Table of Contents

List of Figures xii

List of Tables xv

Preface xvi

1 The Early Farming Dispersal Hypothesis in Perspective 1

The Disciplinary Players 3

Broad Perspectives 4

Some Key Guiding Principles 9

2 The Origins and Dispersals of Agriculture: Some Operational Considerations 12

The Significance of Agriculture: Productivity and Population Numbers 14

Why Did Agriculture Develop in the First Place? 19

The Significance of Agriculture vis-à-vis Hunting and Gathering 25

Under What Circumstances Might Hunters and Gatherers Have Adopted Agriculture in Prehistory? 28

Group 1: The “niche” hunter-gatherers of Africa and Asia 31

Group 2: The “unenclosed” hunter-gatherers of Australia, the Andamans, and the Americas 34

Group 3: Hunter-gatherers who descend from former agriculturalists 37

Why Do Ethnographic Hunter-Gatherers Have Problems with Agricultural Adoption? A Comparative View 39

To the Archaeological Record 42

3 The Beginnings of Agriculture in Southwest Asia 44

The Domestication of Plants in the Fertile Crescent 46

The Hunter-Gatherer Background in the Levant, 19,000 to 9500 bc 49

The Pre-Pottery Neolithic and the Increasing Dominance of Domesticated Crops 54

How Did Cereal Domestication Begin in Southwest Asia? 57

The Archaeological Record in Southwest Asia in Broader Perspective 59

The Pre-Pottery Neolithic A 59

The Pre-Pottery Neolithic B 61

The Real Turning Point in the Neolithic Revolution 65

4 Tracking the Spreads of Farming beyond the Fertile Crescent: Europe and Asia 67

The Spread of the Neolithic Economy through Europe 68

Southern and Mediterranean Europe 71

Cyprus, Turkey, and Greece 71

The Balkans 74

The Mediterranean 74

Temperate and Northern Europe 75

The Danubians and the northern Mesolithic 77

The TRB and the Baltic 80

The British Isles 81

Hunters and farmers in prehistoric Europe 82

Agricultural Dispersals from Southwest Asia to the East 84

Central Asia 84

The Indian Subcontinent 86

The domesticated crops of the Indian subcontinent 87

Regional Trajectories from Hunter-Gathering to Farming in South Asia 89

The consequences of Mehrgarh 89

Western India: Balathal to Jorwe 91

Southern India 92

The Ganges Basin and northeastern India 93

Europe and South Asia in a nutshell 95

5 Africa: An Independent Focus of Agricultural Development? 97

The Spread of the Southwest Asian Agricultural Complex into Egypt 99

The Origins of the Native African Domesticates 103

The Development and Spread of Agriculture in Sub-Saharan Africa 106

The Appearance of Agriculture in Central and Southern Africa 107

6 The Beginnings of Agriculture in East Asia 111

Environmental Factors and the Domestication Process in China 117

The Archaeology of Early Agriculture in China 119

The Archaeological Record of the Early Neolithic in the Yellow and Yangzi Basins 120

Later Developments (post-5000 bc) in the Chinese Neolithic 122

South of the Yangzi – Hemudu and Majiabang 124

The spread of agriculture south of Zhejiang 125

7 The Spread of Agriculture into Southeast Asia and Oceania 128

The Background to Agricultural Dispersal in Southeast Asia 130

Early Farmers in Mainland Southeast Asia 131

Early Farmers in Taiwan and Island Southeast Asia 134

Early farmers in the Pacific 141

The New Guinea Agricultural Trajectory and its Role in Pacific Colonization 142

8 Early Agriculture in the Americas 146

Some Necessary Background 148

The Geography of Early Agriculture, and General Cultural Trajectories 150

Current Opinion on Agricultural Origins in the Americas 153

The Domesticated Crops 154

Maize 155

The other crops 157

Early Pottery in the Americas 158

Early Farmers in the Americas 159

The Andes 159

Amazonia 164

Middle America (with Mesoamerica) 165

The Southwest 168

Thank the Lord for the freeway (and the pipeline) 171

Immigrant Mesoamerican farmers in the Southwest? 173

Independent Agricultural Origins in the Eastern Woodlands 174

9 What Do Language Families Mean for Human Prehistory? 180

Language Families and How They Are Studied 181

Issues of Phylogeny and Reticulation 183

The Identification and Phylogenetic Study of Language Families 185

Introducing the Players 189

How Do Languages and Language Families Spread? 190

How Do Languages Change through Time? 193

Macrofamilies, and more on the time factor 195

Languages in Competition – Language Shift 196

Languages in competition – contact-induced change 198

10 The Spread of Farming: Comparing the Archaeology and the Linguistics 200

Western and Central Eurasia, and Northern Africa 201

Indo-European 201

Indo-European from the Pontic steppes? 201

Where did PIE really originate and what can we know about it? 204

Colin Renfrew’s contribution to the Indo-European debate 206

Afroasiatic 207

Elamite and Dravidian, and the Indo-Aryans 210

A multidisciplinary scenario for South Asian prehistory 213

Indo-European, Afroasiatic, Elamo-Dravidian, and the issue of Nostratic 216

Saharan and Sub-Saharan Africa: Nilo-Saharan and Niger-Congo 217

Nilo-Saharan 217

Niger-Congo, with Bantu 218

East and Southeast Asia, and the Pacific 222

The Chinese and Mainland Southeast Asian language families 222

Austronesian 227

Piecing it together for East Asia 229

“Altaic,” and some difficult issues 230

The Trans New Guinea Phylum 231

The Americas – South and Central 232

South America 233

Middle America, Mesoamerica, and the Southwest 237

Uto-Aztecan 240

Eastern North America 244

Algonquian and Muskogean 245

Iroquoian, Siouan, and Caddoan 247

Did the First Farmers Spread Their Languages? 250

11 Genetics, Skeletal Anthropology, and the People Factor 252

Are There Correlations between Human Biology and Language Families? 253

Do genes record history? 254

Southwest Asia and Europe 256

South Asia 262

Africa 263

East Asia 264

Southeast Asia and Oceania (mainly Austronesians) 265

The Americas 271

Did Early Farmers Spread through Processes of Demic Diffusion? 272

12 The Nature of Early Agricultural Expansion 273

Homeland, Spread, and Friction Zones, plus Overshoot 274

The Stages within a Process of Agricultural Genesis and Dispersal 277

Notes 280

References 292

Index 350

About the Author

Peter Bellwood is Professor of Archaeology at the Australian National University. He is the author of Examining the Farming/Language Dispersal Hypothesis (co-edited with Colin Renfrew, 2003), Prehistory of the Indo-Malaysian Archipelago (2nd edition 1997), The Polynesians: Prehistory of an Island People (1987), and Man’s Conquest of the Pacific: The Prehistory of Southeast Asia and Oceania (1986).

Reviews

Winner of the AAP PSP Award for Archaeology and Anthropology 2005
A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year
Peter Bellwood - 2006 SAA Book Award - The Society for American Archaeology annually awards a prize to honor a recently published book that has had, or is expected to have, a major impact on the direction and character of archaeological research, and/or is expected to make a substantial contribution to the archaeology of an area.
"Do not be misled by the humble title of Bellwood's book ... this volume stands alone in its scope and depth ... No student of anthropology, irrespective of subfield, should leave this book unread. It is and will remain one of the most important anthropological volumes of the 21st century." Choice
"This book is a superb advertisement for archaeology as part of a multidisciplinary approach to the problem of how, where, and why our ancestors settled to plough and pasture." Times Higher Education Supplement
“Bellwood is not afraid to challenge the established orthodoxy. This is a stimulating and thought-provoking assessment of one of the most important questions in archaeology today.” Peter Bogucki, Princeton University

“This wonderful book is a fascinating treasure-house of information about human history since the origins of agriculture. It deserves to be a standard reference for archaeologists, linguists, geneticists, and anthropologists interested in the formation of the modern world.” Jared Diamond, University of California, Los Angeles; author of Guns, Germs, and Steel

“A tour de force of historical anthropology. Rarely does one encounter a book with the sweeping historical scope of Peter Bellwood’s convincing worldwide synthesis of agricultural origins and population dispersals.” Patrick Kirch, University of California, Berkeley

“Global in its scope, Peter Bellwood’s First Farmers boldly correlates the spreads of early farming with episodes of human population and language dispersal. It offers a powerfully coherent perspective, which challengingly sets one of the great themes of human history in a new and simplified vision.” Colin Renfrew, University of Cambridge
"Bellwood is a master at summarising complex information... the real strength of this volume is that it will make accessible to students such a wide range of data and interpretations." New Book Chronicle
"Unlike many books, Bellwood's represents the cogent unfolding of a complex argument that draws on disparate types of information ... It is certainly the most scholarly, single-authored review of global agricultural origins on the market." Austrlian Archaeology
"The book certainly contains a good deal of interesting data and analysis." Anthropology in Action