ORIGIN AND EARLY DIFFUSION OF THE TRACTION 



PLOW* 



By Carl Whiting Bishop 

 Freer Gallery of Art, Washington 



[With 4 plates] 



The earlier efforts of manldnd to assure an abundance of food con- 

 sisted largely in the performance of magical ceremonies, frequently 

 orgiastic in character. It is sometimes forgotten that such methods, 

 even after regular cultivation had come into being, long continued to 

 survive in close association with what we should consider more 

 rational procedures. Yet this is a fact which we need to keep steadily 

 in mind while we try to work out the early history of the traction plow, 

 which here refers to plows drawn by animals, especially those of the 

 ox-kind. 



Certain members of the genus Panicvm — the millets — seem to 

 have been the first cereals actually cultivated. These, grown with 

 the aid of the hoe and the digging-stick under the jhum system of 

 tillage, had spread over a large part of the Eastern Hemisphere before 

 the close of Neolithic times. Under this system, small plots of ground 

 are cleared, often with the aid of fire, and are then tilled for 2 or 3 

 years until their fertility has been exhausted, when they are abandoned. 



It was not, however, the growing of millet but rather that of wheat 

 and barley which became associated with the development and dif- 

 fusion of true agriculture. The first steps in this process had already 

 been taken long before the dawn of history — possibly even before the 

 end of the EpipalaeoUthic period.^ Hand in hand with the greater 

 stabihzation thus gradually brought about in the food supply there 

 went a corresponding mcrease of efficiency in the instruments em- 

 ployed in its production. Of these, the hoe and the pick have never 

 undergone improvement save in matters of detail; in principle they 

 remain today what they were in prehistoric times. To regard either 

 of them as directly ancestral to the plow is to be misled by superficial 

 resemblances in nonessentials.^ For example, the hoe handle can 



'Reprinted by permission from Antiquity, September 1936. 



' Cm-wen, E. Cecil, Agrieultm-e and the flint sickle in Palestine, Antiquity, vol. 9, p. 62, 1935. 



' In the M6ms. Soc. Royale des Antiquaires du Nord, 1902, Sophus Miiller (Charrue, joug, at mors, p. 39) 

 points out that the earlier Egyptian hoes differ more from the contemporary plows than do the later ones. 



Berthold Laufer (Jade, 1912, p. 48) and Paul Leser (Entstehung und Verbreitung des Pfluges, 1931, p. 658 

 and note 29) both regard the hoe and the plow as possessing different histories. 



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