Test 2 Flashcards
(43 cards)
Carrying Capacity
Ability of the environment to support people and animals
Holocene
geologic epoch after the Pleistocene: 12,000 BP to present
Affluent Foraging
Possible when there was a bounty of food sources nearby, both seasonal and year round
Seasonal Round
the strategic movement of hunter-gatherer groups, primarily for obtaining food
Microlith
advanced lithics
Attributes of mor socially complex hunter gatherers
- high population density
- intensification & diversification of food resources
- food storage and preservation
- permanent/semipermanent settlements often with associated cemeteries
- highly developed tools and methods
- division of labor not only by sex and age, but also by occupation
- some form of social ranking
- exchange
- more elaborate ritual beliefs
Agriculture
cultivation of domesticated plants and/or husbandry of domesticated animals
Benefits of Agriculture
•allows increase in carrying capacity
-changes types of plants growing in an area to those that people can eat
-converts plants people cannot eat, but domestic animals can, into meat, milk, wool, etc.
•allows increase in stability of food resources
-people can grow more food than they can eat—> surplus
-storage
-trade and exchange
Costs of Agriculture
- agriculture is not as efficient as hunting and gathering—> lower return in calorie-terms
- more work, investment
- competition with your neighbors
- nutrition not as good as that of hunter-gatherers
- potential high risk—>surplus and storage essential
Theories on the Origins of Agriculture
Climate Change -shifting weather patterns -changing resource availability Population Pressure -need to feed more and more people -need to expand resource base Population - Resource Relationships -imbalances between human populations and resource availability -circumscription -risk Social Causes -interaction between increasing complex social groups of hunter-gatherers -social and economic pressures to produce surplus
Neolithic
look up
The Eastern Neolithic Package
Major domesticated crops: wheat, barley, rye
Domesticated animals: goats, sheep, cattle
Minor domesticated crops: peas, lentils, chickpeas (pulses)
Pre-pottery Neolithic
c. 10,000-6,000 BC
Jericho
- c. 8500 BC tower (west bank)
- excavated by Kathlee Kenyon in the 1950’s
- temporary camp (largest for its time)
- transition site from hunter gatherers to farmers
- settlement had walls (for flooding?)
- Exchange center (obsidian)
- New religious practices
- Buried bodies under the floors of huts and covered skulls in clay to preserve identities of ancestors
Catalhoyuk
- Turkey: c. 7300 BC
- 34 acres
- excavated in the 60’s first and is still being excavated today by Ian Hodder
- Intense art inside buildings (Wall art & shrines)
- Had a monopoly on Obsidian trade
- mural depicting tow plan and possible volcanic eruption
Pastoralism
social organization in which livestock raising is the main economic activity
Early farming in Egypt
- Nabata Playa (c. 6,000 BC, barley)
- The Fayum (c. 4350 BC, wheat, barley, cattle, sheep, goats)
- Merimde (c. 3900 BC)
Fayum Depression
look up
Pastoralism in the Sahara
- 7,000 BC
- Transhumant cattle pastoralism
European Mesolithic
- preadaptation to farming
- lasted about 4,000 years from about 8,000- 4,000 BC
- range from simple to quite complex social organization
- –> affluent foragers
- increased sedentism, increased social complexity
Spread of Farming to Europe: Debate
Independent development or spread from fertile crescent
Bandkeramik Culture
- often called LBK
- around 5,300 BC —> Middle Danube area
- linear-decorated pottery
- widely-spaced, small farming territories
- permanent houses and fields
- domesticates: sheep, goats, dogs, cattle
- grew barley, wheat, flax, peas, lentils
- longhouses
Bandkeramik Social Organization
- women may had had high status (indicated by rich graves)
- Matrilineage: ancestry traced through women
- men controlled cattle and political power?
- by ca. 4500 BC –> villages, communal burials, emphasis on lineages and ancestors in some areas megaliths
- later graves emphasized single males in their prime —> Bronze Age
Mediterranean farming and interaction networks
- around 5000 BC—-> large trade and exchange networks
- cardial ware ceramics
- movement of seashells, obsidian, and later copper
- selective spread of domesticates
