Topic
Subsistence agriculture
About: Subsistence agriculture is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 8069 publications have been published within this topic receiving 156876 citations. The topic is also known as: subsistence farming.
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TL;DR: Hart et al. as mentioned in this paper found that the Oneota were maize dependent agriculturalists and used wild game and plants to supplement their maize-based diets. But they did not have direct evidence for reconstructing the Langford diet and subsistence practices.
Abstract: Langford Tradition horticulture was long viewed as representing a marginalized form of Middle Mississippian agriculture resulting from an adaptation to the less fertile landscapes and marginal climatic conditions of northern Illinois. This adaptation was characterized as involving semi-sedentary maize horticulture combined with an intensive use of wild game and plants. Until recently direct evidence for reconstructing Langford diet and subsistence practices had been limited. In this first systematic study of the specific evidence of Langford maize consumption from archaeology, paleopathology, archaeobotany, and isotopic studies we suggest that these people are best characterized as maize dependent agriculturalists.If maize was universally available in the Midwest by at least A.D. 900 … why did the Oneota not practice agriculture with the same flourish as their nearby Middle Mississippian neighbors?—John P. Hart (1990)
48 citations
Book•
07 Oct 2015
TL;DR: Brautigam et al. as mentioned in this paper show that Chinese farming investments are in fact surprisingly limited, and land acquisitions modest, and China actually exports more food to Africa than it imports.
Abstract: Is China building a new empire in rural Africa? Over the past decade, China's meteoric rise on the continent has raised a drumbeat of alarm. China has 9 percent of the world's arable land, 6 percent of its water, and over 20 percent of its people. Africa's savannahs and river basins host the planet's largest expanses of underutilized land and water. Few topics are as controversial and emotionally charged as the belief that the Chinese government is aggressively buying up huge tracts of prime African land to grow food to ship back to China. In Will Africa Feed China?, Deborah Brautigam, one of the world's leading experts on China and Africa, probes the myths and realities behind the media headlines. Her careful research challenges the conventional wisdom; as she shows, Chinese farming investments are in fact surprisingly limited, and land acquisitions modest. Defying expectations, China actually exports more food to Africa than it imports. Is this picture likely to change? African governments are pushing hard for foreign capital, and China is building a portfolio of tools to allow its agribusiness firms to "go global." International concerns about "land grabbing" are well-justified. Yet to feed its own growing population, rural Africa must move from subsistence to commercial agriculture. What role will China play? Moving from the halls of power in Beijing to remote irrigated rice paddies of Africa, Will Africa Feed China? introduces the people and the politics that will shape the future of this engagement: the state-owned Chinese agribusiness firms that pioneered African farming in the 1960s and the entrepreneurial private investors who followed them. Their fascinating stories, and those of the African farmers and officials who are their counterparts, ground Brautigam's deeply informative, deftly balanced reporting. Forcefully argued and empirically rich, Will Africa Feed China? will be a landmark work, shedding new light on China's evolving global quest for food security and Africa's possibilities for structural transformation.
48 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, stable carbon and nitrogen isotopic analyses were performed on human bones from the Liuzhuang site and animal bones from Zhangdeng site in Henan province, China to determine whether different social groups had various accesses to food resources and whether their dietary difference was related to inequality in social status.
48 citations
01 Jan 1989
48 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors investigated the underlying determinants of Aboriginal preferences for hunting-site characteristics, the frequency of their hunting activities, and marginal values of the characteristics and activities.
Abstract: The desire for economic growth has increased pressure to allocate timber harvesting and mineral extraction rights in northern Canada. A result of this desire is an increased number of overlapping and sometimes incompatible demands for the land base. One important group affected by expanding resource development is the Aboriginal People' who reside in the boreal forest. There are two factors that suggest the importance of the inclusion of Aboriginal People's use of land base in resource planning. First, nontimber resources continue to play an important role in their culture, economy, and diet as documented in anthropology, geography, sociology, and nutrition literatures (Tobias and Kay; Usher; Beckley and Hirsch). The second factor is that Aboriginal People make up a large percentage of the northern Canadian population, and their numbers are growing at a higher rate than the rest of the Canadian population (Statistics Canada).2 In the Canadian boreal forest, Aboriginal People are the primary users of nontimber forest products (e.g., berries, medicinal plants, wildlife meat, and fur). As a result, they are often most affected by changes to the forest landscape. Determining the influence of forest practices and policy changes on their use of the land base is hindered by lack of knowledge on their use and preferences for nontimber forest products. The goal of this project was to investigate the underlying determinants of Aboriginal preferences for hunting-site characteristics, the frequency of their hunting activities, and marginal values of the characteristics and activities.
48 citations