Addressing one of the most debated revolutions in the history of our species, the change from hunting and gathering to farming, this title takes a global view, and integrates an array of information from archaeology and many other disciplines, including anthropology, botany, climatology, genetics, linguistics, and zoology.

This book addresses one of the most debated and least understood revolutions in the history of our species, the change from foraging (hunting and gathering) to farming. Ten thousand years ago there were few if any communities whom we can properly call farmers; five thousand years later, large numbers of the world's population were farmers, using a wide variety of crops and animals in different combinations in different regions. The possible reasons for the transition have long been one of the most controversial topics in archaeology, and continue to be so. The author integrates a massive array of information from archaeology (including archaeological approaches right across the humanities and science spectrum), together with many other disciplines including anthropology, botany, climatology, genetics, linguistics, and zoology. Against current orthodoxy, he develops a strong case for the parallel development of geographically specific agricultural systems in many areas of the world, transformations in the lifeways of forager societies that in some cases have origins reaching much further back in time that commonly suggested. He argues that the change from foraging to farming was as much about foragers developing new ways of thinking about their relationship to the world they inhabited as about new ways of obtaining food.

The Agricultural Revolution in Prehistory addresses one of the most debated and least understood revolutions in the history of our species, the change from hunting and gathering to farming. Graeme Barker takes a global view, and integrates a massive array of information from archaeology and many other disciplines, including anthropology, botany, climatology, genetics, linguistics, and zoology. Against current orthodoxy, Barker develops a strong case for the development of agricultural systems in many areas as transformations in the life-ways of the indigenous forager societies, and argues that these were as much changes in social norms and ideologies as in ways of obtaining food. With a large number of helpful line drawings and photographs as well as a comprehensive bibliography, this authoritative study will appeal to a wide general readership as well as to specialists in a variety of fields.

The twenty-eight contributors to this book show how experimental and ethnographic approaches are being used to shed new light on the process of domestication, and harvesting techniques, tools and technology in the period just before and just after the appearance of agriculture. The book takes an explicitly comparative approach, with chapters on SW Asia, Europe, Australia and Africa.

Description, based upon research evidence from the Near East and elsewhere, of the change in the gendered division of labor during the Neolithic agricultural revolution.

The first book on the origin of clothes shows why climate change was crucial - for the origin of agriculture too.

During virtually the entire four-million-year history of our habitation on this planet, humans have been hunters and gatherers, dependent for nourishment on the availability of wild plants and animals. Beginning about 10,000 years ago, however, the most remarkable phenomenon in the course of human prehistory was set in motion. At locations around the world, over a period of about 5,000 years, hunters became farmers. Far more than the domestication of plant and animal species was involved in this revolution, which was accompanied by massive changes in the structure and organization of the societies that adopted agriculture and by a totally new relationship with the environment. Whereas hunter-gatherers live off the land in an extensive fashion, exploiting a diversity of resources over a broad area, farmers utilize the landscape intensively. The implications of these changes in human activity and social organization reverberate down to the present day.