Origins of Food Production
Lesson Objectives: Compare models of origins of food production and understand what was produced.
Why is the origins of plant and animal domestication considered
an important milestone in human prehistory? How did it happen and when
and where? We might figure that deliberate production of food, as opposed
to gathering it wild, is important to us because it marks innovation
and more complex technology. This may or may not be the case. Traditional
theories suggested people had to struggle and work harder to hunt and
gather, and had a life that was “nasty, brutish, and short,”
in the terms of seventeenth-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes.
The explanation continued to describe the Neolithic Revolution as a
time when the invention of food production allowed people to slow down
and have leisure time to do fancy things with monuments or art or other
pursuits. This is a very elite view, of course, since we know now that
food production is MORE work than just collecting it wild. Most food-producing
cultures involve the majority of the people in this production so that
a few elites, rulers or artists, can indeed do their specialized thing.
Ethnographic data show hunter-gatherers only work a few days a week
to provide for their needs and get to loaf the rest of the time. So
why would they want to do MORE work?
What are some explanations for the origins of food production?
Remember, domestication of species means cultural selection of the desired
biological characteristics so that you get real genetic change. Much
of the change involves dependence upon humans for various requirements,
such as food for animals and reproduction for plants. Remember also
that we characterized cultures as conservative or resistant to change,
and that we often see change happening as a result of trying to do the
same thing. Changes in the surrounding environment that would have made
it more difficult to obtain wild resources might have made people try
to control the species more themselves. The oasis hypothesis,
suggested by famous early twentieth-century archaeologist V. Gordon
Childe, portrayed the drying of the climate at the end of the Pleistocene
in the Near East as an external factor in early domestication. Both
humans and animals and plants would have gathered around the few oases
or water sources, and humans would gradually come to control many other
species. Robert Braidwood’s natural habitat hypothesis
suggested species would be domesticated in areas where they first grew
wild, as part of the gradually increasing association with humans.
The population pressure hypothesis, advocated by Binford and others, pointed to increasing human populations that required more food than could be obtained in the wild, resulting in intensification of production. But there was no explanation of how population sizes grew so much. We know that population sizes of any animal are usually naturally regulated, and humans should be no different. By what cultural ways did these systems get adjusted? It is no surprise that population growth models emerged in the 1970s, when Americans and others began to realize that we are currently overpopulating our planet and using up all the resources.
We already discussed the systems models for agricultural origins in Mexico, in which the genetic responsiveness of maize worked to make it more and more important in the diet. Lately more fashionable are social models (described in the book, p. 202) in which the behavior of particularly self-aggrandizing individuals is highlighted; they would be the ones to try to acquire influence and wealth by building up food surpluses and exchanging them for goods and services and followers. My take on such explanations emphasizing this kind of human agency is that they are direct results of the late-twentieth-century social climate of Wall Street greed: not all cultures value such individualism as we do; in fact, many abhor it.
All these models do not always explain things and are not often testable (especially the social ones). Especially difficult is being able to tell which came first: the population growth, the food production, the sedentism, or the evidence of social inequality and elites?
What are the important species domesticated in the Old World? For animals, the earliest anywhere in the world is the dog. For what purposes would dogs be domesticated? We think of them as companions, as they may have been, but it is possibly more likely they were for work and protection—pulling loads on sleds, helping the hunt, and warning of intruders. What about as a food source? Many cultures still eat puppy stew; you can get it in the butcher shop in the Far East, and the Aztecs bred a small hairless dog for eating (Chihuahua!). Sheep and goats, as you can easily imagine, were early under human control in the Middle East. Species such as pigs and chickens were also early in east Asia. Cattle, horses, and other larger mammals came much later; as you can imagine, the wild aurochs was probably not easy to tame and control.
What Old World domesticated plants are important? You are familiar with the grain crops—wheat, barley, rye; these are all grasses. Lentils, pistachios, and dates in the Middle East, and rice and millet and many others in the Far East, were important early. Many students do not know about some of these plants. (I pass around some dates, red and green lentils, millet that we know from salad bars and birdseed). Don’t forget plants that are for things other than eating. Cotton and flax have seeds that give oil and fiber that gives fabric (flax makes linen for mummy wrappings). Spices, drugs, many other important species are known archaeologically.
What domesticated plants were important in the New World? A major staple was maize, but before it came along in some areas were domesticated squashes, and manioc in South America. Many students are unfamiliar with manioc; some of us only see it in tapioca pudding, but we in Tampa can eat it in Cuban restaurants, where it is called yuca or cassava. It is important to distinguish it as a root crop from all the seed crops. Seeds can be preserved more easily, but propagation of manioc by sticking new canes into the ground leaves very little archaeological evidence.
Other important New World crops are beans, chili peppers, potatoes, tomatoes, and peanuts, many crucial today to world economies and international cuisines. Don’t forget those non-food crops, tobacco, coca, and other drugs and industrial materials.
What animals were domesticated in the New World? The dog came in early, probably with the first Paleolithic hunters. Others were South American camelids (llama, alpaca, vicuna) and guinea pigs, with occasional wild turkeys under human control.
Why so few? Probably because there were few around to control. Horses and other large mammals became extinct at the end of the Ice Age, not to return until brought back by the Europeans. Was this the reason that there were no wheeled vehicles in North and South America—that there were no large animals to pull them? Probably not, since we do have prehistoric Mexican toys with wheels, and humans can pull carts too. What about the hogs that run around Florida and get shot during hog season? These are not native but are descendants of the pigs brought by the Spanish, which got loose and went feral in the forest!
What will look different about archaeological sites after the beginning of food production? Besides evidence of genetically changed species, we will see larger settlements, more dense populations, more storage space, some evidences of social inequality, and more permanent structures, but not everywhere and not all at once.
How does some of this evidence appear at the Ain Mallaha site in the Jordan valley of Israel? This very early village dates from 11,000 to 9000 B.C. Stone houses with querns, grinding stones, set into the floor indicate more permanent settlement. But there are wild grains and remains of gazelle and other wild animals.
What does the evidence show of the development of domestication at Tell Abu Hureya in northern Syria? A tell is a mound of debris from successive habitation sites. Here we have uninterrupted occupation from 10,500 to 6000 B.C., with a record of the changes that happened during the transition from wild food collecting to farming and herding. Wild wheat, rye, lentil, and gazelle become replaced by cultivated cereals and domesticated sheep and goats over a time span of 2,500 years. Plastered mud brick houses were relatively permanent.
How does the 10,000 years of occupation of the tell at Jericho tell us of culture change? A rich oasis in the Jordan Valley, it was a biblical city, but much earlier Neolithic levels were excavated by Dame Kathleen Kenyon (shown digging in a skirt, p. 215 and color picture in Fagan 1985). Similar grinding stones, permanent houses, traces of grain, and wild gazelle giving way to sheep and goats were found. But this article also emphasizes trade items from long distances, such as salt, tar, and sulphur from the Dead Sea and turquoise, shell, obsidian, and greenstone from elsewhere in the region. A Neolithic=period stone tower, wall, and ditch surrounded the site; this was a major group construction project requiring some direction and fancy planning. Was it all for defense, and if so, from whom? Later interpretations suggest that it was fortification against flooding and a tower for storage or community gatherings for social or ritual reasons. Jericho is also famous for early Neolithic human burials with plastered skulls remodeled to look like heads. What might this ritual treatment mean?
What fascinating evidence of Neolithic ideological systems is being recovered at Çatalhöyük? You are already familiar with this site and its recent excavations by Ian Hodder, who is reinterpreting the earlier reconstructions of Neolithic lifeways (Wolle and Tringham 2000) and trying to do postprocessual thinking along with the scientific discovery by publishing absolutely everything on the website, including field notes, lively goddess discussions, etc. Are the burials beneath the houses, female figurines, bull imagery, for special ritual purposes or part of the ideological system represented in every regular household? No status differences are yet seen in households, and both domesticated and wild wheat and other plants have been found. Were the cattle domesticated yet? Would they be important in ritual more so if they were wild or domesticated? What long-distance trade items contributed to the economic system here? The obsidian trade was important, and the source of this rock was 125 miles away.
Where is Mehrgarh and what is its importance in for Neolithic archaeology? This site is in the Indus Valley in Pakistan. Earliest occupations had no pottery, but did have clay bricks for houses, a notable fact we will remember later. Early domesticated grains and dates were recovered, and the goats, sheep, and cattle remains become smaller over time but more abundant, suggesting the domestication process was making them more manageable. Many innovations in food production developed here, and the region was not just a recipient for domesticated species from elsewhere. What might be making it difficult to do archaeology in the Indus Valley today? Warfare and international conflict seriously interrupt or end archaeological research!
What do Neolithic sites in the Far East look like? The two representatives in your book are Ban-po-ts’un in northern China and Spirit Cave in Thailand. They also show control of indigenous plants and animals more than acceptance of domesticated species from elsewhere. Early Chinese farmers were also growing hemp and silkworms for cloth production, as well as millet, rice, and pigs.