Slavs - both East and West - prefer sedentary.Their main occupation was agriculture.The tribes inhabiting the forest-steppe zone (where the soil is relatively fertile) system used fallow or fallow.Forest dwellers were forced to practice slash-and-burn agriculture.Both of these systems are primitive.They are labor-intensive and characterized by low productivity.Primitive farming and primitive communal system are closely linked.In some developing countries will cut is still the main method of cultivation.
Slash-and-burn agriculture: technology
To prepare the land for planting, trees are cut down on it or cut down (partly filmed bark).The trunks and branches spread evenly on the future of the field, some were taken to the village to use as firewood."Undercutting" the trees left to dry on the vine.Typically, about a year (in spring or late summer), carved wood or dead wood burned.Sowing was carried directly into the warm ashes.Thus prepared the soil does not require plowing and fertilizers.The workers only had leveled the field and uproot the roots of hoes.
Slash-and-burn agriculture guaranteed a great harvest, but only in the first year after the fallen.On the loamy soils seeded field for an average of 6 years, on sandy - no longer than 3. After that, the land dwindled.Then the land could be used as grazing or mowing.Forest recovering after about 50 years after the land "left alone."
Benefits
calcination soil provides its sterilization, destruction of pathogens of various diseases.Ash earth is satisfied with phosphorus, potassium and calcium, which are then easily absorbed by plants.This system of farming called for minimum tillage in the first year.Meanwhile, the yield was high at first (at the time) - from 30 to himself-he-100.Finally, this method of management does not require the use of any complicated (specific) tools.In most cases, treated with an ax, a hoe and harrow.According to an Arab traveler, well Slavs grew millet.In addition, it will cut rye, barley, wheat, flax, vegetable crops.
Disadvantages
Slash and burn agriculture - a difficult and laborious collective work.This type of management involves a huge amount of vacant land and a very long period of restoration of their fertility.One piece of land reclaimed from the forest, unable to feed large numbers of people.Initially, this was not necessary: the Slavs lived in small tribal communities.They were able to throw the infertile land and process the new site.But as the population of undeveloped land dwindled.People had to go back to the old site.The economic cycle is gradually decreased, the forest did not have time to grow.This means that the ash becomes less, and it could not provide soil nutrients in the proper amount.Yields fell.Slash-and-burn agriculture is getting less and less profitable.
In addition, in the second year the earth sintered, becoming solid and stopped to pass moisture.Before the next planting it had to be a good process.In order to loosen the ground quality, required more heavy harrows, with which a person was difficult to cope without the help of draft animals.
Tools
shifting cultivation eastern Slavs not imply a wide range of agricultural implements.The bark of trees is cut with knives, cutting was carried out with an ax (first - rock, then - railways).The roots were removed iron hoe.She also broke the large lumps of earth.Harrowed ground via sukovatki, which is made of a small pine tree with boughs hemmed.Later, there were other "models": heavy harrow-Smyk (from split trunks connected born), and Harrow-tray (board of lime, which is inserted into the long spruce branches).There were also primitive rake.At harvest using sickles.Hammer flails, and milled grain with stone grain grinders and hand millstones.
shifting cultivation: the distribution and timeframes
This economic system originated in ancient times.During the Bronze Age, it gradually spread in the forest regions of Europe, but the ancestors of the Slavs mastered it only in the Iron Age.Burning practiced Scandinavians (longer than the other - the Finns), various Finno-Ugric peoples (Komi, Karelia, Udmurtia - until the 19th century), the inhabitants of the Baltic states and the north of Germany, the settlers in North America and several nations in southern Europe.In some countries in Africa, Asia, South America, slash and burn agriculture is still the main occupation of the peasantry.
