Pathways to Plant Domestication: Categories of Cultivation Practice and Convergent Evolution

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Questioning the Fundamentals of Plant and Animal Domestication" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Taking inspiration from Zeder’s notion of pathways to animal domestication (commensal, prey, directed), this presentation will outline equivalent pathways of plant domestication types, and suggest a range of species that can be grouped by these pathways. These pathways are united by issues of habit (annual, perennial), ecological constraints (early successional or late successional) and the nature of selection during the domestication process, which can be illustrated by a range of archaeological examples from both the Old World and the New World. These pathways include the well-documented grain annual pathway shared by primary cereals and pulses, but also secondary segetal pathway, of later weedy cereals, a camp-following ruderal pathway, of numerous vegetables and some of the earliest domesticates; a tuber pathway of short cycle perennials, woody perennial pathway, shared across most tree fruits and vines, and ecosystem engineering pathway that applies to management of long-lived trees within quasi-natural woodlands.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Questioning the Fundamentals of Plant and Animal Domestication   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 24587