A horticultural society is one in which people subsist through the cultivation of plants for food consumption without the use of mechanized tools or the use of animals to pull plows. This makes horticultural societies distinct from agrarian societies, which do use these tools, and from pastoral societies, which rely on the cultivate of herd animals for subsistence.
Overview of Horticultural Societies
Horticultural societies developed around 7000 BCE in the Middle East and gradually spread west through Europe and Africa and east through Asia. They were the first type of society in which people grew their own food, rather than relying strictly on the hunter-gather technique. This means that they were also the first type of society in which settlements were permanent or at least semi-permanent. As a result, the accumulation of food and goods was possible, and with it, a more complex division of labor, more substantial dwellings, and a small amount of trade.
There are both simple and more advanced forms of cultivation used in horticultural societies. The most simple use tools such as axes [to clear forest] and wooden sticks and metal spades for digging. More advanced forms may use foot-plows and manure, terracing and irrigation, and rest plots of land in fallow periods. In some cases, people combine horticulture with hunting or fishing, or with the keeping of a few domesticated farm animals.
The number of different kinds of crops featured in gardens of horticultural societies can number as high 100 and are often a combination of both wild and domesticated plants. Because the tools of cultivation used are rudimentary and non-mechanic, this form of agriculture is not particularly productive. Because of this, the number of people composing a horticultural society is typically rather low, though can be relatively high, depending on the conditions and technology.
Social and Political Structures of Horticultural Societies
Horticultural societies were documented by anthropologists all over the world, using various types of tools and technologies, in many different climatic and ecological conditions. Because of these variables, there was also variety in the social and political structures of these societies in history, and in those that exist today.
Horticultural societies can have a matrilineal or patrilineal social organization. In either, ties focused on kinship are common, though larger horticultural societies will have more complex forms of social organization. Throughout history, many were matrilineal because the social ties and structure were organized around the feminized work of crop cultivation. [Conversely, hunter-gatherer societies were typically patrilineal because their social ties and structure were organized around the masculinized work of hunting.] Because women are at the center of work and survival in horticultural societies, they are highly valuable to men. For this reason, polygyny—when a husband has multiple wives—is common.
Meanwhile, it is common in horticultural societies that men take on political or militaristic roles. Politics in horticultural societies is often centered on the redistribution of food and resources within the community.
Evolution of Horticultural Societies
The kind of agriculture practiced by horticultural societies is considered a pre-industrial subsistence method. In most places around the world, as technology was developed and where animals were available for plowing, agrarian societies developed.
However, this is not exclusively true. Horticultural societies exist to this day and can be found primarily in wet, tropical climates in Southeast Asia, South America, and Africa.
Updated by Nicki Lisa Cole, Ph.D.
Primitive agriculture is called horticulture by anthropologists rather than farming because it is carried on like simple gardening, supplementary to hunting and gathering. It differs from farming also in its relatively more primitive technology. It is typically practiced in forests, where the loose soil is easily broken up with a simple stick, rather than on grassy plains with heavy sod. Nor do horticulturalists use fertilizer intensively or crop rotation, terracing, or irrigation. Horticulture is therefore much less productive than agriculture. The villages are small—some no larger than many hunting-gathering settlements—and the overall population density is low compared with farming regions.
Forest horticulturists use fallowing techniques variously called “slash-and-burn,” “shifting cultivation,” and “swidden cultivation” [a northern English term now widely used by anthropologists]. After about two years of cropping a plot is left fallow for some years and allowed to revert to secondary forest or bush. Before resuming cultivation the bush may be cut, left to dry, and then burned. The ashes bestow some fertilization, but the foremost benefit of this procedure is that the plot will be relatively weed free at first.
Since the fallowing periods of the plots are much longer than the planted periods, the swidden horticulturalists must gradually encroach on more distant land. Sometimes this results in semisedentary villages when the newly arable plots finally are so distant that a few horticulturalists must start to build huts near the newer fields, to be joined later by others. Such a land-hungry system, in a region of competing populations, greatly increases the chances of conflict. Population dispersal thus becomes a grave threat in horticultural regions. Land for expansion inevitably must be found at the expense of neighbours or by shortening the fallowing periods—which eventually results in lower production.
Many forest tribes—typical are the horticulturalists of the South American tropical forest—constantly maintain a military posture. Large-scale warfare is not usual [because of the lack of political leadership] but raids, cannibalism, torturing of captives, and other forms of belligerence are.
Horticulturalists have more material goods than most hunter-gatherers, though not more than such societies as the Indians of the Northwest Coast. This suggests that the accumulation of domestic goods is related not so much to the higher productivity of the horticulturalists as to their greater stability of settlement.
The most highly developed of aboriginal slash-and-burn horticulturalists were undoubtedly the Maya of Guatemala and Yucatán, who had a chiefdom or primitive state. But this was most exceptional, for almost all other primitive horticulturalists did not go beyond simple tribes with egalitarian and nearly autonomous communities. Any regional confederation was likely to be only on the basis of intermarriage and clanship. Sometimes an ephemeral sort of near-chiefdom arises, founded on the capabilities of a charismatic leader. In Melanesia, where a well-established form of personal politics thrives, the leader is called Big Man or Centre Man.
The Big Man in Melanesia is big because he has a following. He begins with his own family and near relatives and friends, who provide goods that he, on behalf of his group, gives away to other groups at a feast on some ceremonial occasion. He and his faction are feasted reciprocally by others at other times. His ability to redistribute on an increasingly lavish scale to larger groups expands his following. He thus amasses what the anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski, in reporting on the Trobriand Islanders, called a “fund of power.” With the public esteem gained in this economic contest, the Big Man is sought out for giving advice, adjudicating quarrels, planning ceremonies, and admonishing and conciliating. But this is influence, not the true authority that inheres in a status or office in an established hierarchy. A really big Big Man may succeed in integrating a region of several villages, but when he loses to a rival or dies, the unity of the region dissolves until some other unusually influential man unites it again.
In many respects the religion of horticultural peoples resembles that of hunting-gathering peoples. Shamans, life-crisis ceremonies—especially puberty rites—totemism [ceremonies for plant or animal species believed to be ancestral to particular human groups like clans or lineages], and the worship of animistic spirits are common in the religion of many kinds of primitive societies. The egalitarian society does not usually practice ancestor worship as does the hierarchical society. Among horticultural peoples with chiefdoms, the chief’s ancestors, in time, become gods. The most remote ancestors, the founders of the chiefly lineage, are the most important gods; more recent ancestors and those of related but collateral lines have a lesser status. The result is a hierarchy of gods resembling the political hierarchy on Earth. Furthermore, the chiefdoms tend to be theocracies, with the hierarchy of priests closely and functionally related to the political hierarchy.