Which of the following modes of production is characterized by subsistence food getting egalitarianism and labor organized on the basis of kinship relations?

Abstract

Pastoralism is a mode of subsistence that involves raising domestic animals in grassland environments using herd and household mobility. Combined with nomadism, pastoralism has allowed humans to inhabit the world's vast dry lands. Pastoral systems are adaptations to diverse political and ecological conditions, but today are influenced by national and global societies. Livestock are objects of pastoralist identification used for subsistence, market sale, social exchange, and symbolic expression and were the world's first currency. Against the tragedy of the commons argument, pastoral use of rangelands is sustainable, and should continue as pastoralists increasingly participate in global institutions and cultural modernity.

Craft Specialization, the Division of Labor, and Commodization

The division of labor by gender and age has been basic in human societies from the simplest hunter-gatherers through pastoralism, simple and more complex forms ofagriculture, to urban societies up until the industrial revolution, and remains important today. In small-scale societies where all adult men and women practice the same craft skills, these tend to be carried out as part of the domestic economy. Kin roles are also economic roles. In this ‘domestic mode of production’ (Sahlins, 1972), craft products are made for both use and exchange. Craft skills are learned from older same-sex kin in the course of assisting with craft production. The developmental cycle of the domestic group reproduces the unit of craft production.

As societies become larger and more complex, emerging urban centers can support craftsmen who specialize in a single product (iron knives, silk cloth, pottery for cooking). Repeatedly we find that specialized production is associated with refinements in technology. With a specialist division of labor, craft products become commodities as they are exchanged for other commodities or enter the market. Hart writes that the central feature of increasing economic complexity is the integration of the division of labor in a nexus of commodity production and exchange; and that there is a tendency towards the progressive incorporation of ever more aspects of social life as commodities. ‘The commodity is human labor embodied in a good or service offered to society rather than be consumed by its producer. As such, com-modisation may be defined as the progressive abstraction of social labor’ (Hart, 1982).

As the nexus of production and exchange becomes more elaborate, new patterns of the division of labor appear. This pattern can be seen in the independent towns of medieval Europe and the Mediterranean. In Europe in the Middle Ages, textile production for an expanding market became organized as manufacture, first in specialist guild workshops, and then in rural cottage industry which took two forms. Cottage-craftsmen and women raised or bought the raw materials which they spun and wove into cloth, and sold locally to merchant buyers. The cottage-craftsmen owned raw materials, tools, and the finished cloth, planned their own work, and dealt directly with the market, although vulnerable to its fluctuations. In the other form of cottage industry, merchant manufacturers supplied the thread, often the loom, and owned the finished cloth. Weavers were paid for their work, in effect selling their labors as cottage-laborers. Rural cottage craft production organized by merchant capital is an example of what has been termed ‘proto-industrialization.’ With the harnessing of water- and then steam-power the invention of machines to replace handcrafts skills became possible. Such machines brought workers into factories, but the organization of components of production in manufacturing remained in many ways the same (machines now did the work of spinning, warping, weaving, finishing, dyeing) (Goody, 1982).

Clearly, the industrial revolution has radically changed the conditions of craft production. It is no longer central to the production and exchange of commodities in industrial societies. Further, Western manufactured goods and industrial production have become integral to the economies of developing countries. Yet a number of niches of craft production remain. Social anthropology, grounded in participant observation, has addressed the topic of craft production during the twentieth century in several ways.

Lineage Society: ‘Wealth in People’

West African agriculture depends on the hoe. The soils of the wetter savannas and adjacent forests are not suited to plow cultivation. Due to fly-borne disease, pastoralism is well developed only along the desert margins. Elsewhere it is not easy to accumulate wealth in livestock. Successful hoe agriculture depends on abundance of human labor. A central social value in the West African heartland is ‘wealth in people.’ This has many manifestations. The importance of a chief, for example, is expressed in terms of wives, children, and domestic dependents, rather than through holdings of land and livestock.

But in hoe agriculture, timing and coordination of labor are as important as numbers of workers, especially in strongly seasonal savanna cultivation systems. Interhousehold labor cooperation, and the social values, crop types, and farming practices conducive to such cooperation figure strongly in West African agrarian social systems. In the old days, the young people of an entire community might pool their labor for farm operations. Today it is more likely that they will form cooperative gangs to tackle backbreaking and time-constrained jobs on a rotational basis. Where agriculture is commercialized labor gangs ply for hire.

Labor cooperation is a practical manifestation of egalitarianism among the young typical of West African heartland social organization. This egalitarianism is frequently fostered through initiation into so-called ‘secret’ societies, widespread and still powerful in parts of the region. Such societies typically tend to support social values among the young, strikingly in contrast with hierarchical values prevailing in the world of the elders. From Guinea to Cameroon, the senior grades within secret societies form a ladder along which elders compete to advance.

French Marxist anthropologists in the 1960s and 1970s wrote about this typical opposition between youthful egalitarians and ranked elders, as ‘lineage’ society, or a ‘lineage mode of production,’ clearly differentiated from feudal relations found in medieval Europe and elsewhere (Seddon, 1978). It was conceived that elderly elites, drawing on the language of kinship and descent for legitimating, reproduced themselves at the expense of the labor of cadets. According to some authors this amounted to a kind of class conflict. The explanation was controversial. An alternative explanation is that typical agrarian societies in the West African heartland are the complex outcome of a number of competing principles of social solidarity, none of which, by itself, can sustain a satisfactory community life over the longer term.

A 24 Technologies in the CEG 1500 AD Dataset.

1.

Military: Standing army, cavalry, firearms, muskets, field artillery, warfare capable ships, heavy naval guns, ships (+180 guns).

Agriculture: Hunting and gathering; pastoralism; hand cultivation; plow cultivation.

Transportation: Ships capable of crossing the Atlantic Ocean, ships capable of crossing the Pacific Ocean, ships capable of reaching the Indian Ocean, wheel, magnetic compass, horse powered vehicles.

Communications: Movable block printing; woodblock or block printing; books, paper.

Industry: Steel, iron.

Moving House – Feeling at Home in a Network

This section describes how people who live in housing that is genuinely mobile may attach meaning to the spaces they move through and occupy. Here, moveable habitats can be defined not only as physical shelter but also as a series of networked and interconnected spaces. For example, in the United Kingdom, one group of residential boaters do not live on permanent moorings but are classed as ‘continuous cruisers’, and they travel around the waterways. These boaters often described a sense of being at home within the waterways network as a whole. Being at home in a network was described in physical terms, as the movement around the waterways themselves. However, there was also a sense of belonging to a community of boaters located in different parts of the country.

A further illustration of this type of experience of moveable habitats has been noted within social gerontology, where moveable habitats have been highlighted in relation to positive aspects of ageing. In Australia, research attention has focused upon ‘grey nomads’ who spend part of the year travelling in recreational vehicles, such as caravans, motor homes, campervans, or converted buses (Onyx and Leonard, 2007). Australian grey nomads are defined as people aged over 50 who spend 3 months or more travelling around the semi-arid areas of this country. It is their mobility that provides the creative potential for their accommodation to be not only a means of serendipitous exploration but also a site for personal growth and development.

Africa

Insights from Africa provide an important counterpoint to the common narratives of the evolution of food production. Crops such as wheat, barley, lentil, and pea were introduced to the northern coast of the continent between 7600 and 7000 BP, likely from Spain (Morales et al., 2013), but indigenous resource management and domestication developed elsewhere in Africa too. One hallmark of African agriculture is pastoralism, which became an important aspect of human adaptations in northeastern Africa by 6000 BP (Marshall and Weissbrod, 2011). During the last glacial maximum, c.18 000 BP, much of northern Africa was too arid to support people, but by the Early Holocene it was more humid than today. Hunter-gatherers were widespread in what is now the Sahara desert where people lived near permanent water sources. Animal domestication appears to have developed in the context of these climate changes. Animal management and their subsequent domestication may have been a response to risk inherent in the Middle Holocene development of the desert regions of northeastern Africa. Early pastoralism may not have developed strictly for food production because the economy at the time was based on early codependence of people and animals, particularly the donkey and cattle. Whether these animals were domesticated is not clear because morphological changes are difficult to see. Reduced size is not necessarily an indication of animal domestication in this instance (Marshall and Weissbrod, 2011). Human diets do not appear to have been dependent on these animals but the close relationship between people and animals involved logistical arrangements of movement to pastures. These animals held important positions in the symbolic life of these northeastern African peoples, as evidenced by the prominence of cattle in rock art. Close relationships between people and domesticated animals, and possibly animal management, appear to have begun in the early Holocene between 10 000 and 8000 years ago. Domesticated cattle may have been present c.9000–8000 BP at Nabta Playa, a site that is well outside the natural range of cattle (Jórdeczka et al., 2013). By 5000 or 4000 BP, cattle remains are common at archaeological sites although the evidence for reliance on domesticated plants is minimal.

Sorghum, pearl millet, cowpea, African rice, and t'ef were domesticated in Africa but not particularly early. Pearl millet was being grown by Kintampo culture people (3600–3200 BP) and further evidence of landscape management comes from the extensive use of oil palm at this time, reflecting what is likely early arboriculture (D'Andrea and Casey, 2002; Logan and D'Andrea, 2012). T'ef, an extremely small-grained grass, has an archeological record that is difficult to interpret because seeds of the domesticated form are not particularly different from those of wild t'ef; however, it was likely under cultivation in Ethiopia at least 2000 years ago (D'Andrea, 2008). Sorghum was a significant component of the plant assemblage at Nabta Playa 8000–7300 BP so it may have been cultivated at the time (Wasylikowa et al., 2001), but its domestication may not have occurred until about 2000 years ago. Domesticated sorghum and African rice are present at the site of Jenne-Jeno in Mali about 2000 years ago (McIntosh, 1995). In South Africa, agriculture and pastoralism are thought to have arrived in the early Iron Age about 2000 years ago with the spread of food producers into this part of the world (for further details see Breunig and Neumann, 2002; Harlan, 1992; Morales et al., 2013).

Social Time

Universal conjectures notwithstanding, most anthropologists focus on local notions of time and subscribe to the Durkheimian thesis that time categories and conventions are ‘social representations’ that mirror the organization of society. This sociological perspective is best exemplified by Evans-Pritchard’s (1939) elegant study of the East African Nuer, which is perhaps the most widely-known anthropological account of a distinctly non-Western style of time. Nuer ‘oecological time,’ which is cyclical or seasonal, reflects the environmental rhythms of cattle pastoralism. More importantly, Nuer indicate time but they lack an abstract chronological system that is numerical, cumulative, uniformly incremental, and measurable. Beyond the year, Nuer speak about temporal duration, intervals, and sequences with sole reference to ‘structural time’ or significant genealogical events in the social system – say, the division of a lineage, or the birth of an age set. Since Nuer genealogies are fixed at a depth of five generations, too, the passage of time is contained within a static framework. Similarly, there is considerable debate over whether or not the terminological groupings and repetitions in many kinship systems freeze, reverse, or emphasize the passage of time (Silverman, 1997). Here, too, the opposition between cyclical and linear time is a leitmotif of anthropological analysis.

Historical Interpretation and Evidence

The first written reports about nomadic groups date to the fourth and third millennia. These and later scripts were almost all written by sedentary people and reflect their opinions and prejudices. Cuneiform texts, for example, always describe nomadic territory in negative terms, as the home of spirits and demons, the same word being used to denote both the desert and the underworld. In Asia the nomad is portrayed ‘as a beast of hell’ and ‘incapable of civilized life’ according to the Chinese Confucians (Khazanov, 1981: p. 142), or stereotyped as a ‘barbarian,’ a wolf or tiger. Little has changed since. However, now it is mainly Europeans who describe the historical role of nomads as destructive or nomadic existence as ahistorical.

The history of nomadism is voluminous, one-sided as regards its sources, doubtless complex, and difficult to unravel, and its inner contradictions have never been critically analyzed (Braudel, 1990). Its contradictory nature consists in the dichotomy between the ephemeral duration and recurrence of nomadic patterns. This will be kept in mind in the following discussion.

Historical descriptions are based on the generally accepted experience that the nomad raided settled land suddenly, like a cavalry attack, and after a while either disappeared or was assimilated. By contrast, the agriculturalist, natural conditions permitting, occupied nomadic country for permanent or at least long-term settlement and remained in logistic contact with the hinterland. Admittedly, nomads had a “considerable impact on the social and political development of many sedentary societies with more diversified economies and advanced technologies” (Khazanov, 1981: p. 142). His process gained importance as the mobility range of nomadic groups was enhanced by more powerful pack animals and the availability of lighter metal equipment. In addition, population pressure on the nomads increased, large (presumably wealthy) sedentary empires tempted nomads to trade or raid, and the scenario of conflict developed between central rule and peripheral tribes (Jettmar, 1966; Planhol, 1975). Yet these waves of nomadic raids on cultivated land are only part of the story, although sources mention them first of all. Much rarer are reports of sedentarists adopting a nomadic way of life. In this context Jettmar (1966: p. 5) even speaks of a ‘victory of nomadism.’ Even in Inner Asia, a region of almost classical ‘antagonism’ between nomads (Mongolia) and sedentarists (China), the situation is more one of overlapping and reciprocity (Lattimore, 1940: p. 328). Hence authors have spoken of an oscillation of nomadism's economic space or of a recurrent emergence of nomadism.

Indeed, empirical experience suggests that sedentism in conjunction with (oasis) agriculture offered safety and food in times of peace, but it was the mobile mode of life with herd-keeping in deserts and steppes that offered a means of survival in uncertain times. Considering the natural and sociopolitical settings and the short- and long-term changes occurring in the respective regions of the Old World dry belt, it may be assumed that a switch from sedentism to mobility or from agriculture to mobile livestock-keeping, and hence from agriculture to nomadism, occurred just as frequently as vice versa.

The historical view distinguishes two phases (Bobek, 1959):

The first phase differs only slightly from events in prehistoric times as described by archeologists. It is characterized by the keeping of small stock (sheep and goats), close links between agriculture and pastoralism, and probably also short, sometimes climate-induced switches from one to the other, leading to the recurrent separation of herders and cultivators within the same family or the same tribe. There is fairly reliable evidence of this from the Middle East. Similar events probably occurred in the Eurasian steppes although the actual ‘nomadization’ of the steppe agriculturalists presumably dates to the Scythian period (Iron Age, beginning around 800 BC) (Wissmann, 1961: p. 30).

This first phase ends during the second millennium BC. It was followed by first, domestication of the horse in the Eurasian steppes (in Turan about 2800 BC), by orienting entire peoples toward nomadism, by domestication of the camel in the Middle East (end of the second millennium), and resulting in greater mobility and the emergence of mounted warriors and hordes or ‘empires’ (e.g., the Cimmerians, Thracians, and Scythians, and later the Huns, Tatars, and (other) Turko-Mongolians). Second, the emergence of ‘wealthy’ centers of high culture, based on irrigation. They form the backdrop of the conflicts between nomadic and sedentary peoples that shape the subsequent history of this region. The clay tablets in the archives at Mari allowed scholars to infer these conflicts from the appearance of nomadic groups such as the Yaminites and Hanaeans (nineteenth century), the Sutaeans (eighteenth century), the Arameans (fourteenth century), or the Chaldeans (ninth century), in the irrigated parts of the drylands of Western Asia Mesopotamia. Lasting reminders of this are the fortified towns and villages of Iran, the famous ‘walls’ built as a defense against the nomadic threat in China (Great Wall, third century BC against the Huns, AD fifteenth century against the Mongols), in phase with Turan or NE Mongolia at the mouth of the Gan, in the Middle East (Limes Syriae), North Africa (Limes Numidiae), Russia (Limes Daciae), or in central Europe (Limes Germaniae Raetiae).

In the seventeenth century BC, the Hyksos descended on Egypt, introducing the horse, and in the eleventh century the Midians overran Palestine and Canaan. Since the ninth century, the ‘Arabs’ (nomadizing Arab = Bedouins), mounted on camels, repeatedly entered fertile Mesopotamia and in the third century they came to Egypt. In the sixth century, the Persian Empire in the northern Middle East expanded northward (beyond the Jaxartes River) into the lands of the sedentarized steppe peoples. Like the later westward expansion of Hun rule (starting in the first century), this interrupted the sedentarization process that prevailed in the Eurasian steppes at the end of the Scythian period. Subsequently, the entire region experienced the upheavals of the migration of peoples. From then on, changes occurred more rapidly, and the nomad Bedouin continued to play a major role.

In the first two centuries AD Roman rule in the Middle East triggered a wave of nomadization; in this case the shift from a non-Bedouin to a Bedouin way of life. This process continued, as the decline of Marib Oasis (Yemen, sixth century) and the contemporaneous revival of Bedouin life show. Over the following centuries it received a new stimulus from the spread of Islam, particularly from the Islamic-Turkish nomadic armies of the Seljuqs (1048) in the mountains of Anatolia and Iran, Iranian tribes as far as Baluchistan, Sind, and Punjab, and the Beni Hilal (1051) and Beni Sulaym in North Africa. In the Khanate of the nomadic Khazars, north of the Caucasus, the sedentarization process that had begun in the eighth century was succeeded by a wave of renomadization as a result of conquests by the Pechenegs and Cumans in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The same happened to the Polovtsy (Kipchaks) after the Mongol invasions in the thirteenth century. In the Iranian mountains, too, they triggered a real nomadization wave described as ‘medieval Bedouinization’ (Planhol, 1975: p. 238). The Mongol impact stretched as far as Western Asia, where for example, Baghdad was destroyed in 1258, the irrigation systems of Mesopotamia were devastated, arable land reverted to pasture, and the desert was the only safe refuge for any length of time (Wissmann, 1961: p. 47). Similar consequences followed the attacks by Timur in the fourteenth century or by the nomadic Turkmen tribes in Anatolia in the sixteenth century, where ‘nomadism’ disappeared in the West and began to flourish in the East (Braudel, 1990: p. 139). Until the nineteenth century Egypt experienced repeated phases of movement and settlement, and the shift between sedentarization and nomadization also continued into the nineteenth century in the Eurasian steppes, where it was quite common among the Turkmen of southern Kazakhstan for “a nomad who had lost his livestock to settle down on land, or for a rich farmer to buy a herd and to shift again to nomadism” (Khazanov, 1978: p. 121). This process has been impressively described for the Arabian Peninsula, for western Afghanistan, or for the western Sahara at the start of the twentieth century, where oasis farmers aspired to the ‘higher’ class of nomadic herders. With some exceptions, however, the trend since the late nineteenth century has been generally toward modern agriculture and sedentary life (Scholz, 1995).

In many instances, this trend is not caused by economic or ecological factors but by politics. Modern states, contrary to some of their medieval precursors like the empires of Chinggis Khan or Timur Leng, are not based on nomadism and do not have (former) nomads as their power elites. They are based on agriculture and on urban forms of life and share the age-old stereotypes of nomads some of which have been depicted above (see also Leder and Streck, 2005). Their main interest seems to be to control nomads, who are perceived as a security risk, and later, when the nomads no longer represent a threat, to appropriate pastoralist resources for other types of use. Also some of the historical theories described in this article affect these sedentist ideologies and policies. The conviction that nomadism represents an early development stage of humankind and stands for primitiveness and barbarism, although it has long been refuted by historians and anthropologists, lingers on in the minds of politicians and development planners. Rather than perceiving nomadism and other forms of mobile pastoralism (like long distance transhumance from a sedentary basis) as a comparatively recent development (old as they may be, they follow mixed agriculture rather than preceding it) and a sophisticated form of specialization which requires portable implements, great expertise in handling animals, flexible forms of organization (shrinking and widening forms of lineage alliance for joint defense, dispersal in times of scattered resource distribution), members of the state class tend to represent nomadism as archaic, traditionalist, unchanging, maladaptive. Anthropological studies of nomads as well as their resilience and reemergence throughout history, which has been the topic of the present article, suggest the opposite. Nomads are strategizing and opportunist users of resources in difficult environments. Recent studies (Babiker, 2013; Behnke and Kerven, 2013; Galaty, 2013) show that mobile pastoralism often compares favorably with alternative (‘modern’) forms of land use like irrigated agriculture, large-scale rain-fed mechanized agriculture or tourism (licensed hunting, photo-safaris) in terms of productivity per hectare, especially when one takes into account that the removal of key resources (access to riverbanks for watering, dry season pastures) often makes the use of much wider areas much less efficient or no longer feasible, so that in the interest of the overall economy pastoralist forms of production should be protected and, wherever possible, intelligently combined with other forms of land use rather than being abolished as ‘archaic’ or ‘primitive.’ Sadly, power elites often do not act in the interest of the overall economy but in their own interests and the interests of those with whom they identify with or with whom they are in alliance. This applies to the nomadic elites of Eurasian empires in antiquity and in medieval times, who were often perceived by their sedentary subjects as purely predatory, as well as to modern power elites who identify with the sedentary populations and have their own stakes in sedentary forms of economy.

Conclusions

Apart from all these riddles about higher and lower degrees of diversity, we also find some universals. One of these universal features of human beings is the capacity to deal with diversity. Since the disappearance of other human species such as the Neanderthal, we have been left alone. There are no other hominids apart from Homo ‘sapiens sapiens.’ Still, we seem to be biologically equipped to deal with a high degree of internal diversity. (Communication with other species, such as canines and ungulates, in a symbiotic system (pastoralism), would be a different topic, though not a less interesting one.) Stephen Levinson (2006) has proclaimed the existence of a human interaction engine. Starting from observations about ‘first contacts’ between people who have no knowledge about each other and do not share a language, and from his experience with deaf-mute people, he has come to the conclusion that human beings start to create sign systems instantly and spontaneously. How has this engine evolved? And why do we have the capacity to learn 10 languages or more, and why are we able to translate and interpret? Why do we possess the basic skills for doing anthropology? Nature does not pay for luxuries. These features must have offered an evolutionary advantage. (This human interaction engine must be something on the same level of generality as the ‘ability to read and share intentions,’ stressed by Tomasello et al. (2005: p. 690). It is one of the prerequisites for the development of languages and language-based complex collaboration. We cannot derive it from language, because it must have been there before.) The game we are studying, the game of identification and reidentification, of learning the features which define friend and foe, of manipulating these delineations, of asserting or hiding who we are, of expressing ourselves in one or the other code, thereby including or excluding people from our audience or defining those to whom we appeal for solidarity and those against whom we make these appeals, making group differences narrower or wider, might be a very old game. Playing this game well often was a matter of survival, and many who did not play well are no longer with us. We have evolved with this game and in response to it. Cultural and linguistic diversity is natural. It has existed for a long time, and we are biologically adapted to it.

The Neolithic and Chalcolithic Periods

As climatic conditions became more favorable during the Holocene, numerous communities across South Asia began the process of plant cultivation and animal domestication. This development is generally associated with the beginnings of the Neolithic period, but it is a process which began at different times across South Asia between the eighth and third millennia BCE. During this span of time, some regional cultures are characterized as ‘Chalcolithic’ based on the presence of copper artifacts. Copper begins to appear in limited quantities by the fifth millennium BCE, increasing in frequency over the next two millennia. Ground stone tools, early pottery, and evidence for permanent settlements are also associated with ‘Neolithic’ period sites across South Asia; however, there is much regional variability in Neolithic stone tool assemblages. Similarly, previous assumptions about the link between domestication, ceramics, and sedentism are now under question in many areas. Although there was a marked increase in sedentism between the eighth and third millennia BCE, various communities continued to practice more mobile lifestyles associated with pastoral or foraging subsistence strategies. This heterogeneity continues across South Asia to this day and must be factored into any consideration of past social dynamics.

Once believed to be a singular development, paleobotanical studies have now confirmed that agriculture was initiated at multiple locations across South Asia (Fuller, 2011). The earliest evidence comes from Baluchistan at the site of Mehrgarh in the Bolan valley, where the transition from seminomadic pastoralism to sedentary agriculture between the eighth and sixth millennia BCE may have been influenced by developments in Western Asia (Allchin and Allchin, 1982). Excavations at Mehrgarh yielded evidence for house structures, burials, and domesticates such as barley, wheat, and cotton. There is evidence for the gradual domestication of cattle, goats, and sheep, though wild game continues to form an important part of diet – this is a pattern seen across South Asia throughout time.

Several other sites in the northwest have provided evidence of small agricultural settlements between the sixth and fourth millennia BCE including Kili Gul Mohammad, Anjira, Mundigak, Gumla, and Sarai Khola (Ghosh, 1989; Singh, 2009). At these sites and many others, Neolithic levels are identified by features and artifacts such as mud brick structures, querns, pottery, and by paleobotanical and faunal evidence for domesticated species (Allchin and Allchin, 1982). Many sites and regions are associated with specific types of pottery traditions including Nal, Kulli, and Hakra ware sites. Copper objects, terracotta figurines, and beads made of semiprecious materials have also been recovered from Neolithic levels in many places, and excavated human burials attest to a variety of funerary customs during this time (Ghosh, 1989).

Elsewhere in South Asia, early Neolithic traditions have been documented in numerous regions, many having distinct traits marking them as potential loci of indigenous development. Rice is an early domesticate in the Ganga valley and surrounding plains, as well as in the northern fringes of the Vindhyas (Fuller, 2011). Though paleobotanical evidence for rice is documented from very early periods in these regions, understanding of its transition from a wild to cultivated crop remains ambiguous and is possibly dependent on the timing of hybridization of indica rice with japonica species introduced from China (Fuller, 2011). At sites such as Mahagara, Koldihwa, Chirand, and Senuar, Neolithic settlements have been dated from the fourth to third millennia BCE, though some earlier dates have also been suggested. In the Kashmir valley, Neolithic sites such as Burzahom and Gufkral are distinguished by the presence of plastered pit dwellings between the third and second millennia BCE. In the Northeast, Neolithic stone celts and axes have mainly been collected as surface finds. Neolithic levels at Sarutaru, Marakdola, Napchik, and Selbalriri have yielded some absolute dates in the range of the mid-second millennium BCE but there are suggestions that some of these sites may date to much later periods (Ghosh, 1989; Chakrabarti, 1999; Singh, 2009).

Further to the south, early agricultural village sites have been uncovered in Orissa and Bengal such as Kuchai, Gopalpur, and Pandu Rajar Dhibi, while in peninsular India, a number of Neolithic and Chalcolithic cultures have been documented, including the Ahar, Ganeshwar-Jodhpura, Malwa, and Jorwe complexes (Ghosh, 1989). These cultures have been dated from the third to late first millennia BCE and are contemporaneous with the Indus civilization. At sites such as Ahar, Gilund, Navdatoli, Daimabad, and Inamgaon, excavations have revealed evidence for copper artifacts in addition to stone implements. The presence of nonlocal materials such as shell, gold, ivory, and semiprecious stones indicates the existence of interregional networks of exchange across South Asia during this time.

In South India, the Neolithic traditions of the Southern Deccan are marked by unique patterns of material culture and paleobotanical evidence, suggesting this region was an independent center of early domestication. The cultivation of pulses and millets by the third millennium BCE at sites such as Hallur, Sanganakallu, Kurugodu, and Tekkalakota gradually intensified to include a wide range of local and introduced species (Fuller et al., 2004). A distinctive feature of the early ‘Southern Neolithic,’ confined mainly to Bellary and Raichur districts in Karnataka, are Neolithic ashmounds. These monumental accretions of vitrified dung indicate the importance of cattle in the agro-pastoral economy and possibly represent the emergence of communal ritual activity (Paddayya, 1993; Johansen, 2004). Further south, Neolithic levels at Paiyampalli in Tamil Nadu have been radiocarbon dated to the mid-second millennium BCE. Very early dates have been suggested for the cultivation of barley, oats, and possibly rice in the Horton Plains (Premathilake, 2008), but overall the transition from the Mesolithic period to the better documented Iron Age remains poorly understood in Sri Lanka.