THE HISTORICAL IMPORTANCE OF QUESTIONS about the origin and spread of agriculture is inextricably linked to Western philosophies of history and concepts of social evolution, although subsistence-linked lifeways are and have been used to categorize peoples within other traditions. The topic has often had marked sociopolitical and ideological nuances both within and beyond archaeology, and has influenced the ways in which farmers have been contrasted to foragers (Zvelebil 1996a; Pluciennik 1998; Rudebeck 2000). There are now no “pure” hunter-gatherers in existence; all have been touched directly or indirectly by the spread of Western civilization and various forms of capitalism based ultimately on agro-pastoral farming.
Typically agriculture has been seen as a revolutionary step, a quantum leap in human history, and the necessary basis for the development of widespread societal characteristics, both good and bad. These include sedentism, population growth, certain endemic diseases, social and political hierarchies, literacy, cities, specialized arts and crafts, widespread environmental degradation, extensive trade, property, laws, morality, and more generally civilization. While it is true that current populations, infrastructures, and many sociocultural practices and institutions would not and could not exist in the form they do without domesticated crops and animals, for some the costs appear to have been high. For example, neo-Romantics, as well as some thinkers in the green movement, would argue that the discovery and adoption of farming was the crucial step toward our current unhappy condition.
Nevertheless, the spread of farming can generally be correlated with the intensification of exploitation (of people and the environment), extremes of population growth, and various forms of hierarchization and centralization of power. However we perceive the trajectory of global human history, in fact wheat, maize, rice, and barley now constitute more than 78 percent of the world’s major crop foods. Harlan (1995:115) notes that the price we pay is that although “when the system works well, large numbers of people can be supported . . . famine and starvation are an integral part of agricultural systems,” which are fundamentally unstable. There are thus profound theoretical as well as historical reasons for exploring the development of our current dependence on varieties of agriculture, and the relationships which subsistence may have with other social characteristics.
Although Classical Greek and Roman authors referred in their mythological histories to ways in which people gained their subsistence, it was in the mid-eighteenth century that “civilized” farmers were explicitly distinguished from the “savage” hunters and “barbarian” pastoralists who were said to have preceded them in the course of human history (Meek 1976; Rudebeck 2000). The reasons for the widespread acceptance of these categorizations in the form of conjectural histories are complex, but can be seen as the expression of trends which can be traced back over at least the preceding century, and which relate to agricultural and mercantile capitalism and associated early economic theories. These factors include colonial conflicts over land, accelerated agricultural enclosure and improvement, and the valorization and moralization of a particular way of life, ideally based on settled communities with enclosed and individually owned agricultural land (Pluciennik 2001). This tradition influenced later anthropological and sociological writers such as Morgan (1877) and Marx and Engels (1884), and remained alive within disciplines such as economics and in popular books. The categories of hunter and farmer were thus already available to be mapped onto archaeological concepts such as the Paleolithic and Neolithic from the late nineteenth century onward (Tylor 1881; Dawkins 1894; Smith 1916) and formed the basis for progressive social evolutionary schemes. Ideas about the nature and the causes and importance of the origins of agriculture thus have a history and political influence extending beyond archaeology, and equally many still extant explanations such as population pressure can be first encountered in the eighteenth century.
Some features of social evolution, particularly the notion of the unlimited benefits of technological progress, remain with us today. But by the beginning of the twentieth century, scholars realized that simply regarding agriculture as a naturally superior way of life was insufficient explanation. More specific reasons for the invention and adoption of farming had to be given. Within the ensuing environmentalist paradigm, environmental change played a role as a controlling or enabling variable. Within this form of explanation, still current today, the natural environment plays either a principal role determining the human condition (environmental determinism) or it is a passive variable, setting a range of conditions and possibilities within which human responses develop (environmental possiblism).
Although the environmentalist approach had its roots in the nineteenth century, it was Gordon Childe with his propinquity-oasis theory who made this type of explanation popular. Childe (1928), following the work of American geologist Pumpelly in Turkmenistan, argued that rainfall patterns over North Africa (pluvials) were climatically linked to the high-latitude glaciations. At the end of the last Ice Age, summer rainfall over Africa moved northward in response to the recession of the ice, and desiccation set in. Humans, plants, and animals concentrated along perennial streams and rivers and permanent springs. Enforced close proximity resulted in domestication in the Nile Valley and other locations within the desert areas of North Africa and the Near East. Childe later combined environmental explanations with Marxist theories, creating the concept of the Neolithic revolution (Childe 1936). In Childe’s view, food production was an economic revolution, “the greatest in human history after the mastery of fire.” Childe’s original conception of the origin of agriculture was flawed for several reasons, including his assumption of a correspondence between glacials and pluvials. As Sherratt (1997) notes in his review of recent research, Childe’s vision of a general desiccation applies not to the beginning of the postglacial, but to the preceding glacial period.
Cultural Ecology
Cultural ecological approaches represent a conceptual advance on the environmentalism. The natural environment and human populations are seen in a dynamic relationship acting together as a system. The medium of such a relationship is culture, which serves to harmonize “social needs and aspirations with the realities of the physical world” (Clark 1957:175) and which is perceived as the “extra-somatic means of adaptation.” Through culture, human populations collectively solve problems of adaptation, using novel and often complex social, technological, political, and ideological means (Clark 1957; Clarke 1972; Binford 1968, 1983a: 195–214, 1983b; Flannery 1968, 1973; Reed 1977). When applied specifically to the origins of farming, the cultural ecological approach focuses on the relationship between population and resources. As a part of a regulated system, population and their resources tend toward homeostasis, a steady, unchanged state as a form of self-management. Different forms of population control, such as sexual abstinence, infanticide, senilicide, abortion, and contraception can be noted as examples of such regulation. When some events upset this equilibrium, adaptive adjustments through culture tend to bring the relationship between humans and their resources into a new dynamic equilibrium. Within this school, the transition to farming is often explained as an adaptive response to environmental events, or to changes in human patterns of mobility and increased sedentism.
The focus on changes in human mobility, reproduction, and the health of populations gave rise to a separate but related demographic approach in which the transition to farming is seen as a consequence of a slow but long-term increase in human populations at a global level. This view assumes that despite different forms of population control, hunter-gatherer communities grew at a very slow rate over a very long time. Such population increase accelerated toward the end of the Paleolithic period, when greater sedentism and the logistic procurement of resources allowed some hunter-gatherer communities to relax their birth control practices and support more children. Initially people were able to adapt to their own reproductive success by migrating to and colonizing hitherto unpopulated regions. However, by the end of the Paleolithic some 12,000 years ago, most of the Old World was already settled by humans, and strategies of economic intensification had to take over. Population growth required more food; the transition to farming was an adaptive response to this need. Increased food supply was achieved through closer control and manipulation of plants and animals, thereby allowing more people to survive. This marks the beginning of the cycles of demographic growth and bust, of increased food demand and food shortage, and of economic development, so familiar to us today (Cohen 1977, 1989).
The difference between cultural ecological and demographic approaches lies in the emphasis among the former on ecological change as the prime mover, while demographers stress human reproduction as the key variable. Significantly, there is also a difference in one basic assumption: for cultural ecologists, populations and their resources tend toward a dynamic equilibrium, so that specific events have to be identified as special cases disrupting such equilibrium; for demographers, control by humans over their biological reproduction is inherently flawed, and population growth, however staggered and variable, can be expected to occur in consequence.
Evolutionary Approaches
Evolutionary explanations have been around since Lamarck and Darwin. More recent work within this perspective has moved away from cultural evolution and environmental determinism, and emphasized instead symbiotic coevolution between humans, plants, and animals (Higgs 1972, 1975; Bailey 1983). The concept of strict control by humans has been replaced by the idea of mutually beneficial symbiosis between humans and their food resources. For example, Rindos (1984, 1989) argues that agriculture did not originate in response to any need, nor was it invented with any goal in mind. The development of agriculture was a coevolutionary consequence of the symbiosis that came to be established between humans and plants simply through mutual interaction. Certain practices associated with cultivation will result in morphological changes through selection (whether incidental or intentional), a corresponding change in the gene pool, leading to the development of domesticated species. Biological domestication, then, would be accomplished through cultural selection over a number of generations. As Bruce Smith points out (1995:23), by taking control over the reproductive cycle of, for example, seed plants, humans have effectively created a separate and parallel world for these plants. The rules for success in this new world were different from those in the world of wild plants. These new rules favored larger seeds, larger seed heads, tough rachis that would retain seeds for harvesting, and, later, unhulled varieties. All these features become signatures of domestication in plants, recognizable in the archaeological record. Domestication, then, is a case of mutualism: a relationship benefiting genetically unrelated organisms and increasing the Darwinian fitness of all involved.
Social Explanations
In contrast to the explanations just noted, other attempts at understanding the transition to agriculture emphasize social and ideological themes. The basis of the social competition approach is the belief that human society is essentially competitive. As people compete for status, influence, and power, they utilize extra resources to promote their own standing, that of their kin, and/or to maintain alliances with other groups of people. This is done through ritual feasting, gift exchange, trade, and other forms of codified, often ritualized contact. The need for extra resources to sustain such exchanges leads to food procurement beyond their immediate dietary needs (overproduction). Such socially motivated needs for extra production of foodstuffs may be satisfied by adopting a more intensive system of exploitation such as agriculture (Bender 1975, 1978; Thomas 1987; Hastorf 1999; Price 2000).
Similar explanations are sometimes used in situations when hunter-gatherer communities come into contact with groups who have already adopted farming. In such situations a complicated set of relations can develop between the primary farming communities and neighboring hunter-gatherer groups, which revolve around exchange, trade, and intermarriage. Such relations have a characteristic structure and define an agricultural frontier zone. Some of these relations are symbiotic, others are competitive. The consequence for the hunter-gatherer groups is often marked by increased competition between different segments of their society, as different households and kinship groups compete with one another for access to resources held by farmers, or to replicate social relations in a farming community. Another result of contact can be the overexploitation of native resources as hunter-gatherers become drawn into exploitation of desired items such as fur for markets controlled by a farming society; they effectively become commercial hunter-gatherers. Both social competition or commercial hunting will lead in time to increased exploitation of resources and overproduction. The hunting-gathering mode of subsistence may not be able to meet such demand because its productivity is limited by the capacity of wild resources to renew themselves. One eventual outcome may be the imposition of greater control over the undomesticated resources (husbandry) and the adoption of farming (Zvelebil 1996; Zvelebil and Lillie 2000; Price 2000; Tringham 2000).
Social, environmental, and demographic forces, active in specific historical situations, can create a range of conditions encouraging the transition to agriculture. But the ultimate choice about which course of action to take rests with people as informed social actors. It is inevitably mediated through their beliefs and expectations, in ideological and cosmological frameworks. Some researchers emphasize ideological and cosmological explanations as key forces in the transition (or resistance) to agriculture (Cauvin 1994; Chase 1989; Yen 1989; Thomas 1996; Ingold 1996). These suggest that animals and plans were domesticated for ideological rather than social and economic reasons. One of the most prominent theories is presented by Ian Hodder (1990), where domestication is seen as a progression from conceptual to social to economic domestication, as humans try to gain control over nature and enculturate their environment, to tame their surroundings and make them less threatening: to bring nature, plants, and animals from the domain of the agrios (outside, of the fields) under the domain and control of the domus (inside, of the house). These acts of enculturation, evidenced in the archaeological record by the development of household architecture, internal decoration, and elaboration of houses, and the burial of dead within or near houses (“taming death”) possess great prestige. They symbolize the security of the cultural as opposed to the dangers of untamed nature. Within this view, the taming and domestication of wild animals and plants can be seen as the next logical step in the broader process of enculturation.
Domestication
Agriculture is based on cultivating domesticated plants and keeping domestic animals. Domestication, then, is a key social practice which defines agriculture, but agriculture is more than just domestication. In the same way, domestication is more than a practical process of managing the reproduction of plants and animals and changing their characteristics through selective breeding. It denotes more generally the bringing closer to home plants and animals useful to humans, thereby increasing control over them; it is an act of socialization, the conceptual enculturation of natural resources. Domestication as an act of taming has been recognized by many researchers (Higgs 1972, 1975; Reed 1977; Zvelebil 1986; Harris and Hillman 1989; Cowan and Watson 1992; Gebauer and Price 1992; Cauvin 1994; Price and Gebauer 1995; Harris 1996; Smith 1995; Gosden and Hather 1999; Price 2000).
Biologically domesticated plants and animals come into being as a result of cultural selection brought about by prior cultivation and tending of undomesticated species: behavioral domestication. It follows, then, that such management must have occurred for some time before biological domestication took place, which can be recognized on morphological grounds in the archaeological record. Different workers subdivide this crucial process of cultural selection into different steps. But, bearing in mind the significant thresholds of human control, the two following social practices must be recognized: husbandry and cultivation or domestication.
One threshold is crossed with the husbandry of tamed food resources. This occurs when the symbiotic relationship, implicit in many traditions of specialized hunting and gathering, reaches the point of taming, or behavioral domestication. Culturally, this is marked by deliberate and effective promotional strategies, designed to increase the control over food resources and improve the conditions of habitat favorable to the propagation of selected species. For plant foods, such practices would include protective plant tending, selective burning of woodland, weeding, and soil modification. It may include sowing or planting. For animals, this may include selective culling, feeding, corralling, herding, and removal of predators. Through these practices animals become tamed and plants semidomesticated in the sense that they become accustomed to human presence, attached to human habitations, and dependent on anthropogenic environments within a web of mutually beneficial relationships. It is with these promotional practices that the change in social relations toward investment, delayed returns, and the appropriation of resources takes place (Barnard and Woodburn 1987), well in advance of actual cultivation. The recognition of these social practices continues to challenge archaeologists because there are few, if any, clear biological or archaeological signatures for the husbandry of tamed but morphologically wild food resources.
In some cases, husbandry of tamed resources leads to the cultivation of domesticated plants and/or to animal husbandry of domesticated animals, through selective breeding of targeted resources, or by practicing other forms of selection that result in biological change. The change in the genetic makeup of the organism, resulting from cultural selection, defines the boundary between behavioral and biological domestication. By crossing this biological threshold, species that are culturally domesticated become a new species with a separate genome and new appearance, incorporating phenotypical characteristics for which they were bred by humans. Such species often end up dependent on humans for survival and reproduction: an ultimate form of human control.
Our current state of general knowledge, then, can be summarized in four major points:
1. The origin of agriculture was a long-term, gradual process in which behavioral domestication preceded biological domestication.
2. It represents one alternative among strategies of subsistence intensification (i.e., increase in food procurement capacity).
3. The adoption of farming depended on a range of choices available to hunter-gatherer populations; the perceived relative merits of farming depended on the local conditions and historical constraints within each region.
4. Each explanation discussed above presents only one segment of reality. It is difficult to see the origin or spread of farming as a single-cause process. In most cases, more than one consideration—ideological, social, economic—was involved.
Traditionally, since the 1920s and the pioneering work of the Russian botanist Vavilov (1926), work on the origins and development of agriculture has focused on the identification of so-called centers of domestication. Reflecting recent global domination in terms of scientific resources and current staple crops, most work to date has been carried out in southwestern Asia, the source of agro-pastoralism (wheat, barley, and pulses, with sheep, goats, and cattle), and in Mesoamerica (the triad of maize, beans, squash). This imbalance has been reinforced by the fact that many sexually reproduced plants (such as the cereals and maize) and animals have undergone genetic and morphological changes through their cultivation or management and can hence be recognized as domesticated, while vegetatively reproduced plants such as the tubers of South America, Asia, Africa, and the Pacific are less often preserved archaeologically and cannot be easily characterized as cultivated rather than wild (cf. Hather 1996; Perry 1999). However, it is now generally agreed that there are at least three and possibly seven core areas where early or independent cultivation and/or domestication can be recognized: southwestern Asia, Mesoamerica, Andean South America, northern and southern China, sub-Saharan Africa, and the eastern United States. Thus while there are many other areas where plant and potentially animal management were occurring (see below), we can identify centers where contemporary farming systems developed and from which they spread by a variety of processes ranging from small-scale migration and acquisition to the large-scale land appropriation and settlement typical of colonial expansion. However, only a few of the many types of plants (and animals) that have been managed and domesticated are considered here.
Southwestern Asia
It is in the area of southwestern Asia that the early use and domestication of three major components of contemporary agriculture—cereals, flocks of sheep and goats, and pulses (especially lentils and beans) can be identified, culminating in their combination by about 8,500 years ago. However the timing, place, or places and interrelationship of many aspects of these changes are still unclear. Prior to this period, in the Late Pleistocene from about 13,000 to 10,000 years ago, archaeology shows the presence of Natufian and related sites and assemblages, best known from the Mediterranean Levant (Bar-Yosef and Belfer-Cohen 1992). During this period there is good evidence at some sites for increased reliance on the harvesting of probably wild stands of grasses—the forerunners of modern wheat and barley. Such evidence derives not only from remains of such plants, but also from the presence of numerous blades with a characteristic sickle gloss from the cutting of grassy stems (Unger-Hamilton 1989; Hillman and Davies 1992:147–148). In addition, the existence of relatively large and permanent structures in settlements, some even described as villages, together with identified bones of small animals (mice, sparrows) which are suited to living in close conjunction with humans, suggest that some of these sites may have been more or less permanently occupied by all or part of the community (Bar-Yosef and Belfer-Cohen 1992:32). Around 10,000 years ago, other village sites often described as PPNA (Pre-Pottery Neolithic A) show the first evidence of domesticated (i.e., morphologically changed) cereals. Most notably, this early wheat (emmer, einkorn) and barley demonstrate such changes as a toughened rachis, the stem which holds the grains together, or an increase in the number or size of grains in an ear. Similarly, domesticated (i.e., cultivated and manipulated) pulses are often recognized through increased size, although other morphological changes such as thickness and structure of the seed coat may also be recognized through the use of scanning electron microscopy. Although such variants do occur in the wild in small numbers, some process of selection so that these latter types become dominant is seen as a critical factor in the identification of domesticated crops.
Widespread knowledge and use of such plants was not new in this or other areas. The harvesting of wild barley is known from the site of Ohalo II around 20,000 years ago (Kislev et al. 1992). At the site of Abu Hureyra on the Euphrates in Syria, more than 150 seed-bearing species were identified, though many of these may not have been related to food use (Hillman et al. 1989; Hillman 1996). What seems to have been crucial in the domestication of certain grasses is their mode of seed dispersal, their abundance, and the method of harvesting. Experimental work by Hillman and Davies (1990, 1992) has shown that the timing and nature of harvesting wild stands of cereals can lead to recognizable domestication in only twenty years.
The evidence shows that within a few hundred years, there was biological domestication and apparent increased reliance (at various sites) on all three cereals together with pulses (lentils, chickpeas, and peas). Together with an increase in settlement magnitude over the preceding Natufian shown in some PPNA sites such as Jericho, eventually with impressive walls and other structures, this suggests that there was a marked shift around 10,000 B.P. for many people in the area in settlement, social, and subsistence organization, including storage (Bar-Yosef and Belfer-Cohen 1992:38). At the same time, these PPNA sites also show a continued reliance on game for most of their protein.
On current evidence such cultivation practices spread north and east during the succeeding PPNB (around 9500 to 8500 B.P.), first into Anatolia and the Zagros region, where it seems likely that sheep and goats were first domesticated. Although the status of indigenous cereal domestication in these latter two areas is uncertain, there was potentially a reverse exchange of domesticated animals southward during the late PPNB, when we see the first integration of domesticated plants and animals within the Levantine corridor around 8500 B.P., around 2,000 years after the presumed initial cultivation of domesticated plants.
The recognition of highly managed or domesticated species of animals poses similar problems. The change from straight to twisted horn cores in goats, for example, or the general decrease in size of domesticated animals, may only show us the end or intensified results of a lengthy process of management and manipulation. Sheep were probably first domesticated in the central Euphrates region, where three sites (Abu Hureyra, Çayönü, and Cafer) show a marked increase in the proportion of sheep bones and/or a marked diminution in size at dates from 8700 to 8500 B.P., and a number of other sites in the region show similar profiles in the succeeding few centuries (Smith 1995:53–62; Legge 1996). At around the same time period or even earlier, goats appear to have been domesticated at centers farther east (Jarmo, Ganj Dareh), and the presence of presumably domesticated goats rapidly appears farther west, coeval with the emergence of sheep herding. Pigs and cattle were generally less important in the earliest farming sites; the former were perhaps domesticated in the second half of the ninth millennium B.P. in the northern part of the area being discussed here (e.g., Çayönü, Gritille), while current knowledge suggests cattle were tamed, perhaps around southeast Anatolia and adjacent regions during the next millennium.
In central Asia, so far poorly known, early farming in Turkmenistan appears to be in place at Jeitun by around 8000 B.P., based on emmer and einkorn wheat and barley, with domesticated sheep and goats, although hunted gazelle appear to be an important source of meat (Harris and Gosden 1996). It is likely that such sites represent the northeastern boundary of the initial spread of agro-pastoralism in southwestern Asia. Similarly, the site of Mehrgarh, between the Iranian Plateau and the Indus Valley, appears to be on the southeastern edge of this zone, with barley (and some emmer and einkorn wheat), together with sheep probably introduced from farther west and present by around 7000 B.P. However, excavator Richard Meadow has argued for the local domestication of goats as well as cattle (the southern Asian zebu). Later, the presence in the area of locally domesticated crops (cotton, gram beans, and dates) as well as those from elsewhere (lentils, peas from western Asia, sorghum and millet from Africa [Webber 1998], and rice probably from eastern Asia) suggests a complex of “multiple domestications, introgressions, hybridizations, replacements . . . and extinctions” (Meadow 1996:405) over the subsequent millennia in southern Asia. However, it was probably not until around 4000 B.P. that animal herding (water buffalo, sheep, goats, and cattle) and a range of cultivated crops can be said to characterize settlement throughout northwestern south Asia, despite the earlier development of agriculturally based societies such as that of the Harappan in the Indus Valley (Webber 1999; Fuller 2001, 2003).
Discussions about the origins of agriculture in southwestern Asia typically emphasize the development of cereal (rather than legume) cultivation among more sedentary hunter-gatherers, practices which eventually amalgamate with the close management of flocks of sheep and goats. Both represent the intensification of food production, which reinforces or enables the development of more highly nucleated, denser, and larger settlements, which in this region are often subsequently manifested as tells or mounds, formed through the accumulation of debris through the rebuilding of often mud-brick structures in highly restricted areas. In general it is agreed that population and the exploitation of surrounding areas increases markedly. Arguments over causality for this trajectory usually rely on some measure of stress, whether through climatic and environmental changes and consequent alterations in available resources, or population pressure, for example (Binford 1968; Cohen 1977; Henry 1985; Köhler-Rollefson 1988; Bar-Yosef and Belfer-Cohen 1992; Bar-Yosef and Meadow 1995), although more recent authors tend to move away from single causal factors and toward contingent processes. Others such as Cauvin (2000) and Hodder (1990) have emphasized the importance of social or symbolic factors at some stage of agricultural development, and have drawn parallels between increasing societal and “natural” control. Others have argued that social competition between various segments of society provided the vehicle for economic intensification, which led ultimately to food production: a situation in which particular foods or animals were seen as desirable prestige or exchange goods, following the lines suggested by Bender (1978) and Hayden (1990). Because of the overwhelming focus on agricultural origins (cf. Byrd 1992), in contrast to areas such as Europe, relatively little attention has been paid to the spread of farming as a process, although evidence of the spread of agricultural practices can be found from Turkmenistan and Pakistan to western Turkey within a few millennia. A recent analysis by Colledge et al. (2004) of preserved crops and associated weeds shows compositional similarities in the Levantine core, Cyprus, and Greece, which demonstrates shared early agricultural practices among the earliest farmers in these regions and suggests one set of direct connections or migration routes. It is important to emphasize the behavioral and geographic contingency of domestication, especially relating to cereals and livestock. The plants and animals which were eventually cultivated and herded were only a few among those originally utilized. However, these contingent outcomes eventually allowed the highly productive—but risky—integration of animals and crops in what proved to be a notably expansive and relatively flexible form of subsistence (Harris 1996:557).
Mesoamerica
Mesoamerica and perhaps northern South America are characterized by the development of maize, beans, and squash. Maize, nowadays the most globally important crop of American domesticates, was derived from the wild plant teosinte (Iltis 1983). Most models suggest that domestication first occurred in south-central Mexico, where excavations of cave sites have found the remains of wild and domesticated varieties, but indirect and often uncertainly dated evidence of pollen (showing early manipulation and clearance of vegetation) and maize-type phytoliths (formed from silicates deposited in plant cells) has been used to argue for earlier and more widespread domestication and spread (Benz and Long 2000; Fritz 1994; Hastorf 1999; McLung de Tapia 1992; Pearsall 1994, 1995). The current consensus is that maize was domesticated by around 5500 B.P. in south-central Mexico, and that during the subsequent 2,000 years its use spread both north and south. Although relatively few sites are known compared with southwestern Asia, a different pattern seems to be emerging, in which plants were first domesticated within relatively mobile communities and incorporated into a suite of use of wild and domesticated resources—perhaps a more sporadic form of horticulture (Flannery 1986; Blake et al. 1992). Agriculture understood in the sense of the cultivation of staple crops capable of supporting dense and relatively settled populations in villages does not occur until much later. This pattern of small-scale use and integration into already existing practices seems to be repeated in many different contexts across the Americas, and it is suggested that maize in particular initially spread as a special, prestige, or at least restricted-use plant, and not because of productivity understood in a modern sense (Hastorf and Johannessen 1994).
The picture for the domestication of beans is even less well-known. It has been argued that both the common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris) and the lima bean (P. lunatus) may have been domesticated twice, in Mexico and in the southern Andes (Kami et al. 1995). However, both were perhaps only recognizably domesticated around 2,500 years ago (but see below). For squash too there are similar problems of recognition and dating, and it is unclear how well associated the triad is in terms of domestication. One could argue this for Mesoamerica and South America in particular, although many questions relating to dating and dietary contribution remain to be answered, and an explanatory focus on the origins and recognition of domestication may not help us answer broader questions about the relation of agriculture to other social and cultural parameters. This is because we have knowledge of the early and widespread use of these plants, and morphological and genetic domestication is not necessarily a good marker of their importance. This argument is perhaps supported by investigations elsewhere in the Americas. There is evidence for the exploitation of many plants, including squash, beans, and various tubers throughout South America. The most important and ubiquitous of the latter group today is the potato (but many other tubers more localized in their occurrence are and were used). For potatoes, the changing size and shape of starch grains has been suggested as a possible marker of domestication, but again the history of cultivation is unclear. There are records of its use back into Late Pleistocene, but finds suggest that it was not until around 4,500 years ago in the central Andes that it became an important cultivated crop (Smith 1995:179). It may be that this is part of a more general pattern in which many areas demonstrate increased reliance on and more intensive production of cultivated and managed foods from around 5,000 to 4,000 years ago. Despite the paucity of remains and clear-cut markers, this is suggested by other lines of evidence. For example, the seed crop quinoa (Chenopodium quinoa) was perhaps domesticated in the southern part of the Andes (Peru) from where its use subsequently diffused north from around 4500 B.P. At approximately the same time there is good evidence for the herding of the llama, such as the prevalence of young bones in assemblages and postholes from fences. There may be various connections between control, corralling, herd management, and the intentional or unintentional cultivation or protection of stands of quinoa (Smith 1995:173–174).
Based on her research in Peru, Hastorf (1999:41) argues for a long history of domestication in the region, with an extended period of local behavioral domestication and regional focus on local resources:
The first evidence for crop plants on the coast comes in the Preceramic III phase, 8000–6000 BC. However, substantial agriculture, with a regular array of fifteen to twenty crops growing up and down the coast, occurs only by the end of the Initial phase, 2100–1400 BC, some 4–5000 years later.
Unlike Mesoamerica, Andean South America eventually integrated animals into these new regimes of subsistence, but the arguments for—and definitions of—domestication are more indirect than the evidence from southwestern Asia. Like Old World camels, to which they are related, llamas (derived from guanaco) and alpaca (from vicuña) do not exhibit clear morphological markers of domestication. The relationship between domesticated, feral, and wild breeds, as with pigs and reindeer in Eurasia, may also complicate such arguments. Nevertheless we can point to the importance of species for certain groups in the past and hence make arguments for subsequent management which we may wish to call “domestication.” A third animal from South America, still locally important for food in the central and northern Andes and perhaps also first domesticated around 4500 B.P. in the former, can be added here: the guinea pig, which is known in the south-central Andes, although it was an important part of the diet for hunter-gatherers for many preceding millennia in many areas (Valdez and Valdez 1997).
The evidence for origins and subsequent histories of domesticated crops and animals is far less certain than in southwestern Asia, but it seems clear that many groups in a wide area of central and southern America were knowledgeably utilizing and perhaps managing, to various degrees, a wide range of plants and animals from the earliest times of occupation. Although subsequent work may show two or more centers of origin of currently widely used and recognizably domesticated crops and animals, it seems likely that the identification of some such centers may be ascribed to contemporary factors such as the potential for the archaeological recognition of domestication, or the subsequent dominance of certain species (such as maize or the potato). Present evidence suggests the integration of various domesticates within relatively slow-changing, often mobile exploitation of various landscapes. At some subsequent point (perhaps in part delayed by the lack of integration of domestic animals) more intensive systems of cultivation appear in association with more aggregated and denser settlements and a higher overall population. But the causes and relationships between these factors are far from clear at present.
China
A third area where crops and animals important on a global scale can be shown to have been first domesticated is southeastern China, for rice and millet, chicken and water buffalo, and pigs. Although the immediate predecessors are poorly known, the most recent claims date the first use of ceramics and the cultivation of wild rice as early as 15,000 B.P. (Zhang 2000; Zhao and Wu 2000). There is more consensus that from around 9,000 years ago on the Yangtze and Yellow Rivers large and densely settled villages with elaborate material culture and cemeteries are known, which certainly relied in part on intensive food management techniques. So far there is no agreement over criteria to securely identify small samples of domesticated rice, but as in Mesoamerica this particular debate may be missing the broader point. Currently the earliest evidence for rice farming is known from the middle Yangtze River, in the Hupei basin (Crawford and Shen 1998; Higham and Lu 1998). The evidence suggests that permanent settlements involving rice cultivation and quite possibly domesticated pigs and other animals were established in these well-watered lowlands perhaps by 8,000 years ago. About 800 kilometers to the east, around Lake T’ai-hu and Hang-chou bay, numerous settlements overlapping in date with the Hupei sites also show good evidence of rice cultivation (from perhaps as early as 7000 B.P.), and the intensive use and probable domestication not only of other aquatic species (water caltrop, fox nut), but also the dogs, pigs, and water buffalo. As with the Hupei basin sites, settlements that may equate to the earliest moves toward reliance on cultivation are not yet well-known. However, the shift as marked by the presence of recognizably domesticated rice may, as in southwestern Asia, have been quick. Experimental work similar to that carried out later on Asian wild cereals suggested that the morphological domestication of rice can be extremely rapid and depends in large part on the harvesting methods used on the wild varieties (Lu 1998).
About 600 kilometers north of the Hupei basin is further evidence that eastern Asia was a center—albeit diffuse—of domestication. The remains of numerous early farming settlements at least partly based on the cultivation of millet have been found around the central Yellow River and its tributaries, and dating from around 8,000 years ago. It has also been suggested that these sites contain the earliest evidence for the integration of chickens and pigs into the agricultural way of life, but many of these sites also present evidence, as with the sites around Hang-chou bay, for the intensive use of a wide variety of plants and animals, gathered, cultivated, hunted, and herded.
The importance of the record of early farming from southeastern China is that it shows that in three widely separated areas (although river valleys especially may provide easy routes of communication) and at approximately the same time, particular types of management practices for plants and/or animals sometimes led to the domestication of regionally or later globally important crops and animals. But the variation (not only between rice areas and millet areas, but also in terms of other components of subsistence and social practices) suggests that these particular outcomes were the contingent results of practices by highly knowledgeable people initially involving a wide spectrum of resources. The list of probable and possible domesticates here—as elsewhere—could easily be extended to include fruit and nut trees, vegetables, and aquatic root crops, for example.
Elsewhere in southern Asia the potential intensive use and management of wild resources such as rice, which had become domesticated in China, appears not to have become widespread until around 5000 B.P., when its use expands rapidly north in China and more gradually in Korea from about 4000 B.P. (Nelson 2000), as well as south throughout southeastern Asia and west to India and Pakistan (Glover and Higham 1996). The Korean situation is more akin to that in Japan, where the highly developed and long-lasting Jomon settlements were founded on fishing, foraging, and hunting, although a few insignificant plants were apparently cultivated by 6300 B.P., and certain trees and tubers may also have been managed; cultivated rice and barley were also known and grown on a small scale by 3000 B.P. (Ikawa-Smith 1980; Aikens and Higuchi 1982; Akazawa 1986; Suzuki 1986; Glover and Higham 1996; Imamura 1996; D’Andrea 2000; Nelson 2000). However, it was not until 2,400 years ago that intensive rice cultivation suddenly appears in southeastern Japan, followed by its rapid spread northward. This suggests that although especially cereal-based farming and agro-pastoralism can enable rapid, expansive demographic growth, often associated with nucleated, highly organized, and strongly hierarchical social and political entities, the existence of farming is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for their existence, as exemplified by the historically or archaeologically known forager groups such as the Calusa of Florida (Marquardt 1988; Reitz 2000), many Pacific Northwest Coast societies (Maschner 1991; Arnold 1996), Korea (Nelson 2000), and the Jomon groups of Japan (Imamura 1996).
Archaeological, ethnographic, and historical evidence demonstrates that hunter-gatherers globally are and were typically knowledgeable about a huge variety of plants and animals, and may use many strategies for their manipulation and management, from irrigation for the provision of suitable habitats (through the damming of rivers for floodwater plants and eels), the replanting or protection of parts of tubers, and the use of fire and other forms of clearance to encourage particular plants and animals such as deer. Dogs were independently domesticated from wolves in many parts of the world by the beginning of the Holocene (Savolainen et al. 2002); pigs in eastern Asia, southwestern Asia, parts of Europe, and America; and cattle in southwestern and southern Asia (Luikart et al. 2001; Troy et al. 2001; Larson et al. 2005; Albarella et al., in press). The intensity and sophistication of many of these systems of “indigenous” management may have been obscured by the later diffusion of other crops and animals, sometimes in association with expanding populations (Spriggs 1996; Bellwood 1996, 2005; Renfrew 1987, 1996, 2000a,b).
Examples of early local cultivation can be found in southeastern Asia and the Pacific. In Papua New Guinea, very early evidence of a form of agriculture has been proposed by Jack Golson at the Kuk swamp. Here irrigation ditches of considerable extent were used to suggest that taro was being managed or cultivated by 9,000 years ago, but within a subsistence system which integrated such cultivation with the harvesting of wild plants and hunted animals. However, there is no direct evidence of such cultivation (yams, taro, a type of banana, and sugar cane have all been proposed); and there is much controversy over the places of origin of domesticates; about definitions as well as the recognition of agriculture, wild food production, or horticulture; and about the timing of such practices (Gosden 1995; Harris 1995; Yen 1995; Bayliss-Smith 1996; Gosden and Head 1999). It seems clear that many forms of manipulation of the landscape and no doubt species within it took place in the Pleistocene and Holocene, and that this may have led to local domestication (Hope and Golson 1995). However, such practices (and trajectories) may have been overlain by processes such as the important Lapita horizon of around 3,500 years ago throughout much of the island Pacific (Kirch 1997), which was associated with the widespread introduction or spread of varieties of the present staple species (taro, yam, banana) as well as domestic animals derived from southeastern Asia (pigs, dogs, chickens).
One may usefully contrast areas where cereal-based farming was never introduced until modern colonial times, if at all (Australia, the Pacific, parts of South and North America, and southern Africa), and those where it was (Indus Valley, central Asia, Europe, northern Africa, southeastern Asia, Japan, and parts of southern Africa and North and South America). Interestingly, for example, despite contact between northern Australian groups and Papua-New Guinea farmers, Australian Aborigines, though using many manipulative techniques, never adopted agriculture as a way of life. This has been variously explained as a result of resource affluence, low population pressure, and ideological or cosmological reasons for resistance, such as different perceptions of the environment in which northern Australian groups were typically guardians rather than exploiters of the land (Harris 1995). This is another example where neither lack of knowledge nor an unsuitable environment can be argued to be the factor limiting the spread of farming. This may be a case where tuber/tree-based systems prove less expansive when conditions for colonization (such as the unpeopled islands of the Pacific) are not present.
A second and relatively well-understood case where indigenous strategies were eventually replaced by a fairly uniform system of agro-pastoralism is that of Europe. Here monolithic models of the spread of farming from southwestern Asia have been progressively dismantled over recent years. Most archaeologists would agree that the processes of the spread of farming within Europe were, as elsewhere, regionally and chronologically highly variable (Zvelebil 1986, 1996; Gebauer and Price 1992; Price and Gebauer 1992, 1995; Price 2000). During the earlier Holocene much of Europe was populated by forager groups predominantly relying for subsistence on combinations of hunted wild pig and red deer, fish and shellfish, and much less well understood but certainly important vegetable components (Zvelebil 1994). These latter sometimes included wild cereals and lentils (e.g., at Franchthi in south-central Greece; Hansen 1992), various fruits and nuts, and possibly managed roots and tubers such as water chestnut in northern Europe. Game was almost certainly manipulated by the maintenance of forest clearings, and boar may have been managed as a tamed animal and perhaps locally domesticated in the Baltic region, Germany, and the Mediterranean (Zvelebil 1995c; Larson et al. 2005; Albarella et al. 2006; cf. Rowley-Conwy 1995, 1999).
From around 9000 B.P. in southeastern Europe, we see the establishment of communities reliant on agro-pastoralism using domesticated crops and animals—predominantly sheep, wheat, and barley. Sometimes these nonnative animals and domesticated crops were certainly introduced by colonists, as on the islands of Crete and Cyprus in the Mediterranean (Broodbank and Strasser 1991; Colledge et al. 2004), and this picture has tended to be reinforced elsewhere in southeastern Europe by the marked change in dwellings associated with farming settlements (substantial nucleated villages) compared to the archaeologically less visible forager communities. Other areas where the spread of farming may largely have occurred through the demographic expansion of farming populations include much of central Europe, from northern Hungary to eastern France, northern Germany, and southern Poland, with the rapid spread of the relatively homogeneous LBK culture between 7400 and 7000 B.P., although this time with cattle as the major animal (Quitta 1960; Pavuk 1980; Pavlu et al. 1986; Bogucki 1988; Moddermann 1988; Lunning 1991; Bogucki and Grygiel 1993; Gronenborn 1998; Zvelebil 2000a). Yet the rapid spread of the LBK could not have been accomplished by the farmer migration alone and must have included the integration of local hunter-gatherer groups (Gronenborn 1999; Lukes and Zvelebil 2004; Dolukhanov et al. 2005; Zvelebil 2005). Elsewhere, such as in southern Scandinavia, the circum-Baltic, parts of Iberia, the whole of eastern Europe and much of northwestern Europe, the spread of farming was much delayed, and sophisticated forager societies only eventually incorporated or wholly adopted farming techniques of subsistence (Arias 1999; Gronenborn 1999; Price 2000). It is now known to be likely that similar differences existed within regions, with a marked contrast between northern and eastern Greece showing rapid establishment of farming compared with the south and west, for example (Halstead 1996). It was not until after 5,000 years ago that the bulk of Europe, including the far northwest, could be said to be largely dependent on farming.
The spread of farming within Europe was thus a mosaic of sometimes protracted and complex processes ranging from small-scale colonization and population expansion, incorporation, integration, and resistance between various communities, and diffusion, with the partial and complete adoption of agro-pastoralism (Lahr et al. 2000; Gkiasta et al. 2003; Pinhasi and Pluciennik 2004; Price 2000; Arias 1999; Zilhao 2003; Zvelebil 2000, 2004). The most influential framework for modeling these processes has been the availability-substitution-consolidation model first suggested by Zvelebil and Rowley-Conwy (1984) for northern Europe, in which a variety of factors may promote or inhibit the commencement, nature, length, and geographic extent of the phases of the knowledge of (availability) of farming traditions, their variable use within societies (substitution), but the eventual replacement of other subsistence systems by farming (consolidation). However, this model too has been criticized on the grounds of assuming an inevitable linear progression toward farming and focusing too narrowly on subsistence practices as a marker of change (Armit and Finlayson 1992; Pluciennik 1998; cf. Zvelebil 1996).
Future directions for researching the agricultural transition are likely to focus on archaeological projects in areas not traditionally associated with the origins of agriculture, such as Australia and the South Pacific, and on genetic research. Indeed, archaeogenetics is among the fastest-growing areas of archaeological investigations (Refrew and Boyle 2000; Richards 2003; Jones 2004; King and Underhill 2003). A new technique that promises to shed light on the spread of farming in Europe and elsewhere has been the study of modern human and ancient genetic distributions and lineages. The role genetics may play in explaining the human dimensions of agricultural invention and spread was first made in the 1970s, when Ammerman and Cavalli-Sforza suggested that if population growth by farming communities—demic diffusion—was the major process involved in transition to farming in Europe, it might still be recognized in modern genetic distributions, seen as a southeast to northwest frequency distribution gradient (Ammerman and Cavalli-Sforza 1971, 1973, 1984). Subsequent work by Cavalli-Sforza and others extended this approach methodologically and geographically, culminating in the volume by Cavalli-Sforza et al. (1994). Principal component analysis and subsequent mapping suggested gradients of distributions (Cavalli-Sforza et al. 1994). Cavalli-Sforza argued that the first principal component (in effect, the largest influence) represented the oldest genetic signal and was related to genetic processes associated with the transition to farming. Since these genetic patterns are similar in geography to the distribution of Indo-European languages, archaeologist Colin Renfrew (1987) suggested that the language family and the genetic relatedness spread together with expanding farmer populations. Often called the language-farming hypothesis, this idea has since been espoused by certain archaeologists and population geneticists for the spread of farming around the world and into Europe especially (Ammerman and Biagi 2003; Barbujani et al. 1995; Bellwood 1996, 2005; Cavalli-Sforza 1996, 1997; Chikhi et al. 2002; Diamond and Bellwood 2003; Renfrew 1992, 1994, 1996, 1999, 2000a,b).
The details of the work of Cavalli-Sforza et al. and Renfrew have been subjected to extensive critique on both methodological and evidential grounds (Mallory 1989; Fix 1996; Moore 1995; Pluciennik 1996; Terrell and Stewart 1996; Weng and Sokal 1995; Zvelebil 1995; Lasker and Crews 1996; Clark 1998; McEachern 2000). Finally, in the past few years new areas of research involving genetics have arisen: the study of ancient DNA, often difficult and problematic because of the variable degradation of DNA strands; the study of (male-specific) Y-chromosome markers (Semino et al. 1996, 2000; Malaspina et al. 1998; Renfrew and Boyle 2000) and of maternally transmitted mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) (Richards 2003; Richards et al. 1996, 1998, 2000; Wilkinson-Herbots et al. 1996; Sykes 1999; Simoni et al. 2000).
These sets of data indicate the following conclusions:
1. Principal component analysis of the classical markers. The first principal component explains, according to Cavalli-Sforza (Ammermann and Cavalli-Sforza 1984; Cavalli-Sforza and Cavalli-Sforza 1995), about 26–28 percent of the modern genetic variation of Europe, mapped as a gradual distribution in values between the Near East and northwestern Europe, the directionality of spread indicated could be from either margin. Recently Cavalli-Sforza has revised the postulated “Neolithic” gene contribution downward. The two strands of genetic evidence are not so far apart now, and agree on a minority contribution to the European gene pool of perhaps between 20 and 28 percent deriving from populations originating in the Near East (Sykes 1999:138).
2. Mitochondrial DNA analysis, which seems to be more reliable than the component analysis of classical markers because of the fewer assumptions involved, shows a similar trend, but accounts for only 10–20 percent of mitochondrial sequences (Richards et al. 1996, 1998, 2000; Sykes 2003) across Europe, this figure declining to less than 10 percent toward the margins of the continent, as in northern Spain or Scandinavia.
3. Y-chromosomal DNA analysis (passed by males to males only) falls between the nuclear and the mitochondrial evidence. The frequency of Y-chromosome haplotypes originating in the Near East averages about 20 percent, with 25 percent in the Balkans, and less than 10 percent in western Europe (Semino et al. 2000). However, Chikhi et al. (2002) recently argued that the geographic distribution of Y-chromosomes from modern Europeans indicates that colonizing farmers from southwestern Asia represent an average contribution of 50 percent across the continent. The difference between male (Y-chromosome) and female (mitochondrial) genetic patterns among modern people may retain significant information about prehistoric cultural practices such as marital residence (patrilocality versus matrilocality), regional endogamy, and migration among farmers, hunter-gatherers, or those in the initial process of adopting farming (Zvelebil 1995; Niiskanen 1998; Villems 1998; Kunnap 2000; Zvelebil and Lillie 2000). In Europe, for example, where modern mtDNA patterns are geographically more homogeneous than Y chromosomes (Seielstad et al. 1998), it could be that Neolithic men from the small groups of the earliest farmers intermarried with indigenous hunter-gatherer women (Bentley et al. 2002, 2003).
Much work to date has been focused on human material in an attempt to explore the demographics of farming spread, but research into the genetics of plants and animals (Bradley et al. 1998; Brown 1999; Allaby 2000; Kozlov and Lisitsyn 2000; MacHugh and Bradley 2001; Larson et al. 2005; Albarella et al. 2006) is enabling better understanding of the place(s) and time depth of genetic domestication. In the case of Near East and Europe, for example, the genetic evidence supports the notion of a dual origin of domestic wheat in the Levant, which spread west through two geographical corridors: across the Mediterranean through southeastern and central Europe (Jones et al. 1998); while genetic studies of female extant cattle suggest two independent centers of domestication, one in northern Africa, the other in Anatolia/Near East. Most of European cattle are thought to derive from the Near Eastern center of origin (Troy et al. 2001). Mitochondrial DNA studies of phylogeography of wild boar, on the other hand, reveal multiple centers of domestication across Eurasia with European wild boar as the principal progenitor of modern domestic European pigs (Larsson et al. 2005).
Another technique which has recently been expanded is isotope fractionation in human (and other animal) skeletons. The potential of carbon isotopes to infer diet was identified more than twenty years ago in the pioneering work of Tauber (1979, 1981). Since then, measurement of isotopes of carbon, nitrogen, and sulfur has enabled interpretations relating to dietary content such as marine versus land-based foods or even particular plants such as maize (van der Merwe 1982; Hastorf 1991; Sealy et al. 1991; Macko et al. 1999; Richards and Hedges 1999; Schulting 1999; for a recent review, see Schulting and Richards 2000). Concerning the onset of the Neolithic in Britain, for example, carbon and nitrogen isotopes show that marine foods were rapidly and abruptly abandoned in favor of terrestrial foods (Richards et al. 2003). More recently, measurement of strontium isotopes, used to infer mobility (rather than diet) from human skeletons, has indicated that the first LBK farmers in southern Germany were quite mobile (Price et al. 2001), patrilocal, and possibly even that they intermarried with hunter-gatherer women along the agricultural frontier (Bentley et al. 2002). In striking contrast, it appears that the more generalist groups of early Neolithic Thailand were matrilocal (Bentley et al. 2005), which may imply some relationship between marital residence and the how readily the transition to agriculture occurs.
All the above suggests clearly that one could have, in theory and practice, not only manipulation and management but full agriculture without domestication, as with many root crops and animals still used today. The notion of primary centers has been important in focusing attention on the sources of important crops and animals today. However, such work is in effect based largely on the contingency of genetic domesticability and does not necessarily aid us in understanding the potential historical and social processes involved. Investigation of trajectories in regions where cultivation or animal management did not lead to domestication, or where there has been oscillation between agricultural and nonagricultural or pastoral regimes (the Baltic region of Europe, parts of southern Africa), warns against unidirectional or simple causal models. Domestication has not been found a helpful concept for exploring subsistence changes and practices, including intensive cultivation in much of the Pacific. Even if one does adhere to domestication (more broadly defined in terms of manipulative relationships) as a criterion of the emergence of agriculture, then many other areas can be seen as participating independently in the sorts of processes concerned, for example, Europe for dogs, pigs, and cattle; central and northern Asia for horses and reindeer, respectively; and southeastern Asia, Australia, and parts of Africa for root crops. All this calls into question the traditional adherence to identifying core areas for the origins of agriculture (as currently defined) as the only way of explaining its causes. It also raises questions about generalized explanations that the intentional avoidance of risk or uncertainty in subsistence may be considered as the prime mover for either agricultural emergence (Smith 1995) or the adoption and spread of farming. The long delays in the adoption of certain domesticated crops as a subsistence mainstay in much of Eurasia and in eastern North America, among other places, suggests that this explanation is insufficient, at least.
There are still many areas of the world in which the basic sequences and chronologies relating to the origins and/or early spread of farming are poorly understood—central, southern, and southeastern Asia and sub-Saharan Africa are two obvious examples. It is also clear that there has been a focus on understanding the origins of major contemporary cultivated crops and domesticated animals, while methodological and other difficulties (finance, accessibility, and traditions of research) have enabled less to be said about certain areas, the management of non–sexually reproduced plants such as tubers, and possible predomestication cultivation. No doubt more refined existing as well as new methodologies in a variety of fields will help us delineate early subsistence practices and their consequences with more precision. Multidisciplinary techniques and approaches are essential if we wish to understand the origin and spread of agriculture as a sociocultural as well as an empirical phenomenon. For example, new ways need to be found to model the genetic consequences of communities understood as social groups with porous boundaries—as networks rather than clearly bounded populations—perhaps in conjunction with bone isotope analysis allowing the recognition of individual movements. Identification of “forager” subsistence management strategies has already blurred the line between hunter-gatherers and farmers in some aspects and in some parts of the world; similarly it seems that there are many hybrid strategies for procuring subsistence and that many early farmers may often have been more mobile, more flexible, and more various than traditional models have suggested. Even if we can identify areas where certain forms of farming such as cereal-based agro-pastoralism do appear to have been consistently applied and have spread rapidly, in other areas this is not the case. Archaeologically we can look forward to expanding our knowledge of the range of agricultures once practiced in the world and the variability of trajectories throughout the transitions to farming. Understanding the meaning, as well as the consequences of the origins of agriculture, is perhaps where the most interesting research and synthesis will be done in the coming decade.
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