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By the sixteenth century, the Incas
of South America ruled an empire that
extended along the Pacific coast and
Line Andean highlands from what is now
(5) Ecuador to central Chile. While most
of the Incas were self-sufficient
agriculturists, the inhabitants of the
highland basins above 9,000 feet were
constrained by the kinds of crops they
(10) could cultivate. Whereas 95 percent
of the principal Andean food crops can
be cultivated below 3,000 feet, only
20 percent reproduce readily above
9,000 feet. Given this unequal
(15) resource distribution, highland Incas
needed access to the products of
lower, warmer climatic zones in order
to enlarge the variety and quantity of
their foodstuffs. In most of the prein-
(20) dustrial world, the problem of different
resource distribution was resolved by
long-distance trade networks over
which the end consumer exercised
little control. Although the peoples
(25) of the Andean highlands participated
in such networks, they relied primarily
on the maintenance of autonomous
production forces in as many eco-
logical zones as possible. The
(30) commodities produced in these
zones were extracted, processed,
and transported entirely by members
of a single group.
This strategy of direct access
(35) to a maximum number of ecological
zones by a single group is called
vertical economy. Even today,
one can see Andean communities
maintaining use rights simultaneously
(40) to pasturelands above 12,000 feet, to
potato fields in basins over 9,000 feet,
and to plots of warm-land crops in
regions below 6,000 feet. This
strategy has two principal variations.
(45) The first is “compressed verticality,”
in which a single village resides in
a location that permits easy access
to closely located ecological zones.
Different crop zones or pasturelands
(50) are located within a few days walk of
the parent community. Community
members may reside temporarily
in one of the lower zones to manage
the extraction of products unavailable
(55) in the homeland. In the second variation,
called the “vertical archipelago,”
the village exploits resources in widely
dispersed locations, constituting a
series of independent production
(60) “islands.” In certain pre-Columbian
Inca societies, groups were sent from
the home territory to establish permanent
satellite communities or colonies
in distant tropical forests or coastal
(65) locations. There the colonists grew
crops and extracted products for their
own use and for transshipment back
to their high-altitude compatriots.
In contrast to the compressed
(70) verticality system, in this system,
commodities rather than people
circulated through the archipelago. | 
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发表于 2005-6-18 06:53:00
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