Preface

David R. Harris

List of contributors

Introduction: themes and concepts in the study of early agriculture

David R. Harris

Part One: Thematic perspectives

Growing plants and raising animals: an anthropological perspective on domestication

Tim Ingold

Ecology, evolutionary theory and agricultural origins

Mark A. Blumler

The spread of agriculture and nomadic pastoralism: insights from genetics, linguistics and archaeology

L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza

Language families and the spread of farming

Colin Renfrew

Tracking early crops and early farmers: the potential of biomolecular archaeology

Martin Jones

Terry Brown

Robin Allaby

The impact of diseases upon the emergence of agriculture

Les Groube

Plate tectonics and imaginary prehistories: structure and contingency in agricultural origins

Andrew Sherratt

Part Two: Southwest Asia

The mode of domestication of the founder crops of Southwest Asian agriculture

Daniel Zohary

Late Pleistocene changes in wild plant-foods available to hunter-gatherers of the northern Fertile Crescent: possible preludes to cereal cultivation

Gordon Hillman

The emergence of crop cultivation and caprine herding in the ``Marginal Zone'' of the southern Levant

Andrew Garrard

Susan Colledge

Louise Martin

Animal domestication - accident or intention?

Hans-Peter Uerpmann

The beginning of caprine domestication in Southwest Asia

Tony Legge

The context of caprine domestication in the Zagros region

Frank Hole

The one-humped camel in Asia: origin, utilization and mechanisms of dispersal

Ilse Kohler-Rollefson

Part Three: Europe

The development of agriculture and pastoralism in Greece: when, how, who and what?

Paul Halstead

The cultural context of the first use of domesticates in continental Central and Northwest Europe

Julian Thomas

The agricultural frontier and the transition to farming in the circum-Baltic region

Marek Zvelebil

The first farmers of southern Scandinavia

T. Douglas Price

Aboriculture in Southwest Europe: dehesas as managed woodlands

Richard J. Harrison

Part Four: Central Asia to the Pacific

The beginnings of agriculture in western Central Asia

David R. Harris

Chris Gosden

The origins and spread of agriculture and pastoralism in northwestern South Asia

Richard H. Meadow

New evidence for early rice cultivation in South, Southeast and East Asia

Ian C. Glover

Charles F. W. Higham

Jomon and Yayoi: the transition to agriculture in Japanese prehistory

Keiji Imamura

The origins and spread of agriculture in the Indo-Pacific region: gradualism and diffusion or revolution and colonization?

Peter Bellwood

People-plant interactions in the New Guinea highlands: agricultural hearthland or horticultural backwater?

Tim Bayliss-Smith

Early agriculture and what went before in Island Melanesia: continuity or intrusion?

Matthew Spriggs

The origins of tropical vegeculture: Zingiberaceae, Araceae and Dioscoreaceae in Southeast Asia

Jon G. Hather

Part Five: Conclusion

The origins and spread of agriculture and pastoralism in Eurasia: an overview

David R. Harris

Index