Subsistence Strategies, Economics, and the Origins of Agriculture

Vocabulary flashcards detailing human adaptive strategies, economic modes of production, exchange principles, and the archaeological origins and biological consequences of agriculture.

Adaptive Strategies

The two primary groupings of economic production used to meet subsistence needs: foraging and food production.

Foraging

A subsistence strategy reliant on exploiting wild plant and animal resources across large territories without labor specialization, characteristic of all human societies prior to 10,000 years ago.

Pastoral Strategy

A food-production strategy reliant on domesticated animals that can support larger, kin-based groups; prior to 1492, it was confined exclusively to the Old World.

Transhumance

A mobile pastoral strategy characterized by the regular seasonal movement of human groups and their herds between distinct pasture areas.

Horticultural Strategy

A nonintensive plant cultivation strategy practiced on small plots using slash-and-burn (swidden) techniques, typically as a part-time activity associated with permanent, sedentary villages.

Slash and Burn (Swidden) Cultivation

A horticultural technique in which plots of natural vegetation are cut down and burned to clear land and provide soil enrichment for nonintensive farming.

Intensive Agriculture

A food-production strategy involving substantial labor investments, larger land areas, terracing, irrigation, and beasts of burden to generate crop surpluses and support larger populations.

Industrial Production

Production carried out through mechanical means, wage labor, and profit orientation, resulting in non-kin-based relations and a larger social gap between owners and workers.

Modes of Production

Sets of social relations through which human labor is deployed to extract energy from nature using factors such as land, tools, technology, skills, and capital.

Domestic Mode of Production

An economic mode in which labor, resources, and production are organized entirely by the kinship or domestic unit.

Tributary Mode of Production

A mode of production wherein the primary output produced by laborers is appropriated by an elite or noble class.

Post Industrial Mode of Production

A production structure involving the movement of labor and production out of the factory and into the household via the use of computers.

Division of Labor

The societal differentiation of tasks; full-time specialization emerges once food surpluses free individuals from direct subsistence activities.

Reciprocity

An exchange principle operating between social equals connected by kinship, marriage, or personal ties, subdivided into generalized, balanced, and negative types.

Redistribution

An exchange principle wherein goods or wealth move from local points of production to a central authority, from which they are subsequently reallocated throughout the society.

Market Exchange

A commercial economic system governed by the production of surpluses, fluctuating commodity prices, and credit institutions.

Agricultural Intensification

The process of increasing total yield by expanding the geographic area under cultivation or boosting productivity per unit of land through increased labor inputs.

Neotinization

The retention of juvenile anatomical or behavioral characteristics into adulthood, frequently occurring as a morphological consequence of animal domestication.

Domestication Syndrome

A suite of shared evolutionary traits in cultivated plants, including larger fruit or grain, gigantism, reduced branching, loss of seed dispersal, loss of seed dormancy, and loss of toxic compounds.

Broad-Spectrum Collecting

A late foraging subsistence pattern preceding agriculture that focused on small, highly reproductive animals and easily stored seeds from colonizing plants.

Neolithic Revolution

A prolonged, step-like transition originating independently in multiple world regions as early as 10,000 years ago, moving human groups from foraging to food production.