A world with agriculture

Before 12,000 bce, the world had few if any signs of agriculture, though plant manipulation may well have a long history stretching back into the late Pleistocene. Certainly there were no agrarian communities and no pastoral societies.

At the beginning of the Holocene, a great variety of familiar foods was enjoyed by successful hunter-gatherers and fishing folk in regions defined by narrow ecological niches that were well explored and successfully exploited for millennia. That changed dramatically with the advent of new subsistence strategies that maximized the potential for population growth. Whether the new menu relied on domesticated rice or quinoa, pigs or guinea pigs, diets became cultural elaborations that were ever more focused on inten­sively cultivated and locally bred food. Food traditions eventually developed around staple crops which, often after much resistance, emerged as the superstars of each culture's diet. Meanwhile, trade and exchange of foodstuffs also eventually contributed exotic flavours to what was found in kitchen gardens and local fields.

One area of science that is transforming the agenda is the analysis of stable isotopes or body chemistry for indicators of diet and movement/migration. There are several examples in this volume of how the technique has given us invaluable insights into dietary regimes at the scale of a community changing from, say, a marine to a terrestrial diet. Change may also have occurred within communities, producing differences based on age and/or gender, and between communities, for example the consequence of marriage partners moving between adjacent villages of foragers and farmers.

In the past archaeologists often assumed that migrating farmers must have been the primary or indeed only process by which domestic animals and plants spread from one region to another, but the growing evidence for different uses of the new resources in adjacent societies, and for extraordinary linkages across huge areas (like phytoliths of bananas, a plant almost certainly first domesticated in New Guinea, turning up in Sri Lanka and West Africa at bafflingly early dates), suggests that things were often not nearly so simple. Certainly the process of ‘food globalization' implies social connectivities between neighbouring and far-flung communities that are a priority to investigate in the next phase of research.

The evidence of cases of long-lived resistance to the new foods and to the technologies of their management reminds us of the dangers of projecting our own notions of post-Enlightenment rationality onto the decision-making of prehistoric people. The study of the beginnings of farming has long been characterized by assumptions that economic drivers familiar to us would have played the dominant factor in decision-making, for example in decisions to experiment with or adopt and manage new resources. However, the fact that the diet of the world's population today depends on a very few plant staples does not mean that the same plants were valued from the outset for their capacity to feed people (indeed, to feed more people than existing food sources).

We can well imagine the magic and mystery the new resources may have held for many societies, far removed from the humdrum packets on super­market shelves in our own world. In fact striking evidence has emerged at some of the earliest sites where ‘initial farming' was practised in Southwest Asia that the cereal seeds, the flint sickle blades that would have been used to harvest them, and the grindstones that would have been used to process them are all found in highly ritualized contexts, suggesting that their use involved complex rituals and ceremonies (Chapter 8, p. 240). Dividing the world of the first farmers into a domestic sphere of houses and fields and rational decision­making that we can understand in terms of our own economic models, on the one hand, and irrational beliefs and practices played out in burials, ceremonial monuments, and the like, on the other, is surely unwise even if we cannot begin to investigate the worldviews of early farming societies in most regions of the world with anything of the sophistication that can be applied to the interpretation of the rich European evidence. We need to remember that for many foraging societies, engaging in the cultivation of mysterious and magical new foods may have been at least as much about cultivating social relationships as about increasing calories and filling stomachs.