Why cultivate? Anthropological and Archaeological Approaches to Foraging-Farming Transitions in Southeast Asia

Barker, Graeme (EDT)/ Janowski, Monica (EDT)

McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research（2011/05発売）

• 製本 Hardcover:ハードカバー版／ページ数 142 p.
• 言語 ENG
• 商品コード 9781902937588
• DDC分類 630.959

Full Description

Does it make sense to understand the prehistory, history and present-day patterns of life in Southeast Asia in terms of a distinction between two ways of life: "farming" and "foraging"? This is the central question addressed by the anthropologists and archaeologists contributing to this volume. Inherent within the question "Why Cultivate?" are people's relationships with the physical world: are they primarily to do with subsistence and economics or with social and/or cultural forces? The answers given by the contributors are complex. On a practical level they argue that there is a continuum rather than a sharp break between different levels of management of the environment, but rice-growing usually represents a profound break in people's relations to their cultural and symbolic landscapes. An associated point made by the archaeologists is that the "deep histories" of foraging-farming lifeways that are emerging in this region sit uncomfortably with the theory that foraging was replaced by farming in the mid Holocene as a result of a migration of Austronesian-speaking Neolithic farmers from southern China and Taiwan.