Foraging and Farming: Evolution of Plant Exploitation(13 One World Archaeology S.)

This book is one of a series of more than 20 volumes resulting from the World Archaeological Congress, September l986, attempting to bring together not only archaeologists and anthropologists from many parts of the world, as well as academics from contingent disciplines, but also non-academics from a wide range of cultural backgrounds who could lend their own expertise to the discussions at the Congress. The series addresses world archaeology in its widest sense, investigating how people lived in the past and how and why changes took place, resulting in the forms of society and culture which exist today. "Foraging and Farming" develops a new approach to plant exploitation and early agriculture in a worldwide comparative context. It modifies the conceptual dichotomy between "hunter-gatherers" and "farmers", viewing human exploitation of plant resources as a global evolutionary process which incorporated the beginnings of cultivation and crop domestication. The studies throughout the book come from a worldwide range of geographical contexts, from the Andes to China and from Australia to the Upper Mid-West of North America. This work should be of interest to anthropologists, archaeologists, botanists and geographers.

Table of Contents:
Part 1 The evolution of plant exploitation - concepts and processes: an evolutionary continuum of people-plant interaction, D.R.Harris; Darwinism and its role in the explanation of domestication, D.Rindos; domestication and domiculture in northern Australia - a social perspective, A.K.Chase; the domestication of environment, D.E.Yen. Part 2 Plant exploitation in non-agrarian contexts - the ethnographic witness: wild-grass seed harvesting in the Sahara and sub-Sahara of Africa, J.R.Harlan; Australian Aboriginal seed grinding and its archaeological record - a case study from the Western Desert, S.Cane; plant foods of hte Gidjingali - ethnographic and archaeological perspectives from northern Australia on tuber and seed exploitation, R.Jones and B.Meehan; plant usage and management in southwest Australian Aboriginal societies, S.J.Hallam; ethnoecological observations on wild and cultivated rice and yams in northeastern Thailand, J.C.White; an example of intensive plant husbandry - the Kumeyaay of southern California, F.C.Shipek; plant-food processing - implications for dietary quality, A.B.Stahl. Part 3 Plant exploitation in per-agrarian contexts - the archaeological evidence: plant exploitation at Grotta dell'Uzzo, Sicily - new evidence for the transition from Mesolithic to Neolithic subsistence in southern Europe, L.Constantini; late Palaeolithic plant foods from Wadi Kubbaniya in Upper Egypt - dietary diversity, infant weaning and seasonality in a riverine environment, G.C.Hillman; plant-food economy during the Epipalaeolithic period at Tell Abu Hureyra, Syria - dietary diversity, seasonality and modes of exploitation, G.C.Hillman et al; Mesolithic exploitation of wild plants in Sri Lanka - archaeobotanical study at the cave site of Beli-Lena, M.D.Kajale; new evidence on plant exploitation and environment during the Hoabinhian (late Stone Age) from Ban Kao Caves, Thailand, K.Pyramarn; the taming of the rain forests - a model for Late Pleistocene forest exploitation in New Guinea, L.Groube; seed gathering in in land Australia - current evidence from seed-grinders on the antiquity of the ethnohistorical pattern of exploitation, M.A.Smith; adaptation of prehistoric hunter-gatherers to the high Andes - the changing role of plant resources, D.M.Pearsall. Part 4 Agrarian plant exploitation - the domestication and diffusion of crops and crop assemblages: the tropical African cereals, J.R.Harlan; factors responsible for the ennoblement of African yams - inferences from experiments in yam domestication, V.E.Chikwendu and C.E.A.Okezie; domestication of the southwest Asian neolithic crop assemblage of cerials, pulses and flax - the evidence from living plants, D.Zohary; origin and domestication of the southwest Asian grain legumes, G.Ladizinsky. (Part contents)