The Emergence of Agriculture

A Global View

Peter White, Timothy Denham, Peter White, Timothy Denham

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000158311
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias biológicas
• Subtopic: Historia natural

This volume, the first in the One World Archaeology series, is a compendium of key papers by leaders in the field of the emergence of agriculture in different parts of the world. Each is supplemented by a review of developments in the field since its publication.

Contributionscover thebetter known regions of early and independent agricultural development, such as Southwest Asia and the Americas, as well as lesser known locales, such as Africa and New Guinea. Other contributions examine the dispersal of agricultural practices into a region, such as India and Japan, and how introduced crops became incorporated into pre-existing forms of food production.

This reader is intended for students of the archaeology of agriculture, and will also prove a valuable and handy resource for scholars and researchers in the area.

1 Early agriculture

Recent conceptual and methodological developments

Tim Denham

In this volume, key papers on early agriculture from previous One World Archaeology (OWA) volumes are reprinted (Harris and Hillman 1989; Shaw et al. 1993; Gosden and Hather 1999), together with brief updates that situate the original papers within their contemporary research contexts. However, there have been several major conceptual and methodological developments over the last 15–20 years, to which I draw attention in this introduction. These developments cluster around two inter-related themes: ‘How we conceive agriculture’ (conceptual) and ‘How we investigate agriculture in the past’ (methodological).

New conceptual directions

In this section I outline three conceptual viewpoints that have been developed over the last 20 years, but which are not represented by contributions to this book. These are the farming/language dispersal hypothesis proposed by Peter Bellwood and Colin Renfrew, the concept of ‘low-level food production’ proposed by Bruce Smith, and a ‘post-processual’ turn to the study of early agriculture illustrated through Tim Ingold’s work.

The farming/language dispersal hypothesis

The farming/language dispersal hypothesis (see Bellwood and Renfrew 2002a), and a recent variant, the early farming dispersal hypothesis (Bellwood 2005), were proposed to:

. . . account for the present distribution of some of the world’s largest language families. . . . In short this proposes that some of these language families (such as the Niger-Kordofanian family (including Bantu), the Austronesian family, the Indo-European family, the Afroasiatic family, and several others) owe their current distributions, at least in part, to the demographic and cultural processes in different parts of the world which accompanied the dispersal in those areas of the practice of food production (and of the relevant domestic species) from the various key areas in which those plant and animal species were first domesticated.

(Renfrew 2002: 3)

Moreover,

. . . early farmers, by virtue of their healthy demographic and economic profiles, frequently colonised outwards from homeland regions, incorporating hunter-gatherer populations and in the process spreading foundation trails of material culture, language and genetic distinctiveness.

(Bellwood 2002: 17)

In summary, early farmers are considered to have spread outwards in a ‘wave of advance’ through demic (i.e. demographically-driven) expansion from an agricultural homeland into adjacent areas occupied by ‘hunting-fishing-gathering’ populations (Ammerman and Cavalli-Sforza 1984). Consequently, and to varying degrees, the cultures, languages and genes of farming populations replaced, or incorporated, those of non-agricultural populations in newly colonised areas (see Bellwood 2005 for a global review). This large-scale, comparative model was initially developed to understand the distributions of Neolithic material culture, Indo-European languages and genes across Europe (e.g. Ammerman and Cavalli-Sforza 1984; Renfrew 1987) and, in recent years, has been applied to disparate parts of the globe, e.g. the spread of Austronesian language-speakers from Southeast China or Taiwan, through island Southeast Asia and island Melanesia, and into the Pacific (e.g. Bellwood 2001, 2005: 128–45). The farming/language dispersal hypothesis has generated much debate; evidence has been marshalled in support and critique for each region of the world to which it has been applied (see papers in Bellwood and Renfrew 2002a).

In opposition to a model of demic diffusion, alternative perspectives attribute a greater historical role to cultural diffusion and advance more social and contextual interpretations to account for the spread of agriculture and material culture in the past, as well as present-day distributions of languages and genes. From a cultural diffusionist standpoint, items of material culture, language and genetic stock can move between interacting groups without high degrees of replacement or absorption of one group (i.e. non-farmers) by another (i.e. farmers). From a more contextual standpoint, there is greater emphasis on understanding how people, languages and items of material culture moved, were adopted and were transformed by communities in particular locales and on resultant transformations to those communities. For example, Thomas (1996), among others (e.g. Price 1996; Zvelebil 1996), has critiqued the application of ‘wave of advance’ models to Northwestern Europe. He doubts whether a ‘neolithic package’ of shared cultural traits ever existed (Thomas 1999: 14) and questions the ways in which demic diffusionary models tend to represent non-farming communities as passive historical actors who are generally replaced by, or incorporated into, farming communities as they spread. As Thomas states:

. . . the indigenous peoples of Northwest Europe were more active in the social and economic changes that took place in the fifth to third millennia bc than this perspective would allow. The mesolithic communities of Europe were already dynamic and changing societies, with a range of different sets of social relationships and economic practices, when they first encountered agriculturalists. So not only did the farming groups of Central Europe impose themselves upon or interact with foraging bands in a range of different ways, but the responses of those foragers will not have been uniform. Some may have been disrupted or assimilated, but it seems that many groups adopted aspects of the neolithic way of life in a fashion that was both novel and inventive.

(1996: 312–13)

Advocates of the farming/language dispersal hypothesis have taken on board some criticisms, particularly with regard to specific regions, e.g. Northwestern Europe, and have clarified how periods of acculturation often accompany stalled demic expansion. However, they view some criticism as a function of analytical scale (Bellwood and Renfrew 2002b). The farming/language diffusion hypothesis seeks to explain broad-scale distributions in material culture, genes and languages that have emerged over thousands of years on continent-wide scales; from this perspective ‘the irregularities of small-scale reality become “ironed-out”’ (Bellwood 2005: 10). As an example, Renfrew perceives the need to more clearly distinguish ‘between the life histories of individual languages and the rather different issues surrounding the life histories of language families’ (2002: 470). Certainly the challenge for those seeking to understand early agriculture, as with conceiving the relationships between ‘agency’ and ‘structure’ in any element of social life (in the past or present), is to overcome dichotomous thinking and to conceive of how the cumulative effects of social practices at the community level relate to continental and millennial-scale cultural, genetic and linguistic distributions (Denham 2004). As Hodder (1999: 175) puts it with regard to archaeology generally: ‘Rather than focussing on major transformations, it is possible to use archaeological data to gain an understanding of the indeterminate relations between large-scale processes and individual lives.’

Additional problems with the farming/language dispersal hypothesis stem from its genetic and linguistic bases. The hypothesis was derived to provide an historical process and time-depth to explain present-day genetic and linguistic distributions (following Ammerman and Cavalli-Sforza 1984 and Renfrew 1987, respectively). Archaeological data have been used selectively to verify or negate these processual and chronological frameworks. It is often hard for the non-specialist to evaluate differing genetic or linguistic evidence and interpretations, e.g. compare Oppenheimer and Richards’ (2002) and Hurles’ (2002) accounts of the inferences that can be made from genetics about Holocene migrations across Island Southeast Asia, Melanesia and the Pacific. Certainly in many regions of the world, there are clear asynchronies among archaeological, genetic and linguistic data in terms of what they reveal about historical processes – as well as debate about the veracity of each body of work presented by archaeologists, geneticists and linguists (contrast Oppenheimer 2004 with Diamond and Bellwood 2003; Bellwood and Diamond 2005).

Despite these criticisms, the farming/language dispersal hypothesis has generated much interest in the fields of agricultural origins and the spread of farming communities, and has fostered much inter-disciplinary collaboration and debate.

Low-level food production: conceiving the middle-ground

Proponents of the farming/language dispersal hypothesis consider the independent transition to agriculture by pre-existing ‘hunting-gathering-fishing’ communities to have been a rare historical event. They consider agriculture and non-agriculture to be two distinct and separate lifeways, with few groups in the past or the present occupying the intervening middle-ground (Bellwood 2005). This claim is central to their hypothesis because those groups that did develop agriculture early and independently were afforded demographic advantages relative to non-agricultural groups.

In contrast to this view, many researchers consider there exists a continuum between ‘hunting-gathering-fishing’ ...