Journal ArticleDOI
The Origins of Agriculture and Settled Life
Frank Hole,Richard S. MacNeish +1 more
TLDR
MacNeish's The Origins of Agriculture and Settled Life as mentioned in this paper is a detailed account of his lifelong personal quest to reconstruct the texture of the past from the shreds of prehistory, but his indomitable will and seemingly boundless energy and endless excavations have not sufficed to finally lay to rest the question of how and why agriculture started.Abstract:
The past few years have seen the publication of numerous books and articles on the origins of agriculture, but this work by MacNeish surely ranks as the most idiosyncratic of the bunch. In The Origins of Agriculture and Settled Life, MacNeish carries on in the style of his The Science of Archaeology? These two books are largely autobiographical, the former documenting the evolution of his research, this one attempting to fit global agricultural origins into the developmental rubric he began to develop in Tehuacan. Both recount his lifelong personal quest to reconstruct the texture of the past from the shreds of prehistory, but his indomitable will and seemingly boundless energy and endless excavations have not sufficed to finally lay to rest the question of how and why agriculture started. As he says at the end, \"we have reached no final conclusions.\read more
Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI
Phylogeography of Asian wild rice, Oryza rufipogon, reveals multiple independent domestications of cultivated rice, Oryza sativa
TL;DR: DNA sequence variation in three gene regions is examined in a phylogeographic approach to investigate the domestication of cultivated rice, indicating that India and Indochina may represent the ancestral center of diversity for O. rufipogon and that the products of these two independent domestication events are the two major rice varieties.
Journal ArticleDOI
Low-Level Food Production
TL;DR: In this paper, a conceptual framework for societies with low-level food production economies is proposed, and the issues and questions concerning these societies, both with and without domesticates, are discussed.
Journal ArticleDOI
Was agriculture impossible during the pleistocene but mandatory during the holocene? a climate change hypothesis
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors use a mathematical analysis to argue that the rate-limiting process for intensijcation trajectories must generally be the rate of innovation of subsistence technology or subsistence-related social organization.
Journal ArticleDOI
Dynamics and Stagnation in the Malthusian Epoch
Quamrul H. Ashraf,Oded Galor +1 more
TL;DR: Analyzing exogenous sources of cross-country variations in land productivity and the level of technological advancement demonstrates that, in accordance with the theory, technological superiority and higher land productivity had significant positive effects on population density but insignificant effects on the standard of living during the time period 1-1500 CE.
Posted Content
Post-1500 Population Flows and the Long Run Determinants of Economic Growth and Inequity
Louis Putterman,David N. Weil +1 more
TL;DR: A matrix is constructed showing the share of the year 2000 population in every country that is descended from people in different source countries in the year 1500, with ethnic groups originating in regions having longer histories of organized states tending to be at the upper end of a country's income distribution.
References
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Book
Method and theory in American archaeology
Gordon R. Willey,Philip Phillips +1 more
TL;DR: In 1958 Gordon R. Willey and Philip Phillips as discussed by the authors published Method and Theory in American Archaeology, a volume that went through five printings, the last in 1967 at the height of what became known as the new, or processual, archaeology.
Journal ArticleDOI
Phylogeography of Asian wild rice, Oryza rufipogon, reveals multiple independent domestications of cultivated rice, Oryza sativa
TL;DR: DNA sequence variation in three gene regions is examined in a phylogeographic approach to investigate the domestication of cultivated rice, indicating that India and Indochina may represent the ancestral center of diversity for O. rufipogon and that the products of these two independent domestication events are the two major rice varieties.
Journal ArticleDOI
Low-Level Food Production
TL;DR: In this paper, a conceptual framework for societies with low-level food production economies is proposed, and the issues and questions concerning these societies, both with and without domesticates, are discussed.
Journal ArticleDOI
Was agriculture impossible during the pleistocene but mandatory during the holocene? a climate change hypothesis
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors use a mathematical analysis to argue that the rate-limiting process for intensijcation trajectories must generally be the rate of innovation of subsistence technology or subsistence-related social organization.
Journal ArticleDOI
Dynamics and Stagnation in the Malthusian Epoch
Quamrul H. Ashraf,Oded Galor +1 more
TL;DR: Analyzing exogenous sources of cross-country variations in land productivity and the level of technological advancement demonstrates that, in accordance with the theory, technological superiority and higher land productivity had significant positive effects on population density but insignificant effects on the standard of living during the time period 1-1500 CE.