Archaeology Paper: Subsistence Strategies/fagan

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Using examples from Fagan and lecture discuss the importance of subsistence strategies including the shift from foraging to agriculture on the development of more complex forms of human social organization.

Mankind has not changed much since the dawn of civilization. "When you throw a party where does everyone hang out? The kitchen, where the food is readily available" (Cornett, lecture 5/19). The same is true, to some degree, of the earliest human populations. People following people following food; instinctual process of man. Survival of our species was made possible by banding together against the environmental forces and insurmountable odds.

The earliest pre-civilizations were comprised of small banded communities. Foraging was the main subsistence strategy employed by pre-homo sapiens. Nomadic foraging left tribes at the mercy of their habitat. Sustainable resources were hard to come by as denser populations began to emerge. Overexploitation of land would result in famine if alternative subsistence strategies weren't used to meet the needs of growing populations. As tool making technology advanced so began the agricultural age. Hunter-gatherer bands were slowly phased out due to newly acquired farming techniques as well as plant and animal domestication. Dominion over the environment sparked dramatic changes in lifestyle. Thus the first steps towards organized societies had begun.

Hunter-gatherer bands were slowly phased out due to advancing technologies and evolving subsistence strategies. The transition into agricultural lifestyles was due to larger more sedentary populations, resource abundance, newly acquired harvesting technology and animal domestication practices. Permanent villages replaced temporary

camps of earlier times (Fagan 291). Agriculture allowed control over food supplies once controlling man. This advent allowed sedentary, permanent housing structures to exist. A new relationship with the land brought about by a new relationship with nature. Ultimately leading to new relationships with one another.

V. Gordon Childe refers to this era as the "Neolithic Revolution; humans were no longer parasites upon nature. Humans remove themselves from nature with the advent of agriculture." (Cornett, lecture 5/19).

Social organization was a necessary means to maintain dominion over settled land.

The technological advancements of the Neolithic Revolution increased dependence on non-native raw materials (Fagan 294). A change from altruistic sharing of resources (or pillaging of) amongst the tribespeople became trading on an economic level. The unequal distribution of wealth and resources, which exists even today, had begun. Survival becomes less determined by the natural environment in leu of socio-economic connections. Social hierarchies