The origins of sedentism and farming communities in the Levant

Particular geographic features of the Mediterranean Levant underlie the subsistence patterns and social structures reconstructed from the archaeological remains of Epi-Paleolithic groups. The Kebaran, Geometric Kebaran, and Mushabian complexes are defined by technotypological features that reflect the distributions of social units. Radiocarbon dating and paleoclimatic data permit us to trace particular groups who, facing environmental fluctuations, made crucial changes in subsistence strategies, which, in the southern Levant, led to sedentism in base camps on the ecotone of the Mediterranean woodland-parkland and the Irano-Turanian steppe. The establishment of Early Natufian sedentary communities led to a regional change in settlement pattern. The relatively cold and dry climate of the eleventh millennium B.P. forced Negev groups into a special arid adpatation. The early Holocene onset of wetter and warmer conditions favored the earliest Neolithic (PPNA) development of village life based on the cultivation of barley and legumes, gathering of wild seeds and fruits and continued hunting.     

Tobacco,Eurasian Trade,and the Early Modern Iranian Economy

This article focuses on the development of the tobacco industry in Iran during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It uses this discussion as an entry point to inquire about the early modern Iranian economy. Using a wide range of primary and secondary sources, it makes several historiographical interventions. In explaining what the development of a completely new agrarian industry means in Iranian society, the paper suggests that innovation and intensification may not have been completely absent in agriculture and that in contrast to the way some of the available literature tends to argue, the Iranian economy may not have experienced continuous decline in all sectors throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In addition, this article contends that the tobacco industry helped bring about the rise of merchants and landowners in Iranian society, and with that the further development of mass consumption and ever-increasing cycles of production and accumulation that expanded the commercialization of agriculture, domestic and international trade networks, and Iran's agrarian economy.     

Brexit,Ireland and the World Trade Organization: possible policy options for a future UK–Australia agri-food trade agreement

Prior to the UK’s accession to the then European Economic Community in 1973, Australia was a significant supplier of Britain’s food. Membership of the European Union (EU) resulted in trade diversion, closing the British market to Australian sugar, for example. This article questions whether the UK’s exit from the EU (‘Brexit’) might usher in a new agri-food trade regime, restoring Australian farmers’ access to the British market, or whether other opposing political economy considerations might prevail. Would the UK unilaterally adopt free trade? Can a comprehensive free trade area agreement between Australia and the UK, including agri-food products, be negotiated? Any new relationship will need to reflect the UK government’s stated preference for a frictionless border with EU 27 (particularly on the island of Ireland), the World Trade Organization’s rule book, and the interests of the UK’s farm lobbies, as well as the UK’s quest for ‘free trade’ with the wider international community.     

A pottery workshop with flint tools on blades knapped with copper at Nausharo (Indus civilisation, ca. 2500 BC)

Twenty years after its discovery, the pottery workshop of Nausharo (province of Baluchistan, Pakistan), which yielded a series of knapped stone tools in association with unbaked sherds and clay waste, is still of unique importance in Asian protohistorical studies. The types of pottery production (sandy marl fabrics) identified in this workshop, which is dated to ca. 2500 BC, correspond to the majority of the domestic pottery discovered at the site during the first two phases of the Indus Civilisation. The flint blades discovered in the workshop were made from exotic flint, coming from zones close to the great Indus sites such as Mohenjo-Daro and Chanhu-Daro. This is also the origin of a small amount of the pottery (micaceous fabrics) found at Nausharo in domestic contexts, e.g. Black-Slipped-Jars. The butts of the blades display features characteristic of pressure detachment with a copper pressure point. Gloss and microwear traces (polish) testify to the blades' having been used for finishing the clay vessels: for actual finishing (trimming) while they were being turned on a wheel, and possibly also for scraping by hand. Both of these operations are distinctly attested to by the presence in the workshop of two different types of clay shavings.     

Reframing autonomy in political geography: A feminist geopolitics of autonomous resistance

Autonomy is often universally defined and undertheorized, making invisible ways of knowing and understanding autonomy that are embodied and practiced. Alternate theorizations have drawn on anti-capitalist and alter-globalization movements and discourses to provide accounts of struggles for autonomy as they relate to self-determination, identity politics, and oppositional action, however, in many cases these accounts are still grounded in universal understandings. In this paper I use a feminist geopolitical perspective to re-read autonomy for difference within, alongside and outside of contemporary political geographies of autonomy. Empirical work in self-declared autonomous communities in Chiapas, Mexico, demonstrates that current political geographies of autonomy do not sufficiently explain the ongoing struggle for indigenous farmers in the highlands. In the article, I examine how autonomy is understood and practiced by subsistence corn and coffee farmers who have declared themselves autonomous and in resistance. I argue that in the case of farmers in resistance, autonomy is not just a political act, but also an embodied practice deployed through agricultural production and consumption. A feminist geopolitics assists with reframing autonomy and identifying different ways that it is understood and practiced. In examining the practices that farmers view as contributing to autonomy, different understandings and ways of knowing autonomy emerge.     

A Morphological Classification of Roots and Tubers and its bearing on the Origins of Agriculture in Southwest Asia and Europe

The classification of roots and tubers into morphological categories is often confusing and more of a hindrance than a help to archaeobotanical analysis. As such, a new classification, based on the potential for vegetative propagation, is suggested, and the terms it uses are briefly defined. The different categories of roots and tubers are then discussed with reference to the archaeological record and the origins of agriculture in Southwest Asia and Europe.     

Map is not territory,studies in the history of religions

Physiocracy is still sometimes seen as an oddly archaic programme of agricultural development. The aim of this paper is to show that one of the Physiocrats’ prime concerns was to take the subject of agriculture out of international relations. The fiscal regime that was central to Physiocracy was designed to make every large territorial state self-sufficient and, by doing so, to break the connection between modern great power politics, the international division of labour, and the politics of necessity. From this perspective, the memorandum that Victor Riqueti, marquis de Mirabeau, sent to the Berne Economic Society in 1759, contains an early indication of what, had the Physiocratic programme ever been implemented in full, a world reformed on Physiocratic lines might have looked like.     

Hunting intensification and the Hohokam “collapse”

The role of long-term demographic stress in the “collapse” of the Hohokam culture of southern Arizona is an open question. If chronic imbalances between population levels and food production, as opposed to catastrophic events, were key factors in the population decline of the 15th century, then the archaeological record should produce evidence for resource stress prior to the near-abandonment of the region. It is difficult to document resource depression in archaeofaunas from southern Arizona, however, because they are dominated by small game throughout the agricultural sequence. Furthermore, in an ecologically and economically diverse region, it is difficult to apply data from an individual site to a region-wide phenomenon like the Hohokam demographic decline. This study uses data from 85 faunal assemblages to explore hunting strategies from the earliest agricultural villages to the cessation of archaeologically visible occupation of the region. One means of hunting intensification employed by the Hohokam was to diversify beyond a focus on staple rabbit species, through the use of fish, birds, artiodactyls, and smaller terrestrial game. Diversification is measured in this study through evenness indices. These indices suggest that demographic stress was increasing in the dense population centers of the Salt and Gila River basins prior to the “collapse.”     

Indigenous management of teak woodland in Zimbabwe, 1850–1900

African forests provide the focus for a growing body of historical research. This study draws on economic and environmental history approaches in exploring the exploitation and conservation of woodland, respectively. The main focus of the investigation is the consumption–conservation relationship between pre-colonial African people and the forest zone, an interaction viewed by colonial foresters in Zimbabwe as wasteful and based on religious superstition. In spite of the open criticism of rapacious timber cutting by mining companies and poor farming techniques by settlers, colonial perceptions over time stressed the notion of ‘improvident Africans’ as the prime cause of environmental destruction, in particular, deforestation and erosion. Within the African context, historical forest literature is bound to reject colonial misconceptions regarding the scope of indigenous woodland management. Customary forest practice in the Zambezi teak or Baikiea woodland points towards a better understanding on the subject, informed by a wide range of sources; oral tradition, missionary records, travel accounts and colonial documents. In reconstructing pre-colonial resource use from interviews and archival data, this study adopts a multi-source approach, while guarding against an overly romanticised view of indigenous practice.