ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates early peasant regimes, from forest agriculture to the first village societies and early state-like polities. Agrarian civilizations created a wide variety of foundational myths about the invention, or more aptly, the gift of herding and farming, about the conflict between agriculture, culture and nature and about the benevolence of Gods who watch over the earth’s fertility and nature’s gifts. The expansion of forest farming became the main incentive for population growth until the first post-forest agrarian societies. The first peasant regimes were based on forest exploitation by practices of temporary cultivation of one to three years, alternating with long-term wooded idling. From its centers of origin, agriculture spread to cultivatable forest environments through systems of slash and burn. Societies based on agriculture facilitated vaster communal units. This triggered profound changes in social relations, interactions and customs. Peasant villages as a new way of life slowly spread across the Fertile Crescent as from 10,000 BCE.
