Transitions to Farming in Europe: Ex Oriente Lux?

Ever since the speculations of the Victorians about the inexorable progress of Man from the savagery of foraging to agriculture and civilization, Europe has been one of the main theatres of debate about transitions from foraging to farming (Chapter 1). The dominant model in the twentieth century, first developed explicitly by Gordon Childe in The Dawn of European Civilization (1925) and The Danube in Prehistory (1929), has been that of ex oriente lux, ‘light from the Near East’. According to this theory, farming began in Europe because it was introduced by Neolithic farmers from South-West Asia, who brought with them domesticated plants and animals together with a new technology that included pottery and polished stone tools. They colonized a land thinly occupied by Mesolithic foragers except at the coastal margins. In southern Europe, the first farmers would have ‘taken to their boats and paddled or sailed on the alluring waters of the Mediterranean to the next landfall—and the next’ (Childe, 1957: 16). In temperate Europe, expansion was facilitated by ‘slash-and-burn’ (swidden) agriculture practised by the first farmers: they arrived at a particular location, cleared the forest, burnt the cut timber, and planted their crops, and then moved on after a few years. The first suite of 14C dates from European Neolithic sites obtained in the 1960s astonished archaeologists, because the (uncalibrated) dates of c.6000 bc from Greek Neolithic settlements such as Nea Nikomedeia and Knossos (Fig. 9.1) were 3,000 years older than Childe’s suggested date for the beginning of the European Neolithic: c.3000 BC. He established the latter by an elaborate process of cross-dating European prehistoric sites with historically dated cultures in the eastern Mediterranean, in turn dated by links to Pharaonic Egypt. At the same time, the 14C data appeared to confirm Childe’s ex oriente lux theory, because there was a clear trend of increasingly younger dates with distance from South-West Asia (J. G. D. Clark, 1965; Fig. 1.7). The dates of c .6000 BC in south-east Europe were in the same time-frame as dates for PPNB Neolithic settlements in South-West Asia, dates in central Europe and the Mediterranean were of the order of 4500 BC, and dates from Early Neolithic sites on the Atlantic margins of Europe were nearer 3000 BC.

The Agricultural Revolution in Prehistory: Why did Foragers become Farmers?

As Chapter 1 described, the origins of agriculture have been debated by archaeologists for most of the discipline’s history. The topic has been a particular focus of archaeological field and laboratory research from the middle of the twentieth century onwards. The number of suggested causes that has been proposed over the years for why prehistoric foragers might have become farmers appears almost endless, with everybody joining the party including the lunatic fringe (Table 10.1)! The main course of scholarly debate, though, has been conditioned partly by changing theoretical currents in archaeological thinking and perceptions of present-day or recent foraging and farming societies (Chapter 2) and partly by the application of improved methodologies (Chapter 3). In the regional studies that form the core of this book, I have concentrated primarily on the archaeological evidence left by prehistoric foragers and farmers, in all its richness, from stones to bones to rock art to starch grains (and more besides), though I have also made reference to the contributions of the several other disciplines that have contributed to the debate, including anthropology, ecology, ethnoarchaeology, genetics, geomorphology, linguistics, and palynology (pollen analysis). The next sections briefly review the principal themes that have emerged from those studies, as the basis for some concluding reflections on whether it is possible or desirable to arrive at an overarching explanation or set of explanations for why foragers became farmers. South-West Asia has probably been the focus of more debate on discussions about the origins of agriculture than anywhere else in the world. On the present evidence what can clearly be recognized as the Eurasian system of mixed farming (the cultivation of wheat and barley and the herding of sheep and goats) seems to have developed in this region very early in the Holocene. It underpinned the dramatic development of PPNB villages in and around the ‘hilly flanks’ of the Fertile Crescent some 1,000 years into the Holocene, c.8500 BC. The parts of South-West Asia where these villages came into being were also places where wild cereals, sheep, and goats were naturally located.

Central and South Asia: theWheat/Rice Frontier

This chapter intentionally overlaps with Chapter 4 in its geographical scope, as there is no clear boundary between South-West and South Asia. Western Asiatic landforms—mountain ranges, alluvial valleys, semi-arid steppe, and desert—extend eastwards from the Iranian plateau beyond the Caspian Sea into Turkmenistan in Central Asia, and there are similar environments in South Asia from Baluchistan (western Pakistan) and the Indus valley into north-west India as far east as the Aravalli hills (Fig. 5.1). Rainfall increases steadily moving eastwards across the vast and immensely fertile alluvial plains of northern India. The north-east (Bengal, Assam, Bhutan) is tropical, with tropical conditions also extending down the eastern coast of the peninsula and up the west coast as far as Bombay. Today the great majority of the rural population of the region lives by agriculture, though many farmers also hunt game if they have the opportunity. The ‘Eurasian’ farming system predominates in the western part of the region: the cultivation of crops sown in the winter and harvested in the spring (rabi), such as barley, wheat, oats, lentils, chickpeas, jujube, mustard, and grass peas, integrated with animal husbandry based especially on sheep, goats, and cattle. A second system (kharif ) takes advantage of the summer monsoon rains: crops are sown in the late spring at the start of the monsoon and harvested in the autumn. Rice (Oryza sativa) is the main summer or kharif crop (though millets and pulses are also key staples), grown wherever its considerable moisture needs can be met, commonly by rainfall in upland swidden systems and on the lowlands by flooding bunded or dyked fields in paddy systems. The systems are referred to as ‘dry’ and ‘wet’ rice farming respectively. Rice is the primary staple in the eastern or tropical zone receiving the greatest amount of summer monsoon rain. This extends from the Ganges (Ganga) valley eastwards through Assam into Myanmar (Burma) and East Asia. There are something like 100,000 varieties of domesticated Asian rice, but the main one grown in the region is Oryza indica. A wide range of millets is also grown as summer crops in rain-fed systems throughout the semi-arid tropical regions of South Asia, including sorghum or ‘great millet’, finger millet, pearl or bullrush millet, proso or common millet, foxtail millet, bristley foxtail, browntopmillet, kodo millet, littlemillet, and sawamillet.

The ‘Hearth of Domestication’? Transitions to Farming in South-West Asia

The principal focus of this chapter is the classic zone of early farming research from the 1960s onwards, the so-called ‘hilly flanks of the Fertile Crescent’ in South-West Asia (Fig. 4.1). This region is normally defined as the arc of hill country to the west of the Syrian desert and to the north and east of the Tigris and Euphrates valleys. The western side of the arc begins east of the Nile in the Sinai and the Gulf of Arabah on the southern border of Israel and Jordan; it continues northwards as the hill country on either side of the Jordan rift valley in Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, western Jordan, and western Syria (the so-called ‘Levantine corridor’); and extends westwards to the Mediterranean littoral. The northern sector is formed by the Taurus mountains along the southern edge of the Anatolian plateau, which curve eastwards from the Mediterranean coast in northern Syria to form the present-day Syrian–Turkish border. The eastern sector consists of the Zagros mountains, running south-eastwards from eastern Turkey and north-west Iran to the Persian Gulf, forming the Iraq–Iran border for most of their length, and continuing in south-west Iran beyond the Persian Gulf towards the Straits of Hormuz. The region also embraces adjacent zones: the alluvial plains of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and the vast tracts of steppe and desert country separating them from the Levantine, Taurus, and Zagros upland systems; the Anatolian plateau to the north of the Taurus, within modern Turkey; and the Iranian plateau east of the Zagros, within modern Iran. The archaeological literature commonly uses the term Near East to describe the main region of interest, with the Levant for its western side (a term also used in this chapter), and South-West Asia for the eastern side, but the entire region is more correctly termed South-West Asia. The upland areas of the region mostly receive more than 200 millimetres of rainfall a year, which is the minimum required for growing cereals without irrigation. Rainfall decreases drastically moving out into the steppe and desert zones.

Identifying Foragers and Farmers

One of the most exciting aspects of studying transitions from foraging to farming is the extraordinary range of evidence available, and the necessary interdisciplinarity of the exercise (Barker and Grant, 1999; Dincauze, 2000). The primary data for whether prehistoric people were living as foragers or farmers (or combining activities, as was often the case) have been collected by archaeologists, from their surveys and excavations. For much of the history of study, subsistence patterns were inferred principally from interpretations of artefacts, settlements, and associated structures. More recently, studies of artefact use have been strengthened by the application of techniques of physical and chemical analyses of food residues attached to them. A vital strand of research has been on the environmental contexts in which early farming took place. Such studies, of sediments, soils, and the microscopic flora and fauna they contain, have contributed reconstructions at a wide variety of scales, from regional climatic and environmental histories of late Pleistocene and Holocene climatic change to the landscapes of single occupation sites—the recognition of signs of animal stalling, for example. From the 1960s onwards, priority has also been given on archaeological excavations to the collection of the organic materials that survive in many conditions such as fragments of animal bone and seeds and other fragments of plants, waste discarded from the consumption of food that is the primary evidence for systems of subsistence. In certain conditions even faeces may survive, telling us about individual meals. Human teeth and bone provide further information about diet. Molecular biology is a new and exciting area of current research, with modern and ancient DNA (aDNA) being used to infer population histories and domestication processes (Jobling et al., 2004; M. Jones, 2001; Renfrew and Boyle, 2000). Further contributions have come from linguistics: studies of present-day languages have been used in support of theories about how farming was spread by new language groups (Bellwood and Renfrew, 2002). The art systems created by foragers and early farmers are yet another source of information, amongst the most intriguing for their potential insights about the beliefs of the people who created them. In short, there is a remarkably broad church of disciplines with contributions to offer, though integrating their findings can be challenging.

Understanding Foragers

Hunter-gatherer or forager societies, as the names imply, have been defined first and foremost by their mode of subsistence: ‘hunting of wild animals, gathering of wild plants, and fishing, with no domestication of plants, and no domesticated animals except the dog’ (Lee and Daly, 1999: 3). Another recent survey develops this defining characteristic in the following terms: ‘the absence of direct human control over the reproduction of exploited species, and little or no control over other aspects of population ecology such as the behaviour and distribution of food resources. In essence, hunter-gatherers exercise no deliberate alteration of the gene pool of exploited resources’ (Panter-Brick et al., 2001b: 2, their italics). In addition to this primary characteristic of ‘not being farmers’, there are or have been two other very common features amongst recent and contemporary forager societies, as Lee and DeVore (1968b: 11) commented in their opening essay to the seminal Man the Hunter volume: ‘(1) they live in small groups, and (2) they move around a lot’. At the end of the Pleistocene, forager societies peopled most regions of the world, at most latitudes. By the middle of the second millennium ad, foragers still occupied a third of the globe including all of Australia and most of North America, and large tracts of South America, Africa, North, and North-East Asia. Yet in recent centuries foragers have ‘retreated precipitously in the face of the steamroller ofmodernity’ (Lee and Daly, 1999: 1), occupying only those areas where farmers simply cannot go, or where farming is so marginal as to be uneconomic (Fig. 2.1). Many societies frequently cited in archaeological textbooks as examples of forager societies today, like the !Kung-San of the Kalahari, in fact also practise cultivation or herding on a small scale, and others depend heavily on trade with neighbouring farmers for staple foods. It is extremely difficult to translate foragers’ behaviour as recorded today or in the recent past into theories of general applicability to the world’s prehistoric foraging population prior to farming. The task is all the more complicated by the remoteness of the everyday lives of foragers (present and past) from western Europeans, a remoteness that has given rise to two enduring currents in European philosophical thinking about such societies: that they are alien savages on the one hand, or innocents close to the state of nature on the other (Barnard, 1999).

Africa: Afro-Asiatic Pastoralists and Bantu Farmers?

Africa, the cradle of humankind several million years ago, was also where anatomically modern humans first developed over 150,000 years ago. Yet our understanding of how these people eventually became farmers is still very limited. A generation ago Thurston Shaw commented that, in comparison with other parts of the world, ‘Africa lags behind. . . in relation to archaeological research and in knowledge about the beginnings of food production’ (Shaw, 1977: 108). Ann Stahl’s review of the topic a few years later made the same observation: ‘research into the origins of African agriculture lags ten to fifteen years behind studies of early agriculture elsewhere’ (Stahl, 1984: 19). In many regions, archaeologists in the 1970s and 1980s were still attempting to establish the most basic chronological framework of artefactual sequences, let alone recover the biological remains that could show when agricultural activities began (Hall, 1996). Many parts of the continent have endured decades of political unrest and military conflict, making archaeological fieldwork impossible for long periods. The equatorial forests are particularly under-researched because of the combination of political unrest, the difficulties of conducting fieldwork in forest, and poor preservation conditions of organic remains. Our understanding of the archaeological history of human settlement in these vast regions is still extremely rudimentary. For countries grappling with tremendous problems of underdevelopment, funding archaeologists in museums and universities can inevitably be a low priority. The number of professional archaeologists engaged in fieldwork on the African continent, indigenous Africans especially, is still extremely small. Distribution maps of archaeological sites are often primarily an indication of where archaeologists have been able to work. Despite these considerable challenges, however, recent studies have started to transformlong-standing ideas about when, how, and why people in Africa started to practise plant and animal husbandry (Fig. 8.1). The northern margins of the continent are Mediterranean in climate and environment, and the beginnings of farming there are best understood as part of the wider settlement history of the Mediterranean basin discussed in the next chapter. The Saharan desert in places reaches right to the coast, for example at Libya’s Gulf of Sirte, but elsewhere the Mediterranean zone can be up to 200 kilometres deep, notably in the mountainous region known as the Maghreb that embraces much of Morocco, northern Algeria, and northern Tunisia.

Weed, Tuber, and Maize Farming in the Americas

The American continent extends over 12,000 kilometres from Alaska to Cape Horn, and encompasses an enormous variety of environments from arctic to tropical. For the purposes of this discussion, such a huge variety has to be simplified into a few major geographical units within the three regions of North, Central, and South America (Fig. 7.1). Large tracts of Alaska and modern Canada north of the 58th parallel consist of tundra, which extends further south down the eastern coast of Labrador. To the south, boreal coniferous forests stretch eastwards from Lake Winnipeg and the Red River past the Great Lakes to the Atlantic, and westwards from the slopes of the Rockies to the Pacific. The vast prairies in between extend southwards through the central United States between the Mississippi valley and the Rockies, becoming less forested and more open as aridity increases further south. South of the Great Lakes the Appalachian mountains dominate the eastern United States, making a temperate landscape of parallel ranges and fertile valleys, with sub-tropical environments developing in the south-east. The two together are commonly referred to as the ‘eastern Woodlands’ in the archaeological literature. On the Pacific side are more mountain ranges such as the Sierra Nevada, separated from the Rockies by arid basins including the infamous Death Valley. These drylands extend southwards into the northern part of Central America, to what is now northern Mexico, a region of pronounced winter and summer seasonality in temperature, with dryland geology and geomorphology and xerophytic vegetation. The highlands of Central America, from Mexico to Nicaragua, are cool tropical environments with mixed deciduous and coniferous forests. The latter develop into oak-laurel-myrtle rainforest further south in Costa Rica and Panama. The lowlands on either side sustain a variety of tropical vegetation adapted to high temperatures and frost-free climates, including rainforest, deciduous woodland, savannah, and scrub. South America can be divided into a number of major environmental zones (Pearsall, 1992). The first is the Pacific littoral, which changes dramatically from tropical forest in Colombia and Ecuador to desert from northern Peru to central Chile. This coastal plain is transected by rivers flowing from the Andes, and in places patches of seasonal vegetation (lomas) are able to survive in rainless desert sustained by sea fog.

Approaches to the Origins of Agriculture

Humans have occupied our planet for several million years, but for almost all of that period they have lived as foragers, by various combinations of gathering, collecting, scavenging, fishing, and hunting. The first clear evidence for activities that can be recognized as farming is commonly identified by scholars as at about 12,000 years ago, at about the same time as global temperatures began to rise at the end of the Pleistocene (the ‘Ice Ages’) and the transition to the modern climatic era, the Holocene. Subsequently, a variety of agricultural systems based on cultivated plants and, in many areas, domesticated animals, has replaced hunting and gathering in almost every corner of the globe. Today, a relatively restricted range of crops and livestock, first domesticated several thousand years ago in different parts of the world, feeds almost all of the world’s population. A dozen crops make up over 80 per cent of the world’s annual tonnage of all crops: banana, barley, maize, manioc, potato, rice, sorghum, soybean, sugar beet, sugar cane, sweet potato, and wheat (Diamond, 1997: 132). Only five large (that is, over 100 pounds) domestic animals are globally important: cow, sheep, goat, pig, and horse. The development of agriculture brought profound changes in the relationship between people and the natural world. Archaeologists have usually theorized that, with the invention of farming, people were able to settle down and increase the amount and reliability of their food supply, thus allowing the same land to support more people than by hunting and gathering, allowing our species tomultiply throughout the world. The ability to produce food and other products from domesticated plants and animals surplus to immediate subsistence requirements also opened up new pathways to economic and social complexity: farming could mean new resources for barter, payment of tax or tribute, for sale in a market; it could mean food for non-food producers such as specialist craft-workers, priests, warriors, lords, and kings. Thus farming was the precondition for the development of the first great urban civilizations in Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Indus valley, China, the Americas, and Africa, and has been for all later states up to the present day.

Rice and Forest Farming in East and South-East Asia

East and South-East Asia is a vast and diverse region (Fig. 6.1). The northern boundary can be taken as approximately 45 degrees latitude, from the Gobi desert on the west across Manchuria to the northern shores of Hokkaido, the main island of northern Japan. The southern boundary is over 6,000 kilometres away: the chain of islands from Java to New Guinea, approximately 10 degrees south of the Equator. From west to east across South-East Asia, from the western tip of Sumatra at 95 degrees longitude to the eastern end of New Guinea at 150 degrees longitude, is also some 6,000 kilometres. Transitions to farming within this huge area are discussed in this chapter in the context of four major sub-regions: China; the Korean peninsula and Japan; mainland South-East Asia (Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, the Malay peninsula); and island South-East Asia (principally Taiwan, the Philippines, Sumatra, Java, Borneo, Sulawesi, and New Guinea). The chapter also discusses the development of agricultural systems across the Pacific islands to the east, both in island Melanesia (the Bismarck Archipelago and the Solomon Islands east of New Guinea) and in what Pacific archaeologists are terming ‘Remote Oceania’, the islands dotted across the central Pacific as far as Hawaii 6,000 kilometres east of Taiwan and Easter Island some 9,000 kilometres east of New Guinea—a region as big as East Asia and South-East Asia put together. The phytogeographic zones of China reflect the gradual transition from boreal to temperate to tropical conditions, as temperatures and rainfall increase moving southwards (Shi et al., 1993; Fig. 6.2 upper map): coniferous forest in the far north; mixed coniferous and deciduous forest in north-east China (Manchuria) extending into Korea; temperate deciduous and broadleaved forest in the middle and lower valley of the Huanghe (or Yellow) River and the Huai River to the south; sub-tropical evergreen broad-leaved forest in the middle and lower valley of the Yangzi (Yangtze) River; and tropical monsoonal rainforest on the southern coasts, which then extends southwards across mainland and island South-East Asia. Climate and vegetation also differ with altitude and distance from the coast.