From Hunting and Gathering to Farming

1. From Hunting and Gathering to Farming Archaic Period Cultures Origins of Food ProductionWhy, Where and When did Food Production Occur?Mesoamerican Food ProductionConsequences

2. Archaic Period Cultures • Archaic (Incipient Farming) Period 10,000-3000 BC • Ajuereado (12-9,600 B.P.), pre-agriculture, hunting and gathering. • El Reigo (9-7,000 B.P.), microbands in seasonal camps, domesticated plants such as squash, amaranth, ground stone tools, mortars and pestles. • Coxcatlan (7-5,400 B.P.), macrobands in semisedentary, bottlegourd, squash, beans, and maize. • Abejas & Purron (5,400-3,300 B.P.), year round occupations, corn, beans, pumpkin, cotton, dogs.

3. Ajuereado (12-9,600 B.P.) 10000 -7,200 B.C. • Hunting and Gathering • 40% diet plants • 54% meat • 6% other • Social Organization: Band • Working of agave fiber to make baskets and bags.

4. Agave Fiber Baskets (recent example)

5. El Reigo (9-7,000 B.P.): 7,000-5,500 B.C. • 19 species of wild plants • Beginnings of squash, avocado and chili pepper domestication (about 5% of diet).

6. Coxcatlan (7-5,400 B.P.): 5,500-4,500 B.C. • Food from gardening increases to 14%. • Corn, chilies, squash and amaranth. • Rabbit drives and fishing.

7. Coxcatlan CaveTehuacan Valley of Mexico Coxcatlan cave has revealed 28 occupational layers or zones. Each layer was considered to have a distinct deposit, laid down during a single time interval. The excavation revealed objects used by humans prior to ceramics. http://emuseum.mnsu.edu/archaeology/sites/meso_america/coxcatlan_phase.html

8. Coxcatlan Cave A small corn cob found during the excavation is shown alongside of an ink pen. The cob compares to that of a popcorn cob, and this type of corn was estimated to have grown in the Tehuacan Valley around 5000 BC.

9. Abejas and Purron (5,400-3,300 B.P.): 3,500-1,500 B.C. • Agriculture 21-35% of diet. • Corn as major part of agricultural economy.

10. Origins of Food Production • Changes during the Lae Pleistocene • Warming caused glaciers to melt and sea levels rose. • Extinction of many plant and animal species. • Cultural Changes • Humans shifted from a focus on megafauna to broad spectrum collecting. • Smaller game, fishing, increase in plant gathering. • Specialized regional patterns and technology: Mesolithic in Europe, Archaic in Americas. • New World • Archaic adaptations, such as at Koster site in Illinois. • Wide variety of food-fish, mussels, nuts, deer, small game.

11. Food Production • Shift from food gathering to food production in different parts of the world. • Deliberate gathering of seeds for planting. • Taming of wild animals. • People began to rely on certain plants or animals. • Artificial selection-people encourage the reproduction of certain plants or animals. • Gradually results in types of plants and animals that are distinct from wild species.

12. Domestication • The process of establishing human control over a plant or animals reproduction. • Humans select mates for animals/plants with particular characteristics.

13. How do we recognize this archaeologically? • Plants • Domesticated plants have stronger stem areas where the seeds attach (rachis). • Also tend to have larger edible parts. • Animals • Species outside native area. • i.e. Horses not native to Egypt, but found there archaeologically 4,000 years ago. • Morphological changes. • Measurements-get smaller during domestication. • Sex ratios and age profiles. • Cultural Evidence

14. Why, Where, and When did Food Production Occur? • Why? • Today we take food production for granted, just go to the supermarket and get what we want. • Hunting and gathering actually takes less time and effort than food production. • i.e. soil has to be worked, crops planted, pests controlled, harves, processed. Hunters-gatherers spend about 12-19 days per week. • Agriculture is also risky-could have crops die due to bad weather.

15. Theories • Oasis Theory-V. Gordon Childe, climate at end of Pleis forced peopleto change, move to isolated areas and produce food. However, no real evidence that the environment changed that dramatically. • Readiness Hypothesis-Robert Braidwood suggested that humans became increasingly familiar with plants and animals in their area and began to domesticate them, but does not explain how. • Human Selection and Environment-Particular local conditions may have affected different patterns of domestication. • i.e. in East Asia, people were sedentary food collectors and logically started planting. • Coevolution-David Rindos suggests that humans unintentionally promoted dispersal of certain types of plants by weeding, stroing, or irrigating particular wild resources.

16. Population Models • Esther Boserup suggested that societies will intensify food produciton only when forced to by pop pressure on food resources. • Binford agrees with this and says that demographic stress such as more people moving into an area will require food intensification. • Mark Cohen said that population got so great acress the world that no natural resources were left.

17. Where and When? • Southwest Asia-Israel, Jordan, Syria, Trukey, Iraq, and Iran-Fertile Crescent • Natufians-best known southwest asians to cultivate wild grains and cereal grasses around 12-14,000. • Farming communities emerged in Jericho with subsistence on wheat, barley, peas, beans, lentils, sheep and goats, pigs, and cattle. • Europe-Mediterranean to Sweden, northwest Russia. Many agricultural products introduced but became established by 6,000. • East Asia-China, Thailand. • Domestication of root crops such as yams, around 11,000 years ago. • rice cultivation as early as 9,000 years ago, also pig, dog and chicken. • Africa-8,000 years ago, emmer wheat, flax, lentils, chickpeas, sheep and goats. • New World • North America-domestication of starchy and oily seeds around 4,000 years ago, maize, squash and beans by 1,000 years ago. • South America-manioc, maize, and beans, peanuts, and potatoes around 6,500 years ago.

18. Mesoamerican Food Production • Settlement and Domestication • During the 1950s and 1960s there was an increased effort to study domestication in this area. • Teosinte is the ancestor of maize and was domesticated by 7-5,400 years ago in Balsas, Guerrero. • also domestication of avocados, squash, beans, chilis. • Fields would grow all of these together, unlike mono-cropping that we see today.

19. Tehuacan Archaeological Botanical Project • MacNeish’s project was run from 1960-1965 and made a concerted effort to find botanical remains from arch sites. • Early cobs in caves only 2-2.5 cm long. • Controversy concerning the progenitors of maize. It now clear that maize developed from a wild grass teosinte. Domestication of teosinte involves a change from hard seed cases to shallow softer cupules with elongated glumes. Made the wild teosinte easier to thresh.  Selection for mutated form when wild maize grew around occupation sites.

20. Differences between the ear of maize and the ear of teosinte • Teosinte pocesses a fragile ear that breaks easily at the rachis joint. Maize has developed a non scattering rachis (seeds do not dispures when contacted). • Teosinte has a two ranked ear, maize pocesses a four or more ranked ear. • Teosintes outer glumes are hard, while maize is soft. • In teosinte the glume covers the seed, while in maize the seed is exposed. • The maize grain is borne in shallow cupules, while teosinte is embedded in deep cupules in the rachis. • Maize can produce small or large seeds, while teosinte is usually small. This is typical of domesticated plants, producing larger seeds.

21. Téosinte (Zea mays ssp)

22. Domestication of Maize Photograph of three Guilá Naquitz archaeological cobs. Two of three specimens were AMS dated at 5,420 ± 60 (C9, Fig. 1, specimen b) and 5,410 ± 40 (D10) 14C years B.P. (6,235 calibrated years B.P.). PNAS | February 13, 2001 | vol. 98 | no. 4 | 2104-2106

23. Domestication of Maize: Problems • Manglesdorf's hypothesis (first published in 1939) • Cultivated maize descended from a now extinct wild pod-popcorn. • kernels were individually enclosed in, and protected by, a pod or chaffy shell • Teosinte is a mutation of maize • Name comes from Nahuatl "teocintli" - grain of the gods Maize's closest relative • maize and annual teosinte have ten pairs of chromosomes with nearly identical structures • are often 100% inter-fertile • both classified as subspecies of Zea mays • practically indistinguishable morphologically • Manglesdorf favors gradual process of natural speciation of teosinte from primitive maize, which excludes man from the selective process. http://www.ku.edu/~hoopes/506/Lectures/Maize.html

24. Domestication of Maize: Problems • Archaeological research • Herbert W. Dick (Harvard) excavated at Bat Cave in 1948 • found corn cobs and other remains • charcoal "pooled" for dating • published paper in Scientific American on "oldest ear of corn" • MacNeish and Tehuacan Valley Project • recovered 23,000 specimens of corn • worked together with Manglesdorf and Walton Galinat concluded lower levels had primitive popcorn (a pod corn) • this earliest corn was thought to be wild

25. Alternate hypothesis • Questions raised: • If maize evolved gradually from teosinte, why have no intermediates been found? • If teosinte was domesticated for its grains, why have none of the durable fruitcases of teosinte been found contemporaneous or predating the earliest archaeological maize? • Given the hardness and concavity of teosinte fruitcases, why are the glumes of the earliest archaeological maize soft and thin and cupules relatively shallow? • If teosinte ears became transformed into maize ears, why do both modern and archaeological maize ears often exhibit staminate "tails"? • Compared with the gradual evolution documented for all other cereals, how did maize arise so suddenly, from ancestors difficult to identify? • Why does maize suddenly appear in the archaeological record?

26. Catastrophic Sexual Transmutation Theory • Teosinte is ancestral to corn, however, teosinte ear is not ancestral to corn ear. • Key is catastrophic change in plant: • Corn is not the result of a step-by-step accumulation of single-gene mutations, but a gross re-expression of existing mutations. • may have been caused by cold, viruses, mycoplasmas, fungi, or other pressures. • Barbara McClintock discovered that extracellular process could trigger changes in chromosomal DNA in corn. • Catastrophe could have been lethal if not for man's intervention.

27. Consequences • Population Growth • Domestication caused food supplies to become more stable and reliable. • More food per acre of land, so can support larger population. • i.e. Paleolithic population=30 million, 2,000 years ago=300 million. • Health and Nutrition • Not necessarily improve quality of life • Closer contact with people, so easier spread of disease. • Non-variable diet, poorer nutrition. • i.e. increase in dental caries, bone diseases, etc. • Increasing Intellectual/Skill Capacity • Increase in quantity and type of artifacts. • More sophisticated material culture, innovations in transportation (wheels), more durable buildings. • Increased Social Stratification and Cultural Complexity • Shift from egalitarian to stratified societies. • Full-time craft specialists.