Introduction: Rethinking the Origins of Agriculture

Abstract

The papers in this special section are revised contributions to one of the Conversations in the Disciplines funded by the State University of New York and the SUNY College at Plattsburgh, held in Plattsburgh on October 7–9, 2007. This discussion, titled “The Origins of Agriculture,” brought together scholars with diverse perspectives and methodological approaches on the origins of agriculture. My perception is that the many perspectives and methodologies are not in sufficient contact with one another, and my goal in organizing this collection for the SUNY Conversation and for this special section in Current Anthropology was to generate cross-fertilization of ideas. The areas in question include ancient health, paleopathology, paleonutrition, paleodemography, evolutionary theory, genetics, political prehistory, social organization, climatology, human behavioral ecology, archaeobotany, and Neolithic demographic transition theory. As these papers demonstrate, the conversation was successful to a degree in that regard, even though, as is inevitable, we reached no consensus. My perspective was then and is now that such widespread common events require relatively simple common core events and causes. To argue otherwise defies the odds of coincidence given the enormously widespread complex sequences of events occurring in parallel but independently in so many regions of the world. I suggested that we resembled the proverbial blind men, each describing an elephant from the perspective of his or her own incomplete experience. (Hence the reference to elephants in some accompanying papers.) I still insist that there is an “elephant,” or common core of events, despite our various incomplete perspectives; however, many participants do not agree that the elephant or core understanding exists. What follows is my own perspective on the problem, modified and updated by more recent research and, most recently, by participation in the conversation. I take pride of place as organizer and also as the person providing the most primitive, albeit drastically updated, hypothesis. In The Food Crisis in Prehistory (Cohen 1977), I proposed