Prehistory of Great Kirav: Difference between revisions

At the dawn of agriculture, certain patterns of social organisation had already settled into prevailing norms across the island continent. Tribes, in the strict sense of the word, had replaced lower-level band societies in all but the most marginal and inhospitable locales. Kiravian tribes were structured according to {{wp|segmentary lineage}}s, most of which were already strictly {{wp|patrilineal}} and {{wp|patrilocal}} as all Coscivian peoples are today, though a minority (now conserved only in a few ''[[urom]]'' tribes) were matrilineal and/or matrilocal. At this stage it is presumed that all or most tribes permitted {{wp|cross-cousin marriage}}, though the extent to which it may have been ''preferred'' (as in later stages of both Coscivian and ''urom'' societies) is not yet known. Due to the segmentary lineage reckoning of kinship, the demographic size of a typical Kiravian tribe during the early agricultural age is somewhat imprecise, but it can be estimated that the largest tribal orders of stable political (that is, military) significance claimed common descent no further back than five generations (to a single great-great-great-great-grandfather) and probably included between 1,000 and 3,000 people. However, the everyday lives of early agrarian Kiravians would have been lived largely within the confines of autonomous village communities within a larger tribe, with such villages comprising between 50 and 400 people. By this point, prehistoric Kiravians were actively cultivating potato and crisp-potato, and keeping swine, yet there is little evidence of major forest clearance for agriculture. {{wp|Pollen analysis}} suggests mostly small-scale clearance to enlarge natural clearings in the primæval Kiravian forests. The short-term nature of the settlements suggested by a paucity of archæological remains of permanent structures comports with the lack of evidence for large-scale clearance, suggesting that during this period of Kiravian prehistory there were no communities large enough to require a large area of cleared cropland to satisfy their subsistence needs. It has been argued that the overall lack of houses points to a quite mobile society dominated by {{wp|shifting cultivation}}. Later, Prehistoric Kiravians developed of {{wp|slash-and-burn}} agriculture, using {{wp|Africa (Toto song)|fire}} in controlled burns to fertilise the mediocre soil covering most of the continent with the rich nutrients accumulated in its thick forest cover. As such, villages would periodically migrate within a localised ambit in search of virgin land as the cinder-enriched soils of one area were depleted. Stress on the land and the contraction of these ambits due to growing populations and the generational fission of villages is believed to have contributed to the period of heightened violence known as the Age of Blood.