Big History Between Nothing and Everything 1St Edition By david Christian - Test Bank

Big History Between Nothing and Everything 1St Edition By david Christian – Test Bank

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Chapter 05: Origins of Agriculture and the Early Agrarian Era

True/False

1. As was observed during the agricultural revolution, foragers are good at finding ways to extract more energy from a given area, a process known as intensification.

Answer: False

Page: 105

Explanation: Foragers are good at finding new energy sources by spreading into new niches and environments, a process that is termed extensification. Farmers, on the other hand, find ways to extract more energy from a given area, a process that is called intensification.

2. American archaeologist Peter Richerson contends that intergroup competition subsequent to the adoption of agriculture during the Holocene more or less forced communities to adopt farming, leading to its inevitable diffusion.

Answer: True

Page: 108

Explanation: American archaeologist Peter Richerson and his colleagues believe that the adoption of agriculture during the Holocene not only became possible but in the long run compulsory. Richerson contends that subsequent intergroup competition more or less forced communities to adopt farming, leading to its inevitable diffusion.

3. In the early Agrarian era people had a clear understanding of the potential benefits of animal fertilizer for thousands of years, and used irrigation extensively.

Answer: False

Page: 112

Explanation: In the Early Agrarian era most energy and labor came from humans, so children became increasingly important as potential farm laborers. Apparently people had no understanding of the potential benefits of animal fertilizer for thousands of years, until the so-called secondary products revolution. For much of the era there was very limited use of irrigation.

4. Basic anthropological theory states that the larger the group, the more explicitly power and authority will be exercised.

Answer: True

Page: 115

Explanation: Basic anthropological theory states that the larger the group, the more explicitly power and authority will be exercised; and gradually throughout the Early Agrarian era, the egalitarianism of Paleolithic kinship groups was replaced by steep hierarchies of wealth and power, evidenced by burials around the world with great differences in the abundance and value of burial goods.

5. As humans moved from nomadic foraging to sedentary farming during the early Agrarian era, farmers did not farm and graze fertile soils adequately and did not sufficiently rely on irrigation.

Answer: False

Page: 123

Explanation: Without any intention or perhaps even awareness of doing so, early farmers often pursued unsustainable agricultural practices. These included the overfarming and overgrazing of poor soils (which led to desertification); excessive dependence on irrigation (which led to salinization); and widespread forest and jungle clearing (which led to serious erosion problems).

Multiple Choice

1. Which of the following statements is true of the emergence of agriculture from foraging?
2. Foragers unequivocally viewed agriculture as a more attractive lifeway.
3. Farmers replaced the process of extensification with the process of intensification.
4. The advent of agriculture was a rapid process and an abrupt break from foraging.
5. For a long time, foraging persisted in close proximity to early farming communities.

Answer: D

Page: 107

Explanation: Archaeology indicates that foragers did not always see agriculture as a more attractive lifeway. Foraging persisted for centuries or even millennia in close proximity to early farming communities.

2. Hunter-gathering was a much better survival strategy for human communities in the Pleistocene because:
3. the variety in plant species was diminishing.
4. climactic conditions became warmer and more stable.
5. animal migration paths were often altered.
6. large steppe species like mammoths and bison were displaced.

Answer: C

Page: 107

Explanation: With animal migration paths so often altered, and with different plant species emerging and disappearing, hunter-gathering was a much better survival strategy for human communities in the Pleistocene.

3. _____ resembles the sort of market gardening that many subsistence and community gardeners continued to pursue in the twentieth century.
4. Jungle clearing
5. Horticulture
6. Desertification
7. Salinization

Answer: B

Page: 112

Explanation: Horticulture resembles the sort of market gardening that many subsistence and community gardeners continued to pursue in the twentieth century. It used traditional techniques and implements such as stone axes hafted onto wooden handles for clearing the land; foot plows and hoes for planting; bone or stone sickles hafted onto wooden handles for harvesting; and stones for grinding grain.

4. _____ means growing crops on human-made floating fields of timber and soil, anchored in the middle of lakes.
5. Swidden agriculture
6. Domestication
7. Chinampa agriculture
8. Extensification

Answer: C

Page: 113

Explanation: Chinampa agriculture, devised by Mesoamerican farmers, means growing crops on human-made floating fields of timber and soil, anchored in the middle of lakes. The use of chinampa agriculture is associated with Aztec urbanization.

5. Which of the following accurately describes bottom-up power?
6. Power based on autonomy
7. Power based on consent
8. Power based on force
9. Power based on coercion

Answer: B

Page: 121

Explanation: In bottom-up power, the focus is on notions of consent, on the idea that power initially comes from below. The process identified with bottom-up power is that people living in larger and more complex societies eventually wanted or needed some mechanism of coordinated management, so they agreed to obey rulers.

Essay

1. Discuss what archeology has revealed about gender relations in Early Agrarian era communities.

Archaeology has revealed something about gender relations in Early Agrarian era communities, but this evidence is ambiguous and provides at best only a partial answer to the question of what impact agriculture and the emergence of sedentary village life had on the status of women. This transition clearly changed the relative positions of men and women, but there is no standard model as to exactly how the change was manifested. Part of the problem is that it is often difficult to isolate male from female remains in the archaeological record, and many of the artifacts discovered do not explicitly show that they were used exclusively by either sex. Anthropologists and gender historians often try to reconstruct what might have been going on during this transition by making comparisons with modern-day early farming societies. One assumption, for example, is that because men generally make the stone tools used by twentieth-century horticultural societies, they probably did so in the Early Agrarian era as well, but this is hardly conclusive.

Studies of San foragers in southern Africa led some researchers to argue that sedentism reduced the status of women. Nomadic groups tended to be more egalitarian, with men’s and women’s roles equally important for group survival. Sedentism changed all this, the argument suggests, by confining women to the relative isolation of the home and freeing up men to play more public roles, including cattle herding and “politics.” Eventually this transition meant that certain women’s jobs were designated as being of lower status, including drawing water from the well and other household chores.

Another interpretation of Early Agrarian gender roles is that women may have taken the lead in persuading the community to abandon nomadism and settle down through actively and intentionally experimenting with plant cultivation, because survival as a nomadic forager was particularly hard work for women. Anthropologists find evidence to support such a model in observations of Sudanese affluent foragers. On the other hand, analysis of skeletons from Abu Hureya in Syria shows that farming was probably even more physically demanding than foraging for women. Many of the female skeletons analyzed had deformed toe bones and powerful upper arms, probably from grinding grain all day, whereas the male skeletons did not have these deformities.

These ambiguous interpretations are complicated by evidence suggesting that living standards initially declined in Early Agrarian villages for residents of both sexes, compared to the lifeways of foragers. This may have been because farmers relied on fewer foodstuffs than foragers, so their diets were less varied and less nutritious, which explains why the remains of some early farmers appear physically shorter than individuals in neighboring foraging communities. Famine was a real possibility and constant threat if staple crops failed, and farmers probably worked harder and longer hours and suffered higher levels of stress (we can tell this from study of bones) than foragers as they attempted to stave off the myriad threats to survival faced by Early Agrarian communities. Within these communities, however, it is probably safe to say that men’s and women’s roles (and consequently status) were increasingly clearly defined.

Page: 116-117

2. Why and how did consensual power emerge in the Early Agrarian era?

As populations grew in the Early Agrarian era, the need to coordinate activities must have become more apparent. A small community of just a few families can sort out its own problems and coordinate its communal tasks face-to-face, but a village of several hundred people, let alone a town of several thousand, can’t do this without leaders of some kind. As farming spread from its centers of origin and more and more villages began to appear, some of them grew large enough to be described as towns. These towns in turn began to exert control over the smaller villages.

What tasks would people in burgeoning agrarian communities need leaders to take care of? They needed leaders for defense (to lead them in conflicts against neighboring communities); for religion (to mediate with the gods, particularly when the community was so dependent on successful harvests); for legal matters (such as the settling of disputes); and for administration (for example, to maintain increasingly complex irrigation systems). In other words, leaders were needed for the first time in human history to take care of those tasks that the community could no longer manage without a coordinating mechanism. Which particular individuals should be selected? What attributes did one need to become a leader? The most obvious answer was individuals who possess particular talent as a priest or shaman, a warrior or diplomat, or an organizer of group projects. But often the selection seems to have had little to do with talent and more to do with birth, particularly in the selection of a chief.

The form of government adopted by many Early Agrarian villages was a chiefdom, a complex human society, led by a chief, in which the chief or an elite noble group is selected to make decisions for the community. As farmers got better at their jobs, the community was able to produce agricultural surpluses, which freed up the leaders from food production and allowed for the emergence of just such an elite group within the community. Generally chiefs were the oldest sons of the senior lineages within these communities, which still thought of themselves in terms of family, so that an accident of birth determined commoner and noble, and the possible futures open to each.

What remains unclear in this process is how agricultural surpluses began to accumulate in the first place, particularly when anthropologists are able to show that many farmers in simple villages today regard the notion of growing more than they need to survive as somewhat ridiculous. The need to store grain to survive through the winter is often undermined by archaeological evidence that these surpluses were often destroyed by rot or vermin.

An alternative explanation is that chiefs arose by giving away surplus food or other goods to create a sense of obligation from the recipients. Gift giving was an essential means of maintaining intergroup harmony in the Paleolithic, and it remained significant in the Early Agrarian. This opened up a route to power through the display of extravagant generosity to potential supporters, a method practiced by the so-called Big Men of Polynesian societies. Generosity (through gift giving) is highly valued in all small-scale societies. The Big Men used this deeply ingrained sense of reciprocity engendered by gift giving to gain power. Modern anthropological studies have shown how the potential Big Man gradually accumulates and stores away significant resources (pigs, blankets, other valuable or useful objects), then redistributes them in times of communal need. The Big Man gains considerable social leverage through the accumulation of reciprocal IOUs, until eventually the beneficiaries of the Big Man’s largesse have no option but to support him. An Eskimo proverb vividly illustrates this path to power: “Gifts make slaves, as whips make dogs.”

Page: 122