FIRST
FARMERS
For Claudia, Tane, Hannah, and Charlie
The Origins of
Agricultural Societies
Peter Bellwood
Summary Contents
Detailed Contents
List of Figures
List of Tables
Preface
1 The Early Farming Dispersal Hypothesis in Perspective
2 The Origins and Dispersals of Agriculture: Some Operational Considerations 3 The Beginnings of Agriculture in Southwest Asia
4 Tracking the Spreads of Farming beyond the Fertile Crescent: Europe and Asia 5 Africa: An Independent Focus of Agricultural Development?
6 The Beginnings of Agriculture in East Asia
7 The Spread of Agriculture into Southeast Asia and Oceania 8 Early Agriculture in the Americas
9 What Do Language Families Mean for Human Prehistory?
10 The Spread of Farming: Comparing the Archaeology and the Linguistics 11 Genetics, Skeletal Anthropology, and the People Factor
12 The Nature of Early Agricultural Expansion
Notes
References
Index
Detailed Contents
List of Figures
List of Tables
Preface
1 The Early Farming Dispersal Hypothesis in Perspective The Disciplinary Players
Broad Perspectives
Some Key Guiding Principles
2 The Origins and Dispersals of Agriculture: Some Operational Considerations The Significance of Agriculture: Productivity and Population Numbers Why Did Agriculture Develop in the First Place?
The Significance of Agriculture vis-a-vis Hunting and Gathering
Under What Circumstances Might Hunters and Gatherers Have Adopted Agriculture in Prehistory?
Group 1: The "niche" hunter-gatherers of Africa and Asia
Group 2: The "unenclosed" hunter-gatherers of Australia, the Andamans, and the Americas
Group 3: Hunter-gatherers who descend from former agriculturalists
Why Do Ethnographic Hunter-Gatherers Have Problems with Agricultural Adoption? A Comparative View
To the Archaeological Record
3 The Beginnings of Agriculture in Southwest Asia The Domestication of Plants in the Fertile Crescent
The Hunter-Gatherer Background in the Levant, 19,000 to 9500 BC
The Pre-Pottery Neolithic and the Increasing Dominance of Domesticated
Crops
How Did Cereal Domestication Begin in Southwest Asia?
The Archaeological Record in Southwest Asia in Broader Perspective The Pre-Pottery Neolithic A
The Pre-Pottery Neolithic B
The Real Turning Point in the Neolithic Revolution
4 Tracking the Spreads of Farming beyond the Fertile Crescent: Europe and Asia The Spread of the Neolithic Economy through Europe
Southern and Mediterranean Europe
Cyprus, Turkey, and Greece
The Balkans
The Mediterranean
Temperate and Northern Europe
The Danubians and the northern Mesolithic
The TRB and the Baltic
The British Isles
Hunters and farmers in prehistoric Europe
Agricultural Dispersals from Southwest Asia to the East Central Asia
The Indian Subcontinent
The domesticated crops of the Indian subcontinent
Regional Trajectories from Hunter-Gathering to Farming in South Asia The consequences of Mehrgarh
Western India: Balathal to Jorwe
Southern India
The Ganges Basin and northeastern India
Europe and South Asia in a nutshell
5 Africa: An Independent Focus of Agricultural Development?
The Spread of the Southwest Asian Agricultural Complex into Egypt The Origins of the Native African Domesticates
The Development and Spread of Agriculture in Sub-Saharan Africa The Appearance of Agriculture in Central and Southern Africa
6 The Beginnings of Agriculture in East Asia
Environmental Factors and the Domestication Process in China
The Archaeology of Early Agriculture in China
The Archaeological Record of the Early Neolithic in the Yellow and Yangzi Basins
Later Developments (post-5000 ac) in the Chinese Neolithic South of the Yangzi - Hemudu and Majiabang
The spread of agriculture south of Zhejiang
7 The Spread of Agriculture into Southeast Asia and Oceania The Background to Agricultural Dispersal in Southeast Asia Early Farmers in Mainland Southeast Asia
Early Farmers in Taiwan and Island Southeast Asia
Early farmers in the Pacific
The New Guinea Agricultural Trajectory and its Role in Pacific Colonization
8 Early Agriculture in the Americas
Some Necessary Background
The Geography of Early Agriculture, and General Cultural Trajectories Current Opinion on Agricultural Origins in the Americas
The Domesticated Crops
Maize
The other crops
Early Pottery in the Americas
Early Farmers in the Americas
The Andes
Amazonia
Middle America (with Mesoamerica)
The Southwest
Thank the Lord for the freeway (and the pipeline)
Immigrant Mesoamerican farmers in the Southwest?
Independent Agricultural Origins in the Eastern Woodlands 9 What Do Language Families Mean for Human Prehistory?
Language Families and How They Are Studied
Issues of Phylogeny and Reticulation
The Identification and Phylogenetic Study of Language Families Introducing the Players
How Do Languages and Language Families Spread?
How Do Languages Change through Time?
Macrofamilies, and more on the time factor
Languages in Competition - Language Shift
Languages in competition - contact-induced change
10 The Spread of Farming: Comparing the Archaeology and the Linguistics Western and Central Eurasia, and Northern Africa
Indo-European
Indo-European from the Pontic steppes?
Where did PIE really originate and what can we know about it? Colin Renfrew's contribution to the Indo-European debate
Afroasiatic
Elamite and Dravidian, and the Indo-Aryans
A multidisciplinary scenario for South Asian prehistory
Indo-European, Afroasiatic, Elamo-Dravidian, and the issue of Nostratic Saharan and Sub-Saharan Africa: Nilo-Saharan and Niger-Congo
Nilo-Saharan
Niger-Congo, with Bantu
East and Southeast Asia, and the Pacific
The Chinese and Mainland Southeast Asian language families Austronesian
Piecing it together for East Asia "Altaic," and some difficult issues The Trans New Guinea Phylum
The Americas - South and Central
South America
Middle America, Mesoamerica, and the Southwest
Uto-Aztecan
Eastern North America
Algonquian and Muskogean
Iroquoian, Siouan, and Caddoan
Did the First Farmers Spread Their Languages?
11 Genetics, Skeletal Anthropology, and the People Factor
Are There Correlations between Human Biology and Language Families? Do genes record history?
Southwest Asia and Europe
South Asia
Africa
East Asia
Southeast Asia and Oceania (mainly Austronesians)
The Americas
Did Early Farmers Spread through Processes of Demic Diffusion? 12 The Nature of Early Agricultural Expansion
Homeland, Spread, and Friction Zones, plus Overshoot
The Stages within a Process of Agricultural Genesis and Dispersal
Notes
References
Index