Table of Contents

1: Rethinking Agriculture: Introductory Thoughts; 2: Agriculture, Cultivation and Domestication: Exploring the Conceptual Framework of Early Food Production; 3: Selection, Cultivation and Reproductive Isolation: A Reconsideration of the Morphological and Molecular Signals of Domestication; 4: Subterranean Diets in the Tropical Rain Forests of Sarawak, Malaysia; 5: Early to Mid-Holocene Plant Exploitation in New Guinea: Towards a Contingent Interpretation of Agriculture; 6: Unravelling the Story of Early Plant Exploitation in Highland Papua New Guinea; 7: The Meaning of Ditches: Interpreting the Archaeological Record from New Guinea Using Insights from Ethnography; 8: Perspectives on Traditional Agriculture from Rapa Nui; 9: New Perspectives on Plant Domestication and the Development of Agriculture in the New World; 10: Keepers of Louisiana's Levees: Early Mound Builders and Forest Managers; 11: Modeling Prehistoric Agriculture through the Palaeoenvironmental Record: Theoretical and Methodological Issues; 12: Chronicling Indigenous Accounts of the ‘Rise of Agriculture' in the Americas; 13: Starch Remains, Preservation Biases and Plant Histories: An Example from Highland Peru; 14: Emerging Food-Producing Systems in the La Plata Basin: The Los Ajos Site; 15: A Tale of Two Tuber Crops: How Attributes of Enset and Yams may have Shaped Prehistoric Human-Plant Interactions in Southwest Ethiopia; 16: Multidisciplinary Evidence of Mixed Farming During the Early Iron Age in Rwanda and Burundi; 17: The Development of Plant Cultivation in Semi-Arid West Africa; 18: Human Impact and Environmental Exploitation in Gabon during the Holocene; 19: The Establishment of Traditional Plantain Cultivation in the African Rain Forest: A Working Hypothesis; 20: African Pastoral Perspectives on Domestication of the Donkey: A First Synthesis; 21: Using Linguistics to Reconstruct African Subsistence Systems: Comparing Crop Names to Trees and Livestock

About the Author

Luc Vrydaghs, Timothy P Denham, José Iriarte

Reviews

"...an excellent and timely compendium of current thinking and debate on the topic...There is much to be learned and thought about here. The editors and contributors should be congratulated for producing such a fine piece of work. The volume is sure to assume considerable prominence and have lasting significance in the intertwined realms of theory, concepts, data, and interpretation in agricultural origins." --Dolores R. Piperno, Journal of Anthropological Research

"In a concise and ambitious opening chapter authors are challenged to critically evaluate concepts such as domestication, centres of origin and the farmer/gatherer dichotomy in defining agriculture as well as the scale of analysis suitable for the investigation of agricultural prehistories. The following papers provide a wealth of new information, at times overwhelming, of significance for both the narrative of ancient agriculture and methodology construction." --Andrew Fairbairn, Archaeology in Oceania

"Most readers will find the contents fresh and, in places, challenging. This volume is a significant addition to the growing literature on alternative ideas about the development of agriculture in different parts of the world. This review cannot do justice to the 21 contributions by a wide range of authors." --Tim Maggs, South African Archaeological Bulletin