Session Details

This session will explore the transition, development and environmental impact of agro-pastoralism in landscapes formerly occupied by hunter-gatherers. This transition led to substantial changes in the way humans interacted with their environment. Here, we would like to examine a number of inter-related themes: the causal factors behind the transition to agro-pastoralism; the timing, nature & spread of the transition; its environmental impacts. The causal factors behind this transition in different founder regions remains hotly debated and influenced by local and regional factors; non more so the nature of the crops and how these are suited to given environments. It is by no means certain that the West Asian/European transition model is appropriate as a global perspective, particularly in the Far East and Africa. The session will explore what innovations were associated with these changes and did they differ according to the area under investigation? What individualistic adaptations do we see in the archaeological and environmental records? Many accounts concerning the origins and development of agro-pastoralism have emphasised the role of environmental or social change. How can we examine such links in an integrated fashion? The timing of cultural and environmental events is obviously crucial, but often the precision of many chronologies is insufficient for examining questions at the human-scale. Advances in techniques such as stable isotope research, bimolecular archaeology and molecular genetics are providing useful insights onto the spread of cultivars and domesticated animals across Eurasia, for instance, whilst advances in the development of spatio-temporal models and simulations are now allowing us to examine detailed questions concerning the temporality and regionality of agricultural traditions and the role of migration and acculturation. Finally, what sorts of landscapes and environments were created as a result of the transition to agro-pastoralism and what were the differing impacts to the environment? How did these transitions feed back into determining the nature of the human-environmental interaction? The switch from hunter-gatherer subsistence to agro-pastoralism had a huge effect on the Earth system, impacting biodiversity, land cover and the global carbon cycle and environmental processes and landforms. How early did these impacts occur and how did they register? We invite papers and posters that relate to the issues identified above.