Chapter 7 anthro vocab

Ecosystem

A system, or a functioning whole, composed of both the natural environment and all the organisms living within it.

Culture Area

A geographic region in which a number of societies follow similar patterns of life.

Food foraging

A mode of subsistence involving some combination of hunting, fishing, and gathering wild plant foods.

Carrying Capacity

The number of people that the available resources can support at a given level of food-getting techniques.

Neolithic

The New Stone Age; a prehistoric period beginning about 10,000 years ago in which peoples possessed stone-based technologies and depend on domesticated plants and/or animals for subsistence.

Neolithic revolution

The domestication of plants and animals by peoples with stone-based technologies beginning about 10,000 years ago and leading to radical transformations in cultural systems; sometimes referred to as the neolithic transition.

Horticulture

The cultivation of crops in food gardens, carried out with simple hand tools such as digging sticks and hoes.

Slash-and-burn cultivation

An extensive form of horticulture in which the natural vegetation is cut, the slash is subsequently burned, and crops are then planted among the ashes; also known as swidden farming.

Agriculture

intensive crop cultivation, employing plows, fertilizers, and/or irrigation

Pastoralism

The breeding and managing of migratory herds of domesticated grazing animals, such as goats, sheep, cattle, llamas, and camels.

Peasant

A small scale producer of crops or livestock living on land that is self-owned or rented in exchange for labor, crops, or money; often exploited by more powerful groups in a complex society.

Industrial society

A society in which human labor, hand tools, and animal power are largely replaced by machines, with an economy primarily based on big factories.

Industrial Food Production

Large-scale businesses involved in mass food production, processing, and marketing, which primarily rely on laborsaving machines.

Cultural evolution

Cultural change over time -- not to be confused with progress.

Progress

In anthropology, a relative concept signifying that a society or country is moving forward to a better, more advanced stage in its cultural development toward greater perfection.

Convergent evolution

In cultural evolution, the development of similar cultural adaptations to similar environmental conditions by different peoples with different ancestral cultures.

Parallel evolution

In cultural evolution, the development of similar cultural adaptations to similar environmental conditions by peoples whose ancestral cultures were already somewhat alike.