ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the important but often misinterpreted history and practicalities of ploughing from 4th-millennium BC Mesopotamia to the present day, ranging from notes on Boserup’s and Goody’s large-scale models to practical discussion of the number of animals and humans in plough teams. Ploughing is not necessarily an advance over manual cultivation. Ard ploughing can be deeper than manual digging, but this can be inappropriate for light, arid soils, resulting in desiccation. Ploughing opens the soil more speedily but leads to an extra burden per farm of weeding and harvesting, and of preliminary field-clearing, as well as of the major task of the care and feeding of the working animals: labour is, in effect, shifted rather than reduced. Top-down models of the adoption of plough agriculture commonly risk ‘leaving out the animals’, notably factors arising from the different virtues of oxen, cows and donkeys. Calculations of area ploughed, yield and labour use – including the issue of year-round utilisation of working animals – commonly defy anthropological modelling. Modern official promoters of agricultural regimes are often baffled by the lack of profit motive among smaller-scale farmers and frustrated by preferences for reduction of drudgery for family members, often achieved by use of working animals for transport rather than for ploughing.
