Human use of fire was a unique, species-defining tool that allowed people to reshape entire landscapes long before agriculture. Across regions such as the Amazon, Australia, North and South America, controlled burning opened forests, encouraged the propagation of desired plants and animals, and concentrated food resources closer to human relying exclusively on gathering, foraging, fishing and hunting across a variety of ecological settings. When Indigenous burning practices in North and South America abruptly ended after European-introduced epidemics, forests rapidly regrew, creating the false impression of a pristine wilderness. Some climatologists even argue that this abrupt halt in burning practices across two continents and the resultant reforestation reduced atmospheric CO₂ enough to help trigger the Little Ice Age. Interestingly, fire, as landscape architecture, does not appear in the historical accounts, most likely because it was spread over thousands of years and the recorders of historical memory, living in the newly cultured world of cities, would have considered the landscapers to be "uncultured" and "primitive" and their practices not worthy of mention.
This long-term, fire-driven landscape engineering was a systematic form of resource intensification: humans, over tens of thousands of years, deliberately created calorie-rich but agriculturally diverse productive mosaics that catered to their preferred nomadic lifestyle rather than accepting the "current disposition of the natural world" as given. From the point of view of a single clan anywhere along that historical continuum, as they foraged from forest to river to wetland to the ocean and back to the forest, it would have appeared that everywhere they went was a paradise prepared for them by the gods. The techniques and practices that maintained and extended those productive regions in which they lived and moved would have been so ancient and "baked-in" to the fabric of their rituals and taboos they would have been attributed to their gods. Any new practices and techniques shared or borrowed from other clans and cultures would, as the mists of time veiled the details, also be attributed to new gods or demi-gods.
In his massive work, The Golden Bough, James Frazer begins the section on Tree Worship with these word, "In the religious history of the Aryan race in Europe the worship of trees has played an important part. Nothing could be more natural. For at the dawn of history Europe was covered with immense primeval forests, in which the scattered clearings must have appeared like islets in an ocean of green. Down to the first century before our era the Hercynian forest stretched eastward from the Rhine for a distance at once vast and unknown; Germans whom Caesar questioned had travelled for two months through it without reaching the end…The excavation of prehistoric pile-villages in the valley of the Po has shown that long before the rise and probably the foundation of Rome the north of Italy was covered with dense forests of elms, chestnuts, and especially of Oaks" (Chapter One, Section 4). He continues citing from ancient works the dense forests of Greece, Germany, Prussia, Lithuania, and so on. His main point is this -trees became the center of worship due to their being a primary source of food.
Anthropologists, archaeologists, and other specialists point out that as forests were converted into farmland, and farmland expanded from the initial centers of the agricultural revolution, over time these original farmlands turned into deserts, forcing the farmers to pick up and move to new locations. This is no more evident than at the Mesopotamian hinterlands that were once dense forests and were the earliest centers of the agricultural revolution. Archeology has traced the slow ecological changes and population migration from the upper reaches of the Tigris and Euphrates river basin to the lower delta from the 10th millennium BC through the 3rd millennium, BC. Although considered sedentary, farmers focusing on a narrow selection of crops (and the cities and states that resulted from them) had to keep on the move due to soil erosion, nutrient depletion, and salinization - concentration of others salts in the soil. Dependence upon monocrops made societies fragile and prone to collapse from drought, pests, disease (as a result of increased population density) or climate shifts. Mesopotamia is not the only civilization to have experienced this phenomenon. Illustrations of this phenomenon exist worldwide. Densley populated agricultural societies were paradoxically more vulnerable to large-scale famine and disease than their smaller, more mobile hunter-gatherer cousins. Major crop failures could devastate dense populations, whereas foragers, relying on a much wider variety of food resources spread out over a much wider area were less prone to crop failures, could more rapidly shift food sources and could scatter more quickly at the hint of a plague.
Interestingly, we have only come to learn much of this ourselves in the last few decades. However, as we do, it begins to shed more light on the "myths" that we have been exposed to. Many contemporary specialists—across anthropology, classics, ancient history, religious studies, and archaeology—explicitly treat myth as a form of history, though not in the modern sense of objective chronicle. Instead, myth is understood as a culturally encoded memory of real events, social transformations, and power struggles, reshaped by symbolism, ritual, and ideology. Most specialists agree on the following three points: First, Myths are not fabricated ex nihilo. They arise from real experiences—ecological disasters, migrations, wars, political upheavals, or ritual violence. Second, Myths preserve meaning, not chronology. What is remembered is why something mattered, not when or how exactly it occurred. Third, Myths legitimate social order. They explain why the world must be the way it is—often by sacralizing violence, hierarchy, or divine authority. Thus myth is best described as: Memory transformed by ritual and ideology.
Another aspect of myth is the concept that history is written by the victors. Most myths encode real struggles over power, often involving class conflict, conquest, or domination. Myth is told from the perspective of winners. When reading a myth, one has to identify who benefits from the myth. Myth often preserves events that shaped a community's identity through ritual. Think of the instructions in the later chapters of Exodus on how the Israelites were to "remember" the story of the Exodus by reciting key elements of the story at an annual festival. It preserves real founding events but transposes them into "mythic time" that transcends actual time. Thus, reenactment of a myth renews the story for each subsequent generation. It also serves the purpose of hiding historical violence - real acts of collective killing behind a thin veil of justification or "legal fiction" (scapegoating).
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