First Farmers

Peter Bellwood is Professor of Archaeology at the Australian National University. He is the author of Examining the Farming/Language Dispersal Hypothesis (co-edited with Colin Renfrew, 2003), Prehistory of the Indo-Malaysian Archipelago (2nd edition 1997), The Polynesians: Prehistory of an Island People (1987), and Man’s Conquest of the Pacific: The Prehistory of Southeast Asia and Oceania (1986).

• List of Figures xiiList of Tables xvPreface xvi1 The Early Farming Dispersal Hypothesis in Perspective 1The Disciplinary Players 3Broad Perspectives 4Some Key Guiding Principles 92 The Origins and Dispersals of Agriculture: Some Operational Considerations 12The Significance of Agriculture: Productivity and Population Numbers 14Why Did Agriculture Develop in the First Place? 19The Significance of Agriculture vis-à-vis Hunting and Gathering 25Under What Circumstances Might Hunters and Gatherers Have Adopted Agriculture in Prehistory? 28Group 1: The “niche” hunter-gatherers of Africa and Asia 31Group 2: The “unenclosed” hunter-gatherers of Australia, the Andamans, and the Americas 34Group 3: Hunter-gatherers who descend from former agriculturalists 37Why Do Ethnographic Hunter-Gatherers Have Problems with Agricultural Adoption? A Comparative View 39To the Archaeological Record 423 The Beginnings of Agriculture in Southwest Asia 44The Domestication of Plants in the Fertile Crescent 46The Hunter-Gatherer Background in the Levant, 19,000 to 9500 bc 49The Pre-Pottery Neolithic and the Increasing Dominance of Domesticated Crops 54How Did Cereal Domestication Begin in Southwest Asia? 57The Archaeological Record in Southwest Asia in Broader Perspective 59The Pre-Pottery Neolithic A 59The Pre-Pottery Neolithic B 61The Real Turning Point in the Neolithic Revolution 654 Tracking the Spreads of Farming beyond the Fertile Crescent: Europe and Asia 67The Spread of the Neolithic Economy through Europe 68Southern and Mediterranean Europe 71Cyprus, Turkey, and Greece 71The Balkans 74The Mediterranean 74Temperate and Northern Europe 75The Danubians and the northern Mesolithic 77The TRB and the Baltic 80The British Isles 81Hunters and farmers in prehistoric Europe 82Agricultural Dispersals from Southwest Asia to the East 84Central Asia 84The Indian Subcontinent 86The domesticated crops of the Indian subcontinent 87Regional Trajectories from Hunter-Gathering to Farming in South Asia 89The consequences of Mehrgarh 89Western India: Balathal to Jorwe 91Southern India 92The Ganges Basin and northeastern India 93Europe and South Asia in a nutshell 955 Africa: An Independent Focus of Agricultural Development? 97The Spread of the Southwest Asian Agricultural Complex into Egypt 99The Origins of the Native African Domesticates 103The Development and Spread of Agriculture in Sub-Saharan Africa 106The Appearance of Agriculture in Central and Southern Africa 1076 The Beginnings of Agriculture in East Asia 111Environmental Factors and the Domestication Process in China 117The Archaeology of Early Agriculture in China 119The Archaeological Record of the Early Neolithic in the Yellow and Yangzi Basins 120Later Developments (post-5000 bc) in the Chinese Neolithic 122South of the Yangzi – Hemudu and Majiabang 124The spread of agriculture south of Zhejiang 1257 The Spread of Agriculture into Southeast Asia and Oceania 128The Background to Agricultural Dispersal in Southeast Asia 130Early Farmers in Mainland Southeast Asia 131Early Farmers in Taiwan and Island Southeast Asia 134Early farmers in the Pacific 141The New Guinea Agricultural Trajectory and its Role in Pacific Colonization 1428 Early Agriculture in the Americas 146Some Necessary Background 148The Geography of Early Agriculture, and General Cultural Trajectories 150Current Opinion on Agricultural Origins in the Americas 153The Domesticated Crops 154Maize 155The other crops 157Early Pottery in the Americas 158Early Farmers in the Americas 159The Andes 159Amazonia 164Middle America (with Mesoamerica) 165The Southwest 168Thank the Lord for the freeway (and the pipeline) 171Immigrant Mesoamerican farmers in the Southwest? 173Independent Agricultural Origins in the Eastern Woodlands 1749 What Do Language Families Mean for Human Prehistory? 180Language Families and How They Are Studied 181Issues of Phylogeny and Reticulation 183The Identification and Phylogenetic Study of Language Families 185Introducing the Players 189How Do Languages and Language Families Spread? 190How Do Languages Change through Time? 193Macrofamilies, and more on the time factor 195Languages in Competition – Language Shift 196Languages in competition – contact-induced change 19810 The Spread of Farming: Comparing the Archaeology and the Linguistics 200Western and Central Eurasia, and Northern Africa 201Indo-European 201Indo-European from the Pontic steppes? 201Where did PIE really originate and what can we know about it? 204Colin Renfrew’s contribution to the Indo-European debate 206Afroasiatic 207Elamite and Dravidian, and the Indo-Aryans 210A multidisciplinary scenario for South Asian prehistory 213Indo-European, Afroasiatic, Elamo-Dravidian, and the issue of Nostratic 216Saharan and Sub-Saharan Africa: Nilo-Saharan and Niger-Congo 217Nilo-Saharan 217Niger-Congo, with Bantu 218East and Southeast Asia, and the Pacific 222The Chinese and Mainland Southeast Asian language families 222Austronesian 227Piecing it together for East Asia 229“Altaic,” and some difficult issues 230The Trans New Guinea Phylum 231The Americas – South and Central 232South America 233Middle America, Mesoamerica, and the Southwest 237Uto-Aztecan 240Eastern North America 244Algonquian and Muskogean 245Iroquoian, Siouan, and Caddoan 247Did the First Farmers Spread Their Languages? 25011 Genetics, Skeletal Anthropology, and the People Factor 252Are There Correlations between Human Biology and Language Families? 253Do genes record history? 254Southwest Asia and Europe 256South Asia 262Africa 263East Asia 264Southeast Asia and Oceania (mainly Austronesians) 265The Americas 271Did Early Farmers Spread through Processes of Demic Diffusion? 27212 The Nature of Early Agricultural Expansion 273Homeland, Spread, and Friction Zones, plus Overshoot 274The Stages within a Process of Agricultural Genesis and Dispersal 277Notes 280References 292Index 350

Winner of the AAP PSP Award for Archaeology and Anthropology 2005 A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year Peter Bellwood - 2006 SAA Book Award - The Society for American Archaeology annually awards a prize to honor a recently published book that has had, or is expected to have, a major impact on the direction and character of archaeological research, and/or is expected to make a substantial contribution to the archaeology of an area. "Do not be misled by the humble title of Bellwood's book ... this volume stands alone in its scope and depth ... No student of anthropology, irrespective of subfield, should leave this book unread. It is and will remain one of the most important anthropological volumes of the 21st century." Choice "This book is a superb advertisement for archaeology as part of a multidisciplinary approach to the problem of how, where, and why our ancestors settled to plough and pasture." Times Higher Education Supplement “Bellwood is not afraid to challenge the established orthodoxy. This is a stimulating and thought-provoking assessment of one of the most important questions in archaeology today.” Peter Bogucki, Princeton University “This wonderful book is a fascinating treasure-house of information about human history since the origins of agriculture. It deserves to be a standard reference for archaeologists, linguists, geneticists, and anthropologists interested in the formation of the modern world.” Jared Diamond, University of California, Los Angeles; author of Guns, Germs, and Steel “A tour de force of historical anthropology. Rarely does one encounter a book with the sweeping historical scope of Peter Bellwood’s convincing worldwide synthesis of agricultural origins and population dispersals.” Patrick Kirch, University of California, Berkeley “Global in its scope, Peter Bellwood’s First Farmers boldly correlates the spreads of early farming with episodes of human population and language dispersal. It offers a powerfully coherent perspective, which challengingly sets one of the great themes of human history in a new and simplified vision.” Colin Renfrew, University of Cambridge "Bellwood is a master at summarising complex information... the real strength of this volume is that it will make accessible to students such a wide range of data and interpretations." New Book Chronicle "Unlike many books, Bellwood's represents the cogent unfolding of a complex argument that draws on disparate types of information ... It is certainly the most scholarly, single-authored review of global agricultural origins on the market." Austrlian Archaeology "The book certainly contains a good deal of interesting data and analysis." Anthropology in Action