The Intimate Bond by Brian Fagan Page A

and do well in areas with uniform grass coverage, which makes herding them easier. Goats consume branches, leaves, and other vegetation some distance off the ground with ardent voracity. A combination of both sheep and goats could have devastating effects on the landscape, as they eat from dawn to dusk with only short pauses for digestion. So managing them carefully soon became a paramount concern. We can only imagine the ecological damage wrought on fragile, semiarid landscapes by uncontrolled grazing, which must have become apparent within short order to herders living in denuded landscapes.
    In a sense, one’s sheep flock was an animal community, not accessible to everyone, as was the case with game, but managed and owned by an individual, a family, or a kin group. Most early flocks or herds cannot have been much larger than a few dozen beasts, given the small size of villages, the limited number of shepherds to manage the animals, and the scarcity of winter fodder. In order to protect one’s flock, one always lived with the realities of management: the need to keep constant watch when the animals were out during the day, to establish times for milking them, and to guard corrals carefully during the night hours.
    Like growing crops, herding goats and sheep is a matter of carefully managed routines—overseeing seasons of breeding and giving birth, rotating grazing so pastures are never denuded, protecting the beastsagainst predators, culling surplus animals before winter or for important feasts. Behind this endless rhythm—dictated in large part by the passage of the seasons and, in warmer climates, by the availability of water and graze—were practical strategies that continued with virtually no change through thousands of years, regardless of the rise and fall of societies and civilizations. Human life revolved around the life and death of the animals, unexpected diseases that decimated flocks or herds, and the ever-changing demands of kin and social obligation. Simple, utterly pragmatic, and refined by countless generations of experience, subsistence herders, whatever their animals and wherever they lived, relied on practical experience when it came to their beasts. England’s Fengate sheep farmers of thirty-five hundred years ago provide dramatic proof. 1
    Fengate and the Realities of Sheepherding
    Eastern England, summer, 1500 BCE . The rising sun casts long shadows an hour after dawn. Light mist hovers near the ground, soon to vanish in the face of warm sunlight. Another long, hot day lies ahead for the herd boys clad in skin cloaks. Their charges huddle together in the byre, mothers and growing lambs crowded by the narrow gateway. One of the youngsters opens the hurdle. The flock pushes forward as the other herd boy urges them gently with soft calls; a dog hovers nearby. The sheep follow their leader, as they always do, to the small pasture, a familiar place where they know they can feed comfortably. As the sun sets hours later, the boys will steer the beasts back to the safety of the homestead in a routine that has never changed over many generations.
    Francis Pryor, both an archaeologist and a sheep farmer, has investigated Fengate, a thirty-five-hundred-year-old sheep farming landscape in the low meadows and wetlands of the Fens, in eastern England, near the cathedral city of Peterborough. He believes that the ancient sheep farmers lived amid a “landscape of the mind,” a dynamic landscape peopled with the deeds of ancestors and the symbolic associations thatpopulated fields and meadows with benign and hostile spirits, with the unpredictable forces of the supernatural world. Theirs was also a “working landscape,” an ever-changing environment that encompassed both physical features such as ditches and hedgerows and intangibles such as the behavior of sheep, herding dogs, and cattle.
    People modified the working landscape. They repaired hedges, deepened and maintained