Intensive Agriculture:

Growers Get Faster & Furiouser

R. Ratcliff
SOAN 451 Spring 2016
Dr. Mark Tveskov
Southern Oregon University
3 June 2016
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INTRODUCTION

As horticulturist societies began to expand their control over the environment,

surplus, and massive populations continued to spread over the landscape the demands

for more control, exponentially greater individual surplus, and of exponentially growing

populations pushed small-scale horticulturists and gardeners into larger scale farming

and more intensive agriculture. The transition to intensive agriculture truly began to pave

the way for contemporary and industrialized agricultural societies. Many of the changes

that came with this transition created the foundation for urban life (Sutton and Anderson,

2014; 303). Though hunting and gathering societies are our true mother societies,

intensive agriculturalists mark the beginning of a new era and the birth of the first great

civilizations, imperial states, and complex chiefdoms (Webster, 2013; 598).

For many societies the transition to intensive agriculture came as a natural

progression of the horticultural ideological shift toward control, but added pressures and

competition over resources may have pushed some people groups toward the

intensification of their agricultural practices in order to gain success and dominance over

others. This success was often found through the use of large military organizations

(Sutton and Anderson, 2014; 302-303). The influence of such aggrandizing behaviors

and competition over the ownership of surplus land and material goods on its own still

may not have been enough. When settled in circumscribed environments however,

agriculturalists were able to thrive and produce more in areas where their neighbors

could not. Because both the neighbors were not able to succeed and the group was not

able to easily fission populations continued to grow, the accumulation of wealth

continued to those in power, social structures became more stratified, and soon the

initial farmers did not even have to labor in their own farms (Sutton and Anderson, 2014;

294).
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The shift in the distribution of labor was a significant transition in many societies

due to incredible innovations in technology, allowing gardeners to either maintain

production on much larger plots of land or maintain production without laboring at all

through intense social stratification (in some cases slavery) (Sutton and Anderson, 2014;

290-291). The introduction of technologies largely to chop, plow, or control water:

irrigation systems, ridged fields, dams, terracing, and other landscape altering

technologies increased productivity and were incredibly poignant displays of control over

the land (Sutton and Anderson, 2014; 295). Agricultural societies did not only control the

land, however. Farmers began to control and value animals for more than their primary

use: meat. Animals were used to fertilize crops, were used as beasts of burden, and for

other secondary functions (Sutton and Anderson, 2014; 289).

The domestication of animals for labor and in some cases the use of lower social

classes for labor also increased the production of high-yield grain, root, fruit, and

vegetable crops. These crops, however, only continued to be a part of less and less

diverse harvests in species and local variety as societies like the agricultural Chinese

only continued to adjust and labor over the environment of their place (Sutton and

Anderson, 2013; 317) and necessitate regional trade (though this was also influenced by

elite desires for foreign and exotic goods in conspicuous consumption) (Webster, 2013;

598). Still, agriculturists like those who began to develop the Pacific Northwest believed

in the efficacy of a human controlled and managed natural world, calculated and

strategically designed environments that would be capable of turning out an ever-

increasing volume of goods and material (Robbins, 1997; 266). Exactly these kinds of

adjustments toward human domination led to the permanent change of environments

and the growth of urban society as rivers began to be moved, forests were cleared, and

even lakes were created to support the largest grows ever established.
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In even more visible ways, agriculturists altered the very look of their landscape.

Great civilizations only continued to become more and more settled on their land with

permanent settlements, which had literally been built on the foundation that beans,

maize, and squash (in the case of Meso-America or teosinte in Chalcatzingo) had

provided. As intensive horticulture develops during the formative period aggregate

settlements begin to appear in the archeological record (Webster, 2013; 397-601).

Societies establish themselves in grandeur around important geographical places as

ceremonial centers and often bridges between ideological worlds (McDonald, 2012;).

These settlements begin to reflect the authority of the gods (polytheistic and

monotheistic) in ceremonial centers and also the authority of political elites in

monumental and iconographic expressions of power through ancestral claims to

culturally important geographical places often tied to their ability to communicate

between super-natural worlds. These great feats and incredible archeological

establishments, though they were not yet true urban centers, required a great deal of

labor and social organization through calendars, writing, etc. (Sutton and Anderson,

2013; 292; Webster, 2013; 605). They were establishments that would not have been

possible without a shift to more an intensive agricultural system that allowed for

community members to be organized by more centralized authority and to specialize

(though this was not always positive) for labor outside of their family garden.

This specialization has been clearly manifest in even the settlement

arrangements and hierarchical patterns among agriculturist societies such as Tikal or

Teotihuacan (Webster, 2013; 602). Where power elites lived in large complexes often

near or within immaculate ceremonial centers, lower classes (those who built and whose

labor was required for the establishment of the great civilization) live on the outermost

ring of the settlement, and classes simply working their way up what could be

considered a type of chain of being moved toward the center where gods and those
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with divine right to rule kept their place. Between the low classes and the gods were

those who kept records, farmers, artisans, and more. Social rankings among the Maya

correlated with certain iconographies depicting life seen in water lily and other artwork

(McDonald, 2012; 86). Traditionally these classes were largely related to family lines

through ascribed birth lines, but as societies expanded into intensive agriculture their

social relations and politics became incredibly more complex than they had been in

hunting and gathering and even horticulturist societies (Sutton and Anderson, 2014;

292).

Such an explosion of people, production, and the building of pyramids required

an incredible organization of energy. People were able to occupationally specialize.

Specializations were classified as more or less important by divine kings who had a right

to rule (Webster, 2014; 624). Labor was needed to transport food, redistribute food, etc.

With more food people were freed to do more things, populations continued to rise

increasing sedentism, specialization, and competition in a positive feedback loop. With

such an increase in surplus there began to emerge classes of those who have and those

who have not. The have nots were exploited as a peasant class emerging to be laborers,

and according to their relation to the center of political power they were then forced to

make tribute. These taxes made the peasant class, therefore, incapable of accumulating

goods, effectively solidifying their placement as the peasant class forced to labor for the

elite (Webster, 2014; 625-626).

These positions in social life were solidified by ideological and cultural

conceptions of rights, power and ties to religious authority wherein causality begins to lie

out of the hands of the individual effectively stealing an individuals sense of agency and

creating the perfect class to construct a pyramid. Ideologies push the rich to desire more

riches and the poor to pursue peasantry (Arkush, 2013; 312). People begin to believe in

the ideology of the state whether it is in their best interest or not. The interactions among
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individuals often illustrate these ideological shifts toward intensified over-consumption

and conspicuous consumption, control over humans as slave labor or sacrifice, and a

disregard for relationship and reciprocity unless it could be commodified or consumed

(Robbins, 1997).

Because intensive agricultural societies had grown so large they had

overwhelmingly violated the Dunbar number to such an extent that individuals no longer

saw the full extent of their actions in relationships and through trade within large cities

(Dunbar, 2014). This sense of disconnectedness lent itself to the use of coercive and

mercenary labor, increased urbanism, imperial conquest, commercial empires, large-

scale conspicuous consumption, and militarism (Sutton and Anderson, 2014; 303). State

societies like the Andean populations only continued to demonstrate their power and

control through violence, conflict, and competition. Ownership had become territorialism,

which led to the growth of control, competition, conflict, violence, endemic warfare and

conquest, and greater and greater consumption.

Intensive agricultural societies placed cultural value on consumption like never

before, and power elites prided themselves in exotic goods. This desire for the scarce

often pushed agricultural societies to consume even beyond their own breadth. Through

this disassociation, intensive agriculturalists were impacted and also had impacts upon

other people groups through regional and inter-regional trade and the establishment of

trade-centers between rivers in Meso-America (Webster, 2014; 622). Unfortunately this

impact was not limited to trade, however, and communities began to act to the fullest

extent of their ideologies of power, control, and consumption in the conquest of other

peoples and other lands. Through trade and conquest ideas quickly spread, but so did

the competition and endemic warfare found in the Andean populations (Arkush, 2013;

319). In the end, intensive agricultural states continued to grow, and their growth rate

became one that could only eventually end in collapse.

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Intensive agricultural societies continued to feed the positive feedback loop that

had been initiated by horticulturist societies and in order to remain stable while

increasing consumption societies were forced to increase and intensify. When the

success of the system depends on a thorough knowledge of the plants, animals, and

soils exponentially scaled intensive agricultural societies were not able to keep up

(Sutton and Anderson, 2014; 326). This exponential intensification, as the growers grew

faster and more furiously, was not sustainable and without balance became the states

own demise.

Even these mother cultures and the first true cities were not invincible, and

though they paved the way for contemporary life and urban industrial agriculture they did

fall. Powerful states like the Maya were not immune to the cyclical nature of collapse and

their system of large, segmented hierarchies, greater centralized authorities, greater

stratification, and unforeseen population growth all contributed to Mayan collapse

(Webster, 2013; 630). While collapse did come in conjunction with the oscillation of

severe, unpredictable droughts; pointing to any one feature of the Mayan circumstances,

which ended in collapse, would be to ignore the interplay of the environmental,

ecological, social, political, and ideological in both establishing the state and in its

demise (Kennet et al, 2012; 338).

Still, it is largely agreed upon that stresses on each of these new ways of life was

directly correlated to the civilizations collapse. The state had grown to populations never

seen before. The state had altered their environment in ways never before experienced

(Kennet, 2012; 791). The state had expanded beyond previously effective political

structures, and required an ideology that refused individual agency. One of the greatest

factors among the violence, competition, and the ideological resource grabbing for

dominance, consumption, and changes in social relationships and control that so

affected Andean populations (Arkush, 2013; 307) has been argued to be the unreliability
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of the environmental cycles and unpredictable climate change making the stresses for

agricultural states much more intense and capable of influencing the states eventual

collapse.

CONCLUSION

Intensive agriculture provided for the expansion of social roles and occupational

specialization but effectively destroyed the diversity of regional harvests. Intensive

agriculture brought an explosion in arts and language but intensified social stratification

and class struggle. Intensive agricultural societies constructed impressive and timeless

monuments but also began a cycle of irreversible changes to the global environment.

Agricultural societies laid the foundation in technology for contemporary plows, irrigation,

and fertilizing, which will allow for continued growth of populations, but ideologically

agricultural societies continued and intensified the perpetuation of greed, conspicuous

consumption, the disassociation of the consequences of conquest and trade.

As we consider the ecological transitions from foraging, to horticulturalist, to

intensive agricultural ecologies and compare the establishment and collapse of the state

to our own industrialized contemporary states, the cyclical nature of growth becomes

identified even more clearly. Ideologies of control have only continued to intensify

alongside overwhelming and some times ridiculous displays of conspicuous

consumption and globalized trade. In this growth, however, it is also important to

consider the pace and cyclical nature of collapse and whether industrialized,

contemporary societies have truly outgrown the limits of control and intensification or if

like the Yucatec Maya, we will be able to find a sustainable solution for balanced growth.
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