PhilPaine.com

This work brings me up to date on the cur­rent state of evi­dence and the­ory con­cern­ing the tran­si­tion to agri­cul­ture. Graeme Bark­er sum­ma­rizes many reports that I haven’t seen, includ­ing for­eign lan­guage ones that I couldn’t have. On the whole, it is grat­i­fy­ing to me, as it shows that both the weight of evi­dence and the weight of opin­ion have been grad­u­ally shift­ing towards my own views. The genet­ic, pale­ob­otan­i­cal, and pale­oiso­topic evi­dence is all push­ing it in that direc­tion. I’m hap­py to see that fish­ing is now accord­ed the promi­nent posi­tion that it deserves. In the long run, I think that fur­ther evi­dence will force the pro­fes­sion­als to make the “leap” that I feel is nec­es­sary. Cur­rently, pre­his­toric trade net­works, while rec­og­nized, are still seen as inci­den­tal, or irrel­e­vant to the tran­si­tion. A few the­o­rists posit that they play a role in fos­ter­ing elites and seden­tarism ― with the assump­tion that acqui­si­tion of “pres­tige goods” was the essence of such trade. I believe, on the oth­er hand, that the process of sub­stitut­ing goods for­merly import­ed through this trade sys­tem by local pro­duc­tion, is the heart of the mat­ter. Pre­his­toric trade, I think we will dis­cover, was over­whelm­ingly con­cerned with food sta­ples, wide­ly used prod­ucts, and “mass mar­ket” tech­nol­ogy, with “pres­tige goods” mere­ly a side-effect. The spread of agri­cul­ture was mere­ly one aspect of an ongo­ing macro-eco­nom­ic process that has its roots in the ear­ly devel­op­ment of homo-sapi­ens, and not a dis­rup­tion of a sta­tic or “non-eco­nom­ic” pre-agri­cul­tur­al soci­ety, com­ing out of the blue. None of the pre­vail­ing “push” or “pull” visu­al­iza­tions of the adop­tion of agri­cul­ture rec­og­nize the impor­tance of this process. The archae­o­log­i­cal evi­dence, espe­cially in north­ern Europe, screams out to be inter­preted in this way. It will mere­ly take a small con­cep­tual shift to make it hap­pen. I would real­ly love to sit down with some of the peo­ple who are close to mak­ing the leap, and argue them into it.