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"Agriculture, Prehistoric"
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Mixed harvest : stories from the human past
\"After millennia of wandering the earth with little impact, a universal, if inadvertent transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture and pastoralism was complete within a period of a few thousand years. Mixed Harvest tells the story of the Sedentary Divide, the most significant event since modern humans emerged. Before the Sedentary Divide, humans followed their food; afterward, everything the human diet had abandoned wild foods by domesticating, and irrevocably changing, plants and animals, staying in one place and keeping them close. Agriculture was so successful that religious and social belief systems evolved to enforce social inequality, exploitation of resources, constrained gender relations, and increasingly devastating conflict\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Dancing at the dawn of agriculture
How dance was depicted in Near Eastern Neolithic artifacts.
eBook
Traditional arid lands agriculture : understanding the past for the future
\"The manuscript is an edited volume which consists of twelve chapters by multiple scholars of arid lands agriculture in the American Southwest and Northwest Mexico. Its goal is to inspire further research and advance the current understanding of traditional agriculture in arid lands, in both the past and the present\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Neolithic Farming in Central Europe
Neolithic Farming in Central Europe examines the nature of the earliest crop cultivation, a subject that illuminates the lives of Neolithic farming families and the day-to-day reality of the transition from hunting and gathering to farming.
Debate surrounding the nature of crop husbandry in Neolithic central Europe has focussed on the permanence of cultivation, its intensity and its seasonality: variables that carry different implications for Neolithic society.
Amy Bogaard reviews the archaeological evidence for four major competing models of Neolithic crop husbandry - shifting cultivation, extensive plough cultivation, floodplain cultivation and intensive garden cultivation - and evaluates charred crop and weed assemblages.
Her conclusions identify the most appropriate model of cultivation, and highlight the consequences of these agricultural practices for our understanding of Neolithic societies in central Europe.
eBook
Prehistoric agricultural decision making in the western Himalayas: ecological and social variables
The high-altitude landscape of western Tibet is one of the most extreme environments in which humans have managed to introduce crop cultivation. To date, only sparse palaeoeconomic data have been reported from this region. The authors present archaeobotanical evidence from five sites (dating from the late first millennium BC and the early first millennium AD) located in the cold-arid landscape of western Tibet. The data indicate that barley was widely grown in this region by c. 400 BC but probably fulfilled differing roles within local ecological constraints on cultivation. Additionally, larger sites are characterised by more diverse crop assemblages than smaller sites, suggesting a role for social diversity in the development of high-altitude agriculture.
Journal Article
Millet and What Else?
Broomcorn/common/proso millet (Panicum miliaceum) is a cereal crop that originated in East Asia and was transferred westward to Europe, where it was introduced in the mid-2nd millennium BCE, at the height of the Bronze Age. Archaeobotanists from the Collaborative Research Centre 1266, supported by many colleagues, conducted a large-scale programme of radiocarbon dating of millet grains from prehistoric Europe. They discovered that the spread of this crop on the continent happened quickly, extending far and wide. What do we know about the (pre)history of this crop in Europe? The workshop organised by the CRC 1266 at Kiel University in 2019 encouraged the discussion on the circumstances and consequences of early broomcorn millet cultivation in Europe. This book brings together many of the workshop papers and reflects the diverse topics and research areas covered. The contributions inform us on the range of cultivated and collected plants from the time before and after the start of millet cultivation in Europe; present the cultural setting in which millet arrived; discuss possible reasons driving the acceptance of this innovation; and reconstruct possible uses of millet and the methods of its cultivation, processing and storage. Not just the plant economy, but also the animal economy is represented, since millet was and is grown for both humans and animals. Techniques used to trace millet archaeologically are continually being developed or improved, and this book describes the application of a few of them. This broad-based compilation of papers adds another layer to the dynamic picture of the Bronze Age and the interconnected continent. It also illustrates the complexity of the research on the diffusion of agricultural innovations.
eBook
From Colonization to Domestication
Winner of the Don D. and Catherine S. Fowler Prize. Eastern North America is one of only a handful of places in the world where people first discovered how to domesticate plants. In this book, anthropologist Shane Miller uses two common, although unconventional, sources of archaeological data—stone tools and the distribution of archaeological sites—to trace subsistence decisions from the initial colonization of the American Southeast at the end of the last Ice Age to the appearance of indigenous domesticated plants roughly 5,000 years ago. Miller argues that the origins of plant domestication lie within the context of a boom/bust cycle that culminated in the mid-Holocene, when hunter-gatherers were able to intensively exploit shellfish, deer, oak, and hickory. After this resource “boom” ended, some groups shifted to other plants in place of oak and hickory, which included the suite of plants that were later domesticated. Accompanying these subsistence trends is evidence for increasing population pressure and declining returns from hunting. Miller contends, however, that the appearance of domesticated plants in eastern North America, rather than simply being an example of necessity as the mother of invention, is the result of individuals adjusting to periods of both abundance and shortfall driven by climate change.
eBook