Tier 1 — Foothold

This tier is where you become sedentary, which is what makes everything above it possible: you cannot own a kiln, a granary or a library if you have to carry it. It is also where the disease burden inverts — settlement concentrates human waste near human water, and sanitation stops being optional.

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Foothold

Neolithic Month 3 – Year 3 ≥ 12+ people

Convert from taking calories out of the landscape to putting them in. Stop moving.

Energy used: about 12,000 kcal per person per day, Cook's primitive agricultural stage (5000 BC) · where civilization stands

Binding constraint. The binding constraint is the first harvest. Between clearing ground and eating from it there is a gap of six to eighteen months during which the group is still living on foraged food while spending its labour on something that pays nothing yet. Groups fail here by planting too late, planting too little, or eating the seed stock in the hungry month before harvest.

A 1650 sundial. Knowing the date is what makes planting on time possible.

t1-calendar

Read the year

Know when to plant, without being told.

Food Guide ×4

Burnt clearing in northern Thailand — ground opened, and fertility released in one go.

t1-clear

Open ground and hold fertility

Turn wild land into a field that does not lose its fertility in five years.

Food Guide ×5BuildSheet

Ripe wheat. Calories that store, from a crop you can save seed from.

t1-staples

Plant staples

Grow enough storable calories to stop foraging.

Food Guide ×3Build ×2Sheet

Split fish drying on racks. Preservation is the difference between a harvest and a year of food.

t1-preserve

Preserve the harvest

Still be eating in March what you grew in August.

Food Guide ×4Build ×2Sheet ×4

Dried maize (left) and the same maize after simmering and steeping in lime water (right): swollen, softened, skins loosened so they rub off. Only the right-hand kernels release their niacin to the body.

t1-nutrition

Prevent deficiency disease

Keep a farming group from sickening on its own staple.

Health Guide ×2

Cleaning teeth with a chewing stick: the end is chewed until its fibres splay into a brush, then worked along the teeth and the gum line. The used end is cut off and a fresh one chewed.

t1-teeth

Teeth: prevent decay, and catch the abscess that spreads

Keep teeth through a starch-heavy diet, and recognise the dental infection that kills.

Health

Cattle on summer pasture — traction, milk, manure and stored wealth on four legs.

t1-animals

Livestock

Convert grass you cannot eat into food, fibre, fertiliser and power.

Food Guide ×3Sheet ×2

Building a cob wall by hand: subsoil, straw and water, laid in lifts.

t1-shelter

Permanent shelter

Build something that lasts thirty years, from what is under your feet.

Shelter Guide ×3Build ×4Sheet ×11

Flood heights on a pole beside the Balonne River at St George, Queensland: the 1890 mark stood until 2010, 2011 and 2012 went higher.

t1-site

Choose the ground

Settle where water lasts the dry season, floods cannot reach the floors, the ground drains and the wind carries smoke away.

Settlements Guide ×2

A hewn-log cabin on a stone foundation, with a shake roof and projecting eaves. The stones lift the bottom logs clear of the ground and the splash.

t1-dwelling

Plan the house: sun, air, smoke and damp

Before the first footing is dug, a plan drawn to scale fixes where the fire and its smoke go, how many people sleep in each room, the wall weight for the climate, the house's turn to the winter sun, the overhang for its latitude, the openings for a through-draught, the floor height, and where the animals and the latrine stand.

Shelter Guide