Publications

The McDonald Institute publishes the Cambridge Archaeological Journal and the McDonald Institute Monographs. The former is the leading world journal of cognitive archaeology. The monograph series exists primarily to disseminate the results of archaeological fieldwork, and of the Institute's interdisciplinary conferences and workshops. If you have any queries, please email us at info@mcdonald.cam.ac.uk.

New Titles

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

edited by Graeme Barker and Monica Janowski

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.

Editors:
Graeme Barker is Disney Professor of Archaeology at the University of Cambridge and Director of the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research. His research focuses on the relationships between past human societies and their environments and how they have transformed each other. He has worked in many different ecologies and with societies at different levels of complexity from the emergence of our species to Roman farmers and, currently in Borneo, present-day rainforest farmers and foragers.

Monica Janowski is Senior Teaching Fellow and Research Associate at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. Her research interests lie in the way people conceptualize and operationalize their relationship between themselves and the rest of the cosmos.

142p, 34 col & 11 b/w illus, 8 tables (McDonald Institute Monograph, McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 2011)
Table of Contents (.pdf)
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