Book contents
- The Cambridge World HistoryVolume II
- The Cambridge World History
- A World with Agriculture, 12,000 bce–500 ce
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Maps
- Tables
- Contributors
- Preface
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Archaeogenetics
- 3 Agricultural origins
- 4 What did agriculture do for us?
- 5 Communities
- 6 Pastoralism
- 7 Agriculture and urbanism
- 8 Early agriculture in Southwest Asia
- 9 ’Ain Ghazal, Jordan
- 10 Early agriculture in South Asia
- 11 Mehrgarh, Pakistan
- 12 Early agriculture in China
- 13 Xinglonggou, China
- 14 Early agriculture in Japan
- 15 The Nara basin paddies, Japan
- 16 Early agriculture in Southeast Asia and the Pacific
- 17 Swamp cultivators at Kuk, New Guinea
- 18 Early agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa to c. 500 ce
- 19 The Tichitt tradition in the West African Sahel
- 20 Early agriculture in the Americas
- 21 Nanchoc valley, Peru
- 22 Early agricultural society in Europe
- 23 Pioneer farmers at Brześć Kujawski, Poland
- Index
- References
3 - Agricultural origins
What linguistic evidence reveals
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 May 2015
Book contents
- The Cambridge World HistoryVolume II
- The Cambridge World History
- A World with Agriculture, 12,000 bce–500 ce
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Maps
- Tables
- Contributors
- Preface
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Archaeogenetics
- 3 Agricultural origins
- 4 What did agriculture do for us?
- 5 Communities
- 6 Pastoralism
- 7 Agriculture and urbanism
- 8 Early agriculture in Southwest Asia
- 9 ’Ain Ghazal, Jordan
- 10 Early agriculture in South Asia
- 11 Mehrgarh, Pakistan
- 12 Early agriculture in China
- 13 Xinglonggou, China
- 14 Early agriculture in Japan
- 15 The Nara basin paddies, Japan
- 16 Early agriculture in Southeast Asia and the Pacific
- 17 Swamp cultivators at Kuk, New Guinea
- 18 Early agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa to c. 500 ce
- 19 The Tichitt tradition in the West African Sahel
- 20 Early agriculture in the Americas
- 21 Nanchoc valley, Peru
- 22 Early agricultural society in Europe
- 23 Pioneer farmers at Brześć Kujawski, Poland
- Index
- References
Summary
The reach of the currently available linguistic evidence on early agriculture also extends back to the middle or the later middle Holocene for the Middle East, India and Mesoamerica. The essential foundation for the linguistic recovery of history is a systematic reconstruction of the relationships and phonological histories of the families of languages spoken in the regions whose human histories one wishes to investigate. Two major originating centres of food production lay in Africa, one in the far eastern Sahara and the other far to the west, in West Africa, along with a probable third centre in the southwestern Ethiopian highlands. The lexicons of subsistence in the first several periods in the history of the Nilo-Saharan language family reveal an extended, stage-by-stage history of shift from food collection to food production. A new stage in the evolution of West African agricultural practices began by no later than the fifth millennium BCE.
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- The Cambridge World History , pp. 55 - 92Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2015
References
Further reading
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Brown, C.H. ‘Prehistoric chronology of the common bean in the New World: the linguistic evidence.’ In Staller, J.E. and Carrasco, M.C. (eds.), Pre-Columbian Foodways in Mesoamerica. New York: Springer, 2010. 273–89.Google Scholar
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Fuller, Dorian Q. ‘An agricultural perspective on Dravidian historical linguistics: archaeological crop packages, livestock and Dravidian crop vocabulary.’ In Bellwood, P. and Renfrew, C. (eds.), Examining the Farming/Language Dispersal Hypothesis. Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 2003. 191–214.Google Scholar
Ross, M., Pawley, A., and Osmond, M. (eds.). The Lexicon of Proto Oceanic: The Culture and Environment of Ancestral Oceanic Society, vol. i: Material Culture. Canberra: Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, 1998.Google Scholar
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