These lines were blurred even further as peoples switched between foraging and farming over time and space, essentially becoming composite economies that defy simple classification as either forager or farmer.
Once again, this complex sequence highlights whether the integrationist approach is sufficient here, or whether this sequence could be described as in keeping with the fusion model.
What is clear from the chapters on the European transition to farming and Neolithization is that significant progress has been made in examining specific sequences and local processes over the last 20 to 30 years but these debates are still directly referencing older models of p.
All this hints at an impasse: scholars are stuck using the terminology of older models and processes which no longer adequately describe or explain the unique sequences of each area in Europe. Whittle and Cummings It is important to note here that the chapters on the European process of Neolithization are not the only ones in the handbook that struggle with categorizing people as either forager or farmer, one of the legacies of social evolutionary thinking a point made by Pluciennik, this volume.
Politis and Hernando this volume note that some hunter-gatherers in South America were once horticulturalists, but they took up foraging as a secondary re-adaption to new conditions. These people seem to have returned to hunting and gathering as a reaction to broader changes brought about during the colonial period. Jana Fortier this volume also discusses the varied ways in which people subsist in South-East Asia in more recent times, where there is plenty of evidence for people utilizing a range of different subsistence types from agriculture right through to hunting and gathering, but most often, a highly fluid and dynamic mix of both , dependent on circumstances and also local choice and agency.
Thus, it is useful at this point to depart from European debates and examine how forager—farmer processes have been studied in other world regions. In other areas of the world it is clear that a simple forager—farmer dichotomy is also not often applicable, and that variability and flexibility are the norm. In these areas authors look at the persistence of hunting and gathering over considerable time periods. Barton examines long-term forager—farmer interactions in South-East Asia.
He begins by discussing the prehistoric spread of farming. As with similar models in Europe, it has previously been claimed that domesticated rice, domesticated pigs, pottery, and polished stone tools formed a package which spread into the region from bc. However, as this new subsistence economy spread south and east, domesticated rice may have been dropped in favour of tree and root-crop agriculture as rice was too difficult to grow in equatorial rainforests.
There have also been suggestions of some indigenous innovations including plant cultivation where rice could not be grown. The role of rice and other plant adaptations is a key debate in this area as foragers would have needed a source of carbohydrates, which are otherwise in short supply in rainforest environments.
Indeed, this whole debate frames the types of forager—farmer interactions in this region. There is no question that foraging persisted in this area, but foragers dependent on farmers would have had very different sets of interactions than those who were isolated or entirely self-sufficient. In contrast to the European sequence, then, in South-East Asia there is a preconceived assumption that foragers would need farmers: indeed, some argue, both could only survive by close mutual interdependence on one another.
Barton describes a rich mosaic of foragers, farmers, and people practising both foraging and farming in South-East Asia, and how definitions of people in relation only to their economy are not sufficient to describe the variety of ways people make a living in this region.
Peoples, therefore, cannot be classed as either foragers or farmers as there is a reliance on both wild and domesticated plants, wild and managed forests, and wild and domestic animals. Moreover, there is considerable flexibility and change, as people make the most of whatever is available locally.
In this area, then, any attempts to map nineteenth-century social evolutionary categories of forager or farmer onto local cultural groupings see above are inadequate to describe a much more complex set of situations. Barton also notes that there is an extensive ethnographic literature which charts trade and exchange between foragers and farmers.
These are recorded for over two millennia in some areas as forest products have been, and remain, highly desirable to people across many parts of the world.
There was a big increase in the exchange of forest products in the seventeenth century with the arrival of a Dutch trading company, along with more recent ethnographic records of indigenous groups.
Forest products to be exchanged and exported were predominantly acquired by foraging groups. Material was acquired by foragers and exchanged with nearby farmers who then traded it on. This often created strong alliances between foragers and farmers, with economic and social benefits for both parties. Thus individual communities were not and are not autonomous self-sufficient units, but part of a broad and wide-ranging series of exchange networks.
Barton also discusses what happens when previously foraging groups take up sedentary farming. He notes that there is a great deal of variation even within individual communities. For example, some now-sedentary people do not farm every year, finding subsistence in other ways. It is also interesting to note that some settled farmers have abandoned farming and become professional collectors of forest products, filling a niche in the current economic situation.
As far as it is possible to tell, forager—farmer interactions in South-East Asia are unlike the various situations outlined for Europe above, although the issues discussed by Barton could fruitfully be explored in relation to the European sequence.
This sequence is therefore in keeping with the ideas outlined above which highlight historical contingency and a multitude of outcomes from the same basic start-point.
In the last chapter in this part of the handbook, Katherine Spielmann also demonstrates that there is no clear-cut dichotomy between foragers and famers by exploring complex interactions that existed between different groups in North America. Until the arrival of colonial peoples from Europe there were no large domesticated herd animals in North America, and no populations acquired their food exclusively from farming. However, many groups did grow domesticated plants, quite intensively in some areas this included indigenous domesticates such as amaranth, chenopodium, and knotweed and imported species from Mesoamerica such as corn, beans, and squash.
What is clear with the North American sequences is that it was common for people to move between agriculture and foraging and back again: flexibility was key. It is also clear that those people who spent most of their time growing crops traded extensively with foraging groups, ensuring that both forager and farmer had access to both carbohydrate and protein. Just as in South-East Asia, then, the trade and exchange of food was an essential part of life.
To classify people as either foragers or farmers in this p. Spielmann explores various interactions between foragers and farmers in three case studies. Historically the Huron were farmers who grew corn and the Algonquians were foragers, with a particular emphasis on fishing. However, both groups took part in other activities, and sometimes the Algonquians would grow corn and the Huron would fish.
This demonstrates the flexibility of making a living and how people can move easily between foraging and farming. Spielmann also considers middle Missouri forager—farmer interactions. The two were involved in extensive trade relations. This example therefore shows that the mutual coexistence of foragers and farmers who exchanged foodstuffs was a viable economic choice. In her final case study she considers the well-documented Plains—Pueblo interactions. Historically, Pueblo groups grew corn and exchanged this for bison meat and hides acquired by Plains groups.
However, there was considerable flexibility in this system. By the fifteenth century, however, the two became part of an interdependent system whereby each relied entirely on the other. Trade did not just involve foodstuffs, but the social networks that evolved were also crucial parts of society, making these groups economically and socially reliant on one another.
The chapter by Spielmann demonstrates unequivocally that many peoples were not either foragers or farmers, but adapted to individual circumstances, mixing foraging and farming, or at least having access to the products of both foraging and farming. This meant that many people in North America were a mix of cultivators, fishers, hunters, and gatherers, with considerable variability from year to year and from place to place. This quite clearly demonstrates that there is no simple and straightforward category of forager or farmer.
Instead, people used a combination of wild and domestic resources as they saw fit, and which often varied from year to year. Foragers will incorporate domesticates into the suite of resources that they utilize. Farmers will rely on wild resources in addition to what they grow. This shows that the idea of people evolving from hunter-gatherer to farmer is inherently flawed, and not found ubiquitously in the archaeological record. This is a general pattern that works at the broadest of scales and over long time periods as the vast majority of peoples across the world now get their food via agricultural methods.
Some of the questions about this process refer back to the role of hunter-gatherers and to the nature of prehistoric p. Was it only the knowledge of farming that spread among foragers? Finally, was the spread of farming only made possible by an earlier and indeed more fundamentally important ideological shift that eventually made farming acceptable to hunter-gatherers? These are the central questions in one of the longest-standing debates in prehistoric archaeology. Some of most intense debate, for various historical and cultural reasons, has been centred squarely on Europe and its archaeological sequences.
The legacy of nineteenth-century social evolutionary thinking and early twentieth-century culture-history means that many of the central perspectives, as well as the key terms of reference, refer back to these older phases of thinking and scholarship. For example, it is clear from the review of the chapters, especially those from Europe, that the social evolutionary thinking and the mapping of the economic categories of forager and farmer onto the archaeological record at the end of the nineteenth century still continues, to a remarkable extent, to structure interpretation and debate: scholars still choose to define groups of people in terms of distinctive units or cultural entities that are primarily defined by how they make a living.
Likewise, the older explanatory ideas of migration and diffusion also remain influential. As data, knowledge, and suites of AMS dates have started to highlight regional variability on the pace, timing, and contribution of different processes, the result is increasingly nuanced models which illustrate the regional and temporal complexities of going from relying entirely on foraging to subsisting predominantly on farmed products.
Despite this, economies are still discussed in relation to basic economic categories—either foraging or farming—spread via either migration or diffusion. More generally, this critical review of the European chapters shows that scholars are struggling in their attempts to accommodate the new level of detail that they identify within their data to the rather rigid, older frames of reference that are a definitive feature of working in this intellectual archaeological tradition.
In contrast, chapters from other world regions and many of the ethnohistoric chapters in Part VI appear to be much less constrained by the intellectual baggage associated with earlier Eurocentric scholarship. They appear to explore variability within regional sequences without referring to the older modes of thinking outlined above. If this is the case, there is an important message for scholars dealing with the European archaeological record: it is time to move discussions forward cf.
Robb and Miracle ; Whittle Thus, several key directions can be highlighted as being likely to structure the future kinds of work that are possible in this area.
Regional variability in data coverage some regions are well-studied, others are not; even the former need more data. To move forward, scholars need more basic data on many world regions. While some regions of Europe now have excellent datasets, many could still benefit from higher resolution data.
This will enable scholars to get a better sense of regional trajectories on the pace, timing, and uptake of different elements available to people at particular points in time. New frames of reference. As reviewed in all these chapters, it is particularly important to find ways to move beyond essentialized descriptions of people particularly in relation to the forager—farmer dichotomy.
Instead the terms forager and farmer can be used as self-critical points of departure for thinking about new ways of understanding people and society. In contrast, the fusion model suggests that p. Perhaps the best starting point for deciding which approach to take is to begin to think about precisely what it is we are interested in understanding. There has been plenty of work on economy in the past, but the most exciting avenues of current research explore identity.
In areas with high resolution datasets there is a whole range of ways that we can interrogate the data to explore the issue of both individual and group identity and daily practice i. Material culture can be investigated alongside isotopic evidence Bentley , the full range of bioarchaeological techniques cf. Zvelebil and Pettitt , and suites of radiocarbon dates Whittle et al. Alongside theoretical approaches to this material, incorporating broader understandings of contextually specific personhood see Finlay, this volume , connections with particular landscapes David et al.
At the most detailed level, this will enable scholars to explore the life histories of individuals in particular areas, at particular times, and in different ways but also to situate these within general processes and transformations. Comparative contextual insights.
In areas where the biggest challenge is seeking out new ways of thinking about how these multiple intersections of subsistence, identity, and practice are caught up in what can crudely be defined as forager—farmer interactions, scholars might usefully start to develop an explicitly comparative approach to their materials by examining: a similarities and differences with analogous regional archaeological sequences in order to pull out unique, as well as universal, trends; b carefully selected ethnographic parallels with other areas, e.
South-East Asia. Analogy, when used in this way, can generate new ways of thinking about active construction of identities and individual life histories and can assist in moving beyond the older debates and entrenched terminology.
As such, analogies represent one way of transcending the constraints generated by using older terms and concepts e. Barton and Spielmann also highlight the importance of access to carbohydrates, not just in terms of diet, but also as a way of enabling both storage and individual aggrandizement see Hayden, this volume. There are clearly insights to be gained from ethnographic analogy as archaeological scholars seek to move debates forward about how best to explore the specifics of social life and identity in these transitional prehistoric economies.
Understanding the transition to farming, and the roles of foragers within that transition, is one of the oldest, most interesting and, as demonstrated by this chapter, also one of the p. What this critical review of scholarship on this topic does reveal is that there are now more data and elaborate new analytical methods than nineteenth-century theorists could ever have imagined.
So where are we in understanding it all? Under closer scrutiny, and with increasingly more detailed local high-resolution datasets, however, the clear boundaries, categories, units, and even the main entities and actors that have traditionally been used in this long-standing debate now increasingly seem to be shifting, blurring, and taking on new significance. Perhaps the key challenge for future research is to move beyond mapping the general details, and to explore how best to make sense of this major human transformation at more local and more human levels.
It also means that the old models, concepts, and approaches might not be best suited for this new task. Retain older concepts, such as Mesolithic and Neolithic, forager and farmer, as they provide a bridge between older debates and new directions, but use them as points of departure for more critical considerations and new discussions on these processes?
Reject older terms and start again? The problem with this approach is how to best pursue this line of scholarship—what language should we use if there are no categories such as foragers or farmers, Mesolithic or Neolithic? This certainly poses a significant, but perhaps also an exciting challenge. Whatever way individual scholars seek to advance their research and interpretation, it is clear that an interesting approach is to explore historically contingent regional sequences, as well as the significance of these broader changes for the individuals and communities caught up in them.
For a topic that has seen so much discussion over the past century, it is clear that this will remain one of the most exciting, and controversial, processes in human history, but one that will continue to offer insights into the cultural significance of how we, as human beings, choose make a living, and into the nature of group and individual identity at this time.
The primary challenge now seems to be to find new ways to explore and describe the multiple outcomes of particularistic histories in regions throughout the world. I am extremely grateful to Peter Jordan for his help with earlier drafts of this chapter, and for his insights into this particular topic.
Ammerman, A. The strontium analysis, published in a PNAS paper, supports this idea. Of the 45 remains tested, 10 belonged to women who came from Anatolia, presumably as part of the farming communities — a head-turning number in what is essentially a forager settlement. Adding to the mystery, three of those women were buried in the hunter-gatherer manner. The discovery suggests the casual manner in which farming spread, says Bori, co-author of the paper.
The femur, which stops replacing collagen usually in early adulthood, suggested a diet primarily of fish, typical of Iron Gates foragers. Here was the Neolithic transition embodied in one person.
The conclusions in the Radiocarbon study are controversial. Contamination is possible, she acknowledges. But Bonsall says bone collagen is relatively resistant to postmortem alteration. By the time the man died, about 8, years ago, hunter-gatherer culture was in its twilight at Iron Gates.
Within hundreds of years of first contact in Iron Gates, complex agricultural societies sprang up in southeastern Europe, along with other advances, such as intricate metalwork. Meanwhile, agriculture was also spreading outside southeastern Europe. By the middle of the sixth millennium B. By the end of that millennium, agriculture had reached Eastern Europe, which included farming settlements in the Ukraine of hundreds of people.
The swiftness of the agricultural revolution makes the interaction at Iron Gates all the more interesting. An ancient subsistence strategy was starting to vanish.
A cultural watershed, perhaps the most significant in human history, was underway. Change was happening on an unprecedented level. But from the viewpoint of an individual living through it, the transition was pretty casual — manifesting, on occasion, as foragers and farmers talking shop above the thrum of a river.
Register or Log In. The Magazine Shop. Login Register Stay Curious Subscribe. The Sciences. A broad bend in the Danube River, seen here from the Serbian side looking into Romania, is home to Lepenski Vir at far left and several other archaeological sites dating back more than 8, years and charting the arrival of agriculture.
Newsletter Sign up for our email newsletter for the latest science news. Sign Up. Institute of Archaeology, Belgrade. Neolithic farmers migrating out of Anatolia brought their way of life to a corner of southeastern Europe. One can say that they depended on themselves for food.
The foragers were hunters, fishermen, and were picking food wherever they could find it. It is important to mention that the food foragers hunted or gathered may have had some diseases or have been poisoned which is a big disadvantage than te farming life. The farmers are the ones who plant and harvest crops and know exactly the quality of their products.
This is why foragers tend to lead shorter lives than other people. Another disadvantage for the foragers is that they can be attacked or even killed by animals while hunting or even other humans as well.
Hunting and gathering food is a hard task and presents many difficulties to anyone who finds themselves in that situation. On the other hand, some farmers have protection from dangerous animals, poisonous food, and other humans.
Farmers have a consistent supply of food which they planted and later harvested themselves. The farmers specialize in the different fields of agriculture which allows people to take on different jobs. The great thing about farming is that people can be less worried about their next drink and meal which is the ultimate goal. Farming can be hard and has many advantages or disadvantages but in the end, it is better than foraging because it gives people a constant supply of food.
Nowadays, farmers are trying to produce more and more crops on their farms mainly to sell more and to enable food supply for a lot of people. Farmers plant and harvest the crops and later sell them to big corporations or even directly to the customers.
There is more and more technology being incorporated into modern farms. The right wants to make redistribution more conditional, more wants to punish free riders, and wants norm violators to be more consistently punished. The left tends to presume large scale cooperation is feasible, while right tends to presume competition more. The left hopes for big gains from change while the right worries about change damaging things that now work.
Views tend to drift leftward as nations and the world get richer. Its value varies with context. So sometimes those who are more reluctant to invoke it are right to be wary, while at other times those who are eager to apply it are right to push for it. It is not obvious, at least to me, whether on average the instincts of the left or the right are more helpful. In the much larger farmer social groups, simple one layer talky collectives were much less feasible.
Farmer lives had new dangers of war and disease, and neighboring groups were more threatening. The farmer world more supported property in spouses and material goods and had more social hierarchies, farmer law less relied on a general discussion of each accused, and more reliable food meant there was less call for redistribution.
Farmers worked more and had less time for play. Together, these tended to reduce the scope of safe playful talky collectives, moving society in a rightward direction relative to foragers. Overcoming Bias. Tagged as: Farmers , Foragers , Politics.
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