Question

How does fertility of soil influence the development of a settlement

Answer 1

Beginning ca. A.D. 1400, Polynesian farmers established permanent settlements along the arid southern flank of Haleakala Volcano, Maui, Hawaiian Islands; peak population density (43-57 persons per km2) was achieved by A.D. 1700-1800, and it was followed by the devastating effects of European contact. This settlement, based on dryland agriculture with sweet potato as a main crop, is represented by >3,000 archaeological features investigated to date. Geological and environmental factors are the most important influence on Polynesian farming and settlement practices in an agriculturally marginal landscape. Interactions between lava flows, whose ages range from 3,000 to 226,000 years, and differences in rainfall create an environmental mosaic that constrained precontact Polynesian farming practices to a zone defined by aridity at low elevation and depleted soil nutrients at high elevation. Within this productive zone, however, large-scale agriculture was concentrated on older, tephra-blanketed lava flows; younger flows were reserved for residential sites, small ritual gardens, and agricultural temples.

Archaeologists have long regarded the “determinants” of preindustrialized human settlement patterns to be multifactorial and complex (1, 2). In addition to environmental variables such as water availability, soil fertility, and natural food and other resources, the distributions of human settlements are influenced by level of technology, sociopolitical and economic factors, and even ritual practices and ideological beliefs (3). Such complex, hierarchically nested determinants influenced the location of habitations, fields and farms, resource extraction facilities, administrative centers, religious sites, and communication networks. For agrarian societies, however, environmental constraints on crop productivity arguably formed the base of such a hierarchy of determinants.

The pre-European-contact (i.e., before A.D. 1778) Polynesian society of the Hawaiian Islands represents a highly stratified, complex sociopolitical structure, with an economy based on intensive agriculture, aquaculture, and marine exploitation but lacking metallurgy, the wheel, or draft animals (4-6). At European contact, the isolated Hawaiian Islands were divided into four polities, each supported by irrigated and dryland forms of intensive field agriculture, based largely on the root crops of taro and sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas), supplemented by secondary crops (7). Hawaii offers an exemplary opportunity to investigate the environmental constraints on human settlement patterns in an intensive agrarian economy, because of both its rich archaeological and ethnographic records, and its usefulness for understanding ecosystem development in an environmental context (8).

The Kahikinui, Maui, Study Area

Rising from sea level to 3,055 m on the arid, southeastern slopes of Haleakala Volcano, Kahikinui is one of 12 wedge-shaped political units formerly constituting the indigenous Maui Island polity (Fig. 1). Kahikinui has been spared modern landscape-altering activities that have transformed other parts of the archipelago, offering one of the few regions where intact ancient settlement patterns are preserved on a district-wide level. Kahikinui is also significant because the arid and geologically youthful landscape is mIarginal for Polynesian agricultural crops (9). Understanding how the prehistoric Hawaiians sustained a permanent and sizeable human population in Kahikinui illuminates key aspects of the adaptability of preindustrial agrarian systems.



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Answer 2

Because the fertile soil help us to grow crops in easy and manner way.

Crops irrigation and plantation is easy in a fertile soil.

Similarly,

The land near The water is so fertile

So this is a good place for crop rotation

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