THE “ROUTINE‐SCAPE” AND SOCIAL STRUCTURALIZATION IN THE FORMATION OF JAPANESE AGRICULTURAL SOCIETIES

Recent archaeo‐botanical research has suggested that the introduction of farming did not immediately cause a sufficient shift in subsistence strategy to form an agrarian society but that the process took as long as hundreds of years. It is therefore suggested that it was not the farming technique in itself but the establishment of routinized day‐to‐day activity patterns and world views associated with farming that eventually led to the formation of a new social structure. The holistic concept of a dynamic day‐today routine and its associated physical and conceptual landscape is termed routine‐scape through which the process of agrarian society formation in Japan is examined around 1000–500 bce when paddy rice farming was introduced from China to Japan. A new crop storage system of a raised‐floor granary was also adopted as a part of the rice‐farming routine, which resulted in changing the Japanese routine‐scape. The community leaders increasingly associated the granary with both symbolic and practical significance; alongside controlling the storage‐related routine they finally gained centralized power. This paper indicates that agriculture brought along a new range of routine activities and their dynamic interactions with landscape produced new social structures.     

SARUP REVISITED: ARCHAEOLOGICAL REALITY AND REALITIES OF ARCHAEOLOGY

In the second half of the 4^th millennium BC, we see significant changes in the early Neolithic culture. These take place some centuries after the initial introduction of agriculture and sees striking developments such as the apparent opening‐up of the landscape, involving forest clearance, the introduction of the ard for ploughing and the construction of regular houses. The transition to a settled and sedentary farming lifestyle must also have demanded mental adaptations, whereby the farmers were required to forge new and stable alliances. These alliances appear to be forged by a series of communal works, involving monumental structures, such as the building of dolmens and passage graves as well as the extensive and land‐demanding causewayed enclosures. The causewayed enclosures were essentially used for only a few days but were remembered for centuries. Since the 1970s, excavations have been undertaken in the Sarup area, on the island of Funen, Denmark, to obtain more detailed information about the activities that took place there between c. 3600 and 3000 BC. This paper presents the results of excavations and studies of two well‐preserved causewayed enclosures, the Barkaer‐structures and more than 30 megalithic monuments, as well as investigations of several settlements. This research has provided insight into a complex farming culture, which appears to have been firmly consolidated by major communal construction works, whereby teams and networks were created within an evolving cooperative social structure.     

Selling Maize in Mexico: The Persistence of Peasant Farming in an Era of Global Markets

The last decade of the twentieth century was heralded as the ‘end of agrarian reform’ in Mexico and the initiation of a new era of market‐led agricultural policy and practice. The impact of neoliberalism and the North American Free Trade Agreement on smallholder maize production has been widely conceived as negative, associated with ecological degradation, rural emigration and cultural erosion. Yet, some twenty years later, all evidence suggests that smallholder maize production is continuing in Mexico, albeit in evolving structures and forms. This article uses a farm‐level survey implemented in three Mexican states to assess the current condition of maize farming in Mexico. The authors revisit past categorizations of Mexican farmers and apply similar approaches to explore what maize‐producing households are doing with their maize, and what current patterns of production imply for future Mexican maize policy. They find evidence of greater persistence and adaptability in Mexican maize farming than is often presented. On the basis of their analysis, they advocate for a reconsideration of the underlying assumptions of public policy, highlighting the heterogeneity of the maize landscape and the unrealized and generally unrecognized potential this heterogeneity represents.     

Consuming the forest in an environment of crisis: nature tourism, forest conservation and neoliberal agriculture in south India

This article engages ethnographically with the neoliberalization of nature in the spheres of tourism, conservation and agriculture. Drawing on a case study of Wayanad district, Kerala, the article explores a number of themes. First, it shows how a boom in domestic nature tourism is currently transforming Wayanad into a landscape for tourist consumption. Second, it examines how tourism in Wayanad articulates with projects of neoliberalizing forest and wildlife conservation and with their contestations by subaltern groups. Third, it argues that the contemporary commodification of nature in tourism and conservation is intimately related to earlier processes of commodifying nature in agrarian capitalism. Since independence, forest land has been violently appropriated for intensive cash-cropping. Capitalist agrarian change has transformed land into a (fictitious) commodity and produced a fragile and contested frontier of agriculture and wildlife. When agrarian capitalism reached its ecological limits and entered a crisis of accumulation, farming became increasingly speculative, exploring new modes of accumulation in out-of-state ginger cultivation. In this scenario nature and wildlife tourism emerges as a new prospect for accumulation in a post-agrarian economy. The neoliberalization of nature in Wayanad, the authors argue, is a process driven less by new modes of regulation than by the agrarian crisis and new modes of speculative farming.     

Land Use and Soil Erosion in Prehistoric and Historical Greece

Abstract

Soil erosion resulting from human exploitation of the land has attracted much public and scientific interest. Being regarded mainly as a modern phenomenon, however, its prehistoric and historical extent remain largely unexplored. Here we summarize three regional studies of Holocene erosion and alluviation in Greece, together with information derived from the literature, and conclude that most recorded Holocene soil erosion events are spatially and temporally related to human interference in the landscape. Wherever adequate evidence exists, a major phase of soil erosion appears to follow by 500–1000 years the introduction of farming in Greece, its age depending on when agriculture was introduced and ranging from the later Neolithic to the late Early Bronze Age. Later Bronze Age and historical soil erosion events are more scattered in time and space, but especially the thousand years after the middle of the 1st millennium B.C. saw serious, intermittent soil erosion in many places. With the exception of the earliest Holocene erosion phase, the evidence is compatible with a model of control of the timing and intensity of landscape destabilization by local economic and political conditions. On the whole, however, periods of landscape stability have lasted much longer than the mostly brief episodes of soil erosion and stream aggradation.     

Fannie Lou Hamer's Freedom Farms and Black Agrarian Geographies

This paper examines Fannie Lou Hamer's Freedom Farms, a 1969 farming cooperative in Sunflower County, Mississippi. Specifically, this paper interrogates how Hamer's identity as a Black southern woman influences her formulation and daily activities at Freedom Farms. Theoretically, this paper situates Hamer as an expert agrarian labourer and knowledge producer who exists within a history of Black women who have always been utilised for their agrarian knowledge, but given little credit. Hamer's knowledge is a part of her body. This paper argues that Freedom Farms is a Black radical geography operating at three scales: the body, the farm and the southern agrarian landscape. This paper utilises Hamer's speeches, interviews and other archival documents to understand Hamer's efforts. Hamer's agrarian landscape is wrought with pain, but also the insistence in the economic opportunity that exists for Black people in agrarian spaces.     

Murujuga,Northwestern Australia: When Arid Hunter-Gatherers Became Coastal Foragers

ABSTRACT

The Dampier Archipelago (Murujuga) in northwestern Australia is a rich rock art province located in an arid-maritime cultural landscape. The archipelago juts into the Indian Ocean just north of the Tropic of Capricorn. When people started inscribing this rugged granophyre landscape it was an inland range more than 100 km from the coast. Murujuga rock art is contextualized by a 47,000-year-old occupation sequence from the Pilbara, a model for stylistic change, and a predictive model that envisages how people may have adapted to this eventual seascape. Initial testing of an outer island suggests that highly mobile coastal foragers took advantage of interior ranges across the Abydos Plain as sea levels rose after the Last Glacial Maximum. This article describes for the first time evidence for Australia's earliest domestic stone structures (dated to between 8063 and 7355 cal BP) and tests the predictive model. Rosemary Island is an inscribed landscape that reveals the emergence of an arid island and provides insights into the dynamics of mobile arid hunter-fisher-gatherers in the early Holocene. It adds to the body of Australian evidence for island abandonment with insulation, but with minimal evidence for subsequent (re)colonization.     

From the sublime to the Druidical: changing perceptions of prehistoric monuments in southern Anglesey in the post-medieval period

Abstract

The prehistoric monuments of southern Anglesey have been interpreted in various ways over the past three centuries, as an examination of the work of antiquarians, artists, landscape designers and other contemporary commentators reveals. During the post-medieval period, the meanings of these monuments shifted, as perceptions of the pre-Roman era changed. As embodiments of the past, megalithic monuments were embraced by Welsh historians, antiquarians and artists in the movement to formulate a Welsh national identity. Moreover, their incorporation into landscape gardens was indicative of the extent to which they captured the contemporary imagination. Local communities, meanwhile, reacted in differing ways to the megaliths, influenced concurrently by superstition and agrarian pragmatism.     

The fallen hero: masculinity,shame and farmer suicide in Australia

The drought-stricken Australian rural landscape, cultures of farming masculinity and an economy of value, moral worth and pride form a complex matrix of discourses that shape subjective dynamics that render suicide a possibility for distressed farmers. However, the centrality of a ‘mental health’ perspective and reified notions of ‘stoicism’ within this discursive field operate to exclude consideration of the ways in which cultural identity is linked to emotions. To illuminate and explore complex connections between subjectivity, moral worth and affect in relation to understanding farmer suicide, this article draws on theory and literature on agrarian discourses of masculine subjectivity and shame to analyze empirical data from interviews with farmers during times of environmental, social and economic crisis. The idealized notion of the farming man as ‘Aussie battler’ emerges from romantic agrarian mythology in which pride and self-worth are vested in traditional values of hard work, struggle and self-sacrifice. However, the structural context of agriculture, as it is shaped by the political economy of neoliberalism, threatens farm economic viability and is eroding the pride, self-worth and masculine identity of farmers. The article suggests that the notion of the ‘fallen hero’ captures a discursive shift of a masculinity ‘undone’, a regress from the powerful position of masculine subjectivity imbued with pride to one of shame that is of central importance to understanding how suicide emerges as a possibility for farmers.     

Vegetation recolonisation of abandoned agricultural terraces on Antikythera,Greece

Abstract

Antikythera is a small, relatively remote Mediterranean island, lying 35 km north-west of Crete, and its few contemporary inhabitants live mainly in the small village at the only port. However, an extensive network of terraces across the island bears witness to the past importance of farming on the island, although the intensity of use of these cultivated plots has changed according to fluctuating population levels. Most recently, the rural population and intensity of cultivation have dramatically declined. Our aim is to understand the recolonisation process of agricultural land by plants after terraces are no longer used for the cultivation of crops. The results demonstrate a relatively quick pace of vegetative recolonisation, with abandoned farm land covered by dense scrub within 20 to 60 years. The archaeological implications are that, following even relatively short periods of abandonment, the landscape would have required arduous reinvestment in the removal of scrub growth, as well as the repair and construction of stone terraces, to allow cultivation once again.     

Arena gets the growth syndrome

Abstract

Geographical educators can make useful contributions to the process of community development by helping local communities to achieve greater understanding of their environments. One way to do this is via the concept of regional synthesis, developed by, and shared with, the local residents of a community through the medium of a course which focuses on their local regional geography. A localised geography course was offered in 1977 to out ‐of‐school adults in the Kohala area of the island of Hawaii. The specific mechanics of the course are described here, and short‐term outcomes are evaluated. The potential of this form of ‘applied geography’ is briefly discussed.     

Prohibido Tocar Este Cenote: The Archaeological Basis for the Titles of Ebtun

Ebtun, Kaua, Cuncunul, Tekom, and Tixcacalcupul are a group of related communities on the Yucatán peninsula described in the corpus of Maya-language documents known as The Titles of Ebtun. In this paper I explore transformations in agrarian practice and material expressions of identity after the Spanish invasion by analyzing archaeological variation in the life histories of places over the last 500 years. As new plants, animals, and technologies were adopted, landscape organization changed, and locales took on new meanings. Ebtun’s landscape reflects a historically contingent process that has transformed place and identity, fostering autonomy of cultural practice and renewal of tradition.     

Unpacking the ‘Emergent Farmer’ Concept in Agrarian Reform: Evidence from Livestock Farmers in South Africa

South Africa has historically perpetuated a dual system of freehold commercial and communal subsistence farming. To bridge these extremes, agrarian reform policies have encouraged the creation of a class of ‘emergent’, commercially oriented farmers. However, these policies consider ‘emergent’ farmers as a homogeneous group of land reform beneficiaries, with limited appreciation of the class differences between them, and do little to support the rise of a ‘middle’ group of producers able to bridge that gap. This article uses a case study of livestock farmers in Eastern Cape Province to critique the ‘emergent farmer’ concept. The authors identify three broad categories of farmers within the emergent livestock sector: a large group who, despite having accessed private farms, remain effectively subsistence farmers; a smaller group of small/medium‐scale commercial producers who have communal farming origins and most closely approximate to ‘emergent’ farmers; and an elite group of large‐scale, fully commercialized farmers, whose emergence has been facilitated primarily by access to capital and a desire to invest in alternative business ventures. On this basis the authors suggest that current agrarian reform policies need considerable refocusing if they are to effectively facilitate the emergence of a ‘middle’ group of smallholder commercial farmers from communal systems.     

海岛文化研究进展及展望

海岛型区域文化是有别于大陆区域文化的一种区域文化形式和类型。有关海岛文化的研究在国外始于20世纪70年代,近十多年来在我国也逐渐得到重视。本文通过对国内外相关文献的分析整理,试图对国内外海岛文化研究进展进行系统的述评,并探讨其研究视角、研究内容及研究方法方面的异同,以期对国内文化地理学的研究有所裨益。     

Peasant Women and Economic Transformation in The Gambia

Contemporary agricultural development strategies in The Gambia are centred on irrigated rice and vegetables—crops traditionally cultivated by women. Irrigated agriculture, however, is opening up new avenues to capital accumulation at the national, regional and household levels. This article examines the contradictions for women of donor-funded schemes that combine gender equity with productivity objectives. The gender conflicts rife in Gambian irrigation projects point to the significance of female labour for contemporary patterns of agrarian transformation as well as the linkage between women's access to land for independent farming and forms of project participation.     

The palaeogeography and Neolithic archaeology of Herm in the Channel Islands

Abstract

The small Channel Island of Herm combines several distinct habitats ranging from steep rocky coasts and a rolling upland plateau in the south to a dune-fringed sandy lowland in the north. Where upland and lowland meet, a line of megalithic tombs constitutes the island’s most striking archaeological feature. Four seasons of fieldwork (2008–2011) have sought to determine the environmental history of northern Herm since the last glacial period and to place the tombs within the broader context of Neolithic activity. A series of trenches and boreholes has revealed the changing morphology of the prehistoric land surface that lies buried beneath the extensive deposits of aeolian sand that cover this part of the island. Results indicate that much of the lowland plain was initially occupied by a shallow marine inlet that was cut off from the sea and progressively infilled starting in the 4th millennium b.c. Pollen and soil sequences reveal how the wooded early Holocene landscape around the edges of this inlet was steadily degraded by human impact and climate. Traces of settlement and cultivation (plowmarks) suggest the megalithic tombs were situated within an agricultural landscape. This finding has relevance for theories that have proposed that islands were favored places for burial by communities visiting from the neighboring mainland. Herm was a locus for settlement and farming as well as for burial during the Neolithic period.     

Bronze Age Field Systems in the Thames Valley

In the last two decades excavation along the River Thames has shown the remarkable survival of Bronze Age field systems. A managed farming landscape emerged in this lowland area during the Middle Bronze Age and continued to develop until the end of the Late Bronze Age. In the latter period the field systems were divided into several regional groups in each of which there was a high status settlement and a concentration of river metalwork. They provide evidence for a predominantly pastoral economy in the Thames Valley on a scale which may have supported an increasingly hierarchical society. Settlements and field systems were abandoned during the Late Bronze Age, and by the Bronze Age–Iron Age transition new sites were largely confined to the extreme upper reaches of the Thames, an area which had been peripheral to the alliance and exchange system that had operated downstream.     

Conflicts Over Trees and Waves on Siberut Island

ABSTRACT The paper describes some recent developments with respect to logging operations and the tourist industry on the island of Siberut (West Sumatra, Indonesia). It discusses these developments from the perspective of the notions of equitable access and benefit sharing and prior informed consent. These are often referred to as basic principles in dealing with external intervention within the territory of indigenous peoples. After the initial logging boom during the 1970s and 1980s about half of the island was declared a nature reserve in the early 1990s. All logging operations were terminated. Backpack tourism started to develop more or less simultaneously, stimulated by the lure of a Stone Age culture on a tropical paradise island. This contributed greatly to the efforts to safeguard the island's rich biodiversity. Recently, however, a new form of logging started on the island, with a university as concession holder. But also a new kind of tourism discovered Siberut: its waves are supposed to be of excellent quality and allow for first‐class surfing. As a result of regional autonomy and the process of democratisation in Indonesia, the local people are not willing to accept these new forms of resource use without at least sharing in their benefits. This paper is based on extensive periods of fieldwork on Siberut over the past twenty years.     

Geographical Preplanning Studies of Economic Complexes in the South of Krasnoyarsk Kray

The planning of the Sayan economic complex, a major development region in the South of Krasnoyarsk Kray, is found to have focused mainly on the use of local resources without adequately considering the complex interplay of man-nature relationships. In particular, little work has been done on problems of landscape ecology, including a determination of landscape budgets and of the ecological functioning of geosystems. The results of relevant investigations are presented, focusing on the present distribution of production and settlement within the study region, the natural landscape and forest use, land and agroclimatic resources, types of farming and levels of farm equipment, and some aspects of human ecology. The study region is found to suffer from excessive concentration of production and settlement in the center of the Minusinsk Basin, a net out-migration exceeding natural increase of population, and an extensive type of farming that is less economical than the dairy economy and truck produce required for a growing urban population.     

Continental excursion, 1928, of the Glasgow university school of geography

An assessment is made of developments in agriculture and fish farming within the Integrated Development Programme (I.D.P.) for the Western Isles. The five‐year I.D.P., which was launched in 1982, was partly funded by the E.E.C. The extent of investment in agriculture and fish farming is reviewed. The growth of employment and output in fish farming is reported, and various agricultural indicators such as trends in livestock numbers and performance are assessed. Various conclusions and lessons that can be drawn from the experience of the Western Isles I.D.P. are discussed. The paper is a summary of a detailed assessment recently carried out by the author for the Highlands and Islands Development Board.