An Archaeologist’s Awakening in Rural Greece

The year was 1982 when I embarked on what would become a defining moment in my anthropological career – my first archaeological excavation in Greece. Though I had considerable excavation experience in Britain, nothing prepared me for the cultural revelation awaiting me in the small agricultural village of Assiros, near Thessaloniki. Our team spent days meticulously counting, weighing, and classifying prehistoric pottery, then unwinding with ouzo in the excavation site’s dusty courtyard as the Mediterranean sun dipped below the horizon.

One evening, an elderly man named Mr. George passed by our site riding a donkey while his wife trudged alongside carrying a heavy sack. When one of our team members asked in broken Greek why the woman didn’t ride instead, Mr. George responded with simple logic that would haunt my intellectual pursuits for decades: “We only have one donkey.” This moment of cultural dissonance – where my British sensibilities clashed with rural Greek pragmatism – planted the seed for what would become a lifelong investigation into how human values evolve alongside energy systems.

Three Value Systems Through the Lens of Energy

Over the past 20,000 years, human societies have developed three distinct value systems corresponding to their primary means of energy extraction:

1. Forager Values (pre-agricultural societies): Characterized by relative equality (particularly in gender relations) and higher tolerance for violence, these values emerged among hunter-gatherer societies dependent on wild plants and animals.

2. Agricultural Values (post-Neolithic Revolution): Marked by strict hierarchies and lower violence tolerance, these values developed in societies relying on domesticated plants and animals. Mr. George’s worldview reflected this system – the practical necessity of maintaining a working animal took precedence over contemporary notions of gender equality.

3. Fossil Fuel Values (post-Industrial Revolution): Featuring renewed emphasis on equality (including gender equality) and extremely low violence tolerance, these values emerged alongside societies powered by coal, oil, and gas.

This framework explains why Mr. George’s actions seemed so foreign to my fossil-fuel-conditioned sensibilities. Our values weren’t just different – they represented different evolutionary stages in humanity’s relationship with energy.

From Philosophical History to Deep Description

The academic journey to understand cultural differences like my Assiros experience has followed a fascinating trajectory through Western intellectual history. Eighteenth-century “philosophical historians” like Adam Smith first proposed stages of human development, while nineteenth-century classical evolutionists attempted more systematic frameworks. By the twentieth century, anthropologists like Clifford Geertz championed “thick description” – intensive cultural interpretation focusing on local meaning rather than universal laws.

My approach synthesizes these traditions. Like the philosophical historians, I see broad patterns linking energy systems to social values. Like Geertz, I recognize the importance of cultural context – but argue we must move beyond interpretation to explanation. The key lies in recognizing that values aren’t arbitrary cultural inventions, but adaptive responses to material conditions.

The Biological and Cultural Foundations of Values

Human values emerge from a complex interplay of biological evolution and cultural adaptation. While our primate ancestors bequeathed us basic tendencies toward fairness and reciprocity, the specific expression of these tendencies varies dramatically across energy systems. Cultural evolution operates much like biological evolution – through variation, selection, and retention of adaptive traits – but at a much faster pace.

Agriculture, for instance, selected for values emphasizing hierarchy and stability because these proved most effective for maintaining irrigation systems, storing surpluses, and organizing large-scale farming. Fossil fuels, by contrast, favor more egalitarian values because industrialized societies benefit from mass education, social mobility, and consumer markets.

Testing the Theory: Values in the Modern World

The World Values Survey (WVS) provides compelling evidence for this energy-values connection. Nations with predominantly agricultural economies consistently score higher on “traditional values,” while industrialized societies trend toward “secular-rational” values. Post-industrial societies emphasize “self-expression values” even more strongly. Though cultural traditions create variations (Catholic countries differ from Confucian ones at similar development levels), the overall trajectory remains clear: as energy systems change, so do values.

The Future of Human Values

If this framework holds, we must confront two radical implications: First, no single value system can claim universal moral superiority – each represents an adaptation to specific historical conditions. Second, our current fossil fuel values will likely seem as strange to future humans as Mr. George’s values seemed to me. As we transition to post-fossil fuel energy systems (whether renewable or nuclear), we’ll likely develop new value systems better suited to those conditions.

Lessons from a Donkey and a Sack

My encounter in Assiros ultimately reveals a profound truth: human values aren’t timeless philosophical truths, but evolutionary tools. The same cognitive flexibility that allowed Mr. George’s ancestors to transition from foraging to farming, and my ancestors to adapt to industrialization, will allow future humans to develop values appropriate to their world. Recognizing this doesn’t diminish morality – it grounds our ethics in the real, material conditions of human existence.

As energy systems continue evolving, so too will our answers to life’s fundamental questions: What is fair? What is just? How should we live together? The story of human values isn’t one of linear progress toward some ideal, but of continuous adaptation to an ever-changing world – a lesson as humbling as it is enlightening, learned not in a university hall, but on a dusty Greek path behind a man, his donkey, and his wife carrying a sack.