Prehistory of Great Kirav: Difference between revisions

Dark historians generally identify the homeland of the Ice Age Levantine migrants with the mythological concept of ''Demomap''. Although variously interpretable from the oral traditions of Coscivian and [[Urom]] communities as a place, time, or abstract state of being, Kapuśitic and Cuomo-Passaic-speaking peoples present ''Demomap'' as the intermediate location of their ancestors between their emergence from the Shadow Realm and their arrival in ''Kam'', interpretable either as the physical world at large or Great Kirav specifically.<ref>In the narratives of Transkiravian-speaking peoples such as the [[Kir people|Kir]], ''Demomap'' is equated to ''Ixnaī'', though the mythological significance of ''Ixnaī'' is somewhat different.</ref> As such, the hypothesised pre-migration prehistory of the proto-Kiravians is known as the 'Demomappic Period'. The proto-Kiravians of the Demomappic Period are associated with a particular lithic technique (examples of which are portrayed here) with examples known from both [[Ilánova]] and finds in [[Kubagne]], [[Yonderre]] and [LOCATION], [[Caergwynn]], cited as the strongest archæological evidence of the iceberg-hopping hypothesis. During the Demomappic Period, the proto-Kiravians are currently believed to have interacted economically and reproductively with the [[Packer Culture]] of the [[Vandarch]] Basin but remained culturally distinct therefrom.

During the Late Ice Age, the {{wp|continental ice sheet}} that had previously covered most of the continent contracted to the island continent's central basin, flanked by the Aterandic, Ximantav, and West Highlands ranges.  

The Archæic Era encompasses the time from the conclusion of the Akai Collapse to the beginning of the Formative Era ca. 5700 BC characterised by the gradual adoption and proliferation of agriculture and pastoralism among the simple tribal groups that would remain the most consequential socio-political collectivities on the continent for millennia to come.

At the dawn of agriculture, certain patterns of social organisation had already settled into prevailing norms across the island continent. Tribes, in the strict sense of the word, had replaced lower-level band societies in all but the most marginal and inhospitable locales. Kiravian tribes were structured according to {{wp|segmentary lineage}}s, most of which were already strictly {{wp|patrilineal}} and {{wp|patrilocal}} as all Coscivian peoples are today, though a minority (now conserved only in a few ''[[urom]]'' tribes) were matrilineal and/or matrilocal. At this stage it is presumed that all or most tribes permitted {{wp|cross-cousin marriage}}, though the extent to which it may have been ''preferred'' (as in later stages of both Coscivian and ''urom'' societies) is not yet known. Due to the segmentary lineage reckoning of kinship, the demographic size of a typical Kiravian tribe during the early agricultural age is somewhat imprecise, but it can be estimated that the largest tribal orders of stable political (that is, military) significance claimed common descent no further back than five generations (to a single great-great-great-great-grandfather) and probably included between 1,000 and 3,000 people. However, the everyday lives of early agrarian Kiravians would have been lived largely within the confines of autonomous village communities within a larger tribe, with such villages comprising between 50 and 400 people. By this point, prehistoric Kiravians were actively cultivating potato and crisp-potato, and keeping swine, yet there is little evidence of major forest clearance for agriculture. {{wp|Pollen analysis}} suggests mostly small-scale clearance to enlarge natural clearings in the primæval Kiravian forests. The short-term nature of the settlements suggested by a paucity of archæological remains of permanent structures comports with the lack of evidence for large-scale clearance, suggesting that during this period of Kiravian prehistory there were no communities large enough to require a large area of cleared cropland to satisfy their subsistence needs. It has been argued that the overall lack of houses points to a quite mobile society dominated by {{wp|shifting cultivation}}. Later, Prehistoric Kiravians developed of {{wp|slash-and-burn}} agriculture, using {{wp|Africa (Toto song)|fire}} in controlled burns to fertilise the mediocre soil covering most of the continent with the rich nutrients accumulated in its thick forest cover. As such, villages would periodically migrate within a localised ambit in search of virgin land as the cinder-enriched soils of one area were depleted. Stress on the land and the contraction of these ambits due to growing populations and the generational fission of villages is believed to have contributed to the period of heightened violence known as the Age of Blood.

 

Early agricultural Kiravians became embroiled in a state of endemic warfare, not unlike that which has been documented among other relatively high-density simple farming societies elsewhere. Oral literary sources speak little about the causes of this phenomenon, but comparative studies of tribal societies with high rates of endemic warfare at similar stages of development and with economies similar in scale and mode of production to those which have been reconstructed for early agricultural Kiravia suggest that swine raids and swine theft were major drivers of conflict, was well as the abduction of women and the imperative to exact revenge for such transgressions. Ecological anthropologists theorise that stress on the land from intensive slash-and-burn cultivation and the contraction of tribal ambits due to growing populations and the generational fission of villages was a key driver of conflict.

==Formative Era (5700 BC - 3200 BC)==

===Neolithic Éorsa===

[[File:Old scatness 2.jpg|thumb|Social innovations on Éorsa (now [[Ilánova]]) allowed for more permanent Neolithic settlements to take root.]]

Initially, the same conditions that prevailed on the Kiravian mainland (constant endemic warfare between small, tribal groups practising shifting cultivation) were also the case on the offshore island known classically as Éorsa and now more commonly called by its Gaelic-derived name, [[Ilánova]]. However, sometime around 6000 BC, developments took place on Ilánova that allowed its inhabitants to break the cycle of endemic violence that plagued the mainland and advance to a higher stage of social and technological capability.

Virtually every macro-region of Great Kirav, along with [[Koskenkorva]], has claimed for itself the distinction of having hosted the geographic nucleus of the [[Lawful Commonwealth]], but among those scholars who accept its historicity, the most commonly held position is that it was located on the island now known as [[Ilánova]].

The rise of the [[Coscivian Emperor|Emperors]], who imposed the [[Four Laws and Four Rites]], forming a tribal confederacy capable of overwhelming any individual hostile tribe and also capable of maintaining peace and cohesion within itself, opened an exit from the Age of Blood for the tribes of Éorsa. The population growth brought on by decreased mortality from warfare enabled the Lawful Tribes to expand territorially into larger (though still thoroughly tribal) political-territorial units, and enhanced the military strength of the Commonwealth as a whole. Using the traditional narratives as a source, it would appear that the key military advantage ensuring the security of the Lawful Commonwealth was its primitive form of {{wp|collective security}}: Lawful tribes were safe from attack than Lawless tribes because they could rely upon neighbouring Lawful tribes for assistance in a simple threat environment wherein numerical superiority was sufficient to guarantee victory. The deterrent effect of collective security allowed the Lawful tribes to become more populous as they were spared the extremely high death rates from warfare that afflicted the Lawless tribes, providing additional fighting-age men that galvanised the deterrent effect. The Lawful Commonwealth would eventually include most of the tribal territories on Ilánova, and it is possible that some nearby areas of the Kiravian mainland (i.e. coastal [[Harma]]) may have somehow participated in or imitated its model.

The peace brought on by the expansion of the Lawful Commonwealth allowed for the advancements of the High Neolithic to take pleace earlier on Éorsa than on the mainland, including the first stone settlements since the Society II culture and the intensive cultivation of {{wp|polyculture}}s with {{wp|crop rotation}}.  

It follows that the Lawful Commonwealth could only be defeated ''{{wp|Africa|in toto}}'' by an adversary if a countervailing tribal alliance was able to assemble more fighters, or if the Commonwealth itself became unable to maintain its own cohesion. The available sources from {{wp|oral literature}} maintain that the latter happened: After the death of the Emperor Akˣɛ, a struggle for succession ensued between five different claimants, each with the backing of different cohorts of tribal allies. The civil war - if it can be called that - resulting from this dispute is said to have ended inconclusively, with each faction diminished into a small splinter confederacy under the leadership of its preferred Emperor. There is no clear archæological evidence to confirm nor controvert this narrative. Tradition maintains - and later history would appear to confirm - that even after the splintering of the Lawful Commonwealth, members of the former Lawful Tribes "carried the Law with them to the edges of the Sea," taken to mean that they would go on to emigrate from Éorsa and establish new Lawful settlements along the coast of mainland Great Kirav and in Suderavia-Levantia.

==== Back-Migrations Mainland Kirav and Levantia ====

The maritime technology introduced to Kiravia by the Ʒ-Q Invasion (or Itaho-Atrassic invasion) spread fairly rapidly around and up the coasts of Great Kirav, with their adoption by littoral peoples continuing along the eastern seaboard and from there on to Éorsa. Here, these technologies enabled large-scale (by the standards of the era) outward migration from Éorsa in two direction:

In the first direction, back toward the Kiravian mainland, Ʒ-Q nautical technology allowed at least two waves of back-migration, one which is believed to have carried the Trans-Kiravian language family, and another which is believed to have carried the Austro-Kiravian language family. Trans-Kiravian speakers also may have sailed northward to [[Koskenkorva]]. The landings of these Éorsan navigators are believed to correlate with centres of megalithic construction on the mainland ([[Prehistory_of_Great_Kirav#Megalithic_Coscivians|see below]]).

 

In the second direction, toward northern [[Levantia]], Ʒ-Q nautical technology allowed for the resumption of contact between Kiravia and the lands from whence the Ice Age settler ancestors of Kiravians had originally come, quite likely for the first time since 18,500 BC. These back-migrations were directed mainly toward what is now western [[Faneria]], [[Covina]], [[Suderavia]], and (controversially) [[Wintergen]]. At least some of these back-migrations must post-date the establishment of the Lawful Commonwealth, because they carried the Four Laws and Four Precepts and the rudiments of the proto-ethnic Coscivian identity with them, beginning the history of the [[Mainland Coscivians]].  

 

Back-migration is estimated to have begun around 6750 BC and continued to trickle on thereafter, transferring important agricultural breakthroughs such as and buckwheat cultivation to the mainland, as well as advanced apicultural techniques adapted to Boreal bee species. Many of the back-migrants may have left to flee the constant violence of the Age of Blood. With the arrival of the technologically sophisticated [[Fenni]] in the Vandarch 6000-5000 BC, regular trade was established between Great Kirav and the Mainland, and would later accelerate as the Fenni became well-established in the region and as the Age of Blood wound down in Great Kirav.

 

The Age of Blood drew down as rates of endemic violence declined. Orthodox historians attribute this to the {{wp|Diffusion of innovations|diffusion of norms}} that had proven advantageous to the Lawful Commonwealth outward beyond its direct sphere of influence, even continuing after its demise, as the Great Law Chant states (see above), enabling the formation of other higher-order tribal confederacies and the pacification of larger pockets of territory, as well as the gradual abandonment of ultraviolent practices by tribes outside of these confederacies. More critical historians question whether the Lawful Commonwealth was truly the originator of the Four Rites and Four Precepts, or merely one of many adoptor societies of constructive innovations that arose elsewhere. What ''is'' certain is that multiple neolithic polities would claim the legacy of the Lawful Commonwealth, adopting its foundational narratives to legitimise their own rule and absorbing its laws as part of their own culture and custom.

 

The end of the Age of Blood allowed for the formation of more permanent settlements and larger-scale (though still thoroughly tribal) social organisation. Permanent settlements featuring stone structures reappeared in large numbers for the first time since Society II.

 

By this time, region of [[South Kirav]], cradle of the millet-growing, hog-rearing [[Voskresen culture]], had seen the rise of multi-crop agriculture as new crops and farming techniques diffused down into the region: Potato cultivation expanded southward down the Farravonian Central Valley via the Madar River, ''Elymus'' had spread down the Issyr, and honey-buckwheat agriculture had expanded southward across the eastern coastal plain. As crops grew more diverse and moved downstream, Neolithic Southern farmers increasingly needed to collaborate at a greater scale in order to manage their increasingly complex agriculture. This need for higher-order collaboration to facilitate water management and seasonal crop rotation predictably invited the consolidation of larger settlements and more complex modes of social organisation resting on a more elabourate social contract than had previously existed among simpler farming societies. This multi-crop agriculture extended the growing season, bolstered yields, and reduced the frequency and devastation of crop failures, eventually resulting in surpluses and a takeoff in population growth.

A separate megalithic society, the Adratic, emerged in the inland Texta Valley around the same time as the proto-Coscivian megalith builders, though it would appear that the Adrates began megalithic construction independently of any contact with the coastal megalithic cultural centres. The old Adratic tongue is currently believed to have been a {{wp|language isolate}} ancestral to later Classical Adratic and Modern Adratic, the latter of which is still spoken by small populations today.  There is an abundance of archæological evidence demonstrating that the Old Adrates were proto-Sarostivist devotees of the Divine Moon, like many other Kiravian peoples of this time, including the Megalithic Coscivians. Unlike the Coscivians, however, the Adrates did not observe the Rites and Precepts and had not restructured their ancestor worship around the Emperor. It is known from later Classical Adratic writings that the Adrates believed that they were creations of the Divine Moon and had previously lived on the Moon, and descended directly from the Moon to ''Kam'' (either Earth or specifically Great Kirav).

It is unclear where copper-smelting first appeared in Kiravia. It may have been independently discovered in more than one location, or been transmitted to Kiravia from Faneria. What is clear is that copper was rapidly adopted by most societies on the island continent with the capability to operate the requisite artisanal mines. The establishment and expansion of interregional trade networks appears to have played a vital role in the spread of Æneolithic technology. The exchange of copper, finished metal goods, and raw materials facilitated the diffusion of metallurgical knowledge across different regions. The construction of megalithic monuments and the expansion of megalithic techniques would continue and accelerate with the adoption of copper tools and weapons by the megalith-builders.

In the western highland civilisation, copper axeheads gained currency as a type of currency and idk I am out of ideas.

The transition to from prehistory to [[Ancient history of Kiravia|ancient history]] is marked by the emergence of the First Dynasties and their consolidation of the first true states, and culminates with the conquest of the Adratic civilisation by Emperor Xoagus I, beginning the First Empire. Methodological and academic justifications for this convention include the nature of predynastic proto-writing and writing: Although writing was known to the Coscivian and Celtic druids during the Megalithic, its use was ritual and monumental, and no long-form written texts suitable for use as historical rather than archæological source material.