This Fleeting World

Acceleration: The Agrarian Era 31
A carving of Kaban-Puuc, the ancient
Maya god of maize (corn) and rain.
to find new land to farm. Although agriculture may have seemed an unattractive
option to many foragers, farming communities usually had more
resources and more people than foraging communities. When conflict occurred,
more resources and more people usually meant that farming communities
also had more power. Agriculture spread most easily in regions
that bordered established agricultural zones and that had similar soils,
climates, and ecologies. Where environmental conditions were different,
the spread of agriculture had to await new techniques such as irrigation
or new crops better adapted to the regions of new settlement.
Such changes are apparent, for example, as agriculture spread from
southwestern Asia into the cooler and usually wetter environments of eastern,
central, and northern Europe, or as maize cultivation spread northward
from Mesoamerica, a process that depended in part on subtle genetic
changes in local varieties of maize. Where new techniques were not available,
foragers survived much longer, and the spread of agriculture could
be checked, sometimes for thousands of years, as it was at the edge of the
Eurasian steppes, which were not brought into cultivation until modern
times. Usually agriculture spread through a process of budding off as villages
became overpopulated and young families cleared and settled suitable
land beyond the borders of their home villages.