The Agricultural Revolution in Prehistory: Why Did Foragers Become Farmers?

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.