Research into early agriculture often focuses on ‘origins': the earliest indications of plant and animal management, and the development of domesticated characteristics that distinguish crops and livestock from their wild progenitors.

Understanding the time depth, sequence, and pace of these developments is crucial for assessing how and why particular groups of hunter-gatherers became farmers. Following these transitions, however, it was the social and ecological consequences of established agri­culture that shaped communities around the world.

This chapter surveys the nature of early agricultural communities, focus­ing on archaeological evidence for the social life of early farmers in different parts of the world. In many ways early agricultural societies are extremely diverse, but underlying this range of cultural forms are striking similarities, suggesting that agriculture tended to constrain and direct social behaviour along certain lines. In a pair of seminal papers, Kent Flannery compared the development of houses and settlements of early farmers in West Asia and Mesoamerica, and found remarkable convergences.¹ Early sedentary settle­ments often resemble loose clusters of simply constructed huts, such as those occupied by extended family groups of complex foragers or forager­cultivators; ethnographically such settlements feature shared storage facil­ities. With increasing dependence on agriculture, nuclear families emerged as the characteristic residential unit, occupying separate houses with internal storage facilities. The implication is that the risks and rewards of agriculture ^[216] shifted from the level of the group to the level of the nuclear household. Flannery notes that there are multiple reasons why sharing might tend to become more restricted in early farming communities. First, agriculture raises productivity of land but also variance around average production; second, restricted sharing makes it easier to monitor balanced reciprocal exchanges and to avoid ‘cheating'; and third, reduced sharing, restricted land tenure, and increasingly private storage make economic decision­making (at the household level) more flexible.

The word ‘community' derives from the Old French/Anglo-Norman communite, which in the medieval period could refer to any group of people living in the same place, usually sharing a common cultural and ethnic identity, ranging in scale from monastic bodies to entire populations of nations or states. The communitas of classical Latin conveyed an even broader sense of participation, fellowship, joint possession, or use. In this chapter, the term community refers not only to people living together in houses and settlements but also to more elastic forms of social cohesion through periodic aggregation and/or exchanges of materials. A relevant concept is that of ‘communities of practice', which form around shared interests and are perpetuated through regular participation and exchange of knowledge.^[217] The aim here is to consider how early farming and herding regimes con­tributed to the formation or perpetuation of ‘communities' at varying social and spatial scales, and to assess how far community ‘types' or trajectories of community development can be recognized cross-culturally.

In order to address these issues, the chapter will focus on archaeological evidence for, first, the nature of agricultural practice, and second, forms and scales of collective social action, from residential families to work parties, ritual ‘congregations', and broader networks. The chapter will present three pairs of case studies, each comprising a major centre of agricultural origin involving domestication of key cereal crops and an adjacent region of agricultural spread/adoption: West Asia and Europe; China and Korea; and Mesoamerica and the Southwest. While West and East Asian agricultural origins incorporated domestication of animals as well as cereal crops, the establishment of agriculture in Mesoamerica involved a major cereal (maize) but no animal domesticates aside from the dog. Outram (Chapter 6) provides a case study on specialized pastoralist groups in Central Asia that can usefully be compared with the farming societies dealt with here. In the final part of the chapter, similarities and divergences among the case studies will be reframed in a concluding discussion on the nature of early agricultural communities.