Description
Book SynopsisOffers readers an understanding of the origins and histories of early agricultural populations in various parts of the world. This book focuses on agricultural origins in and dispersals out of the Middle East, central Africa, China, New Guinea, and the northern Andes. It examines the reasons for the multiple primary origins of agriculture.
Trade ReviewWinner of the AAP PSP Award for Archaeology and Anthropology 2005 A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year
Peter Bellwood - 2006 SAA Book Award - The Society for American Archaeology annually awards a prize to honor a recently published book that has had, or is expected to have, a major impact on the direction and character of archaeological research, and/or is expected to make a substantial contribution to the archaeology of an area.
"Do not be misled by the humble title of Bellwood's book ... this volume stands alone in its scope and depth ... No student of anthropology, irrespective of subfield, should leave this book unread. It is and will remain one of the most important anthropological volumes of the 21st century." Choice
"This book is a superb advertisement for archaeology as part of a multidisciplinary approach to the problem of how, where, and why our ancestors settled to plough and pasture." Times Higher Education Supplement
“Bellwood is not afraid to challenge the established orthodoxy. This is a stimulating and thought-provoking assessment of one of the most important questions in archaeology today.” Peter Bogucki, Princeton University
“This wonderful book is a fascinating treasure-house of information about human history since the origins of agriculture. It deserves to be a standard reference for archaeologists, linguists, geneticists, and anthropologists interested in the formation of the modern world.” Jared Diamond, University of California, Los Angeles; author of Guns, Germs, and Steel
“A tour de force of historical anthropology. Rarely does one encounter a book with the sweeping historical scope of Peter Bellwood’s convincing worldwide synthesis of agricultural origins and population dispersals.” Patrick Kirch, University of California, Berkeley
“Global in its scope, Peter Bellwood’s First Farmers boldly correlates the spreads of early farming with episodes of human population and language dispersal. It offers a powerfully coherent perspective, which challengingly sets one of the great themes of human history in a new and simplified vision.” Colin Renfrew, University of Cambridge
"Bellwood is a master at summarising complex information... the real strength of this volume is that it will make accessible to students such a wide range of data and interpretations." New Book Chronicle
"Unlike many books, Bellwood's represents the cogent unfolding of a complex argument that draws on disparate types of information ... It is certainly the most scholarly, single-authored review of global agricultural origins on the market." Austrlian Archaeology
"The book certainly contains a good deal of interesting data and analysis." Anthropology in Action
Table of ContentsList of Figures xii
List of Tables xv
Preface xvi
1 The Early Farming Dispersal Hypothesis in Perspective 1
The Disciplinary Players 3
Broad Perspectives 4
Some Key Guiding Principles 9
2 The Origins and Dispersals of Agriculture: Some Operational Considerations 12
The Significance of Agriculture: Productivity and Population Numbers 14
Why Did Agriculture Develop in the First Place? 19
The Significance of Agriculture vis-à-vis Hunting and Gathering 25
Under What Circumstances Might Hunters and Gatherers Have Adopted Agriculture in Prehistory? 28
Group 1: The “niche” hunter-gatherers of Africa and Asia 31
Group 2: The “unenclosed” hunter-gatherers of Australia, the Andamans, and the Americas 34
Group 3: Hunter-gatherers who descend from former agriculturalists 37
Why Do Ethnographic Hunter-Gatherers Have Problems with Agricultural Adoption? A Comparative View 39
To the Archaeological Record 42
3 The Beginnings of Agriculture in Southwest Asia 44
The Domestication of Plants in the Fertile Crescent 46
The Hunter-Gatherer Background in the Levant, 19,000 to 9500 bc 49
The Pre-Pottery Neolithic and the Increasing Dominance of Domesticated Crops 54
How Did Cereal Domestication Begin in Southwest Asia? 57
The Archaeological Record in Southwest Asia in Broader Perspective 59
The Pre-Pottery Neolithic A 59
The Pre-Pottery Neolithic B 61
The Real Turning Point in the Neolithic Revolution 65
4 Tracking the Spreads of Farming beyond the Fertile Crescent: Europe and Asia 67
The Spread of the Neolithic Economy through Europe 68
Southern and Mediterranean Europe 71
Cyprus, Turkey, and Greece 71
The Balkans 74
The Mediterranean 74
Temperate and Northern Europe 75
The Danubians and the northern Mesolithic 77
The TRB and the Baltic 80
The British Isles 81
Hunters and farmers in prehistoric Europe 82
Agricultural Dispersals from Southwest Asia to the East 84
Central Asia 84
The Indian Subcontinent 86
The domesticated crops of the Indian subcontinent 87
Regional Trajectories from Hunter-Gathering to Farming in South Asia 89
The consequences of Mehrgarh 89
Western India: Balathal to Jorwe 91
Southern India 92
The Ganges Basin and northeastern India 93
Europe and South Asia in a nutshell 95
5 Africa: An Independent Focus of Agricultural Development? 97
The Spread of the Southwest Asian Agricultural Complex into Egypt 99
The Origins of the Native African Domesticates 103
The Development and Spread of Agriculture in Sub-Saharan Africa 106
The Appearance of Agriculture in Central and Southern Africa 107
6 The Beginnings of Agriculture in East Asia 111
Environmental Factors and the Domestication Process in China 117
The Archaeology of Early Agriculture in China 119
The Archaeological Record of the Early Neolithic in the Yellow and Yangzi Basins 120
Later Developments (post-5000 bc) in the Chinese Neolithic 122
South of the Yangzi – Hemudu and Majiabang 124
The spread of agriculture south of Zhejiang 125
7 The Spread of Agriculture into Southeast Asia and Oceania 128
The Background to Agricultural Dispersal in Southeast Asia 130
Early Farmers in Mainland Southeast Asia 131
Early Farmers in Taiwan and Island Southeast Asia 134
Early farmers in the Pacific 141
The New Guinea Agricultural Trajectory and its Role in Pacific Colonization 142
8 Early Agriculture in the Americas 146
Some Necessary Background 148
The Geography of Early Agriculture, and General Cultural Trajectories 150
Current Opinion on Agricultural Origins in the Americas 153
The Domesticated Crops 154
Maize 155
The other crops 157
Early Pottery in the Americas 158
Early Farmers in the Americas 159
The Andes 159
Amazonia 164
Middle America (with Mesoamerica) 165
The Southwest 168
Thank the Lord for the freeway (and the pipeline) 171
Immigrant Mesoamerican farmers in the Southwest? 173
Independent Agricultural Origins in the Eastern Woodlands 174
9 What Do Language Families Mean for Human Prehistory? 180
Language Families and How They Are Studied 181
Issues of Phylogeny and Reticulation 183
The Identification and Phylogenetic Study of Language Families 185
Introducing the Players 189
How Do Languages and Language Families Spread? 190
How Do Languages Change through Time? 193
Macrofamilies, and more on the time factor 195
Languages in Competition – Language Shift 196
Languages in competition – contact-induced change 198
10 The Spread of Farming: Comparing the Archaeology and the Linguistics 200
Western and Central Eurasia, and Northern Africa 201
Indo-European 201
Indo-European from the Pontic steppes? 201
Where did PIE really originate and what can we know about it? 204
Colin Renfrew’s contribution to the Indo-European debate 206
Afroasiatic 207
Elamite and Dravidian, and the Indo-Aryans 210
A multidisciplinary scenario for South Asian prehistory 213
Indo-European, Afroasiatic, Elamo-Dravidian, and the issue of Nostratic 216
Saharan and Sub-Saharan Africa: Nilo-Saharan and Niger-Congo 217
Nilo-Saharan 217
Niger-Congo, with Bantu 218
East and Southeast Asia, and the Pacific 222
The Chinese and Mainland Southeast Asian language families 222
Austronesian 227
Piecing it together for East Asia 229
“Altaic,” and some difficult issues 230
The Trans New Guinea Phylum 231
The Americas – South and Central 232
South America 233
Middle America, Mesoamerica, and the Southwest 237
Uto-Aztecan 240
Eastern North America 244
Algonquian and Muskogean 245
Iroquoian, Siouan, and Caddoan 247
Did the First Farmers Spread Their Languages? 250
11 Genetics, Skeletal Anthropology, and the People Factor 252
Are There Correlations between Human Biology and Language Families? 253
Do genes record history? 254
Southwest Asia and Europe 256
South Asia 262
Africa 263
East Asia 264
Southeast Asia and Oceania (mainly Austronesians) 265
The Americas 271
Did Early Farmers Spread through Processes of Demic Diffusion? 272
12 The Nature of Early Agricultural Expansion 273
Homeland, Spread, and Friction Zones, plus Overshoot 274
The Stages within a Process of Agricultural Genesis and Dispersal 277
Notes 280
References 292
Index 350
