shifting cultivation Quick reference
A Dictionary of Geography (5 ed.)
... cultivation A farming system based on the clearance of land, cultivation until soil fertility declines, followed by fallowing for up to twelve years, in order to restore the vegetation to its initial condition. Vasconcelos et al. (2002) Appl. Geog. 22, 2 argue that shifting cultivation is ecologically sustainable for the subsistence of small groups. ‘Shifting cultivation is a truly sustainable system, perhaps the only one for humans. It can maintain agricultural production indefinitely with little reliance on external inputs when population levels...
shifting cultivation Quick reference
A Dictionary of Human Geography
... cultivation The use of plot rotation by farmers to maintain soil fertility. A plot of land is typically farmed until its soils become depleted or weeds become rife, and then left to recover (‘in fallow’) while activity switches to another plot. One form of shifting cultivation found throughout tropical forest lands and in the cultivation of dry rice in tropical uplands is ‘slash-and-burn’. Land is cleared by burning, leaving the wood ash as a fertilizer, cultivated, and then abandoned. Critics regarded such practices as wasteful, but others recognize it...
shifting cultivation Quick reference
A Dictionary of Plant Sciences (4 ed.)
... cultivation ( slash-and-burn agriculture ) The traditional agricultural system of semi-nomadic people, in which a small area of forest is cleared by burning, cultivated for 1–5 years, and then abandoned as soil fertility and crop yields fall and weeds encroach. Ideally vegetation succession subsequently returns the plot to climax woodland, and soil fertility is gradually restored. Shifting cultivation of this type was once practised world-wide but in modern times it has been primarily associated with tropical rain-forest areas. The system is best...
shifting cultivation Quick reference
A Dictionary of Ecology (5 ed.)
... cultivation ( slash-and-burn agriculture ) The traditional agricultural system of semi-nomadic people, in which a small area of forest is cleared by burning, cultivated for 1–5 years, and then abandoned as soil fertility and crop yields fall and weeds encroach. Ideally, vegetation succession subsequently returns the plot to climax woodland, and soil fertility is gradually restored. Shifting cultivation of this type was once practised worldwide but in modern times it has been primarily associated with tropical rainforest areas. The system is best...
shifting cultivation
Land Reference library
An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age
...common law and communal custom; and between market-determined wage and customary wastage, all related to the practice and rhetoric of ‘improvement’. Improvement as a practice referred to the management and cultivation of land to render it more profitable; as a discursive and rhetorical term improvement came to refer to moral or social cultivation. In the context of European and trans-Atlantic warfare as well as trade, improvement had a global dimension. In the context of the culture of *Romanticism , the meanings of improvement range from an external set...
Agricultural History Quick reference
David Hey
The Oxford Companion to Local and Family History (2 ed.)
...Agricultural Revolution after 1750 have been dated to much earlier periods. In The Agricultural Revolution ( 1967 ) Eric Kerridge argued that the floating of water‐ meadows , the substitution of convertible husbandry for permanent tillage and permanent grass or for shifting cultivation, the introduction of new fallow and other crops, roots, and selected grasses, fen drainage, manuring, and stock breeding were practices that could be dated to the 16th and 17th centuries. Other historians have agreed on the dating of the beginnings of these changes, but...
Political Economy Reference library
An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age
...]. Acting singly, this development would have been vulnerable to the ‘ordinary revolutions of war and government’. The outcome had been made more durable as a result of the unintended by-products of the shift in consumption patterns by feudal land-owners—those with legal entitlement to the agrarian social surplus. As their expenditure shifted towards the manufactured luxuries produced or imported by merchants living in towns, and away from those military dependants and menial servants that had given them status and power, so their capacity to challenge...
Sensibility Reference library
An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age
...recognized the value of sensational psychology to women, attributing their apparently inferior mental accomplishments to their upbringing. But, also like Astell, Wollstonecraft spelled out the dangerous implications that uncritical sensibility could hold for women. Without the cultivation of reason, women become ‘the prey of their senses, delicately termed sensibility, and are blown about by every momentary gust of feeling’. Sensibility made women ‘the plaything of outward circumstances’. Therefore, they became the ‘prey’ of men, ‘love alone’ concentrating the...
Slavery Reference library
An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age
...range of occupations in the Americas—from gunsmiths to cowboys—but initially the Europeans wanted merely their muscle-power. In the early days of settlement Africans worked alongside Europeans and local Indians, cutting back the wilderness and bringing the land into fruitful cultivation. From one colony to another, the first years were uncertain and survival unsure. Once the ideal local economic formula had been discovered, however, once the most suitable export crop had been planted, slavery developed as the backbone of the local plantation system. Nowhere...
In the Beginning: The Earliest History Reference library
Michael D. Coogan
Oxford History of the Biblical World
...the aeons-old mode of subsistence based on hunting wild game and gathering wild fruits and vegetables was giving way to food production. The domestication of both animals and plants remains one of the most remarkable human accomplishments. Grains and legumes came under cultivation, and the breeding of sheep, goats, dogs, and, later, pigs and cattle began. The men and women engaged in these activities were of necessity settled, or, in the case of pastoralists, seminomadic. Their camps, villages, towns, and even cities are more and more in evidence as the...
Class Reference library
An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age
...the population, which awarded top marks to the working classes, inverted the status pyramid of landed society, and challenged the rival middle-class vision of social value. ‘They only are productive members of society’, Gray insisted, ‘who apply their own hands either to the cultivation of the earth itself, or to the preparing or appropriating the produce of the earth to the uses of life.’ Everyone else was not only an ‘UNPRODUCTIVE’ member of society and a ‘DIRECT TAX upon the productive classes’ but also ‘USELESS unless he gives an equivalent for that which...
Kinship and Kingship: The Early Monarchy Reference library
Carol Meyers
Oxford History of the Biblical World
...marginal lands settled in the out-migrations and population shifts of the late eleventh and tenth centuries. Although Palestine has iron ore deposits, most are of poor quality and were never mined in antiquity. Only the organizational and distributional potential of centralized government could ensure security to the trade networks through which raw materials flowed and the population centers where the specialists who produced agricultural tools lived. Population increase, shifting areas of settlement, and new technologies thus became...
Job Reference library
James L. Crenshaw and James L. Crenshaw
The Oxford Bible Commentary
... Lord sits enthroned as king for ever’). The last verse of ch. 36 presents greater difficulty; Gordis ( 1978 : 424) revocalizes it to read: ‘His thunderclap proclaims His presence; His mighty wrath, the storm’. In 37:1–5 the point of view shifts from God's electrifying display to the human response. The same shift takes place in Ps 29:9 (‘all say, “Glory!” ’). In v. 2 Elihu uses repetition to effect a breathtaking pause in the action (‘Listen, listen’) as he invites others to share his excitement. The point of view in vv. 2–5 begins and ends on the...
Bitter Lives: Israel in and out of Egypt Reference library
Carol A. Redmount
Oxford History of the Biblical World
...of importance within Egypt. At or near the bottom of the Egyptian social ladder were the many slaves tied to state and temple endowments. They were forced to toil on agricultural, industrial, and construction projects, engaging in such tasks as weaving, cultivation, wine making, quarrying, and public works. Thutmose III (Dynasty 18, ca. 1479–1425) put Syrian captives to work as “clothmakers” for the state temple of Amun at Karnak; the same king also gave 150 Asiatic weavers to one of his favored officials. Generally more fortunate were...
Introduction: Muslim Activist Intellectuals and Their Place in History Reference library
John L. Esposito and John O. Voll
Makers of Contemporary Islam
...cultures of Islam, Buddhism, Taoism, and Hinduism, prior to the emergence of a differentiated modern intellectual class, the care of the sacred through the mastery, interpretation, and exposition of sacred writings, and the cultivation of appropriate mental states or qualities were the first interests of the intellectuals.” 25 The ulama were not an ordained priesthood, and their organizations and associations were not “churches.” The key element...
48 The History of the Book in America Reference library
Scott E. Casper and Joan Shelley Rubin
The Oxford Companion to the Book
...good used car; it also served as a meeting place. The affinities with postwar consumer culture (and hence with the ethos of publishing and bookselling) were clear: the new public library accommodated users looking for a particular item of information, not necessarily for self-cultivation. As with bookshops, this trend did not necessarily signal cultural decline: it got more people into the building, fostered community, and increased book circulation. Within research libraries, the picture was gloomier: budget crises curtailed book purchases in the 1970s ....
Visions of Kingdoms: From Pompey to the First Jewish Revolt Reference library
Amy-Jill Levine
Oxford History of the Biblical World
...there a temple to the emperor. He also built a port city, which he named Caesarea in the emperor's honor. Other projects included creating an elaborate winter palace in Jericho, reinforcing the former Hasmonean complex on Masada, and opening several areas for agricultural cultivation. To fund such enterprises as well as his extensive building in Jerusalem, Herod adapted the Hasmonean taxation system. Much of the population, particularly in Galilee, was overburdened with the taxes due to Herod and to Rome as well as the smaller contributions made to the...
