Foraging,Farming, and Social Complexity in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic of the Southern Levant: A Review and Synthesis

The transition from foraging to farming of the Neolithic periods is one of, if not, the most important cultural processes in recent human prehistory. Integrating previously published archaeological materials with archaeological research conducted since 1980, the first half of this essay synthesizes our current understanding of archaeological data for the Pre-Pottery Neolithic period (ca. 11,700–ca. 8400 B.P.) of the southern Levant, generally defined as including southern Syria and Lebanon, Israel, the Palestinian Autonomous Authority, Jordan, and the Sinai peninsula of Egypt. The second half of the essay explores how these data inform archaeologists about the processes by which social differentiation emerged, the nature of regional and interregional connections, and the mechanisms and processes by which the transition from foraging to food production first occurred in the Neolithic.     

Experimental harvesting of wild peas in Israel: implications for the origins of Near East farming

Previous evaluations of the potential advantage of farming over foraging have been based on experimental harvesting of wild cereals in Near Eastern ecosystems. The highly successful combination of cereals and legumes, “the Near Eastern crops assemblage”, is considered a natural choice due to the complementary nutritional value of the two crop types. Yet, legumes were rarely referred to in models describing early farming and the transition from foraging to farming. Wild legumes differ from wild cereals in several attributes pertaining to domestication, including population density (patchy vs. dense), growth habit (indeterminate vs. determinate), dispersal units (camouflaged seeds vs. awned spikelets), seed dormancy (90–80% vs. 50%), and year to year establishment (erratic vs. regular). We have analyzed the yield potential of three wild pea species (Pisum elatius, P. humile, and P. fulvum) in several ecosystems in Israel. All three pea species have patchy distribution patterns and the yield potential of the wild populations is highly variable. A harvest rate of 0.6–610 grams (calculated per collector) of clean dry grain per hour of harvest time was estimated. Among the three species studied the one adopted for domestication appears to be the least productive. This suggests that the potential productivity of wild peas was not the only or even the major consideration for domestication.     

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.     

Comments on the flint daggers of Denmark

The transition to settled farming communities in northern Europe was a far more gradual process than elsewhere in Europe: this makes it possible to study the transition to farming archaeologically at a finer level of resolution. In this paper we trace the shift to cultivation in two areas: Denmark and Finland. Despite the difference in the time scale of agricultural evolution, and despite other chronological and environmental differences, we can, in both cases, isolate three distinct stages in the transition to fanning, thus extending the process well beyond the conventional date for the shift to cultivation. Both the case studies emphasize the long continuation of foraging adaptations, and the long delay before the appearance of a predominantly agricultural economy. This delay has been caused by the development of successful maritime adaptations, which acted as a viable alternative to farming until a specific trigger—a decline in marine resources—occurred and initiated the substitution phase of the transition.     

Pre-Pottery Neolithic A and Late Natufian at 'Iraq ed-Dubb,Jordan

Abstract

Excavations at the cave of Traq ed-Dubb, Jordan, help clarify our understanding of the transition from foraging to farming in the Near East. The people who occupied the site in the Late Natufian period (13,500–11,500 B.P) were a relatively mobile group who used the cave as a temporary base camp for local foraging and hunting. In contrast, the occupants in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A period (11,500–10,500 B.P) constructed at least two stone residences, with food processing features, inside the cave. This study provides a detailed consideration of the timing of the earliest sedentary farmers at Traq ed-Dubb, and elucidates the nature of differences in architecture between these periods, reflecting upon the implications of the transition to food production, which appears to have taken place less rapidly than previously assumed.     

Land-Use Conflict and the Rate of the Transition to Agricultural Economy: A Comparative Study of Southern Scandinavia and Central-Western Korea

Although the forager–farmer interaction model successfully explains the gradual transmission of farming technology to foraging groups, it fails to explain rapid, abrupt transition to agricultural economies. This paper suggests that interaction between farmers and foragers often includes conflict and competition over land and that this conflict between different land-use strategies may lead to a rapid, discontinuous transition of subsistence economy. Comparing southern Scandinavian and central-western Korean cases, this paper suggests that the rapid transition to an agricultural economy in central-western Korea was a consequence of the appearance of territoriality of farmers in mobile, land-sharing context, resulting in a decrease in number of resource patches available to foragers.     

Foraging–Farming Transitions in Island Southeast Asia

The origins of agriculture have been debated by archaeologists for most of the discipline’s history, no more so than in Island Southeast Asia. The orthodox view is that Neolithic farmers spread south by sea from mainland China to Taiwan and thence to Island Southeast Asia, taking with them a new material culture and domestic rice and pigs and speaking the precursor of the Austronesian languages that are spoken in the region today. Opponents of this ‘farming/language dispersal’ theory have proposed models of acculturation, in which foragers acquired new material culture and food resources by trading with farmers. However, new work in archaeology, palaeoecology, palynology and anthropology, especially in Borneo, and in genetics and linguistics for the region as a whole, is suggesting that foraging/farming transitions in Southeast Asia were far more complex than either of these opposing ‘grand narratives’ of discontinuity (population colonisation) or continuity (acculturation) allows. Through the course of the Early/Mid-Holocene new material culture, technologies and foods were variously taken up, promoted or resisted in order to provision changes in the social and ideological constitution of societies. Whilst new readings of the data for foraging–farming transitions in the region vary, a consensus is emerging that it is more useful to focus on how materials and modes of life were used to underwrite changes in social networks than to seek to explain the archaeological record in terms of migrating farmers or acculturating foragers.     

社会节奏与自然节律的契合--近代江南地区的农事活动与乡村娱乐

乡村戏剧、社会交往及赌博是近代江南乡村地区几种比较重要的娱乐活动。但细究之下,这些活动并非在一年之中的每一个时段都会均匀地进行,而总是会伴随着农事活动的开展显示出一定的周期性,即通常集中在农闲时期进行,一入农忙则就很少发生。这实际上反映出一种社会节奏与自然节律间相契合的关系。     

Farming and/or foraging? New environmental data to the life and economic transformation of Late Neolithic tell communities (Tisza Culture) in SE Hungary

The turn of the 6th and 5th millennia BC witnessed probably the largest economic and cultural transformation of SE Europe giving rise to a new techno-complex occupying the alluvial plains of the Tisza River and its tributaries in the southern parts of the Carpathian Basin. Representatives of the Tisza Culture were engaged in intensive farming complemented with foraging creating a complex system of hierarchical multi-layered settlements (tells). The favorable endowments of the sites with a large variety of multiple ecotones ideal for multifocal subsistence, as well as the introduction of new farming techniques ensured the establishment of long-term sedentary lifeways. However, according to the archeology, a major shift in subsistence happened toward the end of the Late Neolithic marking the terminal part of the evolution of the culture. Traditional crop cultivation was increasingly complemented with hunting, animal husbandry gaining importance. Other second-line resources like fish and shellfish followed the same pattern. Finally, tells were disintegrated and a new cultural group of the Copper Age emerged. The exact background of these transformations is still unknown. In order to see whether or not potential transformations in the local riparian environment had some role in shaping human behavior, a multiproxy paleoecological analysis was implemented on mollusk material of one of the largest tell sites of SE Hungary. Freshwater mollusks collected by humans in themselves characterize the quality of the water body from which they derive. They are also an excellent marker of socioeconomic response to environmental stress. According to our findings the emergence of new settlement phases and the intensified foraging could have been correlated with alteration of stream properties yielding successively higher floods. This was initially beneficial creating lush pasturelands for large bodied prey infiltrating the area during the referred period like aurochs, red-deer. But ultimately it might have reduced areas suitable for agriculture and living most likely leading to social disruption besides other cultural, social processes.     

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.     

云南少数民族获食模式探讨

获食模式的差异源于人类对不同生态环境的适应。云南少数民族获食模式的多样性,既是各民族对当地生态环境适应的结果,也是各民族饮食结构差异的主要原因,同时反映出云南各少数民族经济社会发展的不平衡性和文化的多样性。本文根据自然环境和生产方式的差异,把云南少数民族的获食模式分为高山峡谷农牧型、刀耕火种-狩猎采集型、山坡梯田灌溉农耕型、河谷盆地灌溉精耕型等类型,并从文化生态学的角度对其地域分布、类型特征、形成原因等进行了分析。     

Scaling Post‐Industrial Forestry: The Complex Implementation of National Forestry Regimes in the Southern Valleys of Wales

Abstract: Recent years have witnessed increased geographical interest in the changing nature of forestry in the UK. Critical attention has been given to a transition from a previously dominant regime of industrial forestry, primarily concerned with the mass production of timber, to a post‐industrial regime, within which timber production sits alongside a broader range of social, economic and environmental objectives. Investigations of this transition, however, have been largely restricted to analyses of national policy discourse, with relatively little attention given to the implementation of post‐industrial forestry in regional and local spaces. In this paper, we argue that the emergence of this new forestry regime has been associated with a great deal of spatial complexity. Drawing on findings from recent research in the southern valleys of Wales, we highlight the complex geographies bound up with the implementation of national regimes of forestry in the UK, and the significant roles played by the local socio‐natural context in facilitating and resisting the implementation of new forestry regimes in particular spaces.     

Mobility,Land Use,and Leadership in Small-Scale and Middle-Range Societies

Over the past century, the fields of archaeology and anthropology have produced a number of different theoretical approaches and a substantial body of data aimed at ways to understand hunter-gatherer, horticultural, and agropastoral societies. This review considers four recent edited volumes on foraging and food-producing societies. These books deal in innovative ways with a broad array of issues, including transitions in human prehistory and history, mobility, land use, sharing, technology, social leveling strategies, leadership, and the formation of social hierarchies. Small-scale societies include hunter-gatherers or foragers, while middle-range societies may include complex hunter-gatherer (ones with storage and delayed return systems), horticultural, and agropastoral societies, some of them with institutionalized leadership, status hierarchies, and differential access to power and resources. An important set of themes in these books includes diversity in adaptations to complex social and natural environments, the significance of (1) matter, (2) energy, and (3) information in small-scale and middle-range societies on several continents, the persistence of foraging, and the development of inequality. The roles of sharing, exchange, and leadership in small-scale and middle-range societies are explored, as are explanations for social, economic, and political transformations among groups over time and across space.     

滇南山区多元民族文化下的土地利用与区域可持续发展

立体性地貌气候特征下的滇南多元民族文化地区,由于文化背景、生活方式及社会经济发展水平的差异性,构成了资源利用及保护的多样性。我们利用遥感、地理信息系统等高新技术,从土地空间结构及土地利用时空变化着手,结合野外村寨调查,研究了民族文化在边疆、山区、民族地区经济生态系统中、在区域可持续发展中的地位和作用。     

The Origins of the Neolithic Along the Atlantic Coast of Continental Europe: A Survey

The main aim of this work is to compare the processes of transition to the Neolithic along the Atlantic coasts of continental Europe. Archaeological data on the late Mesolithic and the early Neolithic in the best known regions (central and southern Portugal, Cantabrian Spain, Atlantic France, the shores of the North Sea, and southern Scandinavia) are discussed. The transition to the Neolithic in Atlantic Europe can be viewed as a relatively late phenomenon, with several interesting particularities. Among those, we point out the fundamentally indigenous character of the processes; the existence of a long availability phase, in which hunter-gatherer groups maintained contact with neighboring agriculturalists and probably were familiar with farming and animal husbandry without applying them in a systematic way; and the later development of megalithic monumental funerary architecture. Finally, the main hypotheses so far proposed to explain the change are contrasted with the available evidence: those that argue that the change derives from economic disequilibrium, and those that opt for the development of social inequality as the fundamental cause.     

The Shellfishers of St. Catherines Island: Hardscrabble Foragers or Farming Beachcombers?

ABSTRACT

St. Catherines Island (Georgia, USA) was separated from the mainland at about 3000 BC, creating massive estuarine tidal marshes, which aboriginal foragers began exploiting almost immediately. Correlative optimal foraging modeling and four decades of archaeological fieldwork demonstrate how this baseline shellfishing economy evolved and persisted, with some local impacts on estuarine resource patches, but no detectable changes in diet breadth over several millennia. The first St. Catherines islanders were likely tribal-level, egalitarian societies living in economically self-sufficient, virtually sedentary, and politically autonomous villages. They made the earliest pottery in North America. Shortly after AD 800, early Mississippian populations developed into chiefdoms characterized by ranked, inherited social hierarchies, ascribing social status and wealth at birth. This significant shift took place wholly in the context of their long-standing shellfishing economy. In the face of dramatically increasing populations, St. Catherines islanders gradually intensified their shellfishing and, at about AD 1400, they began cultivating maize and other domesticates. Shellfishing offers generally higher return rates than corn farming, so the adoption of a maize-based economy was likely driven by political, social, and perhaps adaptive changes in the Mississippian world rather than strictly provisioning strategies.     

Adopting agriculture in the West African savanna: Exploring socio-economic choices in first millennium CE southeastern Burkina Faso

While significant advances have been made towards outlining the diverse processes of agricultural adoption worldwide, many regions including sub-Saharan Africa remain poorly understood owing to uneven archaeological coverage. This paper presents a case study from the West African savanna of a relatively late adoption of sedentism and agriculture. While domesticates were available in the region by ca. 2000 BCE, residents of the Gobnangou Escarpment in southeastern Burkina Faso maintained mobile foraging strategies likely until the 1st millennium CE. Drawing primarily on faunal remains from three archaeological sites spanning almost 7000 years of occupation, this paper explores the complex relationships between the adoption of domesticates, sedentism and long distance logistical expeditions by presenting data from two new early agricultural sites with varying domestic and local/regional wild resource usage. We argue that the Gobnangou is indicative of the diverse choices local communities make during times of economic transition, and highlight the social implications of the adoption processes.     

Indigenous agriculture in the Americas

Significant advances in our understanding of ancient agricultural practices in the Americas have been made in recent years. This review of the literature focuses on studies published between 1987 and early 1994. Issues pertaining to the transition from foraging to farming include the habitability of the American tropics prior to the development of agriculture, theories on plant domestication and the origins of agriculture, regional syntheses of agricultural development, and the origin, evolution, and dissemination of domesticates in the Americas. Other topics reviewed include new techniques that have recently been applied to the study of prehistoric agriculture in the Americas, various approaches to the study of agricultural change, and ways in which research on ancient agricultural practices is being applied in modern experimental agriculture and rural development projects.     

清代至民国甘青宁地区农牧经济消长与生态变迁

清代至民国时期甘青宁地区农牧交界带农耕和游牧民族因生存而争夺“草场和耕地资源”,此消彼涨的纷争和一些不适当的经济活动,一方面弱化了这里原本脆弱的生态环境,使人居自然环境质量下降,生态失衡加重。另一方面也引发了一系列社会矛盾,乃至武装冲突事件,成为社会不稳定的因素。     

Archaeobotanical and GIS-based approaches to prehistoric agriculture in the upper Ying valley,Henan, China

Archaeobotanical survey has sampled a series of late Neolithic to early Bronze Age settlements in the upper Ying valley (part of the central plain of China) and provided useful data for understanding prehistoric arable ecology and farming during a period of increasing local social complexity. A combination of the modelling functions offered by Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and the data reduction possibilities offered by Principal Component Analysis (PCA) allow us to explore possible relationships between local arable ecology, crop-processing strategies and the natural environment. The results should be treated cautiously given the size of the analytical sample but suggest that differences in the natural environment around each site may explain varying patterns of wild food collection, while social and cultural factors may better explain variation in farming practice and crop-processing at different sites.