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Message: <blockquote data-quote="fusangite" data-source="post: 3584998" data-attributes="member: 7240">Fair enough. I think that's a good general criticism of D&D reasoning. However, the direction the thread ultimately took was more along the lines of Ronald Wright's idea of culture-as-technology.Except that elf myths were often romantic myths about displaced or conquered peoples. So elf society is more about how people imagined the people they replaced having lived. The culture of the myths' creators is refracted through their own mythology about the societies they understood themselves as having conquered (which may or may not have been closely tied to the societies they actually displaced).This is only true if you see the Celts who urbanized and Romanized as ceasing to be Celts. But I would argue that the Empire of the Gauls episode weighs against the idea. People like Gregory of Tours were Gauls and Romans. Rural parts of cultures change slower than the urban parts. So the moment you conflate a cultural identity with ruralness, you create the illusion of a static culture.Agreed. People often see technology as a proxy for scientific knowledge rather than the sign of a relative labour shortage.Spot on! All the stuff of yours I just omitted from the quote I agree with too.This did come up later in the thread. I tried to pull mmadsen into a discussion about disease but it didn't go anywhere. Suffice to say, the ancient and medieval worlds had a pretty consistent demographic rule: the less urbanized your society, the better its birth rate. Cities were killer places that would have shrunk if not for constant immigration.Agreed. Check out my posts about California and the Northwest Coast.Tacitus, a helpful informant, cannot be taken at face value. Much of the rhetorical purpose of his text about Germans was more a criticism of the loss of the citizen-soldier ethic in Roman society. But I agree with you about the importance of wild game in sustaining the societies. Let's also not forget fish!Agreed. The Barbarians had more participatory structures. But participatory <> democracy. Celtic and Viking societies were oligarchic rather than monarchic. But the bottom rung majority in these societies were just as shut out as that rung was in the imperial despotisms. (Except, arguably, for the citizenries of Rome and Byzantium who were slightly more dealt-in).  And was the first to allow female suffrage!16th century Spanish law was pretty similar. But nobody's ever tried to argue that the society that gave us the Inquisition was a big proponent of female equality.Anyway, I agreed with your post overall but couldn't resist a little nitpicking.</blockquote>

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