Resultados

Agrarian societies, like horticultural, are farming societies. The difference between them is that agrarian societies employ some kind of plow in the work of cultiva- tion whereas horticulturalists rely on the hoe or the digging stick.

11. As Figure 5.4 suggests, the spread of ancestor worship in horticultural societies appears to be the result of the establishment of more permanent settlements, which force populations to live in

Table 5.3. Incidence of Warfare, by Societal Type (in percentages) Rare or

Type of Society Perpetual Common Absent Total N

Hunting and gathering 0 27 73 100 22

Simple horticultural 5 55 41 100 22

Advanced horticultural 34 48 17 100 29

Characteristics of Sets of Societies 97

This distinction may not seem the stuff of which social revolutions are made, yet this is how prehistorians and archaeologists have come to view the matter. For example, V. Gordon Childe once wrote:

The plow heralded an agricultural revolution. Plowing stirs up those fertile ele- ments in the soil that in semi-arid regions are liable to sink down beyond the reach of plant roots. With two oxen and a plow a man could cultivate in a day a far larger area than can a woman with a hoe. The plot (or garden) gives place to the field, and agriculture (from Latin ager, “a field”) really begins. And all that means larger crops, more food, and expanding populations. (1936: 100) As Figure 5.1 indicates, not all cultivable land is suitable for plow agricul- ture. Especially in the tropics, vast territories have proven unsuitable. Partly this has been a matter of soils, partly a matter of terrain, and partly a matter of micropredators that attack and kill oxen and other draft animals needed to pull the plow. As a result, there are still large areas—especially, sub-Saharan Africa and much of the hill country in southeast Asia and Latin America—where horticul- ture, rather than agriculture, remains the dominant mode of farming.

closer proximity to their buried dead. This seems to have led to greater mindfulness of the ancestors and to the development of ceremonies designed to obtain their support and favor.

Traditional beliefs concerning headmen and shamans Shift from hunting and gathering to horticulture More food Population growth Men with freed time Permanent Settlements Accumulation of possessions: Pottery Metallurgy Cult of warrior and increased welfare Ancestor worship Female infanticide

Increased size of societies Multicommunity societies Increased division of labor

Urban communities More trade and commerce

Formation of the state Increased inequity Stable

economic surplus

Rising rate of innovation and new

material products

Increased rate of intersocietal

selection

In parts of the northern hemisphere, in contrast, especially in the temperate zone, plow agriculture replaced horticulture, fields replaced gardens, and produc- tivity increased tremendously. These developments had far-reaching consequences for the societies that adopted agriculture. The best single measure of the magni- tude of the change that could result is provided by the upper limits of the range of size achieved by the two types of societies. Previously, we noted that early six- teenth-century Incan society and Songhay were the largest horticultural societies of which we presently have knowledge, and each of these had several million in- habitants at the peak of its power. In contrast, mid-nineteenth-century China— before the beginnings of industrialization—was the largest agrarian society in his- tory and it had a population of several hundred million (Chang, 1955: l02).

This hundred-fold difference in size was due partly to the greater density of population that plow agriculture is able to sustain, and partly to the greater scale of organization that is possible in an agrarian society. One reason for the greater density of population is that much more of the land can be cultivated at any given time. In slash-and-burn horticultural systems, gardens must be allowed to revert to wilderness after a few years of cultivation and it takes many years before that land can be used again. Thus, only a limited fraction of the cultivable land in a horticultural society is under cultivation at any given time (often as little as 10 percent). And, while it is true that agriculturalists have usually been compelled to leave a part of their land fallow in any given year, the fallow is seldom more than a quarter or a third of the total. Thus, the shift from horticulture to agriculture often increased the amount of cultivable land five-fold or more. In addition, the use of fertilizer, the practice of irrigation, the harnessing of animal energy, and the more efficient control of weeds all led to greater yields on the cultivated land and substantially greater economic surpluses.

From the standpoint of territory controlled, early-sixteenth-century Songhay appears to have been the largest horticultural society that ever developed. At the peak of its power, its empire spread over more than 500,000 square miles—an area comparable to the state of Alaska today. In contrast, mid-nineteenth-century Russia’s empire covered nearly 8 million square miles (Blum, 1961: 278), or roughly fifteen times the area of Songhay. In part, this difference was due to advances in the technologies of transportation and communication that made it easier for rulers to control distant territories. The development of literacy was especially important in this regard, since it facilitated the shift from the more limited and constrained kinship-based polities of horticultural societies to the more flexible and expandable bureaucratic systems of agrarian societies. The growth of the state apparatus in agrarian societies seems to have been both consequence and cause of the growth of the economic surplus. Larger surpluses made it possible for rulers to support larger numbers of officials and retainers, and this, in turn, made it pos- sible for them to extract more in taxes and tribute from producers.

Not surprisingly, the growth of the economic surplus that usually resulted from the shift to agriculture had the effect of extending many of the trends asso- ciated with the beginnings of horticulture. Thus, in agrarian societies there was a

Characteristics of Sets of Societies 99 greater division of labor, larger urban populations (and a larger percentage of the population residing in them), greater accumulations of wealth, increased inequal- ity, and increased trade and commerce. There were also a number of new develop- ments, such as the emergence of the first supranational religions, such as Bud- dhism, Christianity, and Islam; the invention of writing12 _{and money; and,}

interestingly, a slowdown, at least temporarily, in the rate of technological innova- tion.

The last of these developments is important because it illustrates the role of feedback in the process of societal change. V. Gordon Childe first called attention to this slowdown, which he attributed in part to the increasingly exploitative na- ture of the polities of agrarian societies. Carrying his analysis a step further, one may argue that the new agrarian societies came dangerously close to separating technological expertise and knowledge from incentive. Peasants and artisans had the expertise and knowledge that were essential to technological innovation, but the governing class controlled the benefits. In addition, the ideologies of agrarian societ- ies increasingly justified this exploitative social system. Also, for members of the gov- erning class, warfare became an increasingly attractive shortcut to wealth. And, fi- nally, there was the added consideration that warfare, unlike work, was viewed as one of the few activities appropriate for the male members of that class. Thus, increasingly agrarian elites turned from the conquest of nature to the conquest of man.

Overall, the shift from horticulture to agriculture has meant a substantial transformation for the societies that made the shift. Although the difference be- tween agrarian societies and horticultural is not as great as the difference between horticultural and hunting and gathering, it is still substantial. Figure 5.5 provides a model of some of the more important changes that have followed in the wake of the adoption of the plow, and it indicates the ways in which these changes seem to have been linked to one another and to the initial change. It should be kept in mind, however, that the sequence of developments shown in the model were not possible everywhere and the biophysical environment, as noted previously, often prevented societies from taking even the first step in the sequence.