Plants and People
eBook - ePub

Plants and People

Choices and Diversity through Time

Alexandre Chevalier, Elena Marinova, Leonor Pena-Chocarro, Elena Marinova, Leonor Pena-Chocarro

Share book
  1. 432 pages
  2. English
  3. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

Plants and People

Choices and Diversity through Time

Alexandre Chevalier, Elena Marinova, Leonor Pena-Chocarro, Elena Marinova, Leonor Pena-Chocarro

Book details
Book preview
Table of contents
Citations

About This Book

This first monograph in the EARTH series, The dynamics of non-industrial agriculture: 8, 000 years of resilience and innovation, approaches the great variety of agricultural practices in human terms. It focuses on the relationship between plants and people, the complexity of agricultural processes and their organisation within particular communities and societies. Collaborative European research among archaeologists, archaeobotanists, ethnographers, historians and agronomists using a broad analytical scale of investigation seeks to establish new common ground for integrating different approaches. By means of interdisciplinary examples, this book showcases the relationship between people and plants across wide ranging and diverse spatial and temporal milieus, including crop diversity, the use of wild foodstuffs, social context, status and choices of food plants.

Frequently asked questions

How do I cancel my subscription?
Simply head over to the account section in settings and click on “Cancel Subscription” - it’s as simple as that. After you cancel, your membership will stay active for the remainder of the time you’ve paid for. Learn more here.
Can/how do I download books?
At the moment all of our mobile-responsive ePub books are available to download via the app. Most of our PDFs are also available to download and we're working on making the final remaining ones downloadable now. Learn more here.
What is the difference between the pricing plans?
Both plans give you full access to the library and all of Perlego’s features. The only differences are the price and subscription period: With the annual plan you’ll save around 30% compared to 12 months on the monthly plan.
What is Perlego?
We are an online textbook subscription service, where you can get access to an entire online library for less than the price of a single book per month. With over 1 million books across 1000+ topics, we’ve got you covered! Learn more here.
Do you support text-to-speech?
Look out for the read-aloud symbol on your next book to see if you can listen to it. The read-aloud tool reads text aloud for you, highlighting the text as it is being read. You can pause it, speed it up and slow it down. Learn more here.
Is Plants and People an online PDF/ePUB?
Yes, you can access Plants and People by Alexandre Chevalier, Elena Marinova, Leonor Pena-Chocarro, Elena Marinova, Leonor Pena-Chocarro in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in History & Ancient History. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Information

Publisher
Oxbow Books
Year
2014
ISBN
9781782970330
SECTION 1
Methodological Approaches to Plant Use Diversity
1 Factors and Issues in Plant Choice
Alexandre Chevalier, Elena Marinova and Leonor Peña-Chocarro
Because humans are omnivores, they need plants to survive but there is more to it than that: they need different plants in order to fulfil their physiological needs, since no single plant can provide all the elements human beings need. However, among the available edible plants in the environment, humans choose only a small part of those plants as food. Throughout time, humans have shaped, consciously or incidentally, their natural surroundings and an essential part of this is expressed by modifying plant communities and diversity, transforming landscapes into cultivated or managed land. Humans eventually noticed that their influence on some of these wild plants lead to modifications in their physiology, taste specificities and morphology, observations that at some stage lead them to deliberate manipulations of those plants. In this way, people were able to get more from the plant’s useful parts, and in a more reliable and systematic way, than from the wild varieties, but in turn they had to work harder and longer to get their food (Sahlins 2003). Plant domestication definitely created plants that were more suitable for human alimentary stability, but this also lead to a reduction in their competitive capacity, and some of these plants eventually became completely dependent upon humans for their reproduction and spread. While limiting ever more their food choices from the wild by focusing on a few very nutritive plants, even running the risk of creating harmful unbalanced diets, at the same time, humans started to promote many domesticated species and varieties of plants different from their wild progenitors in order to adapt them to a diversity of ecological niches and conditions. Parallel to this, people invented a plethora of techniques to get, grow, transform, store and extract the nutritive or useful product components from the plants they needed. Even for the very same plant, strongly varying processes have been applied by different cultural groups across time and space, all of them being as ‘efficient’ as the others and adapted to the local environmental and social constraints.
Local biodiversity and ecological conditions determined the range of possibilities available to humans, who chose which plant they would use according to a multiplicity of factors (social, cultural, environmental, technical, etc.). According to the importance given to, or imposed by each of these factors, human groups gave different responses even in similar environments, which led to an enormous diversity of practices and plant uses.
What lead to these different choices? A process of adaptation to environmental constraints? Cultural materialism based on the local availability of raw materials and on the group’s social structure? Pre-eminence of functional purposes controlled by human biological determinism? Local social categorisation of an objective nature that makes a plant socially acceptable to eat? Adaptive evolution driven by natural selection? Local choices from a specific environment driven by universal human mental categories? Local mental processes that ‘think’ nature and plants in a specific way which will orientate further plant choices (subjective nature)?
Factors and Issues in Plant Choice
The long-standing relationship between plants and people has always been characterised by a continuous dynamic condition of adaptation, interaction and change. This relationship has not always been mutually beneficial and different degrees of interaction, operating at different scales, have been detected through time. Plant diversity and choice are issues intimately related to the natural, to the technical, as well as to the cultural, social and symbolic realms in which the communities are embedded, and these determine the array of possibilities available to people. Choices are made within these possibilities according to a myriad of different factors, the main one possibly being the social or cultural context.
Environmental Constraints
It would be a truism to state that environmental constraints constitute an important limiting factor for plant availability and diversity: crops are and have been throughout time geographically limited, due to various natural factors such as altitude, humidity, temperature, soil type, and humans often had a range of dietary and technical choices limited by the natural conditions and resources they were living in. There are endless studies of human and cultural ecology showing the enormous variability of the practices and systems developed by indigenous communities across the world, not only to adapt to specific environmental conditions but also to overcome them (Amisah et al. 2009; Berkes et al. 2000; Rex Immanuel et al. 2010; Wilken 1987). The choice of specific plants, or the selection of different varieties from one species that will be better adapted to local ecological conditions, constitutes a widespread solution to overcome specific environmental limits, such as the hulled wheats in Mediterranean mountain areas (Peña-Chocarro 1996, Peña-Chocarro and Zapata 1998). Another example is the promotion of certain species through different strategies (pruning, burning, sowing in fallow fields, etc.) in order to increase their population density, as is the case of many species in areas of Mesoamerica, such as for palms or grasses (Casas et al. 2007; GonzĂĄlez-Insuasti and Caballero 2007; GonzĂĄlez-Insuasti et al. 2008) or the huge number of varieties of maize – about 350 different native varieties (the exact number varies according to authors and date of publication) or of potatoes, that may total as many 3,500 different genotypes (both wild and domesticated Solanum tubers, divided into eight species according to Ochoa 1999).
Throughout their history, humans have generally had to cope with environmental fluctuations and unpredictability. The success and failure of the various subsistence systems through time, whether based on agriculture or on the intensive use of wild plants, were greatly dependent on buffering mechanisms to cope with dangerous fluctuations due to both natural and cultural reasons. Studies addressing buffering tactics are numerous both in archaeological and historical literature (Allen 2004; Galant 1989; Halstead and O’Shea 1989; Kellhofer 2002; Kohler and van West 1996; Roberts and Rosen 2009; Stopp 2002; van der Veen 2008) as well as in human ecology (BalĂ©e 1994; Barlett 1980; Berkes et al. 2000; GonzĂĄlez-Insuasti et al. 2008) and provide interesting insights into the strategies aimed at subsistence and social stability.
Ethnobotanical and anthropological research across the world has highlighted the importance of these types of studies as an efficient approach (Altieri 2004; Bellon 1991; Eakin 2005; Wale and Virchov 2003). However, some authors (Winterhalder et al. 1999) have stressed the qualitative character of most archaeological and anthropological literature on subsistence risk, criticising the use of risk-averse behaviours without taking into account formal models.
One of the buffering mechanisms against environmental changes is plant diversity, both wild and domesticated, and the exploitation of different ecological niches, if not ecosystems. Indeed, diversity and diversification are key in addressing issues related not only to biodiversity and genetic resource conservation, on which research has largely focused (Orlove and Brush 1996; Brush and Meng 1998; Smith and Wishnie 2000), but also in dealing with subsistence systems in the past. Recent research on diversity, focusing mostly on crops grown by indigenous communities across large parts of the planet, has shown that diversity levels are greatly influenced by farmers’ decisions within household contexts (Brush and Meng 1998), although these also have effects at a larger scale. However, this has to be understood as a liberty given within the constraints of one’s cultural identity. In fact, Brush and Meng (1998) suggested that the decisions taken at household level determine the choice of the selected species, varieties or landraces to be grown depending on their likelihood of meeting the household’s physiological needs, social status membership and identity requirements. Indeed, yield stability and crop responsiveness are fundamental elements in domestic agricultural production and when these become unstable, farmers develop a wide range of adaptive strategies aiming to minimise shortfalls and lessen variability. Diversification appears, thus, as a common strategy to manage risk and uncertainty better and avoid crop failures in communities characterised by subsistence economies. In the past, it was also a strategy for exploiting the diversity of available ecosystems.
Semi-domesticates and wild plants also played an important role in the everyday life of agricultural management and food intake, and this could be a crucial role when dealing with food uncertainty, shortages and/or agricultural regression, either because of ecological issues or social problems (BalĂ©e 1994; Ertuğ 2009). Two chapters of the current book, namely Chapter 4 on trees (Bouby and Ruas) and Chapter 5 on wild plants (Cruz-GarcĂ­a and Ertuğ), show that the contribution of cultivated or gathered fruits, wild or semi-wild rhizomes and greens to the everyday diet is far from being insignificant and that they were not only used as famine foods.
Technological Developments and Solutions
The development of technological solutions is another answer to ecological constraints. The creation and maintenance of ponds, drainage systems, levees, floating gardens, raised fields, sunken fields, irrigation canals carved in rock or simple wooden planks hanging along cliffs, aqueducts, or terraces (Chakravarty et al. 2006; Denevan et al. 1987; Lentz 2000; Marcus and Stanish 2006) are only a few among the many examples of different landscape engineering strategies that have allowed humans to overcome some of their environmental constraints. Volume 3 of the EARTH Series, Agricultural and pastoral landscapes in pre-industrial society: choices, stability and change (Retamero et al. 2014) takes up these issues, as well as social strategies developed to maximise the output from nature, such as seasonal occupation of specific ecologies, or the exploitation of several different ecologies year-round if it is not possible to develop technical solutions, or if the input required proves to be too high or socially inadequate for a group. Among these social strategies, trade is probably the most effective way to overcome environmental constraints, thus making available in a particular location plants from completely different ecologies.
Of course trade was limited until very recently to non-perishable food plants or to processed plants, such as dried, cured, or smoked products, which could be transported for weeks, at times for months. These preservation practices are part of the plant-processing techniques and field maintenance mentioned in Volume 2 of the EARTH Series, Exploring and explaining diversity in agricultural technology (van Gijn et al. 2014).
Objective technical constraints, such as the availability of raw materials to elaborate the tools necessary to deal with agricultural methods and plant processing are probably less related to plant choices than environmental constraints and social factors. Indeed, the diversity of techniques developed and applied to plants by humans is quite impressive and enabled people to make the most of almost any plant, as is illustrated in Chapter 6 (Griffin-Kremer).
However, the diversity of technical choices made in growing, storing and processing plants explains the diversity of food plant preparations across time and geographic location, as well as the diversity of plant remains in archaeological contexts. Technical choices are therefore highly relevant in archaeobotany in correctly interpreting plant diversity, as is highlighted in Chapter 3 (Marinova) of this volume, but this applies less in ethnography in the efforts to explain choices made.
Cultural Factors
An important key to understanding human choices regarding plants is also represented by the cultural motivations for selecting a specific plant for food (even toxic ones), for creating a new cultivar, or maintaining a particular crop over centuries. Choice is triggered first by what has been called the ‘omnivore dilemma’ (Fischler 1993); precisely because they are omnivores, humans are autonomous and free to choose whatever they want from nature. They are therefore highly adaptable to any ecology in securing their food supply. However, they cannot get all the necessary dietary elements from a limited range of food, and they specifically have to look for this alimentary diversity. Innovation, exploration and changes are crucial for their survival, but this is precisely a source of anxiety and rejection, since some foods may be poisonous and kill them. Interestingly, humans also include plants that are toxic or some of whose parts may be toxic in their food supplies, through elaborate processes of transformation, such as parching acorns, squeezing out the juice of the bitter manioc, or taking out the testa of beans and chenopods, not to mention the well-known nixtamalisation – a process of dehulling of maize grains through an alkali product – that allows a maize-based diet which would otherwise cause pellagra. Humans also modified initially toxic wild plants into domesticated edible ones, such as the almond or the potato. Thus, humans decide which plants have to be accepted and included in their symbolic and dietary realms beyond any potential neophobia vs. neophilia attitude as Fischler (1993) would describe it, and beyond known or potential toxicities.
In fact, choices are intimately related to how people perceive their environment and project themselves within it, and how people perceive themselves within a cultural and social group and interact with their social milieu (Descola 2005, 2011). Cultural representations will transform a natural element into a social one that otherwise would remain outside of the social realm and would not be considered by humans. From the vast array of plants present in a given environment, humans elaborate mentally and socially which plants are good to eat and which ones are taboo (Lahlou 1998; LĂ©vi-Strauss 1964, 1967, 1968), as well as which are appropriate for humans and which are reserved for the gods, as is illustrated in Chapter 7 (Hansson and Heiss).
Within a given cultural group, social norms will tell people what to eat, when, how, where and with whom, according to their social position (Goody 1982; Douglas 1984; Fischler 1988; Mennell 1992; Counihan 1...

Table of contents