Anthro Ch. 12, 13, 15 PP

Pastoralism

- Pastoralist societies are groups of people who live by animal husbandry, which is the breeding, care, and use of domesticated herding animals such as cattle, camels, goats, horses, llamas, reindeer, and yaks. -- Pastoralists mainly consume the animal milk and blood and exploit their hair or fur rather than butcher the animal for food. -- Pastoralism also requires the constant movement of herds through a landscape.

Population growth

- Population growth was a key part of how these structures emerged. Large populations require a sophistication and scale of food production. - Importantly, societies with cities and the early hints of what would become centralized states lived side by side with small-scale and tribal societies that also produced their own food, often the same foods that were part of the diet of people in these early towns and cities. - As a population grows, social conflict over essential resources such as land and water can also increase. This social conflict that results can trigger the rise of complexity.

"the original affluent society"

- Previous assumptions claimed that a hunting-gathering lifestyle was so difficult and precarious that people had to work long hours and had no time to develop elaborate cultural artifacts. -- Hunter-gatherer lives were not harsh: they spent many hours each day in leisure activities, socializing, or sleeping. They neither needed nor desired material goods. -- Hunter-gatherers did not view their natural environments as scarce and harsh, but as affluent and always providing for their needs. - Hence they were called "the original affluent society."

Why Don't cities and states always survive?

- Romanticizing the rise and fall of civilizations leads us to wonder if we are misinterpreting or misunderstanding the course of these ancient states. -- Diamond's argument: the root cause of societal collapse is environmental. -- While compelling, it is like viewing a low resolution digital image: from far away, the image seems clear; up close it dissolves into disconnected parts. -- This and many other arguments are all attempts to explain collapse: the rapid loss of a social, political, and economic order or complexity.

Simple Agriculture

- Simple agriculture emerged in many different locations worldwide at very similar times: -- The Fertile Crescent of Middle East about 10,000 to 12,000 years ago. -- Chinese development of simple rice agriculture emerged in the same period. -- New World cultivation emerged somewhat later, characterized by maize: the indigenous species of corn that was first domesticated in Mexico. -- The Peruvian potato was being cultivated by at least 8,000 years ago. -- The various tubers of the New Guinea highlands noted earlier were being raised in small fields drained by ditches 10,000 years ago. - Humans across the globe were beginning to cultivate useful plants almost simultaneously, suggesting that the knowledge of plants long preceded systematic cultivation.

Relating to the Natural World

Anthropologists explore the effects of environmental changes globally, within societies small and large, and cross-culturally.

The shift from hunting-gathering to food production

- This transformation was "revolutionary" because it allowed for population expansion and change in almost all aspects of society.

The puzzle of Domestication

- A surprising discovery that gardens tended in Papua New Guinea were mostly growing sweet potatoes, a tuber which originated in South America, not Melanesia. -- How could these large populations cultivate a crop that did not originate there? -- When and how did the changes enabled by sweet potato cultivation happen? - This was the result of domestication: the process of converting wild plants and animals to human uses by taming animals or turning them into herds that can be raised for meat or milk or making plants able to be grown for food or other uses.

The hunter-gatherer lifeway

- Agriculture and animal husbandry had not penetrated regions inhabited by hunter-gatherers because the environment and climate were unsuitable. - Europeans depicted these environments as harsh and their inhabitants' technologies as simple. They assumed the foraging way of life was crude and brutish, which became the basis for deeply held cultural stereotypes rooted in urban European and American worldviews. -- The idea that foragers could generate insights into the ancient past was rooted in evolutionary thinking.

In small-scale situations, these pressures have generated dilemmas

- Analyses that focus on the linkages between political-economic power, social inequality, and ecological destruction typify political ecology: the field of study that focuses on the linkages between political-economic power, social inequality, and ecological destruction - Worldwide industrialization of agriculture puts new pressures on foodways, with important dietary consequences for many people. These dynamics have contributed to certain health problems including obesity, hunger, and malnutrition. Cash crops, tenant farming, and wage labor undermine local food security: the access to sufficient nutritious food to sustain an active and healthy life.

How heavily did prehistoric people depend on hunting?

- Anatomically modern humans, around for approximately 200,000 years, ate only what they could hunt, gather, or scavenge from the natural environment. - Anthropologists have studied living hunter-gatherers to find clues about foraging practices in the past—that is, obtaining food by searching for it, as opposed to growing or raising the plants and animals people eat.

Taking Stock

- Ancient complex societies can be easily viewed as stories of high human drama and tragedy. Possibly because we currently face the consequences of global warming, the disappearance of previous societies holds great fascination. - Stepping back from the more dramatic elements allows us to focus on complexity as a means by which archaeologists can study the dynamics of social integration and transformation in ancient societies. -- Cases such as Cahokia or the Tarascan empire allow us to better appreciate these stories as human cultural processes. - All archaeologists agree that any explanation of complexity must be rooted in the actual evidence of artifacts and remains themselves. It is this that allows us insight into how and why states, cities, and other complex societies emerged, and, in some cases, declined.

Pay Attention!

- Anthropologists agree that we must pay close attention to the social practices and structures that shape the way communities relate to their natural environments. When we do, we see that many societies have deep understandings of—and even sustainable relations with—nature. - Today's global ecological crisis—as was the case in past ecological crises—cannot be reduced to any singular cause

The "Man the Hunter" Conference

- Anthropologists gathered to assess: -- How difficult was it for early hunter-gatherers to get their food? -- How similar were contemporary hunter-gatherers to their prehistoric ancestors? - The dominant anthropological model of these societies in the decades before the conference titled "Man the Hunter" held that hunter-gatherers live in patrilocal bands: small groups where men controlled resources and hunting territories.

How is non-Western knowledge of nature similar to and different from science?

- Anthropologists recognize that all systems of knowledge about nature are culturally based—even science. - At the time of the research by Bronislaw Malinowski, the suggestion that Western culture included nonscientific magical and religious elements and that non-Western societies had elements of science was controversial. - In the decades since, it's become increasingly obvious to anthropologists that most societies have scientific attitudes and practices. - Key difference: many cultures integrate science into spiritual beliefs, social behaviors, and identities, rather than distinguishing it as a special domain of knowledge (i.e., without the strict natural-supernatural boundary Western scientists maintain).

comanagement

- Anthropologists recognize that disrupting indigenous practices in order to conserve nature is a culturally constructed idea—and one that must be reconsidered. -- This recognition has inspired experiments in "comanagement" between international conservation groups and indigenous people. - Environmental anthropologists have found that these collaborative approaches create new opportunities for dialogue and shared responsibility between conservationists and indigenous communities. -- It is not a perfect solution. Conservation groups still have extensive control. Critics wonder if creating preserves is a long-term solution to the bigger problem: social and ideological factors that contribute to environmental destruction. - At the heart of co-management is a move toward recognizing and redressing how social inequalities and injustices affect possibilities for conservation and environmental sustainability. - An even stronger approach along these lines is a movement called environmental justice: a social movement that addresses the linkages between racial discrimination and injustice, social equity, and environmental quality.

How do complex structures emerge?

- Archaeologists recognized that for complex societies to form, more intensive food production was necessary. - Elites in early cities and states began to construct a state ideology and religious ideas that explained and justified why the political elites deserved the special treatment they received and groups with less power deserved fewer resources. - Several other features have been suggested that we will consider here: -- Population growth -- Contact with other cultures -- Specialization and the differentiation of social roles

Social complexity in ancient societies

- Archaeology's focus on cities and states reveals much about how, why, and when humans shifted from small-scale societies to larger scale social groupings in which inequalities of power and social hierarchy are common. -- Yet social complexity is not always associated with social inequality and hierarchy.

DO only industrialized Western nations conserve nature? uAre native peoples "natural environmentalists"?

- Are native peoples "natural environmentalists"? - In reality, indigenous people are as susceptible to the risk of overexploitation as any other human group.

artifactual landscapes

- Artifactual landscapes: the idea that landscapes are the product of human shaping. - Efforts to "conserve" these areas without people alter that relationship. -- Maasai pastoralists of southern Kenya and northern Tanzania intentionally burn scrub brush to encourage the growth of nutritious pasture grass, an act that helps support wildlife biodiversity. -- Park administrators disrupted the transhumant system of the Maasai by preventing access to waterholes within parks ("fortress conservation"). -- Because of this shift in mobility, the Maasai were forced to overgraze areas outside the park during drought periods.

City-States

- As smaller cities grew, their complexity increased, and we refer to these as city-states: autonomous political entities that consisted of a city and its surrounding countryside. -- It was from these city-states that proper states and their larger cousins, kingdoms and empires, eventually arose. - The question that arises here is how such structures—city-states, states and empires—emerged in the first place?

Classification systems

- Based on an ethnobiological study of Tzeltal Maya, Brent Berlin (1973) concluded that all human classification systems basically categorize organisms in ways comparable to Linnaean taxonomy. His conclusions have been challenged by some exceptional systems of classification: -- The Kalam of Papua New Guinea identify the large, flightless cassowary as a close cousin of people but not a "bird." Also, bats (mammals) are classified as birds, based on the analogous behavior of flight. - Environmental anthropologists seek to understand traditional ecological knowledge: indigenous ecological knowledge and its relationship with resource management strategies.

Cahokia: A complex society

- Cahokia, a prehistoric site in the Mississippi River bottom lands near what is now St. Louis, offers us a glimpse of social complexity. --A large, thriving urban center of between 5,000 and 10,000 people. -- Then it disappeared as people dispersed. - Understanding how and why such social complexity emerged there when it did, and why it didn't last, leads us to wonder: Why would people who governed themselves give up their independence to be ruled by others?

Changes in everyday objects

- Changes in everyday objects reflect increasing social complexity: -- Ceramic pottery vessels and figurines -- Stone tools and weapons -- Metal tools, weapons, and ornaments - In connecting these objects to their sources, archaeologists have demonstrated that expanding trade networks and administrative control brought raw materials from new and distant locales both outside and within the growing empire. - Changes in production and distribution patterns of obsidian and metals support a similar picture of the empire's social complexity.

How Are Industrial Agriculture and Economic Globalization Linked to Increasing Environmental and Health Problems?

- Changes in global economics—globalization—are driving unprecedented changes, creating environmental problems and challenging both health and sustainability. - The complex interplay of social, cultural, natural, and political-economic factors raise two important questions: How do people consume natural resources in their lifestyles and foodways? And who pays the cost of that consumption?

World Parks Congress

- Goals include environmental protection, conservation, and sustainable development: -- Development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. - Representatives of indigenous groups attended the congress to protest. -- They argued that models for administering protected areas are based on the idea that nature must be kept uninhabited by people, leading to forced evictions, disruption of traditional lifeways, and disregard for native systems of environmental management.

Mortuary Practices

- Changes in the location and contents of Tarascan burial sites over time, including the preparation and treatment of bodies, types of burial goods, and mortuary facilities, correlate with increasing population and indicate social differentiation - A notable shift in mortuary practices takes place with the consolidation of state power during the 1400s. -- Before this period, mortuary objects in elite burials were imported from other distant powerful political and social centers, such as central Mexico. -- Later objects come from areas under Tarascan control which archaeologists interpret as indicating the consolidation of a distinctly Tarascan identity among elites, an identification that supports the consolidation of Tarascan state power.

Consumer Capitalism

- Consumer capitalism promotes the cultural ideal that people will never fully satisfy their needs, so they continually buy more things in their pursuit of happiness, something that has enormous consequences for sustainability. - Most Americans do not understand the destructiveness of consumer lifestyles, although signs of it are everywhere.

Environmental Anthropologists

- Environmental anthropologists—practitioners of the branch of anthropology that studies how different societies understand, interact with, and make changes to nature—have long insisted that it is important to understand the abstract ideas that influence people's interactions with landscapes. - One way to think of these abstract ideas is through the concept of a cultural landscape: the culturally specific images, knowledge, and concepts of the physical landscape that help shape human relations with that landscape. -- The Itzaj Maya view nature as an extension of the social world (rather than the other way around), including the spirits that regulate ecological choices. - A key to cultural landscapes is the concept that humans perceive their natural environments through the lens of metaphor, and metaphors are connected to actions, thought, and organization. - Metaphors offer insights into a community's cultural landscapes and symbolize a society's environmental values.

Population Growth and Food Production

- Esther Boserup developed a model to explain this shift. Intensive agricultural activity requires hard labor. - Boserup examined the relationship between population growth and food production, challenging the assumptions of Thomas Malthus. -- For Malthus, population growth depended on the food supply. - Boserup argued instead that population growth forced people to work harder to produce more food, and that similar processes of population growth had triggered technological improvements and increased labor inputs throughout recorded history.

Past versus Present

- Ethnographic studies of contemporary hunter-gatherers offer many insights about life under these non-agricultural conditions...but do these societies represent the actual lifestyles of our prehistoric ancestors during Paleolithic times? -- Contemporary hunter-gatherers are not identical to prehistoric communities: contemporaries are linked to sedentary agricultural and industrial societies through trade and other social ties, which did not exist prior to the development of agriculture.

Ethnoscience

- Ethnoscientists aim to describe and understand the conceptual models and rules with which a society operates. - They begin by comparing the classification systems used by different people. - In the case of plants and animals, this is called ethnobiology: the subfield of ethnoscience that studies how people in non-Western societies name and codify living things.

The "fertile cresent"

- First evidence of early humans actively and intentionally planting seeds for their own food comes from excavations in the Middle East in what has come to be known as the "Fertile Crescent." -- The so-called "hilly flanks" hypothesis notes that most plants first cultivated there were not indigenous. The upland fringes were the natural habitat of these prehistorically cultivated species. -- Once certain plants had been domesticated in the uplands, their use for food spread to neighboring groups in the lowlands. -- This did not explain why people started to produce their own food when they did rather than a few thousand years earlier or later.

Beyond Population Pressures: Three theories

- First: if food production began in diverse parts of the world almost simultaneously, then it likely had to do in part with the more habitable environment following the last ice age. - Second: social processes were key to the beginning of food production due to changes in cognitive ability that allowed them to perceive some longer term advantages that came with regular food production. - Third: irrespective of why people in one region or another began cultivating plants, the people and the plants they cultivated began to co-evolve, shaping each other.

Foodways and Culture

- Food preferences, etiquette, and taboos also mark social boundaries and identities such as gender difference, ethnic and regional difference, or profession and class status. - These social markers are closely related to differing notions of taste: a reference to the sense that gives humans the ability to detect flavors as well as a reference to the social distinction and prestige associated with certain foodstuffs. - The "perfect meal" typically reflects people's culturally acquired tastes and is closely identified with their social identity and subsistence patterns as a group. - Foodways are remarkably persistent but can change for many reasons.

Foodways

- Foodways are always shaped by cultural beliefs and governed by systematic rules and etiquette particular to a social group. - These cultural processes have implications for human sustainability because they also shape how people think about and interact with landscapes through foodways. - Food is spiritually powerful and humans are susceptible to its influences. - In every society, food communicates symbolic meaning. - Foodways mark social boundaries and identities.

Foraging

- Foraging: searching for edible plant and animal foods without domesticating them (see Chapter 12). -- Hunter-gatherers are foragers. -- Most foragers live mobile lives and travel to the food, rather than moving the food to themselves. -- Low population densities ensure minimal impacts on the environment. -- Foraging is often stereotyped as a brutal struggle for existence. -- This is inaccurate because foragers tend to work less to procure their subsistence than horticulturalists or pastoralists. -- Foragers also tend to view their environments not as harsh but as giving. -- Contemporary foragers tend to inhabit extreme environments where horticulture or pastoralism are not feasible.

Horticulture

- Horticulture is the cultivation of gardens or small fields to meet the basic needs of a household. -- It is sometimes referred to as subsistence agriculture, cultivation for purposes of household provisioning or small-scale trade and not investment. -- The most common form of horticulture is swidden agriculture: a farming method in tropical regions in which the farmer slashes (cuts down trees) and burns small patches of forest to release plant nutrients into the soil. -- Horticulture emerged some twelve thousand years ago with domestication and gave humans selective control over animal and plant reproduction.

Neolithic Revolution (s)

- How did the shift from hunting and gathering to raising plants and animals change how people lived in their environments? Embedded within this larger question are a number of smaller questions: -- How heavily did prehistoric people depend on hunting? -- Why did people start domesticating plants and animals? -- How did early humans raise their own food? -- What impact did raising plants and animals have on other aspects of life? - V. Gordon Childe described this transformation as the Neolithic Revolution, Neolithic referring to the "new" (neo-) stone (-lithic) age when humans had begun growing crops and raising animals for food, using a stone-tool technology. - Anthropologists now agree that there was no single "revolution" but many that played out differently in distinct parts of the globe.

How do people secure an adequate, meaningful, and environmentally sustainable food supply?

- How people think of their landscapes is intertwined with how they actually get their living from it. - Anthropologists consider the idea of foodways: the structured beliefs and behaviors surrounding the production, distribution, and consumption of food - Cultural anthropologists have long studied modes of subsistence: how people actually procure, produce, and distribute food.

More than just wheat and corn

- Humans did not just domesticate plants for food, but have also domesticated plants for other uses, such as fiber-bearing plants for basket-making. - Similar processes occurred with domesticated animals. Raising animals is also an especially useful practice for people who have domesticated plants. - Humans may have begun manipulating their food sources in more subtle and less comprehensive ways. -- Arboriculture, or planting and tending tree crops whose fruits are edible, occurred much earlier than domestication of other crops in Southeast Asia.

How Did early humans raise their own food?

- Hunter-gatherers and their ancestors have an extraordinary knowledge of their natural environment, the result of careful observation made in their daily lives. -- It is highly likely that our human ancestors knew some or all of these things for hundreds of thousands of years, if not even longer. People put this knowledge to work. - Planting wild grains from locally occurring grasses led to larger plant and seed sizes. Tending and planting wild grass seeds meant selecting the best seeds, improving subsequent planting stock.

Understanding + Population Growth = Management of Food Resources

- If hunter-gatherers already understood how plants grew, even a small increase in population could have been enough to encourage them to manage their own food resources. - If incipient food production supported the existing population plus a small amount of further population growth, population pressure would encourage people to further intensify food production.

The Role of Culture

- In addition, new cultural practices emerge that help humans cope with rapid ecological deterioration. We can see this in some examples: -- Clifford Geertz documented how Indonesians on different large islands had increased the carrying capacity through intensification. -- Communities in the floodplain of the Brazilian Amazon have focused on how communities can themselves regulate fisheries to improve sustainability. - Anthropologists have also shown that the environmental disruptions that lead to famines are the result of a complex interplay of natural conditions and existing patterns of social inequality.

The Whole Picture

- In isolation, none of these findings would automatically suggest the existence of social complexity, but together they can create a compelling picture that highlights the rise of state power, social divisions, and social inequality. - Since empires, cities, and states do not usually survive for more than a few centuries we may ask why, after mustering the specialization and organization of production, do most complex societies not persist?

Ecological Footprint

- In the Malthusian view, sustainability is a matter of controlling population where it seems to be growing most. But it does not address a simple fact: different societies, as well as people within those societies, consume differing amounts of resources. - One way to address this issue is by measuring what people consume and the waste they produce, what scholars call an ecological footprint: a quantitative tool that measures what people consume and the waste they produce. It also calculates the amount of biologically productive land and water area needed to support those people. - Some individuals consume more and others less, usually related to their relative wealth or poverty.

Ancestral Pueblo and Abandonment

- In the late 13th century CE the Ancestral Pueblo people who lived in Mesa Verde and the rest of the Four Corners region picked up and moved away. - Why? Was it erosion, soil depletion, dropping water tables, or violence? Probably none of these. - Archaeologists have begun to view this abandonment as a social strategy, not of failure, but of resilience so that the people migrated to take advantage of opportunities elsewhere. - Many of these groups simply migrated to other areas with more abundant resources.

The Impact of industrial agriculture

- Industrial agriculture has important impacts on a landscape, evidenced by the shift in rural communities from traditional modes of subsistence and agriculture to industrialized agriculture. - Part of the reason for this shift can be attributed to the Green Revolution: the transformation of agriculture in the developing world through agricultural research, technology transfer, and infrastructure development. - Global institutions such as the World Bank have encouraged many countries to produce non-traditional exports with the goal of generating foreign revenue through exports in order to make investments in domestic development and pay back loans to those international institutions.

Pastoralism

- Pastoralism: the practice of animal husbandry, which is the breeding, care, and use of domesticated herding animals such as cattle, camels, goats, horses, llamas, reindeer, and yaks. - Raising herds of livestock is a key component of a group's subsistence economy. - Pastoralism tends to lead to larger populations and more complex patterns of social interaction. - Pastoralists are relatively few in number worldwide. Most people in the world are settled, living from agriculture, either directly or indirectly.

Industrial agriculture

- Industrial agriculture is the application of industrial principles and methods to farming. -- Key principles include specialization to produce a single crop, and the obtaining of land, labor, seeds, and water as commodities on the open market. - This form of agriculture is characteristic of highly industrialized and post-industrial economies in which only 1% to 5% percent of the population engages in food production. - Industrial agriculture vastly increases productivity by harnessing sources of energy such as steam power and petroleum. - One consequence of industrial agriculture is overproduction.

Trade-offs

- Intensification carries certain trade-offs. -- (+) It solves the problem of how to provide food for a large number of people and provides a relatively steady supply of food. -- (-) Intensification can create environmental problems when rearranged ecosystems result in vulnerability to declining environmental conditions.

Intensive agriculture

- Intensive agriculture attempts to increase yields and feed a larger community using intensification: processes that increase yields. - Intensification includes different processes: -- Preparing the soil, with regular weeding, mulching, mounding, and fertilizers. -- Technology ranging from the simple(using a harness with horses to plow a field), complex (a system of canals or dams to irrigate the landscape) or very complex (such as a combine harvester). -- Using a larger labor force which can sustain the nutritional and energy needs of large populations, and provide employment. -- Water management, ranging from simple systems to large-scale irrigation systems. -- Modifying plants and soils by selectively breeding plants for better yields, reduced time to mature, and creating a more edible product.

How can we identify social complexity from archaeological sites and their artifacts?

- Material objects are an expression of people's social relationships and help shape social relationships, including those related to wealth, power, and status. - By itself, in isolation, an object recovered in an excavation can't necessarily tell us much about dynamics of wealth, power, and status. - Evidence of such things usually comes from close analysis of different kinds of objects, often as an assemblage: a group or collection of objects found together at an excavation or site.

So What Really happened to the Classic Maya?

- Maya farmers dispersed throughout the countryside and only occasionally congregated to the once occupied centers. - Certain social and political structures persisted, including statecraft based on inherited nobility and social hierarchy. - None of this suggests collapse but rather transformation. - The important point here is that different polities experienced different histories of transformation—some held on longer than others because of their specific political, ecological, historic, and perhaps even climatic conditions.

Modes of Subsistence

- Modes of subsistence consist of four major modes: -- Foraging, or the search for edible things -- Horticulture, or small-scale subsistence agriculture -- Pastoralism, which means the raising of animal herds -- Intensive agriculture, or large-scale, often commercial, agriculture

The importance of Women

- More recent research has shown that there is considerable variation among hunter-gatherer groups. Women spend as much time working as men do. - Recent analyses suggest that in most horticultural and agricultural societies, women's effort is typically greater than that of men.

Social complexity

- Most anthropologists and archaeologists refer to the differences between these societies as differences of social complexity: a society that have many different parts organized into a single social system. -- All societies experience some level of social complexity. No human society is "simple": even the most egalitarian face-to-face societies have ways of exercising power, controlling resources, and grouping people into smaller units for specific purposes. - The idea of complexity is used when the material arrangements of a society are differentiated into social or occupational classes or differences in wealth, power, and control.

Specialization

- Most trade models of state formation focus on the key role that a specialized class of traders plays in managing markets and market places. - The "production model" of state formation is driven by craft specialization, leading to new social roles for food producers and craftspeople who produce useful objects like stone tools and pottery. -- The resulting food surpluses could feed the specialists and give rise to a military class.

Do all people conceive of nature in the same ways?

- No. People conceive of nature and their relation to it very differently, in ways that are reflected in many other aspects of culture. - Compare the indigenous peoples of southern Mexico and Central America and the Spanish who arrived in the 1500s. -- Some natives were able to avoid the invaders by retreating into the tropical lowlands. The Spanish found this environment oppressive and wondered why the forest wasn't simply cleared. -- This reflects essentially different worldviews: part of nature vs. dominant over nature. -- Similarly, the Itzaj Maya of Guatemala view people and nature as belonging to the same realm; forest spirits punish those who cut down too many trees or overhunt and reward those who show restraint

The Expections

- Not all hunter-gatherer societies avoided accumulating surpluses, as demonstrated by Pacific Northwest Indian communities. - They amassed large surpluses. Fish and other valuable objects were given away or sometimes destroyed in competitive exchanges called potlatches: Opulent ceremonial feasts intended to display wealth and social status by giving away or destroying valuable possessions. -- The goal of these gift exchanges was not to provide food or material goods to other groups, but to assert political, economic, and social superiority by giving away more than the recipients could pay back at some later potlatch.

Complex Societies

- Not all societies are complex societies: societies in which socioeconomic differentiation, large populations, and centralized political control, are pervasive and defining features of the society. -- Complex societies typically have political formations called states: societies with forms of political and economic control over a particular territory and the inhabitants of that territory. -- The other defining feature of complex societies are cities: relatively large and permanent settlements, usually with populations of at least several thousand inhabitants. - Complex societies are characterized by dynamics of wealth, power, coercion, and status, in which social stratification—elites and non-elites— ensures that the labor of the non-elites benefits the lifestyles of the elites.

The Problem of Surpluses

- So, if they could procure sufficient food with just a few hours of labor each day, why did they not spend an extra hour each day to amass a surplus? - Anthropologists have suggested two answers to this question: -- Lorna Marshall: !Kung women only gathered as much as they needed for their own families; a surplus meant they would be expected to share it with the entire band. If her labor would not help her family, collecting too much was intentionally avoided. Among many hunter-gatherer communities, people place great emphasis on sharing as a moral obligation. -- Bruce Winterhalder: even if only a few members of the band harvested more than they needed on a regular basis, their actions could threaten the survival of the entire community due to depletion of local resources needed by everyone. This optimal foraging strategy suggests people capture just enough calories from the environment as they need to survive comfortably.

Expanding the Theory

- Some argued that after the end of the last ice age, environmental conditions stabilized and improved, allowing a small but gradual population increase. - Others suggested that the post-glacial populations increased in coastal areas that had favorable wild resources for fisher-foraging groups. - Beyond population pressure, several other kinds of theories have been offered.

The Lessons from the Present

- Some contemporary groups do have features that are important for archaeological understanding of prehistoric hunter-gatherers. -- First: hunting and gathering occurs in a variety of forms, with hunting and fishing making up as much as 100 percent of the diet or as little as 10 percent, while foraging makes up the rest. -- Second: anthropological models of the typical hunter-gatherers have changed. Previously these societies were seen as male-dominated, focused almost solely on hunting. Subsequently, they were seen principally as egalitarian foragers, relying primarily on plant foods, with women's roles equal in importance to men's. - What emerges from this discussion is one of the biggest questions of all: what led people to shift from a foraging lifestyle in the first place?

Social complexity does not always equal social inequality

- Some societies may have social groups organized into broad regional relationships by building on individual relationships rather than central authority. -- One example: the north coast of Papua New Guinea today. --- Nearly 200 politically independent communities are economically integrated through individual exchange relationships between pairs of friends, friendships which are heritable and persistent over hundreds of years.

Why Did People Start domesticating plants and animals?

- Sometime in the past ten thousand years, ancient societies developed more or less independently in the Middle East, China, India, Meso-America, and South America. - Hunter-gatherers didn't suddenly "discover" how to plant seeds, nor did they abruptly learn that by feeding certain wild animals they could control their behavior.

The classic Maya

- The Classic Maya (400-900 CE) of the Mesoamerican lowlands, a prototypical ancient complex state society. -- This was a society of extreme political centralization, rigid social hierarchy, colossal monuments, population centers housing tens of thousands of people, and a hieroglyphic script. - During the 8th and 9th centuries, royal dynasties disappeared, courts no longer functioned, monumental building projects ended, and important centers were abandoned, mostly without evidence of violence. WHY?

The End Result

- The Neolithic Revolution was not a single event occurring during one span of years, but many events in many parts of the world at different times. - Cultivation and animal husbandry typically led to sedentism and the production of food surpluses. - Growing population pressures together with the ability to amass surpluses led to radical new ways for groups to interact. - This led to other developments, most notably the rise of cities, the formation of states, and introduction of social hierarchies with essentially permanent patterns of social inequality.

The Tarascan Empire

- The Tarascan empire in what is now the western Mexican state of Michoacán is a fresh example how we can identify and understand social complexity. - Tarascans organized the second-largest state in Mexico probably in an effort to counter the military and political pressures exerted on them by the Aztecs. - Evidence of complexity: population growth and settlement patterns; soils and land use patterns; monuments and buildings; mortuary patterns and skeletal remains; and ceramic, stone, and metal objects.

Man the Hunter: Assumptions and Results

- The assumptions about this early lifeway included three key features: -- Hunting was an activity principally undertaken by men. -- Hunting was more important than gathering. -- Men's subsistence activities were more significant than women's. - The result? A resounding rejection of the old male-dominated model. -- A strong consensus emerged that hunting was not the defining feature of these societies but in fact were based on women's subsistence activities.

Transformation and Resilience

- The classic examples of great empires that ended did not generally end from collapse but were usually the result of: -- Internal fragmentation, lack of strong central institutions, or more powerful foreign armies. - The two emblematic examples of apparent collapse—the Four Corners area of the U.S. Southwest and the Classic Maya—demonstrate that abandoned ruins do not mean that the people themselves did not survive, although they may have undergone substantial social transformation.

When archaeologists talk about social complexity, what do they actually mean?

- The earliest archaeologists were Europeans educated about the classic civilizations of Greece, Rome, Egypt, and Mesopotamia. -- They saw themselves as linked more or less directly to these older societies, which had provided the inspiration, if not the precise basis for, European legal codes, constitutions, and philosophies. - Early archaeologists believed their findings would better help them understand the principles of how societies became civilized and complex, as well as why some societies remained small and relatively simple.

Generalized Foraging model

- The generalized foraging model: a model asserting that hunter-gatherer societies have five basic characteristics. - The five characteristics included: -- Egalitarianism -- Low population density -- Lack of territoriality -- A minimum of food storage -- Flux in band composition

Collapse

- When we delve deeply into the archaeological evidence, most cases for total societal collapse fall apart. - Archaeologists mostly agree that collapse is an incredibly rare phenomenon -- Instead, societies have the ability for transformation and resilience: the ability of a social system to absorb changes and still retain certain basic cultural processes and structures, albeit in altered form.

Spatial Segregation and Special Function zones

- The growing city became spatially segregated and divided into special function zones. -- Manufacturing: pottery-making and stone tool manufacture, indicating a degree of occupational specialization. -- Public zones: monuments, plazas, and ball courts, all under direct control of administrative and religious authorities. - Soil and land use studies offer useful perspectives on connections between population growth, agricultural expansion, and soil degradation. This evidence indicates that the growth of population centers created soil degradation. - Because they transform a landscape and require substantial engineering and collective labor, monuments and buildings are important symbols of power, wealth, and even connection to the divine order.

Population and Environment

- The interplay between population and environment has been a prominent part of philosophical and environmental discussions for a long time. Malthus in the seventeenth century and Ehrlich in the twentieth century saw overpopulation as the most serious problem we face. - The problems with this view include the absence of any confirmed case of environmental and social collapse because of overpopulation or mass consumption as well as the uncanny ability of humans to develop new technologies and agricultural methods that increase the land's carrying capacity: the population an area can support.

Sedentism

- The most significant changes that accompany food production are largely the combined result of population growth and sedentism: year-round settlement in a particular place. - Some hunter-gatherer-forager groups established year-round settlements during the Mesolithic: the period from the end of the last ice age until the beginning of agriculture or horticulture. - Once settled, populations grew, with greater intensification of food production. More labor for food production resulted in periodic shortages of food, which in turn led to true agriculture. - The most striking aspect of sedentism is that with population growth it tends to lead to permanent social inequality. - This shift also brought with it a change from relying on a large variety of plants and animals typical of hunting and gathering to relying on a small number of plant species.

Explanations Abound

- There are dozens of explanations, the most prominent being: -- Escalating warfare between rulers of city-states. -- Out-of-control population growth leading to environmental degradation, erosion and soil depletion. -- Drought, resulting from climatological change. -- Inability of rulers to adapt to changing economic conditions and social conflict. - Important: the Maya people never disappeared. The history of the Maya is one of social change and resilience, as the existence of seven million Maya today attests. - Late Classic Period evidence of the lives and events of Maya royalty have more accounts of warfare than other historic periods. This is evidenced in stelae: carved limestone slabs.

Traditional Ecological knowledge

- This refers to indigenous ecological knowledge and its relationship with resource management strategies. - Indigenous peoples have been shown to possess knowledge of ecological relations unknown to Western science. - Such knowledge often resides in local languages, songs, or specialized rituals—places researchers might not think to look.

Trade

- Trade is another way to examine the emergence of very complex formations such as city-states. - The "trade model" of state formation holds that states and complex societies have tended to form where there is interaction among groups of people of different ethnic backgrounds with access to different resources. - Trade arises because people want the objects, foods, or raw materials that neighboring groups produce that are not available at home. -- Trade and exchange also create alliances between societies. - Additionally, providing military protection of markets and caravans is crucial. -- All of this is accomplished by collecting taxes and tribute.

Indigenous Knowledge Matters

- Traditional ecological knowledge is ideal for managing resources because it is customized specifically for particular local environments. -- Zapotec farmers of Oaxaca, Mexico, plant specific crops together, build soil mounds to plant maize, let plots lie fallow for designated periods of time, and base crop scheduling on the phases of the moon. - This helps to illustrate why environmental anthropologists must, in addition to developing an etic point of view on a community's relations with the environment, explore the emic point of view to understand how ecological knowledge guides human behavior in particular communities.

Transhumance

- Transhumance: the practice of moving herds to different fields or pastures with the changing seasons. - Transhumance is a fairly simple transformation of the nomadic lifestyle of hunter-gatherers. Instead of moving from one territory to another to hunt game, a family moves itself and its livestock from one set of pastures to another to take advantage of seasonal changes. - This led to societies that practice pastoralism.

Control over Production

- True control of production came with construction of irrigation canals and systems that developed in many early states, especially in the Middle East. - The level of political and social control exerted by ancient elites lays the basis for what early archaeologists referred to as hydraulic despotism: empires built around the control of water resources by despotic, or all-powerful, leaders. -- Images of ancient despotism are reasonable at various times and places, but they are biased because there were so many Mesopotamian scribes writing about everything imaginable in cuneiform script.

The origins of "civilizations"

- Two Models: -- Kroeber: the great civilizations emerged from the accumulation of particular items of material culture. -- Childe: the origins of cities and city-states was less about material things than about organizational arrangements. -- Archaeologists agreed that there were different degrees to which specific cases fit with either Kroeber's or Childe's model. - It was also clear that the social, political, and economic lives of people living in societies characterized as civilizations were very different from those of people living in small-scale societies.

Urbanization and Ruralization in City-states

- Two processes were at play in these city-states: -- Urbanization: the process by which towns grew as residential centers, as opposed to being trading centers. -- Ruralization: process in which the countryside was configured as a contested no-man's land lying between competing city-states. - Monumental architecture associated with religious shrines, temples, and leaders flourished during this time, along with the emergence of record keeping devices like cylinder seals and cuneiform tablets.

What Impact Did raising plants and animals have on other aspects of life?

- While the Neolithic Revolution happened in a series of "small revolutions," it is likely that first efforts to raise food changed people relatively little. - Hunter-gatherer groups ranged across large territories in search of food, planting and harvesting during annual movements. - Herding may have brought a greater change in people's way of life. - As the number of livestock animals increased, their needs may have led some food producers to turn to transhumance.

Reasons for the Change

- Why did hunter-gatherers shift to agriculture? Theories range from the influence of certain geographic features to the growth of populations. - V. Gordon Childe recognized that this shift had significant consequences for the development of more sophisticated technologies, larger populations, and more complex forms of social organization. - For Childe, food production was not a single event but a process that set into motion a variety of changes.