Academic literature on the topic 'Agriculturalist Societies'

The domestication of the earth entails the enfolding of ‘nature’ into human life and society. This chapter focuses on the millennia of the Holocene, when human societies consisted of food collectors and agriculturalists who essentially lived off recently fixed solar energy. In the course of its last 100 years, geography has from time to time taken in, and focused its attention on, diverse approaches to its subject matter. But as a ground bass to these variations, the relation between humans and the environment has persisted, though sometimes virtually at sotto voce level. In part, geography's attention has concentrated on landscapes as visible demonstrations, past and present, of these interrelations, but it has also taken an approach based explicitly on late-twentieth-century ecological theory. This chapter examines humans as hunter-gatherers during prehistoric times, along with the emergence of agriculture in Britain.

On the basis of the plethora of evidence for tropical forest agricultural practices and urban networks in Chapters 5 and 6 it seems somewhat surprising that these environments, and their human occupants, could ever come to be seen as static, primordial, or ‘elusive’ (Biesbrouck et al., 1999). Yet, today, Indigenous peoples living in tropical forests are often depicted as being isolated from the outside world, and as equally, passively threatened by external agricultural, economic, and political forces as the habitats in which they reside. As I showed in Chapter 2, the hunting and foraging practices of these groups can provide useful insights into how our prehistoric ancestors may have made a diverse living in environments that have frequently been considered too poor in crucial resources for long-term human occupation. Somehow, however, these parallels and comparisons have also seen these groups framed as relics of some of the earliest members of our species. This has been encouraged by claims that some of these groups genetically represent ‘archaic’ lineages of Homo sapiens that survived in dense forest habitats in different regions (Endicott et al., 2003; Ranaweera et al., 2014; Ranasinghe et al., 2015).Whether this is the case or not, it is now clear from historical and ethnographic information that tropical forest foragers, the world over, have been involved in complex economic and political networks to varying extents at different points in time. Moreover, the present cultural and subsistence systems of many of these groups have been significantly affected by the infiltration of colonial and imperial regimes from the seventeenth century onwards, as well as the more recent, disruptive effects of global capitalism. This chapter is an attempt to document how Eurocentric concerns with ‘exploration’, developments in literature, modern conservation movements, and the ‘pristine’ hunter-gatherer debate have contributed to the removal of tropical forest societies from history and their placement into isolated, primeval conceptions of tropical forest environments. In response to this, I review evidence for historical and ethnographic connections of tropical forest hunter-gatherers, and agriculturalists, with societies in neighbouring territories.

The archaeological evidence that has accumulated over the past five decades demonstrates that two very different situations existed successively in Britain in the centuries on either side of 4000 BCE. While this is in some ways an arbitrary date, it is nonetheless a convenient one, since there are very few indications that ‘Neolithic’ artefacts and structures existed in Britain for long before the turn of the fourth millennium. Up until 4000 BCE (or perhaps a century or two earlier), the mainland and islands were populated by people who were heavily dependent upon hunting and gathering; afterwards the population lived a way of life that to a greater or lesser extent relied on herding and cultivating. Further, whereas the technology of the hunting societies had been skilfully made but was highly portable, more durable artefacts and architecture now proliferated, creating a much denser world of crafted things. However, the available evidence can be cast in a number of different ways, with the material before and after the critical date being capable of sustaining either maximal or minimal interpretations. As a consequence, the ways in which the character and degree of change across the threshold can be understood are also multiple and varied. As we saw in Chapter 1, the archaeologists of the 1920s to 1960s emphasized the contrast between the Mesolithic and the Neolithic. Before the ‘transition’ between the two, Britain was home to a sparse population of hunter-foragers who followed game (including deer, wild pig, and wild cattle) and collected plants, nuts, and berries, and, for those near the sea, exploited marine resources. They had few, often simple artefacts, although it was acknowledged that significant skill was invested in some of them. They lived in informal campsites composed of rudimentary shelters while pursuing a transient way of life. Afterwards, in contrast, there were settled agriculturalists living in stable communities, in well-built houses, enjoying a mixed farming subsistence base. They were capable of building barrows and tombs for their dead, which may have demonstrated their incorporation into a widespread megalithic cult. The dichotomy between these two ways of life demanded that some fundamental change must have separated them, of whatever kind.