Sustaining Society I Epipaleolithic Middel East and Mesolithic Europe hunting and more on relatively stationary food resources such as fish shellfish small game and wild plant Accounted for an increasingly settled way of life domesticate plants and animals agriculture and to live in permanent villages How and why people in different places may have come to cultivate and The cultivation and domestication of plants and animals Food Production Sedentarism People depended less on big game The Natufians of the Middle East o 11 thousand years ago people living in the area that is now Israel and Jordan inhabited caves and rock shelters and built villages on the slopes of Mount Carmel in Egypt o Harvested wild grain intensively o Stored surplus crops beneath the floors of their stone walled houses o Communities were occupied for most of the year if not all year Why Broad Spectrum Collecting o Climate change o Population growth Population Growth and Sedentarism o Settling down may reduce the typical spacing between births Domestication of Plants and Animals of the new stone age Presence of domesticated plants and animals o Neolithic o People began to produce food instead of just collecting it o Cultivation o Modified o Ali Kosh Different from wild varieties People plant crops People of Ali Kosh cut little slabs of raw clay out of the ground to build small multiroom structures Domesticated goats Depended mostly on wild plants Used flint tools obsidian volcanic glass Why Food Production o Binford and Flannery Incentive to domesticate animals and plants may have been a desire to reproduce what was wildly abundant in optimum hunting and gathering areas Binford Flannery Model preceded first signs of domestication Population pressure in a small area as the incentive to turn to food production Fertile crescent is where population increase Cities and States o Chiefdoms o Civilization Political officials acquired authority over communities First inscriptions or writing cities many kinds of full time craft specialists monumental architecture and differences is wealth and status o State o Early Neolithic societies were egalitarian people did not differ much in wealth o Formative Era Strong hierarchical centralized political system Elman Service Coming together of many changes that seem to have played a part in the development of cities and states With the development of small scale irrigation lowland river areas began to attract settlers Different villages specialized in different goods Sumerian writing was wedged shaped formed by pressing a stylus Written on rolls woven from papyrus reeds Made the land habitable and productive Sumerian Civilization o Cuneiform against a damp clay tablet o Hieroglyphics Origin of States o Irrigation o Population growth o Circumscription o War o Trade Consequences of State Formation o People become governed by force are no longer able to say no o Police and military forces become oppressors o Health issues due to concentration of people o Emergence of warfare Decline and Collapse of States o Environmental degradation Declining soil productivity Sustaining Society II Getting Food o Horticulture o Food production o Foraging food collection o Extensive shifting cultivation Growing crops of all kinds with relatively simple tools and methods A food getting strategy that obtains wild plant and People began to cultivate and then domesticate plants and animal resources through gathering hunting scavenging or fishing hunter gatherers Example Australian Aborigines animals in the absence of permanently cultivated fields idle for some years allowing wild plants and bush to grow When the land is cleared slash and burn techniques are used to return nutrients to soil permanently Use of fertilizers and plows mechanization usually with money as the medium of exchange Keep and breed some animals Domesticate herds of animals Involves increasing dependence on buying and selling People use techniques that enable them to cultivate fields The land is worked for short periods and then left o Intensive agriculture o Commercialization o Pastoralism o