The Origins and Spread of Agriculture and Pastoralism in Eurasia.

Barker, Graeme

This important and timely book is based around the proceedings of a conference organized by David Harris on behalf of the Prehistoric Society, at the time he was its President, held in September 1993 at the Institute of Archaeology in London. The general rationale of the conference, and this book, is stated in the editor's Introduction (p. 2):

'to understand better the processes by which agriculture originated and spread, we need to examine the evidence in broad, explicitly comparative, frameworks. . . . Ideally, and eventually, such comparison should be carried out at a global scale . . . [but] we are, I suggest, likely to gain greater understanding of these complex processes by examining, in depth but not in complete isolation, the evidence currently available for each of the major continental land masses: Eurasia, Africa and the Americas.'

Eurasia, he continues, is better understood than Africa and the Americas, at least as far as Southwest Asia and Europe are concerned, but recent investigations throughout Asia 'have produced sufficient new data to justify an attempt to compare, and partially at least even to synthesize, the evidence for Eurasia as a whole'. Two dozen papers were delivered at the conference, which were then revised in the light of the conference debates, sometimes with input from additional authors. Two other papers were commissioned to broaden the coverage. The final volume has 29 contributions including an introduction and conclusion by the editor. The core of the volume is divided into four sections, the first on 'Thematic Perspectives' and the other three covering respectively 'Southwest Asia', 'Europe', and 'Central Asia to the Pacific'.

The aim of the first section is to provide a 'multi-disciplinary thematic prelude', with a focus on seven thematic perspectives - social, ecological, genetic, linguistic, biomolecular, epidemiological and geographical. Tim Ingold (chapter 2) offers a typically stimulating anthropological perspective centred on case studies of how non-Western peoples today understand their relations with their crops and animals: 'for practitioners, growing crops and raising animals are not just ways of producing food; they are forms of life'. In striking contrast is the following paper by the geographer Mark Blumler, stressing how climate, climatic change and the evolution of domesticable plant species were all significant factors in the transition to farming. Cavalli-Sforza (chapter 3) and Renfrew (4) reiterate their arguments for inferring agricultural diffusion from what Cavalli-Sforza calls 'genetic geography'. There is a brief comment (5) by Martin Jones, Terry Brown & Robin Aliaby on the (still largely unrealized) potential of ancient DNA studies. Les Groube (6) offers a splendidly iconoclastic retort to all of this, arguing that agriculture probably began because humans had to breed like fury to keep apace with the explosion of diseases that the Holocene climatic warming probably unleashed ('perhaps we owe more to bugs that we dare admit'). And Andrew Sherratt rounds the section off with another archetypal paper from his pen on how all of this can really be reduced to 'broad structure' and core-periphery models, agriculture beginning through 'a chapter of rare but important accidents' in three 'global bottlenecks' (Mesoamerica, the Near East and Southeast Asia). As these summaries convey, the papers of the first section certainly do provide multi-disciplinary perspectives on the transition to farming; but if their authors seem mostly to be occupying different planets, how effective are the regional case-studies at applying their separate perspectives within inter-disciplinary frameworks? In most cases, not very.

The Southwest Asia section has seven papers, all of which follow either Blumler's ecological perspective or the amended version of Sherratt, arguing for what Hans-Peter Uerpmann (12, on animal domestication) calls 'a rare constellation of environmental, biological and social factors that occurred together only in a very restricted area, during a short span of time . . . conscious human action was not required, only reaction and transformation when the process was already well under way' (p. 235). Daniel Zohary (9) argues from modern distributions of the 'wild progenitors' (always a problematic data source) that there was probably only a single domestication event in the region for each major grain crop. In contrast Gordon Hillman's chapter (10), the heftiest in the book, provides detailed arguments and evidence that changes to steppe vegetation about 13,000 BC dramatically increased the availability and abundance of protein-rich staples, accelerating trends in food storage and sedentism first in the northwestern sector and then further east, with further shifts to cereal cultivation throughout the region by the 9th millennium prompted by increasing aridity and seasonal unpredictability in rainfall. Frank Hole (14) explains caprine domestication in the Zagros in the context of the same climatic trend. Tony Legge (13) presents the evidence that caprine domestication seems to have taken place across the region as a whole in the 9th millennium; he also suggests that this event was 'a very local phenomenon, although one that is likely to have occured at more than one place' (p. 259), though possible reasons are not discussed. Andy Garrard, Sue Colledge & Louise Martin (12) describe how agriculture spread eastwards to the steppe country of eastern Jordan, but they also hedge their bets about the relative importance of environmental, demographic and/or social factors in the process. The section concludes with a paper by Ilse Kohler-Rollefson on the later dispersal of the camel.

The four main papers of the European section are in striking contrast, epitomizing the very different trajectory of European Mesolithic and Neolithic studies in recent years: rejecting the Cavalli-Sforza and Renfrew arguments for population dispersals, they all downplay the role of incoming farmers and emphasize the likelihood of indigenous foragers adopting domesticates - Paul Halstead on Greece (16), Julian Thomas on central and northwest Europe (17), Marek Zvelebil on the Baltic zone (18), and Douglas Price on southern Scandinavia (19). Zvelebil's detailed paper is a persuasive example of the approach he advocates - 'we need a better understanding of the process of the transition to farming in order to apprehend its causes' - but Halstead usefully explores the kind of social processes that might have been involved, arguing that the establishment of farming in Greece 'was no less dependent on the neolithic social formation, and the symbolic mediation of the internal contradictions between the household and the village, than on the availability of appropriate plant cultigens and livestock' (p. 306).

The third section on Asia has eight papers, in most of which the emphasis is on describing the regional sequences of subsistence change that are gradually being assembled, rather than discussing the possible reasons for such change. The focus moves east and south: Turkmenistan (21: David Harris & Chris Gosden), Baluchistan (22: Richard Meadow), Japan (24: Keiji Imamura), New Guinea (26: Tim Bayliss-Smith), Melanesia and Polynesia (27: Spriggs). There are also two substantial overview papers, Ian Glover & Charles Higham (23) on the current evidence throughout Asia for early rice cultivation, and Peter Bellwood reiterating his arguments for discerning a neolithic dispersal across the Pacific region on the evidence of modern language groupings, like Renfrew's arguments earlier for Europe.

In his final overview (29), David Harris summarizes the regional patterns that he can discern from the papers and offers the following conclusions:

i there were probably only two 'pristine centres' of domestication in Eurasia, the Levant (cereals and pulses by the 8th millennium, sheep and goats by the 7th millennium) and the Huanghe and Yangzi river basins in China (millet, rice and pigs by the 7th millennium);

ii diffusion was therefore the dominant process elsewhere;

iii such diffusion is best explained in terms of incoming farmers replacing or assimilating indigenous hunter-gatherers;

iv although he comments that he has deliberately excluded discussion of 'why', he emphasizes the weight of evidence for linking the earliest agriculture of the pristine centres with the climatic and vegetational changes of the Pleistocene/Holocene transition.

As I have tried to convey in the chapter summaries, I find it rather difficult to square some of these confident conclusions with the detail of the evidence presented by the previous case studies. The thrust of most recent work in Europe and southeast Asia, as in north Africa, sub-Saharan Africa and the Americas, emphasizes the strength of evidence for hunter-gatherers adopting agriculture, rather than being replaced or assimilated by Neolithic farmers. Furthermore, where we have really detailed regional sequences, we seem to be seeing ever more complexity in terms of rates of adoption of domesticates and their incorporation within and/or rejection by existing regimes: wholesale adoption within a century or so here, gradual substitution over a thousand years or more there, oscillations from hunting to farming and back to hunting elsewhere, and so on. As Halstead (p. 306) comments, 'with recognition of the complexity of the problem of early farming, a variety of "why" questions may be posed and a corresponding diversity of answers may be expected'.

Having argued in Prehistoric farming in Europe (1985), along with Robin Dennell in his European economic prehistory (1983), for what at that time seemed to many a heretical case for the transition to farming in Europe needing to be understood more in terms of transformations amongst the indigenous communities than Neolithic colonists, it is strange to see this now becoming accepted orthodoxy in undergraduate essays and conference sessions. The hard reality remains that neither in Europe nor anywhere else in Eurasia can we yet describe in detail the ecology, demography, subsistence base, social structure and ideological world of communities on either side of what we currently discern as the transition from hunting to farming, far less be certain about how their two worlds did or did not interlink. We also need to think through the likely archaeological signatures of traditional Neolithic displacement models and how to distinguish them from the signatures of alternative models. The indications of current research in parts of southeast Asia, as in Africa, are that the population dispersal models in vogue there are as simplistic as trying to explain all the European data in terms of social competition by Mesolithic communities for new resources.

The origins and spread of agriculture and pastoralism in Eurasia is a mine of information, well produced and edited, with an excellent consistency of strength and relevance in the majority of the individual papers. Most of the seven disciplinary perspectives of the first section are not really integrated into the case studies, but that is more a comment on the reality of current field programmes addressing transitions to farming than on the seven authors or the editor. The book certainly serves a major purpose in bringing together papers dealing with agricultural transitions from the Baltic to Japan and New Guinea. Its lasting contribution will be if it prompts students of early agriculture in Europe, the Near East and Asia to read each others' papers and see their relevance.

References

BARKER, G.W.W. 1985. Prehistoric farming in Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

DENNELL, R. 1983. European economic prehistory. London: Academic Press.