Social aspects of the diffusion of agricultural products and practices

Author(s): Loukas Barton

Year: 2015

Summary

The adoption of agricultural products and practices is a social process. Archaeological patterns reveal more than just the timing and direction of the adoption, they help to reveal the very nature of social interaction over a wide area. In particular, the spatial and temporal patterns of diffusion point to norms and priorities in social learning, which in turn generate new avenues for exploring archaeological data. Evidence for the adoption of wheat (a western domesticate) in East Asia is best understood by models that characterize the diffusion of innovations, and the models point to specific attributes of the archaeological record that help characterize the nature of social relations in agricultural Asia, ca. 5,000 – 3,000 years ago.

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Cite this Record

Social aspects of the diffusion of agricultural products and practices. Loukas Barton. Presented at The 80th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, San Francisco, California. 2015 ( tDAR id: 395873)

Spatial Coverage

min long: 66.885; min lat: -8.928 ; max long: 147.568; max lat: 54.059 ;