Publication Date:
2004-06-12
Description:
Before European contact, Hawai'i supported large human populations in complex societies that were based on multiple pathways of intensive agriculture. We show that soils within a long-abandoned 60-square-kilometer dryland agricultural complex are substantially richer in bases and phosphorus than are those just outside it, and that this enrichment predated the establishment of intensive agriculture. Climate and soil fertility combined to constrain large dryland agricultural systems and the societies they supported to well-defined portions of just the younger islands within the Hawaiian archipelago; societies on the older islands were based on irrigated wetland agriculture. Similar processes may have influenced the dynamics of agricultural intensification across the tropics.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Notes: 〈/span〉Vitousek, P M -- Ladefoged, T N -- Kirch, P V -- Hartshorn, A S -- Graves, M W -- Hotchkiss, S C -- Tuljapurkar, S -- Chadwick, O A -- New York, N.Y. -- Science. 2004 Jun 11;304(5677):1665-9.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Author address: 〈/span〉Department of Biological Sciences, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA. vitousek@stanford.edu〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Record origin:〈/span〉 〈a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15192228" target="_blank"〉PubMed〈/a〉
Print ISSN:
0036-8075
Electronic ISSN:
1095-9203
Topics:
Biology
,
Chemistry and Pharmacology
,
Computer Science
,
Medicine
,
Natural Sciences in General
,
Physics
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