A Conversation on Agricultural Origins

Abstract

Placed within a relatively informal and free-flowing context of “conversation,” this issue of Current Anthropology offers an opportunity to step outside of the strictures of formal scholarly discourse, with its requirements of lengthy supporting arguments and exhaustive literature citation and to debate, in a more relaxed fashion, what general form our explanations for agricultural origins should take. Our basic position as we join in this dialogue is that because of the rapid and still accelerating accumulation of relevant new information over the past quarter-century, many of the extant universalist explanations for agricultural origins now represent more of a distraction than an advance in understanding of what is increasingly recognized as a set of long, complex, and independent developmental trajectories in different regions of the world. Universal explanations for major transitions in human history that draw much of their support or authority from overarching theoretical covering laws or assumptions about how the world works tend to flourish in contexts of limited relevant information. But as the amount of available information increases and our view of the past comes into clearer focus, such universal explanations are unable to accommodate a wealth of new data that run counter to their predictions. In this discussion, we focus on what appears to be an everwidening disjuncture between a number of the most popular universal explanatory models for agricultural origins and the steadily growing empirical record of relevant information. Rather than proposing any particular all-encompassing alternative theoretical model or covering laws of our own, our purpose here is to encourage frameworks of explanation that pay close and careful attention to existing relevant archaeological information, that are scaled at the regional level, and that focus on the complex interplay of a range of different environmental and social preconditions, prompts, and factors of various kinds. The essays in this special section provide a comprehensive sampling of the various prime-mover forces championed as universal levers of agricultural emergence. Mark Cohen, the convener of this conversation, began his discourse on this topic in the early 1970s with his book The Food Crisis in Prehistory (Cohen 1977). In that influential book, Cohen argued that because the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture occurred at roughly the same time in many different world regions, there must be a single universal cause for this major turning point in human history. He maintained that during the Early Holocene a worldwide demographic threshold was crossed, resulting in an imbalance between human populations and their chosen subsistence base. Agriculture arose in areas where the pressure was most acute (and where there were domesticable plants and animals) as a means of resolving this demographically induced resource pressure. Cohen (2009) and others in this issue (i.e., Bellwood 2009; Gage and DeWitte 2009; Lambert 2009) revisit the role of demography in the origin and dispersal of agriculture, demonstrating that population pressure continues to hold strong appeal as a universal explanatory lever for agricultural origins. Other voices advocating different universal prime-mover forces have also been heard from in the 30 years since the publication of Cohen’s book, several of which contribute to the conversation taking place in this collection of papers. Climate change, a deus ex machina of agricultural origins since Childe formulated his Oasis Hypothesis in the 1930s, has resurfaced in the intervening years as a prime candidate for causation in agricultural origins. The ice age flashback that occurred during the Younger Dryas at about 12,500–11,500 cal. BP has been featured as a primary causal agent in agricultural origins in both the Near East and in China (Bar-Yosef 2002; Bettinger et al. 2007; Harris 2003; Moore and Hillman 1992), while the climatic amelioration that followed in the Early Holocene and the accompanying rise in CO have been argued to have made the origin of agriculture “compulsory” (Richerson, Boyd, and Bettinger 2001). Snippets of this part of the ongoing conversation can be heard in Bettinger, Richerson, and Boyd’s (2009) contribution to this issue. More recently, a number of researchers working within the