purchase, or by simple appropriation. But over the whole village, in two or three
generations, many households will be reduced to poverty
In the first model, the balance between man- and animal-power and land was assured by more or less freely adjusting the amount of land. Now the attitude to land rights changes, and land becomes important even if it cannot be worked. Hence share-cropping sharply increases. Anyone who is unable to work part or all of his land will be keen to lease it, while many neighbours, having insufficient of their own, will be anxious to share-crop for others.
I have presented this argument so far as a pair of models. These are, of course, designed to make sense of the material from the two villages. This material does not constitute proof. But proof is not the point, since a model is not true or false but more or less useful and appropriate. The cases that follow conform in general to the model, but in some details diverge from it. They are in part reconstructions based on statements of informants, on landholdings, and on the assumption of a basically agnatic system of inheritance.
Table 3 (p. 53) shows the large number of small and very small holdings of land in Sakaltutan. In every case, the small size of these holdings was said to be due directly to the division of paternal holdings among heirs. The process of division seem to have been under way for roughly two generations. Heads of large joint households in the period 1900 to 1910, that is, the fathers of the oldest living generation in the village in 1950, seem to have had as much land as they needed. As late as the early nineteen-twenties households with adequate manpower seem still to have been able to expand their holdings as need arose.
Hamit (V) (Fig. 8) was about eighty years of age in 1950; the only survivor of five brothers who had grown up, only one of whom had no living descendants. He said he had inherited thirty dönüm (fifteen acres, six ha.) from his father, and fifteen from his mother, making forty-five in all. His father presumably then held about I50 dönüm ; much more than he