We're thinking of collecting (a part of) the acorn harvest this fall and trying to make acorn polenta. You need to peel the acorns, crush the acorns, leach the acorns (at least four times over eight hours) in order to remove tannins and other things, and then bake the mush.
If our blender can't handle acorns, the project is clearly a non-starter...
>
>More crucially, many anthropologists say that those groups working with
>neolithic technology (with tribal rather than Aztec-type social relations)
>had an abundance of leisure compared to us. The North American Indians seem
>to have had this. Though of course they lacked in-door plumbing and
>resistance to European diseases.
We can agree that Aztec-type social relations are best avoided...
My reading is that in hunter-gatherer societies the *men* appear to have lots of leisure (also a high death rate from intramural violence--a hazard of perhaps 1/3 of one percent per year [?] among the !Kung?). My reading of the anthropology is that *women* seem to spend much more time in work that strikes me as mind-numbingly boring and repetitive...
Brad DeLong