Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
of forests (hence increasing global phytomass stores) and to an increased frequency
of i res (hence periodically reducing land phytomass)—could actually have been
positive. If that was the case, then it was only during the millennia of nomadic and
agricultural expansion that human actions led to signii cant reductions of the bio-
sphere's mass.
Hunting and Collecting in Preindustrial and Modern Societies
Hunting and gathering retained an important place in all early agricultural societies.
Excavations at Çatalhöyük (a large Neolithic settlement on the Konya Plain estab-
lished about 7200 BCE) coni rmed the dominance of grains and wild plants, but
they also showed that those early farmers hunted large (aurochs) and small (foxes,
badgers, hares) animals (Atalay and Hastorf 2006). Tell Abu Hureyra, in northern
Syria, where excavations by Legge and Rowley-Conwy (1987) found that hunting
remained a critical source of food for 1,000 years after the beginning of plant
domestication, was hardly an exception. Predynastic Egyptians (going back to about
5000 BCE) complemented their dependence on emmer wheat, barley, and sheep by
hunting ducks, geese, antelopes, wild pigs, crocodiles, and elephants and gathering
herbs and roots (Hartmann 1923), and hunting and the gathering of wild plants
were common activities in all of China's ancient dynasties (Chang 1977).
In Europe's agricultural areas adjacent to forests or interspersed with many
groves and shrubs, the hunting of smaller game (partridges, peasants, hares, rabbits,
deer) and the collecting of leaves, fruits, nuts, berries, herbs, roots, and mushrooms
for food as well as for medicinal uses persisted not only through the centuries of
cropping intensii cation but right into the modern era. Some of these activities still
remain a part of village- and urban-based foraging even in the world's most indus-
trialized and densely populated societies. Mushroom hunting remains very popular
not only in Europe (including all nations in the eastern and central part of the
continent, as well as in Italy and France) but also in Japan, as attested by the numer-
ous mushroom guides (Consigny 2010).
Hunting in rich countries belongs to three very different categories. Some species
are hunted primarily to supply game meat to hunters' families or to commercial
markets: Toscana's wild boar (
cinghiale
, much of it made into salami), Central
European deer, and British game birds (grouse, pheasants, partridges) are all excel-
lent examples of the i rst practice. In North America, big game hunted for meat
includes deer, elk, moose, and caribou. Others mammals, including large African
savanna herbivores and North American bears, moose, and elk, are killed primarily
