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7 The Origins of Plant Cultivation and Domestication in the Neotropics a behavioral ecological perspective Dolores R. Piperno 137 During the past 20 years, evolutionary biologists have broadened the study of Darwinian processes by drawing on elements from the ecological and behavioral sciences, and asking questions relating to why as well as to how. As a result, flexible decision making by animals, local ecological circumstances , and rapid, phenotypic-level adjustments are viewed as fundamental to evolutionary change. The transition from foraging to farming is, at its heart, an evolutionary transformation, but to avoid a serious paradigm lag with modern biological principles and ensure that our theories can accommodate complex and learned human actions, archaeologists must incorporate these now-standard approaches to adaptive change in biology. This paper uses behavioral ecology, specifically optimal foraging theory (OFT), to examine the origins of plant cultivation and domestication in the American tropics. It reviews the present empirical evidence for early food production in the Neotropical forest, and evaluates four main questions relating to the why and how of agricultural origins, as seen from the perspective of human behavioral ecology (HBE). Using two important genera of American plant domesticates, Cucurbita and Lagenaria, the paper also compares and contrasts the major tenets of HBE with those of other evolutionary programs in archaeology, such as co-evolution, and examines how well the assumptions and predictions of each approach are met by archaeological data. Lastly, it is argued that HBE can be used to explore nomothetic explanations for food production origins because it, alone among the existing generalizing theories, can be applied across cultural and environmental boundaries. Seasonal tropical forests, those that receive a prolonged period every year during which little to no rain falls, do not carry the distinction enjoyed by their rainforest relatives, despite the fact that they have been of far more use to humans for a longer period of time. It is in these forests that the highest biomass of comestible plants and animals and the most fertile soils for agriculture occur, and before they were cut for agriculture or converted into pasture, seasonally dry forests occupied large areas of the Central and South American landmasses (Figures 7.1a and b). Molecular biological and botanical studies of the modern flora tell us that many wild ancestors of crop plants are native to the seasonal tropical forest, where they can still be found in large stands reproducing successfully without a human hand (e.g., Doebley 1990; Olsen and Schaal 1999; Sanjur et al. 2002). Accumulating evidence from archaeology and paleoecology indicates that human manipulation of these plants gave rise to early, independent, and major systems of agriculture (Piperno and Pearsall 1998). This paper examines the applicability of foraging theory to the question of the origins of food production in the American tropical forest1 . I use foraging theory to identify important environmental and social variables that were acting on selection pressures and subsistence choices on the eve of the Neolithic and test predictions regarding dietary choice and breadth using archaeological data on early Cucurbita domestication. I ask four main questions, (1) why did plant food production start in tropical America and other nuclear cradles around the world, (2) why did it start when it did, (3) out of the many thousand species of plants that were available to prehistoric food producers, why were so few of them domesticated, and (4) should domestication itself be the focus of our studies, or are other socioecological processes antecedent to, and coincident with the transition from foraging to food production actually more significant? Lastly, I argue that foraging theory can be used to construct a nomothetic explanation for food production origins because it, alone among the existing generalizing theories (see Piperno and Pearsall 1998, 10–18), can be applied across cultural and environmental boundaries. FORAGING THEORY, AFFLUENT FORAGERS, AND THEIR RELEVANCE TO FOOD PRODUCTION ORIGINS I begin by questioning a major tenet of prehistoric economic reconstructions; that the transition from foraging to food production carried with it decreasing returns to labor. Although this negative relationship between work effort and agricultural production is now taken for granted in many discussions of agricultural origins (e.g., Hayden 1992; Hillman 2001; Norton 2000), there is little evidence to support it. The issue is important for a number of reasons. The notion that turning to cultivation was a last resort for foragers, initiated late in human evolution only when growing human populations had outstripped the food supply, largely derives from the perceived labor-intensiveness...

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