Rethinking Agriculture ― Archaeological and Ethnoarchaeological Perspectives

Although the need to study agriculture in different parts of the world on its “own terms” has long been recognized and re-affirmed, a tendency persists to evaluate agriculture across the globe using concepts, lines of evidence and methods derived from Eurasian research. However, researchers working in different regions are becoming increasingly aware of fundamental differences in the nature of, and methods employed to study, agriculture and plant exploitation practices in the past. Contributions to this volume rethink agriculture, whether in terms of existing regional chronologies, in terms of techniques employed, or in terms of the concepts that frame our interpretations. This volume highlights new archaeological and ethnoarchaeological research on early agriculture in understudied non-Eurasian regions, including Island Southeast Asia and the Pacific, the Americas and Africa, to present a more balanced view of the origins and development of agricultural practices around the globe.

Timothy P. Denham is a Research Fellow in the School of Geography and Environmental Science at Monash University. His research builds upon the pioneering investigations of Jack Golson and colleagues and focuses upon early to mid-Holocene plant exploitation and early agriculture in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea. Since 2003, he has published extensively on this research, including articles in Science, Antiquity, Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society and World Archaeology, and he co-edited (with Chris Ballard) a volume of archaeology in Oceania entitled Perspectives on Prehistoric Agriculture in the New Guinea Highlands.Jose Iriarte is Lecturer in Archaeology at the Department of Archaeology, University of Exeter. He is a palaeo-ethnobotanist whose research interests focus on the origins and dispersal of agriculture, human-environment interactions, and the emergence of early Formative (Neolithic) cultures in lowland South America.Luc Vrydagh completed his Doctor in Sciences at the Ghent University (UG), having already completed a degree in Philosophy of Sciences and one in African Civilisation at the Free University of Brussels (ULB). His research is concerned with the phytolith analysis of archaeological deposits produced by agricultural practices in tropical, arid and temperate areas. Currently, he is a scientific collaborator with the Royal Museum for Central Africa and the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences, and he is the founding president of ROOTS, a unit specialising in archaeological and palaeoenviromental sciences.h