Graeber / Wengrow 250: "it's wrong to assume that planting seeds [...] means one is necessarily obliged to accept more unequal social arrangements"
"Any student of agrarian societies knows that people inclined to expand agriculture sustainably, without privatizing land or surrendering its management to a class of overseers, have always found ways to do so."
"Communal tenure, 'open field' principles, periodic redistribution of plots and co-operative management of pasture are not particularly exceptional and were often practiced for centuries in the same locations. The Russian mir is a famous example, but similar systems of land redistribution once existed all over Europe, from the Highlands of Scotland to the Balkans, occasionally into very recent times. The Anglo-Saxon term was run-rig or rundale."
251: "We could go on piling up the examples (the Palestinian mash'a system, for instance, or Balinese subak)
"In short, there is simply no reason to assume that the adoption of agriculture in more remote periods also meant the inception of private land ownership, territoriality, or an irreversible departure from forager egalitarianism"