ANTHROP 1AA3 Chapter Notes - Chapter 5: Horticulture, Carrying Capacity, List Of Domesticated Animals
10 Jun 2016
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Document Summary
Subsistence patterns: methods of obtaining food using available land and resources, available labour and energy, and technology. Two basic modes of subsistence = foraging and food production. Foragers: people who subsist on the collection of naturally occurring plants and animals. Food producers: users of a subsistence strategy that transforms and manages the environment to obtain food. Horticulture: plant cultivation carried out with relatively simple tools and methods; nature replaces nutrients in the soil, in the absence of permanently cultivated fields. Carrying capacity: the number of people who can be sustained by the resources and environment in which they live. Not a fixed number varies with factors such as subsistence techniques, labour expenditure, and technological development. Some subsistence strategies and technologies are able to extract more resources from the land than others affects carrying capacity. Carrying capacity is also influenced by the resources within an ecosystem that people choose to exploit: what foods they consider to be edible vs. inedible.
