Four Ways to Live on a Continent
Maize, and what followed it
- The spread of maize cultivation from present-day Mexico northward into the present-day American Southwest and beyond supported economic development, settlement, advanced irrigation, and social diversification among societies.
- One crop, four consequences — and the CED lists them in an order that reads as a chain.
- Advanced irrigation is the transforming verb of 1.1: a society changing its water supply, not merely using it.
Select all four things maize cultivation supported.
One crop, four consequences, listed as a chain.
Aridity produced mobility
- Societies responded to the aridity of the Great Basin and the grasslands of the western Great Plains by developing largely mobile lifestyles.
- Responded to makes this an adaptation — the environmental constraint is real and the response is a choice.
- Largely mobile is careful: not wholly, and the CED does not overstate.
Aridity and grasslands produced...
'Responded to' makes this an adaptation.
Mixed economies produced villages
- In the Northeast, the Mississippi River Valley, and along the Atlantic seaboard, some societies developed mixed agricultural and hunter-gatherer economies that favoured the development of permanent villages.
- Some societies, not all — the CED qualifies inside a region as well as between regions.
- Favoured describes a tendency, and the mechanism is that a mixed economy does not require the whole group to move.
The Northwest case shows that...
The resource base is what decides.
The Northwest breaks the easy rule. Those societies supported themselves by hunting and gathering, and in some areas developed settled communities supported by the vast resources of the ocean — so farming does not equal settlement and foraging does not equal mobility; the resource base decides.
Which regional pattern?
Sort each description into the CED's four regions.
The CED says ____ societies in the Northeast developed mixed economies — it qualifies within a region.
Not all, and not only between regions.
The ocean supported settlement too
- Societies in the Northwest and present-day California supported themselves by hunting and gathering, and in some areas developed settled communities supported by the vast resources of the ocean.
- This is the case that breaks the easy rule — hunting and gathering here supports settled communities.
- So the pattern is not farming = settled, foraging = mobile; the resource base is what decides.
Advanced irrigation is an example of 1.1's 'transforming' verb.
A society changing its water supply, not merely using it.
How and why, by region
- The objective asks how and why various native populations interacted with the natural environment.
- How: cultivation and irrigation, mobility, mixed economies, and ocean-based settlement.
- Why: because each region offered a different resource base, and the CED matches four responses to four settings.
Two societies both stay in one place all year. One does so because it planted a field; the other because the fish come to it. The reason is different, the outcome is the same, and a rule that predicts only one of them is not a rule.
Maize spreading from present-day Mexico northward supported economic development, settlement, advanced irrigation, and social diversification; societies responded to the aridity of the Great Basin and the grasslands of the western Great Plains by developing largely mobile lifestyles; in the Northeast, Mississippi Valley and Atlantic seaboard, mixed agricultural and hunter-gatherer economies favoured permanent villages; and Northwest and Californian societies lived by hunting and gathering, some in settled communities supported by the vast resources of the ocean.