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  3. ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT OF THE ANASAZI (1) A major question in the archeology of the southwestern region of the United States i

ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT OF THE ANASAZI (1) A major question in the archeology of the southwestern region of the United States i

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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.
In paragraph 2, why does the author compare the use of juniper with pinon in the construction of buildings?
选项 A、To prove that juniper is more suitable for building construction than pinon is
B、To indicate that the choice of wood for building construction depended on the age of the tree species
C、To support the claim that wood use changed over time in a patterned way
D、To identify the features of juniper that made the Anasazi use it more often than pinon for constructing buildings
答案C
解析 本题属于修辞目的题，定位在第2段，询问作者为什么比较了刺柏和矮松在建筑方面的使用。第2段第3句意为“古学家对在不同时期的火炉中发现的木炭进行了考古研究。研究表明，人们所使用的木炭种类有规律地转变”，接下来的第4句和第5句都说明了人们对木材的使用的转变。所以第3句显然是一个总起句。第4句和第5句则提供了例证。故选C项“来支持木材的使用会随着时间的推移呈规律性转变”。根据第2段第7句“但与矮松相比，较不适用于建筑方面”可判断，A项和D项均错误。B项“来指出建筑所用木材取决于树种的年龄”没有依据。
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