The Yag Proto-Civilisation - Water Management, Mass Labour, Calendar Men and Literacy

The Yag Proto-Civilisation - Water Management, Mass Labour, Calendar Men and Literacy

Most Tsalmothua crops were, in relative terms, dryland crops - for the most part, root crops or windseeds. The life cycles of crops were resilient, requiring and dependent upon a certain amount of water, but not tied to predictable water cycles, and not water intensive.

Yag agriculture was based around a plant which was extremely productive and nutritious. Pound for pound, Yag berries are the most valuable foodstuffs in Antarctica. But it was also a water hungry plant, and more importantly, it was a plant whose life cycle was based upon specific periodic flows and seasonal flood conditions.

Cultivation of the plant produced great returns in terms of value per labour. But at the same time required careful attention to seasons, extensive cultivation and habitat manipulation and and unique techniques.

One difference was intensity of manpower. Archeological digs in Tsalmothua show early agricultural communities as numbering in the dozens of people. The root crops could be grown in a wide range of locales, were not terribly site specific, and the labour involved in planting and digging up roots tended not to produce significant multipliers. Twenty men engaged in root crops didn’t necessarily produce vastly more than ten men, rather, each man worked his ground. Crop returns paced manpower closely.

In contrast, the Yag Berries were extremely site specific. They would grow in glorious profusion along a riverbank or marsh, but vanish entirely, a dozen feet away, in dryer ground or above a flood line. Cultivation was not simply a matter of planting, but ensuring proper irrigation, and of predicting and preparing for floods. As a result, Yag Berry agricultural communities tended to be dense, clustering around narrow growing areas.

Tsalmothua agriculture tended to disperse, and result in dispersing populations, as each man staked out his bit of land. Yag agriculture tended to concentrate population, everyone homing in on the viable or productive land. This produced higher local population densities. Often it produced organized communities, on other occasions, it produced orgies of mass murder. The result is that early Yag Agricultural communities were much larger, reaching into the hundreds, early on.

Available manpower made a large difference. Yag agriculture responded very well to irrigation and water manipulation projects. Activities such as ditching, dyking, canal building, trenching, ponding, damming and conventional irrigation could multliply crop harvests by orders of magnitude. On the other hand, they required an investment of human labour far greater than a family group or small tribe could supply within a short time frame.

In short, timing was a crucial labou issue. Ten thousand man hours could not be distributed through the year. Rather, for agricultural infrastructure projects, such as ditches or dykes, it had to be concentrated in a few weeks or months. The yields more than justified the investment of labour, but the labour had to be available in the first place, and it had to be motivated..

For Yag, population densities and irrigation required extensive cooperation. Almost the entirety of a Yag community had to be persuaded of the benefits of flooding a particular piece of land, and motivated to work. This required protracted argument and negotiations to commence, agreement on how the work was to be apportioned, and further agreement as to how the spoils were to be divided. Many early Yag communities were quasi-democratic in nature, given to assemblies and debates.

A recurring feature of Yag archeological sites, are the proliferation of calendar stones or calendar logs, found in just about every dig, demonstrating a fascination with attempting to monitor and track the seasonal floods and water fluctuations. Some of these efforts appear to have been controversial, a number of sites show different or competing systems, and smashed or defaced stones or partially burned poles are not uncommon.

The Calendar poles were the works of Calendar men, shamans and savants who attempted to divine the courses of nature from signs and omens in the environment. The Calendar men ranged from mystics to surprisingly sophisticated early astronomers. The Yag were seized with a powerful need to understand and anticipate the water flows. They needed to know when the floods would come, and how high they would be. They needed to develop some understanding of the effects of dykes and ditches, when to pond and dam, and when to release. Poor water management might could well drown promising crops in swamps of standing water, or leave a potentially fertile field high and dry with insuffucient flooding to trigger berries. During the early period, we find evidence of numerous efforts. Astropothere worship ceremonies, efforts at primitive zodiacs, maps of drainage channels, etc. all testify to attempts to understand and eventually manipulate the world around them.

There was often a limit to available local labour. So Yag communities would negotiate with each other, establishing reciprocal arrangements. The networks of Calendar Men were critical links in the communications between communities, and in establishing overviews for mutual projects or mutual assistance.

Another approach by the Yag, particularly on the litoral borderlands of their territories were, large scale organized forced or slave labour. Hunter gatherers or competing agriculturalists would be hunted down and captured. The victims were usually lamed by cutting a tendon to prevent escape. Then they were simply worked until they died, or if they survived into flooding season, usually ceremonially drowned.

Oddly, cannibalism was comparatively rare in Yag societies. As the scale and ambition of water management projects escalated over the years, demand for slave labour grew. Yag slave raiding parties ranged widely into the shadowlands, into Ptahr and Azul and even into Wang Gash. Over time, these regions were substantially depopulated, and surrounding territories developed a deeply rooted fear of the Yag.

Contact with Tsalmothua agriculture produced little in the way of new crops for the Yag. For the most part, their preferred farming territories and techniques were broadly incompatible with Tsalmothua. However, domesticated animals which could extend human manpower or labour were quickly adopted. Domesticated hive monkeys appear in Yag around 14,000 years ago and proliferate rapidly. Adoption of Shaghui was slower because the animals did relatively poorly in swampy territory, but by 13,000 years ago Shaghui were in widespread use, and even large number of Shaghut had been semi-domesticated. Pictographs and the remains of modified harnesses, testify to repeated attempts to domesticate Astropotheres.

Water regulation and irrigation progressed. Early irrigation efforts seem to consist of shallow mud channels dug to extend or channel drainage. Approximately 15,500 years ago, we begin to see evidence of temporary dams on streams to produce local flooding. These evolve, by 14,500 to semi-permanent megalithic river structures allowing daming at selective times. Systematic ponding begins to emerge 14,000 years ago. A large canal is constructed roughly 13,800 years ago. The scale and complexity of the works increase steadily over time, in the later period, it appears that thousands of people from several communities are put to work.

During this time, the work of Calendar Men progressed as well. The period from 15,500 to 14,000 saw the emergence of universal calendar symbols and the development of consistent notch patterns to indicate numbers. By 13,500 the calendar system had evolved into a crude glyphic alphabet or writing system, conveyed in spirals around cylinders. By 13,000 years ago, we find clay ‘calendar cylinders’ or even preserved poles or tree trunks with glyphic remains.