Agricultural terracing in the aboriginal new world

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on experience. Though they lacked, most of them, Stefansson’s flair for publicity, his genius and his talents, they nevertheless had a virtue which he did not: a sense of responsibility and accountability. University of Toronto

ROBERT BOTHWELL

R. A. DONKIN, Agricultural Terracing in the Aboriginal Nenr World (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, Viking Fund Publications in Anthropology, No. 56, 1979. Pp. ix + 196. $8.50) From Arizona to Chile, the technique of terracing survives in great diversity and practical use as well as in relict landscapes. Moreover, as Donkin’s comprehensive geographical synthesis of its history, occurrence and practice indicates, the advantages of this form of intensive land use will long continue to provide sustainable livelihoods for many different groups of cultivators. Donkin presents the terracing practices in the contexts of society, technology, terrain and time for different regions and agricultural systems. Historical geographers, especially those working on the cultural ecologies of the aboriginal Americas, will find here both evidence and stimulating questions. Donkin has carefully sifted and blended the archaeological records, conquest accounts, colonial documents, and present-day ethnography. So richly and meticulously documented is this compact account that Donkin’s own substantial field work tends to be modestly concealed. Evidence of it lies in the clarity of his writing and in the absence of the silly or tedious theoretical constructions of those who have never got dirt or water on their boots in the field. It is apparent that Donkin, who started as a medievalist, is at home with both farming and documentary research. Beginning with a general discussion of pre-Hispanic agriculture in which the questions of soil fertility maintenance, moisture conditions and surface treatments in relation to irrigability are prominent, Donkin turns to the range and utility of aboriginal tools. This well-illustrated account clears often confused distinctions between form and function of implements such as the liukana, taclla and types of coas. Most of the multitude of words used to describe particular soil surface treatments are explained. As to terracing itself, Donkin is a lumper, not a splitter. He sensibly classes the great range of detail and application into three types: cross-channel, lateral or contour and valley floor terrace. Part 2 is a general discussion of terracing dates, cultural associations, and early documentary descriptions. A map of the distribution of agriculture and terracing in relation to altitudes over 1,000 m and some climatic types suggests the associations of physical geography and technical developments in cropping practices. With his strong command of the literature, Donkin is able to explain shifts from aboriginal to colonial land use as part of changes in economy, population and technique. The essay about abandoned terraces (pp. 35-8) is a gem within the book. A careful evaluation of climatic change, conquest diseases, and early colonial policies, all controversial topics, yields explanations which satisfy an ecological view of history. Part 3, ‘Regions of agricultural terracing’, forms the larger part of the book. With photographs, maps, sketches and abundant citations, Donkin discusses specific sites and kinds of terracing. The regional subdivisions consist of a review of basic climate, morphology and soil conditions for each of 33 basins or highland groups of terracings. According to the circumstances in each unit, the significant associations such as irrigability, defensibility, agronomic advantage, or technical execution are analysed. Details of the intricate relationships of crop microclimatic ranges, soil and water use techniques, aboriginal perceptions and settlement histories are synthesized into deeply satisfying

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geographical vignettes. There is even a superior account of the terraced context of cocu production in Bolivia. In a concluding discussion of the relationships among soils, water, technology and society, there is careful attention to the flow of history. Although Donkin adds as a postscript that “the study of agricultural terracing has scarcely begun”, this superb synthesis is a major step forward. In a way, he has constructed some foundation terraces for the rest of us to cultivate, harvest, maintain and imitate. There is a summary appendix listing sites, forms and authorities. The good index is accompanied by a comprehensive list of references with nearly 800 entries. CHRLSFIELI)

Utlirersity of Montana

SYLVIA DOUGHTY FRIES, The

Urban Idea in Colonial

America

(Philadelphia:

Temple

University Press, 1977. Pp. xviii + 218. $12.50) Since Carl Bridenbaugh stated explicitly the proposition that the first English settlers intended to make cities in their earliest plantations, a generation of Americans has had the opportunity to write more accurately about our urban past. Yet it remains a common assumption that the city was a strange and surprising element, somehow at variance with the objectives of the seventeenth-century planters. Sylvia Doughty Fries’s account of the ideas about urban life held by some of those settlers, expressed as intellectual history, helps us to understand why the myth of the pathological, or at least the dysfunctional, nature of the city in colonial America will not die as it should. Clearly, the “Urban Idea” in colonial America was different in the religious-intellectual mind from that perceived by the merchant venturers who made America an economically important partner for Europe. To the extent that one’s analytical faith reposes in what leaders intended, as opposed to what workers accomplished, this book is useful and informative. In commenting on it I should, however, make clear my own bias towards the accomplishments of the mercantile community when questions of urban development are raised. Professor Fries introduces her book with a quotation from Juvenal that seems to sum up much of the urban idea held by the intellectualizing promoters of American colonies: “I’d even choose a desert isle, Myself, to midtown Rome”. Those protagonists of plantation, outside of New England, were to a large degree armchair pioneers. William Penn came briefly to his colony, and James Oglethorpe remained in his for a decade; yet both were distinguished from most of their collaborators by having been in America at all. It is therefore appropriate that this book has as its purpose “to explore the idea of the city in American civilization, not from the perspective of what it became, but of whence it came. What did the city, and life in the city, mean to late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Englishmen as they undertook the westward adventure, the English colonization of North America?” Thus, to a considerable degree the examination is that of the gentry ideal that was more English than American, though as is shown, important Americans sought to implant such visions in the western soil. The gentry ideal led to “expectations of the city manifest by these Englishmen, as they set out to re-create societies in North America, [that were] a reactionary attempt to reconstruct society as well”. The reconstruction is shown in the introductory chapter to have been intended to follow classical models “of the city as civitas”, though “such classically educated Puritan divines as John Cotton were alert enough to the authority of antiquity to caution against over reliance on classical illustrations, rather than scriptural citations . . .“. This reactionary turn was intensified among the elite during colonial times as dissatisfaction with the emerging mercantile towns increased. “Two things disturbed them most about the modern city. The first was the intrusion of new men-enriched and