During virtually the entire four-million-year history of our habitation on this planet, humans have been hunters and gatherers, dependent for nourishment on the availability of wild plants and animals. Beginning about 10,000 years ago, however, the most remarkable phenomenon in the course of human prehistory was set in motion. At locations around the world, over a period of about 5,000 years, hunters became farmers. Far more than the domestication of plant and animal species was involved in this revolution, which was accompanied by massive changes in the structure and organization of the societies that adopted agriculture and by a totally new relationship with the environment. Whereas hunter-gatherers live off the land in an extensive fashion, exploiting a diversity of resources over a broad area, farmers utilize the landscape intensively. The implications of these changes in human activity and social organization reverberate down to the present day.

The case studies presented here, ranging from the Far East to the American Southwest, provide a global perspective on contemporary research into the origins of agriculture. Downplaying more traditional explanations of the turn to agriculture, such as the influence of marginal environments and population pressures, the contributors to this volume emphasize instead the importance of the resource-rich areas in which agriculture began, the complex social organizations already in place, the role of sedentism, and, in some locales, the advent of economic intensification and competition. This volume resulted from an advanced seminar held at the School of American Research in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Contributors include Ofer Bar-Yosef, Anne Birgitte Gebauer, Charles Higham, Lawrence H. Keeley, Richard H. Meadow, Deborah M. Pearsall, T. Douglas Price, Bruce D. Smith, Patty Jo Watson, and W.H. Wills.