So domestication, partial agricultural practices, yes. many transitional societies have this. “Initial emergence of food production economies” around 0AD give or take, about the time maize/corn made an appearance.
Says BRUCE D. SMITH, Curator of North American Archaeology, Department of Anthropology, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC 20560
Notice at this point, the economies exploded; the central Mississippi mound builder societies were boasting towns of tens of thousands and giant earthworks within a thousand years or so after, once this level of food production became feasible.
:smack:
It’s like you have some kind of weird selective blindness:
That’s at least 600 years, possibly as much as a millennium, where corn was a minor crop (since they didn’t have cold-adapted varieties). That is not fucking “partial agricultural practices”, and you have provided zero evidence that agriculture was not the mainstay of subsistence between domestication and the switch to maize.
Jerusalem artichokes have about as much carbohydrate per fresh weight as potatoes, although it’s not in the form of starch. North America has native chestnuts as well which are also a carbohydrate source.
This is one of the key reasons why non-state societies eagerly welcomed state control, according to Diamond’s The World Until Yesterday. He mentions how happy people were that they no longer had to live in a state of perpetual warfare with their neighbouring villages.
Sounds like “somewhat agricultural”, not full-scale agriculture. There seems to be a debate over how sedentary vs. nomadic the settlements were at this time. I don’t claim there was NO agriculture, only that the agricultural production does not seem to have resulted in significant surplus (to be put to use for culture, infrastructure, and war - the usual civilizing activities ) The question is how much the tribes had converted from nomadic to stationary agricultural lifestyles. This seems to be a debate.
I recall Diamond mentioning that the long life cycle of nut trees (he mentioned acorns) meant that generally they have not been domesticated, grafting is the preferred method of controlling quality.
It’s not like Hunter Gatherer/Agriculturalist is a binary thing. Pretty much every agricultural society supplements their diet with hunting/fishing and gathering. I mean, I live in the 21st century US, and I know people who fish and hunt game. So saying, “Well, these people hunted, therefore they couldn’t have agriculture” isn’t one of those arguments that hold up.
There’s no such thing. They were a fully agricultural society. That they hunted and gathered wild plants doesn’t preclude this, any more than peasants gathering haws from hedgerows and lords hunting deer made 14th C England only “somewhat agricultural”
Similarly, “sedentary” vs “nomadic” is irrelevant to whether a group is agricultural or not. Many pastoralists are are semi- or fully-nomadic, but they are nonetheless fully agricultural cultures.
Perhaps the British explorers told themselves that of course agriculture could work at 55ºS latitude, since after all they grew plenty of crops (potatoes and oats) at 55ºN in Great Britain and Northern Ireland. If that was the idea, they didn’t take into account how Scotland and Ireland benefit from the warm North Atlantic Current… and how TdF has nothing to shield it from freezing Antarctic winds. Brr.
Exactly - the articles about some of the Woodlands crops mentioned they tended to grow more easily than other plants in disturbed areas - garbage heaps, fir-cleared land, etc. -so would become most obviously the candidates for agricultural domestication, and would be found by nomadic groups revisiting seasonal camps. (Although with selection, they became modified/domesticated for easier yields) Plus, the bit on Jerusalem Artichokes mentioned their tendency to take over garden plots and spread to the exclusion of other plants. So, it’s almost like these plants were already screaming “ooh, ooh, pick me, pick me!”.
But no, there is no dividing line between hunter and agricultural except the absolute one - so cultivated there is no appreciable wildlife habitat, or at the other extreme no appreciable fields or gardens.
Even the difference between sedentary and nomadic is arbitrary - as Mr. Dibble points out, animal herders are often nomadic. Partially/mainly hunters may follow a seasonal routine returning to the same camps every year; making planting, and building more permanent structures a worthwhile endeavor. Even in Europe, IIRC, it’s not unusual for agriculturalists to move to the “high pasture” for the summer in some locales.
Even the tribes like the Iroquois… They had longhouse towns of hundreds or even thousands. The did slash and burn field clearing; they moved every few years when their fields were exhausted. During the summers, the main villages (towns) could empty out to a significant degree as people left for much smaller hunting camps. Without large domestic herd animals, they got much protein from hunting (and beans…). But they grew corn, it was a major part of their diet, and they used the same fields for several years without moving. So by any definition, they were settled agriculturalists.
And it also illustrates the process we’ve been describing to the OP. The less technical less populous, quasi-nomadic (less well armed) Iroquois were displaced by the Europeans, as happened to most of the inhabitants of North America. Those were pushed off into marginal lands, by force as necessary at the time. Canada and the USA have the financial surplus and (questionable?) altruism to help pay for some of the displaced peoples’ integration into modern society, but for the more remote types - Alaska and Northwest territories/Nunavut, this happened only recently. For less affluent nations, they do not have the wherewithal to push into their remote areas simply to integrate their more remote populations. This will happen when the money is available.
Gotta stand up for my man Jared Diamond here. Part of his book that sometimes gets forgotten is his look at sub-saharan Africa, where he uses language distribution maps and numerous other clues to argue that these allegedly primitive peoples living on marginal lands were displaced to there from more desriable lands and held in poverty by stronger neighbors (using “farmer power,” Diamond’s shorthand for the combination of agriculture and animal labor and disease resistance and population surplus that eventually took over most of the world). He makes a persuasive case that the likeliest reason is that they haven’t so much chosen this lifestyle as been attacked or driven into marginal circumstances by stronger neighbors disinclined to share.
After years of anthropologists practically throttling one another in the contentious controversy over the Tasaday people, it finally shook out that what you describe is exactly what had happened to them. Their great-grandparents’ generation had been driven off their land by more numerous groups of farmers. The Tasaday still went to work seasonally as hired farmhands. They lived primitively in the jungle because they lost their land and were too poor to live anywhere else, but they weren’t primitively primitive, so to speak.
) The question is how much the tribes had converted from nomadic to stationary agricultural lifestyles. This seems to be a debate.