The Fremont Complex: A Behavioral Perspective

The Fremont complex is composed of farmers and foragers who occupied the Colorado Plateau and Great Basin region of western North America from about 2100 to 500 years ago. These people included both immigrants and indigenes who shared some material culture and symbolic attributes, but also varied in ways not captured by definitions of the Fremont as a shared cultural tradition. The complex reflects a mosaic of behaviors including full-time farmers, full-time foragers, part-time farmer/foragers who seasonally switched modes of production, farmers who switched to full-time foraging, and foragers who switched to full-time farming. Farming defines the Fremont, but only in the sense that it altered the matrix in which both farmers and foragers lived, a matrix which provided a variety of behavioral options to people pursuing an array of adaptive strategies. The mix of symbiotic and competitive relationships among farmers and between farmers and foragers presents challenges to detection in the archaeological record. Greater clarity results from use of a behavioral model which recognizes differing contexts of selection favoring one adaptive strategy over another. The Fremont is a case where the transition from foraging to farming is followed by a millennium of adaptive diversity and terminates with the abandonment of farming. As such, it serves as a potential comparison to other cases in the world during the early phases of the food producing transition.     

Modelling the Neolithic transition in a heterogeneous environment

The Neolithic transition, involving the change of subsistence from foraging to agriculture, can fruitfully be modelled mathematically, as, e.g., in the three-population model of Aoki et al. (1996). Here that model is modified to include some features of population dynamics in a realistic, two-dimensional environment, and including population pressure, competition for resources between farmers and foragers, and the dependence of the population carrying capacities and diffusivities on the environmental conditions. This modified model allows for the survival of foragers in regions where environmental conditions do not favour farming. The model is tentatively applied to the Indian subcontinent, which is a complicated example of this transition involving multiple domestication centres. The results are briefly compared with published archaeological data.     

Forager–farmer connections in an ‘unoccupied’ land: First contact on the western edge of LBK territory

The interaction between local foragers and incoming farmers is one of the hot topics in the study of Europe’s recent prehistory. In Central and Western Europe’s loam region, occupied by the first farmers of the Linearbandkeramik (LBK), hunter–gatherer remains are scarce and consist mostly of surface finds. Hence, the hunter–gatherer occupation and activity on the loess has never been studied in detail. This paper tackles the problem of the visibility of hunter–gatherer activity on the loess belt. An interregional comparison of microlith datasets allows identifying behavioural changes and differences in exploitation intensity. With regard to forager–farmer interaction, a mutual influence in the spatial patterning of activity or settlement is demonstrated.     

An investigation of the frequency of squatting facets in Later Stone Age foragers from South Africa

Distinctive morphological changes attributed to a habitual squatting posture were observed on the distal femur, distal tibia and on the talar neck of Later Stone Age (LSA) foragers. The frequency of squatting in LSA foragers (n = 56) was determined by the presence of anatomical features of joint hyperflexion. Three South African comparative skeletal groups from different time periods were also analysed: skeletal remains of early farming populations (n = 17), 18th century ‘Free Blacks’ and/or slaves from Cobern Street, Cape Town (n = 21), and a modern cadaver sample (n = 29). The results show that 28 out of 56 LSA foragers (50%) were habitual squatters; 13 out of 17 farmers (76.5%) and one of 21 individuals from the Cobern Street collection (4.8%) demonstrated squatting facets. No anatomical squatters were found in the modern cadaver sample. There was no significant sex difference between squatters and non‐squatters. Hence at least half of the LSA foragers and farmers were habitual squatters, according to the signs of joint hyperflexion. Squatting is a comfortable position for those used to it because the body weight is supported with minimal muscular activity. Two probable reasons are suggested for the difference in postures adopted by the different groups: (1) availability or lack of availability of furniture and (2) cultural and individual differences in resting posture. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

黄宗智中国小农“三幅面孔”统一体说的误区

中国农民包括小农、大农、雇农三大类.黄宗智的中国小农"三幅面孔"统一体说,事实上是个随意拼凑的"创见".经营式农场主、雇农都不在小农范畴,"三幅面孔"只能和富农、自耕农、佃农相关.经营式农场主和雇农二者所构成的一种生产方式,根本就不能用来反映中国小农经济的内部结构以及受其影响小农经济所表现出来的某种状态.中国小农"三幅面孔"统一体说提出的目的,在很大程度上是为了把经营式农场主、富农、自耕农、佃农、雇农都被包含在小农范畴.由于和农业商品化联系最密切的是经营式农场主-雇农生产方式,所以考察农业商品化、世界经济、帝国主义等对中国小农经济的影响,就需要把经营式农场作为主要研究对象.     

RUSSIAN RAILWAYS AND THE SEABORNE GRAIN EXPORT TRADE: 1883-1911

The interaction between railway development and agricultural expansion is a salient feature of the post-emancipation Russian economy. The railway network's growth allowed the Empire's agricultural core to shift southeastward and facilitated rapid growth in grain exports. Exports rose initially through the Baltic ports and later through the ports of the Black and Azov seas. A limited degree of regional specialization emerged, but governmental constraints and overall economic immaturity hampered further economic development.     

Toddlers in Transition: Linear Enamel Hypoplasias in the Hadza of Tanzania

Bioarchaeologists often use linear enamel hypoplasias (LEH) as a proxy for systemic physiological stress in prehistoric populations. Increased incidences of LEH have been observed in many cases associated with rapid social or environmental changes, such as with the Neolithic transition and agricultural intensification. Still, there have yet to be studies published of LEH incidence among living peoples in the process of transitioning from foraging to a farming economy. It is important to document LEH occurrence in living groups with known subsistence strategies to better contextualise interpretations of bioarchaeological populations. Here, we present LEH data for a sample of the Hadza of Tanzania. We compare LEH incidence and frequency on the permanent anterior teeth of individuals who spent their infancy and early childhood (i) in the bush consuming wild foods; (ii) in the village with a weaning diet dominated by domestic cereals; and (iii) transitory, dividing their time between the bush and village. Our results demonstrate that Hadza living in the bush during the period of tooth formation less frequently have LEH on these teeth, and have fewer of them on average, than do villagers. This is particularly so for the comparison of men. The transient group is intermediate in LEH incidence, although not significantly different from the bush and village samples. A lower LEH frequency in the bush Hadza is consistent with a diet that meets nutrient requirements of tooth formation, but higher incidence in the village sample suggests interruption of enamel secretion, most likely due to malnutrition. Such studies provide valuable context with which to interpret and understand bioarchaeological evidence, and to track effects of sedentisation on the biology of modern foragers. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Drought and cooperation in a conflict prone area: Bedouin herders and Jewish farmers in Israel's northern Negev, 1957–1963

Climate change is increasingly considered a security problem by academics and politicians alike. Although research is challenging such neo-Malthusian views, it focuses on conflict, or lack thereof, paying limited attention, if any, to cooperation. This study examines the effect of a severe drought on a spectrum of both conflict and cooperation in a highly incendiary setting, between Muslim Bedouin herders and Jewish agricultural settlements in Israel's semi-arid northern Negev region. This region, lying between the Mediterranean zone and the Negev Desert, has historically been a battle ground between farmers and pastoralists.Using archival data, both conflictive and cooperative interactions between the two groups during the 1957–63 drought, the worst in the 20th century, were examined. The results indicate that although the entire range of responses occurred, violence was limited and occurred only when some of the Bedouins migrated to the more northern Mediterranean zone. In the semi-arid northern Negev the Bedouins and two settlements engaged in substantive cooperation and assistance. Grazing on damaged crops in return for payment was also practiced during the drought.A number of factors that affected both conflict and cooperation are identified. The severity of conflicts increased when farmers and herders lacked previous familiarity, while the need to reduce the drought's impacts and settlements' left-wing political affiliation formed main incentives for cooperation. Measures taken by state institutions to directly reduce frictions and to provide relief assistance were central to the overall limited level of conflict, but also reinforced the power disparities between the groups.     

Rock Stars and Bad Apples: Moral Economies of Alternative Food Networks and Precarious Farm Work Regimes

Alternative food networks face both challenges and opportunities in rethinking the role of precarious employment in food system transformation. We explore how alternative food networks in British Columbia, Canada have engaged with flexible and precarious work regimes for farmworkers, including both temporary migrant workers and un(der)paid agricultural interns. Based on in‐depth interviews, participant observation and document analysis, we find that alternative food actors often normalize a precarious work regime using a moral economy frame. This framing describes precarious farm employment as either a necessary challenge in the transition to sustainability, or merely involving a few individual “bad apple” farmers. Further, this framing involves an aversion to “one‐size‐fits‐all” regulation by the state in favor of consumer‐driven regulation of labor standards. Our analysis suggests that a moral economy framing can obscure systemic inequities in precarious farm employment and dampen the impetus for structural change through collective food movement organizing.     

Remaking Work, Remaking Space: Spaces of Production and Accumulation in the Reconstruction of American Capitalism, 1865–1920

The era of US capitalist development between 1865 and 1920 offers a good opportunity to analyze the relational nature of social change at multiple scales precisely because it was a time of transition, for US and world capitalism alike. Existing accounts of the transition to monopoly capitalism in the US have focused on one or two geographical scales, such as the national economy or the shop floor. In this literature, scales are essentially treated as "containers" within which social change occurs. The possibility that the containers themselves may be fundamentally altered is not addressed. In contrast, this paper views labor process transformations, and transformations of the social division of labor, as dialectically bound. In particular, I seek to explain how the American transition to monopoly capitalism shaped, and was shaped by, class conflict and competitive pressures at multiple scales—the shop floor, the region, and the national and global divisions of labor.     

A Niche Construction Perspective on the Middle–Upper Paleolithic Transition in Italy

This paper presents an overview of the Middle–Upper Paleolithic transition in Italy in light of recent research on the Uluzzian technocomplex and on the paleoecological context of the transition. Drawing on the realization that human niche construction can be documented in the pre-agricultural archaeological record, niche construction theory is used as a conceptual framework to tie together facets of the behavioral, biological, and ecological dimensions of the transition interval into formal models of their interaction over time and in diverse contexts. Ultimately, this effort shows how foragers of the transitional interval in the Italian peninsula were active agents in shaping their evolutionary history, with consequences of some adaptive systems being felt only much later and directing the forces responsible for the ultimate disappearance of the Mousterian and Uluzzian technocomplexes in favor of the proto-Aurignacian industry, the exact nature of which clearly appears to vary on a regional level.     

Enemies to Allies: The Role of Policy‐Design Adaptation in Facilitating a Farmer–Environmentalist Alliance

In the period 1985 to 1996, agricultural conservation policy in the United States underwent a fundamental transition from a focus on policy design elements that emphasized short‐term economic returns for farmers and long‐term productivity to a focus on design elements that emphasized systemic environmental concerns. Although farmers' concerns with the environment were doubtlessly real, this adaptation of design elements allowed the agriculture policy community to gain the support of the environmental community for programs that offered new ways to channel short‐term economic support to farmers. The adaptation of design elements was triggered by the severe economic threat farmers began to experience in the late 1970s. This article investigates the language adaptations that facilitated the changes in agricultural conservation policy by analyzing the five policy‐design elements developed by Ingram and Schneider.     

Agricultural Adaptation to Real Regulation on the Urban Fringe: The Chicken Meat Industry's Response to Land‐use Conflict in the Western Port Region of Victoria,Australia

Research theorising the rural‐urban fringe has not focussed in detail on the regulatory system managing land‐use conflict, including disputes arising between agricultural enterprises and residential property owners. To explore local forms of regulation the need to identify relevant actors, their interrelationships and the way that they compete to influence decision‐makers is widely recognised in the literature. Moran et al.'s (1996) conceptualisation of ‘real regulation’, with its emphasis on lobbying by social actors and the (re)formulation of legislation, is identified as a theoretical perspective that can help to explain local forms of regulation. The understanding of patterns of regulation on the urban fringe requires a more detailed conceptualisation of non‐legislative forms of policy, and a greater appreciation of the different strategies adopted by farmers to influence government. This paper investigates how urban fringe agricultural industries have attempted to influence decision‐making within the development approval process. Evidence is presented from the Western Port region in the urban fringe of Melbourne, Victoria, where refusal for the construction of broiler sheds by the Administrative Appeals Tribunal has resulted in the chicken meat industry adopting a more scientific siting strategy. It is concluded that, whilst this provides an example of agricultural adaptation and reinforces the importance of adopting a temporal dimension to investigate the land development process, the possibility that government will assess environmental harm differently in the future leaves urban fringe broiler farming in a precarious position.     

Prosperity,power, and change: Modeling maize at Postclassic Xaltocan,Mexico

Documenting the relationship between agriculture and political economy occupies the center of much research and debate in anthropological archaeology. This study examines this issue by focusing on maize at Xaltocan, a Postclassic community located in the northern Basin of Mexico. We consider how different mechanisms of distribution, circulation, and production can influence maize variation. We analyze maize variability through time at Xaltocan and the community’s chinampa system and interpret patterns of variation in relation to its historical trajectory. This methodological and interpretive approach offers an innovative means to understand how agricultural practices transformed in relation to changing conditions of prosperity and power, especially the links between tribute, market exchange, conflict, and regional demography. Our study also speaks to broader, dichotomous perspectives that model the organization of agricultural systems, revealing that the strategies of both agriculturalists and the state often converge at local levels.     

Late Mesolithic burials at Casa Corona (Villena,Spain): direct radiocarbon and palaeodietary evidence of the last forager populations in Eastern Iberia

Current knowledge about the Mesolithic–Neolithic transition in the Central and Western Mediterranean European regions is deeply limited by the paucity of Late Mesolithic human osteological data and the presence of chronological gaps covering several centuries between the last foragers and the first archaeological evidence of farming peoples. In this work, we present new data to fill these gaps. We provide direct AMS radiocarbon dating and carbon (δ¹³C) and nitrogen (δ¹⁵N) stable isotope analysis were carried out on bone collagen samples of two single burials from the recently discovered open-air Late Mesolithic site of Casa Corona (Villena, Spain). The results shed new light on the chronology and subsistence patterns of the last Mesolithic communities in the Central Mediterranean region of the Iberian Peninsula. Radiocarbon results date the human remains and funerary activity of the site to 6059–5849 cal BC, statistically different from other Late Mesolithic sites and the earliest Neolithic contexts, and bridging the 500 yrs chronological gap of the Mesolithic–Neolithic transition from the area. Isotopic evidence shows that diet was based on terrestrial resources despite the proximity to the site of lagoon and marine ecosystems. This and previous isotope studies from the region suggest a lower reliance upon marine resources than for Atlantic and Cantabrian sites, although intra-regional patterns of neighbouring Mesolithic populations exhibit both fully terrestrial diets and diets with significant amounts of aquatic resources in them. We hypothesize that in the Central Mediterranean region of Spain the Late Mesolithic dietary adaptations imposed structural limits on demographic growth of the last foragers and favoured rapid assimilation by the earliest Neolithic populations.     

Ideological change and settlement continuity in the French countryside: the development of agricultural syndicalism in Loir-et-Cher during the late-nineteenth century

The development and spread of new ideas within rural France during the late-nineteenth century was essentially effected within an old pattern of rural settlements. In general, this paper considers the basic dichotomy between nucleated and dispersed settlements and its influence on the spatial patterning of a particular rural ideology, agricultural syndicalism. It also examines the role of the basic conflict between urban and rural attitudes in the transformation of ideas about the organization of agricultural activity. More specifically, this paper analyses the relationships between the clustering of populations, proximity to urban centres, literacy levels and the spatial diffusion of agricultural syndicalism in Loir-et-Cher during the late-nineteenth century. It concludes that the character of rural settlements was not a directly moulding influence on the spread of agricultural syndicalism, that the transformation of rural ideologies was essentially achieved under urban influence and that generalizations about agricultural syndicalism applicable at one scale are not necessarily applicable at another scale.     

20世纪60年代前期湖南省推行农业生产责任制的回顾与启示

20世纪60年代前期,湖南省推行农业生产责任制与大跃进运动和反右倾斗争导致国民经济出现严重困难局面有密切联系,整个过程经历了试点、推广、挫折三个阶段。实行农业生产责任制后,农民的生产积极性被调动起来,粮食产量提高,为湖南省农业迅速走出困境发挥了重要作用。但由于农业生产责任制是局限在三级所有,队为基础的基本体制框架内实行的,因此,阻碍了农民生产积极性的进一步发挥。     

The EB IA tombs and burials of Bâb edh‐Dhrâ, Jordan: a bioarchaeological perspective on the people

The transition from a hunting/gathering economy to an agricultural economy, beginning about 10,000 years ago, was accompanied by the development of specialised innovations including nomadic pastoralism. It was also associated with the emergence of increasingly sedentary human societies in which relatively large numbers of people lived in a crowded urban environment. The dynamic relationship between agriculture and urbanisation undoubtedly had a profound effect on evolutionary dynamics in developing complex human societies. By the beginning of the Early Bronze Age (EB IA, ca. 3300 BCE) an agricultural economy was well established in the region surrounding Bâb edh‐Dhrâ, located in the southeastern plain adjacent to the Dead Sea in Jordan. However, the site apparently did not begin to develop as an urban centre until EB IB. The objective of this paper is to explore what is known about the EB IA people of Bâb edh‐Dhrâ. The presence of infectious and metabolic diseases coupled with high infant mortality and low life‐expectancy at birth suggest a society at risk. Nevertheless the people were robust and give evidence of at least a moderately successful adaptation to the environment in which they lived. Published in 2007 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

约曼与英国资本主义启动

农业是英国资本主义的基础,约曼又是农业资本主义的发动者、农村社会的“脊梁”。在英国农业资本主义发生的时候,约曼是先行者。“约曼”经历了由一个带有荣誉感的职业名词向具有经济与社会含义的名词的转变;约曼阶层经历了由采邑制度下的农民向资本主义农场主的演进。约曼是社会转型时期英国农村的精英群体,对经济、政治、教育文化、日常生活等方面都产生了重大而深远的影响,为英国率先成为第一个工业化国家提供了最初的、最基本的经济力量和政治力量,是英国资本主义的启动者。     

Technological Change and Economy in the Epipalaeolithic: Assessing the Shift from Early to Middle Epipalaeolithic at Kharaneh IV

Epipalaeolithic hunter-gatherer communities in the Southern Levant exhibit numerous complex trends that suggest that the transition to the Neolithic was patchy and protracted. This paper explores the changing nature of occupation at the Epipalaeolithic site Kharaneh IV, Jordan, through an in-depth analysis of the lithic and faunal assemblages. Focusing on the analysis of a single deep sounding (unit AS42), we address how Kharaneh IV occupations link to the local landscape and environmental changes. As an aggregation site, Kharaneh IV represents an interesting locale to explore the changing nature of aggregation and social cohesion prior to the origins of agriculture, as well as changes in technology and subsistence between the Early and Middle Epipalaeolithic. We explore the tempo and nature of transition from one archaeological culture to the next through changes in technology and how this reflects the people making and using tools, to understand how foragers adapted to a changing landscape.