Social aspects of the diffusion of agricultural products and practices

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.

SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American Archaeology and Center for Digital Antiquity Collaborative Program to improve digital data in archaeology. If you are the author of this presentation you may upload your paper, poster, presentation, or associated data (up to 3 files/30MB) for free. Please visit http://www.tdar.org/SAA2015 for instructions and more information.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• Food Globalisation in Prehistory

Keywords

Spatial Coverage