Chapter 7 Flashcards
What is culture?
Helps humans survive, but is also a source of freedom
What are cultural traditions?
Arise out of imagination and cultural experimentation with the material world
What is entrenched?
Can be passed down and affect our future actions
When did we stop hunting a gathering as a main source of food?
about 10,000 years ago
What is new ecological settings?
Earth’s changing climate
What are ecological niches?
an organism actively changes its environment or a new environment
What is domesticate
Plants and animals is a form of niche construction:
- Reproduction (interfering with by human actions)
- Human action (change local environmental settings)
What caused sedentism?
Settling in one location, became increasingly common for farmers
-Wild plants (wheat, were transformed through domestication)
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What is domestication of animals?
challenging to see archaeologically, but can be indicated by:
- Animals (outside their natural range)
- Physical changes(animal shape and size)
- Abrupt increase (animal numbers in one location)
- Increased numbers of males killed of meat
What are the six stages of animal domestication? (start with the the beginning)
- Random hunting
- Controlled hunting
- Herd following
- Loose herding
- Close hearing
- Factory farming
What is Broad-spectrum foraging?
One theory that views domestication as directly related to climate change
- End of the Ice Age enabled more secure hunting, fishing, and gathering,
- Population grew and became sedentary
- Stress on resources led some to domesticate wild plants and animals
What is competition?
Local groups of dominance could have spurred domestication
- Feasting (exchange might have increased demands for food)
- Land (use would have increased)
- Development (food production followed)
What are social factors?
Competitive feasting is difficult to see archaeologically
Three areas of the Americas plant and animal domestication.
- Mesoamerica (maize ‘corn’ and squash)
- South America (manioc, potatoes, beans, quinoa, llamas)
- Eastern U.S (goose-foot, marsh elder, sunflowers, and squash
Why did people never go back to foraging?
- Land was no longer freely available
- Populations grew
- Diseases were more readily spread
- Surplus production of food became possible
- Social stratification and social complexity increased
What is egalitarian social relations?
seen in early farming and herding societies
-No great differences were seen in wealth, prestige, or power
non-complex societies should not be seen as “simple”
What is social complexity
Arose as social organization became stratified
What is increasing differences?
access to wealth prestige or power
What is Surplus production?
Few individuals becomes evident
-More food than bare minimum needed
What is occupational specialization?
contributed to social stratification
What are complex societies?
- Large population
- Extensive division of labor
- Occupational specialization
- Social stratification
What are classes?
- Ranked groups within hierarchically stratified complex societies
- Defined primarily in terms or wealth, occupation, or other economic criteria
What is the evidence of complex societies?
- Monumental architecture (temples or pyramids)
- Elaborate burials
- Artifacts (concentrations that indicate occupational specialization)
- Regional settlement (at least three levels of hierarchies)
What is Prime movers or single factors?
Developed to explain the single cause factor rise of complex societies:
- Domestication (supposedly gave people free time to invent complex social rules)
- Irrigation (dry areas that required a complex bureaucracy to develop and manage complex canal systems
- Population pressure (growing population that led to the rise of leaders to manage the populations)
- Social conflict
What is Robert Carneiro’s theory?
- Environmental Circumscription (refers to the lack of new lands for people to cultivate)
- Population Pressure (caused stress on the land available for cultivation)
- Warfare (conflict between neighboring villages increased when operating together, these factors led to the rise of the states
What is Early complex societies?
- Periods of political unity alternated with those lacking political integration
- Complicate our understanding of complex societies
