Arcél -750

From Almeopedia

Agriculturalists can’t really help it. When there is good fertile land available, they’ll spread out into it, no matter if it’s the hunting territory of some hunter/gatherer group. The primitives can just move further on, can’t they?

In the Hurtso and Ħomtso valleys the hunter/gatherers were likely to be Uyseʔic, and many must have simply adopted the new techniques and settled down. In the Tsyeʔ valley, however, the natives were Dnetic, and were steadily pushed out of the valley by the Uyram.

By about -1000 agriculture had spread to northern Uytai, the region later known as Krwŋ. The land was thickly forested, and the farmers cleared the trees to make garden plots. However, the underlying soil was extremely poor, and supported good yields only for the first three years. After this, the farmers moved to virgin forest and left the abandoned fields to regenerate, a process which took twenty years or more. As long as there was plenty of land and not that many people, this was a sustainable practice.

Agriculture in the Bé, the Beic-speaking region, was a less dramatic transition. The rain forest had always allowed a denser population, with long-lasting settlements along the rivers. Women gathered plant food, including sorghum (né), stripcorn (desú), streff (luhì), and tengbeans (tèŋ). Discarded seeds easily germinated near the settlement, and once this was noticed, it was not hard to reduce the work of gathering by deliberately planting seeds. The gallene (jàr), similar to the turkey, was raised for meat and eggs, while the chief textiles were truca fronds and the cotton-like petay. (Clothing was limited to a loincloth, and often even this was dispensed with.)

Around this time, the villagers of the upper Lɛn domesticated the nawr ox— a heavy, drought-resistant animal, probably first as a source of milk, meat, and dung. Soon, however, their strength as a traction animal was exploited, enabling fields to be cleared easier and the population density to increase further.

Not coincidentally, this region was not far from Krwŋ across the mountains. The mountains are not high in between these areas, and a crossing has never been difficult. Traders from settled countries don’t like to track down hunter/gatherers; they prefer to establish regular trading spots. This gives the locals a reason to congregate there, and an increased reliance on agriculture helped feed the resulting settlements.

Work roles were segregatged by sex among the Bé: men hunted, fought, talked to the gods, wrangled the oxen, and raised adolescents; women took care of younger children, gathered and later planted crops, and— since they were more likely to be at the settlement— took care of trade. In primitive Beic society these roles were balanced, though men were somewhat dominant. However, the techniques of settled life— agriculture and trade— were controlled by women.

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