Regional narratives, comparisons, and connectivities

The chapters discussing major world regions provide readers with an outline of the global patterning of research into agricultural practices and their diffusion, and their accompanying case studies illustrate both a typical site or sites from the region discussed in the companion chapter and how

Introduction: a world with agriculture archaeologists use the evidence from specific sites to interpret the past.

Southwest Asia (the ‘Near East') has probably been the greatest focus of scholarly attention in this field of enquiry and remains an influential model for how world historians continue to think about the origins and impact of agriculture. Among the key domesticates here were sheep, goat, cattle, pigs, barley, and the ‘primitive' wheats emmer and einkorn. Because of the preservation of evidence in the region's arid conditions and because of the visibility of later achievements based on agriculture (the tell mounds and other monumental architecture of the world's first cities), Southwest Asia remains a remarkably influential region for the theoretical concepts used to examine the Neolithic.

change in Southwest Asia without removing the primacy of the region in the narrative of agricultural origins, though we have to remember that rather similar environmental conditions favourable to the wheat/barley/sheep/ goat mix extended eastwards across the Iranian plateau to Afghanistan and Pakistan and into northwest India as far as the Himalayas, large parts of which have been and remain closed to archaeological fieldwork, so the traditional view that the ‘hilly flanks of the Fertile Crescent' (the uplands of the Levant, the Taurus mountains of Turkey, and the Zagros mountains of Iran and Iraq) were an exclusive domestication centre for the cereal/sheep/ goat system may turn out not to be entirely true, as already implied by some of the genetic studies of the plants and animals.

Influenced by the assumed primacy of Southwest Asia, it has long been thought that agriculture in South Asia originated with or was influenced by population movements from West Asia. This question of the relative impor­tance of migrations by farmers versus the adoption of domesticates by the indigenous population of hunter-gatherers has been difficult to answer, but in Chapter 10 Eleanor Kingwell-Banham, Cameron Petrie, and Dorian Fuller certainly demonstrate a much more complex set of dynamics for the region's agricultural story than commonly assumed, with at least three clear path­ways. The first is the early development of farming in the northwest, with the establishment of permanent settlements such as Mehrgarh in Baluchistan, featured in a case study by Cameron Petrie (Chapter 11), with the full suite of the ‘Neolithic package', including Near Eastern-style grain-based breads and mud-brick village architecture, but not (at first) pottery. Genetic evidence confirms multiple clusters of ancestral barley and wild varieties of ancestral einkorn and emmer wheat originating outside the region. Similarly, genetic research on the spread of animals (modern domestic goats and the wild ancestor, the bezoar, as well as cattle and sheep) has produced a complicated picture of both diffusion and possible indigenous innovation (the zebu). Mehrgarh in its later phases also figured prominently in the early history of craft production (pottery, copper metallurgy, and baskets), continuing evi­dence of the nexus of far-flung economic and social relationships in which such a settlement was located. In the monsoonal Ganges plain of central and northeast India, hunter-fisher-gatherer societies used pottery and ground stone, and wild rice was one of the plants they collected, but people only developed a commitment to rice farming thousands of years later, resulting in large mounded settlements. This region also seems to have been the location of the domestication of the pigeon pea (Cajanus cajan).

Introduction: a world with agriculture the herding of sheep, goats, and cattle into their traditional lifestyles, and domesticated plants such as locally available millets and pulses. The more nuanced interpretations of the evidence call into question the respective roles of trans-regional connections and interactions, on the one hand, and bottom-up local processes of experimentation, on the other.

South Asia also marks one of the world's most important and deep-seated culinary divides, from the tradition of grinding flour, baking bread, and roasting foods that extends from the first farming villages of Southwest Asia to those of northwest India, to the boiling and steaming of grains and other foods characteristic of East Asian methods of food preparation. It is significant in this respect that the first pottery was manufactured by late Pleistocene hunter-gatherers in parts of China far earlier than in most regions of the world, around 18,000 years ago, for boiling fish and plant foods. The reasons for the divide are unclear, but they emphasize how transitions to farming and the addition of domesticates were not simply a matter of calories, economic efficiency, and so on, but also involved matters of cultural norms and taste, a point to which we return in the final section of this chapter. Genetic studies, including those by Xinyi Liu, Dorian Fuller, and Martin Jones (Chapter 12), suggest that there was a protracted process of domestication in a centre or centres in northern China stretching down from the beginning of the Holocene to perhaps around 8000 bce, a process that included the same kind of ‘pre-domestication cultivation' practices now evident with wheat and barley in Southwest Asia. As seen in the case study of Xinglonggou by Xinyi Liu, Zhijun Zhao, and Guoxiang Liu (Chapter 13), domesticated foxtail and broomcorn millets then spread westwards, ulti­mately across the Eurasian steppes, to Europe.

Claims for extremely early (late Pleistocene) domestic rice in central and southern China have been made in some of the Chinese literature. However, the analysis of large samples of carbonized seeds and threshing debris col­lected by the large-scale systematic washing of bulk samples of sediment from excavations (see the illustrations in Chapter 12) has shown that, though morphological changes indicative of incipient domestication can be detected in rice remains by about 4000 bce, associated with the beginning of paddy technologies, gathering wild rice was just one aspect of Holocene foraging

systems that otherwise relied mostly on hunting, fishing, and collecting wild plant foods such as acorns and water chestnuts. The latter were only gradu­ally replaced by rice as a dietary staple by about 3000 bce. This was also about the time that domestic rice and rice-farming technologies spread south from the Yangtze to the southern provinces of China. By 2000 bce all five of the legendary ‘five grains' described in the Anyang oracle bones of the Shang state (probably broomcorn and foxtail millet, soybeans, wheat or barley, and hemp, though the list varies somewhat) were being grown in China. Wheat and barley, like domesticated sheep, goats, and cattle, probably reached China from the steppes to the west (and originally Southwest Asia and Europe) during the course of the third millennium bce.

InJapan (Chapter 14), as in China, late Pleistocene hunter-gatherers (here named the Jomon Culture) were making pottery to assist with food prepara­tion, in this case from around 14,000 bce. The traditional narrative has been that Jomon people practised hunting, fishing, and gathering through much of the Holocene, like Mesolithic people in Europe, with the rich resources of lakes, rivers, forests, and coastlines sustaining more or less permanent villages; and that Yayoi farmers then crossed from Korea and mainland China around 500 bce, bringing with them wet rice farming and pig husbandry along with a new set of material culture.

The first evidence for rice farming in mainland Southeast Asia, as described by Huw Barton (Chapter 16), dates to about 1,000 years after it spread from the Yangtze valley to southern China, and as with Japan the traditional model has been that it was introduced to the new region by migrating Neolithic rice farmers and thence via Taiwan to island Southeast Asia and the wider Pacific region beyond. The fact that many present-day people speak languages belonging to the Austronesian language family has stimulated studies of the possible origin in space and time of these languages, and the dominant model for two or more decades, proposed in the greatest detail especially by Peter Bellwood,11 has been that Neolithic farmers speaking a proto­Austronesian language spread across the Pacific, taking with them domestic rice and pigs, in the period c. 3000-1500 bce. As with Jomon ‘foraging' in Japan, there is mounting evidence that through the Holocene (and in the late Pleistocene too, on the evidence of sites like Niah Great Cave in Sarawak, Borneo, and Kosipe in the highlands of New Guinea) the indigenous popula­tion of the region was engaged in a variety of ‘arboricultural' and ‘vegecul- tural' practices, the latter especially with roots and tubers such as taro and sago, sago palms, bananas, and bamboo. (This new knowledge has come especially from the breakthrough in archaeobotanical methodologies that has enabled the recovery of microscopic starch residues, a particular study of Huw Barton, as well as just the macroscopic remains of seeded plants that have traditionally dominated the subdiscipline.) The extraordinary waterlogged site of Kuk in the highlands of New Guinea, as discussed by Tim Denham (Chapter 17), the subject of intensive archaeological fieldwork since Jack Golson began work there in the 1970s, provides a remarkable illustration of the growing evidence in this region for local domestications (such as banana, breadfruit, sugarcane, sago, and associated cultivation technologies) within indigenous systems of arboriculture and vegeculture.

Scholars remain divided about whether a migration of Austronesian farmers best explains the first appearance of domestic rice in island Southeast Asia, or whether it spread by exchange systems which linked

11 Peter Bellwood, First Farmers: The Origins of Agricultural Societies (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004).

the maritime-oriented communities of the mainland Southeast Asia littoral and island Southeast Asia from the beginning of the Holocene (when an area the size of western Europe was flooded by sea-level rise). What does seem clear from the artefactual and botanical evidence, and from isotope studies of diet change in human skeletal remains, is that, as in China and Japan, there was no sudden switch from foraging (or ‘foraging plus' as we might term its integration with arboriculture and vegeculture) to rice farming in either mainland or island Southeast Asia. There appears to have been a long period of active resistance to the new foodstuff, a point to which we return in our Conclusion. The DNA of modern pigs and ancient DNA from pig bones also indicate that domestic pigs did not spread across island Southeast Asia along with rice, but later, and there are indications of some island species of pig being domesticated separately from the main populations of Eurasian pigs. As Huw Barton describes, one recent idea put forward to explain the spread across the region of Neolithic material culture unaccompanied (in most cases) by the domes­ticates is that there must have been some kind of change in social organiza­tion (a rise of elites for example) and belief systems at this time, though what these constituted and why they happened at this time are not clear. As Huw Barton concludes, however, ‘Rather than trying to make people fit into entangled concepts like pre-Neolithic pottery-using cultures or pottery-using Neolithic cultures independent of agriculture, or complex hunter-gatherers independent of rice agriculture, we should ignore the contradictions - which are of our own making - and instead explore the diversity for what it is and what it can teach us about the rich complexity of human adaptation in this remarkable part of the world' - and, we would add, what it implies for many aspects of the study of foraging-farming transitions worldwide.

It has been possible to consider the vast sub-Saharan region of Africa as a single entity only because of the paucity of research and, therefore, evidence of early agriculture. In Chapter 18, Paul Lane's discussion of domestication demonstrates the importance of rethinking regional sequences. As in parts of Southeast Asia, the timescales for the spread of domesticates and the commitment to agriculture - often not at all the same thing, as we have seen in other regions - take us from the early Holocene to well into the first millennium ce. Given the dearth of research in many regions, the research agenda has inevitably concentrated on addressing ‘what?', ‘when?', and ‘where?' questions about transitions to farming, with ‘how?' and still more ‘why?' questions, such as the social and demographic mechanisms involved in the movement of people, crops, and livestock from one region to another, particularly into regions with resident populations of foragers, hardly being addressed, or able to be addressed. What does seem clear so far, and not simply a result of sampling biases, is that animal domestication and pastor- alism often (unusually) preceded crop cultivation. The Nile valley's proximity to the Saharan and West Asian domesticates made northeastern Africa an important crossroads. Beginning with the earliest pastoralists (who had probably domesticated local Sahelian cattle by c. 6000 bce), African popula­tions both experimented locally and carried their innovations to new places through migration, trade, and exchange. The cultivation of millet was widespread across the Sahel by c. 1500 bce but, as exemplified by Kevin MacDonald's case study of Dhar Tichitt in Mauretania (Chapter 19), theories of how millet domestication occurred in the Sahel have varied widely. Once thought to have been a locus of cereal domestication, Dhar Tichitt was argued to have demonstrated the impact of decreasing rainfall on foraging populations, who were pushed into an intensified reliance on millet. However, faunal evidence has since demonstrated dispersed hunter-gatherer populations and pastoral activities and the domestic millet grains are present from the time of the earliest inhabitants and even earlier at other sites to the south in Mali and Ghana (c. 2500-1900 bce). This picture is expected to change as research in the vast region of West Africa continues.

The independent domestication of crops happened in more than one locale, such as of the cereal tef in the Ethiopian highlands and cowpea, oil palm, African rice, groundnut, and fonio in West Africa. Also, there are indications of long histories of the management of oil palm and Canarium, the incense tree, through the Holocene, rather like the arboriculture and vegeculture of island Southeast Asia. By 500-700 ce we can discern hunter­gatherer communities, farming communities, and pastoralists in different parts of Central Africa, and while the ethnographic record cannot be taken as a simple mirror of the past, since farming and herding systems successfully co-existed in more recent times, their co-existence and combining appear to have been a feature of the spread of domesticates southwards, with evidence that ecological niches were manipulated and modified to suit the needs of farming and herding. The domesticates were present at the Southern Cape by some 2,000 years ago. One of the major debates relating to this spread is whether farming was taken south by Bantu-speaking farmers in a relatively straightforward process of migration, or whether more complex scenarios need to be investigated, as in the case of the Austronesian languages in island Southeast Asia.

Compared with Africa, the beginnings of farming in the Americas, as Deborah Pearsall (Chapter 20) notes, have been the subject of intensive study for decades, though some regions remain far better studied than others. Understanding of the broad geographic range of origins has improved dramatically for some key crops, like the transformation of teosinte into maize, which was domesticated in southern and western Mexico, or the Amazon basin's manioc (cassava), today the staple crops for millions around the world. Plant domestication was characterized by multiple independent domestications throughout the continent. These domestications were often accompanied by the same transformations found in other parts of the world, including reduced mobility and the appearance of villages with pottery and elaborate ritual life. The case study of the Nanchoc valley in Peru by Tom Dillehay (Chapter 21) examines an area where between 7,000 and 4,000 years ago foraging and horticultural groups intensified their adoption of cultigens during a critically arid period. However, environmental change cannot have been a simple forcing agent, because social formations reveal that decision­making strategies, risk management, communal resource use, and technolo­gical innovation played key roles in facilitating the movement towards food production - an important general point regarding the role of climate change in agricultural transitions. In turn, agricultural populations expanded into new environments made possible by the successful management of alluvial fan gardening and floodplain exploitation. Thus, new patterns of demo­graphic growth and dynamic ecologies continued to interact even when environmental crises were absent.

In parts of Mesoamerica agricultural regimes transformed landscapes through the employment of irrigation, constructed terracing, fire, modified fields, and canal building. A separate trajectory of plant domestication, of native squash, chenopod, marsh elder, and sunflower, can be discerned from about 3000 BCE in eastern North America. By the time of the European colonial encounters, the cultivation of maize had spread as far north as the Canadian prairies. The controlled use of fire was a common practice, so that, as Deborah Pearsall comments in her chapter, ‘By the time of European contact anthropogenic landscapes existed throughout the Americas.'

In contrast to the relatively recent research focus on the Americas and most of Africa, more than a century of research on the development of early farming societies in Europe has produced a surprisingly dynamic view of agricultural origins and the resultant transformations in Neolithic commu­nity life and worldview, as described by Alasdair Whittle in Chapter 22, a state of research that in time we must hope will be possible to emulate in other less studied regions of the world. He argues that the time is now ripe for more ‘complex, detailed, precise, and regionalized narratives' to move beyond the expectations that once read into the archaeological record a uniform, linear development towards greater complexity and social inequality. Again, the singularity of ‘Europe' as a world region is brought into question. Early Neolithic farmers and agricultural origins were vastly different in central, southeastern, and western Europe, Alpine settlements, and the Mediterranean, yet also, as Whittle emphasizes, these were not disconnected worlds. The quality of the evidence in Europe is well demonstrated by Peter Bogucki and Ryszard Grygiel's case study (Chapter 23) of early Neolithic villages at Brzesc Kujawski in northern Poland dating to the sixth millennium bce. The settlements contain both common features (longhouses, rich bur­ials, pottery, and transformed landscapes) and differences reflected in specia­lized activities (flint manufacture, ground stone and bone tools, decorative jewellery, and copper) and social differentiation. Poor diets, hard labour, and pervasive violence accompanied the mixed strategy of farming and herding activities. The Brzesscs Kujawski farmers were not isolated from their forager neighbours, but rather lived within a short distance (several days' travel) from each other. Thus, the border between farming and foraging/hunting is likely to have been porous and flexible for a very long time.

There is widespread evidence that initial crop farming was often focused on small gardens rather than extensive fields, but markedly different scenar­ios for the imposition or adoption of farming can be constructed to portray the dynamics of 6000 bce and the following millennia during which agricul­ture diffused from other parts of Eurasia. In this confusion (a welcome feature of the quality of the data set compared with most regions of the world), the common thread discerned by Whittle is the materiality of Neolithic life, which he believes bound people together more than it set them apart. As he comments, ‘the range of values held in common by Neolithic people in Europe provided checks and balances against tendencies in the direction of competition, acquisitiveness, and inequality'. Neolithic life was rich in per­formances and rituals, and using this kind of evidence Whittle demonstrates that Europe is the one region where we can get a sense of early farmers' sense of time, their temporalities of futures, presents, and pasts.