GETTING FOOD

• Subsistence derived from a combination of gathering and hunting

• Survival of foraging economies still survive because their environment not suitable to food production.

A contemporary forager from Australia’s Cape York peninsula collects eggs from the nest of a magpie goose.

FORAGERS or GATHERERS AND HUNTERS

• Band-organization (30-50) people -- flexibility allows for seasonal adjustments.

• Mobile, at least seasonally nomadic -- Pattern of congregation and dispersal

• Bands flexible in composition.

• No permanent attachment to group or land.

• Access to resources held communally.

• Individual ownership of food, tools and other goods but strong pressure to share.

Correlates of Foraging

!Kung

• Little difference in wealth, few material goods

• Social and political organization are simpleAt most, headman without authority

• Social control is informal

• Limited means of food storage

The Agta of the Phillippines live by hunting, gathering, fishing and exchange with lowland farmers

•No full-time specialists•Little warfare (conflict between groups)

• Typical gender-based division of labor with women gathering and men hunting and fishing, with gathering contributing more to the group diet.

•All foraging societies distinguish among their members according to age and gender, but are relatively egalitarian (making only minor distinctions in status)

Wide Variation in characteristics across H-G societies

degree of dependence on hunting vs. gathering

gender roles/ gender status

technologies used

Political organization

ForagingForaging

Worldwide distribution of recent hunter-gatherers.

recent foragers have often been used to understand prehistoric humans

Caveats• Now in least desirable

environments:tundra, desert, rain forest

• Cultural changes in last 20,000 years

• Natural environment has changed

• Affected by other people

Horticulture• non-intensive plant

cultivation, based on the use of simple tools and cyclical, non-continuous use crop lands.

• Slash-and-burn or swidden cultivation and shifting cultivation are alternative labels for horticulture.

• About 300 million people depended primarily on swidden cultivation for subsistence. 

slash-and-burn horticulture Ranomafana, Madagascar.

Horticulturists–Slash-and-burn agriculture

•Cyclical process•Burned vegetation, ashes nourish land•Land left fallow for several years•Tend to be less nomadic and more sedentary than foragers

–Cultures include:•Yanomamö•Tsembaga•Iroquois Women planting

taro in New Guinea 

• Groups range from 100 to more than 5,000• Relatively settled, but nomadic within limits• Location of villages is shifted periodically to keep the near areas being cultivated but even so, villages usually remain in each location for several consecutive years. 

South American farmers. Women tend to be the main producers in horticultural societies.

Horticultural Adaptations• Gardening, using tools that require

human power• Domesticated plants• Shift in emphasis on role of women in

kinship• Sedentism• Increased labor intensity• Surpluses• Social stratification • notions of private property, and

ownership of land• warfare

– Subsistence based on care of domesticated animals

– Migration follows herds– Examples: Bedouins, Nuer

Lapps, – East African cattle complex

• Supplement diet with gardens

• Largely eat blood and milk from cattle, not meat

Bedouins

Pastoralists

Pastoralism

A female pastoralist who is a member of the Kirgiz ethnic group in Xinjiang Province, China.

Pastoral Nomadism

all members of the pastoral society follow the herd throughout the year. (Iran)

Part of the society follows the herd, while the other part maintains a home village (this is usually associated with some cultivation by the pastoralists).

Transhumance

East African cattle complexmembers of such economies may get agricultural produce through trade or their own subsidiary cultivation

•cultivation involving continuous use of crop land more labor-intensive than horticulture due to needs generated by farm animals and crop land formation)•Domesticated animals are commonly used in agriculture, mainly to ease labor and provide manure.

•Irrigation is one of the agricultural techniques that frees cultivation from seasonal domination.

Agriculture

Agriculture

Irrigated and terraced rice fields used by the rice farmers of Luzon in the Philippines.

• Agriculture is far more labor-intensive and capital-intensive than horticulture, but does not necessarily yield more than horticulture does (under ideal conditions).

• Agriculture’s long-term production (per area) is far more stable than horticulture’s.

• Intensified food production is associated with sedentism and rapid population increase.

Top: Egyptian shaduf

Agriculture: Costs and Benefits

The Cultivation Continuum•In reality, non-industrial economies do not always fit cleanly into the distinct categories given above, thus it is useful to think in terms of a cultivation continuum.•Sectorial fallowing: a plot of land may be planted two-to-three years before shifting (as with the Kuikuru, South American manioc horticulturalists) then allowed to lie fallow for a period of years.