Pathways to agriculture

Given that most of the world's population relies on a small number of plants and a smaller number of animals for most of its food, it is easy to assume that the advantages of farming must have been obvious to any prehistoric hunter-gatherers given the opportunity to engage in it.

For archaeologists, this assumption received a severe dent in the late 1960s and 1970s from the publication of ethnographic studies of the few remaining populations of present-day hunter-gatherers. Even in the arid Kalahari desert, for example, the small bands of !Kung San people still living there by hunting and gathering were shown not to live an uncertain hand to mouth existence but to enjoy a secure diet of preferred and less attractive emergency foods, and to spend far less time and effort each day securing them than neighbouring subsistence farmers - they spent as much time socializing as they did securing their food supply. The ‘downside' was that they needed to stay mobile, not accumulate lots of possessions as everything had to be carried from one campsite to another, and keep their numbers down (as the mother on the move could only carry one baby) so infanticide was not uncommon. Even so, ethnographies such as those of the !Kung San were influential in persuading archaeologists to think about scenarios for the origins of agriculture in which, rather than hunter-gatherers seeing the advantages of agriculture as obvious, external ‘push' factors such as climate change or population pressure might have pushed hunter-gatherers into adopting the farming life. More recent thinking has tended to postulate internal ‘pull' factors such as social competition or shifts in ideology as possible mechanisms by which hunter-gatherers might have been induced consciously or unconsciously to begin to engage in farming.

Relying on the direct evidence gleaned from the visual analysis of animal bones and seeds, early archaeologists developed limited models for reconstructing the processes of intensification and transformation.

Tropical and subtropical regions of the world offered very little in the way of well- preserved sites, particularly in comparison with dry and arid expanses of Eurasia and Africa. Many of these limitations have now been overcome by systematic investigations in the radically different habitats on all continents, employing both traditional studies of cultigens but also analyses of starch residues (a breakthrough for studying the use of root crops such as yams, taro, and sweet potato in tropical regions). Biomolecular techniques have also revolutionized research on the origins and early history of farming, such as using DNA in modern plants and animals and ancient DNA in archaeological bones and seeds to model domestication histories; analysing the isotope chemistry in human and animal bones from archaeological excavations to establish the diets of the living populations and, in some cases, their migration histories; and analysing organic residues attached to artefacts to identify foodstuffs such as cereal residues on the surfaces of stone tools, or traces of milk, milk products, and animal fat (the latter now identifiable to different species) in the fabrics of pottery sherds. The study of the origins and early history of agriculture requires the concerted efforts of a multidisciplinary archaeology and cognate disciplines, and is being enriched by an ever widening array of scientific techniques of analysis and interpretation.

One assumption that has underpinned a great deal of scholarly as well as popular writing about the origins of agriculture has been that it was probably a ‘one-way journey of progress' from being a hunter-gatherer to becoming a farmer, a journey with the goal of learning how to domesticate and manage the plants and animals whose products fill our supermarket shelves today. The academic literature is full of models envisaging a step-like sequence of ever more intensive modes of plant and/or animal exploitation, from more or less opportunistic foraging to established systems of farming, much as Hodder Westropp envisaged in 1872.

However, there are examples of late Pleistocene and early Holocene hunter-gatherers engaging in subsistence practices that in one form or another presaged the later relationships to the landscape and natural resources within it that we characterize as agriculture; of ‘failed' experiments in managing plants and animals that today are regarded as natural weeds in the case of plants or natural game in the case of animals; of hunter-gatherers whose experiments with food production were ultimately unsuccessful moments of intensification, creating temporary farmers and herders, who in time reverted back to foraging and hunting for subsistence.

Like modern scientists, however, some experimenters either unwittingly or intentionally manipulated the genetic make-up of plant and animal populations, selecting for traits and characteristics that were more productive or more pleasing and thus preferred. By complex mixes of historically contingent decision-making, these early food producers altered the ecology of the planet. Their subsistence strategies also represented a revolutionary commitment to specific environmental niches that range from dry Sahel to verdant river valleys. Agricultural success often demanded settled populations, who in turn wrought further changes on their landscapes. Sometimes settling down led to the intensification of plant use and food storage, as transitional systems of food production gave way to full-blown domestication. In the Andes, the domestication of camelids such as llama and alpaca occurred around the same time as Chenopodium (quinoa). In Southwest Asia, many farmers living in tell (mound) villages continued to rely on hunted meat. Elsewhere, mixed strategies expanded the domestication of plants together with raising livestock, but the elaboration of these new practices was uneven and uncertain. In many parts of the world the domestication of plants and the onset of cereal agriculture predated the domestication and herding of animals, but the relationship appears to be reversed in Africa (Chapter 18).

Perhaps the dominant message from this book is that the global pathways to food production were many and varied.

The development of agriculture was a profoundly human trajectory, bewilderingly complex and often contradictory in its implications. Human and environmental relationships were transformed as the balances recognizable in the Pleistocene shifted in favour of the survival and expansion of human populations at the expense of the rest of the planet during the Holocene. The world with agriculture has secured for the human species its primacy and dominance over the natural world, with all the uncertainties that the industrialized exploitation of selected plants and animals and associated population expansion represent for the sustainable health of the planet. With the development of a world with agriculture, world history became a human story.

The chapters in this volume consist of three kinds, organized into two groups. The first group (Chapters 2-7) takes a series of themes that we selected in order to illustrate some of the wide range of methods and approaches, including non-archaeological as well as archaeological, that we can call on in the study of the origins and diffusion of agriculture. Their authors were encouraged to explore major research questions, and illustrate their particular approaches, at the global scale. For the periods discussed in this volume, archaeology is the primary source of information about material life before the era of written record-keeping, but as the opening chapters following this introduction illustrate, we can also call on subjects as diverse as genetics and linguistics for invaluable insights into past domestication histories and the dispersal of domestic animals and plants, and frequently the movement of people associated with these. The second group of chapters (Chapters 8-23) are archaeology-based, and discuss current understanding of the beginning of agriculture and the character of early agricultural societies on a region-by-region basis, each regional summary (Chapters 8, 10, 12, 14, 16, 18, 20, 22) being accompanied by a case study (Chapters 9, 11, 13, 15, 17, 19, 21, 23) illustrating in more detail a particular archaeological site or set of sites. Part of the rationale for choosing the system of regional summaries and accompanying focused case studies was so that the latter could convey to the non-archaeological reader in some detail the range of data typically making up the ‘archaeological record' of a site and to illustrate how archaeologists attempt to draw robust and careful inferences from the observations that they make about it, and the patterns that they detect in it, in ways very different from how the subject is sometimes presented by the popular media as romantic story-telling and speculation unfettered by evidence!

<< | >>

↑

Source: Barker Graeme, Goucher Candice (ed.). The Cambridge World History. Volume 2. A World with Agriculture, 12,000 BCE-500 CE. Cambridge University Press,2015. — 668 p.. 2015

Pathways to agriculture

More on the topic Pathways to agriculture: