### L1403 agriculture in Aegean region was very uncertain > Living permanently on the Cyclades was never easy, for survival depended on diversifying one’s crops among carefully selected microenvironments. Barley, wheat, and pulses were staples, while goats and sheep thrived on rugged island slopes. Olives and vines became important crops later, when they were widely traded commodities, but almost certainly not in earlier millennia. The uncertainty of the Aegean agricultural year meant that storage of foods of all kinds, including animals on the hoof, was of great importance, a process that must have involved sharing among neighboring communities and perhaps even between one island and another. Unlike mainland farmers, islanders could not fall back on a cushion of reliable wild plant foods or game like fallow deer. The realities of daily life meant that most island communities were small and widely dispersed over generally rugged island terrain. Populations were tiny, to the point that people in the Cyclades were a scarce resource. Few islands attained self-sufficient populations and marriage networks of about three hundred to five hundred people. There were many more people living in a single early Mesopotamian city such as Uruk, one of the earliest urban settlements in the world in the fourth millennium B.C.E., than in the entire Cyclades. Inevitably, then, there was a high degree of interdependence among the islands, for exchange of food and other commodities and mobility were the only long-term survival strategies. - [[Beyond the Blue Horizon by Brian Fagan#L1403 agriculture in Aegean region was very uncertain|View in Vault]]