Intensification, Political Economy, and the Farming Community; In Defense Of A Bottom-Up Perspective Of The Past.
Year: 2006
Type: article
Abstract: A rchaeologists scramble up tall terraces, wade through cold water in irri- gation canals, hop over stone walls, and diligently search farmers' fields for significant concentrations of potsherds that can be registered as a site.In their search for sites, however, most tend to ignore the landscape and what it can show us about agricultural intensification.Contemporary archaeology is firmly rooted in the site concept.Rural sites are said to date agriculture through proximity, and the density, duration, and distribution of settlements are considered indirect evidence of the degree of agricultural intensification.However, we pay only lip service to agricultural fields and boundaries, pathways, roads, and shrines-all seem to be secondary to the goal of finding sites in the form of settlements and monuments.Agricultural features might be described and sketched on the back of site survey forms, but they are rarely discussed in final publications.Despite the term's current popularity, landscape still equates with environment, as it is considered merely the context of a site for most archaeologists.If we are genuinely interested in issues of intensification and intensive agriculture, why do we ignore the most important landscape for directly addressing issues of prehistoric agriculture such as social organization, land tenure, labor organization, and rural lifeways?I would suggest that our perspective has been directed, and limited, by our own cultural background.Few of us grew up on farms or have colleagues that did.Although we are often surrounded by living farming traditions where we excavate and do settlement survey, we rarely pay attention to the farm life going on around us and ignore the relevant local historical and ethnographic literature.In this chapter I will discuss and address a number of explicit and not-so-explicit archaeological assumptions about IntensIfIcatIon, poLItIcaL economy, and tHe farmIng communIty in defenSe of a bottoM-up perSpectiVe of the paStfarming, social organization, settlement patterns, and intensification, as well as their relationship to political economy.I will then show that these assumptions remain largely unsupported by ethnographic and historical evidence.I suggest that a landscape approach that generates models through general and specific analogy and then tests them against landscape signatures of intensive agriculture, agricultural intensification, social organization of labor, land tenure, and energetics can provide a more complete understanding of the rural agrarian past than by relying on sites and settlement patterns alone.I argue that bottomup approaches are valuable alternatives to the traditional top-down approaches currently used by archaeologists.inTensive agriculTure, agriculTural inTensificaTion, and PoliTical economy
Author: Clark L. Erickson
Institution: University of Pennsylvania
Language: English
Subfield: Archeology
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W58718705