This book is written by one of the leaders of cultural ecology. Richard MacNeish is considered the initiator of Latin American archaeological research on the origins of agriculture. His long career in pursuit of the subject has had a remarkable impact; he has provoked many polemics with his discoveries from Mexico, Belize, and Peru. This work is a synthesis of his perceptions and categorizing views of the routes of human cultural evolution that led to food production and sedentism.
The first chapter is the strength of the volume. It reviews some of the models of how agriculture originated but concentrates on an evolutionary model with 17 alternatives, or adaptational choices. Of these, only 3 trajectories lead to agricultural villagers, who evolve from food collectors to food producers. The changes from one stage to the next result from environmental variations (for example, seasonality, distribution of resources, changes in carrying capacity) and the availability of domesticated plants. Population pressure arguments seem relevant only in secondary developments. Environmental variation is the basis of most of the arguments over what are the necessary and sufficient conditions that trigger the change toward any of the potential routes and stages.
In his complex division, MacNeish differentiates (as others have previously) between centers and noncenters of agricultural origins. A center is defined as a part of the world where several plant domesticates occur. The four centers are the Andes, Mesoamerica, the Near East, and the Far East. The rest of the world fosters secondary or even tertiary developments.
The rest of the book—95 percent—presents cases organized according to centers and noncenters. Apparently this portion of the book was produced first, and after discerning the different trajectories of human evolution, the author created the model presented in the first chapter. This inductive process of research may be the reason why none of the case studies gives the impression of testing any model. On the contrary, one feels like building one’s own model by placing the sequence of events in order. The section of case studies has value mainly as an interpretation of sequences of world archaeology regarding the issue. It presents a clear interpretation of the fractional sequences and explanations of the changes in each area. This section can help familiarize the nonspecialist with the archaeological locations where such changes have been proposed. For the Latin American reader, Mac-Neish’s synthesis of material on the Andes (chapter 3), Mesoamerica (chapter 4), and the Latin American tropics (chapter 10) is one of the best available, covering research up to the end of the 1980s.
The volume is highly recommended for anyone interested in archaeology’s contribution to our understanding of the origins of food production. We must wait and see how much of MacNeish’s “trilinear theory,” as his model is called, appeals to researchers for future testing, in contrast to competing deductive models that pursue explanations of why people settled down, why people domesticated plants, and why they started to cultivate them.
