On Apr 16, 2007, at 10:45 AM, Debra Jackson/Harold Forsythe wrote:
> Anthropology needs to come to the aid of history here. From the
> perspective of New York City, Virginia isn't settled yet. Where
> are its rafts of 40 story buildings?
>
> Seriously, human beings have traversed a set of economic uses of
> the land.
OK, here's a bit more. First, you have the nomadic hunters as in
Paleo Clovis and possibly their predecessors (not yet gone to the
jury, still in the midst of investigation)
> From hunting and gathering to pastorialism
Nope, they skipped the animal husbandry step and went to dispersed
settlement incipient horticulture to sometimes palisaded settlement
horticulture but with Hunting and Gathering still part of the
process. Then came the Euros in the 1500's onward with an entirely
different mindset.
> to swidden agriculture to village or settled agriculture to
> industrialization to what some call post-industrialization.
>
> The Indians of eastern Virginia practiced swidden or slash and burn
> migratory agriculture, supplemented by hunting when the Europeans
> arrived. They, of course, brought village agriculture, expansive
> but non-migratory with them. The Indians certainly considered
> themselves "settled" on the land but their practices were different
> from the English. While village or settled agriculture used less
> land (or land reserves) for crops, they made up for it by keeping
> pastures: in New England sheep predominated, in the Southeast pigs
> predominated.
There's a slow progression from the Paleo to the Archaic where nomads
begin to have territories as they produced more little Paleo people
and even more Archaic little people who grew into bigger ones and
went off to settle their own areas. Somewhere at the end of the H/G
era, incipient horticulture began. Maize spread from Mexico (now
starting back at around 7200BC) to VA in the Archaic and with the
other plants, developed as population grew and the demands of sitting
in one spot to grow stuff also grew.
>
> The anthropologist Marvin Harris argues that each progression in
> economic systems actually requires human being to do more work, and
> is thus forced by environmental and prudential causes. (See Marvin
> Harris, Cannibals and Kings.) The Powatans could have done village
> agriculture but their population didn't require it and it was
> repugnant to them.
>
Their two types of settlements were traditionally termed dispersed
hamlets and palisaded villages. However, there are dispersed hamlet
bigtime problems and their are palisaded village bigtime problems
with what is actually meant. Palisaded villages are relatively easy
to find. They're soil marks as either giant donut shaped black
circles, or solid disc shaped circles. Lots of pottery, lithics,
bone, shell, etc. littering the surface. The unpalisaded villages are
more akin to what John White drew for the Roanoke Island Native
Americans. Basically suburban settlements with a group of houses with
space between them. The spacing is about equivalent to the 2-3 acre
lot suburban or exurban subdivision of today, but without the
regularity. These were thought to be the immediate precursors to
palisaded settlements. The palisade is a defensive measure that
starts in the 14th century AD. But it is not a universal and there
were plenty of villages that Capt. J. Smith visited that were not
palisaded. I view them as the first enforced nucleation. What I think
happens is that hamlets grow with the success of horticulture
augmented by the usual hunting and gathering (horticulture would
imply a vegetarian society in its purist form). So one would see
available land settled by these non-palisaded villages. Where there
is an external threat, then the palisade comes into being. Some
villages show numerous rebuilds, overlapping house patterns,
intercutting pits so they were basically getting to the tell building
stage similar the Middle-Eastern civilizations, albeit much later.
The tell is the best model because apart from one mound in Lee
County, there are no temple mounds of the type that spread from
Mexico and reached into the Southeast to North Carolina. Tells are
simply accretional mounds that are built up as folks live in one spot
for hundreds and thousands of years. Palisades may have come and gone
as threats waxed and waned as well. The picture is complicated.
What the English encountered were a series of villages, mostly
unpalisaded, under the overall control of Powhatan. They practiced a
form of swidden horticulture. The telling phrase is that they moved
"when the crops wouldn't grow and the children started dying". The
reference of poison fields is that the soils were exhausted by the
Native Americans and they'd moved to another area to set up shop
again. They were no better or worse than any other group and weren't
living the idylic "In harmony with Nature" that is so PC at the
moment. The determining factor was that they had space to do what
amounted to fallow field crop rotation. When population densities
grow higher, they would have had the same old issues as the rest of
the human populace as in "I'm already here and you cannot move in".
"Oh, yes I can, because I'm bigger and stronger and you're out of
here" that passes for normal human interaction when there's
competition for the same limited resources. They just hadn't reached
that stage yet. The introduction of the Euro's into the landscape
forced a whole new dynamic with competition between two world views.
Lyle Browning, RPA
> Harold S. Forsythe
> ----- Original Message ----- From: <[log in to unmask]>
> To: <[log in to unmask]>
> Sent: Monday, April 16, 2007 10:13 AM
> Subject: Re: Virginia Npblemen
>
>
>> What do you mean by settled? As far as I can tell, Virginia
>> wasn't settled
>> under the common definition of the word until the English came in
>> and put
>> down permanent roots.
>>
>> J South
>>
>> Of course, no one from England, noble or otherwise, "settled
>> Virginia"--it
>> was already settled long before the English showed up.
>>
>>
>>
>> ************************************** See what's free at http://
>> www.aol.com.
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