Differentiating Ecological Contexts of Plant Cultivation and Animal Herding: Implications for Culture Process

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Archaeology on the Edge(s): Transitions, Boundaries, Changes, and Causes" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Over the last few decades archaeologists around the globe have documented a much more variable pattern of prehistoric foraging and food production than was previously imagined. We have also made great progress understanding the macroecology related to variation in hunting-gathering subsistence and social organization. Data recorded from archaeological literature on locations with evidence for the earliest emergence of plant cultivation, plant or animal domestication, or animal herding are used to identify ecological parameters of settings of earliest food production. These data are then used to test logical propositions deduced from patterns in data on ethnographically recorded hunter-gatherers. This allows us to make some broad generalizations about conditions under which foragers become food producers, anticipate locations which are more likely to have food production focused on plants versus animals, and raise questions for future research.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Archaeology on the Edge(s): Transitions, Boundaries, Changes, and Causes   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23381