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This lecture explores the concept of adaptation and how humans have adapted to their environment through cultural practices. It discusses the patterns of behavior and technology associated with food collection, focusing on food foraging and horticulture. The lecture also examines the impact of food collection on society and the transition to food production.
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Lecture 6 Patterns of Subsistence
Chapter Outline • What is adaptation? • How do humans adapt? • What sorts of cultural adaptations have humans achieved through the ages?
Adaptation • Interaction between • changes an organism makes in its environment • changes the environmentmakes in the organism.
Procedures for Cultural Ecology • Analyze the interrelationship of a culture’s technology and its environment. • Analyze the patterns of behavior associated with a culture’s technology. • Determine the relation between those behavior patterns and the rest of the cultural system.
Food Foraging Life: Summary of Characteristics • Move about a great deal. • Small size of local groups. • Populations stabilize at numbers well below the carrying capacity of their land. • Egalitarian, populations have few possessions and share what they have.
Food Collection • May generally be defined as all forms of subsistence technology in which food getting is dependent on naturally occurring resources – that is wild plants and animals.
Food Collection • Although this was the way that humans got their food for most of human history, the few remaining food collectors (also referred to as foragers) live in what are called the marginal areas of the earth, deserts, the Arctic, the dense tropical forests—habitats that do not allow easy exploitation by modern agricultural technologies.
Food Collection • Food foragers must not be looked at as backwards. And a society that has developed agriculture might return to food collecting if their circumstances change. • Despite the different terrain and climate under which food foragers may be found and the different food collecting technologies they use, most recent foragers have certain cultural patterns in common.
Food Collectors • Most live in small communities in sparsely populated territories and follow a nomadic lifestyle, forming no permanent settlements. • This may sound hard but the workweek is shorter and in most cases, the nutrition is better.
Food Collectors • As a rule, they do not recognize individual land rights. • Their communities do not generally have different classes of people and tend to have no specialized or full time political officials. • But food collectors who depend heavily on fishing are more likely to have bigger and more permanent communities and somewhat more social inequalities than do those who forage for plants.
Food Collectors • Division of labor in food collecting societies is based largely on age and gender. Men exclusively hunt large marine and land mammals. • Men usually do most of the fishing and women collect the wild plant food. • In most societies, the plant matter makes up 90% of the diet.
Food Foraging: Impact on Society Three elements of human organization: • Division of labor by gender. • Food sharing. • Optimal Foraging Theory (If I share with you today, you will share with me tomorrow) • The camp is the center of daily activity and the place where food is shared.
Transition to Food Production • Began about 11,000 to 9,000 y.a. • Probably the result of increased management of wild food resources. • Resulted in the development of permanent settlements as people practiced horticulture using simple hand tools.
Food Production • Beginning about 10kya certain peoples in widely separated geographic regions made the revolutionary changeover to food production. That is, they began to cultivate and then domesticate plants and animals.
Food Production • With domestication of these food sources, people acquired control over certain natural processes, such as animal breeding and seeding. Today, most peoples in the world depend for their food on some combination of domesticated plants and animals. • Anthropologists generally distinguish three major types of food production systems –horticulture, intensive agriculture, and pastorialism.
Horticulture • Growing of crops of all kinds with relatively simple tools and methods, in the absence of permanently cultivated fields. • The tools are usually hand tools, such as the digging stick or hoe, not plows or other equipment pulled by animals or tractors. And the methods used do not include fertilization, irrigation, or other ways to restore soil fertility after a growing season.
Horticulture There are two kinds of horticulture • One involves a dependence on extensive or shifting cultivation • The land is worked for short periods and then left idle for some years. • Wild plants return and the fields are later cleared by the slash and burn technique. • The other involves a dependence on long growing tree crops.
Horticulture • Most horticulturists do not rely on crops alone for food. Many also hunt or fish; a few are nomadic for parts of the year. Some even raise animals but they are not large like cattle. They tend to be a few pigs or sheep.
The Yanomamo • Get most of their calories from vegetable matter but spend most of their time foraging. • Slash and burn to clear garden spot. Burned material provides a form of fertilizer. • Plant manioc, plantains, sweet potatoes, taro and medicinal, condiments and craft materials. Now tobacco as well. • Much territory to have extensive cultivation. • Hunting and fishing add protein.
Samoans • Horticulture involves mostly three tree crops requiring little work except harvesting. Breadfruit, once planted will produce a crop twice a year for 50 years. • Coconut may continue to produce for a hundred years and banana trees make new stalks of fruit for many years. • Men do the harvesting and women do the occasional weeding
General features of horticulturists • In most horticultural societies, simple farming techniques have tended to yield more food from a given area than is generally available to food collectors. • Consequently, horticulture is able to support larger more densely populated communities. • Their way of life is more sedentary than food collectors, though communities may move after several years to farm a new series of plots.
General features of horticulturists • Here is where we see the exhibition of the beginnings of social differentiation. • For ex. Some individuals may be part-time craft workers or part-time political officials, and certain members of a kin group may have more status than other individuals in a society.
Intensive Agriculture • People engaged in intensive agriculture use techniques that enable them to cultivate fields permanently. • Essential nutrients are put back though the use of fertilizers, which may be organic (most commonly dung from human or other animals).
Intensive Agriculture • In general, the technology of intensive agriculturists is more complex than that of horticulturists. Plows rather than digging sticks are employed. But there is enormous variation in the degree to which intensive agriculturists rely on mechanization rather than hand labor. • In some societies the most complex machine is an animal drawn plow. In the corn and wheat belts of the untied states, huge tractors till, seed, and fertilize twelve rows at a time.
General features of Intensive agricultural societies • More likely than horticulturists to have towns and cities. • A high degree of craft specialization • Complex political organization • Large differences in wealth and power. • Hours are longer • More likely to face food shortages because they are often produce crops for a market. If the demand drops, they may not have enough cash to buy all the other food that they need.
Pastoralism • Subsistence that relies on raising herds of domesticated animals, such as cattle, sheep, and goats. • Pastoralists are usually nomadic.
General features of Pastoralism • In recent times, Pastoralism has been practiced mainly in grasslands and other semiarid habitats that are not especially suitable for cultivation without some significant technological input such as irrigation. • Most pastoralists are nomadic, moving camp fairly frequently to find water and new pasture for their herds.
General features of Pastoralism • But other pastoralists have somewhat more sedentary lives – they may move from one settlement to another in different seasons. • Pastoral communities are usually small, consisting of a group of related families.
General features of Pastoralism • Individuals or families may own their animals but decisions about where and when to move the herds are community decisions. • There is a great deal of interdependence between pastoral and agricultural groups. The trade is usually necessary for the pastoral, groups to survive.
Pastoralism • Most agriculturist raise animals, but a small number of societies depend directly or indirectly on domesticated herds of animals for their living. • Most do not eat the meat of their animals but they do eat the products. They regularly drink milk and sometimes blood.
Pastoralism • They may trade animals for food and other necessities. In fact, a large proportion of their food may come from trade with agricultural groups. For ex. Some pastoral groups in the middle east make a great deal of their livelihood on what we call oriental rugs, which are made from the wool of their sheep
The Basseri • Tent dwelling nomads. • Sheep and goats though donkeys and camels are used for pulling. • Dry, arid habitat, with no more than about 10 inches of rainfall annually. • 15k sq. mi. of territory. • Il-rah “tribal road”. Has a traditional route and schedule. Il-rah is property of the tribe. Local populations recognize the tribe’s right to pass along roads and cultivated lands, to draw water from public wells and to pasture flocks on public land.
The Basseri • One shepherd (a boy or unmarried man) will be responsible for 300-400 animals. Children of both sexes are responsible for herding the baby animals. • Milk is most important commodities but wool, hides and meat are important economic assets
The Lapps • Reindeer herding in N.W. Scandinavia where Finland, Sweden and Norway share common frontiers. • Two kinds of herding: • extensive and intensive
The Lapps • Intensive is when the animals are corralled ad habituated to human contact and extensively is when the animals are allowed to migrate over a large area. The extensive system means that fewer scouts are required to watch the herd but milking is harder because the animals are not as habituated to human contact.
The Lapps • Extensive system leaves Lapps able to engage in other activities such as fishing and hunting. • Now they are herded with snowmobiles, helicopters and even ferries.
Development of Cities • Cities developed as intensified agricultural techniques created a surplus. • Individuals were free to specialize full-time in other activities.
Social Structure of Cities • Development of cities resulted in increased social stratification. • People are ranked according to gender, the work they do, and the family they are born into. • Social relationships grow more formal and centralized.
