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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James Heard" data-source="post: 3860305" data-attributes="member: 7280">I broke it apart then began working on the beginning, but didn't finish. I put in "harvestables" because not everything people grow is a food product, and I really had no idea other than what you'd put in for the aunt managing the farm. Since there was only one person working the plot I assumed though, that it might be a niche crop of some sort or solely for the family. If someone was a "real farmer" they'd likely have a ton of kids if at all possible so that they weren't relying on the rest of the community at harvest time. That's probably the case right up until you might get to real communal plots that everyone was responsible for, but that's8 one of those nasty things that people are biting their tongues about. It might be the same with sheep and maybe even cows, since we're unlikely to raise dedicated feed crops they're either free ranging or there's a tax of sorts to keep them up since wool is another of those "everyone should pitch in" things - I'm sure there are folks today that can blaze away with shearing, but we don't even have iron tools and there's no guarantee that every farming implement or common tool is anything other than simple copper or tin (because they're going to wear out quickly anyways, so why use the more complex bronze making process for them?)It's also possible that agriculture might only "seem" communal, when in fact the large plots of land would be claimed by the various tribal elders and 'wealthier" families, with the rest of the town working the land "for them" but in a way that produced more of an excess of barterage rather than an actual class of wealthy landowners that can afford to sit around and ..idle, I guess. I'm not sure why that sort of system would have formed, since there's no dangerous external threats yet pushing everyone towards a peasant class - though I imagine there could simply be a large divide between the social status allocated and benefits for the spirit talkers in general?Anyways some ideas. BTW, I object to the notion that a village of less than a thousand people isolate by long distances from any other people wouldn't come up with at least some bits and pieces of communal properties and responsibilities. Like I said, I can't imagine that everyone in the village isn't at least a little bit related unless all of people showed up less than a generation ago from somewhere else. That means that even in what we'd call estate issues, who gets what when the parents die and all that, would be pretty hopelessly complex without some sort of general understanding of common ownership for the common welfare. That's something that will surely change as the community grows and diversifies, but when you're a one horse town (so to speak) no one grows any older fighting over the horse when they can work it out to where everyone gets to use that one horse. It's not "mumbo jumbo" it's simply my assessment of how you'd get some use out of that council of elders thing and keep closely knit, small communities with limited resources from being any more obscenely limited than they would be otherwise. Modeling our little community on ancient Greece only gets you so far. Without wild tribes of other Greeks surrounding us, really crappy land for a lot of agriculture, etc. the Greek system just doesn't make much sense. Even the northern European tribes don't quite make the exact mark, because we're so isolated and the spirit marks make for easy going in a lot of ways. But we seemed to be described as a transition hunter-gather culture in some sort of Middle European/North American-esque plain. Presumably the fact that everyone in town doesn't hunt or raise grains means that we're pretty good at it. The fact that we live on a river but apparently don't live off of the fishing in the river suggests that we've got crappy boats or some cultural aversion to fish ("Boar spirit says that shrimp are icky!") I don't know if we've got bricks yet, but river mud probably is worked into a lot of our construction for insulation. That's good, because it means we probably aren't using cow dung and grass to do it. Yay!Anyways, my cold meds are finally kicking back in so I'm going to see if I can't curl up and be miserable. Excuse my long rambling post? I'll be interested to see which way Zurai decides on how this all goes.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" /> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agriculture_of_ancient_Greece" target="_blank">Agriculture of Ancient Greece on Wikipedia</a><a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=8jr1ajfiXcoC&pg=PP1&dq=European+Societies+in+the+Bronze+Age&ei=0ewmR47rJpCg6wLBlZlB&sig=Gx8xgDbbABAwK9EHelH5HE5EAb8" target="_blank">European Societies in the Bronze Age</a><a href="http://www.clannada.org/culture_development.php" target="_blank">The Significance of Agriculture From the Neolithic Era Through the Bronze Age</a></blockquote>

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