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Thread: Ancient Peoples and how they would affect a map/history making project.

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  1. #1

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    A society of 10 to 15 in a relatively isolated area would likely find hunting and gathering to be the most efficient way to obtain food. You don't start to see agriculture until the population density reaches a point where competition for resources begins to be a factor. If you have to travel half a day to find your food, then you'd better be able to bring back enough to feed yourself and your family for at least three days. If it gets to the point where the entire community is spending more than 60% of their waking time on acquiring food, they're going to start looking for ways to change things. Either that's going to be a conversion to a nomadic living pattern—follow the food like the Lakota—or some enterprising individual is going to figure out how to bring self-replicating food to the village—they'll capture large animals or transplant the food plants.

    As soon as agriculture and/or livestock breeding has been invented, the community will see an abrupt drop in total man-hours required for food production, and you'll start to see a more pronounced division of labor, where some are farmers, some take care of the livestock, and the rest devote their time to improving living conditions.

    Communities split when the number of people in the community can no longer be supported by the resources the community has access to. As resources grow scarce, conflict over those resources will arise, and eventually there will be a schism in the village that will cause one or more families to depart. They will travel far enough away to minimize the overlap in resource gathering areas, but they will almost certainly maintain some level of communication with the original community. Eventually, once the culture has grown accustomed to this kind of split, relationships between groups will be formalized through patterns of trade and marriage. Most small hunter-gatherer and horticultural cultures have customs that encourage inter-community marriages. This helps to keep the culture unified and reduces conflict between neighboring villages: you aren't as eager to attack your neighbor when your daughter or brother lives over there.

    Obviously, there are hundreds of ways that a culture can solve resource and population problems, and there are very few universal patterns. I'd suggest you read a few anthropologists' field studies and maybe pick up an introductory textbook on cultural anthropology just to familiarize yourself with a few ways in which contemporary groups approach these issues. The "Faces of Culture" video series is also a pretty good resource. http://www2.dsu.nodak.edu/users/cumm...ure_videos.htm
    Bryan Ray, visual effects artist
    http://www.bryanray.name

  2. #2

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    I think for the most part agriculture will start off by accident. Remember when we camped here last year and ate all that fruit? The seeds have started growing into berry bushes and fruit trees. We should come back here every summer. Hey, look, the trees grow more easily since that huge oak tree fell over and stopped hogging all the sunlight. If we can clear the area a bit, the plants we want will grow and be ready for us when we make our camp.

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