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When did the world shift from hunter-gatherers to an agricultural way of life?
Around 15,000 ya, societies of modern humans in different areas of the world shifted from hunter-gatherers to an agricultural way of life—many areas of the world
What are the 3 components for the origins of agriculture?
Domestication
Technology
community/settlement
What is domestication?
new relationship between humans, and plants, and animals (humans play a role in protecting and reproducing plants and animals)
What is technology?
the tools and infrastructure used for daily tasks, including: farming, food processing, food storage
What is community?
the development of settled villages and a constructed landscape: the process of settling down–construct a specific way of inhabiting
Changes in:
Social organization
Leadership
Relationship between kin groups
Property
Cosmology
Societies around the world took different pathways toward agriculture–doesn’t happen in one palace or one moment, took many years in many parts of the world
Advanced way of life? Progress?
What intellectual challenge did Europeans face since the 15th century?
encountering “others: in the americas, australia, asia, and africa
Facing these people and they don't know how they live or why they live like that
Understand these people in a different stage of evolution
A consciousness of historical past, but little or no conception of the past as fundamentally different from the present
People in the past were considered to be “just like us”--not much different
Every vision of the past is a product of its time
Solution to the intellectual conundrum:
perhaps “we”, the civilized people of Europe, were like them in the past
We aren't different but they are on a lower stage of evolution–we went through those changes but now we are civilized
Those savages represented an earlier or lower order of human existence
(this was wrong idea)
What did people struggle to distinguish?
objects of human manufacture from objects created by natural processes
Emergence of methods for recognizing objects of human manufacture
What are ThunderStones?
objects such as axes that people in Medieval Europe believed were formed in spots where lightning struck the earth
Who was Antoine de Jussieu?
comparison of “thunderstones” with stone tools from the american islands and canada
What is cultural evolution?
cultural change is progressive from simple to complex, from “primitive to civilized”
Who was Lewis Henry Morgan?
American anthropologist
Traits of civilizations:
The invention of pottery
The construction of buildings out of mud brick
The domestication of animals and plants
The development of agriculture
In 1877, published Ancient society, or researches in the line if human progress from savagery through barbarism to civilization
Unilinear theory of cultural evolution
What is the unilinear theory of cultural evolution?
idea that there is a set sequence of stages that all groups will pass through at some point, although the pace of progress through these stages will vary greatly
Stages
Savagery
agriculture/domestication
barbarism
Civilization
Who was V. Gordon Childe?
attempts to link Morgans scheme with technological changes
civilization=Iron
barbarism=bronze
savagery=stone
Neolithic revolution
What is the Neolithic revolution?
the critical transition that resulted in the birth of agriculture, taking Homo sapiens from scattered groups of hunter-gatherers to farming villages, to technologically sophisticated societies
Revolution: an event that affected every aspect of human society
The ability to control food production and increase food supply
Increase in population (consequences)
Development of settled villages
Who was Herbert Spencer?
he attempts to link the evolutionary scheme with morality
Savagery
Barbarism
Civilization
Increase in morality and progress as you reach civilization
Who was Lieutenant General Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt Rivers?
applied cultural evolution to museum exhibitions
Rooted in our brain–cultural way of thinking
Place objects in displays thinking of these stages
What did Morgan and Childe both imply?
Morgan: Human supremacy above nature
Childe: active partners with nature
They both implied that humans removed themselves from nature
What were the critiques of cultural evolution?
Evolutionary thinking tends to apply criteria from “outside”
outside=thinking they are primitive
Past societies are “flattened out” against general models
Apply general way of thinking that they have to go through these process to evolution
Evolutionary models tend to be teleological
Some kind of goal we have to arrive to (society)
But there is no goal
No room for historical accidents: chance, ambiguities…Coincidences!
Who was David Rindos?
American anthropologist
The development of agriculture resulted from a coevolutionary process involving a symbiotic relationship between plant and animal species
Work together
Agriculture evolved in a symbiotic way
Who was Tim Ingold?
British anthropologist
He rejects the distinction between the natural and the human world (they are the same)
A hallmark characteristic of hunter-gatherer social relations is sharing based on trust
He views the shift from hunting to agriculture as a shift from trust to domination and dependence
Who was Marshall Sahlins?
the “original; affluent society” (with development of agriculture)
argued that hunter-gatherers enjoyed abundant leisure because they were unburdened by the presence of commercial markets, which induce people to spend more time working in the pursuit of material goods
Hunter-gatherers:
Less time working for their food
More leisure time
Because of the increased crowding of villages, agricultural societies were vulnerable to disease outbreaks
What are the new perspectives?
to recognize that plants and animals have been domesticated independently in numerous locations
To approach the origins of agriculture as a process, distinguishing origin and spread–nit just an event, took many years and generations
What do archaeologists question?
whether the development of agriculture resulted from people choosing or inventing a “better” way of life
why did it develop?
Who was Ester Boserup?
Danish archaeologists
Discussed what triggered changes:
Climate conditions
Increase in population: a cause rather than an effect
Criticized models that tended to emphasize single explanations
What are the multifactorial approaches?
Binford: climatic conditions and population size
Brian hayden: surplus food and social organization
What was Brian Haydens Model?
Generalized hunter-gatherers:
Rely on scarce resources
Low pops
Competition is detrimental to the group
Complex
Rely on abundant resources
Larger pops
Competition can develop…and it is expressed in feasts
Can be from overexploitation of resources