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Discussions of early agriculture have long been synonymous with historical arguments about the timing of migration of farmers or the diffusion of crops and technology from centers of domestication, as well as interpretive arguments about whether the spread of new subsistence strategies was more likely the result of the migration of farming people or the adoption of new strategies by local populations. Yet there are no good arguments about the conditions under which people do not migrate or crops and technology do not diffuse. Therefore, we have many interpretive arguments that accommodate what is known and tell a nice story but little development of the theoretical principles that allow us to specify the conditions under which we do and do not expect to find agriculture. Developing the generalizations that could form the foundation of this kind of theory requires fairly substantial knowledge of variability both in the archaeological record of early agriculture and in the hunting-gathering adaptations such as those that regularly precede food-­ producing economies. Lewis Binford’s (2001:363–399) long-term research on the environmental and demographic factors that impact hunter-gatherer subsistence and settlement strategies provides one foundation for this research. Recent archaeological research on early agriculture provides another. Amber L. Johnson A Method for Anticipating Patterns in Archaeological Sequences Projecting the Duration of the Transition to Agriculture in Mexico—A Test Case 6 89 Amber L. Johnson 90 Within the last decade, archaeological research in the large and diverse geographic region that includes the U.S. Southwest and Mexican borderlands has greatly expanded our knowledge of the variability in the timing of intensive plant utilization and mix of resources included in the earliest horticultural adaptations in this region. Several of the authors included in this volume have made significant contributions to the documentation and synthesis of data on a variety of intensively used native plants and earlier dates on water control features and maize across this region (also see Doolittle and Mabry 2006:109–110). The growing body of evidence indicates (1) intensive use of wild plants long before the earliest maize is present, (2) considerable variety within individual sites combined with considerable variance among sites in the types of plants present even after maize is present, (3) earlier dates for the presence of maize across this region, and (4) earlier dates on water control features in this arid region than in the tropical regions of Mesoamerica. This new knowledge of the archaeological record relating to early agriculture challenges what Doolittle and Mabry (2006:110–111) refer to as “The Simplistic Paradigm”—the conventional model of a “relatively sudden shift from hunting and gathering to agriculture” that occurred by either diffusion or migration. Further, they argue, “No longer is it useful or realistic to assume that Southwestern agriculture began with maize, or that there was initially a single kind of early farming that spread across the Southwest prior to the development of other cultivation techniques . Rather than thinking in simple, specific, single-process, single-event terms, our thinking about the early history of maize in the greater Southwest should be framed in the context of complex, diverse, and evolutionary processes over an extended period of time” (Doolittle and Mabry 2006:118). The most common research strategy to develop our knowledge of such processes is continued fieldwork combined with periodic synthesis. Together, these further increase the archaeological data available to researchers. Another productive research strategy is to continue to develop knowledge of the specific subsistence options available and their relative cost-benefit to people living in different environmental settings and under different demographic conditions (e.g., Barlow 2002:70–84). These strategies produce and synthesize increasingly detailed knowledge of particular places at particular times and thus contribute to significant increases in specific knowledge of the archaeological record at local and regional scales of comparison. However, as such detailed knowledge accumulates for multiple regions around the world, it becomes increasingly difficult to compare large-scale patterns of change in subsistence and settlement systems. Thus, there is also a need to develop generalizations that can be applied globally to allow us to learn how these “complex, diverse, and evolutionary processes” compare from one region of the world to another. The primary goal of this chapter is to develop general theoretical principles regarding the conditions under which hunter-gatherer subsistence strategies are expected to change into horticultural subsistence strategies. Such generalizations can provide a global framework for anticipating variance in basic features of the archaeological record related to...

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