FIGURE 1. A Tiv man interplants cassava with peanuts.

Paul and Laura Bohannan's famous work on the Tiv of central Nigeria described a system of shifting cultivation and constantly creeping settlement, which expanded by belligerence against landholders in its path. This adaptive strategy came to be known as "predatory expansion".

However, this description was based on interior Tivland where most farmers were obliged to push into neighbors' land since their own land was being pushed into.

North of Tivland, in an agricultural frontier, the Tiv have established highly stable settlements. Glenn Stone and the late Robert Netting recently studied a Tiv frontier village that has not moved since its founding in 1939. Tiv priorities for settlement and landuse here are not oriented towards expansion, but rather towards protection of their large landbase from intrusion by groups such as the Kofyar. This is an ongoing problem because the tribe in control of local courts often sells off Tiv fallow land to outsiders. The Tiv therefore resort to "predatory" tactics to reclaim their land.

The first papers on this research will be:

  Stone, Glenn Davis
    1996  Predatory Sedentism: The Unexpected Rules of Tiv Settlement.
      Paper in the symposium, "Ethnoarchaeology of Subsistence and 
      Settlement," SAA meeting, New Orleans.
    1996  Intrimidation and Intensification: Contrasting Adaptive 
      Strategies in the Nigerian Savanna.  Paper in the symposium, 
      "Robert Netting and the Study of Agricultural Systems", AAA 
      meeting, San Fransisco.

FIGURE 2. Around one third of the residents of a Tiv village that has been stable for 55 years. This started out as an all-village gathering, but a large segment of the group stormed off after a dispute (along lineage lines) over settlement history of the region.

FIGURE 3. In contrast to Kofyar farmers in the area, the Tiv have managed to maintain a large enough land base to allow extensive fallowing. Their lighter agricultural workload allows ample time for fishing.