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ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT OF THE ANASAZI

游客2024-01-02  18
问题                                             ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT OF THE ANASAZI
    (1) A major question in the archeology of the southwestern region of the United States is why so many impressive settlements, and even entire regions, were abandoned in prehistoric times. Archeologist Tim Kohler has suggested that the nature of human-environmental interaction was an important reason in the case of the Anasazi people. The actual case study that Kohler relies on is from the Dolores River basin of southwest Colorado, where the Anasazi seem to have moved in about 600 A.D. Over the following couple of centuries, the population increased, and they aggregated (or gathered) into villages, but by about 900 A.D. the area began to be abandoned. Other archeologists have identified the immediate cause of this abandonment to be a series of short growing seasons that would have put pressure on corn production at that high altitude. Kohler, however, asserts that a growing population led to human-environmental interactions that caused people to live in villages, intensify agrarian food production, deforest the region, deplete the local soils, and ultimately abandon the area.
    (2) Kohler uses several kinds of evidence to show that human effects, not solely climatic factors, were important factors in the abandonment of settlements. One key indicator of change in the environment surrounding these prehistoric settlements is the wood that was used there. Archeological study of wood charcoal found in hearths dating to the various episodes of occupation indicated that the species used changed in a patterned way. Over time there was a decline in the use of juniper and pinon (native, slow-growing species of trees) and an increase in woody shrubs and fast-growing cottonwood. The species of wood used in the construction of buildings also changed. Fewer pinon were being used, and those that were used seemed to be from increasingly old trees, while juniper continued to be from young trees. The implication is that the forest that did remain was changing to relatively more junipers, a tree that is more fire resistant, better able to reproduce in open settings, and less desirable for construction than pinon. Kohler argues that pinon was disappearing from the locale of settlements and that this put an additional nutritional strain on the population, which used nuts from the tree as well as its wood. [A] The relative proportion of different species of animals hunted by people in the region also changed progressively. [B] A final source of evidence was the seeds found in the archeological deposits, which had blown or been brought to the settlement. [C] As time went on, there was a substantial increase in seeds from pioneer plants, attesting both to agricultural intensification and to an increasingly disturbed local environment. [D]
     (3) This evidence has convinced Kohler of the importance of human impact in degrading the local environment. His interpretation of the situation is that by about 840 A.D., people had aggregated into villages in favorable settings because of their competitive organizational advantages over smaller units in the face of growing population and depletion of local wild resources. Hence, the very nature of the initial slash-and-burn agriculture encouraged a further dependence on agriculture and the aggregation of people into denser settlements. However, there are costs to aggregation, such as the increasing distance to usable fields, the heavier pressure on local soils, and the accompanying increase in agricultural risk. The Anasazi responded to this by further intensification, such as water-control mechanisms, to feed the increasing population. Such a trajectory is fraught with risks, but it is also pushed forward by advantages it bestows on its participants who organize and cooperate. Advantages might include sharing food across groups in a village, investment in facilities to improve the processing and storage of food, and cooperative labor pools and social groupings larger than villages, which would enable organized long-distance hunts and participation in trading networks. Larger and larger villages became possible, but this also made the system vulnerable to collapse. A reliance on the management of resources through cooperative action reduced their flexibility of action, so that when poor seasons occurred, people were seriously hurt. Thus an expectable aberration in the climatic regime may have been enough to cause the collapse of the village system in the Dolores area. [br] Look at the four squares [ ■ ] that indicate where the following sentence could be added to the passage.
Earlier, they had pursued animals native to woodlands such as deer and rabbit and later, those more at home in open or disturbed environments such as antelope and jackrabbit.
Where would the sentence best fit?
选项
答案 B
解析 本题属于句子插入题，需要插入的句子意为“早些时候，他们曾在森林里捕猎诸如鹿和兔子等动物，后来又寻找那些在野外或者受到干扰的环境中更喜欢待在家里的动物，如羚羊和长耳野兔”。该句是作为例子说明了人们狩猎的动物种类的具体变化方式，可见是对B处前这一句话所表述的论点的具体论证。因此，把句子插入到B处最为合适。A处的前一句还在提树木，后一句才开始引出人们狩猎的动物种类的变化。如果将题干句子插入A处，会显得突兀，没有逻辑关联。C处前后两句都在讲种子，联系紧密，不宜插入题干句子。D处的前一个句子已经得出了当地环境被日益扰乱的结论，是这个段落陈述的结尾句。如果将题干句子插入D处，前后内容不关联，且不符合行文逻辑，故排除D处。
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