Roots of Conflict

During the early to mid Holocene, seemingly independently in several parts of the Old and New Worlds, human societies transformed themselves from hunters and gatherers, dependent for their existence on natural resources provided by their environments, to horticulturalists or agriculturalists, who brought a diversity of plants and animals under direct human control. This revolution in the way that humans interacted with the natural world provided the basis for other fundamental changes such as the increasing size and density of human populations, development of sedentary and urban lifestyles, and ultimately the rise of complex sociopolitical formations. Once the majority of humankind had become dependent upon food production for its economic basis, another series of critical transformations was launched. These had to do with the immensely complex relationships linking people to their newly domesticated crops; crops to land, water, and nutrients; land to sociopolitical organization and cultural concepts of territory; and perceptions of yield, well-being, and risk, to the inevitable efforts of humans to bend the natural world to its will through ritual performance and to understand it through myth and religion. With the development of agriculture as the primary basis for most human societies, the dynamic links between culture and nature became infinitely more complex and intertwined. This book presents the efforts of a team of social and natural scientists to understand the complex, systemic linkages between land, climate, crops, human populations, and their cultural structures. The research group, which includes archaeologists, ecologists, soil scientists, geographers, paleobotanists, and demographers, has focused on what might seem to some an unlikely locale to investigate a set of problems with worldwide significance: the Hawaiian Islands, perhaps the most isolated archipelago on Earth. And yet, Hawai'i offers a "model system" for teasing out key linkages between land, agriculture, and society. Their goal is to engage selectively with key concepts in the problem of agricultural intensification through the approach of dynamically coupled human and human systems.