The Origins of Agriculture Rag

One absolutely sacrosanct tradition in archaeology is the field song. For reasons that have yet to be explained to me, if you get a group of archaeologists in the same place (read: pub) at the same time (3:30 am) and in the same state (convivial semi-sobriety), they sing. What they sing is usually fractured song lyrics--I remember most clearly a song about the great collapse of the Pueblo civilization, sung to the Wabash Cannonball.

After engaging in this sort of behavior for the first time, when I arrived home I wrote my own song, and here it is. Sing it out loud and embarrass yourself--it's to the tune of Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg's wonderful "If I only had a brain" from the 1939 Hollywood movie musical Wizard of Oz. This song is about diffusion, which is a word archaeologists use to mean the process by which an invention or development in one part of the world will travel to another. Some people have taken the concept of diffusion far and away from its original idea, and believe that agriculture, for example, was developed in the Tigris/Euphrates valley and everybody else learned it from the Sumerians. Unlikely--for one thing, different crops evolved in different parts of the world; corn in the west; wheat in the east; rice in the far east.

But, the visionaries say, if we could just find that one crop.....

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