Download or read book The Agricultural Revolution in Prehistory written by Graeme Barker and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2009 with total page 615 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Addressing one of the most debated revolutions in the history of our species, the change from hunting and gathering to farming, this title takes a global view, and integrates an array of information from archaeology and many other disciplines, including anthropology, botany, climatology, genetics, linguistics, and zoology.
Download or read book The Agricultural Revolution in Prehistory written by Disney Professor of Archaeology and Director of the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research Graeme Barker and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2006-10-05 with total page 615 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book addresses one of the most debated and least understood revolutions in the history of our species, the change from foraging (hunting and gathering) to farming. Ten thousand years ago there were few if any communities whom we can properly call farmers; five thousand years later, large numbers of the world's population were farmers, using a wide variety of crops and animals in different combinations in different regions. The possible reasons for the transition have long been one of the most controversial topics in archaeology, and continue to be so. The author integrates a massive array of information from archaeology (including archaeological approaches right across the humanities and science spectrum), together with many other disciplines including anthropology, botany, climatology, genetics, linguistics, and zoology. Against current orthodoxy, he develops a strong case for the parallel development of geographically specific agricultural systems in many areas of the world, transformations in the lifeways of forager societies that in some cases have origins reaching much further back in time that commonly suggested. He argues that the change from foraging to farming was as much about foragers developing new ways of thinking about their relationship to the world they inhabited as about new ways of obtaining food.
Download or read book The Agricultural Revolution in Prehistory written by Graeme Barker and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2006-10-05 with total page 616 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Agricultural Revolution in Prehistory addresses one of the most debated and least understood revolutions in the history of our species, the change from hunting and gathering to farming. Graeme Barker takes a global view, and integrates a massive array of information from archaeology and many other disciplines, including anthropology, botany, climatology, genetics, linguistics, and zoology. Against current orthodoxy, Barker develops a strong case for the development of agricultural systems in many areas as transformations in the life-ways of the indigenous forager societies, and argues that these were as much changes in social norms and ideologies as in ways of obtaining food. With a large number of helpful line drawings and photographs as well as a comprehensive bibliography, this authoritative study will appeal to a wide general readership as well as to specialists in a variety of fields.
Download or read book Prehistory of Agriculture written by Patricia C. Anderson and published by Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press. This book was released on 1999-07-01 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The twenty-eight contributors to this book show how experimental and ethnographic approaches are being used to shed new light on the process of domestication, and harvesting techniques, tools and technology in the period just before and just after the appearance of agriculture. The book takes an explicitly comparative approach, with chapters on SW Asia, Europe, Australia and Africa.
Download or read book Sexual Revolutions written by Jane Peterson and published by Rowman Altamira. This book was released on 2002 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Description, based upon research evidence from the Near East and elsewhere, of the change in the gendered division of labor during the Neolithic agricultural revolution.
Download or read book Climate Clothing and Agriculture in Prehistory written by Ian Gilligan and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first book on the origin of clothes shows why climate change was crucial - for the origin of agriculture too.
Download or read book Last Hunters First Farmers written by Theron Douglas Price and published by School for Advanced Research Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During virtually the entire four-million-year history of our habitation on this planet, humans have been hunters and gatherers, dependent for nourishment on the availability of wild plants and animals. Beginning about 10,000 years ago, however, the most remarkable phenomenon in the course of human prehistory was set in motion. At locations around the world, over a period of about 5,000 years, hunters became farmers. Far more than the domestication of plant and animal species was involved in this revolution, which was accompanied by massive changes in the structure and organization of the societies that adopted agriculture and by a totally new relationship with the environment. Whereas hunter-gatherers live off the land in an extensive fashion, exploiting a diversity of resources over a broad area, farmers utilize the landscape intensively. The implications of these changes in human activity and social organization reverberate down to the present day.
Download or read book A Companion to Ancient Agriculture written by David Hollander and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2020-11-10 with total page 736 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first book-length overview of agricultural development in the ancient world A Companion to Ancient Agriculture is an authoritative overview of the history and development of agriculture in the ancient world. Focusing primarily on the Near East and Mediterranean regions, this unique text explores the cultivation of the soil and rearing of animals through centuries of human civilization—from the Neolithic beginnings of agriculture to Late Antiquity. Chapters written by the leading scholars in their fields present a multidisciplinary examination of the agricultural methods and influences that have enabled humans to survive and prosper. Consisting of thirty-one chapters, the Companion presents essays on a range of topics that include economic-political, anthropological, zooarchaeological, ethnobotanical, and archaeobotanical investigation of ancient agriculture. Chronologically-organized chapters offer in-depth discussions of agriculture in Bronze Age Egypt and Mesopotamia, Hellenistic Greece and Imperial Rome, Iran and Central Asia, and other regions. Sections on comparative agricultural history discuss agriculture in the Indian subcontinent and prehistoric China while an insightful concluding section helps readers understand ancient agriculture from a modern perspective. Fills the need for a full-length biophysical and social overview of ancient agriculture Provides clear accounts of the current state of research written by experts in their respective areas Places ancient Mediterranean agriculture in conversation with contemporary practice in Eastern and Southern Asia Includes coverage of analysis of stable isotopes in ancient agricultural cultivation Offers plentiful illustrations, references, case studies, and further reading suggestions A Companion to Ancient Agriculture is a much-needed resource for advanced students, instructors, scholars, and researchers in fields such as agricultural history, ancient economics, and in broader disciplines including classics, archaeology, and ancient history.
Download or read book Human Evolution Beyond Biology and Culture written by Jeroen C. J. M. van den Bergh and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-10-18 with total page 575 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A complete account of evolutionary thought in the social, environmental and policy sciences, creating bridges with biology.
Download or read book From Foragers to Farmers written by Ehud Weiss and published by Oxbow Books. This book was released on 2009-08-01 with total page 534 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume celebrates the career of archaebotanist Professor Gordon C. Hillman. Twenty-eight papers cover a wide range of topics reflecting the great influence that Hillman has had in the field of archaeobotany. Many of his favourite research topics are covered, the body of the text being split into four sections: Personal reflections on Professor Hillman's career; archaeobotanical theory and method; ethnoarchaeological and cultural studies; and ancient plant use from sites and regions around the world. The collection demonstrates, as Gordon Hillman believes, that the study of archaebotany is not only valuable, but vital for any study of humanity.
Download or read book The Birth of the Gods and the Origins of Agriculture written by Jacques Cauvin and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2000-07-27 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study of social and economic transformations in the Near East during Palaeolithic-Neolithic transition, first published in 2000.
Download or read book The Foraging Spectrum written by R. J. Kelly and published by Eliot Werner Publications/Percheron Press. This book was released on 2007-12-31 with total page 463 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author wrote this book primarily for his archaeology students, to show them how dangerous anthropological analogy is and how variable the actual practices of foragers of the recent past and today are. His survey of anthropological literature points to differences in foraging societies' patterns of diet, mobility, sharing, land tenure, exchange, gender relations, division of labour, marriage, descent and political organisation. By considering the actual, not imagined, reasons behind diverse behaviour this book argues for a revision of many archaeological models of prehistory. From the reviews "[A]n excellent overview of key issues in hunter-gatherer studies." Alan Barnard in American Ethnologist "Not since Man the Hunter has there been such a synthesis and such a mix of stimulating ideas. This will be the authoritative work on hunter/gatherers for a good number of years." Brian Hayden in Canadian Journal of Archaeology "[A]uthoritative, comprehensive, and highly readable. . . . A well-worn and heavily annotated copy should be the companion of anyone claiming an interest or expertise in present or past hunter-gatherers." Bruce Winterhalder in American Antiquity Prepublication praise "The Foraging Spectrum [is] a well-written, scrupulously researched synthesis of modern approaches to foraging behavior, both past and present." David Hurst Thomas, American Museum of Natural History "A tour de force of scholarship in behavioral ecology." Mathias Guenther, Wilfred Laurier University
Download or read book The Dawn of Everything written by David Graeber and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2021-11-09 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A dramatically new understanding of human history, challenging our most fundamental assumptions about social evolution—from the development of agriculture and cities to the origins of the state, democracy, and inequality—and revealing new possibilities for human emancipation. For generations, our remote ancestors have been cast as primitive and childlike—either free and equal innocents, or thuggish and warlike. Civilization, we are told, could be achieved only by sacrificing those original freedoms or, alternatively, by taming our baser instincts. David Graeber and David Wengrow show how such theories first emerged in the eighteenth century as a conservative reaction to powerful critiques of European society posed by Indigenous observers and intellectuals. Revisiting this encounter has startling implications for how we make sense of human history today, including the origins of farming, property, cities, democracy, slavery, and civilization itself. Drawing on pathbreaking research in archaeology and anthropology, the authors show how history becomes a far more interesting place once we learn to throw off our conceptual shackles and perceive what’s really there. If humans did not spend 95 percent of their evolutionary past in tiny bands of hunter-gatherers, what were they doing all that time? If agriculture, and cities, did not mean a plunge into hierarchy and domination, then what kinds of social and economic organization did they lead to? The answers are often unexpected, and suggest that the course of human history may be less set in stone, and more full of playful, hopeful possibilities, than we tend to assume. The Dawn of Everything fundamentally transforms our understanding of the human past and offers a path toward imagining new forms of freedom, new ways of organizing society. This is a monumental book of formidable intellectual range, animated by curiosity, moral vision, and a faith in the power of direct action. Includes Black-and-White Illustrations
Download or read book A History of World Agriculture written by Marcel Mazoyer and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2006-06-01 with total page 529 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Only once we understand the long history of human efforts to draw sustenance from the land can we grasp the nature of the crisis that faces humankind today, as hundreds of millions of people are faced with famine or flight from the land. From Neolithic times through the earliest civilizations of the ancient Near East, in savannahs, river valleys and the terraces created by the Incas in the Andean mountains, an increasing range of agricultural techniques have developed in response to very different conditions. These developments are recounted in this book, with detailed attention to the ways in which plants, animals, soil, climate, and society have interacted. Mazoyer and Roudart’s A History of World Agriculture is a path-breaking and panoramic work, beginning with the emergence of agriculture after thousands of years in which human societies had depended on hunting and gathering, showing how agricultural techniques developed in the different regions of the world, and how this extraordinary wealth of knowledge, tradition and natural variety is endangered today by global capitialism, as it forces the unequal agrarian heritages of the world to conform to the norms of profit. During the twentieth century, mechanization, motorization and specialization have brought to a halt the pattern of cultural and environmental responses that characterized the global history of agriculture until then. Today a small number of corporations have the capacity to impose the farming methods on the planet that they find most profitable. Mazoyer and Roudart propose an alternative global strategy that can safegaurd the economies of the poor countries, reinvigorate the global economy, and create a livable future for mankind.
Download or read book The Food Crisis in Prehistory written by Mark Nathan Cohen and published by . This book was released on 1977 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Feeding Cahokia written by Gayle J. Fritz and published by University Alabama Press. This book was released on 2019-01-15 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2020 Society for Economic Botany's Mary W. Klinger Book Award An authoritative and thoroughly accessible overview of farming and food practices at Cahokia Agriculture is rightly emphasized as the center of the economy in most studies of Cahokian society, but the focus is often predominantly on corn. This farming economy is typically framed in terms of ruling elites living in mound centers who demanded tribute and a mass surplus to be hoarded or distributed as they saw fit. Farmers are cast as commoners who grew enough surplus corn to provide for the elites. Feeding Cahokia: Early Agriculture in the North American Heartland presents evidence to demonstrate that the emphasis on corn has created a distorted picture of Cahokia’s agricultural practices. Farming at Cahokia was biologically diverse and, as such, less prone to risk than was maize-dominated agriculture. Gayle J. Fritz shows that the division between the so-called elites and commoners simplifies and misrepresents the statuses of farmers—a workforce consisting of adult women and their daughters who belonged to kin groups crosscutting all levels of the Cahokian social order. Many farmers had considerable influence and decision-making authority, and they were valued for their economic contributions, their skills, and their expertise in all matters relating to soils and crops. Fritz examines the possible roles played by farmers in the processes of producing and preparing food and in maintaining cosmological balance. This highly accessible narrative by an internationally known paleoethnobotanist highlights the biologically diverse agricultural system by focusing on plants, such as erect knotweed, chenopod, and maygrass, which were domesticated in the midcontinent and grown by generations of farmers before Cahokia Mounds grew to be the largest Native American population center north of Mexico. Fritz also looks at traditional farming systems to apply strategies that would be helpful to modern agriculture, including reviving wild and weedy descendants of these lost crops for redomestication. With a wealth of detail on specific sites, traditional foods, artifacts such as famous figurines, and color photos of significant plants, Feeding Cahokia will satisfy both scholars and interested readers.
Download or read book Farmers at the Frontier written by Kurt J Gron and published by Oxbow Books. This book was released on 2020-02-15 with total page 705 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: All farming in prehistoric Europe ultimately came from elsewhere in one way or another, unlike the growing numbers of primary centers of domestication and agricultural origins worldwide. This fact affects every aspect of our understanding of the start of farming on the continent because it means that ultimately, domesticated plants and animals came from somewhere else, and from someone else. In an area as vast as Europe, the process by which food production becomes the predominant subsistence strategy is of course highly variable, but in a sense the outcome is the same, and has the potential for addressing more large-scale questions regarding agricultural origins. Therefore, a detailed understanding of all aspects of farming in its absolute earliest form in various regions of Europe can potentially provide a new perspective on the mechanisms by which this monumental change comes to human societies and regions. In this volume, we aim to collect various perspectives regarding the earliest farming from across Europe. Methodological approaches, archaeological cultures, and geographic locations in Europe are variable, but all papers engage with the simple question: What was the earliest farming like? This volume opens a conversation about agriculture just after the transition in order to address the role incoming people, technologies, and adaptations have in secondary adoptions. The book starts with an introduction by the editors which will serve to contextualize the theme of the volume. The broad arguments concerning the process of neolithisation are addressed, and the rationale for the volume discussed. Contributions are ordered geographically and chronologically, given the progression of the Neolithic across Europe. The editors conclude the volume with a short commentary paper regarding the theme of the volume.
