Page 152 - Encyclopedia Of World History

502 berkshire encyclopedia of world history

In parts of Asia the Food and Agriculture
Organization of the United Nations is
carrying out comparative trials of different
fertilization treatments on experimental
furrowed plantations of local hybrid poplars
(Populus simonigra) in irrigated sandy soils.
Intercropping is also carried out at intervals
between rows of poplars.

the Olmec and Maya to the less organized tribal groups
of the Amazon basin, rain forest was being chopped,
burnt, and changed or eliminated. Large patches of the
Amazon forest were altered irrevocably by the selection
The Premodern Age and propagation of useful trees and by different cycles of
(to 1500 CE) cultivation, so that the mighty rain forest may be one
Because crop domestication and the increase and spread large cultural artefact. In North America, the earliest
of people occurred in largely forested environments, food-growing settlements (c. 10,000 BCE) were in the rich
ancient societies everywhere had a cumulatively severe bottomlands of the continent’s rivers in the South and the
impact on forests. In Europe Mesolithic cultures (c. Southeast. Similar to the practice of the European
9000–5000 BCE) set fire to the woodland edges to facil- Neolithics, flood plains and lower river terraces were
itate hunting.The succeeding Neolithic agriculturalists (c. cleared, and lower slopes altered as intensive cropping
4500–2000 BCE) had a far greater impact as they felled expanded, but unlike the Neolithics, hunting loomed
forests on the fertile loessic soils with stone and flint axes much larger in the economy.The vast eastern temperate
in order to engage in intensive garden cultivation and woodlands were settled later (after c. 800 CE) but the
extensive wheat growing. In order to vary diet they also same imprints are evident, resulting in a mosaic of inten-
ran large herds of pigs, sheep, and especially cattle in sively cultivated cleared lands, abandoned fields with
woodland and cleared pastures for their meat, milk, early forest succession, and thinned and altered forests.
blood, and possibly cheese. It was a stable, sedentary The great difference between the Americas and Eurasia
society that made full use of the many products of the for- was the absence of grazing animals in the Americas,
est, one calculation being that on average it needed 20 which had an effect on the Eurasian forests by preventing
hectares of forest land to sustain one person in fuel, graz- regrowth and making clearing/firing worthwhile to pro-
ing, constructional timber, and food. mote pasture.
In Asia, complex and highly organized societies flour- Knowledge about deforestation in Africa is sparse, and
ished in the forests of the south and southeast parts of the with the exception of settlement in savanna-woodland
continent. Rotational cutting and cultivation followed by and adjacent belts in west Africa, it may not have been
abandonment (swiddening) in forests was accompanied very extensive.
by intensive garden culture for fruit, spices, and vegeta- The conclusion is that the impact of early humans on
bles, and the peculiar and highly innovative development the forest was far greater than expected; it may have been
of wet rice cultivation, a technique that stopped erosion one of the major deforestation episodes in history, and
and leaching of the soil in the cleared forest in heavy rain- left anything but the pristine forest that is such a feature
fall areas. Stock, particularly cattle and pigs, were integral of the romantic imagination of the past and the environ-
to all parts of the economy. mental rhetoric of the present.
The evidence for similar processes is unfolding for the The classical world of the Mediterranean basin pro-
Americas. Earliest were the swiddens in the equatorial vides, for the first time, rich literary detail of wood con-
upland rain forest areas from as early as 12,000 BCE, and sumption for ship-building, urban heating and
from the tropical Gulf of Mexico lowland civilizations of construction, and metal-smelting, but it is tantalizingly