Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations.

Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations. By DAVID R. MONTGOMERY. Berkeley and Los Angeles: UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS, 2007. Pp. ix + 285, illus. $24.95.

Using past civilizations as a starting point, this book sets out to demonstrate how the world is running out of cultivable soil. To fulfill this aim, Dirt builds upon the foundations laid by a long line of earlier publications that outline how the soil forms the basis for agriculture, and agriculture underpins cities and civilizations. Thus scholars such as Hyams, Lowdermilk, and Simkhovitch were able to suggest that cycles of the rise and fall of past civilizations were tied ultimately to the presence and health of a soil cover.

Following an introduction to the soil, its history, and processes of soil development (chapter two), Montgomery breezes through a range of archaeological case studies that relate directly or indirectly to the soil. For example, chapter three outlines the development of agriculture in Mesopotamia. Egypt, and China, and chapter four focuses upon Greek and Roman agriculture as well as classical treatises on agronomy and eventually Meso-American agriculture. In these chapters, as well as elsewhere in the book, readers of this journal may be disappointed by the lack of references or citations of primary data. However, it does not seem to be the intention of this book to provide a treatise on the use of soil by ancient society. Rather. Dirt is a book with a mission, and one clear message to come from chapter four is that civilization can be sustained only as long as people take care of the land by adopting appropriate methods of cultivation and manuring. If the health of the soil is neglected, then there is considerable loss of soil and crop productivity, with the result that the economy and society suffer. Chapter five, which continues this theme, is primarily devoted to problems of soil erosion in Europe and the Mediterranean.

As its title "Westward Hoe" implies, chapter six examines the association between soil erosion and the spread of European agriculture in North America. At this point the narrative hits its stride and from here on the book provides a more complex and nuanced analysis of the relationship between people and soils as well as the economic and social history of agriculture. This theme is continued in chapter seven, which examines the question of the dust bowl in the American plains and its Soviet-period equivalents in Central Asia and beyond. Although not directly relevant to the Near or Far East, these are compelling tales of soil mismanagement, which are relevant to our understanding of other semi-arid steppe regions of Asia.

Chapter eight outlines the discovery of natural fertilizing agents such as guano together with the development of chemical fertilizers, and continues by contrasting the relative value of organic farming and cultivation using chemical fertilizers. Here the book discusses how experimental agriculture has demonstrated the benefits of using organic manures instead of chemical fertilizers, and specifically how the former enhanced crop yields in drier years. This discussion is of relevance to our understanding of rain-fed farming in the Near East, because it suggests how the use of organic soil enhancements benefits cropping in the long term and enables crop yields to remain steady even when rainfall is less than ideal for cropping. Following chapter nine, which addresses agriculture, population, and soil erosion on islands, the book closes with a chapter devoted to population cycles and the life span of civilizations.

Overall, it must be said that the writer, a professor of earth and space sciences at the University of Washington, has read a vast amount of literature in order to write Dirt. But what is the relevance of this book to Near Eastern and oriental studies? Certainly the soil was a fundamental resource that provided the foundation for many Old World civilizations, and it can be argued that in recent decades this resource has been underappreciated by many academics. Although the discussion of the great Old World civilizations and their agricultural systems in Dirt might not satisfy scholars of ancient crop yields, agronomy, or economic history, this is not its real aim. Not only is the narrative derived primarily from the secondary literature on the subject, much of it is under-referenced, so that much recent literature goes uncited.

What the book lacks in detail and nuance, however, it makes up for with narrative pace. The author outlines a world in which the soil was degraded by the ancient inhabitants, but has become increasingly abused as history has developed, the additional population being fed as a result of improvements in the supply of soil supplements and increases in technology. Despite the lack of detail, many of the themes should resonate with scholars of Old World civilizations. Thus the circumstances that led to the dust bowl in the great plains of the United States provide an uncanny parallel with conditions that might have prevailed in parts of Upper Mesopotamia during the late third, second, and first millennia B.C. Here lessons can be drawn from the American West, where the dust bowl seems to have been precipitated by both the ploughing of the prairies and a run of dry years. In other words, the combination of these two factors may also have precipitated some of the crises reported at the end of the third millennium, as well as perhaps at other times in the late second and first millennia B.C.

At various points, the author argues that this book is not intended to show that soil is the only factor that contributed to the rise and fall of civilizations, and he does occasionally point out that monocausal explanations should be avoided. Nevertheless, he frequently gives the impression that soil or its loss was indeed the driving force behind social change. Overall I agree that the enhancement of soil quality was crucial to the maintenance of cropping systems in antiquity, but in this regard the book suffers from a lack of qualification. Many researchers would find the seemingly clear-cut relationships outlined in this book to be unproven and an oversimplification of a more complex reality. Thus Dirt fits within the category of studies that adopt the "ruined landscape" hypothesis to assert that since the Classical period the landscape of the Mediterranean has become degraded and of diminished value for agriculture as a result of human folly and over-use (Grove and Rackham 2001: 8-17). Thus, this book follows in the tradition of the writings of, for example, Walter Clay Lowdermilk (1943), who stated without qualification that "The 'Promised Land' which 3,000 years ago was 'flowing with milk and honey' has been so devastated by soil erosion that the soils have been swept off fully half of the area of the hill lands."

Similarly, Dirt provides a case for human abuse of the land and its soil resources, as well as demonstrating the fundamental role of manures and organic fertilizers. Nevertheless, one sometimes suspects that the case studies are selected in order to drive the narrative. Whereas Montgomery emphasizes the overall negative impact of human activity on soil resources--in part, one suspects, to maintain the pace of the narrative--others, particularly Grove and Rackham, point out the complexity of the relationship between human activity, forest removal, soil erosion, and the formation of valley fills.

Although the Mediterranean and Near Eastern landscapes have undoubtedly experienced a significant degree of soil erosion and landscape degradation over the last few millennia, the situation is complex, with some areas showing evidence for maximum erosion at the transition from the Pleistocene to the Holocene (Vita-Finzi 1979; Cordova 2007; Schmidt et al. 2006), whereas other areas show a peak in erosion relating to the later empires. As Montgomery argues, there is a strong record to support the case that human beings have initiated a considerable degree of erosion in the Near East and Mediterranean, and one can cite significant erosion of the soil cover as a result of the extension of settlement onto the Levantine uplands (Casana 2004), as well as elsewhere in the Middle East (Wilkinson 2003). Nevertheless, the relationships between humans, soil cover, and climate are remarkably complex--hence the qualified nature of the arguments in Grove and Rackham--and despite the arguments made in Dirt, the story is by no means fully understood, despite the large quantity of research that has been conducted in recent years. Not only are many landscapes of the Old and New Worlds highly degraded, this degradation was often inherited from earlier communities, and consequently humans appear to have adapted to this increasingly degraded landscape by developing distinctive local practices of land management (Butzer 1996).

To conclude, David Montgomery's Dirt may therefore be regarded as a "wake-up call" to academics to appreciate the significance of this diminishing resource. Although the narrative lacks the qualification and complexity to satisfy many scholars and scientists, the overall subject matter, the significance of the soil to ancient communities, and its diminution for modern-day society, are fundamental to both the modern and the ancient world, and 1 hope that this book is read by scholars of the Near and Far East with a view to re-examining these questions from new perspectives.

TONY WILKINSON

DURHAM UNIVERSITY

REFERENCES

Butzer, K. W. 1996. Ecology in the Long View: Settlement Histories. Agrosystemic Strategies, and Ecological Performance. Journal of Field Archaeology 23 (2): 141-50.

Casana. J. 2004. The Archaeological Landscape of Late Roman Antioch. In Culture and Society in Late Roman Antioch, ed. J. A. R. Huskinson and Bella Sandwell. Oxford: Oxbow Books. Pp. 102-25.

Cordova, Carlos E. 2007. Millennial Landscape Change in Jordan: Geoarchaeology and Cultural Ecology. Tucson: Univ. of Arizona Press.

Grove, A. T., and Oliver Rackham. 2001. The Nature of Mediterranean Europe: An Ecological History. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press.

Lowdermilk, Walter Clay. 1943. Lessons from the Old World to the Americas in Land Use. Smithsonian Institution Annual Report: 413-27.

Schmidt. M.; B. Lucke; R. Maumler; Z. al-Saad; B. al-Qudah; and A. Hutcheon. 2006. The Decapolis Region (Northern Jordan) as an Historical Example of Desertification? Evidence from Soil Development and Distribution. Quaternary International 151: 74-86.

Wilkinson, T. J. 2003. Archaeological Landscapes of the Near East. Tucson: Univ. of Arizona Press.

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Author:	Wilkinson, Tony
Publication:	The Journal of the American Oriental Society
Date:	Jan 1, 2008
Words:	1689
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