Behavioral Ecology and the Transition to Agriculture

Douglas J. Kennett, Bruce Winterhalder

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN:
  9780520246478
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780520932456
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Ecology
• Index: Biological Sciences

This innovative volume is the first collective effort by archaeologists and ethnographers to use concepts and models from human behavioral ecology to explore one of the most consequential transitions in human history: the origins of agriculture. Carefully balancing theory and detailed empirical study, and drawing from a series of ethnographic and archaeological case studies from eleven locations—including North and South America, Mesoamerica, Europe, the Near East, Africa, and the Pacific—the contributors to this volume examine the transition from hunting and gathering to farming and herding using a broad set of analytical models and concepts. These include diet breadth, central place foraging, ideal free distribution, discounting, risk sensitivity, population ecology, and costly signaling. An introductory chapter both charts the basics of the theory and notes areas of rapid advance in our understanding of how human subsistence systems evolve. Two concluding chapters by senior archaeologists reflect on the potential for human behavioral ecology to explain domestication and the transition from foraging to farming.

Table of contents

• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Foreword
• Preface
• 1. Behavioral Ecology and the Transition from Hunting and Gathering to Agriculture
• 2. A Future Discounting Explanation for the Persistence of a Mixed Foraging-Horticulture Strategy among the Mikea of Madagascar
• 3. Central Place Foraging and Food Production on the Cumberland Plateau, Eastern Kentucky
• 4. Aspects of Optimization and Risk During the Early Agricultural Period in Southeastern Arizona
• 5. A Formal Model for Predicting Agriculture among the Fremont
• 6. An Ecological Model for the Origins of Maize-Based Food Production on the Pacific Coast of Southern Mexico
• 7. The Origins of Plant Cultivation and Domestication in the Neotropics
• 8. Costly Signaling, the Sexual Division of Labor, and Animal Domestication in the Andean Highlands
• 9. Human Behavioral Ecology, Domestic Animals, and Land Use during the Transition to Agriculture in Valencia, Eastern Spain
• 10. Breaking the Rain Barrier and the Tropical Spread of Near Eastern Agriculture into Southern Arabia
• 11. The Emergence of Agriculture in New Guinea
• 12. The Ideal Free Distribution, Food Production, and the Colonization of Oceania
• 13. Human Behavioral Ecology and the Transition to Food Production
• 14. Agriculture, Archaeology, and Human Behavioral Ecology
• References
• Index