10. Carrying Capacity is the maximum number of people a given amount of land can support, given the available resources.
11. Optimal Foraging Theory: Foragers look for plants and animals that will maximize their caloric intake for the time spent hunting and gathering foods.
14. Hunter-gatherers generally have been relegated to marginal areas – the Alaskan tundra, the Australian Outback, the Ituru Forest (of central Africa) and the Kalahari Desert.
15. The lives of the remaining traditional Ju/’hoansi are much like that of their hunter-gatherer forefathers.
21. Seals are killed with harpoons with toggle-headed hooks -- unless it’s summer and then they use throwing harpoons
22. Today, most Inuit live in villages and hunt with guns rather than spears or harpoons and use snowmobiles rather than dogsleds.
23. The Inuit got their own land when the Canadian government created the Nunavut (our land) in 1999 - a 1.2 million square mile piece of land inhabited by only 27,000 people.
26. Vere Gordon Childe: believed that southwestern Asia from Turkey to the Nile Valley and Mesopotamia was the cradle of both farming and early civilization.
27. The Fertile Crescent includes Mesopotamia, the Nile Valley, the Jordan Valley and Zargros Mountains of Iran.
28. Holocene: (from the Greek word holos , which means “recent”)
29. About 15,000 years ago, the great ice sheets began to retreat -- at times very rapidly.
31. Beringia (which separated Siberia and Alaska) was under water by 11,000 BC. Britain became an island and the North Sea and Baltic assumed their modern configurations.
32. By 6000 BC, we see warmer conditions and immigration of new plants such as wild cereal grasses in highland areas like the Zagros Mountains in Iran.
33. By 15,000 years ago, the world’s hunter-gatherer population was probably approaching about 10 million people.
34. By 12,000 years ago, human populations began to match the ability of the world’s environment to support them - i.e., you couldn’t just move to find more food.
35. The Holocene evolved pestles, grinders and other tools specific to processing seeds and other wild plant foods.
36. Complex forager societies developed in places where: 1. Population movements were limited by geography or the presence of neighbors 2. Resources were abundant and predictable by seasonal appearance 3. Population growth reached a point where food shortages occurred and there was an imbalance between people and their food supply.
37. No one person “invented” agriculture - many groups were doing the same sorts of things all over the world.
38. Most anthropologists believe that a set of complex cultural and environmental factors, combined with population growth, caused foragers to switch to food production.
43. Domestication is the process by which people begin trying to control the reproductive rates of plants and animals by manipulating the environment to favor their survival.
48. The Bemba practice shifting cultivation that includes clearing land, burning branches and planting directly on the ash-fertilized soil.
49. Horticultural societies have defined leadership roles that include tasks like settling disputes, arranging marriages, leading feasts and religious rituals.
50. Modern horticulturalists are sedentary and live in households which participate in a larger unit -- the community (comprised of kinship groups) and participate in community-wide religious or political activities.
51. The social structure of the horticultural society is complex and made up of well-defined and largely self-sufficient households.
54. Nomadism: A lifestyle involving the periodic movement of human populations in search of food or pasture for livestock. Transhumance: A movement pattern of pastoralists in which some men move livestock seasonally while other members of their group (women and children) stay in permanent settlements.
55. Mixed farming is a way to spread out the risk of drought, crop failures and disease
56. Pastoralists invest a lot of energy and effort into breeding and caring for their animals.
57. If you were to compare pastoralism to agriculture, the people can produce 10 times as much food -- measure in terms of calories per acre, by raising grain as opposed to livestock.
58. There are six main zones where nomadic pastoralists are found: 1. South of the Sahara in East Africa (cattle); 2. Deserts near the Saharan and Arabian Deserts (camels); 3. North of the deserts of Central Eurasian steppe along the Mediterranean (sheep and goats); 4. Eurasian Steppe – Mongolians (horses, sheep, goats); 5. The high-altitude pastures of the Tibetan Plateau and the neighboring mountain regions (yak) 6. Sub-Arctic areas of Eastern Europe and Siberia (reindeer)
59. Most anthropologists believe that true pastoralists (who get ALL their food from animals) are rare to non-existent.
60. Livestock is key, but not just for food and by-products, but also non-economic social functions.
61. Social Function of Cattle - the use of livestock by pastoralists not only for food and its by-products, but also for purposes such as marriage, religion and social relationships.
63. The Maasai are one of several East African cattle complex cultures who are savannah dwellers that herd cattle, goats and sheep and get most of their sustenance from milk and cows’ blood.
64.
65. The Maasai believe their god (Ngai) gave them all cattle on earth -so it’s okay to steal their neighbors’ cattle.
66. Stock Friendship - A gift of cattle from one man to another to solidify their relationship.
67. Intensive agriculture is farming that involves the use of draft animals, tractors, plows and often some form of irrigation to maximize the output of the land being worked.
68.
69. With intensive agriculture, production is vastly increased through things like irrigation, fertilizers, animal traction and efficient transportation and equipment.
70. Intensive agriculture is seen in many marginal places such as Egypt, the Middle East, China, India, Indonesia – places with large populations of people who need lots of food and where there is the ability to turn unproductive land into productive land through irrigation.
82. Also key to increasing yield is the use of non-human labor –beasts of burden.
83. A pair of oxen produces 10 times more horsepower (pardon the expression) than a human. They’re also less expensive and … not to put too delicate of a note on it, they produce fertilizer.
84. But you want to do more. That’s how the strategies of crop rotations, use of fertilizers and arboriculture came into being.
86. Where intensive agriculture is present, there will be population increases. With population increases comes innovation and more innovative methods of farming … which produces more and more and allows for the storage of food. When there’s surplus food, you get craft specialization. When you get craft specialization, you get trade and more complex social systems. With that you get the need for administrators/a bureaucracy … which leads to social stratification … which leads to class differentiation.
89. There began to emerge higher status people who have exclusive access to goods, etc. About this time, we also begin to see religious specialization – shamans, priests, prayers.
90. You have farmers. You have craft specialists. And then you have this new group of “non-producers” – the religious leaders, the politicians and the administrators.
91. As agrarian societies evolved into large-scale states, communities near the urban centers grew and became powerful. Those farther away from the urban centers languished.
92. The first city states were essentially administrative and trading centers established to control the surrounding countryside that provided the food.
94. In the U.S., we expend about 230,000 calories per capita per day and spend about 10 percent of our time (as a whole, meaning population X 24 X 365) working.
95. In Burundi, they expend 24,000 calories of energy per capita per day and spend 25 percent of their time working.
96. The people of Burundi have to work twice as hard to extract a fraction of the usable energy that the U.S. worker does.
97. In countries where human labor constitutes the main power supply, there is little spare energy to devote to anything other than maintaining the current infrastructure, reproduction and food procurement.
98. But not us (or U.S.) The balance of energy in the U.S. and other developed countries comes from fossil fuels, converted into useful work by machines.
99. Preindustrial societies schedule agricultural activities so that they are as constant as possible. They make use of a mixture of crops and livestock that require different energy expenditures.
100. Plow cultivation and fertilization allowed farmers to reduce the amount of times their fields must be fallow.
101. Fallow is the time that must be allowed between crops for the soil to regenerate its organic and chemical content.
102. Too much intensive can lead to soil loss if nutrients aren’t maintained, erosion, too much irrigation can result in waterlogged or salinized soils.
103. Peasantry - rural people, usually on the lowest rung of society’s ladder, who provide urban inhabitants with farm products, but have little access to wealth or political power.
104. Industrial society is a society that relies on large inputs of fossil fuel and industrial technology for survival.
105. Industrial agriculture is agriculture that relies on large inputs of fossil fuel and industrial technology for survival.
106. Industrial society, because it’s fuel and technology based, creates things like pollution of our air and water, acid rain and things such as global warming and a depletion of the ozone.
