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  3. The Cambridge World History
  • Cited by 9
  • Volume 2: A World with Agriculture, 12,000 BCE–500 CE
  • Edited by Graeme Barker, University of Cambridge, Candice Goucher, Washington State University
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
May 2015
Print publication year:
2015
Online ISBN:
9780511978807
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511978807
Subjects:
American History: General Interest, British History: General Interest, Regional and World History: General Interest, History, Regional History Before 1500, Global History
Collections:
Cambridge Histories - Global History, Cambridge Histories - Ancient History & Classics, Cambridge Histories - British & European History, Cambridge Histories - American History, Cambridge Histories - Asian History, Cambridge Histories - Middle East & African Studies
Series:
The Cambridge World History
Information

Book description

The development of agriculture has often been described as the most important change in all of human history. Volume 2 of the Cambridge World History series explores the origins and impact of agriculture and agricultural communities, and also discusses issues associated with pastoralism and hunter-fisher-gatherer economies. To capture the patterns of this key change across the globe, the volume uses an expanded timeframe from 12,000 BCE–500 CE, beginning with the Neolithic and continuing into later periods. Scholars from a range of disciplines, including archaeology, historical linguistics, biology, anthropology, and history, trace common developments in the more complex social structures and cultural forms that agriculture enabled, such as sedentary villages and more elaborate foodways, and then present a series of regional overviews accompanied by detailed case studies from many different parts of the world, including Southwest Asia, South Asia, China, Japan, Southeast Asia and the Pacific, sub-Saharan Africa, the Americas, and Europe.

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Contents

Page 2 of 2

Contents
  • 21 - Nanchoc valley, Peru
    pp 539-554
  • View abstract

    Summary

    To the north arena of Chinese agriculture, the Central Plain is flanked by the Gobi desert and beyond that a belt of steppe that continues westwards across Eurasia. In Western Asia early crops were processed for a flour-focused food system. While grinding stones were used in prehistoric China, boiling and steaming of grains and other foods appear to have been and remained the predominant East Asian methods for preparing foods. The ultimate expression of the East Asian culinary selection of grain quality is found in the sticky cereals, including sticky rice and sticky millets. Analyses of phytoliths recovered from Pleistocene caves on the southern margins of the Yangtze basin have also led to suggestions of Pleistocene rice domestication in the region, although clear criteria for determining either cultivation practices of rice have been lacking. While agriculture in the Yellow River region diversified through secondary domestications and adoptions and developed an ideology of diversity, early Yangtze agriculture was single-mindedly about rice.
  • 22 - Early agricultural society in Europe
    pp 555-588
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Holocene climatic optimum, as the warm and wet conditions of monsoonal China enabled settlements to flourish. Drawing on typological lineages of ceramics, archaeologists group the early Neolithic sites into a number of types of material culture. A flotation programme at Xinglonggou I yielded more than 1,500 charred grains of broomcorn millet, together with about 20 grains of foxtail millet. Stable isotopic analysis has revealed that early Neolithic humans living at Xinglonggou I consumed millet as their staple food. This chapter considers five distinct aspects of Xinglonggou Neolithic lives in association with millet agriculture, landscape, material culture, settlement, production and consumption. The three localities of Xinglonggou are all on the left bank of the Mangniu River to the north of the Qilaotu mountains. Chinese ceramic vessels are simple in form and dominated by the bucket-shaped pot. Many pit structures contained human burials, a feature known from other Xinglongwa cultural sites, such as Xinglongwa, Baiyinchanghan and Chahai.
  • 23 - Pioneer farmers at Brześć Kujawski, Poland
    pp 589-611
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter explores the development of agrarian societies in Japan and considers the way in which the relationship between rice farming and other foodways contributed to the broader social and cultural developments in the archipelago up to 500 CE. The study of the history of Japanese agriculture has focused on the cultivation of these potential staple plant foods. Domesticated animals played only a limited role in Japanese farming. The chapter discusses the origin and development of rice cultivation in Japan, while reviewing the evidence for the cultivation of other kinds of plant food. Yayoi culture, based on rice farming, is often regarded as replacing the hunter-gatherer, aboriginal, Jomon cultures that preceded it, cultures that are traditionally not regarded as directly ancestral to present-day Japanese. The defences at many later Yayoi settlements, and the move to upland locations, indicate raiding and fighting.

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