E2 Horticulture and Pastoralism

Horticulture

• small-scale farming without a plow and irrigation

• horticultural farm

• clear-cutting

• often slash and burn

• simple tech

• flood water retreat cultivation → planting in receded flood waters

Agriculture (intensive agriculture)

• using plows

• intensive agriculture

  • crop rotation

  • fallowing (letting fields rest)

  • fertilizer (synthetic or organic)

Where did fertilizer come from prior to synthetics?

• animal based

• human based: night soil in parts of world with low soil quality (england, parts of Asia)

  • post ww2 synthetic fertilizer become common and cheap replacing night soil

  • was expensive enough at times to be stolen

  • still used in some regions

Horticultural Societies

• cooperation tends to be local

• often some inequality but few significant differences in possessions

• large differences in status and leadership can exist, with some societies having leaders

• high mobility but little need of migration

• marriage systems and social structures vary

• often don’t have elaborate social structures or artistic traditions

  • more akin to unstratified HGs than stratified ones

Pastoralism

• primarily relies on domesticated herd animals, whose dairy and meat products are a main part of diet

• polygynous marriage extremely common

Pastoralism Challenges

• portable wealth

• variable environment: locations of water and grass can change

• need for large rangelands

• risk of disease

• risk of theft

  • responses:

    • strong male alliances

    • male biased inheritance

    • risk buffering institutions such as bond friendships

    • social identity important

    • bridewealth marriage

    • high rates of warfare

Pastoralism Social Structure

• socially integrating mechanism that all ppl belong to social groups

• membership by virtue of birth

• typically lacks a chief, king, or leader

• informal leadership

• clans: group of people who share real or fictive descent from common ancestor (last or fam name) but it confers rights and privileges

• territorial section: ppl who have right to access land in particular area, will have resources needed for subsistence

How do you make collective decisions and ensure ppl can be mobilized for defense?

• age groupings: men are organized by age, one group will be charged w/deciding important decisions, and another will be charged with defense

Cattle Complex

• set of values that places preeminent cultural importance on cattle, used to denote status, wealth, adulthood, marriage, and death

• have a favorite cattle and bull song

• used for ritual consumption

How do they identify cattle?

• spots, colors, distribution of spots and colors

Why didn’t some societies develop agriculture?

• marginal habitat hypothesis: foraging, horticulture, and pastoralism persisted in environments which prohibited or limited agriculture

• possible limitations include drought, altitude, soil quality, temp, pests, plant diseases, animal diseases, human diseases

• rainfall is either too intense or too little

  • foraging occurs at lower levels of rain

  • horticulture occurs at higher levels of rain

  • agriculture happens at lower levels of rain

Traditional range of elephants

• biodiversity can make intensive agriculture impossible

• colonization resulted in over 20,000,000 elephants being killed

• intensive agriculture in elephant areas today rely on electronic fences

• beehives stop elephant crop-raids, chili fences, electric fences

Tsetse fly

• makes having cattle and livestock nearly impossible due to disease

• eradication of flies require complex tech

Malaria

• drastically reduced available human capital required for intensive agriculture