PREFACE
Connecting the subsistence crisis that brings to the collapse a society and the cultural aspects that go with it (and sometimes they are based) is not so simple. It can help this awareness: a crisis of subsistence (the meaning of that will be explained subsequently) coincides, in one way or another, with a moment of cultural transition. Traditionally, these two perspectives are considered separately; However, it is the analysis and comparative intergrate that can reveal the intimate connection that exists between "culture" and "subsistence". And to shy away from the various historiographical "determinisms".
"We are what we eat", or "we are the way we get what we eat." From this simple axiom, anthropology, from its beginning, placed the company in types and distinguished settlement and nomadism, with everything that goes with it: settlement patterns, social organization, material culture. However, when we talk about "culture", the "subsistence", understood as a modalities through which individuals and groups of people get the food, usually slips into the background; it becomes a '' cultural expression ", a superstructure. No account is taken of the fact that in times of cultural transition occurs, upstream of it, a change and a shift, sometimes radical, in the modalities of subsistence; and that the changed mode of subsistence drive societies towards evolutionary scenarios that affect the whole of the material and cultural expressions.
When a community, either voluntarily or by coercion, changes the way to get food, consequently it also changes the way of perceiving the world around; when it changes the way in which a community uses the space at his disposal, or create new ones, also changes the symbolic and spiritual heritage that distinguishes and constitutes its identity. The perception of these phenomena of transition, usually, is minimal, since such phenomena unfold their effect in rather long periods of time. Only retrospectively it can be discerned with some precision a "before" and a "after". But there are cases in which the change is so sudden, or is spread out over a territory as large, or, again, it is so different the "before" and the "after", that it is possible, through a collection and a critical analysis of data, to evaluate how are connected modes of subsistence and cultural aspects of a given population. I propose here two case studies already well known to the scientific community of historians and anthropologists, but that, through a critical reading, and thanks to being joined together, can demonstrate the validity of the proposed premises; at the end of this short essay it will be possible to do considerations also affecting contemporary societies, their present and their future.
