1. Patterns of Subsistence
Chapter 7
Patterns of Subsistence

2. What Is Adaptation?
Adaptation refers to beneficial adjustments of organisms to their environment.
This process leads to changes in the organisms and impacts their environment.
The human species adapts biologically and culturally.

3. People Adapt All people adapt to three things
Abiotic – physical environment
Biotic – all living things
Human environment – home, neighborhood

4. How Do Humans Adapt Culturally?
Through cultural adaptation, humans develop ways of doing things that are compatible with the resources they have available to them and within the limitations of the various habitats in which they live.
Adaptations may be remarkably stable for long periods of time, even thousands of years.

5. What Sorts of Cultural Adaptations Have Humans Achieved Through the Ages?
Food foraging is the oldest and most universal type of human adaptation and typically involves geographic mobility.
Adaptations involving domestication of plants and animals, began to develop in some parts of the world about 10,000 years ago.
Horticulture led to more permanent settlements while pastoralism required mobility to seek out pasture and water.
Cities began to develop as early as 5,000 years ago in some world regions.

6. Cultural Adaptation
The process organisms undergo to achieve a beneficial adjustment to an available environment and the result of that process.
The characteristics of organisms that fit them to the particular environmental conditions in which they are found.

7. Adaptation Interaction between
changes an organism makes in its environment
changes the environment makes in the organism.

8. Ecosystem
A system, or a functioning whole, composed of both the physical environment and the organisms living within it.

9. Adaptation in Cultural Evolution
Human groups adapt to their environments by means of their cultures.
Cultural Evolution is the the process of cultures changing over time.
Not all changes turn out to be positive, nor do they improve conditions for every member of a society.
Complex, urban societies are not more “highly evolved” than those of food foragers.

10. Comanche Bison Hunt
A Comanche bison hunt as painted by artist George Catlin.
Plains Indians such as the Comanche and Lakota developed similar cultures, as they had to adapt to similar environmental conditions.

11. Convergent Evolution
In cultural evolution, the development of similar adaptations to similar environmental conditions by peoples whose ancestral cultures were quite different.

12. Parallel Evolution
In cultural evolution, the development of similar adaptations to similar environmental conditions by peoples whose ancestral cultures were similar.

13. Culture Area
This map shows the culture areas defined for North and Central America.
Within each, there is n similarity of native cultures, as opposed to the differences that distinguish the cultures of one area from those of all others.

14. Culture Core and Ritual
Culture cores are the features of a culture that play a part the society’s way of making a living.
In Bali, gatherings for rituals at water temples allowed farmers to arrange schedules for flooding their rice paddies.

15. Procedures for Cultural Ecology
Analyze the interrelationship of a culture’s technology and its environment.
Analyze the patterns of behavior associated with a culture’s technology.
Determine the relation between those behavior patterns and the rest of the cultural system.

16. Production The act of making a resource into a product.
Two areas of production:
Factors – physical aspects of production
Organization of production
Division of labor
Patterns of cooperation
Rights to resources

17. Definitions
Carrying capacity - The number of people that the available resources can support at a given level of food-getting techniques.
Density of social relations - The number and intensity of interactions among the members of a camp.

18. Four Types of Subsistence
Hunting and gathering (food foraging)
Horticulturalists
Pastoralists
Agriculturalists

19. Food Foraging Also known as hunting and gatehring Egalitarian
Environmental management
Passive
Active

20. Food Foraging Life: Characteristics
Division of labor – marked by sex and age
Mobility - Move about a great deal.
Seasonal congregation and dispertion
Band political level - Small size of local groups.
Reciprocal sharing - populations have few possessions and share what they have.
Rights to resources - Populations stabilize at numbers well below the carrying capacity of their land.

21. Food Foragers and Population
Frequent nursing of children over four or five years acts to suppress ovulation among food foragers such as Bushmen.
As a consequence, women give birth to relatively few offspring at widely spaced intervals.

22. Neolithic
The New Stone Age; prehistoric period beginning about 10,000 years ago in which peoples possessed stone-based technologies and depended on domesticated plants and/or animals.

23. Neolithic Transition Sometimes referred to as Neolithic revolution.
The profound culture change beginning about 10,000 years ago and associated with the early domestication of plants and animals, and settlement in permanent villages.

24. Transition to Food Production
Began about 11,000 to 9,000 y.a.
Probably the result of increased management of wild food resources.
Resulted in the development of permanent settlements as people practiced horticulture using simple hand tools.

25. Domesticates in the Archaeological Record

26. Horticulture
Cultivation of crops carried out with simple hand tools such as digging sticks or hoes.
slash-and-burn cultivation
Also known as swidden farming.
An extensive form of horticulture in which the natural vegetation is cut, the slash is subsequently burned, and crops are then planted among the ashes.

27. Slash-and-Burn Cultivation
Reburning an old, overgrown slash-and-burn plot in the Amazon forest in Venezuela in preparation for new planting.
Although it looks destructive, if properly carried out, slash-and-burn cultivation is an ecologically sound way of growing crops in the tropics.

28. Pastoralism
Subsistence that relies on raising herds of domesticated animals, such as cattle, sheep, and goats.
Pastoralists are usually nomadic.

29. Pastoral Nomads
In the Zagros Mountains region of Iran, pastoral nomads follow seasonal pastures, migrating with their flocks over rugged terrain that includes perilously steep snowy passes and fast ice-cold rivers.

30. Agriculture
The cultivation of food plants in soil prepared and maintained for crop production.
Involves using technologies other than hand tools, such as irrigation, fertilizers, and the wooden or metal plow pulled by harnessed draft animals.

31. Characteristics of Agricultural Societies
One of the most significant correlates of plant cultivation was the development of fixed settlements, in which farming families reside together near their cultivated fields.
At first, social relations were egalitarian and hardly different from those that prevailed among food foragers.
As settlements grew and large numbers of people had to share important resources such as land and water, society became more elaborately rganized.

32. Locations of Major Early Civilizations
Civilizations of Central and South America developed independently of those in Africa and Eurasia.
Chinese civilization may have developed independently of those in Mesopotamia, the Egyptian Valley, and the Indus Valley.

33. Peasant
A rural cultivator whose surpluses are transferred to a dominant group of rulers that uses the surpluses both to underwrite its own standard of living and to distribute the remainder to groups in society that do not farm but must be fed for their specific goods and services in turn.

34. Development of Cities
Cities developed as intensified agricultural techniques created a surplus.
Individuals were free to specialize full-time in other activities.

35. Mechanized Agriculture
Population boom
Machines do a lot of the work
Specialization
Produce a lot of things we do not need