Page 75 - Encyclopedia Of World History Vol V

1852 berkshire encyclopedia of world history

Nassaney, M. S., & Sassaman, K. E. (Eds.). (1995). Native American inter- The Foraging Era
actions: Multiscalar analyses and interpretations in the eastern wood- Europe was peopled by anatomically modern humans
lands. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.
Rouse, I. (1992). The Tainos: Rise and decline of the people who greeted (Cro-Magnons) from about forty-five thousand years ago.
Columbus. New Haven: Yale University Press. Habitation was initially limited to the more temperate
Salomon, F. (1986). Native lords of Quito in the age of the Incas :The polit-
ical economy of North-Andean chiefdoms. New York: Cambridge Uni- southern coastal lands, because further north much of the
versity Press. landscape was dominated by the glaciation of the last
Smith, M. E. (2003). The Aztecs (2nd ed.). Oxford, UK: Blackwell great Ice Age. Such severe climatic conditions demanded
Publishers.
Smith, M. E., & Berdan, F. F. (Eds.). (2003). The Postclassic Mesoameri- ingenuity on the part of those humans who moved into
can world. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. those regions. Over millennia, a portable and flexible
technology was developed in which there was a high
demand for fine-grained stone cores (shaped but not
completed stone tools). While it is clear that human
Trading Patterns, bands dispersed during the long winters, all the better to

subsist, there is good evidence to suggest that they gath-
Ancient Asian ered during the summers. For example, there is no doubt
that they exchanged objects and, as a result, some arti-
See Silk Roads; Trading Patterns, China Seas; Trading Pat- facts moved a very long way from their initial point of ori-
terns, Indian Ocean; Trading Patterns, Pacific gin. Baltic amber has been found at Cro-Magnon sites in
southern Europe and seashells and sharks’ teeth far
inland.

Trading Patterns, The Neolithic Era

The melting of the ice sheets, with the resulting rise in sea
Ancient European levels, was complete by about 10,000 BCE. It was only
then that Europe, as we know it, finally took shape.The
urope is a broad peninsula spreading westward from North Sea and the Black Sea were flooded; rising sea lev-
Ethe Ural Mountains. Its southern shores are washed els also created the Aegean archipelago, cut Sicily off from
by the Black and Mediterranean Seas, its northern shores Italy, and divided Sardinia from Corsica. The principal
by the Arctic Ocean.To the west, Europe is bounded by cultural development of the Neolithic is dry farming
the Atlantic Ocean, in which the great continental islands (that is, farming on dry, nonirrigated land).This resulted
of Britain, Ireland, and Iceland sit.The coastal extremities in the emergence of village communities and the devel-
of the greater European peninsula are in turn fragmented opment of more specialized technologies. It is also pos-
into number of smaller peninsulas: the Italian, the Greek, sible to begin to identify the emergence of an agricultural
the Iberian, and the Scandinavian. The land mass is surplus as a tradable commodity. Luxury items have
mountainous, although not impassably so, and the plains been found very far inland: in particular, shell jewelry of
are intersected by great rivers that flow from the moun- Aegean origin at sites in Germany and Hungary. Obsid-
tain ranges to the sea. Great river systems, in particular ian from the Lipari islands has been found in Malta, and
the Rhine, the Danube, the Dnieper, and the Rhone, con- the island of Melos served as a source for much of the
nect the coast with lands far inland. These geographical obsidian used in the eastern Mediterranean. It has been
advantages enabled the development of trading networks argued that the trading networks established in the
from an early date. In the absence of roads, the rivers and Neolithic of Mesopotamia/Anatolia for the distribution
long coastline provided the highways by which at first of obsidian established the trading patterns that domi-
goods and later people moved with increasing freedom. nated the ancient Mediterranean world.