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Slash-and-Burn Cultivation in the Highlands South: A Problem in Comparative Agricultural History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

J. S. Otto
Affiliation:
University of Louisville
N. E. Anderson
Affiliation:
Center for American Archaeology

Extract

Slash-and-burn cultivation—the practice of clearing temporary fields in forests by chopping and firing the natural vegetation, planting crops for a brief time, and then allowing these fields to revert to forest—is a well-known type of agriculture in the world's tropical environments. Anthropologists, agronomists, and geographers have demonstrated that slash-and-burn cultivation, once regarded as a primitive and wasteful practice, can be an efficient adaptation to tropical forests, where the soils are highly leached, and the bulk of the nutrients available is locked up in the forest vegetation in a nearly closed cycle. By clearing and burning the forest vegetation in a field, slashand-burn cultivators release nutrients accumulated during many years of forest growth in order to fertilize a few years of cultivated crops. When the crop yield in such a field begins to decline, the cultivators abandon it to natural long-term fallow, allowing it to return to forest. The continued success of slash-and-burn cultivation depends on maintaining a high ratio of fallow land to cultivated land to allow for the gradual restoration of forests and nutrients.

Type
The Human Nature of Materialism
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1982

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References

We wish to thank the staffs of the following libraries for their aid during the preparation of this article: Arkansas History Commission, Little Rock; the Rockefeller, Hay, and John Carter Brown Libraries, Brown University; Filson Club Library, Louisville, Kentucky; University of Arkansas Library; Special Collections, Margaret King Library and Agricultural Library, University of Kentucky; and the University of Louisville Library. In addition, we wish to thank Ben Wayne Banks, author of History of Yell County (Van Buren, Arkansas: Press Argus, 1959), for graciously sharing his knowledge of traditional agriculture in lengthy interviews. Finally, we extend special thanks to Dwight Heath, Department of Anthropology, Brown University; and Yvonne Jones, Department of Anthropology, University of Louisville, for their bibliographical aid. The article is dedicated to Octa Vaughn, a long-time resident of Yell County, Arkansas, who died tragically in May 1979.Google ScholarPubMed

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