Food Production Flashcards
Most of the worlds major food plants and animals were domesticated well before _______
2000 BC
Which kind of society exhibits the beginnings of social differentiation?
Horticultural societies
Approximately 80% of all societies that practice horticulture or simple agriculture are in the _________
tropics
Of all food collectors, ______ probably had the most sophisticated weapons, including _____, _______, and _______
Inuit
Harpoons
Compound bows
Ivory fish hooks
When did people begin to depend less on big-game hunting and more on relatively stationary food resources? What is this called?
- 14000 years ago
- Broad-spectrum food collecting
When did the shift toward broad-spectrum hunting and gathering happen in the New World? What led to this?
- Around 10 000 years ago
- Climate change bit aspect
- Lots of extinction → had to shift toward a broader range of game species
- Melting glacial ice led to more woodlands and grasslands = more plants to exploit
- Highland mesoamerica (mountainous regions of central and southern Mexico) → altitude important factor in hunting and collecting regime
Why did broad-spectrum collecting develop?
- Climate change → rise in sea level increasing availability of fish and shellfish and decline in big game
- Human activity → overkilling of animals
Population growth
Why would the average height have declined during the Mesolithic in the Old World?
Poorer diet
Natural selection for greater height relaxed because leverage for throwing projectiles was not so favoured after the decline of big-game hunting
How does sedentism relate to broad-spectrum collecting?
The nearness or the high reliability and yield of broad-spectrum resources can account for sedentism - not the broad spectrum itself
Explain the difference between foragers, food production, horticulturalists, and agriculturalists.
Foragers:
- Food collectors → use all forms of subsistence technology in which food-getting is dependent on naturally occurring resources
Food production:
- Began around 10 000 years ago
- Populations began to cultivate and later domesticate plants and animals
Horticulture:
- Plant cultivation is carried out with relatively simple tools and methods; nature replaces nutrients in the soil in the absence of permanently cultivated fields
Agriculturalists:
- Intensive agriculture is characterised by the permanent cultivation of fields and the use of complex agricultural techniques
What are the two different kinds of horticulture?
Shifting cultivation:
- More common
- The land is worked for short period and then left idle for some years
- Use slash-and-burn techniques to clear the wild plants and brush in the old field and return nutrients to the soil
- Natural vegetation is cut down and burned off → the cleared ground is used for a shirt time and then left regenerate
Long-growing tree crops
What kind of tools and techniques would horticulturalists use?
Simple tools and methods
Usually hands tools like digging stick or hoe
No ploughs or equipment pulled by animals or tractors
No fertilisation or irrigation
What are some techniques that intensive agriculturalists use?
Cultivate fields permanently
May use fertilizers
Irrigation from streams and rivers
Crop rotation
Explain the relationship between broad-spectrum collecting, sedentism, and population growth in terms of pre-agricultural developments.
Before plants and animals were domesticated in many part of the world there seems to have been a shift to less dependence on big-game hunting and greater dependence on broad-spectrum collecting
The broad spectrum of resources frequently included aquatic resources, such as fish and shellfish, and a variety of wild plants, deer, and other game
Climatic changes may have been partly responsible for the shift to broad-spectrum collecting
Broad-spectrum collecting is associated with more permanent communities in some parts of the world - like the Near East, Europe, Africa, and Peru
In areas like Mesoamerica, the domestication of plants and animals may have preceded permanent settlements
Why do sedentary !Kung women have more babies than nomadic !Kung women?
Reduce spacing between births (sedentary = 3 years) (nomadic = 4 years):
Nomadic women didn’t want to have to carry two kids at once → for sedentary women they didn’t’ always have to carry their children
Sedentary lifestyle seeing advantages to having larger families - more contribution to labour
The longer a mother nurses her baby the longer it is before she starts ovulating again - sedentary mothers can give babies other soft foods like cereals and milk - this shorten the interval between birth and the resumption of ovulation
Sedentary women had more fatty tissue which also resumes ovulating sooner
Discuss the domestication of plants and animals in the Near East, Old world, and elsewhere in the world.
Near East: earliest domestication about 8000 BC
Other independent centres of domestication elsewhere in the Old World: China, SE Asia, New Guinea, and Africa - around or after 6000 BC
New World:
- Highlands of Mesoamerica: 7000 BC
- Central Andes around Peru: 7000 BC
- Eastern Woodlands of North America : 2000 BC
Humans selected certain plants and animals - deliberately or accidentally - because they had characteristics more advantageous for our use: plants with a tougher rachis hold seeds longer and are more desirable for planting; smaller sheep, goats, and cattle are easier to manage than larger ones common in wild herds
What is the significance of the Natufians of the Near East?
Evidence of hollowed out basin-shaped depressions in the rock at the front of their rock shelters - possibly for storage pits
Tools suggest Natufians harvested wild grain intensively (sickles)
Earliest mesolithic people known to have stored surplus crops → stored beneath the floors of their stone-walled houses in storage pits
Evidence suggests increasing social complexity → sites five times larger than those of their predecessors and much more sedentary
Burial patterns suggest more social differences between people
Tooth enamel shows nutritional deficiency
How do archaeologists compare wild vs. domesticated plants and animals?
plants : look for differences in the fragility of rachis (stems), the size of seeds, and the presence of naturally growing ancestors in the region
Animals : look for differences in physical characteristics (ex. Horn shape), the size of animals, and the demography (age-sex composition) of herds
What group made stone axes?
Maglemosians of Northern Europe
Changing environment led to more forested environment
Made stone axes and adzes to chop down trees and use them for houses, canoes, paddles, etc.
Evaluate theories for why food production developed.
Push models: hunter-gatherers were forced into farming by some kind of stressor like an environmental change or population pressure
Pull models: hunter-gatherers were drawn to the benefits of the new farming lifestyle
Most commonly thought that at least initially, some conditions must have pushed people to switch from collecting to producing food, as opposed to it being a voluntary choice
Causes:
- Global population growth → as people moved to fill most of the world’ best habitable regions, people were forced to us a broader spectrum of wild resources and to produce more than what nature could offer by domesticating plants and animals
- Environmental cause → 10000 years ago summers became hotter and winters colder → some people began to favour sedentism in places with vast stands of wild grain; with an abundance of food nearby, populations grew, forcing people to plant crops and raise animals to feed themselves
Mesoamerica → people turned to domestication to produce more of the most desired and useful plants found in nature
- They would sow a variety of plants, then do their seasonal rounds of hunting and gathering, and then go back later to harvest what they had sown
What and when were the first domesticated animals?
Dogs → 10 000 BC in the NEar East (or asia?)
Goats and sheep → 7000 BC
Cattle and pigs → 6000 BC
When and where was the earliest domestication of maize?
5900 BC in Tehuacan Mexico
Domesticated from teosinte
What was an advantageous planting strategy that those in Mesoamerica, Mexico were credited with?
Planting maize, beans, and squash together in the same field
Maize takes nitrogen from the soil and beans put nitrogen back into the soil
What part of the New World was the only one where domesticated animals were a significant part of their economy?
The central Andes
Used for meat, transportation, and wool
Llamas and alpacas domesticated 5000 BC
Guinea pigs also domesticated
Why might the spread of domesticated plants have been more rapid in the Old World than in the New World?
The Old World spread was more along an east-west axis, while the New World spread was more north-south
North-south would have required more time to adapt to variation in day lengths, climates, and diseases
How did plant domestication in Asia differ from in the Near East?
First plants to be domesticated were probably not cereal grains - may not have even been used for food
Bamboo → used to make cutting tools and for other building purposes
Gourds probably used as containers or bowls
Rice → Yangzi Valley in China (6500 years ago)
New Guinea → banana and taro (7000 years ago)
Critically analyse the consequences of food production:
Accelerated population growth
Settling down → greater reliance on agriculture led to an increase in sedentism in many areas
Declining health → populations that relied heavily on agriculture were less healthy compared with earlier foraging people → grains very high in carbs and led to tooth decay → population crowding and close proximity to herd animals led to new infectious diseases
Elaboration of material possessions: in more permanent villages, houses and furnishing became more elaborate, people began to make textiles and to paint pottery, long-distance trade increased, and political assemblies formed
Earliest agriculture?
12000 years ago, SW Asia
What were the four main trends at the end of the pleistocene and going into the neolithic?
Environment
Demography
Society
Economics - how we go about feeding ourselves
How was the environment changing into the neolithic?
Glacial to Interglacial conditions
- Upper Palaeolithic and late Pleistocene = last glacial maximum
Going from cold and dry to warm and wet
Rise in oceans, less land → islands forming - more isolated communities
Dustier
How was demography changing into the neolithic time?
Population increases
Increase in sites
- 100 x increase per year after 10 kya → hockey stick trend - straight and then shoots up
Larger, denser populations lead to → increasing competition, more stress in some places, mechanisms to deal with conflicts (managers, leaders, authority)
How was society and social stuff changing into the neolithic time?
Social complexity
Consequence of larger, denser populations → have to manage things
More sophisticated relationships within and between groups
Exchange of objects and information → venus figurines, seashells, amber
- Have to be able to communicate
Leads to specialization → specialists in trade and crafts
- Some people possess and use information not available to others
- Exercise power (control) over others
- social complexity is not just about food and reproduction
- It’s about reproducing society → social reproduction
- To achieve more production we → improve technology, increase productivity, or both
How were economics changing into the neolithic time?
Variety of hunter-gatherers
Generalized (simple environment - less biotic diversity) Arctic → Specialized
(complex - greater biotic diversity) ->Tropical forest
(It's only in the places where we have less biotic diversity where we see art about plant and animal life Places with more biotic diversity = art about humans and people)
The changes in economics:
Defining the Neolithic characteristics : ground stone technology, food production, no metallurgy
V. Gordon Childe: first to work with excavate data
- Termed this event the neolithic revolution - shift into food production rather than food getting
What are the two different theories for explaining the neolithic revolution?
Single-cause Theories:
- “Prime mover theories”
- Childe (climate) → ex. Food production = consequence of climate change
- Blinford-Flannery (population increases)
Multiple- cause theories:
- “Multivariate”
- Ex. climate, ecological, and social reasons for transition
What are some positives and negatives to farming?
Cons:
- requires more labour
- does not benefit health (initially) –> adds more calories
Pros:
- can feed more people
- provides capital (personal possessions, property)
- increases status differences
- increases standard of living (hard to go back)
What is the estimated population increase around the neolithic? How many people would there be today if that rate actually happened?
40-10 kya: 1.8-2.7% growth/year
estimated population at 10kya = 10 million
- if that rate happened there would be 270 trillion people today
How could social changes induce the change to food production?
- decline of the sharing ethic –> increase of private property + economic intensification = population increase
population increase + social complexity = food production
also requires:
technology, social bonds, relationships in order to lead to an investment and maintenance of society
So, what are the 4 main explanations for food production?
Environmental change:
- Offers new opportunities, denies older ones
Changing social attitudes & values:
- Declining of sharing ethic
Social and economic pressure:
- Intensify production
- Consequence - increases population
Human-environment interaction:
- New people-people and people-animals/plants relations led to food production, sedentism
- Inter-community relations (trade, specialists)
- If balance achieved, led to new social formations
What are the 4 cultural subregions of SW Asia?
Egypt
Mesopotamia
Levant
Anatolia
What was temperature and climate like in SW Asia from the late Pleitocene to the beginning of the Holocene?
late pleistocene - warmer and wetter conditions
beginning of hologene - shift to more stable climate
annual mean rainfall - higher elevation = more water you get
region of vast contrasts
wild cereal distribution - spread of plant communities - oak, almond, pistachio - woodland and seeded grasses
What was Levant’s environment like?
coastal zone
much submerged 6000 - 4000 BC
+4 to +20 m rise in sea level
rich in woodlands - better water
What were the wild animals in Levant?
sheep, goats, pigs, cattle
What are the 2 chunks of the road to domestication in SW Asia?
Mesolithic or Natufian
PPN - Pre-Pottery Neolithic
What was life like in Natufian culture? (time frame, sites, burials, territories, technology)
12000-8300 BC. –> (levant region) (SW Asia)
semi-settled life, hunter-gatherers (foragers), wild grains, no domesticates
sites: different sizes and functions
- large site = 4000 m2
- semi-subterranean pits - floors dug in the ground
burials: small cemeteries and bodies put in the house floors - different relationship with the dead - not afraid of them
Social groups - cooperative (corporate), like the mafia
Technology: shift from shift stone technology to ground stone technology
- Ornaments; jewellery, shells (Nile), animal incisors
- Obsidian from Turkey
- Human dental modification → outward expression of change in status → file down front teeth to points
- Carved human figures
What are the 2 chunks of the Pre-pottery Neolithic?
PPNA (settled life, plant domestication)
PPNB (animal domestication)
What does domestication imply?
- plant or animal is dependent on humans
- manipulation of a plant or animal’s environment
- manipulation of gene frequencies
In domestication, what did people want to change about plants and animals?
Plants:
- Wanted stocks shorter and seeds bigger
- New world domesticated plants - marsh elder, sunflower, and squash seeds doubling in size
Animals: - Want smaller animals because they’re easier to manage - Toe bone of domesticated animals smaller
Describe Jericho during the PBNA
8300-7500 BC
2.5 - 4 ha village
Mud-brick structures - lots of clay
Round houses stuffed into the wall
Wall → 3m thick, 4m high
- Made for flood defence
- Wall along the water side → ditch on the other side
Tower → 8.5m high → ritual? Astronomy? Observation? - we don’t really know
How did animal exploitation and houses change at Jericho?
7500-6000 BC:
Sheep, goat and cattle
Lentils, flax
Round houses to Rectangular houses
Each house had shrines
How were leaders treated differently than other people at Jericho PPNB?
Their heads would be removed from their bodies after death and would be plastered over
What were the important changes in northern syria, Abu Hureya?
9500-8000 BC = hunter-gatherers, 300-400 people in village
8000-7700 BC = gap → people leave
7700-7000 BC = by 7000 BC herding before horticulture, 12 ha village → have domesticated animals but not plants → town grows in size
What were the 2 big times of changes in Ali Kosh (Zagros Mountains)
8000-6000 BC
- Some goat and sheep, hunting and fishing, many wild grasses and legumes, some cereals (wheat, barley) - foragers and some pastoralism
6000 BC
- Simple irrigation → land becomes rich with nutrients
- Herding and farming - “village of farmers”
Which subregion was Ali Kosh, Natufian, and Catal Hyuk
Ali Kosh - Mesopotamia
Natufian - Levant
Catal Hyuk - Anatolia
What were some important period of change in Anatolia?
8500 BC - sedentism and pigs
7500 BC - mixed agriculture
6700 BC - sheep herding
What was the first town on earth? Timeframe?
Catal Huyuk - 6200-5400 BC
Describe the town of Catal Huyuk (economy, houses, crafts)
- very big settlement
- houses –> food storage, places for burials, animals penned next to houses (sealings/stamps unique to each house)
- mixed farming
- craft production - lots of female figurines - very weird looking and all in birthing chairs
What was the lifespan like for people in Catal Huyuk and what kind of ritual stuff did they have?
Short life spans → 34 yrs men and 29 yrs women
- Constantly confronting death
- Women getting pregnant 11-14 times and only about 2 kids surviving
Communal shrines/buildings → weird imagery (bulls, vultures, human skulls)
- Themes of life, death, regeneration
- Symbols in shrines
- Secondary burials under house floors, some in shrines
What are the factors that explain agricultural origins in SW Asia?
Climate change
Biological changes in plant and animals
Population increases
Exchange
Craft specialization (ceramics, metals, textiles)
Increasing social differentiation (burials)
What are some areas that make up Mesoamerica and what is the environment like?
mexico, guatemala, honduras, belize, el salvador, nicaragua, northern costa rica
→ very diverse region
More diverse species - mountainous, lots of rivers
- wetter in lowlands, drier in highlands
What are some shared characteristics of both food production sequences in Mexico?
Oaxaca valley and tehuacan valley:
Seasonal macrobands (100) to microbands (15)
Increase hunting/collecting of small animals
Storing food - unique
Which food production sequence in mexico does guila Naquitz come from? What time? What was their technology like?
- Oaxaca valley
- 9400 BP
Technology:
- Ground stone (metates, manos)
- Chipped stone
- Sticks, atlatls, nets, baskets
- Well preserved plant remains
- Show intensification (increase) in gathering of wild plants
What were some of the wild plants at Guila Naquitz? Which would become early and late domesticates?
Wild plants at Guila Naquitz:
- Setaria millet
- Mesquite pods
- Agave = maguey → tequila
- Cacti
- Acorns
- Pinon nuts
Become Early domesticates:
- Avocado
- Squashes
- Gourds (African) - swallows carried them across the ocean
- Chilli peppers
Late domesticates:
- Ancestors of maize
- Beans
What is the domesticaiton triad of mesoamerica?
Chilis, maize, and beans:
Peppers/chilis: vitamins (esp. C), 9000 BP = regular part of diet
Maize: proteins, carbs and fats, uptake nitrogen
Beans: proteins, lysine (not in maize), replace nitrogen
What were the changes made to domesticated maize and beans?
Maize:
- softer glumes (husk)
- tougher rachis (stem), cob
Beans:
- softer pods
- more permeable
- easier to cook
What is important about Coxcatlan Cave? Where was it located
- located in Tehuacan Valley, mexico
- used Seasonal schedule to exploit wild crops - favouring of certain kinds of weeds
- Protect certain species
- Modify habitat to encourage growth
What are the lessons from tehuacan valley?
- Do not use less productive resources - focused energy on most productive resources
- More effort to grow some plants than others
- Less mobility - cant plant stuff and leave
- Shift from intensive gathering to sedentary horticulture
What was domestication of animals like in the mexican valley, coast, and elsewhere in mesoamerica?
Valley of Mexico:
- 8000-6500 kya
- Fishing, birds, small mammals
Coast:
- 5500 kya
- Shell mounds - marine resources
Everywhere:
- Absence of large domesticated animals
- Have dogs, turkey, guinea pigs (food), camelids (llama and alpaca)
