Horticulture

1
Horticulture

• Adaptations
• Shifting and Slash/Burn
• Yanomami

2
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

3
Horticulture

• Horticulture is a second method of subsisting
  that is technologically rather simple. 
• literally means gardening, and is the label
  applied to the cultivation of domesticated plants
  with simple hand tools (hoes, spades, digging
  sticks and the like), as opposed to cultivation
  with plows. 
• Plant domestication seems to have originated in
  the Middle East about 10,000 years ago, and about
  6,000 years ago in the New World. 
• Once developed, cultivation replaced foraging
  just about everywhere except Australia and the
  western coast of North America, and
  anthropologists often wonder why. 
• The answer is not obvious because under many
  conditions foraging can produce a comfortable
  living with moderate labor inputs thus, why
  people would elect to shift to a horticultural
  mode of subsistence that requires much more
  laborand more drudgery kinds of laboris a
  legitimate question. 

4
Shifting Cultivation

• Many different varieties of plant cultivation
  have been developed since its origins, and
  several of those are horticultural
• i.e., varieties of gardening that dont use plows
  and traction.
• Some variants feature cultivation of permanent
  fieldsthat is, the same field is used year after
  year. 
• However, those occur only in special conditions
  in which soils are unusually fertile or
  periodically enriched, and the most common form
  of horticulture is a type of  shifting field
  cultivation. 
• That is, each field is used for a relatively
  short time, then allowed to fallow, or recover,
  for a relatively long time. 

5
Slash Burn (Swidden)

• The most widely practiced sort of shifting field
  cultivation is a kind called swidden cultivation,
  or slash and burn cultivation. 
• Although its distribution today is limited to the
  rain forests of the humid tropics, it once was
  found in many temperate areas, toovirtually
  anywhere that extensive standing forest was
  available. 
• Several years ago the Food and Agricultural
  Organization of the United Nations estimated that
  300 million people depended primarily on swidden
  cultivation for subsistence. 

6
Swidden Technology

• Basic swidden technology is simple. 
• A cutting tool (such as an ax or machete), a
  digging stick, some means of producing fire, and
  some standing forest are the main elements. 
• The cultivator selects a tract of forest large
  enough to support his family, fells the trees and
  slashes the brush, allows the cut material to
  dry, then burns it. 
• The intention is to burn the cut wood as
  thoroughly as possible, because the wood ash
  supplies the nutrients that crops will need. 
  Crops are planted in the cleared area for
  one-three years, then that field is abandoned for
  recolonization by forest, as the cultivator
  clears another tract.
• Depending on the environment, reforestation may
  require from five to twenty years, so a group
  needs plenty of forest in order to keep the
  system going. 
• The practice of shifting fields discourages
  notions of private property when a cultivator
  abandons a field for reforestation, there is no
  guarantee that he ever will return to that
  particular parcel to cultivate it once more.

7
Stability

• The stability of the swidden agroecosystem
  depends on a fairly high ratio of standing forest
  to human population. 
• If cultivators have to re-use a tract before the
  returning forest is mature, less wood ash results
  from the burn, and the cultivator must clear an
  even larger field, which shortens the
  reforestation period even more, and so on.
• Further, if re-used too frequently a permanent
  tropical grassland can replace forest, and
  perennial grassland is virtually useless for
  producing crops.
• Thus, as human populations become more dense, and
  forest recovery times become too short, swidden
  cultivation can lead to a cycle of increased
  energy loss and environmental degradation. 
• When swidden regimes are healthy they can produce
  quite good diets.  But because of population
  increase and more commercial use, many modern
  swidden systems arent healthy. 

8
Horticultural Groups

• Swidden populations tend to be relatively
  sedentary. 
• The location of villages is shifted periodically
  in order to keep the population near the forest
  areas being cultivated at that time but even so,
  villages usually remain in each location for
  several consecutive years. 
• That sedentary life implies that swiddeners are
  not obliged to space children in the way that
  mobile foragers do thus, swidden populations
  often show rapid rates of increase.

9
Settlement

• All things equal, populations who depend heavily
  on swidden would prefer to reside in small,
  widely distributed hamlets that are scattered
  throughout the forest. 
• That arrangement allows easy access to fields,
  facilitates protection of ripening crops, and
  encourages rapid return of forest from abandoned
  fields. 
• However, there is another feature of swidden
  populations that frequently overrides
  considerations of economic efficiency and
  provides a powerful incentive to nucleate
  settlementto settle in large groups and travel
  longer distances to cultivated fields. 
• That feature is warfare, because
  horticulturalists typically are involved in
  hostilities with neighboring groups and draw
  together for protection. 

10
Horticulturalists and Warfare

• Horticulturalists are groups that are especially
  likely to exhibit a high frequency of raids,
  skirmishes, cannibalism, headhunting and other
  forms of violence and terror. 
• Much of the violence in tribal societies begins
  as disputes about women and  then escalates into
  feuds in which revenge is sought. 
• However, several anthropologists have pointed out
  that at least some of the terror that is
  practiced is intended to frighten neighboring
  groups enough that they will leave, allowing the
  victors access to the second growth in their
  cutover fields. 
• Primary rain forest is very difficult to cut with
  hand tools thus, access to second growth saves a
  lot of labor, and some people think that labor
  savings are worth fighting about. 
• Military winners usually destroy the crops and
  settlements of losers, and try to drive them off
  to live with relatives located elsewhere.  Most
  of the raids are not especially lethal but there
  are occasional reports of entire communities
  being massacred.

11
Yanomami, Brazil Venezuala

• The Yanomami live in the Northern Amazon along
  the Brazil-Venezuela border. 
• Numbering 19,000 roughly equally divided between
  the two countries, they are the largest
  indigenous nation in the Americas that still
  retains their traditional way of life. 
• They are one of the most recently contacted
  peoples,  having very little contact with outside
  society before the 1980's. 
• Since 1987, the Yanomami have seen about 10 of
  their entire population -  over 2,000 people -
  decimated by massacres and diseases brought by
  invaders.

12
Yanomami

• The word Yanomami means "human being". 
• They live in small villages, grouped by families
  in one large communal dwelling called a shabono
• this disc-shaped structure with an open-air
  central plaza is an earthly version of their
  gods' abode. 
• They hunt and fish over a wide range and tend
  gardens (horticulture).