Group 1: The "niche" hunter-gatherers of Africa and Asia

These populations are classified together because all have survived to the present in agriculturally poor environments in the interstices between much larger agriculturalist and pastoralist populations. All have fairly non-ranked "band" forms of social organization and all have apparently been essentially hunter-gatherer in economic orientation throughout their known or reconstructable histories. Classic populations of this type include the San (Bushmen) of the Kalahari and Namib regions, the Hadza of northern Tanzania, the Aka and Mbuti (Pygmies) of the African rain forest, and the Semang and Agta (Negritos) of Peninsular Malaysia and the Philippines. It is possible that some Amazonian interfluvial hunter-gatherers, located between the major riverine farming populations, also belong in this group, but this is a contested issue. Most examples in this section will be drawn from the Kalahari and Southeast Asian rain-forest populations.

Group 1 hunter-gatherer societies live in areas decidedly marginal for cultivation, particularly semi-deserts and equatorial rain forests, and today are surrounded by or live adjacent to more fertile agricultural or pastoralist landscapes. In James Woodburn's (1982, 1991) terms they are "encapsulated" by their more powerful neighbors. Some groups, such as the Malaysian Semang and Philippine Agta, have entered states of severe encapsulation very recently with the march of logging, cash cropping, and other activities completely antithetical to hunter-gatherer survival (Dentan et al. 1997; Headland and Reid 1989; Headland 1997). With all these populations, however, varying degrees of less threatening long-term contact, intermarriage, and sometimes hostility with agriculturalist populations, often over millennia, mean that many have surely undergone substantial change away from any "Paleolithic" behavioral norms that might have existed before agriculture appeared.

The impact of encapsulation is highlighted by Woodburn's categorization of them as having immediate return systems characterized by sharing, together with an absence of storage and accumulation of food and property. Such groups often occupy lowstatus economic positions in partial dependence on nearby agriculturalist or pastoral populations, rapidly losing ethnic identity in the

process. The stresses that result from such subordination, described in some detail for the Philippine Batak by James Eder (1987), ensure that such groups lack any form of social hierarchy. In social terms, they can be described as living in mobile multi-family bands, usually bilateral in kinship terms and egalitarian in terms of authority. Such groups, in Woodburn's view, are most unlikely ever to become agriculturalists. None have ever seemed very determined in this regard as far as the ethnographic record is concerned, and their general lack of concern with accumulation and/or inheritance of wealth is so far from the mind-set of many farmers and herders that any successful shift would require some very fundamental reorganization of their societies and ideologies.1°

Indeed, detailed studies of the Philippine Agta and Batak reveal that they find it extremely difficult to adopt agriculture successfully, even when all their hunting land has been taken by agriculturalists (Headland 1986; Eder 1987). According to Rai (1990), immigrant tobacco farmers in northeastern Luzon nowadays drive out native agriculturalists, who in turn impinge on Agra huntergatherers and take their hunting land. Not only do the Agta and Batak lack the necessary skills for a firm commitment to agriculture, but even when they wish to learn them the surrounding cultivators and cash-croppers normally do not allow the hunters to farm successfully. It suits the farmers better to keep them in a semi-dependent relationship, hunting and collecting for trade and laboring in fields from time to time. Eder (1987:93) states with respect to the Batak of Palawan: "The proximate causes of the desultory state of Barak agriculture are found in an array of poor management practices, scheduling conflicts, social pressures, and cultural values."

Andrew Smith (1990:65, 1998) makes the same point for San populations living adjacent to Bantu herders in southern Africa: "even if a hunter would aspire to be a herder, the social conditions are against it." He also notes that the current low status of hunter-gatherers who live in association with African pastoralists probably goes back deeply into the prehistoric record. Vierich points out that "rather than undergoing a contemporary `Neolithic Revolution'

... the hunter-gatherers of the southeastern Kalahari are becoming increasingly dependent on the encroaching Bantu economy." She also states that amongst Basarwa (Botswana Bushman) populations, "the more dependent a [Basarwa] family is on livestock and agricultural products, the less likely they are to

actually own livestock or plant their own fields" (Vierich 1982:217, 219). This reinforces the fairly obvious conclusion that as encapsulation increases in intensity, so the opportunities for successful and stable long-term adoption of food production rapidly fade.

Sedentism also has its problems for these populations. Kent (1996) notes in the African context how adoption of a sedentary lifestyle can lead to a profound increase in social disorder and homicide amongst egalitarian societies without authoritarian leadership. Hitchcock (1982) states, again in an African (Basarwa) context: "Considering all the problems incurred by sedentism, it comes as no surprise that hunter-gatherer groups would attempt to keep moving if at all possible."

The recent histories of all these circumscribed populations suggest that remaining a hunter-gatherer was actually an attractive prospect in the past, when pressure from farmers or herders was not so high as recently. In such circumstances, people had sufficient hunting land and could establish exchange partnerships with farmers in order to acquire cereals and other domesticated foods. In return, the hunter-gatherers exchanged meat and other wild products, especially important for farmers who lacked large herds (Spielman and Eder 1994). Many examples exist of such exchange systems in all hunter-gatherer situations in the Old World, particularly in West Africa, Malaysia, and the Philippines." Geoffrey Benjamin's (1985) linguistic and anthropological observations suggest that the Semang hunter-gatherers and the Senoi farmers of the Malay Peninsula have differentiated their lifestyles in situations of continuing interaction over about 4,000 years, toward hunting-gathering and farming specializations respectively. The Semang have adopted aspects of social organization, such as local group exogamy and bilateral descent, that encourage wide-ranging movement and social ties, free of any of the links between lineages and specific territories that characterize many sedentary agriculturalists. Thomas Headland (1986) observes similar features amongst the Casiguran Agta.

Such interactive networks between farmers and hunter-gatherers, in situations of non-severe circumscription, are presumably stable until the farmers increase their numbers (hardly a rare circumstance in many modem developing countries) and thus require more land. Then, the hunter-gatherers either join the farmers as an underclass of field workers, or, if they are lucky, they can adopt

agriculture. The catch-22 situation here is that by the time the farmer pressure is sufficient to make agricultural adoption worthwhile, it can be already too late, as some of the Philippine Negrito populations have discovered so tragically, and as have some marginalized San with respect to pastoralism. The process in the 21st century would appear to be similar to trying to jump aboard a fastmoving train.

For those who miss the train through choice or circumstance, the future can be grim indeed. Colonial period attempts to persuade the Malaysian Semang to settle and farm have not been very successful owing to problems with seasonal food scarcity and reduced dietary diversity (Kuchikura 1988; Polunin 1953). The same has been the case for the Philippine groups, although here the enormous population density in the Philippines compared to Malaysia renders the future of Agta foragers as independent groups even more tenuous. Headland (1986, 1997; Early and Headland 1998) gives average life expectancy for the Casiguran Agta as 22 years, with 50 percent of children dying before puberty, one woman in seven dying in childbirth, and one man in five dying as a result of homicide. Malnutrition is severe, and Agta gardening is on such a small scale that it adds little to the diet. Headland suggests that nutritional deficiencies in the past may be a major reason for the short stature of the Agta, indeed for all the Southeast Asian Negrito populations. Eder paints a similar picture for the Batak of Palawan.

However, when some of these groups are looked at from a historical perspective, it is clear that their world has not always been as pressured as now. Some of the Agra in the Philippines adopted agriculture and even changed their languages to those of the Austronesian agriculturalists deep in prehistoric time (Fox 1953; Reid 1994a, 1994b), although today the Ayta of Zambales, now fulltime agriculturalists, rather paradoxically derive 90 percent of their diet from introduced American rather than native Southeast Asian crops (maize, manioc, sweet potato, Xanthosoma taro) (Brosius 1990). This is surely a reflection of the fact that these people are obliged to live in a relatively marginal agricultural location where only these non-irrigated and hardy crops will grow.

The San, in particular, have been the center of a broad and rather vituperative debate in anthropology and archaeology as to how "genuine or spurious" they are as hunters.12 The San live mostly now in an area beyond the range of agriculture, but not of pastoralism, and their relations with Bantu mixed farmers

and Khoikhoi herders have been very intense at times in the past, particularly for those groups who live around the edge of the Kalahari. The Khoikhoi are one group of Khoisan peoples who actually adopted sheep pastoralism on a permanent basis about 1,500-2,000 years ago (pages 109-10). Some San have also adopted agriculture from Bantu farmers, planting tobacco and sorghum on a casual basis, but rarely tending the crop according to Richard Lee (1979:409411). Others, however, such as the Dobe San of the dry Kalahari interior, remained relatively uninfluenced hunter-gatherers until early in the 20th century. As Solway and Lee (1990:119) state: "Thus ... the complete incorporation, as dependants, of the San into the agro-pastoralist system was delayed as long as the bush held the possibility of an alternative livelihood."

Despite the existence of occasional cases of agricultural adoption amongst societies within group 1, it is apparent that all such cases of adoption for which we have records, or which can be surmised from proxy data, have been small in scale and certainly not of the strength likely to set off a process of agricultural dispersal. Indeed, they probably represent lucky escapes from situations of developing encapsulation. It is very hard to see in the records of these "niche" hunter-gatherer societies anywhere in Africa or Asia any potential for agricultural adoption on a large scale, similar for instance to the major spreads of agriculture we witness in the world's Neolithic and Formative periods.

Group 2: The "unenclosed" hunter-gatherers of Australia, the Andamans,

and the Americas

This group comprises those hunter-gatherers who inhabited agricultural latitudes in Australia, the Andaman Islands, and many regions of North America, especially the West Coast and Florida, but who (unlike the members of group 1) lived lives generally apart from farmers prior to European colonization. Many of these societies in North America lived in coastal regions with prolific maritime resources and were thus able to attain chiefdom modes of social organization, often with ranked lineages. Some were also in periodic but non-threatening contact with farmers in adjacent regions in prehistory and thus had opportunities, never taken, to adopt agriculture (e.g., the northern Australians, the Andamanese, and the southern Californians). The Calusa of Florida could also be included in this group, but Keegan (1987) suggests that they ate domesticated maize on bone isotope evidence, so perhaps care is needed in interpretation. Others had limited or no contact with farmers at all, partly through remoteness and by virtue of being "protected" from agricultural contact by extensive intervening hunter-gatherer landscapes. The tribes of British Columbia and the southern half of Australia belonged in this category.

In James Woodburn's terminology, some of these hunter-gatherer populations, especially the maritime chiefdoms of western North America and Florida, had delayedreturn systems for reciprocal repayment of obligation and debt. They were as a result less egalitarian than the encapsulated African and Asian huntergatherers. Such groups often recognized formal rights over territories and resources at many levels ranging from the individual to the community (Richardson 1982; Widmer 1988). They had lineage rather than bilateral social organization for marriage and ritual purposes, they stored food (a necessary development for delayed-return systems - Testart 1988), were often less mobile, more sedentary than the immediate return groups, and in general had the kind of social characteristics which in theory could render a shift to the accumulating and storing lifestyle of the successful farmer a little easier. Socially, therefore, such groups overlapped greatly with agriculturalists, indicating that social

complexity of the chiefdom type can relate in terms of origin more to the intensity and reliability of resources and population density than to any simple presence of food production as opposed to hunting and gathering. This is not a new observation, but it is one worth reiterating nevertheless.

Complex hunter-gatherer chiefdoms of the North American type seem not to have existed in Australia at European contact, although Harry Lourandos (1991, 1997) and Colin Pardoe (1988) provide archaeological and burial evidence to suggest that complex societies in Woodburn's "delayed-return" mold could have existed in the prehistoric past, especially in some of the more fertile southern parts of the continent. Ethnographically, Australia is too complex for easy categorization, with some societies now being strongly "immediate-return" and focused on sharing. Nevertheless, intensely maritime-oriented societies with complex technology and lineage ranking did not occur in Australia and neither was food storage highly developed, except in drier regions (Peterson 1993; Cane 1989:104).

What do we know about opportunities for agricultural adoption amongst these group 2 hunters and gatherers, before the incorporation of most into modern nations? Australia, uniquely, formed a vast continent of hunter-gatherers who survived into ethnographic times with no traces of pre-contact agricultural adoption, yet who lived sometimes in regions of high potential agricultural productivity. Cape York Aborigines were in contact with Tones Strait and southern New Guinea gardeners, all living within a zone of similar ecology, climate, and floral resources (Harris 1977b). Indeed, the crops that supported New Guinea cultivators - yams, aroids (particularly taro), arrowroot, palms, pandanus, and occasional coconuts - grew wild in the Cape York landscape without evincing any agricultural interest.

Arnhem Land and Kimberley Aborigines also had contact with male Indonesian maritime collectors and traders ("Macassans"), but here we perhaps must accept that seamen and farming knowledge do not easily travel together. Macassan visits to northern Australia for beche-de-mer collection since perhaps the 16th century (Macknight 1976) seem to have been frequent enough for Macassan-Aboriginal trade pidgins to form (Urry and Walsh 1981), and some Aborigines were even taken by ship to Macassar (Ujung Pandang). But in this case, the Indonesians did not settle permanently or farm in Australia. Similar contacts occurred with the Andamanese, who were visited by trading ships

sailing between India and Southeast Asia from at least 2,000 years ago, such that they were able to acquire pigs and to adopt pottery-making (Cooper 1996). But they also did not become farmers.

According to some authorities, Australian Aboriginal societies also enshrined behavioral characteristics that would have made adoption of settled agriculture a difficult process. Nicolas Peterson refers to the lack of materialism, need for portability, and ethic of generosity in Aboriginal society, regarding these as removing any motivation for the development of labor-intensive subsistence patterns such as agriculture. He gives the example of an Arnhem Land group who made a garden in 1971 for the specific purpose of convincing officials that their land was in use, thus not available for expropriation. When the group moved camp it uprooted the plants and replanted them beside the new camp, thus giving a new meaning to the concept of shifting cultivation. Not surprisingly, the plants died. A. K. Chase also suggests, with respect to northern Aboriginal societies, that agriculture "implies a radically different perception of the environment and its legitimate human occupants, and it authorizes a radically different manipulation of plants and their habits"."

Some of the drier inland riverine regions of Australia supported populations who harvested wild grasses in prehistory, and still do today (Allen 1974; Cane 1989). But, unlike the situation in the Levant or China, we witness no trajectory here toward domestication. The reasons for this are probably that the handstripping harvesting method recorded ethnographically never selected for grains with a non-shattering habit. Even if such selection were to occur, no planting was practiced for the next season. In addition, processing of these small grass seeds was so laborious (six hours' work to feed one person for one day according to Cane) that the bread-like "dampers" produced from the husked and ground grain never provided more than a supplement to the diet. Whether agriculture would eventually have developed here if the harvesters had been left alone by the outside world for another few millennia we will never know, but with existing processing methods it would certainly be unlikely. The regions concerned are also marginal for agriculture, with recurrent problems of drought.

But what of agricultural adoption by ethnographic group 2 hunter-gatherer societies in other parts of the world? The Yanomama of Venezuela possibly adopted banana cultivation into a basically hunter-gatherer economy in postColumbian times, after this plant was introduced from Southeast Asia into the

Americas (Rival 1999:81). Another example of agricultural adoption has occurred in recent centuries in the Southwest USA. The ancestors of the Athabaskan-speaking Apache and Navajo migrated from Canada into northern Arizona and northwestern New Mexico, apparently after the collapse around AD 1400 of many of the former Anasazi and Mogollon (pueblo-building) agricultural societies made famous by such evocative ruins as Cliff Palace in Mesa Verde and Pueblo Bonito in Chaco Canyon (Matson 2003). The Athabaskans migrated, probably down the western Plains, as bison hunters, but some Navajo in close contact with surviving Pueblo societies had adopted sheep-herding and some casual cultivation of maize by 1705. Ethnographically, the Apache and Navajo habitats were relatively and and the degree of agricultural investment prior to the 19th century was apparently only slight; attempts to force the Navajo to adopt agriculture more intensively prior to 1863 failed. Some Apache living at high altitudes (e.g., the Mescalero) planted maize in spring but harvested it while still green (unripe) to avoid frost. They then needed to roast and sun-dry the grains in order to make them edible, which meant that they lacked any viable planting stock for the next season. This, they probably had to trade for. So agricultural adoption here was evidently both encouraged and yet at the same time limited in intensity by environmental marginality (Hester 1962; Snow 1991).

So far, it seems that the ethnographic record with respect to both group 1 and group 2 hunter-gatherer societies offers few hints of eager and successful agricultural adoption. This seems to be the case regardless of whether societies were immediate or delayed return, encapsulated or unenclosed, ranked or egalitarian, sedentary or mobile, "collectors" or "foragers"." The ranked and populous hunter-gatherer societies of northern California were no more interested in adopting agriculture than were the Cape York Aborigines or the Semang, and perhaps even the majority of huntergatherers in prehistory. It does not follow that hunter-gatherers who have "complex" social institutions will necessarily become farmers whenever they are introduced to the farming concept. Indeed, the Apache and Navajo were probably small and mobile egalitarian bands at the time of their adoption of agriculture and herding.

Thus, whatever the social and environmental conditions conducive to agricultural adoption, the "bottom line" observation still holds. Nowhere in the ethnographic record do we observe any adoption of agriculture that has

imparted expansionary success to the adopting population. However, it is not my intention here to claim that this could never have happened in the prehistoric past, and of course we will return to this issue on many occasions in later chapters.