The more I read about the archaeological evidence for the transition to agriculture—that supposedly useful symbiotic domestication process on the part of plants, animals and humans—the more I realize that in many cases, the process was entered into slowly and reluctantly.
Take, for example, evidence illustrated by the Swifterbant culture of extreme southeastern Netherlands at sites such as the Brandwijk-Kerkhof site. There, although the Linearbandkeramic people and/or culture with their fully-fledged agricultural systems leaked into adjoining lands about 5300 BC, the Swifterbants, successful Mesolithic hunter-gatherer-fishers, put off adopting plant domestication almost 1,000 years.
Hmm. Would I want to work that hard unless I absolutely had to? Or is it just resistance to change that humans cling to?
By the way, the Swifterbant pages I accessed for these collection of webpages are open access—free to the download—so be sure and read the papers in their unfiltered state as you wend through the arguments. Thanks to researcher Welmoed Out, for direction-pointing.
Reconstructed Linearbandkeramik Farmhouse, Archeon. Photo by Hans Splinter
Comments
That indeed was the trade-off all around the world. The work load of agriculture is much higher than that for hunter-gatherers but agriculture yields a much more dependable food supply.
there is a few similar examples in Europe, some of them are:
1.Zedmar in Russia (Kaliningrad Oblast) this site is situated on the border of south-western (LBK and later TRB) influences but showed interesting stability in continuing hunter-gatherer economy
2.Ertebolle sites in the basin of Baltic Sea
3.Bug – Dniester culture sites in Ukraine/Moldavia
The thing that connects those (and Swifterbant) is the existence in rich ecological niches, which means that there was no economical reason to adapt traditiionally understood ‘neolithic package’, it is generally accepted by many researchers that transition to neolithic in such communities was rather effect of change of way of thinking(which took a longer time) than just simply and mechanically adapting agriculture
As one who has studied the transition to gardening and who has maintained a Native American garden since 1976 I will vigorously disagree with Dave. Gardening/agriculture is not more reliable than H&G. Gardening is a desperation strategy which can (and all too frequently does) leave gardeners with little or nothing to show for their considerable efforts (my wife and I just finished planting a mere 75×40 foot Hidatsa garden and can testify that even that small plot is a lot of work — and we have just begun the season). Think climatic vagaries, insects, herbivores, thieving humans, and even bacteria — beneficial as well as detrimental.
People do not garden who do not have to garden. Furthermore, once gardening is a commitment then people have to settle down to take care of their gardens and protect their crops from all manner of things which would rather that either they ate it instead of you or would rather have that space for themselves — weeds. Nature abhors a garden.
Gardening in Russia