Conclusions

Several broad conclusions about the social consequences of early agricultural practice emerge from the regional case studies considered here. In areas with an indigenous agricultural transition (West Asia, China, Mesoamerica), there are extended periods during which cultivation (whether technically ‘pre­domestication' or not) was practised by groups displaying some or all of the characteristics that Flannery associates with open, communally oriented compounds; families are distributed across multiple small dwellings, there is much continuity between indoor and outdoor activities, and the external location of storage facilities suggests that they were (at least partially?) shared across the residential group.

Communities may eventually atomize into small-scale households that store their own produce for a range of reasons: to avoid sharing with neighbouring non-kin in growing settlements, for example, and/or to gain a socially competitive advantage by increasing production. Early agricultural households, however, tended to remain firmly embedded in broader scales of community, from the neighbourhood group or cluster of houses to the local settlement and wider regional networks for exchanging materials, livestock, and marriage partners.

In West Asia and China, the emergence of household production was quickly linked with the dual pursuits of farming and herding. The addition of herding was attractive for a number of reasons: it provided a means of spreading risk, banking surplus, improving crop-growing conditions (e.g. through manuring), and maintaining a ready source of meat for hosting feasts. The combination of crops and livestock added flexibility and robusticity to household farming, and eventually undermined very dense cohesion among households in early agricultural villages, such as the West Asian ‘megasites'.

In regions such as Europe and Korea, to which farming spread from core areas of origin, ‘packages' of crops and livestock (the role of the latter being much less certain in Korea) were adopted, and with them the potential for resilient household economies. In Europe the establishment of mixed agri­culture was clearly linked with the appearance of distinct residential units storing their own produce. In environmentally marginal circumstances, elements of the ‘communal compound' living arrangement re-emerge, underscoring the possibility that risks could be shifted back from the house­hold to community depending on ecological and social conditions.

In Mesoamerica and the Southwest, where herding did not develop, success­ful households diversified their production in other ways, and the long-term social consequences - such as the Olmec civilization of Mesoamerica and the great houses and kivas of Chaco Canyon in the Southwest - were dramatic. It has been suggested that the absence of animal domesticates, and in particular their ‘secondary products' (milk, muscle power, wool/hair), contributed to the collapse of Mesoamerican civilizations when they eventually clashed with European ones.^[263] The fundamental significance of herding, however, is that it enabled flexible and resilient household economies to develop and spread relatively rapidly.

In terms of agricultural practice, a striking convergence across the regional case studies is that household farming, when it emerged, tended to involve high inputs of labour per unit area of arable land. Though these regimes took very different forms - from the wet rice paddy fields of East Asia to various forms of ‘garden-like' agriculture in West Asia and Europe to the ridged plots of Mesoamerica and the grid-gardens of the Southwest - all featured long­term investments in land that would have raised issues of ownership and inheritance. The potentially drastic social impacts of such tensions on wider communities were mitigated in a number of ways, including a degree of co­operative farming within ‘neighbourhood groups' of related families, and feasting (especially meat sharing) at varying social scales.

One of the most fascinating aspects of early agricultural communities is the dramatic ways in which they announced themselves through monumental construction, such as the earthwork enclosures that proliferated across Europe and China and the megalithic funerary monuments of Atlantic Europe and Korea. These monuments emerge in early agricultural contexts that placed a whole new emphasis on the value of labour. On one level, they are statements about the social feat of large-scale labour mobilization. These achievements are all the more remarkable because they arose in small-scale societies that resisted strong traditions of hereditary leadership and lasting social inequalities. They can thus be read as statements about a carefully maintained obligation to invest labour for the benefit of a wider community, despite (or, rather, precisely because of) the continual burden of attending to the interests of the farming household. Less tangible but equally impor­tant to these physical statements of communal effort are the forms of integrative ritual practice that must have been associated with them. Recent cross-cultural research in cognitive anthropology suggests that doctrinal religion, involving frequent, low-intensity ritual (such as weekly visits to the mosque, synagogue, or church), is broadly correlated with dependence on agriculture.^[264] Further work is needed to assess how the emergence of agriculture articulated with new forms of ritual practice and potential for large-scale group cohesion.

There has been much discussion of gender roles in early agricultural societies, but direct archaeological evidence is sparse, and the tentative statements offered in the case studies above are largely based on ethno­graphic analogy and indirect evidence. In a household-based production system, where labour investment was the surest means of safeguarding survival and success, the overriding tendency was presumably for women and men to work together at crucial points in the agricultural calendar, especially harvest time. If anything, therefore, established agriculture might tend to promote equality of status, to the extent that standing was based on hard work. Reality could have been far more complex, however, and poten­tially gendered skills such as hunting and food preparation may well have served to differentiate levels and forms of status in these societies. Activities such as these likely formed the basis of work parties or ‘communities of practice' that brought women and men into regular contact with members of other households and forged relationships across the immediate community that cross-cut kin structure. Indeed, it is evident that the rise of the farming household involved not only new concerns with descent/inheritance and the division of labour, but also with the social ‘weft' of shared interests and identities that bound households together, involving a range of routine and ritual practices.