Agricultural Productivity and Past Population Potential at Aşvan

1973 ◽  
Vol 23 ◽  
pp. 225-240 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gordon Hillman
Keyword(s):  
Land Management ◽  
Agricultural Productivity ◽  
Management Systems ◽  
Archaeological Evidence ◽  
Animal Remains ◽  
Local Erosion ◽  
Population Potential ◽  
Settlement Size ◽  
Past Population ◽  
Sedimentation History

This paper is not a discussion of archaeological evidence for past population levels in our area, nor of likely sequences of change in population through time. Instead, it is a set of estimations of upper levels of population that would have been possible at recent and ancient agricultural settlements in the Aşvan region, assuming certain combinations of territory, land management systems and levels of productivity. This contrasts, therefore, with the approach more frequently adopted in estimating past population levels which uses settlement size and structural remains.The points in time at which these hypothetical situations (with their corresponding population levels) were likely actually to have existed in the Aşvan region are not considered in detail here. We may be in a position to fix time correlates in some cases once we have more data on local erosion and sedimentation history and once we have assembled all data arising from the site materials, in particular the data from the very large quantities of plant and animal remains.

Agricultural Resources and Settlement in the Aşvan Region

1973 ◽  
Vol 23 ◽  
pp. 217-224 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gordon Hillman
Keyword(s):  
Spatial Distribution ◽  
Agricultural Productivity ◽  
Physical Geography ◽  
Land Resources ◽  
Agricultural Resources ◽  
Population Potential ◽  
The Village ◽  
Past Population ◽  
Sedimentation History

Following Wagstaff's paper on physical geography and settlements, a brief expansion of the discussion of distribution of agricultural resources is in place. This topic provides the necessary background for studies conducted in the village itself as well as for the following paper on “Agricultural productivity and past population potential at Aşvan”.My object here is firstly, to outline the spatial distribution of major land resources (this is achieved via Figs. 1 and 2), secondly to discuss a few of the factors which appear to have conditioned this distribution and, thirdly, to outline some problems involved in the location of ancient settlements relative to these land resources. Few conclusions can, however, be drawn until we have more data on sedimentation history (and thence ancient distribution of soils) in the region.

scholarly journals Agroforestry and Its Impact in Southeast Asia

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Hunt
Keyword(s):  
Land Management ◽  
Agroforestry Systems ◽  
Management Systems ◽  
Early Interventions ◽  
Significant Component ◽  
The Holocene ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Vegetational Succession ◽  
Food Procurement

Research during the late 20th and early 21st centuries found that traces of human intervention in vegetation in Southeast Asian and Australasian forests started extremely early, quite probably close to the first colonization of the region by modern people around or before 50,000 years ago. It also identified what may be insubstantial evidence for the translocation of economically important plants during the latest Pleistocene and Early Holocene. These activities may reflect early experiments with plants which evolved into agroforestry. Early in the Holocene, land management/food procurement systems, in which trees were a very significant component, seem to have developed over very extensive areas, often underpinned by dispersal of starchy plants, some of which seem to show domesticated morphologies, although the evidence for this is still relatively insubstantial. These land management/food procurement systems might be regarded as a sort of precursor to agroforestry. Similar systems were reported historically during early Western contact, and some agroforest systems survive to this day, although they are threatened in many places by expansion of other types of land use. The wide range of recorded agroforestry makes categorizing impacts problematical, but widespread disruption of vegetational succession across the region during the Holocene can perhaps be ascribed to agroforestry or similar land-management systems, and in more recent times impacts on biodiversity and geomorphological systems can be distinguished. Impacts of these early interventions in forests seem to have been variable and locally contingent, but what seem to have been agroforestry systems have persisted for millennia, suggesting that some may offer long-term sustainability.

scholarly journals Relations between Land Tenure Security and Agricultural Productivity: Exploring the Effect of Land Registration

Land ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (5) ◽  
pp. 138 ◽  
Author(s):  
Uwacu Alban Singirankabo ◽  
Maurits Willem Ertsen
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Evidence ◽  
Land Management ◽  
Land Tenure ◽  
Agricultural Productivity ◽  
Costs And Benefits ◽  
Tenure Security ◽  
Land Registration ◽  
Scholarly Literature ◽  
Information Updating ◽  
Management Institutions

This paper reviews the scholarly literature discussing the effect(s) of land registration on the relations between land tenure security and agricultural productivity. Using 85 studies, the paper focuses on the regular claim that land registration’s facilitation of formal documents-based land dealings leads to investment in a more productive agriculture. The paper shows that this claim is problematic for three reasons. First, most studies offer no empirical evidence to support the claim on the above-mentioned effect. Second, there are suggestions that land registration can actually threaten ‘de facto’ tenure security or even lead to insecurity of tenure. Third, the gendered realization of land registration and security may lead to uneven distribution of costs and benefits, but these effects are often ignored. Next to suggesting the importance of land information updating and the efficiency of local land management institutions, this paper also finds that more research with a combined locally-set approach is needed to better understand any relation(s) between land tenure security and agricultural productivity.

Issues of sustainability and sustainable land management

1995 ◽  
Vol 75 (4) ◽  
pp. 407-412 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. A. Zinck ◽  
A. Farshad
Keyword(s):  
Land Management ◽  
Policy Making ◽  
Farming Systems ◽  
Land Evaluation ◽  
Economic Viability ◽  
Management Systems ◽  
Threshold Values ◽  
Sustainable Land Management ◽  
Knowledge Based ◽  
Land Management System

The concept of sustainability shows many facets. Ecologists, environmentalists, agronomists, sociologists, economists and politicians use it with different connotations. In addition, the sustainability of land management systems varies in space, according to climate, soil, technology and societal conditions. Sustainable farming systems vary also in time, as they evolve and may collapse, frequently together with the corresponding sociosystems. Because of its complexity, sustainability is difficult to measure directly and requires the use of appropriate indicators for assessment. A good indicator is free of bias, sensitive to temporal changes and spatial variability, predictive and referenced to threshold values. Relevant data are often incomplete or inadequate for indicator implementation. To embrace the whole width of sustainability, several methods and techniques should be used concurrently, including land evaluation and coevolutionary, retrospective and knowledge-based approaches. It is, however, at the application level that major constraints arise. A sustainable land management system must satisfy a large variety of requirements, including technological feasibility, economic viability, political desirability, administrative manageability, social acceptability, and environmental soundness. Real world conditions at farm and policy-making levels need to be substantially improved to achieve sustainable land management. Key words: Definition, assessment and implementation issues of sustainable land management

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