This volume traces the origins of agriculture and the character of early agricultural communities across the world and surveys the development of the more complex social structures and cultural forms that agriculture enabled.
Until around 11,500 years ago, when the world's climate changed from the Pleistocene (the ‘Ice Ages', a period of dramatic and often abrupt transformations in temperature and precipitation regimes) to our own climatic era termed the Holocene, most of the world's population lived by various combinations of hunting, fishing, and gathering (‘foraging').
A few thousand years later many societies in Eurasia, Africa, and the Americas relied wholly or partly on farming for their food. Arguably the most important event in world history, food production has been linked to significant changes in landscapes and populations that eventually supported the rise of urbanism, increasing complexity, and inequality that dominated the planet's history thereafter and enabled human populations to expand from perhaps 6 million at the end of the Pleistocene to over 7 billion today. The processes that led from foraging to farming and herding took thousands of years to unfold globally. Thus this volume necessarily has not only a global perspective but also a very broad chronology to capture the expansive timeframe of the origins and diffusion of agriculture worldwide. Our timeframe is broadly from the beginnings of the Holocene to the beginning of the Common Era, but in some cases the span may be even bigger, as in some parts of the world behaviours that presaged farming went back well into the Pleistocene and in some regions the diffusion and adoption of agriculture continued well into the first millennium ce and even into the second.1The Oxford English Dictionary defines agriculture as ‘the science and art of cultivating the soil, including the gathering in of the crops and the rearing of [1]
livestock', and farming as ‘the business of cultivating land and raising stock', the mix of science, art, and business in these definitions nicely encapsulating the complex management strategies needed in food production, but also their economic potential.
Domestication is commonly used to describe the process by which plants or animals are separated from the natural or wild population to the extent that the individuals within the population lose their ability to survive and produce offspring without human protection and manipulation. At the same time, however, there is increasing recognition that domestication is not a one-way process, and that when plants, animals, and humans are brought into close proximity, domestication has the potential to affect all three parties to the relationship rather than being just a question of humans learning ways to control plants and animals. Pastoralism is defined in the OED as ‘the practice of keeping sheep, cattle, and other grazing animals', especially in ‘the nomadic, non-industrial society that it implies' in a specialized economic system in which people rely mostly on their livestock (i.e. domestic animals) for their food, as opposed to systems of animal husbandry and stock-rearing in which the keeping of livestock is well integrated with, and frequently ancillary to, the cultivation of crops (Chapter 6). Though once thought to be a primitive form of husbandry that preceded plant cultivation, it is now recognized to be more usually a sophisticated economic system on the edge of, and intimately linked to, state-level agricultural societies.The exploration of a world with agriculture invites a world historical approach. It demands an understanding that is simultaneously both global and local. Many scholars have examined local reverberations of the revolutionary transitions to food production. These often have been site-specific studies by archaeologists, who sometimes have placed their work in a wider context only by considering factors that may have led to the diffusion of agriculture via trade and migration. Until recently few authors have attempted to weave a global perspective. Critical to any broader study of agricultural origins is not only the mapping of expansive regional patterns, but also the interpretation of local ecologies that has framed the understanding of prehistoric behaviour. What continues to confound researchers is the answer to the seemingly simple question of why the advantages of agriculture apparently became obvious to many prehistoric populations in vastly different parts of the world.