Lord, Barry. Art & Energy. Washington, DC: The AAM Press, 2014.  [[2020-06-08]] # FIRE CULTURE Zoroastrianism is the oldest organized religion. It holds fire sacred. Prometheus' name means forethought or foreknowledge. First discrete hearth was found in Kebara Cave in Israel, and dated to 60,000 BP. Stone tallow lamps made cave art possible. Cave art was made in lamplight, and the contours of the rock surface were chosen to give the paintings a dynamism from the flicker of fire. Fire also allowed the discovery of the arts of ceramics, metallurgy and glass. Pottery may have originated from weaving. After making baskets, humans may have found that coating the baskets with a layer of clay helped to retain the contents. Then perhaps when cooking over a fire, they found that the clay was hardened. Clay shards with a hatched imprint suggest this. [[2020-06-22]] Ceramics arrived about two thousand years after agriculture. Ceramics allowed people to store surplus agricultural output - grain, oil, wine, etc. It became associated with the storage, control and distribution of surpluses. The fire crafts were the first to establish humans as artists and inventors. Through the invention of the kiln, forge and furnace; and through the creation of new materials such as bronze. # Co-operation Survival requires energy. Co-operation vastly increased our energy efficiency. # Slavery Genghis Khan had to serve as a slave early on in his life. Nevertheless, he embraced the values of his time, because slavery was one of the dominant sources of energy. It was only with the advent of coal as a new source of energy that abolitionists were able to convince people to move away from slavery. If coal had never been discovered, it is possible that the world would still run on slavery today. Coal introduced wage labour as a substitute to slavery. Employers realized they needed to educate their workers, so for the first time universal education was introduced, something that slave-owning societies never had. As it is, there are still modern versions of slavery. The unpaid labour of women and children is an example. The resistance to give up slavery is a foreshadowing of our current resistance in giving up fossil fuels, despite knowing its negative consequences.