A key issue is determining precisely when ‘cultivation’ and ‘domestication’ actually began. There is considerable uncertainty concerning when both cultivation and domestication began as well as what the economic impact that these practices had during the initial 1000-2000 years after they appeared. As David Harris argued over 15 years ago, the distinction between these two concepts is important. ‘Domestication’ involves some genetic changes from wild forms (e. g., the larger sizes of grains and changes in their dispersal structures). These changes can be readily observed in archaeological botanical remains (see Animal Domestication; Plant Domestication). The archaeological occurrence of domesticated forms clearly implies that some form of cultivation or planting existed as well as the selective use of seeds for planting (or animals for breeding). However, a number of palaeoethnobotanists now suggest that prior to the appearance of domesticated forms, many complex hunter-gatherers were involved in forms of cultivation that did not result in the creation of domesticated forms. That is, complex hunter-gatherers were tilling the soil and planting crops just as later groups practiced, but without seed selection which could result in detectable genetic changes. Similarly, as we shall see later, complex hunter-gatherers frequently raised wild animals for pets or for ritual feasts without breeding them or changing their genetic characteristics.
Unfortunately, cultivation or other intensified food production practices are much more difficult to establish for prehistoric communities when there is a lack of indication for domestication. However, clues sometimes do exist such as the occurrence of species at sites outside their normal ranges, the occurrence of weed species typical of cultivated fields, types of sickle gloss that indicate disturbed earth (as in prepared fields), construction of terraces or simple irrigation or drainage features, changes in the species of animals exploited as well as emphasis on certain ages and on males, erosion patterns on animal teeth from bits, settlement pattern shifts to areas of prime farmland, as well as higher population densities and greater sedentism. These characteristics all seem to indicate the likelihood that food production and cultivation, and perhaps animal rearing, may have been taking place for centuries or millennia before the first definite indications of domestication. Nevertheless, the occurrence of domesticated forms has been the defining hallmark of the Neolithic since V. Gordon Childe first proposed this definition in 1953.
‘Food production’ is another term often used in discussing or defining Neolithic societies. It is frequently used as a synonym for ‘domestication’. However, it would probably be more logical to view cultivation (without domesticated forms) as a type of food production as well. Nevertheless, for the purposes of this section, ‘food production’ is used in its more usual sense, as implying the use of domesticated species.
Palaeoethnobotanists have increasingly entertained concepts and interpretations of pre-Neolithic cultivation and animal rearing (without any genetic morphological changes in species) documented back to 13 200 BP and even suggested that these practices may extend centuries or milleniums further back in the Near East. Such views correspond well to what is known about cultivation and animal-rearing practices (without domestication) of ethnographic complex hunter-gatherers which can be viewed as similar to the complex hunter-gatherers of the Mesolithic in Eurasia. In Japan and Siberia, the Ainu and other complex hunter-gatherers captured bear cubs and raised them for a year before sacrificing and consuming them at their winter bear feasts. Evidence for bears being held in captivity has also emerged from the European Mesolithic, while in the Near East, bulls appear to have been held in captivity before domestication (presumably for feasts, as in Japan). Similarly, even among simple horticulturalists in the Amazon basin, Warren DeBoer reports that wild peccaries and tapirs are captured, kept, and fattened for feasts. The Lillooet complex hunter-gatherers of the northwest interior captured and kept birds, foxes, marmots, and bears as pets.
On the Northwest coast of North America, groups of complex hunter-gatherers constructed terraced gardens in which they grew clover and cinquefoil roots for feasts. The gardens were owned, guarded, and tended using all the techniques of later horticul-turalists without resulting, as far as we know, in genetically modified ‘domesticated’ plant varieties. The same techniques were used by complex hunter-gatherers of the Northwest interior, resulting in larger sizes of roots due largely to the reduction of soil compaction, weeding out of plant competitors, and spacing plants for more optimal growth. No genetic changes have been established as the result of these practices even though the techniques used may go back thousands of years. Similarly, no genetic changes resulted from the capturing and raising of bears in Japan or Siberia, even though these practices probably extend thousands of years back into the prehistory of Asia.
But even after the first genetically modified domesticated plants appear in the Near East and the New World, their role in the overall economy of early Neolithic communities appears to be almost inconsequential for the first 1000-2000 years in terms of the proportion of domesticated to wild plant and animal remains. In fact, some of the most widely recognized early ‘Neolithic’ communities in the Near East failed to produce any evidence of domesticated plant or animal use (e. g., Jerf el Ahmar, Asikli, Gobekli, and Nativ Hagdud). Similar patterns occur in the Japanese Jomon.
World History
