfish, “cod” (a general term for fish, mostly not cod), and other marine fish were important.  The Haida, living on islands with small and generally poor salmon streams, depended more on sea fish than on anadromous ones.

Other marine resources were extremely important too.  The Northwest Coast is absolute paradise from a shellfisher’s point of view.  Rocky shores provide attachment for abalones, mussels, chitons, and limpets.  Chitons, now a little-noted resource, were very popular because of their excellent flavor (Croes 2015; I can confirm both their popularity among the Haida and their excellent flavor in Haida Gwaii).  Sandy beaches and, above all, the vast mudflats of the bays and estuaries provide clam habitat.  Shifting bars in bays and estuaries were ideal for oysters, which require this environment.  The cold, nutrient-rich waters are moved by currents that carry enormous amounts of nutrients to these relatively passive feeders.  Shellfish do not offer many calories, and a day of hard gathering in cold wet conditions may involve more expenditure of calories than it brings in, but shellfish were so common on the coast that they usually paid well.  Vast shell middens thus dot the coastline, and in fact shellfish are still an enormously important commercial resource in the Northwest.  Seaweeds were also major resources, though less well known because they do not preserve archaeologically and have only occasionally been well documented as foods.  (On these types of sea resources, see Lamb and Hanby 2005 for fine photographs and general accounts).

Marine mammals once abounded.  Seals and sea lions were important meat sources.  Some Northwest Coast peoples did extensive whaling—quite an accomplishment for people in open dugout canoes (Colson 1953; Sapir 2004; Sepez 2008).  The importance of sea mammals has been underestimated, because heavy whaling, sealing, and sea otter hunting depleted these resources before anthropologists got to the area.  Protection has allowed the gray and humpback whales to recover somewhat, and many now frequent the sounds of wesern Vancouver Island, where they allow such close approach that people sometimes pat them on the head.  Whaling could pay well under such circumstances, though it was still difficult enough to demand incredible levels of ceremony and magic (Sapir 2004).  Sealing was so extensive that the seal resource base was reduced even before European contact, at least in California (Kay and Simmons 2002) and possibly all along the coast.  Deward Walker (2015) has provided an extremely thorough and detailed account of riverine seal and sea lion hunting along the coast from Washington to California.

Seals and sea lions used to come far inland along the rivers (Walker 2015).  Here they ate a great deal of fish, which evidently did not endear them to the local people, who hunted them when possible.  White settlers exterminated them from the rivers, but with protection they are now back, eating enormous quantities of fish, including endangered runs and rare, declining species such as sturgeons.  This is a source of some concern (Walker 2015).  Restoring Native hunting would be a very good way to handle the situation.

Land mammals are numerous:  moose (very locally), deer, elk, mountain goat, mountain sheep, and smaller animals such as marmots and squirrels.  The land was generally rather poor in game, but many areas were exceptions:  lush mountain meadows, lowland prairies, riparian strips, and wetlands. 

Birds were locally important.  As usual, water was more productive than land.  Millions of ducks, geese, swans, cranes, alcids, and other waterfowl flocked to the coasts, lakes, and marshes.  On land, grouse were locally common, especially in forest openings and prairies.

A final note about animals from the human point of view is that some were food:  fish, shellfish, herbivorous mammals.  Some were competition: bears, wolves, mountain lions and other predators all of which consumed humans on occasion, but, more importantly, competed for the same foods.  Some animals were neither very edible nor dangerous, but were respected for their intelligence and thus their presumed role in creating the world: coyotes, ravens, mice, many others locally.  The complexities of these relationships will appear in due course.

Plant foods concentrated in meadows, glades, and wetlands:  Many species of berries, roots, tubers, stems, shoots, leaves, even flowers.  Many trees had edible inner bark, gathered when soft in spring and eaten ground up or in long strands like noodles.  Some fungi and lichens were edible.  In most of the region, these plant and fungal foods did not supply many calories compared to fish or mammals, but they were often essential and always valuable for nutrients.  In the interior parts of Washington and Oregon, root foods were extremely important.  Increasingly as one goes south through Oregon into California, plant foods such as acorns became more abundant, being about as important as fish to the California groups.

Berries were among the more important plant foods in most of the area.  Huckleberries and blueberries (Vaccinium) are especially common and widespread, especially in the mountains.  They tend to be fire-followers, which is important for reasons that will appear.  Highbush cranberries (Viburnum) are locally common.  Blackberries and raspberries (Rubus) occur in many species.  Particularly common and important in the coastal northwest is the salmonberry (Rubus spectabilis), a raspberry of indifferent flavor but extremely high bearing; it also has edible shoots that are like bitter celery. 

With berries, as with fish, humans compete with bears for the resource.  Many tales recount the problems thus occasioned.  A hungry grizzly can supposedly eat 100,000 berries a day.  I have watched a grizzly pick up whole huckleberry bushes and pass them through her teeth, pulling off berries, leaves and twigs and swallowing all together.  Berries are a plant’s way of getting birds and mammals to disperse (and fertilize) its seeds, and bears probably take much credit for distributing berries around the landscape.

Critical in all the above is the extreme contrast between fantastically rich waters—shoreline and sea—and usually poor land resources, especially at high altitudes.  On land, there were similar if less extreme contrasts between berry and root patches—mostly openings, prairies, and plains—and the forests, which were very poor in foods that humans could exploit.  Not only are they minimally productive of edible material; most of what they do produce is tens or hundreds of feet up, out of normal human reach.  Even in the water, there are differences.  At one extreme are choke points where falls and rapids delay salmon migration and concentrate the fish ascending the river; the most famous one is The Dalles on the Columbia, but there are similar if less dramatically productive cascades in most large rivers.  At sea, certain points where currents meet and upwelling zones appear are particularly productive. 

The commonest tree is Douglas fir.  Its superior wood now makes it a staple of world trade, but it was of less use aboriginally; the hard wood is difficult to work, though it makes excellent firewood.  A useful statistic is that a mature Douglas fir may have 70,000,000 needles, a fact not at all surprising to the present author, who spent years sweeping a deck under a grove of them.  (For this, and for more useful information about forest management conflicts, see Satterfield 2003.)  Since Douglas fir grows only in sun and usually only in disturbed habitats, it is naturally a follower of fire, flood, and blowdown.  It is thus the ideal tree for management by clearcut-and-replant, and therefore dismal cornfield-like stands of “Doug fir” cover most of the accessible Northwest today.

Much more useful to Native people was the red cedar (Thuja plicata, technically a cypress, not a cedar).  Its wood is softer and easy to work, but extremely durable, making it the preferred material for canoes, totem poles, and woodwork in general.  One can carve, split, or bend it with convenience, and it is very tractable and cooperative—few knots or splinters or checks or splits.  It grows to enormous size—only the redwoods are much bigger—and thus a single log can make a dugout big enough to carry a whole crew and several tons of freight.  Dugouts are still made of cedar today, mostly for show but sometimes still for use.

Cedars invaded the Northwest rather slowly after the glaciations, not becoming common in more northern areas till about 6000 years ago; cedar and spruce are still spreading northward.  Cedars could be overharvested.  On Anthony Island in Haida Gwaii, where the red cedar is at the very edge of its range, cedars decline dramatically from about 500 AD, when the island became the site of a large village with many canoes and totem poles (Lacourse et al. 2007). 

The related yellow cedar replaces the red in cold and wet areas.  Its wood is useful, and its shreddy bark makes perfectly serviceable clothing.  Another useful tree was the red alder (Alnus rubra), much smaller but with hard wood.  The Pacific yew (Taxus brevifolia) provided the best bows (as the European yew did in old England).  Many small trees with distinctive characteristics exist, such as the Oregan crabapple (Malus fusca), a true apple with extremely hard wood and small fruits that are sour but good (see long, detailed study by Reynolds and Dupres 2018).  Much commoner and more visible are the true firs, Abies species.  Many species exist, some of which grow to 250’.  Despite priority over the name, they have lost it to the Douglas fir in the Northwest. It is not a fir (it may be closer to pines), but is far commoner and has much better wood, so it has usurped the name “fir.”  In western Canada, true firs are called “balsams.”  In the northwestern US, they are “true firs.”

Old-growth coastal forests in the Northwest are quite incredible sights.  (Vaillant 2005 gives a stunning and romantic description.)  Many species of evergreens grow to 200’ or more, some over 300’.  The redwoods of northwestern California can reach 379’; they are by far the tallest trees in the world.  The only other trees on earth conclusively known to break 300’ are the Douglas fir and Sitka spruce.  Possibly other Northwest Coast trees (grand fir, sugar pine, and red cedar) broke 300 in the past.  The sheer amount of wood is incredible.  Wildlife is thin, and mostly far up in the canopy.  Stands were often over 500 years old, since fire and other catastrophes are rare. 

Soil fertility was maintained by nitrogen fixation by lichens, and also—more exotically—by bears dragging salmon up from streams.  The bears would eat some salmon, scavengers would eat more, and the fish and bear-dung would fertilize the land, sometimes as heavily as a modern farmer fertilizing a crop (Gende and Quinn 2006).  This kept alive many trees that needed much nitrogen and could not get it otherwise, such as Sitka spruce.

The interior is different:  fires are much more frequent, and the dominant trees are the fire-following pines and Douglas firs.  (On forest fire regimes, see Agee 1993.)  These do not grow under their own shade, and thus are slowly replaced by shade-tolerant hemlock, cedars, balsam firs, and so on if the fires do not return.   This can take a while.  Douglas firs can live hundreds of years.  Replacement is just beginning in the 100-year-old forests around Seattle.  Soil has much to do with it.  Replacement is far along on rich, deep soils, but barely starting on barren ridgetops.  In the drier and more lightning-prone parts of the interior, fire intervals are much more common than this, so pine and Douglas fir remain dominant indefinitely.

Douglas firs do not tolerate extreme cold, though they can take a lot, and they are replaced in high mountains and north of central BC by spruces of various species.  The interior north is dominated by white spruce, with black spruce on wet sites.  Middle mountain slopes and plateaus that burned often were occupied by lodgepole pine.  Resources are few in pine forests, but include a wide range of fungi (some now commercially valuable) as well as edible cambium and a few herbs.

The typical replacement situation involves alder or cottonwood coming in first.  Alder normally comes in first, especially in less fertile areas, because it fixes nitrogen, as beans do, using symbiotic root bacteria (Rhizobium).  Faster-growing but nitrogen-demanding cottonwood and willow take over in very fertile sites.  Maples, wild cherries, and several other species of trees occur as minor components in the forests. 

The extensive openings created by wetlands, prairies, high mountain meadows and tundras, coastal barrens, and the like are covered by a wide variety of grasses, composites, herbs and bulbs.  Most of these are useful to humans for food, medicine, basketry, cordage, bedding, and many other purposes. 

The vast lava plateaus of interior Washington and Oregon were originally covered by grassland or sagebrush.  These environments were rich in edible roots and bulbs, as well as other plant resources, plus deer and pronghorns.  Root crops are low in calories and take a lot of work, so fish remained the main resource in most of the region.

            Productivity of the seas and waters was almost uniformly high, but the land was uneven in this regard.  Vast areas of rugged, high mountains were almost worthless to early humans except for hunting marmots and mountain goats, and a few other resources.  Much of the forested area was thin on resources, and fire to produce openings was welcome.  At the other extreme of productivity were the mouths of the major rivers.  Here the nutrients of a large percentage of North America were concentrated.  Tens of millions of salmon and countless lesser fish swarmed in the waters.  The extensive mud banks were veritable factories of clams and oysters.  Waterfowl in millions flocked there.  The rich alluvial soil produced roots, berries, and herbs, as well as fast-growing trees.  Bits and pieces of this riverine richness still exist along the lower Skeena, Fraser, Skagit and Columbia, but so terribly hurt by mismanagement that we can form no real idea of what it was like 300 years ago.

2.  Traditional Cultural Areas

In this study I discuss the region classically defined as the “Northwest Coast” (Suttles 1990) and “Plateau” (Walker 1998) cultural areas, as well as neighboring Athapaskan-settled areas linked by rivers and trails to the coast.  Roughly, this comprises what is today the panhandle of Alaska; most of British Columbia; all of Washington, and Oregon; northwestern California; and small neighboring bits of Yukon and Idaho.  Operationally, I am largely defining my topic area as the region where salmon are common enough to be a major resource.  This basically means the Pacific-slope drainages from the Klamath to Alaska.  However, I exclude Alaska itself, except for the panhandle, because it is culturally so different as to require a separate discussion.  I also exclude most of Idaho and western Montana, where the rivers run to the Pacific but the fish are few enough to make the people adapt to other resources, and thus the cultural ecology is different indeed.

Within this area, most of the basic ideas I am considering are broadly similar:  respect for animals and plants, taking them as people (“other-than-human persons”), managing them for conservation but cropping them heavily, and so on.  Since I am concerned with cultural representations of conservation, it is these similarities that matter to my immediate project, and thus I feel comfortable about treating in one book a range of societies that are fantastically different in many other ways.  However, the differences matter too.  One notable example is the contrast between the spectacular totem poles and housefronts of the northern Northwest and the unobtrusive, low-key, but exquisitely detailed arts of the other regions.

The classic Northwest Coast was the realm of large permanent villages and highly complex societies dependent on sea fisheries and salmon.  They are the creators of the great art objects and ceremonies that makes the Northwest so famous.

The Athapaskan groups ranged from small mobile bands hunting big game and camping seasonally for fish to groups bordering on and culturally close to the Northwest Coast tribes.  The Athapaskan groups share a particular and striking epistemology that will be of major concern below.

The Plateau peoples are the most varied ecologically, ranging from the Shuswap and Lakes in the northern forests to the Yakima on the sagebrush deserts of interior Washington.   They lived on a varied diet of fish, game, roots, berries and other plant foods.  Their usual houses were substantial pit houses:  the foundation was dug out two or three feet deep into the ground, large logs were set up in a square, and substantial timbers were put over these to make a domed roof; the whole was then covered with sod.  These large, comfortable, well-insulated houses were ideal for the climate, and they hardly changed for 5,000 years.  The Plateau people were highly mobile, at first in canoes, later on horseback, and their mobility patterns have locally persisted to this day; they may suddenly disappear from one place and reappear in another they supposedly “abandoned” decades before, to the surprise of Euro-American settlers (Ackerman 2005; Pryor 1999).

Humans entered North America from Asia, probably about 16,000 years ago, give or take a millennium.  Earlier dates are suggested by equivocal but interesting evidence from both North and South America.  The stock that came in at these early times was similar to recent finds in south-central Siberia at 24,000 and 17,000 year old levels.  These finds have been genetically sequenced (Raghavan et al. 2014) and prove to be somewhat intermediate genetically between Europe and East Asia; they have many resemblances to earlier Chinese finds and to European and west Asian populations.  The split between east Siberians and Native Americans is about 20,000-23,000 years old; the Athabascans separated later, about 13,000 years ago (Raghavan et al. 2015).  There is no believable evidence of early contact from Europe to the Americas (despite some claims in the media).  There is no question that Native Americans entered the Americas via the Bering Strait within the last few tens of thousands of years.  Native Americans now hold that “we have always been here,” but this applies to their existing languages and societies, not to their ultimate genetic ancestors—as their origin myths generally show, since most relate migrations, or tell of times before humans, when the animals were the people.

Archaeological finds in the Northwest go back to about 12-15,000 years ago, but the area must have been settled before that.  Humans were in South America by 13,000 years ago.  They must have gone through the Northwest to get there.  An early site, On Your Knees Cave on the Prince of Wales islands in Alaska, goes back to 10,300 years ago, has obsidian from Mt. Edziza, on the mainland some 200 km away (Moss 2011; Turner 2014-1:57; on Mt. Edziza, see Reimer 2018).  A wetsite on Haida Gwaii has even preserved wooden tools that look like recent ones but are over 10,000 years old (Moss 2011:90).  Now-extensive archaeology has turned up a long record of gradual learning to use the land more and more efficiently.  There are few, if any, sharp breaks in the record; apparently, people and societies have been developing rather smoothly (Moss 2011), with no evidence of the vast migrations and sudden cultural intrusions that delight archaeologists of Asia.

It is now widely agreed that the main early route into the Americas was along the Northwest Coast.  The famous “Plains corridor” between the Cordilleran and eastern Canadian ice sheets probably did not open early enough to be a competitor, though evidently people came down it as soon as they could.  The Pleistocene glacial maximum, which covered Canada with ice from Atlantic to Pacific and made travel impossible, was earlier than we used to think—more like 19,000 than 16,000 years ago (Clark et al. 2009).  Thus, people could probably have come down the coast by 15,000 BC.  But what was then the coast is now 300 feet deep, the sea levels having risen.  So we know nothing of the earliest migrants. 

By 10,000 years ago, however, people were established in Haida Gwaii (the Queen Charlotte Islands) and elsewhere along the coast.  There is total cultural continuity in Haida Gwaii; apparently the ancestral Haida settled there and never moved.  They were drying salmon in large villages 7000 years ago (Cannon and Yang 2006), e.g. at Namu, where occupation goes back to 11,000 yeas ago.  Salmon and shellfish increases there from 6000 years ago (Moss 2011; Turner 2014-1:84).

The Archaic period lasted from before 10,000 BCE to about 4400, and was characterized by small, mobile groups wandering the landscape, hunting and fishing.  After 4400, the Pacific period set in, lasting until contact with European settlers.  Settled life rapidly advanced, with “storing large volumes of food; increased population density, sendentism, [increasing] household
and community size; escalated warfare; development of canoe-based land-use patterns; more institutionalized social status differences,” and more intensive management of resources (Sobel et al. 2013:31).  Pit houses appear in the interior by very early dates, and were common everywhere by 3000 years ago (Turner 2014-1:85).  By this time also, high-elevation sites were occupied, evidently for berrying and other resource extraction (Turner 2014-1:97).

            Development was fairly slow in early millennia, though large pit houses appear quite early in the record.  Very large, complex societies were established by 1000 BCE.  In the Fraser River canyon, truly astonishing developments existed by 1800 years ago.  At Bridge River, a ttributary that joins the Fraser just north of Lillooet, by 1400-1300 BP there was a huge village with dozens of house pits, some large enough to imply houses holding some 50 people (Prentiss, Cross, et al. 2008; Prentiss, Foor, Hogan, et al. 2012; Prentiss, Foor, Cross, et al. 2016).  Also notable was the rapid rise of inequality; there were chiefs and commoners—more accurately, high-ranked and lower-ranked lineages—and they were very different indeed in the archaeological record.  This village, and other large villages on the middle Fraser, were abandoned around 1000 years ago.  This appears to be due to overhunting, overfishing, and presumably the Medieval Warm Period’s negative effects on fish (the water may have grown too warm for healthy runs).  People reverted to more egalitarian and nomadic lifestyles.

Prentiss and her collaborators review several possible reasons for the rise of inequality in a village like this.  Social learning and imitation is expectably involved.  Self-aggrandizing individuals probably arose; “competitive signaling” by feasts and donations presumably occurred, as it did later.  Presumably some coercion was involved.  There must have been rebels, surely.  Inequality could emerge partly through competition between individuals—presumably their families would slowly evolve into ranked lineages.  Prentiss tends to favor a more moderate situation, in which “house size evolves to solve problems to do with labor management, kin relations, and defense” (Prentiss et al. 2012:544). One assumes some ideological and ceremonial reflection of this (ibid.), but no obvious evidence suggests itself.  Fishing, and control of good fishing spots, was the basis of it all. 

Further research showed diminishing returns to hunting and fishing as the site grew more populous.  More and more mouths had to be fed from less and less available food. This would have meant competition, with the better providers winning out.  Powerful lineages could have arisen as the more successful families consolidated their hold.  Thus in their 2018 paper, the Prentiss group opts for Malthusian pressure as the driver of inequality, social complexity, and bigger, better-built villages.  It would not be the first or only time in history when food problems drove hierarchy and dominance.  When the fishery declined sharply around 1000-900 CE, the population dispersed and the village was abandoned.  It was reoccupied just before settler contact, but abandoned for good in the 1850s, as gold rushes drove Indigenous people away from the Fraser.

Pit houses got larger in early millennia.  On the coast they began to give way to plank houses by 4000-5000 years ago; square house-floors a thousand years older may indicate even earlier ones (Ames and Sobel 2013:131; Moss 2011).  One survives (as an archaeological ruin) from 800 BCE (Sobel 2013:31).  Many were found at the Ozette site.  A single house could contain 35,000 board feet of planks and a village could have a million board feet tied up in housing (Ames and Sobel 2013:138), to say nothing of the amount used for containers, tools, and fuel.  Houses 400 and even 1200 feet long are claimed in early explorers’ accounts, especially for the Lower Columbia and Lower Fraser areas, where resources were really rich.  These would have been adjacent “townhouse” units housing whole villages.

In fact, the whole Northwest Coast shows remarkable continuity, with in-situ development of cultures.  The best-known areas are, unsurprisingly, those nearest the archaeology faculties of the University of British Columbia and the University of Washington.  Here, fairly complex cultures are already known by 3000 years ago, and the modern cultures seem to have been established well over 1000 years ago.  Something of a cultural peak was reached in the Marpole phase along the lower Fraser River and in neighboring areas, 2000-3000 years ago (for Fraser culture history see Carlson et al. 2001).  This may correlate with drier conditions that changed resource availability (Lepofsky, Lertzman et al. 2005).  Major stone fortifications in this area show a great deal of warfare was present in the late prehistoric period (Schaeper 2006).  The global altithermal from around 9000 to 4000 years ago gave way on the Coast, as elsewhere, to a cold period about 3800-2600 (Moss 2011:138).

The same correlation of drying with reduced salmon, more diverse exploitation, and resultant rapid rise in cultural complexity was independently noted for the interior Plateau (Prentiss et al. 2005).  There, complexity of village life increased sharply around 2500 years ago when drier conditions set in.  It reached almost modern levels about 1100 years ago at the start of the Medieval Warm Period, a relatively warm period from the 900s to 1300 CE.  Some increase took place thereafter, in spite of the Little Ice Age from 1300 to 1800.

A more recent site is Sunken Village, on Sauvie Island in the Columbia at Portland.  Here, vast acorn processing and storage facilities exist.  Acorns and hazelnuts were staples.  “The acrorn-leaching technology and baketry of Sunen Village show marked similarities to those of much more ancient Jomon period acorn-processing sites throughout Japan” (Turner 2014-1:101), with similar basket and bag techniques; this is independent invention rather than diffusion. 

Another revealing, though tragic, find was of a young man who apparently fell and froze some 300 years ago at the edge of a glacier in British Columbia near the Alaska border.  Recent melting revealed his body.  He had eaten salmon, crab, and coastal vegetables, so he was evidently coming from the coast.  Particularly interesting was a magnificent spruce-root hat he wore, a masterpiece of basket technology (Turner 2014-1:105 shows a photograph).  Apparently he not only has living relatives, but is probably an individual remembered in local oral tradition (Moss 2011:142-144).  He was cremated and his ashes scattered near where he was found.

By the time the white voyagers and traders reached the area in the mid-18th century, an incredible linguistic diversity existed in the northwest.  This evidently dates back to the very early settlement.  There was maximal opportunity for unrelated groups to establish themselves, and for related peoples to diverge so much that their original relationships are now untraceable.  Many high-level linguistic linkages have been postulated (e.g. between Haida and Na-Dene and between Wakashan and Salishan), but I am unconvinced (not dogmatically so; just skeptical) after looking at a fair amount of evidence.  One fairly well-documented, though still controversial, relationship is striking, however:  Na-Dene has now been argued to be related to Ket, a rarely-spoken language within a group of very closely related “Yeniseian” languages spoken along the central Yenisei River in Russia (Vajda 2004).  It is not really surprising, given histories of migration and contact, to find a large language family whose closest relationships are in the Old World rather than next door in the northwest.

There were six very different language phyla along the coast:  the Haida on their islands; the Na-Dene (Tlingit and Athapaskan) on the northern coasts and throughout the northern interior; the Tsimshian in the lower Skeena and Nass drainages and neighboring coast; the Wakashan (including Haisla, Heiltsuk, Kwakwala and Nuu-chah-nulth) along most of the rest of the coast, the Salish along the “Salish Sea” coasts and much of the interior; and the tiny Chemakuan language family on the Olympic Peninsula.  Haida has often been argued to be a part of the Na-Dene group, but the evidence is poor; most of the resemblances seem to me to be either clear borrowings (e.g. yel ??? for raven in northern Haida; raven is yel in Tlingit, gagak in southern Haida  CHECK THIS) or fairly likely ones.  If there is a true relationship, it is at a very deep level.

There were several additional language groupings in the interior.  Theoretically related to Tsimshian in a huge “Penutian” phylum, but the evidence for relationships among these languages does not convince me.  One group includes Cayuse and Molalla in Oregon.  It is not obviously related to Tsimshian, or indeed to any other group.  Also “Penutian” are the Sahaptian languages of the middle Columbia River in Washington and Oregon, and the Chinookan languages of the lower Columbia River.  None of these show overwhelmingly obvious relationships to the group originally called “Penutian” languages, which occur in California.  Further research on relationships is needed.

People and groups could easily switch languages, and bilingualism was frequent.  The Gitksan may be an Athapaskan group that switched to a Tsimshianic language fairly recently (Miller 1982) or may include descendents of many Athapaskans.  The Inland Tlingit of southwest Yukon were certainly Athapaskan-speakers till recently, and preserve some memory of the change.

These languages were usually grammatically and phonologically complex.  The Salish languages are among the most difficult in the world for outsiders to pronounce.  Nancy Turner has shared with many of us a word from Nuxalk (a particularly difficult Salishan language): čłp’xwłtłpskwč’, meaning “he had in his possession a bunchberry plant” (just the simple word p’xwłtłhp “bunchberry” with a third person possessive). 

In spite of the difficulties, practically every adult knew at least two, often completely unrelated, languages, and many knew three or four.  A kaleidoscopic variety of languages was jammed into a very small space.  War, raid, trade and intermarriage were all constant.  Intermarriage guaranteed that many people spoke two languages from birth, and in some areas it was said that the very concept of having only one native language was strange.  There was thus little barrier to the spread of even the most difficult-to-communicate knowledge, including technical trainings, myths, songs, and religions.

Tragically, all these languages are disappearing, and some are long gone.  One aspect of this has been the loss of the higher style registers.  Chiefs could speak in extremely formal, rhetorical, arcane styles.  Wilson Duff’s notes, which I studied in the 1980s, record that the last speakers of the highest level of chiefly rhetoric passed away in the 1960s.  This left Florence Edenshaw Davidson, one of the more impressive women in Native American history (Blackman 1982), as the last fluent speaker of apparently somewhat less arcane, but still highly aristocratic, Haida.  I was fortunate to meet her and one or two other elders before their passing, but heard no speeches.  (John Enrico recorded an enormous amount of data from Ms. Davidson, but has not seen fit to publish much of it.)  I was more fortunate among the Nuu-chah-nulth, where fine speechmaking in elite style is still extant among the elders.  If what I heard there is any sample (and I am sure it is), we have lost an incredible amount in losing the old elite registers and speeches. 

In historic times, the climax of cultural richness and complexity was in the north, among the Haida, Tsimshian, and their neighbors.  In prehistoric times, however, the climax may well have been around the Salish Sea.  This is the body of water whose Canadian portion is the Gulf of Georgia, whose American portion is largely Puget Sound, and whose shared portion is the Juan de Fuca Strait.  Since it is geographically and ecologically one, with its core area stretching from the Fraser River delta to central Puget Sound, it has recently acquired the much more apt name of Salish Sea.  The international border runs right through it, splitting a major ecological, linguistic, and cultural focus in two.

            Contact across the Bering Strait or even directly across the North Pacific—at least via lost and wrecked boats from Asia—maintained cultural connections.  The Bering Strait comprised a cultural highway, as Boas pointed out long ago (Fitzhugh and Crowell 1988).  One language, the Eskimoan Yupik, was and is spoken on both sides of the strait.  Songs, tales, and other lore were found to link the Siberian Chukchi and Koryak with the American Tlingit and others. 

Metal came to the Northwest by trade and in the wrecks; the Northwest people also learned to work naturally occurring copper from the Copper River (Alaska) and elsewhere (see excellent review by Acheson 2003).  The earliest Boston and English traders brought more, up to tons per voyage (Acheson 2003:229).  All this helped greatly with the woodworking, especially iron from wrecks and later from traders.  This metal spread far inland, being often traded for interior products such as furs and “clamons”—elk hides prepared for armor (Cooper et al. 2015).  These hides can be made so tough that they will stop arrows and even long-shot musket balls.

            A final note on language is the rise, tremendous flourishing, and final decline of Chinuk Wawa, known as Chinook Jargon in English (and thus in most of the literature).  This is a drastically simplified form of Chinook, with many loanwords from other languages.  These are largely Nuu-chah-nulth and Washington Salish languages, but include English and French.  The Wawa developed within and for the fur trade in the late 18th century.  It probably had some degree of ancestry in widespread and presumably somewhat altered Chinook spoken before contact with the whites.  The Chinook language was the most important of a small group of closely related languages spoken on both sides of the lower Columbia River.  The Chinook people, situated at the mouth of that great corridor, naturally became major traders, and their language was widely known far up the Columbia and up and down the coasts.  It was thus well placed to become the substrate for a trade jargon.  Chinuk Wawa uses a simplified phonology and drastically simplified grammar.  It was spoken throughout the Northwest Coast, though not commonly north of central British Columbia, and many whites were fluent speakers, though virtually no whites ever learned any of the traditional languages.  George Lang (2008) has provided a delightful and scholarly history of Wawa.  It survives in countless loanwords and placenames, though it has more or less died out as a spoken language.

3.  Social and Cultural-ecological Dynamics

Society consisted of lineages ranked in some sort of order of power or nobility. Within these were hereditary chiefs, ordinary people of status, and commoners.  There were rather few of the last; this was a world where there were more elites than masses.  This is, however, probably a post-European-settlement phenomenon, due to mass population decline and consequent shortage of people to fill the ranks of the titled (see Boelscher 1988:52 for the debate on this idea).  Below this were slaves, a distinctly separate class, made up largely of captives from other tribes and their descendents.  Raiding for slaves was universal and important.  Slaves could be killed, and sometimes were (de Laguna 1972 has particularly interesting accounts, though scattered through a huge book, and hard to find; see also Boelscher 1988:59-62).

Viola Garfield’s description of the Tsimshian can stand for the whole northern coast:  “Chiefs delegated work to their immediate relatives, wives, children and slaves and set a goal of the quantities to be collected.  They supervised men’s work while their senior wives supervised the labor of younger women and female slaves.  Feasts. Potlatches and ajor undertakings like the building of a new house, were planned several years in advance and surpluses were accumulated in accordance with such long range plans…all resource properties belonged to lioneages or their titular heads.  However, the privilege of using areas belonging to a[n individual] man were extended to his sons during his lifetime” (Garfield, Barbeau and Wingert 1950:15, 17). This latter custom conflicts with the normal rule of matrilineal inheritance, and was at the discretion of the chiefs.  

There has been debate on whether the Northwest Coast was a “class society.”  The slaves were clearly a lower class.  There remains a question of whether there was a major distinction between chiefs and commoners, or the chiefs were merely primi inter pares.  Certainly some of the great chiefs of the mid-19th century were rulers of villages and had large bands of followers, but they were to some extent a product of the settlers’ fur trade.  Scholars who have worked with more egalitarian groups like the Gitksan tend to think pre-fur-trade chiefs merely gave symbolic leadership to families (Daly 2005:196).  Scholars working with the more powerful groups of the outer coast, such as the Haida and Tsimshian, are more open to the “class” word (Garfield, Barbeau and Wingert 1950:28; Roth 2008).  Certainly noble families were acutely aware of their status, as all ethnographies and Indigenous writers of the truly coastal groups agree.   Class” is rather an ambiguous concept at best, and also the Northwest Coast’s more powerful groups were in process of change and differentiation, making their societies “boundary phenomena” in many ways.

Societies were also organized into “houses.”  The actual houses were usually large, and had names.  The house as a named institution, however, was more than that: it was often coterminous with the lineage, or with the group of close bilineally-reckoned relatives typical of central coast First Nations.  Houses thus became quite comparable to the “houses” of Europe, as in house of Windsor, house of Tudor, or house of Gotha—though obviously on a smaller scale.  This comparison was first taken seriously by Claude Lévi-Strauss (e.g. 1982), and has been much discussed since, especially by Jay Miller (2014, passim).

A particularly interesting institution was the name (Miller 2014, passim).  A child would have a personal name, but anyone of substance eventually succeeded to a hereditary title within his or her lineage, and new names could be created.  Names were honored titles comparable to those of feudal Europe.  As Macbeth was first addressed as Cawdor, later as Glamis, and finally as Scotland, so a Northwest Coast person would be addressed by the latest and highest name he or she had acquired.  The difference was that Macbeth took over the estates with those names, whereas Northwest Coast names are strictly personal titles; they imply decision-making power over lineage estates or other property, but they are not the actual names of properties.  Unlike many aspects of Northwest Coast culture, nametaking goes on today, and is increasingly important.  One of the most obvious immediate reasons for a potlatch is taking a new name.  This could have interesting kinship ramifications; among the matrilineal Gitksan, the father and his family had the work of producing and assembling spiritual and material wealth for a child’s naming ceremonies (Adams 1973:38-39). 

Many chiefly names that are mistakenly considered to be personal names in some of the literature are actually more comparable to titles.  Examples include Shakes in Tlingit Alaska, or Legaix among the Tsimshian near Prince Rupert.  One could be, for instance, the Capilano of North Vancouver, just as Shakespeare’s MacBeth became successively Cawdor, Glamis, and King when he took over those titles.  (Capilano—Salish keypilanoq—was the title of the head chief of the village near which Capilano Community College now stands.)

The hereditary chiefly name Maquinna, passed on for centuries on northern Vancouver Island, inspired an excellent discussion of this whole concept by the current Maquinna, Chief Earl George of Ahousaht (George 2003).  A trained anthropologist, he explains in anthropological terms the cluster of rights and responsibilities that the name actually labels.  As Maquinna, he has major responsibilities spread over the central west coast of Vancouver Island.  Another autobiography with enormous and fascinating detail on names and rank is that of the wonderful and impressive Kwakwakawakw noblewoman Agnes Alfred (2004).

Among outsider accounts, Christopher Roth’s account of Tsimshian naming (Roth 2008) and Boelscher’s of Haida (1988:151-166) are particularly thorough and excellent.  A very detailed section of W. W. Elmendorf’s ethnography of the Twana of Puget Sound (1960) describes naming in the more southerly reaches.   Roth points out that a name has a reality of its own, and the bearer of a name comes in a real sense to be the name—complete with all its duties and responsibilities.  Again, readers of Shakespeare’s Macbeth will (at least partially) understand.  Macbeth did not just get the letters “Cawdor” and “Glamis” after his name, let alone the word “King” in front; he became a very different social entity as he took over those titles.  Inheritance, marriages, and house traditions are similar to those of old Europe.  As Jay Miller reports for the Tsimshian:  “Today, Northwest natives are well aware of such parallels between the dynbastic marriages of European and of Tsimshian noble houses” (Miller 2014:97).  Some assimilation to European norms has probably taken place since white settlement, but the parallels go back long before contact.

Like kingship in medieval Scotland, Northwest Coast names are often spiritual and religious.  God appoints kings and kingship is a divine duty.  The ancestors are involved in the appointment of a new Legaix, and some names are so spirit-linked that they convey direct spirit power.  Names thus are unique; only one person at a time can have a specific name.  They are confined to their descent groups.  There are male and female names, chiefly and nonchiefly names, and names that go with particular functions. 

Names are not all formal hereditary titles of this sort.  Ordinary names include casual personal monikers, but even these usually have stories attached to them.  Family histories describe the origins of names identified with particular descent lines.  These follow from tales that often involve meeting supernatural beings and getting spirit powers, but may merely commemorate secular events.  These latter events can be minor or even silly, but once they become grounds for a name, they are canonical stories for the group (see Roth 2008, esp. pp. 40 ff.; cf. royal nicknames in medieval Europe, which conveyed respect even when intrinsically disrespectful like “Charles the Fat”).

An individual may take many names during life:  a youthful personal name, an adult name, and then any number of titles.  Taking a new name of any status, as well as any other change of status such as a marriage (at least between nobles), must be recognized with a potlatch.  This—plus a laudable desire for hospitality and fun— keeps the potlatch alive and flourishing today.  Even groups whose native language has died out often maintain names.  Names were often taboo when the wearer died.  All the Puget Sound languages have one name for the mallard duck, except for one group, the Twana, that calls them “red feet,” because a chief within historic time had had a name sounding like the usual “mallard” word (Elmendorf 1960:393).  Puget Sound Salish has special words for various types of naming taboos.

Residence on most of the coast was in very large plank houses that contained whole lineages or large families.  These could be enormous; a house reportedly 500 feet long existed on the lower Fraser just after 1800.  In front of these, among the northern and central groups, were the famous “totem poles,” which displayed family crests and portrayed historically interesting family stories or other events. 

Most of these events were mythical.  Rarely, however, they were recent, or not even local events;. Abraham Lincoln was carved on one pole.  A fascinating bit of evidence on what constituted as an event occurred in 1825, when a small group of Gitksan on a party of retaliation against a murder stopped at the first trading post in west-central British Columbia, kept by a Mr. Ross.  “Here they observed the white man, his possessions, and his strange ways, for the first time, and considered their adventure in the light of a supernatural experience.  They marveled in particular at the white man’s dog, the palisade or fortification around his houses, and the broad wagon road.”  One, Wa-Iget, took this dog as a crest, and had it carved on his totem pole at Kisgagas, under the name of ‘Auge-maeselos (“dog of Mr. Ross,” r being pronounced l; Barbeau 1929:103).  Another took the palisade, and built a small palisade around his totem pole (Barbeau 1950:10).

Southward, these were replaced by large carved house posts among the Nuu-chah-nulth and Salish.  South of northern Washington there was little or no large-scale carving.

The interior groups lived in large, but not very large, semisubterranean houses.  To build one, a large circular pit was dug down a few feet into the ground, with level floor and often a bench ring along the side.  Four large pillars supported a log frame roof that was then covered with lighter materials and then with earth.  Such a house was warm in winter, cool in summer, and resistant to all weathers.  It is very ancient in the region.  Similar houses were once constructed all over western North America and northeastern Asia.  (Versions of them often survive as ceremonial structures, such as the kivas of the Pueblos and the ceremonial houses of the Navaho and the central Californians.)  Semisubterranean houses were replaced by lighter, more portable or easily-built dwellings in most regions in the last few millennia. 

Inland, away from the great fishing stations, society rapidly became less complex and rich.  In the north, the deep interior was a world of hunters of large mammals.  They had exactly the opposite dynamic:  they had to be sparse on the ground and highly mobile, with few possessions.  Farther south, in the Plateau region, root foods became more important, and were managed intensively.  This was less divisive, and in any case salmon were important there too, if less so than on the coast.  Societies intermediate in size and complexity arose.  Intermediate complexity also characterized the first tier of Athapaskan groups in Canada and Alaska. 

The traditional explanation for this is that the groups “borrowed” ideas from the Coast,  presumably late.  However, current archaeology suggests that the complexity developed slowly throughout the region.  The Athapaskans and Plateau peoples were not latecomers, but were always part of the process.  The more concentrated the subsistence base, the more complicated life and communities became.

Throughout the Northwest, the relative importance of fishing at set places for anadromous fish is a good predictor of social complexity and village size.  This pattern was established by at least 3000 years ago. 

Interestingly, in the southern part of the coastal region, the fish were as common as in the north, but the societies were generally simpler; the reason appears to be that the rivers (and therefore the runs) were smaller, while the landward resources—seeds, nuts, game—were richer.  Evidence occurs in northwest California:  The Klamath River system is a large system that once had huge fish runs, in an otherwise rather barren area; and, as the model predicts, the groups along it had highly complex societies and large towns.  Elsewhere, people could and did scatter out in small villages near more varied productive sites.

The Northwest Coast people were generally a highly warlike set of societies, though there was a range.  The Haida and the Lekwiltok Kwakwakawakw enjoyed reputations as particularly fierce and terrifying warriors, at least in the 19th century.  Tsimshian groups conquered along fur trade routes, developing powerful chiefs.  By contrast, many of the southern groups—from southwest British Columbia south along Puget Sound and the coast—seem to have been relatively peaceful, but perhaps only relatively.  Fairly typical for most of the region is the following paragraph about the people of the Fraser River area in southern British Columbia:

            “Relations

[of the Lillooet]

with the Chilcotin were generally hostile, and stories are common of their raiding the Lillooet for salmon and attacking isolated hunting parties and wandering children for slaves….  The Halkomelem on the Lower Fraser River…engaged in warfare with the Lower Lillooet over elk hunting in the Pitt and Harrison river areas, and hunters of both tribes were massacred.  In the distant past, the Lillooet made war on the coastal people and took many slaves.  Sometime earlier, the Shuswap waged war on the Lower Lillooet, driving them from their lands and fisheries between Anderson Lake and Birkenhead River….  The lower Lillooet in the early 1800s were subjected to frequent raids by the Thompson.  Allied forces of Thompson, Shuswap, and Okanagan attacked the Lake Lillooet but remained friendly with the Fraser River Band of Lillooet…” (Kennedy and Bouchard 1998a:176).  All this action and violence took place in an area of only about 10,000 square miles.  Within that area—and, to generalize—within most of the Northwest Coast—all groups were at least occasionally hostile to each other. 

            Peace could be maintained by scattering eagle or swan down over participants in a ceremony.  This insured peace at the ceremony, and if done properly or in a treaty ceremony would insure peace between fighting elements, potentially for all eternity (though reality interfered with that vision).  Potlatches often involved a peace-treaty or truce component, with down being featured.  Thus, warlike tendencies were not uncontrolled or uncontrollable, and peace—necessary to maintain trade and management—was guaranteed most of the time for most communities.

War, strong chieftainship, and highly localized resources went together.  If a group was focused on a single river with a huge run of fish, they desperately needed to protect it, and they needed slaves to help process the fish during the run—any and all labor was valuable.  They thus tended to be warlike: making themselves secure, and then raiding outward for slaves.  Other groups had to be warlike to defend themselves, and so the process continued,

            Even so, in the more evenly productive landscape of Puget Sound, warfare and strong chieftainship seems rather subdued.  Groups could spread widely over the country and maintain large—and thus more secure—populations.  This may be part of the explanation for the individualism and personal freedom noted for these societies (Angelbeck 2016; Angelbeck and Grier 2012; Miller 2014).  Bill Angelbeck notes that the highly individualized quest for personal guardian spirits was a key part of this.  Each boy and many if not all girls went on a vision quest at puberty or in early teens, seeking guardian powers.  These were not usually spoken of openly.  They allowed a person to avoid irksome social duties by saying “my spirit doesn’t like/permit that” (Angelbeck 2016).  Since others did not really know what one’s spirit was, or what it wanted, this was hard to counter.  Angelbeck and Grier (2012) even use classic anarchist theory (as in Kropotkin 1904) to explain Sound Salish and nearby dynamics, and James C. Scott did for northern southeast Asia (Scott 2009).  The result seems a bit overdone—most hunting-gathering societies are individualist and free, and it is the northern Northwest Coast societies that are the anomaly.  One need not really invoke political theory.  Still, the point is worth making, and the high levels of individualism in the Northwest—not only Puget Sound—is worth remembering.

The social requirements of chieftainship in a warlike world are great.  Chiefs had to attract and keep warriors through generosity. A  pattern of competitive feasting and wealth giveaways is sure to develop.

Feasts come in many forms.  The Tsimshian word liligit, “calling people together,” includes occasions memorably listed by Joan Ryan, who holds the Sm’ooygit Hannamauxw title of the Gitksan people:

“[S]ettlement feasts (which occur after funerals); totem pole- or gravestone-raising feasts; welcome feasts (to celebrate totem pole-raising events); smoke feasts; retirement feasts; divorce feasts; wedding feasts; restitution feasts; shame feasts; reinstatement feasts (pertaining to Gitksan citizens who have disobeyed Gitksan laws [but repented]); first game feasts; welcome feasts (to celebrate births); graduation feasts (to celebrate recent achievements, either academic or spiritual); cleansing feasts (to restore spirits after serious accidents); and coming out feasts (to mark the transition from teen years to adult years).  The feast system is a vehicle by which the Gitksan Nation carries out activities and transactions that affect the daily lives of the House members” (Ryan 2000:ix).  And this is not even a totally complete list.  Similar occasions entail feasts elsewhere on the coast.  Note that almost all of these involve marking some significant change in status of an individual, said change requiring announcement, recognition, and validation by the whole community.  The purpose of many potlatches is in effect to get an actual vote on the change.  If it requires community acceptance, having everyone show up for the feast shows that the change is indeed accepted.  If few or no helpers will contribute to the feast, or if few show up, or if they show up but insult the host, the change is obviously not approved.  Few indeed would give a potlatch if this were a risk, but it did happen in the past, and occasioned fighting or actual war.

Among many accounts of potlatches, we may single out the Tsimshian chief William Beynon’s 1945 account of a series of potlatches by the Gitksan (linguistically close to the Tsimshian; Beynon 2000).  Potlatching was illegal at the time, but the Gitksan country on the Skeena was remote, and Beynon was hardly about to be excluded.  His account remained unpublished until 2000.  Beynon’s father was Welsh, his mother Tsimshian, which made him one of the lucky ones: White by Canadian law (patrilineal), Tsimshian by matrilineal Tsimshian law. 

The high point of feasting is the familiar potlatch of the Northwest Coast.  (The word comes from a Nuu-chah-nulth word meaning “to give.”)  Generosity was such a high value, and so useful in society, that Thomas McIlwraith recorded:  “A native store-keeper once ruefully commented on the fact that he woiuld gain no advantage from the goods on his shelves, since he hoped merely to sell them, not to give them away” (quoted Kramer 2013:738).  This certainly reverses most Anglo-American attitudes!

The reasons for the potlatch have been debated.  Some rather strange ideas have been floated, including the stereotypic-racist one that it was just craziness on the part of ignorant savages.  Better known and more reasonable is the hypothesis of Wayne Suttles and Stuart Piddocke (Piddocke 1965; Suttles 1987) that the potlatch arose to even out resources.  A group would give a potlatch in good times, and thus in bad times would be able to call on reciprocity from more fortunate people.  However, this hypothesis did not hold up well (Adams 1973; John Douglass, interview, 1984).  It turned out that potlatches would not work for this, because they have to be planned years in advance, before scarcity or abundance would be known.  Ordinary reciprocity works instead for the purpose (as Adams and Douglasss both emphasize).  On the other hand, Suttles’ data show some evidence for redistribution and evening-out in his major research area, Puget Sound and the Salish Sea (Wayne Suttles, 1987, and interview, 1984).

Potlatches may locally have served to equalize resources, but this has never been proved, and seems definitely unlikely in many cases.  Suttles (1987) has discussed the whole controversy, with pros and cons.  Since he wrote, the equalization theory has been abandoned by writers familiar with the region (Daly 2005:59-60).  One problem with it is that the potlatching group all gets together to finance the enterprise, and relatively poor individuals must often give up quite a bit; even guests may have to give more than ethnographies usually imply.  And a potlatch takes months to years to plan and stage, whereas local resource shortages tend to appear suddenly.  People needing assistance disperse to kin rather than waiting for the next potlatch somewhere.

The ostensible purpose of most potlatches is to mark ritually a major change in status: taking a new name (and thus a new position), coming of age, getting married, or dying.  Funeral potlatches have been the most important and widespread potlatches in recent times, but in the past nametaking was apparently the most important. 

Still, other cultures around the world mark such transitions without spectacular giveaways.  The giveaways, demonstration of powers and possessions, and feasts powerfully increase and mark the status of the potlatchers, and this is clearly their most important reason (Adams 1973).  John Adams (1973) showed that they also can serve indirectly to redistribute population, notably from larger but troubled groups to smaller and cohesive ones, because of shifting after the potlatch.  

In early times there was a much more compelling reason to potlatch.  Philip Drucker and Robert Heizer showed some time ago (1967) that the root purpose was organization and mobilization for conflict, including—focally—competition for warriors or for chief-status allies.  A successful chief wins loot by fighting.  This he can donate to warriors directly, or can translate into wealth for the whole group, thus organizing and leading his own people.  Either way, he can thus attract more warriors to his side or form alliances with neighboring groups.  A less successful chief must either defer or attempt to do better.  If he cannot be generous enough, his warriors defect, and he is as good as dead. 

Similar patterns of competitive feasting and generosity are well known for West Africa, highland Southeast Asia, early-day Afghanistan (Robertson 1896), and many other areas of the world.  Often, professional poets—the bards of Ireland, scops of Anglo-Saxon society, griots of Africa, song leaders on the Northwest Coast—sang the leader’s praises at such feasts.  

Particularly close to the Northwest Coast is the society of medieval Ireland (Europe’s northwest coast!)—as reflected in the epic “Cattle Raid of Cooley” (Kinsella 1969).  Society there depended heavily on salmon runs.  Chiefs competed to attract warriors by giving feasts and distributing wealth and booty.  Bards sang the praises of the generous.  Warfare included slave raiding and head-hunting.  Chiefs were called ri, usually translated as “king,” but that is a bit of Irish hyperbole—though the word is indeed cognate with Latin rex.   Chieftainship was based in the kinship group, and hotly contested.  This often led to the competitive feasting pattern, as in the Northwest. 

Some astonishing parallels occur:  the wren is a powerful bird for both Irish and Haida (and also the Quileute), because although it is tiny, it sings in the worst winter storms, and its song rings cloud and clear above the howling of the wind.  In societies that share a belief that song gives spirit power, this makes the bird a truly powerful being (Lawrence 1997 for the Irish; my own research on Haida).  Among the Nuu-chah-nulth the wren is the source of reliable words, “One Who Always Speaks Rightly” (Atleo 2004, 2011:98).  The belief in the magic power of song is shared all across Europe and Siberia, along with several folktales (such as the Swan Maiden and “Orpheus” myths) and a number of religious practices including reverence for tree spirits, but the Irish and Haida respect for the wren seems to have been a genuine independent development.   Moving to Scotland, we may add the clan crest, closely parallel to Northwest Coast concepts.  (The Anderson clan crest is an oak tree surrounded by a leather belt, which seems quite close to Haida and Tsimshian themes.)

Singers and tale-tellers graced potlatches also.  We know little of their professional status, but the major songs, dances, and masks were lineage property.  We also are somewhat unclear on the range of chiefly power; the great chiefdoms in which one man extended dominion over several villages seem likely to be products of the fur trade (as among the Tsimshian) in the early post-contact period (Matson et al. 2003).  Chiefs could be powerful, and there was an ideology of this; the Nuu-chah-nulth related chiefs and whales (Harkin 1998; Sapir 2004).  As Nuu-chah-nulth anthropologist Ki-Ke-In points out: “[T]he Nuuchaanulth [sic] people historically had policing, a judiciary system, and a most sophisticated and inclusive system of ownership and title….the entire sea and land territory and everything in it are vested in the Taayii Ha’wilth,” the head chief(Ki-Ke-In 2013:29).  He did not have European-style autocratic control, but he acted as leader of his wide, kin-linked community.  The value of the term “chiefdom” has thus been challenged (see Miller 2014:94), but the chiefs had enough power over enough area to make the term useful, even though the Northwest Coast chiefdoms were small in extent and low in population compared to the great chiefdoms of old Polynesia or Mesoamerica.

The survival of potlatching for 200 years after pacification of the northwest shows that it had other purposes than mere war mobilization.  The direct reason for a potlatch was and is usually succession to a great name.  Sometimes it was defense of that name, as when a potlatch was given to wipe away shame because a holder of a high title had—for example—stumbled at a feast, or been insulted. (Potlatches could, by the same token, shame an opponent.) 

The potlatching person or group will invite everyone in their personal networks.  Those who actually attend are showing their support for the new title.  Their very presence is essentially a vote for the new status.  They normally provide gifts of their own, also, and these show support for the title-holder.  In the old days this was a life-and-death matter; such exchanges made loyalty bonds that were expected to hold in war.  (Again, the Irish institution is so similar that one can usefully apply the explanations in The Tain, Kinsella 1969.)  Today, in the actively political and community-oriented world of the Northwest’s First Nations, such support is only slightly less vital.  Potlatching is the cement and mortar that holds the tribal organizations and political alliances together.  Those who condemned the potlatch as wasteful or irrational had obviously never studied the institution. 

Potlatches are about giving away vast amounts of food and other useful goods, but they are also about displaying what can never be given:  names, crests, dances, sacred possessions (Roth 2008:102ff).  A potlatcher may point out that the food shared out is the product of the potlatcher’s titled endowment property (Daly 2005:59, citing Philip Drucker as well as Daly’s own work).   Once again this institution recalls medieval Ireland and England.  The king could and did feast his followers and give away gold and coin, but he could not give away the crown jewels, the ritual sword and mace, or the intangible names and titles.  As on the Northwest Coast, many of the material possessions had supernatural qualities.  A Tsimshian inherited copper is not just a piece of copper sheeting, just as Excalibur was not just a sword.

A particularly common and widespread type of potlatch was the memorial potlatch, held first when a high-born person died, and then again when his or her totem pole—today, headstone—was raised (see notable discussion in Fiske and Patrick 2000).  This was the occasion to validate the succession:  the name-taker had to host the potlatch, feeding and giving lavish gifts to those who came.  Chiefs and others of status had to give potlatches for marriage, to call everyone to witness and support the couple.  Assumption of any new name or title provided other occasions for name-taking. A girl reaching puberty, and thus the age when arrangements for marriage can begin, has a “coming-out potlatch.” 

Potlatches still abound, for all these latter purposes.  Name-taking has replaced war.  Competitive gift-giving can replace physical conflict; “fighting with property,” as Helen Codere (1950) famously called it.  It can also be simple ambition, or lack thereof.  A friend of mine was in line to be a hereditary chief in one of the Nuu-chah-nulth groups, but did not want the responsibility at the time, so let his younger brother potlatch for the position; later the younger brother got tired of it, so my friend potlatched and took over the job. 

The demographic collapse on the Northwest Coast led to a pile-up of titles:  there were too few people competing for too many names.  This, plus the availability of trade goods, caused potlatching to spin into heights of lavish expenditure that horrified the Protestant missionaries.  They managed to get the potlatch outlawed in Canada from 1884 to 1953.  Potlatching continued anyway, but covert and somewhat distorted.  This was a major psychological blow to the people (Atleo 2011).  All the missionaries accomplished was giving a couple of generations of Native people a contempt for the overt racism in settlers’ law. 

Potlatching became extremely competitive among the Kwakwaka’wakw (Kwakiutlan) peoples.  This was partly because of the pile-up of titles.  It was partly because their complex system of descent does not produce clear lineages, so many people have a chance at inheriting a name and set of privileges.  It was also partly because the central location of the Kwakwaka’wakw made them a crossroads for wealth, opportunity, and communication.  Their potlatches were the spectacular ones involving vast destructions of property, such as huge fires of burning whale and seal oil (highly precious commodities).  North and south of them, potlatches and feasts were calmer, more routine, and more concerned with actual orderly succession—not that that prevented politicking and gossip (cf. Boelscher 1988 for Haida, Roth 2008 for the Tsimshian). Boelscher (1988) pointed out that in potlatching as in other matters involving rhetoric, oratory, and public presence, there is a tremendous amount of individual jockeying for position, often by denying one’s own position with exaggerated modesty.  Rhetoric is highly formulaic and stereotyped, but people manage to assert individuality through practice.  As so often, autobiographies are particularly useful sources (e.g. Alfred 2004; Blackman/Davidson 1982; Spradley/Sewid 1969).

Devotees of potlatch literature will note that I am downplaying the gift/obligation side—so famously studied by Marcel Mauss (1990) and debated ever since—of the institution.  Complicated and highly variable rules of reciprocity, with or without interest, are reported.  All this is not particularly relevant to my purposes here, but quite apart from that I tend to find the gift exchanging rather secondary.  (See Daly 2005; Roth 2008; and other sources cited above, but I am also going with my own research observations here.)  Potlatching is war mobilization, social glue, name and title validation, status-change validation, validation of land ownership, and much else.  Gift transactions, however defined and managed, are more means than ends.  They are necessary and obligatory, but it is what they show—what they communicate—that matters. The gift-giver is rewarding guests for recognizing—some even say voting for—a due adoption of a new name and station in life.  The names and privileges, not the rewards, are what matter.  And in the old days of intergroup warfare, the rival power of chiefs mattered even more.

            The social structure of Northwest Coast peoples was thus based heavily on kinship—extended very widely, to include adopted kin, animals and mountains that were reckoned as kin, mythologically related groups descended from a mythic ancestor, and kin related by wide-flung marriages.  Position within the social system was all-important.  Social positions were loci of power, not only political but spiritual.  “A traditional chief had a moral and religious obligation to transform chaotic cosmic energy into socially useful power by being a conduit for it down throiugh his spine, ceremonial cane, or totem pole, which, above all, was the ‘deed’ to ‘his’ rank, name, house, and territory” (Miller 2014:96).

Northwest Coast society was made up of kinship groups:  patrilineages or patrilineal kindreds in the south, matrilineages in the north and northern interior, and various intermediate accommodations—including something close to double-descent—in the middle (especially among Wakashan speakers). 

The Na-Dene, Tsimshian and Haida peoples are all matrilineal, and in fact their combined territories make up largest matriliny-dominated area on the planet.  The Haida, Tsimshianic groups, and Tlingit had large and powerful matrilineages, and are among the most strongly matrilineal societies in the world.   (This disproves, among other things, the old idea—sometimes still heard—that matriliny is the result of hoe agriculture).  As late as the late 20th century, Canada’s strongly patrilineal and patriarchal legal system conflicted, often dramatically, with Indigenous law and practice.  A person with a Native mother and Anglo-Canadian father was a full member of both societies, and could move easily in both worlds.  An individual with a non-Native mother and Native father was a rootless person, not really part of either world.  When I did research on alcoholism in British Columbia, I found a disproportionate percentage of such individuals to be alcoholic.  Fortunately, since those days, Canadian law has become less narrowly patriarchal.  The point is that kinship really gives identity and personhood on the Northwest Coast; one is a member of one’s family in a way incomprehensible, or at least alien, to many non-Indigenous people.  We will later see how relevant this is to environmental actions.

These matrilineages are further grouped into larger groupings:  the Eagle and Raven moieties among the Haida, three or four comparable phratries among the Tlingit and Tsimshian.  One must marry outside one’s group.  All have Eagle and Raven groups, and a Haida Eagle cannot marry a Tsimshian one.

            Lineages are involved in resource ownership.  Among the Haida, for instance, lineage “members share rights to ancestral villages, to fishing, hunting, and gathering locations, including:

–major salmon-spawning rivers

–halibut and cod banks off shore

–important berry patches (especiallyi cranberry and crabapple)

–bird nesting sites (particularly species of sea gull, Cassin’s auklet, and ancient murrelet)

–rights to stranded whales on the coastline near lineage-owned lands

–trap and deadfall sites for land mammals along rivers

–access to house sties in ancestral villages” (Boelscher 1988:35).

Poaching on someone else’s land, even to take small items, was cause for fighting.

Especially in the northern coast, lineages (matrilineages in the north) had crests:  natural (or supernatural) things that were symbols and that provided some supernatural power for them.  Usually these were impressive animals, such as killer whales, grizzly bears, sharks, wolves, sealions, eagles, frogs and dragonflies (these being spiritually powerful beings), ravens, and the like.  Some plants were crests, as well as weather (Haida crests incuded cumulus and cirrus clouds), the moon, and various spirit beings.  People could add crests when interesting events involving crest-type beings happened to their families.  These crests were typically shown on totem poles, blankets, and even the person; a Haida man would have his lineage crest tattooed on his body (Boelscher 1988:142).

Almost equally important were lineage rights to particular songs, dances, designs, and other intellectual property.  Lineages and phratries even had their own origin myths, very different from other lineages’ stories.  In fact, laws regarding intellectual property were complex and sophisticated, rather like modern copyright legislation.  A song could be unowned and available for everyone to sing, or owned by the moiety or phratry, or by the lineage, or by a family or an individual.  Whoever owned it could allow someone else to sing it, but a substantial payment or exchange was required.  This could be indirect; lineage A might generously allow someone from lineage B to sing a lineage A song, but of course lineage B was expected to do something equivalently generous for lineage A at some point.  Showing off one’s lineage dances, songs, and arts was—and in many areas still is—an integral part of potlatching and feasting.  Often it involved competitive display; at other times it was closer to an arts festival.

Thomas McIlwraith, in his early days as ethnographer of the Nuxalk, inadvertently sang a song belonging to one family, whereupon an elder of that family had to adopt him on the spot to spare everybody serious shame and difficulty (quoted in Kramer 2013:737). 

Individuals owned the products of their own labor, especially things like bows and arrows, clothing, food, and personal articles, but also songs they composed and the like.  An individual might pass songs and crests on to his or her children; a man could even pass them to his children among the matrilineal Haida (Boelscher 1988:38), though that could be a touchy proposition.  Normally, privileges including songs and crests were the property of matrilineages in the northern coast, and passed on accordingly.

Among the matrilineal societies, women had great authority, and owned property.  Chiefs were generally (but not always) male, being the brothers of the women who were the hereditary heads of the lineages; but women had real power.  There is a famous story of a Haida chief taking refuge on a fur trader’s boat because he had dared to sell some furs belonging to his wife.  She and her brothers were out after him.  He had to stay on the boat, under protection of the trader, for months before he could work out an arrangement to go home.  Like other matrilineal societies worldwide, these were not “matriarchies,” but did give more power to women than patrilineal societies generally do.  On the other hand, among the patrilineal societies of the southern Northwest Coast, women were by no means meek or oppressed; they held their own and had considerable real power, partly through controlling access to and management of plant resources, many shellfish resources, and other subsistence matters.

These societies were organized in moieties; among the Tsimshian, the moieties had split into two parts, giving a four-phratry system, but the original moiety structure was still identifiable (Miller 1982).  Crest privileges and their artistic expression were taken so seriously that upper-class artists “worked in great secrecy, punihing with death any unqualified person unfortunate enough to stumble on their workshops hidden in the forest” (Miller 1982; if this runs true to Tsimshian form, however, the threat was enough and killings were very rarely carried out).

In general, ownership among the Northwest Coast peoples was extremely highly developed and complex—as far from the old idea of “primitive communism” as one could possibly get.  Few have doubted that this was related to the need for control over, and management of, resources.  Even the ownership of songs and art motifs could be seen as related to maintaining group solidarity and identity for defense of hard goods—although it was very much more than that, being integral to all aspects of social life.

The patrilineal societies were largely in the southern areas—Washington and Oregon, and the Fraser River area in British Columbia.  They were not so extremely lineal-oriented as the matrilineal groups; they tended toward bilateral reckoning.  The lineage system was comparable, however,

A different matter was the situation in the middle: the Nuu-chah-nulth, Kwakwaka’wakw, and some immediate neighbors.  Here reckoning was equally through father’s and mother’s line.  “The immerdiate family grouping (derived from four grandparents) is technically called a kindred, while the huge extended family, which was and is transnational or intertribal (throiugh eight great-grandparents), is technically called an intersept” (Miller 2014:79).  Names, titles and privileges were taken up by any member of the kindred who wanted to potlatch for them and could get enough support and resources to do so.  Individuals thus often had, and still have, titles inherited through the father’s line and others through the mother’s. Among the Nuu-chah-nulth this accompanied a kinship terminological system similar to that of the Hawaiians, with every relative in one’s own generation being “brother” or “sister,” and every one in the parent generation being “father” or “mother.”  This still persists for the parent generation, with the slight transformation that relatives other than actual mothers and fathers become “uncle” or “auntie.”  Since virtually all Nuu-chah-nulth can trace at least some degree of relationship to all others, the terms wind up being extended to all Nuu-chah-nulth in the generation above one’s own. 

It should be emphasized that family and traditional title are still important everywhere.  Kinship remains the basis of society, and large, close, mutually supportive families are the rule. 

4.  Traditional Resource Management

The Northwest Coast has always seemed anthropologically anomalous.  Despite being “hunters and gatherers,” the Native peoples maintained high populations, lived in large villages, and had a complex social organization (Coupland et al. 2009; Matson et al. 2003).  Noble families led large populations of relative “commoners,” and a large population of slaves (captured in wars and raids) provided a hard-working underclass.  Unlike the incidental slaves used for household services in many small-scale societies, the slaves of the northwest were a genuine population of critically important servile workers.  They cut and carried wood, drew water, and processed the fish that were the basis of subsistence. 

The Northwest Coast has turned out to be much less anomalous now that we have better data on nonagricultural populations elsewhere in the world.  Complex nonagricultural populations with large settlements and complicated ownership rules extended all along the Pacific Coast, even into Baja California, and were characteristic of southern Florida and several other parts of the New World, as well as of northern Australia and Mesolithic Europe.  All these societies depended to a great extent on sea and riverine foods, often anadromous fish.

Moreover, we now realize that the Northwest Coast groups practiced extensive horticulture.  They managed, increased, transplanted, and selectively harvested plants, and had at least one or two domesticated species.  (Tobacco was the only widespread one—which says something about human preferences.)   Of this more anon.  More and more authorities are now referring to the Northwest Coast people as horticulturalists, rather than hunter-gatherers. 

Above all, however, they were exploiters of the aquatic world.  Fish runs are highly concentrated in time and space, forcing the people that depend on them to concentrate in large social agglomerations on a regular basis.  This in turn requires some sort of comprehensive social organization, with strong authority structures provides by kinship groupings or chieftainship or—usually—both.  Also, the best fishing stations are well worth fighting for, and the resulting conflict forces even more tight military organization on the people.  Last, the enormous but brief salmon runs of the Northwest require huge bursts of labor, since people need to develop a virtual assembly line of filleting and drying the catch for preservation through the rest of the year.  Slavery becomes economic under such circumstances.  Raiding for slaves adds to fighting for fishing sites as an economically important activity.

Complexity has traditionally been explained by the “rich” or “abundant” resources of the Northwest, but this is a false claim.  The resources consist largely of fish, which are not always easy to catch.  The great salmon runs of the major rivers are indeed incredible, but one must average out the productivity of the rivers over the thousands of square miles of barren mountains and food-poor forests that make up 99% of the area in question.  In the southern areas—from central Washington and extreme southern British Columbia southward—root crops, berries, and nuts become increasingly abundant, but do not become common enough to be major staples till one gets to the lower Columbia River.  Moreover, salmon runs sometimes fail, especially in the north.  When a run failed, all the people could do was move away, hopefully finding some relatives to stay with. 

This meant that, for instance, maintaining the population of eight to ten thousand on Haida Gwaii was no easy undertaking.  The land was rather poor in berries and roots (though not as poor as it is now; see below).  There were few large game animals, only a tiny herd of caribou.  There were not even any large salmon streams.  The people had to carry out dangerous open-sea fishing for halibut and hunting for sea mammals.  Even more fearful was the need to cross the wide and treacherous Hecate Strait to trade for oil and other goods with the less-than-friendly Tsimshian.  The Haida needed formidable toughness and intelligence, and it is reflected in their stunning art and oral literature.  Similar cases could be made for other groups along the coast and into the deep interior. 

The Nuu-chah-nulth and closely related Ditidat and Makah of the outer coasts of Vancouver Island and the Olympic Peninsula depended to varying degrees on whaling.  The Makah got up to 80-90% of their food from whales and much of the rest from seals, and some Nuu-chah-nulth groups were not far behind (MacMillan 1999).  They could stay out in canones for days, keeping small fires on stone or other fireproof platforms in the canoes (Reid 2015:143-145).  Earlier authors tended to believe the Indigenous groups could not have caught many whales, but excavations at the Ozette site in Washington proved the contrary, and further historical scholarship by Joshua Reid and others has shown that the Native groups took not only the docile grays but also humpback, sperm, and other whales, even blues and orcas (Reid 2015:144-145).  Ozette was a village covered by a landslide on the Olympic Peninsula coast about 300 years ago.  Ozette also revealed a great deal of fine art, like that historically known, as well as large houses, and a complex use of plant materials, including all the common woods (see Turner 2014-1:108-110 for lists). 

 Whaling from an open canoe is very much like the whaling Herman Melville so graphically described in Moby Dick.  The difficulty of striking a swimming whale with an enormously heavy harpoon from an open boat is made clear by a famous photograph; an early photographer, Asahel Curtis, managed to immortalize the moment when Makah whaler Charles White struck a whale, and the picture has been reproduced countless times (see e.g. Reid 2015:175; a huge blowup of the picture decorates the Makah Cultural and Research Center in Neah Bay).  It is not surprising that whalers resorted to magical practices that could involve months of ritual preparation (Drucker 1951; Jonaitis 1999; Reid 2015:150). 

On a more practical note, these groups had to be prepared for finding themselves far out at sea.  A harpooned whale could run seaward, towing the harpooner’s canoe on what Melville’s whalers called a “Nantucket sleighride.”  They could take days to paddle back to shore (Drucker 1951).  If the night was clear, they could “steer by the pole star,” but fog was typical:  “Combinations of regular swell patterns and winds enabled them to fix their approximate location, even in the regular fogs that conceal the coast.  Experienced Makah mariners also used the water’s appearance and the set of the riptide to approximate their location when out of sight of land,” and they could also predict the weather (Reid 2015:142).  They thus had a navigational science similar to that of the Micronesians and other deep-ocean voyagers.  

The Makahs also developed a commercial sealing industry in the late 19th century, even purchasing and running some long-distance-voyaging schooners (Reid 2015:177-196).  Unfortunately, overfishing by settlers’ industrial craft virtually wiped out the whale and seal resource by the early 20th century.

Whale and seal products were traded widely, and these groups often had to depend on trade relationships for necessary food items; they were, to a significant extent, specialized whalers.  Such dependence on trade for staple food is unusual, to say the least, among hunter-gatherers.  The westcoast pattern developed from about 3000 to 2000 years ago, but dependence on whaling probably increased after the latter date. The Nuu-chah-nulth naturally yearned to possess the safer living of salmon streams, and fought many a war to acquire such.

On the other hand, sea mammals are not only bigger than fish, they average much fatter.  A seal or whale obviously equals a lot of salmon, and produces an enormous amount of oil as well as meat.  It is quite possible that some Northwest Coast groups got most of their calories from sea mammals, not fish, as was certainly the case for Aleutian and other island Alaskan Native groups (see e.g. Jolles 2002).

David Arnold (2008:24) estimates that the Tlingit consumed about 6 million pounds of fish a year in aboriginal times, given the very conservative estimate of 500 pounds of fish per person.  In fact they could well have required twice that.  500 pounds would represent only about 1200 calories of fat salmon, and only half as many of lean fish.  The Tlingit had little but fish to eat.  They did take many sea mammals and birds, but 500 pounds of fish per year is still a very conservative estimate.

Indeed, at the other corner of the region, the average Spokan ate almost 1000 lb. of salmon in a year.  (Ross 2011:359; I think the figure better applies to all fish.)   This would be about 1,400,000 pounds per year for the whole tribe, representing well over 100,000 fish (Ross 2011:359, citing Allan Scholtz).  And this though the Spokan, unlike the Tlingit, got half their calories from plant foods.  The Tlingit got their salmon at river mouths, where they were fat, while the Spokan caught fish far upriver, where they had used most of their fat reserves fighting their way up the Columbia.  Even so, 1000 lb. may be exaggerated, since the Spokan got half their almost calories from plants and some more from game.  A reasonable guess for the Northwest Coast as a whole would be two pounds of fat fish or three of lean per day.

Fish are low-calorie fare.  Three hundred calories per pound is typical for fish like halibut and rockfish.  Salmon fatten up for their runs up the rivers, and a fat salmon entering a river could be four times that rich in calories, but otherwise even salmon are not high in calories.  Herring and oolichans are high to very high in fat, but not available except during brief runs.  And the Native people lived hard outdoor lives—calorie consumption was extremely high.  The Tlingit would need up to twice Arnold’s estimate.  Other groups would need similar amounts.  Bears and other predators took a huge number of salmon also, and the pressure on the resource base was high.

Under the circumstances, it is not surprising that all possible resources were used.  This provided, and still provides, an incentive for managing the entire landscape sustainably.  Worldwide, the higher the percentage of natural resources that are used, the more people need to maintain the ecosystem.  Conversely, when people depend on a handful of non-native foods (as in the United States) there is no incentive to maintain the natural environment, and, indeed, every incentive to destroy it.  The wide spectrum of foods and industrial resources used by Indigenous peoples in the Northwest contrasts strikingly with the extreme poverty of crops grown on any significant scale by white settlers. 

Not only were salmon and sea fish important, but river fish now neglected, such as suckers and lampreys, were major resources.  The three local species of lampreys (Lampreta spp., formerly placed in the genus Petromyzon), called “eels” in the Northwest though not related to true eels, are now almost extinct.  They were major resources once.  Temain favorite foods—though now very hard to get (Miller 2012).  Two were parasites on salmon and other fish; the third was a small nonparasitic species.  Suckers were key resources in many inland areas, from the Columbia to the northeast California plateau.  Again many species are endangered, including the Lost River sucker, whose runs used to sustain the Modoc; diversion for irrigation has almost dried up its river.  Suckers remain important in the Pit River area, among other places.

Fish were always carefully managed, as will appear below.  Social groups had depended on the fish for millennia, and knew what they could take and how to maximize returns.  They used a variety of gears, traps, weirs, and other devices, including stone weirs to catch fish on receding tides (Menzies 2016).  Conservation was generally effected by limiting days of fishing, permitting escapements, and improving breeding conditions, rather than by limiting gears or daily takes.  Improving spawning success included things such as clearing redds, returning fish wastes to water for nutrients recycling, and protecting spawning streams.

Shellfish were also carefully managed by developing breeding grounds and enforcing limits.  Charles Menzies (2010; 2016:119-130) has described abalone management by the Tsimshian.  Populations collapsed after settler contact and overfishing.  This led to ethnographic erasure of the importance of abalone in precontact times.  Menzies’ archaeological work turned up massive amounts of abalone shells, leading to new realization of its former importance.  The same could be said of many other resources and foods that we now are beginning to realize were once important.

Marine and freshwater resources were managed carefully.  The high point was the creation of “clam gardens”:  Rock-barriered areas where beaches could upgrade or be developed to maximize clam production.  We will discuss these below.

Northwest Coast knowledge of the environment was as thorough, detailed and comprehensive as one would expect from 15,000 or more years of continuous occupation of and dependence on the land.  Ethnobiology of most groups has been documented in detail.  The most comprehensive work is Nancy Turner’s five-foot shelf of classic ethnobotanies, many of them coauthored with First Nations people, climaxing in her enormous Ancient Pathways, Ancestral Knowledge (2014; see esp. vol. 2, pp. 198-244).  The most comprehensive work on animals and places has been done by Eugene Hunn, especially in N’Chi Wana (1991), and his students such as Thomas Thornton, whose book Being and Place among the Tlingit (2008) goes beyond ethnobiology to discuss major ontological and epistemological points. 

Knowledge can be something as simple as knowing bird songs that announce plant seasons.  In spring, when salmonberries flower and set fruit, the woods are suddenly full of Swainson’s Thrushes returning from their winter homes.  Their exquisitely beautiful songs sound everywhere:  woodily woodily woodily woodily, rising up the scale.  The Saanich (Wsáneć) of Vancouver Island hear this as “weweleweleweleweś”—“ripen, ripen, ripen.”  (Turner and Hebda 2012:103.  Such playful wording of bird songs is widespread in North America; I have encountered similar Maya stories.) 

Northwest Coast peoples managed the environment extremely well (Alberta Society of Professional Biologists 1986; Deur and Turner 2005 Hunn 1990; Kirk 1986;  Menzies 2006; Miller 1999, who gives valuable comparative materials and seasonal rounds; Turner 2005).  The basic principle was to use and value everything, or almost everything.  Total-landscape management resulted.  The whole region was managed to some degree, and productive areas were intensively managed.  But since almost everything was useful, the first rule of management was to keep everything.  Since management was by village or extended family, it was also necessary to manage for long-term, wide-flung payoffs.  Short-term payoffs depleted the resource for one or a very few people.  That made short-term exploitation a selfish crime against society, and it was correspondingly condemned.  

They were the first to admit that they were far from perfect; every, or almost every, group has tales of overharvesting followed by famine.  The fact that these tales were retold with cautionary import is what matters.  There was a learning curve, and everyone knew it.  Many individuals, moreover, tell of overharvesting themselves and getting social sanctions applied in no uncertain terms (e.g. Atleo 2011:50).  Such stories are far more revealing of how management really accomplished than are the romantic stereotypes of the “Indian at one with nature.”

Fish management was notably careful.  Not only were spears and hooks universal, but very effective netting was done.  Trawl nets and set reef nets were used in the Salish Sea, and seines, weirs, scoop nets, and other nets were used everywhere.  Nettles might be grown especially for making nets, or tough grass traded in from other areas (Miller 2014:83).  It was easy to take all the fish from a small river or creek.

Thus, strict limits were set on fishing, and this was usually religiously represented—there were strong religious rules and ceremonies relating to fishing.  This is well documented all the way from the Tlingit in the north (Arnold 2008) to the Yurok in the far south (Swezey and Heizer 1977), and for most groups in between, e.g. the groups along the Skeena (Morrell 1985).  The first fish was subject to ceremonies; often it had to be taken by a religious leader.  (The best account is in Swezey and Heizer 1977, but similar practices were universal on the coast.)  People waited until the season was thus opened.  This allowed leaders to provide for escapement, for spawning or for the tribes upriver.  Swezey and Heizer (1977) report for the Klamath River tribes that the latter was a motive; not allowing enough fish to get through the lower river weirs was cause for the upriver tribes to make war on those downstream.  Ceremonies thus not only allowed escapement for breeding, but also kept the peace.

Other areas too had a fish leader to start the season.  The Lakes and Colville Salishans fished at Kettle Falls, and the Lakes scholar Lawney Reyes, recalling his childhood, reports:

“During the salmon harvest, the head authority at the falls was the appointed Salmon Chief.  Before any nets or traps were set or fishermen were positioned, he stood near the lower falls, facing downriver, and prayed.  The Salmon Chief welcomed the arrival of the chinook [salmon].  He apologized and thanked those salmon that would be separed or taken in the traps.  HE assured the hcinook that most would be allowed to go upriver to spawn and bring forth their young….

“It was the responsibility of the Salmon Chief to see that the closely related tribes…shared equally in all salmon that were caught.  Other tribes that came to fish at the falls were also treated fairly….  According to Sin-Aikst [Lakes] tradition, the first Salmon Chief was chosen by Coyote…. [who] made Beaver the Salmon Chief

[and told him]

…. ‘You must never be greedy and you must see to it that no one else is greedy.’” (Reyes 2002:46-47).

The Lakes and their neighbors had, in fact, such a supervisor for all hunting and fishing activities—there was a hunting chief as well as a salmon chief and other fishing leaders.  Such leaders of hunting and fishing had a special title, xa’tús, from a word for “first”(Kennedy and Bouchard 1998b:241; Miller 1998:255).  The salmon chief was locally called “salmon tyee” (Miller 1998:255), tyee being Chinook Jargon for “chief.”

The tight grounding of conservation in religion, including origin myths, is found everywhere in the region.  It goes a long way to disprove the occasional claim that conservation is actually a new idea, learned from the Whites.  Many early ethnographers segregated “religion” and “subsistence” in separate parts of their ethnographies; it would be better to take the religion-environment-subsistence interaction as the basic unity, with “religion” and “subsistence” being artificial categories imposed from outside.

The Nuu-chah-nulth and Tlingit, at least, and probably other groups, stocked eggs and fry in salmon streams (see e.g. Deur and Turner 2005:19; George 2003:74).  Gilbert Sproat describes this from the early 19th century (Sproat 1987 [1868]).  Since Sproat was the first European to visit the areas he described, this was evidently a pre-contact practice.  A Saanich origin myth of salmon, and of the use of wild parsley (Lomatium) as “medicine” to lure it, talks of the creator hero-twins stocking salmon as they went around Vancouver Island (Turner and Hebda 2012:132).   Earl Maquinna George describes the process in detail, and also points out that the Nuu-chah-nulth would clear choking vegetation out of streams but leave enough to keep the stream healthy; salmon need some logs for shelter and protection.  The Nuu-chah-nulth also understood that bears were people too, and needed and deserved their fair share of the catch, for all to cooperate and consent (Atleo 2011:100-101). 

Fish populations throughout the Northwest Coast region were carefully managed (Johnsen 2009).  The European settlers found fish incredibly abundant—rivers during runs were said to be “more fish than water.”  Some of this abundance is surely due to population recovery after Indian fishing was reduced in the contact period (Ames 2005:84), but an extremely important and little-remarked fact is that even the tiniest and most insignificant streams had runs at contact.  Even normal natural processes would have exterminated some of these small-stream runs.  Such streams have few fish and short run-times.  More to the point, one man with a net can easily “rob a creek” (take all the fish in it) in a couple of weeks of fishing.  Since most salmon run eventually into creeks small enough to rob, overfishing can quickly wipe out even a huge river’s salmon stocks.  We know that Indian fishing was heavy.  Only stocking combined with careful conservation could have maintained the runs.

Limiting fishing was, of course, the major and most necessary way to manage this.  It was done by many means, e.g. not fishing before a certain date or before a large escapement, and these limits were ritually enforced.  The classic account is by Swezey and Heizer (1977) for the Klamath River, but parallels exist throughout the region.  Competition and cooperation over resources drove protection of one’s tribal resource base (Johnsen 2009).  As usual, there are equivalent stories from other regions; Erich Kasten quotes Indigenous elders on Kamchatka as counseling leaving salmon and opening weirs (Kasten 2012:79).  One elder remembered asking, as a child, why some fish were spared and being told those were females that would reproduce the fish.  Today, the runaway market in Russia for caviare has doomed the female fish, which are often simply stripped of caviare and left to rot, to the horror of traditional persons.  Kasten recommends reviving traditional ways of conserving before it is too late.  Comparable accounts from Siberia make it clear that conservation was general there (e.g. Koestler 2012; Wilson 2012). Tsimshian anthropologist Charles Menzies records stories of overhunting and overfishing told as cautionary tales, with conservation morals drawn (Menzies 2012, esp. p. 165).  The Alutiiq conserved and managed fish until settler societies forced overfishing (Carothers 2012).

Another conservation measure was returning inedible parts of the fish to the water.  Salmon die on spawning because the young depend on the nutrients from their parents’ bodies; this enormous import of nutrients from the sea to the river headwaters allows the fantastic productivity of Northwest Coast streams, which would otherwise be extremely nutrient-poor.  (Coniferous forests make oligotrophic streams.)  The Native people know this, and some at least see it as equivalent to human parents feeding their children (Gottesfeld 1994b).  We will consider some teaching stories about this, below.  Returning the bones to the water seems to be universal along the acidic, oligotrophic streams of the coast, but on the Plateau the bones were more often ground up for human consumption (e.g. Ross 2011:429), probably because the streams are richer in nutrients and do not need the addition.

The Tlingit of Alaska not only stocked or restocked streams and took out beaver dams that were blocking these streams.  They also excavated shallow pools (ish) in small spawning streams, to prevent drying in summer, freezing in winter, and excess predation.  They devised a complex trap system to divert salmon fry while trapping dolly varden trout, which eat salmon eggs.  They not only prevented overfishing, they were careful to take about three males for every one female from the upriver runs, to maximize spawning.  This was done with the usual recognition of salmon as people deserving and requiring respect.  Steve Langdon calls this an “existencescape of willful intentional beings.”  Following Viveiros de Castro (2015) he speaks of “relational ontology” and “abductive reflexivity” (Langdon 2016).

In addition to stocking salmon, at least some Northwest Coast groups (specifically the Kwakwaka’wakw and nearby Salishan-speaking groups) protected clam beaches by creating low rock walls along the seaward side to prevent beach erosion (Williams 2006).  These “clam gardens” have now been the subject of major research by Dana Lepofsky and her colleagues and students (Augustine et al. 2016; Lepofsky et al. 2015; Moss 2011).  With the help of First Nations advisors and of Randy Bouchard and Dorothy Kennedy, experts on the ethnography of the local Salishan groups, Lepofsky and her group have found large numbers of rock walls separating, marking off, shoring up, and preserving large areas of clam beaches.  More, they learned that local people had been painstakingly clearing the beaches of large boulders, cobbles, and logs for countless centuries.  Also, clam digging—which was rigorously managed for sustainability—broke up the substrate, which otherwise became too hard for easy clam establishment.  The group tried these various techniques on sample beaches and found that the number of clams was increased severalfold.  They recommend that these techniques be introduced to modern beach management.

Given what we know of plant and fish management, and the importance of clams and other shellfish in the diet, it would be surprising if no enhancement of shellfish was done.  It is very easy to overharvest shellfish, and indeed many Native American groups did, as early as several thousand years ago (Rick and Erlandson 2008, 2009).  Huge shell middens stand up as islands or bars in marshy areas, and cover up to hundreds of acres along rivers and coasts in the Northwest; some were several metres deep.  As with fish, only diligent conservation and management could keep the shellfish resource flourishing in near-settlement locations.

In fact, what Lepofsky and her group found is really clam farming—as intensive and demanding as the oyster and mussel farming now practiced widely in Washington state.  It is at least as labor-intensive and landscape-changing as anything done on the Northwest Coast, and is quite comparable in both labor needs and results to the horticulture of many Native American groups in more easterly parts of North America.  Along with the emerging knowledge of plant management, it changes our idea of the Northwest Coast peoples; they were more like proto-agriculturalists than “hunters and gatherers.”

Birds too were carefully managed, with seabirds and their eggs being taken in a self-consciously sustainable way (Hunn et al. 2003), as is archaeologically confirmed by continued abundance of the birds on even very vulnerable islands (Moss 2007).

Game management is less easy to evaluate.  Overall, there are few declines demonstrated in the archaeological record—in fact, none was found in a major review by Virginia Butler and Sarah Campbell (2004; Butler 2005).  They did not even find a shift in exploitation from big game to lower-ranked resources.  Elk were as common 200 years ago as 5000 years ago.  Locally, the situation gets more interesting, with patterns of local decline or scarcity contrasting with considerable abundance (Kay and Simmons 2002, and see below).  The fact remains that the Northwest Coast was rich in game when first contacted by White settlers, and unlike the situation in California (Preston 2002), this first contact came before introduced disease reduced the population and allowed game numbers to rebound.

Game was conserved by conscious choice to shift hunting grounds when game became depleted, and by the whole complex of ideas associated with respect for animals (see below): not to take too many, to kill with a shot (rather than wound and allow escape), to use all of an animal, and other restrictions.  Explicit conservation was common.  This stands in marked contrast with, for example, June Helms’ careful description of the ecology of the northeastern Athapaskas (Helm 2000).  They not only shot what they could, they opposed government conservation ideas explicitly and at length, with the result that game was drastically depleted around settlements. 

Apparently, in the old days, the population of humans was so thin and mobile that it did not much affect local populations, and if it did people simply moved elsewhere.  Firearms and population growth created a problem that eastern Dene culture apparently could not solve (Helm 2000, esp. pp. 66-68, 79-84).  The contrast with the Northwest is similar to the contrast in South America between sparse groups like the nonconserving Machigenga/Matsigenka and more careful groups that are more populous and settled (Beckerman et al. 2002).

Among the Spokan of eastern Washington, “[l]and mammals were never stalked or taken at springs, as this was disrespectful and, if violated, was believed to be the main reason for game leaving an area” (Ross 1998:273)—naturally enough, as waterhole hunting is the surest way to wipe out local game.  Possibly less directly useful was the same group’s way of dealing with bears; “the successful hunter…sang the bear’s death song” and observed “three days of strict behavioral and dietary taboos to avoid dreaming of the bear or being burned later by fire or struck by lightning” (Ross 1998:273, 2011:314).  But this shows both respect for the bear and awareness of interaction and interdependence in ecology—though bears and lightning would not be associated by most peoples.  The Spokan were competent enough hunters to wipe out the game, using tricks like taking scent glands from animals and luring them with the scents (Ross 2011:307-308).  It is worth noting that the Spokan lived on fish and plant materials (mostly berries and roots), about 50% each; game was a rare treat (Ross 2011:311).

Wet sites that preserve many types of remains for archaeologists have given us new insights into the Northwest.  At Ozette in Washington state, whaling was far more important than anyone realized, and wooden arrows without stone points were far more common than stone-tipped ones (Croes 2003), showing that hunting was far more important than the relative rarity of classic “arrow point” discoveries had suggested.  Baskets show cultural continuity and adaptability over long time periods, and reveal the extreme importance of transporting and storing food (Bernick 2003; Croes 2003).

Plant Resource Management

The Northwest Coast peoples, like other western American hunter-gatherers, managed plant resources by cultivating, pruning, transplanting, fertilizing, and indeed all gardening activities short of actual domestication.  Many authors have surveyed these practices for the Northwest (e.g. Blukis Onat 2002; Deur and Turner [eds.], 2005, esp. Lepofsky, Hallett et al. 2005 and Turner and Peacock 2005 therein; Gottesfeld 1994b; Kirk 1986; Turner 2005).  In addition, Kat Anderson’s great study of Californian Native plant management practices (M. K. Anderson 2005) not only covers the extreme southern end of the region, but describes many techniques used throughout.  Jay Miller’s statement that “While women did encourage the growth of certain wild plants, they did this unobtrusively” (Miller 2014:21) is an odd observation.  Burning, planting, massively selective harvesting, and other techniques were far from unobtrusive.  They were also very successful, and carefully done.  In fact, in the same book, Miller more accurately says “this cultivating was intense—much more than a light or selective tending of ‘wild’ species (Blukis Onat 2002) .  Not quite farming, it was definitely gardening” (Miller 2014:131, from a previously published paper).  Women used digging sticks, and had appropriate prayers and formulae for working with them and with plants in general.

At least the Secwépemc (Shuswap) had recognized resource stewards; stewardship was a named office (Ignace and Ignace 2017:193-194).  They watched over fish, game, and plant stocks, organized and timed burning for berries and other resources, maintained trails, and oversaw conservation.  They appear to be a development from the “fish chiefs” and “game bosses” reported generally over western North America.

Burning was by far the most important method of managing the environment (Agee 1993, esp. p. 56; M. K. Anderson 2005; Stewart et al. 2002).  The Northwest forests do not burn easily, but they do burn.  Clearings, meadows, and brushfields burn much more easiliy.  The old idea that burning had little effect on resources is disproved by the rapid recent changes in environments the Native Americans managed by fire.  An idea that burning was relatively recent has been rendered unlikely by pollen studies and Native cultural traditions, though natural burning was common in the drier and higher areas and must have had much role in maintaining berry fields.  (They did, after all, evolve over millions of years before people were there to burn.)  The pollen records indicate localized burning going back at least several thousand years (Sobel et al. 2013:37).  Plateau forests burn much more easily, and were regularly burned for berries, to eliminate pests, and to renew the landscape and kill insect pests and ticks (Ignace and Ignace 2017:192; Ross 2011:267-272, citing an enormous literature as well as his own field work).  There was even special spirit power for burning (Ross 2011:271).  

Burning for berries was simple and productive (Joyce Lecompte-Mastenbrook, ongoing research; Ross 2011, esp. 344ff; many other writers).  The major berries of the northwest—huckleberries, blackberries, raspberries of various sorts, and so on—are basically fire-followers, and all the Native groups learned exactly how often and when to burn to maximize production. 

Root crops also grow largely in burned-over prairie and grassland habitats.  Fire suppression has made them rare or absent in many areas, and indeed the forests reclaim unburned areas rapidly.  The oak forests found from California (commonly) to Washington (locally) to British Columbia (only around Victoria) require burning for maintenance; those of BC are now succumbing rapidly to invasion by palnts favored by fire suppression. They once supplied numerous acorns, which were a staple in California and probably close to one in the Willamette Valley.  Acorns had to be leached, and in Oregon they were often buried in mud for the winter, thus becoming “Chinook olives” (Gahr 2013:74). 

However, in at least one area, pollen records show less burning in the last 2500 years, after Native cultures became complex (Walsh et al. 2008).  This seems to accompany a local wet phase, but it is a confusing finding.  Probably, small local fires reduced the chance of major fires that would have left a clearer signature in the record.

Berries “were closely tended and maintained by fire clearing until government prohibited this practice.  Today …due to lack of burning, they have changed in such a way that inferior species and subspecies of berries have replaced the quality species of the past (Art Mathews in Daly 2005:221; Gitksan data, but applicable everywhere in the Northwest).  I might chalk this up to “good old days” rhetoric if I had not observed it myself throughout much of western North America over the last 60-odd years.  Almost everywhere, the favorite berry patches of my youth have grown up to forests, brush, or grassland.  Invasion by inferior species is bad enough, but a far worse problem (and one thing Mathews was talking about) is the fact that shading and crowding make berry plants produce fewer and sourer fruit.  Every home gardener who has let trees encroach on his berry patch knows this, but it is rarely mentioned in the ecological literature.

Sugar also occurred in sweet sap and conifer cambium, and from Douglas firs, which sometimes exude a trisaccharide sugar from their twigs and branches; it gathers like snow on the twigs.  It was so loved in the interior that it was known as “breast milk” in some groups (Turner 2014-1:215).  Pit-cooking of roots such as camas turned the indigestible inulin to fructose, thus making them sweet; European sweets and starches were accepted quickly and seen as parallel (ibid. and many references cited there).  Balsamroot was similarly prepared not only for food but for medicine; it contains strongly antibiotic chemicals (Turner 2014-1:431).

The only domesticated plant acknowledged in most of the literature was tobacco.  Tobacco cultivation was certainly pre-Columbian, but not necessarily in all groups where it is known (Moss 2005).  One species (Nicotiana attenuata) was grown by the Haida and probably their neighbors, and also was grown widely in California and probably into Oregon.  It seems likely that other groups grew it but stopped doing so before anthropologists reached them.  N. quadrivalvis, a plant from the central part of the continent, was occasionally farmed in its area of origin, and may have spread into our region at some time.

Root crops were harvested in ways that propagated them:  large tubers were taken, small ones replanted; roots might be cut and the stem replanted. Harvesting was done such that weeds were eliminated.  Particularly favored crops show what appears to be actual selection from thousands of years of this care. 

Camas (Camassia quamash and C. leichtlinii; the latter may be simply a form of C. quamash) was particularly important, and has been for a long time (Lyons and Ritchie 2017).  It seems to have been at least partially domesticated.  It shows several traits characteristic of domestic crops, including large showy flowers (compared to its close relatives), large edible structures, and extremely good adaptation to gardens and gardening (personal observation, from garden cultivation of it by myself and many other persons I know).  Douglas Deur says it is a “cultivated plant” in the coastal forests, being maintained there only by human activity.  Presumably it was introduced from inland (see Deur and Thompson 2008:51; Gahr 2013:70). 

Turner and Hebda (2012:120-121) quote a detailed account by Marguerite Babcock of camas management in southeast Vancouver Island; it was clearly cultivated, and if not domesticated then very close to it.  Turner (2014-2:167-176) provides an extremely detailed account—unique in the ethnographic literature—of how much yield was obtained from various plant resources by Indigenous harvesting efforts.  Few resources yielded high.  Anyone with experience picking berries, which have changed less under domestication than most plants, will have a good idea of effort involved.  Domestic berries yield higher than unmanaged wild stands, but no higher than burned and cultivated wild stands (my considerable personal experience confirms Turner here).

Roots were managed by harvesting with digging sticks, thinning stands and allowing selection of particular sizes.   Balsamroot (Balsamorrhiza spp.) produces edible roots that develop over years into huge, woody, inedible taproots; these were left to reproduce, and very small roots were left to grow.  Carrot-sized roots were harvested (Ignace and Ignace 2017:190).

Wetland resources such as yellow pond lily nuts (the wokas of the Klamath; Colville 1902) and the wapato or “Indian potato” (Sagittaria; see Gahr 2013:69) were similarly managed.  They too may well have been on the road to domestication.  This sort of root management gave the Native people the ability to shift rapidly to cultivating potatoes.  The Haida were trading potatoes in bulk with English and “Boston” ships well before 1800.  In fact, potatoes have been a staple on the coast about as long as they have in Ireland.  The potato was introduced by the Spanish.  Surviving traditional potatoes of the Ozette and Makah types are still genetically South American (Ignace and Ignace 2017:515; Turner 2014-1:198-200), presumably from direct and early introduction by the Spanish. 

The root foods, including other managed ones ranging from glacier lilies (Erythronium) and frilillary (Fritillaria spp.) to clover (Trifolium, especially T. wormskioldii), were baked for long periods in earth ovens, to break down the long-chain polysaccharides, especially inulin, into digestible short-chain sugars.  As experimenters with cooking such roots may be painfully aware, the long-chain molecules can cause acute digestive distress if ingested without breakdown.  Nancy Turner’s five-foot shelf of books give the best and fullest information on these roots and their preparation; she and her students have devoted lifetimes to the research.

We know that fruit trees like Oregon crabapple, Indian plum, hawthorn, and moutain ash were managed, but we do not know much about it.  Techniques included pruning around them, opening land for them, and otherwise encouraging them.  They were often transplanted into new areas, and local orchards established.  Were the seeds planted?  Probably, but we do not know.  Hazelnuts are better known; they were carefully managed throughout the Northwest, with trees carefully tended, pruned, and probably transplanted locally (Armstrong et al. 2018). 

Fibre crops were also managed.  The Secwépemc, for instance, “carefully tended” patches of Indian hemp (Apocynum cannabinum) “by removing brush and undergrowthnear the patch to encsure straight and thick growth of the perennial hemp shoots” (Ignace and Ignace 2017:191).  Cutting the shoots for fibre made the new ones grow out straight and tall.  This is typical of Indian hemp management all over western North America (see e.g. M. K. Anderson                                                                              2005).  Indian hemp was sometimes transplanted to new areas in California and presumably in the Northwest Coast region as well.

Bow staves were taken off living yew trees in the coastal forests, junipers and other trees in the Basin and probably the Plateau.  This indicates major forbearance and the working of conscience.  Yews and junipers produce few straight branches. Staves are best taken off the lower part of a branch, to get the compression wood.  The branch very slowly regrows.  With junipers, only one stave in about twenty years can be taken (Wilke 1998), and for yews the figure is probably about the same.  This means that people must be restrained by their conscience; no one can patrol all the few trees with straight branches.  All over the Northwest, one sees yew trees with the characteristic scars, indicating that people saved their bow trees.  (For the same reason—bow staves—yew trees were planted thickly around castles in the British Isles in the middle ages. Many of them are still growing, providing a thick shade.)

Similar “culturally modified trees” or “CMT’s” include cedars used for bark or planks.  Cuts were made near the foot of the tree and then about 20 or 30 feet up, the cuts being shallow for bark and deep for planks.  The bark was pulled off in long strips.  The planks were sometimes split off, but it was easier to let the tree grow until the stresses of growth split the plank off without human effort.  The scars, again, show that people took only enough for their needs, without killing or greatly harming the trees.  The scars healed and bark could be taken again (see e.g. Schlick 1998:59). 

The only true domesticate was the dog.  In some groups, it was subject to serious selective breeding—most unusual for small-scale societies.  A wool-bearing variety of dog was developed by the Salish.  The painter Paul Kane managed to see and draw one; it looks rather like a lamb.  It sadly became extinct in the mid-19th century, but biologist Russell Barsh (pers. comm., 2007) is trying to breed it back.  Another endangered special variety is the Tahltan bear dog, developed for bear hunting by the Tahltan people of northern British Columbia.  It somewhat resembles the Karelian bear dog of Finland.  Other groups apparently also had special hunting breeds in the old days.

Moreover, wild animals were probably tamed on more than a few occasions.  Early accounts speak of Salish women trapping mountain goats in spring, when they were shedding their winter coats.  The women pulled the loose fur off the goats and let them go.  The wool was then spun with the dog wool, and woven on sophisticated native looms to make the beautiful traditional blankets.  Mountain goats are notoriously tameable—they became pests in Glacier National Park, begging for food from tourists—and it is fairly obvious that the Salish tamed their goats.  Goat hunting did go on, but I suspect it was done as an unobtrusive cropping of semi-managed herds.  The rifle has changed game hunting in America; bow hunting required a close approach.  The sensible thing to do with the smaller, more tameable animals, like mountain sheep, mountain goats, and deer, was to keep the herds as tame and unsuspecting as possible, taking laggards and easily-shot animals but never taking enough to alarm the group.  This is why archaeology reveals a “poor management” practice of taking many females and young rather than concentrating on the conspicuous, wary adult males, as a modern rifle-hunter would.  (On hunting in western North America in general, see Frison 2004; Kay and Simmons 2002.  Frison was a rancher and an expert hunter, and draws on his knowledge.)

The Northwest Coast Native peoples were formidable hunters, and certainly kept game populations down.  Respect was a needed, and not always adequate, check on overhunting.  Stories warned people to take no more animals than they needed, or even a specific small number.  For the Shuswap, “’Stinginess’

[in distributing fish and game…invited bad luck for the future….  Most of all, resource management was carried
out through a value system that enforced the use of all parts of killed animals
and sanctioned individuals who were wasteful” (Ignace 1998:208).  A major origin myth of the Coeur d’Alene
instructs hunters to take no more than two deer per hunt (Frey 2001:4, and
subsequent discussion throughout book).  The
Kaska “do not kill animals needlessly,” realize that “animals are best saved
for times when they are most useful” (Nelson 1973:155), are averse to using
poison because animals eating the poisoned animals will die in turn, thus
killing needlessly (ibid, 244), and in short “have a well-developed conservation
ethic” (ibid, 311).

The same could be said for all the
other Northwest Coast groups, so far as ethnography goes. In fact, these rules
are common worldwide among hunting groups, including European ones. 

Clearly, the Native peoples knew
overhunting all too well, and knew exactly what its effects were and how much
hunting would be suicidal (see Kay and Simmons 2002).  These stories make no sense at all unless
people had overhunted, had found out the consequences to their cost, had
consciously learned better, and had even more self-consciously developed a
stern morality of conservation!  The fact
that this morality was taught so diligently, with so many stories, proves that
it met a felt need.  Historians routinely
use the existence of a law as proof that the outlawed activity was common
enough to be a problem.  The same can be
said here. The Chinook and their neighbors had rules about taking no more than
necessary, but supplying the Anglo-American settlers made this a negotiable
issue, and one hunter supposedly took 20 to 30 deer per day in one early-19th-century
winter (Gahr 2013:66; I am fairly sure several hunters were involved, but in
any case the toll was unsustainable).

Martin and Szuter (1999, 2002)
found that “no man’s lands” between warring tribes were rich in game, while
village areas were not.  (Similar
findings are reported from South America to Vietnam, and I have found the same
thing in Mexico).  Martin and Szuter argue
that the game was killed out near settlements, though bothering and disturbing
may have had more to do with driving them away.
Of course the game animals are smart enough to move to safe places.  We can observe this today throughout the
world.

In short, Native people had good
sense but were not infallible, and they created morals accordingly.  Contra the old stereotypes, they are not
wantonly wasteful killers (pace Krech 1999, last chapters; see Appendix 3 below),
not natural conservationists (pace Hughes 1983), and most certainly not mere
animals with no impact on nature (see appalling quotes from Anglo settlers in
Pryce 1999:85-90, and her excellent discussion of this whole issue).

 

The role of cultivation was underplayed
by early anthropologists.  This was
partly because they wanted to emphasize the sophistication of “hunter-gatherer”
societies as a way of disproving evolutionary schemes.  Douglas Deur and Nancy Turner (2005) point
this out, but they exaggerate the case.  It
remains true that the Northwest  Coast
peoples were hunting-gathering societies, without significant domestication or
agriculture.  Most hunter-gatherer
societies manage the environment, often intensively.  Early anthropologists knew that, and had no
reason not to make the hunter-gatherers seem even more sophisticated by
emphasizing it.

Much more true is Deur and Turner’s
point that women were rarely taken seriously by early ethnographers.  Indeed, what Fiske and Patrick say of the
Babine could be said of almost all Northwest Coast peoples:  “We do not have reliable accounts of women’s
lives, property, or social obligations for the early contact or precontact
eras.  All the available fur trader and
missionary accounts are full of contradictions and replete with biases” (Fiske
and Patrick 2000:238). 

Deur and Turner (2005:33) note that
the famous fish dependence of the Northwest Coast peoples must have been
overstated, because living on fish would cause unhealthy overconsumption of
protein and perhaps of vitamin D.  The
peoples in question had to have been eating a lot of carbohydrates.  Records show diet breadth was always great;
people worked to maintain diversity in all matters. 

On the other hand, it should never
be forgotten that roots, berries, and shellfish are all low to extremely low in
calories, and the Northwest Coast people could not have gotten much of their
subsistence from them.  What has been
missed is not so much the plant foods but the importance of oil, both from
ooligan fish and from mammals (sea lions, whales, deer, elk, and so on).  Early accounts stress the enormous importance
of oils in trade, feasting, and food.  The Makah used to compete to see who could
drink the most whale oil at feasts (Colson 1953).  People were desperate for oils.  Suffice it to say that “ooligan” is derived
from a Tsimshian word meaning “savior,” now used for Jesus.  Watertight boxes of oil from the ooligan
(oolichan, eulachon), a smelt that is mostly fat by dry weight, were traded all
up and down the coast.  The Haida sailed
their great canoes over tens of miles of some of the most dangerous waters in
the world, and traded their most valuable possessions, to get these boxes of
oil.  The biggest ooligan run was on the
Columbia River, where the commercial catch in the peak year, 1945, was over 5.5
million pounds—and the noncommercial (including Indigenous) catch at least as
high (Reynolds and Romano 2013).  The
fish is almost extinct in the Columbia drainage now, thanks to dams and pollution.

Oil provided necessary
calories.  In the Northwest, clothing is
not much barrier against the constant rain, which soaks or trickles through
anything.  Thus oil was used externally
as “clothing,” as well as being consumed internally to keep metabolism up.  Anyone who has lived and worked with Native
people on the outer coast is aware of the incredible calorie needs that working
in that climate entails, and of the incredible amounts of food that have to be
eaten to keep body warmth while carrying out any task.  Early descriptions of people paddling for
four continuous days in cold rain (Drucker 1951; Sproat 1987 [1868]

) may be hard to match now, but I have seen many feats of sustained effort in cold rain that at least make the old stories thoroughly credible.  They are possible only if the workers are eating heavily.

Today, the old oil sources are largely gone, and drinking oil straight is no longer in vogue, so recent writers have generally missed the importance of this in the past. 

An account of a typical meal was provided by William Clark around 1805, in his famously creative spelling.  He “was invited to a lodge by a young Chief” of the Clatsop in Oregon, and received  “great Politeness, we had new mats to Set on, and himself and wife produced for us to eate, fish, Lickorish [shore lupine, Lupinus littoralis], & black roots [edible thistle, Cirsium edule], on neet Small mats, and Cramberries [Vaccinium oxycoccos] & Sackacomey beris [kinnikinnik, Arctostaphylos ua-ursi[, in bowls made of horn, Supe made of a kind of bread made of berries [cf. salal, Gaultheria shallon] common to this Countrey which they gave me in a mneet wooden trancher, with a Cockle Shell to eate it with.”  (Quoted in Gahr 2013:65, from Lewis and Clark 1990:118; her notes in brackets).  The dominance of fish and berries is notable, and the few plant foods were roots.

An obvious question is how many of the cultivation techniques of the Northwest were learned from early European settlers.  By far the most important management technique, burning, was certainly aboriginal; every Native American group in a burnable environment used this method, as did hunters, foragers, and horticulturalists around the world.  Unlike the equivocal situation in California, where natural fire is so common that it makes aboriginal burning difficult to assess, historic and archaeologically evidenced burning on the Northwest Coast can usually be safely ascribed to Native activity.  Natural fire is exceedingly rare west of the Cascades in Oregon and Washington and the Coast Range crest in Canada (see Lepofsky et al. 2005). 

Intensive root-digging was certainly pre-contact, and indeed goes back far in the archaeological record, and the diggers must have known the effects of their cultivation on the crops.  Otherwise, Wayne Suttles (2005), James MacDonald (2005), and Madonna Moss (2005) have considered the matter, coming to rather little resolution. Intensive pruning and transplantation and at least some fertilizing are recorded, but are very possibly post-contact.  Clearing, weeding, fencing, sowing, transplanting, mulching, and fertilizing are all documented (Turner 2014-2:193).

Enormous quantities of plant foods were gathered.   A tribe of a thousand people could easily run through a million camas bulbs in a year, and a single family might eat 100,000 to 200,000 salal berries in a year (Deur 2005:14).  Salal is the commonest berry bush over much of the Northwest, and its bearing capacity, especially when periodically burned over, is incredible—thousands of families gathering on that scale would not make a dent in its yield. 

Boas records a no-nonsense conservation belief among the Kwakwaka’wakw:  “Even when the young cedar-tree is quite smooth, they do not take all of the cedar-bark, for the people of the olden times said that if they should peel off all the cedar-bark…the young cedar would die, and then another cedar-tree near by would curse the bark-peeler so that he would also die” (George Hunt, ed./tr. Franz Boas, 1921:616-617; several other conservation-related beliefs and prayers are given in this section of Boas’ ethnography).

On the other hand, as we have seen, overharvesting cedars was known to occur, though in a different group with less cedar to manage (Lacourse et al. 2007).

More general, and perhaps more valuable, was asking permission of a tree or plant to take its bounty (see below).  Native persons still ask a tree for permission to take some bark, and then thank and praise the tree.  Boas and others recorded many praises and requests of this sort (Turner and Peacock 2005). 

As discussed earlier, resources were owned in the Northwest Coast, according to complex rules and ownership systems.  Nancy Turner et al. (2005; Turner 2014, vol. 2, passim) provide a review, but the full complexity defies summary, and must be found in the old ethnographies, and especially in Richard Daly’s ethnography of the Gitksan and Witsu’weten.  The latter was based on trial evidence of ownership, and thus has an extremely full, detailed and accurate account.  It applies only to the two groups mentioned, but broadly similar ownership patterns exist throughout.  They are generally even more precise and self-consciously maintained along the coast itself, least precise and tightly enforced in the deep interior.

 Along the coast and up the major rivers, every fishing spot, productive cedar grove, and berry patch was tightly owned.  Good hunting grounds for localized species like marmots and mountain goats were also.  Widely necessary goods that were locally abundant but otherwise nonexistent, notably mineral resources, might be open to all (Daly 2005:263).  Complex arrangements for sharing, loaning, and even renting are widely reported, especially for fishing sites.  If a run failed or a slide blocked a stream, a group would be in desperate straits, and neighboring groups would then allow fishing access.  Daly (2005) reports boundary markers, special passes (braided straps and the like) used by people borrowing access, and other highly specific ownership applications.  Male ethnographers underappreciated the importance of female ownership of plant resources, which was incredibly complex and detailed (Turner 2014-2:90-91), quite comparable to land rights of intensive farmers.  Rights were loaned, land was opened, usufruct was differentiated from outright ownership, and sharing was subject to complex rules and norms.  Generosity was always idealized, but ownership strictly enforced.

            Finally, the region had few food taboos.  Animals that ate carrion—including those famous tricksters, ravens and coyotes—or were otherwise more or less disgusting were avoided.   The Haida did not eat killer whales, because humans (especially males, and most especially those who die by drowning) are reincarnated as killer whales and killer whales that die are then reborn as humans.  Killer whales are easily identifiable as individuals by their patterns, and, at least as of the 1980s, Haida would discuss which local killer whale was which recently deceased Haida man (I have heard people do this, and Boelscher 1988:183 also notes it).  The Haida word for “killer whale,” sgaana, also means “spiritual power.”  (A shaman is sgaaga, one who has power; one high god figure was Sins Sgaanaa, “power of the shining heavens”; Boelscher 1988:172-173.)  The Haida also regarded some foods as high status, some as low; the former were foods that came from large animals—whales being particularly high—or that were taken by collective effort, like salmon and berries.  Low foods were those that involved individual and unobtrusive collecting:  shellfish and similar beach foods, especially (Boelscher 1988; I also noted this

in Haida Gwaii, though some shellfish, such as chitons, were so well liked that they had a certain degree of status).  There seems little comparable information on other groups, except the general observation that salmon and large land mammals are highly regarded everywhere.  Whales were certainly special among the whaling groups. 

Studying this successful management reveals a fascinating truth.  The Native Americans managed superbly on the basis of an ontology that postulates spirits in everything from salmon to mountains, and that leads to a practical conclusion that vision questing and contacting spirits through soul-voyages will provide the deepest and most valuable information about the world.  Modern settler societies introduced the idea of hard-headed, pragmatic, rational science, and promptly devastated the resources of the region through incredibly stupid behaviors.  It simply did not occur to these rational, scientific invaders that if you catch all the fish you will have no fish left.  It did not occur to them that if you cut all the trees there will be no trees.  When, belatedly, they came to realize these subtle facts—occasionally by 1880, usually not until well into the 20th century—they had no way of motivating change toward better management.  The result today is rapid extinction of fisheries, with yet another river going out of production almost every year; loss of forest resources, often permanently; loss of berries, roots, and game; and a landscape which in many cases has become a moonscape.  Counter-trends—restored fish, successful farming (far more productive than pre-Columbian root-crop cultivation), sustainable forestry—have come from counter-traditions.  Either the Native Americans have regained some control of their resources (as in Haida Gwaii) or “counter-cultural” settler groups have had their way.  Of these latter, small-scale and mixed farming remains fairly widespread, but organic farming, community forestry, fish restoration by dam removal, and other successful interventions are rare and sporadic.

            In short, mystical spiritism and “irrational” vision-questing outperform economic rationality to the point of total contrast.  This is, obviously, a huge embarrassment for those who still hold that Western Man has some special pipeline to divine wisdom. 

            The reasons for the failure of rational scientific management are clear.  The direct reason is the “steep discount slope”: people discounted the future.  It could take care of itself; only today, or next year, matter.  This has been elaborated into various forms of corporate logic: shareholder payouts, government tax bases, imperative demand, and the rest.  The result is always the same: maximize profit now and forget the long term.  This led to massive accumulation for a while, supporting thousands of people.  But now the landscapes in question are ruined for the foreseeable future, and the short-term profits were usually not reinvested very productively.  Over even the medium term, Native management wins out hands down.  There are more people now than there were once, but that is because the current population gets its food largely from elsewhere.  The areas that supported dense Native populations from local resources are now in many cases deserted.  Some farmland areas—especially the Willamette, Columbia, Yakima, Okanagan and Snake valleys—produce enormous amounts of food, far more than aboriginally, and this may make up for the loss of fish and other foods, but does not excuse the overall damage.

            The reasons for the success of spirit beliefs (“animism” if you will) are not so clear.  Being less than convinced of the reality of sentient, agentive wills within bushes and clouds, I tend to think the reasons are fourfold.  First, animism leads people to respect their environments.  Second, spirit vision questing validates individual knowledge and experience; people learn to take seriously their experience-based perceptions of the world.  Third, Northwest Coast religions are intensely social.  The spirits are part of society, but, more to the point, life is with other people.  One has to be responsible toward them, including the children who will need fish and trees and roots 50 or 100 years from now.  Fourth, respect for everything means that everything should be used—it is disrespectful to ignore a being that is offering itself to you—but that nothing must be overused; that too is disrespect.  Thus, the landscape was used comprehensively but lightly.  Everything had some sort of use, down to the most insignificant scraps of vegetable tissue.  Nothing was overused; monocropping was not a concept.  (The vaunted reliance on salmon has been exaggerated in the literature, as will appear.)  There was an overall, light pressure on the landscape.

Many readers of this book—if it reaches its intended audience—will see plants, salmon, and rocks as conscious agents who decide what to do for their human friends.  (And not all those believing readers are Native American.  I personally know several anthropologists who were converted to Northwestern spirit beliefs by experiences in the field.)  I have no quarrel with this conclusion, or with others that will appear below.  What matters is that we understand that Native management was sustainable in important ways, while settler management has not been, and that this is a problem in need of exploration.

5.  White Settler Contact and Its Tragic Consequences

Endemic local dissention probably explains the ease of European conquest, as well as Jared Diamond’s “guns, germs and steel” (Diamond 1997).  From Cortes and the Pizarros onward, Europeans immediately learned that they could take advantage of Native rivalries to set Indians against Indians and clean up on the result.  In the rare cases when Indigenous people could unite and stay united, they generally held their own.   On the Northwest Coast, the successes of the Tlingit and Tsimshian in early fighting stand as examples, but solidarity never reached beyond the “tribal” level, and the Native people never forged a united front.  Even the rare unity showed by the Nez Perce in the Nez Perce War did not save them; they were harrassed by other tribes and eventually betrayed by Blackfoot warriors.

The total population of the Northwest Coast in precontact times was at least 200,000-250,000 and very likely more, quite high given the resource base.  White man’s diseases, local wars, and massacres reduced the population about 95% by 1900, as established by Robert Boyd (Boyd 1999; Boyd and Gregory 2007; Trafzer 1997).  In one particularly horrendous case, the peoples of the lower Columbia River area, as Boyd relates, “plummeted from in excess of 15,000 to just over 500 survivors” between about 1770 and 1855 (Boyd 2013a:247), a decline of 97%.  Perhaps most serious from California north into Washington was the malaria epidemic of 1830-33 (Boyd 1999; Boyd et al. 2013 passim).  Conversely, some of the tribes of the interior, where malaria was rare or absent, may have lost “only” 75% or so between 1770 and 1900.  They lost population in the 20th century, when—for instance—the 1918-19 and 1928 influenza epidemics wiped out whole communities.  However, the most extremely remote suffered no major long-term declines in population from introduced diseases, since the epidemics—these flu events being apparently the worst—reached them along with modern medicine (see e.g. Helm 2000:120-123, 192-219). 

Boyd notes depression and despair after epidemics; this has been underestimated in the past.  We now know how utterly devastating the loss of even one or two loved ones can be to a community, particularly to children.  The loss of 95% of one’s society is, to moderns, unimaginably horrible, except to those who have gone through genocides.  I suspect it colors the often-gloomy myths and tales of western North American Native people.  One recourse, but a surprisingly rare one, was to blame the whites, who had inadvertently or deliberately introduced the disease and who sometimes threatened to unleash it on the Native population (Boyd 2013a).  This blame was a contributing factor to some killings of settlers; aboriginally, unexplained deaths were assigned to witchcraft, and witches were sought out and killed.  Often these victims were medicine persons, since it was assumed that those who had curing power might well have killing power too.

Boyd and others rightly stress disease as the major killer, but the role of war, massacre, hard usage, denial of hunting and gathering options and of relief food, and other directly brutal behavior need more emphasis than they usually receive.  Catherine Cameron and others have recently established, in an important volume (Cameron et al. 2015), that disease was less important, especially early in contact, than has been alleged in most of the literature, and that declines were often due to direct violence.  Boyd certainly establishes the importance of disease in the Northwest, but it is certainly true that other causes of mortality were highly important.  Small wars around the edges of the region—the Rogue River War in southwest Oregon, the Modoc War in northeast California, the Bannock War in Idaho, the Nez Perce war of 1877 fought from Idaho to Montana, the Chilcotin War in central British Columbia, and others—led to many casualties.  Of course these were wholly one-sided, and usually started by openly genocidal settlers.  Governments collaborated to varying degrees.  The Rogue River War of 1855-56 was extreme, in that troops and settlers indulged in mass murder, leaving few survivors (Beckham 1996).  The Bannock War of 1878 was also notably one-sided as to fatalities.  These two conflicts resemble genocide more than actual war; there was some serious fighting, but inevitable victory by troops was followed by indiscriminate killing.

Wars wound down after this, but starvation, exposure, and other forms of mistreatment continued to kill many Native people on and off reservations.  Alcoholism and suicide have taken a grim toll.  Suicide, especially among young people caught between cultures and feeling they do not belong, reached epidemic levels in several cases, leading to some of the highest rates in the world.  These effects of conquest and racism deserve to be placed with disease as major causes of fatalities.

Native populations began recovering around 1900, and are now close to early levels.  Marriage into settler societies has contributed to this.  However, parts of the Northwest have fewer people now than in 1700.  The languages and cultures suffered blows from which many have never recovered. 

The natural environment did not fare any better.  Clearcutting has destroyed almost all the old-growth forest and created many landscapes where good forest is not recovering.  The fish resources, especially the salmon, are a tiny fraction of what they were, and fish populations are still declining.  In addition to the standard problems of overfishing, dams, and pollution, new problems continue to arise.  Farmed Atlantic salmon have introduced diseases and parasites that are rapidly wiping out the native species in southern British Columbia.

The Native people were rapidly dispossessed of their fisheries and other resources, often despite treaties.  They were urged to follow the “white man” and take to farming, but when they did their lands were routinely seized by greedy whites; one well-studied case study is the life of Arthur Wellington Clah (Brock 2011), who initially succeeded very well in the settler world, but was chased off parcel after parcel until he died in poverty.  (He figures in this book in a less direct but very important way: his son Henry Tate and grandson William Beynon became the great chroniclers of Tsimshian society, Beynon in particular being a superb ethnographer.)  In the 1980s I studied the ways the previously very successful Native fishery in British Columbia was systematically cut to pieces by right-wing governments and shady practices.  The Columbia River, once the richest salmon stream, has suffered from both dispossession of Native rights and destruction of the vast majority of its fish resources.  It will probably lack anadromous fish of any kind by 2100.  (Excellent studies include Dupuis et al. 2006, Ulrich 2001; see also Grijalva 2008 for the general problem of environmental justice and Native Americans). 

Forced acculturation and active repression of Native traditions further devastated the cultures.  The boarding schools, in particular, were sites of major problems.  Fortunately, both the people and their cultures began to get some measure of attention around 1900, allowing a reversal of population decline, and, to some extent, of cultural decline.  A standard history on the United States side of the border is Alexandra Harmon’s Indians in the Making (1998); a British Columbia equivalent is John Lutz’ Makúk: A New History of Indian-White Relations (2008); for a notably temperate, dispassionate, thoughtful Indigenous view, see Richard Atleo’s Principles of Tsawalk (2011).  The clear writing and sober, understated tone make all these books noteworthy.  Harmon’s is better for political machinations that created “tribes” and blood quanta; Lutz’ book is outstanding for its superb history of Indian labor, with discussion of the ways the Indians were forced out of logging, fishing, trapping, and other activities that formerly gave them a good living         

The modern “tribes” and “nations” are creations of settler government policy.  From the start, the settler groups needed clear polities and clear leaders to negotiate with.  Finding fluid polities and leadership systems, the settlers simply created clear-cut “tribes.”  Sometimes “tried to create” is more accurate; groups remained cantankerously independent and fluid.  The process has been described many times, notably in Alexandra Harmon’s and John Lutz’ books and in Andrew Fisher’s Shadow Tribe (2010).  It has left us with most unclear understandings of earlier arrangements, at least on the United States side of the border, where change and population decline came earlier.  The high population density and extensive trade show that there was some way of organizing life above the village level, but we do not really know what it was. 

Native Americans were not even citizens until 1924 in the United States, 1961 in Canada.  Significantly, though, British Columbia had defied the national government by giving Indians provincial voting rights in 1949.  By this time the land was almost completely alienated.  In the United States, at least some large reservations and solid treaty rights obtained, but Canada has been much less accepting of Native title and rights.  The Indians in British Columbia have only tiny reserves and few subsistence rights.  On the American side, having treaties and reservations has not made the Native people much better off than their Canadian neighbors.  A classic study concerns the Okanagan, whose territory was split in half by the border.  Canadians thought the Canadian Okanagan were better off, United States writers thought those on the US side were, but in fact the Okanagan were in the same desperate poverty and want on both sides (Carstens 1991; there is a similar study of the Blackfoot). 

In the early 20th century, less direct cruelty and rapacity was seen, but jobs were scarce for Native people.  Economic depression often led to psychological depression.  Many communities dealt with aimless, disordered lives by heavy drinking.  Others did what they could, especially by maintaining the old hunting, gathering, and fishing ways for sheer survival.

Similar findings occur for tribes split by the Alaska-Canada border.  “In recent years…the Canadian Han have enjoyed far better subsistence hunting and fishing rights than their Alaskan counterparts” (Mishler and Simeone 2004:xxii-xxiii).  This is a very recent situation, and subject to possible change in future.  Conditions for Indigenous hunters, and for game, have rapidly deteriorated in Alaska with a series of Republican governors backed by the oil industry and representing affluent White constituencies, including rich sport hunters who decimate animals needed by Native people for subsistence. 

Conversely, the Canadian situation improved dramatically when courts began recognizing Native rights in the 1990s.  In 1991, in the case of Delgamuukw vs. the Queen, a British Columbia court handed down an infamous decision that denied the existence of Native land title, basically because the Natives had no written records and therefore their obvious occupation of the land for 12,000 years or more did not count.  This was overturned by the Canadian Supreme Court in 1997, and Native title recognized, at least under some circumstances.  This led to the Nisga’a signing a treaty in 2000 that ceded official title of their lands (and, allegedly, some neighbors’ land too) in exchange for money and use rights.  Other tribes still contest their cases.  It should be noted that Canada had recognized at least some native claims from the beginning of British rule in 1763, and thus most of the nation was covered under signed treaties.  However, British Columbia had been a separate colony (not officially part of Canada) for many years, and had not done so, except for a very few in the far northeast and southwest, involving very small areas of land.

The reservations were bones of contention, because treaties were often unfair, and in any case the United States Congress rarely ratified treaties made with Indians.  This led to feelings of betrayal, and consequently to some violent outbreaks by people who had been promised larger and better lands.  The reservations were often treated as concentration camps until the 1930s (or even later).  However, the fact that reservations really helped was made clear by the “termination” of the Klamath tribe in the 1950s (Stern 1966).  The reservation was privatized; almost all the land was taken even before the Indians got their shares, and then the Indians were cheated out of most of what was left.  They have been trying ever since to get a bit back.

Repression of culture and language were comparable in both countries.  The United States’ lack of a safety net has cut deeply; Canadian Native peoples can expect (though they do not always get) better health care and other services.  Racism remains widespread and extremely virulent.  Let not the reader be fooled by the genteel parlor-liberalism of Vancouver and Seattle; the rural Whites are unreconstructed, and they are the ones the Native people must deal with on a day-to-day basis.  When I asked one rural British Columbian why he thought the Indians created so much fine art, his reply was “They are too lazy to work.”

Land claims, treaty rights, and aboriginal title have been the subject of many lawsuits, some successful, in the last 30 years, and the situation has improved somewhat; the problem is so fiendishly complex that discussion must remain outside the scope of this book, even though this book owes everything to that exact question.  For a particularly good story of the movement that inspired my work, see Ian Gill’s All That We Say Is Ours (2009), a biography and history of the Haida struggle to maintain land claims and fisheries.

More directly relevant is the destruction of traditional culture.  An amazing amount survives, but the languages are almost gone everywhere; very few tribes have any speakers under 50, and those few have a bare handful.  Nowhere is there a viable linguistic community of young people, except among the most remote groups of the far north.  Some 40% of the Indigenous languages of North America are gone, with another 40% spoken only by older people.  Stories, knowledge, art, and experience persist after the language is gone, but usually become rapidly impoverished.  Sad experience from more heavily impacted parts of the continent, to say nothing of Celtic languages in Europe, shows that all eventually will die out, unless current attempts at reclaiming traditions and educating the young are much better funded.  Language and cultural loss is an environmental disaster as well as a humanistic one.  Knowledge of the environment and of managing it is encoded in the language used to talk about it, and when the language goes, the knowledge diminishes with it, as has been shown in many studies (see e.g. Hunn 1990).

Language revitalization movements rarely work, partly because they tend to be school-based, often using the familiar rote-drill method that convinced my generation that we could not learn languages.  Native American writer Barbra Meek in We Are Our Language (2010) provides an account of one of the more hopeful, but typical, ones (from just outside our area), and a full review of the relevant literature.  Successes are rare; the lifelong work of Nora and Richard Dauenhauer (e.g. 1987, 1990) among the Tlingit is exemplary but, alas, atypical.  The rural environments in which many Native people live are conducive to the mindless claim that people can learn only one language well.  In fact, the more languages one knows, the better one is at learning more languages, and also at thinking and learning in general.  (In my experience, those who claim otherwise do not know their own languages well.)  Certainly, those Native Americans who have become fluent in both Native and settler tongues have tended to do well.  But the foolish claim persists, and still prevents many children from getting a fair chance at important learning opportunities.

It also remains to be seen whether heritage languages learned as second languages in school will preserve the (formerly) accompanying environmental knowledge.  Teachers are aware of the concern, but traditional ecological knowledge is generally passed on in the bush, or similar settings, and in some cases can only be passed on in such contexts.  The knowledge may be more easily passed on in English in the bush than in a heritage language in a settler-style classroom.

Some recent writers, Native and white, have attacked the “myth of the vanishing Indian” because the Indians did not in fact vanish (see e.g. Harmon 1998).  True, but their populations were reduced by an average of 95% in the Northwest, as in the rest of the New World (Boyd 1999; Boyd and Gregory 2007; Trafzer 1997).  As of the 1890s, there was every reason to believe that the Indians as a separate people would cease to exist in a very few years.  Many groups did vanish entirely, at least as linguistic and cultural entities.  In the Northwest, the grim roll includes the Tsetsaut, the Chemakum, and several Chinookan groups.  (Many groups elsewhere on the continent were completely gone before 1800).  The many people who forecast the final extinction of the “race” had every reason to do so. 

The convenient argument that “introduced diseases” did all the damage is dishonest.  Massacres, one-sided “wars,” and deliberate denial of health care were almost as bad.  Some groups were subjected to outright genocide—merciless attempts at total extermination by the United States.  Among Northwest Coast groups, this was especially the case in the Rogue River “war” of the 1850s (Beckham 1996; Youst and Seaburg 2002).  The Athapaskan and Takelman peoples of the Rogue River drainage had resisted invasion of their lands, and when miners and settlers flooded in, violence quickly spiraled out of control.  There was some actual fighting—it was not pure massacre—but the hopelessly outnumbered Rogue people soon lost, and the genociders moved in.  Local “exterminators”—that was the word used at the time—with the often-grudging aid of the United States Army killed almost all, and exiled the few who were not slain.  An area that had supported at least 10,000 people was left with virtually no Native American inhabitants. 

The survival of the last 5% of the Native Americans of the Northwest was due to heroism on the part of the survivors and their few White allies.  The fact that the Indians did not vanish is due most of all to the incredible toughness of the survivors.  Anthropologists and historians have collected or reconstructed several stories of Native American individuals who not only survived but led their people through the fires of hell.  These make some of the most deeply moving reading one can find in this world.  (Notable examples include Ford 1941; Sewid 1969; and Youst and Seaburg 2002.  The first two are recorded autobiographies, the last an amazing job of reconstructing a long and eventful life from scattered and fragmentary records.  See also Atleo 2004, 2011; George 2003; and Reyes 2002 for later-period accounts.) 

Changing white settler attitudes were also involved.  “Indian lovers” were hated and despised in the 1870s and 1880s, but gradually prevailed, and shamed the nations into changing their ways somewhat.  Anthropologists were leaders in this from the beginning.  Unfortunately, many pro-Indian individuals, including some anthropologists (notably Alice Fletcher), backed breaking up the reservations into individual allotments, in a misguided attempt to make the Indians into Anglo-style small farmers on family-owned holdings.  This proved disastrous; the Native peoples lost almost all their land (see e.g. Stern 1966 for the Klamath).  The million and a half acres of the Siletz Reservation in Oregon dwindled to a few scattered plots, and the Grande Ronde suffered similarly (Youst and Seaburg 2002).  Ironically, gambling is saving it: casino earnings are used to buy back a few acres at a time.

Bad enough to deny the near-extinction of the Native people, and the total extinction of many groups and more languages.  Worse to say, blandly, that the Indians kept right on going, and thus write the heroism of the survivors and the villainy of their persecutors out of the human record.

We need to remember the grim record.  We need to teach it in history courses, just as Europe teaches Hitler’s holocaust.  We need to do everything we can to prevent such genocides in future, and denying them is the worst possible course.

Racism continued through the 20th century, and even the tolerant and successful Sin-Aikst (Lakes) scholar and artist Lawney Reyes had bitter memories of insults, persecution, and ill treatment in youth (Reyes 2002). I remember noting in the 1980s the way the British Columbia newspapers, when highlighting “social problems” such as crime, substance abuse, and dependence on welfare, usually picked a Native family to foreground in any story.  The corresponding Washington state media almost always picked a Black one.  The proportions of Black and Native people in these polities was about the same in both, and was quite small.  White Anglos had by far the most “social problems,” in actual numbers.

Also disastrous have been many of the missionary institutions, which not only attacked Native religion and even family and kinship, but also forcibly removed children into boarding schools that were, in fact, often nothing but sex slave camps where the children were violently abused by beatings and rampant sexual molestation.  Little attempt was made to teach.  The Catholic church, in Canada and in Rome, knew about the rampant sexual molestation in Catholic schools throughout North America and Europe for decades and did nothing about it.  The Church, and the Anglican church, have now made some apologies, but few amends.

Native languages were banned.  A whole “stolen generation” (to borrow an Australian phrase) has resulted.  In my research on alcoholism treatment on the Northwest Coast, I found that all people I interviewed who had been through the residential schools had been active alcoholics for at least some of their lives.  The percentage of alcoholism was much lower among those who had escaped this brand of welfare.

The churches and missionaries got the potlatch outlawed from 1884 to 1953 as a heathen institution incompatible with the modern state; apparently the missionary mind is such that mass organized sexual abuse of minors was regarded as more properly compatible therewith.  Ironically, the first legal potlatch in 1953 was the one organized by Wilson Duff and Kwakiutl artists to inaugurate the totem pole park at the British Columbia Provincial Museum (now Royal British Columbia Museum; see Hawker 2003:138).

Treaty rights to fishing and whaling were guaranteed in the United States and eventually enforced (though not until the late 20th century), but Canadian First Nations still struggle for similar recognition (see e.g. Coté 2010).

Conditions on the reservations and reserves slowly improve.  However, bureaucracy enters, insidiously, in even the best-intentioned situations.  Displacement of Native peoples was followed by waste and misuse of resources by settlers of all sorts.  The Canadian government has had to intervene to save many Northwest Coast groups from starvation and disease, as well as from the alcoholism and violence that followed destruction of livelihood and culture.  Even the welfare system that results has its negative effects.  In their detailed major study of bureaucracy and law in a colonial Canadian context, Fiske and Patrick state:  “It

[i.e., the welfare system]

sustained the hierarchy of state/nation relations that circulates limited resources within the nation while disempowering the extended family…and…has aggravated relations of dependency” (Fiske and Patrick 2000:119).  Even the most benign extension of alcoholism treatment, nursing services, and the like has the effect of rubbing in the “problems” and “difficult situation” of the indigenous peoples.  They do not love this (Fiske and Patrick 2000, e.g. p. 182).

However, thanks to anthropologists as well as Indigenous people, the languages and cultures are at least recorded and available for study.  Some Native people have denounced such recording, but sufficient refutation is found in the marvelous picture of Nuu-chah-nulth elder Hugh Watts reading to his grandchildren from the texts that Edward Sapir collected from Hugh’s great-grandfather, Sayach’apis, in the early 20th century—and the photo is presented by Charlotte Coté, also a descendent of Sayach’apis (Coté 2010:83).  Sayach’apis’ texts represent one of the greatest literary documents in any culture worldwide, let alone one that was reduced almost to the vanishing point in his time.  We are more than lucky to have them, and to have Sapir’s warm and respectful biography of Sayach’apis (Sapir 1922)—a tribute and acknowledgement far ahead of its time, and even of ours.

6.  Resource Mismanagement Since 1800

The Northwest has been as devastated as the rest of the world by foolish exploitation in the last 150 years.  Overlogging has decimated the forests.  Careless plowing and grazing have led to ruin of the soil in many open areas.  The game is shot out.

The mentality was classic pioneer: maximize initial drawdown of all resources, meanwhile hoping to move on to the next open area, or, at worst, build up a replacement in the form of agriculture or the like.  The worldview has been unkindly but accurately summarized as “rape, ruin and run.”  This mentality is not confined to Anglo-Americans (Anderson 2014).  It has been detected archaeologically in the settlement of Polynesia and in the Bronze Age and Iron Age Mediterranean.  It characterized the Japanese spread into Hokkaido.  The Russians and Chinese both acted it out in Siberia.  But the Anglo-Americans had an extreme form of the ideology, one that typically considered all nature to be an enemy, to be utterly destroyed as soon as possible and replaced with a Europe-derived artificial landscape.  And they had the tools: guns, steam engines, fish wheels, machines of all sorts.

Another and more insidious and deadly difference from the Native Americans was and is that the settlers were interested in only a very few resources.  They depleted the game.  They mined gold and later coal and other minerals.  They logged the forests.  They concentrated on salmon and later on other fish.  Gone was the sensitive total-landscape management that concerned itself with berries, roots, bark, grasses, small animals, and other resources.  The white settlers not only drew down the immediately saleable resources with little thought of sustainability; they destroyed the other resources without even considering them.

White individualism contrasts with Native American sociality, but is really a lesser problem in this case, since the Whites tended to stand as a united front against Native Americans. 

The worst damage is to the fish resource, especially the river-running species.  Indian management was displaced over time and replaced with far worse Anglo-American management (excellent histories of this exist:  Arnold 2008; Harris 2008; Schreiber 2008).  Salmon are at least a concern even to Whites, but lampreys, sturgeon, suckers, and other species have almost disappeared without much attention paid to them.  (Sturgeon survive only in a few of the biggest rivers.)  Dams, overfishing, pollution, and the other usual factors have wiped out the salmon from much of their original range and reduced them to low abundance everywhere.  The final “unkindest cut” has been farming Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar).  Parasites—notably “fish lice,” parasitic copepods—from these fish escape and decimate the local salmon, which have no resistance.  A small salmon-farming industry in the waters east of Vancouver Island has led to total extermination of pink salmon throughout the region—millions of wild self-reproducing salmon sacrificed for a few thousand high-cost alien ones.  Naturally, Native people have objected to fish farming (Schreiber 2002; Schreiber and Newell 2006—the latter contrasts correct but “spiritual” Native knowledge with either incredible blindness or outright lying by the White managers).

The fate of the Northwest Coast fisheries shows something about ownership regimes.  The White settlers prefer private property, and, failing that, national government ownership and control:  National Parks and Forests in the US, Crown lands or provincial and national parks in Canada.   The national governments lease out most land outside parks for forestry or mining by giant corporations.  The Native people, by contrast, universally vested property rights in localized kinship groups—communities, in a word. 

For farming, individual ownership has its points, but experience shows that fisheries don’t work that way.  Native control allowed exquisitely careful management of stocks—using the most efficient methods to get the exact number of fish that could be safely taken, and then stopping the fishery.  Western control has led to individual or national development that was incompatible with fish—dams, for instance—and to virtually uncontrolled overfishing at all levels.  State and national governments simply do not have the necessary focus, attention, or priority structure.  They have other things to do, like use the rivers to generate hydroelectric power or to dispose of pollution.  They are also subject to voter pressure by fishermen desperate to take just a few more and let the future take care of itself.  There is simply no way to prioritize the fishery while simultaneously regulating it tightly enough to preserve it. 

British Columbia and Washington are the worst cases, with their fisheries devastated.  Alaska still has enough Native and local control to keep some fisheries healthy, but mining interests are closing in fast.  Oregon has, ironically, saved some of its fish thanks to powerful sport-fishing lobbies.  The sport fishers are not dependent on fishing for survival, like the commercial fishermen, and thus are more willing to let some fish escape now to make sure there will be fish tomorrow.  Long and detailed studies of the resulting biological, cultural and social disasters are legion. 

Andrew Fisher’s excellent study of the devastation of the Columbia River Indians and their salmon is one example (Fisher 2010).  Dams and overfishing wiped out the salmon; racism and oppression did not succeed in exterminating the Indians, but reduced them to greater and greater poverty over time.  Fisher quotes some racist comments from settlers, over time, that are too revealing to leave out here.  The local Indian agent, John D. C. Atkins, opined in 1886 that the Indian “must be imbued with the exalting egotism of American civilization so that he will say ‘I’ instead of ‘We,’ and “this is mine’ instead of ‘This is ours’” (p. 90).  A textbook used in Oregon schools in the first half of the 20th century said that “the Indian vanished because he could not learn the ways of the white man.  He could not survive in competition with the dominant race” (144).  This at a time when thousands of Native Americans were trying desperately to survive, and by and large succeeding, in the face of genocidal racism.

A case study, perfect for our purposes because it shows the whole situation in microcosm, is Charles Menzies’ study of the abalone fishery of northern British Columbia (Menzies 2010, 2016).  As he summarizes it:  “In the face of aggressive overfishing of bilhaa (abalone) by non-Indigenous commercial fishermen, the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans closed all forms of harvesting of bilhaa” (Menzies 2010) in spite of the fact that the Gitxaala (Tsimshian) and probably other groups had been harvesting these shellfish with extreme care for sustainability for thousands of years.  This caused some hardship for the Gitxaala.  Menzies documents their caring regime, and advocates a return to a controlled fishery; but it may be too late.

California’s major bit of Northwest Coast scenery, the Klamath drainage, provides a particularly revealing case.  The Klamath Basin at the headwaters was settled early on by farmers and stockmen, displacing the Indians in the genocidal Modoc War.  More recently, drought has reduced the Klamath flows, while irrigation has expanded in the farming areas.  There is no longer enough water for both farms and fish. 

This came to a head in 2003.  The U. S. Bureau of Reclamation had disposal over most of the upstream water, and it was subjected to intense lobbying by the upriver farmers and downriver fishers.  The farmers are largely well-to-do Republicans.  The fishermen downriver are less affluent and very often vote Democrat, and they include large Native American groups.  2003 being a year of Republican national and state governments, the water went to the farmers, and the fish died.  (Much of this is from my own research; see e.g. Service 2003 for a neutral account; Williams 2003 for an unabashedly pro-fish position; Carolan 2004 for a broader overview, but he incredibly misses the political dimension, thus his account is of rather limited worth.  See Swezey and Heizer 1977 for the far superior pre-contact management system.)

The conflicts above thus involve political power as well as property regimes.  Decisions essentially always go to Whites over Indians—racism being severe in the Northwest, particularly in the 19th and early 20th centuries—and to giant corporations over everyone and everything else.  Some dramatic exceptions have occurred, however, starting with Judge Boldt’s decision in Washington state in 1974 to enforce the treaty rights giving the Native people an equal share of the fish resource.  Since then, Canada has had to recognize at least some Native title to lands.  Other decisions have restored many community management regimes and ownership systems in both nations.

Significantly, the classic claim that humans go for the main chance—material or financial maximization—is massively disproved by this history.  Throughout the last 200 years, White authorities have decided for regimes and stakeholders that were devastating the resource base with extremely low returns to themselves or society.  The potatoes and barley raised by the White farmers up the Klamath were worth far less than the fish would have been if the runs had been maintained.  Political power—from votes, campaign donations, skin color, and actual political position—trumps financial benefit (except to the giant corporations, and even then often only in the short run). 

An interesting case is the evolution of  the MacMillan Bloedel timber corporation.  H. R. MacMillan and Charles Bloedel brought scientific sustainable forestry practices to British Columbia and Washington, respectively.  They appear to have been quite idealistic and to have run their companies well.  Eventually they joined forces.  At first all went well, but long before MacMillan died in 1976, the logging was out of control.  By the 1980s, after decades of corporate mergers and political shenanigans, “Mac and Blo” became a worldwide byword for evil and irresponsible logging.  Things have improved since, especially since Mac and Blo fell on hard times and were taken over by Weyerhauser in 1999.  However, the sustanable forestry of the original founders is still a dream (the literature on this is huge and need not concern us; see Vaillant 2005 for a dramatic but accurate popular account).

An interesting comparison comes from the Russian coast closest to the United States.  Anna Kerttula (2000) describes Russian mismanagement and waste of resources.  The Yup’ik villagers there had been sustanably and efficiently hunting sea mammals, birds, and fish while the Chukchi herded reindeer on the tundra.  Russians brought wasteful hunting and herding practices (throwing away much of the meat).  They also damaged the tundra seriously by construction and driving heavy vehicles, and caused rampant pollution.  This was totally uneconomic; it was subsidized by the state as a way of “civilizing” the “natives,” whom the Russians despised openly and treated as utter inferiors.  When the USSR collapsed, this artificial and destructive economy collapsed with it, and the local people were thrown back on their traditional subsistence economy—much damaged by Russian environmental abuse.  It is interesting to see how clearly foolish and culture-bound the Russians’ “superior” practices were.  We in America are so used to Anglo settler mismangement that we tend to forget just how awful it is, and how much it is driven by culture rather than economics.  The Russian way is culturally different enough to be striking in that regard.

  The result of these bad management practices, and above all of the politics that creates them, has been widespread economic ruin in the rural Northwest, especially the Native communities.

Today, global warming is causing even more widespread damage.  It has caused millions of acres of forest to die; pine beetles give the coup de grace, but the real problem is warm winter that spare the beetles from freezing, followed by hot dry summers that weaken the trees.  Fish, root crops, and other resources are succumbing to increasingly hot and dry conditions. 

However, in recent years, comanagement of resources has come in, with local Native communities cooperating with government agencies (Natcher et al. 2005; see above).  One notable area is the west coast of Vancouver Island (Goetze 2006; Pinkerton 1989; Pinkerton and Weinstein 1995).  This does not always work well, especially when the government ignores Native input—as is often the case (e.g. Nadasdy 2004).  Obviously, comanagement works only if it is in fact comanagement.

            Perhaps it is best to leave the last word to Snuqualmi Charlie, talking to Arthur Ballard in the 1920s.  He concluded a long story of Moon’s creation and transformation of the world:

            “Moon said, ‘Fish shall run up these rivers; they shall belong to each people on its own river.  You shall make your own living from the fish, deer and other wild game.’

            “I am an Indian today. Moon has given us fish and game.  The white people have come and overwhelmed us.  We may not kill a deer nor catch a fish forbidden by white men to be taken.  I should like any of these lawmakers to tell me if Moon or Sun has set him here to forbid our people to kill game given to us by Moon and Sun” (Ballard 1929:80). 

7.  The Ideology Behind It All

            Native American biologist Raymond Pierotti has written:  “A common general philosophy and concept of community appears to be shared by all of the Indigenous peoples of North America, which includes:  1) respect for nonhuman entities as individuals, 2) the existence of bonds between humans and nonhumans, including incorporation of nonhumans into ethical codes of behvior, and 3) the recognition of humans as part of the ecological system” (Pierotti 2011:198-199).  These indeed fully apply on the Northwest Coast, where they are considerably elaborated.

            Thanks to early and superb ethnographic research, we can understand the Northwest Coast ideologies of management in a way we cannot do for other parts of the world.  Enormous record of myths, texts, tales, and instructions, compiled by early and more recent ethnographers, allows us to see exactly what people said in traditional times.

            Some of the Northwest Coast ethnographic collaborations are particularly impressive.  The Tsimshian chief William Beynon collected materials for several ethnographers.  All too predictably, he never got authorship credit for this, though he did most of the work; his first major publication under his own name came out in 2000, 42 years after his death (Beynon 2000).  He was in fact the real ethnographer in many cases (Halpin 1978).  Incredibly impressive also is the work of Edward Sapir with Tom Sayachapis and other Nuu-chah-nulth elders, of Franz Boas with George Hunt, and of James Teit with many interior Salish.  Teit became a major activist for Native American rights as well as an ethnographer, and his story—forgotten until a stunning recent biography (Thompson 2007) saved him from oblivion—is one of the most impressive in the history of “action anthropology.”  

More recent collaborations, such as Nancy Turner’s “five foot shelf” (much of it written with Native coauthors) and the collaboration of Eugene Hunn (1991) and James Selam, carry on the great tradition.  Just out of our region, but very close and sharing the same ideology, are the Yupik of Alaska, whose ethical relations with the animal persons has been described in exquisite detail by Ann Fienup-Riordan (1994, 2005).  She quotes elders at enough length to fill several books.  Many Northwest Coast groups remain sadly little known, but at least we have excellent work by many ethnographers for representative groups from every region.  No other part of the world except the American Southwest and the central desert of Australia has been so well documented in terms of ecological and environmental beliefs.  We do not have a single account of local knowledge and conservation in a modern American town that is as good as the work of Turner or Hunn or Fienup-Riordan.

One major component was attachment to place.  Northwest Coast groups had lived where they were for countless years; the Haida seem to have occupied Haida Gwaii for over 10,000 years, continuously.  Knowledge of and devotion to one’s immediate habitat is at a level possibly unparalleled in the world.  On the Skagit River, the local version universal Northwest Coast story of the boy left alone who must re-create his slain tribe includes a passage that says it all: the people he revives from bones “had no sense…so the boy made brains for them from the very soil of that place” (Miller 2014:70-1).  That line really says it all.

Conservation was based on the simple principle of “leave some for others.”  The Nuu-chah-nulth phrase was “7uh-mowa-shitl,” “keep some and not take all” (George 2003:74; the 7 represents an initial catch in the voice).  This is John Locke’s point that individual users, even if they are owners of his beloved “private property,” have an obligation to leave “enough and as good” (Locke 1924) for others when drawing on a resource base. 

There are, however, several crucial beliefs lying behind this.  These beliefs are the keys to conservation in Northwest Coast ideology, and all the resources of the collective representation of community are deployed to make people accept them.

A good place to begin is with seven “fundamental truths” of Northwest Coast ecological thinking, as abstracted by Frank Brown and Kathy Brown (2009:folder, p. 2) of the Heiltsuk Nation:

“…1.  Creation:  We the coastal first peoples have been in our respective territories (homelands) since the beginning of time.”  (This might be interpreted as “since the beginning of our peoples as identifiable cultural and linguistic entities,” since in fact much migration has occurred, and many of the origin myths actually recount it.  But, for instance, archaeology demonstrates cultural continuity in Haida Gwaii for well over 10,000 years.  The Haida and the other major groups of the Northwest certainly or almost certainly emerged in their present homelands and have been there since the glaciers.)

“2.  Connection to nature:  We are all one and our lives are interconnected.

“3.  Respect:  All life has equal value.  We acknowledge and respect that all plants and animals have a life force.”  

“4.  Knowledge.  Our traditional knowledge of sustainable resource use and management is reflected in our intimate relationship with nature and its preictable seasonal cycles and indicators of renewal of life and subsistence.

“5.  Stewardship:  We are stewards of the land and sea from which we live, knowing that our health as a people and our society is intricately tied to the heath of the land and waters.

“6.  Sharing.  We have a responsibility to share and support to provide strength and make others stronger in order for our world to survive.

“7.  Adapting to Change:  Environmental, demographic, socio-political and cultural changes have occurred since the creator placed us in our homelnds and we have continuously adapted to and survived these changes.”

More specific rules for food gathering are listed by Inez Bill of the Tulalip of northwest Washington state:

“Taking and gathering only what you need so Mother Nature can regenerate her gifts to us.

“Remembering to not waste any of our traditional food.

“Sharing what you gather with family, friends and elders that are not able to go out and gather whenever possible.

“Including prayer and giving thanks when gathering.
“Preparing local native foods at gatherings.

“Preparing food with a good heart and mind so when you serve your meal, people will enjoy their meal.

“Providing nourishment for our people and their spirits, but also the spirit of our ancestors.  We will strive to continue this way of life” (quoted Krohn and Segrest 2010:42). 

There is some obvious modernization and settler society influence here (“Mother Nature…”) that may divert attention from two critically important traditional ideas:  prayer and thanks while gathering, and having a “good heart and mind” when preparing and distributing.  Throughout the Northwest Coast and onward to a great deal of North America and Siberia, these are vital points for maintaining good relations with the spirits of plants and animals, and indeed with the spirit powers in general.  One may contrast the Euro-American food rules for the Muckleshoot school, a few pages later in the same folder:  “No trans-fat and hydrogenated oil.  No high fructose corn syrup,” etc. (Krohn and Segrest 2010:49).  The contrast of spiritual and chemical is significant.

            Rodney Frey, writing on the Coeur d’Alene of northern Idaho, also (and with appropriate modesty and tentativeness) identifies five basic principles, but they are somewhat different:  “…the understanding that the landscape is spiritually created and endowed…that the landscape is inhabited by a multitude of ‘Peoples,’ all of whom share in a common kinship…. That… [humans have an] ethic of sharing [which includes the animal people too]….that…the gifts [of nature] are also to be respected and not abused…and…one is to show thanks for what is received…  The fifth and final teaching encompasses…the ethic of competition” (Frey 2001:9-12).  The last is particularly interesting.  Humans do not simply wait around for the gifts to come to them.  They must work, compete with each other and with other beings, and compete with the powers of weather and geography.  Life is not easy, and nothing comes without major effort.

            Richard Atleo (2011:143-144) sees unity as basic, but coming from reconciling complementary polarities.  He sees individual identity as “an insignificant leaf” (144) in face of basic unity.  He elaborates a philosophy of haḥuuƚi, “land” in the sense of communally owned and managed place (cf. Australian Aboriginal “country”), deriving from the idea of unity.

Marianne and Ron Ignace explain  the Secwépemc (Shuswap) foundational belief thus:  “…ce ntral to the relationship between an animal and the fisher or hunter who ‘bags’ the animal is the concept that the animal gives itself to the fisher or hunter….  Plants as sentient beings also give themselves…. Therefore, the harvesting of all things in nature presupposes prayer that thanks the Tqelt Kúkwpi7 (Creator) for providing the animals or plants…as well as thinking th eanimals or plants for giving themselves…. All parts of the Secwépemc land and environment are …thought of as a ‘sentient landscape.’” (Ignace and Ignace 2017:382 ).  This belief appears to be universal throughout northwestern North America and eastern Siberia.  More specific to the Shuswap is a tradition of painting one’s face red or black at power places, such as lakes and mythic spots, but other groups have similar ways of paying respect to spiritual sites.  This general custom extends through much of east Asia, where such sites may be tied with sacred cloths, circled clockwise on foot, and otherwise revered.

            These are not new ideas, and not the product of Native Americans catching up with the environmental movement of the 1960s.  Manuel Andrade, collecting Quileute language texts in 1928, recorded a “speech…spontaneously offered” by Jack Ward, “when he found out that the texts which he was dictating would be published.”  The entire short speech is worth looking up; it is devoted to calling on the Whites “to observe conservancy of the products of the land….”  Jack Ward speaks in eloquent Quileute.  Andrade translates: “…you should take good care of the trees….  Be careful with fire.  Make sure to extinguish it when leaving a camping ground.  Otherwise, all the animals of the woods may disappear, such as elk, deer, and others.  This applies also to the fish…. Let no one…destroy too much trout, steal-head [sic], salmon, and all other kinds of fish.  Proud and happy I am knowing that my people, the Indians, are moderate in the use of nature’s supplies, never killing wantonly the fish in the waters…. But you, White people, are wasteful. You are not mindful of what you do in your camps, and consequently, many trees are often destroyed by fires.  It is heartbreaking to us Indians to see how the country around us has changed…all the animals in the land are beginning to disapper.  Much of the fish in the…waters is disappearing.  Many of the good trees are disappearing….” (Andrade 1969 [1931]:12). 

            I believe all these principles apply to all northwestern cultural groups, with varying emphasis in varying areas.  All these themes can be identified in folktales and teachings throughout the region, and indeed throughout all northern North America.

Countless authors have pointed out for decades that the Northwest Coast people, and indeed most North American indigenous groups, consider plants and animals to be people—“other-than-human persons,” in the standard phrase, apparently introduced by A. Irving Hallowell from his studies on the Native peoples of central Canada (1955, 1960).  Like humans, these people have spirits that are conscious and have agency and language.  All have a life force.  The Nuu-chah-nulth anthropologist Ki-Ke-In relates that there are many ch’ihaa, spirits, in the world, which draw closer in winter; that humans and other beings have a life force, thli-makstii, which goes ultimately into the stars after death, eventually ending in the Taa’winisim (Milky Way; Ki-Ke-In 2013:28).  Plants were people, and as such critical in ceremonies and in the search for guardian spirits (Turner 2014-2:324-350).

Other-than-human persons can take human or humanoid form when in their own world; salmon, for instance, are people who live in houses at the bottom of the ocean, and don their salmon skins only to sacrifice themselves for the benefit of their relatives on shore.  (This represents Philippe Descola’s ontology of shamanism [Descola 2013], being the same belief that he reports from his South American researches.)  The Katzie Salish, living where the most sturgeons spawn, in the lower Fraser drainage, believed the Creator had two children; the boy was the ancestor of the Katzie, the girl of the sturgeons.  Whenever they caught a sturgeon, it was their beloved sister sacrificing herself for them (Jenness 1955).  Widely believed among Salishan groups is the idea that all living resources are human-like in their own homes, donning outer coverings for human use.  Berries are like small babies in their real—spiritual—state (Miller 1999).  For the Sahaptin, “waqayšwit ‘life’ [is] an animating principle or ‘soul’ possessed by people as well as animals, plants, and forces of nature.  The presence of ‘life’ implies intelligence, will, and consciousness.  This is the basis for a pervasive…morality, in which all living beings should respect one another and are involved with one another in relations of generalized reciprocity” (Hunn and French 1998:388).

Thus, the basic or original being that became an animal, or was transformed into one by the Transformer, was incarnated in all subsequent animals of that kind, or—alternatively—remained as master of them.  Thus, mythic Raven is incarnate in all ravens, or else exists in the spirit world as the guardian of all ravens. The former version of the belief seems to prevail in the north.  The latter prevails in some parts of the coast (being e.g. reported for the Puget Sound Salish by Miller 1999:10-11).  It is the standard form in many areas to the south, including Mexico.  (This belief reaches to the Maya of Quintana Roo.  The deer god Siip, Zip in old literature, still has some role in overseeing deer today; the “leaf-litter turkey,” a giant ocellated turkey, is the eternal master of wild turkeys, punishing hunters who take too many of them; see Llanes Pasos 1993.  Versions of the same belief extend into South America [Blaser 2009; Descola 2013]).  The Yukaghir have spirits of the animals, overall game-guardian spirits, and locality spirits (Willerslev 2007).  Even farther afield, so do the Khanty of northwest Siberia, for whom an excellent ethnography by Andrew Wiget and Olga Balalaeva (2011) is now available.

The leading character in creation myths was a Transformer who changed ambiguously humanlike persons, and more or less formless supernatural beings, into the humans, animals, trees, and geological formations of today.  This story is known from Alaska (e.g. the Han people; Mishler and Simeone 2004) to California and beyond (see comparisons, mostly for the central coast, in Miller 1999; and many stories in Boas 2003 and Thompson and Egesdal 2008).  People who are broadly humanlike but have some animal-like characteristics became the animals they resembled.  Formless supernaturals became rivers and mountains. 

Usually the Raven is the transformer on the coast, Coyote the major one in the interior.  (The missionaries originally used the Chinook word for “coyote” for God; Lang 2008:70.)  A being without specifically known form does the job farther north and east.  The Gitksan Transformer, Wegyet, can be either raven or humanoid, apparently at will; similar shape-shifting is found in several other creator figures throughout North America.  The Tsimshian had a high god known as gal (Miller 2014b:42) and the Haida seem to have regarded the Shining Heaven as a high god.

In the Columbia Plateau region also, there was a widespread concept of a high god who oversaw the animal spirits.  Coyote may have been the immediate creator of much that we have here, but he was under control of a higher power.  (The old idea that “primitive” people lack a high god and have only animistic spirits was disproved a century ago; Lowie 1924.)   For the Colville of northeast Washington, the creator was originally a sort of Power-in-process, a being whose existence was the flow of his creation.  Eventually “the ‘chief’ who made the world and all its creations decided thereafter that he would have no body, legs, or head, and would instead become Sweatlodge for the continued benefit of human beings” (Miller 2010:47; cf. Ray 1933).  He lives on, instantiated in every sweatlodge created since. 

Also reported from the Plateau and not from other areas is a concept of sacred spaces with sacred deer:  “Near my home is a sacred area—about one acre—where sacred deer used to live.  One adult deer would always present itself only to a young man just before he was about to get married.  But only to a young man who, before starting his hunt, had for three days sweated while singing his power song, of course fasted,” and been virtuous.  He would shoot the deer, give the meat to his intended-wife’s mother to redistribute, and make the hide into a robe for the new wife or (in due course) their baby (Ross 2011:145, quoting an unfortunately unnamed elder recorded in Ross’ field notes). 

Not only plants and animals, but also mountains and rivers, were people, and were owed consideration accordingly; “we…talked to the river, so we could get some fish from it without hurting the river at all,” as an Elder woman told First Nations student Johnnie Manson (2016).

Such kinship with all being obviously made conservation a great deal more compelling.  Even people who care little for unrelated fellow humans will care for their own kin.

This implies that animals are not just killed by humans; they offer themselves voluntarily to their human relatives.  Their spirits then reincarnate in new members of the species, just as human souls reincarnate within a descent group. 

Today as in the past, a new baby will be examined to see which recently-deceased elder has reincarnated.  The Khanty (Wiget and Balalaeva 2011) and Yukaghir have the same belief, and the ever-perceptive Rane Willersley (2007:50ff.) points out for the latter that, while the essence of the person is reincarnated, the new child is his or her own person—not just a recycled relative.  This is so strikingly like genetic reality that one assumes the indigenous peoples noticed that descent produces great similarities in appearance and basic personality and yet considerable differences in the final result.  Like Aristotle realizing that heredity must be a “pattern” conveyed from parent to child, rather than a tiny homunculus or divine intervention, the Northwest Coast people recognized the inheritance of traits and reasoned an explanation based on their worldview.

If the souls of previously hunted animals were treated with respect, new (newly reincarnated) individuals of that species will offer themselves.  Of this much more below, but at this point we must quote Richard Atleo’s point that Northwest Coast people pray for the animals to make themselves available, but when European “religious people pray to God for a supply of meat…the meat has no say in the matter” (Atleo 2004:85).  The key here is respect, as will appear below. 

Under special circumstances, humans can visit the salmon people, or the bear or mountain goat people, and see them in human or humanoid form.  Countless Northwest Coast stories recount such adventures (see e.g. Andrade 1969 [1931], with tales of visits to shark people, seal people, and others).  Unsurprisingly, there is also a Yukaghir one: (Willerslev 2007:89-90).  Humans can marry animals, plants, or even stars, and many Northwest Coast kinship groups are descended from such unions.  Totem poles typically show the animal ancestors of the sponsors of the pole.  Hunting involves the hunter leaving the human realm and entering into animal worlds.  This often requires a great deal of ritual, in which the hunter’s wife is often essential, especially in hunting for large animals from whales to deer (see S. Reid 1981 for a detailed description of Kwakwaka’wakw ideology in this area).

Many a local crest derives from such visits.  Some members of the Tsimshian Blackfish phratry “met Nagunaks” when they “inadvertently anchored over his house” at the bottom of the sea; “he sent bglue cod, one of his slaves, to investigate…. The steersman was annoyed by the splashing of the fish, caught it and broke its fins,” which caused the sea-guardian Nagunaks to take them to his house, warn them never to harm animals unnecessarily, and then release them with privileges and songs, sending them off in a fast-speeding copper canoe.  They thought they had been gone for four days, but they were gone four years.  The privileges became lineage crests and emblems (Garfield, Barbeau and Wingert 1950:42).  This is a version of a story known not only throughout the Northwest Coast but through much of North America and Eurasia.  The sequence of offense, warning, release with teachings and privileges, and days that were really years is canonical.

This is a form of the Native American theory that Eduardo Viveiros de Castro defines as “’perspectivism’: the conception according to which the universe is inhabited by different sorts of persons, human and nonhuman, which apprehend reality from distinct points of view.  This conception was shown to be associated to some others, namely:

  • The original common condition of both humans and animals is not animality, but rather humanity;
  • Many animals species [sic], as well as other types of ‘nonhuman’ beings, have a spiritual component which qualifies them as ‘people’; furthermore, these beings see themselves as humans in appearance and in culture, while seeing humans as animals or as spirits;
  • The visible body of animals is an appearance that hides this anthropomorphic invisible ‘essence,’ and that can be put on and taken off as a dress or garment;
  • Interspecific metamorphosis is a fact of ‘nature.’
  • …the notion of animality as a unified domain, globally opposed to that of humanity, seems to be absent form Amerindian cosmologies.” (Viveiros de Castro 2015:229-230).

The Northwest Coast people, however, do not so often seem to see the anthropomorphic form as the real or essential one; in many cases, it seems that animal persons have two forms, equally their own.

Animals have powerful spirits, and are in fact spirit beings, able to move back and forth between our everyday world and the spirit realm.  For the Spokane, “[a]nimals are in touch with, and move between, the two worlds.  That sensitivity allows certain animals to foretell eveents, such as weather, death, or the arrival of a guest.  They can see into the spirit world…. Through animals, man can obtain a vision into that other world; through them, he finds his spirit power….” (Egesdal 2008:140.) 

Animals have many powers.  In the northern Northwest Coast, the land otter (the river otter, Lutra canadensis) can lure one to drowning and then take over body and soul and turn the person into an “otter-man,” a zombie-like being.  This is still a matter of concern, and on Haida Gwaii the fear has spread to the Anglo-Canadian settlers, who can be quite nervous about the “gogeet” (Haida gagitx, otter-man; Anderson 1996).  Otters move easily in both the great realms of life, land and water (de Laguna 1972; Halpin 1981a; Jonaitis 1981, 1986); they even enter the underworld (they live in burrows).  Moreover, they play a lot, and even incorporate humans into their play.  Most daunting of all, they often try to lure people into the water to play with them, as I have personally experienced on several occasions.  Significantly, otters abound in shamanic art (charms and the like) but are largely absent from public art (totem poles and crest art; Jonaitis 1981, 1986, and my personal observation), though a few appear on Gitksan poles (Barbeau 1929:73, 88).  Barbeau recorded a shaman’s otter song, for curing, among the Tsimshian (Garfield, Barbeau and Wingert 1950:122).  The bukwus or “wild man” took the place of the otter, to some extent, in Kwakwaka’wakw tradition (Halpin 1981a).

At least among the Tahltan, mink and weasel have some similar magical powers (Albright 1984).  For the central Salish groups, the fisher, a very otter-like animal, has magic curing powers, and passing a stuffed fisher over a person is part of healing (Lévi-Strauss 1982). 

            The dog is ambiguous, as in most of the world (Amoss 1984; for the Yukaghir, Willersley 2007:76; the Tłįchǫ Dene are descended from a dog who took human form and married a human woman).  As the only aboriginal tame animal, it moved in the human and the nonhuman realms, as the otter moves in three worlds.  It is singularly absent from myths and art on the Northwest Coast, though obviously not elsewhere.  (The Tłįchǫ Dene, who are well outside the Northwest Coast cultural area, treat dogs with respect but think them unable to survive in the wild—unlike wild animals and the Tłįchǫ themselves.  The Tłįchǫ also tend to think of animals as very different in powers and natures from humans, though still being other-than-human persons.  One Tłįchǫ wanted to learn caribou knowledge, and eventually could turn himself into a caribou—but he learned so much that he became a caribou and could not become human again, since he had more caribou knowledge than human knowledge; Legat 2012:89.)

            Salmon are people too, and abundantly present in myth.  Something of the empathy between human and salmon people is found in a powerful song recorded by Marius Barbeau and translated by William Beynon—the song the salmon sing as they go upriver:

“I will sing the song of the sky. 

This is the song of the tired—the salmon panting as they swim up the swift current.

            I go around where the water runs into whirlpools.

            They talk quickly, as if they are in a hurry.

            The sky is turning over.  They call me.”

                        This was sung by Tralahaet (a Tsimshian chief) and translated by Benjamin Munroe and William Beynon, early 20th century.  Recall that the salmon give birth and die; this poem is about sacrificing one’s life for the rising generations.  (Garfield, Barbeau and Wingert 1950:132.)

            “Commonality between species” means “we are all brother and sisters not only to each other, but also to every life form.”  This implies “respect, kindness, generosity, humility, and wisdom” not only toward and for humans, but for other life-forms (Atleo 2004:88).  It should be pointed out that “brothers and sisters” here translates Nuu-chah-nulth words that cover all related persons in one’s own generation.  Since Nuu-chah-nulth kinship is reckoned over many generations, almost all traditional Nuu-chah-nulth can trace some relationship to almost all others, and thus are all literally brothers and sisters (or whatever generation term is appropriate).  And, since animals are persons involved in human kin networks, one can be quite literally brother to a wolf or sister to a whale.  This extension of kinship does fade over distance, and a far-off “brother” or “sister” can be no closer to oneself than some of my long-lost third cousins are to me.  However, it is taken seriously, to a point really striking to an outside observer; correspondingly, my Nuu-chah-nulth friends were struck by the weakness of kin ties among Euro-Canadians.

            One may add that society—human, but also other social mammals’ society—is reinforced by strong social codes.  These are generated, and apply, at the level of community: for humans, on the Northwest Coast, the local realm of a chiefly lineage or lineage-group and associated commoners and others.  This would involve around 500 people—fewer in the cold interior, many more around the rich Salish Sea.  It also involved all the nonhuman lives in the area. 

            Communities were tightly organized.  This too varied, from the extremely close-knit kin and community groups of the Nuu-chah-nulth to the loose and flexible ones of the interior Athapaskans, but the similarities still strike me as more important than the differences.  Even the Nuu-chah-nulth recognized individuals and their needs, balancing them with the collectivity in a very self-conscious manner (see Atleo 2004:55-56).  The strong awareness that a community is made up of interacting individuals led to a philosophy of individuals-in-society.  This integrated harmoniously with the philosophy of people-in-nature—more accurately, no “nature,” only different kinds of people. 

            The contrast is with the western world, where the usual alternative to individualism is “communitarianism,” which, often, consists of justifications for top-down autocracy.   Northwest Coast community morality integrates the individual in the community but does not subject him or her to a king, pope, or dictator.  Chiefs had real authority, and in some parts of the coast could sometimes get downright tyrannical, but their power was limited—usually very much so.  These were face-to-face communities, strongly ranked but small enough that the chief knew he had to get along; otherwise, as noted, he would be abandoned or killed. 

            What Theodore Stern says of some Plateau groups would apply throughout the Northwest:  “On winter nights [children] were an apt audience for elders reciting myths; daily they heard the headman’s exhortations and on special occasions the war stories….  From their parensts and grandparents, as well as those brought in to speak of their lives, they heard praised the virtues of obedience, of honesty, and of charity to the unfortunate” (Stern 1998:406).  The “unruly” were punished.  Teaching stories were filled with lore on managing and the morality behind it (Turner 2014, vol. 2, esp. pp. 244-266). 

            Thus, the Northwest Coast peoples could be paradoxically freer than most westerners manage to be.  Rampant individualism cannot work in practice in a large group, for obvious reasons, and the western remedy has always been top-down autocratic control—by church if not by centralized government.  The ancient Greeks already saw, and criticized, this, in their pessimistic ideas on the sequence from democracy to aristocracy to tyranny.  The alternative of free self-organizing and self-governing communities was not unknown to them.  It was a reality later in much of the Celtic and Germanic world until medieval times and locally later, but it never replaced the dismal alternation between libertarian and tyrannical alternatives. 

Thomas Hobbes (1651) is the locus classicus; he saw no alternative to “warre of each against all” except a totalitarian king.  If only he had known enough about the peoples he called “savages,” he would have realized there were other possibilities. 

On the other hand, recall what has been said of warfare above; typical of the Northwest Coast was superb relations with nonhuman persons, good relations with one’s own people, and warfare with other people of different language and homeland.  The goal, at least for some, was peace with all species within one’s own lands, and warfare outside of that.  By contrast, the western world has long had an ideal—often neglected but never quite forgotten—of peace with one’s own species everywhere.  Unfortunately, modern western societies also exhibit total war against nature. 

            The intense Native American relationship of community and land must be continually stressed, and this brings us back to stewardship.  A group is localized, and their local world is desperately important.  Its mountains, trees, major rocks, and rivers are transformed beings that are part of local society.  They may be actual kin to the humans of the immediate area.  This concept is alien to the modern Euro-American settlers, who have been in the area for three centuries or less.  However, it is similar to the rootedness of many villages in Europe, with their sacred wells, their megalithic monuments, and their churches built on sites of pre-Christian temples.

            This and the two previous principles led to a powerful and quite deliberate conservation ethic.  Conservation was “wise use” of every resource, rather than lock-down preservation.  It contrasts especially with the modern concept of sacrificing most of the land for devastating misuse while locking up a tiny fraction for aesthetic or recreational reasons.  The Northwest peoples used all the land in a carefully managed, sustainable manner. 

For example: “Among the Lower Lillooet, resource stewards…directed the use of specific hunting grounds and some fisheries.  These were hereditary positions, at least in the historic period, but required special knowledge.  Spiritual qualities were not requisite for this position, but such qualities were required for the specialized hunters” (Kennedy and Bouchard 1998a:182).  All other groups in the northern interior had these stewards also.  The Spokan, for instance, had a fish leader or fish chief to oversee fishing, and a fish shaman to make sure that all the rules of proper resource management were kept; there was also a fish trap keeper (Ross 2011).  Rules that were pragmatic (no blood or waste in the water; it repels salmon) merged into purely ritual rules, all being believed equally necessary to keep the fish coming.

The Lakes (Sinixt) Salish of southern British Columbia had almost all moved to Washington state (to a reservation with related groups), had mostly merged into other groups, and had been declared extinct in Canada as long ago as 1956, but when a road was punched through their main surviving cemetery they all appeared in force and blockaded the road (Pryor 1999).  A threat to the old sacred ground brought the tribe together again.

Individual moral experience, especially the vision quest, is discussed and constructed into community morality.

This is brilliantly described by the Nuu-chah-nulth scholar Richard Atleo, a traditionally-raised Northwest Coast person who is also highly educated in European science and philosophy: “In traditional Nuu-chah-nulth culture…the world of good and evil is known and experienced collectively through the practice of oosumich [vision quest; spiritual discipline including bathing in cold water].  Consequently, in these communities the collective spiritual experiences of people determine human perceptions of the nature of the world.  There can be no equivalent to a Plato, or a Socrates, or some such individual who might create a school of thought abvout reality that is later shared by some loyal followers.  Rather, good and evil are determined by consensus through personal spiritual experiences that are reflected in the physical realm.  Individual experiences are judged in the context of broad community experiences” (Atleo 2004:37).  Atleo has gone on to elaborate concepts of consent, continuity, personal independence and responsibility, and polarity, including the reconciliation of opposites (Atleo 2011).

Socialized conservation comes naturally to the highly social Nuu-chah-nulth, who live in a world of kinship and community that is tight and close even by Native American standards, but it applies generally. The first words I learn in most languages are “hello” and a couple of cuss-words, but the first word I learned in Nuu-chah-nulth was tłeko, which is most simply translated “thank you!” but which has so many deeper implications of exchange, interdependence, formal relations, and group morality that it is routinely used even by Nuu-chah-nulth who are otherwise strictly English speakers.  (See e.g. Coté 2010:xi-xii. She spells it “kleko,” which is itself interesting; English-speakers find “tł” difficult as an initial, and substitute “kl”; traditional Nuu-chah-nulth speakers of my acquaintance have the opposite problem, and naturally substitute “tł” for “kl,” thus, for instance, saying “ten o’tłock.”  Coté is Nuu-chah-nulth, but finds the English spelling more convenient.)  The Nuu-chah-nulth tend to pack a huge range of associations into one word, instead of multiplying highly specialized words as English does. 

The Haida seem a good deal more self-consciously individualist, and the Athapaskan groups less communal in lifestyle, but they have the same philosophy; the difference is that the resulting consensus is looser.  (At least this is my experience, and I know at least some would agree with me.)  The contrast of Nuu-chah-nulth and Euro-Canadians is really striking in this regard, as anyone who has observed extensive interactions within and between these groups can testify.  Discussion to reach a collective moral conclusion contrasts vividly with defiant independence and militant liberty of conscience (Atleo 55-56; 2011, amply confirmed by my own research). 

On the other hand, note that in the final analysis the Northwestern collective morality is based on individual experiences, from which the shared principles are then teased out.  This contrasts with the rigid top-down morality and power/knowledge of many western institutions:  the more hierarchic churches, the schools, and above all the state.  (Of course, this brings church and state into many a conflict with the individualistic Euro-Canadians and Euro-Americans!  But that is another story.)

The Plateau groups, however, display a key difference:  Individuals can indeed use their spiritual experiences on vision quests to start social movements that take on a life of their own.  The “prophets” famous in 19th-century Plateau history almost certainly have a long, complex history reaching back centuries or millennia.  This makes them more like the ancient Greeks, especially when one remembers that the philosophy of Plato—and still more that of sages like Pythagoras—had a strong spiritual component.

This brings us to the vision quest, the all-important life-transforming experience that all Northwest Coast young people used to experience, and that a surprisingly large number still undergo.

Let us begin with Richard Atleo again: “Oosumich is a secret and personal Nuu-chah-nulth spiritual activity that can involve varying degress of fasting, cleansing [often by using herbal emetics], celibacy, prayer, and isolation for varying lengths of time depending upon the purpose” (Atleo 2004:17); it also includes beating oneself with medicinal branches, including those of a plant containing a natural soap, which thus has a cleansing effect (Atleo 2004:92).  For whaling it could last eight months, for hunting three or four days (Atleo 2004:17). 

The Nuu-chah-nulth oosumich, or uusimch (George 2003:48; phonetically ʔuusumch) is a quest for spiritual power and purity.  “Oo” or uu literally means “spiritual mysteries” and is used just to mean “be careful” (Atleo 2004:74, 83).  It is related to management practices, even controlled burning, which similarly manages the world to reconcile conflicting impulses of destruction and preservation (Atleo 2011:133). 

Related lonely quests for power, with bathing in cold water, beating oneself with medicinal branches, fasting, and other self-denials, occur among most Northwest Native groups (Benedict 1923; Miller 1988, 1997, 1999).  Similar spiritual quests are known throughout the continent.  Such quests or spiritual retreats are undergone throughout life by medicine persons, warriors, and others in need of extra spiritual power.  The extreme eight-month retreats of Nuu-chah-nulth whalers (e.g. Atleo 2011:101-102) show the great danger, great potential benefits to the whole community, and consequent special needs for spiritual power of that enterprise.  (Herman Melville’s Moby Dick is worth recalling.)   “Indian doctors,” shamans or spirit-possessors, were primarily curers, but they could kill by sorcery, become invisible, foretell the future, protect people, and find lost persons and objects (see e.g. particularly complete account in Ignace and Ignace 2017:387-393; also Jolles 2002:;172-173). 

Secwépemc children as young as five or six might receive spirit powers.  Elders might “doctor” them with animal skins or parts to give them the power of the animal.  Ron Ignace received grizzly bear and woodworm powers this way.  Woodworms, the larvae of wood-boring beetles, are known throughout the Northwest for their ability to drill slowly and patiently through the hardest wood, and thus give persistence and tenacity.  In early adolescence, youths went for the more typical Northwestern vision quest: “…a yong person had to live in solitude for days, potentially weeks and months, often on more than one stay.  Through…fasting and prayer in solitude, individuals found their personal seméc (spirit guardian power)…. Songs would come to them, given by an animal or a force of nature, like fire or water, that thus showed itself to the person questing and transferred its spirit power” (Ignace and Ignace 2017:383-384; see long list of spirit powers on p. 386).  The initiate thus had to shift for himself or herself for many days, with only the few resources brought along for the trip.  One elder lamented the difficulty of finding remote enough places in this modern world.  Getting one’s power from natural beings created an intense bonding with the wild and with natural realities.

Bathing in cold water was apparently a universal part of the quest in the Northwest.  Under conditions of hunger, cold, stress, and loneliness, the young person would sooner or later have dreams and visions, and these would validate the calling.

Known from the Northwest to the Plateau (Benedict 1923) and the Plains (the classic account being Neihardt 1932, but there are many others), vision questing extends down into Mexico, but from the southwest and southern United States on southward it was often supplemented or replaced by group or social training and initiation. 

In the vast majority of cases, it is undergone around the time of puberty.  Often there is one long and arduous quest; sometimes a boy or girl will undergo several quests.  Boys usually—but not always—undergo longer and harder quests than girls, and further discussion below will focus on the boys, whose quests are much better described in the literature. 

            The typical adolescent spirit quest usually involves isolation at a Power Place, an area of great known concentration of spirit power.  Power places can be mountaintops, dramatic cliffs, waterfalls, stream eddies, or other dramatic spots.  Mountaintops are the ones preferred for spirit questing, because of their isolation and extreme conditions of cold, violent weather, spectacular scenery, and fearfulness. 

The youth subjects himself to fasting, drinking only cold water, bathing in cold water, purification, staying awake as much as possible, and continual praying or crying for visions.  After a few days or at most weeks of this, visions or powerful dreams are virtually guaranteed.  Stress physiology combined with cultural expectations insure that even the least sensitive person will have them. 

The quest was highly individual among the Plains and Plateau nations, more socially constructed and integrated into collective ceremonies on the Coast, and reduced to a quiet, secret, lonely forest experience among the Athapaskan groups.  There is a huge literature on it, particularly for the Coast. 

The Salish peoples are especially well covered.  Among them: “In order to exploit his natural environment successfully a person needed to establish lines of communication with the nonhuman realm. He would doso primarily through a vision or encounter with a more or less individualized, personalized manifestation of the power which pervaded the wild realm of nature…. Contact could be achieved only if the human supplicant were purged of the taint of human existence….  Daily bathing in the river was the cornerstone of this regime” (Amoss 1978:12-13, from research with the Nooksack).  The young person had to be away from humans, in a power place, subjecting him- or herself to privation and discomfort.  Women were restricted in action, less often allowed to go far off, and thus tended to get lesser powers (Amoss 1978:13-14).  They could, however, become clairvoyants.

The vision typically tells the youth what power he has—or, in western psychological terms, gives the youth mental freedom to realize what he really wants to do with his life (cf. Jilek 1982).  For the Plains tribes, it normally gave warrior power, but the Northwest Coast groups, with their highly varied range of activities, presented a wider range of possibilities.  Woodworking power came from Master Carpenter or an equivalent spirit being, thus proving the deeply religious nature of art in traditional society.  Seamanship, fishing, housebuilding, and all manner of other powers could be given. 

Since this power comes from the all-important spirit world, it cannot be gainsayed.  Thus, if parents had been hoping the boy would become a woodworker, but the spirits make him a hunter, a hunter he shall remain.  This is not infrequently used by a boy or girl to validate his or her career choice at the expense of parental planning.  Many a college student forced by parents to “go into medicine,” learning of this aspect of the spirit quest in an anthropology class, has dearly wished for such an institution in modern America.

Obviously, some of these spirit gifts were more noble than others, and youths were counseled to be happy with whatever they got.  Some delightful stories make the point.  Among the Upper Skagit, one youth got only the power to win eating contests.  He was embarrassed and ashamed.  But then a much more powerful enemy tribe challenged the Upper Skagit people to war or equivalent competition.  The Upper Skagit had the good sense to demand the right to pick the type of contest…and of course our poor youth was soon the hero of his people (Collins 1974).

Special, everywhere, was healing power.  All the way from Siberia to California (thus bridging the Bering Strait), healing or shamanic power had a special name, separate from other spirit power.  A healer received power to travel to the spirit world to find out the cause and cure of illness.  The whaling power of the Nuu-chah-nulth was also of a special nature, and involved meditating among human skulls and other mementi mori, as part of dealing with the danger of the art.

            The spirit vision quest thus gives meaning and direction to life.  It has thus been rehabilitated lately for treating adolescent alienation and problematic behavior, and community alienation and aimlessness (Amoss 1978).  This is especially true among the Salish groups, because among them the youth returns to society and dances out his vision in a public ceremony.  A youth is not supposed to reveal or talk about the actual spirit that gave him the vision, but he receives a song and dance that sometimes make the spirit identifiable.  A youth who moves and growls like a bear, or a wolf, for instance, reveals what sort of spirit he has.  Others then dance their visions, or simply dance along with everyone. 

This gives the Salish youths a chance to validate their power, life choices, and personal experience of the Divine, as well as to reconnect with their culture, community, and identity.  This is done through dancing during the winter ceremonial season.  The youth—and the adult for the rest of life—dances in such a way as to demonstrate, but not show too clearly, his or her spirit power.  Onlookers can only guess what animal or other spirit the individual received, but his or her life and work demonstrates the actual power received.  

Spirit dancing holds the community together, reveals and reinforces social structure, spreads resources widely, and acts as religious focus; as such, it maintains a vibrant cultural and social world in what is otherwise a situation of limited possibilities (Amoss 1978).

Spirit dancing has proved a powerful social therapy.  It has been instrumental in reducing alcoholism, suicide, depression, and anomie among young people, especially if combined with other help.  It has given people a sense of control and self-efficacy.  Literally hundreds, perhaps by now thousands, of Salish youths have had their lives turned around by it (Amoss 1978; Collins 1974; Jilek 1972).

Psychologist Wolfgang Jilek (1972) memorably described his findings on this and his conclusion that the spirit dancing worked far better than clinical therapy for the Salish youths.  I have talked to Jilek, and many others, about this; the encounter that I most remember was with a Catholic priest who had actually taken part in the dancing.  Someone with me asked “Doesn’t the church say that is all from the Devil?”  To which the priest replied, quietly and seriously, “Anything that has the effects I’ve seen must be from God.”

Returning to the wider—lifelong—quest for spirit power, as Richard Atleo says, powerful individual spiritual experiences validated individuals’ sense of self, and then fed back into the community’s collective experience of spirituality and thus of morality.  Morals were constantly being tested against individual transformative experience.  Since the latter was, inevitably, highly conditioned by cultural expectation and tradition as well as personal experience, it normally reinforced the moral tenets of the people. 

On the other hand, it also allows for change, and validates ideas about how to cope with new circumstances.  This is most obvious on the Plateau, with its many prophets announcing visions about the Whites, the horses they brought, and other new matters.  These prophets were lifelong vision-questers, who had mystical experiences and intense spirit journeys on a regular basis throughout life.  The coastal Salish also had prophet cults, and other groups had individuals who taught new adaptations.

The relevance of this to conservation will appear below, in the consideration of traditional stories.  Many of these depend on some young person having a spirit vision in which the animal persons tell him or her what they expect and need from humans.  The vision is described matter-of-factly—the youth meets a mountain goat and is led to the home of the goats—but many touches reveal that the journeys are spirit journeys rather than physical ones.

Spirit journeys by medicine persons were also regular features of life in the Northwest.  Healers sent their souls to the spirit worlds for many purporses.  They also used their special spirit powers, those peculiar to the curing life.  Curing was especially important, and usually involved sucking out objects or “pains” magically implanted in a patient by a witch or else going to the land of the dead to retrieve a lost soul (see e.g. Boyd 2013a).  More directly relevant to ecology were spirit-journeys to find out why the fish were not running or the game was scarce.  Typically, the finding was that a taboo had been broken—in particular, someone had been disrespectful to the animal persons.  Social rules were powerfully reinforced.

A point not often enough made is that the major role of curers in traditional times was probably treating mental illnesses and sicknesses.  Infectious diseases were rather few, until the Whites brought the full range of Old World conditions.  The healers had no way of coping with these, and died along with their patients.  In pre-contact times, the few infectious diseases were generally either minor and easily treated with herbs, or were chronic and fluctuating.  Probably much more common were physical traumas—accidents, bear bites, war wounds, falls—and these could be treated by first aid and some dramatic placebo-effective ritual. 

Conversely, mental and social problems were evidently numerous and serious.  Winter confined people in their houses with seemingly endless rain, cold, and night outside.  Summer brought frantic activity to get food put away.  Dangers of war and interpersonal conflict were always present.  Anyone even slightly prone to depression, aggressiveness, schizophrenia, or other problems would be sorely tested.  Thus, healers had to specialize in these conditions.  Of course, they interpreted them as spiritual, but their ways of dealing with them were pragmatic.  Psychologists such as Wolfgang Jilek (1972) have pointed out that traditional psychological therapy was stunningly effective, and was based on principles perfectly comprehensible to a modern psychologist.  I can testify to the truth of this from some experience (Anderson 1992; Anderson and Pinkerton 1987). 

All this ritual, healing, and animal protection is part of a religious system loosely known as “shamanism.”  A better name should be coined.  True shamanism is a tightly defined complex of religious ideas and behaviors that centers on Siberia and central Asia (the classic account by Eliade, 1964, is dated and less than satisfactory; see the superb work of Caroline Humphrey 1995, 1996, and the beautifully illustrated work of Pentikäinen et al. 1999 for better overviews).  The word “shaman” is the word for a soul-sending individual healer, in the Tungus languages of eastern Siberia.  Northwest Coast religion is so similar that is can be called “shamanism” without stretching definitions, but as one moves farther east, the characteristic shamanistic features gradually fade, and we are left with a religion more focused on individual spirit experience, less on the spectacular and complex rituals of the shaman per se. 

Shamanism is based on individual soul-travel to the land of gods and dead or to the skyworld or underworld, to find lost souls or lost objects, find causes and cures for illness, and otherwise fix social and personal problems.  The shaman has an animal familiar, or several of them, and often other kinds of spirit powers exist.  Shamans can normally transform themselves into animals or spirit beings.  Ordinary people with special spirit powers can transform also.  Folktales in shamanic societies almost invariably include many competitions between rivals, to see who can assume the most powerful shape, foiling the rival (see Bland 2012).  (Such stories endure even in modern Europe, e.g. the Child ballad of “The Twa Magicians,” a Scottish tale that survived into the 20th century).  Moreover, animals—usually the predators in particular—can transform into humans, or into other shapes.  In fact, the transformation, interpenetration, and mutual shape-shifting and soul-shifting between human and natural realms is a key basic tenet of shamanic societies.  (This problematizes, to say the least, Descola’s claim that “animism” postulates spiritual similarity but physical difference beween people and other-than-human persons; Descola 2013.)

Some authors describe all Native American religion as shamanic, even the priestly religion of the high cultures of Mesoamerica and the Andes.  Others do not even allow the Northwest Coast into the “shamanism” camp.  Still others draw the line somewhere in between.  Some exceedingly acrimonious exchanges have taken place about this.  Some of the best studies, like Jay Miller’s Shamanic Odyssey (1988; see also Miller 1999), integrate Northwest Coast religion into the shamanism complex.  Others do not.

This allows us better understanding of the superficially “strange” or “exotic” ethnozoology of the Athapaskan peoples of northwest Canada.  Recent superb descriptions of these people by Julie Cruikshank (1998, 2005), Jean-Guy Goulet (1998), Leslie Johnson (2000, 2010), T. F. McIlwraith (2007), Paul Nadasdy (2004), Robin Ridington (1981a, 1981b, 1988, 1990), Henry Sharp (19878, 2001), David Smith (1999) and others have presented a very consistent picture. From somewhat outside our area, but from closely related Athapaskan peoples, comes the thorough account of Richard Nelson (1983), which speaks to conservation issues.

The Athapaskans see the world through trails and paths (Johnson 2010; Legat 2012; Ridington 1981b, 1988).  They have complex terminologies for types of places, mostly habitats for hunting and gathering.  They may name features that seem small and insignificant to outsiders, while leaving whole mountains unnamed—as do many peoples worldwide (Johnson 2010; anthropologists were surprised at this, but the beautiful high ridge I see from my window has no name, and it is in a major city).  The trailways were taken by ancestral beings long ago, and the small features were spots that were critical in those mythic adventures.  Again there are world parallels; I have stood in a quite young grove of trees, in Kakadu National Park in Northern Australia, that is locally regarded as composed of transformed supernatural beings from the Dreaming time. 

Robin Ridington has studied the Dunne-za (“Beaver”) people of British Columbia.  He reports:  Beneath each mountain or valley lay the body of a giant animal that had been sent below the earth’s surface when the great transformer Saya taught the Dunne-za of old to be hunters rather than game.  The melodic lines of their songs were said to be the turns of a trail to heaven and the steady rhythm of drum, the imprint of tracks passing over this imaginary terrain” (Ridington 1981b:240).  The giant underground animals are widely known in the Northwest (Sharp 1987), and are the explanation for earthquakes; stories about one of them cluster around the faults running through Seattle.

Ridington continues to describe finding the game by dreaming where they are.
Camps among the Dunne-za were always set up so that there was bush unbroken by human trails in the direction of the rising sun.  People slept with their heads in this direction and received images in their dreams.”  Dreaming the locations of game is also noted for related nearby groups by Henry Sharp (1987, 2001) and Jean-Guy Goulet (1998).  The hunters, among these Athapaskan groups as among other North American Indigenous nations, find that “the animals could not be killed unless they had previously given themselves to the hunter in his dream images.  It was said that the real hunt took place in the dream and the physical hunt was only a realization of what had already taken place” (Ridington 1981b:241).

Leslie Johnson has written at length about the differences between this moving-traveler view of the world and more static or totalizing views (Johnson 2010).  She contrasts the Athapaskan view, rich in narrative, personal history, and subsistence knowledge, with the abstract, arbitrary, geometric grids laid down on the land by modern states.  True, but having grown up in rural Nebraska almost a century ago, I can testify that a few generations of farming and childrearing transforms a grid into a richly-known, well-loved, story-laden landscape. It is the living, or “dwelling” (Ingold 2000; Legat 2012) that counts.  The Anglo-Canadians may have soullessly gridded the land, but more serious is their tendency to “rip, ruin, and run,” taking all the fish or trees or minerals and leaving a desert.  If they had stayed and made a living from the total landscape, as the Native peoples did, they would have come to appreciate it—as Johnson and other long-resident immigrants have indeed done.

For Canadian Athabaskan peoples, animals exist as spirits, as well as in fleshly form.  One dreams of these animals, and dreams of their trails.  The spirit comes from the sky (Ridington 1981a, 1988) or some other nebulous place, moves about on earth.  The hunter dreams the path and goes to intersect the animal.  If successful, he kills it, and the animal’s soul returns to spirit land, to take fleshly form again later (as we have seen, above, for other groups). 

One summary of an Athapaskan worldview sees the past as “continually pulled through to the present” by stories and experiences; humans constantly learning spiritual and practical knowledge; “all beings take different trails, each utilizing different places within the dè [land, country],” (Legat 2012:200).  All are related and interact.  Stories and trails hold the world together. 

What is astonishing is that the hunters do, in fact, dream where the moose and deer are, go where their dreams lead, and actually find and kill the animals.  Often, Anglo-Canadian hunters have no success using their hi-tech hunting methods in the same woods.  Thanks to the work of Goulet (1998), Ridington (1981a, 1981b, 1988, 1990), Sharp (2001), and David Smith (1998), we have some sense how bioscience can explain this.  The hunter notices countless cues at a preattentive level while he (men do most of the hunting) is out in the forest.  Every faint track, nibbled twig, bent branch, distant sound, muddied watercourse, old bedding ground, and unusual bird noise is noted.  Trying to notice and evaluate all these cues consciously would overwhelm the mind.  They are attended preconsciously or at the bare edge of consciousness.  At night, they are all integrated in dreams—and the dreams do, indeed, tell the hunter where lies the game.  Psychologists now hold that the purpose of dreams is to integrate and organize such preattentive knowledge, and process it or store it for use.  The Dunne-za were years ahead of the psychologists.

The First Nations of the Northwest know every tree, every rock, and every fishing spot in a vast wilderness better than I know my own living room.  They also believe also that giant fish produce earthquakes by twitching their tails (Sharp 2001), and that animals have spirits that communicate with hunters.  These beliefs make perfect sense in the context of animism.  Many, perhaps most, cultures worldwide explained earthquakes by assuming a giant animal lived underground.  Spirits that communicate is not only the basic postulate that defines “animism”; it is also a perfectly logical and reasonable explanation for what is perceived by hunters in traditional situations. 

A particularly fasciating belief, subject of a long and brilliant study by Julie Cruikshank (2005), holds that glaciers hate to have meat fried near them.  This belief obtains around Glacier Bay among the Tlingit and their neighbors, and has apparently even spread to some local Whites.  As Cruikshank points out, people avoid throwing meat into the fire, or otherwise creating a smell of burning meat, because it attracts bears (as McIlwraith 2007:114 also reports).  Since a glacier is a huge, moving, unpredicable, constantly changing, and dangerous thing, it appears like a grizzly bear to people who believe that all animated and growing things have spirits.  Nothing could be more natural than assuming that the glacier will wax savage at the smell of scorching meat, as a grizzly would. 

            The coast proper had a quite different set of ideological systems, widely based on extended kinship groups: moieties (dividing society into halves), phratries (dividing it into fourths—originally by halving the moieties), lineages, and other extended kinship groups.  Individuals could inherit or be given privileges and spirit powers; so could groups, from whole communities down to families.  Especially common were powers, songs, myths, and art motifs inherited at the lineage to moiety levels—that is, the level of large groups but not entire communities.  A large group could sponsor a potlatch, and a community needed the variety and competition allowed by having several groups each with its own powers.

            This system reached a high development among the Tsimshian peoples (Adams 1973; Beynon 2000; Menzies 2016 [Southern Tsimshian]; Miller and Eastman 1984).  These groups—the Coast Tsimshian, Southern Tsimshian, Nishga, and Gitksan—were divided into four phratries, probably created by dividing into two the moieties basic to neighboring societies.  The key concept is halait: supernatural, spiritually derived power, or anyone manifesting that power, as in a dance, ritual, or chiefly display of authority.  Halait were spiritual groundings of chiefship and power.  They are validated and explained by adaox, “the family-owned histories of the origin, migrations, and eventual settlement…of the Houses…they indicate how the latter acquired their crests and powers” (M. Anderson and Halpin 2000:15. These last include the naxnox, hereditary privileges in the form of masks, totem pole motifs, dances, songs, myths, and ritual regalia. 

            These are displayed in actual ceremonial contexts.  Initiation and name-taking was necessary to assume naxnox.  A chief would have to go to heaven (or have a vision of it).  This made him a semoiget, “real person.”  On return he would often be able to display a terrifying power, such as cannibalism (biting people or pretending to) or eating dogs.  Dogs were considered inedible and even poisonous, so tremendous power was necessary to eat one and survive.  In practice, the devouring was faked (at least in reported cases), but—just as wearing a mask makes one into the being represented by the mask—the fakery had a transcendent reality.

            The full displays in the winter ceremonies included potlatches, feasts, dances, storytelling, and other performances.  Here and elsewhere on the Coast, they were carefully planned and absolutely spectacular.  No one who watches even the etiolated winter dances of today fails to be profoundly moved.

            Of course, all this had everything to do with ecological management and resource ownership.  Here is the great Tsimshian? Gitksan? leader and spokesman Neil Sterritt explaining it:

            “For centuries, successive Gitksan and Wet’suwet’en leaders have defended th boundaries of their territories.  Here, a complex system of ownership and jurisdiction has evolved, where the chiefs continujally validate their rights and responsibilities totheir people, their lands, and the resources contained within themn.  The Gitksan and Wet’suwet’en express their ownership and jurisdiction in many ways, but the most formal forum is the feast, which sisometimes referred to as a potclatch” (as quoted in M. Anderson and Halpin 2000:31).

8.  Respect and Its Corollaries

            The Browns’ Fundamental Truth 3 seems to me the most critical characteristic of Northwest Coast thought, and indeed of Native American thought in general.  It deserves special treatment.

Above all, the Native peoples believe that one must show “respect” to the animals or they will not offer themselves to be hunted successfully.  Even where the discourse of “respect” is eroding with westernization, the practices of treating slain game animals politely and reverently still go on, with that as the ultimate justification (McIlwraith 2012).  It is particularly striking to find these beliefs still vividly and powerfully alive and motivating even among quite acculturated groups that have been subjected to Canadian colonial domination and coerced assimilation for a couple of centuries; as McIlwraith points out, they were supposedly assimilated more than 50 years ago.   McIlwraith cites a whole lineage of authors on this (McIlwraith 2012:25, citing Goulet 1998; Nadasdy 2003; Ridington 1990; Tanner 1979; Teit 1919; and many others).

Critically, respect involves not taking more than one needs for immediate consumption.  This includes family and needy neighbors.  It also includes guests, especially for rituals involving necessary feasting.  A large feast may mean a very large take.  Still, taking too many animals is always bad and disrespectful and always is subject to punishment.  This clause frightens even the greedy (if they are at all traditional in their beliefs).  It succeeds well in practice, as I know from research in both the Northwest Coast and Maya Mexico and several places in between. 

This wide concept of respect—iisʔaḱ in Nuu-chah-nulth, and as usual the word covers far more than English “respect”—is found throughout the Northwest, and, indeed, much more widely.  The Gold Tungus of Siberia have the same basic attitudes (Arseniev 1996), which are apparently continuous right across Bering Strait.  The Mongols share this; traveling in Mongolia I found the same concept of respect for all nature, from trees to rocks.  A young Mongol friend of mine wanted to collect pretty rocks, but did not, because it would be disrespectful to the rocks to move them for such a frivolous reason.  The word used in Mongolia is shuteekh, focally respect for elders.  Khundelekh is used among some Mongols (Marissa Smith, email to me, July 8, 2013), and in Inner Mongolia bishirt (Lulin Bao, pers. comm., 2014).  Many other cultures, from Rumania to South America, have the same concept. My student Jianhua “Ayoe” Wang found respect to be the key concept for environmental management among his Akha people in southern Yunnan (Wang 2013).  The idea of respecting flowers and rocks by leaving them in place is found in the Northwest Coast too.  Annie Peterson Miner, last speaker of Miluk Coos, after commenting on the need for a girl to share her first berries and a boy his first game without eating them themselves, added:  “Annie said that picking flowers and gathering shells and rocks were also prohibited.  ‘It might start to rain or bring bad luck.’  She said, ‘Things were just to be there, not to be picked.’   It was also bad luck to catch wild things” (Youst 1997:68). 

The same basic stories about the person who killed wantonly and was given stern warnings by the supernaturals are heard from Alaska to South America.  Every Northwest Coast collection of tales records myths about this, and often actual stories of people punished for it, for example by having to give all their kill to relatives (Atleo 2011:50), or being turned to stone with one’s dog for hunting too many mountain goats (Teit 1919:241-242), or simply having accidents and bad luck (very widely).  I have heard such stories in both British Columbia and Yucatan. 

Evert Thomas (pers. comm. at Society of Ethnobiology meeting, 2009) tells me that among the Bolivian Quechua, susto (fear sickness) in children can come from overhunting by their parents; the masters of the game punish the hunter by making his family sick.  The Khanty, who at least until recently practiced sustainable hunting and careful reindeer herding, apparently have similar ideas (Wiget and Balalaeva 2011).   Even the Yukaghir, who are now apparently far less conserving than the Northwest Coast peoples, have something of this idea (Willerslev 2007). 

Sport hunting and trophy hunting are thus definitely out of favor, being clearly disrespectful: killing an animal for pleasure, and as often as not leaving the carcass to rot.  This put the people of Iskut in another quandary:  should they guide White sport-hunters?  Survival forced that issue—they had to do it to get enough money to live—but it was a debate.

Thomas Thornton’s Tlingit consultant, Herman Kitka, recalls “Uncle noticed how we enjoyed the [halibut] fishing; he told us that to fish for the halibut for fun we would be wasting our food supply—to do so would offend the Holy Spirit and cause us to lose our blessing and go hungry” (Thornton 2008:124).  And  he lets others use the resources at Deep Bay, of which he was designated monitor:  “’I don’t own it,’ I tell them, ‘I’m just taking care of it’” (Thornton 2008:168).  Thornton comments on this:  “This typifies the Tlingit attitude towards conservation:  it is not a matter of ‘resource management’ as much as a matter of taking care of places.”  Kitka also noted that when a weir blocks the river totally, the salmon leave because they are “insulted,” not because they’re physically stopped:  “Those little sockeye get offended if you don’t leave them a hole in your [fish] weir; they won’t come back…” (Thornton 2008:173-174).  Tlingit often tell guests, in formal contexts, Tleil dagák’ ahwateeni yík, “Don’t leave insulted like those little sockeyes”  (Thornton 2008:173).  Thornton’s superb account of the phenomenology of place and land among the Tlingit has much more of this kind.

Weirs themselves also need respect.  They are ritually constructed and often consecrated, and thus they become persons.  This is known for the Iroquois and Yurok, as well as for Northwest Coast peoples.  They must be treated with proper attention, and (among the Iroquois and Algonquian, in early times) given wives (Miller 2014:135-142).

Mistreating fish is deadly.  When a man on the Nass harmed a small salmon gratuitously, his whole village was destroyed by fire (Barbeau 1950:77).  Frogs are even more dangerous when offended; a widespread northern coast myth deals with individuals who wantonly cast frogs into the fire, only to have frogs destroy their village by giant conflagrations (versions in Barbean 1950:65-75; many other versions exist).  Salmon remains are usually returned to the rivers, insuring good nutrition for the young, but among the Tsimshian they are burned, and failure to burn every leftover causes trouble (Barbeau 1950:165-176).

Deploring sportfishing as disrepectful “playing with fish” is so widely condemned that it has become the title of a book of “lessons from the north,” by Robert Wolfe, who encountered this particuilar lesson among the Yupik of Alaska (Wolfe 2006).

Respect is also basic in Plateau societies.  It “included not only other human beings but also food, air, water, the plants and animals whose lives were taken, and all other aspects of nature….  The very acts of making or teaching art were highly regarded” and artists respected (Loeb and Lavadour 1998:79).

Rodney Frey, talking about the educational function of Native American folktales, uses as examples the moral injunctions to hunters:  “’Nothing will they throw away,’ ‘you must not be proud,’ ‘you must not kill too many of any kind of animal’” (Frey 1995:173).  These are his prime examples not of Native conservation, but of Native moral discourse; he is not selecting game management to talk about.  It was simply what came first to hand.  Note that hybris is condemned as well as waste.  Respect means proper humility before one’s animal spirit beings, as well as intelligent management.  For one thing, it means not mentioning the name of whatever one is hunting or fishing for, or otherwise being overconfident about one’s expedition (see e.g. Palmer 2005).  It also means killing the animal cleanly, with one shot (animportant mark of respect for the game among my Maya friends in Quintana Roo, too).

The pattern is worldwide, and extends to the Yuit of St. Lawrence Island.  R. Apatki, talking to Carol Jolles in 1992, tells us:

“Whatever they first caught, they show them to…God….

They return the bones, whatever they are to the fields.

Those

[bones]

that belong to the sea, they went to throw away down to sea….

They light small lamps.  There they sacrifice.  The small ceremonial fires are some sort of altars….

They

[the ancestors]

had taken very good care of it [St. Lawrence Island], just like they honor it, those people.

They take good care of the hunting grounds, these places—all hunting ground.  Respectfully.

They don’t go to places until when it is time to go there.

They don’t put some things [trash and the like] on hunting grounds.  They respectfully use them….” (Jolles 2002:296-297; the whole text is well worth looking up).

Jolles also gives accounts of respectful treatment of kills.  Estelle Oozevaseuk told her in 1989 of giving water to seal kills, a universal custom among Inuit peoples and their neighbors, and giving bits of food to fox kills and others (Jolles 2002:298-299).  A whole complex of respectful behaviors is described in following pages: special games, special ways of dividing kills, special stories.  Reverential ceremonies for major games animals, notably whales, go on all year.  Jolles effectively shows how closely the respect for animals tracks the very respectful, structured behavior traditional within the human community.

            Finally, one is not supposed to boast of success.  Hunters and fishers return saying they have taken nothing much.  (This also is shared widely; Willerslev [2007:37] reports it for the Yukaghir, and I can testify from experience that it is a rule in Finland.)  Boasting brings ridicule and censure, but it also can actually drive the animals away, since it is disrespectful of them. I think anyone with much experience in the field will understand these and related concepts.  I have seen more than one proud White hunter humbled, and more than one biologist as well.  One need not believe in spirits to see the value of humility in the bush.

South Wind, the Tillamook Salishan trickster and transformer hero, learned this the hard way.  He caught no fish, day after day, till it was explained to him that he would have to cover any fish he caught with green branches and leaves, then burn the bones and skin in a fire that is to be extinguished.  Water from washing up must go on that fire, not in the bush (Deur and Thompson 2008:38).  Similar stories come from the Chinook (Boyd 2013b).  More common and interesting is the instruction to return all bones (and often other waste) to the water (which the Tillamook and Chinook did not do, at least with the first salmon).  As noted above, it restores necessary nutrients.  The Tututni had a rite in which “[a] religious leader offered thanks to the fish for returning once again…the villagers sent out their private thoughts of gratitude.  This giving of respect to the salmon—and in othersettings to deer and elk, roots and berries, and other gifts from the lands and waters…was not some romantic construct.  The Tututnis saw themselves as…citizens along with the plants and animals, and it was proper to show appreciation” (Wilkinson 2010:22-23).

Frey (2001:9) tells of a Coeur d’Alene woman who resisted a pest control worker’s call to get rid of spiders.  As she said, “’…that Spider might have had a message for me, something to say to me.  Why would I want to kill him?’”  And two pages later, we read of a man who wanted to rob a muskrat’s store of food, but was prevented by his wife (Frey 2001:11).  The Coeur d’Alene pray extensively before hunting or gathering wild foods, and also give thanks, often by leaving some tobacco where they have gathered (Frey 2001:180-182).  He quotes a wonderful oration about respect for deer who have given their lives to the hunters as food (p. 205).  

An extreme (and possibly a bit self-serving) bit of rhetoric on the Northwest Coast is a Nuu-chah-nulth speech to a just-harpooned whale: 

“Whale, I have given you what you wish to get—my good harpoon.  And now you have it.  Please hold it with your strong hands.  Do not let go.  Whale, turn towards the fine beach…and you will be proud to see the young men come down…to see you; and the yong men will say to one another:  What a great whale he is!  What a fat whale he is!  What a strong whale he is!  And you, whale, will be proud of all that you hear them say of your greatness” (Coté 2010:34, quoting text recorded and translated by T. T. Waterman).  Significantly, the Nuu-chah-nulth abstained totally from the very active whale fishery initiated by Anglo-Canadian settlers on Vancouver Island (Coté 2010:64).  Apparently they saw that the whales were not treated with respect.

As usual, this has parallels all over North America.  The Yup’ik of southwest Alaska have enormously elaborate rules (Fienup-Riordan 1994, 2005) for paying respects to mammals and fish, even the small, poor-quality blackfish (valuable because once a winter staple for dogs as well as a back-up food for humans).  Fish see traps and nets differently according to the behavior of the fishers; the fish want to sacrifice themselves to those that have treated their previous incarnations with respect (see esp. Fienup-Riordan 1994:123). 

Seals are thought to live in a giant ceremonial men’s house under the sea.  Here they arrange themselves by social rank, as humans do.  They discuss “whether to give themselves to human hunters” (Fienup-Riordan 2005:xvi), giving themselves only to those that show respect.  When seals are caught and shared out, the seals’ yuit (persons; sing. yua) go into their bladders, so these are saved and restored to the sea at a major festival at the start of winter (the sealing season and the ceremonial season; the Yup’ik have an extremely rich and evocative ceremonial life, beautifully described by Fienup-Riordan).  Here too, bones had to be ritually disposed of; seal bones had to go into fresh water (1994:107), but salmon bones were not returned to rivers.  “Yup’ik cosmology is a perpetual cycling between birth and rebirth, humans and animals, and the living and the dead” (1994:355), and between land and sea also.

Generosity to other humans is rewarded by generosity from nature; generous hunters are successful hunters (Fienup-Riordan 2005:38; a belief that seems to be worldwide).  Other social rules too lead to good fortune if followed, bad fortune if violated.

In general, there was a strong separation between sea creatures and land ones, but they were interlocked by trails and processes.  Sea creatures wanted land amenities (hence the seal bones in fresh water), land creatures wanted sea goods (see 1994:140ff.).  This fits well with Claude Lévi-Strauss’ analysis of the separation of land and sea, and its mediation by travel and myth, among the nearby Tlingit and other groups (Lévi-Strauss 1958, 1995).

People are observed by a high god, the Ellam Yua, “person of universal awareness.”  “Ella can mean ‘outside,’ ‘weather,’ ‘sky, ‘universe,’ or ‘awareness’” (Fienup-Riordan 1994:262).  The ellam iinga, all-watching eye, is shown as a small circle with a dot in the center, a universal motif in Yup’ik art (p. 254 ff.).  

As in most of the Arctic and much of Asia, there were elaborate rules for dividing up large animals and giving particular parcels to particular categories of relatives.  Any violation of rules led to the animals going away.  For instance, if the blackfish are taken with an ordinary dip net, instead of a special device reserved for them, “the blackfish will become extinct and be depleted” (Clara Aagartak, quoted Fienup-Riordan 1994:119).  Most of this long book consists of similar rules.  The great Greenlander ethnographer Knut Rasmussen found equally elaborate rules in the central Arctic (Rasmussen 1931, 1932).

The Tłįchǫ Dene, far to the northeast of the Northwest Coast, have very similar concepts.  Blood of a slain animal must be cleaned up, butchering must be done properly, and there are many rules for such matters.  “The Tłįchǫ elders attribute the disappearance of wildlife to industrial development and to a lack of respect, which inevitably causes destruction” (Legat 2012:30).  On one hunting trip, caribou did not show themselves, so the hunt leader made the people eat all the meat they had brought and made Dr. Legat send away her leather backpack—whereupon the caribou immediately appeared.  Since there was meat and hide in the camp, they had not felt needed (Legat 2012:84).

            James Teit records for the Tahltan:  “The Meat-Mother watches her children, the game, and also the people.  When people do not follow the taboos, and do not treat animals rightly, the latter tell their mother; and she punishes the people by taking the game away for a while, or by making it wild, and then the people starve…the Moose children are the most apt to tell their mother of any disrespect shown them: therefore people have to be very careful of to how they treat moose” (Teit 1919:231-232, as cited in McIlwraith 2012:68-69). 

Among the Spokan, as reported by John Alan Ross:  “After killing a deer, the hunter exercised considerable care in butchering…and skinning…for fear than an act of disrespect would impair his future hunting success, or worse, keep the offended species away from the hunting range of his group” (Ross 2011:256).  Ross records several other respectful practices also, including slitting the throat of a slain game animal to release its life-force (p. 257).   He also watched as a youngster borrowed his great-grandfather‘s traps and went out to trap coyotes without thinking to carry out the necessary ritual; the elder expected both of them would now be kept awake at night by the laughter of the coyotes, who, of course, would laugh at the trapper rather than approaching the traps (Ross 2011:290). 

Plants too had to be respected; when berrying, shouting “to a distant partner…was considered as being disrespetful to the plants” and would cause them to withhold berries; recent widows could not pick (Ross 2011:352).  Ceremonies, especially for the very valuable huckleberries, paid respect to the berry plants.  Roots were the subject of ceremonies, including the rather touching one that recognized a young girl when she got her first digging stick and another when she dug her first root—which was, of course, given away (Ross 2011:335; or the root might be worn as a charm).  Wild rose was ritually very important, used to drive away evil spirits and influences, cleanse after a death, and the like; brushes of the plants were used, and water in which flowers or hips were soaked (Ross 2011:351 and passim). 

Finally, a particularly touching example of respect and care is the universal custom of leaving something for the rodents when taking resources they use.  People often find and steal the caches of seeds, nuts, and roots that rodents make, but they always leave enough to keep the animals from starving.  Ross (2011:249) reports that, also, cattail leaves were left for squirrels for nesting material.  This has some self-interest to recommend it—without the mice, no more caches—but less practical is the widespread tendency to leave something valuable to humans also. 
 

Similar beliefs extend to Mexico.  A Nahuatl fish-trapping charm recorded around 1600 says, in part:   “I have come to lay for you your oriole arbor, your oriole fence, within which you will be happy, within which you will rejoice, within which you will seek all kinds of food, the flowery food…My elder sister the Lady of Our Sustenance…spread out for you your oriole mat, your oriole seat…she is awaiting you with her atole drink…” (Ruiz de Alarcón 1982:166-167, modified).  The oriole arbor is a fish trap, and this is a charm to lure fish into it!  Apparently the idea of promising much to a flighty water-creature is widespread. 

Finally, the K’iche’ Maya of Guatemala do not allow men to touch the metates that the women use to grind maize, because for a man to touch it “shows the stone no respect” (Searcy 2011:93).  I have not heard this among the Yucatec Maya, who are less sharply gender-divided than the K’iche’, but certainly the idea of respect for stones—let alone living beings—is thoroughly established among the Yucatec too.  My Yucatec friends respected animals—domestic, game, or useless—and would completely understand the Spokan hunter.  They took pride, for instance, in killing with one shot, and were both ashamed and heartbroken when they wounded a game animal and thus made it suffer.

Respect also must be given to the supernatural powers (as in all cultures).  In Haida Gwaii (Haida Land—the Queen Charlotte Islands), every stream has a Creek Woman, a female supernatural who guards and protects that creek and its salmon.  A man once swore at the Creek Woman of Pallant Creek, because he kept losing his hat—one he was not entitled to wear in any case.  The woman destroyed the whole town (Enrico 1995:160-169).  This prohibition on disrespect for spirit guardians of waters carries right across the Bering Strait, being important to the Mongols (Roux 1984:132ff.).  Insulting supernaturals draws collective punishment, as did disrespect for God in ancient Israel.  

Natcher et al. (2005) describe a situation in which Native people—Tutchone, in the Yukon— resisted advice from biologists to release caught fish that were small-sized or rare.  The Native persons insisted that this would be disrespectful to the fish, whose spirits would be offended.   Moreover, sport fishing was even more disrepectful of the fish—it was wanton destruction for fun.  Needless to say, these beliefs made for major problems in communication between the Tutchone and the Anglo-Canadian biologists.  McIlwraith (2007:123) found the same opinion among the nearby Tahltan-speaking Dene of Iskut.  Other conflicts between Native thinking and biologists’ “scientific management” surface (Schreiber and Newell 2006).

However, respect can be anti-conservation as well.  Respect includes taking an animal that offers itself to you.  This is another belief shared all round the subarctic, from the Cree (Brightman 1993) to the Yukaghir (Willerslev 2007:35; see the already-cited sources for the Northwest, with a particularly good discussion in Nadasdy 2004).  In fact, it goes right down to South America.  In Paraguay, a Native American game management program ran into heavy water because the local people, the Yshiro, were willing to conserve, but had to take peccaries that offered themselves, thus severely discomfiting the biologists (Blaser 2009; there was special concern for the rare and local Flat-headed Peccary). 

The offering-and-reincarnating belief can thus become a charter for overhunting.  This has occurred among the Yukaghir, who have the same basic beliefs about animals as the Northwest Coast peoples, but are now seriously overhunting game (Willerslev 2007:30-35).  Rapid decline in game numbers are met with the pathetic line I have heard from fishermen all over the world:  “They’ve just gone elsewhere for a while.”  However, even the Yukaghir have traces of a respect-by-not-overhunting belief.  Thus Willerslev expresses very well a tension clearly found all over the Siberian and Native American world:  “In fact, it would be fair to say that we find two polar tendencies in Yukaghir subsistence paractices:  One in the direction of overpredation…, the other in the direction of limiting one’s killings to an absolute minimum….” (Willerslev 2007:49).  The Yukaghir have rather different reasons for this from Native Americans, but the basic ideas are the same.  The Yukaghir’s neighbors, including the Mongols, Tuvans (Kenin-Lopsan 1997), and Tungus, are far more conservationist in their ideology and behavior, but face some of the same tension.

However, even the Yukaghir must have once had a stronger restraint on hunting.  They would long ago have hunted themselves into suicidal starvation without it.  Apparently, Soviet cultural oppression (chronicled in harrowing detail by Willerslev) ended it.  (Willerslev cites Soviet ethnography claiming that massive overhunting is aboriginal and traditional in the Arctic, but this is so obviously tendentious as to be ridiculous.  The Siberian Arctic has been settled for centuries by Russians, and their devastating cultural impact on hunting beliefs as on everything else was felt by the early 18th century; see e.g. Georg Steller’s observations in Kamchatka in the 1740s [Steller 2003].) 

Similar problems with overhunting, justified by reincarnation, are reported for eastern Canada (Brightman 1993; Krech 1999; Martin 1978).  Similar cultural pressures from settlers have occurred there.  Most sources seem to maintain that eastern Canadian hunters maintain respect and hunt with some care (Berkes 1999), but unquestionably there has been heavy hunting in the past, especially in the fur trade days (Martin 1978).  Overhunting by Native people does occur in the Northwest, but I am convinced from my own experience and that of other researchers I know that overhunting is far less common than it would be otherwise—and far less common than among local whites.  The Coast Salish traditions, for instance, hold that a family could take only one grouse per year (Krohn and Segrest 2010:97)—a tight limit.

The rigors of hunting must be undergone, partly to show the animals that the hunter really wants and needs them.  If they then come to care about the hunter and the people dependent on hunting success, they will offer themselves.  On the other hand, if the hunter has offended them, they will take off and be unapproachable.  Sometimes a mountain can withhold them.  Near Iskut is a hill called Stingy Mountain, because the mountain goats there are notoriously good at escaping hunters.  An outsider would probably find that the mountain affords good lookout and listening posts for the wary goats, but the local people say the mountain is deliberately refusing to let them be hunted (McIlwraith 2007:116).  Among the Yukaghir, even one’s own protective spirit can be stingy (Willerslev 2007:43), but I have not encountered this idea on the Northwest Coast.

Thus, if an animal offers itself, it has to be killed.  It spirit goes on to reincarnate in another animal.  Hence the problem with fish, above, and similar problems with moose conservation (again the same problem surfaces for the Yukaghir).  McIlwraith (2007) reports that the people of Iskut refrain from killing cow moose when they possibly can, especially if the cow is likely to be pregnant; so, if a cow just stands there when a hunter comes up on her, the hunter is in a terrible quandary.  The ban on killing female game animals in breeding season (and moose pregnancies last almost a year) is widespread if not often emphasized in the literature (see e.g. Miller 1999:98 for the Salish), and is another part of the “respect” rule that says “don’t waste.”

In fact, this dilemma has caused confusion for both indigenous people and anthropologists.  The indigenous people must always decide whether respect in the form of not taking too much or respect in the form of taking what is offered prevail in a given situation.  The anthropologists argue about whether the “natives” “conserve” or not, depending largely on whether they have observed people take what is offered or go with the conserving option.  Individual hunters differ greatly in this regard.  I suspect the general pattern is what I found among my Maya friends:  the greedier ones go with taking what is offered, the more thoughtful ones with conservation.

This brings us back to the problem that, since the animals’ souls go on to reincarnate, there is little recognition of the finite quality of game.  A Cree (from eastern, not western, Canada) told Harvey Feit (2006):  “The animals are still there, they just do not want to be caught.”  Obviously this attitude is unhelpful for conservation.  Long experience with hunters and fishers of all races, however, teaches me that almost all of them say this, whether or not they believe in reincarnation of animal souls.  Fishermen in particular almost never admit the fish are actually getting scarce.  The fish are always out there, “just not biting today.”  Sometimes they secretly know the truth, and will admit that over a drink, but usually they are genuinely in denial; such at least is my experience, studying fisheries development in many countries. 

Critically, however, respect also involves the point mentioned above:  not taking more than one needs for immediate consumption.  This includes family and needy neighbors.  It also includes guests, especially for rituals involving necessary feasting.  A large feast may mean a very large take.  Still, taking too many animals is always bad and disrespectful and always is subject to punishment.  This clause frightens even the greedy (if they are at all traditional in their beliefs).  It succeeds well in practice, as I know from experience in both the Northwest Coast and Maya Mexico. 

The animal, when dead, must still be treated with respect, since its spirit lives on and takes notice.  This is particularly true in more northerly groups.  Inuit and Yuit groups offered fresh water to kills, and treated them respectfully; disrespecting a dead animal could lead to major accidents (see e.g. Jolles 2002).  Cutting up a dead walrus disrespectfully was thought to lead to the terrible winter of 1878, and more recently disrespect to a slain bear caused a snowmobile crash and human death (Jolles 2002: 98-9, 183).  Once again, this extends across the Bering Straits, reaching an apogee in the bear cult of the Ainu. 

Significantly, only wild game is thought of this way.  Domestic animals get less respect.

 “Respect,” however, goes much farther than this.  One does not speak ill of animals, or insult them.  Saying anything disparaging about a fresh kill is particularly serious (see e.g. McIlwraith 2007:115).  Animals must be killed as cleanly and painlessly as possible.  McIlwraith was told quite graphically to be sure a fish was dead before gutting it:  “’How would you like to be gutted if you were still alive?’” (McIlwraith 2007:117; I remember being told similar things by Anglo fishermen in my childhood).  Very widely throughout the Northwest, fresh water is offered to a newly-killed animal (especially sea mammals, along the coast).  Various ceremonies, some of them extremely elaborate, must be performed.  A large animal may be decorated before being brought home.  This practice extends right across the Bering Strait into Siberia, where it is widespread.  Permission must be asked, and thanks given, even to small bushes and herbs for use of their valued parts (see e.g. Turner 2014-2:316-320, and for ceremonial recognition 326-328, 337-342). 

Many geological features remind children of such matters.  Typical is a story McIlwraith (2007:146) brings us from Iskut:  A hunter protested against a goat refusing to be caught, and the hunter and his dog were promptly turned to stone.  The rock is evidently one of those vaguely human-shaped rocks that people everywhere love to tell stories about.  It is pointed out to children as a cautionary tale.  There are similar cautionary rocks everywhere in the Northwest, and for that matter throughout the world.

An actual recent event—not a folktale—was related by Lawrence Aripa (quoted in Frey 1995:177-179).  There was an individual named Cosechin who was a doctor and prophet of the 19th century (see Pryor 1999).  However, this story probably does not apply to him, but to another Cosechin, or to some generic bad actor who has, in the story, picked up the name.  In any case, it is considered historically true.  The ellipses represent Mr. Aripa’s pauses in the story, not my leaving out material; italics represent spoken emphasis. 

A person named Cosechin

“was just cruel…to animals.

He would knock down trees

            and not use them.

He would grab leaves from the trees in the springtime

            and scatter them to try to kill the trees.

And you know it’s the custom of the Indian that when they’re going to use

something from a tree

            or…even fish or hunt,

                        they…ask permission first…

                                    ‘Mr. Tree may I use some part of you

                                                or I need it…for warmth for my children,’”

And so on.  Cosechin treated humans just as badly, but notice the animals and plants come first.

Cosechin was told to reform, and threatened.  He shaped up for a while, but

            “he went back to his old ways like. 

And then…all of a sudden…he disappeared….” 

The obvious implication is that someone did away with him, and no one was about to inquire into the matter.  There are many similar stories in the literature.

The Northwest Coast and the Quintana Roo Maya definitely prefer—or used to prefer—to err on the side of caution.  The literature suggests that overhunting seems much more common in Siberia and perhaps east Canada.  Again, I suspect this is due to outside influence, but there is a difference of opinion on this (Brightman 1993; Krech 1999). And the Northwest Coast people explicitly credit past overhunting for their conservationist rules.

To western biologists, the combination of intimate knowledge and “exotic beliefs” is incomprehensible.  Conversely, to First Nations people, the biologists’ cold numbers and impersonal regard for animals as mere statistics is incomprehensible.  Nadasdy describes many cases of nonmeeting of minds.  These would be hilariously funny if they were not so tragic, but in fact they are tragic, because the biologists generally win, with disastrous consequences not only for the Native people but for the animal populations.  Nadasdy (2007) has more recently argued for adopting the Native viewpoint on spirits and personhood among animals, or at least a willing suspension of disbelief regarding it.

We can now, however, see why the First Nations believe as they do.  They relate to the animals through lived experience, not through abstract book-learning.  Thus their knowledge and teaching are experiential and procedural, not analytic and declarative.  Being close to the animals in question makes avoiding the agency heuristic difficult or impossible.  The animals are assumed to have a human consciousness within them.  They can talk, and even take off their animal skins and appear in humanoid form.  Because of these things, relationships with the animals are intensely emotional, and the emotions in question are complex and deep.  Finally, this emotionality drives a relationship of mutual power and mutual empowerment; the animal persons have their power, humans have theirs.  Biologists, on the other hand, assert a particular kind of power/knowledge and also represent the power of the State intruding on local societies (Nadasdy produces an excellent, detailed Foucaultian account of this). 

The recent work in northwest Canada, and similar work elsewhere, is surprisingly disconnected from cognitive anthropology.  This was not true of earlier researchers like Robin Ridington, and is not true of some modern ones like Leslie Johnson, but most of the above-cited authors seem ignorant of the cognitive anthropology literature, or at least do not cite it.  Yet, they could profit from cognitive anthropology at least as much as cognitive anthropology can profit from the Canadian research.  Cognitive anthropology can benefit from their attention to total phenomenological experience, especially the embodied and procedural types of knowledge and the awareness of emotional and moral responses.  The Canadian researchers and their equivalents elsewhere could benefit greatly from cognitive anthropology’s rigorous investigation of specific word meanings and semantic domains, from procedures to assess cultural consensus and variability, from awareness of models and the relationship of models to reality, and, in short, from much greater awareness of exactly what they are recording and how to make sure they are getting it precisely right. 

Some of them would fear this as too scientistic or cut-and-dried, or too limited to small domains like firewood taxonomy.  Yet, one need only recall such studies as Steven Feld’s Sound and Sentiment (1982) or Keith Basso’s Wisdom Sits in Places (1996), which are thoroughly sophisticated in use of ethnosemantic and psychological methodologies, to realize that extremely sensitive and humanistic studies of feeling and experience can benefit from cognitivist techniques.  Both groups can benefit from more attention to the immediate experiential bases of knowledge; both have dealt with the issue at some length, but traditional cognitivists have often confined their attention to limited and rational systems, while some of the newer researchers are prone to think in generalizations (like Nadasdy’s highly defined and rather stereotypic contrasts of “hunters and bureaucrats”), and could pay more detailed attention to fine-grained systems.

The Northwest Coast and North Woods Native peoples have a cosmology that is not only “spiritual” but intensely moral.  They ask for permission before taking anything from nature; I have seen women ask permission of a tree to take a bit of its bark.  In regard to animals, respectful treatment is required:  killing only for necessity, not killing too many at a time, treating the remains in accord with ritual regulations that communicate respect, giving away one’s first kill (especially for male hunters) or first basket of berries (for girls; to elders; Gahr 2013:68) and much of one’s subsequent meat take, and so on through countless rules.  There were ceremonies for the first salmon taken in the year, and also first fruits and first roots ceremonies (Gahr 2013:68 for the Chinook, but every well-described group reports them or something equivalent).  These are taught through myths—typically stories that communicate the dreadful consequences of not following the rules (Anderson 1996).

As so often, related ideas from the nearest parts of Eurasia illumine these relationships.  Siberians—both hunters and herders—butchering animals may apologize, or pray, or even say “I had no idea to kill, I killed you by mistake” (Stépanoff et al. 2017:58).  Herders maintain the attitudes of hunters, and vice versa; they all know the animals of their neighborhood, they treat them with respect, and then care for them in life and, ritually, in death.  Animals have souls and spirit power, and agency not only in normal animal ways but in spiritual and sacral ways. 

Kinship is closely involved in this.  Extended kinship groups (widely called “clans,” though not always such in technical anthropological usage) are religiously and ritually constituted, and succession to leadership titles in them is by means of potlatch involving wealth donations and feasting.  Clans in turn own and control resources.  Naturally, as was observed as long ago as 1826, an individual of authority in a clan, when hunting, “is particularly careful neither killing too many himself nor allowing any to do so” (William Brown, quoted Fiske and Patrick 2000:128).  In this group—the Babine—as in others, the clan maintained the fishing weirs and owned the fishing stations.  By introducing individual nets, the Canadian settlers ruined this arrangement, which of course had unfortunate knock-on effects on the entire kinship system as well as on resource management.  Enforcing conservation is almost automatic in a clan-owned weir but almost impossible in a world of individually-owned nets.

On the Northwest Coast, knowledge is divided sharply into esoteric vs public.  Esoteric is divided in turn into knowledge of shamans and knowledge of secret-society initiates.  Public knowledge is divided into special ritual and mythic knowledge of chiefs and ordinary knowledge available to everybody.  Most “science”—that is, empirical knowledge not depending on supernatural belief—is in the public sphere, but not herbal medicine, which is mostly a shaman specialty.  These other ways of dividing up and classifying knowledge are valuable in their particular situations. 

            Athabaskan knowledge is rarely formally discursive.  In other words, people rarely talk about it in general principles.  Significantly, conservation is an exception here, at least among some Athabaskans (Nelson 1983); others are much less prone to talk about conservation in general, but still talk about management rules (McIlwraith 2007).  People are quite conscious of, and vocal about, the need to manage and to harvest selectively. On the other hand, education was thorough, systematic, extensive, and carefully managed (Mandeville 2009:199-204).  It was done through a combination of field training and apprenticeship, myths and tales, ordinary storying, and plain old-fashioned outright explanation.

Teaching and discussimg was most usually done via stories—highly personal, specific, geographically grounded narratives (Cruikshank 1998, 2005; Frey 1995; Goulet 1998; Legat 2012; Mandeville 2009).   This is true of all Native Americans, from Alaska to my Maya friends in Yucatan.  In fact, it is worldwide.  I am used to it, not only from field work, but—much more—from my own rural and small-town youth.  All knowledge about hunting, fishing, and the outdoors was illustrated with stories, or told purely in story form, by my Anglo-American elders.  Talking about anything so grounded in personal experience and local knowledge is simply not reasonably done any other way.

Education was gender- and kin-structured.  Among the matrilineal Gitksan, for instance, much education was expected to come from the father’s side.  This was partly due to gender roles (a father would teach his son hunting), but partly to the desire to keep the father’s side involved in the ordinary and ritual life of the child.  Many privileges, ritual and ceremony came from the mother’s side, since the child would succeed to those, not to his or her father’s privileges.  Conversely, in patrilineal societies, a mother and her kin would teach the child both women’s work and their own family stories and privileges.

Other education processes involve meetings of the whole community, which may involve long and ritualized speeches and ceremonial rhetoric in general, as well as storytelling.  The Okanagan have a political process known as En’owkin (Armstrong 2005a), basically a council meeting of a type familiar over most of Native North America.  Everyone gets together and talks out issues, with elders—not necessarily older people, but rather citizens with special knowledge or political ability—address the issues.  Sharing and community are addressed as major values in such meetings. 

Conformity was less important than having one’s own spirit visions.  For the Kwakwaka’wakw (and they are not alone): “Everyone had to be divided from the familiar, the ‘natural,’ so that he could see freshly and learn to act according to circumstances and not according to routine.  The anti-social hero is typicallyl he who ‘looks through’ society.  I was one of the main aims of Kwakiutl society to use his insight…It would be true..to say of Kwakiutl society that it was based on common dissent.  Every member was carefully trained to be able to decide for himself” (S. Reid 1981:250-251; this was and is as true for women as for men). 

9.  Worldviews Underwriting Knowledge:  Confrontations between Native and Anglo-American Views

            The Native Americans have constructed a whole worldview from such experiential knowledge and from the logical conclusions they draw from it.  Given the well-demonstrated human psychological tendency to infer agency whenever possible, they inferred that there are spirits in the trees and animals, or divine game-masters guarding them.  The daughter of the spirit guardian of fish, for instance, might marry a forsaken boy and provide him with rich stocks of fish, as in a Wishram folktale (Sapir 1990:169). They also inferred many more mundane things, such as the idea that earthquakes are caused by monstrous fish or animals moving about. 

These views and many others, some reasonable, some shamanistic illuminations, comprise a whole cosmovision, or ontology—far more than a “religion” in the ordinary sense, far more than a mere worldview or creation story.  It is different from the western scientific view, and even from western religious stories, constructed as those are by priests and theologians.  A cosmovision based entirely on logical developments from direct, embodied, experiential knowledge is an amazing and wondrous creation (on Northwest Coast worldviews, see Turner’s superb overview, 2014-2:24-350, which defies summary but emphasizes the personhood of plants and landscapes including mountains and rocks). 

As Fiske and Patrick say (citing Theresa O’Neill), “Western philosophy marginalizes morality and spirituality as optional while ‘perceiving practical principles of processes of production, reproduction and power relations as basic to human life everywhere….’ Western notions of the self based on economics and the individual as opposed to notions of the self based on spirituality and the group underlie conflicts that arise in efforts ot create autonomous and/or parallel legal orders” (Fiske and Patrick 2000:236-237).  This is clearly a bit overdrawn—western thought does not consider morality optional!—but there is a real point here.  Both the fusion of spiritual, ethical, and practical in Native Northwest Coast thought, and the application of all three to both human and nonhuman persons, are really totally different from anything in the western tradition. 

On the potlatch, they quote the early anthropologist Pliny Earle Goddard to good purpose:  “There are perhaps two main principles involved; first that all events of social or political interest must be publicly witnessed; and second that those who perform personal or social service must be puiblicly recompensed.  There is a third more general social law that all guests on all occasions must be fed”  (Fiske and Patrick 2000:218, quoting Goddard 1934:1311.)

Thus, as Nadasdy points out in a passage that should be read by all those interested in traditional knowledge (2004:112), anyone analyzing traditional worldviews cannot separate out the knowledge that outsiders see as “practical” from the knowledge that outsiders see as “mere cultural belief.” 

One can, to be sure, take the clearly useful knowledge out of context and use it, but this does not represent the traditional view.  It is, thus, inadequate for comanagement or co-work purposes.  Yet, bureaucrats and outsiders generally have major problems with this; total acceptance of the Native view means accepting those giant earthquake-causing fish.  One can only hope for understanding.  There is never pure acceptance. 

Nadasdy sees no real hope of cooperation.  The bureaucrats must assert power over knowledge, the Native people must lose.  This is partly guaranteed, as he points out, by the fact that “numbers” and “scientific” evidence is all that is taken seriously by the Canadian government and its agencies; local knowledge is “mere anecdote” or “unverified.”  A better way of assessing local knowledge is desperately needed.

However, Nadasdy, and some other recent anthropologists (such as Jean-Guy Goulet 1998), in otherwise superb accounts of such knowledge, reify and essentialize culture.  They see experiential knowledge as confined to First Nations, and revealing “incommensurability”—that word again (Nadasdy 2004:62ff)—with bioscientific knowledge.  This is not the case—as Nadasdy admits (footnote, 2004:277), undermining his whole claim.  The Native people obviously have an incredible pragmatic knowledge of their resources, and that is fully commensurable with genuine bioscientific knowledge.  What is incommensurable is the abstract ontology behind the different views:  the Native spiritual one and the biologists’ lab-based reductionism. 

As to the wider issue of incommensurability, however, Nadasdy is working from a highly essentialized view of  “culture.”  He appears to see a culture as a perfectly integrated, rather unchanging whole.  My more practical view allows me to be more open about learning from others.  I bake bread by feel rather than by recipe; I use stoneground whole wheat flour, and used to grind my own.  My only modern convenience is a gas-fired oven.  In short, I bake bread the same way as the nameless women who invented it (except they used wood as the fuel).  I cannot imagine what their worldview was like, but the bread is pretty much the same.  Bread cares little about cosmovision, but—as every baker knows—it is a living thing, thanks to its vibrantly alive yeast networks, and knows a sure hand from an incompetent one.  In the ways that matter to it, those wonderful women of old are with me in my kitchen, and we all meet in perfect understanding.

Similarly, my elders in the Anglo-American midwest and south had many of the same attitudes as the Northwest Coast peoples.  We children were taught to kill animals cleanly, not take too many, not let them suffer, and so on.  We were taught to look down on indiscriminate shooters.  Moreover, many, if not most, hunters and fishers believed that ultimately a catch was a gift from God, not just a matter of your own skill.  You had to be grateful accordingly.  This all goes a fair way to bridging the gap between “indigenous” and “western.”

Worldviews do indeed influence the realities of counting sheep (Nadasdy 2004), but do not prevent comparison of the results.  Nadasdy’s main example of a failure to communicate does not involve cosmovision at all, but was a simple disagreement over whether the local mountain sheep were overhunted or not.  The more knowledgeable Native Americans thought so, and had all the good evidence.  The biologists thought otherwise, after hearing from powerful trophy-hunter interests.  One need not go beyond common sense, of a sourly cynical sort, to understand this disagreement. 

If people are trapped in narrow views, that is not incommensurability at work.  It is just ordinary narrowness.  In the case of Settler society not understanding Native society, it is all too often mere racism.  

McIlwraith (2007) appears to argue that biologists are so trapped in a mentality of lists and reductions that they cannot and therefore should not use “TEK” at all—they would only corrupt it.  This does not fit the practice of biologists I know (and I know many biologists).  In any case, there are real reasons to pick out the most useful bits of traditional knowledge and bring them into wider practice.  Of course it does violence to the holistic vision of culture, but so does all technical and medical practice.  Does one treat malaria, or contemplate its holistic phenomenology?  There is a place for the latter, and it may even be necessary in some sense, but direct treatment is what we usually wish.

            The Native view generates a particular morality, one of caring and nurturing; animals are protected and conserved out of “respect” or care, rather than because of mathematical models of populations (Nadasdy 2004).  Nadasdy points out that the Native people he knew tended to think of the mathematical models as disrespectful; they treated animals like things, instead of like the people—or “other-than-human persons”—that they are.  Readers who find this strange should think of pets.  Are dogs and cats in Anglo-American society mere numbers in a population graph, or are they individuals with complex lives and moral claims?  How would you, dear reader, feel if your pet were a mere number, to be culled if there are several other dogs in town?  This, in fact, occurred in northeast Canada, when Inuit dogs were indiscriminately killed in the mid-twentieth century, leaving the Inuit utterly heartbroken.

This is not to imply that wild animals are “pets” to the Native Americans; they are not.  They are hunted for food.  They are seen as having spirits that are powerful and often dangerous.  The point is that they are known to be complex, deep, individual beings, not just numbers or soulless automatons.  In this the Native people are more right than the scientists; animals may not have powerful guardian spirits, but they are certainly not automatons or mere creatures of instinct.  That view of them stems from the religious views of Descartes and his peers, who were concerned about souls, not science.  Long discredited in serious science, it remains basic to bureaucratic management.  Biologists talk of “harvesting” game, setting Indigenous peoples’ teeth on edge.

Proof that we are dealing with practical experience rather than essentialized Culture is found in eastern California.  There, ranchers who know the land and wildlife from experience find it impossible to deal with, or communicate with, biologists who know it only from books (Hedrick 2007).  Even though cows exist only to be sold for slaughter, they are not mere numbers to the ranchers; they are living beings with personalities and with needs for care.  Even though grass is merely a food for cows rather than a spirit being, the ranchers can tell if it is overgrazed or not; the biologists are clueless, and assume the worst, thus ham-handedly interfering with ranching.  So we wind up with serious disagreements among people who not only share an Anglo-American culture but in some cases actually took more or less the same general science courses in college!  Particularly ironic is that the biologists in Hedrick’s study took  the same superior, unwilling-to-listen attitude to the ranchers that Nadasdy’s bureaucrats did to the people of Yukon, though the ranchers were not only from the same culture but a good deal richer, and often better educated, than the biologists.  Status in these transactions does not depend solely on race or socioeconomic position.

            Nadasdy and many others have noted the double-bind in which indigenous people are often placed:  if they change with the times, they are no longer practicing their “traditional, authentic” culture and thus need no consideration, but if they do not change, they are “locked in blind tradition.”  Of course there was never a frozen “traditional, authentic” time.  They deserve consideration for what they have, not what they supposedly once had.  The Maya of Chunhuhub, within the time of my work there, have added several plants (such as Hawaiian noni and South American passion fruit) to their gardens, have tried out and abandoned pesticides, and have even taken to computers, but their culture and cosmovision still live.  They are getting more and more comfortable with international bioscience, abstract and rationalized as it is, but their direct knowledge, and the distinctive Maya culture built from that, go on.

            Nadasdy is contrasting an extremely traditional and land-based group with an extremely urban bureaucratic world.  The Anglo-Canadians who deal with the Kluane First Nation are often totally ignorant of the bush and are also trapped in Weberian bureaucratic rationalism.  Wildlife biologists who know nothing about wildlife except from books try to deal with people who know everything about wildlife but have hardly read a book.  Thus, though the contrast he evokes is not all-pervasive or intrinsic, it is certainly real and extreme in northwest Canada (as I can attest from my own research there).  Native peoples who have never seen a city try to deal with city bureaucrats who have never seen a moose.  The result is predictable, and chaotic.  Culture is real, and the fact that it is not necessarily destiny is easy to forget in the Yukon.  But personal experience is real too, and surely the Kluane would be much more able to deal with Hedrick’s ranchers than with biologists turned bureaucrat.

            Nadasdy is on surer ground when contrasting Native and bureaucratic views of the land as “property.”  The Athapaskan peoples were more or less nomadic.  They used the land, they managed it, they had a strong sense of it and of who belonged to what area, but of course they did not have a concept of formal title and deed, either collective or individual.  They were, however, not even remotely like the mere aimless wanderers on a vast unowned space, as the Canadian government officially held them to be (until very recently).  Since “property” and “title,” and even “rights” to land, are legal fictions rather than experience-derived knowledge, they are more amenable to Nadasdy’s cultural-idealist analysis.  Among other things, he points out (2004:233) that modern notions of “property” were developed partly in conscious opposition to the old (and mistaken) view of Native Americans as mere wanderers who owned and managed not at all.  He is, of course, referring primarily to John Locke’s famous, or infamous, line:  “In the beginning, all the world was America” (Locke 1924:140.)

This said, the contrast between ageless, culturally constructed, “spiritual” Native knowledge and rational, cut-and-dried “Western” knowledge is greatly overdrawn in much of the literature.  It has everything to do with the stereotypes of “the Indian” in romantic literature, from Locke to Chateaubriand and J. Fenimore Cooper to Walt Disney’s Pocahontas.  The Indian was sure and silent in the forest, taught by instinct and by native cunning.  His (or even “her”) knowledge was innate and mystical.  The westerner can never match the Indian’s woodcraft, but the Indian can never be rational and civilized like the westerner, and attempts to make Indians civilized end in dismal failure—Pocahontas’ archetypal death and Nadasdy’s community’s alcohol abuse.

            The problem comes not from contrasting a basically spiritual and moral view with a basically reductionist and materialist one—that is real enough in these cases—but from overdrawing the contrast.  Native knowledge is dynamic, flexible, experience-driven, and basically practical.  So is much of Western knowledge.  Native Americans construct from their local knowledge a spiritual cosmovision that has certain logical features, notably spirits of the animal and plant world.  Westerners had similar beliefs until recently, and many east California ranchers believe strongly in a Christianity that involves an intimate, personalistic relationship between God, humanity, and the land (Monica Argandona, pers. comm.; Hedrick 2007).  Perhaps many urban Westerners have become “rational” in Weber’s sense, but Westerners too have experiential and spiritual knowledge. 

Morality is constructed from experience, in all societies—indigenous or not.  Morals emerge and are negotiated within the family, the immediate peer group, and the local community—however far they may then be extended.  Westerners tend to confine morality to human persons, but do extend it at least to pets, and often to livestock and wild animals (at least “charismatic megafauna”). 

            Thus, cultural essentialization and reification fail.  Culture is not an arbitrary crust, a frozen crystalline array, or a unified, harmonious whole.  It is a lot of working knowledge, shared to varying degrees, constructed into varying levels of abstraction, and—above all—moralized.  It works from actual behavior to necessary working rules, and from there to abstract rules, covering both “is” and “ought.” 

            It is, thus, not deduced from general principles or from its big, broad covering assumptions or laws.  Quite the reverse:  the latter are induced from the daily practice.  They are, to exactly the extent that they are general and all-covering, removed from reality.  Reality tells us how to catch a fish, how to make a snare, how to ride a horse.  From this working knowledge we have to go farther and farther into speculation if we want grand generalizations.  We induce or infer these from increasingly abstracted principles.  The final claims—animals are persons, God is an angry god, science is objective—are the farthest from daily experience.  They do feed back on practice, as in the miscounted sheep, but even then the truth on the ground is more complex.  Racism and greed had much more to do with the sheep count than worldviews did.

10.  Teachings and Stories

            Northwest Coast storytellers are famous (Frey and Hymes 1998; Hymes and Seaburg 2013).  Folklore scholar Rodney Frey reports that he observed Mari Watters, Nez Perce storyteller, hear a twenty-minute dramatic Sioux presentation that was new to her, and promptly reproduce it with her own added touches (Frey 1995:152).  Experts on tales were not just any oldster; stories were associated with high status.  The Tsimshian ethnographer William Beynon—one of the greatest ethnographers of all time, but almost forgotten because he was Native—was a high chief (Halpin 1978; Roth 2008:78), and this gave him power and possession over many stories (MacDonald and Cove 1987).  An entire long book of superb stories of animals and divinities has come from notes taken by early ethnographers on the narrations of Coquelle Thompson, an Oregon Coast Athabaskan (Seaburg 2007).  Nancy Turner has compiled dozens of stories relating to plant management (2014-2:231-296).  Crisca Bierwert, story collector herself, has analyzed sensitively the problems of collecting and publishing Native traditions, and the variations, multiple versions, and sometimes downright corruptions that occur (Bierwert 1999).

            These stories get around—sometimes around the world.  Franz Boas (2006 [1895]:660) traced many elements all over North America and even to Asia.  Some, like the Flood, Swan Maiden, and Orpheus stories, are almost worldwide.  In a marvelous collection of tales from the Thompson Indians of south-central British Columbia (Hanna and Henry 1995), Annie York tells a version of the Swan Maiden myth that harmoniously blends European and Native elements of this story—known all across the Holarctic from Ireland to Canada.  It is delightful to see the ends meet this way.  (See also Snyder 1979—a study of this myth in Haida Gwaii and elsewhere, done by the great poet Gary Snyder, in his early days as an anthropology student.)

            Local stories capture truths.  A recent analysis showed that myths of a vast serpent under the earth coincide perfectly with the location of the giant east-west fault that endangers Seattle (Krajick 2005).  The local Salish had obviously observed enough earthquakes to know where to expect them, and they shared the worldwide, and thoroughly common-sense, belief that earthquakes are caused by a monster in the earth shaking himself.  (I have run into exactly the same belief in China, where people know that dramatic scarp faces are earthquake-prone locations, and hold that a dragon in the earth is responsible.  It is worth noting that the scientific explanation for earthquakes has been discovered within my lifetime.  When I was in college, the dragon was still as good an explanation as anything dominant in the geology of that era.)

            All Northwest Coast groups that have been studied report teachings about conservation and wise management.  These include cautionary tales, outright instruction, prayers, and other oral literature (see e.g. Ignace and Ignace 2017:203-210).

            Throughout the Northwest Coast, stories tell of people who were disrespectful to fish, mountain goats, and other animals, only to have these prey animals move away, leaving people to starve.  Native American ethnographers often stress these, and non-Native anthropologists have learned to recognize their importance as moral conservation teachings. 

Tsimshian ethnographer Charles Menzies repeats from the earlier Tsimshian ethnographer William Beynon a story of a salmon woman who married Raven, the creator-trickster; of course he inevitably disrespected her (his way) and she and the salmon left him to starve.  Other stories tell of disrespectful behavior toward salmon that lead to the same result (Menzies 2016:87-90). Menzies concludes:  “If respected, they will reward the harvester.  History has taught us that catching too much salmon…will result in a marked decline or total extirpation…The same history has also shown that not taking enough seems to have a similar effect [because of overspawning or disease—ENA].  Thus the oral histories provide guidelines…” (Menzies 2016:90). 

The Coos of Oregon told a story of children who caught and roasted a raccoon, laughing at its shrinking up and looking funny while roasting, all died except one who did not laugh.  This was universally known and taught to keep kids from laughing at animals (but the irrepressible Annie Miner Peterson, narrator of this story to ethnographer Melville Jacobs [1940:146-147], said she laughed anyway, and survived).  Peterson also narrated a story of a man who was pitied by the supernaturals for his poverty; he was given a strange fish for good luck; his wife made him ask for too much, and he lost the luck (Jacobs 1940:133-135).  This is a version of a story almost universally known from ancient Greece to China to America.

            The origin stories of the Northwest Coast all tell of a Transformer who traveled the world, making it what it is today.  Sometimes he is Raven, Mink or Coyote, sometimes wholly human or wholly supernatural.  Often, supernatural beings opposed him, and he changed them into what they are today.  Most widespread of these stories is that the ancestral Deer was a humanoid, found sharpening two stone knives to kill the Transformer.  The latter jammed the knives onto his forehead and made him a Deer, running off to be food for people henceforth.  More friendly was a powerful fellow transformer who made friends with the hero, and was thus given the privilege of choosing what to be; he chose to become the Nimpkish River (on Vancouver Island; versions in Barbeau 1950:150; Boas 2006 [1895]:306).  That is why this beautiful stream has all the kinds of salmon in it (or had before the logging companies massacred it—to the heartbreak of the Nimpkish people). 

            The close connection of humans and animals comes through in all the myths and tales. 

Myths, as elsewhere, convey the basic moral and personal lessons of the societies that tell them (see e.g. Atleo 2011 for an extended account of their uses in Indigenous education).  Long epics of human/nonhuman transformation and interchange are universal.  Famous examples include the bear-mother story (see e.g. Barbeau 1953:108-146) and a long, brilliant, tightly organized tale of human-salmon transformations and interactions (several versions in Barbeau 1953:338-367).  All these reinforce the general message of respeft for animals and concern for the entire living world. 

            Conservation is promoted by countless stories (Frey and Hymes 1998, esp. pp. 585-587).  Most promote it indirectly, by stressing the importance and interdependence of all plants and animals.  Thus whole books can be almost devoid of specific directions to conserve; Coquelle Thompson’s repertoire has almost nothing, for instance (Seaburg 2007).  But, given the wealth of stories in the northwest, even a small percentage adds up to a huge number of stories.  Many stories include incidental comments about saving a few animals to reproduce and maintain the population (e.g. Mandeville 2009:214).  Sometimes these few are referred to as “seeds.”

The commonest and most widespread concerns a hunter who takes too many animals, is captured by animal powers and taken into a mountain or under a lake, and instructed never to do that.  He is then released if his sins were not too great, but if he wantonly disregarded advice, he dies.  This story occurs with strikingly little variance from Alaska to the Popoluca of far southern Mexico (Foster 1945).  Related stories exist in the Old World, from Tuva (Kenin-Lopsan 1997) to the Caucasus (Tuite 1994). 

Rodney Frey (1995) gives several versions.  Since his book is about Native storytelling, not about animals or conservation, this represents a fair sampling of how important the story is.  The purest form he provides is a Wishram story, originally published by Edward Sapir and beautifully re-edited by Frey, of a man who got elk power, took too many elk, and was punished by death (Frey 1995:197-182 from Sapir 1995:283-285; it is the source of the quotes above on pride and taking too much). 

A happier outcome is found among the Thompson:  the hunter listens to advice.  A hunter of mountain goats was taken in by them in their humanoid form.  (The reasons they took him in are unclear in this version, but in other versions the hunter has helped a goat, or other animal, and been respectful to it, and is rewarded.)  He learned their ways, marrying and having a son in the process.  He returned to teach his people to respect them:  “When you kill goats, treat their bodies respectfully, for they are people.  Do not shoot the female goats, for they are your wives and will bear your children.  Do not kill kids, for they may be your offspring.  Only shoot your brothers-in-law, the male goats.  Do not be sorry when you kill them, for they do not die but return home.  The flesh and skin (the goat part) remain in your possession; but their real selves (the human part) lives just as before, when it was covered with goat’s flesh and skin.”  (Teit 1912:262, quoted Lévi-Strauss 1995:70).  Claude Lévi-Strauss has discussed this myth at length in another context, showing its relationship to other myths of kinship to the animal people. 

            A story from the Klickitat (southern Washington): 

“Coyote would go about hunting;

            he would shoot and kill all sorts of things.

And now then he shot and killed a deer.

Then he butchered it.

There were two young ones in its belly.

He threw them away and left them there,

            at that place there.

The two young deer lay there.

And rain and snow came upon them.

And the Deer who he had killed felt very badly at heart about them.

Then after that Coyote went all over

            and shot and killed nothing.”

For the obvious reason.  He is instructed to sweat in the sweat lodge five times (the Klickitat sacred number) and then never do such a thing again.  He leaves this instruction for human beings, who are soon to come into the world:

“’All right then….

And this is the way the people will do whenever they shoot

            and kill game.

They will carry all of it back home.

Nothing will they throw away.

Alnd always will they sweat for the purpose of the hunt….”

(Joe Hunt, collected and translated by Melville Jacobs in the 1920s, ed. and publ. Frey 1995:49-52)

            Wasting anything killed gets punishment:  no more game.  Note that the slain deer survives in spirit form and is able to bring this about.   Killing a pregnant doe is already bad, and made much worse by the lack of respect shown to the fawns.

            Even relatively useless animals must be treated with respect.  The Haida have a story of people who tortured frogs by burning them, the result being that the frogs burned their village (see e.g. Boas 2006 [1895]:608).

            And even Coyote himself.  He was vital to creation, he made the world what it is, but he was always a zany, greedy, irresponsible, delightfully silly rogue.  The idea of the Creator as a wild, wise, poetic fool not only makes beautiful poetry, it solves the “problem of evil”; evil was created by mistake and by foolishness.  Raven, along the coyote-less northern coast, has a similar role, but is smarter, greedier, and rather more sinister.  Still, he attracts the same mix of respect and scorn.

            One of the finest Coyote narrations ever recorded is Lawrence Aripa’s telling of the Coeur d’Alene story of “Coyote and the Green Spot” (Frey 2001:134-144).  It was originally told in English, allowing us to share the wonderful style that is otherwise inevitably lost in translation.  In it, Coyote’s long-suffering wife Mole reflects:
“This worthless Coyote,

            he’s no good,

                        he’s mischievous,

                                    he does things that are bad…

                                                But he’s a Coyote….

                                                            and we have to have Coyotes on this earth.”

She reflects on this several times as she revives him from the dead—her role in many a Coyote tale. Coyote’s tricks always fail, he always gets killed in the end, but he is always revived—because, as she says, “Well we do need a Coyote.”  He promises to reform when he revives, but of course is soon back to his tricks, and Aripa ends the story:

“But he is still the Coyote,

            and he will always remain the Coyote.”

And we are fortunate in that.

            This sense that all beings are necessary to the world, no matter how inconsequential or annoying they seem, is absolutely basic to Native North American religion, and has been underemphasized in the past.  We need it now.

            A sad indication of how much of the teaching is lost comes from a Salishan tale of a man who went off to join the seals.  (This story reminds us of the were-seal legends of Scotland and Ireland; as so often, Celtic and Northwest Coast thinking run parallel.)  Franz Boas recorded this story in the 1890s (Boas 2006:221-224), but without a moral, leaving it merely a story of a man who unaccountably went off to become a seal.  Around a hundred years later, Honoré Watanabe recorded a version from Sliammon narrator Mary George.  In George’s version, the man is actively captured or persuaded away by the seal folk, and becomes an ancestor of the Sliammon.  She added a long moral (extracted here):

“You always see seals.

            If you see them, you appreciate them.

            Talk nicely to them….

They are a part of us.

That’s why we really respect seals today…..

            Seals are our people.”  (George and Watanabe 2008:128-129.)

A related story was told by Annie Miner Peterson of the Coos (Jacobs 1940:149-150), and a long and complex seal narrative filled with ideals of respect for animals was recorded from Sauk-Suiattle Salish elder Martha Lamont (Bierwert 1996:230-309).  Presumably most other early collectors failed to hear or record morals in cases like this.  We are deprived of many applications that we now need to know.

            Sometimes conservation is stressed indirectly.  The Kutenai culture hero Yaukekam (I am simplifying the spelling) had to get the components of arrows from their animal keepers.  Ducks had the feathers, and he gave them the power to grow a new crop of beautiful feathers every year, freeing up the old ones for fletching, during the annual moult.  (Ducks do not make the greatest arrow feathers, but I assume geese are included here.) 

            These conservation stories were often dramatized in the spectacular winter dance ceremonies.  In 2010 I was privileged (greatly) to see the ?Atla’gimma dance-drama, a forest spirit ceremony owned by four Kwakwaka’wakw families from the Rivers Inlet area.  It was performed at the 33rd annual conference of the Society of Ethnobiology, by kind courtesy of Kwaxsistalla (Adam Dick) and his family.  It is a spectacular performance, involving some twenty dancers masked and costumed as fantastical spirit-beings of the forest.  The story is the standard one known from the Arctic to the Maya of Quintana Roo, Mexico, where my friend Don Jacinto told it to me from his own experience:  a young man goes hunting, takes more than he needs, and is caught by the spirits and warned never to do that again.  The spirits instruct him in how to act properly and respectfully toward the forest and its living beings.  A number of minor points of ecology appear incidentally; a young tree growing from a stump (a universal sight in the Northwest Coast) shows continuity and rebirth.  The full performance is long and extremely dramatic, and is accompanied by many long speeches that thank, bless, and instruct all those present. 

            Plants too can be over-collected.  From Columbia River people comes a story of a mouse who stole too many roots, which loaded her down so much she drowned crossing a creek; mice have been thieves since (Ackerman 1996:21-22).

            In the mid-19th century, Chief Seattle (Sealth, Siatl) gave a famous speech defending his people’s land and land rights.  This speech was, unfortunately, heavily “edited” by a Baptist group in the 20th century; much of the militant defense of land was taken out, and some syrupy Christian-sounding rhetoric substituted.  Alas, the syrupy additions tend to be the parts most often quoted.  This has given rise to a myth that the speech is purely fraudulent.  This is not the case; Seattle’s famous and passionate defense of Indian rights and of the hunting-gathering way of life against White theft and ruin was real.  However, no full version of it appeared for about 30 years, so the one that finally emerged is rather suspect.  Yet, shorn of the purple English added in late versions, it rings true to the general spirit of northwestern American rhetoric of the time.  The whole story has been told by Albert Furtwangler (1997), and by Rudolf Kaiser (1987), who salvaged what can be found of the original.

11. The Visual Art

            In this section I will confine myself to the coast from northwest Washington to Alaska.  The interior and southerly groups have their own art forms.  These are not only very different from the classic “Northwest Coast” art; they are also less directly concerned with animals and the spirit world.  They are usually geometric and ornamental, rather than visual statements of a whole philosophy.  (On Northwest Coast art, see esp. the superb and encyclopedic collection Native Art of the Northwest Coast, edited by Charlotte Townsend-Gault et al.; for the interior, Ackerman 1996.)

This contrasts with ideology and verbal art, where the commonalities overwhelmingly outweigh the differences.    The obvious practical reason for the difference is the more stable, settled life on the coast and the consequent greater opportunity to amass whole arrays of tools as well as gigantic works of art.  The Plateau tribes and the Oregon and California coastal ones had large permanent houses and sophisticated tool arrays.  However, there is more to it than that.  There are clearly some aesthetic and philosophical differences that so far defy analysis but that have an important effect.

It was briefly thought in the early 20th century that the spectacular art of the Northwest was largely a post-contact phenomenon, but archaeology has found plenty of examples of fine art going back more than 2000 years (Duff 1975).  The climate is not kind to wood or even to soft stone, so little remains except hard-stone work.  However, that is revealing.  Also, we can compare the ancient ivories from Alaska (Wardwell 1986), dating back as far as 2000 years, which reflect a style rather close to Northwest Coast art—considerably closer to it than are contemporary Yupik and Inupiak art.  (Compare the plates in Wardwell 1986:71-91 with the stonework in Duff 1975 and with the earliest historic northern Northwest Coast art.)  The sheer volume of art certainly increased after contact, but the style and content were developed before.

            Sheer aesthetic wonder at the bounty of fish and other resources must lie behind the Northwest Coast attitude to nature and art (as noted by Lam and Gonzalez-Plaza 2007).  It is, however, not the major drive.  The main focus is on spirits, and the unity of cosmos and local community that exists on the spiritual level and that is maintained by spiritual exchanges, gifts, and actions. 

            The highest purpose of this art is to display kinship affiliations and stories and associated hereditary privileges within the kinship groups.  Dance costumes including huge masks, blankets, frontlets, and other goods are for displaying in ritual dances—usually kingroup-owned—at potlatches and cemeteries. 

            “Totem poles” have nothing to do with totemism; they display important events in the ancestry of the chiefly descent group that set them up.  The great ones are usually house poles; smaller ones are memorial poles, so similar to gravestones in concept that many groups have switched to the latter without changing the associated ceremonies.  Still others are for art’s sake, or for museums, or parks.  Whatever the purpose, the poles always commemorate the chiefly ancestry of the carvers or their people (see Garfield and Forrest 1961; Halpin 1981b). 

            Aesthetic power shows spiritual power.  An artist whose work has a powerful emotional effect on the viewer has received power from the appropriate spirit.  The Haida have a Master Carpenter (or Carver) as one of their most important supernaturals.  The evocative quality of the art is greatly enhanced for its intended audience by the social connections, family histories, and personal connections. 

            Indigenous lawyer and leader Douglas White, with his sister, visited the American Museum of Natural History.  They came upon a screen that had belonged to their Nuu-chah-nulth great-grandfather.  “ My sister and I were stunned and deeply moved.  After standing in front of the screen for five minutes…we realized we had to do something.  I told my sister that we should go back to the screen, and I would sing one of our family’s potlatch songs, and she should dance.”  Which they did, “for a full five minutes—tears streaming down our faces at the emotional and spiritual impact of an unexpected reconnection with such a critical part of our family’s existence…. No one disturbed us, not even the security guard, who came close but did not intervene…my sister and I were transformed that day by the experience of singing and dancing in front of our screen” (White 2013:642). 

            Thus, gifts of carved, painted, or woven art works are the highest of gifts, and are appropriate prestations to new title-holders at the most important events.  The best Northwest Coast art still usually stays in this highly-charged, emotional world, and rarely gets out to the museums, at least until everyone has seen it and viewed it appropriately.  Exceptions occur when a museum or public body can directly commission a work of art for an appropriate public ceremonial purpose.  It is within this personal universe that craftsmanship becomes both a social and a spiritual thing.  “As the late Haida artist Bill Reid never tired of pointing out, the highest morality is craftsmanship.  One can give nothing more precious of oneself than something well-designed and well-crafted” (Bill Reid, personal communication to Richard Daly, in Daly 2005:45; Reid said more or less the same to the present author).  This obviously takes art far beyond the decorative (or merely shocking or titillating) function(s) it serves in the modern western world.  Northwest Coast art is much more comparable to art in Europe in the medieval age of cathedrals and altarpieces.

            It therefore makes sense that carving was considered a powerful spiritual gift—from the Master Carver himself, in Haida thinking—and that many carvers were of high rank.  Tsimshian artmakers were gitsontk, “people of the hidden studios”—they were highly respected people who worked in chambers or studios taboo to ordinary people and used for formal meetings as well as art (Garfield 1939; Halpin 1981a:274).  This sense that artists are specially gifted, and the corollary that high-born persons are drawn to that trade, is very much alive today.  Studios are still power places for many, all up and down the coast.

            Totem poles and other outdoor art weather away quickly in the Northwest, even if made of cedar.  (They almost always are, because it is easy to work but relatively slow to weather away.)  This disappearance is regretted, but seen as the natural process.  New poles are carved at need.  Again one recalls medieval European attitudes toward art:  wooden sculptures in the open, or days of work on exquisite detail far up in the church roof where no human eyes would ever see it.  The art was for audiences more than human.

            Daly (2005:68) notes:  “The art-appreciating public….forgets that its perceptions are informed by its own literate, written-down tradition….  This public does not see past the rotting artifact to a culture alive and confident of its roots and its pedigree.”  He is thus not in favor of specially preserving the poles.  The public could answer that culture is all very well, but there is also all humanity to consider.  The species at large may have some moral claim on a truly beautiful object made for public display, and this is a moral claim recognized by all nations today (via UNESCO among other vehicles).  Today the rule is still for the best poles to be in the open, to pass away with time, but also to carve replica poles for museums, if so desired.

            Body, house, and cosmos are often equated.  For the Puget Sound Salish, a house is a kneeling body, the house front being the face (Miller 1999:36).  The hearth in the house could be the sun, the ridgepole a backbone, river, and Milky Way all at once, and the four main supporting posts then become human limbs as well as the pillars that hold up the sky.  Canoes were similarly represented.  “In consequence, curing, bailing, and cleaning were all reflexes of a renewal of the world” (Miller 1999:36).

The Tsimshian, and Haida (Duff 1981:215), however, saw the house front as the whole front-facing side of an animal sitting on its haunches, with the result that the door is often the entrance to the womb.  One housefront represented a female bear.  The humans entered and exited through its vagina, thus either being born or returning to the womb whenever they passed.  There is even a small face above the door where a clitoris should be.

(Jonaitis 1981, 1986, 1988, 1991, 1999, 2008)  MacDonald (1983) Vancouver Art Gallery (2006)

            Ronald Hawker (2003) has chronicled the “dark ages” of coast art, from 1921 to 1961.  The first date was that of the arrest of dozens of people and the confiscation of potlatch goods, including fine art objects, at the Cranmer potlatch.  This marked the beginning of really condign and general enforcement of the anti-potlatch law, previously rather less than seriously enforced in remote areas.  The second date is, of course, the granting of citizen rights (including freedom of religion and thus of ceremonies) on the Canadian side.  Hawker points out that art survived, but he has to admit it was down to a slender thread //n//.  //Footnote/ Hawken (2003, esp. p. 8) has some rather unfortunate  things to say about those who speak of a “renaissance” after 1961.  He was evidently not on the coast before 1961.  If I may be permitted a bit of reminiscence, it was indeed possible, though difficult, to find good art then—but it was considered “mere craft” and a fine carving or basket would cost $10 or $20.  Fine large pieces were virtually impossible to find.  Having watched from a distance and later studied close-hand the renaissance, from 1960 through the 1980s, and interviewed many of the participants, I can testify that there was a quite incredible explosion of quantity and quality—and of price, as people of all “races” came to appreciate the work.  Sordid lucre may be the worst way to evaluate such things, but it does give some measure of how much people care.// 

Few artists continued.  Charlie James in Alert Bay continued to carve “Kwakiutl” poles, with some government and business patronage, and taught his stepson Mungo Martin.  The latter, who organized that first potlatch at the British Columbia Museum, was a genuinely great artist by any standards, European or Native.  He was also a fine and patient teacher of art, culture, and ceremony.  (My introduction to Northwest Coast art in its native home was watching him carve at the Royal British Columbia Museum in 1960.)  He taught a whole new generation, including the art historian Bill Holm, long curator at the Burke Museum at the University of Washington.  Holm’s classic analysis of Northwest Coast art as serious art rather than craft (Holm 1965) was the opening fire of the revolution in publc appraisal of and attention of the art.  It remains a standard textbook, found in countless art studios throughout the coast.  Holm, a highly capable artist himself, also knew the other traditional forms. He was, for a while, the only person to know several classic Kwakwaka’wakw dances, and generously taught many young First Nations people.  For this he eventually received a Kwakwala name.  

Meanwhile, art revived among the more northern tribes.  Of course the Tlingit and Alaskan Haida benefited from the fact that potlatches and ceremonies had never been banned in Alaska (thanks to the First Amendment), though the missionaries tried their hardest to discourage them.  So art had not shrunk so much there. 

In any case, a huge explosion of art followed from legalization of the potlatch, local White interest, and patronage by the University of British Columbia as well as the two museums and their local urban counterparts.  Bill Reid became a leader of the Haida art renaissance, along with Robert Davidson and several others.  Like Martin, Reid and Davidson went far beyond mere copying of old forms, and were genuinely great creative artists by any standards.  Reid was also an excellent writer and speaker (De Menil and Reid 1971; Reid 2000); he had a career in radio before turning to art.  Reid’s dialogue on classic art pieces with Bill Holm (Holm and Reid 1975) was a landmark in understanding the art as form and message.

Another pioneer of the renaissance was Wilson Duff, longtime curator of art at the Royal British Columbia Museum in Victoria, later professor at the University of British Columbia.  He analyzed the art in depth and with sensitivity and theoretical interest, trying to understand the mindsets behind it.  His work was cut short by early and tragic death, but stimulated serious thought as well as public interest (Abbott1981; Duff 1975, 1981, 1996). 

Wilson Duff, Bill Holm and Bill Reid (1967) worked together on the famous “Legacy” exhibit at the Vancouver Art Gallery (Vancouver’s city art museum, not a private gallery).  The combination of anthropological theorist, structural analyst, and leading artist was perfect.  A major stated purpose of this exhibit was to get Native art taken seriously as fine art, rather than dismissed as “craft” and consigned to museums of natural history.  At this the show succeeded brilliantly.  Native art prices shot out of sight, and many a career was launched.  Also, the show more or less explicitly gave Native people the right to explore, expand on, and develop their traditions any way they saw fit, without being attacked for “unauthenticity” whenever they got beyond the pre-1921 forms.  We now have Native video, glassmaking art, mixed media, everything, and the art keeps getting better all the time—but this is beyond my subject matter here. 

A later Legacy show organized by Peter MacNair (MacNair et al. 1984) highlighted new creations since the 1960s revival.  The catalogue contains particularly fine photos and biographies.  Great art continues, increasing every day, as more and more of the younger generation find emotional satisfaction as well as economic prospects in the art.  The spiritual knowledge that drives it remains active and vibrant.  It has reacted to Christianity and secular modernity, but those settler intrusions have strengthened the old concepts as often as they have weakened them.  (This point derives largely from my own field work and interviews, but see e.g. G. Wyatt 1994, 1999.)

The art is highly relevant to environmental ideology and practice.  Above all, it encodes the spirit beliefs recorded above, putting them in dramatic visual form for all to see.  (Among major collections, see e.g. Musée de l’Homme Paris 1970;  MAYBE THIS IN FN?)  Stonework was particularly difficult to make under aboriginal conditions, and thus particularly revealing, and it preserves for thousands of years, allowing us to see that Northwest Coast art developed slowly and steadily.  A thorough collection of stone art, with all too brief introduction (the author died about the time the book was published), was provided by Wilson Duff (1975). 

Masks are particularly important, because anyone wearing and dancing with a mask becomes the being or animal portrayed, or at least is inspired by its spirit.  In the spectacular performances of the central and northern coast, huge masks were created, many of which could be changed during performances by strings attached to moving parts.  Raven could open and close his beak, cranes could flap their wings, supernaturals could open and close their eyes.  Among the Tsimshian, fast shifting of masks was also practiced; men could shift from male to female and back by shifting masks, often along with women doing the same (Halpin 1981a).  This partially explains one of the most striking works of Northwest Coast art: a set of two neatly-fitting masks carved in hard stone by an unknown Tsimshian artist in the mid-19th century (one was collected in 1879; Duff 1975:164).  Apparently, metal tools were used.  The inner mask has eyes wide open, with an alert look; the outer mask has its eyes closed and appears peaceful and at rest.  Duff (1975) and Marjorie Halpin (1981a) analyzed this pair, noting that they could be changed rapidly.  In the flickering firelight of a winter ceremony, it would seem that a stone-headed being was opening and closing his eyes.  Open eyes stand for alertness and perception.  Halpin quotes a Tsimshian writer in 1863 describing relgious conversion as having his eyes bored (Halpin 1981a:286).  Tsimshian masks and other visual privileges are naxnox (see above), and often accompany societies of initiated persons of noble lineages, such as the Dog Eaters and Cannibals. 

The Kwakwaka’wakw also have hereditary mask privileges that go with secret societies, including a supposedly cannibal society whose members can theoretically take bites out of people (but in practice usually or always fake it).  The most famous cluster of initiate-related masks and dances concerns the monstrous man-eating birds known as the Hohokw, the Baqbaqwalanukhsiwe, the Crooked Beak of Heaven, and others.  Masks of these beings are so large that only a very muscular person can dance with them; they can weigh 30 kg.  Other classic masks include Moon, Sun, wolf, raven in various incarnations, bukwus (Wild Man of the Woods), nułmał (a sinister “fool,” an ominous clown), grizzly bear, sea creatures, and many more.  Many of these are significantly ambigous figures, like the terrifying but helpful monster-birds and the humorous but dangerous nułmał.  The mix of danger with humor or help is an expression of strong spirit power, and the three together make up a basic underpinning of Kwakwaka’wakw philosophy, an armature on which to base ontological and moral thinking.

12.  Conclusions

            NancyTurner, leading authority on human ecology on the Northwest Coast, has compiled a list of lessons she wants the world to learn.  She advocates “connecting with communities and places,” celebrating generations and elders, recognizing relationships, being grateful and responsible while maintaining accountability, “valuing and supporting diversity,” using different teaching styles, and using all these to re-create healthy, sustainably managed ecosystems (Turner 2014-2:403, 404, 405-411). 

            More specific recommendations and more radical views come from the Indigenous authors already cited. 

Appendix 1.  A Note on Languages

            The Northwest Coast is famous, or infamous, for the variety and difficulty of its languages.  Many, especially in the core area from Washington to southern Alaska, are full of guttural sounds and have a huge range of phonemes.  They actually sound better than they look on paper.  The off-putting symbols of the International Phonetic Alphabet make transcriptions look positively unearthly, but the reality is usually a fair-spoken and pleasant-sounding tongue.  Oratory and rhetoric were, and sometimes still are, developed as truly great arts.  I have been moved to tears by Nuu-chah-nulth speeches even though I could get almost none of the words.

Taking the whole stretch from Alaska to northern California, we have the following:

Eskimo-Aleut:  Unrelated to any other languages, and to each other only about as closely as English and Greek.  Several “Eskimo” languages exist in Alaska, including Inuvialut, Yupik, and Chugach; they are about as close as the Romance languages.  Yupik is spoken on both sides of Bering Strait. 

            Na-Dene (pronounced “nah-daynay”):  A vast, continguous sweep of languages, centering on and originating from south-central Alaska.  The “Na” branch includes only one language, Tlingit; “na” is their word for “people” (presumably cognate with the “ne” of “Dene,” which is in fact pronounced “dena” in several areas).  The Dene branch includes the Athapaskan languages, among which some variant of “Dene” means “people.”  Most of the Athapaskans are interior peoples in the frigid spruce forests of Alaska and western Canada, but small groups split off early and drifted as far as southern Washington, coastal Oregon, and northwestern California.  The Navaho and Apache of the Southwest are also Athapaskan, but they came down from Canada much later, possibly while the Spanish were invading from the other end of the continent.  I have met British Columbia Athapaskans who had encountered Navaho at intertribal meetings and could actually talk with them, more than trivially, in their respective Athapaskan languages. 

Na-Dene is probably distantly related to the Ket language of Siberia (Edward Vajda, mss.)—the only other cross-Bering relationship among American languages.  (The occasionally-alleged link of Athapaskan with Chinese is spurious.)

The Na-Dene have the distinction of being powerfully matrilineal, and indeed are one of the biggest chunks of matrilineal people on earth.  So are all their neighbors in northwest British Columbia; one wonders who influenced whom.

            Haida:  A very old linguistic isolate, apparently on the islands of Haida Gwaii since they were first settled over 10,000 years ago.  Possibly distantly related to Na-Dene, but on bad evidence.  Swanton collected a word list of words similar in Haida and Tlingit, but most are obviously recent loans, and the rest could be due to chance.  Some linguists claim they have better evidence, but if they have adequately published it, I cannot find it.  The languages are very different.  I have some experience with Haida and have examined Swanton’s list; I find the linkage unconvincing. 

            Tsimshian:  Three closely related languages spoken in the lower Skeena and Nass River areas.  Possibly distantly related to the Penutian languages farther south (q.v.).

            Wakashan:  The Heiltsuk, Haisla, and Kwakala languages, which form a tight group (Northern Wakashan), and the slightly more distant Nootkan languages: Nuu-chah-nulth of west Vancouver Island, and the Nitinat-Makah language of southern Vancouver Island and neighboring northwest Washington.  “The Haisla are said to have spoken a Tsimshianic language until some date in the late-precontact period” (Roth 2008:17).

            Salishan:  A vast variety of highly diverse langauges, stretching from central British Columbia inland to western Montana and south to northwest Oregon.  They have the dubious distinction of being the most guttural, glottal-stopped, and consonant-dominated languages in the world, making them difficult for an outsider to learn.  Still, many non-native-speakers have done it.

            Chemakuan:  A tiny language isolate with only two languages:  Chemakum (extinct) and Quileute (dying fast, unfortunately).

            Algonkian:   the great family that dominates the northeastern continent; it extends west to extreme eastern British Columbia (Cree) and to northwestern California.  The relevant languages of the latter area are so distinct it is often separated as a coordinate branch, Ritwan, of a wider grouping (Algonkian-Ritwan).  Kutenai  (spoken at the BC-Idaho-Montana tripoint) may be related; if so, the relationship is distant indeed.

            Penutian:  This family includes the Sahaptin languages of central Washington and neighboring Oregon; and most of the languages of central Oregon and central California, as far south as the Tehachapi.  These languages are far apart.  The most geographically separate are as linguistically different as English is from Armenian or Hittite—so the relationships are tenuous.  The Tsimshian family is even more distant, and its alleged relationship to Penutian requires restudy.  Interestingly, the Mayan language family of Mexico and Guatemala is probably related to Penutian.  Edward Sapir first proposed this; Cecil Brown and I have collected a good deal of supporting evidence, but can’t quite clinch the case, due to lamentable loss of the languages in California, making comparative material wholly inadequate.

            Karok and Shastan:  Northwest Californian outliers of the “Hokan phylum,” so ancient and diverse that many linguists question its existence.  If it is real, these languages have relations all over California and Baja California.

            Yukian:  A tiny family with only three or four languages, all extinct, that once flourished in northwestern California.  It may be distantly related to the isolated languages of south Louisiana (Greenberg 1987) but no one has proved this.

            So we have eleven or more totally distinct groupings, as different from each other as English is from any one of them—or from Bantu or Arabic.  This makes the Northwest Coast and California one of the most diverse areas on earth, linguistically.  Joseph Greenberg (1987) grouped all these except Eskimo-Aleut and Na-Dene into one great Amerindian phylum, which would also include the other languages of the Americas, but he did not live to prove its reality and no one now accepts it on faith.  Conversely, Joanna Nichols (   ) finds these languages so different that she believes they must represent different migrations from Siberia—there has not been enough time for them to differentiate in the Americas!  With America now thought to have been settled at least 15,000 years ago, there is actually time.  But the languages certainly are different. 

            Experience has taught me to question any link that is not well established.  There are Russian linguists who postulate a vast “Nostratic” superphylum including all the major languages of the northern Old World, and there are even linguists who postulate a single “Proto-World” language.  I find the evidence for Nostratic (the most modest, limited form of it) very slightly convincing, but Proto-World strikes me as well within the realm of fantasy, along with extraterrestrial contacts.  That said, I do not know any Northwest Coast languages, so I cannot speak with authority on issues concerning them.  I have looked extensively through materials—mainly collections of texts—in all the languages, however, so at least I know something of the words and sounds.

            Since the Americas were probably settled from the Northwest, we would expect to find maximal linguistic diversity there, and to find the great language phyla stretching out from there, getting less diverse as they go.  This, indeed, we often do find.  Na-Dene, Algonkian, and Penutian are most diverse in the Northwest and get less so as one moves away from it.  Salishan is most diverse along the coast (Nuxalk being the most distinctive), less so inland.

            In the old days, most adults had enough contact with other languages to learn at least one other, and some people knew several—especially at places like the mouth of the Columbia, where many small groups existed and traded widely.  I have heard at least semi-believable stories of areas where people had no idea of “a native language”—everyone spoke at least two from birth!  One such that I know from some experience was the Port Alberni area of Vancouver Island, where Nuu-chah-nulth were moving in on Salish territory when the white settlers came.  Most people seems to have known both languages.

Appendix 2.  The Old Northern Worldview

The Northwest Coast worldviews are special instantiations of a more general worldview that I refer to as “Old Northern” (Anderson 2014).  This general type of ontology probably had no single place of origin; it developed through constant feedback, over thousands of years, between the many societies that share it.  Thanks to continued contact, migration, and information flow around the circumpolar land masses, it has remained rather uniform (at least in some aspects).  A steady diffusion of beliefs and practices has tended to homogenize beliefs about subsistence and environment.  I am not claiming some sort of deep spiritual identity; I am claiming only a broad similarity, created (at least in part) through cultural transmission, of ontology and of environmental management ideas.

It sees humans and animals, and often plants, mountains, and streams, as spiritual beings, linked by spirit contacts and interactions.  It is an instantiation of the “animistic” type of ontology as defined by Philippe Descola (2013).   This is a hunters’ world (Descola 2013), and humans depend on animals; they must show respect, care for the animals’ souls, hunt carefully, and communicate with animals via rituals and visions. 

The Old Northern worldview, as I see it, was shared across the Old World and New World arctic and subarctic zones, and down throughout the hunting-gathering societies of North America and the hunters and pastoralists of northeast Asia and high central Asia.  It seems to become progressively diluted as it enters agricultural societies.  It slowly erodes with the coming of cities, mass trade, and industrial production.  It eventually disappears as an identifiable worldview, but survives in such things as the nature consciousness of the Celtic peoples, the animistic beliefs about tree spirits in Chinese folk culture, and the survival of beliefs in animal companion spirits (naguales) in modern Mexico.  It thus has no definable boundaries in space or time; it is a fuzzy set.

South America’s indigenous cultures often show Old Northern origin or influence, but they vary greatly (see above; also Balee 1994; Lentz 2000; and Sullivan’s great synthesis of South American native religions, 1989).  Some have something close to the North American sense of interpenetration with the natural (Reed 1995, 1997; Reichel-Dolmatoff 1968, 1971, 1976, 1996; Sullivan 1989; Ventocilla et al. 1995).  One group, for instance, believes that humans are reborn as peccaries and vice versa, leading to an alternation of generations.  The peccary you kill is your relative sacrificing himself, or herself, to feed you (Blaser 2009; Descola 2013).  This clearly resonates with Old Northern reincarnation concepts.

Of major concern to our purposes here is the universal conservation ideology of the Old Northern view, especially in regard to animals.  Major gods or goddesses protect them:  Artemis/Diana in Europe, Cybele in Asia Minor, Prajapati in India, and spirits of each animal species in much of the New World.  Trees, or at least some of them, are sacred everywhere, and one must ask permission for taking bark or wood, and must be respectful of them.  Water is widely regarded as sacred, and rules against polluting it are correspondingly widespread among cultures that have some shortage of it, especially in Siberia and Mongolia (see my posting “Water” on my website, www.krazykioti.com).  Mountains are sacred (at least some of them), and often the sacred mountains are taboo for hunting and getting resources, or at least are taboo for all but the lowest-impact uses. 

As we have seen in the main text of this book, this was a hunters’ world, in which human and other-than-human persons are intertwined and can change into one another.  Healers and religious officiants can go into trance, visit the spirit lands, and find out how to deal with human problems ranging from sickness to bad hunting luck.  Typically, the underworld, this world, and the upper world are linked by a sacred tree.  This became the ash Yggdrasil in Scandinavia, the birch in the northern Uralic cultures, and so on, and has gone as far as Yucatan, where the Maya still revere the ceiba as the world-pole tree.  The world tree is known beyond the Old Northern area, and may be almost humanity-wide (Cook 1974).

The spectacular cave art of Europe, which goes back some 35,000 years (Clottes 2008), implies reasonably strongly that this world-view existed at that time.  Beautifully drawn animals, with human-animal hybrid figures, were drawn in remote, dark caves (not in the inhabited, lit caves beloved of cartoonists). 

Some aspects of the Old Northern view may be survivals of the original worldview of humans from our earliest origins.  Joseph Campbell traced many similarities between the most remote and distinctive surviving humans, the San of South Africa, and hunter-gatherers elsewhere.  He inferred a basic worldview, the “way of the animal powers” (Campbell 1983).  Most scholars would probably caution that he overstated the case, but he appears to have had a case, especially as evidence accumulates that most of the world’s languages are related and that all existing humans are genetically close enough to be cousins.  Modern humans originated in northeast Africa a mere 150,000 years or so ago, and probably did not get far from home until less than 100,000 years ago.  They have been in Australia for 50-60,000 years, in Europe 40,000 years, in northeast Siberia a mere 20,000 or less, in the Americas somewhat over 15,000.  In more recent millennia, there has been constant migration, exchange, and mutual learning, leading to such widespread homologies as the animal-soul beliefs of the Old Northern system.

Campbell points not only to animal spirits but to trance-healing, pictograph art showing animals, the ritual power of song and dance, and the belief in a skyworld for spirits and an underworld for the dead, as well as the mythic importance of hunters (cf. Fontenrose 1981) and their association with transformers. 

Campbell based some of his thinking on Carl Jung’s concept of archetypes—symbols that appear over and over in myth, and clearly have some resonance with the human mind.  Animals, the world-tree, waterfalls, snakes, and sacred mountains occur in religious symbolism everywhere (as of course do images of mother, father, and child), and qualify as archetypes.  Unfortunately, Jung’s concept is too vague and general for my purposes here.  These images may be, in part, genetically imprinted on us; all primates are scared of snakes.  They may be derived from a common source (if Campbell’s animal-powers religion has any reality).  They are most certainly subject to independent invention everywhere humans have gone.  Nobody could miss the centrality of parent-child bonds, the salience of mountains, the awesome power of water rushing over a waterfall, or the lifesaving value of water welling up in a spring.  Thus we cannot say much about what “archetypes” really are, or were.

Belief in, and reverence for, the spirits and deities in all things is more or less what E. B. Tylor (1871) caled “animism.”  Tylor viewed it as “primitive,” which led to the term “animism” being shunned for a while, but it is now being rehabilitated by scholars who realize it is not some sort of primitive holdover.  It is as developed and sophisticated a religious view as any other (Descola 2013; Harvey 2006; Hunn 1990).  Animism is based on the tendency to assign spirits or personhood to living things, or sometimes to everything.  Chinese folktales assign wilful, agentive spirits of rags, discarded bits of paper, and old roof tiles. 

Humans in animism are clearly different from animals and other nonhuman beings.  Each can transform into the other, under some conditions, but the very fact that this is a subject for myth shows that it is not expected to be routine.  Similarly, culture is different from nature.  Claude Lévi-Strauss (1962, 1963, 1964-1971) was right: most groups (but perhaps not all) seem to make a distinction between culture and nature.  Every human group known to me has a belief in “natural humans” like Bigfoot—hairy “savages” (Latin homo sylvaticus “forest person”), people in their “natural state,” lacking culture. 

One widespread idea within the Old Northern cluster is a belief in the Master (or Mistress) of Animals.  Others include the universality of animal souls, the full personhood of animals, the need to respect them, the idea that they sacrifice themselves to the hunter, many ideas of “power animals” and plants and places, and other details (Hayden 2013).  Such beliefs are lacking in the southern hemisphere, except where Native Americans have carried them to South America over time.  They are vestigial in the warmer parts of the Old World.  Of course, not everyone shares all these beliefs.  Paul Radin (1927 , 1957) early documented the striking range of difference in belief that existed within one small Native American group. Indeed, Brian Hayden notes that, in traditional hunter societies, typically 10-20% of individuals do not believe in spirits at all (Hayden 2013:495; cf. Hayden 2003).  Every society has its nonbelievers. I thus treat here of widely, but not universally, shared ideas.

The Old Northern complex is associated with shamanism, but many of the relevant groups have ancestor cults and other religious manifestations outside of the shamanistic system.  True shamanism is characterized by rather specific ideas of the cosmos.  The shaman goes into trance and goes through a long dark passage, or climbs the world tree, or otherwise takes a long and arduous “shamanic journey” to reach the lands of spirits above or below.  (The best account I have seen is in Caroline Humphrey’s superb book Shamans and Elders, 1996, written with the Mongol shaman Urgunge Onon.  Eliade’s classic Shamanism, 1965, is seriously dated, though still useful for an overview.)  Aids to trance such as flashing lights, hypnotic drumming, dancing, and hyperventilation are used.  The shaman is an individual performer, but socially recognized, and shamans may share secrets quite widely, so there is something like an organized religion here in spite of the lack of a “church.”  In fact, today, Siberian shamanism is well organized and becoming a major religion.

This sort of shamanism is confined to the Tungus and their neighbors, especially the Mongols, eastern Turkic peoples, and the peoples of central Siberia.  It grades into the “Tengrism” (worship of Heaven, Mongol tengri) in Mongol and Turkic cultures and in early China (where Heaven was tian, a possibly related word).  In these societies Heaven was an abstract, non-humanoid high God. 

Within the Old Northern universe are many religions similar to shamanism.  Very similar views extend widely in east Asia, subarctic Eurasia and Native North America, but they are different from true shamanism.  Particularly in northern Siberia and interior North America, they are more ad hoc, less formalized, less detailed, and thus appear to represent a broader and probably older spectrum of belief.  (I say “probably older” not because of long-discredited ideas of “cultural evolution,” but because classic Mongol-Tungus shamanism seems to me to have been influenced by high civilizations; these shamans use mirrors and metal swords.)   Alternatively, many Native American religions are as complex, elaborated, and self-conscious as the Asian ones, but involve a more complex vision questing in which all individuals seek spirit power and are expected to get it, but only some go on to higher or more specialized powers that are comparable to the shamanic ones of Asia (Benedict 1923 and many subsequent works). 

The tendency to use “shamanism” for all Native American (let alone all “noncivilized”!) spiritual beliefs seems to me too sloppy and vague to be desirable.  There is a huge debate on this issue in the literature (Humphrey [1996]; Kenin-Lopsan [1997]; Nowak and Durrant [1977]; for critiques, see summaries of critical opinions in Harvey 2006 and Willerslev 2007).  Even Northwest Coast healers are shamans only by wide extension of the term.

Shamanism is clearly one modern derivative of the Old Northern view.  The latter has evolved into, or contributed at some level to, many other local forms.  These include East Asian nature mysticism (as in Daoism, Zen, and Shinto), Native North American religions, and early Celtic visionary traditions.  Some or all of these (especially Zen) obviously have other roots as well.  Shamanism (in the narrow sense) has also graded into or blended with quite different worldviews in Korea and China, as historical studies show.  There is every reason to believe that spirit mediumship developed from shamanic religion in China, Japan (Blacker 1986), and Korea (Kendall 1985, 1988).  Similarly, ancient Greek religion is clearly a solidly Old Northern religion, influenced—more and more heavily over time—by Mesopotamian, Levantine, and Egyptian religions (cf. Dodds 1951; Fontenrose 1959, 1981).

            As so often, insightful comparisons with medieval Ireland can be made.  The unique, fascinating, and complex story of “mad Sweeney” (Heaney 1984) gets into realms of shamanic soul-travel.  It is a Christian epic; Sweeney offends an early missionary, who curses him by making him go “mad” and flee from a battle—an unbearable shame for an Irish chief.  Sweeney wanders through Ireland, finally finding peace in his last days in a Christian community.  It is quite obvious that Sweeney is not so much “mad” as engaging in ancient shaman-like practices, though the anonymous author also describes strikingly well the effects of war-induced terror.  Sweeney was evidently a practitioner of a shamanic spiritual discipline that is downvalued by Christianity.  He flies, takes great leaps, shifts shape, foretells the future, talks with wolves, diagnoses mental states, and otherwise acts like a classic northeast Asian shaman.  The anonymous author the work, though Christian, has an obvious sympathy with Sweeney and his “madness.”  The result is one of the most amazing “inside” accounts of soul travels in all world literature, and it is very well worth comparing with Jay Miller’s and others’ Northwest Coast “shamanic odysseys.”  We have this work in a rather late and somewhat corrupt version, but the language is medieval Irish Gaelic, and includes a great deal of extremely beautiful poetry; readers of Irish can consult J. G. O’Keeffe’s excellent bilingual edition (1913).

            Another Irish mythic figure, King Conare, was part bird in origin and was protected by birds who could shed their feather mantles and appear as humans.  From them he got power but had to observe certain rules (geasas) to keep it.  He was constantly being put in positions of having to break these rules, and thus eventually died (Gantz 1981:60-106).  The shape-shifter spirits granting power, the rules attending that, and the myth turning on loss of power through having to break the rules are exactly the same in Northwest Coast mythology.  The similarity seems too close for independent invention.

Throughout the Old North, souls are highly mobile—they can and often do leave the body.  They can inhabit other venues in the process.  This implies that soul travel, soul exchange, dream journeys, and ghosts are all regular features of life.  A given soul can inhabit animal or human bodies, and shape-shifting is common.

Trees and mountains are people and have their own spirits.  High regard for trees and their spirits is one of the main beliefs binding the Old Northern world into a single worldview.  Shutova (2006) reports for the Siberian Udmurt, and Wiget and Balalaeva (2011) for the Khanty, rather similar regard for trees to that reported for Northwest Coast peoples (Turner 2005).  Rivers are important, and dramatic water features such as waterfalls and sinkholes are revered—again all the way from the Khanty (Wiget and Balalaeva 2011:114) to the Maya.  Dramatic rocks and prominences are too, but this is so universally true of humanity that it hardly marks an Old Northern trait.  Trees, waters, and mountains are sacred or highly revered.  Tibet’s Pure Crystal Mountain, for one, maintains its forests (Huber 1999).

When animals are not interacting with people, they often live in villages, look like humans, and see their world in humanlike terms.  This view is universally attested in the literature from ancient Scandinavian and Celtic culture right across Siberia and throughout Native North America.  It is also very widespread in South America (see e.g. Descola 2013; Lloyd 2007:145).  American Native views probably developed from Old Northern views brought across the Bering Strait as long ago as 15,000 years.

But animal people are not quite the same as human people, even when in their humanoid forms.  They still act like themselves.  Thus Descola (2013) sees “animism” as postulating similarity in material form but not in essence.  Yukaghir reindeer people in their humanoid form grunt instead of talking and eat lichen instead of meat (Willerslev 2007:89-90; at least one Siberian Yukaghir hunter told Rane Willerslav of an actual visit to a village of wild reindeer in their human form [Willerslev 2007:89-90].  The hunter admitted he might have dreamed it all, but was fairly convinced it had been real).

In many societies, stretching across the whole Old Northern world, the Masters of the Game are exceedingly important.  These are gods, spirits, or sometimes giant or superior animals, that are the leaders or divine protectors of their species.  This belief system stretches from the Khanty of far northwest Siberia (Wiget and Balalaeva  2011:106-107) to the Maya of Mexico (Llanes Pasos 1993) and on into South America.  It is thus one of the most strikingly uniform and specific traits of the Old Northern worldview.

In Georgia (Caucasus), the worship of pre-Christian deities who served as Masters of the Game persisted into the twentieth century.  The Georgians proper revere Ochopintra in this role (Tuite 1994:73, 134).  The closely related Svan people worshiped the goddess Dael or Dali (Tuite 1994:18, 45-47, 126, 141-3), equivalent to the Roman Diana.  She protected game, and punished those who hunted improperly, wastefully, and destructively. Significantly, these deities, and many related beliefs associated with plants and animals, survived 1700 years of Christianity.  On the other hand, the European separation of nature from culture is present—though not extreme—in Georgia, and very possibly goes back to ancient times (as it does among the Greeks).

The associated reverence for animal persons is perhaps most famously shown in an old ballad about a woman whose son died killing a leopard (or tiger; Tuite 1994:37-41).  The woman sings to the leopard’s mother: 

“I will go, yes I will see her,

And bring her words of compassion.

She will tell her son’s story

And I will tell her of mine.

For he too is to be mourned

Cut down by a merciless sword.”

The werewolf is a common type, but the “bear doctor” is far commoner.  “Bear doctor” is a Californian term, used by Native Californians speaking English (see Blackburn 1975).  But the idea stretches from America to Scandinavia, where the berserkers are the same type of were-being; berserk means “bear shirt.”  In historic times, berserkers were ordinary humans who fell into a battle-frenzy, but they had been bear transformers in the mythic past.  The Celtic battle-frenzy (made famous by Caesar’s accounts of the Gauls) must have been originally the same or related, though no bear stories survive about it.

Common, if not universal, are myths in which a trickster-transformer god or chief spirit makes things what they are today.  The head transformer is Coyote in most of western North America, Raven in the northwest and in northeast Siberia, and various humanoid or composite beings in most of the rest of the western hemisphere.  The cognate European and Chinese figure is the fox, but he has degraded to a mere folklore character.  So has the Japanese trickster, the raccoon-dog or tanuki (generally mistranslated “badger” in English, thanks to some early translator now remembered only for his zoological incompetence).

Tricksters are sometimes female, but the dominant Trickster-Transformer deity is always male.  He is powerful and well-meaning, but often foolish, and easily seduced by women or by greed.  From the Finnish Väinamöinen to the Japanese raccoon dog to the  Raven and Coyote, he does the same general sorts of things:  changing his own shape, changing supernaturals into harmless forms, turning animals from humanoid to animal form, providing light and water and song, and meanwhile having a wonderful run of salacious adventures.  Even the long-Christianized Irish retain many Transformer stories, often—ironically—told of St. Patrick (see e.g. Dooley and Roe 1999).  He did not transform himself, but he transformed the giants of old into ordinary men, drove the snakes out of Ireland, and so on.

Widespread or universal Old Northern stories draw on this belief system.  Naturally, given the hunting-dominated lifestyle of most ancient Old Northern societies, the hero and/or heroine are very often hunters.  This is one of the proofs that ancient Greece was solidly Old Northern.

These stories extend all the way from Ireland and Greece to North America.  One is the swan maiden story (Snyder 1979).  Another is the Orpheus myth (widespread in North America, e.g. Seaburg 2007:221-227; often with Coyote as the Orpheus figure; see Archie Phinney in Ramsey 1981; also Blackburn 1975:172-175, and indeed almost any collection of American myths).  The Orpheus myth, in the ancient world as in Native America and in the beautiful ballad version from the Shetland Islands, often had a successful ending.  The tragic ending we know today was set firmly in place by Virgil in the Georgics (Fantham 2006:xxx).  But some Native American versions, including Archie Phinney’s text collected from his Nez Perce grandmother, are as tragic as Virgil’s.  One proof that Northern minds run in the same channels is the astonishing similarity not only in plot but in emotional portrayals and character development between Phinney’s shattering and heartbreaking text and Rainer Maria Rilke’s incomparable retelling of Virgil’s story (Rilke 1964:142-151). 

Another is the transformation of animals into stars.  The Great Bear was a literal bear in stories told throughout the region (Schaefer 2006).  The resemblance of the constellation to a bear is far from obvious; this implies that the story actually spread from one source, rather than being independently invented.  Also widespread are a tale of two sisters who married stars (Thompson 1955-1958), tales of persons transformed into animals by witchcraft (as in the story of the princess kissing the frog), and countless stories of animal creators.  The earth-diver myth, in which the land is created from a bit of mud retrieved by a diving animal from the bottom of the cosmic waters is closely linked with this northern worldview, but is found far outside its borders and may be human-wide.

In this worldview, people are not subsumed into nature or mere pawns of the environment.  Quite the reverse; rugged, dramatic individualism is characteristic.  It is especially visible in Celtic epics and ballads, but also in Northwest Coast hero tales, Korean and Finnish epics, and other traditional vocal forms.  There is an emphasis on the value of individuals, even ordinary ones, as in the Scottish ballads with their everyday heroes and heroines.  This theme also appears in the many tales of the lone shaman battling dark forces in an alien world (e.g. Nowak and Durrant 1977).  I believe the Old Northern view, with its tales of heroic ordinary people, is a major source of Greek individualism.  The writings of Homer and the myths retold by Aeschylus show that it comes from the earliest stratum of Greek thought.  The ancient Greeks invented the “individual” as we now use that word, and also invented tragedy, through the dramas of Aeschylus and Sophocles; they made heroes of ordinary men and women standing tall in the face of terrible fates and disasters.  The idea of the ordinary person dauntlessly facing fate, though alone and beset on every side, appears here for the first time in history; earlier heroes like Gilgamesh had been semi-divine.  It appears that the Old Northern worldview lies behind all this.

Many of the beliefs make most sense in relation to hunting.  Hunters have to stay pure and avoid smelling like humans, since game animals are acutely aware of such things.  Apparently universal in the Old Northern world is a prohibition against sex before hunting, especially with a menstruating woman; the smell is too human (see e.g. Willerslev 2007:84).  This may be purely psychological, but it may have roots in actual game-animal alertness.  Hunting is often sexualized (Willerslev 2007:110, who notes worldwide comparisons).

A minor but interestingly widespread aspect of this is the avoidance of talking about one’s hunting, or naming animals hunted; they might hear and be offended.  This is bad enough if one might lose game, but worse if one calls up a predator such as a bear.  Bears are thus referred to by various euphemisms; in fact the English word “bear” goes back to a Germanic root cognate with “brown,” apparently used because the Indo-European root was to be avoided.  (And cf. “bruin.”  Incidentally, the Indo-European root is itself interesting.  A philologist working from such forms as Latin ursus and Greek arctos reconstructed it as, approximately, *ughrtko—close enough to grrhaahr! to suggest where that root came from!)  Rane Willerslev (2007:100) reports a Yukaghir hunter talking about having seen the tracks of a Russian in felt boots.  Another commented, “We’ll pay him a visit tomorrow.”  Of course the felt boots—no doubt mentioned in a significant tone of voice—were the giveaway here.  At other ends of the Northern world, the Maya often refer to a jaguar as “red paw” (chak mool) instead of by its right name (balam), and tigers are referred to by a whole flock of euphemisms all over east and south Asia.

All the participants in this worldview have strong indigenous traditions of conservation, or at least of sustainable resource management.  A particularly noteworthy account of a Siberian shamanistic society and its conservation practices is provided by the Tuvan writer Mongush Kenin-Lopsan (1997).  Hundreds of sources deal with indigenous management in northwestern and western North America (Anderson 1996). 

Native American cosmologies demand a much wider respect—nothing less than kinship, sociability, responsibility, and care toward all beings.  Raymond Pierotti has written:  “A common general philosphy and concept of community appears to be shared by all of the Indigenous peoples of North America, which includes:  1) respect for nonhuman entities as persons, 2) the existence of bonds between humans and nonhumans, including incorporation of nonhumans into ethical codes of behvior, and 3) the recognition of humans as part of the ecological system” (Pierotti 2011:198-199).  These indeed fully apply on the Northwest Coast, where they are considerably elaborated.

It should not surprise us if reality is often short of this.  Traditional people, like all people, frequently fail to live by their ecological morals.  (For Native American society, see Kay and Simmons 2002; for other areas of the world, Kirch 1994, 1997, 2007; cf. comparable problems in the Mediterranean world described by McNeill 1992 and Ponting 1991).  Plains Indians, when they got horses and guns and moved from older homelands to the high plains, lost a good deal of their resource management practice.  (See Krech 1999, but he exaggerates, and there are useful correctives in Native accounts, e.g. Black Elk [DeMaillie 1984] and Lame Deer and Erdoes 1972). 

However, throughout North America, the strong conservation ethic had its effect.  It was based on the idea that the spirits will punish anyone who takes more than he or she needs for immediate use by self and personal social group. Native American views, at least in North America, stem from this worldview and carry forward its close relations with nature.  (See e.g. Bernard and Salinas Pedraza 1989; Davis 2000; Haly 1992; Jenness 1951; Menzies 2006; Neihardt 1934; Nelson 1983; D. Smith 1999; Tanner 1979.  Further documentation includes Alberta Society of Professional Biologists 1986; Callicott 1989, 1996; Lopez 1992; Nelson 1973; Scott 1996.)

The locus classicus may be the American Northwest. Less dense populations generally did much less managing, because they had much less need for it.  Thus, many North American groups were decidedly weak on conservation (Hames 2007; Kay and Simmons 2002), though others were exemplary.  The North American system is so universally supported by tales of overuse leading to disaster that there is really no question that people learned the hard way.  The reputed share that Native Americans had in exterminating the Pleistocene megafauna would have taught them common sense, in so far as they were responsible (there is no real evidence that they were).  Siberia and neighboring areas were comparable, often having superb conservation ideology.

In some areas they persist with enthusiastic support, and contribute to modern political debate (see e.g. Kendall 1985 for Korea; Metzo 2005 for Mongolia).  In others, including Japan and most of Europe, they are largely displaced by later-coming belief systems, but they are still there (for Japan, see esp. Blacker 1986; for Scotland, Carmichael 1992). 

Working people close to the land in modern societies may often be closer to Native Americans than to academics.  Kimberly Hedrick’s brilliant study of ranching in California (Hedrick 2007) showed that some individuals combine both.  Her ranchers were often college-educated, and could talk learnedly of range ecology, global marketing, and amino acid constituents of feeds, but when they were out riding the range, they slipped into a totally different worldview.  The concern with abstractions shifted to a very much more pressing and specific concern with caring for cattle and rangeland. They shifted from abstract concepts to personal stories; every creek, hill, and cabin had its story, just as in Native American society.  They also shifted—consciously or unconsciously—from elite American English to cowboy dialect. 

In the Old Northern worldview and its descendents and relatives, we are people-in-nature, not people separate from nature, and certainly not people opposed to nature or (as Marxian communism puts it) “struggling against nature.”  This has ethical implications, many of which are stressed in recent scholarship.

For the Great Lakes area, we have a considerable literature; notable is American Indian Environmental Ethics by Baird Callicott and Michael Nelson (2004), because it is a rigorous and excellent study by two ethical philosophers and also because it is based on actual Native American texts recorded by a traditional Native American ethnographer, William Jones of the Sauk and Fox.  There are also many short accounts; particularly good collections include Snodgrass and Tiedje (2008) and Tucker and Grim (1994). One could point to many other works (e.g. Davis 2000; Medin et al 2006).

Native California has been less well served, probably because the cultures were severely impacted by foreign settlers before anthropologists went among them, but there are several important texts available (Anderson 2011).  I am less familiar with other parts of the continent, but to the classics of Black Elk (de Maillie 1984; Neihard 1932) and Lame Deer (1972) we can now add Ray Pierotti’s wonderful review (2011).

One problem common to most sources is a lack of grounding in thorough study of the ethical systems of the traditional and local cultures under study.  There are, in fact, only two thorough and detailed studies of traditional Native American ethical systems.  Unfortunately, they do not deal with classic Old Northern societies, but with societies influenced by town and city traditions from pre-Columbian Mexico.  Richard Brandt’s Hopi Ethics (1954) and John Ladd’s The Structure of a Moral Code (1957).  Both are by ethical philosophers rather than anthropologists.  Both were stimulated by anthropological work, at Chicago and Harvard respectively.

Richard Brandt, a young man starting his career at that time, went on to become the leading utilitarian ethicist in the United States (see Brandt 1979, 1992, 1996).  It is fairly clear that his Hopi experiences influenced him (compare pp. 319-336 of Brandt 1954 with his later three books).  His work is noteworthy for following the grand utilitarian tradition of Mill and Sidgwick in using clear, readable English, as opposed to the incomprehensible philosophy-jargon found in many philosophic writings.

Brandt’s account of the Hopi begins with the moral terms (Brandt 1954:91).  He stresses the basic importance of hopi—properly human, “the Hopi way”—versus kahopi (we would now spell it qahopi), “not Hopi.”  However, Brandt notes that the moral implications of this term are not simply that custom or tradition is ideal (Brandt 1954:94).  Most social customs are mere conventions, not especially moral.  Conversely, individualist behavior can be very moral.  (Ladd notes the same for the Navaho and for morals in general.)  Commoner but less revealing are oppositions of anta “good, morally right” and ka-anta “bad,and loloma “good, good-looking, nice” and kaloloma.  The equation of the good and the beautiful in that last word is also found in Navaho, and, of course, it was much discussed and debated in ancient Greece too.

The problems of studying traditional ethics were beautifully summed up by Clyde Kluckhohn in his foreword to Ladd’s book (Kluckhohn 1957:xiv).  As he reports it, he asked their mutual friend and frequent consultant Bidaga (a.k.a. Son of Many Beads) why he—Kluckhohn—had never gotten such ethical details.  Bidaga gave him “a long lecture which culminated with the sentence:  ‘I have been trying to explain these things to you for thirty years, but you never asked me the right questions.’” 

In Ladd’s work, the famous Navaho word hozhon (we would now spell it hozhǫǫ) “good, beautiful, harmonious, proper” and its opposite hochoon (hochǫǫ)“bad” are discussed; subsequent discussions by writers like John Farella (1984) and Gary Witherspoon (1977) are better.  From these later accounts we realize that the Navaho are much more self-consciously and socially moral than Ladd thought, and that their concepts of hozhon and hochon refer to the whole universe—divinities, humans, nature.  The universe is a fundamentally moral place; the Navaho would reject, at least in detail, Hume’s claim that one cannot deduce an ought from an is.  This also goes a long way toward adding a more Kantian side to the utilitarian and Aristotelian threads that Ladd notes. 

Hozhon is a concept that environmentalists should adopt.  The idea is that beauty, goodness, harmony, health, peace, and smooth function are aspects of one general reality.  The Navaho, significantly, also realize that ugliness, disharmony, death, and other bad things have a necessary place in the world.  As Ladd notes, the monster-slaying hero-twins were persuaded to leave four monsters—hunger, violence, old age, and death—so that the world would not become static and overpopulated.  If there were always harmony, there would be no change, progress, innovation, or valuable conflict (Farella 1984; Witherspoon 1977).  The world must maintain a dynamic tension between peaceful harmony and dynamic destruction.  Coyote, the source of evil in Navaho cosmology, is a necessary and even a revered animal.

Related is a high order of social and personal morality, enforced by spiritual agents in the natural world.  A Navaho ritual singer told the great pioneer ethnographer Washington Matthews:  “Why should I lie to you? I am ashamed before the earth; I am ashamed before the heavens; I am ashamed before the blue sky; I am ashamed before the darkness; I am ashamed before the sun; I am ashamed before that standing within me which speaks with me.  Some of these things are always looking at me, I am never out of sight.  Therefore I must tell the truth.  That is why I always tell the truth.  I hold my word tight to my breast.”  The Navaho are rather Aristotelian in their morality based on cultivating individual virtues to avoid troubles as well as social sanctions and shame or guilt before the world (Ladd 1957).

      Traditional Native American worldviews typically go with a particular educational strategy (see e.g. Cajete 1994; Gardner 2003; Goulet 1998; Sharp 2001).  Children learn by doing, with almost no verbal instruction.  They copy what their elders do, without much correction, and learn by their mistakes as they try to imitate.  Verbal teaching, if any, is done by personal stories.  What little correcting of the young is done verbally is done by telling stories on oneself:  “When I was young, I…” is a typical formula starting off a story of obvious—but completely tacit—application to the younger hearers present.  (See also Greenfield 2004 on such learning among the Tzotzil Maya and Hunn 2008 on early learning among the Zapotec.)  Once again, rural Anglo-Americans, including Hedrick’s ranchers, converge on Native Americans in these matters.  They teach by the book in schoolhouses and churches, but in the field or on the job they teach by example and personal story, as I know from my own rural-American background as well as from Hedrick’s research.

Appendix 3.  The “Wasteful” Native Debunked

            At some point it is necessary to deal with two old chestnuts that are always raised when anyone speaks of Native American conservation practices.

            First, buffalo jumps.  Native Americans on the plains stampeded bison over cliffs, thus killing a number at a time.  This has been condemned as “wasteful” by generations of white writers (the same people that shot tens of millions of bison for the hides and tongues or solely to starve the Indians out).  The idea seems to be that the Indians drove a million buffalo over a cliff every time they wanted a light lunch (Krech 1999, who should know better, still spins this story). 

            In fact, the vast majority of buffalo jumps were used only once, and the rest rather rarely; there were not very many sites in all, considering the enormous amount of space and time involved (Bamforth 2011).  The busiest, the Head-Smashed-In Jump in Alberta, was used only once a generation during its peak years (according to displays at the site, now a World Heritage Site).  The total number of bison killed in all the jumps in the plains, through the 12,000 or so years of human occupancy, was probably in the low millions.

There was, however, undeniably some waste—too many buffalo killed for the population to use.  The problem is that bison, unlike cattle, are not domesticated to the point of stupid obedience.  You can’t pick out one.  If you start a herd, you can’t stop them, and they may—but, in fact, rarely did—all go over the edge.  Moreover, the extremely high numbers killed at places like Head-Smashed-In were apparently not killed just for the local population.  Grease and dried meat were prepared in quantity, apparently for extensive trade (Bamforth 2011).

Getting them to go at all is the hard part.  Bison do not herd easily, and they are too intelligent to go stampeding over a cliff.  Arranging a jump involved months of planning—watching the bison routes, building cairns that looked like warriors posted along the path to the cliff, organizing the work force, and so on.  Then when the time came, the bison had to be stampeded such that the ones in back forced the ones in front over the cliff; otherwise the ones in front would simply stop and not go over.  This all involved serious danger, since the bison would naturally tend to turn when they got to the cliff, and run back the other way—right over the waiting Indians.  This had to be discouraged by such measures as lighting smoky fires.  If the bison did fall over the cliff, they could fall on other people waiting to dispatch them.  According to one story, that is how Head-Smashed-In got its name; one foolhardy soul got too close to the jumpoff place.

The other chestnut is the reputed Native American extermination of the Pleistocene megafauna.  This was originally claimed by Paul S. Martin in the 1960s (Martin 1967, 1984, 2002, 2005; Martin and Klein 1984).  His only evidence was that the Native Americans appeared in North America about the same time that several large species—including all the largest ones—became extinct. 

At least the buffalo jumps were real, and a lot of buffalo died that way.  But the extinction of the megafauna has not been connected with Native Americans by much direct evidence.  There are a few mammoth and mastodon kill sites from early millennia, but only very few.  Reputed kill sites for horses and other extinct creatures do not hold up well on analysis.

Martin’s original position was that humans entered North America about 12,000 years ago, moved very fast and increased their numbers very fast (3% per annum), and wiped out the megafauna in a sudden “blitzkrieg.”  This is not credible—such increases would have been impossible in a difficult environment filled with predators, new diseases, and such.  But it now appears that people were in the Americas much earlier (probably from 15,000-17,000 years ago).  Also, at least the mastodons lasted longer than was once thought.  All this makes a slower and more believable process possible.  (John Alroy [2001a, 2001b] has created a simulation showing that people could indeed cause the extinction under such circumstances.  Fair enough, but one might add that it would be even easier to construct a simulation showing that little green men from Mars did it, or, for that matter, that it never happened and there are mammoths around us now.  Simulations are wonderful things.  See Brook and Bowman 2002.)  

On the other hand, the deadly Clovis points that are actually found in mammoth and bison carcasses did not develop till many of the megafaunal species were already extinct (or at least are no longer found in the paleontological record; Wolverton et al. 2009).  Clovis flourished around 11,000 years ago (Waters and Stafford 2007), while most of the megafauna disappear around 12,000-14,000 years back.  The main collapse of the megafauna in what is now Indiana was between 14,800 and 13,700 years ago, long before Clovis (Gill et al. 2009).  Indeed, there is no evidence for humans in Indiana at that time.  If there were any, they were exceedingly few.  Extinction in California came later, mainly around 12,000 years ago, when more people were present but when climate was also dramatically changing.

The only real evidence for Martin’s position is that not only in North America, but also in Australia, New Zealand (Worthy and Holdaway 2002), and countless smaller islands, the coming of modern humans coincided with the extinction of the larger and slower species of wildlife, and usually with most of the ground-nesting birds.  This is indeed very good circumstantial evidence.  It also suggest some other possibilities beyond hunting.  All scholars now seem to agree that the very widespread use of fire to manage the landscape is the main thing driving extinctions in Australia.  Rats eating eggs apparently drove most of the extinctions of birds.  People hunted moas in New Zealand, but otherwise most of the species are tiny, obscure, and rare, not the sort of thing people would hunt.  Disease has certainly wiped out much island life.  Fire, other newcoming animal species, and diseases could all have had a hand in the American extinctions; I personally would be very surprised if fire was not involved, given both the Australian case and our current knowledge of the universality of fire in Native American management.

One may also note that the phenomenon of pioneering peoples sweeping through a continuent without thought for the morrow is apparently universal among humans.  We have seen it in the colonial histories of the Americas, Australia, and other areas.  Indeed, nonhuman species can explode when they enter a new area, only to stabilize later as they eat themselves out of a home and as diseases and parasites build up.  The earliest Native Americans thus may be expected to have hunted with no thought of the morrow until game grew scarce enough to force them to change.

On the other hand, island life forms generally have few or no predators of any kind, and are thus not adapted to predation.  America’s megafauna included lions, wolves, sabertooths, giant bears, and other carnivores.  Martin argued that humans are somehow different, but any experience with game animals shows that this is not the case.  Animals exposed to other predators quickly learn to be wary of humans too. 

Similar areas in the Old World—Europe, China, southeast Asia, and so on—did not see their megafauna disappear when modern humans came.  In fact, China still has a few elephants, rhinos, tigers, pandas, and so on, and maintained a quite rich megafauna until the rise of the Chinese empire. 

The other main candidate for causing the megafaunal extinctions is climate change.  We know that much earlier glaciations ended with comparably huge extinction events, although no humans were around to affect this (Finnegan et al. 2011).  The cold peak 18,000 years ago was extreme—more severe than any other well-known ice age in the last several million years—and the warm-up after that was rapid.  By 14,800 years ago, when Indiana began to lose megafauna, the climate was still very cold; changes in vegetation, and the coming of frequent fire, were far in the future (Gill et al. 2009).  However, by 12,000 years ago, times were warm and dry.  Then a sudden, dramatic reversal (the Younger Dryas event) froze the continent again around 11,000 years ago.  Cooling took perhaps only a few centuries.  It was followed by an extremely rapid shift to hot, dry conditions.  It is difficult to imagine large, slow-breeding animals tracking all this, and indeed much less dramatic swings in earlier millennia all led to massive extinction events (late Eocene, late Miocene, early Pleistocene, etc.). 

The rapid drying and heating, especially, is significant.  In 2001-2 and 2005-6, essentially no rain fell throughout the entire southwestern quarter of North America.  A two- or three-year period like that would have exterminated the megafauna.  Such a period is quite likely for the Altithermal, the hot dry period that peaked around 7000-8000 years ago.  The lack of major change in Indiana at the early dates of decline makes human hunting more imaginable as an explanation (Johnson 2009), but there were few (if any) humans there to hunt, and no evidence of a deadly hunting technology till much later.  So a major mystery remains.

            Further proof is the extinction of several large waterbirds, such as the La Brea stork (Grayson 1977).  This is clearly climate; these birds did not depend on the megafauna, but rather on wet Pleistocene conditions. 

            In summary, it seems not only possible but probable that humans contributed to the extinction of the mammoths and mastodons, and perhaps also did in the giant ground sloths.  These were sluggish, and unable to defend themselves against missiles.  The other extinct megafauna includes a number of horse species, a huge camel, a llama, southerly species of ox and mountain-goat, and several smaller forms.  These seem to have disappeared before the rise of human hunters, or at least there is no credible association of them with humans.  They are the sort that would not make it through rapid climate change.  Relatives of two of them—the llama and a flat-headed peccary—not only survived in South America but survive there yet, in spite of extremely heavy hunting pressure. 

            Many carnivorous mammals and birds died off, including all the largest, but almost everyone agrees these went because their large-herbivore prey disappeared.

            Humans might well have finished off the last few of these, especially if they were concentrated around water holes by a drought like that of 2005-6.  I thus find myself with Barnofsky et al. (2004), arguing that the situation is unclear, but it seems hard to question “the intersection of human impacts with pronounced climatic change” (2004:70.  For more pro-Martin, but still reasonable, positions, see several articles in Kay and Simmons 2002).

            In spite of this common-sense middle ground. the argument has remained polarized, with True Believers and total skeptics.  The True Believers are often biologists who have no faith in or sympathy with humans or with human hunting (e.g. Ward 1997).  Many are mere popularizers who have no scholarly competence in this regard, and at least a few are outright racists who simply hate Native Americans.  On the other hand, Raymond Hames (2007) has recently provided a well-argued, well-reasoned defense of the overkill hypothesis.  Martin maintains his extreme position, which has become increasingly indefensible, and has resorted some very bizarre arguments.  He dismisses Grayson’s birds as “cowbirds” that depended on the megafauna, in spite of the fact that close relatives elsewhere are the antithesis of that.  He also argues, repeatedly (see all cited sources), that the lack of evidence proves his point, since the wipeout happened so fast!  This brings us close to the conspiracy theorists of the popular press, who prove their theories by arguing that the absence of evidence shows how successful “the government” or “the Trilateral Commission” has been in hiding it.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about all this is a point made by Deloria:  any overhunting by people 12,000 years ago has very little to do with anything Native Americans may be doing now.  Pioneers everywhere are notorious for overrunning their newly settled lands and wasting resources lavishly; they learn better soon.  The Anglo-American settlement of North America, with its wave of deforestation followed by a wave of reforestation, shows this clearly enough.  In any case, 12,000 years is a long time!  Cultures do change, and archaeology shows that the old story of the changeless, timeless Indian was preposterous (see e.g. Pryce 1999).  A mere 2,000 years ago, my Celtic ancestors were fighting dressed only in blue paint, and taking the heads of conquered enemies.   

The sociology of the controversy is possibly more interesting than the fate of the megafauna.  All the believers appear to be biologists, many of whom clearly have a very sour view of humans in general, at least as managers of nature, and some of whom (as I know from experience) are frankly racist toward Native Americans.

Skeptics include Vine Deloria Jr. (1988); Donald Grayson (1977, 1991, 2001; Grayson and Meltzer 2003); Shepard Krech (1999), in spite of his exaggeration of the buffalo jumps; and many others (Wolverton et al. 2009 provides the latest and most sophisticated review of the skeptical position).  Skeptics seem usually to be either Native Americans or anthropologists. 

The present chapter should be enough to point out that (1) Native Americans have a very lively sense of conservation, and observe it in practice, but (2) they teach it through highly circumstantial stories of overhunting that led to starvation.  This should more or less settle the case.  Yes, Native American conservation is real, but, no, Native Americans are no different from anyone else; they learn through experience, and some of the experience is hard-won.  They probably did contribute somewhat (we will never know how much) to the extinctions, and they surely learned from that.   

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—  “Hunting on Heaven and Earth.”  Current Anthropology 54:495-496.

Here, and citing to book above:

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—  1986.  Art of the Northern Tlingit.  Seattle:  University of Washington Press.

—  1988.  From the Land of the Totem Poles.  New York:  American Museum of Natural History.

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—  1999.  The Yuquot Whalers’ Shrine.  Seattle:  University of Washington Press.

—  2008.  “A Generation of Innovators in Southeast Alaska.”  American Indian Art, autumn, 56-67. 

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—  1988.  The Life and Hard Times of a Korean Shaman.  Honolulu:  University of Hawaii Press.

Kenin-Lopsan, Mongush B.  1997.  Shamanic Songs and Myths of Tuva.  Ed./tr. Mihály Hoppál.  Budapest:  Akadémiai Kiadó.

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— —  1998b.  “Northern Okanagan, Lakes, and Colville.”  In Plateau (Handbook of North American Indians, vol. 12), Deward Walker, ed.  Washington:  Smithsonian Institution.  Pp. 238-252.

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— 1997.  Microcosmic Histories.  American Anthropologist 99:31-42.

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Articles

California: Traditional Indigenous Relationships with Plants and Animals

California:  Traditional Indigenous Relationships with Plants an

California:  Traditional Indigenous Relationships with Plants and Animals

Work in progress; please do not cite without permission.

This is intended to be one part of a book that will also include a section on the Pacific Northwest, thus covering the Pacific coast of North America from the Mexican border (or just south of it) to southern Alaska.  The book is on traditional plant and animal management and ideology.  It draws heavily on myths and texts, especially early recordings from the days when texts were important to anthropology (sadly no longer true—though some stalwart souls are still recording them).  I am interfacing biology with culture, using phenomenology and ethnobiology as the main ways into the latter. 

Unfortunately, events are making it impossible to work on the book.  The California section is substantially finished, though I am updating it as new materials appear.  These now are largely supportive of the basic points, so the time has come to post this work on my website for anyone to use. 

“…we are constantly walking on herbs, the virtues of which no one knows.”  -Pastor, Chujmas elder, as quoted by Fernando Librado Kitsepawit, Ventureño Chumash (Librado 1979:56; cf. Blackburn 1975:258)

Californian Environments

            The Pacific Coast of North America, in pre-European times, had the distinction of supporting large, populous, highly complex societies that lived by hunting and gathering and that almost totally lacked agriculture.  Many groups along the immediate coast and major rivers were not only larger and more differentiated than most hunter-gatherer cultures, but more so than many horticultural societies around the world.  (On California Native environments, see Jones and Klar 2007; Lightfoot and Parrish 2009.)

            The reason has traditionally been considered “the rich environment,” but actually the environment is not incredibly rich.  The Northwest Coast has huge salmon resources, but to balance this out it has millions of acres of dense evergreen forest with almost nothing for humans to eat.  California and the interior regions have rich seed resources and appreciable game, but are dry at best, and are subject to frequent prolonged droughts that make finding food a desperate proposition.  Irrigated agriculture on a large scale has made these dry areas productive, but without that they can be quite barren.

            It is not surprising, then, to learn from archaeology that complex societies did not exist until around 3,000 years ago (give or take a millennium).  What is surprising is the rise of such societies—a phenomenon still unexplained.  Before even attempting explanation, we need to understand the complexity.

            Let us, then, look at how such societies maintained themselves. 

            For convenience, I will make the arbitrary decision to divide these two regions by the California state line.  Groups split by the line will be considered to lie in the state where their major population once dwelt (except for the Modoc, who belong properly to the Plateau region, and are poorly known because of the genocidal “Modoc War”).  The decision is slightly less arbitrary than it looks.  In spite of often being classified as “Northwest Coast,” the Karok, Yurok, and Athapaskan groups of northwest California are politically, mythologically, and socially rather typical Californians, and lived by a Californian economy depending heavily on acorns. 

            This distinction gives us a Californian region whose economy was based on management of varied seed and nut resouces.  The northwest part of the state depended largely on fish, with seed and root foods important.  The Central Valley and other regions living near rivers and lakes had a similar economy, with perhaps relatively more seeds and nuts.  The Plateau region of traditional anthropology begins from the Cascade Range crest and extends eastward to the Rockies, and is defined in terms of human ecology by the intensive focus on wild root, corm and bulb foods, which are cultivated and stored(see e.g. Hunn 1991; Turner et al 1990).  The Plateau economy grades into the Californian economy in the northeast corner of the state, where the Achomawi and Atsugewi lived on fish, acorns, seeds, and root crops (Garth 1978; Olmsted and Stewart 1978).  Most of the rest of California depended largely on acorns, and to a lesser extent other nuts, with seed and root crops important.  The thinly-occupied deserts had few acorns, and life here depended on a wide range of plant foods; pinyon nuts were locally common and important.  I will not be dealing with the Great Basin or Baja California, except that far northern Baja California is linguistically and culturally a part of Native California by all standards, and will be included. 

            I shall, however, include the southeastern groups in California, which depended to a great extent on agriculture rather than, or along with, wild seed management.  As usual, culture areas grade into each other; agriculture supplied about half or less of the food of the Mohave and Quechan along the Colorado on the state line, and only a small percentage of the food of the Kumeyaay and Cahuilla.  Montane and coastal Kumeyaay probably did not practice it at all.  By contrast, agriculture supplied most of the food of the Akimel O’odham (Pima) in south Arizona, and most other culturally Southwestern groups.

            Classic ethnographic California thus focuses on the Mediterranean and montane parts of the state.  Most of the large, complex cultures developed in the former.  In spite of being called “Mediterranean,” California is not much like the Mediterranean Sea region.  The Mediterranean is landlocked and sun-warmed—a downright hot-tub.  This keeps its bordering countries warm in winter, and hot and often rainy in summer.  California’s coast is chilled by the California Current, a vast river of ocean water flowing down from Vancouver Island at a temperature around 55 F.  This creates such extreme conditions that the diving seabirds of Baja California are arctic forms (auklets, murrelets, and subarctic cormorants), while the soaring ones are tropical (terns, frigatebirds).  Thus coastal California is always cool and pleasant, but is quite dry.  More important to Native peoples, the California current and related upwelling produces fantastic biological productivity in coastal waters, and keeps the land cool and moist, permitting great productivity there too.  (Morocco’s Atlantic coast is similar, but the Mediterranean Sea shores are not.)

            This cold ocean keeps even southern California’s mountains pleasant and forested.  At elevations equivalent to California’s giant sequoia belt, Turkey’s mountains have thin woods, and reach a timberline around 8000 feet.  This low line is set not by cold but by drought due to Saharan and Arabian winds. 

            Conversely, much of the Mediterranean is exposed to winter storms and summer rains from farther north.  I have been caught in a major winter snowstorm on the Riviera (but, then, I have seen snow down to 1000’ in southern California) and subjected to days of rain in August in Rome.  California is walled off by mountains from the full force of northern and eastern winds.  The exception is southern California, where major passes allow such winds to roar down as the dreaded “santanas,” named because they pour down the Santa Ana River and other canyonways.  A desert wind, it combines the violence of the mistral with the heat of the scirocco.

            California ranges from warm to hot in summer, cool to cold in winter.  Rains varied (before recent climate change) from 130” a year in the far northwest mountains to 2” or less in the lowest valleys of the eastern deserts.   Such “average” figures mask incredible variation.  El Centro, on the Mexican border in southeastern California, averages 2” a year.  In the middle 1970s it made its average perfectly:  there was essentially no rain for six years, and then in August of 1976 a west Mexican chubasco (hurricane) dropped 12” in one day. 

Northern California has its own variety.  In February 1964, I saw the Sacramento River running more than ten miles wide.  A bridge about 100’ above the normal level of the Eel River was washed out.  Yet in summer 2009 the Sacramento was far below its usual banks and the Eel was almost totally dry, and in 2015 the rivers were still lower.  Within my years in Riverside, yearly rainfall has fluctuated by an order of magnitude (2” to over 20”), and the deserts eastward varied even more than that.  Such conditions would stress anyone, and they certainly proved difficult for hunting-gathering peoples.

Throughout California there is an alternation of El Niño conditions with drier years.  El Niño is caused by warm water in the east Pacific, and brings heavy winter rains.  They start just after the winter solstice, and thus around Christmas—hence the name (originated in Peru), which refers to the baby Jesus.  El Niños came every 5-7 years in the late 20th century, but before and since that time they were less frequent.  They provide about twice as much rain as normal years.  In the normal years, the warm-water pool of the Pacific is around Indonesia, bringing the rain to that country and to Australia instead of to the American coasts.  Recently, a tendency has arisen to refer to particularly cool and dry conditions in California as “La Niña” years, as if Jesus had a long-lost sister!  All, in turn, is part of the vast global El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) system.

            Globally warm periods, like the Medieval Warm Period and the present, are hot and dry in California.  Globally cool periods like the Pleistocene and the Little Ice Age are generally wet, but California suffered some searing droughts at the height of the Little Ice Age, which was globally dry (Gamble 2008).

            Today, global warming, partly natural and partly due to human release of greenhouse gases, is drying and heating California.  Vegetation is dying, and animal life with it.  Drastic reduction of both natural vegetation and agriculture is now in progress, and the future is bleak.  California has taken a world lead in combatting global warming, but without national and world support, all efforts will have little effect.  Political activity funded and driven by oil and coal companies have checkmated all attempts to slow—let alone stop—the warming process.  Unless greenhouse gas release is controlled, California could easily become a lifeless desert, like the central Sahara, within a few centuries. 

The Chumash saw it all as a gambling game.  All year, Coyote (with his allies) gambles with the Sun (with his).  On the winter solstice, the Moon judges the game.  If Coyote has won, the winter will be rainy and there will be much food.  If the Sun wins, winter conditions all too familiar to southern Californians will ensue:  the sun will beat down, day after day, from a brazen sky, and no food will grow (Blackburn 1975).  In the Santa Barbara County mountains, there is a cave where the Chumash bored a hole through solid rock.  The rising sun on the winter solstice morning strikes straight through the hole and illuminates a painting of a coyote on the cave wall.  One can easily guess what magic was tried there.  Alas, modern science cannot do much better than the ancient Chumash at predicting, and no better at controlling.

Biotic California

            The Californian region of the biologists is Mediterranean California.  It includes several formations:  chaparral (dense brushlands), scrub formations of many types, montane and lowland forests, Mediterranean steppe and grassland, winter-rain deserts, and the rainy, wooded northwest part of the state (Barbour et al. 2007).   Over 8000 native species of plants occur.  In spite of claims for extreme diversity (e.g. Lightfoot and Parrish 2009), this is less than comparable Mediterranean-climate zones of the world in Turkey and South Africa, and far less than many dry-tropical areas.  Still, it is diverse enough to provide tremendous variety and opportunity for hunters and gatherers. 

            Any account of the state will describe these plant associations.  However, earlier accounts exaggerate the extent of grassland.  Contrary to earlier assessments, it is now clear that the vast flat lowland valleys of California were usually covered by sparse scrub and annual wildflowers, not bunchgrass (Minnich 2008).  One can still see this in the few areas of the Central Valley that are not cultivated.  The wildflowers were thick and tall near the coast, but inland they would wither away to very little, leaving the ground sparsely covered, or, in such desert plains as the Antelope Valley and southern Central Valley, absolutely bare.  This was especially true where salt was concentrated by deposition in closed drainage basins (as can be seen in several areas today, e.g. the salt lake in Carrizo Plain).   

Anna Gayton (1948) was perceptive enough to notice these facts in early accounts, and realize what it meant for the Yokuts who lived there:  they could not find game, or even water, in the vast burning flats, and had to live near rivers and lakes.  These, at contact (following the wet centuries of the Little Ice Age), were very extensive; there was a vast chain of marshy lakes in the San Joaquin Valley that supported enormous fish and water plant resources (Latta 1977).  I can barely imagine this, being able to recall the last bits of marsh and lake, still visible in the 1950s.  Today, it is difficult to imagine the drought-starved plowed fields having been, only recently, huge marshy lakes teeming with fish, ducks, geese, turtles, frogs, tule elk, and every sort of water plant and insect.

The deserts also were covered with scattered bushes and, in wet springs, annual wildflowers.  The current cover of grass that dominates most of lowland California is made up of introduced Mediterranean weeds, which have outcompeted native plants (Minnich 2008), even replacing chaparral and woodland after hot fires.  The state looks very different today from its aboriginal appearance.  Even in the wildest parts of the western United States, enormous deterioration in the environment was occurring by the 1870s.  One of J. W. Powell’s workmen—a semiliterate frontiersman who cannot be accused of romantic environmentalism—wrote to Powell in 1880, describing southern Utah: “The foothills that yielded hundreds of acres of sunflowers which produced quantities of rich seed, the grass also that grew so luxuriantly when you were here, the seed of which was gathered with little labor, and many other plants that produced food for the natives is all eat out [sic] by stock” (Powell 1971:47). 

Animal life was equally rich.  The vast herds of deer and elk reported by explorers probably involved recovery from heavy hunting by Native Californians and heavy predation by bears, but there were evidently always many cervids.  Moutain sheep, including the desert bighorn, were evidently abundant before diseeases introduced by domestic sheep virtually exterminated them (they survive today partly because Fish and Game workers patiently catch and inocuate them).  Fish choked the rivers.  Salmon and steelhead were particularly prominent. Fall, winter, and spring runs of salmon stayed in the rivers for months until spawning time; they had to run when the streams had enough cool water, making summer runs impossible.  Steelhead (sea-running rainbow trout) still occur in many rivers, but in small numbers.  The salmon runs are disappearing fast, except in the Klamath, where Native Californians have fought desperately to keep the runs alive.  Even there, the outlook is cloudy.  Trout have done much better, thanks in large measure to stocking, and to vigilant monitoring by fishers.   Other fish, including the native warm-water fish of the Sacramento, Colorado, and elsewhere, are extinct or nearly so. 

The end is near; the usual combination of global warming, suburbanization, agribusiness, waste of water, and pollution are closing in fast on what is left of Californian nature, and all will be gone within a few decades unless desperate measures are taken.  (For a good, and depressing, summary see Allen et al. 2014).

Cultural Contours

            Humans have been in California for a long time.  The oldest date so far is 13,000 years ago (give or take a bit; see Erlandson 2015 for this and following dates) from Santa Rosa Island, but to get down the coast and out to a rather remote island would have taken some time.  Just north of California, at Paisley Cave in Oregon, there are dates as far back as 14,800 years ago.  People had reached Monteverde in southern Chile by 13,000 years ago.  So California was almost surely settled by 15,000 years ago.  Settlers probably came down the coast at first, but Paisley Cave is far inland.

            The initial population was small, and increased only slowly.  A few fluted points show that California was not entirely untouched by the Clovis style of spearpoint around 12,000 years ago, but points are few and scattered.  More local and more numerous points follow.  Then a very long period coinciding with the hot, dry Altithermal demonstrates that California was thinly populated by atlatl-wielding hunters from 8000 to 5000 years ago.  Conditions during the Altithermal were like those of the “new normal” developing after 2014, with extreme heat and dryness, though the southeast had higher rain than now, due to expansion of the summer monsoon from Arizona.  Ancient pack rat middens made of local twigs reveal that mountains now bare had juniper and other bushes.

            Climate ameliorated after 5000 years ago, and people responded by becoming more numerous and sedentary.  They began a shift to acorns, small seeds, and geophyte (root, bulb and corm foods; see Pierce and Scholtze 2016; Reddy 2016).

Increase was faster from about 3000 years ago, and in fact seems to have increased exponentially after that.  Hunting was still with the atlatl, but more attention was paid to plants and fish than to land game.  Robert Bettinger (2015:34) points out how this tracked improvements in plant use technology.  The importance of better acorn processing has long been well known, and seeds became so important that there was even local domestication (see below).  There was evidently a positive feedback: the improvements allowed more population growth, which in turn made people want more improvements. 

We must avoid recourse to explanation through “population pressure,” however, since groups evidently differed in their responses to the rising population.  They could innovate, borrow, migrate, fight, starve, or otherwise deal.  Migration, especially, is well attested by linguistic and archaeological data.   Humans love sociability above all other things, and want to live together, share, intermarry, dance, and generally have fun in groups.  They also like good food better than bad food—however their culture defines those.  Thus, wanting to procure more and better animal and plant resources is not a mindless reflex of “population pressure.”  It is a way to cope with scarcity, but also a way to support larger, livelier setttlements with a higher quality of life, however defined by the people in question.  Also, humans do not always love the neighbors, as shown inter alia by the number of skeletons with projectile points in their bones in California cemeteries, and large settlements afford protection.  Pierce and Scholtze (2016) echo Bruce Smith’s call to look at cultural niche construction.  People increasingly create their own environments (not just niches!).  In California, burning and other management techniques clearly increased along with acorn and small seed reliance.

            The bow and arrow probably caused a minor revolution (Bettinger 2015:44-48).  Bows and arrows are better for getting game, especially small game, than the previous technology based on spears, spear-throwers (atlatls), nets, and traps.  An increase in animal bones appears at the time the bow and arrow reached California, around 400-500 CE.  This allowed people to capitalize on the improved plant management, because it provided enough protein to allow more sedentization in remote back-country areas rich in plant resources.  (Less remote areas had access to fish, shellfish, and nuts, and were not limited by quality protein availability.)  It allowed more sedentary lifestyles and more dispersal into small groups (especially in summer), for the same reason.  The land was used more efficiently.  Cultivation and, in the southeast, true agriculture expanded and flourished.  In the pinyon areas, for instance, pinyon exploitation greatly increased, because it was possible to spend extended time in the dry, otherwise-resource-poor areas where pinyons grow.  Vessels for carrying water must have had a lot to do with that.  Bettinger stresses the importance of stored food (largely nuts), which were family property rather than shared by all.

            Along the coast, things were very different.  The bow and arrow had much less effect, since the staples were fish, shellfish, and sea mammals (speared at landings or from boats).  What mattered most was sea temperature, especially in southern California, where warm currents from far south often intrude on the more usual cool water.  Warm currents brought fewer fish, and those larger, faster, and harder to catch.  Thus they were lean times for local people.  This affected demographics over time.  Yet, here too, there was a sharp inflection in the population growth curve around 4000-3000 years ago.  In this case, it seems to result from better marine technology, ranging from the Chumash plank canoe (dating to perhaps 2000-2500 years ago; Gamble 2002) to superior fishhook and net designs.  Again this went in tandem with social structure. Villages got large, with notable differentiation in burials.  The bow and arrow came even later on the coast, in some places as late as 1250 in some areas (Bettinger 2015:100).  It reached the Chumash around 500 CE, following which there was a rise in violence, and presumptively war, that cooled slowly as people adjusted to the new weapon (Bettinger 2015:109). 

This has recently had fateful effects, as southern California has been one of the poster children for the frequency and violence of war among hunter-gatherers alleged by Steven  Pinker (2011) and others.  If the violence-ridden cemeteries sample only a brief and atypical time, Pinker’s ideas need adjusting (as pointed out in detail from much other evidence in Fry 2013).  

Complexity, and probably language distributions, reached something like contact-period levels around 400-600 CE.  By this time, bow hunting, mortars to grind acorns and other large seeds, sophisticated metate production for small seeds, and agriculture in the far south were established.  Corn-bean-squash agriculture spread in from the southwest at some quite early stage, and was probably still spreading when the Spanish came; it was long-established by then in the Colorado River and Imperial valleys.  Local cultivation and possibly domestication of wild seeds—barley and, in the south, maygrass (Reddy 2016:237)—is implied by the seed record. 

            The weather turned hot and dry again after 900, reaching a climax in the late 1200s, which were apparently as hot and dry as the mid-2010’s.  Californians endured, turning to more intensive use of still-available resources, especially marine ones where available.  Shifts away from the formerly vast marshes of the interior are noteworthy.  California’s eastern neighbors crashed.  The Four Corners and Utah were about 90% depopulated.  Incipient civilization crashed into small village societies in the southern southwest.  People migrated, dispersed, set up villages wherever water was still available. The effect on California’s rather extensive trade with Arizona and points east must have been substantial. “[P]rehistoric interaction between the two regions was regular and sustained and…economic or political developments in one area are likely to have hadhad important implications in the other” (Smith and Fauvelle 2015:710), as shown by the very extensive and long-lasting trade that brought shells, asphaltum, and the like from the coast, turquoise from the California desert, and pottery and stone goods (and probably cloth) from the Southwest.  The trade dropped off sharply after the 1200s, but California kept growing in population and social complexity.

            Cooler, wetter times followed, and the Little Ice Age from 1400 to 1700-1750 restored glaciers to California’s highest peaks.  Plant resources exploded, and human populations grew accordingly.

There were only 250,000-300,000 Native Californians as of 1700 (Cook 1976).  This means fewer than two persons per square mile (California’s area is 158,633 sq. mi.).  This population likely represents a reduction from peak, however, because Spanish diseases had already ravaged the state (Preston 1996), having been introduced when Spanish first touched on what is now California—1540 along the lower Colorado, 1542 on the coast. 

Languages and Society

California is famous for the diversity of its indigenous languages (Golla 2011 provides an encyclopedic survey).  At least 64, possibly 80, languages were spoken (Shipley 1978; Golla treats 78), including two whole language families—Yukian and Chumashan—that are completely confined to the state.  Many people were multilingual, and in some areas it seems that the very concept of a single “native language” did not exist (Dixon 1907—if I read him aright; cf. Golla 2011)—a worthy example for us today.  (For background on California Native peoples, the classic account by Kroeber, 1925, is dated and now sometimes sounds patronizing, but is still a superb summary; more up-to-date and sensitive are the great Handbooks of the Smithsonian Institution, but one must not only read the huge California volume [1978] but also relevant parts of the Plateau volume [Walker 1998] and the Southwest volumes, since the state was divided among these various cultural regions.  For prehistoric times, see Jones and Klar 2007, especially Victor Golla’s excellent article on languages and language prehistory, which is summarized and updated in Golla 2011.)

Relationships of California languages with languages elsewhere are usually so remote as to be unclear.  Chumashan was once tentatively linked with several other Californian and Southwestern languages in the “Hokan phylum,” but Chumashan is in fact very distant from other “Hokan” languages.  Edward Sapir, and later in more detail Joseph Greenberg (1987), provided intriguing evidence for linking Yuki with the languages of southern Louisiana, and this appears to be a good likelihood (Golla 1911; it may also be very distantly related to Siouan). 

Edward Sapir and Morris Swadesh thought the Penutian family of languages of central California were related to the Mayan languages of Mesoamerica, and Greenberg (1987) accepted this.  There is much evidence, most obviously the win- root for “person,” as in Wintu wintu and Maya winik, and the tendency to count using base 20, which in Mayan is also “winik”—because the number is derived from counting on fingers and toes, so 20 is a whole “person.”  The Mayanist Cecil Brown and I investigated this idea some years ago, and found dozens of intriguiging pairs like that, but unfortunately the Penutian languages are so poorly attested in the record that we could not come to any definite conclusions and did not publish our work.  I remain convinced, however.  Penutian is generally thought to be related to most of the Plateau languages in a Penutian phylum.  Sapir and some followers considered it to be related to the Tsimshian languages of British Columbia, but that link is, at best, controversial.

One very important problem in understanding Californian, and other Native American, languages is that much was lost by the time that even the earliest ethnographers spread out to study the cultures.  In particular, all these languages had the same sorts of style registers that English or any other world language has.  There were styles appropriate to chiefly speeches, styles appropriate to medicine formulas, styles peculiar to particular animal characters in myths, and so on.  Particularly important was the division into high style, such as a chief would use in a formal speech, and ordinary daily style.  Victor Golla (2011:226-227) discusses what little is known, from the very few languages that survived long enough for such refinements to be noted. 

There was another, intermediate, register, such as a chief might use in his daily directives to the people (recall Garth’s observations cited above).  There were also special modes of speech used by shamans, and still others for myth-telling.  There were evidently some lower registers too, the equivalent of rustic dialect or slang.  We have no idea of most of these.  On the whole, all that was recorded was the ordinary register, the others having been forgotten (as noted by e.g. Laird 1976 for the Chemehuevi).  A. L. Kroeber did hear some formal speaking from Yurok and Mohave consultants, and gives tantalizingly short transcriptions of the Mohave (Kroeber 1972:81-83).

Hokan, Chumashan, and Yukian languages have been spoken in California for many thousands of years and presumably originated there.  Penutian languages are thought to have intruded from the north several millennia ago.  The Algonkian-related Yurok and Wiyot came later, and the Athapaskan and Uto-Aztekan languages later still, probably in the last 2000-3000 years.  Intrusion of the Shoshonean languages into the coastal areas happened about 1500 years ago, give or take a few centuries.  Dissimilar song and vocal styles (Keeling 1992a, 1992b) and vocabularies (O’Neill 2009) fit with other cultural differences, separating e.g. the otherwise culturally close Karuk and Yurok.  Both, for instance, indicate direction upriver/downriver/away from river, rather than by compass points, for reasons that will be obvious if you look at a map or satellite photograph, but Karuk—longer established—has a more complex and intricate system for marking it (O’Neill 2008).

Dramatic shifts in languages probably track changes in resource procurement.  The spectacular radiation of the Shoshonean groups from the southern Sierra into southern California (Takic) and across the Great Basin (Numic) coincides with the coming of the bow and arrow and probably has something to do with it—not only because of fighting and hunting power, but also because of better plant resource procurement (Bettinger 2015:48-49)

The state is traditionally divided into subcultural areas.  We may ignore these; they are rather debatable.  There are, expectably, cultural gradations at the margins into the neighboring culture areas. 

            More interesting to us here is the question of social complexity.  In general, Californian peoples lived in small village communities (“tribelets”; Kroeber 1925) of about 200-1000 people.  They centered around a single winter village or a very small group of such.  People dispersed in the spring and summer to forage and amass storable foods.  Some of these village communities were notably self-sufficient.  A. L. Kroeber interviewed one old man who had never been more than a day’s walk from his home in the remote northern California coast ranges (Kroeber 1925:145).   Bettinger (2015) takes limited mobility as usual.  Archaeology, however, shows substantial trade, and it appears more likely that this old man and others like him were limited in their travels by post-Anglo-settlement conditions.

            The smallest communities were apparently those in the Mohave Desert and Great Basin.  Even along the Colorado River and in the densely populated northwest, the operational unit was often the family; tribal consciousness existed but there was no real tribal government.  People lived in what Robert Bettinger calls “orderly anarchy” (Bettinger 2015).  He traces it to the effects of the bow and arrow on settlement (see above). 

William Kelly reported “anarchy” for the Cocopa (Kelly 1977, esp. p. 78).  For them, the word for “leader” literally meant “mad dog, crazy person” (Frank Blue, quoted Kelly 1977:80).  So much for leaders!  The Cocopa, like other groups, had orators, who performed the hard-work harangues noted above (Kelly 1977:80), but had no real designated authority. 

Even so, riverine communities on the Klamath, Sacramento, and (probably) other major rivers, and the coastal communities of the Santa Barbara Channel, were large.  Many of these in the latter two areas seem to have gone on to become chiefly villages ruling over whole polities, with small tributary villages in the hinterland.  This is believably, but not certainly, attested for the Chumash and Tongva (Gabrielino) of southern California.  It is a more than reasonable inference for the Patwin and neighboring groups of central California (cf. Kroeber 1932).  Chumash polities of up to 2500 square miles are possible.  (See Bean and Blackburn 1976 for several articles on California politics and group sizes.  Bettinger 2015 clearly underestimates the level of chieftainship and chiefdom organization.)  Unfortunately, we shall never know the truth, for these groups were shattered by conquest and disease in the early historic period.  The Patwin and several Chumash groups narrowly avoided total extinction.

            In terms of Julian Steward’s useful if imperfectly defined “levels of sociocultural integration” (Steward 1955), these were simple chiefdoms.  This means that they were organized into ranked descent groups, with chiefly lineages ruling over commoner lineages.  One village would be the chiefly seat; other, smaller settlements would be tributary.  Some Californian societies got substantially more complex, as will appear (see Arnold 2004; Bean and Blackburn 1976; Gamble 2008).  These groups thus not only had dense populations; they had complex societies with chiefs who evidently practiced redistribution economies.  Early accounts (Crespí 2001; Gamble 2008; Kitsepawit 1981) show that Chumash chiefs gathered fish and seed resources and lavished them on guests and others.  Their society was not much less complex that of the Iron Age Irish that we will consider anon, though the latter had sophisticated metallurgy, the wheel, writing, beer, wine, and other trappings of civilization. 

            On the other hand, we are not to see these societies as necessarily very similar to chiefdoms elsewhere, especially agricultural ones.  California’s societies were very different.  Kent Lightfoot and coworkers (1911) have pointed out that the vast shellmounds and earthmounds of central California, some of which contained hundreds or thousands of burials, are a unique feature that indicates a very different society, one about which we know little (most of the mounds are very old, up to 3000 years or more).  Villages of that time were large, but not of the size one would normally associate with huge earthworks.  This and other complex early manifestations indicate a society apparently rather different from any now known.

            They also warred, as chiefdoms do.  As in other chiefdoms from the Northwest to Ancient Ireland, chiefs held feasting and dancing parties that had a competitive edge.  To refuse an invitation to a chief’s fiesta could be cause for war, at least among the Chumash (Gamble 2008:194).  Wars over slights of this kind occurred also in northwestern California.  As is chiefdoms everywhere, feasts were important (Gamble 2008:224-227).  One reason was recruiting fighting men.  Another was cementing alliances with rivals would would otherwise have become enemies.  Cemeteries in the relevant parts of the state show high levels of violent death (Lightfoot and Parrish 2009:85-89), as is true in chiefdoms everywhere.  The Yurok writer Lucy Thompson stresses the enormous value of the huge Klamath River dance ceremonies in reducing conflict. All local groups were invited and had to settle disputes before participating.  Apparently this worked well, since no one wanted to miss these events (Thompson 1991:145-146 and elsewhere).  Presumably, large ceremonies in other parts of the state had somewhat similar effects.

Steward’s other levels of integration were tribes, bands, and states.  (Note, incidentally, that these are not “evolutionary stages” and were never intended to be taken as such [Steward 1955].  They are all the end products of very long and intricate developmental sequences.  Some of his students confused the issue by hanging an evolutionary scheme on them.)  The smaller village communities would be “tribes” in his sense (though not as organized as his general characterization implies).  Steward’s “band level” of integration was modeled on what he thought was characteristic of the Shoshonean groups of the Great Basin, but they have turned out to be much more organized and sizable, definitely “tribes” in his sense.  Steward mischaracterized them for several reasons, but the main one was that he studied them in their late historic condition, devastated by disease, massacre, oppression, and forced acculturation (Clemmer 2009b.)  States did not exist in California, or anywhere else north of central Mexico, until European colonization.

All the above typology crosscuts what is probably a more important truth:  All the California groups were organized into village-level or village-cluster-level societies, led by a not-very-powerful chief or a patrilineal chiefly group, and showing some occupational specialization.  All else was elaboration on this basic pattern.  The central village was not only the winter residence, but was the ceremonial center, where rituals and fiestas were held (Bean and Blackburn 1976).  It was the meeting ground not only for the community but for visitors and traders.  It was often regarded as the center of the world, or at least the center of the little world of its community members.  The situation of the typical village society was dynamic, with back and forth changes in complexity over time (Bettinger 2015), but it was oscillation around the village level of organization.

These groups managed to stay together and maintain their ceremonies and organization with minimal government, apparently through simple sociability and shared culture.  Even if the sources have exaggerated the “anarchy” of California, it was a world held together by norms, which in turn had their force because people needed each other and thus needed shared rules to live by.  Neither organized religion nor organized government were necessary.  Thomas Hobbes was exactly wrong; monarchy was not only unnecessary, it was downright undesirable.  Grassroots self-organization literally beat it out of the field.  There is, obviously, a lesson here.  California was no dream of peace.  There were countless feuds and small wars.  Steven Pinker (2011) exaggerates its violence, but probablly not by much.  Yet California was no “savage state” either; the life of Californians was the antithesis of being “nasty, poore, solitary, brutish and short” (Hobbes 1950 [1657]).  And the dramatically more hierarchic and class-ridden Northwest Coast had at least as much violence.

In the larger groups, the chief had an assistant or cochief who did the orating and much organizing (see e.g. Goldschmidt 1951; Librado 1977).  This dual leadership is probably related to the “peace chief/war chief” team found eastward throughout the continent.

 In general, the larger and more dense the population, the larger the elite group, and the more different it was from the commoners.  Also, the larger and denser the population, the more specializations could exist.  The deep interior groups had chiefs and shamans and little (if anything) more.  Leaders for irrigation, rabbit hunting, and other collective activities were selected ad hoc or were chosen for long periods by the tribe; they were known to the Anglo settlers as “water bosses,” “rabbit bosses,” and so on.  At the other extreme stood the Chumash, with specialized priests, healers, canoe makers, canoe owners and operators, and other formally recognized and named occupational specialties (Gamble 2008). 

Chumash elites formed a group known (in at least one Chumash area) as the ‘antap.  Data are not clear as to whether it was a hereditary class-like formation, a hereditary council of lineage elders, or a sodality like the Plains Indians warrior societies.  Perhaps it was somewhere in between all these.  We cannot tell from the late accounts that survive.  Similar groups of elites or ceremonial leaders are known for other chiefdoms in the state.  The Chumash also had a “Brotherhood of the Canoe” (Kitsepawit 1977), made up of canoe owners and makers; it was an elite, specialized society. 

My impression is that trade was more important than population size or density in driving these distinctions of rank and specialty.  Groups central to great trade routes, and especially the groups that lived where land trade had to shift to the water, were the most chiefdom-like.  This meant especially the great villages of the Chumash and Tongva, gathered around lagoons that made good harbors; the large Patwin and Nisenan settlements on the lower Sacramento and the Sacramento delta; the towns near the junction of the Klamath and Trinity Rivers; and the towns at good harbors on San Francisco Bay and Clear Lake.  I believe that organization for trade was more important than population in driving social complexity.  On the other hand, areas central to trade but low in population density, like the obsidian quarry areas of the East Sierra and elsewhere, were not socially complex, so a fair density of population is evidently a sine qua non for complexity. 

In spite of the well-known fondness of California groups for staying at home and never straying far, trade was important, and trading went on (see below).  People’s unwillingness to travel meant that many intermediaries might be involved, but contact was real, and small “world-systems” developed.  Christopher Chase-Dunn and Kelly Mann (1998) have described the world-system of the Wintu (see Goldschmidt 1951, one of the sources they used, for a notable account).  The Wintu was probably a subsystem of the great Sacramento drainage network focused on the Patwin.  Similar very small world-systems centered on the Yurok, the Chumash and Tongva, and the Lower Colorado River, and rather predict or map out Kroeber’s cultural subareas within the wider California system.  A world-system assumes a core group or groups; a semi-periphery; and a periphery.  For the Chumash-Tongva, the semiperiphery might be seen as including the interior Chumashan groups, the Salinan, Juaneno, Luiseno and Cahuilla; the periphery the Serrano, Vanyume and Alliklik.  The Chumash and Tongva were richer and more populous.  Unlike modern core nations, did not have a stable advantage in trade over these groups, but did have some advantage, and could defeat them in conflict.

The desert and Colorado River tribes had to travel much farther to stay alive, and thus came to love traveling, and to make long journeys fairly often.  In a striking passage, James O. Pattie (1962 [1831]), a fur trapper, tells of walking from the Colorado to the mountains of far northern Baja California in the 1820s.  He and his band of hardened mountain men barely made it—they crawled the last miles on hands and knees.  Their Indian guides not only ran on ahead to check the route, and ran back to the men, but when they all made it to water Pattie and his company collapsed while the Indians had a dance!   His group and other trappers took over a million beaver from the lower Colorado in those decades, eliminating the beaver and permanently changing and degrading the hydrology of the whole region.

California’s indigenous groups were shattered beyond all measure by European contact (Castillo 1978).  Diseases no doubt came with the first Spanish contacts in Baja California, the Lower Colorado (1540), and Cabrillo’s coastal voyage (1542).  Disease surely ran far ahead of Europeans thereafter, as it did elsewhere in the continent (Hull 2009, 2015; Preston 1996, but, as Hull points out, Preston goes far beyond the evidence).  Actual Spanish settlement in 1769—much earlier in Baja California—brought much more disease, as well as military action.  Indigenous peoples were gathered into the missions, which supplied little food, oppressed the Native peoples without providing rights or protection, and stopped much of the burning, hunting, and gathering (K. Anderson 2005; Timbrook 2007).  However, Native Californians could maintain some of their lifestyle, gathering wild seeds and hunting, since the missions could not feed them.  Virginia Popper (2016), analyzing plant remains from colonial sites, found several local adaptations, from Spanish continuing their Mexican lifestyles to Native people living quite traditionally.

Anglo contact was even more traumatic.  Diseases swept through the population.  A malaria epidemic in 1833 killed 1/3 of the population of the north-central part of the state (Cook 1955), and went on to ravage Oregon, where Robert Boyd’s study is exemplary (1999).  Smallpox epidemics were frequent, and endemic disease also occurred.  The relative role of disease in depopulation has been exaggerated (Cameron et al. 2015; Hull 2015).  Its absolute role was horrific, but genocide, virtual enslavement in the missions, poor nutrition, disruption of Indigenous lifeways, and other causes were probably as important in the declines of the Californian nations.

In the 1850s, northern California became one of the areas of the United States subjected to outright genocide:  state-backed, official or quasi-official campaigns of extermination (Madley 2012, 2016; Trafzer and Hyer 1999).  Most of this took place under the brief reign in the 1850s of the Know-Nothing party, which was pro-slavery and openly genocidal toward Native Americans.  The Yahi were eliminated except for a few survivors, notably the famous “Ishi” (R. Heizer and T. Kroeber 1979; T. Kroeber 1961).  The Yuki and their neighbors were almost wiped out (Miller 1979), as were several small groups.  The Wiyot of the Eureka area were subjected to massacre and were almost all killed (Elsasser 1978).  The Tolowa were decimated, as a spillover of the Rogue River War (Madley 2012).  This at least had the effect of showing the three connected tribes of Yurok, Karok and Hupa what was in store for them.  The Karok, and to some extent the other two with them, holed up in the fantastically rugged and inaccessible mountains of their homelands and fought back, in one of the very few genuinely successful resistance movements in the United States.  After decades of sporadic warfare, they received treaties and reservations, and are still among the most numerous and culturally intact groups in the western United States.  This is a story that, amazingly, has never been told, and it deserves a major historical study.  Heroic but ultimately futile resistance by the Cahuilla (Phillips 1975) and the Central Valley tribes (Phillips 1993) has received more and better historical attention.  So have the resistance campaigns of the relatively nearby Seri, Yaqui and Apache in Mexico and along the border, but, in general, successful resistance to genocide has not been much studied—a surprising and deplorable omission.

Elsewhere, Madley documents the murder of 1,340 Native people by California militias, 1680 by the U.S. Army, and 6,460 by settlers and vigilantes.  These are reasonable figures, but one suspects that many a murder is lost in the records.  Madley’s work has brought the California genocide from one of the least-known in history (my use of the term has been questioned in the past) to perhaps the best-documented genocide of an Indigenous population, with the possible exception of parts of Australia.  The sheer death figures do not even begin to describe the cultural effects, however.  Cultural repression in day schools and boarding schools, segregation, prejudice, deliberate breaking up of populations, scattering of groups between reservations that opened and closed with dizzying speed in the 19th century, and other methods calculated to destroy California cultures persisted for decades.  It is testimony to incredible resistance, resilience, and sheer toughness that some cultural groups survived as identifiable “tribes.”  More than a few white settlers, also, rallied to the cause, including such early “Indian lovers” as Helen Hunt Jackson and George Wharton James.  They could be unenlightened by modern standards, but they saved many people.

The Modoc War is perhaps the best known of the sad stories (Dillon 1973).  The Modoc were forced onto a reservation established for their traditional enemies the Klamath.  They were there subjected to harassment by both Klamaths and whites.  A small band left the reservation, holed up in the horribly rough and inaccessible lava beds of Modoc County, and held off the United States Army for six months, only to be ultimately starved out and sent to die in a prison camp in Oklahoma. 

The struggle still needs full treatment; it has always seemed to me to be the archetypal story of the conquest of the Americas.  We have the story in many versions.  In addition to the historical and anthropological accounts, we have contemporary accounts from several different points of view.  The settlers spewed out racist hate via local newspapers.  The army’s deep concerns and tactical debates are available in full (Cozzens 2002:98-298).  The Indian agent for Oregon desperately tried to prevent the war, but was overwhelmed, and we have his heartbroken story (Meacham 1875).  Most interesting, perhaps, is the narrative of the incredibly heroic Native interpreter Winona, transmitted through her son Jeff Riddle (1974).  Winona shuttled back and forth, at constant risk of her life, interpreting and mediating for both sides.  With this Rashomon-like kaleidoscope of views, and with the story’s location in the black and starkly beautiful lava beds, the tale would make a stunning film, but a tragic one, not a Hollywood show.

Throughout California and the west, even after pacification and treaties, food supplies were stolen by corrupt officials (Jackson1885; Phillips 1997), and educational institutions did more sexual abuse and labor exploitation than teaching.  Before 1863 Native people could be enslaved, and conditions after Emancipation were not always much better.  They could still be thrown off their lands illegally, as at Cupa in San Diego County (Castillo 1978).  Many groups had their reservations “terminated” in the late 19th and again in the mid-20th centuries; this involved giving them individual allotments, which they usually soon lost to sharp dealers or outright illegal squatters.  A thorough history of the Wintu (Hoveman 2002) provides documentation of one of the more fortunate groups; the Wintu, in the upper Sacramento drainage, survive, but were almost exterminated and lost almost all their land.

The last termination in the area was the Klamath Reservation termination in southern Oregon in 1954 (Stern 1966), the effects of which were so horrific that terminations were virtually ended nationwide.  Local entrepreneurs even resorted to the classic 19th-century trick of giving men bottles of whiskey in exchange for signing their names on blank sheets of paper—the paper later being filled in with a deed of sale of allotted land.

The sordid record of murder and destruction has been often told, and would not be worth raising yet again if it were not for the fact that, today, denial or partial denial of it has become commonplace.  Not only do the Euro-Americans gloss over it; the surviving Native groups often do.  This is an understandable but sadly misdirected reaction to their being called “extinct” or “culturally extinct,” for decades.  They naturally want to assert their survival. 

Indeed, they survived, and by truly heroic efforts—especially their own, but also the efforts of a few Anglos, such as Helen Hunt Jackson and George Wharton James.  But it was a near thing.  In 1900 there were only about 15,000 identifiable California Indians.  This fits perfectly with Henry Dobyns’ “95% rule” (Dobyns 1983)—the average Native American group was reduced 95% from settlement to lowest point.  There were actually many more individuals, mostly of mixed ancestry, hiding out or calling themselves “Mexicans,” but the total number was still tiny.  Only around 1900 did the precipitous decline from disease and cruel treatment begin to reverse itself.  In the 19th century, there was every reason to assume the California Indians would be gone in a few years, at least as identifiable ethnic groups. 

As it was, though population has fortunately rebounded, most of the languages are now lost, and the last few are kept alive by diligent efforts of a handful of Native people and cooperating linguists (see Leanne Hinton 1994, whose work has been outstanding). 

I would thus urge modern people, including Native people, to be understanding of the “vanishing Indian” attitude of 1900.  We should pay more attention than we have done to the level of loss through disease, oppression, and outright genocide.  We should pay far more attention to the relatively few people—including those forgotten Yurok and Karok fighters—who prevented the vanishing from being total. 

Native Californian Uses of Biota

Major resources are listed in Kent Lightfoot and Otis Parrish’s recent book, California Indians and Their Environment (2009).  The most useful plant resources were divided into two types:  nuts and seeds.  Nuts grew on trees.  Acorns were by far the most important.  The classic account is E. W. Gifford’s “California Balanophagy” (1957), “balanophagy” being a delightful coinage for “acorn eating.”  They could produce around 70,000 kg/sq km in prime habitat (Bettinger 2015:110, citing Martin Baumhoff), enough to feed far more people than California ever had.  There were many species, cropping on different cycles, so nuts were always plentiful.

Pine nuts, walnuts, buckeyes, laurel nuts, wild cherry kernels, and many other nuts were also important, more so than the literature generally suggests.  Resources such as pine nuts from gray and Coulter pines, for instance, were surely more important than the literature suggests.  Seeds came from a vast range of annual and small-sized perennial plants.  Some major ones were sage species, notably chia (Salvia columbariae), tansy-mustard (Descurania pinnata), redmaids (Calandrinia ciliata), tarweeds (Madia and Hemizonia spp.), sunflowers of several genera, and a great profusion of grass species.  Loss of people, especially from remote and mountainous areas, came early after Spanish settlement, losing us knowledge of much resource use.

Berries, fruits, shoots, sap, roots, bulbs, corms, cambium, and every other plant part short of hard wood were eaten.  Berries were particularly rich and prone to follow fires.  An odd line in Pedro Fages’ accounts of Spanish conquest mentions wine from elderberry fruits; he may have meant “juice,” but the Paiute made real wine from cactus fruits (Powell 1971:50), presumably having learned it from the Oodham, and the Opata of Sonora did indeed make elderberry wine—a lot of it—and it was apparently strong and good (Yetman 2010:38-39).  (The Fages entry spawned an odd story about wine from willow fruit, because someone misread saucos “elderberries” as sauces “willows.”)

            California ethnobotany has been richly explored over several generations, but we have probably lost most of the old knowledge.  Even so, what remains is stunning.  Most of the southern California tribes have produced full ethnobotanical books (for the Cahuilla, Bean and Saubel 1972; Chumash, Timbrook 2007; Kawaiisu, Zigmond 1981; Santa Ysabel Kumeyaay, Hedges and Beresford 1986; Baja California Kumeyaay, Wilken-Robertson 2018; Serrano, Lerch 1981; others in manuscript) and northern California has not been neglected (e.g. Welch 2013; for Northern Paiute, just across the line in Nevada, Fowler 1991; reviews, K. Anderson 2005; Mead 1986).  Ethnozoology is less well covered (but see Timbrook and Johnson’s Chumash ethnoornithology, 2013).

Old records remain important.  J. P. Harrington’s are the richest (see Timbrook 2007).  Powers’ Tribes of California (1877) preserved much.  Records are still being discovered and made available.  A recent publication by James Welch (2013) makes available the enormous wealth of information collected by John and Grace Hudson from the Northern Pomo in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  By the time that professional ethnographers reached the Pomo, the genocidal effects of white settlement (well summarized by Welch) had led to much loss, and the Hudson material is invaluable (e.g. noting 12 more basket materials than previously known).  Fortunately, a good deal of Pomo knowledge did survive, and does so still (Goodrich et al. 1980). 

Plants provided a rich source of effective medicines.  Among those proved by chemical analysis to “work” are willows and several other species (salicylic acid—the source of aspirin), many mints (menthol and similar oils), sagebrush (thujone, which is vermifugal and in high doses abortifacient), many tannin-rich barks, and a whole range of mild but useful antibacterial and antifungal compounds.  Mineral medications include naturally occurring salts, antibacterial compounds, absorbent clays, and many more.  Hundreds of plants used medicinally have not yet been fully analyzed.  The Native Californians were also eclectic; modern healers freely use not only Native remedies from all over North America, but even Chinese herbal medicine, as well as drug store cures (see e.g. Peters and Ortiz 2010).  Medical knowledge was highly prized, healers were enormously valued, and traditional medicine by both herbal and religious methods was very widely known and practiced—and to a striking extent still is.

            Animal foods included deer, elk, pronghorn, rabbits, gophers, squirrels and ground squirrels, and hundreds of bird species (Kay and Simmons 2002).  Countless insects were used (Sutton 1988).  Even the bones were ground up.  Small animals could be mashed whole, bones and all, into “gopher-burger.”  Larger animal bones were mashed and boiled to extract bone grease, an important food elsewhere in North America and probably locally in California (Sunseri 2015).

Hundreds of species of fish and shellfish were used. Sea mammals were important, perhaps more so than fish for the Chumash (Gamble 2008), such that some rookeries on shore were depleted (see below).  Areas along major rivers, and along parts of the coast with good harbors for canoes, could rely on extremely rich and reliable fish resources.  Shells were valuable for beads and tools after the animals within had been eaten.  The great salmon fisheries of the major rivers stretch the imagination.  Where there were no salmon, there were river-running trout; the huge rainbow trout of the Pyramid Lake drainage ran upriver to Truckee Lake to spawn, and at such times the river was described as more fish than water (LaRivers 1994, noting this is an exaggeration but that the runs were incredible; he notes that the Basin lakes are extremely nutrition-rich).  Ocean fisheries were important too, with vast runs of smelt of many species, sardines, anchovies, and herring, as well as plenty of larger fish.  A smelt run in 1857 left fish piled “a foot deep” on the beaches of northwestern California (Tushingham and Christiansen 2015:192).  Specialized fishing, with large seagoing canoes and huge riverine weirs and fish dams, developed after 1000 BCE, much of it within the last 1500-2000 years.  Intensive fishing and shellfishing in the south, however, came earlier, and indeed there were extensive shell middens dating to many thousand years ago.  (“Were,” because development has destroyed them on the mainland—within my memory, in Baja California and on Point Sal.  Research is now more or less confined to the islands.) 

Otherwise, animals could be very thin on the ground.  Ethnographic accounts suggest that rabbits (including jackrabbits, which are technically hares) were the most widespread and reliable land animal resource base.  Reptiles and predatory mammals were widely avoided as food. 

Mark Raab (1996), among others, has demolished the idea that Californians were rolling in food.  Most of the state is, after all, desert or barren mountain.  But some areas were indeed quite lush.  These were especially the interfaces between water and land, and most especially the high-energy ones: river deltas, current-swept channels, lakes with large feeder streams.  Populations were dense in the favored areas; numbers of people rose in feedback with elaborate technological and social systems.  In less favored areas, drought years or local disasters could produce real want.  Either way, population often pressed on resources.  Even so, with only some 250,000-300,000 people in a very rich landscape, California hardly suffered from serious long-term pressure on major resources.  Work-horse trees like oak and buckeye, and productive, management-responsive annuals like chia sage (Salvia columbariae), would support large populations in normal years.  Human populations would be trimmed back in years of extreme drought or flood.  Still, it is doubtful if the population figures represent a population at “carrying capacity.”  One suspects that they could have worked harder, stored more, fought less, and supported several times their contact-era population.

Storage was necessary, and many methods developed.  Meat and fish were dried or smoked.  Seeds were kept in baskets.  Acorns were stored in large raised granaries made of basketry, withes, or brush.  The Western Mono serve as a good example:  Christopher Morgan (2012) found that they lived in small communities (about 13 being typical but some reaching as many as 75) which had three or more granaries, but also had dispersed caches around the countryside, so that one was never far from stored acorns.  A granary held about 725 kg of acorns; about seven of these would support a community of 13, providing about 4 million calories (Morgan 2012:724-725).  Granaries were lined with pine needles—other groups sometimes used sagebrush, which is insecticidal—to discourage pests and keep the acorns dry.  Stored food had to sustain the groups during the long and harsh winter of their mountain habitat.  The far larger towns in lowland California had much less severe winters to contend with, but needed more food, and must have stored enormous quantities.  Bears raided caches, making extra storage necessary.

Bettinger (2015:90) has pointed out that meat, fish and the like are front-loaded: they are edible immediately and usually are so eaten, and if they are processed it has to be done immediately.  In California, that was largely an issue with fish, which had to be split and dried or smoked as soon as caught.  Nuts, especially acorns, are back-loaded: they are easy to gather and store, but take enormous amounts of processing.  So they are normally harvested in vast quantities in a brief harvest period, then stored to be processed and used at need.  This had social effects.  At one extreme, great assemblages of people were necessary to catch and dry salmon, but these assemblages would later disperse.  At the other, seed and nut dependence led to smaller but more stable, permanent groups.

Mineral resources were generally concentrated in a few spots, making widespread trade necessary.  Salt was required for survival and was sometimes hard to get.  Even more concentrated in source were obsidian and other silicates that would take a sharp edge; they were essential for points, knives, and the like.  At particularly good obsidian sources, I have seen the ground literally paved with flakes over many acres.  Good-quality grinding stone for mortars and metates could be surprisingly rare and valuable.  It is hard to imagine people carrying huge metates all over the desert, but they did, finding the labor worthwhile to get metates from superior quarries (Schneider 1993).  Soft chlorite schist, as on Santa Catalina Island, was mined for making bowls.   Marcasite became beads used as money in north-central California. 

The extent and importance of trade in California has sometimes been stressed (Lightfoot and Parrish 2009), but on the whole it has been underestimated.  Some communities, especially on the rather impoverished Channel Islands of the south, may have actually depended on trade for food, at least in some seasons (Arnold 1987, 2004).  If true—and it is highly controversial—this would be a very rare case worldwide of a hunting-gathering population depending on trade in staples.  Inland, California shell beads got as far afield as Arizona and northern Mexico.  Dentalium shell beads from Vancouver Island got to northern California.

The degree to which all these items truly constituted money is not clear.  They could be used for buying food, so they were not merely ceremonial (Bettinger 2015:184).  They were certainly monetized in early Spanish times, in areas of dense population, but the Spanish may have had much to do with this.  Clearly the shell items represented a kind of money, but only a special purpose currency, used in specific contexts, perhaps largely ceremonial ones in many or most cases.  Dentalium shells were used as money in the northwest of the state (and further north), but the fact that they were adorned and decorated so they would be happy and would lure more money to the owner (Bettinger 2015:182) shows how different the concept of money was there from what we now experience.

Indigenous Management

            The Californian peoples generally lacked agriculture, but there were significant exceptions, proving that they knew full well how to grow crops and could have done so if they had found it worth while.  Tobacco was grown very widely over the state.  The Karok, otherwise nonagricultural, knew enough about farming it to fill an entire book (Harrington 1932).  The neighboring Yurok believed that wild tobacco was dangerous, only cultivated tobacco being safe to use (Heizer 1978:650).

The southeast part of the state was firmly agricultural, growing the famous trinity of maize, beans, and squash, as well as several minor crops.  They also sowed wild grass, including the possibly domesticated local millet Panicum sonorum.  They may have cultivated amaranth species (Castetter and Bell 1951; Forde 1931:107-109; Nabhan 1982, 1985). 

The Owens Valley Paiute irrigated wild plants (Lawton et al. 1993).  This was presumably derived from true agricultural practices their ancestors carried out further south, since it is now beyond reasonable doubt that the proto-Uto-Aztecans were farmers, and the loss of farming in the Great Basin is a recent and derived condition (Hill 2001).  The Southern Paiutes of Nevada had agriculture from ancient times.  Sowing of wild seed crops is attested for a few groups (Lightfoot and Parrish 2009:127), and there were surely more groups who sowed.  Transplantation is also well attested, but especially for groups that had agriculture, notably the Kumeyaay (Shipek 1993).

Finally, increase in native barley (Hordeum sp.) seed size, to far beyond anything natural, took place in central California (Wohlgemuth 1996, 2004).  Similar seed dynamics are reported from the Los Angeles River area (Reddy 2016:237).  This implies either true domestication or at least intensive manipulation of stocks.  But the experiment ended:  the central Californians came to focus more and more on oaks and other tree crops, and the barley seeds shrank again, at least in central California.

In such a climatically fluctuating place as California, agriculture is difficult.  One need only read accounts by early European settlers trying to predict year by year, in the days before statewide irrigation systems.  Hunting and gathering must have seemed more reasonable.  But it too necessitated some higher organization if people were to manage the environment, store food, and accumulate fixed productive capital in the form of nets, weirs, canoes, and so on.  Hence the benefit of complex societies.  In an environment that is sometimes exceedingly rich but sometimes—and unpredictably—exceedingly poor, they make sense.

Also, the development of agriculture, throughout the world, took place in areas central to vast trade and communication routes.  Presumably the exchanges of goods and ideas were crucial.  Coastal California is a cul-de-sac.  Morever, the Californian biotic and cultural region has no single center; it is polycentric.  Even today, the Anglo-Americans of the Bay Area, Los Angeles, Sacramento, San Diego, and other cities all have their own subcultures and hinterlands.  There was no one confined lush area, like the Jordan Valley, Mesopotamia, or the Nile Valley in the Old World or like the Valley of Mexico in the New, to bring people together.   

The earliest agriculture in the world, that of the Near East, arose in a rather similar environment, but at oases within dry and desert-like parts of it.  Significantly, oases within California’s driest deserts are precisely the areas where agriculture waspracticed in the state.  Such lush pockets in an otherwise very challenging environment evidently make agriculture more appealing.  Near Eastern agriculture arose just after the Younger Dryas event, when environmental stresses and opportunities were high.  California had extremely few people at the time, and never had such climatic traumas afterward (cf. McCorriston 2000).

            Far more prevalent was intensive manipulation of wild plants (K. Anderson 2005; K. Anderson and Lake 2013, 2017; K. Anderson and Rosenthal 2015; Blackburn and K. Anderson 1993).  Native Californians pruned, trimmed, cultivated, selectively harvested, and in short did everything that a modern gardener does for her plants—but without domestication.  At the edge of the region, the level of cultivation of camas (Camassia spp.) and wokas (yellow waterlily seeds; Colville 1902; Deur 2009) reported for the Klamath and Modoc amounts to nearly or fully agricultural-level manipulation.  They also managed fish, and manipulated huckleberry intensively, as well as wild carrot and other root crops (Deur 2009).  So did their neighbors the Shasta, who also managed oaks for acorns (Gleason 2001).  Unfortunately, recording data on management was much less commonly done than recording ethnobotanical uses, and we are left in ignorance of most of it (see e.g. Welch 2013 on this issue).

            Geophytes—root, bulb and corm crops—were particularly subject to manipulation.  Corms of Brodiaea, Dichelostemma, and other plants (Anderson 2017; Gill 2017; Gill and Hoppa 2016; Wohlgemuth 2017) were particularly widespread and important.  Tubers of Cyperus esculentus, Eleocharis, and other plants (Lawton et al. 1976; Pierce and Scholtze 2016) were cultivated in the Owens Valley.

This level of management was a quite different startegy from agriculture.  It was, instead, whole-landscape cultivation, maximizing production across a huge range of resources.  By contrast, the Near Eastern Neolithic peoples in similar environments focused on two or three to cultivate intensively, thus inventing agriculture. 

The large bulbs and flowers of camas (specifically C. quamash  and—if it is a separate species–C. leichtlinii), the response of these plants to cultivation, and their striking failure to thrive and compete after the Native population was exiled from the meadows, all imply true domestication.  My impression from observing camas in the wild and growing it in my garden is that if it were grown by a “truly agricultural” people it would unhesitatingly be called a domesticate.

            Indeed, throughout California the level of management was impressive.  The area covered by camas and wokas was enormous.  Not far away, within California proper, the Shasta (Gleason 2001), Achomawi, and Atsugewi (T. Garth 1978) cultivated bulb- and root-rich meadows extensively.  Wild crops included monocots of many families—true lilies, Mariposa lilies, camas, and so on—as well as roots, mostly of the carrot family, such as wild carrots (Perideridea) and Lomatium.  Root-digging seems very generally to have involved careful cultivating:  small roots were left to regrow or were even planted; competing plants were removed; the soil was loosened; parts that could regrow roots were returned to the ground; and so on. 

Root-digging involved a veritable Protestant ethic of hard work and diligent, responsible effort.  Among the Atsugewi, men tried to marry the girls who brought in the most roots, and myths told of heroic diggers who married well (Garth 1978:237-238).  This was part of a more general ethic of hard work in all spheres of life, best studied by Garth among the Atsugewi, but generally found in California (see e.g. Spott and Kroeber 1942 on the Yurok).  Garth reports chiefs calling everyone up at dawn with harangues such as: “Get up and do something for your living.  Be on your guard.  Be on the lookout for Paiute [raiders].  You have to work hard for your living.  There may be a long winter so put away all the food you can” (Garth 1978:237). 

Probably no bulb-rich meadow in the state was left alone, and apparently all that were even remotely close to a settlement were cultivated quite intensively (judging from K. Anderson 2005, 2017, and Gleason 2001).  Even the Paiute and Shoshone, in some of the most merciless deserts on earth, enormously modified their habitats.  They have been involved in management efforts recently.  Many desert habitats were improved for wildlife and biodiversity by their care, as shown by Catherine Fowler (1992, 2013).  They conserved waterfowl—a staple food—by leaving eggs if there were hatchlings in the nest (Fowler 2013:165-167; taking all eggs from a recently-laid clutch does no harm, since ducks and coots simply lay more).  They also had cautionary tales to keep children from stealing too many bird eggs.

With Fowler we move partly beyond state boundaries into neighboring Nevada.  This allows us to include also the careful review by Richard Clemmer (2009a) of “conservation” among the Western Shoshone.  These groups did not preserve pristine wilderness.  They burned carefully and according to plans, sowed grass seeds, and managed vegetation.  They hunted pronghorn sustainably, planning hunts only when pronghorn populations had built up.  It is absurdly easy to overhunt pronghorn, because they are easy to lure and are slow reproducers.  An estimated 30-40 million pronghorn were reduced to 13,000 around 1900 by settler hunting.  Before that, large communal drives, under some sort of direction but probably not a specialized shaman, took place, especially around the time and place of pinyon harvesting (Wilke 2013).  Charms were used but there is some indication that some pronhorn were allowed to escape.  Certainly the areas were allowed to recover before another hunt.

They may have managed rabbits and beaver locally; evidence is unclear.  I suspect they did.  Clemmer notes that there were many beaver in the tiny Great Basin rivers when Anglo-American trappers got there.  This suggests either management or great difficulty in hunting the beaver.  Since the Shoshone were expert hunters, the latter is unlikely, so good management is implied.  Historic fur trappers had no difficulty in trapping beavers from these small, accessible streams.  Clemmer finds no evidence for management of pine nuts or similar resources.  Pine nuts crop in only some years, and when they do they crop heavily, so there is no real way to manage them.  However, the Timbisha Shoshone of California most certainly do manage pine nuts, by cleaning up the groves to prevent wildfires, brush competition, and the like from damaging the pinyon pine trees (Catherine Fowler, pers. comm.).  It should be noted that pinyons are notoriously erratic croppers—a strategy to foil seed-eating insects—and crop only every few years (Bettinger 2015:68).  People had to scout the neighborhood to find groves that were productive—an easy task, fortunately, since one can monitor the developing cones over a year or so.  Wandering hunters would report back, and the group would know exactly when and where to go when the cones were pickable—just before maturity, since at maturity they open and the seeds scatter or are devoured by a host of animals. 

Clemmer also found no evidence for intensive fishing or management of fish, but data rapidly caught up with him here.  Just outside our area, a major study by Deward Walker and collaborators turned up evidence for fishing on an enormous scale, with a huge range of sophisticated technology, by the northern Shoshone and their neighbors, who lived in the fish-rich Snake River drainage (Walker 2010).  This information presumably applies to the Humboldt River too, and one can be fairly sure that all Great Basin rivers were heavily fished.  Significantly, Walker found it “necessary to conduct research interviews in either the Paiute/Bannock or Shoshone language” (Walker 2010:55)—in the 21st century!  This is real tribute to cultural survival, and one that reminds us that lack of linguistic skills must have caused early investigators to miss a great deal.  Since the Shoshone (and closely related Paiute/Bannock) lived at the rivers’ headwaters, where streams are tiny, narrow, and often rather thin in fish, they could easily have wiped out the salmon and other large river-running fish.  The fact that salmon continued to abound proves some considerable degree of management.

Further, and much more thorough, work on plant and animal management in Nevada results from the comprehensive and thorough work of Jeremy Spoon and his many Southern Paiute coworkers in the White/Muddy river drainage of southern Nevada (Spoon and Arnold 2014; Spoon, Armold, and Newe/Nuwuvi Working Group 2011, 2012a, 2012b; Spoon, Arnold, Lefler and Milton 2015; Spoon, Arnold, Lefler, Wendel, and Nuwuvi Working Group 2013, 2014a, 2014b; these reports are quite repetitious but each has its own findings also).  Among newly reported information are care about pruning mistletoe from pinyon pines, and a great deal about managing water—desperately scarce in their area.  One elder observed:  “Science is a tool to measure stuff.  Culture is a tool to maintain what you have.  That’s what I believe” (Spoon et al. 2013:56).  These elders contrasted interaction with “management,” the latter seen as a not-so-good idea from the white settlers.  They noted a high respect for rocks, which remember whether they were moved for good or bad reasons—a belief I have encountered in Mongolia. One of Spoon’s reports is in fact titled The Voices of the Rocks Sing Through Us (Spoon et al. 2014b).  They also discuss talking with trees.  This makes solid sense when one is used to the significant silences—often filled with nonverbal communication—that mark and enhance Native American conversations.  Fire management is as among California groups described below; pruning, small patch burns in the right season, some clearing of brush beforehand, and general careful preparation and timing (Spoon, Arnold, Lefler and Milton 2015).

The level of personal restraint and responsibility involved could reach quite incredible proportions.  Philip Wilke (1988) found that desert junipers cropped for bow staves were carefully conserved.  A juniper with a straight branch was a rare commodity.  About one bow stave per twenty years could be taken from such a branch, preferably from the compression wood on the under side; then the juniper had to be left to recover.  Yet there are such trees all over the range of the juniper.  Bowyers had to be on their own recognizance—no one was out there patrolling.  Individual conscience restrained them from taking too much.  This self-policing went on for countless centuries over millions of square miles.  I have observed the same for yews in the Pacific Northwest; any venerable yew with straight branches shows the long, straight scars.  Such “culturally managed trees” are often well known locally, to the point that “CMT” has become a normal word in modern archaeology and land management.

California’s and Nevada’s indigenous people normally engaged in long migrations between winter villages and spring and summer harvesting grounds.  These migrations took them through successive habitats, usually on the route from lowlands to highlands and back.  Presumably the routes would change to avoid places heavily harvested in immediately previous years.  No meadow in the state, except extremely remote and high-altitude ones, would have been long ignored.  Archaeology shows this clearly.  Look around any meadow anywhere in the state, and (unless settlement or flooding have destroyed the record) you will find tiny scatters of flakes where someone sharpened a knife, broke an arrow point, or quickly flaked out a skinning tool.

            On the other hand, recent writers have been too quick to maintain that all California was highly managed, with wilderness a meaningless concept.  The Native Californians did not greatly affect the rough, infertile parts of the state, or the high mountains.  This was not purely because of indifference.   More significant was the use of remote mountaintops and high-mountain environments for vision quests and meditation, with the goal of gaining spiritual insights, knowledge, and ability.  Anthropologists generally refer to this as “power,” but, significantly, Native people speaking English usually call it “knowledge.”  It refers to a comprehensive spiritual vision that gives the visionary enough self-efficacy to accomplish important matters; the highest knowledge is generally considered to be that of healing.  In any case, all western North American peoples sought this, and depended on mountain wilderness for it.  All groups knew certain spots, called “power places” in the literature, that were particularly good for vision questing; mountaintops were particularly favored, but remotes lakes, waterfalls, and springs were important.  Of this more anon; at present we need note only that wilderness was required for a specific important use.

Most important of all was burning, but readers should remember that all those other techniques were important as well.  This was not simply “firestick farming.” 

            Fire was the chief way of managing the environment, and here the record is somewhat confusing.  There is no question that California Native peoples set fires everywhere that would burn, and that these very substantially altered the vegetation over vast areas of the state (K. Anderson 1999, 2005; K. Anderson and Rosenthal 2015; Lewis 1973; Lightfoot and Parrish 2009, with major review of literature; Pyne 2004; Timbrook 2007).  This was to be expected, for all Native American peoples except those in non-combustible environments (basically, Arctic and high-alpine areas and sand deserts) burned regularly (Pyne 2004; Stewart et al. 2002), and the effects on the vegetation were considerable; it is possible that the entire Eastern North American forest was deliberately maintained as an oak-chestnut-hickory community by burning (Delcourt and Delcourt 2004).

Juan Crespí’s diary from 1769 (Brown 2001; see Gamble 2008) is particularly revealing.  He noted not only widespread deliberate burning, but also that the vegetation in many areas was short annual pasture rather than the chaparral and coastal sage scrub that are now, or recently were, found in those locations.  The reviews by K. Anderson and by Lightfoot and Parrish list hundreds of sources covering dozens of groups. 

            On the other hand, a few doubters have raised their voices, and one of them is a formidable authority: Richard Minnich (1983, 1987, 2001a, 2001b, 2008), one of the two or three leading experts on California fire ecology.  He points out at length that much of the state is affected by dry lightning, which in the mountains can be an almost daily phenomenon in late summer, and that other sources of ignition exist.  (These might range from volcanism to spontaneous combustion in animal nests.)   California’s bone-dry summers and highly inflammable vegetation combine to guarantee natural fires on a cyclic basis.  California would burn sooner or later, indigenous people or no (see also Sugihara et al. 2006). 

Chaparral and some California forest formations are characterized by large numbers of species that seem actually designed to burn:  they dry out in summer and contain resins, waxes, and other compounds that are highly inflammable.  These species all either stump-sprout aggressively after fire, have fruits that need fire to open them, or have seeds that need fire to germinate.  Some authorities think that these plants evolved to eliminate competition and maximize their own dominance by this aggressive route. 

For instance, California’s most distinctive pine groups, the closed-cone and knobcone pines, have cones that normally do not open unless burned.  They live in chaparral, grow and fruit rapidly, and are designed to burn on 20-to-50-year cycles.  I have lived to see the knobcone pine forest on the San Bernardino Mountains go through two cycles and get well into a third.  Obviously they did not evolve in the last few centuries, and thus it is clear that California has burned since long before the Native Americans perfected their management systems.

Be that as it may, Native Californians burned chaparral regularly, to increase edible plant, mammal, and even insect resources.  Kat Anderson and Jeffrey Rosenthal (2015) report, for instance, that caterpillars, as well as grasshoppers, were managed by fire, which causes rapid regrowth of the tender new shoots on which they feed.   These authors describe the values of each stage of regrowth after fire.  Burning also opened the brush, making travel possible; a stand of mature chaparral is impenetrable, or at best very slow going.  Annual plants often produce more seeds (they need heavy seeding to survive) and greens than perennials do. 

Even fish could be helped.  Michelle Stevens and Emilie Zelazo (2015) point out that burning in summer opened up floodplains that flooded in fall, winter and spring.  Fish that spawned in those areas, including many important ones endemic to the central part of the state, were increased.  Another benefit was increase in number and quality of stems of plants used to make fishnets, such as Indian hemp (Apocynum cannabinum) and milkweed.  These plants grow in moist areas and produce longer, straighter stems after burning.

            A contrarian work is a volume edited by Thomas Vale (2002), which contains some articles on California.  Vale took a considerably more extreme position than Minnich, and argued that Native Americans did little managing by fire (or, for that matter, anything else).  Vale’s work might have had more impact if it had not been almost immediately buried under the enormous floods of counter-evidence in Stewart et al. (2002), Pyne (2004) and K. Anderson (2005).  Vale’s book was effectively answered, and refuted, by in a review by Henry Lewis (2003), the pioneer investigator of fire in Native North America.

            Vale, like Minnich, emphasized the probability that remote and mountainous parts of the state would be more influenced by lightning than by Native burning.  Lightning strikes were and are so much commoner that Native burning would not have affected the cycle.  Fire scars on trees have been used to assess the frequency of fires, but the vast majority of lightning strikes burn one tree (and perhaps its immediate neighbors) without starting a serious fire.

However, in California, the areas near dense Indigenous settlement are also the areas with the least lightning.  Dry lightning is almost nonexistent in coastal California.  Rivers and barren areas prevent the spread of fire from distant mountains, though it certainly does spread from nearby ranges (especially in the Santa Barbara area).  Fire return intervals in all these areas, even redwood forest, are so extremely frequent that lightning is highly unlikely to be the major cause (Kat Anderson, pers. comm, Feb. 4, 2014).

            Moreover, the testimonies of Crespí and others make it clear that the vegetation was burned far more frequently than even frequent lightning strikes would do.  Taken together, they describe millions of acres of annual pasturage.  Yet, in early historic times, these areas were brushlands. 

Minnich (2008) has established that the bunchgrass prairies of California’s interior valleys were nonnatural, and indeed many of them were purely mythical—early mappers’ overgeneralizations.  The potential vegetation of most of the valleys is saltbush and other brush.   Minnich has qualified his stand on the inexorable nature of burning cycles (Minnich 2008 and pers. comm, 2009-2010; Minnich and Franco-Vizcaino 2002).  It appears that chaparral and even desert vegetation can be burned much more often than it would naturally do.  This has made him more open to Native American burning as a landscape shaper.

            Californians were careful fire managers; they made very small fires for their own use.  J. W. Powell, writing on the Paiute, says: “…an Indian never builds a large fire…and expresses great contempt for the white man who builds his fire so large that the blaze and smoke keep him back in the cold” (Powell 1971:53; this confirms a very widespread American folk observation that I have heard since my childhood). 

            In short, the evidence is unequivocal.  They certainly managed well-populated parts of the state by burning.  On the other hand, their ability to reshape the vast lightning-prone mountains of the state seems limited.  K. Anderson (2005, and pers. comm, Feb. 4, 2014) finds that they maintained and expanded the mountain meadows and coastal prairies of the state.  These are now rapidly growing up to forest, in spite of lightning strikes; but deliberate fire suppression and the current years of drought (which favor trees over meadow grass) are involved in this. 

Another equivocal case is oak woodlands.  Oak seedlings die when burned.  Frequent burning of oak groves would eliminate them.  On the other hand, oaks survive burning when they grow large enough to have thick bark.  I have seen coast liveoaks sprout rapidly back from the very hottest fires.  It takes about ten years for a live oak to reach fire-withstanding age.  Thus, rarer burning—once a new generation of oaks had grown up—would eliminate fungal and insect pests, thin out the competition, and maintain the groves. 

A problem for everyone trying to reconstruct Californian vegetation as of 1700 is that Europeans replaced deliberate burning with deliberate fire suppression.  The Chumash were already seeing this as a major hardship, and complaining about it, by 1800 (Gamble 2008; Timbrook 2007).  The Achomawi, later, complained and regretted the ruin of the forests (Rhoades 2013:112).

The only possible conclusion is that human-set fire profoundly affected areas near large population centers, minimally affected remote mountain and desert areas, and affected to an unknown and probably unknowable degree the vast in-between zone.

            The situation in regard to animals is even less clear.  California Native peoples overharvested the choicest shellfish, such as abalone, which are delectable and easy to over-collect (Jones, Porcasi, Gaeta and Codding 2008; Kennett 2005; Lightfoot and Parrish 2009, summarizing a very large and contentious literature; Rick et al. 2008).  It seems clear that depletion was very slow and gradual, and frequently reversed (Rick et al. 2008).  People were fairly careful stewards.  They may have overharvested fish, but the wild swings in fish populations caused by ocean dynamics make this impossible to judge.  Fish have to accommodate to the sudden alternations of El Niño’s warm water and La Niña’s cold, both unpredictable in extent and reach.  Anyone familiar with fishing in California (especially the south) knows that species of fish, sometimes in enormous numbers, suddenly appear and as suddenly disappear when such events occur (cf. Gamble 2015; Jones et al. 2016). 

Chumash fishing pressure in the Santa Barbara Channel, however, was enormous, and declines of easily overharvested species like sheepshead in the archaeological record are therefore significant.  The Chumash had several named types of net.  A 20-foot gill net required 12,500 stems of Indian hemp (Apocynum cannabinum), which would have to be prepared, retted, and spun.  A 40-foot seine required 35,000 stems.  With these nets they took great quantities of small fish (Johnson 2015).  With these, they could easily fish out streams and bays.  Indian hemp was carefully managed—pruned, selectively harvested (K. Anderson 2005).  Its sporadic occurrence, especially in places where it does not normally grow (such as dry lowlands) and which are not very near other stands, strongly suggests deliberate planting.  Apocynum androsaemifolium was an inferior substitute in dry mountain areas, and nettles were also widely used for cordage; both were managed.

Recent research on the Channel Islands shows a tendency for popular resources to decline in hard times, but the staple shellfish—mussels—was about equally common through time (Lapeña et al. 2015; cf. Joslin 2015).  Mussels still abound on the islands.  The highly favored abalones were sharply reduced during hungry times, but were still abundant till modern settler societies got at them and destroyed the resource—a fate conspicuously absent from the closely corresponding Isla Cedros in Mexico, where local conservation is still the rule (Des Lauriers 2010).  The Channel Islands were settled by 13,000 years ago, and quite densely populated for most of the time since.  In spite of epidemics, they remained densely populated till the people were forcibly removed to the mainland in the Spanish colonial period.  These islands are small and absurdly easy to overexploit, so the fact that they were still resource-rich through the 18th and 19th centuries implies extremely careful and thorough resource management.

Seabirds were little disturbed, but a flightless duck (Chendytes lawi) became extinct, through human hunting and probably also through predation by human-introduced animals including foxes (Jones et al. 2008; Rick et al. 2008; Rick et al. 2009; Whisler et al. 2015; there was also a puffin, Fratercula dowi, but it was so rare that no one knows what happened to it).  The duck lasted for some 8,000 years after human contact, however (Jones et al. 2008; Jones and Codding 2010), which indicates human restraint.  Indeed, one wonders why the Chumash allowed it to die out; it could easily have been quasi-domesticated.  They may have hunted it for prestige (Hildebrandt et al. 2010) but probably did not (Jones and Codding 2010; I agree with them that hunting a smallish bird that could not escape would not give anyone much prestige).  I suspect that period of unfavorable climate may have led to both natural decline and desperation-caused overhunting.  The case seems to me more interesting than the insignificance of the bird would warrant, since we have here a prey that could very easily be exterminated, yet was not for many millennia.   

            A classic study of indigenous conservation was Sean Swezey and Robert Heizer’s study of salmon management on the Klamath River (Swezey and Heizer1977; see also Kroeber and Barrett 1960, Tushingham and Christiansen 2015).  The tribes there allowed escapement of salmon to preserve the stocks.  This was ritually represented; first-salmon rites, weir inauguration rites, and other ceremonies provided a cycle that regulated take and escapement.  Prayers to the salmon to return in abundance were part of the maintenance; the Karuk prayed with the wonderful word ?imshírihraavish, “you will shine upriver quickly” (O’Neill 2008:101).

However, this was not all; any temptation to cheat was reduced by the fact that the tribes upstream would protest, often violently, if escapements were inadequate.  People kept each other honest.  Everyone wanted an equal chance at the fish, and would enforce it through warfare if necessary. 

Rules on fishing were tight.  Robert Spott reported that his people, in the first half of the year (by their reckoning), could not take or eat salmon below Cannery Creek; if a salmon was caught right at the point where the creek entered the Klamath River, only the part that had passed the creek mouth border could be eaten (Spott and Kroeber 1942:172; a great deal more about salmon rituals follows).  Weirs that could take 50 days to build were demolished after 10 days of fishing, to allow escapement.  This emphasizes how strict the conservation rules were on the Klamath.

            Recall that the Native people of California’s northwest were blissfully lacking in formal government, so, as with Great Basin bow stave trees, this management was entirely based on people’s individual consciences reinforced by public opinion. 

            It seems highly likely, and locally certain, that similar fishing regulations held throughout the state.  At contact, most of southern California’s small streams had steelhead runs.  A run even survives, or did until very recently, in tiny San Mateo Creek in Orange County, and, again until recently, in Malibu Creek in Los Angeles County.  All the streams in the region are so small that a single determined fisherman could wipe out a run.  The San Mateo Creek run was down to one female at one point.  These runs could not have survived without deliberate restraint, given the high aboriginal hunter-gatherer populations.  Similarly, the dense population of Pomo around Clear Lake could not possibly have subsisted on its fish resources (as they did:  McLendon and Lowy 1978) unless they practiced careful conservation.  There were just too few fish, and these few have to run up the creeks or concentrate in shallows to spawn, making them utterly vulnerable.  Even the simplest aboriginal fishery could have wiped out the runs within a year or two.  But we have no documentation on this; apparently nobody thought to ask.

Another case in point is the abundance of enormous trout and suckers, and the lack of decline in their numbers, in the Lost and upper Klamath Rivers of the California-Oregon border country (Stevenson and Butler 2015).  The Lost River in particular is a tiny stream that almost dries up in drought years (hence its name—it tends to disappear in, or even before reaching, the vast Tule Lake sink), and only careful management could have preserved large fish in it.  Mismanagement since contact almost wiped out the Lost River sucker, but it is recovering under intensive management.  Suckers were also important on the upper Pit River, where the Achomawi not only still fish for them but still carefully manage them, watching and protecting their spawning areas and not taking too many (Floyd Buckskin, pers. comm.). 

Native Californians probably overharvested mainland colonies of seals and sea lions (Broughton 1994, 2002; Jones et al. 2004), but probably not as much as sometimes alleged (Jones et al 2004 pull back from their own earlier estimates; and see Rick et al. 2008).  Remember that grizzly bears and gray wolves entered the state at the same time humans did, and would have made mainland pinniped colonies nonviable, humans or no.  Native hunters probably kept numbers of elk and deer well below potential (Kay and Simmons 2002; compare the much better evidence for the Columbia River area, in Martin and Szuter 1999).  They tried their best to keep the numbers of grizzly bears down, but probably with limited success.  How much they could affect these animals, and how much they tried, remains unclear.  Extermination of the megafauna no doubt allowed deer and elk to expand their populations enormously, because of competitive release.  I suspect the Native peoples came into some degree of conscious equilibrium with them.  Elk, deer and mountain sheep all tame themselves if given any chance, and herds habituated to human presence might have been cropped almost like livestock.  Indeed, red deer are farmed today in Europe and New Zealand; red deer are basically the same as Californian “elk.”  They are tamed, but not domesticated; true domestication involves a genetic change to a new and artificially selected strain, but red deer remain genetically wild. 

William Hildebrandt (e.g. Hildebrandt et al. 2010) has long argued that much hunting was done for prestige rather than for economic return; very likely true, but I doubt whether this was significant.  The Native peoples had too little margin.  They had to hunt rationally for food.  Prestige would naturally accrue to anyone bringing in a huge amount of meat, but I believe people forewent rabbits to hunt deer because they knew the deer would provide more meat rather than because it would provide more prestige.  After all, a good-sized deer, around 180 lb., would dress out around 100 lb meat, and thus provide as much meat as 100-150 cottontails or 1600 sizable shellfish.  Even a fair chance at a deer would thus beat all but the biggest rabbit hunt or shellfish expedition in economic terms.

California’s sparse population was really not enough to do much damage to fleet, widely-dispersed game like deer and pronghorn, though the effect on more concentrated stocks like sea lions and tule elk, to say nothing of abalone, could be severe.  Burning would be likely to lead to increases in deer and elk.  Slow-moving animals like porcupines would be caught in the fires.  Many species would be indirectly affected by opening up the landscape. 

California’s population was not evenly distributed.  Along the Santa Barbara Channel and the lower Sacramento, and around San Francisco Bay, there were at least ten persons per square mile (judging especially from Chumash population estimates, the best we have for a densely-populated part of the state; see Gamble 2008, Kennett 2005).  Conversely, the higher mountains and the Mohave Desert had a tiny fraction of a person per mile (I would estimate one person per ten square miles for the Mohave).  Intensity of management and of hunting obviously varied proportionately.

However, the Mohave Desert people managed to overhunt the bighorn sheep seriously.  They were bighorn specialists, and when the bow and arrow came in, a fatal temptation presented itself.  Sites show rapid decrease of bighorns; the rock art showing thousands of bighorns in that area may have been made in an increasingly desperate attempt to call the sheep back spiritually (Garfinkel et al. 2010).  It stopped short around 1300, probably because Numic speakers with a different lifestyle replaced whoever was there before.  Possibly the latter were dying out from the consequences of their folly.  One assumes that this was not the only overhunting story in ancient California.

An  insight into Californian hunting is found in Frank Latta’s work on the Yokuts (Latta 1977).  Asking Yokuts hunters how far their bows would shoot, he was told that no one knew.  No one would waste an arrow and its valuable stone point by shooting it at a distant target.  Hunters disguised themselves in deerskins and sneaked up on deer and other animals, finally shooting from 10-20 yard range.  John Wesley Powell noted the same thing among the Paiute (Powell 1971:49), and, indeed, traditional hunters worldwide did the same.  This indicates an appreciable tameness on the part of the deer.  Deer are not stupid, and are notoriously hard to sneak up on.  The author recalls a story from many years ago:  just before hunting season, a couple of California wildlife trackers painted a buck deer bright orange, fitted him with a radio tracker, and followed him for a day through the brush of the Shasta County back-country.  They knew exactly where he was at all times, thanks to the radio, but they saw nothing of him except a flash of orange for a few minutes. In Michigan, a herd of deer in a 50-acre fenced enclosure were intensively studied and censused year after year, but the lead buck was never seen.  He avoided all contact even in that tiny space, being known only from his tracks and shed antlers (Pierotti 2011:87).

Wanton, uncontrolled hunting would make close-hunting tactics impossible.  Early explorers were told similar things by coastal peoples.  The exceptionally powerful Hupa bows could shoot a deer at 50 to 75 yards off, and the Hupa could shoot clear through the soft parts of an animal (Goddard 1903:33).  But the Hupa preferred to get close, and disguised themselves as deer so well that they had to take pains to avoid mountain lion attacks (Goddard 1903:21).  So did the Maidu—one hunter was attacked within living memory (Jewell 1987:125). 

Deer were occasionally driven over cliffs, at least by the Wintu (Lapena 1978:336), but this must have been an exceedingly rare event.  To anyone who wants to drive deer over a cliff, all I can say is Good luck!  I’d rather try to push water uphill with a rake.  Deer jumps are known for the Spokan (Ross 2011:304), but required extensive and careful planning, as well as rituals.  The gullibility of city anthropologists on the subject of “jumps” and “cliff drives” never ceases to amaze those of us who have some field experience.  Game animals are not stupid, and know a cliff when they see one.  Cliff drives required very careful preparation, with many people organized to panic the animals and keep them stampeded in the right direction, and if possible with fires.  People must line the intended drive path, yelling and waving blankets.  If possible, fences or barriers will be set.  This works for buffalo and sometimes with elk, but was evidently an uncommon way to get deer.

Pomo hunters supposedly knew, individually, every deer in their hunting radius, and indeed it is fairly easy to learn to recognize individual deer and know their peculiarities.  My Maya friends in Yucatan know their local deer that way, and, for comparison, early Irish hunters did too, as shown by the individually named stags in Irish epics.  This allowed the Pomo to manage the deer (Blackburn and Anderson 1993:20, citing Burt Aginsky).  Indeed, traditional Native American hunters are apt to know individually every large animal in their regular hunting areas—at least that is my experience in the Northwest, Mexico, and the western United States.

            The much-debated “Pleistocene overkill” need not concern us very long here, since we are dealing with recent management systems.  Still, it requires a note.  Paul S. Martin inferred long ago that Native American hunting was the sole factor in the disappearance of most of the large mammal species in the Americas around 12,000-14,000 years ago (Martin and Klein 1984).  In its original form—involving a sudden enormous expansion of human populations and hunting—this thesis is not credible.  It assumes a population growth rate of 3% over a vast area and a long time; nothing remotely like this has ever been observed in premodern populations.  It assumes people spread with lightning speed throughout the Americas.  And it assumes that people killed wantonly, since even a high population would not have needed more than a tiny fraction of the meat supposedly taken.  Surely, even without any conservation ideology, hunters would have thought twice about going after mammoths and mastodons simply to destroy them.  The danger would have been daunting.

            Moreover, mass kill sites are singularly absent.  We have a few scattered mammoth and mastodon kills, but not much else.  This is in stark contrast to the huge bison kills, involving thousands of animals, that happened later, without exterminating the bison.  Contrasting, also, are the massive boneyards on Sicily and Cyprus, where humans unquestionably exterminated the local dwarf elephants and hippos (Simmons 2007; displays in Sicily’s historical museum at Syracuse, studied Jan. 1, 2009).  On Cyprus, one site alone has the bones of over 500 pigmy hippos (Simmons 2007:231)—couple that with post-Pleistocene drying and heating, and there is no question why that species went extinct!  This is exactly what we do not find anywhere in early North America.  It is simply not credible that the there was better preservation on a couple of Mediterranean islands than in the whole North American continent.  There is also the fact that the vast terminal-Pleistocene boneyards we do have, such as the La Brea tar pits, contain few or no human kills.

            Thus, many authorities, notably archaeozoologists such as Donald Grayson (over many years—e.g. 1977, 1991, 2001), and Steve Wolverton (Wolverton et al 2009 and references therein) have given no credence to this hypothesis.  Neither have Native American authorities like Raymond Pierotti (2011).  Grayson pointed out long ago that many bird species, and several small hard-to-catch animals such as rabbits and dwarf pronghorns, went extinct.  The birds were mostly carrion-eaters that died out when their food did, but some were large water birds such as storks, and only climate change can explain their demise.

            On the other hand, it is hard to deny some role for human hunting (see, once again, Kay and Simmons 2002; also Krech 1999 for a relatively balanced review).  This is especially true since we now know that people were in North America earlier than Martin thought, and that some of the megafauna—notably the mastodons—persisted much longer than he thought.  Spreading out the time frame makes the levels of population growth and hunting much more believable.

People are highly efficient hunters.  Animals like giant ground sloths would have seemed like walking free-lunch counters.  The native mammals had no evolved or learned knowledge of humans and no defenses against group hunting with spears.  On the other hand, they would have learned it fast—certainly the mastodons had plenty of time.  It is not credible that animals used to avoiding sabretooths, lions, dire wolves, short-faced bears and the like would not soon figure out that humans were dangerous (veteran field biologist Raymond Pierotti 2011 makes this point).

The most convincing argument for overkill is indirect:  everywhere that Homo sapiens has gone, large animals have immediately begun to disappear.  This effect has been observed, archaeologically, from Australia, Madagascar, Indonesia, east Asia, and indeed everywhere carefully studied on the globe.  Some scholars have made far too much of this, though, by blaming even the extermination of tiny flightless island birds on humans; in this case the damage was surely done by the rats, dogs and pigs that people generally bring with them.  In New Zealand, for instance, rats came with the Maori, and probably did more than humans did to exterminate the moas.  The latter were ground-nesters with eminently edible eggs, and rats love nothing better than bird eggs.

In the Americas, the extinction pattern fits climate, not hunting.  The uncommon meso-size fauna went first, not last.  If humans had hunted everything out, the biggest, slowest, meatiest animals like ground sloths and mastodons would have gone first, the mesoprey later, according to all tenets of optimal foraging theory and common sense.  The truth was exactly the reverse.

I believe that, in the Americas, human-set fires were surely far more important than hunting.  (This is based partly on my observations of, and my reading of scholarly research on, burning in Australia and Madagascar.  It seems to be now generally accepted that fire, not hunting, was the human factor in extinctions in Australia around 50,000 years ago.  Both humans and climate change are implicated in the rise of fire.) Slow-moving species like the giant ground sloths could hardly have withstood frequent burning. 

Also, humans and other invading species after the peak of the last glaciation probably introduced diseases, and epidemic disease could well have had a role in wiping out the big game.  Within historic times, diseases have decimated North American trees such as the chestnut, white pines, and California oaks, and have wiped out Hawaiian native birds. 

Last and most serious, climate change after the glaciation was extremely rapid and disruptive.  Similar rapid and dramatic extinction events occurred at the ends of previous glaciaations, such as the Ordovician-Silurian event (Finnegan et al. 2011).  Humans were, obviously, not involved in those events.

North America 18,000-20,000 years ago was probably the coldest it has ever been.  It was hot and dry by 12,000, but then the Younger Dryas event dropped temperatures back to Ice Age levels around 11,000 years ago.  This in turn reversed, and an extremely hot and dry period set in by about 6-7,000 BCE.  (On ancient California, see Jones and Klar 2007.)  The changes were extremely rapid.

It would take only a few successive years like the horrific droughts of 2001-2002 and 2011-2015 to exterminate all lowland big game in California.  There would simply not be enough water for them.  Alternatively, and more probably, a couple of very dry years would so concentrate the megafauna, and so reduce human hunters to starvation, that any notions of conservation would go by the board, and desperate humans would indeed kill the last few mammoths.  I expect that climate change (basically drought), fire, disease, and hunting, in that order of importance, were all factors.

            The whole controversy has been greatly exacerbated by personal feelings.  The overkill hypothesis has proved popular with those who have an exceedingly limited faith in humanity’s ability to manage anything, especially biologists.  Some of these are frankly anti-Native American.  However, also among these ranks are more pro-human and pro-Indigenous anthropologists and other social scientists who dislike the “ecologically noble savage” stereotype (Kay and Simmons 2002).  Some of these scholars, like Raymond Hames (2007; his experience is in South America), have worked with Indigenous groups that lack any conservation ideology and hunt without restraint.  Others, including Kay and Simmons (and the present writer), see the “ecologically noble savage” stereotype as patronizing, and prefer to contemplate efficient if merciless hunters rather than meek and inept ones. 

Skeptics who doubt that humans exterminated the megafauna have included not only Indigenous writers like Vine Deloria, but also those who have little vested interest one way or another (such as Grayson and Wolverton), and even those who stalwartly reject the “ecologically noble savage” concept but are even more skeptical about Martin’s hypothesis (e.g. Krech 1999). 

            As with fire, we are left in some doubt.  California’s indigenous people certainly hunted hard and cropped the more vulnerable fish and shellfish as close as they could.  On the other hand, there were no extinctions after the end of the Pleistocene, and archaeology shows only rather minor declines in game populations over time.  Apparently people and wildlife reached a loose equilibrium. 

Ownership

            Ownership is critical to management.  Since John Locke, conventional wisdom has it that private ownership is best, but modern experience suggests that ownership at appropriate levels of management is better.  The California peoples already knew this.  Resources were owned or held at various levels (Bettinger 2015).  Individuals owned their own tools and implements.  Large productive capital goods like canoes could be owned by rich individuals, families, or associations.  Houses were owned by the families that lived in them.  Generally, but not everywhere, families or lineages owned particular patches of food-producing plants, or individual oak trees, or other productive land resources.  More remote areas of the state, however, tended to have community ownership of land, at least of remote lands.  Families or village communities owned good fishing spots.  The village community owned ceremonial structures and grounds, and held control with varying degrees of formality over resources.  As usual, there was variation in different parts of the state, from the far northwest where everything was owned by individuals or families to the much more collectivist northeast and south. 

The Luiseño, for instance, had four levels of ownership.  Individuals owned their portable goods.  Kingroups or groups of related people owned tungva “gardens,” understood to be oak groves, productive berry patches, and the like.  Village communities owned tchon tcho’mi, specific areas for collective exploitation. Larger tracts of relatively useless land were held as territory of particular village communities, but were not subject to specific management by socially constituted groups (White 1963).  The Achomawi maintained rights to hunt and gather on land, owned by kingroups or possibly local groups (Rhoades 2013:68). 

Fighting was generally about revenge, sometimes women, rarely property.  Still, land and resource conflicts were numerous and important enough to define groups and color lifestyles.  Access to resources was generally restricted to the owners, especially relative to other North American peoples (Bettinger 2015:132-134).  We read of people fighting over berries, oak trees, and productive areas of land (e.g. Gamble 2008:258; Rhoades 2013; White 1963).  Like many other people, they exaggerated their grievances; Walter Goldschmidt, George Foster, and Frank Essene, comparing notes in the 1930s, found that the groups they were studying described the same war, but each claimed it was the aggrieved one, and that it held on though badly outnumbered (Goldschmidt et al. 1939).  Raymond White (1963) recorded in detail the wars between Luiseño villages over resource encroachments.

The Yurok had an exceedingly complex ownership system.  Some things were owned in common (“’everybody’ ownership”), others by the village or group of houses, others by the house (which usually contained an extended family), others by individuals (note that this is very similar to Luiseño ownership).  At least after white settlement, individual land ownership existed.  Individuals might hold fractional shares of an item.  Songs and ceremonies as well as resources and wealth goods were named (Pilling 1978:146-147).  For the neighboring Hupa, Goddard (1903:26) notes extended-family ownership of acorn groves and of fishing sites and stretches of fishing streams.  Bettinger (2015:168-70) sees this as the limiting case of his “orderly anarchy.”  He clearly underestimates the role of community and elders, since the large towns of the northwest did function smoothly and coordinate everything from weir-building to the yearly ceremonial round, but certainly ownership tended to be at a grassroots level.

The Nomlaki occupy an intermediate position, with individual ownership of personal goods and also certain trees and the like; otherwise they preferred community ownership—villages headed by chiefs who administered (Goldschmidt 1951:340).

For the Cahuilla, Lowell Bean and Katherine Saubel (1972) describes family ownership of small plant resources, lineage ownership of individual oaks, and village community ownership of land and major resource clusters. For the Chemehuevi, descent groups owned territories.  These groups owned songs—notably the Mountain Sheep, Deer, and Salt songs—by hereditary right, and sang them to assert ownership and to show and teach knowledge of the ground.  Large, vague divisions of the Chemehuevi owned the songs.  Families owned specific versions of them, and these went with territory they owned, controlled, or habitually visited.  Such song groups were exogamous (Laird 1976:21).  The songs described the country, often in the form of travels through it; the Salt Song, for instance, traced a circle from the Bill Williams River (in southwest Arizona) through southern Nevada, eastern California, and back.  In striking parallel to the Australian Aborigines, these ownership songs recounted travel over the country, with human reactions, sacred places, waterholes, and other important matters incorporated (Laird 1976:6-18).

Since we are not talking about formal states, land was not formally owned, surveyed, and measured; vast remote tracts were open for anyone (though loosely held by the nearest village), and large shadow-zones existed between village holdings in such resource-poor areas.  Conversely, rich lands were grounds for major and serious conflict. 

            All this was less complicated than it looks.  The basic principle is that everything was owned at the level at which ownership was most efficient.  It would hardly be sensible for the whole community to own a bow and arrow set.  Conversely, an individual could not possibly hold (even if he or she owned) a large oak woodland.  The size of a particular resource item or patch seems to have determined the size of group owning it.  My sense is that a group owned a patch it could easily crop, manage, and defend (cf. K. Anderson 2005; also the studies in Bean and Blackburn 1976).

            Population density must have affected this.  It certainly seems, from the rather thin evidence, as if ownership was a more serious matter among the Chumash than among the desert Shoshoneans (Clemmer 2009a, 2009b), and more serious among the Yurok and Karok than among the tribes inland of them.  Evidence is thin (though see Bettinger 2015), and some of it goes against this generalization; ownership of choice fishing spots by lineages is still very much alive among the Achomawi (inland from the Karok), even after 200 years of oppressive contact with Euro-Americans.  Good fishing spots are highly concentrated there, and it could well be that there—and elsewhere—concentration of resources was more crucial than density of people.  Similarly, the Timbisha Shoshone of Death Valley, though they had the sparsest population of any California group, still maintain ideas of ownership of mesquite trees and pinyon groves.

Representations:  Sources

            The early and devastating decline of the Native Californians has left us quite poorly informed about them.   

Fortunately, a few exceptional collaborations between particular researchers and consultants have produced comprehensive and sensitively recorded bodies of data.  We can be enormously grateful that California was blessed with ethnographers who, whatever their faults may have been, actually cared about traditional people and cultures, and wanted to learn all they could.  Even today, when many ethnographers are interested only in high theory or in playing political games, California remains blessed with a stunning array of people who care—including Native ethnographers like Julian Lang and Katherine Saubel, as well as people like Thomas Blackburn, Lowell Bean, and others cited in the present work. 

  Particularly notable are certain cases of longstanding cooperation between an ethnographer and a Native Californian individual.  A. L. Kroeber’s work with the traditional Yurok elder Robert Spott is outstanding (e.g. Spott and Kroeber 1942).  Roland Dixon evidently managed exceptional rapport with the Maidu mythographer Hanc’ibyjim (Shipley 1991).  John Harrington’s work with the Chumash, especially Fernando Librado Kitsepawit (1981), is famous.  Harrington’s former wife, Carobeth Laird, cemented a particularly close collaboration by marrying her main consultant, George Laird; she produced a trio of books (Laird  1975, 1976, 1984) that are California literary classics in their own right—possibly the most sensitive, well-written, and moving collections of lore and texts from the state.  They have languished in some obscurity, ironically because they were published by a Native Californian organization (Malki Museum) rather than an academic press! 

Finally, special mention goes to the incredible efforts of the few Native Californians who have studied and recorded their own cultural traditions.  Julian Lang has done yeoman service on the Karuk and their neighbors (Lang 1994).  Native Californian elder, ethnographer, and writer Katherine Siva Saubel has for several decades been the unofficial dean of Native California studies (Bean and Saubel 1976; Saubel 2004).  Self-taught and with no “position” other than head of Malki Museum for most of its career, she compiled a record of publication, research, public service, and collaboration with international experts that is matched by few if any “formal” academics in the field. 

Susan Suntree (2010) has integrated many southern California Native origin stories and environmental teachings into a beautiful, poetic volume that catches much of the essence of the land.

            Unfortunately, all the above, together with the enormous mass of other ethnographic work, still fails to give a complete picture of the life and culture of any group.  Often, our knowledge of a whole group depends on one individual who did not actually grow up in traditional times.  George Laird had forgotten much of Chemehuevi lore, and we have essentially no other source.  Fernando Librado and Candelaria Valenzuela, our sources on the Ventureno Chumash, were raised long after the missions had changed Chumash life.  Our knowledge of the Kiliwa (just across the line into Baja California) derives from one man, Rufino Ochurte.  At least, he remembered quite traditional times and did find an exceptional ethnographer in Mauricio Mixco (1983), so when he does not mention conservation beliefs we can probably take it that there were no important ones.  (The Kiliwa maintained a very sparse, highly migratory population in a harsh desert, and probably had no need of them.)  Otherwise, however, a lack of reports of conservation myths and injunctions means nothing; “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”

We are best informed for the Yurok and Karok, who (with the Hupa) have been most successful at maintaining their culture till now, so that information derives from their own highly educated scholars such as Julian Lang as well as from many consultants interviewed over many years by many investigators.  Many other cultural groups were contacted too late, and often by “green hands” doing practice field work.  Material culture and ordinary social life have generally been well covered, since they show up in the archaeological and historical records as well as in ordinary ethnography.  The situation for myth and religion is far less good.  These leave little mark, and require extremely sensitive ethnography over many years to document adequately.  The contrast between the myth records of Hanc’ibeyjim or the Lairds on the one hand, and the hasty recordings by less sensitive ethnographers on the other, is most striking.  It reminds one of the contrast between Homer and the children’s books summarizing his stories for the subteen trade.

            One final problem with the sources is that California ethnography suffered from a tendency to compartmentalize “religion” and “subsistence” (or “environment”) as two separate things.  “Religion” covered abstract notions of gods’ “subsistence” meant pounding acorns and hunting deer.  Ways that religion sanctioned ecological behavior fell between the chairs.  Few recorded such data.  This problem is endemic in Kroeber’s Handbook (1925) and the larger Smithsonian Institution handbook (Heizer 1978).  Kroeber’s trait-list ethnographic method did not help the situation.  (Cf. Swezey and Heizer 1977 to show what could be done when the blinders were off.)  On the other hand, ethnographers not bedeviled by artificial boundaries do not report much specifically conservationist religious teaching, either (see e.g. Laird 1976, 1984).  It would probably be more accurate to see the religion-environment-subsistence interaction as basic, with “religion” and “subsistence” as segregates imposed artificially on Californian culture by outside ethnographers.

            One recalls that it took three generations of ethnographic work to get much sense of how Australian Aboriginal religion constructed landscape.  Californian ethnographers, working with memory cultures from the beginning, had no opportunity to do likewise.

Attitudes and Representations:  Specific teachings

            As elsewhere, conservation derived from more general postulates about the world.  These have been best summarized by Thomas Blackburn in December’s Child (1975; this book refers to the Chumash but what follows applies equally well to all California groups).  He lists fourteen postulates about the world as central to Indigenous thought:

A personalized universe

Kinship of all sentient beings

Existence and potential of supernatural or nonordinary Power

Determinism (within broad limits)

Negative-positive interaction (rather than pure good separate from pure evil)

A dangerous universe (with many frightening supernatural as well as natural beings)

Unpredictability

Inevitable, inherent inequality (especially of powers)

Affectability (all can potentially affect all)

Entropy (disorder builds up unless controlled)

Mutability

Closed universe

Dynamic equilibrium of oppositions

Centricity (the Chumash at the center of a circular world, itself the middle plane in a multiplanar cosmos) (Blackburn 1975:65, with my explanatory extensions)

            Of these, the most important in general and in managing landscapes are the first three.  The others may be considered ancillary.

            Blackburn also lists thirteen things that are highly respected:

Knowledge

Age and seniority

Prudence

Self-consraint

Moderation

Reciprocity

Honesty (but also trickiness in the face of frightening beings)

Industriousness

Dependability and responsibility

Self-asertion and self-respect

Pragmatism

Etiquette (proper behavior)

Language (Blackburn 1975:65)

            Explicit conservation in California representations of nature are rare, but Kat Anderson found a great deal of conservationist ideology in her studies of Native Californian plant management.  She found two universal rules: “Leave some of what is gathered for the other animals and Do not waste what you have harvested” (K. Anderson 2005:55; her italics; see also Blackburn and Anderson 1993).  In fact, there is evidently a general rule not to waste at all.  What is not harvested is left for later, or left for the other people (the four-footed or winged ones).  Native Californians would steal stored seeds from mice and other rodents, and acorns from woodpeckers, but would always leave some for the rightful “owners.” 

People approached plants with reverence and respect.  They felt the usual Native American kinship with nature (K. Anderson 2005:57-59).  Their ceremonies for first fruits and seasonal foods bonded people to the resource base.  People were close to the land.  Kat Anderson recorded a revealing comment from a Chukchansi Yokuts elder:  “I’ve alwas wondered why people call plants ‘wild.’  We don’t think of them that way.  They just come up wherever they are, and like us, they are at home in that place” (K. Anderson 2007:41).  She and Thomas Blackburn note:  “Today, native peoples still retain a deep respect for the natural world, and retell stories that remind them of the absolute necessity for judicious harvesting.  Elders are quick to tell younger gatherers, ‘Do not take all—and leave the small ones behind’” (Blackburn and Anderson 1993:20).

Kat Anderson found that a general sense of kinship with nature, or at least consociality with it, and a more specific sense of genuine deeply-felt responsibility for conserving resources for the wider good, were the basic attitudes of management.  Yet—whether because it is really lacking or because ethnography is so thin—there is little record of its being verbalized explicitly in a philosophic ideology, as it is on the Northwest Coast (Atleo 2004). 

An important exception is the Klamath River region, where traditional culture continues to an appreciable degree.  For that area we have not only a great deal of good ethnography, but a unique source in the form of an early book by a Native Californian woman—Lucy Thompson’s To the American Indian (1991, orig. 1916).  In it, she points out that the Yurok carefully protected sugar pines, source of nuts and sugary sap (Thompson 1991:28ff).  They conserved fish (Thompson 1991:178-179) and burned carefully and systematically (Thompson 1991:31-33).  In general, she stands in striking contrast to ethnographies by outsiders—she stresses the religious interaction with nature and its function in maintaining conservation.  It seems highly likely that this was universal, and that it was missed by early ethnographers for the reasons above noted. 

Confirmation for the Yurok case comes from more recent work.  The Yurok spiritual teacher Harry Williams (on whom see Buckley 2002) tells:  “I was with my grandfather, Charley Williams.  We were walking on a dirt path down to the ocean.  There was a bug crossing our path, and my grandfather told me, ‘Reach down and help that bug on its way.’  So I did.  I reached down and helped the bug on the path to where it was going.  ‘Now, do you know what you have done?’ Grandfather continued.  ‘You won’t feel badly now, for perhaps a bird will someday eat the bug.  But you must remember that the Creator created the bug for birds to eat.  He didn’t create them to get stepped on’” (Burrill 1993:43; presumably the Creator is Wohpekumeu, the Yurok trickster-transformer; strictly speaking there is no Yurok Creator, since the Yurok teach that the universe has always existed).  Lest anyone think this is an exaggeration, I can testify that the Yucatec Maya routinely do things of this sort, with similar teachings.  Maya who picked up a bug to show me would always put it back on the path, unharmed, and headed the way it had been going (Anderson and Medina Tzuc 2005).  Williams’ grandfather also said that rocks are living things, and that “the white man is like the wind.  Nobody knows where he comes from.”  Williams also tells of a line he heard at a Native American conference:  “Creator gave man two ears, and two eyes, but only one mouth.  But the white man thinks he has five mouths, no ears, and no eyes.  That must be why he talks so much” (Burrill 1993:106). 

For the Karok, the “Ikxareyavs were old-time people, who turned into animals, plants, rocks, mountains, plots of ground, and even parts of the house, dances, and abstractions when the Karuk came to the country” (Harrington 1932:8).   Many of the most feared of these prior beings turned into large and spectacular rocks, a story which the Karok supposedly proved to Harrington by pointing out that you can still see the rocks.  The Ikxareyavs who turned into abstractions remind us yet again of classical Greece, with its goddesses such as Sophia and Nike, as well as the ancient Hindus, who visualized Time (kali) as a goddess.

The Hupa, culturally very close to the Karok though linguistically unrelated, held that one Yinukatsisdai “made all the trees and plants which furnish food for men….  If he sees food being wasted he withholds the supply and produces a famine.”  If pleaded with, he may relent, and “then gives the food…in such bountiful quantities that acorns are found even under the pines” (Goddard 1903:77).  The puritanical and religious Hupa shared the Northwest Coast view of punishment for waste, but added a fascinating touch in the mercy of the creator.  The corresponding masters of deer are the Tans, who withhold deer from hunters if deer are not treated with respect.  As elsewhere in the wider Northwest and California (e.g. Rhoades 2013:81), respect means not only treating the dead deer respectfully but also totally refraining from waste, overhunting, and hunting without serious need for food.  Yet other deities care for fish in similar ways (Goddard 1903:77-78).  The fish, like the deer and other food animals, had been kept by the supernaturals, and had to be liberated by culture-heroes; there are many stories of these events, and the stories are used in ceremonies to maintain the stock (Goddard 1904).  Less effective, but not unrelated, were prayers that birds and squirrels might not desire to eat the acorn crop (in competition with the Hupa) (Goddard 1903:81).  The Hupa regarded trails as sacred persons. 

The Yurok, Karok and Hupa joined in enormous ceremonies that were intended to preserve and renew the world and its resources.  These ceremonies almost died out, but managed to survive, and are now once again celebrated regularly.  The belief in the need of humans to hold elaborate and active rituals to keep the game, fish, and plant foods productive has itself been preserved and renewed, especially since these groups have seen the result of modern Californian indifference to conservation.  Many myths detail the origin of these ceremonies and the need for them, but specific teachings of directly conservationist behavior are rather limited.  However, it seems clear that a general reverence and spiritual concern for the landscape has a preservationist effect.  People will not thoughtlessly waste resources that are personally and spiritually important.

Among the Lake Miwok, as in several other parts of North America, “game animals were believed to be immortal and under spirit control, and it was believed that animals sometimes transformed themselves into other species” (Callahan 1978:272).  The Yuki held that deer are immotal, their souls living in a mountain under care of a Deer Guardian who is second only to the Creator and who controls obsidian as well as deer.  This belief in animal souls within a mountain occurs widely in North America, as far as Huitepec, the sacred mountain near San Cristobal in Chiapas. It is more than likely that the immortality and protectedness of spirits of game was universal. 

The Northern Pomo had a concept of “xa, manifestations of the supernatural spirits…left on earth from the beginnings and investing certain peculiar objects with supernatural attributes….  Xa  is the genius of procreation, acquisition, alien to human activities…but a spiritual concomity of men whose aid may be engaged through prayer and possession of its symbols….   Xa is summoned by sexual contact, is the mystery of conception and gestation, leaves its stamp on the buttocks of new born till erased by cognoscence; places an indelible mark on the skin of a favored mortal…. Xa is the inspiration of song…, the rhythmic impulse of song-dance ceremonies, the buoyancy of regalia…and the stimulus of fingers tapping upon the flute. It is the celestial, beneficent influence as opposed to the terrestrial demon of diaster…”  (notes of John Hudson, ca. 1900, from Welch 2013:169).  Xa resides in hawk and falcon and eagle feathers, in crests and red tails of birds such as woodpeckers, and in omens and apparitions.  Five plants have it: trail plant (Adenocaulon bicolor), angelica, sweet cicely (Osmorhiza sp.), Fendler’s meadowrue (Thalictrum fendleri), and leather root (Welch 2013:169).  As elsewhere in California, tobacco and Jimson weed (Datura wrightii) were sacred in a different way: they gave direct visions and healings.  All this must have fed back on resource management, but no early record of this seems to have survived.

Equally revealing is a story related by Fernando Librado (1979:113):  A man was trapping rats in a pitfall trap, and an old Santa Rosa Chumash told him:  “’You are polluting our mother, Xutash!  [The Chumash earth goddess.]  Remove this at once, If you defile our Mother, she will give us nothing.’”

The Cocopa, who lived in a landscape of abundance in the fertile Colorado River delta, lived simply and never worried much about food—though famine threatened if a drought led to the river being very low.  William Kelly made careful enquiries about religious beliefs connected with fertility, harvest, wild foods, agriculture, and the whole suite, and found:  “Harvest festivals…were…religious in nature; yet their function, explicit and implicit, was in connection with group life and social organization, and they were neither related to the harvest as such nor a mechanism aimed at increasing effort or diligence in farming” (Kelly 1977:44).  This seems general throughout California (the Cocopa live in Baja California).  The only rule related to such issues that is even remotely ecological in function was the universal Native American rule that a boy could not eat his own first kills (Kelly 1977:45).  This has no conservation function in itself, but in most of North America is part of teaching the boy respect for both the game and the human social group that shares the kill.  The Cocopa tabooed doves but apparently for totemic, not environmental, reasons.  As agricultural people, they probably had a different take on myth, with Coyote a creator of good crops and transformer of insulted ones into bitter wild foods, rather than a producer of good wild foods for people to gather (see Nabhan 2013 for a brilliant, incisive analysis of this contrast in southwestern mythology).

We are, however, surely missing a great deal.  The Northern Paiute, whose territory included the northeast corner of California, offered prayers to slain game animals.  They left the tail tip of a hunted deer under a rock with the prayer “’Deer, thank you, and come again.’  A similar offering was made for bighorn sheep” (Fowler 1992:181).  Note that the deer will be reincarnated, and will again offer itself to the hunter if treated well—a universal North American belief.  Even roots required an offering or prayer.  Eagle feathers were harvested without killing the eagle (ibid.).  A number of prayers, to the Sun and othe powers, were given daily or frequently.  Ceremonies insured continued production of food resources.  Yet Fowler does not record conservation myths either.

            Taboos may also have had a conservation effect.  The Yana, for instance, did not allow salmon to be eaten with deer meat, small game, or roots taken from gopher burrows (Sapir 1910:156).  The salmon would cease to come if this taboo was violated.  One assumes it was disrespectful to them.  Possibly they did not like to associate with prototypically “land” foods.  There is no evident conservation here, but at least some respect for the salmon was apparent.  The Wintu and related peoples tabooed a large number of things, including most birds of prey and predatory animals (Du Bois 1935).  The Nutuwich Yokuts even tabooed bear and deer, being thus reduced to eating rabbits for meat, a most unusual degree of forbearance (Gayton 1948:166).  Taboos this extensive would have a major ecological effect.  They preserved even the hunted species indirectly, by preserving keystone species in the ecosystem.  Heizer (1978) cites a number of taboos and rules from around the state that affect land use. 

            The Chilula (Athapaskan) culture is barely known from a very few elderly people just after 1900.  One of them “was a medicine woman for troubles caused by the deer gods” (Goddard 1914:379).  That is all we know of Chilula animal religion, outside of a few generic myths, but it implies spirit guardians of the game such as we know from most of Native America.

            Attested from one end of the state to the other are harangues by chiefs telling people to work hard and diligently at hunting, gathering, and food production in general.  (The best description is for the Atsugewi, but the custom is attested all the way to the Mohave [Kroeber 1972] and Cocopa [Kelly 1977:66].)  Many groups  had a special designated Orator as well, who could do this.  People could ignore if they chose, but they would then be subject to major criticism and coolness, and hard work was a strong value everywhere from the northwest corner (e.g. Buckley 2002, Kroeber 1972 for the Yurok) to just beyond the southeast one (Cocopa:  Kelly 1977:23).  This would rather tend toward overexploitation of the resources than conservation of them, and thus may have much to do with the archaeological evidence noted above of local over-harvest.

Attitudes and Representations:  General

Native American biologist Raymond Pierotti states:  “A common general philosphy and concept of community appears to be shared by all of the Indigenous peoples of North America, which includes:  1) respect for nonhuman entities as individuals, 2) the existence of bonds between humans and nonhumans, including incorporation of nonhumans into ethical codes of behavior, and 3) the recognition of humans as part of the ecological system” (Pierotti 2011:198-199).  This and all it implies is fully true for California.

Respect.   The full panoply of North American Native conservation attitudes is reflected in an astonishing prophecy that Cora Du Bois recorded from Kate Luckie, a Wintu shaman, in 1925:

“When the Indians all die, then God will let the water come down from the north.  Everyone will drown.  That is because the white people never cared for land or deer or bear.  When we Indians kill meat, we eat it all up.  When we dig roots, we make little holes.  When we build houses, we make little holes.  When we burn grass for grasshoppers, we don’t ruin things.  We shake down acorns and pine nuts.  We don’t chop down the trees.  We only use dead wood.  But the white people plow up the ground, pull up the trees, kill everything.  The tree says, ‘Don’t.  I am sore. Don’t hurt me.’ But they chop it down and cut it up.  The spirit of the land hates them…  The indians neverf hurt anything, but the white people destroy all.  They blast rocks and scatter them on the earth.  The rocks says, ‘Don’t!  You are hurting me.’  But the white people pay no attention.  When the Indians use rocks, they take little round ones for their cooking.  The white people dig deep long tunnels.  They make roads.  They dig as much as they wish.  They don’t care how much the ground cries out.  How can the spirit of the earth like the white man?  That is why God will upset the world—because it is sore all over” (Du Bois 1935:75-6; cf. Heizer 1978:650). 

Luckie continued to say that water could not be permanently hurt, because it eventually runs to the ocean, and that it would thus survive to destroy the current world by flood.  The Wintu share the widespread North American belief that there have been four worlds of people so far, and we are in the fifth; it is to be destroyed by flood, according to Wintu tradition.  Another Wintu shaman commented that “the gold feels sorry” for the Indian people because they were driven from their homes by men seeking that metal (Du Bois 1935:76).  (It is worth noting that Du Bois had no special interest in ecology or environment, but was meticulous about documenting shamans and all they said; hence these unique recordings.)

The California Native peoples shared the widespread Native American belief that disrespect of powerful animals brought danger.   A story has made it from the Chumash consultant Juan Justo to early ethnographer John Peabody Harrington, thence to Chumash expert John Johnson, and then into Lynn Gamble’s book on the Chumash—a typically indirect route: 

            “…Juan’s uncle began to laugh and shout and make fun of [a rattlesnake]…. The other man advised Juan’s uncle to be quiet,…but Juan’s uncle made all the more noise….whereupon the other man left him and went on alone.  When he was alone, Juan’s uncle looked around a saw a whole pile of guicos [alligator lizards] with their mouths open towards him and their tongues out….he…shut his eyes and went jumping and climbing to break through the lizards, and when he opened his eyes there was nothing there” (Gamble 2008:216, quoting John Johnson’s edited version of a Harrington text). 

I have heard very similar stories on the Northwest Coast and among the Maya.  If the parallels hold—and I am sure they do—the lizards were warning Juan’s uncle that if he teased a snake again he would suffer, probably through a bite from the snake. 

General respect for plants and animals and their spirits and spirit guardians existed.  Respect guided conservation generally.  “One took what he needed and expressed appreciation…. Without these attitudes the California Indians could have laid waste to California long before the Europeans appeared” (Heizer 1978:650).

There was a very general sense that plants needed human care, a sentiment backed up by experience, but going well beyond the facts of Native management and care.  Plants and animals need to be used, as a mark of respect.  Neglecting them wounds their spirits.  They decline and become weedy, poorly grown, and despondent-looking (K. Anderson 20005; Blackburn and Anderson 1993; McCarthy 1993:225).  I have run into the same idea among Northwest Coast peoples and something very close to it among my Maya friends.  In fact, California’s useful plants do respond to care; basketry plants put out long straight shoots, nut trees crop more, and so on (Anderson 2005). 

Such attitudes survive today in areas where something like traditional plant uses can exist.  Michael Wilken-Robertson, interviewing Kumeyaay people in Mexico just south of the California border, heard from elder Teodora Dcuero Robles:

“This I can assure you, the ancient ones never damaged a tree, no, never; they loved them as something very sacred.  They would tell us not to go breaking the branches of the pines, not to play there, nor to climb up on any small tree, they said that they were almost juist like humans; ‘They are watching us, they are taking care of us, they give us our food.  Don’t go around damaging them don’t be shouting, none of that,’ they would say, ‘take special care of them,’ for this reason we know very well that we must take care of these trees.  Also the medicinal herbs, those they especially charged us to care for, we shouldn’t just go out and cut for no reason, go out and cut them and throw them away to dry up, no.  They told us many things, that we should even care for the rocks, just imagein!  The rocks, the sand, the springs, the water flowing, all these things they said we must respect” (Wilken-Robertson 2004:49, reprinted in Wilken-Robertson 2018:231-232).  From the Paipai, a group that moved from Arizona to northern Baja California about 300 years ago, comes a story told by Eufemio Sandoval.  The Mexican government forbid them cutting juniper posts because the junipers were getting rare.  Sandoval commented “we have never cut the plant to the root, but rather it has been a form of pruning that we carry out. We just take what is useful as a post and leave the rest to keep growing and developing” (Wilken-Robertson 2004:53-54, reprinted in Wilken-Robertson 2018:236).  Sandoval held that this was better conservation than pure neglect.  Recall Wilke’s findings on Great Basin junipers. 

There is little reference to animals letting themselves be taken if they are respected, but apparently the belief existed.  One Mohave did say that the Creator gave hunting to the desert tribes but not the Mohave, so when the Chemehuevi “see game, the animals cannot run fast, or they sit down…they want to be caught.  The same with the Walapai.  But if Mohave go to hunt, the animals run swiftly away” (Kroeber 1972:84).  A Wintu hunter who failed to get deer would say “The deer don’t want to die for me any more” (Heizer 1978:651).  Many stories around the state imply that animals not respected will not let themselves be killed.  Conversely, they might go away.  Elsewhere in North America, some groups have noted that game disappears as white settlers fill up the landscape, and suspect this is because Native hunting is outlawed and the game is offended and leaves.  I am certainly aware that dramatic declines of deer have taken place since hunting has been banned in settled areas, but in fact the reasons are drought (first of all), suburbanization, and introduced diseases.  Still, the Native view has its merits; failing to keep the game alert, and failing to weed out sick and slow individuals, has its costs.

The belief that wild plants and animals, and even rocks, must be treated with respect is shared all over North America and among similar societies in Asia.  In Mongolia I learned immediately that one had to treat all these entities with respect (shuutekh, a word whose root meaning is respect for one’s elders).  All have spirits and the spirits are ever-present; they deserve respect as elders, helpers, friends, and possible sacrificers of themselves to the human hunter or forager.  Thus there are absolute rules against overhunting, overcollecting, and waste, and these are observed in the remotest areas.

The widespread North American taboo against a youth eating his first kill was probably general, and among the Chumash one report says that a hunter or fisher could never eat his own kill, on pain of never succeeding again (Grant 1978:512, citing Z. Engelhardt).  This is evidently part of the North American complex of respect for animals.  The Chumash are known to have prayed to the swordfish to drive whales on shore, and to have had a swordfish dance; they revered other powers of the sea also (Blackburn 1975; Gamble 2008). 

They also had the idea, general in western North America, that the bones of an animal should be treated carefully and respectfully, because such things as breaking a bone would mean the animal would reincarnate with a broken or missing leg; at least this is attested in myth, if not in actual practice (Blackburn 1975:131, in a myth recorded by Harrington).  Another version of the same myth has Momoy—Datura personified as an old woman—protesting against a boy (her grandson in other versions) killing unnecessarily:  “Have you no sense at all?  You are just killing for the sake of killing” (Blackburn 1975:147).  Occurrences like this, in Harrington’s very complete materials on the Chumash, make it seem very likely that California Indians did not lack the usual western North American values; ethnographers simply failed to record them.

And yet, among the Monache, careful enquiry indicated otherwise:  “No special ritual precautions accompanied the hunting of deer or bear.  Animals were not addressed before, during, or after the kill” (Spier 1978:428).  This is reported because it is in such marked contrast to the situation in the Northwest Coast and many other areas, where respectful addresses to the animals were required, and were part of a conservation-related ideology.  Generally, nothing is reported either way for California peoples; “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence,” but the lack is suggestive given Spier’s report.

Social Bonds with Nature.  All California groups thought of the natural world as closely allied to the human one, almost always with actual kin relations or equivalent social bonds.

Many Californian groups, especially in the center and south, had lineages and moieties with animal emblems.  Moieties named Coyote and Wildcat (Bobcat) were found widely, as among the Cahuilla and Serrano.  The Yokuts named them West and East, but divided the animals among them; “the Tachi assigned Eagle, Crow, Killdeer, Raven, Antelope, and Beaver to the…West moiety and Coyote, Prairie Falcon, Ground [Burrowing] Owl, Great Horned Owl, Skunk, Seal” and other beings to the East (Wallace 1978:453, from E. W. Gifford’s data; reference to Valley Yokuts, but all Yokuts groups apparently had more or less the same).  Anna Gayton (1976) points out that people really felt close to their lineage animals.  Eagle and Coyote were the lead animals respectively.  Within the moieties were animal-named patrilineages; the Eagle lineage supplied chiefs. The Coyote moiety had its own chiefs, however (Wallace 1978:454).  Moieties sometimes owned certain foods, and feasted each other with their respective foods (Gayton 1976:84).

The Miwok seem to have reached an extreme, extending human society to the entire cosmos by classifying everything (at least everything they noticed) into either the Land or the Water Moiety; the former included mostly up-country beings, the latter not only water but also lowland creatures (Gifford 1916, summary in Kroeber 1925:455; it is worth noting that Gifford’s rather scattered and obscure studies of Miwok society are one of the more amazing achievements in the history of kinship studies, being far ahead of their time in almost every way; Gifford had a high-school education and was a true autodidact).  These had nothing to do with individuals’ spirit power animals or other less global social symbolism.

The Monache had lineages named after birds or sometimes other animals; a lineage’s namesake was called its “dog” in the sense of  “pet animal” (Spier 1978:433).  The Eagle lineage was the chiefly one; messengers (and talking leaders?) came from Roadrunner and Dove lineages.  The Yokuts used their Dove lineages for this purpose, and Magpie lineage members as criers.

Humans as Part of the Ecological System.  This phrase understates the powerful, deep and complex emotional attachments to the land.  For every Californian group, their land is home—not just their personal home but the home of their people since the time of creation (or at least of transformation into our recognizable world).  Lynn Gamble and Michael Wilken-Robertson, in a recent, particularly sensitive account of Native Californian relationships with the land (2009), describe “…a landscape that is permeated with symbolic and ritual meanings[,] that embraces mythical histories, ancestral pasts, and moral messages that overlay a landscape where economic resources, such as foods and medicines, abound. 

Related to this ideational landscape are the themes of landscape as memory and landscape as identity.  Specific places are reminders of a social past that was filled with triumphs and disasters” and other stories.  People remember “not just a boulder, but the significant events associated with the boulder” (Gamble and Wilken-Robertson 2009:148).  Every stream and hill, as well as every sizable boulder, has its stories, and even individual trees are often important landmarks.  Often the historic associations of these landmarks blend into myths and origin stories.  Other, related groups in Baja California maintain similar ties with the land, including long-lost homes on the United States side of the border, where they have kin and other social relations (Garduño 2016).

The article refers specifically to the people of the Tijuana River basin in Baja California, but it could be said with equal truth of every group in California, or for that matter the whole of the North American Pacific coast. Every ethnographer who has written much about the ideational culture of Native Californians has emphasized their extreme attachment to and concern for the land, and I can certainly attest it from my own experience there and in the Northwest Coast.  Directions—including up toward the sky and down toward the lower world—as well as places have enormous significance ritually and culturally.

The Yumans of the Colorado River drainage—close linguistic relatives of the Tijuana River people— speak of “’Coyote Law,’…the law of the land—sometimes capricious and unreasonable like Coyote himself—but nevertheless, the way things are.  [Their] tales tell about Coyote Law” (Hinton and Watahomigie 1984:6).

This train of investigation leads to two broad conclusions.  First and most important, views of the land and its resources are impassioned.  Native people are not sizing up “resources” with the cold eye of the economic planner.  They are looking at their home.  For California’s people, the whole land is not only their family home, but the home of their entire people since the beginning of time.  We may understand the latter clause as meaning “since the beginning of the group as an identifiable cultural and social entity,” but that does not diminish its psychological force.  The land is loved, but the emotional involvement is much more than that; it is a total personal involvement, the sort of interaction that Emmanuel Levinas regarded as literally infinitely important, because it makes us who and what we are (Levinas 1969).

Second, knowledge is derived from interactive practice, not from passive book-learning.  Knowing the land comes from living on it and making a living from it.  Knowledge of plants and animals comes from working with them in the field, not from a biology text.  Rural Anglo-Americans in my youth learned the same way, and contrasted it quite sharply with “book learning.”  They knew that interactive practice is far better for learning actual life skills and work skills, whatever it may cost in knowledge of grand theory.  However, their wider knowledge of the world was book-learning (or TV-learning).  For traditional Californians, all knowledge came from interactive practice.  People grew up knowing the local ecology from personal experience; they knew what the fish ate, which plants grew together, what was needed for a healthy ecosystem.  Research comparing Native and White rural folk in the northern Midwest is relevant here; even Whites who knew the outdoors as intimately as the Natives thought very differently, seeing species as separate and relatively isolated rather than part of a great web that included humans (Medin et al. 2006).

Awareness of the possibility of overpopulation—too much population pressure—is found in the story, reported for every well-studied Californian group, of Coyote or Lizard or some similar creature bringing death because the world would become too crowded if people lived forever.  Where Coyote is the death-bringer, his own child is usually the first to die, and he regrets his choice.  The Mohave shaman Nyavarup had “the small lizard” as deathbringer; the lizard says “’I wish people to die.  If they all keep on growing, there will be no room.  There will be no place to go; if we defecate, the exrement will fall on someone’s foot’”  (Kroeber 1972:6).

Mythic Construction.  Even myths and chants came not from mindless classroom memorization but from ritualized transmission around the flickering winter-season fire.  Myths could not be lightly told.  Relating them in summer could lead to rattlesnake bite, among other things.

            Mythic animals were most conspicuously predators:  Coyote, Wolf, Fox, Eagle, Falcon, Condor, and so on.  Many game animals seem to have been merely game animals even in mythic time.  Among the Wappo, Elk was a humanoid pre-animal in mythic time, but hunted deer, which were ordinary game animals (see tales in Radin 1924).  Deer are rather rarely seen as having been humanoid in mythic time (though the Karok have several Deer stories; Kroeber and Gifford 1980).  Among the Chemehuevi, Coyote and Fox hunted rats and mice (Laird 1976).  

            Southern Californian groups had long and complex origin cycles, involving creation by heroic individuals.  In the Serrano song cycle for mourning ceremonies, the first song spoke of the earth, the second chukiam, “all growing things” (Lerch 1981:11).  This refers to plants and animals, but apparently to plants above all; it included a passage about the Datura plant, ritually used as a halluncinogen in puberty rites and in medicine.  Cognate words such as chukit are known among other southern Californian Shoshonean groups.  The Serrano creator died in Big Bear Valley, which thus has an enormous variety of plants, many of them endemic.  It is interesting that “[t]he Serrano “were not only aware of the phenomenon, they had an explanation for it in their cosmology” (Lerch 1981:14). The mourners turned to pines, which still stand in ranks around the valley (due, in modern terms, to the layered rock outcrops).  The related Cahuilla have a long cycle of creation myths centering on Mukat, a human-like figure who brought agriculture among other useful plant and animal management strategies.

            By contrast, the far northwest of the state had no origin myths; the cosmos always existed.  However, creator-like beings had altered it greatly and made it suitable for humans, who appear after the time of such beings as the Karok ikxareyavs (see below).

The Yuki and Kato had something close to monotheism; their high god (Taikomol in Yuki, Nagaitcho to the Kato; Goddard 1909) was far above Coyote and his fellow creatures, though they fine-tuned the creation.  Taikomol created the universe by song and speech.  In a beautiful Kato telling of the creation story by Bill Ray in 1906, Nagaitcho and the dog he has created end by rejoicing in their world:

“My dog, come along behind me and look.”

Vegetation had grown, fish had come into the creeks.

Rocks had become large….

“Walk fast, my dog.”

The land was good.  Valleys had appeared….

Water had begun to flow.  Springs had come….

“I made the land good, my dog,

Walk fast, my dog.”

Acorns were growing, pine cones were hanging,

Tarweed seeds were ripe, chestnuts were ripe,

Hazelnuts were good, manazanita berries were getting white,…

Buckeyes were good, peppernuts were black-ripe,

Bunch grass was ripe, grasshoppers were growing,

Clover was with seed.  Bear-clover was good.  Mountains had grown.
Rocks had grown, different foods were grown.

“My dog, we made it good.”

Fish had grown that they will eat.

“Waterhead Place we have come to now.”

Different plants were ripe.  They went back, they say,

His dog with him.

“We will go back,” he said.

(Goddard 1909:9394; slightly rewritten for comprehensibility.  Nagaitcho and his dog return to the north, whence they came, and leave us this beautiful world.)

This hymn to all the wonderful foods of the north coast ranges—and indeed they are excellent eating—is only a tiny part of a very long creation story that mentions virtually every plant, animal, fish, and geological feature in Kato habitat.  It is all very reminiscent of Psalm 104, but far more richly detailed.  It also reveals something of Bill Ray’s personal narrative style, which included long chanted lists of plants, animals, and geographic features of the environment, alternating with narrative that is largely spoken and is so telegraphic as to be dreamlike.  The combination is powerful enough to make Ray one of the more distinctive and poetically gifted California myth-tellers.  Such lists are a widespread stylistic feature in myths in many languages of north-central California and elsewhere in the world (think of Hesiod’s Theogony).

The Athapaskan original takes full advantage of the exquisite beauty and potential for sound-poetry of the Athapaskan languages.  The above is rhythmical and rhymed poetry in the original, rhyming with the repeated chorus-line word kwanang (“they say”).  Note that the mountains and rocks grow; they are living things in California belief.  Like Hanc’ibeyjim’s creation story (Appendix) Ray’s is one of the greatest religious poems in world literature, and it deserves more than languishing in a forgotten monograph.  Here are the first few lines, in Kato, simplified for easier reading from Goddard’s linguistic transcription:

“E lot, shiit la, nan dal, o dut t ge ka la e kwanang,

To nai nas de le kwanang.

Sha na ta se gun cha ge kwanang

N gun sho ne kwanang.

Kakw chqal yani kakw ko winyal, e lots ul chin yani ne n gun sho ne kwanang….”

Many other groups had Earthmaker and Coyote or Wolf and Coyote as creators.  Earthmaker or Wolf was the senior, more responsible and sober one, the stereotypic elder brother.  Coyote was young and wild, everybody’s crazy kid brother.  Of course, everyone respected Earthmaker but loved Coyote.  A particularly beautiful and moving version of this story is William Benson’s Pomo version (2002, where Coyote is called by his Pomo name or alternative incarnation Marumda).  The Pomo had a range of creation stories, often conflicting, because of their diversity and the diversity of peoples around them; they were influenced by the monotheistic Yuki to the north, the Guksu Cult of the Patwin to the east, and so on (Barrett 1933).   Other fine stories are Hancibeyjim’s Maidu one (Dixon 1912; Shipley 1991; cf. below),  Laird’s Chemehuevi stories (Laird 1976, 1984), and stories from the Kiliwa (Mixco 1983) and Kawaiisu (Zigmond 1980, 1991). 

The Yuman groups had humanlike but mystical and powerful creators.  The Yuman peoples and the culturally related Chemehuevi told of these in long song cycles, that describe the courses of the creator beings as they traveled around the world—the known habitat of the people, that is—creating, transforming, teaching, and instituting practices (see e.g. Kelly 1977; Kroeber 1972; Laird 1976, 1984).  Individuals dreamed their own versions of the song cycles. 

Some Mohave song cycles are given by Kroeber (1972; see also 1925:754-770), including a Mohave version of the Salt cycle known also by the Chemehuevi.  It contains not only the origin of salt, but of tobacco, the stars, and much else.

Kroeber found the cycles rambling and uneventful, but he recorded them in his youth from elderly individuals, and he was not fluent in the language; he seems to have gotten bland and truncated versions.  (Compare, for instance, Paul Talejie’s short but brilliant creation tale in the closely related Walapai language, in Hinton and Watahomigie 1984, and Laird’s Chemehuevi renderings.)  Even Kroeber’s recordings contain some striking poetry; one cycle begins:  “At Ha’avulypo Matavilya [the original creator] had made a house out of darkness and lived there” (Kroeber 1972:44).  The cycle continues to tell of his death and burial. In the cycle of Yellak (goose?), Yellak’s end is noted by Halykupa: “I know what made Yellak die.  He became sick from the sky, the clouds, the earth, the water, and the wind….Now cry.  Cry with the sky and with the wind…” (Kroeber 1972:63).  His skin sank into the Colorado River and turned into animals.

One reason Kroeber rather wearied of these cycles is that they detail almost all important actions as having been done and repeated facing each of the four directions in sequence, and there are other stylized repetitions as well.  Another is that some of the memorialized events, complete with long songs, are nothing more than the hero seeing a badger or catching a rat (Kroeber 1925:756).  The interest in these cycles attaches to their detailing geographical points and the creation events that took place there—of sheep, deer, grapes, salt, everything—rather than to exciting stories.  California Native people have an unexcelled sense of place, and—today as in the past—can find the simple mention of familiar spots enormously moving.

With the songs, which were repeated over and over, these cycles took anywhere from a night to several weeks of nights to perform.  Some were never performed in their entirety, because, like epics everywhere, they could be lengthened out indefinitely by adding elements and repeating songs. 

Separate (or possibly, at some level, from the Yellak bird myth cycle), but part of the same general tradition of singing to create and transform, were the bird song cycles, which survive among the Yuman and neighboring Uto-Aztecan peoples; these are not only about birds, but can be about anything, and are sung for entertainment—often with slow dancing.  Bird songs were in decline in the 1960s and 1970s, but have been enthusiastically revived, and now abound, with several good recordings commercially available. 

These spirit beings transformed the world for their own reasons, but also to make it ready for humans.  This can be compared to the Australian Aboriginal beliefs in the Dreamtime, and to the most ancient stratum of Greek myths.  These latter, at least some of which go back to a very ancient stratum of belief, lie behind the “metamorphoses” that the Roman poet Ovid turned into art long after the highly-charged shamanic power had gone out of them. 

Thus at the south end of the state, the Tipay (Diegueño) taught that Chaup, the focal deity of their religion, “named and marked all animals whereby they lost their ti.pay (‘human’) nature” (Luomala 1978:604).

Thought and song created much of the world.  The very long and circumstantial Achomawi origin tales of Istet Woiche (1992) and Maidu tales of Hanc’ibyjim 1991) seem to indicate that this belief reached a peak in the northeastern corner of the state.

Calendars everywhere recognized months, and frequently named them from the subsistence activities or seasonal nature events that went with them.

California is distinctly lacking in the specifically conservationist texts so commonly recorded from the Northwest Coast and Mexico.  There are none in the above-cited major collections.  Even Zigmond, focusing on ethnobiological research, found none.  Almost nowhere are there mythic stories about animals driven away by overhunting.  One intriguing exception concerns the Patwin Hesi cycle of the Kuksu religion.  Four songs were obtained from the deer of the Marysville Buttes, back when deer were humanoid in mythic time; enemies took advantage of the deer while the latter were ceremonially sweating, and exterminated them, which is why there are no deer on the Buttes (Kroeber 1925:385-386).  This is quite a different story from the widespread  North American motif of overhunting followed by famine, but is clearly a relative with the same general perception behind it.  The Kuksu cult is associated with morals and discipline, and this myth is surely significant.  Farther afield are various myths in which evil entities wreck the environment for no special reason, and are eventually transformed into their present animal form, as for instance in the Yurok myth of the origin of the mole and Jerusalem cricket (Kroeber 1976:47-54).  These animals, in their humanoid form of mythic time, bring death as well as widespread ecological damage.  The sense that the environment has to be orderly, constant, and well-managed to be fruitful lies behind this and similar myths, and evidently served as a general sanction against damaging the environment.

Apparently universal, however, is a myth of a time when animals and fish were held by supernatural beings who would not release them.  A culture hero such as Coyote or the Yurok Pulekukwerek outwits the keepers and releases the prey them through a mix of heroism, trickery and magic. 

Masters of the game animals—almost universally recognized in the Native Americas—seem less common in California.  Supernatural beings controlling or watching over plant and animal resources are mentioned, but without much detail.  The Southern Paiute, who range into California (where they are called Chemehuevi), had this belief:  “All the deer on Kaibab Plateau were believed to be owned by a supernatural being named Qainacav.  During the hunting season (July and June, also early fall), his name must not be mentioned, or else the luck of the whole hunting season would be spoiled.”  Hunters sometimes encountered him in human or deer form, but seeing him meant no luck that day.  Anyone who offended him would be lured off by deer tracks that eventually disappeared (Sapir 1992:829, from notes made around 1910), one way of explaining one’s inability to follow a trackway.

Few myths that I can find give specific directions or charters for the plant and animal management that we know was so universal (although some myths mention it in passing).  Quite the contrary; animals in their mythic humanoid forms go hunting and collecting quite at will, killing enormous numbers of game animals and gathering all the seeds they want.  The wishful dreams of the storytellers are evident, but conservation teachings are not evident at all.  The myths are extremely well supplied with moral teachings, but the morals are social.  Tales show the awful results of condemning ungenerousness, vindictiveness, mean-spiritedness, violence, sexual sins, ignoring good advice, and trying to imitate others mindlessly, but not the awful results of mismanaging resources.  The stories are set the times before human people, and thus I suspect they date back to a time so ancient that the people were still few, with simple technology, when they could take without a second thought.  The Northwest Coast conservation stories seem usually to concern real people, albeit in long-ago times.

One exception is in an astonishing Wappo text, “The Chicken-Hawk Cycle,” recorded by Paul Radin from Jim Tripo (Radin 1924:87-147).  This is one of the most impressive and striking mythic texts ever recorded in California, and deserves better than to languish obscure in a forgotten volume.  Tripo spins it out to 60 pages; more typical is a Karok version of the same story that manages only two pages (Kroeber and Gifford 1980:250-252.)  Much of the plot turns on the anger of Moon, a captious old man, at the Hawk chief and his son harvesting pine cones by breaking off the branches of Moon’s pine trees.  Moon is not portrayed in a sympathetic light, but it is clear that such a damaging way of getting pine nuts was genuinely bad by Wappo standards. 

            Education of the young came through these myths, through specific instruction, through reprimand, but above all through interaction with the world, guided to varying degrees by elders and peers (see Margolin 2005 for a fine summary of Native Californian education).  Autobiographies recount dramatic experiences—accidents, vision quests, special hunting accounts, personal crises—that were interpreted, usually briefly but in extremely telling words, by elders.  Apparently this was a canonical way of learning, along with myths and initiation rites.  The long and complex initiation rites of such groups as the Luiseno involved detailed explanations of cosmology and of human life, including life crisis ritualization.  Other rites of passage, such as marriages and funerals, provided opportunities for songs, stories, and speeches that provided a great deal of instruction.  Finally, chiefs at dawn often harangued their communities on the need to be up and working.  Overall, there was a great deal of education, much of it quite formalized:  winter myth cycles, sings, initiations, funeral orations, and many more occasions. 

Religion, Cosmology, and Spiritual Concerns

A whole cosmology based on interactive practice and intense emotional involvement is bound to be quite different from one based on books, deductive logic, and laboratory experiments.  For one thing, it is hard to avoid personalizing the land—seeing the rocks, plants, and animals as people.  Even modern Anglo-Americans name their cars, talk to their dogs, and cherish their plants. 

Thousands of years of such interaction, in a world without labs and mass media, will inevitably make the nonhuman world more personal.  The nonhuman beings are “other-than-human persons.”  They have will and intellect, but not like ours; they plan and communicate, but we have to know how to hear them.  They have supernatural power to transmit.  

            The Californians shared the almost universal Native American belief in a prior cosmos, ruled by animal powers, that changed dramatically to make our present cosmic order.  The earlier beings included Coyote, Quail, Wildcat, and other beings.  There seems to be a vague tendency for interior and mountain groups to have more strictly animal powers in mythic time.  At least, the mythic-time people of the Yurok and the larger southern California tribes were very often humanoid, especially the main characters.  The large, rich tribes of the Delta and Bay Area are not well enough known for many conclusions.

Widely, however, especially in central California, an apparently human-like high god or pair of gods was the chief agent.  The Wiyot were the northwest pole of this belief; the Yurok, distantly related in language, lacked it (Kroeber 1925:119).  The Maidu, Wintu and their neighbors had a high creator or Earthmaker/Earthnamer.  Some (or all) Pomo groups had a similar high god.  Everywhere, he was very often assisted by Coyote, who royally messed up the process (see e.g. Hanc’ibyjim in Shipley 1991).  Similar pairings in southern California include Wolf and Coyote or Southern Fox and Coyote (Laird 1976, 1984).

            What Walter Goldschmidt said of the Nomlaki would apply equally well to all California Native peoples:  “To the Nomlaki, the world of reality and the world of the supernatural were inseparable, so that even the most practical undertaking was circumscribed by elaborate ritual inspired by the religious ideas with which the act was invested….  The Nomlaki world was animistic.  ‘Everything in this world talks, just as we are now,’” one Nomlaki man told him (Goldschmidt 1978:345).  There was, in fact, no concept of “reality” or of “supernatural”; there was simply the cosmos, with a gradient from clearly visible and tangible beings to invisible and intangible ones, and with a gradient from animals that were just animals to the mythic human-like animals of prehuman times.

Goddard, missionary turned ethnographer, was deeply struck by the religious nature of the Hupa, and sardonically remarked that “this undercurrent of deep religious feeling makes the life and deeds of the Indian seem…strange to the white man” (Goddard 1903:88).  Similar comments (if without the depreciative aside about Anglo-Americans!) could be made about all California Native people.  Religion was deeply felt and important in all aspects of life.  This was closely connected with plant and animal interactions.  Like their neighbors, they had a first salmon ceremony in the spring and a first acorns ceremony in the fall, as well as a first-lamprey (“eel”) ceremony (Goddard 1903).  (The related Lassik had a bulbous-plant ceremony; Elsasser 1978.)  All this involved stressing the importance of maintaining the resource; the ceremony was intended to keep the salmon and acorns coming, probably by showing proper respect and entertainment.  I strongly suspect that conservation lessons were once part of the rituals. 

Thomas Buckley discusses the importance of the spirit world, of doctoring power, and of “wealth” objects (actually ritual objects), among the Yurok, as Goddard does for the Hupa.  Of the wealth objects, Buckley says that “[d]ance regalia are not objects but ‘people,’ sentient beings (like deer) that have wewecek’, ‘spirit’ or ‘life,’ and that ‘cry to dance.’  As people, their ‘prupose in life’ is to get out of the baskets and boxes in which they’re stored and dance to ‘fix the world…’ (Buckley 2002:175).  They sometimes ask their owners to be loaned out so they can be danced at a ceremony in a neighboring community. 

Buckley, like the Karok anthropologist Julian Lang (1994), faults A. L. Kroeber for holding that the Yurok were obsessed with material wealth per se.  Kroeber was not entirely unaware that wealth objects (dentalia shells, obsidian blades, white deerskins, woodpecker scalps, and so on) were spiritual things and tokens of spiritual power.  He recorded many stories in which they are personified and spiritualized (Kroeber 1976, e.g. 200-204; cf. Kroeber 1925:40-42).  However, these objects, the dentalium shells in particular, were used as regular money too, for ordinary purchases and bargains. 

Kroeber was writing at a time when materialism, Marxian and otherwise, was dominant in American social science.  Not only Kroeber himself, but his main Yurok coworker, Robert Spott, seem rather matter-of-fact and materialist in their narratives (Spott and Kroeber 1942).  Euro-American readers might recall the Renaissance associations of gold:  money and material wealth, but also a spiritual and magical substance.  Interesting is one rather barbed comment that Kroeber recorded from Dick of Wohkero.  To a myth about Earthquake, who is personified among the Yurok, Dick added that “[n]ow Earthquake is angry because the Americans have bought up Indian treasures and formulas and taken them away to San Francisco to keep.  He knew that, so he tore the ground up there (referring to the earthquake of the year before, in 1906)” (Kroeber 1976:418).

Unsurprisingly, religion was thoroughly embedded in the natural world, and ceremonies continually constructed and reinforced ties with nature.  The Chumash had a particularly complex and arcane cosmology, paralleling their complex socioreligious organization (Hudson et al. 1977).

The dances of the Kuksu religion of central California included duck, grizzly, deer, coyote, goose, grasshopper, turtle,condor, and other dances based on animals; presumably the dances invoked them and imitated their motions.  These were not mere dances, but entire ceremonies centered on dancing (Kroeber 1925:378-380).  These ceremonies were “thought to bring rains, nourish the earth, and produce a bountiful natural crop; perhaps also to ward off epidemcis, floods, earthquakes, and other disasters…” as well as producing “an abundance of bulbs and greens, and…acorns…” as well as game (Kroeber 1925:383-384).  I take it this means that the dances were essential to co-create the natural community as well as the human one; human society being extended to include wild animals and plants, it is natural that human community-building rituals would impact the other-than-human community members favorably as well. Kroeber notes the significant lack of dances for critically important animals like fish and rabbits; there was no one-to-one mapping.  Of course it is possible that such dances existed but were lost before ethnography began.

Of course the agricultural tribes of the southeast part of the state had agricultural ceremonies, like most farming peoples of the world.  Yet, as with the Cocopa (see above), these seem not to have been elaborated as fertility or harvest ceremonies. 

Girls and boys coming of age went through initiation rituals, sometimes involving hallucinogenic plants that produced visions interpreted as spirit communications.  These initiation rites seem to have been among the most important ceremonies of the Native peoples.  Many smaller groups had no other major ceremonies, leaving initiation rites as the most important part of their religion (cf. Kroeber 1925, e.g. p. 428; the Yurok, alone among major groups, had no girls’ rites and apparently no true male rites either).  This is particularly true in the south (north through the Yokuts lands), where the use of toloache (Datura spp.) as a hallucinogenic drink made another link with the plant world.  The Luiseño youths acquired animal guardian spirits while under its influence, and did not subsequently kill the animal received (Kroeber 1925:670).  Toloache was widely used medicinally as well (see e.g. Librado 1979, esp. pp. 68-72).

Widely, across the state, puberty rites were the occasion for telling the longest, most detailed, most sacred myths and group histories.  This was when people really learned their culture in its depth.  All accounts agree that detailed and extensive teachings were  part of this, but no accounts give us much detail on the contents of the teachings, primarily because the rites vanished or went underground quite early.  (Constance Du Bois found some among the Luiseño.)  One suspects that ecological and conservation teachings were a major part of this initiation, but we will never know.

At the other end of the life cycle, groups in southern and central California burned the possessions of the dead, and then in memorial ceremonies burned large quantities of their own goods.  This prevented a buildup of material wealth, and indirectly served to eliminate the possibility of accumulating wealth for status display.  This seems to have mattered little, however, since the northwestern groups that did accumulate wealth for (spiritual) status did no notable damage to the environment thereby.

            There were several major religious cults or general ceremonial complexes in the state, each one confined to a few neighboring groups, possibly because of the difficulties of translation into the many different languages of the state.  The Northwest group of Yurok, Wiyot, Karok and Hupa (and to a lesser extent their hill neighbors) shared a focus on fish ceremonials, world renewal dances and ceremonies, the white deerskin dance, and other dances displaying ancient prized items of spiritual power.  The center of the state was dominated by the Kuksu and related cults, centering on the Patwin, Wappo, and Pomo groups.  The spectacular rock art of the Chumash and Yokuts (and probably the Gabrielino and other Shoshoneans, though evidence is mostly lost) indicates another religious area.  The bird songs of the lower Colorado and the Chinigchinich cult of the Luiseno and their neighbors also involved two or three major linguistic groupings each (counting the river Yumans as basically one group).  Finally, the rock art of the inner deserts, focusing on mountain sheep in many sites, is distinctive. 

            By contrast, more general folklore, as well as material culture, spread widely; it could be shared by anyone within hundreds of miles.  Folktales gradually transform, with north and south being quite different.  Language was not much of a barrier, and of course hardly a barrier at all to the spread and copying of material items.

Central to religion was spiritual ability and efficacy.  I have noted above the tendency of anthropologists to use the word “power” for what Native people generally call “knowledge.”  One could use the phrase “power/knowledge” if it had not been preempted by Foucault for a very different idea.

A model developed especially with the Luiseño concept of ayelkwi, but valid rather widely (especially for groups in the south coast, of course), lists four characteristics:  “Power is sentient and the principal causative agent in the universe”; it is found in the upper, middle, and lower worlds and “possessed by anything having ‘life,’” which can include rocks and tools as well as biota; it is in some degree of equilibrium in the cosmos; and man is a central figure in power networks (Bean 1992:22, citing and partly following White 1963).  One might qualify this for other parts of the state primarily in regard to clause 4; in some places (including central California, if I read the myths aright), humans are definitely less central than some supernatural beings, and probably some of the larger natural ones too.  Power is totally bound up in geography, with dramatic rocks, peaks, mountains, waterfalls, and other striking landmarks being major “power places.” 

People got power from vision questing in the wilderness.  They would undergo strong physical discipline:  enduring cold and heat, bathing in freezing waters, living with little or no food and water, and so on.  (The classic account of vision questing, Ruth Benedict [1923], refers to the Plateau area just north of California; her account is broadly valid for the latter place.)  The Achomawi preserved this knowledge later than most and were more willing to share it, so the map of their power spots provided by D. L. Olmstedt and Omer Stewart (1978:226) is exceptionally valuable.  Famous rock art sites are often power places.  (Places I know personally, but that are unpublished, shall remain unidentified!)  

  Most of the spots are dramatic peaks, but some are canyons, lakes, and large springs.  Power is largely a spiritual essence that allows beings (including humans—to the degree they have learned it) to control and create.  It is typically exercised through song.  Shamans cure by singing just as the creator beings shaped the world by singing.  However, actual physical and mental ability to do things is an expression of power, so it is not entirely “supernatural” by European standards.  It is learned through conventional training as well as through visions and dreams.  Knowledge of how to manage natural resources is a key part of power.

As noted previously, California Native peoples sought visions, usually in arduous vision quests, at puberty, in the wilderness.  This was another religious mechanism binding Californians to their landscape.  Apparently some groups, at least the Coast Central Pomo (Loeb 1926:320), did not have the vision quest.  Indeed, Loeb notes that the Pomo in general lacked a belief in guardian spirits, otherwise the goal of vision quests among most California (and indeed most North American) peoples.  They did have shamans and shamanic healers, however, and must have done something to get that power.  However, the Pomo and Native people everywhere dreamed of animals, daydreamed about animals, and interpreted their dreamings as important.

 Shamans operate by controlling power; but, again, in the center and north, they operate more by controlling specific “pains” that they own.  To be shamans or other religious officiants they had to have visions giving medicine power.  (Strictly speaking, the term “shaman” applies to healers of the ancient societies of Siberia, and it might be better to call the Californian healers “medicine persons,” but “shaman” is established in the literature and fairly well justified by the similarity of beliefs and practices to Siberian ones.  See Bean [ed.] 1992.)

The culturally and technologically simpler groups had vision-questing shamans and no other religious practitioners, but the complex chiefdoms had whole ranges of religious officiants.  These including true priests: officiants of organized religious cults (as opposed to shamans, who are independent individuals with special healing and visionary powers).  The Kuksu cult complex of central California had a priesthood (Loeb 1926:320), which presumably led to the decline or disappearance of vision questing among the Coast Central Pomo.  The Chumash of southwestern California had a whole range of shamans and priests with specialized functions, ranging from weather control to fishing to canoe safety (Bean and King 1974; Gamble 2008).  

Californians feared shamans and wizards with transforming and poisoning powers.  They acquired special visions of their familiar spirits.  These were often animal powers, but could be other natural or supernatural beings.  Different animals gave different powers, often related to the animal’s traits; rattlesnake power often involved the ability to cure rattlesnake bites, for instance.  These beliefs closely resemble shamanistic beliefs elsewhere, from eastern North America to Siberia.

A particularly important problem was “bear doctors,” men who had bear power knew the magic for transforming themselves into grizzlies at will.  These were known and feared all over the state, from the Hupa to the Chemehuevi (Burrill 1993; Laird 1976:38).  Real grizzlies usually prefer to leave humans alone, but bear doctors transform themselves in order to do harm.  One remembers the bear transformation stories in the Old World, from the berserk (“bear shirt”) men of ancient Scandinavia and the Celtic Arthur (“bear man,” “were-bear”) to the Ainu bear cult with its divinization of bears.  People could sometimes transform into other kinds of animals, and animals and spirits could become or appear to be people; of course the animals in the time before people came were humanoid to varying degrees.  Related Old World figures are the werewolf, were-tiger, and leopard-man.  All come from a stratum of thought that is most famously seen in Siberian shamanism but is far more widespread.  Animal transformations are central to this cosmology. 

Other supernatural and ghostly transformations are known.  People with supernatural powers can invoke and control this shape-shifting.  So can many animals.  The raccoon dog (tanuki, often mistranslated “badger”) is a shape-shifter in Japan, and some tanuki stories are related to Californian Coyote tales.  The trickery of the fox is proverbial throughout Eurasia.  Modern Europeans have lost the transformation tales, but foxes in east Asia routinely turn into beautiful women to beguile men.

Common all over the state, but especially in the dry southeast, were weather shamans who could bring rain and snow.  Some songs for this purpose have been recorded, and a rain shaman’s bundle has been almost miraculously preserved and studied (Fenenga et al. 2012; Hopkins et al. 2012).  It came from the Tübatulabal of the Kern River valley, but incorporated many items, especially steatite smoking pipes, from the Chumash.  These are known to have been used by the coastal tribes to blow smoke clouds that invited rain clouds by a form of sympathetic magic.  Sometimes water was thrown into the air, during ceremonies, for similar reasons.  The bundle was used in ceremonies along with detailed chants that were guaranteed to bring rain (if properly carried out, of course).  Shamans had to know how to stop rain, to prevent large rains they invoked from causing floods.  There were many adept weather shamans among the Tübatulabal and their neighbors until quite recently.  The use of a magic bundle, incorporating a collection of sacred stones and other items, is very widespread in North America (see esp. Wildschut 1975 on Crow bundles; one Crow doctor, showing some small stones with some gravel near them, said—with a twinkle in his eye—that the rocks in the bundle had mated and had a litter).

Other “Indian doctors” could send pains into people.  These were often pebbles, small snakes, or other physical objects.  A “sucking doctor” would be called to suck this pain out.  He (rarely she) would suck on the belly or chest of the patient, sometimes hard enough to draw blood (assumed to be posioned).  Often he would produce the stone or small animal.  I have encountered this practice among the Maya as well; my old friend Don José Cauich Canul sucked a live scorpion from the little niece of my field assistant Don Felix Medina Tzuc.  I did not see this, but Don Felix described it.  He was duly impressed.  Don José has taught me something of his craft, including his use of sleight-of-hand, so I know where the centipede really came from.  Claude Lévi-Strauss (1963 [1958]) has pointed out that this sort of deception is typically done by doctors who believe that the old-timers really had such powers, but modern ones have less power and must imitate the old-timers as best they can.  This seems to fit California and Maya cases.

            Arts represented interaction with the nonhuman realm. Among the Yokuts, people wore crowns of flowers during spring (Gayton 1976:83).  

Much of the art were clearly associated with shamanism; more is inferentially so.  The spectacular rock art of southern and Baja California—some of the most outstanding in the world—is highly abstract, and also features strange and unearthly creatures.  Most viewers of the art, from anthropologists to artists, feel that shamanism and vision states must be involved.  (Some reviews include Campbell 2007; Grant 1965; Whitley 2000, notably speculative; and for Baja California, Crosby 1997, a more ambitious work than anything devoted to Alta California.  See also Jean Clottes’ stunning book Cave Art, 2008, which deals with the paleolithic art of Europe but presents California material for comparison on pp. 300-303.)  Other, more unassuming or crude pictographs and petroglyphs are almost certainly mere “Kilroy was here” markers, or at best markers of local descent-group territory.  Unfortunately, we do not have the keys (though see Spoon et al. 2014a, 2014b—the Nevada Paiute still know something).  The shamans are gone. 

There are a few recorded explanations, most of which refer not to shamanic visions but to puberty rites.  Often, puberty rites involved explanations of the cosmos using pictorial but abstract symbols, and sometimes the initiates were supposed to draw geometric designs of their own.  The Luiseno girls’ puberty rite, for instance, involved drawing red checkerboard, diamond, or maze patterns on rocks, and many of these survived in my younger days in the Riverside area.  Unfortunately most have faded now. 

Otherwise, outside of fairly obvious representations of animals, we have little identifiable rock art.  Earlier theories of hunting magic have gone by the wayside.  Besides the known cases just noted, other rock art sites are very often astronomically aligned—in canyons down which the equinoctial sunrise strikes, for instance—or are on remote and spectacular rock outcrops or in caves, rather than along game trails or near water holes or the like.  It is very possible that a general relationship with the cosmos was intended and good luck in hunting was one perceived consequence.  However, the focus remains on that general relationship, not on a specific pragmatic application.

An excellent analysis of a mountain sheep shrine, by Robert Yohe and Alan Garfinkel (2012), summarizes all that is known of mountain sheep ceremonies, rock art, and hunting lore from southeast California.  Clearly, mountain sheep were important game animals, and a huge and complex body of lore surrounded them.  (They were once extremely abundant; their rarity today is due to introduced sheep diseases as well as overhunting and habitat destruction.)  The content of ritual is lost to us, but at least there are still large amounts of art and religious construction to analyze.

Songs were basic to activities and teachings.  They gave and expressed power, and had power themselves.  A good explanation was given by a California basketmaker, Mrs. Mattz.  Richard West reports that she

            “…was hired to teach basket making at a local university.  After three weeks, her students complained that all they had done was sing songs…. Mrs. Mattz, taken aback, replied that the were learning to make baskets.  She explained that the process starts with songs that are sung so as not to insult the plants when the materials for the baskets are picked.  So her students learned the songs….. Upon their return to the classroom, however, the students again were dismayed when Mrs. Mattz began to teach them yet more songs.  This time she wanted them to learn the songs that must be sung as yo soften the materials in your mouth before you start to weave….  The students protested…. Mrs. Mattz…patiently explained the obvious to them: “You’re missing the point,” she said, “a basket is a song made visible.”  (Quoted Wilkinson 2010:382). 

Appendix

            To give the flavor of Californian religious narrative, let us consider the beginning of the creation myth told by Hanc’ibyjim (Tom Young) to Roland Dixon in 1902-03 (Dixon 1912).  This myth was partially retranslated and massively rewritten by William Shipley (1991).  I will do still another rewrite, though I do not know the Maidu language and have to rely on Dixon and Shipley.

            Neither of the translators refers to the incredible chantlike prosody of the narrative, which comes across even to a non-Maidu-speaker like me.  It is worth setting some of this up in poetic form.  Hanc’ibyjim uses the obligatory marker of speech, –tsoia (“it is said”), as a chorus, its sharp sound contrasting with the beautiful flow of the narrative, full of “a” and “m” sounds.  Simply enjoy the sounds before reading the meaning.  (Most letters are pronounced as in Spanish, umlaut vowels as in German.  The apostrophe marks the accented syllable [not a glottal stop].)

Kō’doyapen kan ūniñ’ ko’do momim’ opit’mőni hintsetō’yetsoiam.

Hin’tstetoyewē’bisim hōmōñ’ jidiu; dunaat yj;tun jawun;naat tsemen’tsoia.

Tsai’tsainom mai’dűm hesī’kimaat hesim’maat kai’noyemen’tsoia.

Amőn’ikan ūniñ’ ka’dom tsewu’suktipem ka’dom yőtson’otsoia.

Epin’iñkoyōdi kō’do tsehe’hetsonopem yak’hubőktsoia.

Adōñ’kan wasā’ hubőktsoia.  (Dixon 1912:4.)

Literally, the first two lines means “Earth-Maker and this world water full-when drifted about, it is said.  Kept drifting about where world-in indeed little earth indeed saw-not, it is said.”

            Translating the first part of the story (and leaving out the endless repetition of “it is said,” so effective in Maidu, so monotonous in English):

Earthmaker, when this world was covered with water, drifted.

He kept drifting; he saw nothing, not even a bit of earth.

He saw no creatures of any kind, nothing flying.

He went on and on, over the unseen earth.

The world seemed transparent, like the Valley Above in the sky.

He felt sad.

“How, I wonder—how, I wonder—where, I wonder, in what world or place, can we see the earth?”  he said.  (After Dixon 1912:4 and Shipley 1991:18.)

[Coyote then appears, and he and Earthmaker discuss creating the world.  Earthmaker sings:]

Where are you, my great mountains, my world mountains?

            [Coyote sings:]

Where are you, my foggy mountains, my world I could travel?

            [A tiny piece of land like a bird’s nest then appears, and the two succeed in stretching it to make a world.  Meadowlark joins them, and Coyote goes on:]

My world, where I can go along the edge of the meadow,

My world, where I can travel side to side, wander all ways,

My world of mountains beyond mountains,

I call, singing, to my traveling-world,

In such a world shall I wander.

            [There is some conference among the three, about how to paint the world, and Coyote continues:]

I will paint it with blood,

There will be blood in the world,

Creatures with blood will be born,

Animals with blood will be born,

Deer and other animals,

People shall be born,

Nothing will be missing, all those with blood will be born.

Red rocks will come into being,

The world will seem painted with blood,

It will be beautiful.  (After Dixon 1912:5-10 and Shipley 1991:19-22.)

Coyote…stretched out the land with his feet.

‘Pushing it out, little by little,

He stretched it out to where the usn rises—

Foirst, he stretched it out to there.

Then, to the south, and to where the sun sets,

He stretched it out, little by little.  (Shipley 1991:22.)

            Creation continues, in an epic poem filled with intense images like those above.  This story is as beautiful and powerful as Genesis and one of the great religious poems of the world, yet it remains unknown, and neither Dixon’s nor Shipley’s translations do it justice (judging from analysis of Dixon’s line-by-line translation).  We need a Maidu to do a real translation that can bring out the full meanings and keep the power of the language.

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d Animals

Work in progress; please do not cite without permission.

This is intended to be one part of a book that will also include a section on the Pacific Northwest, thus covering the Pacific coast of North America from the Mexican border (or just south of it) to southern Alaska.  The book is on traditional plant and animal management and ideology.  It draws heavily on myths and texts, especially early recordings from the days when texts were important to anthropology (sadly no longer true—though some stalwart souls are still recording them).  I am interfacing biology with culture, using phenomenology and ethnobiology as the main ways into the latter. 

Unfortunately, events are making it impossible to work on the book.  The California section is substantially finished, though I am updating it as new materials appear.  These now are largely supportive of the basic points, so the time has come to post this work on my website for anyone to use. 

“…we are constantly walking on herbs, the virtues of which no one knows.”  -Pastor, Chujmas elder, as quoted by Fernando Librado Kitsepawit, Ventureño Chumash (Librado 1979:56; cf. Blackburn 1975:258)

Californian Environments

            The Pacific Coast of North America, in pre-European times, had the distinction of supporting large, populous, highly complex societies that lived by hunting and gathering and that almost totally lacked agriculture.  Many groups along the immediate coast and major rivers were not only larger and more differentiated than most hunter-gatherer cultures, but more so than many horticultural societies around the world.  (On California Native environments, see Jones and Klar 2007; Lightfoot and Parrish 2009.)

            The reason has traditionally been considered “the rich environment,” but actually the environment is not incredibly rich.  The Northwest Coast has huge salmon resources, but to balance this out it has millions of acres of dense evergreen forest with almost nothing for humans to eat.  California and the interior regions have rich seed resources and appreciable game, but are dry at best, and are subject to frequent prolonged droughts that make finding food a desperate proposition.  Irrigated agriculture on a large scale has made these dry areas productive, but without that they can be quite barren.

            It is not surprising, then, to learn from archaeology that complex societies did not exist until around 3,000 years ago (give or take a millennium).  What is surprising is the rise of such societies—a phenomenon still unexplained.  Before even attempting explanation, we need to understand the complexity.

            Let us, then, look at how such societies maintained themselves. 

            For convenience, I will make the arbitrary decision to divide these two regions by the California state line.  Groups split by the line will be considered to lie in the state where their major population once dwelt (except for the Modoc, who belong properly to the Plateau region, and are poorly known because of the genocidal “Modoc War”).  The decision is slightly less arbitrary than it looks.  In spite of often being classified as “Northwest Coast,” the Karok, Yurok, and Athapaskan groups of northwest California are politically, mythologically, and socially rather typical Californians, and lived by a Californian economy depending heavily on acorns. 

            This distinction gives us a Californian region whose economy was based on management of varied seed and nut resouces.  The northwest part of the state depended largely on fish, with seed and root foods important.  The Central Valley and other regions living near rivers and lakes had a similar economy, with perhaps relatively more seeds and nuts.  The Plateau region of traditional anthropology begins from the Cascade Range crest and extends eastward to the Rockies, and is defined in terms of human ecology by the intensive focus on wild root, corm and bulb foods, which are cultivated and stored(see e.g. Hunn 1991; Turner et al 1990).  The Plateau economy grades into the Californian economy in the northeast corner of the state, where the Achomawi and Atsugewi lived on fish, acorns, seeds, and root crops (Garth 1978; Olmsted and Stewart 1978).  Most of the rest of California depended largely on acorns, and to a lesser extent other nuts, with seed and root crops important.  The thinly-occupied deserts had few acorns, and life here depended on a wide range of plant foods; pinyon nuts were locally common and important.  I will not be dealing with the Great Basin or Baja California, except that far northern Baja California is linguistically and culturally a part of Native California by all standards, and will be included. 

            I shall, however, include the southeastern groups in California, which depended to a great extent on agriculture rather than, or along with, wild seed management.  As usual, culture areas grade into each other; agriculture supplied about half or less of the food of the Mohave and Quechan along the Colorado on the state line, and only a small percentage of the food of the Kumeyaay and Cahuilla.  Montane and coastal Kumeyaay probably did not practice it at all.  By contrast, agriculture supplied most of the food of the Akimel O’odham (Pima) in south Arizona, and most other culturally Southwestern groups.

            Classic ethnographic California thus focuses on the Mediterranean and montane parts of the state.  Most of the large, complex cultures developed in the former.  In spite of being called “Mediterranean,” California is not much like the Mediterranean Sea region.  The Mediterranean is landlocked and sun-warmed—a downright hot-tub.  This keeps its bordering countries warm in winter, and hot and often rainy in summer.  California’s coast is chilled by the California Current, a vast river of ocean water flowing down from Vancouver Island at a temperature around 55 F.  This creates such extreme conditions that the diving seabirds of Baja California are arctic forms (auklets, murrelets, and subarctic cormorants), while the soaring ones are tropical (terns, frigatebirds).  Thus coastal California is always cool and pleasant, but is quite dry.  More important to Native peoples, the California current and related upwelling produces fantastic biological productivity in coastal waters, and keeps the land cool and moist, permitting great productivity there too.  (Morocco’s Atlantic coast is similar, but the Mediterranean Sea shores are not.)

            This cold ocean keeps even southern California’s mountains pleasant and forested.  At elevations equivalent to California’s giant sequoia belt, Turkey’s mountains have thin woods, and reach a timberline around 8000 feet.  This low line is set not by cold but by drought due to Saharan and Arabian winds. 

            Conversely, much of the Mediterranean is exposed to winter storms and summer rains from farther north.  I have been caught in a major winter snowstorm on the Riviera (but, then, I have seen snow down to 1000’ in southern California) and subjected to days of rain in August in Rome.  California is walled off by mountains from the full force of northern and eastern winds.  The exception is southern California, where major passes allow such winds to roar down as the dreaded “santanas,” named because they pour down the Santa Ana River and other canyonways.  A desert wind, it combines the violence of the mistral with the heat of the scirocco.

            California ranges from warm to hot in summer, cool to cold in winter.  Rains varied (before recent climate change) from 130” a year in the far northwest mountains to 2” or less in the lowest valleys of the eastern deserts.   Such “average” figures mask incredible variation.  El Centro, on the Mexican border in southeastern California, averages 2” a year.  In the middle 1970s it made its average perfectly:  there was essentially no rain for six years, and then in August of 1976 a west Mexican chubasco (hurricane) dropped 12” in one day. 

Northern California has its own variety.  In February 1964, I saw the Sacramento River running more than ten miles wide.  A bridge about 100’ above the normal level of the Eel River was washed out.  Yet in summer 2009 the Sacramento was far below its usual banks and the Eel was almost totally dry, and in 2015 the rivers were still lower.  Within my years in Riverside, yearly rainfall has fluctuated by an order of magnitude (2” to over 20”), and the deserts eastward varied even more than that.  Such conditions would stress anyone, and they certainly proved difficult for hunting-gathering peoples.

Throughout California there is an alternation of El Niño conditions with drier years.  El Niño is caused by warm water in the east Pacific, and brings heavy winter rains.  They start just after the winter solstice, and thus around Christmas—hence the name (originated in Peru), which refers to the baby Jesus.  El Niños came every 5-7 years in the late 20th century, but before and since that time they were less frequent.  They provide about twice as much rain as normal years.  In the normal years, the warm-water pool of the Pacific is around Indonesia, bringing the rain to that country and to Australia instead of to the American coasts.  Recently, a tendency has arisen to refer to particularly cool and dry conditions in California as “La Niña” years, as if Jesus had a long-lost sister!  All, in turn, is part of the vast global El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) system.

            Globally warm periods, like the Medieval Warm Period and the present, are hot and dry in California.  Globally cool periods like the Pleistocene and the Little Ice Age are generally wet, but California suffered some searing droughts at the height of the Little Ice Age, which was globally dry (Gamble 2008).

            Today, global warming, partly natural and partly due to human release of greenhouse gases, is drying and heating California.  Vegetation is dying, and animal life with it.  Drastic reduction of both natural vegetation and agriculture is now in progress, and the future is bleak.  California has taken a world lead in combatting global warming, but without national and world support, all efforts will have little effect.  Political activity funded and driven by oil and coal companies have checkmated all attempts to slow—let alone stop—the warming process.  Unless greenhouse gas release is controlled, California could easily become a lifeless desert, like the central Sahara, within a few centuries. 

The Chumash saw it all as a gambling game.  All year, Coyote (with his allies) gambles with the Sun (with his).  On the winter solstice, the Moon judges the game.  If Coyote has won, the winter will be rainy and there will be much food.  If the Sun wins, winter conditions all too familiar to southern Californians will ensue:  the sun will beat down, day after day, from a brazen sky, and no food will grow (Blackburn 1975).  In the Santa Barbara County mountains, there is a cave where the Chumash bored a hole through solid rock.  The rising sun on the winter solstice morning strikes straight through the hole and illuminates a painting of a coyote on the cave wall.  One can easily guess what magic was tried there.  Alas, modern science cannot do much better than the ancient Chumash at predicting, and no better at controlling.

Biotic California

            The Californian region of the biologists is Mediterranean California.  It includes several formations:  chaparral (dense brushlands), scrub formations of many types, montane and lowland forests, Mediterranean steppe and grassland, winter-rain deserts, and the rainy, wooded northwest part of the state (Barbour et al. 2007).   Over 8000 native species of plants occur.  In spite of claims for extreme diversity (e.g. Lightfoot and Parrish 2009), this is less than comparable Mediterranean-climate zones of the world in Turkey and South Africa, and far less than many dry-tropical areas.  Still, it is diverse enough to provide tremendous variety and opportunity for hunters and gatherers. 

            Any account of the state will describe these plant associations.  However, earlier accounts exaggerate the extent of grassland.  Contrary to earlier assessments, it is now clear that the vast flat lowland valleys of California were usually covered by sparse scrub and annual wildflowers, not bunchgrass (Minnich 2008).  One can still see this in the few areas of the Central Valley that are not cultivated.  The wildflowers were thick and tall near the coast, but inland they would wither away to very little, leaving the ground sparsely covered, or, in such desert plains as the Antelope Valley and southern Central Valley, absolutely bare.  This was especially true where salt was concentrated by deposition in closed drainage basins (as can be seen in several areas today, e.g. the salt lake in Carrizo Plain).   

Anna Gayton (1948) was perceptive enough to notice these facts in early accounts, and realize what it meant for the Yokuts who lived there:  they could not find game, or even water, in the vast burning flats, and had to live near rivers and lakes.  These, at contact (following the wet centuries of the Little Ice Age), were very extensive; there was a vast chain of marshy lakes in the San Joaquin Valley that supported enormous fish and water plant resources (Latta 1977).  I can barely imagine this, being able to recall the last bits of marsh and lake, still visible in the 1950s.  Today, it is difficult to imagine the drought-starved plowed fields having been, only recently, huge marshy lakes teeming with fish, ducks, geese, turtles, frogs, tule elk, and every sort of water plant and insect.

The deserts also were covered with scattered bushes and, in wet springs, annual wildflowers.  The current cover of grass that dominates most of lowland California is made up of introduced Mediterranean weeds, which have outcompeted native plants (Minnich 2008), even replacing chaparral and woodland after hot fires.  The state looks very different today from its aboriginal appearance.  Even in the wildest parts of the western United States, enormous deterioration in the environment was occurring by the 1870s.  One of J. W. Powell’s workmen—a semiliterate frontiersman who cannot be accused of romantic environmentalism—wrote to Powell in 1880, describing southern Utah: “The foothills that yielded hundreds of acres of sunflowers which produced quantities of rich seed, the grass also that grew so luxuriantly when you were here, the seed of which was gathered with little labor, and many other plants that produced food for the natives is all eat out [sic] by stock” (Powell 1971:47). 

Animal life was equally rich.  The vast herds of deer and elk reported by explorers probably involved recovery from heavy hunting by Native Californians and heavy predation by bears, but there were evidently always many cervids.  Moutain sheep, including the desert bighorn, were evidently abundant before diseeases introduced by domestic sheep virtually exterminated them (they survive today partly because Fish and Game workers patiently catch and inocuate them).  Fish choked the rivers.  Salmon and steelhead were particularly prominent. Fall, winter, and spring runs of salmon stayed in the rivers for months until spawning time; they had to run when the streams had enough cool water, making summer runs impossible.  Steelhead (sea-running rainbow trout) still occur in many rivers, but in small numbers.  The salmon runs are disappearing fast, except in the Klamath, where Native Californians have fought desperately to keep the runs alive.  Even there, the outlook is cloudy.  Trout have done much better, thanks in large measure to stocking, and to vigilant monitoring by fishers.   Other fish, including the native warm-water fish of the Sacramento, Colorado, and elsewhere, are extinct or nearly so. 

The end is near; the usual combination of global warming, suburbanization, agribusiness, waste of water, and pollution are closing in fast on what is left of Californian nature, and all will be gone within a few decades unless desperate measures are taken.  (For a good, and depressing, summary see Allen et al. 2014).

Cultural Contours

            Humans have been in California for a long time.  The oldest date so far is 13,000 years ago (give or take a bit; see Erlandson 2015 for this and following dates) from Santa Rosa Island, but to get down the coast and out to a rather remote island would have taken some time.  Just north of California, at Paisley Cave in Oregon, there are dates as far back as 14,800 years ago.  People had reached Monteverde in southern Chile by 13,000 years ago.  So California was almost surely settled by 15,000 years ago.  Settlers probably came down the coast at first, but Paisley Cave is far inland.

            The initial population was small, and increased only slowly.  A few fluted points show that California was not entirely untouched by the Clovis style of spearpoint around 12,000 years ago, but points are few and scattered.  More local and more numerous points follow.  Then a very long period coinciding with the hot, dry Altithermal demonstrates that California was thinly populated by atlatl-wielding hunters from 8000 to 5000 years ago.  Conditions during the Altithermal were like those of the “new normal” developing after 2014, with extreme heat and dryness, though the southeast had higher rain than now, due to expansion of the summer monsoon from Arizona.  Ancient pack rat middens made of local twigs reveal that mountains now bare had juniper and other bushes.

            Climate ameliorated after 5000 years ago, and people responded by becoming more numerous and sedentary.  They began a shift to acorns, small seeds, and geophyte (root, bulb and corm foods; see Pierce and Scholtze 2016; Reddy 2016).

Increase was faster from about 3000 years ago, and in fact seems to have increased exponentially after that.  Hunting was still with the atlatl, but more attention was paid to plants and fish than to land game.  Robert Bettinger (2015:34) points out how this tracked improvements in plant use technology.  The importance of better acorn processing has long been well known, and seeds became so important that there was even local domestication (see below).  There was evidently a positive feedback: the improvements allowed more population growth, which in turn made people want more improvements. 

We must avoid recourse to explanation through “population pressure,” however, since groups evidently differed in their responses to the rising population.  They could innovate, borrow, migrate, fight, starve, or otherwise deal.  Migration, especially, is well attested by linguistic and archaeological data.   Humans love sociability above all other things, and want to live together, share, intermarry, dance, and generally have fun in groups.  They also like good food better than bad food—however their culture defines those.  Thus, wanting to procure more and better animal and plant resources is not a mindless reflex of “population pressure.”  It is a way to cope with scarcity, but also a way to support larger, livelier setttlements with a higher quality of life, however defined by the people in question.  Also, humans do not always love the neighbors, as shown inter alia by the number of skeletons with projectile points in their bones in California cemeteries, and large settlements afford protection.  Pierce and Scholtze (2016) echo Bruce Smith’s call to look at cultural niche construction.  People increasingly create their own environments (not just niches!).  In California, burning and other management techniques clearly increased along with acorn and small seed reliance.

            The bow and arrow probably caused a minor revolution (Bettinger 2015:44-48).  Bows and arrows are better for getting game, especially small game, than the previous technology based on spears, spear-throwers (atlatls), nets, and traps.  An increase in animal bones appears at the time the bow and arrow reached California, around 400-500 CE.  This allowed people to capitalize on the improved plant management, because it provided enough protein to allow more sedentization in remote back-country areas rich in plant resources.  (Less remote areas had access to fish, shellfish, and nuts, and were not limited by quality protein availability.)  It allowed more sedentary lifestyles and more dispersal into small groups (especially in summer), for the same reason.  The land was used more efficiently.  Cultivation and, in the southeast, true agriculture expanded and flourished.  In the pinyon areas, for instance, pinyon exploitation greatly increased, because it was possible to spend extended time in the dry, otherwise-resource-poor areas where pinyons grow.  Vessels for carrying water must have had a lot to do with that.  Bettinger stresses the importance of stored food (largely nuts), which were family property rather than shared by all.

            Along the coast, things were very different.  The bow and arrow had much less effect, since the staples were fish, shellfish, and sea mammals (speared at landings or from boats).  What mattered most was sea temperature, especially in southern California, where warm currents from far south often intrude on the more usual cool water.  Warm currents brought fewer fish, and those larger, faster, and harder to catch.  Thus they were lean times for local people.  This affected demographics over time.  Yet, here too, there was a sharp inflection in the population growth curve around 4000-3000 years ago.  In this case, it seems to result from better marine technology, ranging from the Chumash plank canoe (dating to perhaps 2000-2500 years ago; Gamble 2002) to superior fishhook and net designs.  Again this went in tandem with social structure. Villages got large, with notable differentiation in burials.  The bow and arrow came even later on the coast, in some places as late as 1250 in some areas (Bettinger 2015:100).  It reached the Chumash around 500 CE, following which there was a rise in violence, and presumptively war, that cooled slowly as people adjusted to the new weapon (Bettinger 2015:109). 

This has recently had fateful effects, as southern California has been one of the poster children for the frequency and violence of war among hunter-gatherers alleged by Steven  Pinker (2011) and others.  If the violence-ridden cemeteries sample only a brief and atypical time, Pinker’s ideas need adjusting (as pointed out in detail from much other evidence in Fry 2013).  

Complexity, and probably language distributions, reached something like contact-period levels around 400-600 CE.  By this time, bow hunting, mortars to grind acorns and other large seeds, sophisticated metate production for small seeds, and agriculture in the far south were established.  Corn-bean-squash agriculture spread in from the southwest at some quite early stage, and was probably still spreading when the Spanish came; it was long-established by then in the Colorado River and Imperial valleys.  Local cultivation and possibly domestication of wild seeds—barley and, in the south, maygrass (Reddy 2016:237)—is implied by the seed record. 

            The weather turned hot and dry again after 900, reaching a climax in the late 1200s, which were apparently as hot and dry as the mid-2010’s.  Californians endured, turning to more intensive use of still-available resources, especially marine ones where available.  Shifts away from the formerly vast marshes of the interior are noteworthy.  California’s eastern neighbors crashed.  The Four Corners and Utah were about 90% depopulated.  Incipient civilization crashed into small village societies in the southern southwest.  People migrated, dispersed, set up villages wherever water was still available. The effect on California’s rather extensive trade with Arizona and points east must have been substantial. “[P]rehistoric interaction between the two regions was regular and sustained and…economic or political developments in one area are likely to have hadhad important implications in the other” (Smith and Fauvelle 2015:710), as shown by the very extensive and long-lasting trade that brought shells, asphaltum, and the like from the coast, turquoise from the California desert, and pottery and stone goods (and probably cloth) from the Southwest.  The trade dropped off sharply after the 1200s, but California kept growing in population and social complexity.

            Cooler, wetter times followed, and the Little Ice Age from 1400 to 1700-1750 restored glaciers to California’s highest peaks.  Plant resources exploded, and human populations grew accordingly.

There were only 250,000-300,000 Native Californians as of 1700 (Cook 1976).  This means fewer than two persons per square mile (California’s area is 158,633 sq. mi.).  This population likely represents a reduction from peak, however, because Spanish diseases had already ravaged the state (Preston 1996), having been introduced when Spanish first touched on what is now California—1540 along the lower Colorado, 1542 on the coast. 

Languages and Society

California is famous for the diversity of its indigenous languages (Golla 2011 provides an encyclopedic survey).  At least 64, possibly 80, languages were spoken (Shipley 1978; Golla treats 78), including two whole language families—Yukian and Chumashan—that are completely confined to the state.  Many people were multilingual, and in some areas it seems that the very concept of a single “native language” did not exist (Dixon 1907—if I read him aright; cf. Golla 2011)—a worthy example for us today.  (For background on California Native peoples, the classic account by Kroeber, 1925, is dated and now sometimes sounds patronizing, but is still a superb summary; more up-to-date and sensitive are the great Handbooks of the Smithsonian Institution, but one must not only read the huge California volume [1978] but also relevant parts of the Plateau volume [Walker 1998] and the Southwest volumes, since the state was divided among these various cultural regions.  For prehistoric times, see Jones and Klar 2007, especially Victor Golla’s excellent article on languages and language prehistory, which is summarized and updated in Golla 2011.)

Relationships of California languages with languages elsewhere are usually so remote as to be unclear.  Chumashan was once tentatively linked with several other Californian and Southwestern languages in the “Hokan phylum,” but Chumashan is in fact very distant from other “Hokan” languages.  Edward Sapir, and later in more detail Joseph Greenberg (1987), provided intriguing evidence for linking Yuki with the languages of southern Louisiana, and this appears to be a good likelihood (Golla 1911; it may also be very distantly related to Siouan). 

Edward Sapir and Morris Swadesh thought the Penutian family of languages of central California were related to the Mayan languages of Mesoamerica, and Greenberg (1987) accepted this.  There is much evidence, most obviously the win- root for “person,” as in Wintu wintu and Maya winik, and the tendency to count using base 20, which in Mayan is also “winik”—because the number is derived from counting on fingers and toes, so 20 is a whole “person.”  The Mayanist Cecil Brown and I investigated this idea some years ago, and found dozens of intriguiging pairs like that, but unfortunately the Penutian languages are so poorly attested in the record that we could not come to any definite conclusions and did not publish our work.  I remain convinced, however.  Penutian is generally thought to be related to most of the Plateau languages in a Penutian phylum.  Sapir and some followers considered it to be related to the Tsimshian languages of British Columbia, but that link is, at best, controversial.

One very important problem in understanding Californian, and other Native American, languages is that much was lost by the time that even the earliest ethnographers spread out to study the cultures.  In particular, all these languages had the same sorts of style registers that English or any other world language has.  There were styles appropriate to chiefly speeches, styles appropriate to medicine formulas, styles peculiar to particular animal characters in myths, and so on.  Particularly important was the division into high style, such as a chief would use in a formal speech, and ordinary daily style.  Victor Golla (2011:226-227) discusses what little is known, from the very few languages that survived long enough for such refinements to be noted. 

There was another, intermediate, register, such as a chief might use in his daily directives to the people (recall Garth’s observations cited above).  There were also special modes of speech used by shamans, and still others for myth-telling.  There were evidently some lower registers too, the equivalent of rustic dialect or slang.  We have no idea of most of these.  On the whole, all that was recorded was the ordinary register, the others having been forgotten (as noted by e.g. Laird 1976 for the Chemehuevi).  A. L. Kroeber did hear some formal speaking from Yurok and Mohave consultants, and gives tantalizingly short transcriptions of the Mohave (Kroeber 1972:81-83).

Hokan, Chumashan, and Yukian languages have been spoken in California for many thousands of years and presumably originated there.  Penutian languages are thought to have intruded from the north several millennia ago.  The Algonkian-related Yurok and Wiyot came later, and the Athapaskan and Uto-Aztekan languages later still, probably in the last 2000-3000 years.  Intrusion of the Shoshonean languages into the coastal areas happened about 1500 years ago, give or take a few centuries.  Dissimilar song and vocal styles (Keeling 1992a, 1992b) and vocabularies (O’Neill 2009) fit with other cultural differences, separating e.g. the otherwise culturally close Karuk and Yurok.  Both, for instance, indicate direction upriver/downriver/away from river, rather than by compass points, for reasons that will be obvious if you look at a map or satellite photograph, but Karuk—longer established—has a more complex and intricate system for marking it (O’Neill 2008).

Dramatic shifts in languages probably track changes in resource procurement.  The spectacular radiation of the Shoshonean groups from the southern Sierra into southern California (Takic) and across the Great Basin (Numic) coincides with the coming of the bow and arrow and probably has something to do with it—not only because of fighting and hunting power, but also because of better plant resource procurement (Bettinger 2015:48-49)

The state is traditionally divided into subcultural areas.  We may ignore these; they are rather debatable.  There are, expectably, cultural gradations at the margins into the neighboring culture areas. 

            More interesting to us here is the question of social complexity.  In general, Californian peoples lived in small village communities (“tribelets”; Kroeber 1925) of about 200-1000 people.  They centered around a single winter village or a very small group of such.  People dispersed in the spring and summer to forage and amass storable foods.  Some of these village communities were notably self-sufficient.  A. L. Kroeber interviewed one old man who had never been more than a day’s walk from his home in the remote northern California coast ranges (Kroeber 1925:145).   Bettinger (2015) takes limited mobility as usual.  Archaeology, however, shows substantial trade, and it appears more likely that this old man and others like him were limited in their travels by post-Anglo-settlement conditions.

            The smallest communities were apparently those in the Mohave Desert and Great Basin.  Even along the Colorado River and in the densely populated northwest, the operational unit was often the family; tribal consciousness existed but there was no real tribal government.  People lived in what Robert Bettinger calls “orderly anarchy” (Bettinger 2015).  He traces it to the effects of the bow and arrow on settlement (see above). 

William Kelly reported “anarchy” for the Cocopa (Kelly 1977, esp. p. 78).  For them, the word for “leader” literally meant “mad dog, crazy person” (Frank Blue, quoted Kelly 1977:80).  So much for leaders!  The Cocopa, like other groups, had orators, who performed the hard-work harangues noted above (Kelly 1977:80), but had no real designated authority. 

Even so, riverine communities on the Klamath, Sacramento, and (probably) other major rivers, and the coastal communities of the Santa Barbara Channel, were large.  Many of these in the latter two areas seem to have gone on to become chiefly villages ruling over whole polities, with small tributary villages in the hinterland.  This is believably, but not certainly, attested for the Chumash and Tongva (Gabrielino) of southern California.  It is a more than reasonable inference for the Patwin and neighboring groups of central California (cf. Kroeber 1932).  Chumash polities of up to 2500 square miles are possible.  (See Bean and Blackburn 1976 for several articles on California politics and group sizes.  Bettinger 2015 clearly underestimates the level of chieftainship and chiefdom organization.)  Unfortunately, we shall never know the truth, for these groups were shattered by conquest and disease in the early historic period.  The Patwin and several Chumash groups narrowly avoided total extinction.

            In terms of Julian Steward’s useful if imperfectly defined “levels of sociocultural integration” (Steward 1955), these were simple chiefdoms.  This means that they were organized into ranked descent groups, with chiefly lineages ruling over commoner lineages.  One village would be the chiefly seat; other, smaller settlements would be tributary.  Some Californian societies got substantially more complex, as will appear (see Arnold 2004; Bean and Blackburn 1976; Gamble 2008).  These groups thus not only had dense populations; they had complex societies with chiefs who evidently practiced redistribution economies.  Early accounts (Crespí 2001; Gamble 2008; Kitsepawit 1981) show that Chumash chiefs gathered fish and seed resources and lavished them on guests and others.  Their society was not much less complex that of the Iron Age Irish that we will consider anon, though the latter had sophisticated metallurgy, the wheel, writing, beer, wine, and other trappings of civilization. 

            On the other hand, we are not to see these societies as necessarily very similar to chiefdoms elsewhere, especially agricultural ones.  California’s societies were very different.  Kent Lightfoot and coworkers (1911) have pointed out that the vast shellmounds and earthmounds of central California, some of which contained hundreds or thousands of burials, are a unique feature that indicates a very different society, one about which we know little (most of the mounds are very old, up to 3000 years or more).  Villages of that time were large, but not of the size one would normally associate with huge earthworks.  This and other complex early manifestations indicate a society apparently rather different from any now known.

            They also warred, as chiefdoms do.  As in other chiefdoms from the Northwest to Ancient Ireland, chiefs held feasting and dancing parties that had a competitive edge.  To refuse an invitation to a chief’s fiesta could be cause for war, at least among the Chumash (Gamble 2008:194).  Wars over slights of this kind occurred also in northwestern California.  As is chiefdoms everywhere, feasts were important (Gamble 2008:224-227).  One reason was recruiting fighting men.  Another was cementing alliances with rivals would would otherwise have become enemies.  Cemeteries in the relevant parts of the state show high levels of violent death (Lightfoot and Parrish 2009:85-89), as is true in chiefdoms everywhere.  The Yurok writer Lucy Thompson stresses the enormous value of the huge Klamath River dance ceremonies in reducing conflict. All local groups were invited and had to settle disputes before participating.  Apparently this worked well, since no one wanted to miss these events (Thompson 1991:145-146 and elsewhere).  Presumably, large ceremonies in other parts of the state had somewhat similar effects.

Steward’s other levels of integration were tribes, bands, and states.  (Note, incidentally, that these are not “evolutionary stages” and were never intended to be taken as such [Steward 1955].  They are all the end products of very long and intricate developmental sequences.  Some of his students confused the issue by hanging an evolutionary scheme on them.)  The smaller village communities would be “tribes” in his sense (though not as organized as his general characterization implies).  Steward’s “band level” of integration was modeled on what he thought was characteristic of the Shoshonean groups of the Great Basin, but they have turned out to be much more organized and sizable, definitely “tribes” in his sense.  Steward mischaracterized them for several reasons, but the main one was that he studied them in their late historic condition, devastated by disease, massacre, oppression, and forced acculturation (Clemmer 2009b.)  States did not exist in California, or anywhere else north of central Mexico, until European colonization.

All the above typology crosscuts what is probably a more important truth:  All the California groups were organized into village-level or village-cluster-level societies, led by a not-very-powerful chief or a patrilineal chiefly group, and showing some occupational specialization.  All else was elaboration on this basic pattern.  The central village was not only the winter residence, but was the ceremonial center, where rituals and fiestas were held (Bean and Blackburn 1976).  It was the meeting ground not only for the community but for visitors and traders.  It was often regarded as the center of the world, or at least the center of the little world of its community members.  The situation of the typical village society was dynamic, with back and forth changes in complexity over time (Bettinger 2015), but it was oscillation around the village level of organization.

These groups managed to stay together and maintain their ceremonies and organization with minimal government, apparently through simple sociability and shared culture.  Even if the sources have exaggerated the “anarchy” of California, it was a world held together by norms, which in turn had their force because people needed each other and thus needed shared rules to live by.  Neither organized religion nor organized government were necessary.  Thomas Hobbes was exactly wrong; monarchy was not only unnecessary, it was downright undesirable.  Grassroots self-organization literally beat it out of the field.  There is, obviously, a lesson here.  California was no dream of peace.  There were countless feuds and small wars.  Steven Pinker (2011) exaggerates its violence, but probablly not by much.  Yet California was no “savage state” either; the life of Californians was the antithesis of being “nasty, poore, solitary, brutish and short” (Hobbes 1950 [1657]).  And the dramatically more hierarchic and class-ridden Northwest Coast had at least as much violence.

In the larger groups, the chief had an assistant or cochief who did the orating and much organizing (see e.g. Goldschmidt 1951; Librado 1977).  This dual leadership is probably related to the “peace chief/war chief” team found eastward throughout the continent.

 In general, the larger and more dense the population, the larger the elite group, and the more different it was from the commoners.  Also, the larger and denser the population, the more specializations could exist.  The deep interior groups had chiefs and shamans and little (if anything) more.  Leaders for irrigation, rabbit hunting, and other collective activities were selected ad hoc or were chosen for long periods by the tribe; they were known to the Anglo settlers as “water bosses,” “rabbit bosses,” and so on.  At the other extreme stood the Chumash, with specialized priests, healers, canoe makers, canoe owners and operators, and other formally recognized and named occupational specialties (Gamble 2008). 

Chumash elites formed a group known (in at least one Chumash area) as the ‘antap.  Data are not clear as to whether it was a hereditary class-like formation, a hereditary council of lineage elders, or a sodality like the Plains Indians warrior societies.  Perhaps it was somewhere in between all these.  We cannot tell from the late accounts that survive.  Similar groups of elites or ceremonial leaders are known for other chiefdoms in the state.  The Chumash also had a “Brotherhood of the Canoe” (Kitsepawit 1977), made up of canoe owners and makers; it was an elite, specialized society. 

My impression is that trade was more important than population size or density in driving these distinctions of rank and specialty.  Groups central to great trade routes, and especially the groups that lived where land trade had to shift to the water, were the most chiefdom-like.  This meant especially the great villages of the Chumash and Tongva, gathered around lagoons that made good harbors; the large Patwin and Nisenan settlements on the lower Sacramento and the Sacramento delta; the towns near the junction of the Klamath and Trinity Rivers; and the towns at good harbors on San Francisco Bay and Clear Lake.  I believe that organization for trade was more important than population in driving social complexity.  On the other hand, areas central to trade but low in population density, like the obsidian quarry areas of the East Sierra and elsewhere, were not socially complex, so a fair density of population is evidently a sine qua non for complexity. 

In spite of the well-known fondness of California groups for staying at home and never straying far, trade was important, and trading went on (see below).  People’s unwillingness to travel meant that many intermediaries might be involved, but contact was real, and small “world-systems” developed.  Christopher Chase-Dunn and Kelly Mann (1998) have described the world-system of the Wintu (see Goldschmidt 1951, one of the sources they used, for a notable account).  The Wintu was probably a subsystem of the great Sacramento drainage network focused on the Patwin.  Similar very small world-systems centered on the Yurok, the Chumash and Tongva, and the Lower Colorado River, and rather predict or map out Kroeber’s cultural subareas within the wider California system.  A world-system assumes a core group or groups; a semi-periphery; and a periphery.  For the Chumash-Tongva, the semiperiphery might be seen as including the interior Chumashan groups, the Salinan, Juaneno, Luiseno and Cahuilla; the periphery the Serrano, Vanyume and Alliklik.  The Chumash and Tongva were richer and more populous.  Unlike modern core nations, did not have a stable advantage in trade over these groups, but did have some advantage, and could defeat them in conflict.

The desert and Colorado River tribes had to travel much farther to stay alive, and thus came to love traveling, and to make long journeys fairly often.  In a striking passage, James O. Pattie (1962 [1831]), a fur trapper, tells of walking from the Colorado to the mountains of far northern Baja California in the 1820s.  He and his band of hardened mountain men barely made it—they crawled the last miles on hands and knees.  Their Indian guides not only ran on ahead to check the route, and ran back to the men, but when they all made it to water Pattie and his company collapsed while the Indians had a dance!   His group and other trappers took over a million beaver from the lower Colorado in those decades, eliminating the beaver and permanently changing and degrading the hydrology of the whole region.

California’s indigenous groups were shattered beyond all measure by European contact (Castillo 1978).  Diseases no doubt came with the first Spanish contacts in Baja California, the Lower Colorado (1540), and Cabrillo’s coastal voyage (1542).  Disease surely ran far ahead of Europeans thereafter, as it did elsewhere in the continent (Hull 2009, 2015; Preston 1996, but, as Hull points out, Preston goes far beyond the evidence).  Actual Spanish settlement in 1769—much earlier in Baja California—brought much more disease, as well as military action.  Indigenous peoples were gathered into the missions, which supplied little food, oppressed the Native peoples without providing rights or protection, and stopped much of the burning, hunting, and gathering (K. Anderson 2005; Timbrook 2007).  However, Native Californians could maintain some of their lifestyle, gathering wild seeds and hunting, since the missions could not feed them.  Virginia Popper (2016), analyzing plant remains from colonial sites, found several local adaptations, from Spanish continuing their Mexican lifestyles to Native people living quite traditionally.

Anglo contact was even more traumatic.  Diseases swept through the population.  A malaria epidemic in 1833 killed 1/3 of the population of the north-central part of the state (Cook 1955), and went on to ravage Oregon, where Robert Boyd’s study is exemplary (1999).  Smallpox epidemics were frequent, and endemic disease also occurred.  The relative role of disease in depopulation has been exaggerated (Cameron et al. 2015; Hull 2015).  Its absolute role was horrific, but genocide, virtual enslavement in the missions, poor nutrition, disruption of Indigenous lifeways, and other causes were probably as important in the declines of the Californian nations.

In the 1850s, northern California became one of the areas of the United States subjected to outright genocide:  state-backed, official or quasi-official campaigns of extermination (Madley 2012, 2016; Trafzer and Hyer 1999).  Most of this took place under the brief reign in the 1850s of the Know-Nothing party, which was pro-slavery and openly genocidal toward Native Americans.  The Yahi were eliminated except for a few survivors, notably the famous “Ishi” (R. Heizer and T. Kroeber 1979; T. Kroeber 1961).  The Yuki and their neighbors were almost wiped out (Miller 1979), as were several small groups.  The Wiyot of the Eureka area were subjected to massacre and were almost all killed (Elsasser 1978).  The Tolowa were decimated, as a spillover of the Rogue River War (Madley 2012).  This at least had the effect of showing the three connected tribes of Yurok, Karok and Hupa what was in store for them.  The Karok, and to some extent the other two with them, holed up in the fantastically rugged and inaccessible mountains of their homelands and fought back, in one of the very few genuinely successful resistance movements in the United States.  After decades of sporadic warfare, they received treaties and reservations, and are still among the most numerous and culturally intact groups in the western United States.  This is a story that, amazingly, has never been told, and it deserves a major historical study.  Heroic but ultimately futile resistance by the Cahuilla (Phillips 1975) and the Central Valley tribes (Phillips 1993) has received more and better historical attention.  So have the resistance campaigns of the relatively nearby Seri, Yaqui and Apache in Mexico and along the border, but, in general, successful resistance to genocide has not been much studied—a surprising and deplorable omission.

Elsewhere, Madley documents the murder of 1,340 Native people by California militias, 1680 by the U.S. Army, and 6,460 by settlers and vigilantes.  These are reasonable figures, but one suspects that many a murder is lost in the records.  Madley’s work has brought the California genocide from one of the least-known in history (my use of the term has been questioned in the past) to perhaps the best-documented genocide of an Indigenous population, with the possible exception of parts of Australia.  The sheer death figures do not even begin to describe the cultural effects, however.  Cultural repression in day schools and boarding schools, segregation, prejudice, deliberate breaking up of populations, scattering of groups between reservations that opened and closed with dizzying speed in the 19th century, and other methods calculated to destroy California cultures persisted for decades.  It is testimony to incredible resistance, resilience, and sheer toughness that some cultural groups survived as identifiable “tribes.”  More than a few white settlers, also, rallied to the cause, including such early “Indian lovers” as Helen Hunt Jackson and George Wharton James.  They could be unenlightened by modern standards, but they saved many people.

The Modoc War is perhaps the best known of the sad stories (Dillon 1973).  The Modoc were forced onto a reservation established for their traditional enemies the Klamath.  They were there subjected to harassment by both Klamaths and whites.  A small band left the reservation, holed up in the horribly rough and inaccessible lava beds of Modoc County, and held off the United States Army for six months, only to be ultimately starved out and sent to die in a prison camp in Oklahoma. 

The struggle still needs full treatment; it has always seemed to me to be the archetypal story of the conquest of the Americas.  We have the story in many versions.  In addition to the historical and anthropological accounts, we have contemporary accounts from several different points of view.  The settlers spewed out racist hate via local newspapers.  The army’s deep concerns and tactical debates are available in full (Cozzens 2002:98-298).  The Indian agent for Oregon desperately tried to prevent the war, but was overwhelmed, and we have his heartbroken story (Meacham 1875).  Most interesting, perhaps, is the narrative of the incredibly heroic Native interpreter Winona, transmitted through her son Jeff Riddle (1974).  Winona shuttled back and forth, at constant risk of her life, interpreting and mediating for both sides.  With this Rashomon-like kaleidoscope of views, and with the story’s location in the black and starkly beautiful lava beds, the tale would make a stunning film, but a tragic one, not a Hollywood show.

Throughout California and the west, even after pacification and treaties, food supplies were stolen by corrupt officials (Jackson1885; Phillips 1997), and educational institutions did more sexual abuse and labor exploitation than teaching.  Before 1863 Native people could be enslaved, and conditions after Emancipation were not always much better.  They could still be thrown off their lands illegally, as at Cupa in San Diego County (Castillo 1978).  Many groups had their reservations “terminated” in the late 19th and again in the mid-20th centuries; this involved giving them individual allotments, which they usually soon lost to sharp dealers or outright illegal squatters.  A thorough history of the Wintu (Hoveman 2002) provides documentation of one of the more fortunate groups; the Wintu, in the upper Sacramento drainage, survive, but were almost exterminated and lost almost all their land.

The last termination in the area was the Klamath Reservation termination in southern Oregon in 1954 (Stern 1966), the effects of which were so horrific that terminations were virtually ended nationwide.  Local entrepreneurs even resorted to the classic 19th-century trick of giving men bottles of whiskey in exchange for signing their names on blank sheets of paper—the paper later being filled in with a deed of sale of allotted land.

The sordid record of murder and destruction has been often told, and would not be worth raising yet again if it were not for the fact that, today, denial or partial denial of it has become commonplace.  Not only do the Euro-Americans gloss over it; the surviving Native groups often do.  This is an understandable but sadly misdirected reaction to their being called “extinct” or “culturally extinct,” for decades.  They naturally want to assert their survival. 

Indeed, they survived, and by truly heroic efforts—especially their own, but also the efforts of a few Anglos, such as Helen Hunt Jackson and George Wharton James.  But it was a near thing.  In 1900 there were only about 15,000 identifiable California Indians.  This fits perfectly with Henry Dobyns’ “95% rule” (Dobyns 1983)—the average Native American group was reduced 95% from settlement to lowest point.  There were actually many more individuals, mostly of mixed ancestry, hiding out or calling themselves “Mexicans,” but the total number was still tiny.  Only around 1900 did the precipitous decline from disease and cruel treatment begin to reverse itself.  In the 19th century, there was every reason to assume the California Indians would be gone in a few years, at least as identifiable ethnic groups. 

As it was, though population has fortunately rebounded, most of the languages are now lost, and the last few are kept alive by diligent efforts of a handful of Native people and cooperating linguists (see Leanne Hinton 1994, whose work has been outstanding). 

I would thus urge modern people, including Native people, to be understanding of the “vanishing Indian” attitude of 1900.  We should pay more attention than we have done to the level of loss through disease, oppression, and outright genocide.  We should pay far more attention to the relatively few people—including those forgotten Yurok and Karok fighters—who prevented the vanishing from being total. 

Native Californian Uses of Biota

Major resources are listed in Kent Lightfoot and Otis Parrish’s recent book, California Indians and Their Environment (2009).  The most useful plant resources were divided into two types:  nuts and seeds.  Nuts grew on trees.  Acorns were by far the most important.  The classic account is E. W. Gifford’s “California Balanophagy” (1957), “balanophagy” being a delightful coinage for “acorn eating.”  They could produce around 70,000 kg/sq km in prime habitat (Bettinger 2015:110, citing Martin Baumhoff), enough to feed far more people than California ever had.  There were many species, cropping on different cycles, so nuts were always plentiful.

Pine nuts, walnuts, buckeyes, laurel nuts, wild cherry kernels, and many other nuts were also important, more so than the literature generally suggests.  Resources such as pine nuts from gray and Coulter pines, for instance, were surely more important than the literature suggests.  Seeds came from a vast range of annual and small-sized perennial plants.  Some major ones were sage species, notably chia (Salvia columbariae), tansy-mustard (Descurania pinnata), redmaids (Calandrinia ciliata), tarweeds (Madia and Hemizonia spp.), sunflowers of several genera, and a great profusion of grass species.  Loss of people, especially from remote and mountainous areas, came early after Spanish settlement, losing us knowledge of much resource use.

Berries, fruits, shoots, sap, roots, bulbs, corms, cambium, and every other plant part short of hard wood were eaten.  Berries were particularly rich and prone to follow fires.  An odd line in Pedro Fages’ accounts of Spanish conquest mentions wine from elderberry fruits; he may have meant “juice,” but the Paiute made real wine from cactus fruits (Powell 1971:50), presumably having learned it from the Oodham, and the Opata of Sonora did indeed make elderberry wine—a lot of it—and it was apparently strong and good (Yetman 2010:38-39).  (The Fages entry spawned an odd story about wine from willow fruit, because someone misread saucos “elderberries” as sauces “willows.”)

            California ethnobotany has been richly explored over several generations, but we have probably lost most of the old knowledge.  Even so, what remains is stunning.  Most of the southern California tribes have produced full ethnobotanical books (for the Cahuilla, Bean and Saubel 1972; Chumash, Timbrook 2007; Kawaiisu, Zigmond 1981; Santa Ysabel Kumeyaay, Hedges and Beresford 1986; Baja California Kumeyaay, Wilken-Robertson 2018; Serrano, Lerch 1981; others in manuscript) and northern California has not been neglected (e.g. Welch 2013; for Northern Paiute, just across the line in Nevada, Fowler 1991; reviews, K. Anderson 2005; Mead 1986).  Ethnozoology is less well covered (but see Timbrook and Johnson’s Chumash ethnoornithology, 2013).

Old records remain important.  J. P. Harrington’s are the richest (see Timbrook 2007).  Powers’ Tribes of California (1877) preserved much.  Records are still being discovered and made available.  A recent publication by James Welch (2013) makes available the enormous wealth of information collected by John and Grace Hudson from the Northern Pomo in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  By the time that professional ethnographers reached the Pomo, the genocidal effects of white settlement (well summarized by Welch) had led to much loss, and the Hudson material is invaluable (e.g. noting 12 more basket materials than previously known).  Fortunately, a good deal of Pomo knowledge did survive, and does so still (Goodrich et al. 1980). 

Plants provided a rich source of effective medicines.  Among those proved by chemical analysis to “work” are willows and several other species (salicylic acid—the source of aspirin), many mints (menthol and similar oils), sagebrush (thujone, which is vermifugal and in high doses abortifacient), many tannin-rich barks, and a whole range of mild but useful antibacterial and antifungal compounds.  Mineral medications include naturally occurring salts, antibacterial compounds, absorbent clays, and many more.  Hundreds of plants used medicinally have not yet been fully analyzed.  The Native Californians were also eclectic; modern healers freely use not only Native remedies from all over North America, but even Chinese herbal medicine, as well as drug store cures (see e.g. Peters and Ortiz 2010).  Medical knowledge was highly prized, healers were enormously valued, and traditional medicine by both herbal and religious methods was very widely known and practiced—and to a striking extent still is.

            Animal foods included deer, elk, pronghorn, rabbits, gophers, squirrels and ground squirrels, and hundreds of bird species (Kay and Simmons 2002).  Countless insects were used (Sutton 1988).  Even the bones were ground up.  Small animals could be mashed whole, bones and all, into “gopher-burger.”  Larger animal bones were mashed and boiled to extract bone grease, an important food elsewhere in North America and probably locally in California (Sunseri 2015).

Hundreds of species of fish and shellfish were used. Sea mammals were important, perhaps more so than fish for the Chumash (Gamble 2008), such that some rookeries on shore were depleted (see below).  Areas along major rivers, and along parts of the coast with good harbors for canoes, could rely on extremely rich and reliable fish resources.  Shells were valuable for beads and tools after the animals within had been eaten.  The great salmon fisheries of the major rivers stretch the imagination.  Where there were no salmon, there were river-running trout; the huge rainbow trout of the Pyramid Lake drainage ran upriver to Truckee Lake to spawn, and at such times the river was described as more fish than water (LaRivers 1994, noting this is an exaggeration but that the runs were incredible; he notes that the Basin lakes are extremely nutrition-rich).  Ocean fisheries were important too, with vast runs of smelt of many species, sardines, anchovies, and herring, as well as plenty of larger fish.  A smelt run in 1857 left fish piled “a foot deep” on the beaches of northwestern California (Tushingham and Christiansen 2015:192).  Specialized fishing, with large seagoing canoes and huge riverine weirs and fish dams, developed after 1000 BCE, much of it within the last 1500-2000 years.  Intensive fishing and shellfishing in the south, however, came earlier, and indeed there were extensive shell middens dating to many thousand years ago.  (“Were,” because development has destroyed them on the mainland—within my memory, in Baja California and on Point Sal.  Research is now more or less confined to the islands.) 

Otherwise, animals could be very thin on the ground.  Ethnographic accounts suggest that rabbits (including jackrabbits, which are technically hares) were the most widespread and reliable land animal resource base.  Reptiles and predatory mammals were widely avoided as food. 

Mark Raab (1996), among others, has demolished the idea that Californians were rolling in food.  Most of the state is, after all, desert or barren mountain.  But some areas were indeed quite lush.  These were especially the interfaces between water and land, and most especially the high-energy ones: river deltas, current-swept channels, lakes with large feeder streams.  Populations were dense in the favored areas; numbers of people rose in feedback with elaborate technological and social systems.  In less favored areas, drought years or local disasters could produce real want.  Either way, population often pressed on resources.  Even so, with only some 250,000-300,000 people in a very rich landscape, California hardly suffered from serious long-term pressure on major resources.  Work-horse trees like oak and buckeye, and productive, management-responsive annuals like chia sage (Salvia columbariae), would support large populations in normal years.  Human populations would be trimmed back in years of extreme drought or flood.  Still, it is doubtful if the population figures represent a population at “carrying capacity.”  One suspects that they could have worked harder, stored more, fought less, and supported several times their contact-era population.

Storage was necessary, and many methods developed.  Meat and fish were dried or smoked.  Seeds were kept in baskets.  Acorns were stored in large raised granaries made of basketry, withes, or brush.  The Western Mono serve as a good example:  Christopher Morgan (2012) found that they lived in small communities (about 13 being typical but some reaching as many as 75) which had three or more granaries, but also had dispersed caches around the countryside, so that one was never far from stored acorns.  A granary held about 725 kg of acorns; about seven of these would support a community of 13, providing about 4 million calories (Morgan 2012:724-725).  Granaries were lined with pine needles—other groups sometimes used sagebrush, which is insecticidal—to discourage pests and keep the acorns dry.  Stored food had to sustain the groups during the long and harsh winter of their mountain habitat.  The far larger towns in lowland California had much less severe winters to contend with, but needed more food, and must have stored enormous quantities.  Bears raided caches, making extra storage necessary.

Bettinger (2015:90) has pointed out that meat, fish and the like are front-loaded: they are edible immediately and usually are so eaten, and if they are processed it has to be done immediately.  In California, that was largely an issue with fish, which had to be split and dried or smoked as soon as caught.  Nuts, especially acorns, are back-loaded: they are easy to gather and store, but take enormous amounts of processing.  So they are normally harvested in vast quantities in a brief harvest period, then stored to be processed and used at need.  This had social effects.  At one extreme, great assemblages of people were necessary to catch and dry salmon, but these assemblages would later disperse.  At the other, seed and nut dependence led to smaller but more stable, permanent groups.

Mineral resources were generally concentrated in a few spots, making widespread trade necessary.  Salt was required for survival and was sometimes hard to get.  Even more concentrated in source were obsidian and other silicates that would take a sharp edge; they were essential for points, knives, and the like.  At particularly good obsidian sources, I have seen the ground literally paved with flakes over many acres.  Good-quality grinding stone for mortars and metates could be surprisingly rare and valuable.  It is hard to imagine people carrying huge metates all over the desert, but they did, finding the labor worthwhile to get metates from superior quarries (Schneider 1993).  Soft chlorite schist, as on Santa Catalina Island, was mined for making bowls.   Marcasite became beads used as money in north-central California. 

The extent and importance of trade in California has sometimes been stressed (Lightfoot and Parrish 2009), but on the whole it has been underestimated.  Some communities, especially on the rather impoverished Channel Islands of the south, may have actually depended on trade for food, at least in some seasons (Arnold 1987, 2004).  If true—and it is highly controversial—this would be a very rare case worldwide of a hunting-gathering population depending on trade in staples.  Inland, California shell beads got as far afield as Arizona and northern Mexico.  Dentalium shell beads from Vancouver Island got to northern California.

The degree to which all these items truly constituted money is not clear.  They could be used for buying food, so they were not merely ceremonial (Bettinger 2015:184).  They were certainly monetized in early Spanish times, in areas of dense population, but the Spanish may have had much to do with this.  Clearly the shell items represented a kind of money, but only a special purpose currency, used in specific contexts, perhaps largely ceremonial ones in many or most cases.  Dentalium shells were used as money in the northwest of the state (and further north), but the fact that they were adorned and decorated so they would be happy and would lure more money to the owner (Bettinger 2015:182) shows how different the concept of money was there from what we now experience.

Indigenous Management

            The Californian peoples generally lacked agriculture, but there were significant exceptions, proving that they knew full well how to grow crops and could have done so if they had found it worth while.  Tobacco was grown very widely over the state.  The Karok, otherwise nonagricultural, knew enough about farming it to fill an entire book (Harrington 1932).  The neighboring Yurok believed that wild tobacco was dangerous, only cultivated tobacco being safe to use (Heizer 1978:650).

The southeast part of the state was firmly agricultural, growing the famous trinity of maize, beans, and squash, as well as several minor crops.  They also sowed wild grass, including the possibly domesticated local millet Panicum sonorum.  They may have cultivated amaranth species (Castetter and Bell 1951; Forde 1931:107-109; Nabhan 1982, 1985). 

The Owens Valley Paiute irrigated wild plants (Lawton et al. 1993).  This was presumably derived from true agricultural practices their ancestors carried out further south, since it is now beyond reasonable doubt that the proto-Uto-Aztecans were farmers, and the loss of farming in the Great Basin is a recent and derived condition (Hill 2001).  The Southern Paiutes of Nevada had agriculture from ancient times.  Sowing of wild seed crops is attested for a few groups (Lightfoot and Parrish 2009:127), and there were surely more groups who sowed.  Transplantation is also well attested, but especially for groups that had agriculture, notably the Kumeyaay (Shipek 1993).

Finally, increase in native barley (Hordeum sp.) seed size, to far beyond anything natural, took place in central California (Wohlgemuth 1996, 2004).  Similar seed dynamics are reported from the Los Angeles River area (Reddy 2016:237).  This implies either true domestication or at least intensive manipulation of stocks.  But the experiment ended:  the central Californians came to focus more and more on oaks and other tree crops, and the barley seeds shrank again, at least in central California.

In such a climatically fluctuating place as California, agriculture is difficult.  One need only read accounts by early European settlers trying to predict year by year, in the days before statewide irrigation systems.  Hunting and gathering must have seemed more reasonable.  But it too necessitated some higher organization if people were to manage the environment, store food, and accumulate fixed productive capital in the form of nets, weirs, canoes, and so on.  Hence the benefit of complex societies.  In an environment that is sometimes exceedingly rich but sometimes—and unpredictably—exceedingly poor, they make sense.

Also, the development of agriculture, throughout the world, took place in areas central to vast trade and communication routes.  Presumably the exchanges of goods and ideas were crucial.  Coastal California is a cul-de-sac.  Morever, the Californian biotic and cultural region has no single center; it is polycentric.  Even today, the Anglo-Americans of the Bay Area, Los Angeles, Sacramento, San Diego, and other cities all have their own subcultures and hinterlands.  There was no one confined lush area, like the Jordan Valley, Mesopotamia, or the Nile Valley in the Old World or like the Valley of Mexico in the New, to bring people together.   

The earliest agriculture in the world, that of the Near East, arose in a rather similar environment, but at oases within dry and desert-like parts of it.  Significantly, oases within California’s driest deserts are precisely the areas where agriculture waspracticed in the state.  Such lush pockets in an otherwise very challenging environment evidently make agriculture more appealing.  Near Eastern agriculture arose just after the Younger Dryas event, when environmental stresses and opportunities were high.  California had extremely few people at the time, and never had such climatic traumas afterward (cf. McCorriston 2000).

            Far more prevalent was intensive manipulation of wild plants (K. Anderson 2005; K. Anderson and Lake 2013, 2017; K. Anderson and Rosenthal 2015; Blackburn and K. Anderson 1993).  Native Californians pruned, trimmed, cultivated, selectively harvested, and in short did everything that a modern gardener does for her plants—but without domestication.  At the edge of the region, the level of cultivation of camas (Camassia spp.) and wokas (yellow waterlily seeds; Colville 1902; Deur 2009) reported for the Klamath and Modoc amounts to nearly or fully agricultural-level manipulation.  They also managed fish, and manipulated huckleberry intensively, as well as wild carrot and other root crops (Deur 2009).  So did their neighbors the Shasta, who also managed oaks for acorns (Gleason 2001).  Unfortunately, recording data on management was much less commonly done than recording ethnobotanical uses, and we are left in ignorance of most of it (see e.g. Welch 2013 on this issue).

            Geophytes—root, bulb and corm crops—were particularly subject to manipulation.  Corms of Brodiaea, Dichelostemma, and other plants (Anderson 2017; Gill 2017; Gill and Hoppa 2016; Wohlgemuth 2017) were particularly widespread and important.  Tubers of Cyperus esculentus, Eleocharis, and other plants (Lawton et al. 1976; Pierce and Scholtze 2016) were cultivated in the Owens Valley.

This level of management was a quite different startegy from agriculture.  It was, instead, whole-landscape cultivation, maximizing production across a huge range of resources.  By contrast, the Near Eastern Neolithic peoples in similar environments focused on two or three to cultivate intensively, thus inventing agriculture. 

The large bulbs and flowers of camas (specifically C. quamash  and—if it is a separate species–C. leichtlinii), the response of these plants to cultivation, and their striking failure to thrive and compete after the Native population was exiled from the meadows, all imply true domestication.  My impression from observing camas in the wild and growing it in my garden is that if it were grown by a “truly agricultural” people it would unhesitatingly be called a domesticate.

            Indeed, throughout California the level of management was impressive.  The area covered by camas and wokas was enormous.  Not far away, within California proper, the Shasta (Gleason 2001), Achomawi, and Atsugewi (T. Garth 1978) cultivated bulb- and root-rich meadows extensively.  Wild crops included monocots of many families—true lilies, Mariposa lilies, camas, and so on—as well as roots, mostly of the carrot family, such as wild carrots (Perideridea) and Lomatium.  Root-digging seems very generally to have involved careful cultivating:  small roots were left to regrow or were even planted; competing plants were removed; the soil was loosened; parts that could regrow roots were returned to the ground; and so on. 

Root-digging involved a veritable Protestant ethic of hard work and diligent, responsible effort.  Among the Atsugewi, men tried to marry the girls who brought in the most roots, and myths told of heroic diggers who married well (Garth 1978:237-238).  This was part of a more general ethic of hard work in all spheres of life, best studied by Garth among the Atsugewi, but generally found in California (see e.g. Spott and Kroeber 1942 on the Yurok).  Garth reports chiefs calling everyone up at dawn with harangues such as: “Get up and do something for your living.  Be on your guard.  Be on the lookout for Paiute [raiders].  You have to work hard for your living.  There may be a long winter so put away all the food you can” (Garth 1978:237). 

Probably no bulb-rich meadow in the state was left alone, and apparently all that were even remotely close to a settlement were cultivated quite intensively (judging from K. Anderson 2005, 2017, and Gleason 2001).  Even the Paiute and Shoshone, in some of the most merciless deserts on earth, enormously modified their habitats.  They have been involved in management efforts recently.  Many desert habitats were improved for wildlife and biodiversity by their care, as shown by Catherine Fowler (1992, 2013).  They conserved waterfowl—a staple food—by leaving eggs if there were hatchlings in the nest (Fowler 2013:165-167; taking all eggs from a recently-laid clutch does no harm, since ducks and coots simply lay more).  They also had cautionary tales to keep children from stealing too many bird eggs.

With Fowler we move partly beyond state boundaries into neighboring Nevada.  This allows us to include also the careful review by Richard Clemmer (2009a) of “conservation” among the Western Shoshone.  These groups did not preserve pristine wilderness.  They burned carefully and according to plans, sowed grass seeds, and managed vegetation.  They hunted pronghorn sustainably, planning hunts only when pronghorn populations had built up.  It is absurdly easy to overhunt pronghorn, because they are easy to lure and are slow reproducers.  An estimated 30-40 million pronghorn were reduced to 13,000 around 1900 by settler hunting.  Before that, large communal drives, under some sort of direction but probably not a specialized shaman, took place, especially around the time and place of pinyon harvesting (Wilke 2013).  Charms were used but there is some indication that some pronhorn were allowed to escape.  Certainly the areas were allowed to recover before another hunt.

They may have managed rabbits and beaver locally; evidence is unclear.  I suspect they did.  Clemmer notes that there were many beaver in the tiny Great Basin rivers when Anglo-American trappers got there.  This suggests either management or great difficulty in hunting the beaver.  Since the Shoshone were expert hunters, the latter is unlikely, so good management is implied.  Historic fur trappers had no difficulty in trapping beavers from these small, accessible streams.  Clemmer finds no evidence for management of pine nuts or similar resources.  Pine nuts crop in only some years, and when they do they crop heavily, so there is no real way to manage them.  However, the Timbisha Shoshone of California most certainly do manage pine nuts, by cleaning up the groves to prevent wildfires, brush competition, and the like from damaging the pinyon pine trees (Catherine Fowler, pers. comm.).  It should be noted that pinyons are notoriously erratic croppers—a strategy to foil seed-eating insects—and crop only every few years (Bettinger 2015:68).  People had to scout the neighborhood to find groves that were productive—an easy task, fortunately, since one can monitor the developing cones over a year or so.  Wandering hunters would report back, and the group would know exactly when and where to go when the cones were pickable—just before maturity, since at maturity they open and the seeds scatter or are devoured by a host of animals. 

Clemmer also found no evidence for intensive fishing or management of fish, but data rapidly caught up with him here.  Just outside our area, a major study by Deward Walker and collaborators turned up evidence for fishing on an enormous scale, with a huge range of sophisticated technology, by the northern Shoshone and their neighbors, who lived in the fish-rich Snake River drainage (Walker 2010).  This information presumably applies to the Humboldt River too, and one can be fairly sure that all Great Basin rivers were heavily fished.  Significantly, Walker found it “necessary to conduct research interviews in either the Paiute/Bannock or Shoshone language” (Walker 2010:55)—in the 21st century!  This is real tribute to cultural survival, and one that reminds us that lack of linguistic skills must have caused early investigators to miss a great deal.  Since the Shoshone (and closely related Paiute/Bannock) lived at the rivers’ headwaters, where streams are tiny, narrow, and often rather thin in fish, they could easily have wiped out the salmon and other large river-running fish.  The fact that salmon continued to abound proves some considerable degree of management.

Further, and much more thorough, work on plant and animal management in Nevada results from the comprehensive and thorough work of Jeremy Spoon and his many Southern Paiute coworkers in the White/Muddy river drainage of southern Nevada (Spoon and Arnold 2014; Spoon, Armold, and Newe/Nuwuvi Working Group 2011, 2012a, 2012b; Spoon, Arnold, Lefler and Milton 2015; Spoon, Arnold, Lefler, Wendel, and Nuwuvi Working Group 2013, 2014a, 2014b; these reports are quite repetitious but each has its own findings also).  Among newly reported information are care about pruning mistletoe from pinyon pines, and a great deal about managing water—desperately scarce in their area.  One elder observed:  “Science is a tool to measure stuff.  Culture is a tool to maintain what you have.  That’s what I believe” (Spoon et al. 2013:56).  These elders contrasted interaction with “management,” the latter seen as a not-so-good idea from the white settlers.  They noted a high respect for rocks, which remember whether they were moved for good or bad reasons—a belief I have encountered in Mongolia. One of Spoon’s reports is in fact titled The Voices of the Rocks Sing Through Us (Spoon et al. 2014b).  They also discuss talking with trees.  This makes solid sense when one is used to the significant silences—often filled with nonverbal communication—that mark and enhance Native American conversations.  Fire management is as among California groups described below; pruning, small patch burns in the right season, some clearing of brush beforehand, and general careful preparation and timing (Spoon, Arnold, Lefler and Milton 2015).

The level of personal restraint and responsibility involved could reach quite incredible proportions.  Philip Wilke (1988) found that desert junipers cropped for bow staves were carefully conserved.  A juniper with a straight branch was a rare commodity.  About one bow stave per twenty years could be taken from such a branch, preferably from the compression wood on the under side; then the juniper had to be left to recover.  Yet there are such trees all over the range of the juniper.  Bowyers had to be on their own recognizance—no one was out there patrolling.  Individual conscience restrained them from taking too much.  This self-policing went on for countless centuries over millions of square miles.  I have observed the same for yews in the Pacific Northwest; any venerable yew with straight branches shows the long, straight scars.  Such “culturally managed trees” are often well known locally, to the point that “CMT” has become a normal word in modern archaeology and land management.

California’s and Nevada’s indigenous people normally engaged in long migrations between winter villages and spring and summer harvesting grounds.  These migrations took them through successive habitats, usually on the route from lowlands to highlands and back.  Presumably the routes would change to avoid places heavily harvested in immediately previous years.  No meadow in the state, except extremely remote and high-altitude ones, would have been long ignored.  Archaeology shows this clearly.  Look around any meadow anywhere in the state, and (unless settlement or flooding have destroyed the record) you will find tiny scatters of flakes where someone sharpened a knife, broke an arrow point, or quickly flaked out a skinning tool.

            On the other hand, recent writers have been too quick to maintain that all California was highly managed, with wilderness a meaningless concept.  The Native Californians did not greatly affect the rough, infertile parts of the state, or the high mountains.  This was not purely because of indifference.   More significant was the use of remote mountaintops and high-mountain environments for vision quests and meditation, with the goal of gaining spiritual insights, knowledge, and ability.  Anthropologists generally refer to this as “power,” but, significantly, Native people speaking English usually call it “knowledge.”  It refers to a comprehensive spiritual vision that gives the visionary enough self-efficacy to accomplish important matters; the highest knowledge is generally considered to be that of healing.  In any case, all western North American peoples sought this, and depended on mountain wilderness for it.  All groups knew certain spots, called “power places” in the literature, that were particularly good for vision questing; mountaintops were particularly favored, but remotes lakes, waterfalls, and springs were important.  Of this more anon; at present we need note only that wilderness was required for a specific important use.

Most important of all was burning, but readers should remember that all those other techniques were important as well.  This was not simply “firestick farming.” 

            Fire was the chief way of managing the environment, and here the record is somewhat confusing.  There is no question that California Native peoples set fires everywhere that would burn, and that these very substantially altered the vegetation over vast areas of the state (K. Anderson 1999, 2005; K. Anderson and Rosenthal 2015; Lewis 1973; Lightfoot and Parrish 2009, with major review of literature; Pyne 2004; Timbrook 2007).  This was to be expected, for all Native American peoples except those in non-combustible environments (basically, Arctic and high-alpine areas and sand deserts) burned regularly (Pyne 2004; Stewart et al. 2002), and the effects on the vegetation were considerable; it is possible that the entire Eastern North American forest was deliberately maintained as an oak-chestnut-hickory community by burning (Delcourt and Delcourt 2004).

Juan Crespí’s diary from 1769 (Brown 2001; see Gamble 2008) is particularly revealing.  He noted not only widespread deliberate burning, but also that the vegetation in many areas was short annual pasture rather than the chaparral and coastal sage scrub that are now, or recently were, found in those locations.  The reviews by K. Anderson and by Lightfoot and Parrish list hundreds of sources covering dozens of groups. 

            On the other hand, a few doubters have raised their voices, and one of them is a formidable authority: Richard Minnich (1983, 1987, 2001a, 2001b, 2008), one of the two or three leading experts on California fire ecology.  He points out at length that much of the state is affected by dry lightning, which in the mountains can be an almost daily phenomenon in late summer, and that other sources of ignition exist.  (These might range from volcanism to spontaneous combustion in animal nests.)   California’s bone-dry summers and highly inflammable vegetation combine to guarantee natural fires on a cyclic basis.  California would burn sooner or later, indigenous people or no (see also Sugihara et al. 2006). 

Chaparral and some California forest formations are characterized by large numbers of species that seem actually designed to burn:  they dry out in summer and contain resins, waxes, and other compounds that are highly inflammable.  These species all either stump-sprout aggressively after fire, have fruits that need fire to open them, or have seeds that need fire to germinate.  Some authorities think that these plants evolved to eliminate competition and maximize their own dominance by this aggressive route. 

For instance, California’s most distinctive pine groups, the closed-cone and knobcone pines, have cones that normally do not open unless burned.  They live in chaparral, grow and fruit rapidly, and are designed to burn on 20-to-50-year cycles.  I have lived to see the knobcone pine forest on the San Bernardino Mountains go through two cycles and get well into a third.  Obviously they did not evolve in the last few centuries, and thus it is clear that California has burned since long before the Native Americans perfected their management systems.

Be that as it may, Native Californians burned chaparral regularly, to increase edible plant, mammal, and even insect resources.  Kat Anderson and Jeffrey Rosenthal (2015) report, for instance, that caterpillars, as well as grasshoppers, were managed by fire, which causes rapid regrowth of the tender new shoots on which they feed.   These authors describe the values of each stage of regrowth after fire.  Burning also opened the brush, making travel possible; a stand of mature chaparral is impenetrable, or at best very slow going.  Annual plants often produce more seeds (they need heavy seeding to survive) and greens than perennials do. 

Even fish could be helped.  Michelle Stevens and Emilie Zelazo (2015) point out that burning in summer opened up floodplains that flooded in fall, winter and spring.  Fish that spawned in those areas, including many important ones endemic to the central part of the state, were increased.  Another benefit was increase in number and quality of stems of plants used to make fishnets, such as Indian hemp (Apocynum cannabinum) and milkweed.  These plants grow in moist areas and produce longer, straighter stems after burning.

            A contrarian work is a volume edited by Thomas Vale (2002), which contains some articles on California.  Vale took a considerably more extreme position than Minnich, and argued that Native Americans did little managing by fire (or, for that matter, anything else).  Vale’s work might have had more impact if it had not been almost immediately buried under the enormous floods of counter-evidence in Stewart et al. (2002), Pyne (2004) and K. Anderson (2005).  Vale’s book was effectively answered, and refuted, by in a review by Henry Lewis (2003), the pioneer investigator of fire in Native North America.

            Vale, like Minnich, emphasized the probability that remote and mountainous parts of the state would be more influenced by lightning than by Native burning.  Lightning strikes were and are so much commoner that Native burning would not have affected the cycle.  Fire scars on trees have been used to assess the frequency of fires, but the vast majority of lightning strikes burn one tree (and perhaps its immediate neighbors) without starting a serious fire.

However, in California, the areas near dense Indigenous settlement are also the areas with the least lightning.  Dry lightning is almost nonexistent in coastal California.  Rivers and barren areas prevent the spread of fire from distant mountains, though it certainly does spread from nearby ranges (especially in the Santa Barbara area).  Fire return intervals in all these areas, even redwood forest, are so extremely frequent that lightning is highly unlikely to be the major cause (Kat Anderson, pers. comm, Feb. 4, 2014).

            Moreover, the testimonies of Crespí and others make it clear that the vegetation was burned far more frequently than even frequent lightning strikes would do.  Taken together, they describe millions of acres of annual pasturage.  Yet, in early historic times, these areas were brushlands. 

Minnich (2008) has established that the bunchgrass prairies of California’s interior valleys were nonnatural, and indeed many of them were purely mythical—early mappers’ overgeneralizations.  The potential vegetation of most of the valleys is saltbush and other brush.   Minnich has qualified his stand on the inexorable nature of burning cycles (Minnich 2008 and pers. comm, 2009-2010; Minnich and Franco-Vizcaino 2002).  It appears that chaparral and even desert vegetation can be burned much more often than it would naturally do.  This has made him more open to Native American burning as a landscape shaper.

            Californians were careful fire managers; they made very small fires for their own use.  J. W. Powell, writing on the Paiute, says: “…an Indian never builds a large fire…and expresses great contempt for the white man who builds his fire so large that the blaze and smoke keep him back in the cold” (Powell 1971:53; this confirms a very widespread American folk observation that I have heard since my childhood). 

            In short, the evidence is unequivocal.  They certainly managed well-populated parts of the state by burning.  On the other hand, their ability to reshape the vast lightning-prone mountains of the state seems limited.  K. Anderson (2005, and pers. comm, Feb. 4, 2014) finds that they maintained and expanded the mountain meadows and coastal prairies of the state.  These are now rapidly growing up to forest, in spite of lightning strikes; but deliberate fire suppression and the current years of drought (which favor trees over meadow grass) are involved in this. 

Another equivocal case is oak woodlands.  Oak seedlings die when burned.  Frequent burning of oak groves would eliminate them.  On the other hand, oaks survive burning when they grow large enough to have thick bark.  I have seen coast liveoaks sprout rapidly back from the very hottest fires.  It takes about ten years for a live oak to reach fire-withstanding age.  Thus, rarer burning—once a new generation of oaks had grown up—would eliminate fungal and insect pests, thin out the competition, and maintain the groves. 

A problem for everyone trying to reconstruct Californian vegetation as of 1700 is that Europeans replaced deliberate burning with deliberate fire suppression.  The Chumash were already seeing this as a major hardship, and complaining about it, by 1800 (Gamble 2008; Timbrook 2007).  The Achomawi, later, complained and regretted the ruin of the forests (Rhoades 2013:112).

The only possible conclusion is that human-set fire profoundly affected areas near large population centers, minimally affected remote mountain and desert areas, and affected to an unknown and probably unknowable degree the vast in-between zone.

            The situation in regard to animals is even less clear.  California Native peoples overharvested the choicest shellfish, such as abalone, which are delectable and easy to over-collect (Jones, Porcasi, Gaeta and Codding 2008; Kennett 2005; Lightfoot and Parrish 2009, summarizing a very large and contentious literature; Rick et al. 2008).  It seems clear that depletion was very slow and gradual, and frequently reversed (Rick et al. 2008).  People were fairly careful stewards.  They may have overharvested fish, but the wild swings in fish populations caused by ocean dynamics make this impossible to judge.  Fish have to accommodate to the sudden alternations of El Niño’s warm water and La Niña’s cold, both unpredictable in extent and reach.  Anyone familiar with fishing in California (especially the south) knows that species of fish, sometimes in enormous numbers, suddenly appear and as suddenly disappear when such events occur (cf. Gamble 2015; Jones et al. 2016). 

Chumash fishing pressure in the Santa Barbara Channel, however, was enormous, and declines of easily overharvested species like sheepshead in the archaeological record are therefore significant.  The Chumash had several named types of net.  A 20-foot gill net required 12,500 stems of Indian hemp (Apocynum cannabinum), which would have to be prepared, retted, and spun.  A 40-foot seine required 35,000 stems.  With these nets they took great quantities of small fish (Johnson 2015).  With these, they could easily fish out streams and bays.  Indian hemp was carefully managed—pruned, selectively harvested (K. Anderson 2005).  Its sporadic occurrence, especially in places where it does not normally grow (such as dry lowlands) and which are not very near other stands, strongly suggests deliberate planting.  Apocynum androsaemifolium was an inferior substitute in dry mountain areas, and nettles were also widely used for cordage; both were managed.

Recent research on the Channel Islands shows a tendency for popular resources to decline in hard times, but the staple shellfish—mussels—was about equally common through time (Lapeña et al. 2015; cf. Joslin 2015).  Mussels still abound on the islands.  The highly favored abalones were sharply reduced during hungry times, but were still abundant till modern settler societies got at them and destroyed the resource—a fate conspicuously absent from the closely corresponding Isla Cedros in Mexico, where local conservation is still the rule (Des Lauriers 2010).  The Channel Islands were settled by 13,000 years ago, and quite densely populated for most of the time since.  In spite of epidemics, they remained densely populated till the people were forcibly removed to the mainland in the Spanish colonial period.  These islands are small and absurdly easy to overexploit, so the fact that they were still resource-rich through the 18th and 19th centuries implies extremely careful and thorough resource management.

Seabirds were little disturbed, but a flightless duck (Chendytes lawi) became extinct, through human hunting and probably also through predation by human-introduced animals including foxes (Jones et al. 2008; Rick et al. 2008; Rick et al. 2009; Whisler et al. 2015; there was also a puffin, Fratercula dowi, but it was so rare that no one knows what happened to it).  The duck lasted for some 8,000 years after human contact, however (Jones et al. 2008; Jones and Codding 2010), which indicates human restraint.  Indeed, one wonders why the Chumash allowed it to die out; it could easily have been quasi-domesticated.  They may have hunted it for prestige (Hildebrandt et al. 2010) but probably did not (Jones and Codding 2010; I agree with them that hunting a smallish bird that could not escape would not give anyone much prestige).  I suspect that period of unfavorable climate may have led to both natural decline and desperation-caused overhunting.  The case seems to me more interesting than the insignificance of the bird would warrant, since we have here a prey that could very easily be exterminated, yet was not for many millennia.   

            A classic study of indigenous conservation was Sean Swezey and Robert Heizer’s study of salmon management on the Klamath River (Swezey and Heizer1977; see also Kroeber and Barrett 1960, Tushingham and Christiansen 2015).  The tribes there allowed escapement of salmon to preserve the stocks.  This was ritually represented; first-salmon rites, weir inauguration rites, and other ceremonies provided a cycle that regulated take and escapement.  Prayers to the salmon to return in abundance were part of the maintenance; the Karuk prayed with the wonderful word ?imshírihraavish, “you will shine upriver quickly” (O’Neill 2008:101).

However, this was not all; any temptation to cheat was reduced by the fact that the tribes upstream would protest, often violently, if escapements were inadequate.  People kept each other honest.  Everyone wanted an equal chance at the fish, and would enforce it through warfare if necessary. 

Rules on fishing were tight.  Robert Spott reported that his people, in the first half of the year (by their reckoning), could not take or eat salmon below Cannery Creek; if a salmon was caught right at the point where the creek entered the Klamath River, only the part that had passed the creek mouth border could be eaten (Spott and Kroeber 1942:172; a great deal more about salmon rituals follows).  Weirs that could take 50 days to build were demolished after 10 days of fishing, to allow escapement.  This emphasizes how strict the conservation rules were on the Klamath.

            Recall that the Native people of California’s northwest were blissfully lacking in formal government, so, as with Great Basin bow stave trees, this management was entirely based on people’s individual consciences reinforced by public opinion. 

            It seems highly likely, and locally certain, that similar fishing regulations held throughout the state.  At contact, most of southern California’s small streams had steelhead runs.  A run even survives, or did until very recently, in tiny San Mateo Creek in Orange County, and, again until recently, in Malibu Creek in Los Angeles County.  All the streams in the region are so small that a single determined fisherman could wipe out a run.  The San Mateo Creek run was down to one female at one point.  These runs could not have survived without deliberate restraint, given the high aboriginal hunter-gatherer populations.  Similarly, the dense population of Pomo around Clear Lake could not possibly have subsisted on its fish resources (as they did:  McLendon and Lowy 1978) unless they practiced careful conservation.  There were just too few fish, and these few have to run up the creeks or concentrate in shallows to spawn, making them utterly vulnerable.  Even the simplest aboriginal fishery could have wiped out the runs within a year or two.  But we have no documentation on this; apparently nobody thought to ask.

Another case in point is the abundance of enormous trout and suckers, and the lack of decline in their numbers, in the Lost and upper Klamath Rivers of the California-Oregon border country (Stevenson and Butler 2015).  The Lost River in particular is a tiny stream that almost dries up in drought years (hence its name—it tends to disappear in, or even before reaching, the vast Tule Lake sink), and only careful management could have preserved large fish in it.  Mismanagement since contact almost wiped out the Lost River sucker, but it is recovering under intensive management.  Suckers were also important on the upper Pit River, where the Achomawi not only still fish for them but still carefully manage them, watching and protecting their spawning areas and not taking too many (Floyd Buckskin, pers. comm.). 

Native Californians probably overharvested mainland colonies of seals and sea lions (Broughton 1994, 2002; Jones et al. 2004), but probably not as much as sometimes alleged (Jones et al 2004 pull back from their own earlier estimates; and see Rick et al. 2008).  Remember that grizzly bears and gray wolves entered the state at the same time humans did, and would have made mainland pinniped colonies nonviable, humans or no.  Native hunters probably kept numbers of elk and deer well below potential (Kay and Simmons 2002; compare the much better evidence for the Columbia River area, in Martin and Szuter 1999).  They tried their best to keep the numbers of grizzly bears down, but probably with limited success.  How much they could affect these animals, and how much they tried, remains unclear.  Extermination of the megafauna no doubt allowed deer and elk to expand their populations enormously, because of competitive release.  I suspect the Native peoples came into some degree of conscious equilibrium with them.  Elk, deer and mountain sheep all tame themselves if given any chance, and herds habituated to human presence might have been cropped almost like livestock.  Indeed, red deer are farmed today in Europe and New Zealand; red deer are basically the same as Californian “elk.”  They are tamed, but not domesticated; true domestication involves a genetic change to a new and artificially selected strain, but red deer remain genetically wild. 

William Hildebrandt (e.g. Hildebrandt et al. 2010) has long argued that much hunting was done for prestige rather than for economic return; very likely true, but I doubt whether this was significant.  The Native peoples had too little margin.  They had to hunt rationally for food.  Prestige would naturally accrue to anyone bringing in a huge amount of meat, but I believe people forewent rabbits to hunt deer because they knew the deer would provide more meat rather than because it would provide more prestige.  After all, a good-sized deer, around 180 lb., would dress out around 100 lb meat, and thus provide as much meat as 100-150 cottontails or 1600 sizable shellfish.  Even a fair chance at a deer would thus beat all but the biggest rabbit hunt or shellfish expedition in economic terms.

California’s sparse population was really not enough to do much damage to fleet, widely-dispersed game like deer and pronghorn, though the effect on more concentrated stocks like sea lions and tule elk, to say nothing of abalone, could be severe.  Burning would be likely to lead to increases in deer and elk.  Slow-moving animals like porcupines would be caught in the fires.  Many species would be indirectly affected by opening up the landscape. 

California’s population was not evenly distributed.  Along the Santa Barbara Channel and the lower Sacramento, and around San Francisco Bay, there were at least ten persons per square mile (judging especially from Chumash population estimates, the best we have for a densely-populated part of the state; see Gamble 2008, Kennett 2005).  Conversely, the higher mountains and the Mohave Desert had a tiny fraction of a person per mile (I would estimate one person per ten square miles for the Mohave).  Intensity of management and of hunting obviously varied proportionately.

However, the Mohave Desert people managed to overhunt the bighorn sheep seriously.  They were bighorn specialists, and when the bow and arrow came in, a fatal temptation presented itself.  Sites show rapid decrease of bighorns; the rock art showing thousands of bighorns in that area may have been made in an increasingly desperate attempt to call the sheep back spiritually (Garfinkel et al. 2010).  It stopped short around 1300, probably because Numic speakers with a different lifestyle replaced whoever was there before.  Possibly the latter were dying out from the consequences of their folly.  One assumes that this was not the only overhunting story in ancient California.

An  insight into Californian hunting is found in Frank Latta’s work on the Yokuts (Latta 1977).  Asking Yokuts hunters how far their bows would shoot, he was told that no one knew.  No one would waste an arrow and its valuable stone point by shooting it at a distant target.  Hunters disguised themselves in deerskins and sneaked up on deer and other animals, finally shooting from 10-20 yard range.  John Wesley Powell noted the same thing among the Paiute (Powell 1971:49), and, indeed, traditional hunters worldwide did the same.  This indicates an appreciable tameness on the part of the deer.  Deer are not stupid, and are notoriously hard to sneak up on.  The author recalls a story from many years ago:  just before hunting season, a couple of California wildlife trackers painted a buck deer bright orange, fitted him with a radio tracker, and followed him for a day through the brush of the Shasta County back-country.  They knew exactly where he was at all times, thanks to the radio, but they saw nothing of him except a flash of orange for a few minutes. In Michigan, a herd of deer in a 50-acre fenced enclosure were intensively studied and censused year after year, but the lead buck was never seen.  He avoided all contact even in that tiny space, being known only from his tracks and shed antlers (Pierotti 2011:87).

Wanton, uncontrolled hunting would make close-hunting tactics impossible.  Early explorers were told similar things by coastal peoples.  The exceptionally powerful Hupa bows could shoot a deer at 50 to 75 yards off, and the Hupa could shoot clear through the soft parts of an animal (Goddard 1903:33).  But the Hupa preferred to get close, and disguised themselves as deer so well that they had to take pains to avoid mountain lion attacks (Goddard 1903:21).  So did the Maidu—one hunter was attacked within living memory (Jewell 1987:125). 

Deer were occasionally driven over cliffs, at least by the Wintu (Lapena 1978:336), but this must have been an exceedingly rare event.  To anyone who wants to drive deer over a cliff, all I can say is Good luck!  I’d rather try to push water uphill with a rake.  Deer jumps are known for the Spokan (Ross 2011:304), but required extensive and careful planning, as well as rituals.  The gullibility of city anthropologists on the subject of “jumps” and “cliff drives” never ceases to amaze those of us who have some field experience.  Game animals are not stupid, and know a cliff when they see one.  Cliff drives required very careful preparation, with many people organized to panic the animals and keep them stampeded in the right direction, and if possible with fires.  People must line the intended drive path, yelling and waving blankets.  If possible, fences or barriers will be set.  This works for buffalo and sometimes with elk, but was evidently an uncommon way to get deer.

Pomo hunters supposedly knew, individually, every deer in their hunting radius, and indeed it is fairly easy to learn to recognize individual deer and know their peculiarities.  My Maya friends in Yucatan know their local deer that way, and, for comparison, early Irish hunters did too, as shown by the individually named stags in Irish epics.  This allowed the Pomo to manage the deer (Blackburn and Anderson 1993:20, citing Burt Aginsky).  Indeed, traditional Native American hunters are apt to know individually every large animal in their regular hunting areas—at least that is my experience in the Northwest, Mexico, and the western United States.

            The much-debated “Pleistocene overkill” need not concern us very long here, since we are dealing with recent management systems.  Still, it requires a note.  Paul S. Martin inferred long ago that Native American hunting was the sole factor in the disappearance of most of the large mammal species in the Americas around 12,000-14,000 years ago (Martin and Klein 1984).  In its original form—involving a sudden enormous expansion of human populations and hunting—this thesis is not credible.  It assumes a population growth rate of 3% over a vast area and a long time; nothing remotely like this has ever been observed in premodern populations.  It assumes people spread with lightning speed throughout the Americas.  And it assumes that people killed wantonly, since even a high population would not have needed more than a tiny fraction of the meat supposedly taken.  Surely, even without any conservation ideology, hunters would have thought twice about going after mammoths and mastodons simply to destroy them.  The danger would have been daunting.

            Moreover, mass kill sites are singularly absent.  We have a few scattered mammoth and mastodon kills, but not much else.  This is in stark contrast to the huge bison kills, involving thousands of animals, that happened later, without exterminating the bison.  Contrasting, also, are the massive boneyards on Sicily and Cyprus, where humans unquestionably exterminated the local dwarf elephants and hippos (Simmons 2007; displays in Sicily’s historical museum at Syracuse, studied Jan. 1, 2009).  On Cyprus, one site alone has the bones of over 500 pigmy hippos (Simmons 2007:231)—couple that with post-Pleistocene drying and heating, and there is no question why that species went extinct!  This is exactly what we do not find anywhere in early North America.  It is simply not credible that the there was better preservation on a couple of Mediterranean islands than in the whole North American continent.  There is also the fact that the vast terminal-Pleistocene boneyards we do have, such as the La Brea tar pits, contain few or no human kills.

            Thus, many authorities, notably archaeozoologists such as Donald Grayson (over many years—e.g. 1977, 1991, 2001), and Steve Wolverton (Wolverton et al 2009 and references therein) have given no credence to this hypothesis.  Neither have Native American authorities like Raymond Pierotti (2011).  Grayson pointed out long ago that many bird species, and several small hard-to-catch animals such as rabbits and dwarf pronghorns, went extinct.  The birds were mostly carrion-eaters that died out when their food did, but some were large water birds such as storks, and only climate change can explain their demise.

            On the other hand, it is hard to deny some role for human hunting (see, once again, Kay and Simmons 2002; also Krech 1999 for a relatively balanced review).  This is especially true since we now know that people were in North America earlier than Martin thought, and that some of the megafauna—notably the mastodons—persisted much longer than he thought.  Spreading out the time frame makes the levels of population growth and hunting much more believable.

People are highly efficient hunters.  Animals like giant ground sloths would have seemed like walking free-lunch counters.  The native mammals had no evolved or learned knowledge of humans and no defenses against group hunting with spears.  On the other hand, they would have learned it fast—certainly the mastodons had plenty of time.  It is not credible that animals used to avoiding sabretooths, lions, dire wolves, short-faced bears and the like would not soon figure out that humans were dangerous (veteran field biologist Raymond Pierotti 2011 makes this point).

The most convincing argument for overkill is indirect:  everywhere that Homo sapiens has gone, large animals have immediately begun to disappear.  This effect has been observed, archaeologically, from Australia, Madagascar, Indonesia, east Asia, and indeed everywhere carefully studied on the globe.  Some scholars have made far too much of this, though, by blaming even the extermination of tiny flightless island birds on humans; in this case the damage was surely done by the rats, dogs and pigs that people generally bring with them.  In New Zealand, for instance, rats came with the Maori, and probably did more than humans did to exterminate the moas.  The latter were ground-nesters with eminently edible eggs, and rats love nothing better than bird eggs.

In the Americas, the extinction pattern fits climate, not hunting.  The uncommon meso-size fauna went first, not last.  If humans had hunted everything out, the biggest, slowest, meatiest animals like ground sloths and mastodons would have gone first, the mesoprey later, according to all tenets of optimal foraging theory and common sense.  The truth was exactly the reverse.

I believe that, in the Americas, human-set fires were surely far more important than hunting.  (This is based partly on my observations of, and my reading of scholarly research on, burning in Australia and Madagascar.  It seems to be now generally accepted that fire, not hunting, was the human factor in extinctions in Australia around 50,000 years ago.  Both humans and climate change are implicated in the rise of fire.) Slow-moving species like the giant ground sloths could hardly have withstood frequent burning. 

Also, humans and other invading species after the peak of the last glaciation probably introduced diseases, and epidemic disease could well have had a role in wiping out the big game.  Within historic times, diseases have decimated North American trees such as the chestnut, white pines, and California oaks, and have wiped out Hawaiian native birds. 

Last and most serious, climate change after the glaciation was extremely rapid and disruptive.  Similar rapid and dramatic extinction events occurred at the ends of previous glaciaations, such as the Ordovician-Silurian event (Finnegan et al. 2011).  Humans were, obviously, not involved in those events.

North America 18,000-20,000 years ago was probably the coldest it has ever been.  It was hot and dry by 12,000, but then the Younger Dryas event dropped temperatures back to Ice Age levels around 11,000 years ago.  This in turn reversed, and an extremely hot and dry period set in by about 6-7,000 BCE.  (On ancient California, see Jones and Klar 2007.)  The changes were extremely rapid.

It would take only a few successive years like the horrific droughts of 2001-2002 and 2011-2015 to exterminate all lowland big game in California.  There would simply not be enough water for them.  Alternatively, and more probably, a couple of very dry years would so concentrate the megafauna, and so reduce human hunters to starvation, that any notions of conservation would go by the board, and desperate humans would indeed kill the last few mammoths.  I expect that climate change (basically drought), fire, disease, and hunting, in that order of importance, were all factors.

            The whole controversy has been greatly exacerbated by personal feelings.  The overkill hypothesis has proved popular with those who have an exceedingly limited faith in humanity’s ability to manage anything, especially biologists.  Some of these are frankly anti-Native American.  However, also among these ranks are more pro-human and pro-Indigenous anthropologists and other social scientists who dislike the “ecologically noble savage” stereotype (Kay and Simmons 2002).  Some of these scholars, like Raymond Hames (2007; his experience is in South America), have worked with Indigenous groups that lack any conservation ideology and hunt without restraint.  Others, including Kay and Simmons (and the present writer), see the “ecologically noble savage” stereotype as patronizing, and prefer to contemplate efficient if merciless hunters rather than meek and inept ones. 

Skeptics who doubt that humans exterminated the megafauna have included not only Indigenous writers like Vine Deloria, but also those who have little vested interest one way or another (such as Grayson and Wolverton), and even those who stalwartly reject the “ecologically noble savage” concept but are even more skeptical about Martin’s hypothesis (e.g. Krech 1999). 

            As with fire, we are left in some doubt.  California’s indigenous people certainly hunted hard and cropped the more vulnerable fish and shellfish as close as they could.  On the other hand, there were no extinctions after the end of the Pleistocene, and archaeology shows only rather minor declines in game populations over time.  Apparently people and wildlife reached a loose equilibrium. 

Ownership

            Ownership is critical to management.  Since John Locke, conventional wisdom has it that private ownership is best, but modern experience suggests that ownership at appropriate levels of management is better.  The California peoples already knew this.  Resources were owned or held at various levels (Bettinger 2015).  Individuals owned their own tools and implements.  Large productive capital goods like canoes could be owned by rich individuals, families, or associations.  Houses were owned by the families that lived in them.  Generally, but not everywhere, families or lineages owned particular patches of food-producing plants, or individual oak trees, or other productive land resources.  More remote areas of the state, however, tended to have community ownership of land, at least of remote lands.  Families or village communities owned good fishing spots.  The village community owned ceremonial structures and grounds, and held control with varying degrees of formality over resources.  As usual, there was variation in different parts of the state, from the far northwest where everything was owned by individuals or families to the much more collectivist northeast and south. 

The Luiseño, for instance, had four levels of ownership.  Individuals owned their portable goods.  Kingroups or groups of related people owned tungva “gardens,” understood to be oak groves, productive berry patches, and the like.  Village communities owned tchon tcho’mi, specific areas for collective exploitation. Larger tracts of relatively useless land were held as territory of particular village communities, but were not subject to specific management by socially constituted groups (White 1963).  The Achomawi maintained rights to hunt and gather on land, owned by kingroups or possibly local groups (Rhoades 2013:68). 

Fighting was generally about revenge, sometimes women, rarely property.  Still, land and resource conflicts were numerous and important enough to define groups and color lifestyles.  Access to resources was generally restricted to the owners, especially relative to other North American peoples (Bettinger 2015:132-134).  We read of people fighting over berries, oak trees, and productive areas of land (e.g. Gamble 2008:258; Rhoades 2013; White 1963).  Like many other people, they exaggerated their grievances; Walter Goldschmidt, George Foster, and Frank Essene, comparing notes in the 1930s, found that the groups they were studying described the same war, but each claimed it was the aggrieved one, and that it held on though badly outnumbered (Goldschmidt et al. 1939).  Raymond White (1963) recorded in detail the wars between Luiseño villages over resource encroachments.

The Yurok had an exceedingly complex ownership system.  Some things were owned in common (“’everybody’ ownership”), others by the village or group of houses, others by the house (which usually contained an extended family), others by individuals (note that this is very similar to Luiseño ownership).  At least after white settlement, individual land ownership existed.  Individuals might hold fractional shares of an item.  Songs and ceremonies as well as resources and wealth goods were named (Pilling 1978:146-147).  For the neighboring Hupa, Goddard (1903:26) notes extended-family ownership of acorn groves and of fishing sites and stretches of fishing streams.  Bettinger (2015:168-70) sees this as the limiting case of his “orderly anarchy.”  He clearly underestimates the role of community and elders, since the large towns of the northwest did function smoothly and coordinate everything from weir-building to the yearly ceremonial round, but certainly ownership tended to be at a grassroots level.

The Nomlaki occupy an intermediate position, with individual ownership of personal goods and also certain trees and the like; otherwise they preferred community ownership—villages headed by chiefs who administered (Goldschmidt 1951:340).

For the Cahuilla, Lowell Bean and Katherine Saubel (1972) describes family ownership of small plant resources, lineage ownership of individual oaks, and village community ownership of land and major resource clusters. For the Chemehuevi, descent groups owned territories.  These groups owned songs—notably the Mountain Sheep, Deer, and Salt songs—by hereditary right, and sang them to assert ownership and to show and teach knowledge of the ground.  Large, vague divisions of the Chemehuevi owned the songs.  Families owned specific versions of them, and these went with territory they owned, controlled, or habitually visited.  Such song groups were exogamous (Laird 1976:21).  The songs described the country, often in the form of travels through it; the Salt Song, for instance, traced a circle from the Bill Williams River (in southwest Arizona) through southern Nevada, eastern California, and back.  In striking parallel to the Australian Aborigines, these ownership songs recounted travel over the country, with human reactions, sacred places, waterholes, and other important matters incorporated (Laird 1976:6-18).

Since we are not talking about formal states, land was not formally owned, surveyed, and measured; vast remote tracts were open for anyone (though loosely held by the nearest village), and large shadow-zones existed between village holdings in such resource-poor areas.  Conversely, rich lands were grounds for major and serious conflict. 

            All this was less complicated than it looks.  The basic principle is that everything was owned at the level at which ownership was most efficient.  It would hardly be sensible for the whole community to own a bow and arrow set.  Conversely, an individual could not possibly hold (even if he or she owned) a large oak woodland.  The size of a particular resource item or patch seems to have determined the size of group owning it.  My sense is that a group owned a patch it could easily crop, manage, and defend (cf. K. Anderson 2005; also the studies in Bean and Blackburn 1976).

            Population density must have affected this.  It certainly seems, from the rather thin evidence, as if ownership was a more serious matter among the Chumash than among the desert Shoshoneans (Clemmer 2009a, 2009b), and more serious among the Yurok and Karok than among the tribes inland of them.  Evidence is thin (though see Bettinger 2015), and some of it goes against this generalization; ownership of choice fishing spots by lineages is still very much alive among the Achomawi (inland from the Karok), even after 200 years of oppressive contact with Euro-Americans.  Good fishing spots are highly concentrated there, and it could well be that there—and elsewhere—concentration of resources was more crucial than density of people.  Similarly, the Timbisha Shoshone of Death Valley, though they had the sparsest population of any California group, still maintain ideas of ownership of mesquite trees and pinyon groves.

Representations:  Sources

            The early and devastating decline of the Native Californians has left us quite poorly informed about them.   

Fortunately, a few exceptional collaborations between particular researchers and consultants have produced comprehensive and sensitively recorded bodies of data.  We can be enormously grateful that California was blessed with ethnographers who, whatever their faults may have been, actually cared about traditional people and cultures, and wanted to learn all they could.  Even today, when many ethnographers are interested only in high theory or in playing political games, California remains blessed with a stunning array of people who care—including Native ethnographers like Julian Lang and Katherine Saubel, as well as people like Thomas Blackburn, Lowell Bean, and others cited in the present work. 

  Particularly notable are certain cases of longstanding cooperation between an ethnographer and a Native Californian individual.  A. L. Kroeber’s work with the traditional Yurok elder Robert Spott is outstanding (e.g. Spott and Kroeber 1942).  Roland Dixon evidently managed exceptional rapport with the Maidu mythographer Hanc’ibyjim (Shipley 1991).  John Harrington’s work with the Chumash, especially Fernando Librado Kitsepawit (1981), is famous.  Harrington’s former wife, Carobeth Laird, cemented a particularly close collaboration by marrying her main consultant, George Laird; she produced a trio of books (Laird  1975, 1976, 1984) that are California literary classics in their own right—possibly the most sensitive, well-written, and moving collections of lore and texts from the state.  They have languished in some obscurity, ironically because they were published by a Native Californian organization (Malki Museum) rather than an academic press! 

Finally, special mention goes to the incredible efforts of the few Native Californians who have studied and recorded their own cultural traditions.  Julian Lang has done yeoman service on the Karuk and their neighbors (Lang 1994).  Native Californian elder, ethnographer, and writer Katherine Siva Saubel has for several decades been the unofficial dean of Native California studies (Bean and Saubel 1976; Saubel 2004).  Self-taught and with no “position” other than head of Malki Museum for most of its career, she compiled a record of publication, research, public service, and collaboration with international experts that is matched by few if any “formal” academics in the field. 

Susan Suntree (2010) has integrated many southern California Native origin stories and environmental teachings into a beautiful, poetic volume that catches much of the essence of the land.

            Unfortunately, all the above, together with the enormous mass of other ethnographic work, still fails to give a complete picture of the life and culture of any group.  Often, our knowledge of a whole group depends on one individual who did not actually grow up in traditional times.  George Laird had forgotten much of Chemehuevi lore, and we have essentially no other source.  Fernando Librado and Candelaria Valenzuela, our sources on the Ventureno Chumash, were raised long after the missions had changed Chumash life.  Our knowledge of the Kiliwa (just across the line into Baja California) derives from one man, Rufino Ochurte.  At least, he remembered quite traditional times and did find an exceptional ethnographer in Mauricio Mixco (1983), so when he does not mention conservation beliefs we can probably take it that there were no important ones.  (The Kiliwa maintained a very sparse, highly migratory population in a harsh desert, and probably had no need of them.)  Otherwise, however, a lack of reports of conservation myths and injunctions means nothing; “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”

We are best informed for the Yurok and Karok, who (with the Hupa) have been most successful at maintaining their culture till now, so that information derives from their own highly educated scholars such as Julian Lang as well as from many consultants interviewed over many years by many investigators.  Many other cultural groups were contacted too late, and often by “green hands” doing practice field work.  Material culture and ordinary social life have generally been well covered, since they show up in the archaeological and historical records as well as in ordinary ethnography.  The situation for myth and religion is far less good.  These leave little mark, and require extremely sensitive ethnography over many years to document adequately.  The contrast between the myth records of Hanc’ibeyjim or the Lairds on the one hand, and the hasty recordings by less sensitive ethnographers on the other, is most striking.  It reminds one of the contrast between Homer and the children’s books summarizing his stories for the subteen trade.

            One final problem with the sources is that California ethnography suffered from a tendency to compartmentalize “religion” and “subsistence” (or “environment”) as two separate things.  “Religion” covered abstract notions of gods’ “subsistence” meant pounding acorns and hunting deer.  Ways that religion sanctioned ecological behavior fell between the chairs.  Few recorded such data.  This problem is endemic in Kroeber’s Handbook (1925) and the larger Smithsonian Institution handbook (Heizer 1978).  Kroeber’s trait-list ethnographic method did not help the situation.  (Cf. Swezey and Heizer 1977 to show what could be done when the blinders were off.)  On the other hand, ethnographers not bedeviled by artificial boundaries do not report much specifically conservationist religious teaching, either (see e.g. Laird 1976, 1984).  It would probably be more accurate to see the religion-environment-subsistence interaction as basic, with “religion” and “subsistence” as segregates imposed artificially on Californian culture by outside ethnographers.

            One recalls that it took three generations of ethnographic work to get much sense of how Australian Aboriginal religion constructed landscape.  Californian ethnographers, working with memory cultures from the beginning, had no opportunity to do likewise.

Attitudes and Representations:  Specific teachings

            As elsewhere, conservation derived from more general postulates about the world.  These have been best summarized by Thomas Blackburn in December’s Child (1975; this book refers to the Chumash but what follows applies equally well to all California groups).  He lists fourteen postulates about the world as central to Indigenous thought:

A personalized universe

Kinship of all sentient beings

Existence and potential of supernatural or nonordinary Power

Determinism (within broad limits)

Negative-positive interaction (rather than pure good separate from pure evil)

A dangerous universe (with many frightening supernatural as well as natural beings)

Unpredictability

Inevitable, inherent inequality (especially of powers)

Affectability (all can potentially affect all)

Entropy (disorder builds up unless controlled)

Mutability

Closed universe

Dynamic equilibrium of oppositions

Centricity (the Chumash at the center of a circular world, itself the middle plane in a multiplanar cosmos) (Blackburn 1975:65, with my explanatory extensions)

            Of these, the most important in general and in managing landscapes are the first three.  The others may be considered ancillary.

            Blackburn also lists thirteen things that are highly respected:

Knowledge

Age and seniority

Prudence

Self-consraint

Moderation

Reciprocity

Honesty (but also trickiness in the face of frightening beings)

Industriousness

Dependability and responsibility

Self-asertion and self-respect

Pragmatism

Etiquette (proper behavior)

Language (Blackburn 1975:65)

            Explicit conservation in California representations of nature are rare, but Kat Anderson found a great deal of conservationist ideology in her studies of Native Californian plant management.  She found two universal rules: “Leave some of what is gathered for the other animals and Do not waste what you have harvested” (K. Anderson 2005:55; her italics; see also Blackburn and Anderson 1993).  In fact, there is evidently a general rule not to waste at all.  What is not harvested is left for later, or left for the other people (the four-footed or winged ones).  Native Californians would steal stored seeds from mice and other rodents, and acorns from woodpeckers, but would always leave some for the rightful “owners.” 

People approached plants with reverence and respect.  They felt the usual Native American kinship with nature (K. Anderson 2005:57-59).  Their ceremonies for first fruits and seasonal foods bonded people to the resource base.  People were close to the land.  Kat Anderson recorded a revealing comment from a Chukchansi Yokuts elder:  “I’ve alwas wondered why people call plants ‘wild.’  We don’t think of them that way.  They just come up wherever they are, and like us, they are at home in that place” (K. Anderson 2007:41).  She and Thomas Blackburn note:  “Today, native peoples still retain a deep respect for the natural world, and retell stories that remind them of the absolute necessity for judicious harvesting.  Elders are quick to tell younger gatherers, ‘Do not take all—and leave the small ones behind’” (Blackburn and Anderson 1993:20).

Kat Anderson found that a general sense of kinship with nature, or at least consociality with it, and a more specific sense of genuine deeply-felt responsibility for conserving resources for the wider good, were the basic attitudes of management.  Yet—whether because it is really lacking or because ethnography is so thin—there is little record of its being verbalized explicitly in a philosophic ideology, as it is on the Northwest Coast (Atleo 2004). 

An important exception is the Klamath River region, where traditional culture continues to an appreciable degree.  For that area we have not only a great deal of good ethnography, but a unique source in the form of an early book by a Native Californian woman—Lucy Thompson’s To the American Indian (1991, orig. 1916).  In it, she points out that the Yurok carefully protected sugar pines, source of nuts and sugary sap (Thompson 1991:28ff).  They conserved fish (Thompson 1991:178-179) and burned carefully and systematically (Thompson 1991:31-33).  In general, she stands in striking contrast to ethnographies by outsiders—she stresses the religious interaction with nature and its function in maintaining conservation.  It seems highly likely that this was universal, and that it was missed by early ethnographers for the reasons above noted. 

Confirmation for the Yurok case comes from more recent work.  The Yurok spiritual teacher Harry Williams (on whom see Buckley 2002) tells:  “I was with my grandfather, Charley Williams.  We were walking on a dirt path down to the ocean.  There was a bug crossing our path, and my grandfather told me, ‘Reach down and help that bug on its way.’  So I did.  I reached down and helped the bug on the path to where it was going.  ‘Now, do you know what you have done?’ Grandfather continued.  ‘You won’t feel badly now, for perhaps a bird will someday eat the bug.  But you must remember that the Creator created the bug for birds to eat.  He didn’t create them to get stepped on’” (Burrill 1993:43; presumably the Creator is Wohpekumeu, the Yurok trickster-transformer; strictly speaking there is no Yurok Creator, since the Yurok teach that the universe has always existed).  Lest anyone think this is an exaggeration, I can testify that the Yucatec Maya routinely do things of this sort, with similar teachings.  Maya who picked up a bug to show me would always put it back on the path, unharmed, and headed the way it had been going (Anderson and Medina Tzuc 2005).  Williams’ grandfather also said that rocks are living things, and that “the white man is like the wind.  Nobody knows where he comes from.”  Williams also tells of a line he heard at a Native American conference:  “Creator gave man two ears, and two eyes, but only one mouth.  But the white man thinks he has five mouths, no ears, and no eyes.  That must be why he talks so much” (Burrill 1993:106). 

For the Karok, the “Ikxareyavs were old-time people, who turned into animals, plants, rocks, mountains, plots of ground, and even parts of the house, dances, and abstractions when the Karuk came to the country” (Harrington 1932:8).   Many of the most feared of these prior beings turned into large and spectacular rocks, a story which the Karok supposedly proved to Harrington by pointing out that you can still see the rocks.  The Ikxareyavs who turned into abstractions remind us yet again of classical Greece, with its goddesses such as Sophia and Nike, as well as the ancient Hindus, who visualized Time (kali) as a goddess.

The Hupa, culturally very close to the Karok though linguistically unrelated, held that one Yinukatsisdai “made all the trees and plants which furnish food for men….  If he sees food being wasted he withholds the supply and produces a famine.”  If pleaded with, he may relent, and “then gives the food…in such bountiful quantities that acorns are found even under the pines” (Goddard 1903:77).  The puritanical and religious Hupa shared the Northwest Coast view of punishment for waste, but added a fascinating touch in the mercy of the creator.  The corresponding masters of deer are the Tans, who withhold deer from hunters if deer are not treated with respect.  As elsewhere in the wider Northwest and California (e.g. Rhoades 2013:81), respect means not only treating the dead deer respectfully but also totally refraining from waste, overhunting, and hunting without serious need for food.  Yet other deities care for fish in similar ways (Goddard 1903:77-78).  The fish, like the deer and other food animals, had been kept by the supernaturals, and had to be liberated by culture-heroes; there are many stories of these events, and the stories are used in ceremonies to maintain the stock (Goddard 1904).  Less effective, but not unrelated, were prayers that birds and squirrels might not desire to eat the acorn crop (in competition with the Hupa) (Goddard 1903:81).  The Hupa regarded trails as sacred persons. 

The Yurok, Karok and Hupa joined in enormous ceremonies that were intended to preserve and renew the world and its resources.  These ceremonies almost died out, but managed to survive, and are now once again celebrated regularly.  The belief in the need of humans to hold elaborate and active rituals to keep the game, fish, and plant foods productive has itself been preserved and renewed, especially since these groups have seen the result of modern Californian indifference to conservation.  Many myths detail the origin of these ceremonies and the need for them, but specific teachings of directly conservationist behavior are rather limited.  However, it seems clear that a general reverence and spiritual concern for the landscape has a preservationist effect.  People will not thoughtlessly waste resources that are personally and spiritually important.

Among the Lake Miwok, as in several other parts of North America, “game animals were believed to be immortal and under spirit control, and it was believed that animals sometimes transformed themselves into other species” (Callahan 1978:272).  The Yuki held that deer are immotal, their souls living in a mountain under care of a Deer Guardian who is second only to the Creator and who controls obsidian as well as deer.  This belief in animal souls within a mountain occurs widely in North America, as far as Huitepec, the sacred mountain near San Cristobal in Chiapas. It is more than likely that the immortality and protectedness of spirits of game was universal. 

The Northern Pomo had a concept of “xa, manifestations of the supernatural spirits…left on earth from the beginnings and investing certain peculiar objects with supernatural attributes….  Xa  is the genius of procreation, acquisition, alien to human activities…but a spiritual concomity of men whose aid may be engaged through prayer and possession of its symbols….   Xa is summoned by sexual contact, is the mystery of conception and gestation, leaves its stamp on the buttocks of new born till erased by cognoscence; places an indelible mark on the skin of a favored mortal…. Xa is the inspiration of song…, the rhythmic impulse of song-dance ceremonies, the buoyancy of regalia…and the stimulus of fingers tapping upon the flute. It is the celestial, beneficent influence as opposed to the terrestrial demon of diaster…”  (notes of John Hudson, ca. 1900, from Welch 2013:169).  Xa resides in hawk and falcon and eagle feathers, in crests and red tails of birds such as woodpeckers, and in omens and apparitions.  Five plants have it: trail plant (Adenocaulon bicolor), angelica, sweet cicely (Osmorhiza sp.), Fendler’s meadowrue (Thalictrum fendleri), and leather root (Welch 2013:169).  As elsewhere in California, tobacco and Jimson weed (Datura wrightii) were sacred in a different way: they gave direct visions and healings.  All this must have fed back on resource management, but no early record of this seems to have survived.

Equally revealing is a story related by Fernando Librado (1979:113):  A man was trapping rats in a pitfall trap, and an old Santa Rosa Chumash told him:  “’You are polluting our mother, Xutash!  [The Chumash earth goddess.]  Remove this at once, If you defile our Mother, she will give us nothing.’”

The Cocopa, who lived in a landscape of abundance in the fertile Colorado River delta, lived simply and never worried much about food—though famine threatened if a drought led to the river being very low.  William Kelly made careful enquiries about religious beliefs connected with fertility, harvest, wild foods, agriculture, and the whole suite, and found:  “Harvest festivals…were…religious in nature; yet their function, explicit and implicit, was in connection with group life and social organization, and they were neither related to the harvest as such nor a mechanism aimed at increasing effort or diligence in farming” (Kelly 1977:44).  This seems general throughout California (the Cocopa live in Baja California).  The only rule related to such issues that is even remotely ecological in function was the universal Native American rule that a boy could not eat his own first kills (Kelly 1977:45).  This has no conservation function in itself, but in most of North America is part of teaching the boy respect for both the game and the human social group that shares the kill.  The Cocopa tabooed doves but apparently for totemic, not environmental, reasons.  As agricultural people, they probably had a different take on myth, with Coyote a creator of good crops and transformer of insulted ones into bitter wild foods, rather than a producer of good wild foods for people to gather (see Nabhan 2013 for a brilliant, incisive analysis of this contrast in southwestern mythology).

We are, however, surely missing a great deal.  The Northern Paiute, whose territory included the northeast corner of California, offered prayers to slain game animals.  They left the tail tip of a hunted deer under a rock with the prayer “’Deer, thank you, and come again.’  A similar offering was made for bighorn sheep” (Fowler 1992:181).  Note that the deer will be reincarnated, and will again offer itself to the hunter if treated well—a universal North American belief.  Even roots required an offering or prayer.  Eagle feathers were harvested without killing the eagle (ibid.).  A number of prayers, to the Sun and othe powers, were given daily or frequently.  Ceremonies insured continued production of food resources.  Yet Fowler does not record conservation myths either.

            Taboos may also have had a conservation effect.  The Yana, for instance, did not allow salmon to be eaten with deer meat, small game, or roots taken from gopher burrows (Sapir 1910:156).  The salmon would cease to come if this taboo was violated.  One assumes it was disrespectful to them.  Possibly they did not like to associate with prototypically “land” foods.  There is no evident conservation here, but at least some respect for the salmon was apparent.  The Wintu and related peoples tabooed a large number of things, including most birds of prey and predatory animals (Du Bois 1935).  The Nutuwich Yokuts even tabooed bear and deer, being thus reduced to eating rabbits for meat, a most unusual degree of forbearance (Gayton 1948:166).  Taboos this extensive would have a major ecological effect.  They preserved even the hunted species indirectly, by preserving keystone species in the ecosystem.  Heizer (1978) cites a number of taboos and rules from around the state that affect land use. 

            The Chilula (Athapaskan) culture is barely known from a very few elderly people just after 1900.  One of them “was a medicine woman for troubles caused by the deer gods” (Goddard 1914:379).  That is all we know of Chilula animal religion, outside of a few generic myths, but it implies spirit guardians of the game such as we know from most of Native America.

            Attested from one end of the state to the other are harangues by chiefs telling people to work hard and diligently at hunting, gathering, and food production in general.  (The best description is for the Atsugewi, but the custom is attested all the way to the Mohave [Kroeber 1972] and Cocopa [Kelly 1977:66].)  Many groups  had a special designated Orator as well, who could do this.  People could ignore if they chose, but they would then be subject to major criticism and coolness, and hard work was a strong value everywhere from the northwest corner (e.g. Buckley 2002, Kroeber 1972 for the Yurok) to just beyond the southeast one (Cocopa:  Kelly 1977:23).  This would rather tend toward overexploitation of the resources than conservation of them, and thus may have much to do with the archaeological evidence noted above of local over-harvest.

Attitudes and Representations:  General

Native American biologist Raymond Pierotti states:  “A common general philosphy and concept of community appears to be shared by all of the Indigenous peoples of North America, which includes:  1) respect for nonhuman entities as individuals, 2) the existence of bonds between humans and nonhumans, including incorporation of nonhumans into ethical codes of behavior, and 3) the recognition of humans as part of the ecological system” (Pierotti 2011:198-199).  This and all it implies is fully true for California.

Respect.   The full panoply of North American Native conservation attitudes is reflected in an astonishing prophecy that Cora Du Bois recorded from Kate Luckie, a Wintu shaman, in 1925:

“When the Indians all die, then God will let the water come down from the north.  Everyone will drown.  That is because the white people never cared for land or deer or bear.  When we Indians kill meat, we eat it all up.  When we dig roots, we make little holes.  When we build houses, we make little holes.  When we burn grass for grasshoppers, we don’t ruin things.  We shake down acorns and pine nuts.  We don’t chop down the trees.  We only use dead wood.  But the white people plow up the ground, pull up the trees, kill everything.  The tree says, ‘Don’t.  I am sore. Don’t hurt me.’ But they chop it down and cut it up.  The spirit of the land hates them…  The indians neverf hurt anything, but the white people destroy all.  They blast rocks and scatter them on the earth.  The rocks says, ‘Don’t!  You are hurting me.’  But the white people pay no attention.  When the Indians use rocks, they take little round ones for their cooking.  The white people dig deep long tunnels.  They make roads.  They dig as much as they wish.  They don’t care how much the ground cries out.  How can the spirit of the earth like the white man?  That is why God will upset the world—because it is sore all over” (Du Bois 1935:75-6; cf. Heizer 1978:650). 

Luckie continued to say that water could not be permanently hurt, because it eventually runs to the ocean, and that it would thus survive to destroy the current world by flood.  The Wintu share the widespread North American belief that there have been four worlds of people so far, and we are in the fifth; it is to be destroyed by flood, according to Wintu tradition.  Another Wintu shaman commented that “the gold feels sorry” for the Indian people because they were driven from their homes by men seeking that metal (Du Bois 1935:76).  (It is worth noting that Du Bois had no special interest in ecology or environment, but was meticulous about documenting shamans and all they said; hence these unique recordings.)

The California Native peoples shared the widespread Native American belief that disrespect of powerful animals brought danger.   A story has made it from the Chumash consultant Juan Justo to early ethnographer John Peabody Harrington, thence to Chumash expert John Johnson, and then into Lynn Gamble’s book on the Chumash—a typically indirect route: 

            “…Juan’s uncle began to laugh and shout and make fun of [a rattlesnake]…. The other man advised Juan’s uncle to be quiet,…but Juan’s uncle made all the more noise….whereupon the other man left him and went on alone.  When he was alone, Juan’s uncle looked around a saw a whole pile of guicos [alligator lizards] with their mouths open towards him and their tongues out….he…shut his eyes and went jumping and climbing to break through the lizards, and when he opened his eyes there was nothing there” (Gamble 2008:216, quoting John Johnson’s edited version of a Harrington text). 

I have heard very similar stories on the Northwest Coast and among the Maya.  If the parallels hold—and I am sure they do—the lizards were warning Juan’s uncle that if he teased a snake again he would suffer, probably through a bite from the snake. 

General respect for plants and animals and their spirits and spirit guardians existed.  Respect guided conservation generally.  “One took what he needed and expressed appreciation…. Without these attitudes the California Indians could have laid waste to California long before the Europeans appeared” (Heizer 1978:650).

There was a very general sense that plants needed human care, a sentiment backed up by experience, but going well beyond the facts of Native management and care.  Plants and animals need to be used, as a mark of respect.  Neglecting them wounds their spirits.  They decline and become weedy, poorly grown, and despondent-looking (K. Anderson 20005; Blackburn and Anderson 1993; McCarthy 1993:225).  I have run into the same idea among Northwest Coast peoples and something very close to it among my Maya friends.  In fact, California’s useful plants do respond to care; basketry plants put out long straight shoots, nut trees crop more, and so on (Anderson 2005). 

Such attitudes survive today in areas where something like traditional plant uses can exist.  Michael Wilken-Robertson, interviewing Kumeyaay people in Mexico just south of the California border, heard from elder Teodora Dcuero Robles:

“This I can assure you, the ancient ones never damaged a tree, no, never; they loved them as something very sacred.  They would tell us not to go breaking the branches of the pines, not to play there, nor to climb up on any small tree, they said that they were almost juist like humans; ‘They are watching us, they are taking care of us, they give us our food.  Don’t go around damaging them don’t be shouting, none of that,’ they would say, ‘take special care of them,’ for this reason we know very well that we must take care of these trees.  Also the medicinal herbs, those they especially charged us to care for, we shouldn’t just go out and cut for no reason, go out and cut them and throw them away to dry up, no.  They told us many things, that we should even care for the rocks, just imagein!  The rocks, the sand, the springs, the water flowing, all these things they said we must respect” (Wilken-Robertson 2004:49, reprinted in Wilken-Robertson 2018:231-232).  From the Paipai, a group that moved from Arizona to northern Baja California about 300 years ago, comes a story told by Eufemio Sandoval.  The Mexican government forbid them cutting juniper posts because the junipers were getting rare.  Sandoval commented “we have never cut the plant to the root, but rather it has been a form of pruning that we carry out. We just take what is useful as a post and leave the rest to keep growing and developing” (Wilken-Robertson 2004:53-54, reprinted in Wilken-Robertson 2018:236).  Sandoval held that this was better conservation than pure neglect.  Recall Wilke’s findings on Great Basin junipers. 

There is little reference to animals letting themselves be taken if they are respected, but apparently the belief existed.  One Mohave did say that the Creator gave hunting to the desert tribes but not the Mohave, so when the Chemehuevi “see game, the animals cannot run fast, or they sit down…they want to be caught.  The same with the Walapai.  But if Mohave go to hunt, the animals run swiftly away” (Kroeber 1972:84).  A Wintu hunter who failed to get deer would say “The deer don’t want to die for me any more” (Heizer 1978:651).  Many stories around the state imply that animals not respected will not let themselves be killed.  Conversely, they might go away.  Elsewhere in North America, some groups have noted that game disappears as white settlers fill up the landscape, and suspect this is because Native hunting is outlawed and the game is offended and leaves.  I am certainly aware that dramatic declines of deer have taken place since hunting has been banned in settled areas, but in fact the reasons are drought (first of all), suburbanization, and introduced diseases.  Still, the Native view has its merits; failing to keep the game alert, and failing to weed out sick and slow individuals, has its costs.

The belief that wild plants and animals, and even rocks, must be treated with respect is shared all over North America and among similar societies in Asia.  In Mongolia I learned immediately that one had to treat all these entities with respect (shuutekh, a word whose root meaning is respect for one’s elders).  All have spirits and the spirits are ever-present; they deserve respect as elders, helpers, friends, and possible sacrificers of themselves to the human hunter or forager.  Thus there are absolute rules against overhunting, overcollecting, and waste, and these are observed in the remotest areas.

The widespread North American taboo against a youth eating his first kill was probably general, and among the Chumash one report says that a hunter or fisher could never eat his own kill, on pain of never succeeding again (Grant 1978:512, citing Z. Engelhardt).  This is evidently part of the North American complex of respect for animals.  The Chumash are known to have prayed to the swordfish to drive whales on shore, and to have had a swordfish dance; they revered other powers of the sea also (Blackburn 1975; Gamble 2008). 

They also had the idea, general in western North America, that the bones of an animal should be treated carefully and respectfully, because such things as breaking a bone would mean the animal would reincarnate with a broken or missing leg; at least this is attested in myth, if not in actual practice (Blackburn 1975:131, in a myth recorded by Harrington).  Another version of the same myth has Momoy—Datura personified as an old woman—protesting against a boy (her grandson in other versions) killing unnecessarily:  “Have you no sense at all?  You are just killing for the sake of killing” (Blackburn 1975:147).  Occurrences like this, in Harrington’s very complete materials on the Chumash, make it seem very likely that California Indians did not lack the usual western North American values; ethnographers simply failed to record them.

And yet, among the Monache, careful enquiry indicated otherwise:  “No special ritual precautions accompanied the hunting of deer or bear.  Animals were not addressed before, during, or after the kill” (Spier 1978:428).  This is reported because it is in such marked contrast to the situation in the Northwest Coast and many other areas, where respectful addresses to the animals were required, and were part of a conservation-related ideology.  Generally, nothing is reported either way for California peoples; “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence,” but the lack is suggestive given Spier’s report.

Social Bonds with Nature.  All California groups thought of the natural world as closely allied to the human one, almost always with actual kin relations or equivalent social bonds.

Many Californian groups, especially in the center and south, had lineages and moieties with animal emblems.  Moieties named Coyote and Wildcat (Bobcat) were found widely, as among the Cahuilla and Serrano.  The Yokuts named them West and East, but divided the animals among them; “the Tachi assigned Eagle, Crow, Killdeer, Raven, Antelope, and Beaver to the…West moiety and Coyote, Prairie Falcon, Ground [Burrowing] Owl, Great Horned Owl, Skunk, Seal” and other beings to the East (Wallace 1978:453, from E. W. Gifford’s data; reference to Valley Yokuts, but all Yokuts groups apparently had more or less the same).  Anna Gayton (1976) points out that people really felt close to their lineage animals.  Eagle and Coyote were the lead animals respectively.  Within the moieties were animal-named patrilineages; the Eagle lineage supplied chiefs. The Coyote moiety had its own chiefs, however (Wallace 1978:454).  Moieties sometimes owned certain foods, and feasted each other with their respective foods (Gayton 1976:84).

The Miwok seem to have reached an extreme, extending human society to the entire cosmos by classifying everything (at least everything they noticed) into either the Land or the Water Moiety; the former included mostly up-country beings, the latter not only water but also lowland creatures (Gifford 1916, summary in Kroeber 1925:455; it is worth noting that Gifford’s rather scattered and obscure studies of Miwok society are one of the more amazing achievements in the history of kinship studies, being far ahead of their time in almost every way; Gifford had a high-school education and was a true autodidact).  These had nothing to do with individuals’ spirit power animals or other less global social symbolism.

The Monache had lineages named after birds or sometimes other animals; a lineage’s namesake was called its “dog” in the sense of  “pet animal” (Spier 1978:433).  The Eagle lineage was the chiefly one; messengers (and talking leaders?) came from Roadrunner and Dove lineages.  The Yokuts used their Dove lineages for this purpose, and Magpie lineage members as criers.

Humans as Part of the Ecological System.  This phrase understates the powerful, deep and complex emotional attachments to the land.  For every Californian group, their land is home—not just their personal home but the home of their people since the time of creation (or at least of transformation into our recognizable world).  Lynn Gamble and Michael Wilken-Robertson, in a recent, particularly sensitive account of Native Californian relationships with the land (2009), describe “…a landscape that is permeated with symbolic and ritual meanings[,] that embraces mythical histories, ancestral pasts, and moral messages that overlay a landscape where economic resources, such as foods and medicines, abound. 

Related to this ideational landscape are the themes of landscape as memory and landscape as identity.  Specific places are reminders of a social past that was filled with triumphs and disasters” and other stories.  People remember “not just a boulder, but the significant events associated with the boulder” (Gamble and Wilken-Robertson 2009:148).  Every stream and hill, as well as every sizable boulder, has its stories, and even individual trees are often important landmarks.  Often the historic associations of these landmarks blend into myths and origin stories.  Other, related groups in Baja California maintain similar ties with the land, including long-lost homes on the United States side of the border, where they have kin and other social relations (Garduño 2016).

The article refers specifically to the people of the Tijuana River basin in Baja California, but it could be said with equal truth of every group in California, or for that matter the whole of the North American Pacific coast. Every ethnographer who has written much about the ideational culture of Native Californians has emphasized their extreme attachment to and concern for the land, and I can certainly attest it from my own experience there and in the Northwest Coast.  Directions—including up toward the sky and down toward the lower world—as well as places have enormous significance ritually and culturally.

The Yumans of the Colorado River drainage—close linguistic relatives of the Tijuana River people— speak of “’Coyote Law,’…the law of the land—sometimes capricious and unreasonable like Coyote himself—but nevertheless, the way things are.  [Their] tales tell about Coyote Law” (Hinton and Watahomigie 1984:6).

This train of investigation leads to two broad conclusions.  First and most important, views of the land and its resources are impassioned.  Native people are not sizing up “resources” with the cold eye of the economic planner.  They are looking at their home.  For California’s people, the whole land is not only their family home, but the home of their entire people since the beginning of time.  We may understand the latter clause as meaning “since the beginning of the group as an identifiable cultural and social entity,” but that does not diminish its psychological force.  The land is loved, but the emotional involvement is much more than that; it is a total personal involvement, the sort of interaction that Emmanuel Levinas regarded as literally infinitely important, because it makes us who and what we are (Levinas 1969).

Second, knowledge is derived from interactive practice, not from passive book-learning.  Knowing the land comes from living on it and making a living from it.  Knowledge of plants and animals comes from working with them in the field, not from a biology text.  Rural Anglo-Americans in my youth learned the same way, and contrasted it quite sharply with “book learning.”  They knew that interactive practice is far better for learning actual life skills and work skills, whatever it may cost in knowledge of grand theory.  However, their wider knowledge of the world was book-learning (or TV-learning).  For traditional Californians, all knowledge came from interactive practice.  People grew up knowing the local ecology from personal experience; they knew what the fish ate, which plants grew together, what was needed for a healthy ecosystem.  Research comparing Native and White rural folk in the northern Midwest is relevant here; even Whites who knew the outdoors as intimately as the Natives thought very differently, seeing species as separate and relatively isolated rather than part of a great web that included humans (Medin et al. 2006).

Awareness of the possibility of overpopulation—too much population pressure—is found in the story, reported for every well-studied Californian group, of Coyote or Lizard or some similar creature bringing death because the world would become too crowded if people lived forever.  Where Coyote is the death-bringer, his own child is usually the first to die, and he regrets his choice.  The Mohave shaman Nyavarup had “the small lizard” as deathbringer; the lizard says “’I wish people to die.  If they all keep on growing, there will be no room.  There will be no place to go; if we defecate, the exrement will fall on someone’s foot’”  (Kroeber 1972:6).

Mythic Construction.  Even myths and chants came not from mindless classroom memorization but from ritualized transmission around the flickering winter-season fire.  Myths could not be lightly told.  Relating them in summer could lead to rattlesnake bite, among other things.

            Mythic animals were most conspicuously predators:  Coyote, Wolf, Fox, Eagle, Falcon, Condor, and so on.  Many game animals seem to have been merely game animals even in mythic time.  Among the Wappo, Elk was a humanoid pre-animal in mythic time, but hunted deer, which were ordinary game animals (see tales in Radin 1924).  Deer are rather rarely seen as having been humanoid in mythic time (though the Karok have several Deer stories; Kroeber and Gifford 1980).  Among the Chemehuevi, Coyote and Fox hunted rats and mice (Laird 1976).  

            Southern Californian groups had long and complex origin cycles, involving creation by heroic individuals.  In the Serrano song cycle for mourning ceremonies, the first song spoke of the earth, the second chukiam, “all growing things” (Lerch 1981:11).  This refers to plants and animals, but apparently to plants above all; it included a passage about the Datura plant, ritually used as a halluncinogen in puberty rites and in medicine.  Cognate words such as chukit are known among other southern Californian Shoshonean groups.  The Serrano creator died in Big Bear Valley, which thus has an enormous variety of plants, many of them endemic.  It is interesting that “[t]he Serrano “were not only aware of the phenomenon, they had an explanation for it in their cosmology” (Lerch 1981:14). The mourners turned to pines, which still stand in ranks around the valley (due, in modern terms, to the layered rock outcrops).  The related Cahuilla have a long cycle of creation myths centering on Mukat, a human-like figure who brought agriculture among other useful plant and animal management strategies.

            By contrast, the far northwest of the state had no origin myths; the cosmos always existed.  However, creator-like beings had altered it greatly and made it suitable for humans, who appear after the time of such beings as the Karok ikxareyavs (see below).

The Yuki and Kato had something close to monotheism; their high god (Taikomol in Yuki, Nagaitcho to the Kato; Goddard 1909) was far above Coyote and his fellow creatures, though they fine-tuned the creation.  Taikomol created the universe by song and speech.  In a beautiful Kato telling of the creation story by Bill Ray in 1906, Nagaitcho and the dog he has created end by rejoicing in their world:

“My dog, come along behind me and look.”

Vegetation had grown, fish had come into the creeks.

Rocks had become large….

“Walk fast, my dog.”

The land was good.  Valleys had appeared….

Water had begun to flow.  Springs had come….

“I made the land good, my dog,

Walk fast, my dog.”

Acorns were growing, pine cones were hanging,

Tarweed seeds were ripe, chestnuts were ripe,

Hazelnuts were good, manazanita berries were getting white,…

Buckeyes were good, peppernuts were black-ripe,

Bunch grass was ripe, grasshoppers were growing,

Clover was with seed.  Bear-clover was good.  Mountains had grown.
Rocks had grown, different foods were grown.

“My dog, we made it good.”

Fish had grown that they will eat.

“Waterhead Place we have come to now.”

Different plants were ripe.  They went back, they say,

His dog with him.

“We will go back,” he said.

(Goddard 1909:9394; slightly rewritten for comprehensibility.  Nagaitcho and his dog return to the north, whence they came, and leave us this beautiful world.)

This hymn to all the wonderful foods of the north coast ranges—and indeed they are excellent eating—is only a tiny part of a very long creation story that mentions virtually every plant, animal, fish, and geological feature in Kato habitat.  It is all very reminiscent of Psalm 104, but far more richly detailed.  It also reveals something of Bill Ray’s personal narrative style, which included long chanted lists of plants, animals, and geographic features of the environment, alternating with narrative that is largely spoken and is so telegraphic as to be dreamlike.  The combination is powerful enough to make Ray one of the more distinctive and poetically gifted California myth-tellers.  Such lists are a widespread stylistic feature in myths in many languages of north-central California and elsewhere in the world (think of Hesiod’s Theogony).

The Athapaskan original takes full advantage of the exquisite beauty and potential for sound-poetry of the Athapaskan languages.  The above is rhythmical and rhymed poetry in the original, rhyming with the repeated chorus-line word kwanang (“they say”).  Note that the mountains and rocks grow; they are living things in California belief.  Like Hanc’ibeyjim’s creation story (Appendix) Ray’s is one of the greatest religious poems in world literature, and it deserves more than languishing in a forgotten monograph.  Here are the first few lines, in Kato, simplified for easier reading from Goddard’s linguistic transcription:

“E lot, shiit la, nan dal, o dut t ge ka la e kwanang,

To nai nas de le kwanang.

Sha na ta se gun cha ge kwanang

N gun sho ne kwanang.

Kakw chqal yani kakw ko winyal, e lots ul chin yani ne n gun sho ne kwanang….”

Many other groups had Earthmaker and Coyote or Wolf and Coyote as creators.  Earthmaker or Wolf was the senior, more responsible and sober one, the stereotypic elder brother.  Coyote was young and wild, everybody’s crazy kid brother.  Of course, everyone respected Earthmaker but loved Coyote.  A particularly beautiful and moving version of this story is William Benson’s Pomo version (2002, where Coyote is called by his Pomo name or alternative incarnation Marumda).  The Pomo had a range of creation stories, often conflicting, because of their diversity and the diversity of peoples around them; they were influenced by the monotheistic Yuki to the north, the Guksu Cult of the Patwin to the east, and so on (Barrett 1933).   Other fine stories are Hancibeyjim’s Maidu one (Dixon 1912; Shipley 1991; cf. below),  Laird’s Chemehuevi stories (Laird 1976, 1984), and stories from the Kiliwa (Mixco 1983) and Kawaiisu (Zigmond 1980, 1991). 

The Yuman groups had humanlike but mystical and powerful creators.  The Yuman peoples and the culturally related Chemehuevi told of these in long song cycles, that describe the courses of the creator beings as they traveled around the world—the known habitat of the people, that is—creating, transforming, teaching, and instituting practices (see e.g. Kelly 1977; Kroeber 1972; Laird 1976, 1984).  Individuals dreamed their own versions of the song cycles. 

Some Mohave song cycles are given by Kroeber (1972; see also 1925:754-770), including a Mohave version of the Salt cycle known also by the Chemehuevi.  It contains not only the origin of salt, but of tobacco, the stars, and much else.

Kroeber found the cycles rambling and uneventful, but he recorded them in his youth from elderly individuals, and he was not fluent in the language; he seems to have gotten bland and truncated versions.  (Compare, for instance, Paul Talejie’s short but brilliant creation tale in the closely related Walapai language, in Hinton and Watahomigie 1984, and Laird’s Chemehuevi renderings.)  Even Kroeber’s recordings contain some striking poetry; one cycle begins:  “At Ha’avulypo Matavilya [the original creator] had made a house out of darkness and lived there” (Kroeber 1972:44).  The cycle continues to tell of his death and burial. In the cycle of Yellak (goose?), Yellak’s end is noted by Halykupa: “I know what made Yellak die.  He became sick from the sky, the clouds, the earth, the water, and the wind….Now cry.  Cry with the sky and with the wind…” (Kroeber 1972:63).  His skin sank into the Colorado River and turned into animals.

One reason Kroeber rather wearied of these cycles is that they detail almost all important actions as having been done and repeated facing each of the four directions in sequence, and there are other stylized repetitions as well.  Another is that some of the memorialized events, complete with long songs, are nothing more than the hero seeing a badger or catching a rat (Kroeber 1925:756).  The interest in these cycles attaches to their detailing geographical points and the creation events that took place there—of sheep, deer, grapes, salt, everything—rather than to exciting stories.  California Native people have an unexcelled sense of place, and—today as in the past—can find the simple mention of familiar spots enormously moving.

With the songs, which were repeated over and over, these cycles took anywhere from a night to several weeks of nights to perform.  Some were never performed in their entirety, because, like epics everywhere, they could be lengthened out indefinitely by adding elements and repeating songs. 

Separate (or possibly, at some level, from the Yellak bird myth cycle), but part of the same general tradition of singing to create and transform, were the bird song cycles, which survive among the Yuman and neighboring Uto-Aztecan peoples; these are not only about birds, but can be about anything, and are sung for entertainment—often with slow dancing.  Bird songs were in decline in the 1960s and 1970s, but have been enthusiastically revived, and now abound, with several good recordings commercially available. 

These spirit beings transformed the world for their own reasons, but also to make it ready for humans.  This can be compared to the Australian Aboriginal beliefs in the Dreamtime, and to the most ancient stratum of Greek myths.  These latter, at least some of which go back to a very ancient stratum of belief, lie behind the “metamorphoses” that the Roman poet Ovid turned into art long after the highly-charged shamanic power had gone out of them. 

Thus at the south end of the state, the Tipay (Diegueño) taught that Chaup, the focal deity of their religion, “named and marked all animals whereby they lost their ti.pay (‘human’) nature” (Luomala 1978:604).

Thought and song created much of the world.  The very long and circumstantial Achomawi origin tales of Istet Woiche (1992) and Maidu tales of Hanc’ibyjim 1991) seem to indicate that this belief reached a peak in the northeastern corner of the state.

Calendars everywhere recognized months, and frequently named them from the subsistence activities or seasonal nature events that went with them.

California is distinctly lacking in the specifically conservationist texts so commonly recorded from the Northwest Coast and Mexico.  There are none in the above-cited major collections.  Even Zigmond, focusing on ethnobiological research, found none.  Almost nowhere are there mythic stories about animals driven away by overhunting.  One intriguing exception concerns the Patwin Hesi cycle of the Kuksu religion.  Four songs were obtained from the deer of the Marysville Buttes, back when deer were humanoid in mythic time; enemies took advantage of the deer while the latter were ceremonially sweating, and exterminated them, which is why there are no deer on the Buttes (Kroeber 1925:385-386).  This is quite a different story from the widespread  North American motif of overhunting followed by famine, but is clearly a relative with the same general perception behind it.  The Kuksu cult is associated with morals and discipline, and this myth is surely significant.  Farther afield are various myths in which evil entities wreck the environment for no special reason, and are eventually transformed into their present animal form, as for instance in the Yurok myth of the origin of the mole and Jerusalem cricket (Kroeber 1976:47-54).  These animals, in their humanoid form of mythic time, bring death as well as widespread ecological damage.  The sense that the environment has to be orderly, constant, and well-managed to be fruitful lies behind this and similar myths, and evidently served as a general sanction against damaging the environment.

Apparently universal, however, is a myth of a time when animals and fish were held by supernatural beings who would not release them.  A culture hero such as Coyote or the Yurok Pulekukwerek outwits the keepers and releases the prey them through a mix of heroism, trickery and magic. 

Masters of the game animals—almost universally recognized in the Native Americas—seem less common in California.  Supernatural beings controlling or watching over plant and animal resources are mentioned, but without much detail.  The Southern Paiute, who range into California (where they are called Chemehuevi), had this belief:  “All the deer on Kaibab Plateau were believed to be owned by a supernatural being named Qainacav.  During the hunting season (July and June, also early fall), his name must not be mentioned, or else the luck of the whole hunting season would be spoiled.”  Hunters sometimes encountered him in human or deer form, but seeing him meant no luck that day.  Anyone who offended him would be lured off by deer tracks that eventually disappeared (Sapir 1992:829, from notes made around 1910), one way of explaining one’s inability to follow a trackway.

Few myths that I can find give specific directions or charters for the plant and animal management that we know was so universal (although some myths mention it in passing).  Quite the contrary; animals in their mythic humanoid forms go hunting and collecting quite at will, killing enormous numbers of game animals and gathering all the seeds they want.  The wishful dreams of the storytellers are evident, but conservation teachings are not evident at all.  The myths are extremely well supplied with moral teachings, but the morals are social.  Tales show the awful results of condemning ungenerousness, vindictiveness, mean-spiritedness, violence, sexual sins, ignoring good advice, and trying to imitate others mindlessly, but not the awful results of mismanaging resources.  The stories are set the times before human people, and thus I suspect they date back to a time so ancient that the people were still few, with simple technology, when they could take without a second thought.  The Northwest Coast conservation stories seem usually to concern real people, albeit in long-ago times.

One exception is in an astonishing Wappo text, “The Chicken-Hawk Cycle,” recorded by Paul Radin from Jim Tripo (Radin 1924:87-147).  This is one of the most impressive and striking mythic texts ever recorded in California, and deserves better than to languish obscure in a forgotten volume.  Tripo spins it out to 60 pages; more typical is a Karok version of the same story that manages only two pages (Kroeber and Gifford 1980:250-252.)  Much of the plot turns on the anger of Moon, a captious old man, at the Hawk chief and his son harvesting pine cones by breaking off the branches of Moon’s pine trees.  Moon is not portrayed in a sympathetic light, but it is clear that such a damaging way of getting pine nuts was genuinely bad by Wappo standards. 

            Education of the young came through these myths, through specific instruction, through reprimand, but above all through interaction with the world, guided to varying degrees by elders and peers (see Margolin 2005 for a fine summary of Native Californian education).  Autobiographies recount dramatic experiences—accidents, vision quests, special hunting accounts, personal crises—that were interpreted, usually briefly but in extremely telling words, by elders.  Apparently this was a canonical way of learning, along with myths and initiation rites.  The long and complex initiation rites of such groups as the Luiseno involved detailed explanations of cosmology and of human life, including life crisis ritualization.  Other rites of passage, such as marriages and funerals, provided opportunities for songs, stories, and speeches that provided a great deal of instruction.  Finally, chiefs at dawn often harangued their communities on the need to be up and working.  Overall, there was a great deal of education, much of it quite formalized:  winter myth cycles, sings, initiations, funeral orations, and many more occasions. 

Religion, Cosmology, and Spiritual Concerns

A whole cosmology based on interactive practice and intense emotional involvement is bound to be quite different from one based on books, deductive logic, and laboratory experiments.  For one thing, it is hard to avoid personalizing the land—seeing the rocks, plants, and animals as people.  Even modern Anglo-Americans name their cars, talk to their dogs, and cherish their plants. 

Thousands of years of such interaction, in a world without labs and mass media, will inevitably make the nonhuman world more personal.  The nonhuman beings are “other-than-human persons.”  They have will and intellect, but not like ours; they plan and communicate, but we have to know how to hear them.  They have supernatural power to transmit.  

            The Californians shared the almost universal Native American belief in a prior cosmos, ruled by animal powers, that changed dramatically to make our present cosmic order.  The earlier beings included Coyote, Quail, Wildcat, and other beings.  There seems to be a vague tendency for interior and mountain groups to have more strictly animal powers in mythic time.  At least, the mythic-time people of the Yurok and the larger southern California tribes were very often humanoid, especially the main characters.  The large, rich tribes of the Delta and Bay Area are not well enough known for many conclusions.

Widely, however, especially in central California, an apparently human-like high god or pair of gods was the chief agent.  The Wiyot were the northwest pole of this belief; the Yurok, distantly related in language, lacked it (Kroeber 1925:119).  The Maidu, Wintu and their neighbors had a high creator or Earthmaker/Earthnamer.  Some (or all) Pomo groups had a similar high god.  Everywhere, he was very often assisted by Coyote, who royally messed up the process (see e.g. Hanc’ibyjim in Shipley 1991).  Similar pairings in southern California include Wolf and Coyote or Southern Fox and Coyote (Laird 1976, 1984).

            What Walter Goldschmidt said of the Nomlaki would apply equally well to all California Native peoples:  “To the Nomlaki, the world of reality and the world of the supernatural were inseparable, so that even the most practical undertaking was circumscribed by elaborate ritual inspired by the religious ideas with which the act was invested….  The Nomlaki world was animistic.  ‘Everything in this world talks, just as we are now,’” one Nomlaki man told him (Goldschmidt 1978:345).  There was, in fact, no concept of “reality” or of “supernatural”; there was simply the cosmos, with a gradient from clearly visible and tangible beings to invisible and intangible ones, and with a gradient from animals that were just animals to the mythic human-like animals of prehuman times.

Goddard, missionary turned ethnographer, was deeply struck by the religious nature of the Hupa, and sardonically remarked that “this undercurrent of deep religious feeling makes the life and deeds of the Indian seem…strange to the white man” (Goddard 1903:88).  Similar comments (if without the depreciative aside about Anglo-Americans!) could be made about all California Native people.  Religion was deeply felt and important in all aspects of life.  This was closely connected with plant and animal interactions.  Like their neighbors, they had a first salmon ceremony in the spring and a first acorns ceremony in the fall, as well as a first-lamprey (“eel”) ceremony (Goddard 1903).  (The related Lassik had a bulbous-plant ceremony; Elsasser 1978.)  All this involved stressing the importance of maintaining the resource; the ceremony was intended to keep the salmon and acorns coming, probably by showing proper respect and entertainment.  I strongly suspect that conservation lessons were once part of the rituals. 

Thomas Buckley discusses the importance of the spirit world, of doctoring power, and of “wealth” objects (actually ritual objects), among the Yurok, as Goddard does for the Hupa.  Of the wealth objects, Buckley says that “[d]ance regalia are not objects but ‘people,’ sentient beings (like deer) that have wewecek’, ‘spirit’ or ‘life,’ and that ‘cry to dance.’  As people, their ‘prupose in life’ is to get out of the baskets and boxes in which they’re stored and dance to ‘fix the world…’ (Buckley 2002:175).  They sometimes ask their owners to be loaned out so they can be danced at a ceremony in a neighboring community. 

Buckley, like the Karok anthropologist Julian Lang (1994), faults A. L. Kroeber for holding that the Yurok were obsessed with material wealth per se.  Kroeber was not entirely unaware that wealth objects (dentalia shells, obsidian blades, white deerskins, woodpecker scalps, and so on) were spiritual things and tokens of spiritual power.  He recorded many stories in which they are personified and spiritualized (Kroeber 1976, e.g. 200-204; cf. Kroeber 1925:40-42).  However, these objects, the dentalium shells in particular, were used as regular money too, for ordinary purchases and bargains. 

Kroeber was writing at a time when materialism, Marxian and otherwise, was dominant in American social science.  Not only Kroeber himself, but his main Yurok coworker, Robert Spott, seem rather matter-of-fact and materialist in their narratives (Spott and Kroeber 1942).  Euro-American readers might recall the Renaissance associations of gold:  money and material wealth, but also a spiritual and magical substance.  Interesting is one rather barbed comment that Kroeber recorded from Dick of Wohkero.  To a myth about Earthquake, who is personified among the Yurok, Dick added that “[n]ow Earthquake is angry because the Americans have bought up Indian treasures and formulas and taken them away to San Francisco to keep.  He knew that, so he tore the ground up there (referring to the earthquake of the year before, in 1906)” (Kroeber 1976:418).

Unsurprisingly, religion was thoroughly embedded in the natural world, and ceremonies continually constructed and reinforced ties with nature.  The Chumash had a particularly complex and arcane cosmology, paralleling their complex socioreligious organization (Hudson et al. 1977).

The dances of the Kuksu religion of central California included duck, grizzly, deer, coyote, goose, grasshopper, turtle,condor, and other dances based on animals; presumably the dances invoked them and imitated their motions.  These were not mere dances, but entire ceremonies centered on dancing (Kroeber 1925:378-380).  These ceremonies were “thought to bring rains, nourish the earth, and produce a bountiful natural crop; perhaps also to ward off epidemcis, floods, earthquakes, and other disasters…” as well as producing “an abundance of bulbs and greens, and…acorns…” as well as game (Kroeber 1925:383-384).  I take it this means that the dances were essential to co-create the natural community as well as the human one; human society being extended to include wild animals and plants, it is natural that human community-building rituals would impact the other-than-human community members favorably as well. Kroeber notes the significant lack of dances for critically important animals like fish and rabbits; there was no one-to-one mapping.  Of course it is possible that such dances existed but were lost before ethnography began.

Of course the agricultural tribes of the southeast part of the state had agricultural ceremonies, like most farming peoples of the world.  Yet, as with the Cocopa (see above), these seem not to have been elaborated as fertility or harvest ceremonies. 

Girls and boys coming of age went through initiation rituals, sometimes involving hallucinogenic plants that produced visions interpreted as spirit communications.  These initiation rites seem to have been among the most important ceremonies of the Native peoples.  Many smaller groups had no other major ceremonies, leaving initiation rites as the most important part of their religion (cf. Kroeber 1925, e.g. p. 428; the Yurok, alone among major groups, had no girls’ rites and apparently no true male rites either).  This is particularly true in the south (north through the Yokuts lands), where the use of toloache (Datura spp.) as a hallucinogenic drink made another link with the plant world.  The Luiseño youths acquired animal guardian spirits while under its influence, and did not subsequently kill the animal received (Kroeber 1925:670).  Toloache was widely used medicinally as well (see e.g. Librado 1979, esp. pp. 68-72).

Widely, across the state, puberty rites were the occasion for telling the longest, most detailed, most sacred myths and group histories.  This was when people really learned their culture in its depth.  All accounts agree that detailed and extensive teachings were  part of this, but no accounts give us much detail on the contents of the teachings, primarily because the rites vanished or went underground quite early.  (Constance Du Bois found some among the Luiseño.)  One suspects that ecological and conservation teachings were a major part of this initiation, but we will never know.

At the other end of the life cycle, groups in southern and central California burned the possessions of the dead, and then in memorial ceremonies burned large quantities of their own goods.  This prevented a buildup of material wealth, and indirectly served to eliminate the possibility of accumulating wealth for status display.  This seems to have mattered little, however, since the northwestern groups that did accumulate wealth for (spiritual) status did no notable damage to the environment thereby.

            There were several major religious cults or general ceremonial complexes in the state, each one confined to a few neighboring groups, possibly because of the difficulties of translation into the many different languages of the state.  The Northwest group of Yurok, Wiyot, Karok and Hupa (and to a lesser extent their hill neighbors) shared a focus on fish ceremonials, world renewal dances and ceremonies, the white deerskin dance, and other dances displaying ancient prized items of spiritual power.  The center of the state was dominated by the Kuksu and related cults, centering on the Patwin, Wappo, and Pomo groups.  The spectacular rock art of the Chumash and Yokuts (and probably the Gabrielino and other Shoshoneans, though evidence is mostly lost) indicates another religious area.  The bird songs of the lower Colorado and the Chinigchinich cult of the Luiseno and their neighbors also involved two or three major linguistic groupings each (counting the river Yumans as basically one group).  Finally, the rock art of the inner deserts, focusing on mountain sheep in many sites, is distinctive. 

            By contrast, more general folklore, as well as material culture, spread widely; it could be shared by anyone within hundreds of miles.  Folktales gradually transform, with north and south being quite different.  Language was not much of a barrier, and of course hardly a barrier at all to the spread and copying of material items.

Central to religion was spiritual ability and efficacy.  I have noted above the tendency of anthropologists to use the word “power” for what Native people generally call “knowledge.”  One could use the phrase “power/knowledge” if it had not been preempted by Foucault for a very different idea.

A model developed especially with the Luiseño concept of ayelkwi, but valid rather widely (especially for groups in the south coast, of course), lists four characteristics:  “Power is sentient and the principal causative agent in the universe”; it is found in the upper, middle, and lower worlds and “possessed by anything having ‘life,’” which can include rocks and tools as well as biota; it is in some degree of equilibrium in the cosmos; and man is a central figure in power networks (Bean 1992:22, citing and partly following White 1963).  One might qualify this for other parts of the state primarily in regard to clause 4; in some places (including central California, if I read the myths aright), humans are definitely less central than some supernatural beings, and probably some of the larger natural ones too.  Power is totally bound up in geography, with dramatic rocks, peaks, mountains, waterfalls, and other striking landmarks being major “power places.” 

People got power from vision questing in the wilderness.  They would undergo strong physical discipline:  enduring cold and heat, bathing in freezing waters, living with little or no food and water, and so on.  (The classic account of vision questing, Ruth Benedict [1923], refers to the Plateau area just north of California; her account is broadly valid for the latter place.)  The Achomawi preserved this knowledge later than most and were more willing to share it, so the map of their power spots provided by D. L. Olmstedt and Omer Stewart (1978:226) is exceptionally valuable.  Famous rock art sites are often power places.  (Places I know personally, but that are unpublished, shall remain unidentified!)  

  Most of the spots are dramatic peaks, but some are canyons, lakes, and large springs.  Power is largely a spiritual essence that allows beings (including humans—to the degree they have learned it) to control and create.  It is typically exercised through song.  Shamans cure by singing just as the creator beings shaped the world by singing.  However, actual physical and mental ability to do things is an expression of power, so it is not entirely “supernatural” by European standards.  It is learned through conventional training as well as through visions and dreams.  Knowledge of how to manage natural resources is a key part of power.

As noted previously, California Native peoples sought visions, usually in arduous vision quests, at puberty, in the wilderness.  This was another religious mechanism binding Californians to their landscape.  Apparently some groups, at least the Coast Central Pomo (Loeb 1926:320), did not have the vision quest.  Indeed, Loeb notes that the Pomo in general lacked a belief in guardian spirits, otherwise the goal of vision quests among most California (and indeed most North American) peoples.  They did have shamans and shamanic healers, however, and must have done something to get that power.  However, the Pomo and Native people everywhere dreamed of animals, daydreamed about animals, and interpreted their dreamings as important.

 Shamans operate by controlling power; but, again, in the center and north, they operate more by controlling specific “pains” that they own.  To be shamans or other religious officiants they had to have visions giving medicine power.  (Strictly speaking, the term “shaman” applies to healers of the ancient societies of Siberia, and it might be better to call the Californian healers “medicine persons,” but “shaman” is established in the literature and fairly well justified by the similarity of beliefs and practices to Siberian ones.  See Bean [ed.] 1992.)

The culturally and technologically simpler groups had vision-questing shamans and no other religious practitioners, but the complex chiefdoms had whole ranges of religious officiants.  These including true priests: officiants of organized religious cults (as opposed to shamans, who are independent individuals with special healing and visionary powers).  The Kuksu cult complex of central California had a priesthood (Loeb 1926:320), which presumably led to the decline or disappearance of vision questing among the Coast Central Pomo.  The Chumash of southwestern California had a whole range of shamans and priests with specialized functions, ranging from weather control to fishing to canoe safety (Bean and King 1974; Gamble 2008).  

Californians feared shamans and wizards with transforming and poisoning powers.  They acquired special visions of their familiar spirits.  These were often animal powers, but could be other natural or supernatural beings.  Different animals gave different powers, often related to the animal’s traits; rattlesnake power often involved the ability to cure rattlesnake bites, for instance.  These beliefs closely resemble shamanistic beliefs elsewhere, from eastern North America to Siberia.

A particularly important problem was “bear doctors,” men who had bear power knew the magic for transforming themselves into grizzlies at will.  These were known and feared all over the state, from the Hupa to the Chemehuevi (Burrill 1993; Laird 1976:38).  Real grizzlies usually prefer to leave humans alone, but bear doctors transform themselves in order to do harm.  One remembers the bear transformation stories in the Old World, from the berserk (“bear shirt”) men of ancient Scandinavia and the Celtic Arthur (“bear man,” “were-bear”) to the Ainu bear cult with its divinization of bears.  People could sometimes transform into other kinds of animals, and animals and spirits could become or appear to be people; of course the animals in the time before people came were humanoid to varying degrees.  Related Old World figures are the werewolf, were-tiger, and leopard-man.  All come from a stratum of thought that is most famously seen in Siberian shamanism but is far more widespread.  Animal transformations are central to this cosmology. 

Other supernatural and ghostly transformations are known.  People with supernatural powers can invoke and control this shape-shifting.  So can many animals.  The raccoon dog (tanuki, often mistranslated “badger”) is a shape-shifter in Japan, and some tanuki stories are related to Californian Coyote tales.  The trickery of the fox is proverbial throughout Eurasia.  Modern Europeans have lost the transformation tales, but foxes in east Asia routinely turn into beautiful women to beguile men.

Common all over the state, but especially in the dry southeast, were weather shamans who could bring rain and snow.  Some songs for this purpose have been recorded, and a rain shaman’s bundle has been almost miraculously preserved and studied (Fenenga et al. 2012; Hopkins et al. 2012).  It came from the Tübatulabal of the Kern River valley, but incorporated many items, especially steatite smoking pipes, from the Chumash.  These are known to have been used by the coastal tribes to blow smoke clouds that invited rain clouds by a form of sympathetic magic.  Sometimes water was thrown into the air, during ceremonies, for similar reasons.  The bundle was used in ceremonies along with detailed chants that were guaranteed to bring rain (if properly carried out, of course).  Shamans had to know how to stop rain, to prevent large rains they invoked from causing floods.  There were many adept weather shamans among the Tübatulabal and their neighbors until quite recently.  The use of a magic bundle, incorporating a collection of sacred stones and other items, is very widespread in North America (see esp. Wildschut 1975 on Crow bundles; one Crow doctor, showing some small stones with some gravel near them, said—with a twinkle in his eye—that the rocks in the bundle had mated and had a litter).

Other “Indian doctors” could send pains into people.  These were often pebbles, small snakes, or other physical objects.  A “sucking doctor” would be called to suck this pain out.  He (rarely she) would suck on the belly or chest of the patient, sometimes hard enough to draw blood (assumed to be posioned).  Often he would produce the stone or small animal.  I have encountered this practice among the Maya as well; my old friend Don José Cauich Canul sucked a live scorpion from the little niece of my field assistant Don Felix Medina Tzuc.  I did not see this, but Don Felix described it.  He was duly impressed.  Don José has taught me something of his craft, including his use of sleight-of-hand, so I know where the centipede really came from.  Claude Lévi-Strauss (1963 [1958]) has pointed out that this sort of deception is typically done by doctors who believe that the old-timers really had such powers, but modern ones have less power and must imitate the old-timers as best they can.  This seems to fit California and Maya cases.

            Arts represented interaction with the nonhuman realm. Among the Yokuts, people wore crowns of flowers during spring (Gayton 1976:83).  

Much of the art were clearly associated with shamanism; more is inferentially so.  The spectacular rock art of southern and Baja California—some of the most outstanding in the world—is highly abstract, and also features strange and unearthly creatures.  Most viewers of the art, from anthropologists to artists, feel that shamanism and vision states must be involved.  (Some reviews include Campbell 2007; Grant 1965; Whitley 2000, notably speculative; and for Baja California, Crosby 1997, a more ambitious work than anything devoted to Alta California.  See also Jean Clottes’ stunning book Cave Art, 2008, which deals with the paleolithic art of Europe but presents California material for comparison on pp. 300-303.)  Other, more unassuming or crude pictographs and petroglyphs are almost certainly mere “Kilroy was here” markers, or at best markers of local descent-group territory.  Unfortunately, we do not have the keys (though see Spoon et al. 2014a, 2014b—the Nevada Paiute still know something).  The shamans are gone. 

There are a few recorded explanations, most of which refer not to shamanic visions but to puberty rites.  Often, puberty rites involved explanations of the cosmos using pictorial but abstract symbols, and sometimes the initiates were supposed to draw geometric designs of their own.  The Luiseno girls’ puberty rite, for instance, involved drawing red checkerboard, diamond, or maze patterns on rocks, and many of these survived in my younger days in the Riverside area.  Unfortunately most have faded now. 

Otherwise, outside of fairly obvious representations of animals, we have little identifiable rock art.  Earlier theories of hunting magic have gone by the wayside.  Besides the known cases just noted, other rock art sites are very often astronomically aligned—in canyons down which the equinoctial sunrise strikes, for instance—or are on remote and spectacular rock outcrops or in caves, rather than along game trails or near water holes or the like.  It is very possible that a general relationship with the cosmos was intended and good luck in hunting was one perceived consequence.  However, the focus remains on that general relationship, not on a specific pragmatic application.

An excellent analysis of a mountain sheep shrine, by Robert Yohe and Alan Garfinkel (2012), summarizes all that is known of mountain sheep ceremonies, rock art, and hunting lore from southeast California.  Clearly, mountain sheep were important game animals, and a huge and complex body of lore surrounded them.  (They were once extremely abundant; their rarity today is due to introduced sheep diseases as well as overhunting and habitat destruction.)  The content of ritual is lost to us, but at least there are still large amounts of art and religious construction to analyze.

Songs were basic to activities and teachings.  They gave and expressed power, and had power themselves.  A good explanation was given by a California basketmaker, Mrs. Mattz.  Richard West reports that she

            “…was hired to teach basket making at a local university.  After three weeks, her students complained that all they had done was sing songs…. Mrs. Mattz, taken aback, replied that the were learning to make baskets.  She explained that the process starts with songs that are sung so as not to insult the plants when the materials for the baskets are picked.  So her students learned the songs….. Upon their return to the classroom, however, the students again were dismayed when Mrs. Mattz began to teach them yet more songs.  This time she wanted them to learn the songs that must be sung as yo soften the materials in your mouth before you start to weave….  The students protested…. Mrs. Mattz…patiently explained the obvious to them: “You’re missing the point,” she said, “a basket is a song made visible.”  (Quoted Wilkinson 2010:382). 

Appendix

            To give the flavor of Californian religious narrative, let us consider the beginning of the creation myth told by Hanc’ibyjim (Tom Young) to Roland Dixon in 1902-03 (Dixon 1912).  This myth was partially retranslated and massively rewritten by William Shipley (1991).  I will do still another rewrite, though I do not know the Maidu language and have to rely on Dixon and Shipley.

            Neither of the translators refers to the incredible chantlike prosody of the narrative, which comes across even to a non-Maidu-speaker like me.  It is worth setting some of this up in poetic form.  Hanc’ibyjim uses the obligatory marker of speech, –tsoia (“it is said”), as a chorus, its sharp sound contrasting with the beautiful flow of the narrative, full of “a” and “m” sounds.  Simply enjoy the sounds before reading the meaning.  (Most letters are pronounced as in Spanish, umlaut vowels as in German.  The apostrophe marks the accented syllable [not a glottal stop].)

Kō’doyapen kan ūniñ’ ko’do momim’ opit’mőni hintsetō’yetsoiam.

Hin’tstetoyewē’bisim hōmōñ’ jidiu; dunaat yj;tun jawun;naat tsemen’tsoia.

Tsai’tsainom mai’dűm hesī’kimaat hesim’maat kai’noyemen’tsoia.

Amőn’ikan ūniñ’ ka’dom tsewu’suktipem ka’dom yőtson’otsoia.

Epin’iñkoyōdi kō’do tsehe’hetsonopem yak’hubőktsoia.

Adōñ’kan wasā’ hubőktsoia.  (Dixon 1912:4.)

Literally, the first two lines means “Earth-Maker and this world water full-when drifted about, it is said.  Kept drifting about where world-in indeed little earth indeed saw-not, it is said.”

            Translating the first part of the story (and leaving out the endless repetition of “it is said,” so effective in Maidu, so monotonous in English):

Earthmaker, when this world was covered with water, drifted.

He kept drifting; he saw nothing, not even a bit of earth.

He saw no creatures of any kind, nothing flying.

He went on and on, over the unseen earth.

The world seemed transparent, like the Valley Above in the sky.

He felt sad.

“How, I wonder—how, I wonder—where, I wonder, in what world or place, can we see the earth?”  he said.  (After Dixon 1912:4 and Shipley 1991:18.)

[Coyote then appears, and he and Earthmaker discuss creating the world.  Earthmaker sings:]

Where are you, my great mountains, my world mountains?

            [Coyote sings:]

Where are you, my foggy mountains, my world I could travel?

            [A tiny piece of land like a bird’s nest then appears, and the two succeed in stretching it to make a world.  Meadowlark joins them, and Coyote goes on:]

My world, where I can go along the edge of the meadow,

My world, where I can travel side to side, wander all ways,

My world of mountains beyond mountains,

I call, singing, to my traveling-world,

In such a world shall I wander.

            [There is some conference among the three, about how to paint the world, and Coyote continues:]

I will paint it with blood,

There will be blood in the world,

Creatures with blood will be born,

Animals with blood will be born,

Deer and other animals,

People shall be born,

Nothing will be missing, all those with blood will be born.

Red rocks will come into being,

The world will seem painted with blood,

It will be beautiful.  (After Dixon 1912:5-10 and Shipley 1991:19-22.)

Coyote…stretched out the land with his feet.

‘Pushing it out, little by little,

He stretched it out to where the usn rises—

Foirst, he stretched it out to there.

Then, to the south, and to where the sun sets,

He stretched it out, little by little.  (Shipley 1991:22.)

            Creation continues, in an epic poem filled with intense images like those above.  This story is as beautiful and powerful as Genesis and one of the great religious poems of the world, yet it remains unknown, and neither Dixon’s nor Shipley’s translations do it justice (judging from analysis of Dixon’s line-by-line translation).  We need a Maidu to do a real translation that can bring out the full meanings and keep the power of the language.

References

Allen, Michael F.; Cameron W. Barrows; Michael D. Bell; G. Darrel Jenerette; Robert F. Johnson; Edith B. Allen.  2014.  “Threats to California’s Desert Ecosystems.”  Fremontia 42:2:3-8.

Anderson, M. Kat.  1999.  “The Fire, Pruning, and Coppice Management of Temperate Ecosystems for Basketry Material by California Indian Tribes.”  Human Ecology 27:79-113. 

—  2005.  Tending the Wild:  Native American Knowledge and the Management of California’s Natural Resources.  Berkeley:  University of California Press.

Anderson, M. Kat (ed.).  2017.  Special Issue: California Geophytes.  Fremontia, 44:3.

Anderson, M. Kat, and Frank K. Lake.  2013.  “California Indian Ethnomycology and Associated Forest Management.”  Journal of Ethnobiology 33:33-85.

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Categories
Articles

The Huihui Yaofang: List of Medicinals, with Comparisons

Arabic Medicine in China: Tradition, Innovation and Change

 

Paul D. Buell

Eugene N. Anderson

 

 

Part B: Medicinal Items Mentioned and Used in the Huihui Yaofang [Ver. 16 August 2018]

 

  1. N. Anderson

Characters supplied by Paul D. Buell

 

Introduction

 

As most readers will know, the Huihui Yaofang was a vast encyclopedia of Near Eastern medicine, compiled—evidently from Central Asian sources and probably by Iranic-speaking experts—in Yuan China, in the 14th century; what survives is about 1/6 of a Ming edition.

 

A modern edition appeared in 1996.  Editor Y.C. Kong and his collaborators—including Shiu-Ying Hu, the world’s leading expert on China’s ethnobotany—have identified most of the medicinals. We have found the rest, with a very few exceptions. (Another modern edition, by Song Xing, 2002, adds some useful confirmation.) Shiu-ying Hu died in 2012 at age 102, having had an active career as ethnobotanist for Harvard University for over 70 years.

 

In what follows, we list the substances with their modern biological classification and with brief summaries of their ascribed medical values in classical Greek, Arab, Jewish, Central Asian, Indian and Chinese medicine, using the standard references (discussed in detail below).

 

Listings:

 

A total of around 381 entries appears below (not counting synonyms and several completely unidentifiable items, which would bring the total to approximately 416). This does not translate to 381 species, because there are entries for generic things (“dung,” “soil”) and some entries that cover several species of plants that seem similar and were apparently used similarly. The actual total of identifiable species (or substances) is 287 plants, 68 animals and animal products, and 26 minerals. In some cases, multiple substances are derived from one species; in others, we are not sure of which species was used in the HHYF and thus include data for two or three similar ones. We have tried to make one entry correspond to one taxon as listed the HHYF. In many accounts we have included data on related species when such data are clearly relevant (e.g. when several similar species are used in similar ways in Central Asian medicine, as with oreganos, smartweeds, and many others). At the same time, when different species within a genus have different names in the HHYF, as with cinnamon relatives, mints, and Prunus, we have given separate accounts to each named category.

 

We can do no more than follow the identifications in Kong’s edition (Kong 1996) of the HHYF, including the various papers republished there. but some of these identifications are almost certainly wrong (see e.g. Launaea below). Further work is sorely needed.  Fortunately, most of the Arabic, Persian and Chinese names are well known and apply to well-known herbal and animal medicinals. It is striking to note how many of the plants in the HHYF are still used, and proven by biomedical research to have actual value.

 

The plant family assignments given herein are not always those given in earlier sources. When possible, I follow Hu Shiu-ying’s great work on Chinese food plants.[1] Recent research, especially genomic and cladistic work, has dramatically revised many earlier family alignments. The lily family, in particular, was once known as “the Smith family of the plant world”; there were once thousands of “lilies” only very dubiously related. This family has now been broken up into several tightly-defined groups that are known to be actual lineages. Everyone knew the lilies were a mess, but no one knew quite what to do about it, until modern genetics and chemistry gave them the tools.

 

We have tried to be conservative on this, not accepting unproven changes. Where confusion would be certain and problematic, because the changes are particularly recent, we have included the traditional family names in parentheses after the modern ones. (The very old, long-abandoned names ‘Compositae’ for Asteraceae, ‘Labiatae’ for Lamiaceae, ‘Cruciferae’ for Brassicaceae, and ‘Umbelliferae’ for Apiaceae are used in the oldest literature. I have not bothered to indicate this below.)

 

Species and genus names are given in standard current versions, which may need revision in some cases. Dominik Wujastyk)[2] is not alone is complaining not only about the difficulty of finding scientific names for Asian herbs, but also about the lack of taxonomic agreement about names even when the identifications are certain. Nonetheless, there is a reason for changes in Latin nomenclature.  Some names are just plain wrong. Others were (mis)applied by scientists who did not realize someone had named the plant already. Most often, research shows that a plant is more different from, or more similar to, another plant than was previously realized. In Wujastyk’s example, Nardostachys jatamansi, Indian spikenard, was once classed in the genus Valeriana, but turned out to be too different to fit in that genus.  Other names have also been applied to it but are not valid. At least scientific names are consistent and are based on something. The Sanskrit, Arabic, Chinese, English, and other names that have been used for Nardostachys are also confusing, as is often the case. Vernacular names are usually far too inconsistent to be very useful, though the Chinese did achieve a commendable consistency in herbal usage; Li Shizhen’s taxonomy is quite comparable to the best European taxonomy of his time in its systematic consistency. China lacked only a Linnaeus.

 

There is no question about the names—in Latin, Arabic, or Chinese—of common plants like fennel and coriander, but in folk practice, common names are regularly applied to anything of the same genus as the “correct” plant, and very different plants may be lumped under one name according to appearance. This became particularly problematic when New World crops came to Asia, because they were all too often given the name of some common native plant, leading to endless confusion. The Chinese transferred the name of an obscure variety of millet to maize.  Guavas were “foreign pomegranates,” pineapples were “foreign jakfruit,” and so for countless other species. All too often the word “foreign” is dropped in ordinary usage. In much of southeast Asia, chile (Capsicum annuum) replaced the completely unrelated and dissimilar long pepper (Piper longum) in spice use, and thus took over its name—for instance, lada in Malaysia and Indonesia. Mercifully, the HHYF dates to an earlier time, but we can see the same principle operating: often a Chinese name was used for a Near Eastern one labeling a plant of the same genus. We are left wondering if the Chinese plant itself was substituted. For example, recipes calling for quince use the Chinese name of the Chinese quince; we have no idea whether they used that species, or used the Near Eastern quince under the same name, or both.

 

 

Sources Used and Summarized

 

Hu: refers to Hu’s table, pp. 490 ff in the HHYF edition, of when plants are first mentioned in Chinese herbals. (She gives traditional dates for those. The actual dates of the entries in question may be later, since the Chinese, like modern medical writers, revised their medical textbooks every so often.)

 

From here onward, sources are listed, and utilized in the text, in chronological order of the material they treat: Ancient Egypt first, then the Greeks, and then the Muslim and Jewish sources in order by year, then Nadkarni’s Indian remedies, and finally Li’s Bencao Gangmu.

 

Material in parentheses is ENA’s commentary.

 

Manniche: Lisa Manniche’s An Ancient Egyptian Herbal brings together the relevant lore from the old papyri. I have briefly summarized pre-Greek uses. Greek medicine was introduced with Alexander the Great, if not before, and became dominant.

 

Theophrastus: Theophrastus, a student a Plato and Aristotle, compiled the first known botany textbook, a superb and thorough overview. In some areas, notably timber, his work is up-to-date enough to need few revisions today. He practiced ethnobotany 2200 years avant la lettre by asking mountain and island folk about their plants and plant uses; he bunched together in a brief section the material about which he had a healthy skepticism, such as the idea that mandrake root harvest required one to draw three circles around the plant with a sword, and for a second piece one must dance around the plant talking of erotic love.[3]

 

Unfortunately for our purposes here, his section on medical uses is short; possibly much is lost, or possibly he ran out of time. I have drawn on a few accounts where the plants are identifiable and the uses specified in some detail.

 

Theophrastus was unknown in Western Europe until the Renaissance, being “translated from Greek into Latin by Teodoro of Gaza (c. 1398-c. 1478).”[4] There is no evidence that he was any better known in Mongolia.

 

Athenaeus, in The Deipnosophists (1928-1941),[5] quotes Theophrastus and others on edible plants and medicine, but in snippets too short to be of any value here. The very long book is purportedly a record of a long dinner spent discussing foods, but is merely a bit of scholarship by quotation; no dinner could possibly be that dull, surely?

 

Dioscorides: Dioscorides shows a fascination with plants that are diuretic, emmenagogue, abortifacient, and curative of poisoning. Snakebite especially was an obsession, emphasized far beyond any believable role it may have had in Roman Empire pathology. Countless plants are given as snakebite cures. By modern standards, none of them works. This stands in contrast to the diuretics and abortifacients, many or most of which do work.

 

One wonders how all this could be sustained. How could so many plants be cited for snakebite, when none actually functions against venom? Probably, the Greeks, like many people today, did not well distinguish venomous from nonvenomous snakes, and listed as “good for snakebite” anything that relieved a nonvenomous bite.

 

Skin diseases also feature largely in his perspective. This makes more sense; skin conditions are very common, and easily relieved (if not always cured) by commonly available plant materials.  The modern Yucatec Maya have a vast number of skin remedies, because they have a vast number of skin problems. They explain that one never knows what plants will be around when one is suddenly wounded or burned in the field, and so one must know all sorts of plants that can provide first aid.  In addition, some remedies work for one condition, some for another. The ancient Mediterranean surely had similar problems and needs.

 

Fits, convulsions, and pains rank next. Cures for fevers and other classic infectious-disease syndromes are notably fewer. He describes herbs in concrete terms, rarely in theoretical except to say that some are “warming”; most of these do indeed feel warming, often because they stimulate blood flow to the skin. A few are cooling. The theories of Galen are far from Dioscorides’ pragmatic soldier’s approach.

 

This relative listing of concerns evidently provides much insight into what were, in Dioscorides’ day, considered to be the common problems. Perhaps they were of special concern to soldiers in the field.

 

Like herbalists everywhere (at least everywhere that the family occurs), Dioscorides uses many mints (Lamiaceae). This family does indeed contain a striking number of medically active substances, including many strong antibiotics. More notable is his—and the Greco-Roman world’s—fondness for Apiaceae (carrot family, including celery, dill, and other common flavorings). A vast variety is recommended, and many rank among his cure-alls. Apiaceous seeds often contain digestion-aiding oils, and the resins of many have medical effects. Still, one wonders how the value of Apiaceae became so emphasized.

 

Available is Robert Gunther’s 1934 edition of the translation by the great English botanist John Goodyer. Goodyer translated the book in 1652-55 but never published it, and indeed it has never been published except in this one edition. Identifications are often tentative, though many have worked on the problem; the 1934 book includes an appendix listing identifications assembled by Charles Daubeny in 1857[6]  and provides updated ones. These seem generally accurate, but I have made silent corrections in some cases, especially for new scientific usages. Some identifications are clearly wrong (see e.g. under Pinus below) and many must be only guesses.

 

Goodyer inconsistently transliterated Greek ypsilon as “y” or “u.” To make comparison with scientific and English names easier, I follow standard botanical usage, making it “y” when it is a stand-alone vowel or first vowel in a diphthong and “u” when the second element in diphthongs.  (I thus avoid the French system, widely used today in English as well as French, in which ypsilon is “u” and the long-u sound is “ou.”)

 

Galen of Pergamon (130-200 AD):  Galen’s book on food[7]  adds very little to the specifics of herbal application and use. He usually added his theoretical classification system to the general herbal knowledge of the time (better found in Dioscorides, Pliny, etc.).

 

Anthimus (fl. 511-534),[8] though an important medical writer of later antiquity, has even less of relevance here. But he gives many interesting notes on uses and digestibility, but little about medicine.

 

Paul of Aegina (625-690) maintained the herbal and Galenic traditions in Byzantium. He was a key link to later medicine and is among those Greek authorities cited by name in the HHYF.

 

Levey: Martin Levey’s translation of medical formulary of Al-Kindī (801-873)[9] goes well beyond mere translation; his enormous ethnobotanical appendix covers everything from ancient Sumer, Babylon, and Egypt to modern India. Below, however, we focus on Al-Kindī’s own uses. His remedies are overwhelmingly for external application; sores, skin problems, and mouth and eye conditions were obviously major problems then, as they are today in the Middle East. Many of the other remedies are for stomach ailments, and are usually good homely remedies and mild but effective herbal cures of the sort familiar to many who grew up in mid-20th century America.

 

Notable is the overlap between Al-Kindī’s drugs and the HHYF’s. Few drugs are found in one but not the other. One is also struck by the similarity with the remedies recorded from Morocco by Bellakhdar et al.[10] in the late 20th century, and visible now in such venues as the great bazaar in and around the center of Marrakesh. Notable, also, and not unrelated, are the high percentage of Al-Kindī’s drug names that have gone over into English, or, alternatively, are from the Greek and thus cognate with Greco-English and/or scientific names. Greek kentaurion became Arabic qanṭūriyūn, Latin and scientific Centaurium, English “centaury.”

 

Al-Bīrūnī (973-1048): This Central Asian polymath, one of the greatest Islamic scholars, produced Al-Bīrūnī’s Book on Pharmacy and Materia Medica, edited and translated by the Pakistani Yunani hakim (doctor) Mohammed Said.[11] Al-Bīrūnī spent time in India and wrote an excellent account of that subcontinent, and thus learned about Indian drugs, though it is not clear if he had done so when he wrote this herbal. Even without full Indian treatment, his herbal is one of the more astonishing medical sources of all time. An incredible work listing some 850 simples, it updated Dioscorides and added Near Eastern discoveries and philologies.  Unfortunately for our purposes, it is much more an economic botany than a pharmacology.  Details on medicinal uses are fewer than on wood uses, local varieties, edibility, and even poetic and metaphoric uses. When he does give medical uses, he often cites them to Dioscorides or to Rāzī. It is clear from the entries that he intended this book to be used as a supplement to their herbals. It provides names in many languages, background information, and substitutions, but generally refers the reader to them (sometimes to Galen, Mesue, and others) for the medicinal uses. When he does give medicinal uses, it is often because the plant is obscure. Such obscure plants did not generally become known to the Mongols or Chinese, and thus are outside our scope here. Serious comments on medical uses almost stop about half way through, resuming with Letter 20. (A copyist at the end of 19 in the version used by Mohammed Said says the previous copyist must have been “insane,” because there were so many mistakes and omissions).  Minor comments and names are ignored in the present work. Said’s translation is an astounding accomplishment in itself, involving not only translation and annotation but identification of the plants, animals and minerals mentioned; moreover, Sami Hamarneh provides an appendix reviewing al-Bīrūnī’s life and work and providing notes on all the dozens of authors drawn on by al-Bīrūnī in the book.

 

Here and elsewhere, Said and Hamarneh have provided a very large percentage of the English-language material on medieval Near Eastern medicine, just as Fred Rosner has done on the medieval Jewish material.[12] Without them and a very few others (notably Michael Dols and Martin Levey) we would know very little about this huge and important tradition.

 

Avicenna (Ibn Sīnā, 980-1037). Avicenna, born near Bukhara, was probably the greatest medical man between Galen and the “scientific revolution” of the 16th-17th centuries. Avicenna’s Canon was the basic medical book of the entire western world for centuries.  Its second volume is an herbal. Unavailable in English till very recently, this book was translated by the Hamdard Delhi group of Yunani doctors and edited and published by Laleh Bakhtiar.[13] (At the same time, the first volume was translated and published;[14] it had appeared before in a poor summary.) Avicenna’s drug records are summarized below.

 

An interesting point about Avicenna’s herbal, and to an extent al-Bīrūnī’s, is their awareness of Indian drugs. In Central Asia, they had much more opportunity to learn of these.

 

Like many later authorities, Avicenna uses very many drugs for the same purposes, and usually uses any given drug for many purposes. In particular, there is a standard list of uses for drugs considered hot and dry in the humoral system—as most active drugs are. They are used externally for swellings and wounds, and for earaches and eye troubles; internally, for respiratory problems and stomach aches. Many, perhaps most, of them do indeed work for these conditions—but some are much better than others. Some could be combined, but that is not often mentioned. I assume that the situation is the same as that which my Maya friends in the Yucatan Peninsula explained to ENA: You have to know all the plants that treat a given condition, because you never know which plants will be available when the need arises.

 

Like Dioscorides, he recommends an astonishing number of abortifacients—many of which are well-known in modern medical literature (and are often quite dangerous). Some of this was precautionary—warning women what to avoid—but at the very least these early societies, with their supposedly pronatalist policies, felt a clear need to know what would terminate a pregnancy.

 

Avicenna has notes on 226 of our medicinals: 182 plants, 32 animals, 12 minerals. This is by far the most mentions in any authority, Li Shizhen being the runner-up with 203.

 

Nasrallah: Nawal Nasrallah[15] appends to her translation of a medieval Arab cookbook an enormous, comprehensive glossary of Arabic terms for foods, including medicinal items. She includes considerable material from Medieval medical herbals. Some material is summarized below, but most of it duplicates the accounts in the more complete translations cited herein.

 

Graziani:[16] A general study of medieval Arab medicine as seen in the works of Ibn Jazlah (d. ca. 1100). He provides an appendix listing major drugs; in this he not only gives some of Ibn Jazlah’s uses, but provides considerable valuable comparative material, including otherwise impossible to find folk uses of today.

 

Maimonides (1135-1204): Maimonides[17]  lists several uses, mostly of foods, closely following Galen and Dioscorides. Maimonides’ incredible dictionary of drug names,[18] an early ethnobotany, is, alas, lacking in medical detail.

 

Levey and Al-Khaledy:[19] Translation and annotation of the important herbal of Shams al-Dīn Al-Samarqandī (ca. 1250-ca. 1310), the closest well-studied source in time and space to the HHYF. Most of the common drugs below are used by Al-Samarqandī, but it is hard to tell exactly how in most cases, since he usually provides only a long list of ingredients in an introductory paragraph or for a formulary recipe. It would be tedious to mention all cases, so only the most important ones are inserted in the species accounts below. Al-Samarqandī used carrot, cinnamon, cress, cucumbers, cyperus, frankincense, ginger, gourds, ironwood, lavender, lettuce, malabathrum, mint, myrrh, nightshade, peppers (black, cubeb, long), sagapenum, sarcocol, senna/cassia, scammony, sebesten, sesame, tarragon, wormwood, the mineral remedies, and most of the other commoner remedies described in the species accounts below, presumably in the usual ways. He also used several remedies not found in what we have of the HHYF, including whey (“milk of cheese”), which he recommends highly.

 

Lev and Amar: Efraim Lev and Zohar Amar[20] have studied the Cairo Genizah documents concerning medicine and extracted a vast amount of medical lore, including discussion of 278 materia medica items—interestingly close to the figure of 286, the figure for the medieval Levant, and also the average of modern folk medicine lists they could discover for the Middle East (but the modern Cairo markets produced fully 504 items, raising that average considerably).  They provide an extremely valuable review of materia medica in the Greek-Arabic-Jewish tradition from Theophrastus to the present (pp. 55-86). The entries under particular drugs review all early sources. This is the best and most valuable single compendium of medieval Near Eastern medications, but most of the information in it is from—or at least in—the other sources cited here, and it seems preferable to cite to them.

 

The discussions of drugs show that the Genizah physicians tended to use almost any drug for almost any condition. (So did Avicenna. So did medieval European doctors).[21] In particular, almost every animal, mineral and vegetable was used for the most common complaints—eye problems, stomach upsets, skin pathologies of every kind, kidney problems, hemorrhoids, swellings, and so on. One becomes weary of reading the same long list of uses for every drug, even those—and there are many—that have no conceivable value for any of the stated purposes. Clearly, the idea was to try everything and hope something worked.

 

Notable, here and in the classic early sources, is the use of virtually everything for eye medicine.  This is explained by the fact that the Near East’s extreme dryness, extreme dustiness and extreme crowding have always caused eye problems and diseases to be a major concern here—far more so than in countries with less extreme conditions. Evidently, anything that could soothe the eye, let alone actually treat diseases there, was pressed into service.

 

The level of sharing with the HHYF is astonishing. Some 200 of the 278 are shared, including all the mjaor ones. Only very local items (spiny lizards, rare desert plants, and the like) are not.

 

Kamal:  Kamal’s modern-day encyclopedia of Islamic medicine[22] contains a great deal about pharmaceuticals. It also has considerable data on bites, cancers, etc.

 

Fattening drugs: Kamal cites Avicenna: Almonds, hazelnuts, nigella, camphor, pistachois, cannabis (presumably the seeds), and pine seeds. Make into pills and take with wine. These are not only fattening but aphrodisiac.[23]

 

Conversely, slimming can be aided by centaury, birthwort, gentian, germander, parsley, sumac, and other herbs.[24]

 

Cauterization:  Major section; for many purposes. Local burning seems to have been used for almost everything. A huge section covers almost every condition.

 

Compounds: Another large section.[25]

 

Bellakhdar et al.:[26] A study of modern Moroccan folk and traditional medical uses. They recorded 231 species and 567 indications. Digestive remedies were the most frequent, followed by cosmetic and skin uses. (ENA has had the opportunity to observe this medicinal tradition in the field, visiting traditional drug markets and observing medicinal plants in the Atlas; thanks to Dr. M. Ouhammou for superb ethnobotanical guiding.) The findings here show great similarity to Kamal’s Egyptian data and lesser but real similarity to ancient and medieval uses. There is a truly astonishing degree of overlap between modern Morocco and medieval North China in species and uses. There would surely be more if more of the HHYF had survived.

 

Ghazanfar:[27] This book is a wonderful ethnobotany of Arabia. Ghazanfar is based in Oman, an exceptionally enlightened Arab country as far as scholarship goes. She gives full nomenclature, usage, and treatment directions, especially for Omani practice. She gives very detailed descriptions of treatments and treatment methods. Particularly unique and valuable are her findings on women’s medicines, especially in relation to childbirth; this is an area almost totally inaccessible to male researchers today (less so in medieval times, when gender attitudes were generally more liberal in Arabia than they are now). She also has a great deal on aphrodisiacs—some two dozen plants being noted—and one wishes she had indicated whether any of these are used by women. This book would repay much more comparative research, but I am limiting citations to very basic nomenclature (no strictly local names) and uses. Interesting here, especially in comparison with Levey, are the number of plants in the HHYF that are in Arabic medicine but not in her book—usually because they are not native to desert Arabia, but are Greek plants (often extending into northern Arabia and montane Iran).

 

Lebling and Pepperdine:[28] This valuable book on Saudi Arabian folk medicine is a beautifully illustrated popular account (a “coffee table book”) rather than a thorough ethnobotany, but it is rigorous and valuable as far as it goes. It records in detail many household remedies. Again, the presence of a female researcher (Donna Pepperdine) allowed otherwise inaccessible material on women and childbirth to be recorded. Among the most interesting findings here is the apparently universal use of spices and herbs to restore strength and tone after delivery; this seems a close equivalent to the Chinese custom of “doing the month” by eating foods rich in protein, iron, calcium and other mineral nutrients.

 

Mandaville:[29]  James Mandaville’s superb recent ethnobotany of the Bedouin of Arabia.

 

Another reference with many modern folkloric uses of these plants is by Chishtiyya;[30] it adds little to what is extracted below, but has some interesting brief formulas that may be compared with the much longer ones in the HHYF.

 

Madanapāla Nighantu: An ayurvedic materia medica compiled for King Madanapāla (a central Indian king) in 1374 A.D., and thus almost contemporary with the HHYF. It has been edited and translated by Vaidya Bhagwan Dash assisted by K. Kanchan Gupta.[31] They provide good annotations and give the Sanskrit and many transliterations. Disease name translations are only approximate; the Sanskrit is given so that one can check the actual medieval indications. I have not provided the full transcriptions. In general, few of his remedies are in the HHYF. Many congeners are, but I have not summarized their qualities here.

 

The book discusses the various values of different types of waters, as does the YSCY and some of the Arab and Persian sources. It also discusses alcohol and alcoholic drinks at length—something that is of course rather thinly represented in Islamic works, and is surprisingly thin in Chinese sources also.

 

Interesting is the amount of sharing with the Near Eastern sources from slightly earlier.  Evidently, yunani (“Ionian,” i.e. Galenic) medicine had influenced ayurveda enormously by this time, and ayurveda had influenced the Near East at least as much. Outside our purview here, but very interesting in this text, are the many recommendations about foods, seasonal regimen (food, sex, exercise, etc.), and other matter, reasonably close to the Near Eastern works.

 

Dash’s identifications are not always perfect; Psidium guajava is given for one name (not in our database), but it did not reach India until the 16th century.

 

Nadkarni:[32] A standard English-language source on Indian traditional materia medica.  A huge collection of remedies, both ayurvedic and “unani” (i.e., yunāni, Greek). These are not distinguished, but the unani remedies are essentially the Arab-Persian ones. The book is a good source not only for Indian uses of the HHYF plants, but also for Persian ones, which are often not described in the Arabic sources. Of course, ayurvedic remedies moved into Arabic and Persian practice quite freely, too.

 

The number of uses of plants in Indian medicine is truly noteworthy; everything with any visible effect seems to be used for a vast range of purposes, and, notably, a huge range of unlikely plants are “aphrodisiac.” Medieval cookbooks and sexual manuals from India confirm this tendency to see aphrodisiacs in every garden.

 

More recent work by Vaidya Dash on India[33] has been consulted also.

 

Dash: Vaidya Bhagwan Dash, Materia Medica of Tibetan Medicine [34]  a wonderful compilation. Material is culled from Tibetan sources, primarily the sMan gyi min gi rNam Grans. It seems close to ayurvedic medicine—not surprising, because it is basically a translation of an 8th-10th century Kashimiri work, translated into Tibetan around 1013. Dash reports that it is still very influential in Tibet and neighboring areas, including Mongolia.[35] Dash’s own ayurvedic background is clearly relevant to his interpretations, and he seems to have selected sources particularly influenced by ayurvedic medicine.

 

Notable is the use of essentially all spices in Tibet to treat poisoning. Possibly they were used as emetics, as they are today, but a deeper belief seems implied.

 

In spite of the clear evidence of Tibetan influence on the Mongols and on the HHYF, the number of Tibetan medicines not in the HHYF is astonishing. The HHYF remedies truly are Near Eastern, with a solid Dioscoridean core. Tibet has had rather little influence on the pharmacopoeia of this book. See the reasoning on this in Part A.

 

We have also consulted Clifford).[36] We have had the benefits of discussion with Denise Glover, whose work on Tibetan medicinal plants is extensive but unpublished.

 

Eisenman: Eisenman et al., Medicinal Plants of Central Asia: Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan,[37] provides an excellent, thorough reference to medicinal herbs of high central Asia; gives the actual chemistry, and contemporary herbal uses. A fascinating note is the very large number of plants used medicinally in these two countries, many of them also used all over the western world, including Cnicus benedictus (blessed thistle) and Datura stramonium as well as Salvia (sage), Verbascum (mullein), and Silybum (milk thistle), that did not find their way into the HHYF. This seems truly remarkable. Conversely, medicines widely used in China and also in these parts of Central Asia, such as Codonopsis, did not make it to the west. These observations present interesting historical problems. Eisenman et al. list many biochemical findings for each plant; note that these are Russian or Central Asian research, often old and often preliminary, and are not to be taken as current demonstrated biochemical effectiveness! I have thus kept them strictly separate from my much more brief notes (in parenthesis) on current uses.

 

Sun: Sun Simiao, Recipes Worth a Thousand Gold, a great Tang Dynasty medical compilation (appearing 654 AD). Sun is quoted literally, since his work is beautifully concise and clear, and since it has not previously been translated or made available to non-Chinese readers. The translation here is by Sumei Yi, done in 2007 when she was a graduate student at the University of Washington, used by her kind permission; I have edited and commented on it.

 

Li:  Li Shizhen’s Bencao Gangmu, the famous Chinese herbal compilation that remains definitive in traditional Chinese medicine. (NB:  “traditional Chinese medicine,” with small letters, is the traditional medicine of late imperial and early 20th-century China. “Traditional Chinese Medicine,” with capitals, is a specific derivative of it, developed by the Communists after 1950, and quite different in countless ways from the older version.)  Li mentions some 203 of the medicinals in the HHYF, including at least 46 western ones and 15 from India and southeast Asia. Used here is the very unsatisfactory Foreign Languages Press edition,[38] which over-translates illness names (using English equivalents that do not exactly correspond to the traditional categories) and is otherwise problematical. Nonetheless, awaiting a full and improved translation, this version is satisfactory.[39] One very useful thing done by the Foreign Languages Press edition is capitalizing the humoral illness-causal categories (Hot, Cold, Wind, etc.) to separate them from literal heat, cold, and so on (but also from the Galenic hot/cold qualities of the ingredients themselves). I follow this edition in using “toxic” and “nontoxic” to translate you du “having poison” and wu du “lacking poison,” but actually the terms mean something closer to “poison-potentiating” and “safe in most applications.” They are also translated as “having a strong medicinal impact” and “not having a strong medicinal impact.” According to Chinese medicine, a plant that is you du may be poisonous or it may simply bring out poisons in other medicines or in a patient’s body itself. We have drawn the line at following their mistranslation of “balanced” as “plain”; balanced herbs are neutral between heating and cooling—they balance yang and yin.

 

Li usefully quoted all the major herbals he could find, so that we have data going back to early times. Outside of a small study of the 7th-century “Recipes Worth a Thousand Gold,”[40] there is little translation or specific study of these materials.[41] We await much-needed studies of Chinese herbals, especially Tao Hongjing’s monumental 6th-century works, which remain not only untranslated but quite little studied in the western world.

 

Striking is the comparison of Li’s mammoth compilation with the far more modest Greek and Arab herbals. For instance, he has 14 large pages (in the translation) on various aconites, as opposed to a page or so in the western sources. There is no room even to summarize adequately Li’s enormous detail; mere suggestions of the wealth are given below.

 

A problem for Chinese doctors of the old school was the enormous range of conditions treated by almost any important drug; how would one decide? Usually, standard mixtures were prepared.  But, also, our rather long experience with ordinary Chinese pharmacists and herbalists is that they knew quite well which drugs really, visibly, empirically worked for a given condition, and did not worry about the countless others specified for that condition in the old herbals although patients might demand something special. They would give artemisia for worms, or watercress for scurvy, for instance—not the minimally effective nostrums mentioned in Li’s more obscure sources. Not all their remedies worked, but at least they maximized their odds given what they could know.

 

It is worth noting that Li repeats with a straight face and proper respect the more ridiculous stories in the old herbals and in the folk wisdom of his own time, but is conspicuously silent about them when writing in his own voice to evaluate what an herb really does. This is exactly equivalent to Dioscorides’ (and his Arab followers’) “some say.” But even the long-suffering Li does sometimes denounce truly outrageous stories (see under Cinnamomum cassia).

 

A notable thing about Li’s book is that he clearly recognizes taxonomic reality, putting e.g. Artemisia species together, Brassica species together, and so on. The Chinese names do not reflect this; Chinese simply gives a quite separate name to every common plant, and tend to assimilate the rest to superficially similar common ones, with an appropriate adjective—so the pomegranate, when the Chinese acquired it from the western world, became the “seedy willow,” and then the South American guava (introduced by the Spanish or Portuguese) became the “foreign seedy willow.” Li sometimes arranges plants according to these ad hoc names, as in treating the ma “hemp” plants—sesame (hu ma), flax (ya ma) and marijuana (da ma)—together although they are very dissimilar and Li must have seen they were botanically very different.  Usually, however, he seems to have a pre-Linnaean view of taxonomy, similar to that in Europe in his time.

 

Meserve: Ruth Meserve[42] has published a short list of Mongol medicinal plants collected by Ralph Chaney on the Roy Chapman Andrews expedition to Mongolia in 1925. He provides extensive commentary. The most interesting thing about the list is how few plants from it are on the list below. Only a few widespread species are shared. Clearly, the HHYF was concerned solely with transmitting received medical wisdom; unlike the YSZY, it did not incorporate or seek to incorporate specifically Mongol knowledge.

 

In addition to the above sources, Chipman[43] summarizes a pharmacist’s manual from Cairo, ca. 1260. It mentions many (perhaps most) of the medicines herein, and gives uses and formulas, as well as tests for genuineness. The material is taken from the classics, and has nothing significant to add, but is interesting to show what was standard practice in the developed west as the Mongols were expanding.

 

For the following list, Uphof[44] and Wikipedia always provide faithful backup, especially useful when no one else gives the authorities and families. Tobyn et al[45] provide a great deal of information, not summarized here, on post-medieval uses of herbs in European medicine; most of the herbs are in our list below.

 

There is a huge modern literature on medical botany, and all or nearly all the plants mentioned herein have been the subjects of extensive studies, mostly chemical and taxonomic; a simple computer search turns up many, and there is no reason to go into this literature.

 

Below, material in parentheses, beyond simple word queries and synonyms, are our own observations from wide experience with Chinese and other folk medicines.

 

 

The Medicinals

 

Herbal

 

Acacia gummifera Willd., Fabaceae. Bunk (Persian).

 

Manniche: A. nilotica for vermifuge, swellings, sores, wounds, etc., and even in bandages on broken bones (the tannin might ease the pain and swelling).

 

Dioscorides: I-133, akakia, A. vera [and probably other spp.]. Binding and cooling. Juice of leaves (and/or fruit) for eyes, sores, skin conditions, etc. Stops excess menstruation and related conditions (presumably leucorrhea). Stops diarrhea. Wash for eyes. Gum, with egg, good on burns. Also used to make black hair dye.

 

Levey: A. arabica gum for lesions, teech, cough, eyes, etc.

 

Al-Bīrūnī: Astringent, haemostatic, darkens hair, good for skin, good in eyes for conjunctivitis and redness, used for leucorrhoea, etc. Some of this obviously refers to the bark extract rather than, or as well as, the gum.

 

Avicenna: A. arabica, shaukah, qaraẓ, aqāqiā. Gum of Arabic trees is hot; Egyptian cold and dry. Constricting. Very good for many external uses, including swellings. Roots and seeds of Egyptian acacia for healing joints. Acacia gums used for vision, coughs, sore throat, stomach, etc. A. nilotica (and probably other spp.) hot and dry, strengthening, clears skin, good for stomach, but disturbs the mind.

 

Levey and Al-Khaledy: Usual uses; important in Al-Samarqandī’s herbal.

 

Lev and Amar: A. nilotica gum for eyes, headache, stomach, teeth, cleasning, fractures, etc.  Less usual is a use as “a depilatory for hairy women” (p. 181), presumably as Persian wax is used today. Hot and dry. The highly astringent juice of acacia pods was used in sexual medicine “to constrict the glans and strengthen the penis, as well as in a preparation to restore virginity” (p. 181; i.e. to constrict the vagina to give the false impression of virginity). Other acacias of uncertain identity also used.

Kamal: Sont, shokah; “anciently for heoptysis and ophthalmias” (28).

 

Bellakkhdar et al: ‘alk talh. For broncho-pulmonary infections; antitussive.

 

Ghazanfar: A. nilotica resin for cataracts; leaves for diarrhea; seed extract for diabetes; leaf paste for boils; smoke of pods for colds. A. senegal gum for many medicines. Several other species used locally.

 

Nadkarni: Acacia spp., gums astringent, demulcent, expectorant, etc.; for a vast range of uses; shoots, seeds, leaves for many uses also, most obviously depending on the tannins in them.

 

Li: A. catechu known only as an “earth,” a resin imported from far off.

 

(The powerful catechin tannins in acacia actually make it very effective for many medical uses.  Various acacia products were officinal in the United States well into the mid-twentieth century.)

 

 

Aconitum ferox Wall., Ranunculaceae. Bish

 

Dioscorides: IV-78, akoniton eteron, Aconitum lococtonum and/or A. napellus, wolfsbane, to kill wolves. IV-77, akoniton, probably Doronicum pardalianches, used to kill “Panthers and Sowes, and wolves, & all wild beasts” (Gunther 1934:475).

 

Al-Bīrūnī:  Khāniq-al-namir. Aconitum lycoctinum. Poisonous. Kills wild animals. Discussion followed by a number of other poisons of dogs and wolves; species of Aconitum or other poisons; identifications unclear.

 

Avicenna: Deadly poison, but used for skin conditions, and very carefully taken for this also. A. lycoctonum very poisonous, too much so to use; only for poisoning wild animals.

 

Kamal: Akonit, or khaneq al-theb (“strangler of wolf”). A. napellus for poisoning, but also “sedative, antipyretic and sudorific” (29). For rheumatism, gout, cough, asthma.

 

Nadkarni: Root used for diaphoretic, diuretic, antiperiodic, anodyne, antidiabetic, antiphlogistic, antipyretic, narcotinc, sedative. Acrid and poisonous. Several other spp. mentioned.

 

Dash: A. heterophyllum cold, digestive stimulant, carminative, cures dysentery and parasites.

 

Eisenman: A. karakolicum and A. soongaricum taken in kumys, broth, etc., in spite of high toxicity, for tuberculosis and headaches and sore throats; externally for rheumatism and similar painful conditions. A. leucostomum used for heart arrhythmia. A.talassicum for rheumatism, malaria, veterinary medicine.

 

Li: A. carmichaeli, loulanzi: Bitter, pungent, toxic. Good for malignant dysentery, scrofula and Cold. Malignant sores and leprosy. Directions given.

 

  1. coreanum, baifuzi: Warming and usually considered toxic. Treats pains, stagnation of blod, face ailments, pathogenic Cold and Wind, etc. Tonifies liver.
  2. kusnezoffi, wutou: Several opinions on humoral qualities; all agree it is toxic. Used for fevers due to Wind, etc. Several pages of indications and formulas, most for dispelling Cold conditions (but also fevers and much else); one is warned of toxin, and Li gives a personal reminiscence of a friend who died of overdose.
  3. ochranthum, niubian: Minor use, largely to kill ectoparasites on people and animals.

(Well-known alkaloid toxins make this a dangerous medicine.)

 

Li: A. carmichaeli, loulanzi: Bitter, pungent, toxic. Good for malignant dysentery, scrofula and Cold. Malignant sores and leprosy. Directions given.

 

  1. coreanum, baifuzi: Warming and usually considered toxic. Treats pains, stagnation of blod, face ailments, pathogenic Cold and Wind, etc. Tonifies liver.
  2. kusnezoffi, wutou: Several opinions on humoral qualities; all agree it is toxic. Used for fevers due to Wind, etc. Several pages of indications and formulas, most for dispelling Cold conditions (but also fevers and much else); one is warned of toxin, and Li gives a personal reminiscence of a friend who died of overdose.
  3. ochranthum, niubian: Minor use, largely to kill ectoparasites on people and animals.

(Well-known alkaloid toxins make this a dangerous medicine.)

 

 

Acorus calamus (Chinese form sometimes separated as A. gramineus Soland.), Acoraceae.     Native.

 

Manniche: A. calamus rhizome powdered for ant repelling, perfume, tooth powder, shampoo…, at least in later times and very likely in ancient times.

 

Dioscorides: 1-2, akoron, Iris pseudacorus, root for body pains, liver, ruptures, convulsions, spleen, eye medicine, poisoning. 1-17, kalamos euodes, Acorus calamus, root for kidneys/diuresis, hernia, reducing menstrual flow (as drink or pultice), cough (incl. smoke with terebinth resin), etc.

 

Levey:  A. calamus, teeth; memory and mind cure.

 

Avicenna: Wajj. Persian agir. Hot and dry. Usual minor uses for hot dry drugs, plus use for stomach gas, improving complexion, treating convulsions and muscle rupture, pain of liver, abdominal pain, hernia, uterine pains, diuretic, emmenagogue, stimulant.

 

Lev and Amar: Stomach, colic, tonic.

 

Kamal: ‘Erq-aikar, al-wagg. simulant; for eyes.

 

Nadkarni: Stimulant, emetic, nauseant, stomachic, aromatic, expectorant, carminative, antispasmodic, sedative. In unani specifically, aphrodisiac; for sight, antipoison; for digestion, cold, coughs, nervous complaints.

 

Dash: Indigestion, appetite. Throat, etc.

 

Li: Changpu. Treats pain due to Wind, Cold, Humidity. Stops coughing, opens Heart orifice, etc.; very long list of indications. Cheers the spirit.

Baichang, A. calamus, receives much less attention. Apparently used as a poor substitute for the foregoing.

 

(Sweet flag still widely used medicinally, especially by Native Americans, the plant being circumpolar in distribution)

 

 

Adiantum capillis-veneris L., Polypodiaceae. Barsiyyawashan (Persian).

 

Dioscorides: IV-136, adianton, A. capillus-veneris, “is of force” for practically anything: asthma, dyspnoeia, pox, etc.; diuretic and emmenagogue; for spleen, stones, stopping diarrhea, curing poison, sores and boils; grows and restores hair; and even makes fighting-cocks braver when fed to them![46]

 

Avicenna: Neutral tempering or slightly hot and dry.  Dissolving, blood thinning, constricting.  Ashes for baldness. Used for abscesses, tubercular lymph glands, malignant ulcers, dandrusff, itches.  Internally for lungs, coiughs, stomach, urine, urinary calculi.  Emmenagogue. Aspleenium  hot and dry, diutant, dissolvent. Used for spleen. Also kidney and bladder stones.

 

Lev and Amar: kuzbarat al-bi’r, etc. Hair, purgative, snakebite, worms, stones, stomach skin.  Expectorant. Stops hemorrhages, accelerates menstruation, diuretic. Asplenium onoperis for spleen (hence name) and hemorrhoids, intestines, etc. For melancholy and related conditions.

 

Nadkarni: Expectorant, diuretic, emmenagogue.

 

(Widespread tonic use continues today)

 

 

Aegle marmelos Correa, Rutaceae.  Bull. BiLi.

 

Avicenna: Hot and dry. Diluent; blood thinning. Fruit bitter, piungent, constrictive, but soothing like honey.

Nadkarni: Cooling, alterative, nutritive. Fresh fruit is laxative. Unripe is astringent, digestive, stomachic. Pulp stimulant, antipyretc, antiscorbutic.

 

(Note that this is an example of an almost strictly Indian medicinal in the HHYF. The central Asian Avicenna must have learned of it from India, directly or indirectly. Indian contacts were deep and wide in central Asia in his time.)

 

 

Agaricus campestris L., AgaricaceaeALiFong, AliHun; ghārīqūn

 

Dioscorides:  III-1, agarikon. He thought it was a root, but he knew that at least some agarika grew on stumps like mushrooms. Binding, warming, for sores and ruptures and falls, for all respiratory conditions, liver, rashes, “womb stranglings, and sickly looks”; for spleen, stomach, blood, pains, epilepsy, constipation, snakebite; emmenagogue, and for “women suffocated in ye womb,” malarial shivering.[47] Certainly useful, but we remain unsure what the term agarikon comprised.

 

Avicenna: Hot and dry. Dissolving and diluent of thick humors. Used for swellings, asthma (with wine), stomach ache, purging black bile and phlegm, fevers, insect bites. A different species, fuṭr or kashnaj, identified as Boletus luridus in our source, is cold; minor external uses. Notes poisonous mushrooms, which cause numbness, strokes, etc., and bear rapidly putrefying and sticky substances on the cap; these could be Amanita or a toxic Russula or other bolete.

 

Levey: Malaria, jaundice, stomach, liver.

 

Nasrallah: Sweet but turns bitter. Cures stomach-ache, diarrhea, etc.

 

Lev and Amar: Al-Kindī used it for malaria, intestines, liver. Maimonides: cleansing, expectorant. Hot and dry. Ibn Sīnā: for epilepsy and malaria. Other uses noted, including modern one to stanch wounds—presumably powdered (a use known from my own folk tradition).

 

Nadkarni: Tonic. A. ostreatus astringent.

 

Li: Moguxun. Reinforces Intestine and Stomach, dissolves phlegm and regulates qi, but mainly a food.

 

 

Agrimonia eupatoria L., Rosaceae.  Ghafath. Afeidi 阿肥的

 

Levey:  Ghāfit. In electuary for jaundice, and phlegm.

 

Al-Bīrūnī:  Notes some differences of opinion. Benign, incisive, detersive; slightly styptic. For falling hair, etc. Drunk (and/or applied?) for skin problems.

 

Lev and Amar: ghāfit. Poisons, stings, bites; liver, kidneys, eyes, cough, fever, jaundice—in short, the standard things for which the Near Eastern sages used almost every drug.

 

Kamal: astringent, tonic, antihelminthic. Leaves and root (only leaves mentioned for antihelminthic action).

 

Nadkarni: Aromatic, astringent, antihelminthic, diuretic. (Note near-identity to Kamal’s Egyptian uses.)

 

Eisenman: A. asiatica. Hemostatic. “Decoction of underground parts and dried stems and leaves is used”) p. 26) for gastrointensinal conditions; astringent; for rehumatism and verious external conditions. Flowers also.

 

 

Ajuga chamaepitys Schreb., Lamiaceae. Kamafitus (Gr), Kemafeitusi  可馬肥禿思, Ar

 

Dioscorides: III-175, chamaipitys, A. chamaepitys, ground pine. Rashes; liver, kidneys, being diuretic; aconite antidote; with figs for stomach; with honey etc. for purge; several other minor uses. III-176, chamaipitys etera, ?Teucrium or Ajuga iva; chamaipitys trite, Passerina hirsuta.  Uses as for 175.  III-153, anthyllis, second type, may be A. iva; for kidneys and epilepsy, and as pessary for womb inflammations (with rose and milk).  Used on wounds.

 

Eisenman: A. turkestanica for weight, hair growth, ulcers, burns, wounds. Several compounds shown to have anabolic and tonic activity.

 

 

Ajuga iva Schreb., Lamiaceae. Subtended under Kamafitus

 

Dioscorides: See above.

 

Bellakhdar et al:  Shendgura. Antihelminthic, panacea (sic), and for intestinal disorders

 

Nadkarni: A. bracteosa astringent, aperient, diuretic.

 

 

Alectoria usneoides. Usneaceae. Ushnat, Ushna; includes also Usnea spp. and probably other lichens.

 

Dioscorides: I-20-21, bryon, Usnea sp., lichen. For pains of vulva; suppositories; etc. Used in perfumes and painkillers for its binding quality [medical or physical?].

 

Galen: Astringent.

 

Levey: Swollen spleen; eyes.

 

Vicenna: Ushnah. Hot, or possibly cold; dry. Relieves inflammations, swellings, etc. With medicinal oil for joints. Produces sleep if soaked in wine and taken. Clears vision. Stops vomiting; also for stomach, relieving gas, etc. Sitz bath relieves uteral pain.

 

Lev and Amar: Usnea sp., Parmeliaceae, ’ushna. Swellings, furuncles, stiffness, eyes, heartbeat, stomach, womb obstructions, menstruation, liver, womb pains, anaesthetic. Stops vomiting.

 

Li:  [Songluo 松蘿, Usnea spp.  Bitter, sweet, balanced, nontoxic.  For malaria and some other serious illnesses.

 

(Useful, powdered, for stanching blood and the like, but the internal uses seem without any biomedical foundation.)

 

 

Allium cepa L. (including the var. ascalonicum), Alliaceae (Liliaceae). Ishqīl/Yisijili 亦思吉里 also Ba©al l-fār, when processed and roasted, and Khallu l-‘un©uli , “vinegar onion.”

 

Manniche: A. cepa, astringent. Stops excessive menstruation, bleeding; for mummification also.  (Probably it had more astringent chemicals then than now.) Cooling (probably so considered because of the astringency).

 

Dioscorides: II-181, kromyon, A. cepa:  appetite, thirst, bringing about vomiting and purging, stomach problems generally, hemorrhoids (usually as suppository apparently). Juice with honey for a very wide range of conditions. With chicken grease, given for diarrhea, hearing and ear problems, and many other conditions. With raisins or figs as plaster for sores. If sick, eating too many onions brings lethargy.

 

Galen: Onions in general. Bitter, heating. Thin the humors and cut viscid ones. Lose bitterness (i.e. spiciness) when boiled.

 

Levey: Squill, Urginea maritima, Ishqīl. Malaria, jaundice, ear, stomach, liver pains; seeds demulcent and stimulant. Kurrāth, the Near Eastern leek-like onion, for headache and hemorrhoids.

 

Avicenna: A. cepa, baṣal; pīāz in Persian. Drops of the juice in the nose to cleanse the head.  Drops in ear for ringing, and heaviness of head, etc. Too much use harms the intellect and produces bad humors. In eye for cataracts; seeds with honey for corna. Minor uses internally and for piles. A. porrum, leek (actually a var. of A. cepa). Hirbah; kurrāth; these are different varieties, and tame and wild ones are distinguished. Hot and dry to different degrees, by variety.  Various external uses on wounds, ulcers, etc. Vapor of seeds for nosebleeds, and with cedar resin for tooth decay. Oral use causes bad dreams. Used for ringing in ears, but bad for teeth and eyes.  used for asthma, etc. Seeds for coughing up blood, and with vinegar for spleen. Pungent and so irritates digestive tract; produces gas. Diuretic (leaves). Emmenagogue. Stimulate sexual desire. Various combinations for pains, etc. Urginea maritima, ishqīl or ‘unsul, hot and dry, for serious external uses (very burning and destroying), asthma, cough, spleen, stomach, diuretic, etc.

 

Lev and Amar: A. cepa, baṣal. Eyes, ears, paresis and weakness of sexual organs, aphrodisiac.  Prevents vomiting. Strengthens memory and appetite. Externally, cleans wounds etc.; poultice.  Maimonides held it a bad food, partly because he recognized its low caloric value—so he recommended it for weight-loss diets. A. cepa var. porrum, Near Eastern form, kurrāth, hot and dry, nutrition and for hair and skin; trivial uses. Urginea maritima, squill, baṣal al-far’, etc., for malaria, jaundice, intestines, liver, epilepsy, etc. (Highly poisonous and might have some antibacterial action.)

 

Kamal: A. cepa, baṣal in Arabic, for whitlows (poultice), rubefacient (rubbed over), peel for filiarisis but doubtful; many ancient Egyptian uses. A. porrum (leek; these too actually a var of cepa), kurratl, qurt, etc., for expectorant; asthma, cough, respiratory diseases; enema for constipation.

 

Bellakhdar et al: Common onion, bsal, antiasthmatic and used for skin diseases and dental hygeine; leek, zgebt l-korrat, basal l-korrat, for hair care. Note dialect difference here and elsewhere between Maghribi Arabic and standard (bsal and basal vs. baṣal).

 

Ghazanfar: baṣāl. Juice for coughs, deafness, skin, stomach.

 

Madanapala: palāndu. Sweet. Properties similar to garlic.

 

Nadkarni: Oil stimulant, diuretic, expectorant. Bulb emmenagogue; topically as stimulant and rubefacient. Roasted, demulcent, aphrodisiac, antiseptic.

 

Dash: Sweet, minor uses.

 

Eisenman: A. karataviense, bulb used for lungs and breath. A. suvorovii, very rare, pickled for spitting blood and tuberculosis. Also on skin for eczema, itch, etc. Neither of these has known biomedical compounds beyond ordinary allicin compounds.

 

Li:  A. cepa.  Hucong胡蔥.  Edible.  Warming, dissolving, softening.  General tonic.  Allium nipponicum Fr. et Sav., Shansuan.  One of a number of Allium spp. used for dissolving, warming, etc.

 

(Onion juice is slightly antiseptic, and the plant seems good for heart health.)

 

Meserve: A. fistulosum, “for loss of appetite” (Meserve 2004:79). Muich comparative material.

 

 

Allium sativum L., Alliaceae (Liliaceae).  Saqardiyūn/Suguerdirong速古兒的榮

 

Manniche:  Oddly not used in medicine.[48] Used for food.

 

Dioscorides: II-182, skorodon, A. sativum; leukoskorodon, A. ampeloprasum; ophioskorodon, A. scorodoprasum; elaphoskorodon, A. subhirsutum. The descriptions make the scientific identifications likely. Used (eaten, or drunk) for stomach problems of all kinds, boils, eyes, vermifuge, snakebites, arteries, coughs, lice and nits. Plaster, mashed, for snakebite, hemorrhoids, bites of mad dogs; burnt with honey, for eyes, hair loss, etc.; with salt and oil or honey for papules and sores and skin problems of all kinds; with “taeda” and frankincense for toothache; with fig leaves and cumin for bites of the “mygale”; leaf decocted or used for smoke, as emmenagogue; mashed with black olives for diuretic (Gunther 1934:189-191). Apparently any garlic will do for all these diverse uses.

 

Levey: Thūm. Pain in ears; suppuration, fistulas.

 

Avicenna: Thūm. Hot and dry. Laxative and stomachic. Oddly, eating it with mountain mint destroys lice and nits. External uses include ash with honey for shedding skin. For baldness, freckles, abscesses, skin ulcers, mites; with germander for malignant wounds. Expels blood (i.e. sanguine humor), yellow bile and black bile. Poultice with vinegar for muscoles. Causes headache, butboiled for toothaches. Used for dandruff, and with egg yolk for cracks in the skull. With yok for eyes. For throat, cough, colds. Good for stomach. Hip bath of garlic leaves is diuretic and emmenagogue and helps expel placenta. Orally helps also. With honey-water for phlegm and worms. Purgative. Possibly anaphrodisiac, but helps produce semen.

 

Nasrallah: Hot; causes stomach-ache and thirst. Drying. Anaphrodisiac.

 

Lev and Amar: thūm. Both wild and tame used. (The wild would probably be a different species.)  Cureall: bites, stings, inflamattions, eyes, lungs, worms, throat, coughs, toothache, skin, emmenagogue, stomachic, diuret

ic.

 

Kamal: thom, theriac-al-fuqara’, “theriac of the poor”: “stomachic, antipyretic, intestinal antiseptic, e.g. in cholera, food poisoning, enteritis and enteric fever. It is expectorant in whooping cough and asthma; prevents dental caries, diuretic, emmenagogue, carminative and aphrodisiac. Boiled in water or milk, the fluid is useful in colic and urinary stones. Externally it is rubefacient. As ear-drops it improves hearing. Externally it also removes the toe-corn.” (45). Oil antiseptic.

 

Bellakhdar et al: tuma. Antihelminthic, antirheumatism, urinary antiseptic, antidote. Used for pulmonary and digestive disorders and hypertension (this last presumably a modern use).

 

Ghazanfar: thōm. Abdominal pain and colic, dandruff, diabetes, diarrhea, eyes, tuberculosis, bites and wounds.

 

Lebling and Pepperdine: Topically on bites and stings, bleeding, hair loss, warts. Taken for coughs, colds, diarrhea, fatigue, heart, stomach including vomiting. Eaten after childbirth, with spices.

 

Madanapala: laśuna. Hot. Laxative, carminative, aphrodisiac, rejuvenating, nourishing; for hair, intellect, dyspnoea, cough, fever, anorexia, edema, piles, skin, colic, parasites.

 

Nadkarni: Stimulant, carminative, emmenagogue, antirheumatic, antihelminthic, alterative.

An amazing ayurvedic paean of praise to garlic, dating to the 6th century, is translated by Dominik Wujastyk.[49] This document is so overwritten, and in such a delightful style, that one suspects humorous irony, but clearly someone really thought garlic was the great cureall. Significantly for our purposes here, the document occurs in a manuscript transcribed—and much later (re)discovered—in Kucha, Xinjiang.

 

Dash: Pungent, sweet, hot, promotes strength and virility. For intellect, voice, complexion and eyesight.  Helps in healing fractures. For heart, fever, pain and other conditions in abdomen, constipation, skin, parasites, etc. A cureall.

 

Sun: Garlic (hu葫): spicy, warm, and poisonous. The spiciness will go to the five internal organs. So it dispels deteriorative ulcer (yongju癰疽) and cures “the ulcers of hidden vermine” (?? chuang[匿蟲]瘡).[50] It eliminates the noxious feng (fengxie風邪) and kills the poisonous qi expelled by a gu (gu duqi 蠱毒氣). When the bulb has only one clove, it is best. The Yellow Emperor said, “If one takes raw garlic with salted herring (qingyu zhashi青魚鮓食), it will cause ulcer in his abdomen, or swelling in his intestines, or ache and hardness in the abdomen (shanjia疝瘕). If one has frequently taken raw garlic, he will hurt the of his liver when he is having sex. It will make one’s face lose color. In the fourth and eighth month, do not eat garlic. Otherwise, it will hurt the spirit (shen 神) as well as the qi of the bladder. It will cause gasping and the feeling of being frightened (chuanji 喘悸). It will cause the shortage of the qi around the ribs and the upper part of the side of the body (xielei qiji 脅肋氣急). It will also frequently cause one to lose sense of his taste.”

 

Li:  Dasuan 大蒜, hu.  Warming, nontoxic. Standard food.  Helps digestion but large amounts are harmful (in various ways for various reasons, depending on authority quoted). Several pages of indications and recipes.

 

(Allicin, the acrid chemical released when garlic is injured, is a powerful antibiotic and antifungal, which is why the plant produces it on injury.  Allicin is also stimulant. The medicinal value of this plant is very widely known and used.  Allium spp., especially this one, may well be the most-used drugs on earth.)

 

 

  1. victorialis L., Alliaceae (Liliaceae). Native Ishqīl/Yisijili 亦思吉里

 

Sun: Longroot onion (gecong格蔥): spicy, mildly warm, nonpoisonous. It gets rid of noxious poison caused by miasma (zhangqi瘴氣). If one has taken it for a long time, it is beneficial to the gall qi. It also strengthens the mind. Its seeds mainly treat the discharge of semen (xiejing泄精).

 

Li:  Gecong.  Pungent, warm, nontoxic. Usual Allium uses plus antiparasite action against worms, fleas, etc.

 

(A very common medicinal plant in East Asia; unknown in the old Near East. It is probably the “mountain onion” of some recipes in the HHYF, but see Veratrum.)

 

 

Aloe spp., incl. “Aloe vera L.” Asphodelaceae (Liliaceae).

 

The name Aloe vera is invalid technically, because Linnaeus never made it really clear which aloe he was naming, and no one has been much clearer since. Thus it is not used in standard botany works. Hu identifies the HHYF plant as A. barbadensis Miller (her number 973).  This is indeed the standard Chinese “aloe vera” (our observations as well as published sources), and also the Indian one (see Nadkarni), but other species are used elsewhere under the “aloe vera” name.

 

Manniche: Dubiously identified; possibly mentioned in a catarrh remedy.

 

Dioscorides: III-25, aloe, A. vulgaris. Juice, dried, for binding and drying. Produces sleep. For stomach cleansing, spitting blood, poxes, purge. For wounds and sores, including genital sores and cracks, hemorrhoids, eye sores, etc. With wine for falling hair; with honey and wine for tonsils and gums and mouth sores; roasted, for eyes. Dioscorides explains in detail how to tell the pure from the adulterated or counterfeit, indicating that this drug was (1) imported and (2) highly valued.

Avicenna: Notes 3 spp., Socotran (presumably A. socotrana), Arabian and Samangani. Socotra is best. Gum used. Hot and somewhat dry. Constricting. Helps sleep. Put on scars, skin infections, ulcers, arthritis, etc., and for hair loss and swellings. With rose oil, rubbed on head for headaches. Purgative; used for stomach ache, etc. Arabian form causes spasms when taken internally. Worst on cold days, so avoid it then.

 

Levey: ṣabir. In preparations for boils, abscesses, teeth, eyes, insanity and epilepsy, perspiration.

 

Lev and Amar: Eyes, inflammations, headaches; in compounds for insanity, epilepsy, sweat, abscesses, etc. Stomach, nervous system, liver. Maimonides: A. succotrina for haemorrhoids, stomach, bleedig, wounds. Several modern uses noted, including usual uses on wounds and sore places, as purgative, intestinal, etc.

 

Kamal: ‘wud, sabr, lowah; genus in general. Aloin is stimulant, stomachic, laxative. For anemia, amenorrhea, atonic dyspepsia; jaundice, piles; antihelminthic. Powder dusted on wounds. The Arabs would have used Socotra aloes and other local products.

 

Bellakhdar et al: sibr, sibr sidqi, A. succotrina [a.k.a. socotrana] laxative, hypoglycemic, and for skin.

 

Ghazanfar: A. vera leaves for fever, headache, eyes. Several other species used for various similar purposes.

 

Lebling and Pepperdine: Diabetes, hair loss. Modern evidence of value for diabetes.  Antioxidant.

 

Nadkarni: Cathartic, stomachic, tonic. Other Aloe spp. tonic, purgative, laxative, etc.

 

Dash: “A. barbadensis” [the traditional ID for “aloe vera”]:  laxative, rejuvenating, for eyes, corpulence, strength, virility. Spleen, liver, fever, burns, eruptions, bleeding, skin diseases.

 

Li:  Luhui盧薈.  Besides the obvious external uses: Vermifuge, tooth soothing, treats restlessness and suffocation from Wind and Heat, dispearses Heat, etc. Poorly known in China at the time.

 

(Aloes of the small-sized “aloe vera” group are still used worldwide for their well-known and well-demonstrated value in healing the skin, especially from sores and burns. They are grown in gardens and houses everywhere, and are among the most widely used herbal medicinals. The HHYF in several places specifies Socotran aloes, which come from a quite different group of species peculiar to that island.)

 

 

Alpinia galanga L., Zingiberaceae. Lesser galingale (galangal).  Introduced to China. Liangjiang良姜, Khūlanjān/Saowulinzhang掃兀鄰張. (Farsi), khwalinjān

 

Levey: A. officinarum, khūlanjān, greater galingale. Stomachic; for sexual overindulgence; for breathing, teeth, fistulas.  Both the name for this and for the lesser galingale are from Farsi khawlinjān.

 

Al-Bīrūnī: for dementia, citing, as so often, Rāzī.

 

Avicenna: A. officinarum, khalanjan, etc. Hot and dry. Useful in stomach, other very minor uses.

 

Nasrallah: Aphrodisiac, as well as digestive and breath-sweetening.

 

Graziani: A. officinarum, khūlanjan. Liver pain, digestion, stomachic, sciatica, easing urination (Ibn Jazlan). Ibn Butlān used it for sciatic vein, sweetening the mouth, strengthening cold stomach, increasing sexual power. Today in Iran, Iraq and Egypt as aromatic and carminative.

 

Levey and Al-Khaledy: As above. Minor.

 

Lev and Amar: khūlanjān, khawlanjān. Stomach including colic; tonic. Treats sex

addiction, strengthens respiration, improves virility, etc. Used in toothpaste.

 

Bellakhdar et al: A. officinarum, kudenjal, kolenjan; antitussive, stimulant.

 

Ghazanfar: A. officinarum in tea with cinnamon and cloves for colds, tonic, aphrodisiac.

 

Nadkarni: Aromatic, stimulant, stomachic, carminative. A. officinarum same.

 

Li: A. japonica, shanjiang山薑. Pungent, hot, nontoxic. Treats pain with cold, malignant qi, etc.

(Stimulant and stomachic chemicals well known.)

 

 

Althaea rosea (L.) Cav., Malvaceae.  Native

 

Theophrastus: II, p. 309. marsh-mallow (A. officinalis). For fractures; also in wine for coughs.

 

Dioscorides: III-144, malache agria, Malva sylvestris; malache kepaia, Alcea [=Althaea] rosea.  Plaster for sores, stings, skin conditions, etc. Decoction for womb, stomach pains, poisonings, etc. Makes one vomit up poison.

III-163, althaia, Althea officinalis, marsh mallow. Taken for wounds, sores, skin problems, and similar conditions (including nerves). With grease or turpentine, applied to inflammations; also for womb, expelling afterbirth etc. Decoction of root in wine for dysentery, toothache, and many other conditions. Seed for skin conditions; also for bites, stings, etc.

 

Avicenna: A. officinalis, khiṭmī. Slightly hot. Relaxant, drying, diluting, etc. External uses to soften, dissolve blood, mature boils, relieve skin conditions and joint pains. Poultice for swellings, edema, etc. Poultice on chest. Boiled down roots orally for inflammation of urinary tract, burning in intestines. Rub with vinegar and olive oil for insect bites.

 

Levey and Al-Khaledy: A. officinalis for few uses. Today for chest and bladder.

 

Lev and Amar: A. officinalis. Khaṭmī. Sciatica, varicose veins, liver, bile corruption, swellings, lung ailments, urinary tract burning, kidney stones, hot coughs, etc. Sweet, gooey root product used for lozenges, lotions and poultices. Also externally on all sorts of pains, abscesses, swellings, etc.

 

Kamal: Khatmiyah, khatmi, althea. A. officinalis: emollient, sedative. For throat inflammations.  Enema for enteritis. Ear bath for ear infections. Powdered roots used in pills.

 

Ghazanfar: Flowers in tea for coughs.

 

Nadkarni: Seeds demulcent, diuretic, febrifurge. Roots astringent, demulcent.

 

Eisenman: A. nudiflora, dried flowers for diarrhea. Root and seed decoction for postnatal bleeding.  Plaster of flower and leaf powder for tumors.  Fresh stem on cuts.  Roots and seeds diuretic tea. No demonstrated biomedical effect. A. officinalis, anti-inflammatory, for flu, sore throat, liver, urine, stones, cycstitis, tumors, prostatitis, joint pain.

 

Sun: Hollyhock/althea (wukui吳葵): it has another name, shukui蜀葵. It is sweet, mildly cold, smooth, and nonpoisonous. Its flower stabilizes the heart qi. Its leaves eliminates the heat caused by outside sources (kere客熱). It helps empty the intestines and stomach. It cannot be frequently taken, or it will slow one’s mind. If one is bitten by a dog and then takes it, the wound will never recover.

 

Li: Shukui. Seeds, roots, stem, flower used. Cooling; disperses heat. Diuretic. Treats dysentery and a large number of other conditions and pains.

 

(A. officinalis, marsh mallow, has a sweet substance in the root that can be beaten up into a frothy white mass—the original of marshmallow candy, now made of spun sugar. It was originally medicinal, for the soothing purposes indicated by many authors above. Eisenman notes that it is used in biomedicine to treat eczema, itch, skin inflammations, and for metabolism—taken internally for all. Also used with other herbs for stomach and intestinal ulcers, colitis, dysentery, kidneys, etc. Action seems largely due to soothing compounds. Probably many of the above accounts refer to this sp., not rosea.)

 

 

Ambrosia maritima, Asteraceae.  Bastard absinth, amrūsiyā. One mention in the Index.

 

Ghazanfar:  Bronchial asthma; antispasmodic; diuretic. Contains chlorosesquiterpene lactones.

 

 

Ammi copticum.  Nānakhwah.  See Carum copticum.

 

 

Amomum spp. including A. racemosum Lam., Zingiberaceae.  Hamama, qāqulla.

 

Dioscorides: I-14, amomon, begins by describing a bush, probably Cissus; then “that which commes from Pontus” fits Amomum subulatum or Elettaria cardamomum. Like many spice names, this one was reapplied from a non-spicy Greek plant to an Asian spice, but early enough for Dioscorides—that is, the late-edited version we have—to include both. The Amomum was “warming, binding and drying” and as a plaster could relax and ease pain, from eye conditions to scorpion stings. (Dioscorides was obsessed with scorpions; they must have been a major problem in the rural Greek world.) Decoction drunk for liver and kidneys, etc., and as antidote. Some of these uses are probably for the Cissus.

 

Levey: Amomum spp., qāqullah, in throat and mouth preparations, for hemorrhoids, for breathing, for stomachic.

 

Nasrallah: Heating, dry; more so than Ellettaria.

 

Lev and Amar: “palpitation, theriac, purgative, general tonics, indigestions, haemorrhoids, looseness of bowels, stomach ailments, and colic” (p. 101). Also wounds stings, eye problems, etc. Hot and dry (as it is today in China). Soporific, and for liver and kidneys.

 

Bellakhdar et al: Aframomum granum-paradisii, guza sahrawiya, stimulant, aphrodisiac.

 

Madanapala: A. subulatum, sthūlailā, for appetite, nausea, poisoning, mouth, head, vomiting, cough.  Hot.

 

Nadkarni: A. subulatum and relatives, stimulant, carminative. For stomach, kidneys, etc.

(Amomum species have strong stimulant and carminative effect.)

 

Dash: A. subulatum, digestive, carminative, aromatic, for bad taste in mouth. Cleases uterus.

 

 

Amomum tsaoko Crevost & Lemarie.  Native; another species, A. xanthioides Wall, probably included.  Introduced.  Caoguo草果. Egyp, Gaz is-sirk.

 

Li: These, and/or A. villosum, included in suoshami縮砂密. A. tsaoko is usually called caokuo is Chinese, this being the source of the scientific name. Warming. Generally considered pungent. Nontoxic. Treats consumptive diseases, diarrhea and dysentery, and other Cold conditions. Long detailed account with many indications.

 

 

Ampelopsis cantoniensis Planch. Vitaceae. Possible but uncertain identification for one entry in the Index.

 

 

Anacardium sp, Anacardiaceae. See Semecarpus anacardium.

 

 

Anacyclus pyrethrum (L.) Link, Asteraceae. Pellitory-of-Spain. ‘Āqīr qarh.ā

 

Dioscorides: III:73. Paralysis, phlegm, toothache.

 

Levey: Blemishes, neck pustule, sore throat, teeth, insanity.

 

Avicenna: Būzīdān (Arabic and Persian). Hot and dry. Minor rubbing and massaging uses for soothing. Cleans out nose. Used for toothaches.

 

Lev and Amar: ‘āqir qarḥa, ‘ud qarḥ. Eyes, throat, insanity, pustules, teeth, headaches, stomach-ache, malaria, chills, paralysis, swellings, stings. etc. Hot and dry.

 

Nadkarni: Stimulant, sialogogue.

 

 

Anamirta paniculata Colebr., Menispermaceae. Mahizahrah.

 

Nadkarni: Seeds for night-sweats (tuberculosis).

(Another case of a strictly Indian or Indo-Iranian drug in the HHYF.)

 

 

Andropogon schoenanthus L., A. nardus. Poaceae. Not in Ch med or native to Ch. Ikdhir/Yijiheier亦即黑而/Adiheier阿的黑兒. Also binj-e idhkhir [“root of schoenus”]. Also the flower, fuqāḤ-e idhkhir. In Chinese the root is Yijiheiergen亦即黑而根, “root of Idhkhir.”

 

Dioscorides: I:17. Probably the species he called sxoinos.

 

Galen:  Astringent, diuretic.

 

Levey, Levey and Al-Khaledy: idhkhir, lemon-grass. Kidneys. Modern uses for tumors, fevers, etc.

 

Lev and Amar: ’idhkhir. Kidneys, fever. Stones. Bleeding (flowers).

 

Bellakhdar et al: Antipyretic, diuretic. Idkir, obviously the source of the Chinese, which would have been pronounced almost exactly like idkir in Yuan times.

 

Nadkarni: Oil stimulant, carminative, antispasmodic, diaphoretic. Extensively used. Many other spp. of the genus used.

 

Dash: A. jwarancusa, bitter, cold, aphrodisiac, urinary.

 

Since lemon grass (Cymbopogon citratus) is not in the HHYF, it seems possible that the HHYF subsumes it under this name.

 

 

Anemarrhena asphodeloides Bge., Asparagaceae (Liliaceae). Native. Zhimu 知母

 

Li:  Zhimu. Huge synonymy. Bitter, cold. Very large number of indications, and history of use going back to long passage by Zhang Zhongjing (Later Han).

 

 

Anethum graveolens L., Apiaceae. Dill. Shabath Shibiti 失必提. Morocco: Karwiya amja. (Note that this name is derived from caraway, not the Arabic word for dill.)

 

Levey: Shabath. In plaster for arthritis, and in remedy for kidneys and bladder.

 

Al-Bīrūnī: Shibthth. Cites Dioscorides as diuretic; for gripes and inflammation; palliative.  Reduces hiccups. Palliates uterine pain; sitz bath. Seeds burnt for hemorrhoids. Galen gave it as hot and dry, resolvent, anodyne, soporific, matures inflammations, helps genitalia, soporific.  Rāzī adds: very hot, too much so for people with hot temperament; useful for gas and lumbago.  Other sources note galactagogue, etc.

 

Avicenna: Shibitt. Hot and dry. Externalliy, ash for ulcers; oil for nerve pain and other pains, on head for sleep, in ear for earaches.  Dill leaves and seeds internally for breast milk production; hiccups; abdominal pain.

 

Graziani: Shibith. Used by Ibn Jazlah for brain diseases, nose, ears, and throat illnesses, and vomiting poison. Boiled with oil and water and drunk. Al-Kindī used it for limb problems, kidneys, and bladder.

 

Lev and Amar: shibth. For arthritic limbs, kidneys, bladder, pain, breath, digestion.  Emmenagogue. Carminatve.

 

Kamal: Shabat. “The seeds are stomachic, cardiac tonic, carminative and soporific. The ashes are antiseptic for sores” (57).

 

Bellakhdar et al. (1991): modern Moroccan use as aphrodisiac, stomachic, antiseptic. Parts unspecified; presumably seeds and ashes as above.

 

Ghazanfar: Seeds for colic.

 

Li: Shiluo 蒔蘿. Pungent, warm, nontoxic. Known as a foreign drug; few uses; unclear image.  Diarrhea, gas, aches, etc.

 

(There appears to be more than a little confusion in the HHYF about apiaceous seeds. All the commonly-used ones contain volatile oils that are stimulant, carminative, and stomachic, as virtually the entire Eurasian world has known since time immemorial. They are in the first herbal writings.)

 

 

Angelica sinensis (Oliv.) Diels, Apiaceae. Native. Danggui 當歸

 

Li:  Danggui. Sweet, warm, nontoxic. This famous cureall rates 7 pages in the translation.

 

(As all those familiar with Chinese medicine know, it is used to treat almost everything that is not clearly a Warm condition. So important in women’s medicine that it is called “women’s ginseng.”)

 

 

Apium graveolens L., Apiaceae. Possibly subtended under Karafs but not attested as such in our HHYF although there are references to “wild celery” as an equivalent.

Var dulce DC

 

Manniche: Popular, important. Tonic, appetiser, carminative (mostly the seeds) and the juice is diuretic. Used in mixes to stimulate appetite, treat the teeth, “cool the uterus” (Manniche 1989:76), and as contraceptive. Used also in remedies for burns and eye problems.

 

Dioscorides: III-67, anethon. Dill. Decoction of dried leaves and seeds, lactogogue, eases sores and pains, stops diarrhea and vomiting. Diuretic. Too much dulls sight and reduces sexual potency. Seed burnt, ash applied to skin eruptions.

Avicenna: Karafs. Hot; dry only when dried somewhat. Relieves gas, opens obstructions, sudatory. Wild celery has hot and pungent properties; erosive, cleansing, irritating. Wild celery—from his description, including different species—treats baldness, cracked nails, warts, cold eruptions, vitiligo, scabies, etc. Poultice of the wild form for ulcers. Not good for headache, but roots promote nasal discharge. Garden celery for poultice. Diuretic, emmenagogue, harmful in pregnancy; can hasten labor or even bring abortion. (This probably refers to a wild type, since some wild relatives do indeed produce abortion.) Disagreements on stomach effects; not considered good. (The different species explain the differences here.)

 

Levey: Karafs. Seed in poultice for stomach, in electuaries, in drug for memory, and as stomachic. Modern uses as carminative, aromatic, tonic (evidently the seed).

 

Levey and Al-Khaledy: term (karafs) may include parsley. (The HHYF also seems a bit confused about parsley, celery and related herbs.)

 

Lev and Amar: karafs. “Pains, palpitation, theriac, sand in kidney, wounds, indigestion, haemorrhoids, looseness of bowels, stomach ailments, and colic, and as a purgative” (p. 136); Seeds for most of these, and diarrhea, flatulence, warts, diysuria, dysmenorrhea, hard swellings, abortifacient; leaves for inflammations; roots for male erection; celery water for sciatica, veins.  Once again we see the use of a very mildly active substance for a vast range of conditions, most of which would be trivially affected by it (if at all). Many of these uses persist and still more can be found in modern times.

 

Kamal:  Seed diuretic and antispasmodic; some say carminative, emmenagogue, aphrodisiac, stops lactation.

 

Nadkarni:  Unani uses as deobstruent, resolvent; pectoral tonic, carminative with purgatives; diuretic, emmenagogue, etc.  In addition, seeds are stimulant and cordial. Prevents rheumatism and gout.

 

Dash: Pungent, hot, digestive, carminative, stimulant. For parasites.

 

Li: Qin 芹. Cold, nontoxic. Minor uses.

 

(Domestic celery is as biologically uninteresting as one could get, but wild celery and, above all, some of its relatives are active medicinally.)

 

 

Aquilaria agallocha Roxb., Thymeleaceae. Imported. Aloeswood, Chenxiang 沉香.

 

Avicenna: Constricting. Hot, dry, diluting.  Causes constipation, so used for dysentery.

 

Levey and Al-Khaledy: Minor use. Today for astringent, stomachic, etc. The appearance of this plant in Al-Samarqandī is one of the marks of progressively increasing Indian influence; it is, in fact, called ‘ud hindī in the text.

 

Lev and Amar: Al-Kindī used it for enlarged head, bad respiration, tooth complaints including caries, etc. Others note various uses, including Maimonides’use for stimulating sexual desire and pleasure.  Hot and dry. Carminative, for nerves, diuretic (Ibn al-Bayt.ār).

 

Bellakhdar et al: ‘ud l-qmari, cardiac stimulant.

 

Nadkarni: Stimulant, cholagogue, deobstruent. In nerve tonics, carminative and stimulant preparations. For gout, rheumatism, vomiting, snake-bite, etc. Fumigant for wounds and ulcers.  Paste with other things on chest, head.

 

Dash: Hot. Fumigant.

 

Li:  Chenxiang (“sinking fragrance”—a very famous perfume and fumigant throughout Chinese history). Warm or hot. Clears the mind as well as treating pains and much else. In addition to treating Cold conditions it does what a good warming drug should do: adds energy, stamina, etc., and treats weakness or debility.

 

 

Aralia racemosa L., Araliaceae. Sadah (Persian) A misidentification; A. racemosa is an American plant, and not in the Chinese pharmacopoeia. Possibly intended here for A. cordata.

 

Nadkarni: A. pseudo-ginseng for dyspepsia and vomiting.

 

 

Arctium lappa L., Asteraceae. native. Burdock, Niupangzi牛蒡子.

 

Kamal: lawiyah, or from the Greek: arqityon, araqityon, arqityum. “Aperient, diuretic and diaphoretic” (the root; 73).

 

Li: Many synonyms. Fruit, root and stem used for a large number of Cold conditions, etc.

 

 

Areca catechu L., Arecaceae. Binlang檳榔

 

Avicenna: Cooling, constricting. For hot and hard swellings, eye pain, aphrodisiac.

 

Levey: faufal. Ointment, nasal uses.

 

Kamal: “astringent, stupefying, anthelmintic” (73).

 

Lev and Amar: fawfal. Liver, skin.

 

Madanapala: pūīphala. Cold. Digestive, intoxicating, appetiser. For parasites.

 

Nadkarni: Stimulant, astringent, antihelminthic. Modern data on stimulant, toxic, mind-altering qualities added.

 

Dash: Astringent, sweet, laxative, intoxicating, appetiser.

 

Li: Binlang (which, like the HHYF name, is a Sinicization of the Malaysian name pinang—via Hokkien, in which the characters that in Mandarin are “bin lang” are pronounced “pin nang.”).

 

Known as a Southeast Asian product.  Seed qualities subject to varying opinions. Many indications, most conformant to the real stimulant qualities of the seed.

 

 

Aristolochia longa L., A. rotunda L., Aristolochiaceae. Zarāwand, zarawand-gird, zarawand-daraz. Zalawan咱剌灣

 

Theophrastus: II-319: Applied for head bruises, wounds, snakebite. Pessary for womb. Taken for snakebite, sleep.

 

Dioscorides: III-4, aristolochia stroggole, A. pallida. “Aristolocia is so called because it is thought to help passing well women in child-bed.” (The Greek name means “noble or best for birth.”)  But it can be an abortifacient, too. This one is “female” because rounder.

III-5, aristolocia makra, A. parvifolia, A. sempervirens.  The male, because larger and less round-leaved and round-rooted. (This same distinction between male—longer, more pointed—and female—rounder—varieties of plants is made among the Maya of Yucatan. Possibly it came via the Spanish from Dioscorides. The Maya also use Aristolochia as a cureall. In fact, wherever this genus is found, its toxic but highly bioactive ingredients have tended to attract herbalist attention.)

III-6, aristolochia klematitis, A. boetica.

 

In addition to uses for birth and menstruation—either in medicines or as plaster—these herbs were used for poisons and bites, asthma, rickets, spasms, spleen, ruptures, convulsions, pains, splinters, and much else. Cleans gums and teeth.

 

Avicenna: Hot and dry. Cleansing, diluting, opening, absorbing. Can extract thorns. Produces flesh (round sp.). Used for skin diseases, ulcers. Orally for gout. Good for tetanus. Used for head conditions, asthma, hiccups, spleen, etc. Purges out phlegm and yellow bile. Emmenagogue and abortifacient. Treats scorpion poison.

 

Levey: A. rotunda, zarāwand mudaḥrij. Scrofula, nose ointment, boils, ulcers, hemorrhoids, teeth, etc. In oil of wild cucumber for sinews, backache, sciatica, pains of rheumatism and lameness.  One species for tooth powder.   

 

Graziani:  Zarawand mudahraj, zarawand tawil. A. rotunda, A. longa respectively. Use unmentioned but widely used.

 

Levey and Al-Khaledy: A. longa in several recipes.

 

Lev and Amar: Vomiting, gas, warts, dysuria, dysmenorrhea, swellings.

 

Kamal: zarawand; whole genus discussed; some emmenagogue, sudorific, antipyretic, but species unclear.

 

Bellakhdar et al: Laxative, emmenagogue, anti-palpitant.

 

Ghazanfar: A. bracteolata rubbed on stings, bites. It is toxic.

 

Nadkarni: A. indica, for snake-bite and other bites, both externally and internally.  For leprosy, dropsy, cholera, diarrhea, intestinal problems, abortifacient. Several other spp. with similar uses.

 

Dash:  A. indica pungent, bitter, for parasites, scorpion stings, snakebite, ulcers.

 

Li: A. contorta and A. debilis, tianxianteng, bitter, warm nontoxic, for many uses relating to warming. Blended widely. A. mandschurica, tongcao, treats both cold and heat; disperses stagnant qi, drains urine, treats a range of conditions. Balanced, nontoxic.

 

(Aristolochia species are used worldwide for tonic and cureall effects, including childbirth, whence the name, Greek for “fine birth”; but the plants are actually too toxic for safe use.)

 

 

Artemisia abrotanum L., Asteraceae. Qaysum/Gaisong改松.

The many very real medical values of Artemisia spp.—a huge genus of some 550 speces—have made these plants medicinally important almost everywhere they are found. Perhaps their use for “female troubles” associated them with Artemis. They are still grown by millions of Chinese and other Asian households, and very often elsewhere in the world, from Europe to Latin America. They are still very widely used as vermifuges (in spite of some danger), abortifacients (much more danger), digestive aids (their original role in vermouth, “wormwood” wine), and so on. See below; most entries in the HHYF refer to annua or are hard to disentangle; identifications combined below.

 

Avicenna: A abrotanum specifically is ‘ubaithrān. Hot and dry. Dissolving, blood-thinning, etc.  Irritant, so not for wounds. Tea for muscular contusions, brain diseases, cold problems in head.  Improves vision and breathing. Cooked with olive oil for stomach. Expels fetus.

 

 

Artemisia absinthium, A. annua L., Asteraceae. Afsintīn/Afusanting阿福散汀

This, the traditional Chinese treatment for malaria, has emerged as the leading treatment for malaria today, partly because it kills young stages of the parasite almost totally, making it difficult for the parasite to evolve resistance (as it has to other treatments; see White 2008 for an excellent account).

 

  1. absinthium and other spp. are included in this section because the text is unclear on these related and similar species.

 

Dioscorides: III-127: artemisia monoklonos, A. campestris; artemisia monoklonos etera, A. vulgaris. Either one could really be abrotanum and annuum may be involved also. For emmenagogue and abortion.

III-138, artemisia leptophyullos, A. arborescens. Poultice for stomach and sore sinews.

III-26: apsinthion, A. pontica, A. absinthium; warming, binding. Emmenagogue. For poisons, including shrew bites (which can be infected) and sea-dragon bites. For eyes and ears, liver, stomach, many other conditions. Absinth wine noted and used; in Propontis and Thrace it was used as a general tonic drink. The leaves could be used for insect repellent, as powdered sagebrush leaves were in China and elsewhere.

III-27, apsinthion thalassion, A. maritima.  Warming, bad for stomach, but a powerful, effective vermifuge.

III-28: apsinthion triton, santonion, A. palmata.  Also vermifuge.

Note that only two Artemisia spp. are recommended for vermifuge, though all work well.

 

Levey:  This sp. is shīh, used for teeth and mouth. A. absinthum, ifsintīn. Reduces swelling of the spleen.

 

Al-Bīrūnī: “artamisiyā, artamāsā” for headaches due to colds (citing Rāzī, as he often does).  “Afsantin,” this species, repels moths, cleans the air, is useful for hair, but can cause headache if taken (as for drinking alcohol—possibly explaining the headache!). Used in ears. Used for apoplexy, eyes, etc.

 

Avicenna: A. absinthium, asfantīn. Several other names for wormwoods are given. Bitter, biting, acrid. Purgative. Smoke and vapor used as well as tea. Astringent. Used for swellings, pimples, wounds, ulcers, black bile, eyes, a very wide range of internal ailments, and, of course, worms.

 

Graziani: “absinthum” used; shikh, with synonyms etc.; stomachic [and surely vermifuge].

 

Lev and Amar: all the species are discussed together, though the Arabic clearly refers to several different species with quite different names. Apparently the Genizah documents are shaky as to actual identifications. Uses as specified under the species.

 

Kamal: A. absinthum, Arabic afsantin or shaibah, as tea, appetizer, tonic for brain, heart, stomach; febrifurge, worm medicine, emmenagogue. A. pontica, shih, burnt for purifying; febrifurge; tea for diabetes.

  1. abrotanum, qaysum, stimuilant and anthelminthic. The “female” (whatever Kamal may mean by that) is khrisaneh; it is stomachic, antivconvoulsive, anthelminthic.
  2. santonin, shih khurasani, qaisum ontha antihelminthic.

 

Bellakhdar et al: A. arborescens, antihelminthic; diuretic; emmenagogue; abortive; aperitive. A. herba-alba, gastro-intestinal, antiseptic, anthelminthic, poison antidote, hypoglycemiant, emmenagogue.

 

Ghazanfar: A. herba-alba for worms.

 

Lebling and Pepperdine: A. herba-alba and A. sieberi, shih, etc.; for diabetes, indigestion, kidneys, stomach, weakness, and with bay leaf and rose water or milk, fenugreek, and other spices for childbirth (presumably recovery after delivery). A. judaica, bu-aythiran, sheeh, for insomnia, rheumatism, skin, stomach.

 

Nadkarni: A. absinthium, febrifurge, stomachic, deobstruent, diaphoretic, antihelminthic, antiseptic, stomachic. Toxic, but tonic effect on brain. A. maritima, strong antihelminthic; antispasmodic. Several other spp. used.

 

Eisenman: Carminative; vermifuge. Used locally for dyspepsia, insomnia, “liver, stomach, spleeen, and gall bladder, fever, hemorrhoids, malaria, intestinal ulcers,…wounds” (p. 41).  Biomedically effective on skin, and for stomach, as well as for worms. A. annua, leaves for skin conditions.

 

Li: A. annua?, huanghuahao黃花蒿, pungent, bitter, cool, nontoxic, minor uses. A. annua is normally qinghao青蒿. This seems to be a color variant of it, greener in leaf, yellower in flower (the name means “yellow-flowered wormwood”).

  1. apiacea, A. annua, qinghao. Leaves and fruits used. Bitter, cold, nontoxic. Many uses, including killing external parasites and other pest insects. The famous use, of course, is for malaria; artemisin derived from it is now the worldwide drug of choice for that disease. Li apparently got confused, and used “qinghao” for A. apiacea.
  2. anomala, liujinucao劉寄奴草, fruit, bitter, warm, nontoxic. Minor uses, mostly digestive.
  3. argyris, ai, a very common and important remedy. Usually leaves used, but fruit also. Bitter, slightly warm, nontoxic. Not only is it taken for a huge range of conditions; the leaf is dried and powdered for moxibustion. A rare and unusual Artemisia, qiannian’ai千年艾, “Argy wormwood of a thousand years,” is found in mountains and used to treat male debility and female pain; from Li’s description it appears to be a different species.
  4. capillaris, A. scoparia, yinchenhao茵陳蒿. Bitter, balanced or cold, nontoxic. Important; wide range of uses. Like some other wormwoods, it will make the rabbits that eat it immortal, according to early reports that Li politely indicates he questions.
  5. japonica, muhao牧蒿, bitter, slightly sweet, warm, nontoxic. Minor uses, plus in combination for malaria.
  6. keikeskiana, yanlu [CHARACTERS??], bitter, cold or warm, nontoxic. Range of treatments for pain and digestion, etc.
  7. sieversiana, baihao白蒿, leaves, roots, seeds used; cool; similar to above. Many uses as food and drug.

 

(Sagebrushes are digestive in small doses, vermifugal in larger, dangerously abortifacient in slightly larger—all cultures in the range of the genus seem to know this. Use, very widespread but often deadly, as last resort for abortion.)

 

Meserve: Artemisia sp. for constipation, and other Mongol uses cited, including the inevitable vermifuge use as well as antiseptic and febrifuge uses.

 

Elisabeth Hsu:[51] a major paper by this brilliant Needham Institute researcher finds A. annua used for external purposes—bites, stings, wounds—in the earlier literature, including one of the excavated Mawangdui texts. Ge Hong is the first known to have used it for intermittent and persistent fevers, certainly including malaria.[52] He used extracts or infusions of the fresh plant, as did later writers, but eventually the dried material was made into tea, which is much less effective. A. apiacea, Li Shizhen’s “qinghao,” is less effective, but may have been easier to extract. Hsu thoroughly reviews the literature. A companion piece[53] stresses the common-sense nature of plant knowledge (with philosophical grounding from Thomas Reid and Scott Atran on the concept of “common sense”), and the resulting mix of truth and error that culture constructs from plant experiences.

 

 

Artemisia dracunculus L. (=A. dracunculoides Pursh), Asteraceae. Tarragon.

One mention in Index; evidently not a serious medicinal. Not mentioned in most sources; evidently blanked by the more pharmaceutically active Artemisia spp. See above

 

Dioscorides: apparently mentioned. Old uses as diuretic, anthelminthic, emmenagogue, as with other artemisias.

 

Avicenna: ṭarkhūn; Persian tarkhūn. Dry, somewhat cold. Reduces libido and hard to digest.

 

Kamal: A. dracunculus, tarkhun (whence English “tarragon”) is stomachic, emmenagogue, anti-tooth-decay.

 

Eisenman: For edema, scurvy, appetite, carminative.  Powder for mouth conditions. Vermifuge.  Central Asian tarragon has no methyl-chavicol, unlike the western form, but the medical relevance of this is unclear. A. leucodes, a more sagebrush-like species, is strongly anti-inflammatory and used in biomedicine for athersclerosis and heart problems. A. scoparia used for respiratory conditions, rheumatism, and as diuretic; also, like other Artemisia spp., vermfuge and emmenagogue. Essential oils with such action are noted. A. viridis, infusions for uclers, kidneys, liver, bile ducts, but biomedical action unstudied.

 

 

Artemisia vulgaris L., Asteraceae.  native. Afsintīn/Afusanting阿福散汀. Iran, afzentin

 

Dioscorides: see above.

 

Kamal:  Swaila, shwaila. A. vulgaris, emmenagogue, anti-hysteria; roots anti-epileptic. Used for catarrh in Morocco.

 

Madanapala: Nāgadamanī. Cures poisons.

 

Nadkarni: Antihelminthic, antiseptic, expectorant.

 

Dash: Bitter, cardiac, alleviates dosas, cures afflictions by evil spirits as well as poisoning and skin conditions.

 

Eisenman: Wide range of folk uses, including colds, nervous conditions, epilepsy, neurasthenia, anticonvulsant; poisoning, inflammation of gastrointestinal tract, tuberculosis, appetite, ulcers; wounds (externally). Antibacterial, anthelminthic, and other biomedical effects well known.

 

Sun: Wormwood/hairhead wormwood (baihao白蒿): [54] bitter, spicy, balanced, and nonpoisonous. It nourishes the five internal organs. It is good for the Middle Burner (zhongjiao中膲) and enhances qi. It helps hair grow. If one has taken it for a long time, he will not die; white rabbits take it and become Immortals.

 

 

Asarum sieboldii Miq., Aristolochiaceae. And other A. spp. Native. ‘Āqīr qarā/Ajierhaerha阿吉而哈而哈

 

Dioscorides: I-9, asaron, Asarum europaeum. Root for ruptures, convulsions, cough, breathing problems; diuretic and emmenagogue. With wine for poisonous bites. Leaves as poultice for inflammations, headache, inflammations, rashes, etc. Smell induces sleep. Can cause vomiting.

 

Al-Bīrūnī: Warming. Used for smallpox.

 

Kamal: A. europoeum, asaron, emetic.

 

Nadkarni: A. enropoeum, emetic, cathartic.

 

Li: This and A. heterotropoides, A. sieboldii, A. hexalobum are xixin, a common and important drug still today. A. forbesii is duheng.  Roots used.  Warming, pungent, nontoxic. Many uses, with little in common; a cureall.

 

 

 

Asparagus officinalis L., Asparagaceae (Liliaceae). Marjubah (Persian), whence the HHYF’s Mār-chūba/Maerchubo馬兒出伯. Also spelled Mārshūbah in a subtext and occurs as Haliyūn/Halirong哈里榮

 

Dioscorides:  II-152, aspharagos, Asparagus acutifolius. Root decoction for illnesses generally; kidneys, being diuretic; helps with dysentery and bites. Can make one infertile. Seed, etc. used also. Dioscorides properly dismissed a tale that bits of rams’ horns would grow into asparagus.

 

Avicenna: Neutral to hot. Cleansing, opening. Dissolvent Diuretic. Roots increases semen and libido, so helps in conceiving. Suppository for menses. Used for kidney stone. A kind that grows on rocks is hotter and stronger.  (The normal kind grows in marshy ground and cannot live on rocks, so this is evidently some other, interesting species.)

 

Graziani: Asparagus sp., hilyawn, used by Ibn Jazlah for sciatica. Other medieval Arab uses for kidneys, bladder, backache, lumbago, pains in lungs; in syrup and robs.

 

Lev and Amar: eyes, strength, bites, urine, pains, etc. Seeds fermented good for sexual medicine, and plant aphrodisiac (traditionally from phallic shape). Diuretic.

 

Bellakhdar et al.: sekkum, A. albus antirheumatismal and for liver infections; aperitive.

 

Nadkarni: Dropsy, rheumatism, gout, etc. Whole plant used. Some other spp. noted.

Eisenman: A. persicus, for various conditions; no empirical data though contains various chemicals.

 

Li:  A. cochinchinensis, tianmendong天門冬, root widely used. Sources disagree on qualities and value.  Used in medieval times to prolong life and youth, with some preposterous stories from Ge Hong and others. Li admits value as a tonic, but maintains his skeptical silence in regard to the “immortality” and “300-year longevity” stories.

 

 

Astragalus sarcocolla Dym., Fabaceae. ‘Anzarūt/ Anzaluti安咱盧提. Also called for is Astragalus gummifer, Kathīrā’/可西剌 (Sometimes identified as, or equated with, Penaeus mucronata L. See Levey.)

 

Dioscorides: IV-62, astragalos, A. baeticus and/or similar spp. Stops diarrhea.  Diuretic.  Good for old sores, as powder applied.

4-18, medion, A. sesameus. With honey for dysentery. Seed in wine emmenagogue.

 

Levey:  This or Penaea mucronata L., salve for skin spots, leprosy, abscesses, cataracts; in musk.

 

Avicenna: ṣamagh, anzarūt, etc. Astragalus spp. He calls it “Persian gum,” which may reflect his Central Asian origins. Hot and dry (somewhat). Can cause baldness. Poultice for swellings, etc.  Sets sprained organs. Used for ear, eyes, coughs and chest (with honey and wine), kidney pains, etc.

 

Lev and Amar: ‘anzarūt. Eyes, very widely and for almost any eye condition; sexual health; skin spots, abscesses; leprosy. Wounds, intestines, etc. Hot and dry.

  1. gummifera, kathīrā, Perspirant; for cough and espiratory diseases, throat pains, limbs, etc. In compounds for all sorts of purposes.

 

Bellakhdar et al.: A. gummifera, ktira. Antitussive, antiashthmatic, reconstituant.

 

Lebling and Pepperdine: A. sarcocolla, anzarut, kuhl farsi. On cuts and wounds; rubbed on babies; taken for indigestion.

 

Nadkarni: Aperient. Other spp. used.

 

Eisenman: A sieversianus, infusion for kidney and bladder stones. Seeds for “hernias in children, and are smoked to treat syphilis” (p. 52). Biomedically, antioxidant, sedative, antibacterial, anti-inflammatroy, and other effects demonstrated; saponins from roots protect liver from chemicals; clearly a plant to watch.  Many chemical ingredients known.

 

Li:  Five or more species lumped in Chinese as huangqi黃芪. A very common, important drug then and today; usually the root used. Several pages of uses, for almost every imaginable condition and some unimaginable ones.

 

 

Astragalus tragacantha L., Fabaceae. Kathīra. Probably a misidentification for the above, but possibly both this and A. sarcocolla were known. Members of the genus are more or less interchangeable in Arabic-Persian medicine.

 

 

 

Balsamodendron africanum Arn., B.  mukul Hook., and probably other spp.  Burseraceae.  Sometimes classed with Commiphora.

 

Levey:  Kūr azraq, resin of former; muql, latter.  Dressings; insanity.

 

Bellakhdar et al: B. africana, cosmetics, digestive, pulmonary cure, stomachic.

 

Ghazanfar: Commiphora mukul (=B. mukul) for childbirth:  resin burned, smoke directed to birth area to get placenta expelled and dry up area.

Earlier and other uses unclear as to species. (HHYF confusing on this also.)

 

Nadkarni: B. mukul gum, demulcent, aperient, alterative, carminative, antispasmodic, emmenagogue. Said to be aphrodisiac.

 

 

Bambusa spp., Poaceae. Stem concretions or ash: tabasheer (Arabic ṭabāshīr). Also one mention of use of shoots in soup, but this is merely an intrusion of Chinese foodways rather than a medical entry (it is the other ingredients in the soup that are medicinal).

 

Avicenna: constricting, ripening, dissolvent. Bitter, drying. Used for ulcers, sores, eye inflammation, heart, yellow bile in stomach, quenching thirst, stopping vomiting, etc.

 

Levey: Few casual mentions.

 

Levey and Al-Khaledy: Commonly recommended by Al-Samarqandī in many formulations. One of the marks of progressively increasing Indian influence on Near Eastern medicine. Note that it does not appear often in the earlier sources.

 

Lev and Amar: Jaundice, fever, palpitation, stomach and diarrhea, bile, black bile, phlegm, mouth sores, gums, eyes, etc.

 

Nadkarni:  Stimulant, astringent, febrifuge, tonic, cooling, antispasmodic, aphrodisiac. Unani specifically: Tonic for heart and liver, sedative, and for vomiting, palpitation, coma, fevers.

 

Li:  Bamboos are zhu竹, the shoots zhusun竹筍, the concretions in the stems—what is usually meant by tabasheer—zhuhuang竹黃. Minor, somewhat dubious uses.  Bamboos, on the other hand, are used for a vast range of conditions.

 

(This substance is singularly inactive pharmacologically, but the high content of silica granules in the ash would possibly make it good for binding and soothing sores.)

 

 

Berberis spp. (probably originally B. vulgaris L. in the source materials, but several species occur in China and are used medicinally, so no doubt this should be understood generically), Berberidaceae. Barberry. Barbārīs, amirbārīs.

Brief mentions; not significant. Apparently the reference in the HHYF index is to the fruit as a food, not the wood and root as remedies.

 

Dioscorides: probably B. lycium. Fruit much used.

 

Avicenna: cold, dry. Syrup for eradicating yerllow bile. Indian barberry is dissolvent, and used on sores and ulcers. Barberry taken internally for spleen, etc. Causes constipation.  Fruit used.

 

Lev and Amar: Liver, spleen, abdomen, bowles, bile, etc. Maimonides recommends for stomach, purgative, etc. Widely used for ointment for skin in Iraq and Iran today.

 

Nadkarni: Several spp. used, esp. B. vulgaris. Tonic, stomachic, astringent, antipyretic, tonic, antiperiodic, diaphoretic, alterative, root purgative, etc. The yellow alkaloid berberine, from the wood and roots, is known to be effective for at least several of these uses. Fruit can serve as a laxative. B. lycium Royle for hemorrhoids and ulcers. B. vulgaris for leprosy, snakebite, malaria, jaundice (presumably sympathetic magic, because of the yellow extract), etc. The fruit has minor medical uses as laxative, stomach soothing, etc.

 

Eisenman: B. integerrima, fruit antipyretic (and a food). Roots for wounds, bone fractures, rheumantism, heart pain, stomach aches.  Leaves for kidney stones. Tea of flowers for lungs, chest, headache.  Infusion of fruits for constipation and wounds. Contains berberine, widely known as a blood pressure and relatant drugs; depresses nervous system action. Also has antitumor and bacteriostatic action and other biomedical effects. B. oblonga, similar uses; atnidiarrheal; root for eyes and mouth (wash for sores). Residue from root tea eaten or applied externally for jaundice, stomach, back and other pains. Shares biomedical effects of other barberries (berberine, etc.).

 

Li:  Various spp. for aphtha, nasal and oral eczema, worms, Heat in stomach and abdomen, etc.

(Common food in Iran.  Nutritious. The English name is a folk etymology based on Latin barbaris, the source also of the Arabic and scientific names. But the plant does have barbs and berries, so the folk etymology was easy to invent.)

 

 

Beta vulgaris L var. cicla L. Chenopodiaceae.  [Pr.] Chugundur/Junda莙薘

 

Dioscorides: II-149, teutlon melan agrion. Good for the belly, but the black root causes constipation. Juice in nostril with honey to purge the head and help pains of ears. Cleanses sores, etc. Raw leaves to anoint skin eruptions, etc.

IV-16, leimonion, B. sylvestris, seed for dysentery.

 

Levey: Silq. Includes other plants. Beet leaves in a clyster.

 

Lev and Amar: Silq. Hot and dry to some, but Maimonides saw it as cold and moist. Various kinds. Good food. Modern uses for seeds and leaves as well as root; leaves put on stings, rashes, wounds, dandruff, etc.; food for intestines, urination, kidney stones, anemia, liver.

 

Kamal: Diuresis, cystitis, constipation. Leaves used.

 

Nadkarni: Various minor uses for headache, liver, eyes, burns, constipation, hemorrhoids, and externally for ulcers, sores, dandruff, etc.

 

Li: Tiancai菾菜. Sweet, bitter, very cold, slippery, nontoxic. Use, obviously, for very serious Heat conditions, including some “real” heat affections like moxibustion burns (poultice used for them as well as bites, etc.).

 

 

Bletilla striata (Thunb.) Reichb., Orchidaceae. F. Native. Baiji白芨

 

Li:  Baiji.  Nontoxic, pungent. Balanced. Wide range of uses, especially for chapping, wounds, swellings, acne, and other external conditions.

 

 

Borago officinalis L., Boraginaceae.  KunDuShi. Arabic Lisān al-thaur/Lisanusaoer里撒奴騷而

Al-Bīrūnī: Lisān al-thawr; “būghlūs in Roman.”  (“Cow tongue”; cf. English “bugloss”—which is bu-gloss, cow-tongue, not bug-loss!)  Refrigerant. Quotes several major authors.

 

Avicenna: Hot, moist. Exhilarant; relieves anxiety (still believed in 21st century!). Cures mouth ulcers.

 

Graziani: Ibn Jazlah used it for palpitation, cough, chest pain; could harm the spleen.

 

Levey and Al-Khaledy: Usual importance—a person from the Persian cultural universe, which included Samarqand, would never neglect this greatest of Persian curealls.

 

Maimonides: Used by Maimonides as rather a cureall (Maimonides 1974).

 

Lev and Amar: Probably various species, including Anchusa spp., used. Hallucination, eyes, headaches, fever, aphrodisiac, etc. many uses, internal and external, including madness and melancholy. Relieves pain, etc.

 

Kamal: Aperient and diaphoretic.

(Used in Persia today under the name “cow’s tongue” for every imaginable condition, including those mentioned by Graziani. Usually made up as an herbal tea. Anderson’s Iranian students were all raised with it. Dried flowers in bags of all sizes are sold in every Persian market. Oddly little or no use in traditional medicine in India or China.)

 

 

Boswellia carteri Birdw., Burseraceae. Imported. Mai’a/Mia米阿, also lubnā or Lubān/Lubuna魯不納. Hu: Ruxiang乳香; 540.

 

Dioscorides: 1-81, libanon; thus, frankincense. Warns about adulteration. Warming, binding, cleansing. Applied: Cures ulcers and wounds, suppresses bloody flux and excessive bleeding, cures skin ailments (long list), relieves women’s breast inflammations. Taken with medicines:  arteries, intestines, lungs; but being drunk by the healthy, it drives mad or kills.

1-82, phloios libanou:  bark of this species.  Similar uses, but more binding.

1-83, libanou manna, manna of the species. Similar uses. One wonders what this is as opposed to the gum itself.

1-84, libanou aithalie, “fuligo of frankincense,” i.e. soot prepared by charring. For inflammation of eyes, repressing fluxes, cleaning ulcers, etc. 1-85 notes that other resins (myrrh, styrax, etc.) make good soot also.

 

Levey: Lubān, Lubnā.  Storax (gum) from this plant. In a clyster for humors.

 

Al-Bīrūnī: Kundur. Heating, etc. Quotes Galen, Paul of Aegina and many Arab writers.

 

Avicenna: Kundur. Hot and dry.  Stops bleeding. Vapor has strong drying quality, constricting tissues and channels. Many external uses, by itself or with vinegar, oil, honey, rose oil, etc. With duck fat on skin fungus, and with swine fat (odd thing to see in a Muslim book) “on burn ulcers and cold fissures” (*p. 465). Used internally for fevers, vomiting, etc.

 

Graziani: Kandur, kundur, luban.  Resin used.

 

Lev and Amar: Lubān, kundur. Maimonides used I for melancholy, rabid dog bites, stings, hemorrhages, wounds, skin diseases; hot and dry. Various other authorities noted the same, plus use for lungs, intestines, liver, etc. Strengthens teeth and gums. Used today for these purposes and for disinfectant.

 

Kamal: Luban, loban. Stimulant, emmenagogue; for throat and larynx, locally for chilblains; sudorific; toothache relief.

 

Bellakhdar et al: Antitussive, cosmetic.

 

Ghazanfar: B. sacra. Lubān, bakhor. (Same sp. as above; taxonomy has been debated.)  Gum for perfume, mastitis, teeth, digestion, etc.; soot for eyes; gum chewed by pregnant women and to treat emotional problems. Diuretic, purgative, and for memory in Saudi Arabia.

 

Lebling and Pepperdine: Smoke for wounds and swellings, post-delivery, etc. Taken for childbirth, coughs, diabetes, diarrhea, liver, lungs, memory, nausea, odors, oral care, stomach!

 

Nadkarni: This and various related Indian spp.; resin refrigerant, diuretic, demulcent, aperient, alterative, emmenagogue, etc.

 

Li: Xunluxiang薰陸香, ruxiang. Known to be from the western world.  Warm or hot, nontoxic. Treats pains, disabilities, etc.

(Resin well known as antiseptic and soothing.)

 

 

Boswellia papyrifera Hochst., Burseraceae. Tus.

Same data and sources, but seem distinguishable in the formularies.

 

 

Brassica alba (L.) Boiss. and other Brassica spp. Brassicaceae. Native. Karanb/Keboer可伯兒.Morocco, Zarrit s-san

 

Dioscorides: II-134, gongylis, B. rapa, turnip. Root, eaten boiled, noted as causing flatulence; “provoking venerie” (Gunther 1934:147), presumably from the stomach irritation. Decoction for gout and sores; drunk or applied.  Leaves diuretic. Seeds antidotal to poison etc.

 

Levey: Khardal. May include Sinapis. Leprosy, erysipelas, itch, etc.

 

Al-Bīrūnī: Brassica sp. Khardal. Treats dyspepsia and flatulence.

 

Avicenna: B. rapa, shaljam, turnip. Softening effects; trivial uses; increase semen; water of boiling is diuretic. B. nigra, khardal, black mustard. Hot and dry to fourth degree. Prevents production of phlegm. Oil very warm. Fumes repel insects. Cleansing, dissolving, rubefacient. Poultice irritating and erosive; clears complexion and spots, dissolves hot inflammations and chronic swellings, used with sulfur on tubercular lymph glands. Used on scabies and arthritis. For ear, eye (for day-blindness and roughness). Internally for windpipe, inflammation of spleen, hysteria. Aphrodisiac. Used for intermittent and chronic fevers.

 

 

  1. campestris, Brassicaceae, turnip, shaljam, used for gout, chapping, etc. Probably in HHYF under the generic Karanb, which is not called for that often. Stalks diuretic. Seeds in pastes, electuaries, confections; analgesic for bites; antidote. Aphrodisiac. Wild turnip seeds for poultices for mouth and skin.

 

Graziani: “Mustard,” khardal, species uncertain, used by Ibn Jazlah for menstrual disorders. Ibn Butlān used it for gout and for loosening induration. Today in Iran and Iraq [as elsewhere in the world] for emetic.

 

Lev and Amar: Sinapis alba, khardal. Skin and skin conditions including leprosy, erysipelas, and neck pustules. Several species recognized (unclear identifications). Seeds for stomach. Plan for inflammations, rheumatism, pains, colds, influenza, jaundice, stones in urinary system, etc.

 

Bellakhdar et al: B. napus, magic uses; B. nigra, magic, calefacient, revulsive.

 

Madanapala: Sārsapa, B. campestris. Heavy, hot. Alleviates dosas.

 

Nadkarni: Mustard powder stimulant, emetic, diuretic. Digestive. Oil stimulant, rubefacient, vesicant.

 

Dash: B. campestris and B. nigra discussed together; pungent, cures parasites and colic. B. nigra prevents afflictions by evil spirits and bestows auspiciousness on children.

 

Li: Baijie白芥. Known to be from west. Pungent, warm, nontoxic. A range of respiratory and warming uses, as for coughing, phlegm, asthma; most familiar to the western world.

  1. campestris, yuntai蕓苔. Pungent, warm (or cool), nontoxic. Common food. For swellings, erysipelas, other external conditions, as well as diarrhea and other internal matters. Leaves and seeds used. The disagreement over whether the leaves are warm or cool persists today. The seeds are always warm.
  2. chinensis (B. campestris var. chinesis), song, baicai白菜. Stem and leaf sweet, warm or cool (today considered very cooling), nontoxic. Leaves for digestive and a few other complaints. Seeds for oil used for hair growth etc.
  3. rapa (B. campestris var. rapa), wujing蕪菁, root, leaves, seeds. Bitter and nontoxic. Various conditions. It is not clear which of these apply to the western turnip and which to the indigenous Chinese turnip, which are closely related and confused even by modern scientists.

(Stimulant effects of Brassica seeds are known worldwide. Mustard plasters are still not unknown in the United States.)

 

 

Brassica juncea (L.) Czern. et Coss. Brassicaceae. Native. Does not occur in the HHYF as such but could be subtended by the generic karanb.

 

Nadkarni: Plant aperient and tonic.  Oil stimulant, counterirritant.  Hot mustard bath, emmenagogue.

 

Sun: Mustard leaf (jiecai芥菜): spicy, warm, nonpoisonous. It treats nose problems (guibi歸鼻). It dispels noxious qi in the kidney. It breaks spells of vomiting caused by coughing. It makes qi move downward. It is good for the nine orifices. It is good for eyesight and hearing. It pacifies the Middle Jiao膲 [Burner] (anzhong安中). When one takes it for a long time, it warms the Middle Jiao, though alternatively it is said that “it chills the Middle Jiao.” Its seeds are spicy. The spiciness also treats nose problems (guibi). The seeds are poisonous. They especially treat throat illnesses caused by wetness, wind, or cold (houbi喉痹). They can rid every kind of wind poison and bump [boil? Tumor?] caused by living in wet and lower places (fengduzhong風毒腫). The Yellow Emperor said, “Mustard leaves cannot be taken along with rabbit meat. Otherwise they will cause bad and noxious disease (exiebing惡邪病).”

 

Li:  jie. Leaves and seeds; large number of miscellaneous uses, mostly household first-aid and minor remedies, but Li personally recommends the seeds for lockjaw, deafness, epistaxis, and other serious conditions.

(Seeds of this plant are the traditional source of the standard Chinese mustard preparations, used in households as stimulant, etc.)

 

Brassica oleracea L., Brassicaceae. Kurunb, karnab.

Var. botrytis L. Kalam (Persian)

 

Dioscorides: Krambe. II:120, sight, trembling, stomach, erysipelas, carbuncles, gangrene, spleen, pessary against conception, etc.

 

Avicenna: Laxative, drying. Good for inflammations of soft connective tissue. Leaves made into poultice, sometimes with flour. Heals wounds, eused on burns with egg white, treats mites and the like. Burnt and used with butter on chronic pain of chest and ribs. Poured on arthritis.Boiled wild cabbages, and seeds, delay intoxication.  Diuretic. Emmenagogue. For treating displaced uterus, but this can interfere with semen. Sea cabbage (Crambe maritima) mild laxative. Various other uses.

 

Levey: Kurunb. Ulcers, etc.

 

Lev and Amar: Qunnabīṭ, qarnabīt, kurnub. Stomach ulcers, etc. Bites, food poisoning.

Graziani:  Kurunb. Ibn Jazlah used for bites and to stop trembling. “Dioscorides employs it for dull sight, trembling, stomach, erysipelas, carbuncles, gangrene and spleen troubles” (1980:208); presumably this is an Arabic Dioscorides; it is not in the English.

Li:  ganlan. Sweet, plain, nontoxic. Very little said; known as a western borrowing, rarely found in China. Very interesting is that Li puts it with smartweed and other herbs rather than with the other Brassica species, which are together in a single group of entries.

 

 

Bryonia alba L. Cucurbitaceae. (Persian) Hazarjashan/Hazaersashang 哈咱兒撒商.

 

Manniche: B. dioica for bladder and urinary problems, stomach problems, digestion, anal inflammation.

 

Dioscorides: IV-184, ampelos leuke. Young shoots (a traditional European food) diuretic. With salt on ulcers and gangrenous sores. Root or fruit for sunburn and scars, etc., or with wine for inflammation and abscesses. Root brewed and drunk for epilepsy, one dram daily for a year.  Also apoplexy, dizziness, etc. More (drunk or as pessary) will produce abortion. Fruit, eaten in boiled wheat, lactogogue.

 

Avicenna: Hot, dry. Cleansing, diluent, warming. Cleanses the body and treats scars and marks. Used on hard swellings, spleen inflammation (taken with vinegar), etc. With honey for hysteria.  Useful for stomach; astringent, pungent, a boit bitter and acrid. Abortifacient but good for displaced uterus. Black bryony (Tamus communis) used for chest, paralysis, etc.

 

Lev and Amar: B. creticaFāshirā, hazārjishān. Pains in womb, swellings, diuretic, purgative, ulcers, abscesses, etc.  Juice increases mother’s milk but excess causes vomiting. Roots for cleansing, bunions, boils, scars, skin.  Ointment of root cooked in oil for pain, hemorrhoids, broken bones, etc. Leaves for stomach, diuretic.

 

Kamal:  fashra, etc. Cathartic.  For anasarca, mania, jaundice, colic, constipation.

 

Nadkarni: Several related species have minor uses in India. B. epigoea especially in alterative, tonic, antihelminthic, aperient, with uses for sexually transmitted disesases, acute dysentery, etc.

 

 

Bupleurum chinense DC. & other spp. Apiaceae. Native. Chaihu柴胡.

 

Kamal: B. perfoliatum, antihelminthic. Cooked, for hematomas.

 

Li: Chaihu. Several other species included in this name. Root a common, important medicine.  Bitter, balanced to cold, nontoxic. Several pages of indications. Leaf used for ears to prevent deafness.

 

 

Calonyction muricatum. Convolvulaceae. Tentatively identified in one HHYF recipe; not noted in the herbals. Likely an error for some other convolvulaceous plant.

 

 

Calycotome spinosa. Fabaceae. Dārshīsh’ān/Daershishian荅兒失實安. Hairy thorn-broom. Mentioned in the Table of Contents. Nothing known of its herbal use here, and little or nothing in the literature; very possibly a mistake, the name being used for some more medicinal species of broom. A widespread weed with no recorded medical uses.

 

 

Cannabis sativa L. Cannabaceae (Urticaceae). Native. Humaten胡麻仁 (seeds) Hu: 100.

 

Manniche: With celery for eyes.

 

Dioscorides: III-165, kannabis emeros. Seed eaten, kills sexual desire (!). Juice of green plant for pain of ears. (Interesting that the drug quality was not known. Our 17th-century translator already calls it Cannabis sativa. This is by no means the only plant already known in 1655 by its eventual Linnaean name.)

 

Al-Bīrūnī: Shāhdhānaj. Seeds dry up sperm. Infusion of seeds for ears. Leaves cure gas.  Desiccant. Embrocation applied to hot inflammations and the like. Note differences from Dioscorides; Galen cited for the drying up of sperm, presumably the same idea as Dioscorides’ anaphrodisiac claim.

 

Avicenna: qinnab. Seeds are shahdānj, oil is ḥabb-al-simnah and may sometimes come from other spp. Hot and dry. Dissolves gas. Minor external uses; Causes dark-sightnedness. Seeds fattening but hard to digest. Makes semen sticky. Mild laxative.

 

Nasrallah: Adds that the seeds create “unfavorable humors in the body and cause headaches and constipation.”[55] Notes that Ibn al-Bāytar described marijuana and its extremely intoxicating, maddening properties. Apparently the poor used them in pills or with sugar and sesame.

 

Graziani: Avicenna and Rāzī used as anaesthetic, painkiller.  They warned against overdose.  Ibn Jazlah avoided it. Modern uses in Middle East as anaesthetic, styptic, diuretic.

 

Lev and Amar: Against insanity (!) and epilepsy. Al-Bīrūnī and others noted dangers of use; causes intoxication and even insanity. Maimonides notes use of oil for ears. Plant used for soporific and eye pains (cf. modern use for glaucoma).

 

Kamal: qinnab hindi, qunbus; hashish for the drug. Narcotic.

 

Bellakhdar et al: just a narcotic. Famously a major part of Moroccan culture.

 

Madanapala: Bhangā. Digestive, constipative but also cures constipation [i.e., regularizes digestion]. Causes intoxication.

 

Nadkarni: Stomachic, antispasmodic, analgesic, stimulant, aphrodisiac, sedative, etc. Bad effects of habitual use noted. (Important part of Indian culture; traditional indulgent, often abused long before modern times.)

 

Dash: Bitter, hot, sharp, constipative, carminative, intoxicating. Makes one talkative.

 

Li: For foretelling future, amnesia, etc. Plant toxic, seeds debatably so. Sweet, balanced to cold.  Seeds much used for medicine and in early times for food and oil. Leaves, being dangerous, much less used. (The indulgent use of marijuana was conspicuously rare in traditional China, in sharp contrast to the Islamic and Indian worlds.)

 

 

Capparis spinosa L., Capparidaceae. Kabbār/Keboer可伯兒

 

Dioscorides: II-204, kapparis; cynosbatos; many other names. Fruit for spleen, urine, dysentery, sciatica, palsy, ruptures, convulsions, toothache; emmenagogue; applied on ulcers; juice kills worms in ears.

 

Avicenna: Root and fruit used. Pungent and hot. Keeps mustard from fermenting and spoiling.  Root bitter and pungent. Hot and dry; hot according to local climate (hotter where climate is hotter). Fruit dissolving, opening, cleansing; root erosive. Bark bitter and pungent; constrictive.  Nutritious, but less so when salted (interesting, showing that it was salted then as now). Bark of root for wounds, pain, tenderness, etc. Extract as enema. Can treat paralysis and loss of sensation. Chewing bark of root relieves cold headaches.Treats worms; extract instilled in ear (possibly for worms in ear?). Relieves toothache. Mouthwash, probably from root bark again.  Salted fruit for asthma. Fruit and root bark for splenic hardness. Kills roundworms when taken internally; increases sexual desire; treats piles and menses.

 

Levey: Kabbār. Root bark in poultice for spleen, and for hemorrhoids. Leaf for the spirits.

 

Levey and Al-Khaledy: Root rind for various conditions; fairly important to Al-Samarqandī.  Current uses for ulcers, scrofula, carminative, aphrodisiac, fever, rheumatism. Various uses in India, including dropsy.

 

Lev and Amar: kabar. Pains, women’s afflictions, insanity, worms in ears, diuretic; mouth medicine for sores, gums, teeth; also stings, wounds, stomach, emmenagogue, hemorrhoids, appetite, etc., etc.

 

Kamal: qabbar (Persian kabar). Roots diuretic, fruit carminative and sudorific. Leaves alleviate toothache.

 

Bellakhdar et al: Antirheumatic, stimulant; treats painful menstruation.

 

Ghazanfar: Laṣafa, fakouha, shafallah. Leaves for earache, coughs, worms, diabetes. Other spp. of the genus and the closely related Cleome for various purposes.

 

Lebling and Pepperdine: Emetic, scrofula, spleen, liver.

 

Nadkarni: For palsy, dropsy, gout, rheumatism. Related species, similar minor uses.

 

Eisenman: For hepatitis; root bark smoked for syphilis. Flower juice for scrofula. Fruit, decocted, for hemorrhoids and toothatches, and gums. Antioxidant and other biomedical effects; experimental data indicate potential.

 

Li: Several local species, mabinlang馬檳榔 (“horse’s areca-nut”). For childbirth. A “minority”-area drug very little known in Han circles, but Li recommends it personally for mouth and gum sores—another example of his seeking out even very obscure drugs.

 

 

Carduus benedictus L., C. dipsacus L., Asteraceae. Bād-āvard/badawaerdi八達洼而的

 

Dioscorides: This species not distinguished, but he cites many thistles, including skolymos, Scolymus hispanicus, glossed as “carduus” in the 1655 translation, and used for urine; shoots a pot-herb.

 

Li:  C. crispus, feilian, bitter, salty, balanced, nontoxic; for a number of conditions. One early herbal recommends it for “Wind in the skin that makes the patient feel as if it is a bee sting with bumps,”[56] another for getting rid of worms like horse’s tail hair (i.e. probably whipworms) in the genitalia.

 

 

Carthamus tinctorius L., Asteraceae. Hu: Honghua 紅花973  Safflower.  Apparently confused with Gardenia in naming saffron “foreign gardenia” or “foreign safflower.”  Used on its own medicinally.

 

Dioscorides: IV:188, knekos, purgative.

 

Levey: In salve for beatings.

 

Avicenna: ‘aṣfar. Hot and dry. Usual minor external uses. Taken with fig or honey for abdominal pain and to evacuate burnt phlegm. A number of mixtures and combinations mentioned, including with almond, anise and honey.

 

Lev and Amar: qurṭum, qirṭim. Womb, kidney pains, heart, poisons, urinary tract. Causes diarrhea; laxative. Hot and dry; much used in Medieval Egypt.

 

Kamal: Qurtum, qurtuma, bahram and variants. Oil purgative and emmenagogue. Mixed with honey for soothing use on skin, etc.

 

Bellakhdar et al: ophthalmic, antiseptic, laxative.

 

Ghazanfar: Conjunctivitis and related conditions; whole plant extracted, or leaves simply crushed.

 

Nadkarni: Seeds purgative, roots diuretic.

 

Dash: Alleviates blood, etc.

 

Li: Hunglanhua紅蘭花. Pungent, warm, nontoxic. Usual range of uses. Seeds and leaf.

 

 

Carum copticum Benth. (Trachyspermum ammi L.), Apiaceae. Known in English by the Indian name ajwain or ajowan. Nānakhwah (Arabic) from nankhawah (Persian). Nanghua囊化or Nanhua難化 in the HHYF. This or caraway (Carum carvi) is presumably the “karawyā,” implausibly defined as dill, in the HHYF.

 

Dioscorides: III-66, karos, Carum carvi, caraway. Antidote, etc., used like dill. Root boiled and eaten.

 

Avicenna: hot and dry. Used for skin; pulverized fruits with honey for bruises. Digestive. Treats gas, upset stomach, nausea. Treats cold liver. Used for cleaning eyes and darkened sight.  Increases stickiness of semen, as does rue. Emenagogue; pessary for displaced uterus, etc.  Diuretic. Minor first aid uses for stings. Caraway is hot and dry, carminative, strengthening.  Relieves stomach and gas. For eyes, but overdose harmful. Clears chest and coughs, treats hiccups. Scent said to be abortifacient.

 

Levey: For hemorrhoids. Minor use.

 

Levey and Al-Khaledy: Very commonly used by Al-Samarqandī in a range of formulas.

 

Lev and Amar: nākhuwāh. Hot and dry. Diuretic, for skin, bites, liver, stomach, urine, etc. C. carvi, hot and dry, for smallpox, kidney stones, stomach worms, swellings, sleep, etc.

 

Kamal: C. copticum, ammi, nikhwah, nan-khuwav, etc. Stimulant, carminative. For appetite. C. carvi, karawyah, al-niqr, etc.; seeds fragrant, stomachic, carminative, diuretic.

 

Bellakhdar et al. (1991:126):[57] “digestive, stimulant, spasmolytic, analgesic, sedative for children” in modern Morocco.

 

Lebling and Pepperdine: Stomachic. Mothers drink tea of it to increase milk.

 

Nadkarni: Antihelminthic, antiseptic, carminative.

 

Dash: C. carvi bitter, cleanses uterus, and for colic.

(Another apiaceous seed, with the usual well-recognized properties—stomachic, carminative—from the volatile oil. Contains enough thymol and related phenols to be strongly antibiotic, and widely used for this, especially for treating digestive disease)

 

Eisenman: C. carvi, a common plant in Central Asia, used as sedative, expectorant, diuretic, carminative, laxative, sedative, appetite help; most of this is well documented medically.

(Oddly, this plant never made it to China as a regular medicine; it seems almost limited to the HHYF.)

 

Cassia acutifolia Del., Fabaceae (C. angustifolia). Sana-makki.

 

Levey: Sanā makkī. Infusion. Used generally as purgative, etc.

 

Avicenna: C. fistularis. Khiyār shambar, qiththā. Cold and moist, with some heat. Laxative.  Used also for visceral swellings, throat, gout, joints, diphtheria, liver (including jaundice and liver pain), thirst, etc.

 

Lev and Amar: sanā. This and other species for eyes, women’s illnesses, epilepsy, smallpox, purgative, etc. Recent use as cathartic.

 

Kamal: C. absus, shishm, etc. From west Sudan. Eye powder for eye diseases made from seeds; with sugar, sarcocolla, celandine. C. senna, sana, sana-makkak, sana hejazi, al-sana-al-Makki; purgative, cholagogue. Major cure for constipation. Also vermifuge for roundworms.

 

Bellakhdar et al: C. (Chamaecrista) absus and C. glauca, znina, ophthalmic, antiseptic. C. italica, sana haram, sana mekka, laxative, blood-cleansing.

 

Ghazanfar: Several Cassia  and related spp. for purgative and stomachic uses.

 

Lebling and Pepperdine: C. italica, purgative, laxative.

 

Nadkarni: This and other spp. purgative, laxative, antiparasitic.

 

Dash: C. tora, reduces fat, cures skin fungus and itch.

 

Li: C. tora, jueming 決明.  C. sophora, jiangmang茳芒. Various uses. The long-suffering Li breaks out into vituperation at the silliness of some claims about cassia; for instance, a claim that cassia in the garden makes lame children. He says: “This is what a decadent scholar had overheard and [one] should not take it seriously.”[58]

(Cassia spp. are still widely and effectively used to treat constipation and similar complaints.)

 

 

Cassia fistula L., Fabaceae. Khayār shanbar/Heiyaershanbaer黑牙而閃八而.

 

Lev and Amar: khiyyār shanbar (one name) and variants thereof. Hot and dry. Purging. Swellings, nerves, throat, anti-venom, etc.; similar modern uses, also for colds, cleansing blood, fevers, gall bladder, liver, respiration.

 

Kamal: Khiyar, shambar (two separate names). Eye-drops. Pulp of seed pod edible.

 

Bellakhdar et al: kiyar shambar; ‘ud salib. Laxative; for gastro-intestinal disorders.

 

Ghazanfar: For constipation, stomach ulcers and gastritis, hemorrhoids.

 

Madanapala: Āragvadha. Mild purgative. For fever, heart, bleeding, colic, etc. Flower constipative; pulp and flower bitter.

 

Nadkarni: Purgative. Root tonic and febrifuge.

 

Dash: Mild laxative.

(Effective and well-known laxative, purgative. Standard in biomedicine until fairly recently.)

 

 

Cedrus spp.  C. deodara Loud., Pinaceae. Dīudār/Diaodaer吊荅兒

 

Avicenna: C. deodara, diwdār. Hot and dry. Bitter. Sap pungent; produces thirst; hot and dry.  Used for cold diseases of head; stroke; epilepsy. Dissolves kidney and bladder stones. C. libani.  Resin hot and dry.  Treats lice, mites, and the like. Tones up flabby flesh. Cones or seeds apparently cause headaches, but the resin cures them. Leaves with vinegar for mouthwash.  Resin used in ears and eyes. Cone to control coughs (presumably boiled and tea used). Treats painful urination; diuretic, with pepper. Bark disinfectant, pesticide, emmenagogue, abortifacient, birth easer.  Constipating. Resin as enema for worms. Contraceptive if rubbed on penis.

 

Kamal: C. libani, arz-libnan, needles diuretic and used on wounds.

 

Bellakhdar et al.: C. atlantica, qitran er-raqiq, for skin infections, antiseptic, hair-care.

 

Nadkarni: Wood carminative. Bark powerful astringent, febrifuge. Unani specifically:  Antispasmodic, anti-paralysis, and for fevers and kidney-stones.

(The three Cedrus species are very similar, and a nice example of a genus whose members have mutually exclusive ranges and would surely be substituted for each other. Cedar leaves, bark and resin are rich in volatile oils, terpenes, and other chemicals, and have a strong astringent and antibiotic action. Many of the uses above would be justified biochemically.)

 

 

Centaurea behen L., Asteraceae. Bahman, bahman-sapid (Persian). Bahaman八哈蠻.

 

Dioscorides: III-8, kentaurion makron, Centaurea centaurium. Root for ruptures, convulsions, pleurisy, respirators infections especially tuberculosis, etc.  Emmenagogue and abortifacient; root applied to vulva. Good on wounds.

 

Levey: C. centaurium, qanṭūriyūn, in clyster, and for sciatica, lameness, backaches, rheumatic pains.

 

Avicenna: Bahman. Hot and dry. Heart tonic. Increases semen.

 

Lev and Amar: Qanṭūriyūn; bahamān abyaḍ. Heart, gout, aphrodisiac.

 

Kamal: noted for thinning.

Bellakhdar et al: C. chamaerhaponticum, for gastrointestinal and hepatic disorders.

 

Nadkarni: Aphrodisiac, and used for jaundice and stone.

 

Eisenman: C. depressa, tea for melancholy, neurasthenia, eye conditions, hepatitis. Biomedical antibacterial and antifungal action.

 

 

Ceratonia siliqua L., FabaceaeCarob.  Kharnūb (whence “carob”), yanbūt (Arabic). Haernubi哈而奴必.

 

Avicenna: Bad for stomach; hard to digest. Good for skin—extract rubbed on. Diuretic. Can be laxative. Different carobs from different areas have somewhat different properties.

 

Lev and Amar: A number of uses, ranging from treating fractures (how?) to diuretic, anti-swelling, stopping bleeding, increasing sexual desire, and even curing the hair. Vaious uses of honey, juice, jam, pods, etc.

 

Ghazanfar: Diarrhea; seeds eaten.

 

Nadkarni: Purgative, astringent, for cough.  Pods used.  (Evidently in tea.)

(High tannin content of plant, especially pods, explains use for diarrhea.)

 

 

Cetraria islandica (L.) Ach., Parmeliaceae. Iceland moss. No direct reference but there is a general term for moss Ushnah/wushina兀失拏 which may have included Iceland moss.

Iceland moss is a lichen with a number of folk and herbal medical uses; not in the Asian sources but widely used in Europe, and current today for humans and animals for a number of herbalist uses. The HHYF may be referring with Ushnah to a wider or general category of lichens; the few references are hard to pin down (see Alectoria).

 

Cheiranthus cheiri L. (Erysimum cheiri), Brassicaceae. Root of Khīrī/Hailigen海黎根

 

Dioscorides: III-138, leukoion, wallflower. Leukoion thalassion, C. tricuspidatus. Confused in this edition of Dioscorides with Viola alba (violet) and apparently also Matthiola incana (stock), but distinguishes the yellow-flowered one as the medicinal one; its uses ring true for a mustard (cf. other mustards in the book), not for a violet. The pictures are unequivocally Brassicaceae. Seeds used in bath, for womb and as emmenagogue, and as pessary for same and as abortifacient. Seed infusion drunk for respiratory complaints, etc. Roots in oil used as rub for gout and the like.

 

Nadkarni: Emmenagogue.

 

Chrysanthemum x  morifolium Ramat. A hybrid of C. indicum and at least one other sp., possibly C. coronarium. Asteraceae. Native. Juhua菊花

 

Avicenna: C. parthenium, the related and somewhat similar feverfew, varioius minor uses.

 

Nadkarni: C. coronarium and C. indicum for gonorrhea.

 

Sun: C. coronarium (tonghao茼蒿)[59]: spicy, balanced, non-poisonous. It pacifies the heart qi and nourishes the spleen and stomach. It also eliminates thick or thin mucus in the respiratory tract (tanyin痰飲).

 

Li: Ju 菊.  Flower, leaf, foliage. Bitter, balanced, nontoxic. White ones somewhat different in values from yellow. Many uses. (The modern, very common Chinese use as febrifuge and general coolant, however, seems minor, and the plant was “balanced” to Li, rather than, as now, very cooling.)

  1. indicum, ye ju 野菊, bitter, pungent, warm, slightly toxic. Minor uses mostly on external irritations.

(Chrysanthemum spp. and related genera such as Matricaria are used worldwide to reduce fevers—hence the name “feverfew”—or just make the patient feel cooler. The biomedical jury is still out on whether these plants actually have any such value.)

 

 

Cichorium endivia L. Asteraceae. Woju萵苣ASiMangGong. Lettuce is called for a number of times in the HHYF under its generic Chinese name.

 

Levey:  Baql, hundabā’. Nasal ointment; itching. Other for bites, etc. Some Cichorium or similar plant is ṭalakhshaqūq, used for poultices for swellings. Root to cure insanity.

 

Al-Bīrūnī: Karwah, a mysterious drug from Kashmir, is described by “some pharmacists” as root of wild endive. It could also be dandelion (notes). Root cooling, refrigerant, febrifurgal.  Adulterated with aconite roots, which is a very dangerous thing to do. Interesting to show Al-Bīrūnī’s attention to new drugs not in the Dioscoridean canon.

 

Avicenna: hindabā’. Bitter. Cold and dry, but with a moist component. (The idea that a plant could have two natures is occasional in Avicenna and occasional in Chinese medicine too.)  Removes obstructions. Not a strong medicine; wild is stronger than domestic. Milky sap relieves conjunctivitis. Used for chest poultice, and gargle for soe throat (with purging cassia). Relieves nausea and yellow bile. Strengthens heart. Good for stomach of a person with hot temperament.

 

Graziani: Ibn Jazlah noted two kinds (possibly the two spp. Herein) and used for obstructed liver (whatever he meant by that), gout, stomach, malaria, astringent, stomach. Kindī used it for nasal ointment and juice for itching. Samarqandī used it in syrups and robs.

 

Levey and Al-Khaledy: Very important, used widely.

 

Lev and Amar: Plaster, liver, aphrodisiac, weak eyes, headaches; stops salivation; liver and bile corruption; other uses. Recent uses add many, most of them involving putting the plant on irritations as a soothing agent, but also taken for a vast range of purposes. As so often, we see an ordinary food pressed into service for anything and everything.

 

Bellakhdar et al: C. intybus, diuretic, hepatic. (Essentially the same plant as C. endivia. Odd that it is so little noticed by older writers; its value as a diuretic is unquestionable and must have been well known for millennia.).

 

Ghazanfar: C. intybus, ḥinḍiba’, for fevers (leaves, eaten raw or boiled); dyspepsia (roots); headache, jaundice (fruits).

 

Nadkarni: Resolvent, cooling for bilious complaints. C. intybus for bile, digestion, tonic; aperient, diuretic. Resolvent. Carminative seeds.

 

Eisenman: C. intybus, roots for appetite and digestion; flowers for stomach inflammation, intestines, gall bladder, kidneys including stones, heart conditions. Biomedical action as sedative, heart tonic, anti-inflammatory, cholesterol uptake drug, etc., and more certainly proved use as diuretic.

(Appetite can be stimulated by the bitterness. C. endivia is unknown in the wild and appears to be a domestic hybrid, presumably of intybus with C. pumilum.)

 

 

Cinnamomum burmannii.  See C. cassia.

 

 

Cinnamomum camphora (L.) Presl., Lauraceae. Kāfūr (Indian)/ kefuer可夫兒.

 

Levey: Kāfūr. Poultices for liver and spleen, drugs for sore throat. Teeth, eyes.

 

Nasrallah: Cold and dry, so used for heat-related conditions. Can produce euphoria. For tooth decay. Over-sniffing can bring insomnia, etc. Can be balanced with heating things such as ambergris. Nasrallah retails some medieval stories to the effect that the trees were frequented by tigers, and camphor could be gathered only when the tigers were in heat and went off to cool themselves in water. (This is presumably a merchants’ tall tale to justify charging high prices, like many other medieval tall tales about spices.)

Lev and Amar: Antisepsis; cough; jaundice; trachoma, ulcers, pains, swellings, etc. Even for use in dyeing hair black. Common in ointments. Dissolves bladder stones. A major aromatic medicine.  Recent uses include the above and also typhoid.

 

Graziani: In India for sprains and rheumatism. Medieval Arab uses for headache, abscess, kidney and bladder stones.

 

Bellakhdar et al: l-kafur. Antiseptic, for skin diseases, revulsive.

 

Ghazanfar: Kafur. Bark, branches and root, anti-convulsant, antihelminthic, carminative.

 

Madanapala: Karpūra. Aphrodisiac. Cold. Curse burning syndrome, distaste in the mouth, edema. For obesity and some poisons.

 

Nadkarni: Diaphoretic, stimulant, antiseptic, antispasmodic, expectorant, sedative, carminative, etc. More or less a cureall.

 

Dash: Sweet, cold, intoxicating (!). Cures eyes, thirst, poison.

 

Li: Zhang樟. Wood, zhangcai樟柴, and camphor, zhangnao樟瑙, minor use in several compounds.

 

 

  1. cassia Presl. Lauraceae. Native. Gui桂

The Chinese generic is used to describe a number of kinds of cinnamomum, also specific descriptives for specific species. Chinese cinnamon or cassia is not singled out in the HHYF and is lumped with other Cinnamomum spp. Several were used.  See C. zeylanicum below.

 

Avicenna: As usual, unclear which species is discussed. Darṣīnī or darchīnī. Diluting, absorbent, opening. Oil very hot. Constricting. Pungent, tenuous, erosive. Cinnamon was rubbed on spots, used on swellings and ulcers, used on ringworm. Bark with honey for acne. Oil for nervous tics, colds, earaches. Treats many internal pains. Used with oil, wax and egg yolk for many reasons including preventing production of hardness in uterus and kidneys. Emmenagogue. Various uses for female medicine, etc. Treats fevers. Avicenna notes that juniper berries can substitute. C. tamala (or C. citriodora), sādhaj, malabathrum. Hot and dry.

 

Lev and Amar: Cassia was distinguished as salīkha in the Middle East, including in Avicenna and the Genizah documents, but apparently used as C. zeylanicumC. citriodorum, sādhaj, is malabathrum, with minor uses including preventing caries, treating hot swellings, etc.

 

Nasrallah: stomachic, whets the mind, aphrodisiac.

 

Dash: Cold, aromatic. For heart, anorexia, parasites, skin, influenza.

 

Li: Gui; jungui菌桂for small reedy trees. Considerable differences of opinion on humoral qualities, but general agreement that it is hot or very hot. Bark (rarely leaf) for a vast range of uses mostly involving heating and dispelling. The jungui were used for magical practices to produce immortality, about which Li says “Taoist alchemists always make such stories to mislead people” (Li 2003:2945). C. japonicum, tianzhugui, and true laurel, Laurus nobilis, yuegui, follow in the book with minor uses. The entry on true laurel is actually about mythical trees that are obviously not laurel; included are stories (which Li ridicules) of seeds falling from the cassia-tree in the moon.

(Cinnamon and cassia oils are powerfully antiseptic, as well as stimulant and carminative.  C. japonicum certainly, C. loureiroi probably, and C. burmannii possibly, are referred to in the HHYF, used more or less the same as C. cassia.)

 

 

Cinnamomum japonicum.  See C. cassia.

 

 

Cinnamon loureiroi.  See C. cassia.

 

 

Cinnamomum zeylanicum Nees, Lauraceae. Salīkhah/Saliha撒里哈

 

Manniche: Used with other ingredients—mostly vehicles: oil, fat, honey—for unguents for sores, growths, wounds, anal inflammation, etc. Theophrastus describes cinnamon for perfume among the Egyptians.

 

Dioscorides: I-13, kinamomon. Gunther identifies it as C. cassia, but Dioscorides notes many kinds from many countries. These would be different species and genera. All are warming. Reduces menstruation when drunk with myrrh. Gets rid of poisons, heat, eye problems, etc. With honey on sunburn and skin diseases. For coughs and similar problems, kidneys, dropsy (congestive heart failure), etc.

Dioscorides’s “kassia” (I-12) is equated with C. iners, but, again, the description refers to several plants and tells how to distinguish them. The real stuff—unquestionably true Cinnamomum spp.—is used like 1-13.

(The “kinnamon” problem is monumentally vexed. Kinnamon evidently referred, originally, to a native Greek or Near Eastern plant. The name was extended to anything with a “hot” bark.  Cinnamon oil, like chile pepper oleoresin, directly stimulates the pain receptors, thus feeling sharp or hot without actually doing damage. Eventually the Greek name settled on Cinnamomum, as being by far the most medicinally useful species. Cinnamon oil is in in fact strongly antiseptic, warming and carminative, stimulant, and generally a first-rate medicine, which appears to be rising again as antibiotic-resistant organisms evolve.)

 

Levey: C. zeylanicum and C. cassia, dār ṣīnī. For happiness. Strengthens stomach and liver. In tooth and breathing recipes. (It has been shown by modern science to have a cheering effect if scented or consumed.)

 

Al-Bīrūnī: Dār Sīnī, now C. zeylanicum, possibly cassia in his time. Warming, acrid. Used in various medicines.

 

Lev and Amar: dār ṣīnī for both C. zeylanicum and C. cassia; qirfa for the former alone.  Coughs, colds, eyes, colic, obstruction, flatulence, diarrhoea, pleurisy, trembling, palpitation, purging, tonic, etc. For urine; emmenagogue, abortifacient; for skin diseases, eyes, eas, etc.  (Anderson suspects this would mostly be the oil.) Liver teeth and mouth, depression, hearing, neck pains, etc. Maimonides lists many uses, adding poisons, bites, stings, etc. to the above.  Also for sexual health.

 

Kamal: Salikha, qirfa sini. Aromatic, carminative, astringent. C. zeylanicum (true cinnamon in modern food usage), qurfa, dar sini, same uses. Also astringent for diarrhea, and internal antiseptic for typhoid.

 

Bellakhdar et al.: qerfa, qerfa galida. Stimulant, notably digestive and cardiac; emmenagogue; used for headache. C. zeylanicum, dar sini, stimulant; used for headaches, memory loss, colds. (Note that qerfa, qurfa, and l-kafur are all forms of the same word. “L” is the definite article in Moroccan Arabic, corresponding to standard Arabic “al.”)

 

Lebling and Pepperdine: For coughs, colds, stomach; menstrual pain; and childbirth, with many remedies for helping delivery and for recovery after delivery. Most involve mixed spices with fat, honey, or milk. Cf. cardamom.

 

Madanapala: Tvak. Hot. For poisoning, heart, pelvia, piles, rhinitis, parasites, semen.

 

Nadkarni: This and other spp. carminative, antispasmodic, aromatic, stimulant, hemostatic, astringent, antiseptic, stomachic. (A long list, but most of these uses are well supported by modern research). Unani specifically adds absorbent, diuretic, aphrodisiac, demulcent; used for colds, headaches, hiccups, liver, diarrhea, etc.

(Cinnamon contains a volatile oil that is intensely fragrant, and strongly antiseptic and carminative, with very good action on digestion; the oil kills skin diseases but can burn in heavy use. Cinnamon is actually one of the most effective medicines, by modern biomedical standards, in this corpus.)

 

 

Cistus ladaniferus, C. creticus.  Cistaceae. Lādhan/Ladan剌丹

 

Levey: The name applies to the resin. Used in dentifrice, ointment.

 

Avicenna: Qissūs, lādhan. Hot, though relatives include some cold items. Some value for retaining hair. Boiled down with wine for ulcers. Poultice also for ulcers. Ointment for burns.  Sniffing, with orris root oil, honey, and sodium nitrate, for headaches. Ear drops from tips, with pomegranate peels, relieve ears and teeth. Poultice for spleen. Flowers in wine for dysentery. Emmenagogue. Suppository for menses and abortifacient, and getting placenta out. Suppository for uterine swellings.

 

Lev and Amar: Minor medication; styptic, constricting, thus e.g. for strengthening penis and constricting glans in Maimonides’ sexual medicine.

 

(Gum widely used as medicine and soothing agent in Mediterranean from ancient times to today.  These two and perhaps other species may be included in the HHYF as Lādhan.

 

 

Citrullus colocynthis Schrad., Cucurbitaceae. Sham-e anzal, Hanzal/Shahamuhandali沙哈木罕荅里.

 

Manniche: C. lanatus probably used for finger tremors, constipation, various magical procedures.

 

Dioscorides: IV-178, kolokynthis, colocynth. Purging. Made into pills. Drives out phlegm and various diseases. Abortifacient; as pessary. On toothache. Bad for stomach. Suppository for constipation.

 

Galen: Bad for stomach; indigestible raw.

 

Avicenna: Ḥanẓal. Dissolving, erosive, absorbent. Young leaves stop bleeding. Put on swellings, etc. Used as massage for leprosy and elephantiasis. Also, presumably the fruit here, for nerve pain, arthristis, etc. Powdered for bleeding, cleansing the brain, washing teeth and mouth, etc. Hollowed, burned, for eardrops. Used for stomach swelling, etc. Cures diarrhea, but purgative. Abortifacient. Used on snake bites.

 

Levey: Ḥanẓal. For itch, insanity, rheumatism and phlegm.

 

Al-Bīrūnī: Expels hot and unnatural humors, but dangerous; much use gives diarrhea that can be fatal.

 

Lev and Amar: Ḥanẓal.  Tongue swelling, swollen throat, easing tooth extraction.  Pith for joint pains. In prescriptions for fever, tetany, colic. Cathartic. Treats itching, insanity, and much in between. Expectorant. Constipation, headache,stings, epilepsy, lung disease, depression, kidneys, etc. Leaves for hemorrhages, boils, leprosy, etc.  Roots for sting and bites, and increasing mother’s milk.  Various minor uses.

 

 

Citrullus vulgaris Schrad. Watermelon.  Cucurbitaceae. Xigua 西瓜Purgative, diuretic, for oedema and jaundice, kidneys, internal lesions, bites.

 

Graziani: Ibn Jazlah used it for elephantiasis, nervous pain, gout, eye disease, and snakebite.  Used today in Iran and Iraq as a drastic cathartic, in Egypt as purgative and astringent.

 

Kamal: handhal, ‘alqam. Seed oil for liniment.

 

Ghazanfar: Bites; laxative; joint pain.

 

Lebling and Pepperdine: purge, suppository.

 

Madanapala: Indravārunī. Bitter, hot, pungent; laxative; for jaundice, spleen, abdominal diseases.

 

Nadkarni:  Drastic, cathartic, diuretic, emetic, etc.

 

Dash: For digestion, jaundice, and anemia.

(Colocynth still used, and is effective, for the uses noted by Nadkarni. Watermelon is an effective diuretic, still widespread in Old World folk medicine from China to Europe.)

 

 

Citrus aurantium L., Rutaceae, bitter orange. Native (?).  Turunj/Tulunzhi突論只 is called for twice and is apparently citron. Otherwise, various oranges are called for in the HHYF usually under Chinese generics such as Ganzi 柑子 or Deng 橙

 

(Added here are notes on Citrus limon Burmann / C. aurantifolia Swingle, Rutaceae, lemon and lime. They are not in the HHYF but are not distinguished well in the old herbals, and thus may be included in the general term here; in any case, their modern medical uses in the Middle East are relevant. All these citrus fruits are hybrids, often complex, of tangerine, lime, and pomelo.)

 

Avicenna: C. aurantium (“C. sinensis” in Bakhtiar edn., but that plant was unknown in Central Asia in Avicenna’s time), zarrīn darakht. Leaves for urination and menstruation.C. limon, hot and dry. Externally for ringworm, swellings, wounds, etc., and facial paralysis. Strengthens brain. A collyrium from sour lemon helps remove yellow tinge in eyes from jaundice; orally for conjunctivitis. Sour lemon and fruit in sugar for palpitations, etc., and with vinegar for leech in throat. Buds and rind help digestion, though rind itself in not very digestible. Lemon with wine is laxative and treats excessive menstrual discharge. Extract calms sexual desire in women. Seeds anti-poison.

 

Lev and Amar: C. limon, līmūn, Juice mild purgative; peel and leaves against poison (Maimonides). Snakebite, headaches, fainting, stomach, appetite (both increase poor appetite and restrain gluttony), etc. Treats scars (this can work; the combination of oil and acid softens the skin). Not clear whether lime is included in these indications.

 

Bellakhdar et al: C. limon, lim-deqq, cosmetic; used on skin spots.

 

Ghazanfar: Lumi, C. aurantifolia. Juice, fruit, peel, bark for cataracts, colds, fever, chest pains, earache, stomachache. Crushed dried fruit made into poultice for thorn sticks. (The dried limes of Oman are among the most famous Near Eastern items of commerce, found worldwide today in Middle Eastern food stores.)

 

Lebling and Pepperdine: C. aurantifolia, lumi, limun. Colds, coughs, colic, diarrhea, mesntrual pain.

 

Kamal: Leaves of C. aurantium stomachic and antiepileptic. (The first of these uses is still universal in Latin America; ENA, personal research.)  One variety, bergamot: fruit, bergamut in Arabic, eaten as antihelminthic.

 

Madanapala: Jambhīra, C. limon.  Sour, hot. Colic, distaste, cardiac pain, parasites, etc. Nārangī (identified as C. reticulata but no doubt actually aurantium or sinensis.). Sour, hot, laxative appetiser, cardiac. Nimbu, C. aurantium, sour, but one var. is sweet; digestive, carminative.

 

Nadkarni: Dried peel aromatic, stomachic, tonic, astringent, carminative. Oil strong stomachic; topical applications stimulant. Several other citrus spp. discussed.

 

Dash: As in the Madanapala volume, Dash identifies “nāranga” (here) as C. reticulata, which we doubt. In any case, in Tibet it apparently is used for appetitie, digestion, heart, following ayurvedic norms. C. limon given for thirst, colic, nausea, vomiting, asthma, constipation. This would probably be the juice.

 

Li: Zhi 枳. Fruit, immature or mature. Bitter, slightly cold, nontoxic, sour. Several pages of recipes.  Entry followed by one on trifoliate-orange, Poncirus trifoliata. Gouju 枸橘; Li notes without comment the old story that bitter (or other) oranges planted north of the Yangzi River, they turn to trifoliate oranges. (This is true; the oranges were grafted onto trifoliate understock, as they still are around the world; the cold winters and droughts of northern China killed the graft and let the understock grow up. ENA has seen this happen many times in California.)

(Citrus species contain volatile oils of well-demonstrated value for soothing the stomach, treating minor skin conditions, etc.)

 

 

Citrus medica L., Rutaceae. Native to China, but widespread, possibly domesticated in India.  Certainly a “western” plant to most East Asians. The lemon, which appeared in the medieval Near East, is a descendant from a hybrid with lime. Turunj/Tulunzhi突論只.

 

Dioscorides: 1-164, persica mela, C. medica, citron?  For stomach and belly; unripe is too binding.  Dried or decocted for diarrhea.

1-166, medika, C. medica, citron. Drunk in wine to resist poisons etc. Juice for sweetening breath. Reduces lust in women. Put into clothes-chests to repel moths.

It appears that both these articles apply to citron. The second one clearly does, the description being unmistakable. Apparently we are dealing with the same thing under two names with two different usages.

 

Al-Bīrūnī: Utrujj. Cucumber-like; name sometimes used for types of cucumber and/or melon.  Nothing specific about its medicinal value, but several beautiful poetry quotes.

 

Graziani: Utruj, C. medica. Widely used; use unspecified.

 

Kamal: C. medica:  Fruit skin stomachic, tonic; seeds antipyretic and antihelminthic; juice astringent, used for vomiting, rheumatism, and inflammation.

 

Madanapala: Bījapūra. Appetiser; for throat, tongue, heart; bleeding. Light and sour. Pulp cold.  Skin and flower bitter and hot. Pistil light; constipative; for colic, abdomen. Seed hot; for parasites. Juice for colic, indigestion, constipation, digestion, anorexia, dyspnoea, cough, thirst, anorexia, etc.

 

Dash: C. medica for griping, intestinal pain; digestive, cardiac; for asthma, cough, anore

 

 

  1. reticulata (“C. erythrosa” Tanaka) Rutaceae. Native. Not in HHYF as such.

 

Li: JuFruit, seed, pith, leaf, peel all used, in various stages. Major drug. Fruit sweet, sour, warm, nontoxic; peel bitter, pungent, warm and nontoxic. A number of uses cluster around warming, soothing, astringent, and harmonizing functions.

Li discusses many other types of citrus, including pomelo C. grandis.

 

 

  1. x sinensis (C. junos Tanaka). Rutaceae. Native. Under Gan 柑 in the HHYF.

The sweet orange is apparently a very ancient hybrid of tangerine and pomelo C. grandis.

 

Li: Jinqiu金球, cheng  橙 (the last means sweet orange specifically). Minor uses. Closely related is C. x nobilis, gan, a stable swarm of tangerine-orange hybrids with specific qualities (very sweet, juicy, flavorful, large) gets a separate entry in Li, just before this one (with several obsolete scientific names synonymized in Li 2003).

 

 

Cocos nucifera L., Arecaceae. Coconut. Yepiao椰瓢.

 

Avicenna: Somewhat hot and dry. Good food, though heavy. Aphrodisiac. Oil for piles, joints.  Very old oil—copra oil—kills worms.

 

Lev and Amar: Very good for sexual health, also hemorrhoids, mental perception.

Dash:  Sweet, cold.  Strength, virility, corpulence, muscle tissue.  Cleanses urinary bladder.  (Today, the flesh would be used for the former, the water for the latter.)

(In modern Chinese folk medicine, the meat is used for soothing and nourishment.  It is nutritious enough to give some credence to the sexual nutrition claims, but it would work only by helping nutrition generally.)

 

 

Colchicum autumnale L., Colchicaceae (Iridaceae). Sūranjan/Shulingzhang屬伶章 or LaḤ/Lalahua剌剌花.

 

Dioscorides: IV-84, kolchikon. Poisonous. But counteracts mushroom poisoning.

IV-85, ephemeron, C. parnassicum. Bulb for toothache. Leaves for swellings and humors, applied.

 

Avicenna: Purgative, biting. Used for gout (somewhat effectively) as a massage. Arthritis. Not good for stomach; weakens it. However, it is laxative and aphrodisiac, the latter with ginger, mint and cumin. Purges phlegm, worms, thickens humors.

 

Levey: Sūranjān. In drugs for calculi and for the spirits.

 

Graziani: Suranjān. In Babylonia for poison, stings, head and eye, breast pain.

 

Lev and Amar: sūranjān, khamīra. Kidney stones mental illness, hemorrhoids, abscesses, sexual appetite. Used for fattening in spite of its poisonousness.

 

Kamal: lihlah, kolshik. Corn and seed cathartic, cholagogue, diuretic, sudorific, emetic, irritant.  Poisonous in large doses. Used in gout, rheumatism, etc., and throat conditions.

 

Nadkarni: C. luteum substituted in India for the above. Rheumatism, gout, etc. Unani:  Alterative, aperient; diseases of liver and spleen.

(Powerful, dangerous stimulant.)

 

 

Commiphora myrrha Engl. Burseraceae. Imported. Myrrh, Moyao沒藥. also Murr/Muliye木里葉

 

Dioscorides: I-77, smyrna, myrrh. (Identified as Amyris hafal by Gunther.[60]) Long directions on telling counterfeits. Warming, drying, astringent. Produces sleep. Emmenagogue, aid in childbirth, applied with wormwood etc. Taken against cough, pain in side or thorax, dysentery, malaria. Kills worms. Sweetens breath. Applied for armpit chafing, teeth and gums, etc. Even cures “broken ears and bared bones,” etc.[61] when applied with various agents. Various other minor usees. Soot made and used also.

 

Levey: Murr. In applications for erysipelas, boils, cankers, abscesses, decayed teeth, wounds, eyes, insanity, nosebleeds. The antiseptic and soothing values of myrrh were obviously well known.

 

Nasrallah: Adds abortifacient and vermifugal uses. Smearing on toe will keep a man able to have sex as long as it is on his toe (Ibn al-Bayt.ār).

 

Lev and Amar: C. mukul (bdellium, a common medicine in the Near East) for colic, diarrhea, liver, sciatica, veins, legs, nails, swellings, lungs, cough, kidney stones, hemorrhoids, bile, expelling fetus, etc.  Various kinds noted.

  1. myrrha, murr, stomach, liver, coughs, colds, ulcers, sores, toothache, wounds, eyes, hemorrhages, snakebite, dog bite, worms, etc.

 

Kamal: “It is stimulant and astringent, and is used in dyspepsia, chronic bronchitis, leukorrhea, amenorrhea, and as a local application in stomatitis, carious teeth, and inflammation of the gums.” (p. 91)

 

Ghazanfar: Resin for colds, fevers, digenstion, hemorrhoids, toothache.

 

Lebling and Pepperdine: Murr, murrah. Abdominal pain, chest, childbirth, colic, coughs, colds, digestion, health, infections, menstrual pain, sore throat; topically on wounds, cuts, newborn (navel), burns.

 

Nadkarni: Gum stimulant, expectorant, emmenagogue; externally, astringent.

 

Dash: Cold, aromatic, for skin and blood, uterus, thirst.

 

Li: Moyao. Disperses blood stasis, helps physical damage of all kinds, swellings, pains, etc.  Known to be from the west, but a local Southeast Chinese myrrh is mentioned; it would be a different species.  Bitter, balanced, nontoxic.

(In addition to the proverbial use as incense, myrrh gum is genuinely antiseptic, astringent, soothing.  It was one of the more effective drugs in this canon. Still used medicinally, and was even in biomedical practice till very recently.)

 

 

Commiphora opobalsamum (L.) Engler. Burseraceae. Balasān/Bolasang伯剌桑.

 

Dioscorides: Drying, heating; long discussion of how to tell it, so clearly important import.

 

Avicenna: hot, dry. Digestive and diuretic. Used on sores, swellings, pains, skin conditions.

 

Levey: Bakasān. Drying, heating; clyster.

 

al-Bīrūnī: Large tree; oil healing, mixed with other substances.

 

Lev and Amar: balasān. Eyes, epilepsy, palpitation, purging, stomach, etc. Oil for spleen, kidneys, liver, womb, lungs, cough, tuberculosis, urine, skin, bites, stings, poisons. Works against infertility, dizziness.

 

Nadkarni: Fruit carminative, expectorant, stimulant; gum astringent and demulcent.

(Effective antibacterial.)

 

 

Convolvulus scammonia L. Convolvulaceae. Scammony. Saqamūniyā/Saheimuniya撒黑木尼牙. Also Mamūda/Mahamuda馬哈木荅.

 

Dioscorides: purgative.

 

Avicenna: Saqmūniā. Hot and dry. Cleansing, dissolvent. Used in poultices for skin disease, ulcers, etc. For headaches; but harms heart, stomach, intestines and liver. Purges yellow bile, but to be used with care.

 

Al-Kindī: purgative, stomach medicines.

 

Lev and Amar: Root. Fever, nerves, stomach, liver. Dangerous; produces diarrhea and abortion.  In ointment for skin, wounds, scars, headaches.  Powerful purgative. Expels worms. Can cure intestinal diseases, palpitations, insanity.

 

Nadkarni: Cathartic; used for dropsy and anasarca.

 

Eisenman: C. subhirsutus seeds used for gastrointestinal conditions; infusion of plant for pain, convulsions, wounds, asthma, tuberculosis. Biomedical action: analgesic but irritating to eyes; large doses paralyze nervous system. Less toxic derivatives used for spasms and other conditions.

(Powerful purgative. Not in Chinese practice though important in the Near East; presumably too strong in a negative way for the Chinese medical spirit.)

 

 

Coptis chinensis Franch., Ranunculaceae. Native. Huanglian黃連.

 

Avicenna: Coptis trifolia, māmīrān, hot and dry, purifying; minor uses typical of hot and dry drugs.

 

Nadkarni: C. teeta. Bitter tonic; for appetite, digestion, etc. Used in jaundice, convalescence, fevers, dyspepsia; conjunctivitis (salve).

 

Li: C. chinensis, huanglian, Chinese goldthread. Rhizome most used; bitter, cold, nontoxic.  Many pages on this very popular Chinese drug, whose coldness makes it used to treat Fire of many sorts.

(Modern research confirms some traditional values, due to berberine, but more research is needed.  It is very likely that in the HHYF it is used in place of C. teeta, as one of several cases in which a native drug was used only because it was a substitute for the Middle Eastern one. C. teeta occurs in Yunnan雲南and is harvested by minority peoples there. It is used as an analgesic and antibacterial as well as for the uses of C. chinensis. This is another of the interesting cases in which Avicenna is our only western source for an otherwise Indian drug.)

 

 

Cordia myxa L., Boraginaceae. Sibsitān/Xibixitang西比西唐Sibistan.

 

Theophrastus: food (it has a small, pear-like fruit).

 

Levey: Sabastān,sibāsah. In electuary for happiness and stomach and liver.

 

Al-Bīrūnī: Shajarah al-dibq and other names. Disiccant, refrigerant. Against heat and coughs.  Removes hardness in chest. Cures blenorrhea due to agitation in bile in kidneys and bladder.  Expels worms.

 

Avicenna: C. sebestena. Sibistān, Persian sīsabān.  Laxative.

 

Lev and Amar: Ointment for liver etc. Purgative. Malaria, etc. Astringent; dry but neutral (not hot or cold).

 

Graziani: Sabastān. Ibn Jazlah used it for bronchial and pulmonary problems and stomach disorders, to calm sneezing, for throat pain, and as mild laxative; if taken excessively could harm the liver. “Al-Kindī has it in a remedy to lift up the mood and strengthen stomach and liver.”[62]  Used today in Iran for coughs and chest, in Egypt and Syria as laxative and for respiratory problems.

 

Kamal: C. sebestena, sabastan, mokhatah. Soothing for chest conditions and urinary tract infections. Apparently the fruit is eaten for this.

 

Ghazanfar: Seeds and leaves for stomach ailments and wounds.

 

Madanapala: Ślesmāntaka. Hot. For hair, poisoning, pustular eruptions, ulcers, erysipelas, skin; fruit [the foregoing was presumably the leaves] for virility, consumption, blood.

 

Nadkarni: Mild tonic. C. latifolia better known; for chest, uterus, etc. Demulcent; bark mild astringent and tonic.

 

Dash: Sweet, cold. No special uses mentioned.

 

 

Coriandrum sativum L., Apiaceae. Kashnij. Yuansuizi芫荽子.

 

Manniche: Many remedies for stomach problems used it. Externally it was used in unguent for small sores (herpes?). The related cumin Cuminum cyminum was very heavily used for stomach complaints—as it still is, worldwide.

 

Dioscorides: III-71, koriannon. Cooling. Heals skin eruptions and ulcers, inflammations, etc.  Seed drunk can expel worms and increase male semen. Excess of the seed is bad. Juice for inflammations, applied to skin.

 

Avicenna: Kuzbarah. Cold and dry, but Galen said it could be warm—perhaps having both a cold and a warm property. (Modern Chinese and others also tend to disagree about its coldness and warmth.)  Constricts. Used for swellings, etc. With rose oil, honey and dried grape for hives and eczema (the combination of soothing and antiseptic qualities would work very well here). Used for fainting, epilepsy, fevers related to yellow or black bile or phlegm.  Fresh coriander used for sleep. Treats inflammations and mouth sores. Powdered dry coriander for mouthwash.  Helps eyes, relieves stomach, purges worms, etc. Fresh and dry both cause mental confusion and reduce sexual desire and male potency (a very odd claim).

 

Levey: Kuzbarah. Headache, etc.

 

Nasrallah: Digestive, soporific, eases childbirth.

 

Lev and Aman: Eyes, diarrhea, inflmmatory swellings, headaches, fever, heart. Plant made into compress for stings. Also, taken, to accelerate childbirth. Incense from it keeps snakes and scorpions away. Sexual medicine and stimulant. Several other minor uses. Modern uses add toothache. Another all-purpose plant. (Its carminative and stimulant effects help digestion—hence wide use in Near Eastern spicing then and now—but it hardly deserves this wide use.)

 

Graziani: Kuzbarah. Ibn Jazlah used it for eyes, bleeding, vomiting, but warns it dulls the eyes and reduces semen.

 

Kamal: Kuzburah, qalantarah, etc. Fruit carminative, aromatic.

 

Bellakhdar et al.: for scurvy (evidently the leaves); anti-rabies, stomachic, aphrodisiac, tonic, antiinflammatory (presumably the seeds; aphrodisiac probably only as  mixed into ras-al-hanout, traditional Moroccan spice and drug mixes used for that purpose and often working through incorporation of Spanish fly [cantharid beetles]).

 

Ghazanfar: Kobzra, kabzara, khabzara. Dried seeds, leaves, carminative, for digestion, swellings, eyes, general tonic; seeds boiled in water, for nausia as well as general stomachic, or in vinegar with sugar as tonic for heart and system.

 

Lebling and Pepperdine: Kuzbara, kizbara. Digestive.

 

Madanapala: Dhānyā. Diuretic, cardiac tonic, appetite; alleviates excess dosas; for dyspnoea, cough, thirst, piles, parasites.

 

Nadkarni: Fruit stimulant, carminative, stomachic, antibilious, refrigerant, tonic, diuretic, aphrodisiac. Leaves pungent and aromatic.

 

Dash: Diuretic. Pungent and bitter.

 

Sun: Coriander (Chinese parsley, cilantro) seeds (huxuzi胡荽子): sour, balanced, nonpoisonous. They help digest grains and recover one’s appetite. Its leaves cannot be taken frequently, or it will cause short memories (duowang多忘). Hua Tuo 華佗 said, “If one has armpit odor (lit. “fox smell,” huchou 胡臭), bad breath (kouqichou 口氣臭), or rotten teeth (?ni chong chi [匿蟲]齒. “teeth hiding vermine”), taking coriander leaves will worsen the condition. if one is suffering from noxious qi in the abdomen, he should never take it. Otherwise, it will arouse his chronic conditions. One having cut-wounds should not eat it either.”

 

Li: Husui 胡荽, yuansui 芫荽. Root and leaf pungent, warm, slightly toxic.  Good food; digestive.  Beneficial to the body, protecting; many specific uses. Seed pungent, sour, balanced, nontoxic.

(Overall, note the wide agreement across cultures on the value of this plant.)

 

 

Cornus macrophylla Wall, Cornaceae. Native.  Dingpi丁皮.

 

Sun: Dogwood (Cornus officinalis Sieb. et Zucc., shizhuyu食茱萸): spicy, bitter, greatly warming, nonpoisonous. It should be collected in the ninth month. When preserved for a long time, it becomes better. When its fruit is closed [presumably:  not ripe enough to burst open], it is poisonous and should not be used. It stops pain and helps the qi move downward. It terminates vomiting caused by coughing. It eliminates coldness in the five internal organs. It warms up the Middle Jiao and treats every kind of cold shi[63] that will not disappear (lengshi buxiao冷實不消). Its raw, white bark mainly treats the illness of being attacked by noxious qi (zhong’e中惡), stomachache, and toothache. Its thin roots treat Three Worms and threadworm. The Yellow Emperor said, “In the sixth and seventh month, do not eat dogwood, or it will hurt the spirit and the qi and arouse hot-summer qi (fuqi伏氣).” If one’s throat is not clear, or if wicked wind attacks people (zeifeng zhongren賊風中人), or one’s mouth is wry and cannot speak, take one sheng升 of dogwood and get rid of black seeds and closed fruits. Take three sheng of fermented soy beans (chi豉). Add pure liquor (qingjiu清酒) to the dogwood and beans. Boil them till they reach the boiling point for four or five times. Take the juice and cool it down. The patient has half a sheng of the juice three times a day. After it sweats him a little, he will recover. If one is stung by a scorpion (chai蠆), he should chew dogwood, put what has been chewed up on the wound, and the poison will be dispelled.

 

Li:  Songyang松楊. Leaf, sweet, salty, balanced, nontoxic, for fractures and blood; bark, bitter, balanced, nontoxic, for dysentery. (Tannin makes it effective for this.)

 

 

Cornus mas L., Cornaceae. Dogwood. One reading for mū/Mo, but that is normally, and surely in the HHYF, Meum athamanticum. However, dogwood uses in the west are clearly relevant, since Meum probably was used as a substitute for C. mas in western-derived formulations.

 

Avicenna: Hot and dry. Diluent, cleansing, opening. Root taken for arthritis, painful urination, bladder pain, menstruation, and “cold and aseous inflation of the liver.”[64] Ash of bark on wounds.

 

Lev and Amar: C. mas, , qaraniyya. (Ali Zargari’s book of Persian plants lists this second name, but not mū, as an Arabic name for this sp.)  Phlegm, poisons, etc.  For urine and generating heat. Helps smell, voice, stickiness, soothes stomach, live, kidneys. Stimulates sexual desire, cures infections of bladder, stops sweating, dispels pains. Oil for shivers, paralysis, coldness, weakness.

 

 

Corylus avellana L. Betulaceae. Hazelnut. Mentioned in Index. Not in our recipes. Jillauz/Chiliwoza赤里窩咱

Avicenna: Aṭyuṭ, bunduq (“round thing”). Hot and moist. Cleansing, constricting.Slow to digest.  Minor uses include use to remove blue spots on infants, but Avicenna says only “some” believe this, meaning he does not.[65]

 

 

Crataegus azarolus L. Rosaceae. Common hawthorn. Soup of this plant, presumably the fruit, mentioned in Index. Za’rūr/Zaluli咱盧黎

 

Dioscorides: Sweet fruit used.

 

Avicenna: Constricting. Best fruit for eliminating yellow bile.

 

Eisenman: C. altaica. Leaves and dried flowers and fruits in tea for “hypertension, dizziness, tachycardia, insomnia, heart diseases and common colds.”[66] Laxative. Biomedical evidence for effectiveness, for heart etc. Tannins give some value. Vitamin C content high. C. songarica, similar uses and values.

(Fruits of Chinese hawthorns are widely used medicinally in China today, for cooling, tonic, astringency, but oddly absent from the herbals.)

 

 

Cressin alenois.  Possible identification for a mysterious name in the Table of Contents. Used in Morocco for appetite and as general stimulant (Abdelhai Sijelmassi, Plantes médicinales de Maroc, on website). Nothing else recorded in the literature. Maliyāsa/Maheiliyasa馬黑里牙撒

 

 

Crocus sativus L., Iridaceae. Many variants Za’farān/Zafalan 咱法闌/Zafalang咱法郎/ Safalang撒法朗; Zarnab/ Zaerbaby咱兒納不.

 

Dioscorides: I-25, krokos. Applied with women’s milk to stop flux of eyes. Drunk and/or pessary for uterus. Stirs lust. Soothes inflammations, applied. Diuretic.

I-64, krokinon. Complicated recipe for oil with saffron and other herbs infused. Warming, soporific, etc.

 

Levey: Za’farān. In musk, air freshener, and perfume products. For nose, scrofula, swollen head, liver, sore throat and mouth, bad teeth and gums, eyes, epilepsy and insanity, stomachic. In these various medicines it is probably used largely to give pleasant flavor and stimulant quality. Others used it for eyes, etc.

 

Avicenna: za‘farān. Hot and dry. Constricting and dissolving. Dissolves swellings. Rubbed on inflammation. Causes headache but used for sedative. With wine, makes drunkenness worse, causing uncontrollable behavior. Strengthens eyesight; various optical uses. Exhilarant; cardiac tonic; good for lungs and chest conditions. Causes vomiting, reduces adppetite, diuretic, aphrodisiac. Used for hardness, malignant ulcers, etc. in uterus.

 

Nasrallah: Adds that, in alcoholic drinks, saffron creates “an ecstatic state of euphoria, almost to the point of madness.”[67] Ibn Sīna noted that one could even lose one’s soul.

 

Levey and Al-Khaledy: Very important in Al-Samarqandī’s formulations; major medicine.

 

Lev and Amar: za‘farān. One of the curealls, used for the usual reasons:  eyes, headache, stomach, brain, liver, bile, sexual energy, epilepsy, hemorrhages, purgation, inflammations, women’s ailments, various topical applications, and so on and on. Hot and dry.

 

Graziani: Za‘faran, shiyaf. Ibn Jazlah used it in eye powder, eye wash, and to meliorate strong medicines. Also strengthens heart. Excessive use harmful to lungs, causes headache and drowsiness.

 

Kamal: Za’faran; emmenagogue.

 

Bellakhdar et al: emmenagogue and abortive; cardiac stimulant.

 

Lebling and Pepperdine: Headaches, heart; externally, skin care. Anticancer potential noted, and a less plausible finding of value for learning and memory, though like lemon balm and mint it certainly has a soothing and focusing effect when sniffed.

 

Madanapala: Kunkuma. Hot, pungent. Makes one happier and alleviates excess of dosas. For skin, ulcers, parasites, headache.

 

Nadkarni: Stimulant, aphrodisiac, stomachic; anodyne, antispasmodic; emmenagogue.

 

Dash: Bitter, astringent, hot. For parasites among other things.

 

Li: Fanhonghua 番紅花. Sweet, plain, nontoxic. Barely known. Even so, mentioned for melancholy with stagnation and suffocation, blood stasis, mania, etc.; can make one happy.

(The importance of this stimulant, warming medicinal spice continues, though it is now priced out of the reach of most.  Saffron is in fact antiseptic and warming. Thus, like rose, it fits the medieval Near Eastern ideal of a plant that is beautiful, wonderful-tasting, and genuinely medicinal. Research also confirms that the scent can increase happiness.

Throughout East Asia, turmeric or safflower are substituted for saffron in dyeing, cooking, and medicine.  Turmeric does have spice and medicinal value; safflower has no well-demonstrated value and is tasteless. The two were enough to block saffron from getting established in China.)

 

 

Croton tiglium L., Euphorbiaceae. Introduced to China. Saqamūniyā/Sajimuniya撒吉木你牙. Egyptian: Habb il-muluk

 

Avicenna: Māhūdānah; seed is dand. Hot and dry. Strong vomiting and laxative agent. For a range of stomach conditions.

 

Kamal: C. cascarilla, qishr-‘anbar, nabat habb al-muluk. Bark aromatic, antipytretic, soothing, anti-emetic, expectorat.

 

 

 

  1. tiglium, habb al-muluk, hab al-Salatin. Seeds produce an oil used as antihelminthic, and cathartic for constipation, anasarca, syncope, and externally for rheumatism, gout, etc. Badou芭荳.

 

Bellakhdar et al.: drastic.

 

Ghazanfar: C. confertus for constipation, coughs, tonic, pains.

 

Nadkarni: Drastic purgative. Seeds vermifuge. Oil powerful cathartic; vesicant. Plant used as extreme measure, for purgation and for violent stimulus in dropsy, apoplexy, etc.

 

Li: badou. Major drug. Seed pungent, warm, toxic. Cures diarrhea and other intestinal complaints. Vermifuge. Usual huge range, but also some instructions on what not to treat with so poisonous a cure.  Seed coat and seed oil sometimes used.

(Powerful, dangerous purgative and vesicant.)

 

 

Cucumis melo and its var. conomon (Thunb) Mak.  Cucurbitaceae. Shaogua稍瓜. Native. (conomon is a native Chinese variety, but the sweet fruit is west Asian.)

 

Avicenna: C. melo, biṭṭīkh. Cleansing. Unripe and ripe fruit and seeds all used. Flesh and seeds used to clear skin; peel on forehead prevents eye secretions. Root produces vomiting. Diuretic.

Wild cucumber (C. sativus?). Hot and dry. Wild one used for medicine. Used on ulcers and sores, and internally for dysentery, urination, menstruation, vomiting, etc.

 

Lev and Amar: C. melo, shammām, diuretic, good for stomach, useful on swellings and skin. C. melo var. chate (with a long, hairy, grooved fruit) for liver, cough, aphrodisiac, etc. Wounds, bites, diuretic, stomach-soothing. Common food. C. sativus, minor use for fevers and diuretic and stomach.

 

Sun: Chinese melon (yuegua越瓜): sweet, balanced, nonpoisonous. One cannot take it too much. It is good for intestines and stomach.

(The latter is a small, smooth fruit, but otherwise similar to the Near Eastern one. It works as a diuretic and stomach-soother—note that both the Genizah physicians and Sun knew its value for the stomach, though they could not have been in touch. It might help cough.)

 

 

Cuminum cyminum. Apiaceae. Cumin. Kammūn/Kemuni可木你, only a few references but cumin may also occur under the Generic Zira/即剌, also referring to caraway. This same term occurs also for dill (and maybe some related spp.) as Shiluo蒔蘿, a very old borrowing. This apiaceous plants’ small dry fruits (“cumin seeds”) are medicinal throughout the Near East and areas influenced by it.

 

Dioscorides: stomachic; with wine for poisons.

 

Avicenna:  kammūn. Hot and dry. Warming. Relieves gas. Erosive, drying, constricting. Wash for cleansing face. Ointment, with oil and borad bean flour, for inflammation of the testes. With vinegar for acne. Inhalation of powder with vinegar, for nosebleeds. Chewed with olive oil or salt and used externally. Used internally for labored breathing; stomachic.

 

Levey: carminative, stomachic, carminative, stimulant; against flatulence. In India for arthritis etc.

 

Ghazanfar: “antispasmodic, carminative, sedative and stimulant.”[68] Several active ingredients explain at least the carminative and stimulant functions (it is hard to believe how it could also be a sedative!). For diarrhea, nosebleed, sexual potency, colic.

(The traditional heavy use of this spice in beans, a use invented in the ancient Near East and spreading with beans to Mexico and elsewhere, is based not only on flavor but on the fruits’ considerable success at improving digestion and combating flatulence. However, the spice is almost unknown in China.)

 

 

Curcuma longa (C. aromatica in Kong).  Salisb. Zingiberaceae. Introduced to China. Does not occur directly in the HHYF but probably subtended under other C. spp.

 

Levey: C. longa, kurkum. Throat, mouth, teeth, gums.

 

Avicenna:  Hot and dry.  Dissolvent.  Used for nerves eyes, jaundice.

 

Lev and Amar: kurkam, kurkum. Teeth, throat, gums, mouth, eyes. Jaundice, stoach-ace, digetion, headaches, vagina. Purgative. Hemorrhoids. Hot and dry. Imported from India and likened to saffron.

 

Ghazanfar: C. longa, kurkum. Bronchitis, coughs, bruises, skin, eyes; rhizome used.

 

Madanapala: C. longa, haridrā. Hot. For skin diseases, urinary disorders, vitiation of blood, edema, anemia, ulcer.

 

Nadkarni: Tonic, stimulant, carminative. C. longa, Same. Used for liver, etc., and even worms.

 

Dash: Cures poisoning, helps bones heal, etc. Pungent, bitter, cure urinary problems, etc.

Dash: C. longa bitter, hot, eliminates wastes, cures poisoning, urinary diseases, itch, skin coditions, parasites, julcers, rhinitis, anorexia.  (Much of this is folk Indian usage.)

 

Li: Turmeric, C. longa, yujin郁金 (other writings), includes C. aromatica.  Pungent, bitter, cold, nontoxic. Many uses for pains and illnesses.

(Strong stimulant effect; stomachic; vitamin and iron content makes it valuable for nutrition, which explains some of the traditional medical uses.  Under study today for anticancer, antiseptic and antiparasite uses.)

 

 

Curcuma zedoaria (Berg.) Rosc., zedoary. Zingiberaceae. Imported. C. zerumbet (Rosc.) Roxb. Zedoary is Zurunbat (Egyptian), in the HHYF Zarnab/Zaernabu咱兒那不, Zarnabāt/Saernabate撒兒那把忒Guangshu廣戍. C. Zerumbet is Zurunbād/Zuerbadi祖兒八的

 

Levey: Zurunbād.  Nosebleed. Used elsewhere for stomachic, tonic, carminative, etc.

 

Al-Bīrūnī: For eyes. Antitoxin.

 

Avicenna: Zaranbād. Hot and dry. Dense. Relieves gases. Cardiac tonic. Good against insect bites.

 

Kamal: C. zerumbet. Cardiac tonic, other minor uses.

 

Bellakhdar et al: C. longa, kerqum, digestive stimulant, for blood diseases, against amnesia.

 

Lebling and Pepperdine: C. longa, kurkum. On burns, eyes, infections, skin ailments. Smoke for colds and coughs. One of the spice foods for women after delivery, in soup with meat, onion, pepper, cumin.

 

Nadkarni: Stimulant, carminative, expectorant, demulcent, diuretic, rubefacient. Root in particular is cooling, diuretic, aromatic. Used widely. C. zerumbet used like ginger.

 

Dash: Pungent, bitter, hot, appetiser, stimulates digestion, cures spleen, piles, skin, cough.

 

Li:  Pengshu蓬朮 and other names. Rhizome used. Bitter, pungent, warm, nontoxic. Similar uses to above.

 

 

Cuscuta epithymum L. /or/ Bove ex Choisy, Convolvulaceae. Dodder of thyme. (It grows as a parasite on thyme, hence the specific scientific and Arabic names, both from Dioscorides’ Greek for “on thyme.” Many other very similar dodders occur, and must have been used; the temptation to pass them off as this one would have been great, since the dried medicinal material would have been very difficult to recognize to species.) Afīthimūn/阿副體門.

 

Dioscorides: IV-79, epithymon. Drunk with honey for purging and black choler (melancholy).

 

Avicenna: Hot, dry and pungent. Relieves gas; digestive. Not good for those with yellow bile excess. Purgative for black bile and phlegm. Avicenna also has an entry for European dodder, C. europaea, Arabic kushūth, a different plant.

 

Levey and Al-Khaledy: Similar uses; very important to Al-Samarqandī, as it is in the HHYF.

 

Lev and Amar: afīthimūn. Influenze spasms, epilepsy depression (al-Kindī). Vomiting, bile, nerves, worms, hert diseases, purging, etc. Hot and dry. An unidentified species or set of species is kashūth [or Kushūth/Keshuxi可述西], with various uses, including liver, spleen, malaria, and stomach. Diuretic, purgative, emmenagogue. For pains and infections. Maimonides uses it in a sexual medicine for “excitation and great desire” but notes this medicine also causes “sorrow and depression” (which makes one wonder when it could have been worth bothering with[69]).

 

Nadkarni: C. reflexa, alterative, purgative, antihelminthic. Seeds carminative and anodyne.  Stem purgative.

 

Li:  C. chinensis, tusizi菟蕬子. Seed useds; pungent, balanced, nontoxic.

(This species of dodder parasitizes thyme, hence the Greek name, and its Arabic derivative, also the English name dodder-of-thyme. Its modern uses seem minor, but it was one of the most important medieval remedies.)

 

 

Cydonia vulgaris (C. oblonga) and C. indica Spach., Rosaceae. Shul/Xili西里/Shuli屬里; Safarjal/Safarerzheli撒法而者里. (In the Near East it would be vulgaris. In actual practice in China, C. vulgaris might have been used, but Pseudocydonia sinensis (a.k.a. Chaenomeles sinensis, Cydonia sinensis) would have been the major medicinal quince.)

 

Dioscorides: V-28, C. vulgaris, wine (oinos kydonites) binding; for stomach, dysentery, liver, kidneys (diuretic).

 

Levey: C. vulgaris, safarjal, seed in drug for coughs, in a mothwash, etc.

 

Avicenna: C. vulgaris, safarjal (Persian bīh). Cold and dry. Oil constricting. Oil on ulcers and skin. Roasted quince on eye swellings. Extract for difficult breathing, asthma, etc. (Still used for this in China.) Treats vomiting and hangover. Diuretic.

 

Levey and Al-Khaledy: Al-Samarqandī and others boiled down the fruit and made syrups, robs, and preserves of it, for its own value but also as vehicle for medicines. (The modern use of it for quince paste, the original “marmelade” from Spanish marmelada, derives from this; the paste is still used in folk medicine in many parts of the world. The fruit juice is boiled down to a solid cheese-like substance. This is still used medicinally for the throat. In the New World tropics, where quinces will not grow, guavas were early substituted, producing one of the world’s great confections, guabada.)

 

Lev and Amar: C. oblonga (=C. vulgaris). Safarjal. Strengthens stomach, helps check diarrhea; seeds, fruits, and jam for stomach in general. Headaches. Seed oil for medications against abscesses of liver.

 

Kamal: C. vulgaris, safargal, safarag. Astringent.

 

Nadkarni: C. vulgaris, fruit astringent, demulcent, tonic. Leaves, buds and bark astringent. Seeds used for gonorrhea, dysentery.

 

Sun (almost certainly referring to Chaenomeles sp.): Quince (muguashi木瓜實): sour, salty, warm, astringent, and nonpoisonous. It mainly cures the illness caused by wet qi (shibiqi濕痹氣), cholera, violent vomiting, on-going spasms in the back part of the legs (houjiao zhuanjin buzhi後腳轉筋不止). Its uncooked bark is nonpoisonous. It is edible after being boiled.

 

Li:  C. oblonga (=C. vulgaris), sour, sweet, slightly warm, nontoxic. Minor uses, mostly for indigenstion. Stops watery diarrhea.

(The astringent quality and the fibre in quince do work against diarrhea. The Chinese use quince syrup for the throat and for cooling in general, and for harmonizing with other cooling herbal medicines in a range of situations. Anderson can testify from experience that the throat-soothing functions are real.)

 

 

Cymbopogon schoenanthus (L.) Spreng. Poaceae. See Andropogon schoenanthus.

 

 

Cynanchum atratum Bge. Apocynaceae (Asclepidaceae). Native. Baiwei白薇

 

Avicenna: C. vincetoxicum, qunna barā. Cleansing, erosive. Externally for skin, shedding skin, ulcers. Clears tjhick fluids from brain by sniffing water of roots (presumably infusion). For lungs, liver, spleen, etc.

 

Li: Baiwei. Root. Bitter, salty, balanced (or cold) and nontoxic. Large range of uses. Many other spp. mentioned.

 

 

Cyperus rotundus L. Cyperaceae. Native. Xiangfu香附. Su’d/Shuwudi述兀荅 is Cyperus longus.

 

Dioscorides: kypeiros. Root used. Warming, diuretic and useful for kidney/bladder stones. Used for scorpion bites. Emmenagogue. Used in ointment for eyes and other conditions.

 

Levey: Su’d. In drugs for canker, ulcers, teeth.

 

Avicenna: C. esculentus, ḥabb al-zalim. Hot and moist. Fattening. Increases seminal fluid. C. rotundus, sa’ad, used on ulcers in “state of foul decay,”[70] on joints and nerves, chronic nose and throat diseases. Expels stones.

 

Lev and Amar: C. longus, su‘d.  Against scorpion stings (topically?), Stimulated menstruation. Treats mouth and teeth, thus in toothpaste. In medication to eliminate sexual desire. Hot and dry.

 

Graziani: Su’d. Used for taste and wonderful smell.

 

Kamal, C. esculentus, habb al-Aziz, habb al-Zalam. Oil relaxing; alleviates pains of mastitis.

 

Bellakhdar et al: the sp. for hair care, tonic; C. longus reconstituant, aromatic

 

Madanapala: Musta. Cold. Digestive stimulant, carminative. For parasites, bleeding, thirst, fever.

 

Nadkarni: Stimulant, tonic, demulcent, diuretic, antihelminthic, stomachic, carminative, diaphoretic, astringent, emmenagogue.

 

Li: Shacao, xiangfuzi 香附子. Rhizome sweet, slightly cold, nontoxic, bitter to some. Foliage and flowers also used. Important drug with many pages of uses and recipes. A very standard qi regulator.

(Tubers roasted for soothing plaster in Middle East.)

 

 

Daemonorhops draco Bl., Arecaceae. Imported to China from early times. Xuejie 血竭. Hu: 659.

 

Li: Qilinjie 麒麟竭. Resin. Sweet, salty, balanced, nontoxic. For pain, bleeding, blood stasis, new flesh, other physical injury issues; external conditions generally. Various other uses.

 

 

Daphne mezereum L., Thymeleaceae. Māzariyūn/Mazalawan馬咱剌彎; Māziriyūn/Maqiliwan馬齊里彎.

 

Dioscorides: IV-148, daphnoides (literally “laurel-like,” because in Greek daphne applied to laurel, Laurus nobilis; in English as in scientific Latin it was rather unfortunately applied to the unrelated genus Daphne). Leaf taken, apparently eaten rather than in tea, to expel phlegmatic matter from stomach; causes vomiting; emmenagogue; provokes sneezing. Leaves and fruit for purge.

 

Avicenna: Mādhrīum (from the Greek). Hot and dry to fourth degree (i.e. extreme). Cleansing, purifying. Removes dead skinb, treats vitiligo and spots. Also on skin fungus, ulcers (with honey), dead skin, scabies. Mouthwash. “Very harmful to the liver”[71] (true enough). Purges out water. Expels worms. Careful instructions given on dosage, since overdose is deadly.

 

Bellakhdar et al: D. gnidium, lezzaz, hair-care, abortive. D. laureola, walidrar, drastic.

 

Li:  D. genkwa, yuanhua芫花. Sources disagree on humoral codings but agree that it is toxic (which it is, by any standards). Several pages of medical uses for dozens of conditions.

  1. odora, ruixiang蕊香, sweet, salty, nontoxic, for laryngeal infection (only).

(Dangerously toxic plant.)

 

 

Daucus carota L. Apiaceae. Introduced, but long cultivated in China. Dūqū/Duhu 堵胡

 

Dioscorides: III-83, three kinds of “daukos” described, at least one of which is surely this sp. All have seeds that are warming. Emmenagogue and abortifacient. Diuretic. Help with coughs, bites, swellings, etc. See Athamantha above.

 

Levey: Jazar. Seed for stomach and for sexual overindulgence. In one remedy for calculus.

 

Avicenna: jazar. Hot and moist. Wild carrot seed is strong laxative. Powdered seeds and leaves for corroxsive ulcers. For inflamed chest. Relieves abdominal pain; diuetic; wild seeds, unlike seeds of garden form, do not produce gas. Stimulates menstruation, but the use for abortion (so well known in Europe) is not mentioned.

 

Lev and Amar: In addition to the usual jazar, it apparently was called dawqū, dawkaws and daucos in some Genizah documents, an odd bit of surviving Greek. Palpitations, eye problems, purgative. In theriac, and the usual minor complaints—pains, cough, bites, and so on—that seem to have had every drug in the Genizah documents used as opportunity permitted. Maimonides held it hot and dry and used it in sexual medicine.

 

Kamal: Jazar. Seeds carminative and diuretic, juice stomachic and diuretic, used in jaundice and bronchitis. (The use for jaundice is presumably sympathetic magic.)

 

Bellakhdar et al: urinary infections.

 

Ghazanfar: Gizrī. Crushed seeds with honey for sexual potency.

 

Madanapala: Grñjana. Hot, digestive, constipative, for bleeding and piles.

 

Nadkarni: Fruits abortifacient and for diarrhea. Root for first-aid poultices, burns, skin, etc.

 

Eisenman: Common weed in high Central Asia. Vermifuge, purgative, etc. Extract of seed has been used biomedically for cholesterol, kidney and gallbladder problems, coronary conditions, etc., but seem not usually current.

 

Li: Huluobo胡蘿蔔 (“Iranian radish”; today hongluobo紅蘿蔔, “red radish”). Sweet, pungent, slightly warm, nontoxic. Largely a food; good for appetite and health generally, improves digestion.

(Wild carrot plants still used as an abortifacient; unpredictable, dangerous, but a resort of the desperate. The cultivated carrot is often said to have been developed in Afghanistan in the late Middle Ages, but there are unmistakable pictures of domestic orange carrots in Dioscorides mss. in Europe, going back to the Juliana Anicia codex of 512; see Carrot Museum website, www.carrotmuseum.co.uk.)

 

 

Delphinium staphisagria L. Ranunculaceae. Zabīb al-jabalMayūbazaj/ Maiyuzazhi 買與咱只.[72] Also Mawizak/Maiyuza麥雨咱

 

Dioscorides: Phlegm, toothache, rheumatic gums, itches.

 

Levey: Zabīb al-jabal, mayūbazaj. Epilepsy, neck pustules. Today, as emetic, for itch and skin.  (Very widely used in Near East at all time periods.)

 

Avicenna: D. staphisagria, mawīzaj. “Seeds are burning, corrosive, pungent, and biting” (p. 658). Kill lice (better with arsenic) and mites. Chewed for clearing phlegm and edema from brain. Used in mouthwashes, etc. D. officinale: jadwār, zarduār, etc. Antidote against snake bites, aconite, insect bites, etc. Not well known to this writer.

 

Lev and Amar: zabīb al-jabal, etc. Epilepsy, neck pustules, skin, lice, toothache.

 

Nadkarni: various related spp., minor uses.

 

Eisenman: D. confusum, tea for intestinal disorders, muscle tone, veterinary antiparasitic medicine. Several current biomedical uses for delphiniums; highly toxic but can be used for anesthesia, parkinson’s disease, various nervous conditions. D. semibarbatum tea with barley flour on tumors. Ashes on eczema and scabies. Tea for fever, flu, sore throat, burns, anticonvulsive, stomach, etc. Kills flies and cockroaches.

 

 

Desmodium (Hedysarum) gangeticum DC., Fabaceae. Matin/Mating馬亭.

 

Nadkarni: Bitter tonic, febrifuge, digestive, anticatarrh. D. latifolium alterative, tonic, for diarrhea, vomiting, insanity, ulcers.

 

 

Dolichos lablab L. Fabaceae. Native. (Now renamed Lablab purpureus, but we retain the old name here for convenience, since it is used in almost all the references.) Dolichos Bean. Biandou扁豆.

 

Levey: lūbiyāh; this name may also apply to Vigna sinensis (it is a general Arabic word for beans, now including New World beans unknown to medieval Arabia). In a preparation for freckles.

 

Avicenna: Lablāb. Hot and dry. Softening, dissolving, drying, purifying. Removes hair and kills lice. Leaves usable on large wounds, as poultice or internally with wine. Poltice on wounds also.  Said very good. Used for earaches also. Treats chest and lung afflictions including asthma (as with other beans, presumably mixed with more obviously medicinal items). Leaves with vinegar for enlarged, inflamed spleen. Purges burnt bile.

 

Kamal: Liblab, kisht, etc. No medical use noted.

 

Ghazanfar: Lablab. Roots aphrodisiac, laxative, diuretic, and to regulate menstruation.

 

Nadkarni: Seeds aphrodisiac.

 

Li: Biandou (a name now used for the broad bean or the lima bean). Sweet, slightly warm, nontoxic. Several minor uses.

 

 

Doronicum scorpioides Lam. (D. grandiflorum), Asteraceae, leopard’s bane. Durūnj/Durunazhi都盧拏只; Daurunj/dulongzhi都龍知.

 

Dioscorides: IV-77, akoniton, Doronicum pardalianches. See under Aconitum above.

 

Levey: D. pardalianches L. Durūnj, darsūnaj. In collyrium, etc.

 

Avicenna: Darūnaj, khāniq al-namir. Hot and dry. Usual minor uses. Stimulates heart. “It causes leopards to suffocate.”[73]

 

Lev and Amar: D. scorpioides, darwanj, for eyes, and an anaphrodisiac. Hot and dry.

 

Nadkarni: Root of D. hookeri aromatic and tonic. D. pardalianches cardiac, tonic, for depression, melancholia, and scorpion stings.

 

 

Dracaena spp. Dracaenaceae (Liliaceae), dragontree.  Resin imported to China from quite early Dam [al]-akhawayn/Danmuaheiyun擔木阿黑云.

 

Avicenna. Dam al-akhawain. Uncertain as to cold or hot; dry.  Used on ulcers and wounds and for strengthening the stomach. Minor and debatable remedy, in his time.

 

Levey: Dam al-akhawain, for fistula, hemorrhoids, canker, gums, etc.

 

Lev and Amar: D. draco, the famous dragon’s blood, dam al-’akhawayn, shīyān. Fistula, hemorrhoids, canker, looseness of gum, stomach, bleeding, wounds, diarrhea.

 

Ghazanfar: D. serrulata. ‘Ariyeb, ‘ayrob. Resin for hemorrhage, skin infections; pain.

 

Nadkarni: D. cinnabari, astringent.

 

 

Dryobalanops aromatica Gaertn.f., Dipterocarpaceae. Introduced. Baroos Camphor or Borneo Camphor/Piannao片腦; Longnao 龍腦; Hu: 659.

 

Nadkarni: Gum. Diaphoretic, antiseptic, antispasmodic, stimulant.

 

Li: Longnaoxiang片腦香. Li explains that the name—“dragon brain fragrance”—indicates the drug is precious (i.e., powerful like a dragon).  However, the uses are rather few, and the resin seems poorly cognized, with sources disagreeing on the humoral codings. Nontoxic. (The name may be from the appearance of the dried resin lumps, or some other feature.  )

 

 

Ecballium elaterium (L.) Rich., Cucurbitaceae. qiththā’ al-imār/Heisaliheimaer黑撒里黑麻而/Jidawuheimaer吉荅兀黑馬兒

 

Dioscorides: IV-154, sikys agrios. Leaf juice in ears for earache. Root, paste, on swellings, gout, sciatica. Decoction for toothache. Beaten for skin infections, scars, etc. Purges phlegm and choler. Purge.

IV-155: seed extract of same. Causes purging and vomiting. Can be overdone, in which case wine with oil is recommended. Poured in with milk into nostrils for rash and headache. Various other minor conditions.

 

Avicenna: qitha’ al-ḥimār. Hot and dry. Diluting, blood thinning, drying. External uses for jaundice, scars, wounds, skin diseasses, swellings, abscesses, ringworm, scabies, arthritis, etc.  Internally for laxative, swellings, vomiting. Evacuates phlegm and excess blood (sanguine humor).

 

Levey: ‘alqam. In oil for binding sinews, pain in back, rheumatisim and lameness. For nosebleeds.

 

Kamal: qaththa’ al himar, etc. Renal and cardiac anasarca, brain congestion [1], paralysis.

 

Nadkarni: Narcotic; for malaria and rabies.

 

 

Elettaria cardamomum L., Zingiberaceae. Doukouhua豆蔻花/Baidoukou白豆蔻

 

Dioscorides:  I-5, kardamomum. Unmistakably the present plant, from the description (including source countries), and not the native Greek cress, kardamon (see Lepidium). Infusion for respiratory and other diseases, worms, scorpion stings, poisons, breaking kidney/bladder stones, etc. Abortifacient. Applied for itch, etc.

 

Avicenna: Ḥamāmā, hīl. Hil in Persian. Hot and dry. Cleansing and diluting. For stomach, cold liver. Stops vomiting. Diuretic and emmenagogue; treats pain in uterus and is used to support a displaced uterus. Bath for kidney pain; orally for pain in womb. Plaster with sweet basil for scorpion stings.

 

Levey: Hāl. For happiness. Also teeth and breath, breathing, stomachic. “Still sold…as a stomachic, stimulant, carminative, and condiment.”[74] (Anderson can confirm it is still sold for these purposes in the Middle East.)

 

Lev and Amar: Hāl, kākalī. Colic, kidney stones, cough, paralysis, stomach complains, tuberculosis, skin.  Vermifuge. Teeth and mouth, respiration, tonic, etc. Still used for all these, including appetite and stomach, nausea, votmiting, stones, etc., and even for insanity and depression.

 

Graziani: qaqullah. Ibn Jazlah used it for constipation and as dentifrice.

 

Levey and Al-Khaledy: Minor uses following the above.

 

Kamal: habbahan, hab al hal, al hayl, etc. “Stomachic, carminative, anit-colic, heart stimulant, aphrodisiac, emmenagogue, relaxant and digestive” (117).

 

Bellakhdar et al: qa’qulla. Aphrodisiac, calefacient.

 

Lebling and Pepperdine: Hal, hail. Stomachic and for liver. After childbirth, a woman is given a mix of cardamom, ginger, pepper, fennel, cinnamon, cumin, peppermint, browned flour, and fat. Cardamom with nigella and ginger in olive oil make a rub for coughs and colds.

 

Madanapala: Elā. For dyspnoea, cough, pales, dysuria.

 

Nadkarni: Powerful aromatic, stimulant, carminative, stomachic, duretic. Unani adds use for nausea, vomiting, headache, digestion; as resolvent, etc.

 

Dash: Uses not given.

 

Sun: Spicy, warm, astringent, nonpoisonous, and able to warm the Middle Jiao (burner; wenzhong溫中)[75]. Its major effects are to cure heartburn and stomachache, stop vomiting, and get rid of bad breath. (All of which fits perfectly with modern experience.)

 

Li: Not mentioned specifically, but doubtless included in the various cardamoms.

(Still used today in a minor way in China and more commonly in the Middle East; the Amomum cardamoms are much more important medicinally, but Elettaria is used too. All are effective, having volatile oils with stimulant, carminative, digestive effects.)

 

 

Embelia ribes Burm. Primulaceae (Myrsinaceae). Biranj/Bolangji伯朗吉/Bailang白朗; Biranj kābili /Bilingjikebuli必靈極可卜黎 etc.

 

Avicenna: Birank kābulī. Notes it as an Indian item, coming (to Central Asia, evidently) from Sindh. Expels phlegm and worms.

 

Madanapala: Vidanga. Digestion, flatulence, abdominal disease, constipation, parasites.

 

Nadkarni: Carminative, antihelminthic, stimulant, alterative, purgative. Fruit used.

 

Dash: Digestion, colic, constipation, parasites. Note similarity to Madanapala uses.

Note that this is another case of an Indian drug in the HHYF; its importance in Tibetan medicine shows that it may have reached Central Asia via Tibet, but Avicenna had it, obviously via Kabul (see the name); it was one of several Indian drugs that he knew well.

 

 

Emblica officinalis.  See Phyllanthus emblica.

 

 

Emilia sonchifolia DC, Asteraceae. Yangti羊蹄. Uncertain.

 

Nadkarni:  Sudorific.

 

Minor Chinese medical uses.

 

 

Ephedra sinensis Stapf. & presumably other spp., Ephedraceae. Native. Mahuang麻黃.

 

Nadkarni: E. vulgaris and relatives or synonyms. Alterative, diuretic, stomachic, tonic. Seems to be known mostly as a plant learned from Chinese practice. Many Indian species noted.

 

Eisenman: E. equisetina, infusion of green shoots for rheumantism, scabies, ulcers, malaria, altitude sickness, fever, heart disease. Plants also used for asthma. E. intermedia, stimulant and antiasthmatic. These species, unlike some ephedras, contain ephedrine and pseudoephedrine and are therefore highly effective biomedically.

 

Li: E. sinica, mahuang. Bitter, warm, nontoxic. Many pages of uses, but the use to relieve asthma is universally known. Root also used.

(It was the major worldwide drug for asthma and related conditions, in biomedicine as well as Chinese folk practice, until safer ones were discovered very recently.)

 

 

Eriobotrya japonica (Thunb.) Lindl. Rosaceae. Pipaye枇杷葉.

 

Li: Pipa 枇杷. Li notes the name comes from the similarity of the leaf shape to the profile of a lute (pipa 琵琶in Chinese). Fruit, leaf, flower and bark all used. Balanced and nontoxic; fruit sweet but leaf bitter. Various uses, external and internal.

(Loquat syrup is a universally used Chinese nutraceutical today, for its soothing, emollient, balancing, and general feel-good qualities, familiar to almost anyone with Chinese background or experience. It does not seem to have been so used in traditional times, which is certainly interesting. At least, Li and our other sources do not mention it.)

 

 

Eruca sativa Mill., Brassicaceae. Jirjīr/Zhierzhier知而直兒. Rocket.

 

Dioscorides: II-170, euzomon. Eaten raw “doth provoke Venery,”[76] especially flowers and seeds. Diuretic, digestive. Seeds in sauces as mustard is used.

 

Levey: Jirjīr. Insanity, stomachic. Many minor uses.

 

Lev and Amar: Jirjīr. Plant aphrodisiac; treats sexual weakness, strength of sperm, etc. Also for nternal diseases, urinary tract, gas. Increases mother’s milk. Seeds against insanity and stomach pains. Wet and hot (Maimonides).

 

Kamal: Gargir, baqlat ‘Ai’shah. Seeds vesicant, diuretic, aphrodisiac, anti-caries.

 

Bellakhdar et al: calefacient.

 

Nadkarni: Known, but no significant medical uses.

(Whole plant stimulant, from glucosinolate chemicals, but not much value medicinally.)

 

 

Euphorbia granulata Forsk., Euphorbiaceae. ‘ilk-al-ghzal; Euphorbia sp., Euphorbiaceae.  Farfiyūn/Falafurong法剌夫榮/Faerfarong法而法榮 (Persian); Shibram/Zhebulan折不藍.

 

Dioscorides: III-96, euphorbion, Euphorbia spp.?  (Description vague and smacking of travelers’ tale.) Sharp, burning sap extracted. Drunk for groin pains, bones, etc., and snakebite.

 

Levey: Furbiyūn, afarbiyūn. Abscesses, fistulas, scrofula; ointment. In a remedy for insantiy.

 

Avicenna: E. pityusa, shabram.  Hot and dry (very). Used very widely for external conditions.  Also for teeth; breaks up rotten teeth. Treats eye swellings. Harms stomach and liver, so used with care in mixtures. Removes piles.

 

Graziani: Furbiyun. Ibn Jazlah used it for paralysis, numbness, kidneys, against miscarriage, stopping tears, and for dog bites and burning belly. Modern Egyptian use in ointments for paralysis etc.

 

Lev and Amar: afarbiyūn, farbiyūn. Various spp. Wounds, mumps, insanity, purging. Hot and dry. Constricts womb and prevents miscarriage.

 

Kamal: E. officinarum, farbion, etc. Emetic, cathartic, poisonous. Juice vesicant, sloughing, rubefacient externally.

 

Bellakhdar et al: E. resinifera, abortive, drastic, toxic; skin conditions and earache cure

 

Ghazanfar: Many species, with many local names, for every type of external application. E. hadramautica also for purgative.

 

Lebling and Pepperdine: E. helioscopia and others.  Emetic, purgative (sap); externally, for paralysis, apoplexy, etc.

 

Nadkarni: Huge range of species used for the usual reasons (emetic, purgative, cathartic, etc.).

 

Eisenman: E. jaxartia, powdered root for wounds and syphilis. Latex for fungal skin conditions, scabies, corns and warts. A number of chemicals; some may be effective. E. apulum, purgative; for tuberculosis.

 

Li: Langdu狼毒includes many species, and yet more are used under other names. Li clearly saw them as related, putting them near each other in his work. Root usually used; bitter and pungent, balanced, toxic. Large range of indications, many of them external. (Euphorbia spp. often have strong external action, irritating to actually blistering the skin but effectively killing parasites, treating fungus and infected swellings, etc.)

 

 

Ferula asafoetida Lam. (also given as Ferula foetida [Bunge] Regel, apparently the same sp.), Apiaceae. Ashtu-ghar. Imported. Anjudān安吉丹/Anjidang安吉當 (from Arabic Anjudān—angudān in vernacular); Hiltīt/Heilititi黑黎提提. Also: Awei 阿魏, Hu: 659.

The many Ferula species used medicinally in Asia are possibly confused in the HHYF. ßaghyin/Saeyin撒額因/Saheiyin撒黑因; Sakabīnaj/Samibienazhi撒吉別拏只 (root of ferula spp.)

 

Dioscorides: III-55, panakes herakleion, Ferula opopanax or rel. Sap. Warming, mollifying, for agues, spasms, convulsions, ruptures, pains, coughs, gripes, strangury, scabies, and almost everything else. Emmenagogue and abortifacient. Salve for head, boils, eyes, dog bites, etc.  Root shaved, on vulva, abortifacient or birth aid. With honey on wounds and sores.

III-56, panakes asklepion, poorly described, may be F. nodosa. Flower, seed, on ulcers etc.

III-87, libanotis, one sort may be F. nodiflora. Similar cureall to the others.

III-91, narthex, F. communis. For griping and sweats; seed. Green pith with wine for snakebite and flux.

III-95, sagapenon, F. persica. Brief notes; similar uses to other spp.

III-98, ammoniakon, Ferula spp. As following, plus use for thorax when licked with honey or eaten with juice of Ptissana. Cures bloody urine, cleans eyes, etc. Applied with vinegar for hardness in abdomen and joints. Good for lassitudes and sciatic pains.

III-94, silphion, F. tingitana. Cureall, recommended for almost everything. Taken or applied as indicated for toothache, dog bites, poinsons including poisoned arrows, scorpion stings, etc.  Gangrene, carbuncles, corns, swellings, etc. Taken for respiratory and throat problems of all sorts, including leeches in the throat; general health, etc.; also as for other Ferula spp. This is the famous resin cureall that led to extinction of the best (Libyan) kind. Dioscorides was writing at the height of the truly fanatical obsession with silphium and other Ferula spp. which led to Libyan silphium becoming the textbook example of a plant exterminated by overcollecting.[77]

 

Avicenna: Hot, dry, diluting (bloodthinning); relieves gas; purgative; dring. For body odor, hair growth, fungus, mouthwash, tumors and sores, ulcers, growth of flesh, rheumatism, epileps, headaches, earaches, eye conditions in general, clearing voice, asthma, shortness of breath, jaundice, diuretic, purgative, malaria, and even kills leeches in the throat!

 

Levey: Ḥiltīt. Cold affliction of phlegm, aphrodisiac, rheumatism, etc. Throat and toothache.  Various forms. F. marmarica  is one source of gum ammoniac,  used widely in the HHYF.

 

Al-Bīrūnī:  Quotes Oribasius:  mollifying, flatulent, etc. Apparently on his own, he adds: Deodorant, dispels evil-smelling humors.  Poltice. Removes abcesses. For rheumatism.

 

Aphrodisiac. Cures hemorrhoids if boiled with pomegranate peel in vinegar and drunk.

 

Lev and Amar: Hot and dry, purgative, ointment on bites.

 

Kamal: Haltit. Gum anticonvulsive, stomachic, antihelminthic, emmenagogue.  Enema for gas and convulsions.

 

Bellakhdar et al: antiepileptic; F. communis antispasmodic.

 

Ghazanfar: Ḥaltīt, ḥaltīta. Antispasmodic, colic, expectorant, sedative; resin used, boiled or chewed. Also to fumigate women after childbirth, as with mukul resin. Resin with honey for menstruation.

 

Lebling and Pepperdine: Coughs, colds, stomach disorders, fevers, sore throat toothache (topically). Apparently antifungal (modern bioscience cited).

 

Nadkarni: Stimulant, carminative, antispasmodic, expectorant, laxatic, antihelminthic, diuretic, aphrodisiac, emmenagogue, nervine, etc. Unani uses for brain, digestion, vision, paralysis, epilepsy, convulsions, colic, etc.

 

Dash: F. foetida digestive, stimulant, appetiser. For colic and parasites.

 

Eisenman: F. foetida. Major folk medicine. Anticonvulsant, vermifuge, nervous condition treatment; restorative and tonic in Chinese medicine. These uses seem sustained by biomedical experiment.  Has been used in modern medicine as stimulant, etc. Contains a huge range of bioactive chemicals. F.kuhistanica, resin for syphilis; external use for wounds, tumors, etc.  Antibactierial. F. moschata, rare, tonic, etc.

 

Li: F. sinkiangensis, F. fukanensis, awei. Li is aware that the use of asafoetida was largely learned from the Middle East. Pungent, balanced, nontoxic. Kills worms, dispels gas, useful digestively in general.

 

Rossetti:[78] Still common spice; medicinal uses not discussed, but excellent history of production, trade, and use in food.

(This famous cureall was used in American folk medicine within living memory. The bad smell was supposed to scare away devils, among other things.)

 

 

Ferula galbaniflua Boiss. et Buhse, Apiaceae. Bārzad/Bieerzadi別兒咱的/Bieersadi別兒撒的(Persian)

 

Dioscorides: III-97, chalbane, Ferula ferulago, Selinum galbanum, or similar plant; possibly F. galbaniflua. Galbanum is the same. Emmenagogue, abortifacient; for coughs and respiratory problems, ruptures, convuilsions, poisons, etc. For pains and fits, etc. Variously mixed with potions. Applied for pains.

 

Levey: Various psychiatric complaints (madness, weakness…).

 

Avicenna: Jāushīr, a small plant; kamāshīr, a stronger and apparently larger form. Hot and dry. Bitter. Laxative, dissolving, gas relieving. Emmenagogue and in larger doses abortifacient. Used for asthma, cough. Various external uses including as collyrium for eyes. In general, a typical Avicenna cureall—put on all external conditions, taken for all minor internal ones.

 

Lev and Amar: qinna, etc. Insanity. Modern uses suggest there were many more uses in early times.

 

Kamal: Qana-washq, khalabani, qinnah, barzad, etc. Gum expectorant, anti-cough, anti-convulsive, emmenagogue.

 

Nadkarni: Stimulant, expectorant, antispasmodic, etc.

 

 

  1. persica, Apiaceae. Sagapenum. Sakbīnaj/Sajibienazhi撒吉別拿只; ßaghbīn/Sayibing撒亦冰

 

Dioscorides: Sagapenon. Various uses for this important Ferula resin.

 

Avicenna: Sakbīnaj. Hot and dry. Dissolvent, diluting/blood thinning, warming, cleansing. Relieves gas. Treats paralysis and dislocations. Relieves some headaches and epilepsy. Used fin eyes for dim vision, etc. Used for chest, for abdominal pain, dissolving stones, etc.; emmenagogue and abortifacient.

 

Lev and Amar: sakabīnāj. Kidneys, glands, back pains, insanity, etc. Hot and dry.

(Extremely important in medieval Europe as well as the HHYF, but oddly rare in the Arabic herbals.)

 

 

Ficus carica L. Moraceae. Introduced to China as cultigen. Tīn提尼; Wuhuaguo無花果, Hu: 1407

 

Manniche: Already used for constipation and related complaints (as it still is in the 21st century worldwide). Also in a number of remedies for heart and lung diseases. (The heart remedies would work for stomach problems but not for heart ones, and surely “heart” just means “internal pains” here.) Suppository for anus pain. F. sycomorus used similarly.

 

Dioscorides: I-183, syka. Laxative. Good for throat and bladder and kidneys, for asthma, epilepsy, dropsy (congestive heart failure). With hyssop for a tea for thorax. Good for respiratory problems generally, for inflammations, and much else. For women, with fenugreek, rue, etc., for fomentations (unspecified). With various substances for external use on almost every imaginable external condition. Also a long list of preparations for internal conditions. Juice used for coagulating milk; also as emmeanagogue, laxative, childbirth easing, plasters for gout and skin conditions, etc.

I-184, syka agria, wild fig. Juice from pounded leaves for ulcers, etc. Sprigs boiled with beef make it “soone sod,”[79] which must mean “tender,” since that is what they actually do (a meat tenderizing enzyme is in the leaf shoots). Similarly for curdling milk.

I-181, sykomoron, Ficus sycomorus Linnaeus. Grows in Mediterranean islands; Name sycomoron, “fig mulberry,” because it is a fig tree with mulberry-like leaves (Dioscorides’ explanation; basically correct). Fruit for laxative but bad for stomach generally. Sap for skin conditions, or drunk or applied for snakebite, etc. Used for hard swellings and pains.

I-182, sykon en Kypro (“fig in Cyprus”), apparently a variety of the above, and so used.

 

Galen:  Laxative, cleaning; often used with medicinal herbs.  Harmful to inflamed liver and spleen.

 

Levey: Tīn. Skin and ulcers; poultice for swelling, etc.

 

Avicenna: Tīn. Hot, moist. Cleansing, dissolvent, etc. Usual laxative and cleansing uses, and a vast number of uses for soothing, relieving, etc., internally and externally. Treats essentially anything, though evidently largely as a soothing agent.

 

Kamal: tin. Cooked for drink for smallpox, measles, scarlet fever, bronchitis, urinary affections, respiratory problems, etc.  Gargle for mouth and throat sores.  Sap laxative and external caustic.

Bellakhdar et alshariha, kermus, tin. Laxative.

Ghazanfar: ṭin. Leaves, fruit and latex for various external applications. Fruit tonic, laxative, diuretic; for kidneys, including kidney stones; for cough. In Yemen, mixed with dates, raisins and honey for depression or nervous tension (pleasant enough that it might even work!).

 

Madanapala: Añjīra. Cold, sweet. Alleviates some dosas, and blood.

 

Nadkarni: Aperient, emollient, cooling, laxative, demulcent.

 

Li: Wuhuaguo (“flowerless fruit,” the flowers being invisible inside the fig). One old herbal knew that “if the fruit is not stewed within a few ays, it will evolve into an ant, which will fly away by penetrating the peel,”[80] Known to be an import, and not much used, but fruit and leaf used for hemorrhoids and appetite, and fruit, oddly, for diarrhea and dysentery.

(Figs are still a very standard folk and even biomedical doctors recommend them as laxative. Both species appear frequently in the Bible, the common fig as the choicest tree fruit. The Biblical prophet Amos stressed his humble origin by saying he had been a dresser of sycomore trees.)

 

 

Foeniculum vulgare Mill., Apiaceae. Introduced to China as common seasoning. Huixiang茴香; Rāziyāna/Laziyala剌子牙剌. Hu, 659.

 

Both Dioscorides and al-Bīrūnī knew this plant, but said little about it.

 

Levey: Bisbās. Swellings and enlargements. Scrofula, ulcers, fever, stomach, liver pain, eyes.

 

Avicenna: Rāzīānaj. Seeds used. Hot and dry; cultivated is less hot. Opens obstructions.  Strengthens eyesight. Moist fennel (probably means the leaves) increases milk. Treats nausea and stomach ache. Diuretic and emmenagogue.Treats urinary system.

 

Levey and Al-Khaledy: Important in Al-Samarqandī’s text. Now diuretic, purgative, stimulant, carminative, stomachic, emmenagogue; root purgative. “In Persia today…it is one of the five ‘opening roots’ of the ancients; the others are parsley, celery, asparagus, and butcher’s broom.”[81]

 

Lev and Amar: shamār, rāyazānaj. Weak eyes, headache, hemorrhoids, aphrodisiac, brain problems, cooling generally, etc. Fennel seeds for children with incessant crying. Put on sore eyes, navel problems of newborns, etc. Maimonides used it in wine for the heart, holding it hot and dry. Modern uses extensive and varied.

 

Evelyn:[82] “Aromatick, hot, and dry; expels Wind, sharpens the Sight, and recreates the Brain.”

 

Kamal: shamar. Stomachic, diuretic, emmenagogue, carnimantive, anti-epileptic, soothing for colic. Aphrodisiac and lactagogue.

 

Bellakhdar: for liver and pancreas; dyspnoea.

 

Ghazanfar: Shih, samār. Decoction of leaves and seeds for couighs and carminative uses. Stems for toothbrushes. Seeds diuretic and for kidneys.

 

Lebling and Pepperdine: Colic, stomachache, flatulence, indigestion, rheumatism.

 

Madanapala: Śatapuspā. Fever, ulcers, colic, eyes.

 

Nadkarni: Fruit stimulant, carminative, diuretic, emmenagogue, purgative. Root purgative.

 

Dash: Sweet, hot, appetiser.

 

Sun: Fennel (huixiangcai茴香菜): bitter, spicy, mildly cold, astringent, and nonpoisonous. It is particularly important for treating cholera. It prevent sunstroke (bire辟熱) and gets rid of bad breath. If one boils smelly meat in water, add a little of it and the smell will go away. So it is called “the return of the good smell“. If the sauce is smelly, adding fennel to it will rid of the smell. Its seeds treat, especially, snakebites that have not healed for a long time. Crush and apply on the wound. It also treats nine kinds of swelling in the neck (lou瘺).

 

Li: Huaixiang懷香, huixiang. Fruit used (minor uses for foliage). Many uses, some so mystical that they defeated even the translators, others more related to the well-known (and still used) stomachic and digestive properties of the fruit.

Other apiaceous seeds may be confused here.

 

 

Fraxinus excelsior L. Oleaceae. Lisān al-‘asāfīr/Lisanuasafeier里撒奴阿撒飛兒/Hei[li]sanuliasafeier黑[里]撒奴黎阿撒肥而/Lisanuliasabeier里撒奴黎阿撒肥而.

Dioscorides: I-108, melia, Fraxinus ornus, manna ash. Juice of leaves drunk with wine, or applied, for snakebite; bark burned as ash applied for leprosy.

 

Avicenna: F. ornus, shir khishk, man. Neutral. For cough, chest congestion, purging yellow bile.

 

Lev and Amar: palpitation, purgative, aphrodisiac, for gases, stomach, pains, urination, memory; aids pregnancy.

 

Kamal: F. excelsior, lisan al ‘asfur, fraksunus, etc. Bark febrifuge. Leaves sudorific. F. ornus, manna mild aperient and cholagogue.

 

Bellakhdar et al: F. angustifolia, lisan t-tir, lisan l-‘usfur. Aphrodisiac, calefacient.

 

Nadkarni: Bark astringent; leaves purgative.

(The common ash has no major medical uses. Probably substitutes for manna ash, a mild laxative of long-standing use.)

 

 

Fumaria officinalis L. Papaveraceae (Fumariaceae). Shay®araj/Satela撒忒剌; Shāh®iraj/Shayitalazhi沙亦他剌只/撒忒剌

 

Dioscorides: IV-110, kapnos, F. parvifolia. Gives several alternative names. Juice quickens sight and brings tears. Used to prevent plucked eyebrow hair from regrowing. Eaten for choleric urine.

 

Levey: Shātiraj. Various humoral disorders. Popular today for various reasons.

 

Al-Bīrūnī: Shāhtaraj, qufnus. Cites Galen:  Sharp, pungent, astringent, diuretic, good for gall bladder and stomach. Helps eye and heart. Rāzī adds that it kills lice and ticks, cures itch, strengthens gums and tongue, etc. Juice reduces scab and itch, strengthens stomach, opens liver.

 

Avicenna: shīṭraj (making it easy to confuse with Lepidium). Hot and bitter. Used on itching, skin disease, gums.  Strengthens stomach. Laxative and diuretic.

 

Lev and Amar: shāhtaraj.  Helps melancholy; diuretic; for skin, blood, stomach.

 

Kamal: Shahatarg, shahatra. Tonic. Skin diseases. Antipyretic. Good for caries and jaundice.  Fluid extract used.

 

Ghazanfar: F. parviflora. Antihelminthic, laxative, for dyspepsia; externally, paste for skin rashes.

 

Nadkarni: Diaphoretic, tonic, diuretic, antihelminthic, aperient, etc. Used for sexually transmitted diseasess and leprosy, among other things.

 

Dash: F. parviflora bitter, cold, for fever, burning, anorexia, fatigue, intoxication, giddiness.

 

Eisenman: F. vaillantii, decoction for blood cleansing, diuretic, “coughs, jaundice, headache, fever, gonorrhea, uterine bleeding, erysipelas,” (118), etc. Also bath for itch, rashes, and pimples.  Biomedically, fumarine causes paralysis, catalepsy. Inhibits cholinesterases.

 

 

Gardenia jasminoides Ellis, Rubiaceae. The Chinese name for this plant is routinely confused in the HHYF with saffron, Crocus sativus, q.v. Still, it may very well have been used.

Li describes many uses for it. Fanzhizihua番梔子花.

 

 

Gentiana lutea (and/or asclepidea) L., Gentianaceae. Jantiyānā/Zhentiyana真體牙拿/Hentiyana恨提牙拿/ Jan®iyān

 

Dioscorides: III-3, gentiane, gentiana. Root warming, binding. Drunk with pepper, rice and wine for venomous bites. Also for pain of side; falls; ruptures and convulsions; liver and stomach problems. Abortifacient. Applied to ulcers, skin conditions, and inflamed eyes.

 

Avicenna: Janṭiānā. Hot and dry. Laxative. Syrup rubbed on twisted muscles and on bruises.  Used for conjunctivitis. Internally for lungs, spleen, liver. Diureti and emmenagogue. Abortifacient.

 

Nadkarni: G. kurroo, root, local equivalent to above; similar chemistry. Tonic, antiperiodic, antibilious, astringent, stomachic, antihelminthic.

 

Eisenman: G. olivieri, decoction of flowering herb for gastric conditions, malaria, teeth and gums and mouth; externally for ulcers and abscesses. Syrup from boiling gentian with barberry roots for side pains, rheumatism, chest pain. Biomedically, tests how sedative and anti-inflammatory action; chemicals identified.

 

Li: Qinjiao秦艽, longdan龍膽; each name covers many species of gentian. Roots used. Bitter and nontoxic. The former are the warmer ones, the latter the cooling species. The usual proliferation of uses.

(Gentian remains a European folk remedy, used in many digestive liqueurs and drinks.)

 

 

Glaucium corniculatum Kurt, Papaveraceae. Horned poppy. Māmithā/Mamisamo馬米撒末

 

Dioscorides: III:86. For eyes.

 

Levey: For eyes, erysipelas, gout.

 

Eisenman: G. fimbrilligerum, seeds crushed and roasted for hemostatic and tonic use for women after childbirth. Oil also effective. Decoction of leves and flowers as tonic, stimulant; large doses emetic and soporific, even to asphyxiation. Seeds laxative. Biomedical experiments confirm, and show antiarrhymthmic action.

 

 

Glossostemon bruguieri (Desf.), Malvaceae. Mughāth/Muaxi木阿西 (Arabic name). 

Uncertain identification.

Medicinal and food in Near East. Not in our sources but apparently in the HHYF.

 

 

Glycyrrhiza glabra L., G. uralensis Fisch., & probably other spp, Fabaceae. Native, but the Chinese sp. is obviously being used for the western one. Sūsi/Suxi速西; Gancao甘草.

 

Levey: Sūs. In electuary for coughs; salve for itching; oxymel for humors; in oil for scrofula, hemorrhoids, etc. Rob for tooth medicine, jaundice, cough, malaria, rheumatism, sciatica, pterygium. Many other remedies in other authors. As in China, it seems to be a general carrier and mollifier.

 

Avicenna: Moderate, slightly hot and moist. On burns and skin infections. Root for eyes.  Internally, softens and clears trachea; good for lungs; decreases thirst and treats burning in stomach; used for gonorrhea and internal ulcers. Treats fever.

 

Graziani: Sūs. Used in rob (thick syrup). Ibn Jazlah used it for leprosy, spleen ailments, and scorpion stings. Today in Middle East for acute indigestion.

 

Levey and Al-Khaledy: G. glabra made into a rob for a very wide range of uses; major part of Al-Samarqandī’s pharmcopoeia.

 

Lev and Amar. G. glabra, sūs and other names. Various preparations for yellow bile, acute fevers, etc. Skin, cough, chest, liver, scabies, hemorrhoids, mumps, teeth, pains, jaundice, even killing fleas. Weight gain, facial skin improvement, sharpens eyes and other eye applications.  Lungs, liver, spleen, etc., indeed almost every ailment of every part of the body.

 

Kamal: irq al-Sus, irsus, G. officinalis. Laxative, flavor for medicines, demulcent in throat lozenges.

 

Bellakhdar et al.: G. glabra, ‘arq sus, sore throat, cohlagogue, refreshing.

 

Ghazanfar: G. glabra, rhizome and leaves, coughs, expectorant, idigestion, pain, purgative.

 

Nadkarni: Tonic, cooling, demulcent, expectorant, diuretic, emmenagogue, gentle laxative.  Unani uses for liver, bladder, lungs, nerves, etc.

 

Eisenman: Decoctions and extracts for cough, chest, etc. G. uralensis roots diuretic, laxative, carminative, for pneumonia, bronchitis, asthma, ulcers, poisoning.

 

Li: Gancao. Usually this species, but term includes other species. Roots used. Fully ten large pages on this plant, the universal harmonizer, smoother, side-effects mollifier, and general additive of Chinese medicine, so important that the great Tao Hongjing陶弘景compared it to “the imperial instructor—who is not the monarch, but the monarch follows his instructions.”[83] Its role as harmonizer means that it is usually used in combinations, for essentially any type of condition. (This was still true in Chinese medicine in the 1960s.)

(Used as a general vehicle, soothing and harmonizing; hence its use in almost every possible condition in both the Middle East—see Lev and Amar—and China.)

 

 

Gossypium spp., Malvaceae. Cottonseed is tentatively identified as one item mentioned in the Index. Qu®n/Huteni胡忒尼. Mianhua綿花 is used in frequent reference to cotton cloth for binding, etc. Cotton at that time would be Gossypium herbaceum and Gossypium arboreum, not the common modern species (they are new world–barbadense and hirsutum).

 

Avicenna: quṭn. Seeds for chest and as laxative.

 

Lev and Amar: quṭn; seeds for purulent wounds, sexual desire; oil for hair. Plant for heartbeat, insanity, swellings, memory, diarrhea, burns skin diseases, hemorrhages.

(Seeds toxic; an effective male contraceptive but too dangerous to use. Otherwise apparently no biomedical value. They are now detoxified for food use.)

 

 

Gypsophila struthium L., Caryophyllaceae. Kundus/Kundusi困都思/Kundushi困都失 /Kundushi捆都石 (Gr)

 

Levey: kundus. In remedy for insanity.  Al-Samarqandī used it in a plaster for various purposes.

 

Lev and Amar: kundus. Insanity, skin, diuretic, purgative.

(It is rarely mentioned except in the HHYF and obscure in the sources.)

 

Helleborus albus L. Ranunculaceae. Not in the HHYF as such but Helleborus spp. is routinely confused with Veratrum and H. spp. almost certainly occur identified as such, quite probably incorrectly in many cases.

 

Dioscorides: IV-152, sesamoeidesHelleborus cyclophyllus. Purge, with white hellebore (i.e. Veratrum, q.v.)

 

al-Bīrūnī: Toxic, medicinal.

 

Lev and Amar: Kharbaq.  Diuretic; also for skin diseases, warts, epilepsy, madness, black bile, toothache, eyes.

 

Kamal: kharbaq (for Helleborus in general) used for mania, amenorrhea, ascites; now used only in veterninary medicine. White hellebore deadens pain; used in ointment.

(Highly toxic. The alkaloid can be hallucinogenic, hence possibly having some effect in madness; possibly not the desired effect. Not that Veratrum, confused with this plans, does not have such affects. It stimulates the heart in very small regulated doses, thus treating dropsy and serving as diuretic in that case; thus the diuretic use, above, which may clearly refer to Veratrum.)

 

Helleborus niger L.; Helleborus officinalis Salisb., Ranunculaceae. Same comment as previous. (See under Veratrum viride for white hellebore.)

 

Dioscorides: IV-151, ‘elleboros melasHelleborus officinalis, black hellebore. (Probably includes H. niger.) Roots for purging by vomiting or diarrhea. For epilepsy, melancholy, arthritis, fits, paralysis, etc. Pessary for emmenagogue and abortion. In ear for ear problems; applied to skin for skin conditions; to teeth for toothaches and mouthwash. Cataplasm for dropsy. Planted near vines, it makes their wine purgative! Sprinkled about house; thought to preserve from evil spirits (as rue still is in Latin America and other places—a use of rue not mentioned by Dioscorides). If one sees an eagle while digging it, one will die.

V-82, oinos elleborites, hellebore wine. Brewed with wine must. For constipation, or to vomit, including voluntary vomiting at banquets. Many brews and uses noted. The inevitable emmenagogue and abortifacient uses noted.

 

Avicenna: kharbaq aswad. Extremely toxic; used to kill rats—“not suitable for cowards!”[84] Hot, dry, dissolvent, diluting, cleansing. Renews youth and vigor. Those wishing to take it should abstain from heavy food for three days. Used for skin conditions, scabies, etc., wounds, ears, eyes. Internally, evacuates black and yellow bile and phlegm.

 

Nadkarni: Hydrogogue, cathartic, emmenagogue, antihelminthic. Poison. Local anaesthetic.  Used for a wide range of conditions, including epilepsy, mania, melancholia, etc., as well as on skin and for worms.

(The dangerous stimulant alkaloids in hellebore have banished them from use today, but they were important in folk medicine throughout history.)

 

 

Hordeum vulgare. Poaceae. Damai大麥. Oddly and significantly, while there are more than a score of mentions of barley flour and one of barley congee, barley water does not seem to have enjoyed in the HHYF the enormous importance that it enjoyed in Hippocratic-Galenic medicine. The thrust is as part of foods to eat with medicines, as in Greek medicine.

From ancient Egypt (Manniche 1989:108) and especially from Hippocrates onward through time, it was a sovereign food for the sick. Averroes, echoing Hippocrates, says: “Barley water is inferior to wheaten, but is cooling and readily digestible, and its coldness is of the first degree.  Barley water is more medicinal than bread, it is excellent in hot and dry diseases, since it cools, moistens, tempers, and wonderfully generates a laudable humour, nor does it inflate or remain in the stomach…”[85] Similarly, Al-Bīrūnī goes on at some length from Dioscorides, Galen, etc. on the advantages of barley water.

 

Avicenna: Cold and dry. Water used on freckles, pimples, etc. Poultice made with quindce and vinegar for gout, and other poultices for chest, etc. Barley water used for chest, but is “not suitable for stomach,”[86] a rather amazing point given the importance of this item from Galen and Dioscorides right down to Anderson’s own Midwestern childhood (the old Galenic uses were still very much alive). It was, however, used for fevers (as in the Midwest!).

 

Levey: notes that Al-Kindī uses it for memory, dental medicines, etc., and barley water to make hair and beard grow.

 

Nadkarni: Tonic and astringent decoction, as well as the usual use for invalids.

 

Dash: Yava in Sanskrit. Sweet, cold, laxative, aphrodisiac, cures diseases of urine, rhinitis, asthma, cough, etc. This use as a cureall recalls Greek medicine.

 

Li: Da mai. Minor uses.

Barley water was made by boiling barley for a long time in a large amount of water. Pearl barley (barley with seed coats milled off) was used for illness and convalescence from early times well into the 20th century (as Anderson remembers from personal childhood experience). Pearl barley, boiled in soup, was one of the medicines most enthusiastically adopted by China, and is still sovereign in Chinese medicine as a cooling agent.

 

 

Hosta plantaginea, Agavaceae. Yuzan玉簪. Dubious identification.

 

Li: Root is sweet, pungent, cold and toxic. Used for mastitis, sterilization of women, detoxification of snakebites and insect bites and stings, helping with pulling teetch, etc.

(A common Chinese ornamental plant, beautiful and sweet-scented but of little traditional medical note.)

 

 

Hyoscyamus niger L. Solanaceae. Native. Tianxian天仙; Bang/Fanaqi法納乞/Ponaqi拍納乞/Bang

 

Dioscorides: IV-69, ‘Yoskyamos melas, leukos, meloides, respectively identifie in Gunther as H. niger, H. albus, H. aureus. Descriptions a bit equivocal. First two cause frenzies or narcosis, and not normally used. Third (evidently meaning the second above)  with white flowers is gentler.  Juice from plant or seeds hard to store, but can be mixed with wheatmeal and dried for storage.  Juice used for pains, in various preparations, for various areas of the body; also respiratory problems excessive menstruation, gout, swollen genitals, swollen breasts of nursing women, etc.

I-42, seed oil for poorly specified conditions.

 

Levey: Banj (derived from Indian bhang). Cold ailments, insanity, epilepsy, melancholy.

 

Avicenna: Banj. Cold and dry. Soporific. Externally for pain, swellings, earache, eyes. Internally for gout pain, coughing up blood, pain in uterus. Poisonous.

 

Nasrallah: Deadly poison, especially seeds. Cold and dry.

 

Graziani: Binj, banj. Medieval Arab uses for toothache, stings of poisonous animals, swellings, stomach disorder.  Maimonides used it for poinsonous and painful stings.

 

Lev and Amar: banj, shawkarān, saykarān. Also H. niger. For palpitation, crying, toothaches, earache, bleeding, eyes, spitting blood, women’s diseases. With hellebore for cold, insanity, epilepsy, blck bile.

 

Kamal: bang, bang aswad. Sedative, narcotic,anti-epileptic, relaxant, painkiller, anti-colic, mydriatic.

 

Bellakhdar et al: H. niger and H. albus, both sikran. Narcotic, toxic, antihemorrhoidal, dental analgesic; magic. Atropa belladonna and A. baetica [closely related to Hyoscyamus and worth relating], zbib leydur, aphrodisiac, memory stimulant.

 

Ghazanfar: H. gallagheri, zgaf, for hair growth.

 

Nadkarni: Digestive, astringent, antihelminthic, as well as the narcotic effect.

 

Eisenman: Analgesic. Leaf juice for tumors, earaches. Water infusion of seeds for convulsions; smoke from burning seeds for toothaches. Plaster of leaves on abscesses. Biomedical action includes use of atropine for bile ducts, stomach ulcers, intestinal spasms, etc., and mydriatic.  Scopolamine formerly used as nervous system depressant; too toxic for much current use.

(Another plant with dangerous tropane alkaloids. Antispasmodic, analgesic.)

 

 

Hypericum perforatum L., Hypericaceae. Fāriqūn/Faligong法里公; Hayūfārīqūn/胡法里渾. (Gr).

 

Dioscorides: III-171, ‘yperikon, Hypericum crispum, H. barbatum. Resin diuretic; as pessary, emmenagogue. With wine for malaria; seed for sciatica.

III-172, askyron, H. perforatum. Fruit drunk with hydromel for sciatica. Expels choleric problems. Applied to burns.

III-173, androsaimon. H. perfoliatum and/or H. ciliatum. Same uses.

 

Avicenna: hīyūfārīqūn (from the Greek). Hot and dry. Attenuating, diluting, dissolving. Externally on large, cold, hard swellings; biurns; large wounds; malignant ulcers; dusted on soft ulcers. For hip and joint pain. Internally as diuretic, emmenagogue.

 

Nadkarni: Astringent, aromatic, antihelminthic, diuretic, emmeenagogue, purgative. For diarrhea, hemorrhoids, etc.

 

Eisenman:  commonly used. Decoction used as “astringent, anti-inflammatory, antiseptic, tonic, and hemostatic, and is used to treat kidney diseases, heart diseasese, diarrhea, and hemoptysis” and externally for wounds.[87] Still used for most of those uses in contemporary medicine in Central Asia. H. scabrum, similar uses; antimicrobial activity demonstrated in laboratory experiments.

(Traditional use in Europe as antidepressant recently confirmed by experiment and wide use, but less used now due to problematic interactions with commercial drugs.)

 

 

Hyphaene thebaica, Araceae. One of the possibilities for Muql/Muheili木黑里/Muheili木黑黎Listed in some sources as producing a gum used as or for muql, but in the HHYF muql is surely the gum of a Balsamodendron (Commiphora), q.v. Thus this tree may or may not be in in the HHYF.

 

 

Hyssopus officinalis L., Lamiaceae. Zūfā/Zufa祖法/Zufuda祖夫荅/Zufa祖伐

 

Dioscorides:  III-30, ‘hyssopos. Notes there are two sorts. Gunther identifies it (or one type) as Thymbra spicata, with figure of an Origanum sp. [Anderson believes at least one type is a Hyssopus sp.]  With green figs for stomach, purgative. Applied, with fig and nitre, for spleen, dropsy; with wine for inflammations. Decoction with figs for throat. Relieves toothache. Smoke for ears.

 

Levey: Zūfā. In oxymel for malaria, jaundice, etc.

 

Avicenna: Zūfā yābis. Hot and dry. Dissolvent. Usual minor uses for hot dry drugs; also, internal use toimprove complexion. Boined down with vinegar for toothaches. Vapors for ear. Poultice with borax and fig on spleen. Orally for swellings. With caraway and orris root for worms, phlegm, etc. Laxative.

 

Lev and Amar: zūfā yābis. Hot and dry (at least to Maimonides). Chest, lungs, coughs, stomach, asthma, jaundice, blood clots in eyes, diphtheria, toothache, earache, dropsy, bites, tears.

 

Graziani:  Zūfa. Ibn Jazlah used it for lungs, cough, hard swellings, spleen, and vermifuge. Rāzī used it, citing Dioscorides, for swellings, vermifuge, chest.  (Note difference from our received Dioscorides, summarized above.)

 

Kamal: Zofa, isof. Tops and leaves stimulant, carminative, tonic, expectorant, anti-catarrhal.

 

Nadkarni: Stimulant, stomachic, expectorant, diaphoretic, emmenagogue, carminative; used for hysteria, colic, coughs, asthma, sore throat, bronchitis, uterus, etc., and even for worms.

 

Eisenman: H. seravschanicus, infusion “expectorant, anti-inflammatory, astringent, tonic, antihelminthic, to heal wounds, and to treat bronchial asthma, gastrointestinal diseases, dyspepsia, rheumatism, anemia, stenocardia, neurosis, scrophua, meteorism and hyperhydrosis…applied to the mouth to treat stomatitis and bad breath, and externally to heal persistent wounds.”[88] In short, the Central Asian cureall. Biomedically demonstrated antibiotic action.

(Widespread European use for many conditions.   Biomedical value established for many of these. Has soothing effects.)

 

 

Inula helenium L., Asteraceae. Rasan (Persian). Rāshin/Laxin剌辛

 

Dioscorides: I-27, elenion. Elecampane. Root warming. Decocted for diuretic and emmenagogue. Root taken in honey for cough, ruptures and convulsions, swellings, venomous bites, stomach. Leaves boiled and applied for sciatica.

III-136, konyza, I. viscosa, I. saxatilis, I. Britannica (three types mentioned). Leaves for snakebite and the like. Emmenagogue and abortifacient (taken or applied).  For strangury, gripes, rashes, epilepsy, fits, etc. In herbal bath for womb problems including menstrual problems.

 

Levey: Rāsin. For stomach and rheums.

 

Avicenna: Rāsin. Hot and dry. Root used externally for pain, but causes headache. Internally in syrup withy honey, expectorant and purifying; relieves sore throat and cough. Thins blood.  Diuretic.

 

Lev and Amar: Diuretic; for coughs, bites, stings, menstruation, poisons; intestines,digestion, cleansing lungs, strengthening mind. Hot and moist.

 

Kamal: Rasan. Persian Qanas. Root stimulant for skin, bronchitis, amenorrhea.

 

Bellakhdar et al: I. viscosa, reconstituant.

 

Nadkarni: For bronchitis and rheumatism.

 

Eisenman: I. britannica. Infusion or decoction of roots for cystitis, diabetes, jaundice, catarrh, bone tuberculosis, rheumatism, hemorrhoids; vermifuge, hemostat, etc. Anti-inflammatory, astringent. I. grandis, tuberculosis, gastrointestinal conditions; vermifuge. Young stems, debarked, for restorative.  Anti-oxidant. I. helenium, same uses plus diuretic, emmenagogue, etc.  External use for eczema and scabies. Root tincture in vodka for gastritis, ulcers, nerves, heart disease, hypertension, etc. Biomedical uses for respiratory and gastrointestinal conditions; ulcers; expectorant, diuretic, etc. Effective vermifuge and skin parasite killer. Sesquiterpene lactones inhibit cancer lines.

(The anti-cancer effect of the sesquiterpene lactones of this and related species has been considerably investigated, but nothing significant has come of it so far.)

 

 

Ipomoea turpethum (L.) R.Br., Convolvulaceae. Turbid/Tulubidi突魯必的; Turbud/Daerbudi荅兒不的(Sanskrit); Yinchaihu銀柴胡; Qianniu牽牛is used for I. nil.

 

Levey: Turbad. Purgative, widely used and recommended in medieval Near East.

 

Avicenna: Turbud. Produces dryness; used for nerves and phlegm.

 

Graziani: Mentioned; no use given.

 

Levey and Al-Khaledy: Standard remedy in this work. Root a strong purgative. Arabic name, turbid, turbud or turbad, is from Sanskrit; a clear, early Indian influence.

 

Lev and Amar: Dry; purgative.

 

Ghazanfar: I. pes-caprae, seeds purgative.

 

Nadkarni: Roots cathartic and laxative; a “black” form is more drastic, to the point that it is no longer used.

(Odd that this common medicinal plant—an effective cathartic and laxative—is not found in more of the authorities. I. aquatica is used medicinally in China, but is so different a plant that it is not worth comparing here.)

 

 

Iris lactea Pall. Var. chinensis  (Fisch.) Koidz. Iridaceae. Native. The HHYF is not so precise in its nomenclature and mostly uses generics which include a number of spp. This includes Sūsan/Suoshan璅珊 which can refer to Iris l. but not exclusively so. Another general term is Irīsā /Yeersa也而撒 apparenty including Iris florentina. Also referred to is I. ensata including Malin馬藺 etc.). Zihua紫花, is also an Iris sp., which one is uncertain.

Dioscorides: I-1, iris, I. germanica and/or I. florentina. Dioscorides notes the name comes from the rainbow, because of the varied flower colors. Root warming, extenuating. For coughs, gross humors. Drunk in hydromel to purge away thick and choleric humors, cause sleep, provoke tears, heal stomach-ache. With vinegar for venomous bites, fits, etc. With wine, emmenagogue.  Infusion for sciatica, fistulas, sores. With honey for abortion, but application not clear. Applied to hard swellings, etc. Various uses for skin and external ailments.

I-66, irinon, iris oil. Complex recipe for an oil with many herbs.Mollifying and warming, etc.

 

Levey: Sūsan: lily, iris, etc. Lily oil for swelling in ears, hemorrhoids, etc.

 

Avicenna: Sūsan for iris; īrsā’ for orris root. Hot and dry. Drying cleansing. Usual uses of hot dry drugs for skin conditions, sweelings, wounds, ulcers. Treats nervous breakdown; oil removes fatigues. Internally with vinegar or wine for convulsions, etc. Enema for pain and sciaticsa.  Camomile oil, iris oil, for fatigue; dill oil for cold. Root boiled for mouthwash. Treats breathing problems. Laxative. Abortifacient. Treats most internal pains. Sitz baths and suppositories used for lower-body conditions; suppository expels yellow and black bile and phlegm. Treats fevers and insect bites. In short, this plant is a real cureall, to a degree rarely allowed by Avicenna.

 

Al-Bīrūnī: Apparently this is the īrsa or īrīsā he describes. “Sawsan” is partial equivalent. Orris is calorifacient, demulcent, lenitive, flatulent, deobstruent, detersive, purifier, etc. Juice resolves phlegm. Decoction for scirrhus, scrofula, pustules, ulcers, etc. Regenerates flesh. Sternutatory. Used in toothaches, ear problems, nostrils, wounds, gargling, hydrops, hemorrhoids, gripes, etc.  Emmenagogue and much more. Basically a cureall, used in all conditions.

 

Lev and Amar: I. florentina or I. mesopotamica. ’īrisā, sūsān, sawsan. Kidney stone, wounds ears, palpitation, purgative, menstruation, abortion, eyes, etc.  Cough, phlegm, sleeplessness, stomach pains, stings, bites, men’s and women’s problems, skin, wounds, earaches, mouth sores, hemorrhoids, eliminating wetness, etc. Another all-purpose herb.

 

Graziani: “Lily or Iris,” sūsan. Dioscorides for drawing out blood, inflammation of eyes, breast (note difference from English version!). Today in Egypt for detersive, liniment, emmenagogue.  Lily in Iran for labor pains and headache.

 

Kamal: I. florentina, sawsan, irisa, qos-quzah (“rainbow”). Rhizome purgative.

 

Bellakhdar: I. germanica, I. pseudoacorus, I. florentina, reconstituant, antirheumatic.

 

Dash: I germanica, bitter, pungent, for insanity, epilepsy, evil spirits (rakshas).

 

Li: I. pallasii, lishi蠡實, and I. tectorum, yuanwei鳶尾, various minor uses.

 

 

Juglans regia L., Juglandaceae. Walnut. Hutao胡桃.

 

Dioscorides: against poisons, dog bites, worms, internal infections, gangrene, etc.

 

Avicenna: jauz. Hot, pungent. Vinegar and honey drink treats being sick from walnuts (presumably from eating the fruit as opposed to the nut). Gum for hot ulcers. Oil for deep, feveish ulcers. Bark for throat inflammation, etc. Nuts difficult to digest, but all right if preserved or fresh-peeled. Not for hot stomach, however. Various external uses of different arts of the plant.

 

Lev and Amar: Cholera, body blemishes, hemorrhois, kidneys, cough, stomach, liver. Unripe fruit for eyes, draining urine, etc. Shell for limbs and gums, and usable in regulating menstruation. Nut on skin. Leaves for ears, kidneys, stomach, worms, lice, etc. Resin strengthens stomach.

 

Eisenman: Decoction of nuts to treat high blood pressure, heart, mouth; from fruit husk, for external use on ulcers, eczema, dermatitis; tea of leaves drunk for diabetes, vermifuge, skin diseases, gastrointestinal conditions, tuberculosis; decoction for scrofula and rickets. Root bark slightly laxative. Biomedical use in area for skin conditions including bacterial sores; antimicrobial and anti-inflammatory action; leaves effective. Omega-3 fatty acids in nuts beneficial for arteriosclerosis.

 

Sun: Walnut (hutao): sweet, cool, astringent, nonpoisonous. One cannot eat too much. Otherwise it will arouse phlegm, make people sick, or make them vomit liquid or food.

 

Li: Hutao (“Iranian peach”—yet walnuts are probably native to China as well as Iran; presumably the large edible and medicinal variety came from Iran, as the English name “Persian walnut” also tells us). Sweet, neutral or hot or cold (!), warm, nontoxic.  Fattening. Moistens muscle. Tonifies qi, nourishes blood, moistens dryness, dissolves phlegm. Reinforces gate of life (mingmen, “length-of-life gate”) and helps the three burners; Li adds a long monograph on these mysterious organs and their relationships. Relieves pain, hernia, dysentery, etc. Kills worms, treats poison; good on skin for leprosy, scabies, tinea, etc. Large number of formulas given. Separate discussions for green rind, and for bark of the tree.

(Common in Near Eastern medicine.  In China, used very widely today, including as a brain strengthener because the nut looks like a brain.  This bit of sympathetic magic is probably widespread. The extremely astringent, tannin-rich husk [fruit], bark and gum are used extensively in Avicenna’s healing, and are in fact very effective by any standards. The omega-3 fatty acids make this one of the most beneficial foods in this time of excessive consumption of omega-6 fats.)

 

 

Juniperus. See under Thuja orientalis. Cupressaceae. Very widely used medicinally around the world, actual juniper is not certainly mentioned in the HHYF; references appear to be to Thuja. Possibilities of juniper use should not be discounted. The well-known toxic, antibiotic, abortifacient, and astringent uses of many juniper species are well known in Central Asia (Eisenman covers four species) and China. A serious study of Cedrus, Juniperus, Tetraclinis, and Thuja in Near Eastern medicine is sorely needed to remove confusion of names, record actual uses (by genus and species), and compare with the well-known and quite dramatic biomedical values of these plants.

 

 

Lagenaria siceraria (Molina) Standl., Cucurbitaceae. Incl. var. clavata and var. depressa Ser.  Both native. Qar’u/Heiliyi黑里亦

 

Avicenna: ūbūṭīlān. Used on wounds, but Avicenna is very skeptical of its value.

 

Lev and Amar: widely used in various prescriptions, but probably mostly as a carrier. Fevers, liver, bile, earache, fever, headache, throat, cough. Diuretic.

 

Dash: Bitter; alleviates dosas.

 

Sun: Bottle gourd (tianhu甜瓠)[89]: sweet, balanced, smooth, and nonpoisonous. It mainly treats emaciation and thirst (xiaoke消渴), noxious ulcer, festering and aching in the flesh of the nose and mouth. It leaves are sweet and balanced. They primarily helps resisting hunger. Bian Que said, “If one has beriberi (lit. foot qi, jiaoqi 腳氣) or is weak and swelling (xuzhang虛脹), he should not eat it, or his illness will never end.”

Gourds (gua) [possibly bottle gourd, Lagenaria siceraria, but the quote implies he may be thinking of winter melon] are sweet, cold, smooth, and nonpoisonous. They hold back thirst. The Yellow Emperor said, “In the ninth month, don’t eat frosted gourds (winter melon, Benincasa hispida). It is towards the winter and will cause cold, hot, or warm illness (han re ji wenbing寒熱及溫病).” When one starts to eat it, it causes nausea. After one finishes with it, it remains in the heart as water and it cannot be digested. Otherwise it returns to the stomach (fanwei反胃). If one eats gourds that sink into the water, he will have cool illness (lengbing冷病) and will not be cured in life.

 

Li: Hulu葫蘆. Very important plant in Chinese culture, but medicinal uses few and minor, for various parts of the plant.

(Cooling in Chinese medicine; astringent; fairly effective diuretic; still a minor but well-known plant in Chinese folk medicine.)

 

 

Lagoecia cuminoides L., Apiaceae. Qardamānā/Jiermana吉兒馬那/jierdimana 吉而的馬拏. Qardamānā is also commonly understood as caraway and most often as cardamom. The Lagoecia identifications should be considered doubtful.

Mediterranean herb and occasion cumin substitute (Uphof). In our sources only as a surmise and the translation of the name in Lev and Amar.

 

 

Launaea angustifolia, (Desf.) Kuntze (syn. Sonchus, angustifolia, Zollikofera angustifolia).  Asteraceae. Maybe Kumai 苦蕒vegetable.

The only mention of this species in our sources is in Mandaville; he reports that in Arabia the herb is called marār from its bitterness, and has no use. Kong et al. identified the Arabic name saliyy as this species under the now long obsolete name Zollikofera. This is almost certainly a misidentification. Presumably they relied on some very early herbal that used that name. Some other Launaea species rate trivial mentions in Near Eastern herbals.

 

 

Laurus malabathrum, Lauraceae. Sādaj/Sada撒荅; Sādhaj hindī/Sadazhixindi撒荅只忻的  (“Indian malabathrum”; it is indeed from India but is not a malabathrum, though related)

 

Levey: For tears. (Levey thought it might be a spikenard.)

(A common enough Indian drug that even though rarely mentioned it is probably correctly identified here.)

 

 

Laurus nobilis, Lauraceae. Ghār /Aer阿兒; Òabbu’l-ghār/Habuliaer哈不里阿而 (berries).

 

Dioscorides: I:78, daphne. Scorpion sting, ears, liver, inflammations.

 

Avicenna: Bark hot and dry. Seed warming, relaxant. Oil useful for baldness, etc. Bark/seed extracts and oil for swellings, nerves, head, headaches, ears, chest, liver, spleen, abdominal pain.  Oil causes nausea but stimulates menstruation. With honey and vinegar for diarrhea. Bark can be abortifacient. Treats stings and scorpions.

 

Levey: In clyster for kidneys. Seed in formula for vermifuge and for air purifying.

 

Nadkarni: Astringent, stomachic, aromatic, stimulant, said to be narcotic (wrongly).  Emmenagogue and for leucorrhea, etc.

 

Levey and Al-Khaledy: Ghār. Minor uses.

 

Lev and Amar: ghār, rand. Stomach, hemorrhoids, palpitations, liver, spleen, kidneys, bites, poisons, worms, etc. Hot and dry.

(The stimulant yet soothing volatile oils are effective for symptomatic treatment of the less serious conditions above.)

 

 

Lavandula spp., notably L. stoechas L., Lamiaceae. Ustūkhūdūs/Yisituhudusi亦思禿忽都思/Wusutuhuduxi烏速突忽都西/Wusuhuerdirong烏速胡而的榮/Yisitaowudusi亦思討兀都思

 

Dioscorides: III-31, stoichas. Decoction for chest pains. Added to antidotes.

 

Avicenna: Usṭūkhūddūs, apparently from stoechas. Hot and dry. Bitter, dissolvent, opening, cleansing, somewhat constricting, strengthening, anti-decaying. Boiled down, relieves nerve pain, cold diseases of nerves, etc. Necessary for patients with cold diseases of nerves. Good for melancholia and epilepsy. Can induce vomiting, especially in those with excess bile.  Strengthens urinary organs; purges phlegm and black bile.

 

Graziani: Azhar al-Khazān. Modern uses in India and Egypt as carminative, resolvent, antispasmodic, stimulant.

 

Lev and Amar: isṭūkhūdūs. Eyes, including things like lice on eyelid (it would work, being strongly insecticidal). Malaria, wounds, hair, lengthening life, strengthening heart, asthma, infections, swellings, etc. Maimonides considered it hot and dry.

 

Bellakhdar et al: calefacient, nervous diseases, antitussive. L. x abrialis for urinary and gynecological problems, and colds; also cosmetic uses. L. multifida gastro-intestinal, antiseptic, colds. (ENA’s observations confirm that this useful genus is exceedingly popular in Morocco.)

 

Ghazanfar: L. dentata, L. officinals, L. pubescens, carminative, for headaches, colds; L. dhofarensis, stomach, kidneys, nerves.

 

Lebling and Pepperdine: L. dentataKhuzama.  Gas, urinary problems.

 

Nadkarni: Unani/ Near Eastern uses as resolvent, deobstruent, carminative; for colic in chest.  One unani source calls it the “broom of the brain”—it expels brain crudities, strengthens the intellect, etc. Also stimulant, carminative, emmenagogue, etc.

(Various species of lavender are used throughout the world medicinally; they are powerfully antiseptic. The scent is so universally liked, and found soothing and cheering, as to make one wonder about evolved attraction, and many would agree that it sweeps away worries—purges black bile and treats melancholia, as Avicenna put it. Experiments confirm that simply smelling it soothes the brain. This has led to extensive farming of lavender, for the scent and sometimes for flavoring food, in France, Morocco, the United States, and elsewhere. Lavender oil is insecticidal, which explains the name, cognate with “laundry”; the plants are still widely used to keep insects from eating stored clothing.)

 

 

 

Lepidium latifolium L., Brassicaceae. Shī®araj/Shatalazhi沙他剌只/Shidalazhi失荅剌知; Shī®arj/ Shidalazhi失荅剌知/Satela撒忒剌/shayitala 沙亦他剌只; Shāh®iraz/Shaheifeiliezhi沙黑肥烈知.

 

Manniche: Seeds found archaeologically. (Medical use seems likely.)

 

Dioscorides: II-205. Plaster for sciatica; leaves, beaten with root of elecampane. Hung around neck for toothache.

II-185, kardamon, L. sativum. Seed warming, sharp, bad for stomach but used to kill worms and produce abortion. Emmenagogue and aphrodisiac. Recognized as similar to mustard and rocket seeds. Presumably applied, it cleanses skin problems. Drives away serpents, stops falling hair, applied to carbuncles, etc. Used for a range of conditions; seed; also foliage, less effective.

The Greek name was transferred to the spice (see Elettaria) early, but survives in altered form as the scientific name Cardamine for a large genus of cresses closely related to Lepidium.

 

Levey: Shīṭaraj, Vitiligo. ḤurfL. sativum. Skin, ulcers, etc.

 

Al-Bīrūnī: Jarjīr; cites “arzūmūn” as the “Roman” name. Two varieties, the main one clearly a Lepidium, the other different. Cites Dioscorides for the Lepidium as calling it aphrodisiac, carminative, diuretic, detersive. Note that some of these uses are indeed in the received version summarized above, others not. This is not the only case of medieval Near Eastern sources citing now-lost bits of Dioscorides.

 

Avicenna: Shāhṭaraj, L. latifolium. Interestingly, not shīṭaraj, which Avicenna uses for Fumaria.  Hot, dry, bitter. Rub with vinegar. Much more on: Ḥurf, thūm, L. sativum. Hot and dry.  Dissolvent. Used on swellings, boils, ulcers, mites, ringworm, chronic skin diseases, joint pains, etc. Taken for lungs and asthma. Heat for stomach and liver. With honey as poultice for spleen enlargement. “Stimulates sexual desire, expels worms, promotes menses and causes abortion.”[90] In short, a typical cureall.

 

Nasrallah: Seeds hot; abortifacient. Treat asthma, headaches. Expectorant, stimulant. Can repel insects. Leaves similar but moister and thus less hot and less effective.

 

Lev and Amar: Shītaraj. Skin conditions, gout, spleen.

 

Graziani: “cress,” qurdumanā, eaten in Persia and elsewhere.

 

Lev and Amar: L. latifolium, shīṭaraj. L. sativum, rashād, ḥurf. Skin; ulcers, weakness, teeth, gums, mumps, intestiness, emmenagogue. Wounds, bites, stings. Possibly for abortion. For pains, worms, hard stomach, spleen, etc.

 

Bellakhdar et al: L. sativum. Brocho-pulmonary infections; childbirth difficulties; tonicardiac; revulsive.

 

Lebling and Pepperdine: L. sativum, rashad, hilf, etc. Seeds. Blood cleanser; coughs; seeds or leaves eaten to speed up healing of broken bones; childbirth, eaten especially after delivery, with other nutritive spices, for recovery. Many remedies here. Also diabetes, hair loss, indigestion, kindney stones, sore throat, stomachache.

 

Nadkarni: L. sativum, seeds aperient, diuretic, alterative, tonic, demulcent, aphrodisiac, carminative, galactagogue, emmenagogue.  (In short, about like every other spicy seed in Indian medicine.) Leaves somewhat stimulant, diuretic.

 

Eisenman: L. perfoliatum, minor uses, including ground seeds for nerves.

 

Li: Several spp. grouped as tingli 葶藶. Seeds used as purgative, etc.

(Seeds and foliage of this mustard-like plant are very high in glucosinolates, which are safe yet strongly stimulant and carminative. The term Shīṭaraj is used in Indian and possibly Persian medicine for Plumbago rosea, rose-colored leadwort,[91] which may have been taken—rather strangely—as a substitute for Lepidium. There is no way of knowing for certain if this is done in the HHYF. One assumes that the HHYF follows orthodox usage, however.)

 

 

Lepidium sativum L., Òurf/Huerfu忽而福. See above.

 

 

Levisticum officinale Koch., Apiaceae. Kāshin/Keshen可深; Kāshim/ Keshen可深; Kāshen/Kexini可昔尼. Lovage in English.

 

Dioscorides:  III:51, ligystikon. Digestion, edema, urine, stomach.

 

Levey: Coughs, earache.

 

Avicenna: Sīsāliyūs, kāshim. Hot and dry.Internally for gas, abdominal pain, epilepsy, asthma, chest mucus, digestion, worms, urinary and uterine pain.

 

Lev and Amar: kāshim barrī. Coughs, earache, bruises; intestines, dropsy; expels worms; induces menstruation.

(This well-known apiaceous plant is indeed effective for relieving mild stomach problems.)

 

 

Linum usitatissimum L.  Linaceae. Kattān/Ketang可唐/Ketan可檀.

 

Dioscorides: II-125, linon. Flax. Seed for inflammations, internal and external; with honey and oil. Raw, as cataplasm with figs and nitre, for sunburn and skin conditions. With lye on hard swellings. A large number of other minor external uses. Aphrodisiac, with honey and pepper.  Used in herbal bath for womb inflammations. Clyster/suppository for bowel conditions and constipation.

 

Avicenna: Hot. Neutral between moist and dry. Cleansing; produces gas. Paste for freckles.  Various preparations for swellings, joints, head, chest, etc. Rinse or sitz bath for uterus.

 

Graziani: Ibn Jazlah used it in ointment for keeping body from heat and keeping it soft and moist; evidently linseed oil is meant.

 

Lev and Amar: kattān. Seed or oil used; hot and dry. Seeds for chickenpox, skin, stomach, coughs.  Oil for embroactions, for various reasons.

 

Kamal: kittan. Ground seed demulcent; presscake for poultices.

 

Bellakhdar: zerri’at l’kettan. Laxative, emollient, antitussive.

 

Ghazanfar: Seeds for constipation, joint pain (externally applied), urinary disorders, venereal diseases.

 

Nadkarni: Demulcent, expectorant, diuretic; seeds hot and dry, aphrodisiac. Flowers for cordials.

 

Dash: Sweet, for strength and skin.

 

Li: Ya ma亞麻. Oil on leprous and other sores.

Flax has probably been known in China since the Han Dynasty,[92] but this is not certain, since early records call both it and sesame hu ma, “Iranian hemp.” It was not grown as a fibre crop in China till the 20th century.

(Flaxseed oil is a good oil for the skin, as well as high in omega-3 fatty acids.)

 

 

Liquidambar orientalis Mill., Altingiaceae. Resin. Imported. Rose maloes/Suhe蘇合; May’ah/Mia米阿 (once). Hu:547. The Chinese word is said to have been derived from the Malay.

 

Nadkarni: Storax; stimulant, expectorant, diuretic, antiseptic, disinfectant, astringent. Unani:  tonic, resolvent, astringent.

 

Li: Suhexiang 蘇合香. The resin. Imported (he thought, wrongly, from Southeast Asia; it probably came via that region, hence the Malay name used in East Asia). Sweet, warm, nontoxic. Powerful treatment for toxins, worms, noxious agents generally. He used the resin of the native L. taiwanensis, feixiangji, for various illnesses.

(Gum still widely used.)

 

 

Lupinus termis Forsk., Fabaceae. Tarmush/Daermusi荅兒木思; Turmus/Tuermixi突而迷西; Tarmus/荅兒木思; Jarjar/Zhierzhier知而直而.

 

Dioscorides: II-132, thermos emeros, Lupinus sp. Seed meal with honey or vinegar, or leaves, eaten or in tea with rue and pepper, for vermifuge and for nausea. Various external uses for gangrene, ulcers, sores, skin conditions in general. Pessary, with myrrh and honey [presumably to soften down its poisonous qualities], for menstruation and for abortion.

 

Levey: Turmus. Spots, abscesses.

 

Avicenna: ālūsan, tarmus. Hot and dry. Bitter. Externally for pimples, wounds, swellings, tubercular lymph glands, etc. Taken with vinegar and honey for many of these as well as used externally. Boiled-down (soup?) for gangrenous conditions. Poultice for sciatica. Flour on head ulcers. Internally with vinegar, honey, rue, and/or pepper for nausea etc. Various uses for worms, etc. Can even be abortifacient, orally or “as a device with common rue and pepper or with honey.”[93] Useful for rabid dog bites (whether externally or internally used is not stated).

 

Kamal: Lupinus albus, turmus, diuretic.

 

Bellakhdar et al: L. albus, termas, semqala beyda, hypoglycemiant; for liver disorders.

 

Nadkarni: L. albus, termas in Hindi as well as Arabic, antihelminthic, diuretic, tonic.

 

 

Lycium afrum L., Solanaceae. Òu†a†/Hazaze哈咱則. The Arabic name apparently covers both this sp. and Rhamnus infectorius, the latter being more obviously medicinal, and thus probably the one intended in the HHYF.

 

Dioscorides: lykion, Rhamnus infectorius. Medical qualities of this plant are so different from Lycium that summary seems worthless, especially since it is one of those curealls that he used for everything. He notes an “Indian Lycium[94] that may be a true Lycium. It was used, however, more like the Rhamnus, for inflammations of the spleen, diarrhea, emmenagogue, purgative.

 

Avicenna: ‘ūsaj, L. shawii. He mentions “the view of some that desert thorn counters the ill-effects of sorcery and the evil eye when it is hung over doors and windows” (p. 356). The skeptical phrase “of some” means Avicenna believes no such thing. More realistic use as poultice for fevers and inflammations.

 

Levey: Ḥuḍaḍ. Scrofula, lesions, preventing miscarriage. Also as ‘ausaj, for pustules.

 

Lev and Amar: khawlān, ‘awsaj. Various species and the Rhamnus used for eyes, as well as gums, coughs, spleen, diarrhoea, swellings, dog bites, etc.

 

Graziani: Lycium sp. Hudad, used by Ibn Jazlah for swelling, eyes, leprocy.

 

Bellakhdar et al: L. intricatum, ‘ud l-gerteg, for women’s sterility and for itch.

 

Ghazanfar: L. shawii, stems boiled for diuretic, laxative, tonic; berries for colic and for eyes.

 

Sun: L. chinense, Chinese wolfthorn leaf (gouqiye枸杞葉): bitter, balanced, astringent (se澀), and nonpoisonous. It restores the body from being weak and increases the essence and marrow (jingsui精髓). The proverb says, “If you leave home for one thousand li, don’t eat luomo蘿摩[95] or wolfthorn.” This is because they are very strong in the Dao of yang and then will assist the qi of yin and soon cause diseases.

 

Li:  L. chinense and occ. L. barbarum, gouqi 枸杞.  Fruit, leaf and root. Usually, the dried fruit is used, being a cureall. The roots of very old plants can take on the form of an animal; one estimated to be a thousand years old looked like a dog, and was therefore offered to the Emperor Huizong of Song as a medicinal prodigy. Li even quotes a bit of “doggerel” about this event.

(L. chinense (and probably L. barbarum) is actually more a medicinal food, or “nutraceutical,” than a drug; its biomedical value lies largely in the fact that its berries and leaves have almost the highest concentration of vitamins and minerals known in any natural product. It has thus been used for thousands of years, pragmatically and empirically, as biomedicine uses vitamin-mineral supplement pills. It is especially valued for convalescents and women recovering from childbirth. Handfuls of the dried berries go into the soups made for women “doing the month” of rest and high-nutrient eating after parturition.)

 

 

Mallotus philippensis Muell., Euphorbiaceae. Qanbīl/Hanbili罕必里

 

Levey: qanbīl. Red glands on fruit used for ulcers. Antihelminthic.

 

Nadkarni: Many names and uses; widespread, important. Cathartic, antihelminthic, aphrodisiac, purgative, etc. Powder (“kamala powder”) a standard vermifuge in India.

(This appears to be another Indian influence in the HHYF.)

 

 

Malus communis DC (Pyrus malus L.), Rosaceae. Linqin林檎; Tūrūshā/Tulusha突魯沙. (domestic apple)

 

Avicenna: Sweet and thus relatively neutral; unripe, cold (sour); ripe warmer. Tasteless and unripe apples have no medicinal value. Fruit a mild stomachic and heart strengthener; leaves more valuable—used (evidently in tea) with apple extract for skin conditions. Avicennia recognized the value of apples for diarrhea as stomach soother and binder—still standard medical use (see the BRAT diet—bananas, rice, apples and tea—for diarrhea).

 

Lev and Amar: Eyes, bites, etc. Cold and dry.

 

Sun: Crab apple (linqin林檎, rinkin, Malus asiatica): sour, bitter, balanced, astringent, nonpoisonous. It ends thirst. It makes people want to spit. It cannot be taken too much. Otherwise it will make the mai weak.

Apple (Malus pumila, naizi奈子): sour, bitter, cold, astringent, nonpoisonous. It makes people endure hunger and is good for heart and qi. It cannot be eaten too much. Otherwise it will cause flatus (luzhang臚脹). If one has been sick for a long time, his situation will become even worse after eating it.

 

Li: M. micromalus, haihong, haitangli海棠梨:  sour, sweet, balanced, nontoxic.  M. asiatica, linqin:  For fever. Sour, swet, warm, nontoxic.

 

 

Malva rotundifolia Desf. Malvaceae. Khubbāzī/Hubaza忽八咱; Kuihua葵花.

 

Dioscorides: III-164, alkea, Malva alcea, mallow. Drunk with wine or water for dystentery and ruptures.

 

Galen: Wild mallow (Malva sp.). Moist, moderately heating, viscid, glutinous, digestible. Thick juice. [The plant is very mucilaginous.]

 

Levey and Al-Khaledy: Usual uses. Today for coughs, chest and purging.

 

Lev and Amar: M. sylvestris mentioned but nothing given for it.

 

Kamal: M. sylvestris, kubbaza, khubbayzah (the modern vernacular is khubez). Leaves soothing, emollient [as they are almost everywhere, and effectively, as Anderson knows from experience]; used for poultices. Used in enemas for acute enteritis.

 

Bellakhdar et al: M. sylvestris, baqula, kubbeyza: laxative emollient.

 

Ghazanfar: M. parviflora, seeds and leaves for demulcent and fevcer and ulcers; external.

 

Nadkarni: Leaves mucilagionus, emollient as poultice. Seeds same; also demulcent; power taken for coughs, uncerated bladder, hemorrhoids, similar conditions. Other spp. also used.

 

Sun: [See taxonomic note for Li.]  Mallow (dongkuizi冬葵子): sweet, cold, nonpoisonous. It mainly cures coldness, hotness, or weakness in the five internal organs and six hollow organs (wuzangliufu五臟六腑). It breaks the five kinds of urinary problems (wulin五淋). It is helpful for discharging urine. It also cures the difficulty of producing milk by women. It cures blood stoppage (blocking; xuebi血閉). If one takes it for a long time, it will strengthen the bones and make the muscles grow, lighten the body, and lengthen life. In the twelfth month, gather the leaves, which are sweet, cold, smooth, and nonpoisonous. It is good for spleen. If one takes it for a long time, it is good for the stomach qi. Its heart [usually this would mean central shoot and bud, but they are harmless and a common Chinese food, so woody lower stem is probably meant here] harms people. With every kind of medication, eating the heart is contraindicated. The heart is poisonous. The Yellow Emperor said, “If one takes frosted mallow that has previously been preserved without cooking it, it will cause five kinds of liquid illnesses (liuyin流飲)[96]. When the liquid accumulates too much, it will make him vomit. ” [I.e., it ferments too much.] When mallow and carp (liyu鯉魚) or fish in general (zha鮓) are taken together, this harms people. In all four seasons, when the earth is prosperous (tuwang土王), avoid raw mallow. It will cause indigestion and arouse chronic diseases. [Probably this means that if the mallow flourishes too much because of good growing conditions, it should be avoided; indeed, mallow, though highly nutritious, can become hard to digest and over-rich in nitrates if overgrown.  Mallow is another plant notable for high levels of vitamins.]

 

Li: M. parviflora, tukui菟葵. Same species complex as M. rotundifolia (the small mallows are all closely related and taxonomically almost impossible to separate or sort out). Trivial, mostly magical uses. However, a common food.

(The small mallows represent a species complex, with M. rotundifolia, M. parviflora, and M. sylvestris, among others, poorly distinguished. These, like the Chinese lycium, are exceedingly high in vitamins and minerals, and thus have the same use in nutrition—de facto vitamin-mineral supplements. They fill this role in Arab culture especially, but were a major vegetable and nutrition aid in China too, especially in early times. They were a standard vegetable in ancient China, a low-status food in medieval China, and a famine food more recently—thus do less choice vegetables sink down the status hierarchy. Incidentally, kui now includes sunflowers and is often so translated, but sunflowers were introduced from North America in the last couple of centuries.)

 

 

Mandragora officinarum L. Solanaceae. luffāḤ/Heifahei黑法黑/Lifa里法; Shabīzaj/ Chebanizhi徹怕你知.

 

Manniche: Probably shown in art, and, if so, surely used for tranquilizing etc.

 

Dioscorides: IV-76, mandragoras, Atropa mandragora, mandrake. Male and female varieties noted. These are obviously different species, but the dscriptions make it hard to pick these out.  For sleep and pain relief. Expels black choler and phlegm, but is deadly in overdoes. Used in eyes and other topical applications. Pessary emmenagogue and abortifacient. Used for snakebite.  Large number of other related uses. Use in love magic noted.

V-81, oinos mandragorites, mandrake wine. Root bark brewed with wine must.  Causes sleep and relieves pain.

 

Avicenna: luffāḥ, yabrūj. Cold and moist. Anesthetizing. Used for swellings, abscesses, tubercular lymph glands. Power with vinegar for deep-red inflammation with fever and pustules.  Poiultice on arthritis and eoephantiasis. In wine for sleep; anal suppositories are also soporific.  Excessive use or even smelling cuases a stroke. Causes vomiting of bile and phlegm.  Emmenagogue and abortifacient. Poisonous. Sirāj al-quṭrub, M. autumnalis: Hot and dry, though not very. Opening, but constricts vessels, so helps stop bleeding; “best drug for healing wounds.”[97] Poultices used. Internally for vomiting blood. Enema for intestinal ulcers. Antidote for scorpion stings. “Said” (i.e. Avicenna is skeptical here) to tranquilize scorpions in the wild.

 

Levey: Sāsak. In a remedy for insanity and epilepsy. Luffāh. In collyrium and in insanity remedy. Narcotic, at least in other medieval sources.

 

al-Bīrūnī: Usual material and folkore, as above.

 

Lev and Amar:  Leprosy, skin diseases, eyes, snakebite, headache, swellings, mumps, wounds, pains, stings, insanity, epilepsy, sleeping.  Toxicity recognized.  Anesthetic.  Maimonides notes use for tightening vagina to simulate virginity, and holds it cold and dry.

 

Kamal:  yabruh, mandraghorah, sirag al qutr, sabizak-Ibn al-Baytar, etc.  Narcotic, sedative, anaesthetic.

 

Bellakhdar et al: M. autumnalis, bayd l-gul, narcotic.

 

Nadkarni:  Sedative and anaesthetic; dangerously toxic.

(Powerful, dangerous alkaloids probably as important as the alleged manlike shape of the root in making this a valued but feared drug in early times.)

 

 

Marrubium vulgare L., Lamiaceae. farāsiyūn/Falaxirong法剌西榮.

 

Avicenna: Farāsiyūn. Hot and dry. Cleansing, dissolvent, etc. For earache, eyesight, chest and lungs, laxative, emmenagogue.

 

Lev and Amar: Farāsiyūn. Earache, hearing, eyesight, lungs, womb, chest, liver, spleen, rabid dog bites; emmenagogue. All this from Ibn Sīnā.

 

Bellakhdar et al: Marrubium vulgare, merryut, notably important:  diuretic, hypoglycemiant, hair-care, antihelminthic, anti-tinea, antipyretic, anti-jaundice, antidiarrheal, emmenagogue, and cosmetic.

 

Ghazanfar: Expectorant.

 

Nadkarni: Stimulant, expectorant, resolvent, antihelminthic, alterative; for respiratory and digestive conditios, jaundice, tuberculosis, rheumatism, amenorrhea, etc.

 

Eisenman: M. anisodon, decoction for chronic catarrh, thrat, toothaches. Biomedical use as sedative and heart aid.

(Bitter, astringent; standard cough remedy well within my own memory and experience, only replaced by better biomedical remedies in the last very few decades.)

 

 

Matricaria chamomilla L.; Anthemis nobilis L. Asteraceae. Uquwān/Wuguhuwan烏古虎頑. Chamomile.

 

Dioscorides: III,137, various chamomiles for febrifuge etc.

 

Galen: Laxative, resolvent.

 

Levey: Fuqqāh. Al-ard. For fever, eyes, muscles.Carminative, stimulant, etc.

Related Anthemis nobilis, bābūnaj, used similarly and for spleen, liver, stomach.

 

Lev and Amar: M. aurea, bābūnaj. On skin; poultices, lotions, etc. for usual reasons. Also eyes. Hemorrhoids, settling liver and stomach, strengthening limbs. For urinary stones, menstruation, urination, sweating.

 

Nadkarni: Babuna and cognates. Antiseptic, antiphlogistic. Antispasmodic.

 

 

Melilotus officinalis (L.) Lam., Fabaceae. Iklīl al-malik/Yiqililumuluku亦乞里魯木魯枯/ Iklīl/Yiqilili以其黎黎.

 

Dioscorides: III-48, melilotos, but apparently referring to clover, Trifolium.

 

Levey: iklīl al-malik. Liver, stomach, fever, etc.

 

Avicenna: M. arvensis, iklil al-malik. Somewhat hot and dry. Constricting, dissolvent. Tonic for organs. Externally on inflammations, ulcers, skin, ears, inflamed eyes, sore anus or testicles.  Internally, diuretic, emmenagogue, abortifacient. (This indicates how desperate people were for abortifacients; the amount needed for coumarin—the toxic principle in question—to accomplish this would be cattle-feed quantities.)

 

Nasrallah: hot; diuretic.

 

Lev and Amar: M. albus, iklīl al-malik. Eyes, skin, wombs, bits, poisons, stones, fever, liver, etc.

 

Kamal: Iklil al-malek, handuq, nafl, ghosn al-ban. Used in eyedrops. Seeds stop diarrhea in children.

 

Bellakhdar et al: M. indica, azrud, hair care.

 

Ghazanfar: Otrah. Astringent, narcotic; poultice for pain.

 

Eisenman: Infusion for catarrh, migraines, hypertension, bladder and kidney pain, menopause. Externally in compresses, plasters, wash, for various wounds and infections. Biomedically, coumarins in this plant suppress nervous system action and—as is well known—inhibit blood clotting.

 

Li: Many close relatives used for various purposes.

(Coumarin, which interferes with blood clotting, makes this a dangerous remedy.)

 

 

Melissa officinalis L., Lamiaceae. Badranj-būya/Badilanzhiboya八的闌只博牙/ Badarūj/Badulu八都魯 (Persian).

 

Dioscorides: III-118, melissophyllon, lemon balm. Leaves with wine, or applied, for scorpion stings, dog bites, etc. Herbal bath, emmenagogue. Put on teeth for pain. Clyster for dysentery.  Leaves drunk with nitre for mushroom poisoning and gripes. Uses for ulcer, gout, etc.

 

 

Levey and Al-Khaledy: Minor uses; today in Persia as carminative and tonic.

 

Lev and Amar: bādharnabūyah (the source of the HHYF name), bādīrnabīh. Plant reelieves snakebite, abscesses, cough, respiratory problems, and lung diseases. Seeds a component of a drink that cleans the heart. Cures black bile, stings, etc. Many minor uses including sexual energy, eliminating phlegm, aiding digestion, etc.

 

Kamal: Torongan, ibn al-baytar, hashishet al-nahl, habaq torongani. Stomachic, cardiac, carminative, anti-epileptic. Infusions for fainting and indigestion. (Most of these uses are still in folk practice in the European world, including sniffing to treat depression.)

 

Lebling and Pepperdine: For stomach; also tiredness and run-down condition. Reported in medical literature as antiviral and improving mood.

 

Nadkarni: Minor; for swellings, bowel complaints.

 

Eisenman: For migraines, insomnia, women’s conditions, goiut, dizziness, anemia; for cardiovascular disease, and as analgsic, sedative, hypotensive, diuretic, digestive, toxicosis.  Biomedically, most of these uses are confirmed, albeit not very dramatically. One Central Asian study found use in Alzheimer’s disease [though this should not be taken very seriously]. Essential oil anti-oxidant.

(The limoniol and other volatile oils have a strongly soothing and stomachic function. Even the scent is relaxing and relieves worries and sadness.The many volatile oils in this plant have well-demonstrated relaxing effect when smelled, whether this is a “psychological” or a “biological” effect.)

 

 

Mentha aquatica L., Lamiaceae. Faudanaj/Fudanazhi夫荅納知/Fudanazhi夫荅那知.

 

Dioscorides: III-42, ‘edyosmos agrios. Properties similar to following; less good.

III-41, ‘edyosmos emeros, M. sativa (?). Warming, binding, drying. Juice of leaves stops bleeding, kills roundworms, provokes lust. Sprigs in pomegranate juice stop hiccups, vomiting, choler. Applied in plaster for skin conditions, headaches, etc. With salt on dog bites. Juice for ear pain. Applied as birth control agent (?). Good for stomach.

 

Levey: Ḥabaq nahriyy, mint. Fevers, jaundice, pains. For smell. Now stomachic, etc. Faudanaj, fautanaj, faudhanaj, M. aquatica and other mints, for poultices for spleen, liver, stomach, binding sinews, oxymel for humors.

 

Al-Bīrūnī: many comments on mints, under the usual names, esp. na’na’, but no serious medicinal comments.

 

Avicenna: Na ‘na ‘, pūnah. Hot and dry. Pungent and bitter. External uses: boiled down with wine for removing black spots; poultice with flour for abscesses, headaches. Heals fractures and ruptures. Bath for itches. Internally for leprosy, worms. Digestion, coughing up blood, jaundice, purging phlegm; for appetite, etc.  Aphrodisiac. “The pre-coital use of mint as a suppository prevents pregnancy;”[98] see following entries. Emmenagogue. May kill sperm and prevent nocturnal emissions. Removes black bile. Tonic.

 

Nasrallah: Hot, dry, sharp, stimulates appetite and digestion, relieves bloating and headaches, etc. Good for heart and for sexual performance. Contraceptive (women using as suppository).

 

Lev and Amar: M. sativa, nammām, na‘nā. Convulsions, tetany, fever, colic, spleen, liver, stomach, sinews, bites and stings, cleanses menstrual blood, strengthens lungs, soothes hiccup, and even claimed to prevent preganncy and contribute to sexual ability. Hot and dry.

 

Kamal: M. aquatica, n‘nai’ al-mazare’; M. piperita (a hybrid possibly not yet existing in Dioscorides’ time), ma‘na’, na‘na’, saisambar. Aromatic, carminative, stomachic, anti-convulsive, emmenagogue, rubefacient; for colic, flatulence, headache, rheumatism etc. Mints smelt for nausea.

 

Ghazanfar: M. longifolia, na‘ana, for coughs, breathing, stomach, chills and fevers.

 

Lebling and Pepperdine: mint species in general, for abdominal pain, stomach, throat, colds, colic, headache, insomnia, menstrual pain. With other spice foods for mother after delivery, to restore strenghth.

 

Nadkarni: M. arvensis, and mints in general (including M. aquatica as well as M. sylvestris and others), aromatic, carminative, stimulant, antispasmodic, stomachic, emmenagogue. M. x piperita antiseptic, also, and used for external as well as internal preparations.

 

Eisenman: M. asiatica, anti-inflammatory, hemostatic; for wounds, gastritis, dysentery, diarrhea, colitis, tuberculosis, respiratory tract, coughs, toothache, gall bladder.

 

Sun: Mint leaves (Mentha spp., fanheye蕃荷葉): bitter, spicy, warm, nonpoisonous. Can be frequently taken. These make the qi of the kidneys recede. They make one’s breath pleasant and clean. It is especially good for dispelling noxious poison (xiedu邪毒) and it eliminates tiredness (laobi勞弊). If one is thin and tired, he should not take it frequently, or it will arouse the illness of losing weight and feeling thirsty.

(Mints are still used worldwide for stomach, skin, throat, coughs, colds, and many other minor purposes. Very effective for stomach, throat, etc., and by wide agreement—if not medical proof—as a mood-improver, even when merely smelled. They are grown in a very large percentage of the world’s gardens, and in the aggregate are probably the most widely grown medicinal herbs in the world. They are a major commercial crop in the United States and elsewhere, for medical and flavoring uses.)

 

 

 

 

Mentha pulegium L., Lamiaceae, etc. (Mentha silvestris, M. Arvensis and other M. spp.). Pudina/Pidina普的納; Fautanaj/Fudanazhi夫荅納知 , etc. (Persian); Bohe 荷葉.

 

Dioscorides: III-43, kalaminthe, M. sylvestris, calamint. Three types; one clearly M. pulegium; another, described as having longer leaves and being less effectual, is surely M. sylvestris.  Warming, sharp. Helps snakebites (and even drives away snakes), urine, ruptures, convulsions, gripes, and the rest of the standard Dioscorides catalogue. Emmenagogue, abortifacient, and kills worms (virtually guaranteeing that M. pulegium is the primary reference here). Juice dropped in ears to kill worms there.

 

Kamal: filayah, fulayah; fawtang, fawthang. Stimulant, carminative, emmenagogue.

 

Bellakhdar et al: Fliyyo. Against chills; cure for broncho-pulmonary infections. M. rotundifolia (timijja, marsita, timersit) anti-hemorrhoidal and against chill. M. viridis, na’na’, liqqama refreshing and against headache. (It is not clear what species are really involved. Spearmint, na’na’, a hybrid or variety of the above and/or M. aquatica, is famously the signature herb of Morocco, used not only in food and medicine but as the universal tea, drunk sweetened on all occasions.) Calamintha officinalis, menta (loanword), for pulmonary infections, refreshing. (Many of these uses are widespread in the Mediterranean and the whole complex is worth reporting here.)

 

 

Menyanthes trifoliata L., Menyanthaceae. Kishnīj/Keshinizhi可失尼只

 

Kamal: Itraifel. Emmenagogue, tonic, antipyretic, diuretic, anti-caries. Leaves used.

 

Li: Shuichai水蠆. Sweet, slightly bitter, cold, nontoxic. Helps sleep, but also may keep awake; Li knew it poorly and was not sure of its values.

 

 

Mesua ferrea L., Clusiaceae. Nāramushk/Naermoshiqi納而謨失其/Naermushiqi納而木石其 /Naermushiqi那兒木失乞; Mazz/Mazu馬祖 (Persian);

 

Avicenna: nārmushk. Hot and dry. Diluting, dissolving. Used for cold stomach and liver.  Similar to nard. (Another Persian-Indian drug notably lacking in more western sources but picked up by Avicenna.)

 

Madanapala: Nāgakeśara. Hot; For bad smells, serious skin diseases, erysipelas, poisons.

 

Nadkarni: Flowers astringent, stomachic, stimulant,  carminative; unani use for heart, expelling winds, antispasmodic, diuretic.

 

 

Meum athamanticum Jacq., Apiaceae. Spignel. Mū/木瓦/Mo

 

(This common medicinal herb, used like other medicinal Apiaceae as stomachic, carminative, etc., is strangely absent from the classic herbals, though mentioned in the HHYF.)

 

 

Moringa oleifera Gaertn., Moringaceae. Bān/Bang邦/Bani (Ar. gen.)八尼.

 

Manniche: M. pterygosperma and/or M. aptera Gaertn. oil for stomach ache; enema for anus; mixed with other things to apply to sore gums; refreshing ointment; used in poultices, eardrops, mosquito repellent, etc.

 

Levey: M. pterygosperma Gaertn. For hair oil, teeth and gums, nosebleeds, ointment.

 

Kamal: Hab al ban, gos al-ban, al-habbah al-ghaliah (“costly seed”), yasar. Ban or ben oil produced from seed. Used in perfumes and cosmetics, as well as for lighting.

 

Lev and Amar: M. peregrina, bān. Oil strengthens teeth and gums, acts against nosebleed and aging, strengthens senses and sexuality. “Treats leprosy skin diseases, toothache, boils, spleen and liver troubles, rheumantism; it is an emetic and a purgative.”[99]

 

Ghazanfar: M. peregrina, source of ben oil.  Oil for headache, fever, abdominal pain, constipation, burns, back and muscle pains, and for childbirth.

 

Nadkarni: Notably important in India. All parts used.  Antispasmodic, stimulant, expectorant, diuretic. Fresh root acrid and vesicant; internalliy stimulant, diuretic. Gum bland. Seeds acrid and stimulant. Bark emmenagogue, abortifacient. Flowers stimulant, tonic, diuretic. Unani conisder the flowers hot and dry. Plant is cardiac and circulatory tonic and antiseptic.

(M. oleifera is famous throughout Africa, the Middle East, and South and Southeast Asia as a medicinal and nutritional aid, but does not seem to have reached China by Li’s time. It is there now. It is widely planted, and recommended by aid agencies, as a food and medicinal crop.)

 

 

Morus sp., Moraceae. Mulberry. Shen椹

 

Mentioned as a food in two places. In China it would be M. alba L., but the Near Eastern one is usually M. nigra L. Both, especially the latter, are common foods, but of little medical note.

 

Avicenna: M. alba, M. nigra. Tūth. Sweet, hot, moist (white sp.). Minor external uses; soothing.  Sour ones not good for stomach. Salted and dried ones very constipating, so used for dysentery.  Bark purifying and purgative.

 

Eisenman: M. alba, leaves for angina; fresh leaf juice for toothaches; fruits and juice for “oral and throat bumps, dysentery, anemia, … diuretic, hemostatic.”[100] rashes, scarlet fever.  Biomedically, some very tenative results for blood pressure, leukemia cells, blood sugar. Leaves contain tannins, coumarins, and other bioactive chemicals.

 

Li: M. alba.  Sang . Sweet, cold, nontoxic. Various differences of opinon ecorded on this.  Tonifying, treats strains and extremes, nourishes. Helps lung and intestines. Disperses stagnation of blood. Many medical prescriptions, for root, bark, etc. as well as fruit.

 

 

Myristica fragrans Houtt., Myristicaceae. Roudoukou肉荳蔻. Unlikely: Òabb l-bāni/Habulibani哈卜黎八尼. Hu: 973.

 

Dioscorides: I-110, maker, mace. Called a bark. Drunk (as tea) for spitting blood and dysentery.

 

Levey: Bisbāsah. Mace. Strengthens breathing. Jauz bawwā, nutmeg, for teeth, breathing.

 

Al-Bīrūnī: Jauz buwwā. Antipyretic, antiphlogistic.

 

Avicenna: Jauz būwwā’. Mace is bizrkitān. Hot and dry. Mace is constricting of tissues and improves body odor. Nutmeg used to scent breath. Mace used in ointment for swellings; nutmeg for eyes. Mace strengthens stomach and liver, nutmeg strengthens liver, spleen, stomach.

 

Levey and Al-Khaledy: Bisbās, mace, appears in compounds. Strengthens spirits. Today tonic, stomachic, liniment, internal and external aromatic.

 

Lev and Amar: jawzbuwā, basbāsa,  jawz al-ṭīb. Breathing, colic, coughs, colds, sexual desire, etc. Hot and dry.

 

Bellakhdar et al: guzt sh-sherq, s-sibisa, besbasa. Aphrodisiac, stimulant, calefacient, anti-hemorrhoidal, vaginal infections.

 

Madanapapa: Jātīphala. Hot. Digestive, carminative. For vomiting, parasites, rhinitis, cough. Mace used similarly.

 

Nadkarni: Stimulant, carminative; nutmeg narcotic in large doses. Oil rubefacient, stimulant, aperient. Mace is carminative and aphrodisiac. Wood astringent. Unani use as stomachic, aphrodisiac, and for many conditions from diarrhea to fevers.

 

Dash: Pungent, hot, aromatic. Cures poisoning. For diarrhea and urinary troubles.

 

Li: Roudoukou. Pungent, warm, nontoxic. Nut used, as elsewhere. Warming, digestive, antidiarrheal. Most of the various virtues seem to reduce to this.

(The warming, stimulant, carminative, and stomachic qualities of nutmeg and mace are widely known; the narcotic use perhaps too widely known! Nauseating in large doses.)

 

 

Myrtus communis L., Myrtaceae. Mūrd/Muerdi木兒的/Moerdi摩而的 (Persian from Greek).

 

Manniche: Various dubiously identified conditions. Mixed with other ingreidents. Usually external, as for penis, chest, stomach, swellings, limb stiffness, indeed almost any body pains; also hair ointment (it would alleviate several scalp conditions). Internally for cough.

 

Dioscorides:  I-155, myrsine, myrtle. Berries given to those who spit blood etc., juice for same and for stomach and other conditions including scorpion stings. Fruit used to make hair dye.  Herbal bath for womb fluxes (leucorrhea?), and for various skin conditions. A large and repetitive catalogue of external uses, for every imaginable condition.

 

Galen: Fruit astringent, constipating, cold.

 

Avicenna: ās. Cold, dry, though “box myrtle” is hot. Stops diarrhea, prspiration, bleeding, etc.  Boiled-down tea poured over broken bones helps them set. Syrup good for diarrhea and pain.  Good with olive oil on inflammations, wounds, ulcers, etdc. Fruit used for joints. Stops nosebleeds (fruit? Juice?). Helps eyes, chest, etc. Paste of fruit strengthens stomach. Fruit diuretic and helps with inflammations of urethra. Many other uses—something of a cure-all.

 

Levey and Al-Khaledy: Long history of uses, going back to Talmud as well as Dioscorides and down to many modern uses. In India astringent, for epilepsy, stomach and liver diseases, etc.

 

Lev and Amar: ‘ās, marsīm. Usual uses for eyes, stomach, hemorrhoids, etc., but also for dyeing hair black and other cosmetic uses. Also, oil on spider bites and on glans penis, etc. Reported even for hearing and kidney stones. Cold and dry.

 

Kamal: Juz al-tib. Mace is bisbasah. Carminative; good for rheumatism.

 

Bellakhdar et al: r-rihan. Hair-care, antidiarrheal. For gastro-intenstinal disorders.

 

Ghazanfar: Yās. Introduced and cultivated in Arabia. Leaves for colic, couighs, fevers, headache, nosebleeds. Various topical uses on blisters, stings, ulcers. Insecticide.

 

Lebling and Pepperdine: Stimulant, antispasmodic, diaphoretic, etc.

 

Nadkarni: Stimulant, astringent.  Leaves antiseptic and rubefacient.

 

Li: Wide range of Myrtaceae used in China, for all purposes, but not this sp.

(The species is effective as antiseptic; slightly toxic.)

 

 

Narcissus tazetta, Amaryllidaceae. Chinese sacred lily. Narjis/Naergexi納而各西. Shuixianhua水仙花.

 

Avicenna: Narjis (Persia nargis). Cleansing, drying. Powdered root for swellings, whole root with vinegar for skin spots. Used on wounds, nerves, joints, head, chest.  Root causes vomiting but treats pain in uterus and bladder.

 

Li:  Combats pathogenic wind. Root bitter, slightly pungent, slippery, cold and nontoxic. Many minor medical uses, from “removing a fish bone stuck in the throat” (vol. II, p.1437) to fragrant otions, dispelling heat and fever, etc.

 

 

Nardostachys jatamansi DC, Caprifoliaceae (Valerianaceae). Imported. Gansong甘宋 (focally Chinese Spikenard, N. chinensis); “Foreign” Chinese Spikenard Fangansong番甘松 (focally N. jatamansi); Sunbuli/Sunbuli筍卜黎.

 

Dioscorides: I-6, nardos, nard. Warming, drying. Stop various fluxes and nausea, flatulation, liver and kidney problems, etc. Applied for inflammation of vulva. Good for eyelids. Mixed in antidotes.

I-75, nardinon myron, nard ointment. A complex mix for unspecified uses, presumably those above.

 

Graziani: Sunbul. Used by Ibn Jazlah for swellings, sweat, brain strengthening relieving chest pain and palpitations, and for stomach. Today in India and Egypt for convulsions, hysteria, epilepsy; Iran and Iraq for nervous disorders.

 

Levey and Al-Khaledy: For stomach.

 

Lev and Amar: sunbul, nardin, nard. Hot and dry; opens obstructions in urinary tract, heats kidneys, arouses sexual desire, protects against miscarriage, regulates heartbeat, cleanses womb.  Also for headache, eyes, poisons, bites, stings, bladder, etc. Strengthens heart and stomach.

 

Kamal: nardin, sunbul-rumi, sunbul, sunbulat al-tayib, ith-khir, nardision. Root/rhizome stimulant, good for brain. Liver, spleen, kidneys. Nerve tonic, antiepileptic, digestive, sedative.

 

Madanapala: Māmsī. Cold. Good for alleviating excess of dosas; for blood, burning syndrome, erysipelas, skin.

 

Nadkarni: Root bitter, aromatic, antispasmodic, diuretic, emmenagogue, sedative, tonic, carminative, deobstruent. Unani uses: tonic for heart, liver and brain; removes obstructions; diuretic, emmenagogue, etc.

 

Dash: Bitter, cold, pungent, fragrant, cures poison and burning.

 

Li: Gansongxiang甘松香 (includes N. chinensis). Sweet, warm to balanced, nontoxic. Rhizome used. Various uses.

 

 

Nigella sativa L.  Ranunculaceae.  Seeds.  Shūnīz/Shaonizi少尼子; Xiangheizi香黑子, “Aromatic Black Seeds.”

 

Avicenna: Shūnīz. Hot and dry. Pungent, cleansing, gas relieving, purifying. Externally with rue for swellings of liver and other problems. Mouthwash; can add pine bark. Taken for breathing, asthma; liver; stomach relief; worms. Also for paralysis of face, so relevant to stroke treatment.

 

Levey: Shunīz. In salve for itching, and for insanity.

 

Lev and Amar: Shūnīz, qizḥ. Colds, worms, leprosy and othger skin problems, nose infections. Increases semen and sexual energy. Against poisons and stings, bites, etc. Hot and dry.  Insecticidal and good on skin. Treats paralysis and facial spasms.

 

Ghazanfar: Seeds for conjunctivitis (drops with rose oil); seeds eaten for stomach and breathing; with ginger and other plants on paralyzed limbs.

 

Lebling and Pepperdine: Acne, topically with honey. Taken for asthma, childbirth (with milk etc.); sniffed for colds; oil with tea of anise, cumin, sugar and peppermint for colic (which would be very effective!). Coughs, diabetes, heart, kidney stones, nausea, rheumatism, stomachache, toothache. A Saudi Arabian cureall. Noted that modern medicine holds it effective as bronchodilator, antioxidant, etc.

 

Madanapala: Various names; none seems standard. Flatulence, vomiting, etc.

 

Nadkarni: Seeds armoatic, diuretic, diaphroetic, antibilious, stomachic, stimulant, carminative, digestive, antihelminthic, emmenagogue (in short, like all other medicinal seeds, Indian medicine uses this quite promiscuously).

 

Eisenman: Toothaches, gsatric and intestinal diseases, pains; diuretic, soporific, vermifuge.  Biomedically, some minor antibiotic effects; helps heart fiunction by increasing cardiac output, but other studies show it reduces heart rate. Wide range of bioactive compounds.

(Many plants in this family are extremly toxic to humans but have strong antibiotic and possibly other activity. The many chemicals in this species should be investigated.)

 

 

Ocimum basilicum L. Lamiaceae. Falanjamashk/Falanzhumoshiqi法闌朮謨失其; Siparham/Subueryan速補兒奄; Afaranj mushk/ Falanzhumoshiqi法闌朮謨失其;  Shāhsifaram/Shasufulin沙速福林; Baranjmushk/Polangjimushiqi抇朗吉木失乞. Hu: 1061

 

Dioscorides: III-50, akinos, O. pilosum (possibly a mistake for O. basilicum), basil. For stomach ache. Stops menstrual flow. Applied on skin.

I-59, okiminon, basil macerated in olive oil. Applied. Used like marjoram oil.

 

Avicenna:  Hot and dry. Cleansing, purging, relieves gas, thins blood, constricts tissues. Can be either laxative or constipating, because though it generally constipates it can purge. Wild basil expels yellow and black humors. Seeds stop black bile. Used, mostly the wild form, for a very wide range of items: uclers, gout, etc., and facial paralysis. Used for pains, eyes, heart, chest, sticky matter in stomach, piles, etc.

 

Levey: This sp. and probably others. Rheumatism, eyes.

 

Al-Bīrūnī: Bādrūj. Astringent, cathartic, resolvent, maturative, flatulent. Decays fast. Promotes bad humors (leading to dim eyes, etc.). Seeds used for mental derangement. External applications for inflammations, nosebleed, etc. On teeth for pain. Thyme can substitute, for at least some uses. Shāh safaram, apparently Persian name for same plant, for heat, headache, irritation; soporific; seeds against diarrhea.

 

Nasrallah: scent cheering (a belief still current and widespread).

 

Lev and Amar: rheumatism, eyes, etc. Maimonides: appetite, sexual aid, cleans breth, relieves depression. Many other uses from other authorities, including bleeding, stings, digestion, etc. Modern uses for skin, wounds, itch, scent, heart medicine, diuretic, etc. Brain, nose, hemorrhoids.

 

Kamal: Rayhan, huk, habaq. Stimulant, antispasmodic.

 

Bellakhdar et al: l-hbeq. Against mosquitoes. Used for sinusitis, tachycardia, hemorrhoids.

 

Ghazanfar: Reḥān. Cataracts, colds, abdominal pain, diarrhea. Keeps hair from turning gray (paste of leaves).  Topical uses of leaves on wounds etc. Aphrodisiac. Many cosmetic and social uses.

 

Lebling and Pepperdine: Topically on ant bites and cuts, tea for colds and coughs, in formulas for indigestion and insomnia, tea for stress.

 

Madanapala: Vatapatrī. Hot, astringent; cures diseases of female genitalia. Seeds constipative.

 

Nadkarni: Usual herbal uses as carminative, stimulant, aphrodisiac, diuretic, etc.

 

Dash: Bitter and hot. Cures parasites, difficult skin diseases; relieves scorpion bite. O. sanctum for cough, hiccup, asthma, poison, skin.

 

Sun: Basil (Ocimum basilicum, luole羅勒): bitter, spicy, warm, balanced, astringent, and nonpoisonous. It eliminates the water remaining in the body (tingshui停水) and dispels poisonous qi. It cannot be frequently taken, or it will make the circulation of qi in the body difficult (se rongwei zhuqi澀榮衛諸氣).

 

Li:  Luole. Interestingly, in his volume on vegetables rather than among the herbs. Foliage or seed used. Various minor uses.

(The plant is rather uncommon in China, though fairly well known in the north and west. The enormous use and value of basils in west, south, and Southeast Asia forms a striking contrast to their trivial role in China. Basil is an effective stomach and sore throat treatment, widely used; many species are used, worldwide; the Native American peoples of Mexico have independently discovered the value of the local wild species, O. micrantha, and use it very widely.)

 

 

 

Olea europaea L.  Olive.  Oleaceae. Za’itūn/Zaitong宰桐, olive tree; the oil is zai’t/Zaiti宰體/Saidi賽的, and za’itūn just means “oil plant.”

 

Dioscorides: II-105. Oil, probably of the wild form (“O. oleaster”—not a valid scientific name), for eyes, erysipelas, herpes, carbuncles, ulcers, etc.

 

Levey: Leaves for sprue, gums, etc.

 

Avicenna: zaytūn. Oil from unripe olives is cold and dry, from from ripe is hot and moist (giving some clue to how the codings are determined—the green-olive oil is sour, astringent and biting, “drying,” while the ripe is fatty, lubricating and moistening). Wild olives make more medicinal oil. Used on all skin conditions. Enema for sciatica. Used for all the usual lubricating and soothing purposes. Leaves, in tea, used for sores, infections, teeth, eyes, etc.

 

Lev and Amar: zayt (the oil). Eye, skin, general external soothing (hair, head, bites, stings, wounds, teeth and gums, joints, burns, scratches, etc.). Internally for intestines, stomach, etc., and even for worms.

 

Ghazanfar: Itm. Resin, fruit, leaves, and bark all used, for many applications. Olives with salt and dates are made into a paste for broken bones. Leaves for poultice for boils. Juice of fruit for eyes. Leaves and bark for rashes. Ash of leaves on blisters and ulcers. Bark made into a tea for constipation. Twigs used for toothbrushes.

(Olive oil is, of course, unsurpassed for soothing and oiling the skin, and recently the extra-virgin oil has been found to have some heart and other beneficial effects from the antioxidant chemicals in the juice.)

 

 

Onopordum (Onopordon) macracanthum Schousb., Asteraceae. Shukā’āi /Shukeyi書可亦.

 

Avicennia: O. arabicum Strong and biting medicine. Mouthwash for toothache and sore uvula. Tea of root for excessive menstruation. Boiled down extract for suppository or bath for anal swellings.

The related O. acanthium of Europe and the Middle East is recorded in Wikipedia as having minor medical uses.

 

Eisenman:  O. acanthium, “used internally to treat inflammation of the bladder and urinary system, bronchial asthma, pertussis, scrofula,… colds, hemorrhoids, as a blood cleanser,” etc.  Infusion of top of stem in flowering drunk for nerves, colds, inflammation of respiratory system.  Put in baths for frightened children. Biomedically, cardiotonic, hemostatic, styptic, diuretic, and bacteriocidic properties and raises arterial pressure…tonic…”[101] and other uses.

(This rather little known thistle would seem like the perfect cureall, if Central Asian medicine is correct—but Wikipedia devotes much more attention to controlling its thorny, weedy presence.)

 

 

Opopanax chironium (L.) Koch. Apiaceae. Jawāshir /Zhawushier扎兀失兒/Zhawushier扎兀石而/ (Persian).

 

Dioscorides: III-55, panakes (panax) herakelion, Ferula opopanax or Opopanax hispidus [the figure looks more like Ferula]. Sap and roots; bitterest is best. Warming, mollifying, attenuating. Drunk, often with wine, good for agues, rigors, convulsions, rputures, pain in the side, coughs, gripes, dysuria, scabies. Like almost everything else Dioscorides uses, it is emmenagogue and abortifacient (also the root, topically) and is topically applied on all sorts of skin and eye conditions, including bites of mad dogs.

Seed taken with aristolochia or wormwood for menstruation, etc.

 

Levey: Jawāshīr. Rheumatism, phlegm, melancholy. Other uses in old sources for antispasmodic, emmenagogue, etc.

 

Lev and Amar: jāwshīr.  Eyes, convulsions, tetany, fevers, colic, penile erections, rheumatism, phlegm, black bile. Detersive. For abscesses.

 

Kamal: Gawshir (Farsi, “cows’milk”). Juice for pharyngitis, bronchitis, brain disease, paralysis.  Used on skin wounds.

 

Nadkarni: Gum stiumlant, antiseptic.

 

 

Origanum majorana L., Lamiaceae. Marzanjūsh/Maerzanggeshi馬而臧哥失/Maersangguoshi馬兒桑過失/ (Arabic and Persian; the general dried-herb name sa‘tar is used for this as well as thyme, etc.).

 

 

Origanum maru L., Lamiaceae. Marmaūz/Maermahuze馬而馬呼則/ Marmākhūr/馬兒馬乎兒/Mahuer馬乎兒[102]/Mahumaerguazi馬乎馬兒瓜子/Mailumahuer麥魯馬呼兒/Maermahuzi馬而馬胡子/Mulamahuer木剌馬乎兒

 

Theophrastus: II, p. 295, diktamnon, O. dictamnus. A great deal of lore on three different kinds of Cretan dittanies. Eases labor of women, and pain in general. Goats shot with arrows eat it and it makes the arrows fall out.

 

Dioscorides: III-32, origanos ‘erakleotike, Origanum vulgare. Warming. Tea for posionous bites and antidotes to poison hemlock, etc. Eaten with figs for convulsions, ruptures, coughs, etc.    Emmenagogue. Usual topical applications. With onions, sumac, etc., kept 40 days in burning summer heat, makes a medicine that brings on vomiting.

III-33, Origanum onitis?  O. sipyleum?; III-34, O. vulgare, wild; various confused drawings; all seem used more or less similarly; short, confused accounts.

III-37, diktamnon, O. dictamnus, dittany. Retails with evident disbelief a tale by Theophrastus about goats consuming it. Used for pain of spleen. Root hastens birth and helps with snakebite. Various other uses similar to above.

I-58, sampsychinon, an oil of this and many related herbs pounded and infused in olive oil. For drawing out menstruation and afterbirth, and abortifacient. Applied for pain relief.

 

Avicenna: O. majorana and O. vulgare (oregano): hot and dry. Usual all-purpose minor uses for sores, swellings, stomach, diuretic, emmenagogue. Also vermifuge. Avicenna mentions dittany, but here identified (perhaps wrongly) as Dictamnus albus, a completely different plant from O. dictamnus. Hot and dry. For pain, menstrual problems, urination. Abortifacient.

 

Levey: Marzanjush. Liver, stomach, spleen, kidneys; ear infections with suppuration. Eyes.

 

Levey and Al-Khaledy: Dittany, mishkatarā mashīr, occasional. O. maru, marw, seeds mentioned; marmāh.ūz, herb used; apparently Al-Samarqandī thought they were different plants, though the names are usually synonyms.

 

Graziani:  Marzanjūsh, mardaqush.  Headaches, constipation, scorpion stings (Ibn Jazlah).  Ibn Butlān used it for chest pains and cough.  Egypt today for vulnerary, nerve disease, cephalic, emmenagogue, sternutatory.

 

Lev and Amar: O. maru, O. syriaca, za’tar, sa’tar, for gynecological, kidney and urinary problems; for anemia; etc. Note that the general name za’tar (like the Hebrew ezov) also covers wild thyme and similar wild herbs, but Lev and Amar are confident that these Origanum species—primarily the latter—are the species called for in the Genizah documents. O. majorana, mardakūsh, marzanjūsh, for various women’s complains, kidneys, urinary tract.

 

Kamal: Bardaqush, marzangush, habq al fil-Ibn al-Baytar, a’bqar, etc. Stimulant, tonic, stomachic, sneezing, carminative, anti-inflammatory. O. vulgare, za-tar, antiseptic, antirheumatic, externally on ulcers etc., internally for worms and antisepsis. Includes thymol, which is powerfully antiseptic.

 

Bellakhdar et al: O. compactum, za’tar. For all diseases, gastro-intestinal antiseptic, mouth hygiene, antiacid. O. majorana, merdeddush, against chills and fevers.

 

Nadkarni: Plant stimulant, carminative, diaphoretic, emmenagogue, tonic. Oil used for stimulant, especially digestive.

 

Eisenman: O. tyttanthum, for appetite, digestion, inflammation of respiratory tract, nerves.  Externally in compresses for abscesses, bath for rickets and scrofula in children. Water extracts of plant for gastritis, bronchitis, pneumonia, etc. Tea for tympanites, lryngitis, stomatitis, angina, etc. Biomedically for hypertension, atherosclerosis, kidney, liiver, and epilepsy; sedative; expectorant; regulating intestinal action; diaphoretic tea, etc. O. vulgare, for the usual reasons, including insomnia, gastritis, etc.; as expectorant; as anti-spasmodic, antiseptic, anti-inflammatory. Essential oils do show antibiotic effect.

(Modern biomedicine agrees with the stimulant, carminative, and tonic parts of this. The plant is rich in volatile oils with medicinal effects.)

 

 

Oryza sativa L., Poaceae. Rice. Mi/米; Dao稻. One mention of rice husks, probably a Chinese substitution for some Near Eastern husk preparation.

 

Nadkarni: Pages of products and medicinal uses. Soothing, especially to stomach or rice-water as enema. Invalid food. Rice poultices are used for all sorts of purposes, being soothing, available and cheap. Nothing said about medicinal uses of husks.

 

Li: Vast range of broadly similar uses (soothing, poulticing, etc.). No medicinal use of husks.

Significantly, this basis of Chinese food is otherwise missing in the HHYF.

 

 

Osmanthus fragrans Lour., Oleaceae. Native. Kuihua葵花; Shukuihua蜀葵花 (“Sichuan四川” Kuihua)

 

(Not in Li, but, in modern China, the flowers are very commonly used to flavor tea or to make a tea by themselves, and now often considered cooling and otherwise medicinally valuable.)

 

 

Paeonia suffruticosa Andr. Paeoniaceae (Ranunculaceae). Native. Dudan杜丹; ‘ud fāwāniyā [Paeonia officinalis]/ Wudifayuna兀的法與納. Egypt Ubsalib, Iran Assalib.

 

Dioscorides: III-157, paionia arren, P. corallina; paionia theleia, P. officinalis. Dioscorides recognizes male and female varieties. Roots given to women after childbirth to eliminate afterbirths; also for menstruation (apparently both too much and too little) and cramps. Helps kidneys, stops diarrhea, etc. Black roots for nightmares and “suffocations of the womb.”[103]

 

Avicenna: Fāwāniā, from the Greek, is one name. Several others discussed. Treats epilepsy—by being hung around the neck or over him; Avicenna has seen this work. When the suspended plant was removed, the condition returned. Used as snuff for insanity and epilepsy, also. Also for gastric irritation, protecting stomach, jaundice, liver obstructions. Regulates discharge of menses and helps with placenta, etc., after birth. Good for kidney and abdominal pain. Can remove stones, at least in children. With honey wine for hysteria due to pain in uterus.

 

Kamal: P. officinalis, ‘anzarut, sarqoqola, etc. Powder for purulent conjunctivitis, wounds, ulcers.

 

Ghazanfar: P. officinalis, Aphrodisiac and tonic.

 

Li: Mudan. P. lactiflora and P. veitchii are shaoyao and are next to mudan in Li’s book. Cortex of former, root of latter, widely used for countless purposes.

 

 

Papaver somniferum L., Papaveraceae. Afiyūn/Afeirong阿肥榮/Afurong阿夫榮; Yumizi御米子; Yingsu罌粟; khaskhāsh/Hashihashi /哈失哈失      A FeiRong, LaLaHua, for the resin; ShaoNiZi for seeds; Ying-su-ke. Hu 973,

 

Manniche: Rather shakily identified in a tranquilizing remedy; seeds used.

 

Dioscorides: IV-64, mekon roias, P. rhoeas. Sleep, healing inflammations, etc.

IV-65, mekon agrios, mekon emeros, P. somniferum, opium poppy. Obvious use for sleep and pain, used internally or externally; also for inflammations and rashes, coughs, diarrhea, menorrhagia,

IV-66, mekon keratites, Glaucium luteum. Sciatica, liver, urinary problems (infections?), purging, etc. Externally on ulcers etc.

IV-67, mekon aphrodes, Silene inflata. Purges by causing vomiting.

IV-68, ypekoon, Hypecoum procumbens. Use similar to poppy.

 

Galen: seed produces lethargy. Not nutritious.

 

Levey: Used in combined medicine for insanity. Wild poppy, presumed P. rhoeas, nār-kīwā, provided an oil used in clyster for kidneys and for bringing back blood to face.

 

Al-Bīrūnī: Afiyūn: Detailed discussion of opium, used for the usual reasons. Khashkhāsh (the normal Arabic name for poppy): Cures cough. Opium-bearing kind narcotic to point of danger.

 

Avicenna: Notes many kinds. Khashkhāsh, seeds; afyūn, opium. Cooling and dry. Usual anaesthetic uses, but also seeds used for coughs, congestion, vomiting, stomach, etc.

 

Levey and Al-Khaledy: Usual uses; important.

 

Nasrallah: Black and white seeds known. Opium known and widely used; cold, dry, sdative, treats coughs and humidity and diarrhea.

 

Lev and Amar: afyūn. In addition to the obvious uses for sleep and diarrhea, used for jaundice, loss of teeth, etc., and in gargles and other preparations. Root of plant used for pains of thigh, liver, head. Seed for cough, liver, intestines.  (Glaucion corniculatum, māmīthā, for the usual minor matters:  eyes, pains, soothng, etc. Cold and dry.)

 

Kamal: khashkhas (the seeds), abu-al-nom. Sedative, anaesthetic, soporific. Fruiting head, cooked, for stomach ache, meteorism, pains, including toothache. A formulation by Mesue the Younger uses roses, gum arabic, starch, tragacanth, liquorice juice, spodium, and saffron with poppy syrup for tuberculosis, pleurisy, and the like (Kamal 1975:519).

 

Bellakhdar et al: P. rhoeas, belle’man, shqayeq n-ne-man, measles, children’s fevers. P. somniferum, korkasha, analgesic, children’s insomnia, hiccups.

 

Ghazanfar: Coughs and insomnia. Dried capsules ground and mixed with rose water, applied to forehead, for nervous tension.

 

Lebling and Pepperdine: P. rhoeas, coughs.

 

Madanapala: Khasatila, seeds. Aphrodisiac, strengthening, constipative. Ahiphena, presumably gum or whole plant, constipative.

 

Nadkarni: usual narcotic and sedative uses. Causes constipation. For a vast range of purposes, in many preparations, but basically for sedative reasons.

 

Eisenman:  P. pavoninum, for heatstroke, eyes. Other poppies used for tea for coughs. These are not very close to the opium poppy.

 

Li: Yingzisu 嬰子粟. Seed sweet, plain, nontoxic; food and minor medical uses. Capsule and drug used for coughing and especially for diarrhea and dysentery (called “wonder drug” for this, and still is, in modern biomedicine). Narcotic uses not noted (not important in China in Li’s time).

(Opium remains as good a drug for treating some types of diarrhea as medicine can offer.  Causes constipation if much used.)

 

 

Pedicularis sp. Orobanchaceae (formerly Scrophulariaceae). Mavīzak /Maiyuza麥雨咱. Mentioned in Index; otherwise not in the HHYF. Species of this genus are used in folk medicine in various parts of the world.

 

 

Peganum harmala L., Zygophyllaceae. Isfand/Yixipandangdi亦西攀當的.

 

Dioscorides: III-53, peganon agrion, Peganum harmala. Seed beaten up for dullness of sight; applied with many other ingredients.

 

Levey: ḥarmal. Insanity, epilepsy, baldness, hemorrhoids, etc.

 

Avicenna: ḥarmal. Hot and dry. Minor uses, much like those of Ruta.

 

Lev and Amar: ḥarmal. Emetic, aphrodisiac, diuretic; for intestinal diseases, hemorrhoids, nerves, epilepsy, insanity, colic, sciatica, arthritis.

 

Bellakhdar et al: harmel. Toxic, hair-care, antihelminthic, antirheumatismal, antalgic, antidiarrheal; for bowels and nervous diseases.

 

Ghazanfar: H.armal. Leaves rubbed on joints for rheumatic pain. Tea antihelminthic. Tea of blossoms for stomach. Seeds for same, or topically with black pepper for joint pain. Seeds used as narcotic and for removing kidney stones.

 

Lebling and Pepperdine: Alterative, purifying, aphrodisiac; seeds used. Also emmenagogue, diuretic, vomitive.

 

Nadkarni: Alterative, antiperiodic, stimulant, emmenagogue, abortifacient. Purifying, aphrodisiac, antihelminthic. Seeds narcotic, anodyne, emetic, emmenagogue.

(Important mind-altering drug in Iran and elsewhere; possibly one of the “soma” plants of the ancient Aryans.)

 

Eisenman: Decoction or infusion for “olds, malaria, fever, syphilis, neurasthenia, and epoilepsy, and…as a mouthwash… smoke…for headaches…epileptic diseases…mixed with chil pepper to treat syphilis, and it is used as a diuretic and diaphoretic.”[104] Biomedical uses as soporific; harmine alkaloid a strong nervous system drug, causing deperssion or hallucinations. Peganine has effectcs on cholesterol metabolism. Other chemicals await further study; contains many alkaloids.

(Well-known psychoactive plant, possibly the “soma” of the Aryans.”)

 

 

Penaea mucronata, sarcocolla. See Astragalus.

 

 

Petroselinum hortense (=P. crispum (Miller) Nym.), Apiaceae. Fu®rāsāliyūn/ Fadilasaliwen法的剌撒里溫; Jitejisalirong吉忒即撒里容; Fa®rā l’sāliyūn/Jidalasaliyun吉荅剌撒里云/Fatilasalirong法體剌撒里榮.

 

Dioscorides: III-76, oreoselinon, P. sativum (=P. crispum). Diuretic and emmenagogue.

 

Avicenna: Hot and dry. Dissolving. Cleanses ulcers and similar problems. Used for chest and lungs.

 

Graziani: Karafs. Ibn Butlān used it as diuretic, emmenagogue, anti-constipation.

 

Levey and Al-Khaledy: Today as carminative, aromatic, tonic. Seeds of this and related apiaceous plants noted by Al-Samarqandī as used for the usual reasons. Levey and Al-Khaledy mistakenly equate it with celery; the plants, uses and words and quite different.

 

Kamal: baqdunis. Roots sudorific, stimulant, diuretic, emmenagogue. Leaves as hot applications for inflammatory conditions, mastitis, haematomas.  Fruit carminative (effective, like almost all apiaceous spices). Active ingredient apiol, antipyretic and emmenagogue.

 

Bellakhdar et al: hypnotic.

 

Ghazanfar: Leaves and seeds for diarrhea and stomachache. (Effective.)

 

Nadkarni: Minor in India. Diuretic, etc.

 

 

Peucedanum ammoniacum H. Bn. (Dorema ammoniacum D. Don), Apiaceae. Ushaq/Wushaji兀沙吉/Wuzheji兀折吉Ushshaq; wushshaq/Wushaji兀沙吉; Wakhshīrk /瓦黑失失Gum ammoniac.

 

Dioscorides: III-92, peukedanon, P. officinale. Root sap anointed with vinegar and rose oil for lethargy, frenzy, vertigo, epilepsy, headaches, paralysis, convulsions, earaches, and so on.  Smelled for womb strangling and swoons. Drives away serpents. Root decoction drunk (and applied?) for ulcers, scales on bones, etc.

 

Avicenna: Ushaq. Hot and dry. Dissolving and drying. Opens vessels; laxative and absorbent.  Externally for wounds, tubercular lymph glands. In eyes for cleansing, etc. Internally for joint pain, asthma, labored breathing, ulcers of diaphragm, hardness of spleen and liver, worms, mesnstruation, abortifacient, and other minor uses.

 

Levey: Gum from this plant and Ferula marmarica. For fistulas, abscesses, eyes, insanity.

 

Avicenna: said it cools the blood, cleanses, helps with tumors. Modern uses as laxative, abortive, emollient, resolvent. Widely used in Persia.

 

Kamal: P. oreoselinum, atrilal, “ibex parsley, devil’s carrot, crow’s leg.” Seeds used for leprosy.

 

Lev and Amar: Eyes, pains, worms, etc. Purgative. Hot and dry, but cools blood, etc. Disinfects.

 

Nadkarni: Used for liver and spleen; oil.

 

Li:  P. praeruptorum, P. decursivum, qianhu前胡. Root important. Various dispersing and regulating uses. P. japonicum, fangkui, much more important and highly regarded. Various uses from digestion to mania! In all species, commentators disagree about qualities, even toxic vs. nontoxic.

 

 

Phoenix dactylifera L., Arecaceae. Date. Traditionally dates are part of the confection sukk/Suqi速乞/Suqi速其mentioned in the HHYF.

 

The HHYF mentions something that seems to equate with sukk, an Arab medicine including date, but this is tentative enough that we have not seen fit to do a full search on dates. But, also, terms for jujube in the HHYF probably mean dates, and “ten-thousand-year jujube” certainly does.

 

Avicenna: Nakkhl (tree), raṭab (ripe fruit), other names for every part and aspect. Cold and dry.  Unripe dates cause indigention. Various medical uses for both flesh and kernel—ash of latter has many external uses.

 

Lev and Amar: Aphrodisiac and for diarrhea, but little used, though often mentioned, in Near East medicine.

 

Li: Wulouzi無漏子. (Also, in Chinese colloquial, various such as fan zao番棗“foreign jujube” and qian nian zao千年棗 “thousand-year jujube”—a neat reverse of the English name “Chinese date” for jujubes.)  Minor use as tonic.

 

 

Phyllanthus emblica L. (=Emblica officinalis Fr.), Euphorbiaceae. Āmala/Amila阿米剌. “Milk” of [Ar.] āmala/Amilaru阿米剌乳 . From Perso-Arabic amlaj, in turn from Sanskrit āmālaka.

 

Levey: Depression, breathing, stomach, liver, etc.; usually with musk or other items, in mixed medicinal preparations. For happiness and strengthening the heart.

 

Avicenna: Amlaj, suk. Hot. Cites Indian physician on this. Opening, dissolvent. Aphrodisiac.  Expels black bile and phlegm. Good on piles.

 

Levey and Al-Khaledy: Myrobalans are very important to Al-Samarqandī, but not well distinguished. This would have been major. The rise of myrobalans from early times to the HHYF indicates the rise of Indian influence. Belleric myrobalans with milk made a remedy used by Al-Samarqandī.

 

Madanapala: Āmalaka. Cold; aphrodisiac.

 

Nadkarni: Fruit refrigerant, diuretic, laxative. Carminative and stomachic. Dried, astringent.  Flowers cooling and aperient. Bark astringent. Unani uses as heart and brain tonic, and to prevent humors in stomach and intestines; for diarrhea, fevers.

 

Dash: Fevers, appetiser.

 

Li: Anluoguo 庵羅果. Barely known. One report of fruit and leaf for minor uses.

 

 

Picnomon acarna (L.) Cass., Asteraceae. Bādāward/Badiawaer把的阿瓦兒/Badiawaerdi把的阿瓦兒的; Bād-āvard/Badawaerdi八達洼而的 (Persian)

 

European/Near Eastern plant, not mentioned in our sources.

 

 

Pimpinella anisum L. Apiaceae. Anīsūn/Anisong阿你松

 

Dioscorides: III:56. Antidotes, headache, ears.

 

Galen: Diuretic, aphrodisiac, general antidote.

 

Levey; Levey and Al-Khaledy: In an electuary for liver, kidneys, etc; in eye medicine; stomachic; for rheums. Current uses as stomachic, carminative, stimulant, emmenagogue.

 

Avicenna: anīsūn. Hot and dry. Opening, biting, acrid. Relieves stomach ache and gas. Relieves headache (smoke of seeds); powder with rose oil in ear. Treats chronic eye problems.  Lactagogue, diuretic, aphrodisiac. Laxative for kidneys; stimulates uterus and helps women after blood loss (presumably vaginal hemorrhage). Treats chronic fevers.

 

Lev and Amar: Palpitations, eyes, inflammation, etc. Maimonides used it for heart strengthening. Brain, sexual medicine, emmenagogue, fever, etc. Hot and dry. Modern uses include stomachic and carminative (as in European folk medicine), emmenagogue, etc.

 

Ghazanfar: Anasīn. Fruit digestive. Mixed with cumin and fennel for women after childbirth, to increase milk and ease pains.

 

Lebling and Pepperdine: Strengthens a mother following childbirth, along with fenugreek, nigella, wheat, dates. For colic. Chewed or in various formulas for cough, headache. Boiled and drunk for indigestion, stomachache, stress, toothache, and menstrual cramps. For insomnia.

 

Nadkarni: Usual apiaceous-seed uses as stimulant, carminative, diuretic, stomachic.

(Still used widely, throughout the world, for coughs and as carminative and stomachic; very effective.)

 

 

Pinellia ternata (Thunb.) Breit., Araceae. Native. Panxia/Banxia半夏.

 

Li: Banxia. Tuber. Pungent, cool to warm (depending in part on processing), toxic. Several pages of uses, many for phlegm and respiratory affections, but also digestive and some other uses.

 

 

Pinus koraiensis Sieb. Et Zucc., Pinaceae. Native. Songziren松子仁; Songzi松子Songshuzi松樹子.

 

Li: Haisong海松. Seeds used. Sweet, warm to hot, nontoxic. The uses center on nutritional value. Used classically as a food to prolong life; said to make one an immortal if eaten enough. Li notes that “Whenever Taoists talk about Songzi [pine kernels], they always mean Haisongzi.[105]

(The use for nutrition for longevity is partly sympathetic magic—pines live for centuries—but partly also because pine kernels are a concentrated source of high-quality protein, minerals, and unsaturated oils. They are a perfect supplement or, better, replacement for the dismal traditional North Chinese diet of grain and low-protein, low-mineral vegetables. Taoist and Buddhist adepts, especially, ate ascetic diets, and were at major risk for malnutrition. People living on such diets would indeed feel better and live much longer if they ate large quantities of pine kernels.)

 

See also the next entry.

 

 

Pinus spp. P.  massoniana Lamb. & spp.  Songzi松子Songshuzi松樹子. Lātyanaj/Lateyana剌忒牙納; Rātiyanaj/Lantiyanazhi闌體牙納只  Resin. JiFuTi.

 

Dioscorides: I-86, pitys, P. halepensis; peuke, P. maritima, P. cembra (and/or other evergreens?). Bark ground and eaten; binding (constipating; very effective, from fibre and tannins). Used for cataplasm for ulcers, sores, etc., or eaten for boils. Aids in childbirth.  Drunk, presumably in tea, it stops the belly and is diuretic. Leaves in cataplasm for inflammations and wounds; sodden in vinegar for toothache; leaves or cone drunk in a tea for liver. Soot for eyelids and eyes.  I-87, pityides, seeds; I-88, strobiloi, cones, ground, taken for coughs.

These species are closest to P. massoniana, except for P. cembra, which is closer to koraiensis.

(Gunther identifies IV-166, pityosa, as P. halepensis, but the description and picture cannot possibly apply to a pine. It has flowers, among other incompatible things!)

 

Galen: Pine cones eaten! But not well digested, unsurprisingly. (Green cones are edible, but normally only as a famine resource)

 

Levey: ṣanaubar. Various spp. Seed for electuary for throat. Rātinaj, resin of pines and other conifers. Ulcers.

 

Avicenna: P. gerardiana, ṣanūbar, pine; large pine seeds, ḥabb al-ṣanūbar. Resin is rātiyānaj.  Small seeds, jillauz. Resin hot and dry. Bark constricting. Resin, and dust of bark for wounds and sores. Seeds for lungs, pus, cough. Gargling with boiled-down bark evacuate phlegm. Pine smoke for falling eyelashes, etrc. Various internal uses, but bark irritates stomach. Seeds candied, for use in stomach and reprodiuctive health incliuding volume of semen. They cancause constipation; bark definitely does. Eating too many seeds can cause abedominal pain, but help with urination.

 

Lev and Amar: P. pinea, ṣanawber, bladder, kidneys, drying wetness, coughs, phlegm, paralysis, skin, spasms, jaundice, etc. Resin also used. Needles in a medication to strengthen the penis and constrict the glans.

 

Kamal: P. pinea, snonobar (snubar, snobar—this specifically means pine nuts). Resin for respiratory and dental conditions; diuretic.

 

Bellakhdar et al.: P. halepensis, tayda, dbag, for tuberculosis, skin abcesses. Pinus sp., u-mennas, er-rzina, cosmetic.

 

Madanapala: P. gerardiana, nikocaka, aphrodisiac, nourishing, for strength, etc. P. roxburghii, śrīvāsa, presumably seeds, for head and eyes; laxative.

 

Nadkarni: Various pines used. P. gerardiana seeds stimulant, nutritive, tonic, aphrodisiac.  Pinewood is aromatic, antiseptic, deodorant, stimuant, diaphoretic, refrigerant, rubefacient, carminative; sapwood, oil, resin of P. longifolia and presumably other species used.

 

Dash: P. roxburghii for earache, etc.

 

Li: Song, pine in general. P. massoniana is the common one of south China, replaced northward by P. tabuaeformis and others, westward by P. yunnanensis and others. (The very different P. koraiensis is found only in the far northeast, near Korea.)  Resin and foliage for various purposes. Seeds used, but very small and dry, not a food like those of P. koraiensis.

(Pine oils used medicinally as antiseptic, skin treatment, etc. well into modern times, worldwide. Anderson remembers them from his childhood. Seeds advocated throughout early Chinese history as the best food for longevity.)

 

 

Piper cubeba L., Piperaceae. Common import to China in Medieval times. Bidengjia蓽澄茄.

 

Avicenna: Kabābah. Fāghirā for the fruit alone. Opening, thinning. Dissolving, constricting.  Useful for mouth ulcers, etc. Laxative. Used for cold stomach and liver, and indigestion from coldness. Cleanses urinary tract, dissolves stones. “Coital pleasure in women is enhanced by the local use of saliva secreted by chewing cubeb.”[106]

 

Levey: Kabbābah. Gums, mouth, throat, teeth.

 

Al-Bīrūnī: Tanbūl. Astringent, tightens gums, desiccant, carminative. Chewed with areca nut.

 

Lev and Amar: kabāba, qūbība. For throat, mouth, diuretic, liver.

  1. betel, tānbūl, for teeth, gums, skin.

 

Kamal: kababah, kababa-sini, al-fulful thu al-thanab “tailed pepper,” hab al-arus. Stimulant, diuretic; for gonorrhea, leucorrhea, urethritis, etc. P. betel, tanbul, tamul, used as stimulant, appetizer, aphrodisiac.

 

Bellakhdar et al: kebbaba.  Bladder and uterus diseases, urinary disorders, aphrodisiac, calefacient.

 

Madanapala: Kankola. Hot. For heart disease.

 

Nadkarni: Stimulant, carminative, expectorant. P. betel used for these and many other purposes.

 

Dash: Pungent, bitter, hot. Appetiser. Cures bad taste and “sluggishness in the mouth.”

 

Li: Bidengjia. Pungent, bitter, warm, nontoxic.  Digestive for many purposes.  In mixes for several other conditions.

 

 

  1. longum L., Piperaceae. Baibibo 白蓽撥, “White Long pepper;” Bibo蓽撥; Falfalmūn[iya] /Falijialimeng法里賈里蒙. Hu 973.

 

Theophrastus: II, p. 315:  this and P. nigrum for heating; this one stronger.

 

Dioscorides: II-189, piperi, “long” noted as particularly sharp and biting, otherwise used like nigrum.

 

Levey: Dār filfil. In electuaries, eye powders, arthritis drug, etc. Stomachic.

 

Al-Bīrūnī: Dār-i-filfil. Cleans out uterus, etc.

 

Avicenna: Dār filfil. Hot and dry. Dissolvent. Heals cold diseases. For gout. With juice of roasted goat liver for day blindness (probably extreme sensitivity to light). Digestivve.  Aphrodisiac. Root for abdominal pain.

 

Lev and Amar: dār fulful and variants. Eyes, palpitation, purgation, tonic, indegestion, hemorrhoids, stomach, colic, sexual medicine, etc. Hot and dry (Maimonides).

 

Madanapala: Pippalī. Very hot. Aphrodisiac, rejuvenating, purgative. For dyspnoea, cough, fever, skin, urinary diseases, piles, abdominal conditions, spleen, colic, rheumatism.

 

Nadkarni:  Stimulant, carminative, alterative, aphrodisiac, diuretic, vermifuge, emmenagogue.

 

Dash: Cures cold diseases. Aphrodisiac, laxative. For asthma, cough, rejuvenation, etc. Root for a number of digestive conditions.

 

Li: Biba蓽苃 Pungent, very warm or hot, nontoxic. Digestive uses including cholera and other diarrheas; various other uses. P. betle, jujiang蒟醬, follows it in Li; root, leaf, spike all used; pungent, warm, nontoxic, for coughing, digestive purposes, other minor uses.

(This important medicinal plant, universally used in old Asia for its very “hot” and stimulant qualities, has fallen dramatically from favor since chile reached Asia. P. longum is “hotter” [more piquant] but less flavorful than black pepper, so chile replaced it almost totally in cooking, and to a great extent in medicine. Often, the very name was transferred to chile, its original meaning being forgotten, e.g. Malay/ Bahasa Indonesia lada.  Could lada be the source of or cognate with Chinese la, Cantonese laat, “piquant”?)

 

 

  1. nigrum L., Piperaceae. Hujiao/胡椒; Heihujiao黑胡椒. Hu 659

 

Dioscorides: II-189, piperi. Warming, dissolving, etc. Cleans eyes. Drunk or anointed for malarial attacks, poisonous bites, abortion. Pessary for birth control. Taken for chest, coughs, etc. Gripes, pains, etc. In sauces for provoking appetite. With pitch, applied for scrofulous conditions, and with nitre for white skin infections. Root warming.

 

Levey: Filfil. Pain of gum and throat, collyrium, happiness, stomachic.

 

Avicenna:  Filfil.  Hot and dry (very). Used for skin, tubercular lymph glands, eyes, coughs, sore throat, digestive, appetizer, diuretic; birth control; bowles.

 

Levey and Al-Khaledy: This and the other pepper spp. are important in Al-Samarqandī’s drugs, for the above reasons.

 

Lev and Amar: Filfil, fulful. Cureall: bladdertones, inflammations of tongue and gums, teeth, crying, laughing, cold, heat, paresis and weakenss of sexual organs, aphrodisiac, deafness, earache, hedche, joints, epilepsy, ulcer, colic, vision, etc. Hot and dry. Against insects. Topically on skin. Even said to prevent pregnancy. Basically a cureall.

 

Kamal: felfel aswad. Carminative, counterirritant, stimulant, antiperiodic, antipyretic, anthelminthic, aphrodisiac, rubefacient.

 

Bellakhdar et al: l-bzar lekhel, labzar labyed. Aphrodisiac, calefacient, reconstituant, antitussive. P. retrofractum, first 2 same.

 

Ghazanfar: Filfil. In honey for earache. Stomachic, jaundice cure, reduces phlegm. Tonic, stimulant. Topically for eyes, for vision.

 

Lebling and Pepperdine: In mixed spice foods, especially for women after childbirth, where it appears to be a universal restorative.

 

Madanapala: Marica. Hot. Digestive stimulant. For colic, dyspnoea, parasites.

 

Nadkarni: Acrid, pungent, carminative, antiperiodic; externally, rubefacient, stimulant. Widely used in many preparations.

 

Dash: Digestive, for parasites. Cures cold diseases.

 

Li: Hujiao. Pungent, warm or hot, nontoxic. Digestive, respiratory, general heating uses.  Strongly heating rather than warming, so used with caution. In Li’s book, followed by cubeb pepper in the “fruits” section, while long and betel peppers are together in the “herbs” section, though the uses are similar and Li must have seen the relationships.

(Pungent, stimulant, carminative, and antiseptic value of volatile oils is widely known and still useful.)

 

 

Pistacia terebinthus L., Anacardiaceae and other spp. ‘Ilk al-anbā® [resin of the terebinth, Pistacia vera]/ Yiligulianbati亦里古里唵把提; ‘Ilku l-bu®mi [terebinth gum, from Pistacia terebinthus]/ Yilikulibutemi亦釐苦釐卜忒迷. Bu®m/Butemi卜忒迷

 

Dioscorides:  I-177, pistakia, P. lentiscus. Nuts eaten or ground and drunk with wine, for stomach and for snakebite.

 

Avicenna: P. terebinthus, buṭm. Several other names. Hot and dry, but changeable in degree, according to condition and part of the plant. Cleanses skin conditioins, treats paralysis. Oil for facial paralysis. Treats ear, eye, pains, other external uses. Internally for spleen and liver.  Diuretic and somewhat aphrodisiac. P. lentiscus, maṣṭakī. Hot and dry. Dissolving; dissolves tphlegm. Usual external uses for a hot, dry drug. Strengthens stomach and liver, restores appetite.  Strengthens kidneys, intestines. Used for diarrhea and dysentery. For coughing up blood, also prolapse of uterus and anus (its drying, constricting action). P. vera, fustuq (Persian pistah), laxative, good for stomach. Oil for liver pain.

 

Graziani: P. lentiscus, mastakā, Medieval uses as stomachic, obstructions, nausea.

 

Levey and Al-Khaledy: Mastic from P. lentiscus very important in Al-Samarqandī’s remedies.

 

Lev and Amar: P. lentiscus, maṣṭakā. Diet for weight increase. Diarrhea. Malaria, black bile, phlegm, obstruction, wind, pleurisy, trembling, eyes, etc. Constipative. Expectorant, analgesic, etc. Also used in food. P. atlantica, buṭm, ‘ilk (resin). Oil for kidneys, internal conditions, colds, birth pangs. Resin for various dressings. Hot and wet. Benefits stomach. P. vera, fustaq, fustuq, resin for same or similar uses.

 

Kamal: bottom [butm], fustuq, habbah khadra.  Fattening. Expectorant, diuretic. Galls used for ashthma and chest diseases. P. lentiscus for diarrhea, incontinence, moth conditions, etc. P. vera, food only.

 

Stol:[107] Nuts of P. terebinthus and P. vera eaten since ancient times in Iran and elsewhere in the Near East; mentioned in cuneiform texts (apparently P. terebinthus). Medicinal uses for terebinth resin also go back to cuneiform texts. Ancient Egypt also used resins from Pistacia spp. as aromatics.

 

Bellakhdar et al.:[108] Modern Moroccan use of P. atlanticus for stomach-ache, fever, cosmetics; P. lentiscus for oral hygeine and heart, emmenagogue, stomachic, diuretic, astringent.

 

Ghazanfar: P. lentiscus, mistakah, mustaka, resin for fevers; applied on wounds; chewed as breath freshener; taken for coughs and chest cramps. Topically on swellings.

 

Lebling and Pepperdine: P. lentiscus mastic. Mastaka, etc. With, or instead of, other incense gums, as incense for drying up womb after childbirth.

 

Madanapala: P. vera, pistā, aphrodisiac, nourishing, etc.

 

Nadkarni: P. lentiscus, stimulant, diuretic. P. terebinthus, astringent, restorative; resin used.

 

Li: P. vera, ayuehunzi, seed, pungent, warm, astringent, nontoxic; for genitalia and thus used in sexual medicine (and pleasure). Also for dysentery, cold, general nutrition (the last of these explains the sexual value; most of the Chinese sexual nutraceuticals actually work by providing concentrated protein and mineral nutrition in an easily-digested form).

 

 

Plantago asiatica L. & P. psyllium. Plantaginaceae. Seeds. Native. Qa®ūnā/Huguna忽谷納; Bizr Qu®ūnā/Bazilihatuna八子里哈土納 (Leaf); Bazr l-qa®ūnā /八子里哈土納 (Seeds); Bazr-e qa®ūnā /八子里哈土納;  Cheqianzi車前子  Iran Barihang.

 

Dioscorides: II-153, arnoglosson, P. major; arnoglosson mikron, P. lagopus. Leaves drying and binding, so applied for essentially all types of wounds, sores, and skin conditions, up to and including dog bites and mouth sores. Taken or as clyster for dysentery, etc. Taken for epilepsy, tuberculosis and asthma. Taken or as pessary for womb conditions. Seeds taken to stop diarrhea and spitting blood.  Root for mouthwash, or chewed, for mouth sores and toothache.  Root and leaves for bladder and kidneys. “Some say” (generally a sure indicator that Dioscorides disbelieves what follows) that three roots in wine help tertian, four roots quartan, malaria, and that amulets help scrofulous conditions.

 

Avicenna: Lisān al-ḥamal. Cold and dry. External for the usual sores, ulcers, skin diseases, and pains. Treats earache and mouth. Treats epilepsy. Treats coughing up of blood. With lentils for asthma. For liver, kidney obstructions. Extract or enema for internal ulcers and cholera. Stop bleeding piles. For kidney and bladder pain.

 

Levey:  P. albicans L., shawīk. Scrofula, boils, ulcers, hemorrhoids, tooth care, wounds.

  1. psyllium, qaṭūnāa, for coughs, mouthwash, head, sciatica, back pains, rheumatism.

 

Avicenna: bazr qaṭūnā, P. ovata. Husk of seed used. Cold and moist. Causes constipation, so used for diarrhea. Put on swellings, herpes, inflammation, nerves, rheumatism, headaches, chest.  Used internally for bilious thirst.

 

Lev and Amar: P. afer, dūfus, other names. P. major, lisān al ḥamal. Crying in infants; kdney stones; women’s diseasese; eyes. Various minor conditions. Infection of large intestine; oedema.  Hot and dry.

 

Kamal: P. major, lisan al-hamal, mesis, massas, musas, zummarat al-Ra’i. Roots and leaves astringent, refrigerant, diuretic. P. psyllium, hashishet al-Garaghith, bizr qatuna, burghuthi ibn al-Baytar, hunayn-physilion. Seeds for poultices, dressings, fomentations, sedating drinks, inflammations, vomiting, urinary troubles, skin conditions, eyedrops. (Just about everything except the standard modern use for constipation!)

 

Bellakhdar et al. Plantago sp., messasa, for ripening of abcess, analgesic, local anti-inflammatory.

 

Ghazanfar: Seeds for diarrhea, dysentery, fevers, tonic. Leaves on ulcers and abscesses.

 

Lebling and Pepperdine: P. major, laxative, and for dysentery and diarrhea. Poultices for boils. Seeds used.

 

Nadkarni: P. ispagula and other spp., including asiatica, but primarily ispagula: Seeds cooling, demulcent, emollient, laxative, diuretic. Mucilaginous seeds as laxative particularly important.

 

Eisenman:  P. lanceolata. Decoction diuretic and for cystitis, gastric conditions, tuberculosis, headaches, snake bites; antibiotic, anti-inflammatory, antispasmodic, expectorant, used to treat all sorts of ulcers, wounds, internal inflammation, malaria, etc. Biomedically, seems effective as hemostat and anti-inflammatory, antispasmodic, possibly other uses. Many chemicals isolated.  P. major, similar uses, and diarrhea, bladder inflammation, expectorant. Also has many compounds under investigation.

 

Li:  P. asiatica, P. depressa, cheqian車前. Seed, root, foliage; sweet, cold, nontoxic. Diuretic, laxative, cooling; other uses. Foliage has external uses for poultices etc.

(Seeds still a major laxative, especially those of P. psyllium.)

 

Meserve: P. major. “Leaves made into a plaster for ‘Siberian Sore.’”[109] Also to stanch blood, etc. She presents a great deal of comparative material.

 

 

Platycodon grandiflorum (Jacq.) A. DC., Campanulaceae.  Native. 桔梗, “Baloon flower”

 

Li: Jiegeng. Root cold, bitter, pungent.  General tonic with many uses; a major Chinese drug.

 

 

Plumbago sp.  Plumbaginaceae. Shī®araj/Shayitalazhi沙亦他剌只. Usually, and presumably in the HHYF, this Arabic name means Lepidium, q.v.  (Thus not scored.)

 

Madanapala: Citraka, P. zeylanica. Digestive, stimulant, carminative. For sprue, skin, edema, piles, parasites, cough.

 

Nadkarni: P. rosea alterative, gastric stimulant; P. zeylanica, root, same uses.

 

Dash: Same uses in Tibet as in Madanapala; he cites to the Tibetan sources, so the copying is presumably old.

 

 

Polygonum multiflorum Thunb., Polygonaceae. Native.Tuber. Bahman/Bahaman八哈蠻; ‘A©ā’ urrā’i [Polygonum bellardi]/ Asawulayi阿撒兀剌亦.

 

Dioscorides: IV-5, poygonon arren, P. aviculare, knotgrass.  Binding, refrigerating. Used for blood spitting, fluxes, choler, strangury. Helps with venomous bites and with malaria. Pessary for vaginal flow. Dropped in for earache. Applied with wine for ulcers of genitalia. Applied for wounds, inflammations, and related conditions.

II-191, ydropeperi, P. hydropiper. Leaves and seeds applied to destroy swellings and the like. Used to season food. Root useless.

 

Al-Bīrūnī: P. bistorta. Leaves for dog bites, ulcers, cankers, pustules, inflammations. P. hydropiper, zanjabīl, aphrodisiac, stomachic, dries out phlegm.

 

Avicenna: P. aviculare. Haft band, Narsiān dārū, etc. Poultices for many external purposes and for uterus and intestineal ulcers. Extract for ear worms, ear ulcers. Useful for coughing up of blood. Cooling. P. hydropiper, filfil al-ma‘. Warming, but not much use.

 

Kamal: P. bistorta, leflafah, godwar rokny. Root astringent; contains tannins; hemostatic, and for diarrhea, gonorrhea, angina, exudations.

 

Nadkarni: P. aviculare, expectorant, diuretic, tonic, astringent, antiseptic, antiperiodic; usually decoction of root used.

 

Eisenman: P. aviculare, for stomach spasms, intestinal infections, diarrhea, tonic, hemostat, etc.; decoction or infusion. Bath for skin infections and fungus, wounds, etc. Infusion on head for hair growth. In milk for convulsions. Biomedically, incresaes blood coagulation, decreases blood pressure, etc. Used as hemostat for women. P. coriarium, astringent, tea for diarrhea.  Biomedically seems to be effective.

 

Li: Heshouwu 何首烏. Bitter, astringent, slightly warm, nontoxic. Wide range of uses.

Fully a dozen other species are mentioned in Li, and this certainly does not exhaust the range of species used in China. The dozen have different uses and names. The genus has long been very important as food, spice, and medicine throughout eastern Asia.

In the HHYF, bahman—normally a word for Centaurea behen—is identified in the Chinese text as this species.

 

 

Polypodium vulgare L., Polypodiaceae. Basbāyij/Basibanizhi把思把你知/Bosibanizhi伯思八你知/Bosibaya伯思八牙/ Bosibanazhi 伯思把那知/Baxifayizhi八西法亦只; Basfāyij/八西法亦只  (Persian).

 

Dioscorides: IV-188, polypodion. Root for purging, with foods, or powdered. Also for phlegm and choler. Root applied for certain sores.

 

Levey: Basbāyij. Teeth. Modern uses noted as aperient, alterative, deobstruent, etc.

 

Lev and Amar: basbāyaj, basfāyaj. Roots cleanse intestines, liver, spleen; reduce swseelings.  Teeth. Purifies blood and gall bladder. Asthma. Can cause diarrhea. Reduces swellings. Said to be hot and dry.

 

Nadkarni: Minor use of P. quercifolium for fevers and diseases and P. vulgare for aperient and alterative.

 

 

Polyporus officinalis Fr., Polyporaceae, and/or Boletus purgans Gmel, Boletaceae. Ghārīqūn/Alihun阿里渾/Aligong阿里 公. Probably the former sp. here.

 

Kamal: P. fomentarius, soffan. Powder astringent for bleeding.

 

Nadkarni: P. officinalis, astringent, emetic, purgative.

 

Li: P. umbellatus, zhuling豬苓. Sweet, plain, nontoxic. Important for several serious conditions from fevers to leukorrhea. (Still an important medicine in 21st century China; astringent and drying qualities.)

 

 

Poria cocos (Schw.) Wolf (Wolfiporia cocos), Polyporaceae. Native. Baifuling白茯苓.

 

Li: Fuling茯苓. Sweet, balanced, nontoxic. Many forms, preparations, and uses; a very important, versatile medicine.

 

 

Prunus amygdalus Batsch., Rosaceae. Badam (Persian). Bādām/Badan把躭 Persian); Lauz/Liwazhi里瓦知.

 

Dioscorides: I-176, amygdale, almond. Root or nut of bitter var. mashed, applied to face, for sunburn. Applied (nuts?) also for menstruation, headaches, etc., with vinegar and rose; with wine, for ulcers etc.; with honey for dog bites. General for soothing:  chest, kidneys, etc.  Diuretic; for stone; etc. Keeps off drunkenness, eaten before drinking. Nut kills foxes. Gum for binding and heating; drunk for many of above conditions. The sweet almond is much less medicinal than the bitter. Green almonds eaten to dry up stomach (they are extremely high in tannin).

 

Galen: Cleaning, thinning.

 

Avicenna: Sweet is moist (neutral) but bitter is hot and dry. Almond, mostly bitter, used for liver, spleen, internal organs. Sprains and uclers  treated with the oil. “Bitter almond dissolves kidney stones.”[110] Many uses of both, and oil, for poultices, etc.

Levey and Al-Khaledy:. Oil for stomach and intestines.

 

Lev and Amar: Gaining weight; oil—cold and moist—for heart, stress, fevers, cancer, erysipelas, inflammations. Bitter almond for stones in bladder, stomachic, liver, spleen, ears, etc., and aborting dead fetus; in prescriptions for headaches, pain, and indeed almost everything, up to and including dog bites. This accords with modern uses in the Near East and China as an all-purpose emollient, soothing agent, lubricant, etc. (I can confirm this from experience).

 

Kamal: no uses noted, but peach (P. persica, khokh, durraq) used for laxative.

 

Bellakhdar et al: P. amygdalus var. amara, luz harr, hypoglycemiant, tonic.

 

Nadkarni:  Demulcent, stimulant, tonic, emollient.  Bitter almonds add laxative quality.

 

Li: Badanxing badanxing 巴旦杏 (lit. “the badan type of apricot kernel”—badan being the Persian name of the almond). Account follows the account of the true apricot.  Li knew the almond came from the Middle East, but noted it is now grown in China. Sweet, warm, balanced, nontoxic. For coughs and digestive problems.

 

 

Prunus armeniaca L., Rosaceae. Native. Xingzi 杏子; Xing 杏.

 

Dioscorides: I-165, armeniaca, apricot. For stomach.

 

Avicenna: Cold, moist. Drink; made into soothing syrup, with honey, etc. Seed oil on piles.  Water in which fruit (this with others) is boiled was used for fever.

 

Levey and Al-Khaledy: Used by Al-Samarqandī for syrups, etc., largely as a vehicle for giving other medicines.

 

Lev and Amar: barqūq (the source of the English word, via Spanish albaricoque), mishmish.  Leaves for mouth sores, tonsils, throat. Fruit for itching stinging, thirst, burns, stomach, skin, ains, swellings, worms. Maimonides thought it was a bad food.

 

Kamal: mishmish. Oil noted but not for medicinal use.

 

Bellakhdar et al: ‘elk meshmash. Aphrodisiac.

 

Nadkarni: Fruit minor use as tonic, locally.

 

Sun: Apricot kernel (xingheren杏核仁): sweet, bitter, warm, cool, good laxative, diuretic (li利), poisonous [from hydrocyanates]. It is important for treating rising breath caused by coughing, thundering in intestines (changzhong leiming腸中雷鳴), the swollen throat (houbi喉痹), intestinal gas (xiaqi下氣), ulcer caused by giving birth or cutting (chanrujinchuang產乳金瘡), the illness of a cold heart running like a pig (presumably a heart beating with a fast, erratic rhythm like a running pig;  hanxin bentun寒心奔豚), fright illness (jingxian驚癇), anxiety and heat under the heart (xinxia fanre心下煩熱), the illness of the wind qi coming and going (fengqi qulai風氣去來), and chronic headache (shixing toutong時行頭痛). It also relieves hunger (jieji解肌)[111] and anxiety under the heart (xiao xinxia ji消心下急). It rids toxins from dog bites (shagoudu殺狗毒). It should be picked in the fifth month [when apricots are ripe]. If there are two kernels in one pit, they hurt people and should be discarded. When the apricot is still unripe, it is very sour. The kernel in it is not hard. Collect it and expose it in the sun till it is dry. Eat the dry kernel and it is very effective for ceasing thirst and ridding poisons of cool or hot nature. Bianque 扁鵲said, “Apricot kernels cannot be taken over a long time. Otherwise, it will make the person blind, cause his eyebrows or hair fall, and arouse all kinds of chronic illnesses. ”  [This would be due to the hydrocyanic acid liberated by chewing them; chewing releases an enzyme that acts on hydrocyanic glycogens in the seed. The seeds are still an extremely common medicine in China, used for throat and respiratory conditions among other things. They are usually powdered and cooked to eliminate the poison.]

 

Li: Xing. Usually the seeds (xingren or xingheren “apricot seed kernels”) used, though minor uses for fruit. Kernels, ground, are the sovereign remedy for coughs. Many other uses, even for epilepsy. Many other Prunus species are discussed at length in Li.

(Today the kernels, powdered, are used in milk, with sugar, especially for children, to treat cough, sore throat, and the like; ENA shamelessly used this milk drink all the time in East Asia, in spite of its identification with child culture, because it works so well for the purposes.)

 

 

Prunus domestica L., P. salicina Lindl., Rosaceae. Resin. Native. Li李; Ālūchah [plum, Prunus instititia].

Dioscorides: kokkymfelia, P. domestica, damson. Laxative, but a Syrian plum has the reverse effect. (Presumably a local high-tannin fruit of some kind.) Leaves or fruit gargled for mouth sores. Gum breakes stone if drunk with wine. Anointed with vinegar for skin eruptions of children.

 

Levey: Ijjās. P. domestica or possibly apricot and pear. Infusions.

 

Al-Bīrūnī: Plums in general; laxative. Enormous detail about local varieties.

 

Avicenna: P. domestica, ijjāṣ. Cold and moist. Gum mixed with vinegar for sores and ringworm.  Minor uses; expels yellow bile. Wild plums very constricting.

 

Lev and Amar:  P. domestica. ‘ijjāṣ. Constricting fruits. Mild. Cold and moist. Cathartic. Resi for various binding and resolving and skin conditions. Plum fruit relieves headache, throat pains, nausea, vomiting, blockages, etc. Leaves eliminate worms (they have enough cyanide, tannin and fibre that this might work).

 

Kamal: P. domestica, laxative.

 

Madanapala: Āruka. Digestion, urinary problems, plies.

 

Eisenman: P. sogdiana, a Central Asian plum close to P. cerasifera, above-ground parts used; laxative, stimulant to appetite and digestion. Gum for coughs. Roots and bark for diaphoretic, anti-pyretic, and anti-inflammatory use. Not tested biomedically.

 

Sun: Plum kernel (liheren李核仁): bitter, balanced, nonpoisonous. It mainly treats the symptom of falling down dead (jiangpuji僵僕躋), gores, and bone ache. Its fruit (plum) is bitter, sour, a little bit warm, astringent, non-poisonous. It rids obstinate heat (gure固熱), harmonizes the Middle Jiao, and is good for the heart. It cannot be eaten too much. Otherwise, it will make the person weak. The Yellow Emperor said, “Plums cannot be taken with white honey (baimi白蜜). That will erode the five internal organs (wunei五內).”

 

Li:  P. salicina. Li. (Yes, our herbalist is named Plum! It is, in fact, one of the commonest surnames in east Asia.) First of fruits, coming just before the apricot. Many, but minor, uses for all parts of the plant and fruit.

(Laxative effects of prunes are well known worldwide, and the tannins in the leaves and bark are very effective on minor skin conditions.)

 

 

Prunus mahaleb L., Rosaceae.  Mahaleb cherry. Mahlab/Muhalabi木哈剌必/Mahalabi馬哈剌必.

 

Avicenna: Miḥlab.  Hot and dry. Cleansing, dissolvent. Sour cherry with honey water for brief loss of consciousness (this app. refers to P. cerasus).

 

Lev and Amar. Maḥlab. Hot and dry. Minor uses.

 

Nadkarni: Tonic, stomachic, diuretic.

 

Eisenman: P. padus, Eurasian bird cherry, fruits astringent, for diarrhea etc. Bark, leaves, flowers also used. All contain glycosides.

(The kernel of this wild cherry is an important medicinal food in the Near East; tonic, stomachic, soothing, as for Nadkarni; oddly missing from our Arabic sources.)

 

 

 

Pterocarpus indicus Willd. and/or P. marsupium Roxb., Fabaceae.

 

Nadkarni: Gum (kino) astringent; for digestion, toothache, etc. Bark powdered for same. Leaves externally used as paste on boils, sores, skin diseases. Wood of P. santolinum astringent, cooling, tonic.

 

 

Punica granatum L. Punicaceae. Introduced; common cultivated plant, but usually for the flowers rather than the fruit. Nārmishk/Naermushiqi那兒木失乞/ Naermoshiqi納而謨失其/Naermushiqi那兒木實乞 [wild pomegranate flower]; Nārdān/Naerdang納尒當; Nār/Naer拿兒; Mughāth/Minghada名哈荅/Muaxi木阿西 [pomegranate root]; Rummān/Luman魯蠻; Jullinār /Gulinaer古里拏而/Gulinaer谷里納而; Ghūli/Guli谷里; Shiliu石榴, “stone willow,” i.e. “seedy willow,” in standard Chinese.

 

Dioscorides: I-151, rhoa, pomegranate. Good for stomach. Seed of sharpest (which are the most medicinal) ground and sprinkled on food for stomach looseness. In rain water for blood-spitting, or as bath for dysentery and childbirth problems. Juice for sores of many kinds.

I-152, kytinoi, pomegranate flowers. Similar uses. Binding and drying. Put on teeth and gums for problems. “Somme relate” (i.e., do not believe what follows) that taking three flowers prevents eye griefs for a year.[112]

 

Levey: Jullinār (this is the familiar “Golnar” or “Gulnar” so common in Iranian writings, often as a girl’s name). Flower. Liver, stomach, pains in spleen, and variously for limbs, throat, abscesses, teeth, gums.

 

Avicenna: rummān. Julnār is wild pomegranate. Persian, anār. Cold and dry, but wild is hot and moist. Syrup for yellow bile. Seeds with honey on malignant ulcers. Flowers on wounds. Wild form in poiultices for sprains, fractures, etc. Pomegranate with honey for toothaches, earaches, nose. Powdered seeds with honey on oral inflammations, ulcers. Many minor uses for eyes, chest, throatt, stomach, etc.

 

Lev and Amar: rummān. Flowers jullanār. Syrup used for various soothinguses. Oil of flower in water for eyes. Flowers in gargling and rinsing solution. Juice for diarrhea (tea of the skin works better). Juice also for fevers, cancer, erysipelas, sweelings, elephantiasis, etc. Peels and seeds used but no specifics survive. More generally, juice or fruit for thirst, stomach aches, liver.  Maimonides notes the peel for wounds, stopping diarrhea; cold and dry, though sweet is hot and dry.

 

Kamal: rumman. Rind for diarrhea, leucorrhea, hemorrhage, pharynx. Root starch powdered, cooked in milk, for tonic for weak or syphilitic patients.

 

Bellakhdar et al: qshur romman. Antiulcer, vaginal antiseptic, hypoglycemiant (presumably modern use). For gastro-intestinal disorders.

 

Ghazanfar. Fruit, especially rind, antihelminthic, and for diarrhea, jaundice; topically for skin rashes and vision.

 

Lebling and Pepperdine: Rumman. Usual uses for stomach and topically on burns and skin problems; also taken for diabetes, heart, sinus. Value as antioxidant and astringent, and possibly for cancer, noted from recent medical literature.

 

Madanapala: Dādimī. Alleviates dosa problems.

 

Nadkarni: Astringent, antihelminthic.

 

Dash: All stomach diseases; digestion; cold conditions. Cardiac.

 

Sun: Pomegranate (anshiliu安石榴): sweet, sour, astringent, and nonpoisonous. It ends hotness and thirst in the pharynx. It cannot be eaten too much. Otherwise it hurts the lung.

 

Li: Anshiliu. Sweet and/or sour, warm, astringent, nontoxic. Used, especially the rind of sour fruits, as a cure for diarrhea and dysentery. Powdered rind or flower stanches wounds and otherwise useful. Various minor indications, including flower decoction to turn graying hair black. (This would work if some iron got in the mix; the tannins in the plant would make a black dye with iron.)

(The universal old-time use against diarrhea is still standard, and biomedically verified; the tannins stop diarrhea and seem to kill dysentery germs. The fruit is very high in antioxidants and is now recommended for all sorts of conditions; evidence is slim but suggestive. Modern Near Eastern and Chinese uses of flower, rind, and root bark, as in HHYF, for vermifuge, etc. Here as in HHYF it is used for almost anything where a strongly astringent herbal would help.)

 

 

Quercus infectoria Oliv. Fagaceae. Galls made by Cynips gallae-tinctoriae. mushizi木實子; Māzū/Mazu馬祖in Iran.

 

Dioscorides: I-146, kekides, oak galls. Binding, and used for any condition needing that. Put on swellings, gum diseases, ulcers, toothaches, wounds, etc. Dye hair black when macerated in vinegar or water. Sitz bath for women for vulvar discharges. Good for dysentery, etc.

Also oak uses: I-142, drys, Q. aegilops, dyer’s oak. All parts astringent; inner bark best. Acorn cup lining is good. For dysentery, blood-spitting, etc., and as pessary for leucorrhea and/or similar condition.

I-143, balanoi, acorns. Same uses. Also eaten for venomous bites. On wounds and sores.

I-144, phegos, Q. aesculus; prinos, Q. coccifera, kermes oak. Root bark dyes hair black. Leaves help swellings.

 

Lev and Amar: Various minor purposes for powder; gargling, etc. Hemorrhoids, skin, teeth, sores, wounds, drying in general. Maimonides notes sexual medicine uses for constricting vagin (the tannin would do this), hardening penis, increasing sperm.

 

Bellakhdar et al: Q. suber, Q. ilex, hair-care (the tannin adds much to a hair wash), bowel and colon infections.

 

Nadkarni: Galls for obvious astringent uses.

 

Li: Galls of this and other oaks, wushizi, bitter, warm, nontoxic, powdered for use for dysentery, external conditions, and black dye; the tannins make it effective for all these.

Several other oak species are used similarly, the acorns in particular being employed.

(Very concentrated tannins in the galls make them extremely effective for the above uses involving drying, constricting, washing.)

 

 

Raphanus sativus L. Brassicaceae. Native. Luobo蘿蔔. Hu 659 seeds, roots

 

Dioscorides: II-137, raphanis, radish. Root for vomiting, etc. Cataplasm for spleen. Various external applications. Seed for several minor conditions, used externally or internally.

I-45, oil of seed for skin conditions.

 

Galen: With fish sauce as purgative. Root usually eaten; leaves sometimes.

 

Avicenna: Fujl. Wild radish is. Roots hot, seeds hotter. Oil hot and dry. Usual minor external and internal uses, but bad as a food because it causes belching and is laxative.

 

Lev and Amar: fujl. Mouth, throat, skin, deafness and earache, headache, fever, skin conditions, poison. Maimonides notes use of seeds for sexual health—strengthens, heats, increases activity. Hot and dry.

 

Kamal: fugl, figl. Stomachic. Diuretic, galactagogue. Oil from seeds used in ear. Juice for dissolving gallstones. Eaten for scurvy.

 

Bellakhdar et al: Calefacient.

 

Ghazanfar: Leaves with salt and honey for ears. Ground seeds on skin for spots, pains, baldness.  Eating seeds for lactation and for kidneys. Root reduces phlegm; eaten before breakfast.

 

Madanapala: Mūlaka. Hot. Appetite, voice, dyspnoea, throat, eyes, rhinitis.

 

Nadkarni:  Seeds and leaves diuretic, laxative; seeds emmenagogue. Seeds used for gonorrhea.

 

Dash: Constipative. Pungent, hot, can cure poison.

 

Li: Luobo. Many uses, including some fascinating folklore with songs and stories. Usually described as warm, though in modern China it is one of the coldest foods, used against heats of all kinds.

 

 

Rhamnus infectorius. Rhamnaceae. Òazaz/Haqiqi哈齊齊; Òu†a†/Hazaze哈咱則

 

Avicenna: Snuff for facial paralysis. Treats eyelid swellings.

 

Nadkarni: several species (not this one) for purgation and astringent uses.

 

Eisenman: R. cathartica, usual laxative uses. Infusion of fruits in vodka to treat rehumatism.  Decoction of branches for ulcers, and extern ally on wounds. Tea for catarrh.

(Rhamnus spp. are standard purgatives everywhere, holding their own even today. The Near Eastern species was no doubt used for that purpose, but is barely mentioned in HHYF.)

 

 

Rheum palmatum L. & other spp. Polygonaceae. Native. Dahuang大黃; Rāwand/Luoyina羅亦那/Liewandi列頑的

 

Dioscorides: III-2, ra, rha, R. rhaponticum, rhubarb. [Note the scientific name is “rha ponticum,” the “rha” plant from the Pontic area.] Root drunk for bloating, stomach conditions, pains, convulsions, and essentially any and all illnesses. Binding and heating.

 

Avicenna: Rheum ribes, R. officinale. Ribās, rīwand. Cold and dry. Used externally for bubonic plague. Massages and poultices for various external uses, including treatment of beatings.  Internally for disease of liver stomach, etc. Also for cholera.

 

Levey and Al-Khaledy: Long tradition of rhubarb as very important in Near Eastern medicine.

 

Lev and Amar: Rheum spp. probably including R. officinale. Rībās, rāwand (these often treated as two separate things, presumably different spp. of Rheum). Cathartic. For liver including jaundice. Strengthens stomach, helps with vomiting and regulating heartbeat and appetite. For hemorrhoids, smallpox, pains, internal ailments, internal organs, plague, eyes, etc.

 

Nadkarni: R. emodi, R. officinale, other spp. Stomachic, tonic, cathartic, purgative. Standard cure for constipation and bowel complaints.

 

Eisenman: Rheum maximowiczii, decoction for diarrhea. Juice used for malaria.Young petioles and stemps for tonic, antipyretic, etc., and to prevent anemia and detoxify. Inreases appetite, treats gastritis and liver and gallbladder, tuberculosis, hemorrhoids, constipation (as well as diarrhea!), etc. Biomedically, well-known astringent; said to be diuretic, improve liver function, etc.

 

Li: Dahuang. This and other species. Bitter, cold, nontoxic. This major drug has a vast range of uses for basic regulation of the system. (Its fame spread throughout Eurasia in premodern times, to the point that 18th-century Chinese strategists assumed it was necessary to Europeans and thus usable to get a purchase on them by manipulating availability). Purgative and digestive, in particular.

 

Meserve: R. undulatum, “cathartic” (Meserve 2004:80).

(“I have observed Rheum nanum gathered for medical use in Mongolia; it is a widely used herb there.” Anderson has also had this experience.)

 

 

Rhus coriaria, R. chinensis Mill. & other spp., Anacardiaceae. Includes galls from Melaphis chinensis (Bell) & spp.  Summāq /Sumahei速麻黑/Sumaji速麻吉; Wubeizi五倍子; Fuyan 夫烟. [Note that the word “sumac” is a straight Arabic loan into English.]

 

Dioscorides:  I-147, rous, Rhus coriaria, tanning sumac. Leaves binding, and dye hair black. Clyster for dysentery; also drunk or as sitz bath. Various external applications (where tannin would do good). Applied for leucorrhea and hemorrhoids.

 

Avicenna: Sumāq. Cold and dry. Minor uses; causes constipation; stops excessive menstrual flow, or any excessive bleeding.

 

Levey, Levey and Khaledy: Summāq. R. coriaria. Gum and moth, anti-miscarriage, sore throat, sprue, collyrium.

 

Lev and Amar: R. coriaria, summāq. Diarrhea, toothache, gum pains, swellings, stomach, liver, measles, smallpox. Hemorrhoids, eyes.

 

Kamal: Rhus spp., sumaq. Tonic, stimulant. For incontinence of urine, and hematuria.

 

Nadkarni: R. coriaria fruit astringent, tonic, diuretic, styptic. For dysentery, etc. In paste on ulcers and piles.

 

Li: Yanfuzi鹽麩子, etc. Various minor uses for fruit and bark.

(Strongly astringent and sour. Very common spice in the Middle East then and now.)

 

 

Ricinus communis L., Euphorbiaceae. Bimazi鹽麩子, Hu 659.

 

Manniche: already very well known in ancient Egypt as a purgative, laxative, emollient, disinfectant, etc.

 

Dioscorides: IV-164, kroton e kiki. Poisonous. Oil laxative. Vomitory also, but dangerous. Oil put on sunburn. Leaves with flour in paste for eyes, milk-swollen breasts, rash, etc.

 

Avicenna: qanqabīn, the plant; the oil is khrū‘. Leaves with barley flour for swellings. Oil on ulcers, swellings, headaches, earaches. Laxative. Masage good for “uterine orifice and hot anal swellings.”[113] Expels worms.

 

Levey: Hair oil; epilepsy, clyster.

 

Lev and Amar: On skin for all the usual uses; internally for convulsion, tetany, fever, colic, purging. Also spleen, liver, kidneys, teeth, malaria, dysenery, lungs, thigh sinew, cough, heart, paralysis, hardened skin, joint pains, etc. Enema.

 

Kamal: Oil laxative and emetic. Seed powdered for skin diseases. Oil on ulcers. Pulverized seeds drunk to purge phlegm and abdominal worms. This from Avicenna. Presumably the seeds were used in very small quantities, since they are deadly poison. Seed mashed for external conditions; antiseptic on them.

 

Bellakhdar et al: Laxative, tonic.

 

Ghazanfar: ‘Arash, kharwa, khirwa. Smoke for bad breath. Topically for blisters, ulcers, toothache, eyes. Purgative.

 

Lebling and Pepperdine: For hair loss, indigestion, abdomen and liver.

 

Nadkarni: Usual purgative use of oil; used in an incredible range of illnesses. External applications for sores, soreness, skin conditions, etc.

 

Dash: Strong purgative. Red variety also cures colic, gout, various other digestive and abdominal conditions.

 

Li: Bima 鹽麩. Sweet, pungent, balanced, slightly toxic. Usual purgative uses, plus uses where its toxins would be effective externally, etc.

(Castor oil remained the laxative of choice for very stubborn cases until well into the 20th century, but it is too drastic for use now that better things are available.)

 

 

Rosa spp., Rosaceae. Jinyingzi金櫻子; Qiangwei 薔薇. Jull (=gul; [Arabized] Persian for “flower”), ward (standard Arabic name), lawarda (Persian; from Arabic?  Or possibly vice versa?).

 

Dioscorides: I-130, rhodon, Rosa spp. Kynosbaton, “dog thornbush, for dog rose (R. canina). Petals ground, in wine, externally applied for soothing all sorts of coinditions. Burned for eyelid makeup. Leaves can be used for the medicinal uses. The petal salve or extract is recommended in a very wide range of headings; it was used as a general carrier, emollient, or aid for herbal applications.

I-131, rhodides, pomanders (scent balls made up with myrrh and nard). For perfume, etc.

I-53, rhodinon, rosaceum oil. Various recipes for extracting rose petals in oil, with honey and/or other items. Resulting oil used internally for stomach, externally for boils, sores, toothache, etc.  Clyster for rectal problems. Applied to vulva for irritations. [Rose attar is in fact both highly soothing and fairly strongly antibiotic. Note, however, that Dioscorides is talking about roses macerated in olive oil, not rose attar, i.e. the oil actually extracted from the petals.] This rose oil is noted as used with other herbs in a very large number of Dioscorides’ entries. [The cultural importance of the rose in Greco-Roman culture guaranteed it a major place in all areas, including medicine. Conversely, some of the cultural importance is due to the medicinal value.]

Levey: ward, Rosa spp. Rose oil for hemorrhoids, ulcers, boils, ointments, poultices for liver; flower in poultices for stomach, liver, spleen, sore throat, mouth; electuary for jaundice and for f=phlegm. Excellent for perfumery. Notes names including Akkadian murdinnu, Egyptian wrt, Hebrew wered, Aramaic wordā. Today astringent, etc. [The soothing and antiseptic values of rose are also well known, as they have been for millennia.]

 

Al-Bīrūnī: ward, Rosa spp. Gives the “Roman” (i.e. Rumi, Byzantine) as “anthūs,” i.e. Greek anthos “flower.” Flowers/buds used. Perfumes for women; desiccatory, refrigerant, astringent; good for liver and stomach. Iran is major source. An Iraqi variety was so big it could not be fully contained in two cupped hands. Rose oil distilled from many varieties.

 

Avicenna: Ward, Rosa damascena.  Persian gūl-i-surkh. Cold. Drying; constricting and astringent. Laxative, cleansing. On ulcers, sores, skin. Inhaled for headaches, and to make one sneeze (the oil). Rose water for loss of consciousness. Various uses for stomach, often preserved in honey (rose jam in sugar or honey is still a very common Middle Eastern medicine). Nasrīn, R. canina. Hot and dry. Purifying. Kills ear worms and used for ringing eaer and for toothaches. Used on forehead for headaches. Useful—presumably as tea—for sore throat and tonsillitis. Four-dram dose (of petals, fruit…?)—stops vomiting and hiccups.

 

Nasrallah: Cooling, dry, astringent.

 

Lev and Amar: nasrīn, ward (the later is the usual Arabic word). Various uses for liver, eyes, headaches, purging, and even lice. Used in a vast range of recipes for every purpose from babies’ navels to black bile and phlegm. Seeds fom fruit for diarrhea. Rose syrup (presumably the modern type: rosewater cooked down with sugar) often used; sometimes rose oil, mostly topically for almost any and every purpose from ear problems to stings. Rose leaves for coughs and colds. Rose rubb mentioned (and may be the rose-petal jam now common in the Middle East). Rosewater mentioned in recipes for diarrhea, headache, salivation, colds, giddiness, stomach ache, eyes, etc. Also spleen, fevers, etc.

 

Graziani: ward, R. gallica. Ibn Jazlah used rose oil as stomachic, for headache and spleen, for eye and ear illnesses, for dressing wounds. Al-Kindī used it for ulcers, boils, hemorrhoids, stomach, liver, spleen, and in mixes for sore throat and mouth. Samarqandī used it in lozenges for fever, phlegm, jaundice, heart palpitation, cold liver, etc. Today, in Egypt for stomachic; in Iran and Iraq as astringent for colic and diarrhea. (Many of these uses are found in Latin America today, ultimately from Arab medicine.)

 

Kamal: R. canina, nisrin, gul-nisrin (from Farsi). Astringent. Root used to treat rabies, hence name of plant. R. gallica, ward (in Arabic), influsions astringent, for throat and rectum.  Bellakhdar et al:  l-werd, R. damascena, R. centifolia. Laxative, against headache, cosmetic.  (These spp. universal for throat, cough, etc. in Hispanic countries now.)

 

Ghazanfar: Rosa sp.  Flowers for skin, coughs, tonic.

 

Lebling and Pepperdine: R. damascena, ward. Tea with cinnamon for childbirth. In eyes for care.  For stomach, heart, insomnia.  On skin for general care (this worldwide use is oddly lacking in the other sources, but historical evidence shows it was extremely well known in the Mediterranean and Near East from time immemorial; so much for the completeness of the sources!)

 

Madanapala: R. moschata kubjakā, R. centifolia śatapatrī. Cardiac tonic, constipative, for semen, complexion, dosas, etc. Cold.

 

Nadkarni: Mildly astringent, aperient, carminative, refrigerant, tonic. Several spp. used.

 

Eisenman: Decoction of petals, leaves, branches, roots for rheumatism, stomach, heart. Tea of hips for scurvy, colds, diuretic. Decoction of roots for liver and gastrointestinal tract. Tea of hips also for astringent uses, including fevers, intestines, hemostat for uterine bleeding, and mouthwash. Seeds diuretic and for kidneys. Powdered leaves on wounds and skin ulcers.  Biomedically, various local uses, but potential apparently not well explored. R. fedtschenkoana, similar uses; remedy for scurvy; hips with honey for coulds and coiughs. Oil of rose used to treat cracked and injured breasts of nursing women. Also bed sores and other wounds and sores. Less successful uses of hips for tuberculosis, diphtheria, scarlet fever, flu. Biomedically, hips are a rich vitamin source.

 

Li: R. multiflora, yingshi, and R. chinensis, yuejihua 月季花. Range of minor uses, mostly for the former. Seeds and root. (Red rose is medicinal today for many internal purposes. The external uses are not traditional in eastern Asia.) Rosa laevigata Michx. Native. This is called “Cherokee rose” in the United States, because of its garden popularity and subsequent rapid spread in the south, but it is from China. Hip, jinyingzi (mistranslated “fruit” in Li 2003) sour, astringent, balanced, nontoxic. Male sexual tonic. Flower stops dysentery, makes a black hair dye, and kills worms (none of these seem biomedically very effective). More hopeful are several uses, external or digestive.

 

Meserve: R. acicularis, possibly various uses including diluent for infectious material in smallpox nasal inoculation.

 

(The rose was the Near East’s dream plant: both aesthetic and genuinely medicinal. The standard of beauty and sweet-scentedness, symbol of love and pleasure, and symbol of romance from earliest times, it was also known to be antiseptic, soothing both externally and internally, and effective against throat ailments—all of which it actually is, in biomedical terms. Rose oil is powerfully antiseptic. Rose-petal or roseleaf tea is extremely soothing to the throat. The preparations with sugar—syrup, rose jam—dilute the medical action too much to be more than symptomatically soothing, but they are so delightful that the Near Eastern belief that God made healing pleasant makes them inevitable parts of treatment. The high tannin content explains the widespread use of leaves and of tea of the plant for wounds, throat, skin, etc. By contrast, the more sober and pragmatic Chinese never used roses much in medicine, though the use of roseleaf tea for throat and stomach was well known and well established, giving us the English name “Chinese tea rose.” The place of the rose flower in romantic symbolism was taken by its relatives the peach and apricot. Nonsoothing items like ginseng and atractylis had the medical reputation. There is obviously an important and interesting cultural difference here. Rose hips are a source of vitamins, but there is a huge range in concentration; commercial roses have almost no vitamin value, whereas the rugosa rose of Japan is so rich in vitamin C that it is a regular commercial source thereof, and some other species, including R. fedtschenkoana as noted above, have high vitamin values.

Several HHYF recipes for treating wounds call for “rose dew.”  In modern Chinese, this is distilled liquor (baijiu) in which roses or rose oil has been infused to give a powerful damask-rose flavor.  In the HHYF it probably means the same, but just possibly could mean attar of roses, i.e. pure rose oil, usually water-extracted.

A minor rose mystery is the association with dogs of the small Eurasian wild roses: Dioscorides’ kynosbaton, Latin rosa canina, English “dog rose,” Mongolian noxoin xoshuu “dog snout,” etc. Explanations for this usage are inadequate.)

 

 

Rubia cordifolia L. Rubiaceae. Root. Native. Qiangen茜根; Rūnās/Luniyasi魯你牙思. Morocco, Fuwa.

 

Dioscorides: III-160, erythrodanon, Rubia tinctorum, madder. Root diuretic, abortifacient, emmenagogue, helps expel afterbirth. Helps with paralysis, venomous beast bites, etc. In short, a typical Dioscorides drug.

 

Avicenna: R. tinctoria. ‘Ushr.  Hot and dry. Constricting. Used on pains, ringworm, and internally for inflammations of spleen, clearing liver, diuretic, etc.—usual minor uses of hot and dry drugs.

 

Lev and Amar: R. tinctoria. Fūwa. Pains, hemorrhoids, childbirth pangs, etc. Eases childbirth, whitens teeth, cleases spleen and liver, cures leprosy, induces urine, etc. Hot and dry.

 

Kamal: R. tinctoria, fowah, fowat al-sabbaghin. Roots for emmenagogue, diuretic, childbirth.  Powder for rickets.

 

Bellakhdar et al: R. tinctoria, R. peregrina. Fuwa, tarubya. Aphrodisiac, antidiarrheal, antianemic, analeptic, for liver pain.

 

Ghazanfar: Fauwa. Root for irregular menstruation, with Salvadora persica and mulberries.  Crushed root as tonic after childbirth.

 

Nadkarni: Emmenagogue, astringent, diuretic, etc.

 

Eisenman: R. tinctoria, rickets, constipation, jaundice, joints, rheumatism in back etc. For kidney stones, gallstones, gout, diuretic, laxative. Roots mixed with honey for jaundice, memory improvement, diuretic. Biomedical activity as antibiotic.

 

Li: Qiancao茜草. Root used. Astonishing disagreement on its humoral qualities. Range of uses, from pain to bleeding to red dye.

 

 

Rumex spp. In China, mainly R. japonicus Houtt. Polygonaceae. Yangtigen羊蹄根; ummā©/Heimaxi黑馬西 [Rumex, sorrel]; Òimād/Hunmazi渾馬子 [Rumex, Sourwood, Sorreltree, Oxydendron arboreum]; Chokrī/Chukuli出枯哩 [dock, Rumex acetosa]. Root mostly used.

 

Dioscorides: II-140, lapathon, R. patientia, dock. Plant or seed boiled for stomach. Seed in water and wine for dysentery, scorpion stings, stomach and intestinal complaints. Leaves and/or roots externally for a wide range of conditions, from leprosy and impetigo to earache and toothache.

 

Galen: Also lapathon, R. patientia. Juice irritates stomach. Oxylapathon (“sour dock,” presumably R. acetosella), not good to eat.

 

Avicenna: ḥummāḍ, R. crispus. Cold and dry. Various poultices for tubecular glands, etc.  Mouthwash. With wine for black jaundice. Seeds cause constipation but leaves may be laxative. Minor internal uses.

 

Lev and Amar, Rumex sp., ḥummād. Minor uses including depressing sexual function.

 

Kamal: R. acetosa, hammad, hummayd. Diuretic (root). R. patientia, ‘rq. mushel, rawand barri.  Root infusion sudorific, and on skin and scabies. Leaves astringent.

 

Bellakhdar et al: Rumex sp., zerri’at l-hummida, laxative, for liver disorders.

 

Ghazanfar: R. vesicarius, ḥamid., leaves and seeds eaten for scorpion stings.

 

Nadkarni: R. crispus, Astringent, sedative.

 

Dash: R. acetosella and R. vesicarius. Alleviate dosas. Appetiser.

 

Eisenman: R. caesius, various diseases from scabies to scurvy; astringent for diarrhea.  Decoction of roots and leaves for skin conditions and wounds. Biomedically, astringent, purgative, and many intestinal conditions; vermifuge. R. tianschanicus, on abscesses.

 

Li: Yangti羊蹄 (can cover other species too). Range of uses, including root as vermifuge and antifungal. R. acetosa, suanmo, next in Li after this sp., sour, cold, nontoxic, for pain, scabies, tinea, dystentery, etc.

 

 

Ruta spp. (R. graveolens is the usual domestic species), Rutaceae. Rue, sādhab, is called for in the HHYF, but always glossed as “field mint,” and one can only assume the gloss is correct here, and that the rue actually used in the Near Eastern originals found a local substitute in field mint.  Either the Chinese did not have rue (but they do, now, and use it medicinally) or the translators were confused. Thus, see Mentha. However, in the HHYF Table of Contents, rue frequently appears, unglossed. Yunxiang雲香; Sadhāb/Sadabu撒荅不.

 

Dioscorides: III: 45: peganon to oreion (“mountain rue”). Pain in sides and breasts, asthma, coughs, lungs, joints, uterus, worms, ear trouble, itching, etc.

 

Levey: Various plants for pains in boys. Modern uses for diuretic, emmenagogue, abortive, etc.

 

Avicenna: Sadhāb, Ruta graveolens. Hot and dry. Pounded with salt for hot swellings. Used on tubercular lymph glands. Used for paralysis, pain, sciatica, arthritis; orally or poultice with honey. Usual minor uses of nose, eyes, chest. Used with fig as poultice for “watery swellings throughout the body.”[114] For abdominal pain. Internally or externally for fevers and chills.

 

Lev and Amar: sadhāb (wild rue), fayjān (cultivated). Diarrhea, wind, warts, dysuria, dysmenorrhea, hard swellings, aphasia, spasms, tension, shaking, palsy, baldness, fever, bile, phlegm. Rue oil specifically for convulsion and tetany, fevers, colic; seeds for eyelids; etc. Used with othe medications for anything and everything from sexual therapy to sore armpits. Hot and dry.

 

Kamal[115] translates Avicenna on rue; the account is very long and detailed. The plant is breaks up and resolves or soothes various conditions, clears vessels, etc. It is good on skin conditions for odor of garlic and onion, for tumors and pustules, for wounds and ulcers, for headaches and head conditions, for various eye, chest, and stomach conditions, and so on; it helps with fever and resists poisons. He gives formulations for all these purposes. Significantly, he says nothing about magical uses, though these were rampant in the west—at least later, and presumably in his time. The plant is, in modern biomedical terms, slightly antiseptic and quite soothing to the stomach, but not much else. Large quantities of it, made up as he recommends, would probably have action in most of the ways Avicenna mentions, though not necessarily very much action.

 

Meserve[116] lists R. sahurica as a Mongol medicine for nerves and possibly other uses, though there are problems with identification.

(Significant here is the thoroughly scientific and empirical way Avicenna treats the plant and its uses. He brought together an incredible amount of material that was obviously based on close observation and recording. Interestingly, rue never made it to East Asia in early times. It is very commonly grown as a folk medicine today, however. Li does not mention any Ruta sp. Possibly the easy availability of the closely related and similarly effective Citrus spp. account for this. Rue is extremely effective as an antiseptic [especially the oil], soothing and digestive agent, etc., but dangerous in overdose.)

 

 

Saccharum officinarum L., S. sinensis Roxb., Poaceae. Sugarcane. There is no sugarcane as such in the HHYF but hundreds of references to sugar in various forms. Shatang 沙糖/ shatang砂糖/Baishatang白沙糖/ Tang糖; Baishami白砂蜜; Zar nabāt/ Saernabate/撒兒那把忒; Fanīdh/Fanidi法尼的.

 

Dioscorides: II-104, sakcharon, sugar (from S. officinarum). Drunk for stomach, and pains of bladder and kidneys. Applied to eyes.

 

Levey: Sugar in various preparations, as a modifier. In clysters.

 

Avicenna: Hot and somewhat moist, but dry after aging. White sugar candy is moist. Laxative, cleansing, washing; the candy is especially laxative. Softens chest. Candy treats coughs. Cane for yellow bile. Various minor uses.

 

Lev and Amar: Cough, colds, heartbeat. Ash used for this and even malaria. Much more widespread was the use of sugar as the vehicle for carrying drugs; almost anything could be given in a syrup, rob (rubb), sugar pill, etc.

 

Ghazanfar: S. officinarum, juice for cough and diuretic, also in eyes for pain.

 

Madanapala: S. spontaneum, kāśa, cold; cures bronchitis, dysuria, stone, bleeding, consumption.  Other spp. noted.

 

Nadkarni: S. officinarum preservative, demulcent, antiseptic, cooling, laxative, diuretic. Juice used. Sugar for antiseptic and demulcent uses.

 

Dash: Sweet, cold. Promotes corpulence and virility. Laxative. S. spontaneum similar; also for thirst, cough, bleeding.

 

Sun: Sugar cane (ganzhe甘蔗): sweet, balanced, astringent, nonpoisonous. It helps the qi move downwards and harmonizes the Middle Jiao (hezhong和中) and nourishes the qi of spleen. It is good for the large intestine. It stops thirst and rids anxiety. It also treats intoxication caused by alcohol.

 

Li: Ganzhe (=S. officinarum, S. spontaneum, also). Sweet, balanced to cold, astringent, nontoxic. Minor uses including soothing stomach.

 

 

Salix babylonica L., Salicaceae. LiuBīd/ Biedi別的.

 

Dioscorides:  I-74, itea, Salix sp., willow. Leaves ground, taken as contraceptive; drunk with pepper and wine for colic. Fruit (seed) or bark tea, drunk for spitting blood. Various external applications.

 

Avicenna: Bahrāmaj, khilāf, ṣafṣāf (various species). Several external uses, including poultice for bone wounds. Fruits for gases in head. Smelling of leaves is good. Flowers and juice in ears for aches. Juice for liver and jaundice. Somewhat laxative. (Interestingly, the painkilling effects are not mentioned.)

 

Lev and Amar: Salix spp. S. aegyptica, khilāf, etc. Eyes, fever, colic, stomach-ache.

 

Kamal: S. alba, root for antirheumatic and antipyretic uses. S. nigra, sexual disturbances. S. babylonica not used medicinally.

 

Nadkarni: Antihelminthic, antiseptic, astringent, tonic. Several other spp. used similarly.

 

Dash: Cures aggravated heat in lungs and heart.

 

Li: Liu (“willow” in general; this sp. is the usual garden one in China). Bitter, cold, nontoxic.  For fever, of course, but also a variety of other internal and external uses, the external ones related to tannin values.

  1. purpurea, shiuyang水楊, twig and fruit for a number of internal and external uses related to strong tannin value.

(Willows are one of the most concentrated sources of salicylic acid, the natural “aspirin,” though the latter drug was actually discovered by the Bayer chemists in a Spiraea, of which the word “aspirin” is an anagram. Cultures around the world have learned to use willow leaf or bark tea, or simply chew the leaves, for fevers, headaches and inflammations.)

 

 

Santalum album L., Santalaceae. Sandalwood. Tan/ 檀. Hu 540.

 

Graziani: Ibn Jazlah used it for palpitation, headache, liver ailments; modern Iranian use for antiseptic action in genito-urinary tract. White sandalwood in Egypt against gonorrhea and other genito-urinary complaints.

 

Levey: ṣandal. Liver, spleen, erysipelas, etc.

 

Avicenna: ṣandal. Cold and dry. Dissolves hot swellings; used on inflammation. For headaches, fevers, weak stomach.

 

Lev and Amar: ṣandal. Black bile, phlegm, malaria, diarrhea, liver, ulcers, teeth, erysipelas, heart, etc.

 

Kamal: Sandal. Oil sudorific, heart tonic, cure for gonorrhea.

 

Al-Bīrūnī: used in India for treating acute swellings, as well as for making useful objects (that would then be scented), etc.[117]

 

Bellakhkdar et al: sendal. “Magic,” whatever that may be.

 

Madanapala: Candana. Cold. Cardiac tonic. For complexion, poison, thirst, bleeding, burning syndrome.

 

Nadkarni: Wood bitter, cooling, sedative, astringent. Oil used as disinfectant for membranes.

 

Li:  Tan, a name used also for Dalbergia hupeana. Root-bark balanced, pungent, nontoxic, good for external parasites. The gum, tanxiang (sandalwood fragrance/incense), warm, pungent, nontoxic, few minor uses including the same external ones and a stomachic use.

(This is, of course, also the most important Chinese incense, so important that it gave its name to Hong Kong [xianggang 香港, “incense port,” because sandalwood was once shipped from there; mistranslated “fragrant harbor” all too often] and the Hawaiian Islands (tanxiangshan 檀香山, “sandalwood mountains,” in Chinese, because they once produced this root-parasitic tree). As a sacred incense, its smell defines sacred space in Chinese culture. Its major medicinal importance, then, lies in its magical or religious function. Its scent when burned pleases the gods and spirits and makes them help and heal the worshipers.)

 

 

Satureja thymbra L., Lamiaceae. Savory. ßa’tar/Satela撒忒剌; hāshā/Hasha哈沙

 

Dioscorides: III-45, thymbra, Satureia thymbra, savory. Used like thyme.

 

Lev and Amar: za‘tar (sa‘tar) fārisī. Kidney pains and stones, urine flow, ears, eyes, intestines, growths on neck, emmenagogue, diuretic, stomach, etc.

 

 

Saussurea lappa C. B. Clarke, Asteraceae. Introduced to China as cultivated medicinal. Muxiang木香; Guang-mu-xiang. Hu 100.

 

Avicenna: Qusṭ (from the Greek kostos). Hot and dry. Various external uses; also for lethargy, chest pains, menstruation, worms, etc. Aphrodisiac but abortifacient. Treats bites; with wine and absinthe for snake bites. (Interesting that Avicenna is the only western source to go into much detail on this widely distributed and chemically active plant—a major Chinese medicine.)

 

Madanapala: Kustha. Pungent, sweet, bitter. Promotes semen. Cures gout, erysipelas, bleeding, cough.

 

Nadkarni: Carminative, antiseptic, disinfectant.

 

Dash: Bitter, pungent, hot, alleviates dosas, cures thirst, erysipelas, poison, fungus, skin conditions.

 

Li: Muxiang. Root pungent, warm, nontoxic. Dispels problems in general, even nightmares and weak will. General tonic and toner of system, with wide functions.

 

 

Scolopendrium vulgare Swartz, Polypodiaceae. As-saqūlūfandariun/Yisigulufandilirong亦思古魯凡的里榮.

 

Dioscorides: III-121, phyllitis. Leaves with wine for snakebite and the like, and dysentery and diarrhea.

 

 

Sedum sarmentosum.  Chuipencao垂盆草. Possibly a mistaken identification in sources.

However, Lev and Amar report use of possible Sedum sp., ḥayy al-’ālam, for nerves, lungs, bleeding, pains. Not scored.

 

 

Semecarpus anacardium L., Anacardiaceae. Balādur/Biladier必剌的兒/Baladuerdi八剌都而的; Anqardiyā/Anjiaerdiya安家兒的牙/ Anaqardiyā /Anhaerdiya安哈而的牙. Oriental cashew nut.

 

Presumably the cashews mentioned in HHYF is this sp.

 

Avicenna: Balādur. Hot and dry. On ulcers, inflammation, warts, vitiligo. Eliminates tattoo marks. Relieves baldness. Treats “coldness and laxity of nerves caused by paralysis and facial paralysis.”[118] May stir up melancholia. Snuffing it dries piles. Poisonous.

 

Madanapala: Astringent, sweet, hot.  Promotes semen. Cures abdominal diseases, constipation, skin including leprosy, piles, fever, ulcers, parasites, etc.

 

Nadkarni: Very important; many major uses. Antiseptic, stimulant, digestive, etc. Modern studies confirm effects; several active ingredients noted.

Powerful vesicant, rash producing, but oil highly antiseptic and cholagogue. “Ripe fruits are regarded as stimulant, digestive, nervine and escharotic…gastro-intestinal irritant. Kernel edible, digestive, carminatice. Cardiac and respiratory tonic.[119] Several pages of uses; very important in India, especially for skin and digestion.

 

Dash: Hot; digestive.

 

 

 

Sesamum indicum  DC., Pedaliaceae. Oil.  Introduced crop in China. Zhima芝麻; Ma 麻; Mazi痲子; Huma胡麻. In the HHYF, sesame oil is often confused with flax or cotton oil.

 

Dioscorides: II-121, sesamon, sesame. Hurts stomach. Causes bad breath if the seeds stick in the teeth. Gets rid of thickness of nerves (whatever that is), helps with fractures, inflammations, burns (evidently externally applied), and (presumably internally) for colon, etc. Used with rose oil on head. Herb in wine for the same and for eyes. Use of oil mentioned, but apparently it is not medicinal.

 

Galen: Warm, oily, not a good food.

 

Levey: Simsim. Ear, leprosy; oil general carrier for all sorts of poultices, clysters, etc.

 

Avicenna: Simsim. Hot and moist. Laxative. Soothing. Seeds on burns. Poultice for nerves.  With rose oil on head for headaches. For difficult breathing; seeds taken. Emmenagogue and abortifacient.

 

Lev and Amar: simsim. Oil is shīraj. Oil used in preparations for various topical purposes; part of a medicine for babies’ umbilical hernia and incessant crying that apparently included all the favorite curealls in the Genizah. Also for convulsion, tetany, fevers, colic, breast swellings, ears, headache, leprosy, lungs, abscesses, toothaches, cough, instanity, etc. Apparently always the oil.

 

Graziani: Simsim. Used by Ibn Jazlah for blood, hair, relaxation, snakebite. Fattening but makes thirst and slows digestion. Used today in Middle East to increase milk, for stomach and pulmonary diseases, emmenagogue, even abortifacient.

 

Kamal: semsem, simsim. Seeds for poultices.

 

Bellakhdar et al.: jenjlan. Hypnotic for children. Stimulant, including for lactation (a very widespread use in the Mediterranean and elsewhere).

 

Ghazanfar: Zait simsim (the oil). Seed oil for dysentery, colds, urinary problems. Seeds used as aphrodisiac.

 

Nadkarni: Seeds laxative, emollient, demulcent, diuretic, latagogue, emmenagogue. Leaves demulcent.

 

Sun: Sesame (huma胡麻): sweet, balanced, nonpoisonous. It especially treats hurt Middle Jiao (shangzhong傷中) and weakness (xulei虚羸). It is nutritious to the five internal organs. It enhances the qi and strength. It builds muscles. It fills the head with brains. It strengthens tendons and bones. It cures cutting wounds and relieves pain. It treats the striking cold (shanghan傷寒) and the illness in which at first the patient has fever and then feels cold (wennue溫瘧). It treats the feeling of weak, heat, and tiredness after excessive vomiting and diarrhea (datuxia hou xure kunfa大吐下後虛熱困乏). If one has taken it for a long time, his weight will be lessened and he will not get old [presumably “old” means “senile” here]. It is helpful to hearing and eyesight. It helps people resist cold and heat. It elongates one’s lifespan. Its oil is mildly cold. It particularly helps the large intestines (li dachang利大腸). It deals with the problem when a lying-in woman has difficulty pushing out the afterbirth (chanfu baoyi bu luo產婦胞衣不落). It will let hair grow on a bald head. One can use raw sesame to rub a wound or swelling (chuangzhong瘡腫). It eliminates wandering wind (youfeng遊風) on head and face. It has other names: jusheng巨勝, goushi狗虱, fangjing方莖, or hongzhi鴻芷. Its leaves are called qingxiang青蘘. It treats the striking heat (shure暑熱). Its flowers especially treat loss of hair. On the seventh day, pick those growing on the top (zuishang piaotou最上摽頭) and dry them in the shade for future use. [The nutritional uses stressed above are perfectly practical; the high content of protein, oil, vitamins and minerals in sesame seed has made it a valuable nutritional source for thousands of years.]

 

Li: hu ma (“Iranian hemp”—the seeds, not the fibre, being similar to hemp) or you ma油麻or zhima (“oil hemp”; the last of these is the modern term). Li reports it was introduced to China by Zhang Qian張騫in the Han Dynasty; he is credited with many introductions from the west). Stem, oil, leaves used, but mostly the seeds, with black seeds having a different nutritional and medical value than white/yellow ones. (Black seeds are now considered more nourishing and warming.)

(Sesame oil is an excellent skin oil, also nutritious, and a good vehicle for other drugs, but has no special biomedical value.)

 

 

Seseli tortuosa L., Apiaceae. Sisāliyūs/Xisaliyuxi西撒里欲西/Xisaliyusi西撒里雨思/Xisaliyuxi 西撒里玉西.

 

Dioscorides: Kagchru, possibly this sp. Warming, drying. For eyes. Dioscorides’ “seseli” is identified as Echinophora tenuifolia (seseli massaleotikon, III-60) and Bupleurum fruticosum (seseli aithiopikon, III-61). These were used—seed and root—for diuretic, emmenagogue, and abortifacient purposes and general internal complaints, from coughs and gripes to fevers.

 

Nadkarni: S. indicum, seeds stimulant, carminative, stomachic.

 

 

Solanum melongena L., Solanaceae. Eggplant. Wagdh/Wenda溫荅; Jiazi茄子. Mentioned as a food in the Index.

 

Avicenna: Bādhinjān. Produces black bile. Hot and dry. Minor uses but most of the entry consists of warnings: harms clomplexion, causes headaches, causes liver problems unless cooked with vinegar, etc.

 

Lev and Amar: Strengthens stomach, dispels nausea. Hot and dry. Improves smells of body, increases urine, blackens the hair, removes white spots and tears from eyes, et. Thorns used for hemorrhoids and the like.

 

Ghazanfar: Regulates cholesterol.

 

Nadkarni: hypnotic, antiphlegmatic, alleviate wind, etc. Ash used. Leaves narcotic, seeds stimulant. Fruit fried for toothache. Fruit good for liver.

 

Li: Sweet, cold, nontoxic. Not a particularly good food. Useful for poultices; stem burned for ash for aphtha. A large number of specialized medical uses, some magical: hang up an eggplant, gaze at it day after day; as it withers the disease withers. Many small, intensely flavorful eggplant species exist in south China and neighboring Southeast Asia. Li calls them “bitter eggplant,” kujia苦茄, probably lumping several species, and recommends them for a wash for carbuncle and swelling.  Some are used in local and Tibetan medicine (e.g. Dash, S. indica).

(Major food in the Middle East, where any eggplant dish is likely to be called Būrūniyā from the extreme fondness that an early ‘Abbasid Princess Burun was said to have for the fruit (sober history does not record this, however). This has given us “boronia,” “alboronia” and the like in various European languages. Converted Moors carried it to Mexico. Sometimes the dishes are made with green beans or other substitutes instead of eggplant.)

 

 

Solanum nigrum L., Solanaceae. ‘Inab ath-Tha’lab/Yinabusalabi亦拏卜撒剌必/Yegouputao野狗蒲萄 (“Wild dog grape”)

 

Theophrastus: II, p. 311, strykhnos, possibly not this species; makes one mad.

 

Dioscorides: IV-71, strychnos kepaios, garden nightshade. Leaves edible, cooling, applied for a very wide range of external conditions.

 

Galen: Medicine; extremely astringent, cold.

 

Levey: Rūzbāraj. In nasal ointment and for liver and stomach, hemorrhoids, etc. Also as ‘inab ath-tha’lab, for erysipelas.

 

Avicenna: ṭiqāqawāūn (enchanter’s nightshade). Many other names. Cold and dry. Usual uses in poultices; unusual is one with white lead and rose oil, for diffuse inflammation. Sedative. Used in eyes, for stomach and kidneys, cleansing. Primarily an anaesthetic or sedative.

 

Lev and Amar: eggplant, S. melongena, stoach, nausea, diuretic, etc. Hot and dry.

 

Kamal: ‘inab al-th’eb. Leaves for poultices and vaginal treatments. S. melongena leaves for fomentations for burns and leprosy; juice of fruit (eggplant) diuretic.

 

Bellakhdar et al: S. sodomaeum, limun n-nsara, quras l-jenn, antiepileptic.

 

Ghazanfar: Plant used as expectorant; for fevers, gonorrhea, kidney, bladder, stomach; on ulcers.

Madanapala:  Kākamācī. Hot. Cardiac tonic, rejuvenating, promotes voice and semen. For odema, skin, leprosy, piles, fever, urinary diseases. Several other Solanum spp. discussed.

 

Nadkarni: Not this, but several other spp. used, some narcotic; most very different in nature and effect from S. nigrum, however.

 

Dash: Hot, laxative. Promotes voice and virility and alleviates dosas. Cures skin. Can be poisonous.

 

Li: Longkui 龍葵. Bitter, slightly sweet, slippery and nontoxic (!). All parts used; a few minor uses including external uses on boils and the like.

Several other Solanum species used, including eggplants S. melongena and relatives for an astonishing variety of uses, including poultice on frostbite.

(Solanum nigrum sometimes contains dangerous alkaloids, giving it the name “deadly nightshade.”)

 

 

Spartium junceum L., Fabaceae. Badāshghān/Badashihan八達失韓Badashqan.

 

Dioscorides: IV-158, spartion, broom. Seeds purgative. Drunk or clyster for lower parts.

(Arab/Persian name obscure; very likely applies to a different species of broom, as in the case of the hairy thorn-broom above. But it is not in the Middle East sources under any name.)

 

 

Stellaria dichotoma L. var lanceolata Bge., Caryophyllaceae. Yincihu 銀紫胡 [?].

 

Sun: Chickweed (Stellaria media, perhaps including the above sp.; fanlou蘩蔞): sour, balanced, nonpoisonous. It treats especially the deteriorative ulcer that exist for years, and hemorrhoids that cannot be cured. Pick it at noon, the fifth day of the fifth month. It is also called zicao滋草, or jichangcao雞腸草. Dry and burn it. Use the parched ashes for medication. Bian Que扁䳍 said, “If a man has a deteriorative ulcer, or his glans (yintou陰頭) and penis have ulcers and are festered, and the pain is intolerable and the ulcer cannot be healed up for a long time, take one part ashes to two parts mud recently excreted by an earthworm. Add water and fully blend them. Make a paste like the dough that is used to make a pancake before it is fried. Apply the paste on the ulcer and change it when it is dry. Do not consume alcohol, flour food, the five spices (wuxin五辛), or hot food (reshi熱食).” The Yellow Emperor said, “When fanlou is taken alongside with (?zha[鱼旦]鲊), it will arouse the illness of losing weight and being thirsty and make the person forgetful.” There is another species, growing in warm and wet location, for instance a place close to the aqueduct. It grows in the winter and its shape is like coriander (husui胡荽). It is also called jichangcao雞腸草. It can be used to cure hemorrhoids. It has another name, tianhusui天胡荽.

 

Li: Fanlü繁縷. Trivial uses,

 

 

Strychnos sp. (S.  pierriana?), Loganiaceae. Jawz [al-]qāyi/Guoerji過兒吉… [Transcription incomplete]

 

 

Dash: S. nux-vomica L. bitter and astringent; cures parasites. Usable for rat-poison.

The fact that only Tibetan medicine seems to use this plant, among our sources, does not mean we have a Tibetan influence here. Note the Arabic name and the fact that S. nux-vomica is known all over the Old World, but mostly as a poison rather than a medicine.

 

 

Styrax benzoin Dryand., Styracaceae. Resin.  Anxixiang安息香. Hu 659.

 

Dioscorides:  I-79, styrax, S. officinalis. Gum used. Warming, softening. Cures coughs and other respiratory conditions. Drunk or applied for vulva and as emmenagogue. Soot also used.

 

Al-Bīrūnī: Usshaq, usshaj. Deeobstruent, haemorrhagic, resolvent, purgative. With vinegar and tar for scrofula, sclerosis, enlargements, cleaning away bad flesh, etc. With honey and barley for arthritis and uralgic problems, and joint pain in general. Al-Bīrūnī  records some controversy over exactly what plant is meant.

 

Avicenna: S. officinalis, aṣṭarak; lubni for liquid. Hot and dry. Usual minor uses for hot dry drugs.

 

Kamal: gawi. Inhalations for cheat disease and throat inflammations. Resin stimulant, expectorant, astringent; cough sedative, dries expectoration. Antiseptic dressing powder for wounds.

 

Bellakhdar et al: jawi. Ripening of abscesses.

 

Nadkarni: Antiseptic, disinfectant, stimulant, expectorant. Gum. Used as incense.

 

Li: Anxixiang. (Identified in Li 2003 as S. tonkinensis, but Li notes it may have come from Anxi in central Asia, and had a Sanskrit name, so S. benzoin is surely included.) Gum pungent, bitter, plain, and nontoxic. A number of uses, most of them, unusually, psychological; it dispels nightmares, unnatural sexual dreams, fright, visions of ghosts, evil, and devils, and the like. This is the only plant in this canon that the hard-headed Li uses primarily for such purposes.

 

 

Syzygium aromaticum (L.) Merr. et Perry (Eugenia caryophyllata Thunb.), Myrtaceae. Imported. Dingpi丁皮; Dingxiang丁香 (“nail aromatic,” cf. English “clove” from French clou “nail.” Hu 973. Flower bud, dried, becomes clove.

 

Avicenna: Qaranful. Hot and dry. Strengthens stomach and liver.Treat vomiting and nausea.  Can help eyes, also epilepsy.

 

Levey, Levey and Al-Khaledy: Qaranful. In electuaries, dentifrice, collyrium, and for breathing and stomachic.

 

Lev and Amar: Qaranful. Heat, dryess, black and red bile, coughs, colds.  Freshens breath, treats gums and stomach. Hysteria, epilepsy, etc., and for sexual medicine (Maimonides). For nausea.

 

Lebling and Pepperdine: Qaranful, mismar. Coughs, colds, cuts, eyes, hair loss, headaches, menstruation, nauseal and vomiting, sore throat, toothache, and childbirth (cinnamon, cloves, honeyu, dates during labor). Antiseptic and antifungal activity noted here.

 

Nadkarni: Dried buds stomachic, carminative, stimulant, aromatic, antispasmodic. Oil antiseptic, local anaesthetic, rubefacient. (These uses are all well documented by modern biomedicine; the volatile oils are responsible.)

 

Dash: Cold. Cardiac, promotes eyesight and virility, cures poisons.

 

Li: Dingxiang.Pungent, warm, nontoxic.Topical for mouth and nose. Cures gum disease, bad breath, etc. Digestive. Some minor uses. Used since very ancient times.

(Clove is highly effective, still in some medical use, and perhaps the most effective in biomedical terms of anything mentioned in the HHYF. Its volatile oil is strongly antiseptic, antifungal, carminative, stomachic. It has been used since time immemorial for toothache, since it not only kills at least a few bacteria but also has some numbing or pain-relieving effect; treats gums, sweetens breath.  Still almost universally used, worldwide, in folk medicine.)

 

 

Tamarindus indicus L., Fabaceaae.  Tamarind. Bādranjabuyah/Badilangjiboye把的朗吉波也; khurmā’ Hindī/ Huermaxindu忽而麻忻都; Òumar/ Huerma胡而麻. Mentioned only a few times including in the table of contents volume.

 

Avicenna: Cold and dry. Laxative.  Treats vomiting, thirst from fever, yellow bile, and effects of excessive vomiting.

 

Lev and Amar: Astringent. For menorrhagia, jaundice, laxative, purgative, cooling; in modern Egypt as mouthwash for thrush; seeds for plaster; for nausea, fever, etc.

 

Nadkarni: Pulp contains tartaric, citric, malic, ascorbic, and acetic acids, as well as oter useful items.  Cooling, carminative, digestive, laxative. Antibilious. Leaves and seeds strongly astringent. Two pages of fine print on local uses.

(Oddly not in Li. A very popular cooling drink throughout much of the Mediterranean world, and its extension into Hispanic America, is prepared from the pulp, and no one who has tried it can fail to be impressed by the cooling effect of the astringent but sweet pulp rich in vitamins and minerals.)

 

 

Taxus baccata L., Taxaceae. Zarnab/Zhaernabu札而拿卜

 

Levey: Zarnab. Uncertain identification as yew. Good for spirits and happiness.

 

Avicenna: Hot and dry; minor uses typical of hot dry drugs.

 

Lev and Amar: zarnab. Disinfectant. For bad smells. Softens voice, dissolves phlegm, improves digestion, diuretic, etc.

 

Nadkarni: Leaves and fruits emmenagogue, sedative, antispasmodic.

 

Li: Torreya grandis, feishi榧實, seed, sweet, balanced, astringent, nontoxic. Vermifuge, mouth sores, sore throat (still standard in the 21st century for this; the nuts are roasted and eaten.)

(Berries of Taxus are highly toxic.)

 

 

Terminalia bellerica (Gaertn.) Roxb., Combretaceae. Balīlaj/Balila八里剌.

 

Avicenna: balīlaj. Cold and dry. Cleansing. Oxidizing, assimilative. Maturing for stomach.  Laxative. (Note this is another of the many Indian medicines not mentioned by Islamic authorities other than Avicenna.)

 

Madanapala: Bibhītaka. Astringent, purgative, for eyes, cough, etc.

 

Nadkarni: Astringent, tonic, expectorant, laxative; yunani use as cold and dry tonic for stomach etc., used also for headache, hemorrhoids, diarrhea.

 

Dash: Cures all diseases caused by either heat or cold!  Pungent, hot, corrosive. Cures abdominal diseases.

It would seem highly likely that this drug got into HHYF practice via Tibet.

 

 

Terminalia chebula Retz.,Combretaceae. Hozi訶子; Hawm al -majūs /呼木麥乎思/Humumaishuzi呼木麥朮思; Halĩlaj/Halila哈里剌. Hu ds659

 

Levey: Halīlaj. Loose uvula; ears; throat; mouth; preventing miscarriage. Levey notes its wide use in Asia, giving even a Tokharian word for it (arirāk).

 

Avicenna: halīlaj. Cold and dry. Internal pains. Digestive. Evacuates black bile and phlegm. Laxative. Good for memory, sense organs, intellect.

 

Lev and Amar. Terminalia spp. ‘amlaj, halīlaj, etc. Various kinds used but hard to sort out in the Genizah material—which has a very great deal about them. As in India, they tend to have been curealls. Eyes, stomach, cough, cold, pains, and most other minor ailments.

 

Bellakhdar et al: astringent; also for liver, stomach and bowel disorders.

 

Ghazanfar: Leaves on skin rashes. Enema from crushed fruit with other substances. For childbirth.

 

Nadkarni: Astringent, purgative, etc. Myrobalans—this, T. bellerica, and Emblica—are standard Indian medicines, universally used.

 

Dash: Root cures bone diseases, trunk for muscles, branches for vessels and tendons, bark for skin, leaves for hollow viscera, flowers for sense organs, fruits for solid viscera—a wonderful bit of correspondence theory, obviously influenced by the Chinese (note the classification of viscera). Stimulant, appetiser, laxative.

 

Li: Helile, hezi, the former explained by Li as Sanskrit for “coming of the heavenly god”!  (Note that it is actually a transcription of the Arabic name.) Very wide range of uses, but most cluster around respiratory and digestive. Myrobalans, from India, have a long history in China.

 

 

Teucrium chamaedrys L. Lamiaceae. Kamāduriyūs /Kemadiyusi可馬的雨思/Kemadieryusi可馬的兒雨思; Kamādariyūs /Kemadaeryuxi可馬達而玉西/Kemafeixixi可馬肥徙西 (Gr).

 

Kamal: Kamadrios, ballat al-ard. Used for tuberculosis; antipyretic, anti-gout. T. maritimum, kamadrios al-bihhar; tonic, astringent, dissolvient. For nasal polypi.

 

Nadkarni: Tonic, diuretic, sudorific.

 

 

Teucrium leucocladum Boiss. and Teucrium polium L., Lamiaceae. Ju’dah /Zhuwuda主兀荅/Shuwuda述兀荅; Sādhaj/Sada撒荅.

 

The former is a local Middle Eastern plant. All sources probably trace back to Dioscorides’ comments on T. polium, possibly including T. chamaedrys, a European plant still widely used medicinally including in the HHYF. See above.

 

Dioscorides: III-124, polion, T. polium; Goodyer Englishes it as hulwort. Bites, dropsy, jaundice, spleen. Purgative, emmenagogue. Bad for stomach.

 

Avicenna: A range of germander species are treated. All are hot and dry. Most are opening and diluting. They have the usual range of uses for hot and dry herbs.

 

Lev and Amar: T. capitatum, ja‘da, kamādriyūs. Wounds abscesses, spleen swellings, fevers, stings, diuretic, purgative, emmenagogue. Hot and dry. Dropsy, jaundice, spleen, etc.

 

Bellakhdar et alj’idiya. Against chill, oedema, liver pain [a folk category]. Blood-cleansing.

 

Ghazanfar: Ja’ada and other names. Leaves boiled and drunk for pain, jaundice, fever; topically on bites and abscesses; for childbirth. T. mascatense for colic, diabetes, stomach pain, fever.

 

Lebling and Pepperdine: Diabetes, rheumatism, swellings, purgation, stomach. Leaf influsion used. Effective, but toxic, so inadvisable.

 

Mandaville: Mention (ja’dah) but no medicinal use reported.

 

Nadkarni: Arab knowledge noted. No Indian use.

 

 

  1. scordium L., Lamiaceae. Asqūdūriyūn /Sugudierrong速古的兒榮; Suqurdiyun; Saqūrdiyūn/Suguerdiyun速古兒的云

 

Dioscorides: III-125, skordion, T. scordioides [or possibly scordium?], water germander. Herb warming. Diuretic. Snakebites, poisons, dystentery, old coughs, convulsions. Applied in vinegar or water to gout. Aplied for emmenagogue and for wounds. Various external uses.

 

Al-Bīrūnī: Shaqardiyūn. Astringent, bitter, sharp. Purifies organs. Diuretic and emmenagogue.  For pains from obstruction and coldness. Granulates gaping wounds. Antitoxin. With wine for stomach, intestines, strangury. Cleansing. Dry for coughs and cramps. With medicine with oil and wax, reduces iflammation and pain. Pessary, emmenagogue. Detergent for wounds; generates new skin, removes hard dried flesh. Extract for pains. Most of this from Galen.

 

Kamal: T. scordioides, water chamaedrys; al-thom al-barri, magl al-safsaf. For preservative.

 

Nadkarni: Antiputrefactive. Antiseptic, diaphoretic, stimulant.

 

 

Thapsia sp. (e.g. T. garganica L.), Apiaceae. Not. Thāfsiyā/Tafuxiya他福西牙 (Persian).

 

Dioscorides: IV-157, thapsia, T. garganica. Root or sap for purging. This helps not only with stomach pains but for asthma, etc. Applied to sunburns, eruptions, etc. Noted that “it behoves him that takes ye liquor not to stand against ye wind, but rather to doe it in still weather. For it puffs up ye face mightily, & ye naked parts are blistered by the sharpness…”[120]  In other words, it, like some relatives, contains furanocoumarins that sensitize the skin to ultraviolet radiation, causing massive sunburn.

 

Al-Bīrūnī: Tāfsiyā. Vesicant, very heating.

 

Bellakhdar et al: Analeptic, antirheumatic, revulsive

 

 

Thuja orientalis L. and other Cupressaceae. Some native. Unclear what species is or are mentioned in the HHYF. Bozi柏子

 

Al-Bīrūnī: Juniperus, one name being ‘ar‘ar (see below), cited to Rāzī as emenagogue and treatment of “foetal disorders.”

 

Avicenna: rīs for tree; abhal for the berry; ‘ar‘ar for the tree and berry; sandrūs for gum.  Hot and dry. Fruit roasted in sesame oil for ear drops. Fumes help respiratory ailments. Fruits for chest pain and cough. Gum—sandarac—for palpitations, asthma, etc. Berry cleansing, laxative; sandarac taken for inflamed spleen. Berry diuretic. Berry and oil a famous abortifacient. Gum used for diarrhea; fumes of it on piles.

 

Nasrallah: hot, dry, purging, diuretic. Antihelminthic. Emmenagogue, abortifacient.

 

Lev and Amar: ‘ar‘ar.  Hot and dry. “Regulates” menstruation, treats fractures, skin, heart, eyes.

 

Kamal: T. articulata, leaves diuretic and anticatarrhal, sedative for reumatic pains. Wood sudorific; for syphilis.

 

Bellakhdar et al: Juniperus phoenicia for urinary antiseptic, emmenagogue, stomach pains; Tetraclinis articulata, ‘ar‘ar, a native Moroccan juniper-like plant similar to Thuja, as antidiarrheal, antipyretic, antivertigo, anti-headache, astringent.

(The fame of juniper oil as abortifacient is widespread; it is dangerous, not infrequently fatal, but very effective.)

 

 

  1. vulgarus. (generic thyme) Òāshā’/Hasha哈沙; ©a’tar/Sadala撒荅剌/Satela撒忒剌; Dijiao地椒

 

Dioscorides III-44, thymos, Cretan thyme. Loosens and drives out phlegm, helps with asthma, expels worms. Not surprisingly by now, it is diuretic, emmenagogue, abortifacient, clears out afterbirths. The usual variety of minor external uses. Eaten with food, helps the sight.

 

Graziani: “Wild thyme,” nammām, used by Ibn Jazlah, unspecified use. Ordinary thyme and marjoram, sa’tār, use (unspecified) by Ibn Jazlah who gives other names. Note that the general term sa’tar or za’tar covers both thyme and marjoram, and sometimes other wild herbs too.

 

 

Thymus serpyllum L.  Lamiaceae. Native?  Dijiao地椒 [Thymus serpyllum and T. mongolicus]

 

Levey: Ḥāshā’, T. vulgaris (which is almost the same as T. serpyllum). Liver, stomach, spleen.  ṣa’tar, various thymes and thyme relatives; erysipelas, stomach, neck pustules. Notes the asses’ thyme, ṣa’tar al-ḥamīr, possibly T. capitatus. See below.

 

Avicenna: T. praecox, nammām, thūmūn (evidently from Greek). Hot and dry. Kills lice and dissolves warts. Externally on cold swellings, hard inflammations, etc. “Boiled down in vinegar and used with rose oil on the head, it is useful in treating amnesia, mental confusionk, sluggishness, irritation and swelling…of the brain and headache”[121] (a very useful plant, if it worked). Internally for weakness of nerves, eyesight, chest, digestion, worms. Expels dead foetus, menstrual discharge, etc.  Diuretic and emmenagogue.

 

Levey and Al-Khaledy: hashā (totally different transcription from that in Levey 1966!). T. vulgaris. Al-Samarqandī uses this and zatar (wild thyme) for, presumably, the usual purposes.

 

Nasrallah: Thyme in general, hot, stomachic, good for liver, relieves nausea and toothache, cures gum diseases, etc.

 

Kamal: T. vulgaris, hashā, za’tar al-hamir, i.e. asses’ thyme. Stimulant, diuretic, emmenagogue. Cooked in honey to ease breathing and asthma. Anihelminthic.

 

Bellakhdar et al.: Thymus spp. z’itra, za’ter, tazukenni. For all diseases. Gastro-intestinal antiseptic.

 

Ghazanfar: T. vulgaris, za’ater. Taken for colic, kidneys, bronchitis, cough.  Leaves boiled and tea massaged on breasts to bring down milk. Mixed with salt and water to wash vaginal area after childbirth.

 

Lebling and Pepperdine: T. vulgaris, za’tar etc., for colds, coughs, diarrhea, fatigue, stomach, liver, memory.

 

Nadkarni: Antiseptic. Very minor in India.

 

Eisenman: T. marschallianus, tea for stomatitis and toothaches, also fevers, headaches.   Decoction in milk for acute respiratory infections, amenorrhea. Biomedically, expectorant and antibiotic.

 

Li:  Dijiao. Includes also T. mongolicus. Relieves pain and swelling. Insecticide.

(Thyme is a well-recognized stimulant and antiseptic. Thyme oil is still the antiseptic of choice when all else fails, used e.g. for sterilizing areas contaminated by multiple-drug-resistant staphylococcus and streptococcus.)

 

 

Tragopogon pratensis L., Asteraceae. Badi (Yemenite).

Probable misidentification. Liyatu [al-] Taysi/Lihayitutaisi里哈亦土台思

 

Nadkarni:  bare mention.

 

 

Tribulus terrestris L. Zygophyllaceae. Native. Òasak/Hasaqi哈撒其Ḥasak (Arabic); Jili蒺藜.

 

Dioscorides: IV-15, tribolos. Binding, cooling. Various external applications, including mouth sores, mouth ulcers, gums, tonsillitis. Applied to eyes. Seed brewed for stone. Made into tea for snakebite.

 

Avicenna: Hot and dry, but only slightly. Swellings, ulcers, etc.

 

Ghazanfar: Diuretic and for kidney stones. T. longipetalus diuretic, aphrodisiac.

 

Madanapala: Gokshura. Urinary diseases, asthma, cough, blood, heart.

 

Nadkarni: Plant and fruit cooling, demulcent, diuretic, tonic, aphrodisiac; powdered.

 

Dash: As in Madanapala, also arthritis, kidneys.

 

Eisenman: Many uses including malaria and energizing. Biomedically, used for scerotic conditions, worms, fungus and yeast infections; possible anti-cancer activity.

 

Li: Jili. Bitter, warm, nontoxic. Disperses Cold and Heat, etc.

(An infamous worldwide pest, widely used but apparently ineffective as medicine.)

 

 

Trigonella foenum-graecum L., Fabaceae. Huluba葫蘆芭/Huluba葫蘆巴 (Òulba);

 

Manniche: Helps in childbirth. Ointment (oil cooked out of ground seeds) to make the old look and feel younger [the description of the process makes one think the old would have had to work so hard they would have gotten healthful exercise, at least]. “It is a million times efficientk”[122] (translating from Edwin Smith papyrus of ca. 1500 BC; the hypertrophe is typical—no false modesty in the Smith papyrus).

 

Dioscorides: II-124, telis, fenugreek. Seed meals applied for inflammations. Sitz bath for women’s conditions (vulvar inflammations, etc.), and applied with goose-grease to soften and dilate the womb. Grens in vinegar for ulcers, etc. Tea for dysentery. In oil with myrtle for cleansing genitalia and treating scarring there.

I-57, telinon, seed oil. For all external conditions.

 

Galen: Warming. With fish sauce for laxative, cleaning out intestines.

 

Levey: Ḥulba. Swellings, phlegm, kidneys, ulcers.

 

Al-Bīrūnī: Hulbah. Bran with natron for spleen. Sitz bath for women prepared from the plant. Used on wounds. With duck fat to cure scirrhus of the uterus. Note this is straight out of Dioscorides.

 

Avicenna: Ḥulbah. Hot, dry, but only to first degree. Discharges pus; laxative. Cleansing and drying. Used externally (oil) for hair, scars, skin disease, eye conditions, ruptures, freckles, ulcers, etc. Poultice on swellings. With rose oil on burns. Internally for voice, lungs, chest, throat, cough and asthma. Especially good for these when boiled down with honey, dates, figs.  (This would indeed work well.) Mix with dates and honey, heated over coals, taken before meals, is particularly good. Used with sodium nitrate for spleen; with vinegar for stomach, gastric ulcers, etc. and to make one vomit. For uterus, taken or as hip bath, boiled down.  Vaerious uses for diarrhea, anal swellings, intestines, many other related conditions.

 

Graziani: Hubbah; food.

 

Lev and Amar: ḥulba. Heats, cures cough and ailments of lung and womb. For bites and stings.  Swellings, headaches, stomach ulcers, and kidneys. Infections, intestinal problems skin, hair, women’s diseases, etc.

 

Kamal: hulbah, fariqah. Hot fomentations, sedative. Seeds stomachic, antihelminthic, sedative for cough and asthma, used for emphysema, and said to be aphrodisiac. (Because of the stomachic qualities, which are very real in biomedical terms, it is added in large quantities to many Arabic dishes, especially in Yemen where it is a major food ingredient.)

 

Bellakhdar et al: l-helba, reconstituant, hair-care, hypoglycemiant, blood-cleansing, and for aortic palpitations.

 

Ghazanfar: ḥelba, ḥilba. Powdered for colic, fruits for bronchitis, cough. Topically (seeds ground) on sprains. Seeds boiled, mixed with egg, given to new mother for 7 days after birth.  Enema for new mother to strengthen her back. (The cultural importance of fenugreek in Ghazanfar’s native south Arabia is enormous; it is used in vast quantities in Yemeni cooking as well as medicine.)

 

Lebling and Pepperdine: Externally for bleeding, headache, breast abscesses and mastitis; liver, eaten for diabetes, bones, menstrual cramps, stomachaches. Very many uses in childbirth; eaten during and after delivery, especially as one of the spice foods used for recovery from childbirth.  Also used for babies—presumably in tea, but also put on fontanel (presumably to prevent it falling).

 

Nadkarni: Seeds mucilagionous, demulcent, diuretic, tonic, carminative, emmenagogue, astringent, emollient, aphrodisiac.

 

Li:  Huluba (from the Arabic—one of very few common Chinese words that is a straight Arabic transliteration). Bitter, very warm, nontoxic.  Important heating drug, against various results of Cold.

 

 

Triticum spp.  “T. spelta” L., Poaceae. Maizi麥子; Xiaomai 小麥. Khandarūs /Handaluxi罕荅魯西 (Greek orig).  There is no such sp. as “T. romanum,” and T. spelta is not a valid species either, being merely a variety of T. x aestivum, itself a complex hybrid of T. dicoccoides and Aegilops squarrosa.)

 

Manniche:  T. dicoccum water (grains boiled in water, which is then strained and drunk) for “heart,” i.e. internal complaints, and constipation. Also eaten in cake for cough, etc.

 

Dioscorides: II-107, pyroi, T. vulgare [of which spelta is actually just a variety]. Wheat. Eaten raw (soft new kernel, evidently), causes roundworms. Chewed, applied to mad dog bites. Bread from it is nourishing. Meal with Hyoscyamus juice applied to fluxes of the nerves, puffing of bowels, etc. Bran also used as carrier in cataplasms. Made up with rue for breasts, bites, gripes, etc.  In general the meal is obviously just a carrier vehicle for the medicinal herbs. Leaven warming and extracting; reduces calluses; ripens boils and the like. Taken for blood-spitting, and with mint and butter for coughs and blod. Various other external applications. Old dry bread constipating.

 

Galen: Under wheats, long discussions given of types of bread, the whiter being the more digestible and better for health. Only peasants can digest the very coarse (wholemeal) breads, and even they only because they sleep so well (digestion going on during rest). Better-baked breads are better for digestion. Notes gruel is good but simple boiled wheat almost indigestible.

 

Avicenna: ḥinṭah (bran), sawīq (roasted, or flour), harīsat (wheat preparation), etc. Hot and somewhat moist but slightly drying also. Mostly a food, but flour for face, bran for swellings, other minor mostly external uses.

 

Lev and Amar: Triticum sp. (probably mostly T. aestivum), ḥinṭa, burr, ḥabba, qamh. (flour). Skin, wounds, minor pains.

 

Kamal: T. vulgare, infused in vinegar for pains.

 

Nadkarni: various uses, mostly flour pastes for external conditions.

 

Sun: Wheat (T. vulgare, xiaomai小麥): sweet, mildly cold, nonpoisonous. It nourishes the qi of the liver. It rids fever caused by invading qi (kere客熱). It terminates anxiety and thirst. It treats dry throat. It helps discharge urine. It stops loss of blood (louxue漏血) or blood in slaver (tuoxue唾血). It helps women become pregnant. It can easily be made into leaven, which, if made in the sixth month, is warm and nonpoisonous. It treats especially children’s epilepsy (xiao’erxian小兒癇) and helps digest food. It rids the Five Hemorrhoids (wuzhichong五痔蟲).[123] It pacifies qi in the stomach. It helps digest grains and stops diarrhea. Its powder is warm and nonpoisonous. It cannot eliminate fever or anxiety. It cannot be frequently taken. Otherwise, it will aggravate chronic diseases, and enhance “stranger qi” (keqi客氣), which is difficult to cure.

 

Li: T. aestivum, mai 麥, grains, flour, bran, leaves, shoots, straw ash, ferments, and other preparations, for a vast range of ills; often for the nutrition value or value as carrier for other drugs, but often in its own right.

Leaven (from wheat among other things), qu, also important.

 

 

Urtica. There are several mentions of generalized Urtica spp. in the text under the generic Anjrah/ Anzhila安知剌/Anzhula安諸剌 (also specifically U. dioica).

 

Avicenna: U. dioica, qurayḍ; seed, falanjah. Hot and dry. Used inpoultices, for nerves, for nose when can’t smell, and usual minor uses. Seeds aphrodisiac.

 

Nadkarni: U. dioica L. Used for laxative and diuretic vegetable and as antiscorbutic (works for all these). Also for catarrh, leucorrhea, hemorrages, etc. Syrup used for these and said very successful against uterine hemorrhage. Tincture on burns. Dried leaves powdered and inhaled to relieve asthma and bronchial troubles.

 

Li:  U. cannabina L. and U. angustifolia Fisch. ex Hornem., xunma, pungent, bitter, cold, very toxic; causes vomiting and diarrhea. Pounded for snakebite; juice applied to rash in rubella.

(Nobody in our sources, or to my knowledge anyone else, uses the tiny seeds, making it almost certain that the HHYF reference is not to Urtica. Possibly the HHYF intends some sort of hemp plant—very likely marijuana.)

 

 

Valeriana dioscorides Sibth. (=V. officinalis L.), V. celtica, Caprifoliaceae (Valerianaceae).  Nārdīn/Naerding納尒丁/ Naerding納而丁 [Nard, Valeriana celtica]; Fū/ Fu福 [valerian, Valeriana phu or V. dioscoridis]

 

Dioscorides: I-7, nardos keltike, V. celtica, valerian. Little stalks and roots ground, made into balls. Diuretic. For stomach, inflammations, jaundice, bloating, spleen, bladder, kidneys.  For venomous bites. For ointments.

I-8, nardos oreine, Valeriana tuberosa, mountain nard. Same uses.

 

Levey: V. celtica, nārdīn. Bladder, kidneys.

 

Al-Bīrūnī: V. celtica, Celtic nard, nārdīn. Similar to spikenard. Roots used.

 

Avicenna: . Hot and dry. Warming, laxative, pain-relieving. Treats opaque cornea, inflamed chest, etc. Boiled for emmenagogue.

 

Kamal: Waleriana. Stem and root oil relaxing and antipyretic.

 

Nadkarni: V. officinalis antispasmodic, stimulant. V. wallichii, similar uses, nervine, calming, etc.

 

Eisenman: V. officinalis sedative, carminative, vermifuge, and for psychological conditions from hypochondria and hysteria to epilepsy and insomnia. Used for pains, heart, anxiety.  Biomedically, well-known sedative, calming to nervous system and heart; treats insomnia, overactive cardiovascular system, spasms.

(Strongly active on nervous system and thus not a safe remedy, but very widely used.)

 

 

Veratrum album L., Melanthiaceae (Liliaceae). Hellebore. Kharbaq/ Haliji哈里吉/ Haerbaji哈而八吉. See Helleborus niger for black hellebore. (Veratrum is often called “false hellebore,” but it is not “false”—it has always been called hellebore. Apparently the similar activity, including toxic effect, is what mattered to the ancients who named them.)

 

Dioscorides: IV-150, ‘elleboros, Veratrum album, white hellebore. Roots for purging by vomiting. In eyes with collyrium for sight. Emmenagogue and abortifacient, to the point where planting it near grapevines makes the wine abortifacient (V-77).[124] For choking. Poison; kills mice.

 

Levey: Purgative, vermifuge, etc. Toxic.

 

Avicenna: kharbaq abyaḍ. Hot and dry. Poisonous; used to kill rats, dogs, wild pigs; Avicenna even warns that chickens have died from pecking the excrement of humans who use it. Externally on wounds, joints, ears, etes; internally to produce vomiting, but this is very dangerous, and a range of antidotes and diluents must be kept on hand and instantly used if suffocation (i.e., breathing cessation or incipient heart stoppage) appears. Expels black and yellow bile and phlegm.

 

Lev and Amar: Possible confusion with Helleborus albus, q.v.

 

Eisenman: V. lobelianum, on eczema, rheumatism, neuralgia; internally for mental illness. Biomedically, an insecticide and miticide. Analgesic and hypotensive. Highly toxic.

(Powerful heart stimulant and dangerous drug. Native Americans of the west coast of North America use V. viride for heart conditions, notably dropsy, and for other conditions in which stimulation is appropriate; but with extreme caution. It is sometimes called “mountain onion” in Chinese, and some at least of the HHYF recipes call for “mountain onion” to treat what looks like stroke or heart attack; in these cases Veratrum might be appropriate as a substitute, or at least would be seen to have a strong effect.)

 

 

Vicia ervilia Willd., Fabaceae. Kasnā/ Kexini可西尼; Karsana / Kelaxina可剌西納/ kirsinnah/kelexina可剌西納 /Kexini可西尼 (Persian); bāqqilā/Baheili八黑黎  [Vicia faba].

 

Dioscorides: II-131, orobos, vetch. Meal used [presumably cooked] for belly. Diuretic. Causes pain and bleeding if overeaten. External for almost everything imaginable from dog and human bites to griping. Presumably the soothing quality is all that matters; there is no medicinal value.

II-127, kyamos hellenikos, Vicia faba, fava bean. Ground for a vast range of external uses, mostly the same as above; a unique one is to delay growth of pubic hair in children.

 

Galen: Cleans thick fluids from chest and lungs. Drying and laxative.

 

Avicenna: Broad bean cold, cleansing (weakly), produces gas, etc. Poultices for external conditions.  Poultice with honey for eyes. Good for chest, coughs, etc.; poultice on throat for laryngitis, tonsillitis. Treats diarrhea.

 

Levey: Karsanah. Salve for skin and cankers. Widely used for various minor functions; cleansing, etc.

 

Lev and Amar: V. ervilia for cough, heart, skin, leprosy, blood in urine, spitting blood; skin diseases, cancer. Seed flour hot and dry to Maimonides, who used it for burns distinfecting, cleansing. Diuretic (plant, not seeds), cleans urinary tract. Overeating causes headaches. Seed powder on wounds, bites, (including human), stings, etc. V. faba (Arabic fūl) for soothing inflammations and skin irritation, mixed with egg white, oil, etc. Purgative, digestive, anti-constipation, etc.; for ears, muscles, swellings, various external uses. (It provides bulk in the diet, and the powder mixed with other things would indeed be soothing, but otherwise this would be largely a “mother’s chicken soup” sort of remedy.) A version of the Egyptian national dish fūl medames (cooked broad beans, now eaten with garlic, olive oil and lemon juice) is noted in one Genizah fragment.

Lentil, ‘adas, for toothache, head, reducing urine, stanching blood.

 

Eisenman: V. cracca, demulcent, hemostatic, healing on wounds. Tincture to treat diarrhea, and as diuretic. Poultice for rectal prolapse and hemorrhoids. Used on abscesses. Antibacterial.

 

Li: V. hirsuta, qiaoyao翹搖; V. sativa, wei薇.  Minor uses.

 

 

Vigna spp. incl. V.  radiata (L.) and Vigna mungo, Fabaceae. Native. Lūbiyā/ Luobiya羅必牙 [?]. There is also a reference to a “small white eyebrow bean (Baixiaomeidou白小眉豆),” probably V. unguiculata.

 

Manniche: Vigna sinensis (which is now V. unguiculata): meal for constipation, in enema. Used in various unguents, etc.

 

Levey: V. sinensis, lūbiyāh, possibly the one used for freckles (cf. Dolichos lablab); “Phaseolus mungo” (=V. radiata), māsh, again for skin discolorations, also for lips, hemorrhoids, scrofula.  It would seem to be a soothing vehicle for medicines.

 

Avicenna: Lūbiya. Treats chest and lung, often in poiultice or paste with more obviously medicinal items. Produce thick humor (indigestion), remedied by mustard or wine.  Emmenagogue with nard oil.

 

Graziani: V. mungo, mash, maj; Ibn Jazlah used with sumac for cough, and with myrtle for pain.  Weakens teeth. Ibn Sīnā cosidered it aphrodisiac Rāzī gave it as a refresher.

 

Kamal: Lobia (lubiya), fasolia, dagar. Nutritious.

 

Bellakhdar et al: V. sinensis, hair-care, pulmonary infections.

 

Li: Lüdou綠豆 (V. mungo). Cold. Minor cooling and detoxifying uses. (Green bean soup is a standard modern cooling medication.) V. cylindrica, baidou白豆, minor uses.  V. sinensis, jiangdou豇豆, sweet, salty, balanced, nontoxic. General regulating and detoxifying value.

 

 

Viola sp., Violaceae. Violet. Two mentions as such as Banafshah/Bunafusha不納福沙 (V. odorata). The “purple flower” widely called for in the HHYF is probably V. yedoensis Makino, important in Chinese medicine as is V. odorata L. in the west.

 

Avicenna: Banafsaj, V. odorata. Hot and dry. Usual minor uses; also for kidney pain, and diuretic.

 

Lev and Amar: V. odorata, banafsaj. Like many other soothing and medicinally active flowers, it is recommended for essentially everything, from mumps and toothache to splitting hair and backache. Oil often used. (The plant does not produce significant quantities of oil, so one assumes the flowers were steeped, though possibly an incredible number was gathered and soaked in hot water which was then skimmed, as with roses.)

 

Nadkarni: “Flowers are astringent, demulcent, diaphroetic, diuretic and aperient.”[125] For “bilious affections” lungs, uterus, cough, liver, etc. Syrup usual. Mixed with almond oil (possibly a hint to how Lev and Amar’s oil was made). The Hindi name banafsha is an obvious borrowing from Arabic.

 

Eisenman: V. suavis. Syrup diuretic, anti-inflammatory, expectorant, diaphoretic, choleretic.  Decoction for coughs, colds, eyes, throat, stomach. Roots for emetic and laxative use. Decoction of flowers with sugar to treat heart illnessses.

 

Li: V. yedoensis (V. philippica) Makino, zihuadiding 紫花地丁. Bitter, pungent, cold and nontoxic.  Carbuncles, boils, scrofula, skin infections, sore gums, sores, etc., mostly as extermal application but sometimes internal. Plant with root usually used.

 

 

Vitex sp., possibly intended for Vitex agnus-castus L. or V. negundo L. Verbenaceae. Manjing蔓菁/蔓精, Seashore Vitex (Vitex trifolia or V. rotundifolia)

 

Avicenna: Dissolving, diluting, relieving. Hot and dry, somewhat. Relieves suffocation feelings, and melancholia. Increases bresatmilk but decreases semen. Opens obstructions to liver and spleen. For swellings, piles, etc.

 

Nadkarni: V. agnus-castus: Berries stimulant, diuretic, alterative. For liver, spleen, dropsy. Also hiccups. Several other spp. of Vitex widely used, esp. V. negundo, used for inflammations incluiding rheumatism and arthritis, sprains, bites, etc., often as poultice or pillow or smoke. Juice of leaves for external uses including sores, etc. Oil also.

 

Li: V. negundo, Mujing牡荊. As medicine, bitter, warm and nontoxic. Disperses cold and heat in joints (clearly derived from the Indian usage!), facilitates stomach qi flow, stops coughing, etc. Many prescriptions given. V. rotundifolia and V. trifolia, both manjing, similar uses; dispels heat and cold, helps teeth and orifices, kills tapeworm, makes happiness, treats eyes, etc.

(Used for female complaints throughout European history; Lewis and Elvin-Lewis 2003:523.  Legendary use as anti-aphrodisiac explains the names “chaste-tree” in English and agnus-castus, chaste lamb, in Latin.)

                                

Vitis vinifera L., Vitaceae. Grape; wine. Putao葡萄; Putaojiu葡萄酒/putaojiu葡萄酒.

 

Manniche: in laxatives and other remedies. Wine to stimulate appetite. Wine was used as a vehicle for various drugs, as it has been throughout time.

 

Dioscorides:  V-1, ampelos oinophoros, Vitis vinifera, grapevine.  Applied for headaches, inflammations, stomach, etc.  Juice for dysentery, blood-spotting, stomach, and “women that lust.”[126] Various other external applications.

V-2, ampelos agria, V. sylvestris, wild vine. Similar uses.

V-3, staphyle, grape. Green grapes disturb the stomach and bloat it. Ripe or dry they are good for the stomach, improve appetite, etc. Usual variety of external applications, especially for women, as clyster, sitzbath, fomentation. Seeds used for binding stomach, etc.

V-4, staphis, raisins. Various external applications [one of those external curealls].

V-5, oinanthe, fruit of wild vine. Dried. Binding. Tea for stomach; diuretic but stops diarrhea and blood-spoitting. Usual vast range of external applications.

V-6, omphacion, juice of unripe grapes. Tonsils, uvula, mouth sores, gums, ears, fistulas, ulcers, etc. Clyster for dysentery and women’s problems.

V-7-83, various kinds of wine, each with long list of virtues; irrelevant to the present work.  Most involve brewing grapes with herbs; rose wine (V-35), for instance, involves added rose petals to the fermenting grapes. There is even an abortion wine (V-77), but it is made by planting abortifacient plants by the grapevines; the vines supposedly [but not really] take up the chemicals.

IV-183, ampelos agria? wild Vitis vinifera, or possibly another Vitacea or even a Cucurbitacea.  Root for purging, dropsy. New shoots eaten.

Wine is used in a vast number of preparations with other herbs.

 

Galen: Acid or sour ones bad for health. Wine good for many conditions.

 

Levey: ‘inab, grapes, for jelly for stiff neck.

 

Avicenna: cold, dry peels, but flesh hot and moist. Unripe grapes sour, acrid. Help with gas, etc.  Pulp on wounds; juice for skin conditions. Ash for pinched nerves. Poultice for eye, with barley flour. Extract of leaves for coughing up blood; fruit can help with this. Leaves and tendrils in barley-flour poultice for abdominal pain. Fruit for nausea and stomach ache. Wine and water, boiled down, expectorant. Resin for internal pains and problems. Fruit slightly laxative. Leaves for dysentery, etc. Ash with vinegar for piles. Wine used for wounds, to clean them; white wine diuretic; Honey wine useful for birth pains. Old wine an antidote against insect bites. Many recommendations to drink sparingly.

 

Lev and Amar: The usual list of eyes, headaches, aphrodisiac (raisins), topical, muscle pains and swellings (vinegar), etc. Wine was used for sexual therapy and aphrodisiac function, as well as bites and stings, variouis diseases, etc. Vinegar was used for diarrhea, stomach in general, teeth, headache, head cold, fevers, and so on. The vinegar-and-honey mix so well known from ancient Greece up to today was used by Maimonides and others for many reasons. Grapes and raisins had further minor uses, including liver. Leaves for poultices, roots for swellings. Grape juice concentrate (dibs, also used for date and carob syrups; considered at the time a subtype of ‘asal, honeys and syrups; further concentrated, this became rubb, very thick syrup, English “rob”), hot and moist, for obesity, blood, jaundice, heart disease, depression, epilepsy. Grape juice for neck pains. Vine resin for skin diseases.

Wine was, of course, forbidden to Muslims, but—quite apart from the fact that this prohibition was often taken quite lightly in medieval Islam—health and survival made for exceptions.

 

Kamal:  karm, ‘enab (ripe grape), zabib (raisin), hosrom (unripe fruit), kashalmish, keshmesh.  Fruit laxative; for liver. Raisin for bronchitis. Naturally, the Arabs do not use wine medicinally, especially in modern times when Islamic rules have grown stricter.

 

Ghazanfar: ‘anab, ‘eneb.  Raisins boiled for drink for coughs. Grape juice with honey in ears for earache.

 

Madanapala: Drāksā. Cold. For thirst, fever, dyspnoea, vomiting, gout, jaundice, dysuria, bleeding, burning, consumption, etc. Fruit for alcoholism [hair of the dog?].

 

Nadkarni: Grapes demulcent, laxative, refrigerant, stomachic, diuretic, cooling. Raisins similar; attentuant, suppurative, blood-purifying. Juice astringent.

 

Dash: Cures fever and diseases of lungs. Other uses as above.

 

Sun: Grape (putao蒲桃): sweet, spicy, balanced (ping平), and nonpoisonous. Its major effects are to cure the illness caused by wetness (shibi濕痹) in tendons and bones. It is good for qi (yiqi益氣), enhances one’s strength as much as severalfold (beili倍力), and strengthens one’s memory (qiangzhi強志). It will make people strong and healthy, capable of enduring hunger, wind and cold. If one keeps taking it, his body will be lightened and he will not get old [presumably meaning something like “senile” here]. It elongates life. It also helps with the water in intestines (changjianshui腸間水), nourishes the Middle Jiao (tiaozhong調中).[127] It can be used to make wine, which is good for health if one keeps having it. It would drain water (zhushui逐水) and is diuretic (li xiaobian利小便). [The west Asian grape was still something of an exotic plant in China in Sun’s time, which may explain the preposterous claims made for it here.]

 

Li: V. vinifera, putao.  Sweet, balanced or warm, astringent, nontoxic. Many minor uses.

 

 

Vladimiria souliei. Muxiang 木香. Probably “muxiang” means Saussurea (q.v.) more often than not in the HHYF but both species share the name.

 

 

Zingiber officinale Rosc., Zingiberaceae. Native. Zanjabīl/Zanzhebili贊者必厘; Jiang薑.

 

Dioscorides: II-190, zingiberi, ginger. Warming, softening, good for stomach and eyes.

 

Levey: Zanjabīl ṣīnī. In collyrium for sight; in drugs for sore throat, earache, arthritis, stomachic.

 

Avicenna: Zanjabīl. Hot and dry. Warming. Laxative and digestive; relieves gas, and coldness of stomach and liver. Oil used on skin for mites, etc. Enriches memory.

 

Lev and Amar: zanjabīl. Extensively used for the usual range of things: stomach, aphrodisiac, kidneys, black bile, phlegm, eyes, etc. Stimulates sexual desire.

 

Graziani: Zanjabil. Ibn Jazlah used it for headache, sight, liver, stomach, and reducing swellings.  Antidote.

 

Kamal: Stimulant, cardiac tonic, aphrodisiac. Added to other medications to improve taste.

 

Bellakhdar et al: skenjbir, skenjabil. Calefacient, antirheumatismal, antitussive, stomachic.

 

Ghazanfar: zingībīl. Rhizome for bronchitis, carminative, for coughs, stomach. Juice in eyes for cataracts.

 

Lebling and Pepperdine: Rubbed on woman giving birth. Eaten after delivery. Used for colds, coughs, diarrhea, eyes, headaches, mentrual pain, sore throat, stomach. Effectiveness for stomach, vomiting, etc. noted.

 

Madanapala: Śunthī (dry ginger). Pungent, hot, sweet; treats rheumatism, constipation, vomiting, dyspnoea, cough, colic, heart, edema, piles, other abdominal conditions. Green ginger (ārdraka) is purgative, aphrodisiac, and cures most of the same conditions as dry.

 

Nadkarni: Aromatic, carminative, stimulant, stomachic. Externally, stimulant and rubefacient.  Unani uses as hot and dry drug for above plus aphrodisiac, sedative, memory-strengthening, and other uses.

 

Dash: Sweet, hot. Appetiser, digestive, tonic.

 

Sun: Dry ginger (ganjiang幹薑): spicy, hot, and nonpoisonous. It is especially valuable for treating fullness in the chest and vomiting caused by coughing, and rising qi. It also warms up the Middle Jiao and terminates continuous bleeding (louxue漏血). It heals sweating. It heals paralysis caused by the feng and wetness. It treats the liquid remaining in the intestines and diarrhea (changpi xiali腸澼下利). It cures coldness and stomachache. It treats the illness of being attacked by the noxious qi. It cures cholera. It treats fullness in the stomach (zhangman脹滿). It treats noxious winds and every kind of poison. It treats the blockage of the qi (jieqi結氣) in the skins. It treats the illness of spitting blood (tuoxue唾血). When it is raw, it is better.

 

Ginger (fresh; shengjiang生薑): spicy, mildly warm, nonpoisonous. The spiciness will go to the five internal organs. It mainly treats spells of cold (febrile conditions; shanghan傷寒) and headache. It also eliminates phlegm and helps the qi move downward. It helps sweat break out (tonghan通汗). It breaks through blockage in the nose. It treats vomiting caused by coughing, and rising qi. It stops vomiting. It dispels the bad qi above the midriff (xiongge胸膈). It lets the spirit free (tong shenming通神明). The Yellow Emperor said, “In the eighth and ninth month, do not eat ginger. It will hurt the spirit and shorten the lifespan.” Hermit Hu (hujushi胡居士) said, “Ginger kills the long worms in the abdomen. If one has taken it frequently, it will lessen his memory and wisdom and make his temper worse.”

 

Li: Jiang (fresh ginger, shengjiang). Pungent, warm, nontoxic. Noted as accompanying every meal. General dispersing function.

(In modern China, one of the commonest strongly heating drugs, used in large quantities for Cold conditions generally. It is well known in modern practice as a stimulant, rubefacient, digestive, and carminative. As a tonic, stimulant, stomachic, etc., it is used today throughout the world. The aphrodisiac reputation survives in colloquial English:  “gingery,” “the ginger man,” etc.)

 

 

Zingiber zerumbet (L.) Rosc., Zingiberaceae.

See Curcuma zerumbet.

 

 

Zizyphus spp., Rhamnaceae. Jujubes. Several mentions, but this word probably (and certainly in some cases) refers in many of them to dates (Phoenix dactylifera L, Arecaceae), which are routinely confused with jujubes in China (dates being called “foreign jujubes,” just as jujubes are called “Chinese dates” in colloquial English). However, nothing as important to Chinese medicine as jujubes can be completely ignored here. Zao 棗; Wannien zao 萬年棗, “Ten-thousand year jujubes” (Z. jujuba);

 

Avicenna: ‘unnāb, other names—“different people call it by different names depending on their language.”[128] Moist and cold but with dry propertiews also. Fruit used; sometimes its flour, or vapor from cooking it. For hot blood. Constricting. Avicenna does not think it is blood-purifying. Various minor uses, but Avicenna does not seem to think much of it.

 

Eisenman: Z. jujuba, fruit for catarrh, fever, intestinal infections. Root bark stimulant. Decoction of fruit for “anemia, chest pains, asthma, coughs, smallpox, diarrhea, and as an analgesic for diseases of the liver, kidneys, and intestines…hypotensive” (271). Biomedically, the fruit and leaf infusion seems to work as a huypotensive and diuretic tea.

 

Li: Z. jujubaZao. “It is sweet, pungent, hot and nontoxic. Overeating of it causes chills and fever. An emaciated and wek person should not have it.”[129] Usual wide mix of minor uses. (Used more recently to strengthen body and blood; black ones best for body, red for blood, sympathetic magic being obvious, but also the fruit contains some iron and vitamin C, enough to make a difference if nothing else is available. This has been, in modern times at least, one of the very favorite “nutraceuticals” in the Chinese repertoire, being used for weaning babies, restoring strength to new mothers after childbirth, treating invalids, etc. It is used in soup or congee, as opposed to the more ordinary method of simply eating the fresh or dried fruit, which is excellent.)

(The fruit has a high vitamin value, especially for vitamin C, and has some iron; it has probably saved many a Chinese child from malnutrition.)

 

Zollikofera angustifolia Coss. et Dur.,  Saliyy.

Obsolete name for Launaea angustifolia, q.v.

 

 

Animals

 

A few other animals are mentioned in the Table of Contents, but data on them is lost.

 

Accipiter sp.?, Accipitridae. Hawk mentioned in one recipe in the HHYF; too unspecific to identify. Ying鷹; Qa®āmī/Qiandamu箝達木 [sparrow hawk, etc.].

 

 

Anser spp. and probably other geese would be expected. Anatidae. There is one reference to Yan雁. “Wild goose,” to make a comparison, and once to Rakham/lahama剌哈麻, probably as a medicinal food.

 

Li: E 鵝 (tame goose Anser domestica and domesticated strains of A. cygnoides), yan (wild goose A. albifrons, A. fabalis, wild A. cygnoides; when birds are recognizable in classical Chinese paintings, tame geese are A. cygnoides, wild usually A. fabalis).

Sweet and plain, but arguments over toxin. He says: “I have witnessed cases of toxins being activated by the eating of goose meat.” (Recall that “toxic” said of animal meat means that it brings out toxins in the system, not that it is itself poisonous.) Some say white geese are safe but gray are toxic, others that young are toxic but old are not. Goose fat is soothing—a good skin tonic. Goose, and goose blood, can help with certain worms, according to at leas one tradition. Gall used medinally, also eggs, feathers, and even saliva. Wild geese: fat used; soothing on hair and skin, including for boils and sores; medicinal when eaten, for deafness among other things. Bones, feathers, and even dung used (the last on sores).

 

 

Apis cerana Fabricius, Apidae.  Native. Used in China in place of Apis mellifera, which is the species referred to in the western herbals. Feng 蜂, one direct reference but feng can also be wasp. There is also a reference to honey bees, Mifeng蜜蜂, more specific.

The products of bees are far more common. Honey (Mi 蜜), also ’Asali/Asali阿撒里/suali速阿里/Suwali速洼里/Suoali璅阿里/Asali阿撒力, and “yellow wax (Huangla 黃蠟),” obviously beeswax from the indications, is used very widely in the HHYF; honey is the universal vehicle for medicines and beeswax is used in many, if not most, poultices etc. Honey is in fact the second most often mentioned item in what we have of the HHYF.

 

Dioscorides: II-101, meli, honey. II-102, 103, different kinds. Various external applications, mostly as a soothing agent, often as a carrier for herbal medicines.

  1. mellifera important in medieval Near East, honey being used for skin, throat, eye and stomach conditions, and wax for hemorrhoids, burns and wounds, sore throat, etc.[130] A. cerana is the east Asian equivalent. Doubtless A. mellifera is actually meant in the recipes that served as originals for the HHYF.

 

Levey; Levey and Al-Khaledy: ‘asal. Honey. In many recipes as carrier and sweetener.

 

Avicenna: Hot and dry. Cleansing. Dissolvent. In addition to the universal carrier and demulcent values, it is used externally to prevent lice and kill their eggs; with ginger for freckles; with salt for bruises (odd but effective); for cleaning deep ulcers. Boiled down for wounds; fosters healing. With dill for ringworm. Beeswax used for softening scabs, but pollutes ulcers (it would be very difficult to maintain it sterile).  Relaxes nerves, cleansees ear, cures dim vision. Rubbed on palate for suffocation and pains. Ointment on chest. Cane sugar “honey” laxative (this would be the unrefined juice); refined sugar or boiled-down honey do not do this. Honey is taken with rose oil for insect bites; also for opium addiction. Various anti-toxic uses. Honey wine (ūnūmālī, from Greek oinomeli) hot and moist; used for ulcerative itches and rheumatism, and internally for purging bile, etc.

 

Lev and Amar: ‘asal, ‘asal nah.l. They note that ‘asal also covers fruit syrup concentrates. Bee honey used for eyes, headache, brain, diarrhea, wind, wars, urine, dysmenorrhea, hard sweelings, crying of infants, fever, black bile, phlegm, sciatica, varicose veins and venesection, paralysis, trembling, wind, facial lotion, and so on—any imaginable soothing purpose. Often the base or carrier of other medicines, but its sweetness and healthiness made it valued for itself too.  Oxymel—the classic vinegar-honey drink of folk medicine—used for stings, etc. Wax for ulcers with fever, and other skin applications. Also legs, nails, sciatica, varicose veins, convulsion, tetany, fever, colic. Oxymel (honey and vinegar mix) for colds, coughs, spleen, liver, bowels, malaria, black bile, hematuria, bites, cold sweat, baldness, etc.

 

Lebling and Pepperdine: Honey used on burns, cuts, wounds, etc.; taken for fatigue and general health, and more specifically for heart, indigestion, insomnia, sore throat, stomach; taken after childbirth, by itself or as vehicle for the spice foods used at that time.

 

Sun: Honey (shimi石蜜) is sweet, balanced, mildly cold, and nonpoisonous. It treats especially the evil qi in the heart and abdomen. It cures fits caused by fright and characterized by twitching (jingxianjing驚癇痙). It pacifies the five internal organs. It cures every kind of incompleteness (buzu不足). It enhances the qi and compensates the Middle Burner. It kills stomachache. It detoxicates every kind of toxin in medicines. It dispels various kinds of diseases. It can be used to make dozens of medicines. It nourishes spleen qi. It extinguishes the feeling of being vexed (xinfan心煩). It treats the problem of being unable to eat or drink (shiyin buxia食飲不下). It stops the illness characterized by the liquid remaining in the intestines (changpi腸澼). It expels the pain in muscles. It cures ulcers in the mouth (kouchuang口瘡). It enhances the hearing and eyesight. If one has taken it for a long time, it will solidify his memory, lessen his weight, help him resist hunger and aging, elongate his lifespan, and help him become an immortal. It is also referred to as shiyi石飴. [Honey] that is as white as fat is good, which is found in the mountain and cliff. Black-red honey (qingchimi青赤蜜) is sour. If one swallows it, it will make him feel vexed. The bee is black, like a horsefly (meng虻; this is probably one of the local Apis species of east Asia, different from the domestic A. mellifera). The Yellow Emperor said, “In the seventh month, do not eat raw honey. It will cause serous diarrhea (baoxia暴下). It will cause cholera.” Beeswax (mila蜜蠟) is sweet, mildly warm, and nonpoisonous. It mainly treats diarrhea and pyaemia (nongxue膿血). It compensates the middle burner. It heals wounds involving severed body parts, and cut-wounds (jinchuang金瘡). It enhances qi and strength. It helps resist hunger and aging. White wax (baila白蠟) mainly treats the patient that has long suffered diarrhea and just recovers from it, and then is found bleeding (jiu xiepi chaihou chongjian xue久泄澼瘥後重見血). It compensates [for damage done by] wounds involving severed body parts. It is beneficial to children. If one has taken it for a long time, it will lessen his weight and help him resist hunger. It grows in the honeycomb or on a rock or lumber. It [the bee, presumably] dislikes lilac daphne and lily (wuyuanhua baihe惡芫花百合). This is what we use nowadays.

 

Li: Mifeng (“honeysharp”). Minor uses, especially larvae. (Very widely used today in Chinese medicine for soothing, tonic, antiseptic, adjuvant, and other reasons.)

(Honey is mildly antiseptic, and certainly soothing, but does not have the many virtues given to it by folk medicine—in the United States as in the old Near East and China.)

 

 

Bat. One mention, in a magical-type recipe, of an unidentified bat. Bianfu蝙蝠.

 

Avicenna: Milk cleansing and used on benign growths in eye; oil has quasi-magical uses that Avicenna denies categorically; brain for cataract.

 

 

Bedbug. Fasāfis/Fasafeixi法撒肥西. Mentioned in contents as being in lost food section.

 

Avicenna: Expel leeches from pharynx. Vapor for hysteria. Treats painful urination (powder in appropriate openings). Swallowed for inset bites. “Swallowing seven bed bugs with broad beans” treats quartan fever.[131]

 

 

Bombyx mori. Bombycidae. Silkworm. Dūd-i qirmiz/ Dudiliheimiji都的里黑迷即. Mentioned in contents as being in a lost food section.

 

Avicenna: Chrysalis exhilarant. Some say silk clothing is less apt to carry lice.

 

Li: several recipes using its binding and blood-stopping/absorbing qualities, either really or by what appears to be sympathetic magic.

 

 

Bos taurus, Bovidae. Ox/cow. Niu 牛. Mentioned in HHYF Index in the section on food; presumably its value as a medicinal food was discussed. Specifically wild ox is also mentioned, and could be some other species. See also Butter (Suyou 酥油), Milk (Nai 妳; ruincluding human).

 

Li: many pages on medicinal values of all parts and products, from penis and marrow to urine and the material in the umbilicus of a newborn calf. Far too much to summarize. Meat warm, nontoxic, sweet.

 

Butter (butter oil, i.e. ghee, being usually called for): the Chinese aversion to dairy products seems to have influenced the HHYF. One would expect more butter; it abounded in Near Eastern and Indian medicine. It is barely mentioned in the HHYF.

 

Avicenna: Hot and moist. Discharges pus, dissolves, relaxes. Fumes drying and constricting. For swellings and wounds including in mouth. For cold dry coughs, “especially when given with almonds and sugar”[132] (I can second that recommendation). Treats yellow bile, etc.  Laxative, even purgative (evidently in huge amounts).

 

Lev and Amar: Soothing on skin etc.; strengthens penile erection (with milk).

 

Li: Niu you 牛油 (or you , oil, of other milk-giving animals). Several references from older literature, back to Tao Hongjing, summarized. Various soothing and moistening functions; detoxifying.

 

 

Callorhinus ursinus, Phocidae. Seal genitalia was extensively used in the Chinese medicine of the time but not apparently in the HHYF, at least not by name. There is only a single reference to what may be seal gall, Marāratu kalbi al-mā’i/ Malalatukelibilima馬剌剌土可里必里麻.

 

 

Camelus sp., Camelidae. Brain used in one magical recipe, the lung and the urine and even a camel tail. Milk also called for several times. Luotuo駱駝.

 

Madanapala: Ustra. Meat sweet and light; for eyes, dyspnoea, piles.

 

Dash: Similar.

 

The recipes presumably refer to dromedaries, but the Chinese would have known primarily Bactrian camels, which were then common in both wild and domestic forms. (A few dromedaries were used in the Silk Road trade from fairly early times, but did not thrive in the cold winters.  They later came to dominate, perhaps evolving to deal with local conditions; I have seen a camel caravan on a bitterly cold mountain pass well above timberline in the Hindu Kush).[133] Wild Bactrian camels survive in Northwest China and Mongolia, but fewer than 1000 are left. They are somewhat different genetically from domestic ones.[134]

 

Li: Tuo Sweet, warm, nontoxic. Various minor uses. Dromedary known but only by one report.  All medicinal references evidently to Bactrian camel.

 

 

Canis lupus, Canidae. Wolf. Lang 狼; Laolang 老狼. Wolf meat and fat and parts and even oil are used in HHYF recipes, some magical. Does not seem to be a traditional Near Eastern drug. “Old wolf” is mentioned along with just “wolf.”

 

 

Canis sp., jackal, zi’b/Zabuyi咱卜宜, mentioned in probably magical recipe context.

 

Li: Invigorates the Five Viscera and otherwise strengthens. Good-tasting; formerly much eaten.  Several magical uses, some of which are too much for the long-suffering Li, who doubts or frankly contradicts claims.

 

 

Canis lupus familiaris, dog. Gou狗. Probably a medicinal food in lost sections of the HHYF.

 

Except for numerous references to the bite of a “wind” or rabid dog, the dog is naturally absent from the Middle Eastern sources as meat, for example, the dog being unclean and avoided in the Near Eastern religions. Similarly, like most animal products other than dairy, it is absent from the Hindu and Buddhist sources.

 

Avicenna: Kalb. Rabid dog’s blood used for its own bite (compare the English “hair of the dog that bit you”).

 

Li: Many pages on various dog products. Every part has its own medical use. Dog meat is salty, sour, warm and nontoxic. Yellow dog meat usually preferred to black (the opposite of modern preference; Guinness named itself “black dog” in Chinese to sell its product).

 

 

Cantharides. Banmao 斑貓. Two references, one to Cantharides as being in the lost food section and another to a recipe.

 

Avicenna: usual uses.

 

 

Capra spp. Capridae. Goat. Shanyang山羊. Mention of tame and wild goats as food, probably with medicinal value. Horn and dung and blood also used.

 

Li: Does not diferentiate between domestic goat (C. hircus) and sheep. Meat is bitter, sweet, very hot and nontoxic. Countless medical uses and prescriptions. Blood detoxifies several chemical and heavy-metal poisons, with the interest side effect that it thus ruins attempts at manipulating one’s lifespan and health by Chinese “alchemy.” One should immediately drink about a pint. Milk is also ecommended for many purposes, from spider bite to aptha. Other body parts from horns to uvula all have their uses. The wool, for instance, treats twisted tendons: stew with vinegar, then wrap around the limb.

 

 

Castor fiber, beaver, Castoridae. Jandbādstar/Zhundibiedaxidaer肫的別荅西荅兒; Bidstar/ Biediasidaer別的阿思荅兒.

 

Avicenna: castoreum, “the testes of a water animal,”[135] diluting; “more potent than all substances that are hot and dry.”[136] Relieves gas. Absorbent.  Warming. Used on ulcers and swellings. Helps with headache. Vapor inhaled for inflammation of lung, etc. Several other minor uses.

 

Levey: Jundubādastur, castoreum. Nasal; head enlargement, swelling; clyster for urine; insantiy; electuary.

 

Levey and Al-Khaledy: Important remedy. Al-Samarqandī thinks it needs opium to balance it.  Today a resolvent, antispasmodic, stimulant, antihysteric.

 

Lev and Amar: castoreum, qast.ūriyūn, for eyes, brain, fever, palpitation, sexual weakness; aphrodisiac. For nose, head, insanity, bites and stings, etc.—the usuals.

 

 

Cervus nippon Temminck, Cervidae. Possibly other deer spp. implied. Lu鹿; She麝, “musk deer;”

 

Li: Lu. horns for a large range of conditions, including nutrient tonic and male sexual health.

(As with seals, the heroic abilities of the adult male Cervus are recognized here.)

 

 

Chamaeleon. Òirbā’ /黑而八; Badhūr irbā’/ Bazuliheierba白祖里黑而八. Two mentions in list of foods in lower table of contents. Identifications and species uncertain.

 

Avicenna: blood used to prevent hair in eye; eggs poisonous.

 

 

Columba spp. (focally C. livia, domestic pigeon, a descendent of the wild Rock Pigeon).  Columbidae. Pigeons. Mentioned in lower Table of Contents for the section on food; presumably its value as a medicinal food was discussed. Boge 鵓鴿; Huojiu火鳩, “fire pigeon” or “fire turtledove.”

 

Li: Ge 鴿. Salty, plain, nontoxic. Detoxifying. Blood, feces also used. Li transmits some fascinating folklore: “Zhang Jiuling thought the pigeon could carry letters, os it is called Feinu 飛奴(…flying servant)….  All birds mate in such a way that the male is on top of the female. But for pigeons, the female is on top of the male. This shows that the pigeon is a very risqué fowl.”[137]  Interesting to note that carrier pigeons were barely known and not normally used. The “risqué” (a delightful translation for yin 淫, “lewd, debauched,” behavior is pure travellers’ tale; pigeons mate normally, as anyone can observe in any park on any spring day. Obviously birdwatching was not a major pastime of doctors.

 

 

Coral (?Corallium japonicum Kish.) Shanhu珊瑚; bussad/ busadi卜撒的.

 

Dioscorides: Some kind of coral for diarrhea, spleen, coooling, cleansing, hemorrhage.

 

Avicenna: Bussad. Cold and dry. Constricts. Drying; stops profuse bleeding (presumably powdered and put on the wound) and otherwise externally used for purposes of this sort. Stops coughing up blood; expectorant (presumably taken, powdered). Black coral is tonic for heart, especially when burnt and washed.

 

Lev and Amar: Eyes, teeth, breath. For wounds, bleeding, spleen, urinary tract, deafness, etc.  Strengthens heart. Maimonides used it for this and considered it cooling and drying. Many modern uses, mostly related to the above.

 

Madanapala: Pravāla. For nourishment, complexion, strength, semen.

 

Dash: Cold, laxative, cures poison and eye disorders.

 

Li: Shanhu. Minor functions include eyesight improvement.

 

 

Crane. Gruidae (?). Mentioned as being in the lost food section and also among those things raised perversely by people. He鹤.

 

Li: a wide range of cranes, each with its name and uses.

 

 

Crocodile. Crocodylus spp. ñimsāḤ/Tansahei嗿薩黑 (Arabic). One mention in list of foods and a reference to bites.

 

Avicenna: Excrement for eyes and to strengthen sexual desire (!). Its fat is used to relieve its bite (presumably because when it bit a person and was then killed, its fat was there at hand). Avicenna has a very long, detailed, interesting discussion of fish in general, discussing several kinds including the crocodile.

 

 

Cuttlefish. Sepia spp. “Ocean” (Hai 海) piaoshao螵蛸 [cuttle fish bone]. Unidentified species in a recipe.

 

 

Cygnus spp., Anatidae. Swan. Hu (mute swan, Cygnus cygnus; wild swans are “golden-necked wildgeese” in Chinese). Unidentified species mentioned in the section on food; presumably its value as a medicinal food was discussed. May actually be the cormorant. The term hee is Cu… 鷀… [Second character illegible]. Cormorant is Cu鷀 + a second character, 老+鳥.

 

Li:  Sweet, plain, nontoxic.  Fat used on sores.

 

 

Cynips gallae-tinctoriae Oliv. (on Quercus infectoria Oliv.), Cynipidae. Mushizi木實子; generally Māzū/Mazu馬祖.

 

Li:  Wushizi無食子, galls. As noted above under Quercus, a number of uses of galls turn on their high gallotannic content.

 

 

Cypraea moneta? Cypraeidae. Wada’/Wada瓦荅.

 

A rather indeterminate reference to cowrie or perhaps simply snail shells. Probably the former.

 

Madanapala, Dash: A number of shell drugs for all manner of reasons.

 

 

Dragonfly larvae.  Called for in a few recipes.

 

 

Earthworm (Allobophora, Lumbricus or similar spp.). Dilong地龍; Qiuyin蚯蚓.

 

Avicenna: Lumbricus and/or relatives, dūd, kharāṭīn. Cooling but drying. Used for various magical and quasi-magical uses.

 

Li: various minor medical, magical and alchemical uses. Long section.

 

 

Elephas sp. Ivory. Xiang 象.

 

 

Equus asinus. Equidae. Donkey. Luu驢. Minor products mentioned but including milk.

 

Avicenna: ḥimār. Ashes of flesh and liver for ruptures caused by cold, also tuberculous lymph swellings. Tetany treated with broth (external).  Roasted liver for epilepsy. Burnt hoof similarly used. Urine for kindney pain. Wild ass (a different sp., E. hemionus) for bladder stones.

 

Lev and Amar: ḥimār. Milk meat etc. strengthening. Modern uses include dung and urine, as in China.

 

Li: . Mule is luo騾. Minor uses of minor products. Meat sweet, cool, nontoxic. Several medical uses for various parts, including penis (nourishes sexual energy, of course). Meat of mule pungent, bitter, warm, slightly toxic. Gives names of some hybrids, including hybrids of donkey or horse with cattle! Again, observation was not a strong suit of some writers

 

Equus caballus. Equidae. Horse. Ma馬. Mentioned in Index in the section on food; presumably its value as a medicinal food was discussed. Milk frequently called for once. Interestingly little in view of the values the Mongols assign to it.

 

Avicenna: Rennet from horse for treating chronic diarrhea, intestinal ulcers, intestines.

 

Li: Pungent, bitter, cool and toxic to very toxic, though some disagree with this. White stallion best. Many uses, and more uses for parts of horse. Mare’s milk wine (i.e. kumys) mentioned. The keratin spot on the “knee” (foot joint) of the horse was considered a “night eye” allowing the horse to see at night; it was used for hiccups and toothaches and other purposes. Teeth, skullbone, hide, tail hair, etc. all used. The soil from the hoofprints of an eastbound horse, which, according to the normally more reasonable Tao Hongjing, was used to detect whether a wife is having an affair, and, according to the Huainanzi淮南子, to prepare a method for keeping a person lying down and unable to get up.

The old belief that horse liver is deadly poisonous is mentioned, but a more recent prescription indicates this belief may have faded. (ENA believes that the old story was based on fact; liver accumulates toxins, and horses can eat some plants poisonous to humans. It is interesting, however, that even the skeptical and realistic Li relates such a bizarre farrago of absurd folklore. For no other entry in the entire Bencao Gangmu is the ratio of folklore to serious medicine so high. Clearly there is something special about the horse.)

 

 

Erinaceus sp.  Hedgehog.  Raz /Zhulaji諸剌即. Mentioned in Index in the section on food; presumably its value as a medicinal food was discussed.

 

 

Eriocheir sinensis.  Pangxie 螃蟹Chinese mitten crab. Mentioned in the Index.

 

Avicenna: minor uses for unidentified crabs.
 

Felis catus L., Felidae. Cat. Qi®®a /Keta可塔 (female).

One mention in lower table of contents probably as medicinal food.

 

Li: Mao. Many uses. Meat sweet, sour, warm and nontoxic. As with other domestic animals, a vast range of uses for each part of body, many magical.

 

 

Fly. Mentioned in contents as being in lost food section. 班貓 (=banmao 班蝥);

 

 

Francolinus sp. Phasianidae. Francolin. Durrāj/Duerlazhi都而剌只

One mention as a food, in the Index.

 

 

Frog. Ha蝦+ nonstandard character (insect plus hemp) = Ma蟆; ¾ifdi’un / Jifudaxi即福達奚; Zefde’i-ye zardee/Jifudaxizaerdi即福達奚咱而的. Unidentified; food but also in medical recipes.

 

Avicenna: Ash for bleeding organs; boiled down for leprosy, mothwash, etc. Oral intake of blood causes swellings. Very minor item.

 

Li: Hamo蛤蟆 (rice frog, Rana limnocharis), xigou (unidentified frog), some others. Meat of rice frog pungent, cold, toxic (some say nontoxic). Removes pathogenic factors. Magical uses.

 

 

Gallus gallus/domesticus Brisson, Phasianidae. Chicken. Yuan鶢 (may not be a chicken); ji雞.

 

The universal panacea, chicken soup, was not missed by the medieval Near East, and it was already “Jewish penicillin.” The Jewish doctor Ya’qūb ibn Ishāq wrote around 1202: “if the strength is weak…there is nothing more appropriate for that than the right amount of chicken broth.”[138] The Genizah physicians also knew and loved it. [139]

 

Dioscorides:  eggs (species uncertain) for soothing and various related reasons; wounds, sunburn swellings.  Obviously topical.

 

Avicenna:  Chicken is dajāj; Persian murgh wa khurūs. Inevitable uses of chicken soup, including meat of yong hen to strengthen intellect. Various eggs of various birds used, but Gallus best. Yolk hot, white cold. Both moist. Constipating, especially fried yolk. Adhesive. White of egg for sunburn, etc. Yolk, cooked, with honey, for spots on skin. Eggs in general for ulcers, swellings, inflammations, etc. Stop bleeding from membranes. Whites used in eye for inflammation; yolk with saffron and rose oil, or with barley flour, for throbbing eye. Large number of internal and external uses, largely of a soothing nature, e.g. for displaced uterus. “All eggs are highly aphrodisiac, particularly the eggs of sparrows”[140] (the extreme sexual energy of sparrows was a watchword in Europe too).

 

Lev and Amar: Topical uses continued from Dioscorides. Nutrition. Sexual strengthener (eggs).

 

Madanapala: Kukkuta. Nourishing. Hot. Good for eyesight and semen.

 

Dash: Wild, for general nutrition. Domestic heavier for digestion.

 

Sun: (Very extensive entries on different colors, sexes, and growth stages—too much to quote or even summarize. The nutritional and tonic value stands out.)

 

Li: Ji. Many pages cover all sorts, colors, conditions, and parts (even to the membrane of the gizzzrd), all with different medical indications. Black roosters are famous tonic foods, and especially the black-boned chickens so common in northern Southeast Asia and southwest China.

Some birds described as “chickens” are not that; “wild chicken” or “mountain chicken” can mean “pheasant.” A “black chicken” mentioned in Juan 12 is a small songbird, not a chicken; it is described as being smaller than the “painted eyebrow bird” (huamei 畫眉), a common thrush-sized songbird.

(The nutritious value of chickens, and especially their easy digestibility and high iron content in the dark meat, has made them perhaps the most important of Chinese medicinal foods over the millennia. They are usually warming, especially the dark meat. Roosters are now often held to be toxic—not poisonous of themselves, but bringing out poisons in the eater—and are thus avoided by cancer patients and others.

Chicken soup has survived biomedical tests; it really is the best medicinal food for clearing the nose, providing easily digestible protein, etc.)

 

 

Gecko. al-Wazaghat/Aliwaeratu阿里瓦兒阿禿; wazaghah/Yizaya亦咱牙; Wazhaa洼札阿; Hehu 蝎虎; Saqanqūr/Saganhuer撒干胡兒; Sōsmār/Susimaer速思麻而

Several recipes in HHYF use geckos or lizards.

 

Avicenna: lizards, including probably geckos, minor uses.

 

Li: several species of lizards, including some geckos, for all sorts of uses, often magical.

 

 

Homo sapiens. Human dung, etc., in the more magical recipes. Ren人; Furen婦人

 

Avicenna:  semen for skin conditions including skin fungus. Urine for fever including deep-red inflammation in skin or mucous membranes. Ashes of hair for pimples. Semen and human milk with opium, wax and olive oil for gout. Rumen with honey in a copper vessel for conreal opacity.  Hair with lead oxide for scabies. Human milk for tuberculosis and for the bite of a sea rabbit (what this meant to Avicenna, living hundreds of miles from the sea, can only be conjectured). Milk diuretic and may be good for stomach. Menstrual blood used for uterus and to prevent contraception, but Avicenna is very skeptical of this. Various other uses, including human excrement on human bites—a use found in the HHYF (juan 34). Avicenna is aware that human bites are notably prone to infection.

 

Li: Similar dreckmedezin is found abundantly in Li. Humans may be second only to horses in the ratio of folk magic to Chinese medical tradition in Li’s book.

 

 

Kerria lacca (Laccifer lacca). Purple keng. Imported. Zikeng紫梗.

 

Lev and Amar: Weight loss, liver, etc. Opens obstructions and fortifies organs. Cough, asthma, swellings, etc. Helps lose weight.

 

 

Leech. Mentioned in contents as being in lost food section. Mahuang螞蟥 (here second, non-standard characters is insect +皇); Shuizhi水 insect +至.

 

Avicenna: usual use for bleeding.

 

 

Leptoptila sp. Ciconiidae. Haiqing海青Adjutant stork rather improbably mentioned in the food section of the index. Possible magical use. Neither Middle Eastern, nor Indian, nor Chinese medicine normally use this huge uncommon bird.

 

 

Lepus sp. Leporidae. Hare. Tu兔; Arnab barī/ Aernabibahali阿而拿必八哈黎 (steppe hare).

Mentioned in Index in the section on food; presumably its value as a medicinal food was discussed. Also the meat is found in one set of instruction.

 

Avicenna: Lepus trerrisi, brain for nervous complaints (sympathetic magic) and other rather magical uses. Rabbit also used.

 

Li: Not distinguished from rabbit.

 

 

Lizard. See under Gecko. Several terms mentioned. Not really identifiable. Avicenna has notes on some lizards, including monitor, waral (Varanus sp.).  Some minor, slightly magical uses there.

 

 

Milk, yogurt, cheese: Extremely important in Near Eastern medicine, these are little mentioned in the HHYF—in fact yogurt is not certainly mentioned at all, and cheese barely. Milk including human and other milks do turn up. Greek, gala (milk). Ru 乳; Nai妳; Rubing乳餅;

 

Avicenna: Milk, shīr, consists of water, cheese (i.e. protein solids), and fat. Camel’s milk is thinner than cow’s (an interesting observation; not true today, but cows have been bred for more watery milk). Ass’ milk is dilute, goat’s milk moderate, sheep milk thick and rich, cow even better. Horse milk very dilute (not true). “Human milk is best, especially when it is fresh and sucked directly form the breast.”[141] Whey is hot but yogurt is cold and dry. Very long account of milk as food. Medically, it relaxes bowels but the protein fraction is constipating.  Colostrum is thick and requires honey to make it good for humans. External uses on swellings, boils, fever-caused inflammations, skin diseases, scabies, ulcers, etc. Many soothing uses of skin and head and in eyes, often combined with actually medicinal items. Soothing salve of ilk, egg white and rose oil for bruises and the like. Various species’ milk recommended for every imaginable internal use. Used to treat poisoning of all sorts. In general, the soothing and nourishing value of milk, and its oil content that makes it good for skin and membranes, made it useful for virtually every purpose in medieval Islamic medicine.

Cheese is moist, but the cured salty cheese is hot and dry. Cleansing. Fresh cheeses nutritious, fattening. Eaten with honey. Stle cheese causes yellow bile; hot, purifying. Buttermilk is dissolvent. Cheeses used in poultices for all sorts of external conditions. Cheese is poor for the stomach. The whey expels yellow bile, however. Alkalinity noted, interestingly. Enema for diarrhea.

 

Levey: Leprosy, spleen, etc. Ass milk for collyrium for ophthalmia, scury, fistulas, etc. Good for eyes and teeth (Ibn Sīnā—right again).

 

Lev and Amar: Food values recognized. Poultices and similar uses of dairy products.

 

Li: Several minor uses for cream (tihu 醍醐). Pain, apoplexy, fever, runny nose, etc. Yogurt (rufu 乳腐) moistening, lubricant, benefits channels and stirs up qi, etc. Making of congealed yogurt, yogurt cooked down into a solid, etc. mentioned; the solid is cut up and mixed with flour for dysentery.

(The Yinshan Zhengyao also fails to say much about dairy products. Evidently, in spite of the Mongol dependence on these foods, they were not salient enough in the Yuan Chinese world to rate much attention.)

 

 

Moschus moschiferus. Cervidae. Musk. native. She麝; Shexiang麝香; muski/Mushiqi木失其; miski/ Misiqi迷思乞/ Misiqi密思乞.

 

Avicenna: Hot and dry. Tenuous, tonic. Sniffed for headaches. Strengthens eye and heart.  Exhilarant. Used for palpitations and restlessness.

 

Lev: Medieval Near East: musk purgative, and for eyes, headaches, potency, cold ailments generally.[142]

 

Levey and Al-Khaledy: Widely used for many purposes in Al-Samarqandī and other texts of the age.

 

Lev and Amar: misk. Headaches, brain disease, paresis, weakness of sex, aphrodisiac. Against flatulence, warts, dysuria, dysmenorrhea, sweelings, etc. Aborts dead fetus. For aphasia, muscle spasms, tension, shaking, palsy. Headache, eyes, limbs, etc. Hot, dry, stimulant.

 

Li: She. Musk, shexiang, used. Pungent, warm and nontoxic. Bitter. Good for sores, bites, worms, etc., and various psychological diseases including fright and convulsions.

 

 

Oryctolagus cuniculus. Leporidae. Tuer 兔兒.  Rabbit brain is used in a couple of recipes also other products.

 

Li: Similar species, various, native to China. Applied to frostbite; for childbirth (magical uses; presumably because rabbits breed so successfully); applied on chapped skin and sores. Other parts of the rabbit are also used.

 

 

Ostrea incl. local O. rivularis, Ostraeidae. Oysters. Bangge蚌蛤; Muli 牡蠣.

 

Avicenna: uses for shells.

 

Li: This and other spp. muli. Shell powdered and used for a variety of conditions, including some psychological ones. (Did calcium deficiency cause nervous affections?)

 

 

Ovis aries, Capridae. Sheep. Mentioned in Index in the section on food; presumably its value as a medicinal food was discussed. In the recipes tail fat frequently called for, also furs, sheep parts and dung, etc. Yang 羊.

 

Avicenna: gall bladder used.

 

Li: See under Goat. The fat-tailed sheep was recognized by Li but had no special medical values.  Some mythical creatures, one deriving from the “vegetable lamb” myth of Europe (which in turn was a garbled and highly colored account of cotton), are noted. One evolves from a 1,000-year-old tree.

 

 

Pavo spp. Pavidae. Peacock. Mentioned in Index in the section on food; presumably its value as a medicinal food was discussed.

 

Li: Meat salty, cool, slightly toxic or perhaps nontoxic. Detoxifying agent.

 

 

Phalacrocorax carbo sinensis (Blumenbach) native. Cormorant whole and gall bladder. Cilao [?] 鶿鳥+老

 

Li:  Luci 鸕鶿Meat sour, salty, cool, slightly toxic. For distended abdomen and similar conditions.  Quotes (with a straight face) a source that says one can dislodge a fishbone from the throat by repeating this bird’s name over and over. (Cormorants disgorge fish for their young, and in China for fishermen too.) Li has some other good stories about birds in this chapter.

 

 

Physeter catodon, Physeteridae. Ambergris. Longyan 龍涎; “black” ‘Anbar/ Anbaer安伯兒aromatic. Morocco, Anbarhorr. Hu 1228.

 

Avicenna: Hot and dry. Useful for elderly for mild warming. Scent cheeering. Musk used in womb for displaced uterus, swelling, menstruation, and general health.

Medieval Near East: Sore throat, heart diseases, paralysis.[143] Heating.[144]

 

Lev and Amar: ‘anbar. Aphasia, muscle spasms, tension, trembling, paralysis, brain, obstruction, wind, dirrhea, pleurisy, etc. Heart, joints, etc. Significantly, noted for hemi-paralysis of face, that condition so amply treated in what is left of the HHYF.

(Ambergris is a product of the intestines of the sperm whale.  It is found washed up on beaches.)

 

 

Pteria margaritifera and pearls in general. Zhenzhu 珍珠/ Zhenzhu 真珠.

 

Lev and Amar: lu’lu’. Treat gums, tonsils, teeth, uvula, throat, eyes, liver, depression. Presumably powdered. Powder specifically for depression, palpitations, hot temperament, stomach, liver.

 

Li:  Pearls, zhenzhu, from this and other bivalves. Salty, sweet, cold, nontoxic. In eye for cloudiness; on face to moisten and brighten the skin; helps with skin in general; etc. Pacifies mind and soul. Some other minor uses.

 

 

Quail. Sumānā /Sumana速馬納, focally Coturnix coturnix. Unidentified species mentioned in Index in the section on food; presumably its value as a medicinal food was discussed.

 

Li:  several species.

 

 

Rattus spp., Muridae. Rat. Shu鼠.

Meat and excrement used.

 

Li: Mouse and rat not distinguished. Many varieties described, most of them mythical; one has asbestos fur. Meat of real mice/rats is sweet, slightly warm, nontoxic. Only males used medicinally. Various poultice uses, also for convulsions, epilepsy, etc. Sympathetic magic in an ascription that since it is good at digging holes its meat is good for sores and fistulas. “This is based on the understanding that something having a certain function will work in the same way when it is used as medicine” (citing Liu Wansu劉完素; as neat a definition of sympathetic magic as exists in the literature).[145] Many other uses.

 

 

Scorpion. Mentioned in contents as being in lost food section. Jiehe解蝎; Hezi蝎子;

 

Avicenna: Burnt for dissolving hard masses in urinary tract, also kidney stones.

 

 

 

Shellfish. Unidentified “shellfish,” as well as oyster (species uncertain), mentioned. Shanj/ Shanji善吉.

 

Avicenna: shells for various reasons.

 

 

 

Snake. Unidentified snakes mentioned for medicinal or magical uses, also in terms of responding to specific snake bites. She蛇; Af’āyi/Afuaye 阿福阿耶; Af’āyi/Afuaye 阿福阿耶snake (She蛇); Habb al-āfā’ya/ Habuliafayu哈不里阿法與; Afuyuya阿夫雨牙; Wushao 烏稍Snake (She蛇); Kha®®āf /Hutafu忽他福Snake (She蛇); Bazzāqah/Buzaha卜咱哈Snake (She蛇); Muqrinah/ Muhulina木忽里納 Snake (She蛇); Adhariyus/Adaeryuxi阿荅而玉西Snake (She蛇); Mu’a®ishah/Muatisha木阿體沙 Snake (She蛇); Ballū®iyyah/Baludiya八盧的牙Snake (She蛇); Jāwarsiyyāh/Gewaerxiya各洼而西牙Snake (She蛇); Òayyah/ Hayiye哈亦也Snake (She蛇); Af’āyi/Afuaye 阿福阿耶 Snake (She蛇).

 

Avicenna: Again, various spp. for various minor and mostly magical uses.

 

Li: many species. Of course snakes are common medicinally in China for warming, poisonous ones being most effective.

 

 

Sparrow. Jiaque家雀; Queer雀兒. Unidentified species mentioned in Index in the section on food; presumably its value as a medicinal food was discussed. Also occurs in a recipe as food.

 

Li: the common Asian sparrow Passer montanus, Que, has many uses. Meat sweet, hot, nontoxic. Warming; sexually stimulating. Various prescriptions, and many parts and products used.

 

 

Spider. Zhiju蜘蛛; Xizhu 喜蛛; Biaoshao 螵蛸 [?]; Mentioned in contents as being in lost food section also call for in recipes including references to spider webs.

 

 

Struthio camelus, Struthidae. Ostrich. ḥalīm/ Zhalimu扎里木. Mentioned in Index in the section on food; presumably its value as a medicinal food was discussed.

 

 

Swallow. Yan燕; Alkha®ā®īf /Lihatatifu里哈他提福. Unidentified species mentioned in Index in the section on food; presumably its value as a medicinal food was discussed. Also called for in recipes.

 

 

Syrrhaptes paradoxus, Pteroclidae. Pallas’ sandgrouse. Shajier沙雞兒Mentioned in one HHYF recipe.

 

Li: Tujueque突厥雀. Sweet, hot, nontoxic.  Invigorates and warms.

 

 

Trimeresurus sp., Crotalidae. Viper. Af’āyi /Afuaye阿福阿耶Snake (She 蛇). See above under snakes.

 

Not in our sources. (Common today at least as a warming food in winter.)

 

 

Turtle. Bie鱉. Unidentified species mentioned in Index in the section on food; presumably its value as a medicinal food was discussed. Also occurs in a recipe.

 

Avicenna: Testudo elegans, Arabic sulḥafāt, two or three uses reported with obvious skepticism; magical.

 

Li: Many medicinal uses of many species of turtles.

 

 

Vulpes spp., Canidae. Fox. Huli狐狸; tha’labi/Salabi撒剌必. Unidentified species mentioned in Index in the section on food; presumably its value as a medicinal food was discussed. Elsewhere meat and testicle and dung called for.

 

Li: Red fox, V. vulpes, Hu 狐. Sweet, warm, nontoxic. Many uses for various parts. The countless folkloric beliefs about foxes are summarized ably. Most of the recipes have a magical tinge, in line with the demonic and shapeshifting nature of foxes in East Asian lore.

 

 

Vulture. Karkas/Keergexi 可而各西. Unidentified species mentioned in Index in the section on food; presumably its value as a medicinal food was discussed.

 

Avicenna: Rakhmah, Pseudogyps spp. Gall in ear, collyrium, etc.; basically magical uses.

 

 

Weasel. Huangshu 黃鼠; Shulang鼠狼Unidentified species mentioned in Index in the section on food; presumably its value as a medicinal food was discussed. Also mentioned in connection with treatment or problems presented by.

 

Li:  Siberian weasel, Mustela sibirica, youshu 鼬鼠, sweet, warm, slightly toxic, a few trivial uses.

 

 

Note: Al-Bīrūnī covers many animals.

A 14th-century zoologist, al-Damiri, described hundreds of animals, many medicinal.[146]

 

 

Minerals

 

Agate ‘Aqīq/Ajiji 阿吉吉; huihuihungmanao/ 回回紅瑪瑙.

 

Lev and Amar: ‘aqīq. Dispels fear, stops bleeding—mainly of women. For teeth, gums.

 

 

 

 

Alum. Baifan白礬; kuhongfan枯紅礬 (red potash alum).

 

Dioscorides: V-123, stypteria. Warming, binding, purging. All the expected external uses as styptic (after all, it is the source of the English word). Among other things, strengthens “wagging teeth.”[147] Also kills nits and lice. Deodorant. Alum from Melos was used as a contraceptive or abortifacient; applied to uterus before intercourse.

 

Avicenna: Constricting. Hot and dry. External, for ulcers, lice, body odor. Rubbed on teeth, including toothache. Styptic.

 

Levey: shabb. Tooth care.

 

Al-Bīrūnī: astringent. Hot. Clears eye, cures pustules on breasts etc. With honey to strengthen loose teeth and cure pustules of mouth. Also for ears. With grape leaves or honey on mange, wounds, itch, whitlow, nails, chapping of skin. With oak galls and vinegar lees for corrosion of flesh. Granulates chronic wounds with salt and water. With asphalt water (liquid asphalt?) for pustules. With water to kill lice and ticks. Antiphlogistic if applied externally. Uterine pessary to stop menstruation etc. Can be abortifacient. Cures body odor, gum swelling, inflammation of throat, mouth, cheeks; helps with pain in ears, uterus, testicles. Note close similarity to Dioscorides. Galen also cited. Rāzī adds that it clarifies impure water etc.

 

Lev and Amar: Minor uses including teeth. Mimonides notes it for stimulating sexual desire in men. Modern uses for eyes, gums and teeth, wounds and bleeding, lice, etc. (as in many areas).

 

Lebling and Pepperdine: Stops bleeding. Shrinks tissues after childbirth.

 

Li: Fanshi 礬石. Sour and nontoxic; various forms have different values. Huge range of uses.

 

 

Amber. Hupo琥珀; kharabā/Kehalaba可哈剌拔.

 

Li:  Hupo. Sweet, plain and nontoxic. Correct origin known. Various uses.

 

 

Armenian bole (“Armenian [Ārmānī] mud”). Aermainini阿而麥你泥/ Yiermainini亦兒麥你泥/ Aermainini阿而麥你尼; gel-e Armanī [subtext].

 

Avicenna: “Armenian stone” (usually lapis) purgative of black bile, but unsuitable for stomach. Notable for melancholic diseases; replaced black hellebore in Avicenna’s medicine. Armenian bole, cold and dry, constricting; minor uses; “wonderful healing effects on wounds.”[148] Good for respiratory tract including coughing up blood. Internally for intestinal ulcers, diarrhea, uterine bleeding. Good for fevers; live-saving.

 

Lev and Amar: Many kinds of clay are mentioned in the Genizah documents. This one, identified as oxidized iron in lime chalk, was used externally for skin diseases, burns, and pain; also eyes, breast swellings. Chalk itself is useful as soothing agent for eyes and swellings, usually with more active items.

(It would have a soothing action and might clear up some minor skin diseases.)

 

Borax, bauraq/Bola博剌; Jian鹼; Na®rūn/Natilong納體籠; Būra/Bola博剌.

 

Avicenna: Hot and dry. Cleansing. Disintegrates thick humors. For hair, complexion, skin (itchy eruptions), dog bites, beetle bites, dandruff, ears. Expels worms but is bad for stomach.

 

Levey: Dental medicine, swellings, itch, baldness. Lev and Amar give many uses.

 

 

Coal. Shihui石灰; Hui

 

Li:  Shitan 石炭.  Fuel; few medical uses.

 

 

Copper & copper powder. Mes/Misi迷思; Tong銅; Tongyuan銅緣 (copper rust, copper green, copper chloride); rōsakhtaj/luoyisoheida羅亦鎖黑達  (copper oxidants);

 

Dioscorides: V-87, khalkos kekymenos, burnt copper. Brass (not copper) burnt till it can be powdered. Binding, drying, repressing, cleansing.  Antibiotic for sores, “proud flesh,” eye problems, etc. Causes vomiting.

V-88, khalkou anthos, flower of copper. Scum on molten brass being refined. Similar uses; “mightily biting.”[149]

V-89, lepis, scales of copper. Brass flakes. Corroded in water. Similar uses, especially for eyes.

V-90, lepis stomomatos, smithy scales. Similar.

V-91, ios xystos, verdigris. Preparation explained in detail, but little medical use indicated; evidently as the previous.

V-92, ios skolex, corroded brass. Again various preparations explained. Binding, warming, wearing off or removing; for eyes, inflammations, ulcers, etc. Purgative.

V-114, khalkanthon, copperas-water. Binds, warms, kills tapeworms, causes vomiting and thus good for mushroom poisoning, etc.

V-115, khalkitis, copper ore. Various external uses.

V-117, misy, copperas.  Minor external use.

 

Levey: Burnt copper in collyrium for eyes. Also for itch.

 

Avicenna: nuḥās. Hot and dry. Copper oxide is more diluting than the metal. Constricting. Used to blacken hair, for malignant and creeping ulcers, for wounds, eyes, etc. With honey to massage hard and burning ulcers. With honey wine, taken to purge. Avicenna warns that one should not keep meat, oil, or salty, bitter, sour, sweet, or fatty items in copper containers, no rhould one drink from copper utensils. Red copper oxide, zahrah al-nuḥās, constricting; dries up ulcers.  Evacuates thick humors, etc. Dries up piles. Verdigris, zanjār, copper acetate, hot and dry (very), cleansing, piungent, corrosive. External uses to clean out ulcers and skin disesaes, including ascabies. Cleanses eyes; in colliyrium. For piles. No internal uses. Vitriols: various uses for the several forms.

 

Lev and Amar: Copper: nukhās, etc. Eyes, skin. Tūbāl (they translate “scoria” but explain it is a copper product). Mouth and teeth, eyes. Cuprite, rāsakht, rāsukht, for unknown uses (only a few mentions in the Genizah documents).

 

Madanapala: Tāmra. Cold.  Laxative, for anemia, skin, piles, edema, dyspnoea, cough.

 

Dash: As above. Apparently a cureall in Tibet.

 

Li: Tongqing 銅青, verdigris. Minor, mostly topical uses.

(Most users recognize the danger of these highly toxic metallic chemicals.)

 

 

Dung Fen 糞.

 

Sheep, goat, fox, wild ox, horse, donkey, pigeon, and other dungs are mentioned. Magical uses for these exist in Chinese medicine but this sort of dreckmedezin is not common in the Near East.  However, burned dung of herbivores is suggested in one list of things that can go into a poultice, and this would be perfectly reasonable; the burning would sterilize them and the high-fibre ash would be a good absorbent.

 

Li mentions various dungs. Dungs of all common animals were used.

 

 

Ferric oxide Tiexiu鐵鏽

 

Dioscorides: V-93, ios siderou, iron rust. Binding. In water, contraceptive. In vinegar for many external uses. Hot iron, quenched in water or wine: liquid drunk for dysentery and other digestive problems.

V-94, skoria siderou, iron slag. Similar uses; less force.

 

Li: tie 鐵, iron; teixiu, tieyi 鐵衣, ferric oxide; many other iron preparations. Vast range of uses.

Ferric oxide mostly external use, on sores etc.

 

 

Gold. Jin金; Jinzi金子; Jinsha針砂  (gold dust)

 

Avicenna: For blood diseases, eyesight, heartburn, talking to oneself pathologically.

 

Lev and Amar: Dhahab. Treated with vinegar, produces a preparation used for bad breath. Gold in eyes for sight. Heart and other problems.

 

Madanapala: Suvarna. Astringent, bitter, sweet, cold. Aphrodisiac, for strength, rejuvenating, for dosas, posions, insanity, fever, phthisis.

 

Li: Jin. Pungent, balanced, toxic or nontoxic (one source says crude is toxic, refined nontoxic; in fact gold is as poisonous as any other heavy metal, but normally so chemically resistant to digestive fluids that eating it is perfectly safe, in spite of the frequent literary device of suicide by swallowing gold in Chinese fiction). Minor topical uses, including an unusual one of absorbing mercury spilled on a person, which would otherwise be deadly.

 

 

Iron. Tie鐵 (Iron), occurring in various shapes and forms in the recipes; khabthu l-adīdi/Habasulihadidi哈八速里哈的的 (iron or steel shavings); Qalqadīs/ Halihadixi哈里哈的西 (red oxide of iron, iron pill); qalqa®ār/ Halihadaer 哈里哈達而 (burnt vitriol, impure iron sulfate).

 

Dioscorides: V-144, aimatites lithos, hematite. Binding and warming. Takes off scars and problems of eyes. With woman’s milk, or as collyrium, for eye conditions.  Drunk with wine as diuretic and against women’s fluxes, and with pomegranate juice for spitting blood.

V-145, schistos lithos, hematite; Spanish, less effective than above.

 

Levey:  Hematite, shādhanah, in collyria, etc.

 

Lev and Amar: Eyes, preventing nosebleeds (doctrine of signatures—hematite being red).  Maimonides held it cold and dry, and used it for hemorrhages, diarrhea, skin disease, swelling, wounds, worms, fractures.

 

Li: See above.

 

 

Jade. Yu玉.

 

One astonishing HHYF recipe combines jade with gold, silver, mica, petroleum salt, aluminum oxide (?), lapis lazuli (two kinds?), ivory and a whole range of valuable herbal ingredients.  Clearly some sort of magical effect involving all these extremely expensive items is intended.

 

Li: Yu. Superior drug. Many recipes, most alchemical or magical, plus a great deal of lore.

 

 

Lapis lazuli. Lāzward/ Lazhuwaerdi剌諸洼兒的; Òajar Armanī/ Hazhaeraermani 哈札而阿而馬尼/ Hazheleaermani哈者里阿而馬尼; Jinjingshi金精石; Òajar l-yahūdī/ Hazheluliyehudi 哈者盧黎野乎的.

 

Lev and Amar: lāzward, Eliminates warts, shapes lips, etc. Diuretic, cleansing. For kidneys, black bile, menstruation (stops excess), curls hair, treats leprosy and skin conditions, eyes, etc.; helps the mad and depressed. (Much, if not all, of this is purely magical.)

(Not used in Chinese medicine and almost unknown in China except as an ornamental stone.)

 

 

Lead oxide, lead peroxide. Huangdan黃丹 (minium); Mituoseng蜜陀僧 (litharge); Dingfen定粉 (white lead); Heixi黑錫 (“black tin,” lead).

 

Dioscorides: V-95-98, molybdos (lead) in several preparations. Various mostly-external uses; cooling, binding.

V-103, psimythios, white lead, cerussite. Cooling, pore-closing, molifying, filling, lowers swellings, helps scars develop, etc.

 

Levey: Several modern uses, similar to above.

 

Avicenna: various names for various lead salts. In general, cold and moist. A “red lead oxide is cold and dry.”[150] Black lead cold and moist. Zinc oxide cold and dry. Most of these salts stop bleeding, treat wounds and swellings, treat ulcers and tubercular lymph glands, etc. Red lead oxide on burns in ointment. Used in eyes. Used on bites and stings. Avicenna is aware that lead salts are poisonous and dangerous to use.

 

Lev and Amar: White lead for kohl (eye treatment), aphrodisiac, itch, children with umbilical hernia and incessant crying; various skin conditions, etc. Dressings to prevent orgasm. Stings, fleas, removes dead skin, etc. Red oxide of lead—minium—for abscesses, boils, lacerations.

 

Li: Qiandan 鉛丹. Pungent, slightly cold and nontoxic (!). Range of internal uses.

(This and other lead salts were amazingly common drugs in both the western world and old China, leading to many deaths. Some remained in use in modern biomedicine, for external purposes, within living memory.)

 

 

Litharge (lead oxide). See under Lead oxide.

 

Dioscorides: V-102, lithargyros. Binding, mollifying, fills hollowness, lowers swellings, helps with wounds and the like. Long and complex details on preparation.

 

Levey: Murtak, martak. External applications for scrofula, vitiligo alba, boils, abscesses, hemorrhoids, dirty wounds, eyes.

 

Avicenna: Murdāsanj. Dryish but fairly neutral. Constrictive and drying; cleansing.  Diluting.  Many external uses, especially on ulcers, wounds. Deadly poison, so not much used internally, but given to children for diarrhea and intestinal ulcers (this horribly dangerous usage persists in Mexico to this day, and poisoning from it occur in California’s Mexican-American communities occasionally).  Avicenna notes similar preparations of silver and, improbably, gold.

 

Lev and Amar: martak. Sores and skin conditions including boils, abscesses, dirty wounds.  Hemorrhoids. Eye diseases.

 

Li:  Mituoseng. Like other lead salts, which it follows in the book, this was used for a range of purposes, including dysentery, hemorrhoids, other intestinal conditions.

 

 

Melanterite. See under iron. qalqa®ār/ Halihadaer 哈里哈達而.

 

Li: Lüfan綠礬. Sour, cool, nontoxic. For inflammations, stagnation, dispelling phlegm, etc. Several pages of preparations.

 

 

Mica.  Jinxingshi金星石; Jinjingshi金精石;

 

 

Naft (naphta or crude oil). Naft Nafute納福忒/ Nafuti納福提. Mentioned in Lev and Amar[151]  but not in their texts. Local use in Arabian medicine. No significant use in Chinese medicine.

 

 

Orpiment. Cihuang雌黃.

 

Dioscorides: V-121, arsenikon. Binding. Strongly biting. Makes hair fall out.

 

Levey: Realgar, zarnīkh aḥmar, for ulcers; al-Kindī seems to confuse it with red lead.

 

Lev and Amar: Ulcers, teeth, gums, soap (presumably disinfectant), hair removal, poisoning lice and other vermin. The Arabic word is arsin (from the same Greek source as the English word, now used for the metal rather than this salt thereof). Modern uses include small does for most of the above purposes. Of course the poisonous effects of strong doses are and were known.

 

Madanapala: Haritāla (yellow arsenic). Hot. For poisoning (!), itch, skin, mouth, blood, hair, affliction by evil planets (!).

 

Dash: Pungent, astringent. For skin, mouith, ulcers, hair removal. Realgar adds repulsion of evil spirits.

 

Li: Cihuang. Pungent, balanced, toxic. Li cautiously recommends it largely for topical use, but does mention the internal uses for digestive conditions etc. Realgar, xionghuang, gets more uses and attention. Sources differ on its qualities, but agree it is toxic.

(These deadly drugs were much used in early medieval Chinese medicine, including immortality medicine; they caused brain poisoning and thus hallucinations, and then preserved the corpse, so the dying man seemed to see visions and the dead seemed not to have truly died. By Li’s time, such medicine was known to be pernicious.)

 

 

Salt(s). Fan 礬; namāki/ Nanaqi拏馬其; Yan鹽;

 

Dioscorides: V-126, ‘ales. Notes various types of sea and lake salt. Binding, cleansing, dissolving, repressing, etc. An even longer list than usual of external applications. Used in preparations with soothing ingredients for bites (including crocodile bites!), stings, boils, sores, etc.

 

Avicenna: milḥ. Persian namak. Hot and dry. Cleansing, dissolvling, constricting, drying; relieves gas. Burnt salt is more drying and dissolving. Anti-putrefaction. Used as rub for teeth and gums, in poultices of all sourts for various reasons, as corrosive for excssive flesh on wounds, on skin diseases, etc. Rub with pulp of colocynth for head. Ingredient of various rubs for chest, etc. Helps elimination. Many other uses, usually with other items.

 

Lev and Amar: In medications for most purposes, from eyes to bile. Dissolves phlegm, reduces weight, relieves poisons, treats diarrhea and hemorrhoids; topical uses on teeh, skin, stings, bites, etc.

 

Madanapala, Dash: several kinds of salt with various uses.

 

Li: Yan; shiyan 石鹽 (rock salt). Used in many preparations for varied reasons. .

 

 

Silver and silver residue. Yin銀.

 

Avicenna: Silver, fiḍḍah. Cooling and drying. Minor external uses.

 

Lev and Amar: fiḍḍa. Skin, heart, hemorrhoids, breath; diuretic.

 

Madanapala: Rūpya. Cold, sweet, laxative, rejuvenating. For aging, etc.

 

Dash: Happiness, cures gray hair, complexion, etc. Cures poisoning and several ailments.

 

Li: Yin. Pungent, balanced, toxic. Flakes usually used. For psychological conditions (fright, convusions, willpower, depression, mania) as well as a range of physical ones.

 

 

Soil (including mud from an altar, soil from a crossroad, etc.). Tu土.

 

Dioscorides V-170, ge. Cooling, stops pores. Various kinds; descriptions of many follow (171-181).

 

Avicenna: various minor uses.

 

Arabic sources, Li:  Many kinds of dirt used in various, usually magical ways.

 

 

Sulphur. Liuhuang硫黃; l-kibrīti/Qibuliti其卜黎提/ Qibiliya乞必里牙.

 

Dioscorides: V-124, theion. For coughs, asthma, spitting. External uses for infections and other conditions. Abortifacient. External use for jaundice (clearly sympathetic magic).

 

Avicenna: Kibrīt; Persian, gugard. Hot and dry (very; fourth degree). Diluting, cosmetic, effective for skin including scabies. External uses except vapor for colds.

 

Lev and Amar: kibrīt. Skin conditions, including bites and stings; paralysis, inflammation, leprosy (presumably on skin), even mental illness. Kills lice.

 

Madanapala: Gandhaka. Laxative; for skin, consumptioni, spleen.

 

Dash: Pungent, bitter, hot. Cures poisoning, itch, skin.

 

Li:  Sour, warm/hot, toxic. Many uses, mostly in formulations.

(Well-known skin medicine.)

 

 

Zinc oxide. Tōtiyā/ Tuotiya脫體牙 (zinc sulfate); Qalīmiyā/halimiya哈里米牙 (scoria).

 

Avicenna: sifīd āb; external uses for wounds, swellings.

 

Lev and Amar: tūtiyā. Eyes.

 

 

Several recipes refer to a an apparent burnt vitriol, “red potash alum” (a mix powder?). See also under Iron, qalqa®ār/ Halihadaer 哈里哈達而 (burnt vitriol, impure iron sulfate). Totally mysterious are reference to an andarūn (possibly for andarini, a form of salt) among things to put on blood vessel wounds (juan 34).

 

Lev and Amar have many uses for vitriol and related compounds.

 

 

Obscure

 

See also the Index list.

 

 

Hongjiezi紅芥子 (red mustard); Hong 紅 (“red”) [Pr.] Sipandān/Xipandan西盤丹; Isfandān/ Xipandang西攀當 (white mustard seeds).

 

 

Baijiezi 白芥子 (white mustard); Sipandān/ Xipandan 西盤丹. Egyp. Xardal.

 

 

Qūqīyā/ Gujiya古吉牙. Three recipe mentions Qūqīyā Pills apparently containing ivory; the dictionary gives “narwhal” which is more than improbable although not entirely since Narwhal ivory was being imported to Europe at the time from Greenland.

 

 

圓芥子的根 Yuan jiezi di gen (“root of round mustard seeds”). Dārshīsha’ān/ Daershishian荅而失實安/Daershishian荅兒失失安/Daershihiang荅兒失失昂. Not mustard some other plant. Uncertain.

 

 

Zihua紫花, “purple flower.” Frequent mentions, but there is no plant by this name in Chinese medicine. Probably the violet Viola yedoensis, although apparently the clear violet of the text , which occurs under the general term Banafshah/Bunafusha不納福沙 is probably Viola odorata.

 

 

Some drugs strangely absent from what we have of the HHYF:

 

Camellia sinensis. Tea was a cureall for al-Bīrūnī (as for the good Dutch Doctor Bontekoe in the 17th century).  Al-Bīrūnī knew that in China it was used to counteract alohol, help the stomach, purify the blood [i.e., help qi], etc. He even knew some of the Chinese folklore about the plant.

 

Li:  Cha, ming. Bitter, sweet, cold, nontoxic. Cureall, but uses for diarrhea/dysentery, stimulant effect including clearing head, and hydration stand out.

 

 

Lawsonia inermis. Henna. This plant, so widely used in the Middle East especially for external uses of all kinds, is strangely absent from the HHYF.

 

 

Salvia spp. These plants, widespread as medicines in Europe and west Asia, never seem to have made it to East Asia as significant herbal remedies, though Li mentions S. miltiorrhiza, danshen丹參, as a disperser of Cold, Heat, pathogenic factors, etc., and for many minor uses, including fright and evil.  It tranquilizes the spirit, stabilizes the willpower, etc.

Sage spp. are used in the west for stomach, pain, throat, general nutrition and tonic. Antiseptic and antioxidant properties well documented and effective.

 

 

Operculum: Snail opercula were a major drug in the Near East and common in China too. They contain substances that are highly aromatic when used as incense.Various species were used. These may be hidden under some other name among shells mentioned in the text.

 

Lev and Amar: az.fār t.īb. Used for skin, wounds, purgative, emetic, menstrual regulation, uterus, epilepsy, paralysis, etc.

 

 

 

 

Appendices:  Tables and Comparisons (items marked with * are not in the main text)/

 

Foods in Table of Contents; starred ones not mentioned in the main text that survives.

 

Humans

Camel

Horse

Domestic Ox

Wild Ox

Domestic Donkey

*Wild Donkey

Sheep

Goat

Mountain Goat

Dog

Wolf

Old Wolf [Unidentified]

Fox

[Ar.] Zi’b [Jackal]

*[Pr.] Nakhjīr [? unidentified]

Rabbit

*[Ar.] Arnab ba [Steppe Hare]

Rat

Weasel

Hedgehog

Male Chicken and Female Chicken

Duck

Pigeon

*Swallow

*[Ar.] Durrāj [Francolin]

*[Ar.] Rakham [kind of goose]

*[Ar.] Sumānā [Quail]

Sparrow

Sand Grouse

*[Ar.] Qi®®a Cat [female]

*Butterfly

Bat

Snake

[Ar.] Af’āyi Snake [Viper ?]

*[Ar.] Timsā  [Crocodile]

[Ar.] Òirbā’ [Chameleon]

*[Ar.] Sāmm ābras [Gekko]

Fish

Turtle

*Eriocheir sinensis

[Pr.] Jandbādstar [beaver]

* [Ar.] Saqanqūr [scincus lizard]

*[Pr.] Sōsmār [lizard]

Frog

Oyster

Earthworm

*[Ar.] Òirdhawn [a lizard]

*Ma-tse [insect + hemp] 蚱 [Unidentified]

*Dung Beetle

*[Ar.] Dūd [Worm, maggot, etc]

*[Pr.] Dūd-e qirmiz [silk worm]

Cantharides

*House Fly

Scorpion

Spider

Leech

*[Ar.] Fasāfis [Bedbug]

Peacock

Crane

*Swan

*Adjutant Stork [Leptoptilus javanicus]

*Xunhu [to smoke + bird] 鹕 [Unidentified]

*[Ar.] Gha®ghā® [Lapwing, Hoplopterus spinosus]

*[Ar.] ḥalīm [Ostrich]

*[Ar.] Mūghāli, “shrew mouse”]

[Ar.] Qa®āmī [sparrow hawk, kite, harrier, etc]

*[Pr.] Karkas [Vulture]

 

 

Division: Various Flowers, Fruits, and Vegetables for Treating Illness

 

Category: Various Fruits

 

“Foreign 10,000-year Jujubes” [dates]

Sweet Grapes

Fig

Sweet Pomegranate

Sour Chinese Quince [Chaenomeles sinensis = C. speciosa]

Southern Pears

Mulberry

Sour Apple

Plum

[Pr.] Badam [Almonds]

Seedless White Dried Grapes

Hazel Nuts

Nutmeg

Wild Indian Eggplant [Deadly Nightshade Fruits]

Pine Nuts

Hemp Seeds

Sesame

Opium Poppy Seeds

 

Category: Various Vegetables

 

Garlic chives

Coriander

[Ar.] Sadāb [Rue]

Basil [or mint]

*[Pr.] Mavīzak [Pedicularis ?resupinata]

*[Ar.] Bādrūj [Melissa officinalis, mountain balm]

[Ar.] Tarkhūn [Tarragon]

Lettuce

Seashore Vitex

Radish

Carrot

[Ar.] Lāfah [garlic mustard?]

[Pr.] Chugundur [Sugar Beet]

Garlic

Ampelopsis cantoniensis

Green Onions

*K’o-lan 可藍  [Unidentified]

Spinach

Eggplant

*Cimi 刺 [tree + without] [or mieh; unidentified]

*Lizijiao 李子膠 [Unidentified]

[Pr.] Chokrī [dock, Rumex acetosa]

*[Pr.] Zumārōg [a mushroom]

 

Category: Various Flowers

 

Violet

[Ar.] Shahsibargham [sweet basil]

Chinese Sacred Lily

*White ma-lan 馬藺 Flower [Unidentified]

[[Pr.] Mūrd [Myrtle]

*[Pr.] Āzargōn [autumn peony ?]

Lotus

*Red lo-san 羅傘 Flower [Unidentified]

[Ar.] za’farān [saffron]

[Pr.] marzanjūsh [Marjoram]

Rose

Willow

 

Some remedies from Al-Kindī:

 

Contents of the nosh-dārū electuary, labeled as Indian by Al-Kindī, which is intended to make one happy and to make sadness disappear:[152]

 

Red rose, sweet rush, clove, mastic, nard, wild nard, cinnamon [presumably cassia], Ceylon cinnamon, yew, saffron, sebesten, large cardamom, ordinary cardamom, walnut.

 

Contents of the longest formula in the book, a “black remedy” (presumably a nonstandard or somewhat magical one) for insanity:[153]

 

Nard, mastic, wild ginger, leopard’s-bane, opium, euphorbium, henbane, white pepper, soapwort, black Indian salt, red Indian salt, mandrake root, rhubarb root, pyrethrum, myrrh, aloe, sesame oil, frankincense, sweet flag, sagapenum, gum ammoniac, long birthwort, round mustard, blue bdellium, chicory root, castoreum, colocynth root, yellow sulfur, seed of rocket, chaste-tree, mountain raisin, opopanax, wild harmel seed, fennel flower, galbanum, saffron.

 

Stomachic and treatment for sexual overindugence:[154]

 

Cardamom, clove, walnut, ginger, pepper, long pepper, saffron, Chinese cinnamon (presumably cassia), ‘ūdnī, sukk (these unidentified), ganga, rocket seed, carrot seed, secacul (a carrot-like root, not certainly identified), small desert lizard.  (Note that most of these are indeed effective stimulants, carminatives, and stomach medicines.)

 

Maimonides on diet for the insane:  oxtongue drink (borage?); counterindicated coriander seed, fruit, and purgatives.

 

 

Plant Families Represented in the HHYF

 

Numbers refer to separate taxa in the HHYF, not to species, since it is unclear how many species are included in the vaguer taxa. There are, for instance, clear references to several different species of rose, but only “Rosa” is scored here (as one taxon).

 

Acoraceae, 1

Agaricaceae, 1

Agavaceae, 1

Alliacea, 3

Altingiaceae, 1

Amaryllidaceae, 1

Apiceae, 27

Apocynaceae (now in Asclepidaceae), 2

Araceae, 1

Araliaceae, 1

Arecaceae, 4

Aristolochiaceae, 2

Asparagaceae, 2

Asteraceae, 22

Avicenniaceae, 1

Berberidaceae, 1

Betulaceae, 1

Boraginaceae, 4

Brassicaceae, 7

Burseraceae, 5

Campanulaceae, 1

Cannabaceae, 1

Capparidaceae, 1

Caprifoliaceae, 2

Caryophyllaceae, 2

Chenopoodiaceae, 3

Cistaceae, 2

Clusiaceae, 1

Colchicaceae, 1

Combretaceae, 2

Convolvulaceae, 3

Cornaceae, 2

Crassulaceae, 1

Cucurbitaceae, 4

Cupressaceae, 1

Cyperaceae, 1

Dipterocarpaceae, 1

Dracaenaceae, 1

Ephedraceae, 1

Euphorbiaceae, 5

Fabaceae, 18

Fagaceae, 1

Gentianaceae, 1

Hypericaceae, 1

Iridaceae, 2

Juglandaceae, 1

Lamiaceae, 19

Lauraceae, 5

Linaceae, 1

Loganiaceae, 1

Loranthaceae, 1

Malvaceae, 4

Melanthiaceae, 1

Menispaermaceae, 1

Menyantheaceae, 1

Moraceae, 2

Moringaceae, 1

Myristicaceae, 1

Myrtaceae, 2

Oleaceae, 3

Onagraceae, 2

Orchidaceae, 1

Orobanchaceae, 1

Paeoniaceae, 1

Papaveraceae, 3

Parmeleaceae, 1

Pedaliaceae, 2

Pinaceae, 3

Piperaceae, 3

Plantaginaceae, 1

Poaceae, 8

Polypodiaceae, 3

Polyporacese, 2

Poygonaceae, 3

Primulaceae, 1

Primulaceae, 1

Punicaceae, 1

Ranunculaceae, 6

Rhamnaceae, 3

Rosaceae, 11

Rubiaceae, 1

Rutaceae, 6

Salicaceae, 2

Santalaceae, 1

Solanaceae, 5

Styracaceae, 1

Taxaceae, 1

Thymeleaceae, 2

Usneaceae, 1

Verbenaceae, 1

Violaceae, 1

Vitaceae, 2

Zingiberaceae, 8

Zygophyllaceae, 2

 

Lichen, 1

Moss, 1

 

 

It may be useful to compare this with total numbers of species in the major families in Central Asia. A. R. Mukhamejanov provides the following numbers:[155]

 

Asteraceae, 1351 spp. in the Central Asian region

Fabaceae, 927

Lamiaceae, 455

Apiaceae, 419

Poaceae, 415

Liliaceae, 396

Brassicaceae, 390

Caryophyllaceae, 286

Rosaceae, 264

Chenopodiaceae, 242

Boraginaceae, 230

Polygonaceae, 157

 

This includes over 70% of the total species for the region. Endemicity is high, 65-70%.

Of course this is only somewhat similar to the basically Mediterranean flora of the HHYF.

Mukhamejanov notes the existence of montane forests that are largely walnut, almond, apricot, pistachio, etc., with no pines, larches, oaks or similar large trees. Such forests are surely the result of human selective cutting (personal research, Afghanistan, ENA; cf Harlan[156]). Timber is cut, fruit trees preserved.

 

 

 

 

Places of Origin of Major Medicinal Items

 

This involves some arbitrary scoring. In the first place, many of the HHYF taxa, such as rose, poplar, rhubarb, dock, and willow, include several species, distributed all over Eurasia, with local species being medicinally used in China and western Eurasia.These have been coded as “All” below. Secondly, some individual species, such as apricot, sweetflag, and hemp, occurred throughout the Eurasian heartlands from very early times, and were used medicinally throughout their ranges. Third, some species, such as citron, barely reach China and were probably not known medicinally there, and seem to be treated as “western” plants in the HHYF. It is important to note that in all these cases the names given are Near Eastern ones, and the indicated uses tend to follow the Dioscorides-Galen traditions. We are thus dealing with western uses of the plants, however Chinese or universal the plants may be. Honey presents a special problem, since the domesticated bee Apis mellifera, was an introduction from the west, but the similar east Asian A. cerana was always known and used. Honey is regarded here as in the “widespread” category.

 

On the other hand, the HHYF does separate some groups, e.g. Artemisia and mints, into roughly species-level categories, and different species were used in east and west, so these can be scored more precisely.

 

In the second place, many medicinals were widespread in India, the Near East, and Europe long before the time of the HHYF. These have all been coded as “Western,” since this is a book of Near Eastern medicine. However, some are known to have come from India originally (most, however, were genuinely widespread). “India” thus becomes something of a residual category, for plants that clearly came from India and were not known, or at least not much used, in the western world much before the HHYF’s time. Even this presents maddening conundrums, like sugar, which we code as “India” though it was, in the 14th century, rather recently popularized in the west and China.

 

Similarly, some medicinals made it to China slightly before the HHYF’s time, but they have all been scored as “Western” here, because they were recent arrivals as of the 14th century and had not been well assimilated into Chinese culture. This, also, is obviously maddeningly ambiguous. We have scored grape as “Western,” for instance, though it was known in China since the 2nd century B.C.; it remained as of the 14th century an overwhelmingly western crop, though widely grown in western China (often or usually by Hui peoples). Walnut, probably native to China as to west Asia, scores western because it is “Iranian peach” in Chinese and the common large edible form is evidently an import.[157]

 

The Southeast Asian eleven are, similarly, plants that would have been seen at that time as rather exotic Southeast Asian items, though long known in India and China. They are mostly spices and incenses. Cloves are the extreme case here; they were still strictly an import, but the importation had started by 300-400 BC.

 

Note the importance of India even after it has “lost” many of its drugs to scoring as generically “Western.”

 

 

Plants:

 

Found in all regions, 31

Western, 152

India, 26

China, 38

Southeast Asia, 11

 

Total 258 taxa

 

Number of these mentioned in Dioscorides:  136

 

Mentioned in Li: 148 (as well as most of the animals and animal products)

 

The vast majority of these overlap, and many of the rest are obscure. The rest of the exceptions are several plants in Dioscorides that cannot grow away from the Mediterranean, and several native to East and South Asia were not known to Dioscorides.

 

In most cases, when the genera are the same, the species used by Li and slightly different from the one(s) used by Dioscorides. Rheum is one example.

 

This indicates a flow of knowledge from west to east. Since Dioscorides has priority, and since most of the overlap is in western-origin or Indian-origin plants, we can safely infer that the botanicals in question went in that direction.  However, in many cases—from Artemisia and Asparagus to Ricinus and Vicia—the genus, if not the species, is widely distributed and independent discovery is possible. When the plant has such obvious medical value that no one could miss it, as in Artemisia and Ricinus, independent discovery becomes probable.

 

The only clear and unmistakable western borrowings shared by the HHYF and Li are common foods and a few other products of early (often very ancient) presence in China:[158] ball onion (A. cepa), dill, celery, beet, frankincense, cabbage (B. oleracea, specifically said by Li to be western), safflower, myrrh, coriander, saffron, carrot, asafoetida, fig, fennel, barley, flax, basil, poppy, pistachio, almond, apricot, pomegranate, possibly sumac (but there are native sumacs in China), rosemary (Li says it came from the west in the Wei Dynasty), madder, sesame, styrax, fenugreek, wheat, and European grape (but there are also native Chinese grapes). This totals 30 species. Some, such as wheat and barley, go back to very ancient times in China. Others, such as grape and coriander, reached China in very early imperial times.

 

The only clear borrowings from India or southeast Asia are galingale, Aquilaria, Areca (its Chinese name is a loanword from Malay), turmeric, zedoary, Daemonorhops, Dryobalanops, nutmeg, Phyllanthus, the Piper species, sugarcane, clove, Terminalia chebula. Several other largely Southeast Asian species probably ranged into China in ancient times. Possibly even turmeric and zedoary did.

 

 

 

 

Analysis and Comparison

 

Plants mentioned in the Yinshan Zhengyao, a nutrition and dietary guide from the same decade

 

Starred ones occur, or their close congenerics do, in the HHYF.

 

 

Acanthopanax sp. Wujiapi五加皮. Bark liquor.

 

*Aconitum chinese. Chinese aconite

 

*A. carmichaeilii. Sichuan aconite

 

*Acorus calamus. Sweet rush, sweet flag. Root

 

*Aframomum sp. (more likely, in context, Amomum villosum). Grains-of-Paradise

 

*Agaricus spp.

 

*Allium cepa (and probably also A. fistulosum). Onion

 

  1. chinense. Chinese leek.

 

*A. sativum. Garlic

 

  1. tuberosum. Chinese chives

 

*Alpinia officinarum. Lesser galingale

 

Amaranthus sp. (possibly also Chenopodium sp.) Greens

 

*Amomum spp. (notably A. tsaoko, probably also A. villosum, A. xanthioides). Large cardamoms

 

*Angelica sinensis. Danggui當歸

 

*Aquilaria agallocha. Eaglewood, gharuwood

 

*Arctium lappa. Burdock

 

Asarum forbesii. Forbes’ wild ginger

 

*Asparagus cochin-chinensis, A. lucidus (possibly also Zizania caduciflora?). Chinese asparagus (“reed shoots’)

 

Atractylodes macrocephala. Baishu柏樹

 

Atractylodes spp. (A. lancea, A. chinensis, A. japonica). Cangshu 蒼朮

 

Auricularia auricula. Tree ear fungus

 

*Bambusa spp. etc. Bamboo shoots

 

Begonia sp.

 

Benincasa hispida. Winter melon

 

*Beta vulgaris. Beet, sugar beet, Swiss chard

 

Biota orientalis. Boshi

 

*Brassica campestris (including B. chinensis). Chinese cabbage, oil greens

 

*B. juncea (?). Mustard (possibly Sinapis sp.); mustard greens

 

*B. rapa (?). Rape-turnip

 

Camellia sinensis

 

*Canarium album

 

*Cannabis sativa. Hemp seeds

emHem

 

*Carduus crispus. Thistle root, feilian 蜚蠊

 

*Carthamus tinctorius. Safflower

Castanea mollissima. Chestnut
*Chaenomeles sinensis. Chinese quince

 

*Chrysanthemum coronarium. Edible chrysanthemum

 

Cicer arietinum. Chickpea

 

*Cinnamomum camphora. Camphor

 

*C.  cassia. Cassia, Chinese cinnamon

 

*C. zeylanicum (?). Cinnamon

 

Citrullus vulgaris. Watermelon

 

*Citrus reticulata and various hybrids and related spp. (taxonomy unclear)

 

*C. sinensis

 

Cnidium officinale

 

Coix lachrymae-jobi. Job’s tears

 

Colocasia esculenta. Taro

 

*Coptis chinensis. Goldenthread

 

*Coriandrum sativum. Coriander, cilantro

 

Corylus spp. (many present). Hazelnuts

 

*Croton tiglium (and possibly other spp.). Croton beans

 

*Crocus sativus. Saffron

 

*Cucumis melo. Melon. Var. conomon, Oriental picling melon.

 

  1. sativus. Cucumber

 

Cuminum cyminum. Cumin

 

*Curcuma longa (possibly also C. aromatica, etc.). Turmeric

 

Cynanchum sp.

 

*Daucus carota. Carrot

 

Dichroa febrifuga or Orixa japonica. Chinese quinine

 

Dimocarpus longan. Longan

 

*Dioscorea spp. Chinese yams

 

Diospyros kaki. Chinese persimmon

 

Elaeagnus angustifolia and possibly E. pungens. Russian olive fruits.

 

Eleocharis dulcis. Water chestnut

 

*Elettaria cardamomum. Small cardamom

 

Euryale ferox. Foxnut

 

Evodia sp.

 

Fagopyrum esculentum, F. tataricum. Buckwheat

 

*Ferula asafoetida. Asafoetida

 

*Foeniculum vulgare. Fennel

 

*Gardenia jasminoides

 

Ginkgo biloba

 

Gleditsia sinensis. Chinese honey-locust

 

Glycine max. Soybean

 

*Glycyrrhiza uralensis. Liquorice

 

Hordeum vulgare. Barley

 

Juglans regia. Walnut

 

*Lablab purpureus (formerly Dolichos lablab). Hyacinth bean

 

Lactuca sativa. Lettuce

 

*Lagenaria siceraria. Bottle gourd

 

*Ligusticum sinense. Chinese lovage

 

Lilium concolor and probably other spp.

 

Litchi chinensis (=Nephelium litchi). Lychee

 

*Lycium chinense. Chinese wolfthorn

 

Magnolia liliflora. Magnolia flower

 

*Malus spp. (=Pyrus subgenus Malus). Crabapples, Chinese apple

 

*Malva parvifolia complex. Mallow leaves

 

*Malva sp.? Musk mallow

 

*Mentha spp. Mints

 

Millettia lasiopetala. Baiyao 白藥

 

Morus alba. White mulberry

 

Myrica rubra

 

*Nardostachys chinensis. Chinese spikenard

 

Nelumbo nucifera. Lotus

 

?Ocimum spp. Basil  (uncertain)

 

Oenanthe javanica. Water celery

 

Orchidaceae sp. (or epidendrum?) Orchid

 

Orobanche sp. Broomrape

 

Oryza sativa. Rice

 

Osmanthus fragrans. Sweet olive, kueihua 桂花

 

*Paeonia sp. (probably P. suffruticosa). Tree peony

 

Panax ginseng. Ginseng

 

  1. japonicus? Korean ginseng

 

Panicum miliaceum. Panic millet

 

*Papaver somniferum. Poppy seeds

 

Perilla frutescens. Perilla, beefsteak plant

 

Phragmites communis. Reed. Juice

 

*Phyllanthus emblica? Myrobalans (type unclear)

 

Phytolacca acinosa. Chinese poke

 

Pinellia ternata. Banxia 半夏

 

*Pinus spp. (probably focally P. koraiensis for the nuts). Pine nuts; pine pollen; pine liquor, pine root

 

*Piper cubeba. Cubeb

 

*P. longum. Long pepper

 

*P. nigrum. Black pepper

 

*Pistacia vera. Pistachio nuts

 

Pisum sativum. Peas

 

*Platycodon grandiflorum

 

Pleurotus ortreatus. Fungus

 

Polygala sibirica. Chinese senega

 

Polygonatum spp. Solomon’s seal.

 

*Polygonum aviculare. Smartweed

 

*P. multiflorum. Chinese cornbind

 

*Poria cocos. China root

 

Portulaca oleracea. Purslane

 

Prinsepia uniflora. Prinsepia

 

*Prunus amygdalus. Almond

 

*P. armeniaca. Apricot. Kernels, fruit

 

*P. mume. Oriental flowering apricot

 

*P. persica. Peach

 

Prunus (subgenus Cerasus) spp. Cherries.

 

Pteris sp. Bracken fern

 

Pueraria lobata. Kudzu

 

*Punica granatum Pomegranate

 

Pyrus spp. Chinese pears

 

*Quercus spp. Acorns

 

*Raphanus sativus

 

Rehmannia glutinosa (possibly also Digitalis purpurea?). Chinese foxglove

 

*Rheum officinale and probably other spp. Rhubarb

 

Ribes rubrum. Red currant.

 

*Rosa spp. Flowers, attar, hips

 

*Saccharum officinale. Sugar

 

Sanguisorba sp? Burnet (?)

 

Santalum album. Sandalwood

 

Saussurea lappa (and possibly also Vladimiria souliei). Muxiang 木香

 

Schisandra spp. Schisandra fruits

 

Schizonepeta tenuifolia. (A small herb of the mint family)

 

*Sesamum indicum. Sesame

 

Setaria italica. Foxtail millet

 

Solanum melongena.  (Chinese) eggplant

 

Sonchus arvensis (and probably other spp.). Sow thistle. Greens.

 

Spinacia oleracea. Spinach

 

Spiraea media (or possibly Gentiana sp.). Tabilqa

 

Stachys sieboldii. Chinese “artichoke”

 

*Torreya grandis. Torreya nuts

 

Trapa bispinosa. Water caltrop

 

Tricholoma mongolicum. Mushroom

 

*Trigonella foenum-graecum. Fenugreek

 

*Triticum aestivum. Bread wheat

 

Tussilago farfara. Tussilago flower

 

Typha spp. Rhizomes, pollen, shoots

 

Ulmus macrocarpa. Stinking elm

 

  1. parvifolia, U. pumila (and/or relatives). Elm seeds

 

Urtica sp. Nettle

 

*Veratrum nigrum and/or V. maacki. False hellebore

 

*Vicia spp. (focally V. sativa). Vetch

 

*Vigna angustifolia. Adzuki beans

 

*V. mungo. Mung beans

 

Vitex trifolia. Seashore chaste-tree. Fruits.

 

*Vitis spp. Grapes; wine

 

Xanthium strumarium. Cocklebur

 

Zanthoxylum sp. Flower pepper

 

*Zingiber mioga. Chinese ginger, Japanese ginger

 

*Z. officinalis. Ginger

 

Zizyphus spp. Jujubes (various; mostly Z. jujuba)

 

 

Unidentified fungi

 

Total 173 taxa (not counting the unidentified fungi).

 

 

Some 85 are also in the HHYF. Many of these are native Chinese equivalents of western plants (Allium, for example) or western plants long established in China even before the HHYF (almond, saffron). Others, such as lesser galingale, cassia, sugar and ginger, are East/Southeast Asian in origin and spread west by early medieval times. Only 27 plants are clearly western species borrowed into China. Most are in the HHYF, but some (e.g. spinach, peach) are strictly foods with no special medicinal value, and are thus not mentioned in the HHYF. All these 27 are probably much older in China than Yuan.  Most of the rest are strictly Chinese remedies or foods.

 

 

Some Plants and Minerals with Real or Probable Medical Effect besides Low-level Stimulant and Soothing Values

 

Acacia (DMT release when brewed with harmala and maybe other plants)

 

Aconite (strongly toxic, can produce hallucinations or delusions; like other Solanaceae below, contains psychotropic tropane alkaloids)

 

Acorus (mental effects not well studied scientifically, but widely alleged in folk medicine worldwide; confirming evidence for at least some strains).[159]

 

Artemisia (toxic effects can include mental influences; active ingredient in absinthe)

 

Boswellia (mental effects alleged in sources, probably with considerable foundation; research shaky but there is evidence for antidepressant effect from inhaling the incense)

 

Cannabis (mental effects well known and well described in all early sources, Near Eastern and Chinese)

 

Saffron (mental effects real but little studied and rather minor; see species account above; at least some of the reported effects check with contemporary experience)

 

Ephedra (strong stimulant effects; used in Near East with other drugs for mental effects)

 

Hellebore (white and black; well-known producer of visions and other mental effects)

 

Hyoscyamus (henbane; notorious in witches’ brews and such for its psychotropic effects, which are reported to include visions of devils)

 

Hypericum (St. John’s wort; famous antidepressant)

 

Lavender (mental effects little studied, but undeniable; “broom of the brain” in Indian medicine; recent research confirms rather striking antidepressant and soothing value, even from simply inhaling the scent)

 

Lead, copper, and arsenic compounds

 

Lemon balm (antidepressant effect; needs confirmation)

 

Mint (stimulant, harmonizing, antidepressant effect from mint oil taken or sniffed; needs research)

 

Peganum harmala (harmal; major, very widely used psychedelic in Near East)

 

Soda and other alkaline minerals

 

Solanum nigrum (deadly nightshade; toxic effects include some mental ones)

 

Wine

 

 

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[1] Hu Shiu-ying, Food Plants of China, Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, 2005.

[2] Wyjastyk 2003: xxxvii.

[3] Theophrastus 1926: II, 257.

[4] Pavord 2005: 146.

[5] Athenaeus, The Deipnosophists, tr. Charles Burton Gulick, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press (Loeb Classics Series), 1928-41.

[6] Gunther 1934: 661-679.

[7] Galen 2003.

[8] See Anthimus, On the Observance of Foods, Totnes, England: Prospect Books, 1996.

[9]  Levey 1966.

[10] Jamal Bellakhdar, Renée Claisse, Jacques Fleurentin, and Chafique Younos, “Repertory of Standard Herbal Drugs in the Moroccan Pharmacopoea,” Journal of Ethnopharmacology 35 (1991):123-143.

[11] Al-Bīrūnī 1973.

[12] See Maimonides 1979 below.

[13] Avicenna 1999-2014, II.

[14] Avicenna 1999-2014, I.

[15] Nawal Nasrallah, Annals of the Caliphs’ Kitchens: Ibn Sayyār al-Warrāq’s Tenth-Century Baghdadi Cookbook,  Leiden: Brill, 2007.

[16] Joseph Salvatore Graziani, Arabic Medicine in the Eleventh Century as Represented in the Works of Ibn Jazlah, Karachi: Hamdard Foundation, 1980.

[17] Maimonides (Moses ben Maimon), Moses Maimonides on the Causes of Symptoms, ed. and tr. by J. O. Leibowitz and S. Marcus, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974.

[18] Maimonides 1979.

[19] Levey and Al-Khaledy 1967.

[20] Lev and Amar 2008.

[21] See Wallis 2010, passim.

[22] Kamal 1975.

[23] Kamal 1975: 117.

[24] Kamal 1975: 118.

[25] Kamal 1975: 164-189

[26] Bellakhadar et al. 1991.

[27] Shahina A. Ghazanfar,  Handbook of Arabian Medicinal Plants,  Boca Raton, FL:  CRC Press, 1994.

[28] Robert W. Lebling and Donna Pepperdine, Natural Remedies of Arabia, Riyadh and London: Al-Turath and Stacey International, 2006.

[29] James Mandaville, Bedouin Ethnography: Plant Concepts and Uses in a Desert Pastoral World, Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2011; See also his earlier work, James Mandaville, The Flora of Eastern Saudi Arabia,  London: Kegan Paul, 1989.

[30] Chishtiyya 1985.

[31] Vaidya Bhagwan Dash and K. Kanchan Gupta, Materia Medica of Ayurveda based on Madanapāla’s Nighantu, New Delhi: B. Jain, 1991.

[32] Nadkarni 1976.

[33] Dash and Laliteshkashyap 1980.

[34] Dash 1994.

[35] Dash 1994, xvi,

[36] Terry Clifford, Tibetan Buddhist Medicine and Psychiatry: The Diamond Healing, York Beach, ME:  Samuel Weiser, 1984. This overlaps with or is partially based on Dash 1994.

[37] Sasha W. Eisenman, David E. Zaurov, and Lena Struwe eds., Medicinal Plants of Central Asia: Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, tr. David E. Zaurov, Sasha W. Eisenman, Dilmurad A. Yunusov, and Venera Isaeva; New York: Springer, 2013. Medicinal herb accounts by the editors and Igor V. Belolipov, Anvar G. Kurmukov, Ishenbay S. Sodombekov, and Anarbek A. Akimaliev.

[38] Li Shizhen, Compendium of Materia Medica (Bencao Gangmu), tr. and ed. By Xiao Xiaoming, Li Zhenguo, and committee, 6 vols, Beijing:  Foreign Languages Press, 2003.

[39] Now available for consultation is Zhang Zhibin and Paul Unschuld, eds., Dictionary of the Ben cao gang mu, Volume 1: Chinese Historical Illness Terminology (Ben Cao Gang Mu Dictionary Project), Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2014.

[40] Sun Simiao, “Recipes Worth a Thousand Gold, ” trans. Sumei Yi, 2007, available by email from E. N. Anderson or on his website www.krazykioti.com.

[41] See Unschuld 1986 for their history.

[42] Ruth Meserve, “A Mongolian Medicinal Plant List,” Journal de la Société Finno-Ougrienne 90 (2004): 67-100.

[43] Chipman 2010.

[44] J.C. Th. Uphof, J. C. Th., Dictionary of Economic Plants, Lehre, Germany:  J. Cramer, 1968.

[45] Graeme Tobyn, Alison Denham, and Margaret Whitelegg, The Western Herbal Tradition: 2000 Years of Medicinal Plant Knowledge, London: Singing Dragon, 2011.

[46] Gunther 1934: 527.

[47] Gunther 1934: 232

[48] Nunn also notes this. See John F. Nunn, Ancient Egyptian Medicine, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996.

[49] Wujastyk 2003: 154-160.

[50] “I cannot find the compound [匿蟲] in the dictionary. It seems to be some kind of ulcer. ” (Note by Sumei Yi, translator of this passage.)

[51] Elisabeth Hsu, “Qing hao 青蒿, Herba Artemisiae annuae, in the Chinese Materia Medica,” in Elisabeth Hsu and Stephen Harris, eds., Plants, On the Interface of Ethnobotany and Medical Anthropology, New York:  Berghahn, 2010, 83-130 [2010b].

[52] See especially Hsu 2010b, 109-110, 116.

[53] Elisabeth Hsu, “Plants in Medical Practice and Common Sense: On the Interface of Ethnobotany and Medical Anthropology,” in Hsu and Harris 2010, 1-48. [Hsu 2010a].

 

[55] Nasrallah 2007: 672.

[56] Li 2003:1673.

[57] Bellakhdar et al. 1991: 126

[58] Li 2003: 1788.

[59] Chrysanthemum coronarium L. var spatiosum Bailey.

[60] Gunther 1934: 42.

[61] Gunther 1934: 43.

[62] Graziani 1980: 180-215.

[63] Shi is an important concept in Chinese medicine, which means the noxious qi proliferates so much that it fills certain parts of the body.

[64] Avicenna 1999-2014: II, 376.

[65] Avicenna 1999-2014: II, 284.

[66] Eisenman 2013: 83.

[67] Nasrallah 2007: 678.

[68] Ghazanfar 1994: 207.

[69] Lev and Amar 2008: 399.

[70] Avicenna 1999-2014: II, 804.

[71] Avicenna 1999-2014: II, 726.

[72] The ba in the transcription is clearly in the Arabic Script entry but the Chinese transcription leaves it out.

[73] Avicenna 1999-2014, II: 650.

[74] Levey 1966: 342.

[75] Zhong means zhongjiao, or the Middle Jiao or burner.

[76] Gunther 1934: 181.

[77] See Henry Koerper and A. L. Kolls.  1999. “The Silphium Motif Adorning Ancient Libyan Coinage: Marketing a Medicinal Plant,” Economic Botany 53: 133-143.

[78] Chip Rossetti, “‘Devil’s Dung’: The World’s Smelliest Spice,”Saudi Aramco World 60 (2009): 4: 36-43

 

[79] Gunther 1934: 91.

[80] Li 2003: 2819; the pollinator wasps’ young do emerge thus, from eggs laid in the fig.

[81] Levey and Khaledy 1967: 173.

[82] John Evelyn, Acetaria: A Discourse of Sallets, Lexington, KY:  High Quality Paperbacks; (typescript from a 1937 publication by Brooklyn Botanic Garden), 2012/1699: 22.

[83] Li 2003: 1229.

[84] Avicenna 1999-2014: II, 535.

[85] Kamal 1975: 86.

[86] Avicenna 1999-2014: II, 98.

[87] Eisenman et al. 2013: 138.

[88] Eisenman et al. 2013: 140.

[89] Lagenaria siceraria (Molina) Standl var. clavata Ser.

[90] Avicenna 1999-2014: II, 487.

[91] Levey and Al-Khaledy 1967: 191.

[92] Liu Fei-Hu, Xia Chen, Bo Long, Rui-Yan Shuai, and Chen-Lin Long, “Historical and Botanical Evidence of Distribution, Cultivation and Utilization of Linum usitatissimum L. (flax) in China,” Vegetation History and Archaeobotany online, 10.1007/s00334-011-0311-5, retrieved Sept. 14, 2011.

[93] Avicenna 1999-2014: II, 684.

[94] Gunther 1934: 72.

[95] Metaplexis japonica (Thunb.) Mak. The proverb rhymes in Chinese.

[96] It is caused by the liquid that remains in the body and cannot be excreted out of the body.

[97] Avicenna 1999-2014: II, 359.

[98] Avicenna 1999-2014: II, 743.

[99] Lev and Amar 2008: 356.

[100] Eisenman et al. 2013: 175.

[101] Eisenman et al. 2013: 178.

[102] Part of the transcription is missing.

[103] Gunther 1934: 383.

 

[104] Eisenman et al. 2013: 187.

[105] Li Shizhen 2003: 2804.

[106] Avicenna 1999-2014: II, 332.

[107] M. Stol, On Trees, Mountains, and Millstones in the Ancient Near East, Leiden: Ex Oriente Lux, 1979.

[108] Bellakhdar et al. 1991.

[109] Meserve 2004: 73.

[110] Avicenna 1999-2014: II, 26.

[111] The character ji肌 might be ji饑.

[112] Gunther 1934: 81.

[113] Avicenna 1999-2014: II, 207.

[114] Avicenna 1999-2014: II, 948.

[115] Kamal 1975: 433-436.

[116] Meserve 2004: 19.

[117] Hamarneh 1973: 87.

[118]

Avicenna 1999-2014: 707.

[119] Nadkarni 1978: 1120.

[120] Gunther 1934: 551.

[121] Avicenna 1999-2014: II, 753.

[122] Manniche 1989: 152.

[123] The character chong might be superfluous. The Five Hemorrhoids are male hemorrhoids (muzhi牡痔), female hemorrhoids (pinzhi牝痔), mai hemorrhoids (maizhi脈痔), intestine hemorrhoids (changzhi腸痔), and blood hemorrhoids (xuezhi血痔).

[124] Gunther 1934: 621.

[125] Nadkarni 1976: 1275.

[126] Gunther 1934: 601.

[127] Zhong means zhongjiao, or the Middle Jiao.

[128] Avicenna 1999-2014: II 603.

[129] Li 2003: 2703.

[130] Efraim Lev, “Healing with Animals (Zootherapy) from Practical Medieval Medicine to Present-day Traditional Medicine in the Levant,” Ms, 2002.

[131] Avicenna 1999-1214: II, 108.

[132] Avicenna 1999-2014: II, 170.

[133] David R. Harris, Origins of Agriculture in Western Central Asia: An Environmental-Archaeological study,  Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, 2010, 81.

[134] Matt Walker, “Wild Camels ‘Genetically Unique,’” BBC Earth News Online, July 24, 2009.

[135] Avicenna 1999-2014: II, 208.

[136] Ibid.

[137] Li 2003: 3791.

[138] Pormann and Savage-Smith 2007: 49.

[139] Lev and Amar 2008: 142.

[140] Avicenna 1999-2014: II, 119.

[141] Avicenna 1999-2014: II, 728.

[142] Lev 2002.

[143] Lev 2002.

[144] Nasrallah 2007: 644.

[145] Li 2003: 4106-4107.

[146] Lev 2002.

[147] Gunther 1934: 643.

[148] Avicenna 1999-2014: II, 921.

[149] Gunther 1934: 628.

[150] Avicenna 1999-2014: II, 629.

[151] Lev and Amar 2008: 553.

[152] Levey 1966: 32-34.

[153] Levey 1966: 198-200.

[154] Levey 1966: 220.

[155] A. R. Mukhamejanov 2000: 275-276. [Full citation needed]

[156] Jack Harlan,  Crops and Man.  2nd edn., Madison, WI: American Society of Agronomy and Crop Science Society of America, 1992.

 

[157] Berthold Laufer,  Sino-Iranica. Chicago:  Field Museum, 1919.

 

[158] Laufer 1919; Edward H. Schafer, The Golden Peaches of Samarkand, a Study of T’ang Exotics, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1963.

[159] Timothy Motley, Timothy, “The Ethnobotany of Sweet Flag, Acorus calamus,” Economic Botany 48 (1994): 397-412.