"in the period between about 9000 and 2000 b.p. populations throughout the world, already using nearly the full range of palatable foods, were forced to adjust to further increases in population by artificially increasing, not those resources which they prefered to eat, but those which responded well to human attentiona nd could be made to produce the greates number of edible calories per unit of land...agriculture is not easier than hunting and gathering and does not provide a higher quality, more palitable, or more secure food base. agriculture has, in fact, only one advantage over hunting and gathering: that of provideing more calories per unit of land per unit of time and thuis supporting denser populations..."
the food crisis in prehistory: over population and the origins of agriculture. mark nathan cohen. 1977 p.15
more bang for the buck as it were...or feeding more people per acre...an artificial carrying capacity necessitated by a neolithic population boom...foragers certainly would have been well versed in the biology of their environments and in plant and animal behaviors...coming to some sort of decision on which would respond better to human intervention probably would not have posed too great a problem ( if it had we would not have the social structures we have, would we? it would be a differnt planet.)...part of the working hypothesis for the garden's first season ( it is an academic project , on campus anyway, my backyard is much less structured and i can do things there that don't really fit in the academic parameters) was that annuals became the overwhelming majority of staples because they produced more edibile calories per unit of land than perennials do...that idea is in serious need of adjustment...the jerusalem artichokes blew that out of the water...the top two photos are of jerusalem artichokes i have culled form the campus garden...sixty-six volunteers that i have had to remove so far just to keep the campus population at double the six i consciously palnted last fall...so there's obviously some other mechanism at work in the annuial/perennial staple dichotomy...storage was another issue i wrote about in the paper on the first season, thinking that storage issues might have some impact ( i had something of a premonition when i statred harvesting) but there seem to be at least as many problems with storing annuals as there are with perennials ( this is traditional , not industrial, storage technology we're talking...the neolithic revolution had some environments where freeze-drying was used, to remove glyco-alkaloids from the higher elvation, frost-resistant potato varieties domesticated in the andes for instance, but no industrial refrigeration or preservatives...we're thinking in terms of cache-pits and rudimentary storage buildings) and we have seen that my jerusalem artichoke storage technology is in dire need of tweaking if i plan to eat them all next winter ( and i do...this could become a major embarassment)...so if it's not more calories or easier storage what is it? i have a few ideas, but i'm not tipping my hand...just looking around for research materials and planning some summer reading, growing gardens, collecting data, and then writing...i think i have found a sort of vocation for my dotage...something to keep body and mind moving...nothing wrong with that.
the middle photo is of my stand of winter wheat....an annual, i know, but still part of the second season thinking...the fourth photo is of some really happy perennial asparagus ( i finally remebered the photographic scale)...the one-year-old crowns i planted in april of 2010 are into their third season so next spring we can start harvesting spears...the bottom is the pgp as it looked yesterday evening about five or so
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