Ch2


 * //__Chapter Outline__//**

__**I. The Problem Of Agriculture**__

1. Husbandry happened in two distinct ways

a. In some environments, people could exploit creatures that had a herd instinct by managing the herds, rather than hunting them. b. In other environments, however, plant husbandry involved massive human intervention. Instead of merely trying to manage the landscape nature provided, farmers recarved it with fields and boundaries, ditches, and irrigation canals.

2. A Case in Point: Aboriginal Australians

a. Two explanations for why foragers in Australia would (and did) reject agriculture..they were either stupid or sub-human b. We can be certain that if aborigines (a type of forager) rejected agriculture or other practices Europeans considered progressive, it must have been for good reason. c. They could have used agricultural methods, but, they were well enough off without it.

3. Preagricultural Settlements

a. The Middle East shows that people can settle in one place without the trouble of farming. b. By about 14,00 to 15,00 years ago, permanent settlements arose throughout the Middle East. c. What was life like in early settlements?

4. The Disadvantages of Farming

a. In the early stages of moving from foraging to farming, the food supply actually becomes less reliable because people depend on a relatively small range of farmed foods or even on a single species. As a result, a community becomes vulnerable to ecological disasters. b. People have to plant and grow and gather the food, In result, they use up as much energy as they would have received in nourishment. c. Concentration of domesticated animals spread disease.

II. Husbandry in Different Environments A. Herders’ Environments 1. Three regions of Earth a. tundra, evergreen forests, grasslands 2. Herding develops where plants are too sparse to sustain human life, but animals can convert plants into meat 3. Tilling develops where soil is suitable or enough ecological diversity exists to sustain plant husbandry or mixed farming of plants and animals 4. Grasslands unfavorable for tilling 5. Herding has three consequences a.mobile way of life b. herds are made up of milk yielding stock 1. cattle, sheep, horses, goats c. Herders diet lacks variety 1. mainly milk, meat, and blood 6. Some herder societies had permanent cities a. Karakorum 7. Conflicts between herders and farmers B. Tillers’ Environments 1. Swampland a. rice is grown b. taro (in New Guinea) 1. New Guinea never generated big states and cities d. Bantu 1. West Africa 2. grew yams 2. Uplands a. The Andes 1. mixed farming 2. potato b. Mesoamerica 1. maize, beans, and squash 2. farming might have started with squash while gatherers of wild beans and grains needed food for times of drought c. The Old World 1. rye and barley a. rye is vulnerable to diesase b. barley fulfilled potential around 6th century CE 2. teff (Ethiopia) 3. Alluvial Plains a. flat lands where river borne or lake borne mud renews the topsoil b. Jordan Valley 1. In Jericho, skulls were painted with plaster, and eye sockets were filled with shells c. Catalhuyuk 1. walkways across roofs 2. waters dried up


 * // __I. The Spread of Agriculture__ //**

B. Europe a. Initially by natural causes (tree disease 4,500-5,000 years ago) b. Made land well suited for farming c. When forests started to grow back, farmers cut them back. C. Asia D. The Americas E. Africa F. The Pacific Islands II. How Did Farming Start? 2. Outcome of Abundance 3. Power of Politics 4. Cult Agriculture 5. Climatic Instability 6. Agriculture by Accident 7. Production as an Outgrowth of Procurement III. Seeking Stability A. Gathering –> Hunting –> Herding –> Tillage B. Developed together over thousands of years C. Agriculture helped people to stabilize in new environments
 * 1) Agriculture was independent to each area because of different foods and environments.
 * 1) Migrants from Asia colonized Europe, bringing farming and languages
 * 2) Deforestation
 * 1) Spread through Central Asia by 8,000-9,000 years ago
 * 2) East of Zagros Mountains (altitude 1,800), people replaced wild grain with cultivated varieties
 * 3) Comprehensive irrigation systems in southern Turkmenistan (6,000 years ago)
 * 4) In Southern Pakistan, barley and wheat in mud bricks and domestic goat bones have been found and dated at 9,000 years ago.
 * 7,500 years ago, cotton thread strung through copper bead (Southern Pakistan)
 * 1) Maize spread north from Central Mexico
 * 2) New varieties of maize came about to accommodate new environments
 * 3) In SW United States by 3,000 years ago
 * 4) North Americans farm sunflowers and sumpweed
 * 5) In South America, agriculture started in high Andes and spread through upper Amazon basin
 * 9,000 years ago, similar plants grown in Egyptian Sahara and Nile valley
 * 4,500-5,000 years ago, agriculture and Bantu language spreads to west Africa
 * 1) Then spreads south and east
 * 1) How did sweet potato get there?
 * 2) Theory-agriculture spread from New Guinea
 * 1) There are many different theories as to how farming started which can be grouped into 7 major categories.
 * 2) Population Pressure
 * 3) Agriculture is a response to stress over population growth
 * 4) This theory is contradicted by chronology.
 * 1) Agriculture is a result of an abundance of food (Opposite of Population Pressure)
 * 2) Agriculture came about from people experimenting with plants in their spare time
 * 3) As temperatures rose, animals congregated peacefully and humans discovered that they could be domesticated
 * 4) This theory doesn’t explain why people would make extra work for themselves when they already had plenty of food.
 * 1) Feasting and an excess of food were used to show wealth and power, and agriculture allowed access to a lot more food.
 * 1) Religion was inspiration for agriculture.
 * 2) Farming was considered a divine gift.
 * 1) Global warming was unpredictable. Warmer weather forced people to try to find ways to increase the edible amount of wheat (13,000-11,000 years ago, there was a dry/hot spell).
 * 2) Agriculture was a way to keep food stock stable with changing climates.
 * 1) Popular 19th century theory
 * 2) Someone simply observed a seed, dropped by accident, begin to grow on fertilized soil.
 * 3) No real evidence supports this theory.
 * 1) Farming and herding evolved from gathering and hunting.
 * 14,000-15,000 years ago, Asians with wheat (see pg. 53)
 * 1) Humans closed in snail rich areas and picked out bad ones-common sense leads to herding

Chronology Compilers 15,000 B.C.E – Ice Age ended 14,000-15,000 years ago – Permanent settlements arose in Middle East 13,000 years ago – Jomon people lived in permanent villages as settled foragers 10,000 years ago – Settlers lived in the Egyptian Sahara at Nabta Playa 9,000 years ago – First agriculture starts in western New Guinea in boggy valley bottoms 8,000 years ago – Evidence of rice production in India and parts of Southeast Asia 6,000-7,000 years ago – Scythians domesticated horses and invented wheel and axle 5,000 B.C.E – people of Eurasian and African grasslands were probably herding []- 1. Stupid or subhuman (Australia seemed to have gone to reverse to European discoverers) 2. Aborigines did not lack the knowledge necessary to switch to farming: so there must be a good reason why they rejected - Aborigines were doing well without farming (Wild foods were abundant) || 5. In the region we now call the Middle East, there is evidence that under some conditions, people can settle down without the need of farming. In 15,000 B.C.E., the East was covered in forests filled with acorns, pistachios, and almonds, and grasslands had vast quantities of wild grass with edible seeds. Permanent settlements began to rise throughout the regions with dwellings made of wood with stone foundations, or cut from soft stone and roofed with reeds. These small permanent houses suggested that nuclear families predominated. The people of those villages usually kept to themselves and had very distinctive identities and habits. The most surprising thing about the foragers though, was that work was shared between the two sexes. Women did slightly more gathering and men did slightly more hunting but both sexes did both hunting and gathering. They also married within their own communities. Foragers were also better off than farmers. The foragers remains showed better health and nourishment than the farmers that followed later in the same region. Examples of foragers 6. **The Jomon People** lived on Honshu Island in Japan about 13,000 years ago. They lived in permanent villages and fed themselves by fishing and gathering acorns, chestnuts, and such. The most significant contribution the Jomons made to history is their use of pottery. They “made pots of display, in elaborate shapes, modeled on flames and serpents and lacquered them with tree sap. Their potters were, in a sense, magicians, transforming clay into objects of prestige” (Armest 35). //While now Jordan valley looks as though it is all deserts, ten thousand years ago it would have looked as though it were all forest. Rituals in Jericho contained of painting skulls after the burial of the corpse. They shared this hobby with different cults all over the region of the Middle East. Catalhüyük was a very large// //Neolithic// //and// //Chalcolithic// //settlement in southern// //Anatolia////, which existed from approximately 7500 BC to 5700 BC, about the same period in time as Jericho. It flourished with wheat and beans of all sorts filling the area of approximately 32 acres. The houses of this time and city were made out of mud bricks and were not connected by walkways, but by roof top, connecting building to building by ladders. By learning the art of trade, Catalhüyük prospered and became extremely wealthy by the standard of that era. Although the city’s fate was not a good one, being plagued by drought as their water resources dried up, survived for nearly 2,000 years without difficulty.// **//Climacteric –> why significant as a concept?//** //Climacteric is a period in which critically important changes take place that are poised between different outcomes. This is significant to Armesto’s telling of history seeing as this shows a major change in the flow of times and demonstrates that some outcomes of events depend on how the event happens to begin with.// 7.) Herders are in three main geographical locations on the Earth, the evergreen forests of the northern Eurasia, tundra, and great grasslands. The role of herding had three special consequences. First it is imposes a mobile way of life. The proportion of the population who follow the herds-and in some cases, it is the entire population-cannot settle into permanent villages. Second, since herders breed from animals that naturally share their grassland habitats, their herds consist of such creatures as cattle, sheep, horses, goats-milk yielding stock. To get the full benefit from their animals, herding peoples have to eat dairy products. This does not sound like a problem but it required a modification of human evolution. Most people, in most parts of the world, do not naturally produce lactase, the substance that enables them to digest milk, after infancy. They respond to dairy products with distaste or even intolerance. Third, the herders diet, relying heavily on meat, milk, and blood, lacks variety compared to diets of people in more ecologically diverse environments. Because of this herders would tend to steal produce from farmers, which lead to hostility between herders and farmers. In society the hatred between herders and farmers went on for about 300 years. In most herding societies, there were no villages because they were constantly moving, and mainly the richest herding societies were the ones that founded cities for elites or for specialist working outside of food production, such as craftsmen or miners. However in most herding societies people just lived in temporary camps.
 * //__ID Terms__//**
 * **I.D** || **Page** || **Definitions** || **Importance** ||
 * **Husbandry** || 31 || Breeding animals and cultivating crops || * **How husbandry change human life-patterns**
 * 1) Herders kept their traditional patterns of migration, accompanying their animals – driving them.
 * 2) Tillers ||
 * **Civilization** || 32 || A way of life based on radically modifying the environment || # Farmers began to recarve the fields and boundaries, ditches and irrigation canals
 * 1) Gave humans the idea that they could become lords ||
 * **Unnatural Selection** || 32 || Sorting and selecting by human hands, for human needs, according to human agendas || # Humans forged a new relationship of interdependence with the species we eat
 * 1) Farmers select best specimens of edible crops and creatures, collect them in the most convenient places and pastures, crossbreed the livestock, and hybridize the plants to improve size, yield or flavor ||
 * **Aborigines** || 33 || Early Austrailians || * **Why they rejected agriculture**
 * 1) described as apelike creatures
 * 2) Shun every technical convenience
 * The Jomon people of central Honshu Island in Japan lived in permanent villages 13,000 years ago feeding themselves by fishing and gathering acorns and chestnuts.
 * In Egypt Sahara, Nabta Sahara, 40 different types of plants grew along hearths and pit ovens, evidence of settled life from 10,000 years ago.
 * At Gobeki Tepe, in southeast Turkey, the people lived mainly be gathering wild wheat.
 * Tillers**
 * Geographic location**- the tillers worked in areas that ranged from the Amazon in South America, the Andes, Ethiopia, New Guinea, China, Cambodia, India, Iraq and Egypt. These places were the Tiller’s crop sites because they consisted of either swampy wetlands, alluvial plains, temporal forests, irrigated deserts and some uplands
 * Prerequisites necessary**- the tillers had to have soil loose enough for a dibble to work, sufficient water, enough sun to ripen the crop, and some way to nourish the soil. Without these needs, the crops wouldn’t grow properly, which would decrease food supply. The type of land that tillers use need to sustain plant husbandry or mixed farming of plants and animals.
 * Societal Structure**- The tillers lived in urban areas with large-scale industries and had a possessive attitude towards land. Unlike herders, they settled in areas. There was usually violence between herders and tillers.
 * Tillers’ environments**
 * Swamplands**- the swamp soil was rich, moist, and easy to work with simple technology. Since the technology back in their age wasn’t very advanced, they needed soil that would be easy to plant crops in. Rice grew very well in swamplands, and cultivators were able to plant the mounds they build and farm in ditches between the mounds
 * Uplands**- they usually contain many different microclimates at various altitudes and in valleys where sun and rain can vary tremendously within a short space. Even though regions of high altitude are not places that people today consider good for farming, plant husbandry or mixed farming did develop there. Some highlands, like the Mesoamerican highlands, have their own kind of highland adapted food.
 * Alluvial Plains**- Flat lands where river-borne or lake-borne mud renews the topsoil. Alluvium restores nutrients and compensates for lack of rain, and alluvial soils in arid climates sustained some of the world’s most productive economies. Alluvial plains are important because they’re where farmers get the best help from nature.
 * Earliest cities –> Jericho; Catalhüyük**

8.) The Scythians are a significant example of herders, because these people of the Western Asian steppe first domesticated the horse and in vented the wheel and axle about 6,000 to 7,000 years ago, built impressive stone structures. The Scythians are important because their accomplishments greatly benefited the world, because the horse was later used as a main method of transportation and of getting work done, their wheel and axle design has been used numerous times through out history to make important inventions, the car being one of the main ones. Also their impressive stone structures were used as the model for architecture in other societies. media type="custom" key="4366953"

__//**Critical Question Breakdowns**//__ 1. How did the development of “civilization” change humankind’s perception of its relationship with the environment?
 * define civilization
 * research development of a civilization
 * research humankinds perception of its relationship w/environment
 * relate the development of a civilization to how humankind relates with the environment
 * report the response

2. Why does Fernández-Armesto suggest that societies that practice agriculture are the most unstable? What connection might exist between the development of agriculture and the instability of a society?
 * Research the history of societies that practice agriculture, focusing on the good and bad things that resulted from this practice
 * Generate a list for both
 * Research unstable societies in history and why they were unstable.
 * Generate a list of the flaws in a society that could lead to its instability
 * Compare your two lists
 * Report the differences/similarities and build your argument

3. Why did James Cook (and more generally those who look at and interpret societies very different from their own) view the society on Possession Island to be so perplexing? How does one’s own experience shape the perception one has of others?
 * Research James Cook’s findings on Possession island.
 * Research past interpretations of differing societies.
 * Analyze why societies differing from ours seem perplexing.
 * Make connections between one experience and how they view others.
 * Synthesize response.

4. How did the transition to settled agriculture often produce negative effects and new challenges in contrast to the life of foragers?
 * examine the transiton to settled agriculture
 * find the negative effects that were produced from settled agriculture
 * locate the new challenges caused by the transition to settled agriculture.
 * recall the life that the foragers left
 * contrast the life of settled agriculturists to the life of foragers.
 * report the response

5. How does Fernández-Armesto’s “Making Connections” chart on p. 41 illustrate his approach to understanding history? What does his depiction of the causal relationship suggest about what drives human behavior and history?
 * Read and comprehend his chart
 * Combine your previously attained knowledge about Armesto’s approach to understanding history
 * Use the chart to compliment your previous knowledge and construct your base for your argument
 * Actively read about what Armesto suggests that drives human behavior and history
 * Answer the question with your own opinion, thus creating an argument

6.Why does Fernández-Armesto choose to offer so many different explanations for the rise of farming? What does this decision to include competing interpretations reveal about his approach to understanding history?
 * Research Armesto’s explanations for the rise of farming.
 * Analyze his approach to history.
 * Make connections between his explanations and approach to history.
 * Synthesize response.

7. Which of the explanations for the rise of farming is the most convincing and why? What evidence would you draw on to support your determination as //that// particular explanation as the most persuasive?
 * Actively read all of the explanations for the rise of farming
 * Choose which ever one you think is best
 * Explain why it is the best using concrete evidence throughout the chapter as support
 * Use outside sources and research explanations for the rise of farming to further validate your argument

8.How does Fernández-Armesto’s use of climacteric as a concept help us reconsider our understanding of the origins of the earliest human settlements and the way in which they sustained themselves? Why does he prefer this concept as opposed to others?
 * Research Armesto’s use of climacteric.
 * Think about our views of early settlements.
 * Analyze how it changes our understanding of the earliest human settlements.
 * Research Armesto’s view on history.
 * Analyze why he would prefer the climacteric concept.
 * Synthesize response.

