INTRODUCTION TO ARCHAEOLOGY Nancy White - Touro Institute

Lesson Objectives: Compare models of origins of food production and understand what was
produced.
Why is the origins of plant and animal domestication
considered an important milestone in human
prehistory? How did it happen and when and where?
We might figure that deliberate production of food, as
opposed to gathering it wild, is important to us because
it marks innovation and more complex technology.
This may or may not be the case. Traditional theories
suggested people had to struggle and work harder to
hunt and gather, and had a life that was “nasty, brutish,
and short,” in the terms of seventeenth-century English
philosopher Thomas Hobbes. The explanation
continued to describe the Neolithic Revolution as a time when the invention of food production
allowed people to slow down and have leisure time to do fancy things with monuments or art or
other pursuits. This is a very elite view, of course, since we know now that food production is
MORE work than just collecting it wild. Most food-producing cultures involve the majority of
the people in this production so that a few elites, rulers or artists, can indeed do their specialized
thing. Ethnographic data show hunter-gatherers only work a few days a week to provide for their
needs and get to loaf the rest of the time. So why
would they want to do MORE work?
What are some explanations for the origins of food
production? Remember, domestication of species
means cultural selection of the desired biological
characteristics so that you get real genetic change.
Much of the change involves dependence upon
humans for various requirements, such as food for
animals and reproduction for plants. Remember also
that we characterized cultures as conservative or
resistant to change, and that we often see change
happening as a result of trying to do the same thing.
Changes in the surrounding environment that would
have made it more difficult to obtain wild resources might have made people try to control the
species more themselves. The oasis hypothesis, suggested by famous early twentieth-century
archaeologist V. Gordon Childe, portrayed the drying of the climate at the end of the Pleistocene
in the Near East as an external factor in early domestication. Both humans and animals and
plants would have gathered around the few oases or water sources, and humans would gradually
come to control many other species. Robert Braidwood’s natural habitat hypothesis suggested
species would be domesticated in areas where they first grew wild, as part of the gradually
increasing association with humans.