Bruce D. Smith

Melinda A. Zeder

Eve Emshwiller

Daniel Bradley

Agriculture is the lever with which humans transformed the earth over the last 10,000 years and created new forms of plant and animal species that have forever altered the face of the planet. In the last decade, significant technological and methodological advances in both molecular biology and archaeology have revolutionized the study of plant and animal domestication and are reshaping our understanding of the transition from foraging to farming, one of the major turning points in human history. This groundbreaking volume for the first time brings together leading archaeologists and biologists working on the domestication of both plants and animals to consider a wide variety of archaeological and genetic approaches to tracing the origin and dispersal of domesticates. It provides a comprehensive overview of the state of the art in this quickly changing field as well as reviews of recent findings on specific crop and livestock species in the Americas, Eurasia, and Africa. Offering a unique global perspective, it explores common challenges and potential avenues for future progress in documenting domestication.

New Genetic and Archaeological Paradigms

Documenting Domestication

Roger Koenker

Mark Huggett

Joseph T. Mahoney

Chung-Ming Kuan

Stephen P. D'Arcy

Chamu Sundaramurthy

Chao-Shin Liu

George Edward Monahan

Gillian Yeo Hian Heng

Herbert L. Baer

Joseph Francis Allen Porac

Luis C. Nunes

Miles B. Gietzmann

Rhonda K. Reger

Timothy L. Smunt

The Relevance of Opportunity Costs in the Management of Congested Stochastic Production Systems

Absorption Versus Direct Costing

Daniel G. Bradley

"A genetic revolution has transformed the study of the domestication of plants and animals. Documenting Domestication presents the best research and resolves issues that had been intractable in the past."—Richard I. Ford, University of Michigan

This collection, addressing a topic of ongoing interest and debate in American archaeology, examines the evolution of ranked chiefdoms in the Midwestern and Southeastern United States during the period A.D. 700–1200. The volume brings together a broad range of professionals engaged in the fieldwork that has vitalized the theoretical debates on the development of Mississippi Valley cultures. The initial chapter provides a general discussion of various explanations for the rise of these distinctive ranked societies in the eastern United States (A.D. 750-1050) and sets the stage for the interdisciplinary analysis from multiple viewpoints that follows. The first section discusses a cluster of individual sites in the Midwest and Southeast and reveals the parallel—and occasionally divergent—paths followed by the inhabitants as they transitioned from Late Woodland into Mississippian lifeways. The chapters in the second half discuss by region the emergence of ranked agricultural societies and examine how these networks played a role in the large-scale and roughly contemporaneous socio-political development. Contributors: C. Clifford Boyd Jr. James A. Brown R. P. Stephen Davis Jr. John House John E. Kelly Richard A. Kerber Dan F. Morse Phyllis Morse Martha Ann Rolingson Gerald F. Schroedl Bruce D. Smith Paul D. Welch Howard D. Winters

The Mississippian Emergence

C. Wesley Cowan

Michael P. Hoffman

Organized into four sections, the twelve chapters of Rivers of Change are concerned with prehistoric Native American societies in eastern North America and their transition from a hunting and gathering way of life to a reliance on food production. Written at different times over a decade, the chapters vary both in length and topical focus. They are joined together, however, by a number of shared “rivers of change.”

Essays on Early Agriculture in Eastern North America

Rivers of Change

Bruce D. Smith

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