Domestication of
Plants and Animals
Village Life
The Process of Domestication
In contrast to hunting and gathering as a
way of life, agriculture implies modifying
the environment in order to exploit it more
effectively.
 Both the animals and plants can be
modified as a result of human intervention - domestication. Ultimately, agriculture
changes the very landscape itself.
 The central question is why did agriculture
arise in the first place.

Effects of Farming
The growing of a single crop in a field by
definition substitutes a biological monoculture
for the complex ecological system that existed
on the same ground previously.
 This change has several effects.

 The quantity of food is greatly increased.
 There are cost to this strategy.
 Over a relatively short period of time, growing a single
crop can deplete even very rich soils.
 This was a problem which rendered many early
agricultural sites uninhabitable after a time. It is still a
very serious problem.
Unintended effects
The human farmers are consciously altering the
environment and "selecting for" the plants they need.
 unwittingly, they are also "selecting for" any organism that
can live on wheat for example: wheat-eating "vermin,"
pathogens, and diseases of wheat, etc.
 Thus, by increasing their food supply, farmers
simultaneously increased threats to their food supply.
 Farming may also create a biological system that lacks
flexibility to resist disease or climatic changes.
 For example:

 The Great Potato famine in Europe is a classic case. Andean
farmers grew a wide variety of potatoes in an effort to maintain
diversity as a result of the familiarity with the domesticated potato
knowing the various risks associated with it.
The Process of Domestication
Agriculture is a process.
 One begins with a high degree of familiarity
with wild plant foods.
 Through a process of experimentation and
ultimately manipulation, humans create a
"selective force" choosing those
characteristics they find most favorable
about a plant or animal.
 The act of harvesting the wild grains
changed them genetically in this process.

For Example
For example, a small percentage of wild grass
plants has seed that clings to the stalk even
when ripe, rather than separating easily.
 Humans collecting wheat or barley seed such
as these would succeed in gathering a
disproportionate amount of the mutant seedsthat-cling in each harvest.
 Thus, the seed they sowed--the act of
manipulating--the next year would gradually
increase the amount of seeds-that-cling in the
next crop.

Con’d
Over time, the percentage of wheat and
barley seed that falls off the stalk when
ripe declined--which made harvesting
much easier.
 In this way, these crops were
"domesticated" to the point where they
cannot reproduce themselves without
human intervention.
 This is the hallmark of what it means to
be "domesticated"--dependent upon
human intervention.

Agave



Archaeologists surveyed
an area north of Phoenix.
They found a series of
rock alignments and
piles.
They observed a
particular type of agave
plant growing in several
spots.
This type of agave does not
grow naturally in this region
of Arizona.
 We also know that it
reproduces in a certain way.
 The plant first sends out a
tall stalk that has blooms at
the end.
 These are fertilized by bats
and insects. Instead of
growing seeds, this plant
actually produced small
plants at the end of that
stalk.
 The stalk eventually
deteriorates and the plants
land on the soil to hopefully
grow roots and mature.

Uses for Agave





It can be roasted in an oven and eaten, and it is high in nutrient
values.
Used for medicine and even clothing.
The prehistoric people of southern Arizona grew this plant in large
fields where they constructed rock alignments and rock piles.
Through experiments it was revealed that the moisture around the
base of the rock piles increases thereby providing a little extra
moisture to plants that are growing at the base of these piles.
The rock alignments tend to trap water as it runs across the ground
thereby also enhancing a region so that plants can capture more of
the ground moisture. In a hot, dry desert environment, rock alignments
and rock piles are an ingenious way to enhance growth of plants such
as agave.
Earth Oven
So what can we infer about all of this?




We can infer that people brought this plant into this
region from where it naturally grew.
That they probably had to help the plant reproduce. Since
the plant puts off more than 50 little plants per stalk, this
means they could use a great number of agave plants for
food and other things and keep a ready supply of plants
growing through their intervention.
They simply had to break the stalk and plant the new
"seedlings" in the right areas - such as at the base of pile
of rocks, which increase soil moisture stimulating plant
growth.
We can, therefore, infer that the agave growing in this
area was part of an elaborate agricultural system
operating prehistorically.
Maize, the Staple Crop of the Americas
Maize, or what we tend to call "corn," was first
domesticated in Mesoamerica several
thousand years ago.
 Maize was highly adaptable, and selective
breeding over centuries created subspecies
able to flourish in such diverse climates as
New England, the arid South West of the U.S.,
the wet tropical lowlands of Mexico and
Guatemala, and mountain plateaus 9,000 feet
high in the central Andes of South America.







Maize has many advantages
over wheat or barley.
Seed-bed preparation can be
accomplished with a digging
stick.
Harvest is easier and the
standing crop is less easily
spoiled by moisture or wind.
Most importantly, the return on
seeds planted was as high as
45 to 1 at a very early date.
In contrast, early wheat farmers
may have realized only a 6-1
return on seeds planted.
However, it took much longer
for people in the Americas to
begin to rely upon maize as a
domesticated food supply.
Maize, Beans and Squash


Maize has excellent nutritional value and, eaten
together with squash and beans, the other staples
of early American agriculture, provides all the
amino acids necessary for human life.
In the Americas, we often hear people talk about a
combination of foods: corn, beans and squash. It
is interesting to note that people in the Americas
knew a great deal about the nutritional intake from
these various foods.
 Beans, for example, provide needed protein that corn
does not. They also knew ways to cook corn that would
enhance it's nutritional values.

Cooking corn with burnt ash for example improves
the nourishing potential of the corn.
Piki Bread
The Hopi woman making something known as Piki bread first
combined corn meal with ash and water. She then cooks a thin
layer of this mixture to make a traditional Hopi bread with the
consistency of paper.
Native American Stories on
the Origins of Corn

http://www.indians.org/welker/origcorn.htm
Other New World Domesticates
TRANSITION ONE: 3000 B.C. - 2000 B.C.

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

Native North Americans discovered that wild seed plants
growing along river floodplains could be controlled; that
plants could be harvested and used as food, with seeds
stored and replanted in prepared garden plots the next
year.
Four indigenous plants underwent this transition to full
domesticates, with clear morphological changes taking
place in their seeds.
Three additional cultigens appear as food crops as Native
Americans began to harvest these previously wild sources
of food.
The highly nutritious seeds from these seven plants could
be variously boiled into cereals, ground into flours, or
eaten directly.
TRANSITION ONE:
3000 B.C. - 2000 B.C.
Each of the seven indigenous plants involved--chenopod,
marsh elder, squash, sunflower, erect knotweed, little
barley, and maygrass--had its own particular course of
development. Most began as wild plants growing along
river floodplains that Native North Americans first gathered
and used.
 They gradually brought these plants under their control as
they harvested them and planted their seeds the following
year. By 2,000 B.C., there is evidence of indigenous crop
domestication occurring over a broad geographical area, on
lands today known as Tennessee, Arkansas, Illinois,
Kentucky, Ohio, Missouri and Alabama.
 After a slow beginning for each crop, the overall shift to
domestication occurred rather abruptly, with several spring
and fall crops introduced together, some high in oil and
some in starch.

TRANSITION TWO:
250 B.C.- A.D. 200
Food production economies emerged.
Greater amounts of seeds appeared in
the diet, and seed crops became the
focus of more intensive cultivation, as
farmers planted them away from their
original habitats.
 Maize first appears in small amounts.

TRANSITION THREE:
A.D. 800 - A.D. 1100
Food-producing economies based on these indigenous
seed crops flourished from about A.D. 200 until about A.D.
800.
 This early farming served as a pre-adaptation for a rapid
and broad-scale shift to large field agriculture after A.D. 800
when a new, non indigenous crop plant--maize--was
introduced.
 Maize came to dominate the fields and diets of Native North
American farmers extending from what is now northern
Florida to Ontario in Canada, from the Atlantic Coast to the
Great Plains.
 Archaeologists now know that maize appeared in Native
North American Villages more than 2,000 years after
indigenous plants were domesticated and well after the rise
of Hopewell societies.

Animal Domestication in North America

Dogs->11 kya
 http://employees.oneo
nta.edu/walkerr/Dogs/
dogindex.htm

Turkeys-2 kya
Questions to Explore
What did ethnohistoric data suggest about
the roles of dogs?
 What did these dogs look like?
 How did they compare to dogs from different
places during similar time periods?

Ethnohistoric Data
Hunting dogs
 Household companions

 Warning
 Cleanup
 Pets
Ritual sacrifices
 Pack animals
 Food

Hunting Dogs
An Assiniboin hunter, Peter Rindisbacher 1833 (Schwartz 1997)
Companions
Diegueño house at Campo (Northwestern University
Libraries, 2001; Original in Curtis 1926, Volume 15, Plate 525)
Ritual
Iroquois sacrifice of the white dog
Pack Animals
Assiniboin Hunter with Two
Dogs Carrying Packs
(Northwestern University
Library 2001, original in
Curtis 1928: Volume 18,
Plate 630)
Pack Animals: Travois
Assiniboin camp, Karl Bodmer, 1843 (Schwartz 1997)
Dogs in Burial Contexts
From Webb 1974:157, Figure 16
Turkeys
There is archaeological evidence that the
Anasazi and other Indian cultures in New
Mexico and the Southwest traded for
domesticated turkeys from Mexico and
Central America.
 These domesticated turkeys are possibly
the forerunners of today’s Merriam’s wild
turkey who escaped domestication and
likely became feral (wild) long before the
first Spanish colonists arrived.

Turkeys
Sedentism and Village Life
First, agriculture means sedentism--living
permanently in one place.
 This was itself new to human beings, and it
may have seemed very constraining to the
first people to experience this way of life.
 Living in one spot permanently means
exploiting a relatively small amount of land
very intensively (rather than exploiting a
large amount of land extensively, as
hunter-gatherers did), and over a long
period of time.

Challenges of Sedentism

Dependency on few plants
 Agriculture made human communities
dependent on relatively few plants--the main
crops which they grew--rather than on the
many different kinds of plants which huntergatherers use.
Consequences continued

Greater vulnerability to weather
 Dependency on fewer plants in turn makes agriculture a
great gamble, as farming involves "betting" that the
weather conditions will favor the growth of the particular
crops planted.
 Weather patterns, however, constantly fluctuate and
rainfall tends to vary unpredictably.
 Agricultural life bets the life of the community on weather
patterns favorable to the few plants it cultivates.
 Agriculture thus continues the ancient dependency of
human life upon natural, ecological systems like the
weather cycle, but it raises the odds of disaster in any
given year.
Consequences continued

Complete dependency on harvest times
 To survive, agriculturalists have to gather all their food for
the year at one or two or three harvest times, rather than
gathering year round.
 Nothing, therefore, can be allowed to interrupt the harvest.
 There is similarly a very narrow window of opportunity for
planting and cultivating. Under this kind of pressure,
agricultural communities became more time-conscious.
 Agriculturalists also have to store the produce of their
fields for the rest of the year, protect it from moisture,
vermin, and thieves, and learn to dole out supplies in
measured quantities so the community can survive and
have seed for next year's planting. These conditions
created a new kind of life style.
Consequences continued

Need for intense physical labor
 Agriculture requires intense and sustained
physical effort--"drudgery"--at several times of
the year, and on a scale previously unknown.
 The labor of both men and women was required
in the fields.
 As can readily be imagined, these fundamental
conditions of survival encouraged the
development of social as well as individual
discipline.
 That is to say, the new way of life molded
humans and human society in new ways.

Population Growth and Epidemic Diseases
Storing and Sedentism


Where some natural food resources are abundant but
seasonal, they can be gathered while available and
stored on a large scale once transformed through
appropriate food processing techniques thus becoming
a staple food year-round.
Around 10,000 years ago, plant resources became
relatively abundant in fertile areas. The idea of an
abundant food supply that could be processed and
stored on a year-round basis was a new one with
profound implications to human existence.
Storage
Two factors conditioned human response at
this time: conspicuous seasonal variability
and a storage based subsistence strategy.
 If in the face of conspicuous or abundance,
people opted to process and store portions
of this "surplus", then they could settle down
in one area on a year-round basis. This, for
the first time, changed societies from a
mobile way of life to one of sedentism. It is
clear that this is not a process that happened
over night. It probably was associated with a
decreased reliance on mobility as a strategy
to seasonally exploit a variety of resources.

Storage of Surplus
Southwest storage units
Permanent and Semi-permanent
structures
Earth covered hogan
SW pueblo
Plains earth covered
lodge
Great Basin thatched wikiup
Plateau ladder-entrance house
Northwest Coast
Plank house
Sources
http://www.kstrom.net/isk/maps/houses/
housingmap.html#buttons
 http://www.indiana.edu/~arch/saa/matrix/
bclt.html
