Wellmann Imre szerk.: A Magyar Mezőgazdasági Múzeum Közleményei 1971-1972 (Budapest, 1973)

Steensberg, Axel: The practice of tilling spades in Asia and Europe

frame. The same tilling spade was in use in Jaeren in South-West Norway and in crofting districts of Scotland. The origin of this spade had a triangular blade like the rope-traction ards of Hama mentioned before. The oldest specimens I know were found in Satrup Moor in Schleswig and they are kept in the Landesmuseum at Gottorp. There were three pieces dated to c. 3000 B.C. One of them had its shaft preserved in full length, and when I examined it thoroughly I observed slight concavities into which the fingers of my left hand fitted exactly when they were placed as on a spade when digging with under-grip. These marks were apparently made by means of a burning stick. Curiously enough they were placed rather high up on the shaft, as if the tool had been used for shovelling, not for digging. But the triangular blade, which was cut in one piece with the shaft, was perforated by two holes which could have been intended for attachment of traction ropes like those of the Hama implements. Unfortunately this spade has not been used. We observed on the surface of the blade fresh marks from the edge of a flint scraper and no wear marks are to be seen at all. Therefore it is impossible to prove how this spade was operated in detail, and none of the other two spades was perforated, and only one of them had its fully preserved shaft. At Gwithian in Cornwall impressions of the triangular spade were found in the soil in a layer dated between 1500 and 1300 B.C. And the triangular type still survives in Southern Europe as well as in Asia. The development from the spade to the ard need not have been a constant progression from one type to another but there may have been accidental regressions according to needs of economic, social or habitual kinds, and one is in any case constantly inclined to ask: What is the primitive type and what the advanced under particular circumstances? The earliest find of the iron mounting of a wooden share in China is from the Chan-kou period (403—221 B.C.) and is connected with and adapted to the dry-farming and the loose soil of North China, where it was not necessary to till deeply or to turn the soil over effectively. This implement with the iron mounted share was probably pulled by a rope as can be seen from a figure stone of the Han period (206 B.C.

—219 A.D.), and it functioned like the ropetraction ard from Hama's Bronze Age mentioned before. From China it was introduced to Korea from which country the oldest description of ploughing with oxen is found in the first piece of Korean literature c. 500 A.D. However, the cultivation of rice had already been introduced to South Korea and West Japan from the Yang-tze valley in the 3rd century B.C. China's highly developed and intensive agriculture was in fact a predominant reason for the comparatively late introduction of the ard and plough. Chinese experts on agriculture may have been acquainted with the idea of ploughing with oxen much earlier because of the trading contacts with the Near East. But such inventions had very little chance of being accepted at that time and with that structure of the economy. In North China the early rope-traction ard had a pointed iron mounting well fitted to the-dry-farming methods of this country, but when it was introduced to the more humid South Korea with a heavy, muddy soil in the rice fields its share was transformed into an U-shaped edge, a form which also suited the Japanese rice fields. To the difference between the light yellow loose soil of North China and the muddy and sticky soils of the rice paddocks of South China correspond two different agricultural methods: dry-farming and wet-