Steve Lieb wrote:
>IMO, it appears that for a great deal of time, "raiding" like we're
>talking about seems to have been a relatively successful lifestyle (at \
>least, Caesar's Gallic Wars, the history of the attempted settlements
of >the balkans up until say 1200 or so (just to pick a number, I think
you
>get by point), the history of the pre-crusader muslim kingdoms
bordering
>"wild" areas in the mideast, etc) for quite some time for quite a large
>number of people?
In part, because Jericho and other fortified sites are usually relatively large -- small fortified places (say, a single house) are tough to hold against raiders, at least until recently, and weren't worth the effort (as you earlier suggested). So the local farms are still ripe for plucking, and scattered populations are in trouble. And the western European model of the modern village isn't true everywhere - -- villages in the Balkans tend to be pretty scattered, so they're not compact enough to fortify (and are raidable). Some places are also, as you note, too darn poor to support a population that can easily afford this without some big nasty guy on a horse (e.g., a king) forcing you to do it. (Though really, this is more regional than temporal -- there were *lots* of fortifications before the medieval period).
Also true, some of the goodies are the food in the fields and the herds, so the locals have to venture outside to protect them, which fortifications don't help with too much. So you can still raid *those*. The big sites for forts in the Balkans are the passes, where you can bushwhack raiders, armies (and merchants) rather than settlements.
There can also be just too many freakin' raiders, the perennial Balkan problem for the period you're thinking of. ("Well, that's it for the Avars. What the hell? Slavs on the horizon! Man the parapets!"). The regional cities just couldn't hold out against them when they moved in by the tens of thousands (though the big cities like Thess could), walls or no. (Plus, to mock one of MOB's favorite civilizations, the Byzantines were too busy poisoning each other and arguing about obscure religious dogma to remember to fight off the raiders. ;) Call me Gibbonesque...)
"Rational" and "logical" or not, local leaders may not *want* you to take the military step of building fortifications, since it may make it tougher for them to maintain their own control over you -- as evidenced by all the royal decrees in Western Europe banning non-royal fortifications. Open settlements are a lot more controllable, and may help to explain why some parts of Glorantha lack walls. The king might rather have all that wall-building effort lavished on his personal army, which will ride out and smite the raiders. As a *liberal* guess there might be a corrolation between the strength of royal or central authority and a lack of strong local fortifications.
As support for much of what Martin's saying about fortifications, though (and to plug an interesting and chock-full of liftable gaming material book, _Prehistoric Warfare in the American Southwest_), anthro and archeo types don't always "see" evidence of archaic fortifications -- there's a recent controversy over whether or not the Peublo Native Americans were building those big stone clusters surrounded by walls on top of mesas as (gasp!) fortifications or not. (The evidence in the book seems to be lots of places where you can find many bodies with lots of arrow damage in burned out settlements. Clue.) So there may have been a lot more fortifications, too, in many marginal and "primitive" societies than we are normally led to believe in the RW.
PWitSW's imagery of the baddies responsible for this move (the Chakan Cannible Interaction Sphere) makes from some prime gaming material. ;)
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