Farming societies without calendars

Question

Were there ever any farming societies without a calendar?

For example, the Egyptians had a calendar to help them know when to plant and when to harvest. The ancient Greeks had a calendar, as did the Romans. Were there ever any societies that lived by farming (as opposed to pastoralism or hunting/gathering) without a calendar to keep track of the parts of the year?

Answer 1

One example would be the Amondawa who are a group of indigenous peoples of Brazil. The Amondawa are a sedentary group that utilize various forms of hunting fishing and agriculture to provide for their community, yet according to researchers the Amondawa lack an "abstract concept of time."

The University of Portsmouth and the Federal University of Rondonia in Brazil have hypothesized that the lack of the time concept arises from the lack of "time technology" - a calendar system or clocks - and that this in turn may be related to the fact that their number system is limited in detail and only goes up to four.

Amondawa seasons are decided by weather, the changing landscape and by the rhythm of agriculture itself. The irony being that instead of agricultural activities being performed by a season designated by "time", agriculture is an integral part of what actually determines the seasons.

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The Amondawa were first "discovered" by anthropologists in 1986 and according to recent studies the Amondawa language has no word for "time", or indeed of time periods such as "month" or "year".

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Source: Amondawa tribe lacks abstract idea of time, study says

By Jason Palmer, Science and Technology Reporter
BBC News | Science & Environment

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Prof Sinha and his team, including a linguist and anthropologist, spent eight weeks with the Amondawa researching how their language conveys concepts like "next week" or "last year". There were no words for such concepts, only divisions of day and night and rainy and dry seasons.

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Source: Amazonian tribe has no calendar and no concept of time

By Richard Alleyne, Science Correspondent
The Telegraph | Science News

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Research team's collective article:

When Time is not Space: The social and linguistic construction of time intervals and temporal event relations in an Amazonian culture.

Article appears in Language and Cognition, 3(1): 137-169.

By:

Chris Sinha (University of Portsmouth)
Vera da Silva Sinha (University of Portsmouth)
Jörg Zinken (University of Portsmouth)
Wany Sampaio (Federal University of Rondônia)

Answer 2

Depends where you live.

If you are near the equator then it's warm and sunny all year round and any crops you can grow will grow whenever you plant them and you harvest them when they are ready.

As you go slightly further north you have distinct periods when it will be too cold to too wet to plant and you need to know when these arrive. This doesn't need a calender, when it gets warm you plant. Even if you depend on the Nile flooding you don't necessarily need a calender, at least for a small population, when the river rises your crops get watered - great. As the population increases you need to plan for this, have drainage channels cut and seedlings ready, then it makes sense to have a calender.

As you get much further north you need to plant some crops before the spring, so you need to know that it's going to stop freezing in 2 months - then it becomes more important to know that it's midwinter rather than just a cold day in october.