Week9

All human societies collect food, it is only the ways in which they collect it that vary. Anthropologists have described four specific subsistence strategies within food collection: foraging, horticulture, pastoralism, intensive agriculture.

General Features of Foraging Societies: Foragers derive all of their food from resources that naturally occur in the environment, and in general:
1. tend to live in small communities with low population densities.
2. often have weakly expressed or developed concepts of territoriality and private ownership.
3. division of labor in foraging societies is based on age and gender, in which men hunt and women gather.
4. the economic contribution of hunting versus gathering has been a controversial issue in anthropology because of the gender specific roles they sometimes assume.
5. In some foraging societies gathering makes a greater economic contribution than hunting, and vice versa.
6. Women sometimes hunt and men sometimes gather.
7. Foraging societies tend to have a great deal of leisure time.

General Features of Horticultural Societies: Horticulture involves the growing of plants in the absence of irrigation, fertilization, or the plough. Instead, simple tools such as digging sticks are used to turn soil, plant and weed. In general:
1. Horticulturists tend to have higher food yields than foragers.
2. Population densities tend to be higher in horticultural societies.
3. Mobility is decreased over foraging societies.
4. Tend to live in semi sedentary villages.
5. The display the beginnings of social differentiation
6. An emergence of part time craft specialists, and status differences among some kin groups.

General Features of Pastoralist Societies: Pastoralists depend on the animals they grow and keep for food. Most pastoralists rely on the secondary products produced by domestic animals such as milk, cheese, butter, and yogurt, as a primary source of food. These products are also traded for food with agricultural communities and foraging societies. In general:
1. pastoralists tend to be found in areas lacking in arable land for agriculture, as well as lands prone to drought.
2. tend to be relatively nomadic, moving their herds to and from grazing areas.
3. they consist of small communities of related families.
4. are somewhat vulnerable to famine and food shortages due to the effects of disease and drought on herd animals.

General Features of Agricultural Societies: Unlike horticulturists, societies engaging in intensive agriculture make use of techniques that allow them to cultivate fields more or less permanently. This is accomplished through the use of fertilizers, irrigation features, ploughing, and composite crop planting. In general, Agricultural Societies:
1. have a high degree of craft specialization.
2. have complex forms of political organization.
3. have large differences in wealth and power between individuals, families, and communities.
4. are the most labor intensive of all subsistence strategies.
5. Are more prone to food shortages and famines than other types of subsistence strategies, because of the motivation to generate surpluses.
6. Will often plant what will produce the highest return, and not what might be more resistant to droughts, pests, etc.
7. The desire to generate high yields sometimes leads a farmer to plant one or two of the highest yielding crops, rather than diversifying crop types.

Types of Economic Production:
Anthropologists usually distinguish between four modes or types of Economic Production.
1. Domestic Mode of Production: families work the land and retail all of the products produced.
2. Tributary Mode of Production: families work someone else's land in exchange for a portion of the products they grow.
3. Industrial Mode of Production: large corporations or government institutions own the land and the means of production. Individuals work as paid laborers.
4. Post-Industrial Mode of Production: knowledge and information become currencies that are more important than capitol and equipment.

Incentives for Labor: In hunter gatherer societies and small scale horticultural societies, people produce only enough for themselves and their families. So what are the incentives for creating surpluses?
1. exchange it for items that you want or need
2. forging alliances with other individuals or groups
3. individual achievement
4. forced labor

The Distribution of Goods and Services: The term Reciprocity refers to the exchange of goods and services without the use of money. Anthropologists distinguish between three types of reciprocity:
1. Generalized Reciprocity - Exchanges are conducted without expectation of return. Usually characterizes hunter gatherer societies. Within this context, unpredictable resources are more likely to be shared than predictable ones.
2. Balanced Reciprocity - Goods and services exchanged with the anticipation of immediate return of goods and services that ate considered desirable.
3. Negative Reciprocity - involves the exchange of goods and services of unequal value.

Marshall Sahlins suggested that the type of reciprocity practiced is usually determined by kinship distance, as follows: (1) close kin = generalized reciprocity, (2) extended kin = balanced reciprocity, and (3) strangers and enemies = negative reciprocity.

The Origins of Agriculture
During the Pleistocene-Holocene transition, human beings shift from being Specialists: focusing on large big game animals, to Generalists: making more intensive use of a wider range of plant and animal resources. Intensive Agriculture began about 10,000 years ago, when human groups in areas of the Near East begin to intensify their use of specific types of plants and animals by removing them from their natural settings and placing them in artificial ones. The domestication of plants and animals was a process rather than an event. It represents a fundamental change in the relationship between humans, plants, and animals.

Early views on the origins of food production tended to treat it as an “event” rather than as a “process”. They tended to view agriculture as an invention stemming from a single individual's recognition that seeds sprouted when planted in the ground. The invention of agriculture is now seen as a process in which the relationship between plants, animals, and humans was fundamentally altered by a combination of natural and cultural processes. In general, theories relating to the origin of agriculture can be organized into four basic categories:

1. Early Evolutionary Theories - many of the earliest theories relating to the origins of food production are placed squarely within cultural evolutionary frameworks. Rather than examining the "why" or "how" aspects of food production, 18th and 19th century scholars were concerned more with properly placing such "events" into various evolutionary schemes of cultural development. As a result, the questions asked had less to do with the mechanics and the initial conditions that lead to the transition from food gathering to food producing, and more to do with whether pastoralism preceded agriculture, or vice versa.

2. Environmental/ecological Theories - In order to develop a more dynamic theory for the origins of food production, a number of anthropologists and archaeologists began to look for catalysts, or prime movers that may have triggered agriculture in past human societies.

i. Oasis Theory - V. Gordon Childe (1951) proposed that environmental deterioration had acted as a stimulus for the domestication of animals and plants in the Near East. He suggested that with the termination of the Pleistocene, there was a shift in summer rainfall patterns had resulted in the desiccation of many sub-tropical countries. In order to survive, Childe suggested that humans and animals were drawn to local oasis, separated by vast stretches of desert. Trapped within the confines of these "islands in the desert", Childe explained that symbiotic relationships would have been formed by humans and animals, eventually resulting in the domestication of animals by humans.

ii. Braidwood’s Readiness Model - Childe's Oasis Hypothesis was later tested, and rejected, by Robert Braidwood. Braidwood's work in the foothills of the Zagros Mountains of Iraq found little evidence to support Childe's assertion that significant environmental shifts had occurred at the end of the Pleistocene. Rather, Braidwood suggested that domestication and food production represented the logical outcome of a long period of association between plants, animals, and humans. He argued that as people settled into post-Pleistocene environments, they gained a greater familiarity with the behaviors of plants and animals. When people were intellectually ready, they began domestication.

3. Population Pressure & Cultural Ecology
i. Binford’s Marginal Habitat Zone Model - In a study of how post-Pleistocene human adaptations in southwest Asia, Binford (1968) developed a model in which population pressure replaced environmental stress as a mechanism for culture change. He utilized the theories of Esther Boserup who indicated that people had long recognized their ability to manipulate plants and animals and only did so when it was necessary. He also maintained that people adopted food production only when forced to do so. Binford recognized that the long periods of technological and economic stability apparent in the archaeological record contradicted the idea of continuous technological and economic advancement. The model developed by Binford states that with the termination of the Pleistocene, many groups began to exploit coastal, lakeside, and river resources such as sea mammals, mollusks, and fish. When the carrying capacities of these "core" resource areas were reached, groups were forced to "bud off" into smaller units. Binford states that inter-group competition within optimal areas eventually pushed these daughter groups into more marginal environments, where they were forced to adopt agriculture in order to survive.

ii. Flannery’s Optimal Habitat Model - To Flannery (1969), the broadening of the subsistence base at the end of the Pleistocene had more to do with the over-use of land, than it did with climatic change. When population pressure in optimal zones forced migration into marginal environments, Flannery explains that groups attempted to create new ecological "niches" to exploit. This was accomplished through the intentional relocation of plants from optimal zones into marginal areas.

iii. Cohen’s Food Crisis Theory - Cohen (1977) suggests that by 15,000 BP, human beings had managed to successfully colonize most of the world's ecological zones. As population levels continued to escalate, migration into new areas no longer became an option. Subsequently, groups began to place a serious strain on the productivity and availability of locally available resources. People responded to this apparent "food crisis" by intensifying their exploitation of secondary resources like grains and tubers. This, in turn, initiated specific genetic changes in some secondary plant species. As such, Cohen argues that further population increases eventually "pushed" people into committing themselves to agriculture.

4. Social Theories
i. Bender’s Positive Feedback Model - Barbara Bender (1978) suggests that internal social forces, rather than external environmental forces may have prompted people to switch from hunting and gathering to food production. She states that in order to minimize the risks of resource failure, hunter/gatherers often form alliances with other local and regional bands. These alliances are sustained through the social obligations held between participating individuals. Bender suggests that with the expansion of social relations and obligations between bands, a need was created for the production of food surpluses. Powerful individuals, for example, required surplus goods to legitimize their newly acquired authority.

ii. Hayden’s Competitive Feasting Model - Like Bender, Hayden (1992) suggests that agriculture arose to provide emerging high status individuals with the surpluses necessary to legitimize their newfound authority. Hayden argues that competitive feasting between high status individuals provides a motive that would explain why hunter/gatherers moved beyond the simple practice of generalized reciprocity. The desire to increase ones status is seen as triggering the need to intensify the production of foodstuffs.

5. Coevolutionary Theory
i. Anderson's Dump Heap Theory - Some plants are attracted to disturbed habitats. Since humans disturb the ground around their settlements in many different ways, certain plant species would begin to grow in these areas. People would realize the outcome of their actions and begin tilling the land on purpose.

ii. Coevolutionary Model - David Rindos's (1984) model for the origins of agriculture stresses that plant domestication was largely an unconscious, undirected process in which domesticated traits evolved in the absence of cultivation. Furthermore, the emergence of domesticates stemmed from the establishment of symbiotic, mutualistic relationships between humans and plants. Thus, plants become dependent upon people for seed dispersal, and people become dependent upon plants as food sources.

Animal Domestication
How do we identify animal domestication in the archaeological record?
1) Presence of a foreign species - the sudden appearance of a new species in an assemblage is almost always the result of human intervention.
2) Morphological Changes - a series of morphological changes, including size also occur when animals are domesticated. These differences make them quite distinctive from their previous wild forms.
3) Species Frequency - hunter gatherers will often focus on a wide variety of different large and medium animal species. As a result, the representation of species in a hunter gatherer faunal assemblage is often quite diverse. With the introduction of pastoralism and animal husbandry, however, this diversity is severely diminished.
4) Pathology - when animals get sick or injure themselves in the wild they often succumb to predators. As a result, we rarely see evidence of healed fractures in the bones of wild animals. However, when animals are held in captivity they are often protected from predation and disease by their human keepers.
5) Burials - the interment of animals in human burials can also reflect the establishment of “bonds” between animals and humans that might reflect domestication.
6) Sex and Age-Related Culling - Age profiles of domestic faunal assemblages are often different than those of wild animals in nature, and of wild animals hunted and brought back to hunter gatherer camps.

The Evolution of Civilization
All civilizations grew out of a change that began about 11,000 years ago (or about 9000 BC), when modern humans began to change the way they made their living. Instead of following a way of life based on hunting and gathering, they began to domesticate animals and plants. The shift to an agricultural way of life took thousands of years, but its impact on humanity was lasting. And by about 2,000 years ago most of the world’s people relied on agriculture for their food. Eventually, with the domestication of plants and animals, humans moved from relying on what nature provided to modifying nature to provide for themselves. Surpluses in food supply led to larger populations and the settling of towns, cities and eventually, something we call civilization.

What is Civilization?
In general terms, "civilization" implies a society "at an advanced state of intellectual, cultural and technological development, marked by advancements in the arts and sciences, including the invention of writing". While it can be debated, the term civilization can be equated with a culture which meets a number of criteria, including:

Although there are exceptions to these criteria, they are generally applicable to most civilizations (past and present).

From the archaeological remains of past civilizations, we can not only make inferences about how people made a living, and how they lived, but are also well-equipped to explain the social and cultural, as well as ideological nature of the people who lived in these kinds of places. For example, from the remains of ancient monumental architecture, like Egyptian pyramids, we can infer that the organization of labour and control of wealth were key ingredients in these civilizations. Upon closer inspection of the function of these kinds of monuments, we can further explain, that there was a great social differentiation between the individuals who were entombed in these structures - and those who built them.

The Role of Record Keeping
The development of writing and record keeping is arguably one of the most important features of civilization. Using a system of characters or images to keep track of census or taxation information is central to the organization and administration of any town, city, or state. Writing systems can also be used to document the history of a civilization by recording the dates of significant events, the names of rulers, as well as religious practices and beliefs. Record keeping, whether it is writing, or some other system, is the only way in which rulers are able to control labour and wealth generated by large populations. Rulers, for example, need to keep track of each citizen's wealth - to ensure that everyone contributes. Records for food production were needed to ensure that those who didn't farm would have enough to eat. Labour records are required to organize and pay workers.

Why did Civilization Occur?
This question is not all that different from that of domestication and the origin of agriculture, and is also, linked to increased food production. As with the development of surpluses in food production, civilizations appear in several different areas of the world - more or less at the same time. This is no coincidence. It indicates that the conditions for civilization were met in a number of places at about the same time. Like the arguments for the origins of agriculture, there have been many different explanations for how and why civilization developed. While the majority of these concepts have been discredited over the years, the one thing that they all have in common is that they reflect the social and cultural nature of the time in which they were developed.

The Beginnings of Civilization

Jericho was an ancient town in

Israel

, and is one of the world's earliest known examples of civilization. It dates back to about 9000 years ago, and may have been inhabited by as many as 3000 people over an area of about 10 acres. It's structures include two meter thick stone walls that measured up to 7 meters (22 feet) in height that were used to defend Jericho - which had economic influence from as far away as Turkey, to the Sinai Peninsula to the Red Sea. Evidence for social status suggests that this was a chiefdom-level society.