The cultural life of early domestic plant use.

The cultural life of early domestic plant use. This paper is a contribution to the on-going discussion about whatis often called the 'origins of agriculture'. The literaturehas seen a broadening of perspective over the past 10 years. We havegained from these works and have reoriented much of our thinking aboutthis societal transition. Nevertheless, there is still room to ask whatcultivation looked like in the early days. What were the culturalsettings that initiated these changes in plant-human interactions? Wecan gain further understanding about this transition by thinking moreabout the 'invisible' and the 'unstudyable', bytrying to understand why people might have nurtured plants in the firstplace. This paper proposes that the domestication domesticationProcess of hereditary reorganization of wild animals and plants into forms more accommodating to the interests of people. In its strictest sense, it refers to the initial stage of human mastery of wild animals and plants. process was tied tointensifying social relations and lineage construction. Further, thesuggestion is that the plants that were adopted early on had specialmeanings and identities due to their associations with places, events,and lineage groups, especially for women. The plants that accompaniedpeople into new communities and placers were part of these groups'cosmologies and identity constructions. It is hoped that the individualplants themselves might give us clues to the past cultural changes thatwere taking place. Several cultural examples will illustrate how womenand their lineage associations are important instigators in the spreadof plants and therefore were probably involved in plant domestication. To address these questions, this paper focuses on the social andcultural side of plant 'mothering' and cultivation.(1) Planttending is biological but it is also cultural. At some point, peoplebegan to act and think differently about the world around them,including the plants and animals, which they had eaten since before theybecame 'people'. Why did people change their social, economic,and ecological practices? How did their perceptions of close and distantsocial interactions alter their relationships with plants and animals?The suggestion put forward here is that the creation of identity (anddifference) at the personal, familial, and group level was a dynamicprocess which also underlay early plant cultivation. Gatherers andhunters began to associate and identify certain plants and animals withthemselves. They brought the plants into their community to be caredfor, like the people in their community. This process of changingrelationships with plants (and animals)(2) accompanied changes in therelationships between humans. We might benefit from looking at practicesand interpersonal relations that are routine and repeated in mostpeople's lives in order to see how the nurturing of new socialrelationships might have been linked to horticulture.(3) There are now many archaeological examples of early cultivationthat suggest a low level of plant use for many generations, evenhundreds or thousands of years, before agriculture became important inthe subsistence base. These early cultivated plants were both local andnonlocal. Only some of these early cultivars, however, grew to dominateagricultural assemblages (Johannessen 1988), shown by the evidence alongthe coast of Peru and the western coast of Mesoamerica (Hastorf 1998).While the dominant, carbohydrate plants later came to support surplusand hierarchy (Johannessen 1993; Welch & Scarry 1995), the earlypropagated plants were not carbohydrate, staple crops; rather they weremedicinal, industrial, spicy, hallucinatory hal��lu��ci��na��to��ryadj.1. Of or characterized by hallucination.2. Inducing or causing hallucination. or merely exotic. Ourproblem is that if the earliest plants are not exotic, morphologicallyaltered or densely deposited, archaeologists have not been able torecognize and identify agriculture in the archaeological record The archaeological record is a term used in archaeology to denote all archaeological evidence, including the physical remains of past human activities which archaeologists seek out and record in an attempt to analyze and reconstruct the past. . It isargued that some early sedentary sites were pre-agricultural, but theycould have been intensely horticultural, dealing with plants that didnot have the physical changes that we normally assume to be required inthe definition of agriculture (Bar-Yosef & Belfer-Cohen 1989).Places like the desertic Peruvian coast, where virtually all cultivatedplants are foreign, make such a subtle artefactual adj. 1. of or pertaining to an artefact.2. made by human actions.Adj. 1. artefactual - of or relating to artifactsartifactual event more visible toarchaeologists, and it is here that we see spicy and industrial plantsbeing nurtured first, at a low level and for a long time (Hastorf 1998;Pearsall 1992). Because there are no clear topographic barriers thatcreated the pattern and tempo of plant entry, it leads one to ask whatit was about these plants that prompted the local inhabitants to begincultivation, and why it was these specific plants that were brought infirst. The concept of cultivation is extremely old, learned from living inthe forests, shrub and grasslands long before the occurrence ofdomesticated do��mes��ti��cate?tr.v. do��mes��ti��cat��ed, do��mes��ti��cat��ing, do��mes��ti��cates1. To cause to feel comfortable at home; make domestic.2. To adopt or make fit for domestic use or life.3. a. species. At some point groups began more actively tendingand moving plants around, perhaps only as a small part of the diet,perhaps only for ritual or industrial use. While some plant taxa reactto human action with morphological change, many plants were usedregularly without visible morphological change for thousands of years.Why did some plants get more attention by people in the first place, andwhat were the cultural settings that encouraged new plant cultivation?Farrington & Urry (1985) suggest that it was spicy, flavourfulplants that were first brought under cultivation and harvested in orderto mark certain meals as special. Their model fits well with the oldertheory that some annual plants, such as peppers and gourds, could havebeen domesticated in the nearby middens of returning foragers. This isthe dumpheap model proposed by Anderson (1952) which states that ifplants were notable and conveniently located, they could have beeneasily tended during the return to previously inhabited camps. There isa powerful dimension of territoriality TerritorialityBehavior patterns in which an animal actively defends a space or some other resource. One major advantage of territoriality is that it gives the territory holder exclusive access to the defended resource, which is generally associated with in this model. In many settings,however, it was probably the case that the earliest plants to be adoptedwere from far away or could not have grown easily on the midden middendungheap. heaps. Taking the Farrington & Urry idea a step further, these earlycultivated plants, used at a low level for many hundreds of years, wereadopted (into the family) because of their special meaning andsignificance to the foragers. The specialness of certain plants putforward in the Farrington & Urry model results not only from theirtastiness, but also from the plants' roles in family life. Models for the origins of agriculture Models explaining change have always been open to criticism in thesocial sciences. Systems theory and the deviation amplification models(Flannery 1968; Hill 1977) or (cultural) evolutionary theory ''This article is about the creole theory. You may be looking for the concept of biological evolution. For other uses, see Evolution (disambiguation).Main article: Creole language The evolutionary perspective as agradual progression (Fried 1967; Blumler 1996) have been considered toomechanical and essentialist. Even popular models for political changelike the structural Marxist models for state development (Friedman &Rowlands 1978) are guilty of the prime mover prime mover:see energy, sources of. Prime moverThe component of a power plant that transforms energy from the thermal or the pressure form to the mechanical form. critique that changeresults only from structural contradictions or from within the relationsof production Relations of production (German: Produktionsverhaltnisse) is a concept frequently used by Karl Marx in his theory of historical materialism and in Das Kapital. Beyond examining specific cases, Marx never defined the general concept exactly. . The same criticism is seen also in the critiques ofstructuration The theory of structuration, proposed by Anthony Giddens (1984) in The Constitution of Society, (mentioned also in Central Problems of Social Theory, 1979) is an attempt to reconcile theoretical dichotomies of social systems such as agency/structure, theory (Turner 1984; Treherne 1995). Chaos theory chaos theory,in mathematics, physics, and other fields, a set of ideas that attempts to reveal structure in aperiodic, unpredictable dynamic systems such as cloud formation or the fluctuation of biological populations. , forexample, has been put forward to be less unilinear u��ni��lin��e��ar?adj.Of or developing in a progressive sequence usually from the primitive to the advanced. , but even thesemodels have been hard to implement archaeologically (Van der Leeuw1989). Similar problems beset theories about agricultural'origins'. The environmental change model for the Near East has quitesuccessfully provided clues to the necessary conditions for certaintypes of agriculture, and these conditions are relatively independent ofhuman will (Childe 1954; Wright 1970; Byrne 1987). Importantenvironmental influences are seen in the recent pollen evidence from theNear East and South Eastern European Neolithic, that detects the YoungerDryas climate change (Wright 1993; Moore & Hillman Hillman was a famous British automobile marque, manufactured by the Rootes Group. It was based in Ryton-on-Dunsmore, near Coventry, England, from 1907 to 1976. Before 1907 the company had built bicycles. 1992; Hillman1996). Such information is, of course, very important in constructingthe ecological setting within which people acted. In the Old World,certain grasses moved into the Fertile Crescent Fertile Crescent,historic region of the Middle East. A well-watered and fertile area, it arcs across the northern part of the Syrian desert. It is flanked on the west by the Mediterranean and on the east by the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, and includes all or parts region due to changes inclimate and seasonality. But there is increased acceptance byresearchers now that nature and culture were equal players, interactingwith each other in non-linear fashion', a la Sauer (Blumler 1996:26). When we try to imagine the past, we must remember, as Ingold (1993)has pointed out, that people were 'playing their part' in theon-going transformation of the natural world. People lived with theirfellow plants and animals, not just among them. The whole world was agarden in the sense that humans participated in all parts of theecosystem, thinking themselves into their place in the world. Many of the prominent models about agricultural origins concentrateon the major cultural changes that took place at about the same time.The most common have been population growth (Spooner 1972), demographicshifts (Binford 1968), the existence of permanent settlements (Braidwood1960) and trade (Flannery 1965; Renfrew et al. 1966). Further models andconditions with a more ecological orientation are the ecosystemicapproaches, including the Darwinian biological models of biotic biotic/bi��ot��ic/ (bi-ot��ik)1. pertaining to life or living matter.2. pertaining to the biota.bi��ot��icadj.1. Relating to life or living organisms. interactions (Rindos 1984), ecological plant-human interactions (Zohary& Hopf 1988; Hillman & Davies 1990; Blumler & Byrne 1991),the requirement of a broad base of potential plants and animals that canbe domesticated (Sauer 1952; Harris 1969) and plant characteristics thatlend themselves to morphological change by human manipulation (Hather1994; Johns 1989). All models offer clues to understanding human-plantchanges. Most agricultural models and investigations focus on when farmingbegins to be visible in the archaeological record and on theaccompanying social and political dynamics. My point is not to offer acritique of these models, for there are useful insights in each of themas well as many recent, eloquent advances and critiques (see Harris1996). Rather, the point made here is to add another dimension from aslightly different standpoint and reorientate Verb 1. reorientate - orient once again, after a disorientationreorientorientate, orient - determine one's position with reference to another point; "We had to orient ourselves in the forest" our views on the culturalimpact within such a shift, beginning with the daily practices andreasonings of the people who were involved with local and exotic plants.We want to pause at the early days of alteration and focused use toconsider what the people might have been doing, thinking and desiringwhen both plants and people altered their ways. A helpful beginning is presented by Bender (1979) and Hayden(1990), who suggest that the early manipulation and cultivation ofplants were part of the economic and political escalation involved ininter-group relations. Their discussions gravitate grav��i��tate?intr.v. grav��i��tat��ed, grav��i��tat��ing, grav��i��tates1. To move in response to the force of gravity.2. To move downward.3. around the idea thatpeople adopted and cultivated crops because of an increased interest inpolitical activities (alliance-building feasts) and exchange betweengroups. They assume that agricultural surplus would provide ways to gainexchangeable goods. With increased access to valuables, groups couldregularly operate in a larger social network through exchange of thosegoods. Hence, people would be interested in producing more for thegroup's greater benefit, in an acquisitional mode (Helms 1993).Such agricultural escalation also has been linked to an increased desirefor intracommunity competitive public display, alliance building andconstruction of group identity through feasts and food gifts (Young1979). These political acts would probably be initiated by importantfamilies, leaders or religiously inclined persons, keen to introduceplants or to encourage the cultivation of crops once they were presentfor trade and political ends. This political-social perspective isessential in models of the growth of visible difference, hierarchy andsurplus. Not every horticultural act became expansionary ex��pan��sion��ar��y?adj.Tending toward or causing expansion: the empire's expansionary policies in Asia.andsurplus-generating, however. Starting from these gift-giving, feastingmodels, we can move closer to the social dimensions involved in becominga cultivator cultivator,agricultural implement for stirring and pulverizing the soil, either before planting or to remove weeds and to aerate and loosen the soil after the crop has begun to grow. The cultivator usually stirs the soil to a greater depth than does the harrow. . Another view Beginning with the characteristics of some members of the plantkingdom and the factors that might have contributed to new plant-humanrelations, we can benefit from a more social-cultural perspectivetowards agriculture. Such a perspective of early agricultural societiesincludes the importance of familial and social interactions. Ithighlights kin/clan identity as participating actively in plantdomestication. Despite our need for routines, we should remember how creative andexperimental humans are. We have always been tinkering with the worldaround us, even in our routinized lives. Part of our culture is thechanges that occur all around and within it. With in this sameperspective about how culture is transmitted Wagner notes that'every cultural act . . . involves the interplay of invention andconvention' (Wagner 1975: 45). Hugh-Jones (n.d.: 2), applying thisto Amazonian groups, further suggests that smaller-scale groups try to'create their universe of innate convention by constantly trying tochange, readjust, and impinge upon it, in an effort to knock theconventional off-balance, and so make themselves powerful and unique inrelation to it' (Wagner 1975: 889). If your world is a forest youwill not only learn its patterns, sounds and constraints, but also youwill continually alter it and cause changes to living things Living Things may refer to: Life, or things in nature that are alive Living Things (band), a St. Louis musical group Living Things (album) by Matthew Sweet within it.Scholars like Balee, for example, suggest that the plant distributionsseen in tropical forests today are due to human tinkering, nurturing andtransport (Balee 1989; Denevan 1992). Such plant distributions are theresult of many years of people carrying clippings, root stocks or seedsas they hunt, visit relatives, go on trading trips, journey to newterritories or simply place plants where they are more useful to people(Shipek 1989). There are many examples of foragers who not only nurtureall that is around them, but also actively manipulate the ecologicalzones to aid the human use of local plants. Shipek (1989) provides an evocative example of such a sustainedinteraction over many generations without 'agriculture'. Thesouthern Californian Kumeyaay's impact on the many plantcommunities throughout their territory was great, yet they have beenconsidered foragers, as they 'only' harvested and hunted. Intheir 'foraging', the Kumeyaay moved many plants near to theirdwellings (including trees and cacti that are considered extremelydifficult to transplant), nurturing and harvesting them for a wholerange of personal uses, including aid in warfare. Shipek is correct instating that their intensive interaction with the plant world offers aneffective model for understanding aspects of domestication (1989: 160).In their activities we see a broad-based, on-going nurturing of theplant world as the Kumeyaay interacted with staple and starvation foods,as well as plants for tool-making. Despite their foraging label, theKumeyaay introduced and planted foreign plants and probably domesticatedat least one local grass plant that displayed morphological changebefore it faded into extinction with European contact. Their level ofplant knowledge was incredibly extensive, sufficient for a domesticatedworld, had they chosen to live in one. Instead, they chose to let naturedo most of the work for their needs. The social girl The essence of human social life is exchange (Mauss 1990). Not onlydo exchanges create a cycle of debt and a built-in mechanism ofobligation for future interaction, they also define the boundaries ofsocial groups, between the giver and the receiver. Exchanges of partnersbetween communities and lineages is perhaps one of the earliestexchanges. To keep the channels of interaction open between these rareevents within one human life-span, more regular food exchange would havebeen an important medium. Often these gifts become codified cod��i��fy?tr.v. cod��i��fied, cod��i��fy��ing, cod��i��fies1. To reduce to a code: codify laws.2. To arrange or systematize. , by event,by class of item or by relative value. In some settings, giving ishighly regulated and sufficient accumulation may take many years, as inthe exchange of wives for pigs in highland New Guinea New Guinea(gĭn`ē), island, c.342,000 sq mi (885,780 sq km), SW Pacific, N of Australia; the world's second largest island after Greenland. (Rappaport 1969),or the giving of cumbi cloth to local leaders by the Inka rulers whennew groups 'joined' the Empire (Rowe 1946). In most settings,gifts are less expensive, such as foodstuffs foodstuffsnpl → comestibles mplfoodstuffsnpl → denr��es fpl alimentairesfoodstuffsfood npl → and spices, fish or manioc manioc:see cassava. in northwest Amazon (Hugh-Jones n.d.), wine or flowers taken to aEuropean dinner party. Intra-family and inter-family gifts create and maintain alliances.Archaeologists have focused most often on the presence of non-localgoods as indicators of trade and alliance building, primarily becausesuch goods are visibile in the archaeological record. It seems likely,however, that most gifts were of things that people had fairly easyaccess to and with which they were familiar. Such items or actions arethe most invisible in the archaeological record, like stories, dances,songs or things made of plants and animals; even just the plantsthemselves. Dances and songs we cannot do much about, but transportedplants are common in the archaeological record. For example, the resultsof regular small-scale exchange activity are seen in the distribution ofchilli peppers and tobacco. These spread from their loci loci[L.] plural of locus.lociPlural of locus, see there ofdomestication throughout the New World, across political and culturalboundaries, prior to European contact. Such non-staple spices and drugswere the most wide-spread plants in the pre-Columbian New World.Wherever chilli and tobacco have been found, however, they had asignificant meaning to those using them. While they were often used inrituals, they are almost never the focus of paleoethnobotanical study. Food or food-stuffs have probably been the most common gift itemthroughout human (pre)history. Since food is culturally constituted aswell as biologically necessary, these exchanges are almost essential forfamily existence as well as group identity and social acceptance. Itmakes sense to think about food being the basis of social life andritual. Plants Plants were part of the social world from the start. All societieshave names and meanings for plants in their surroundings, for theiruses, their characteristics, for plants' reactions to humans andfor their seasonal life-cycles. Plants, like humans, have their owntime-scales of growth. Annual plants, with faster life cycles, areconsidered to participate more in the social world of interpersonalrelations, because people can see their growth more clearly (Rival1993). Because of their intimate relations with humans, plants becomelinked into wider structures of meaning that help people navigatethrough their natural and social worlds (Ortiz 1994). Many ethnographieselegantly demonstrate the symbolism and intricate classification givento plants and how plants are related to social groups (e.g. Balee 1994;Hugh-Jones 1979; Weismantel 1988). Such meanings are hard to contactfrom the deep past, but if we keep in mind that these meanings wouldhave been present at the beginning of symbolic thought, perhaps we canuse this concept to place plants more centrally into the social world ofpast interpersonal relations. Since every plant was chosen and broughtto the hearth, in order to be eaten, every plant was altered in some wayevery time it was harvested for any use, and this had to be thoughtabout. The thoughts and meanings associated with these actions are theplaces to seek the cultural beginnings of domestication. Women's plants At most times and in most places in the world, it was almostcertainly women who, if they were not collecting, were activelychannelling the consumption of the plant food to their families. Thus,women would have been intimately and continuously involved in theactivities that led to plant cultivation (Watson & Kennedy 1991). Itis not surprising that, in foraging and horticultural societies, moststaple crops are associated with women (Hugh-Jones 1979; Kahn 1986).Women reproduce humans and crops. But women do not operate alone; theywere and are embedded in their families, residence groups, lineages,societies and their 'natural' world. Women had at least twosets of offspring, the plants in their gardens and the children in theirhouses. Decisions about who, what and when to nurture were at the baseof a women's daily world. Because many living things could havebeen in competition for a woman's time and nurturing, tensionsmight have arisen in allocating their time and energy, as any motherknows. Women would have tried to organize the scheduling of their dailytasks by helping the plants help themselves, in the same general mannerthat mothers help children learn. This pressure might have led totransplanting near the home-base. For these same reasons, women may haveselected plants that produce at certain times or in new places in theenvironment. Such nurturing was on-going and from it developed kitchengardens, as sedentism increased. House-midden gardens are probably avery early and long-lived phenomenon (Doelittle 1992). Women built theirfamilies as well as their social worlds with every meal they produced. Ingold identifies the essence of domestication as the constanthuman involvement with fast growing plants (1996:21). In the same way,it is the constant involvement with children that brings children intothe cultural world of kinship relations and society. It is this constantand recurring interactive social dynamic as much as the need for foodthat encouraged women to monitor, pick, weed, water, watch, trim, tendand replant re��plantv.To reattach an organ, limb, or other body part surgically to the original site.n.An organ, limb, or body part that has been replanted. plants. These regularly performed nurturing actions wereculturally constituted as well as culturally constructive. 'Thereis far more to gardening than the mere production of food, just as thereis more to a song than the production of notes . . . But forpractitioners, growing crops and raising animals are not just ways ofproducing food; they are forms of life' (Ingold 1996: 24). Thelived social values of a group, the act of creating and rearing thingsand the curiosity and experimentation within an ecological and socialworld all channelled women to become the domesticaters of plants andpeople. We see hints of this same idea of nurturing put forward by Watson& Kennedy (1991). They suggest that women gatherers first initiatedthe cultivation of plants in North America North America,third largest continent (1990 est. pop. 365,000,000), c.9,400,000 sq mi (24,346,000 sq km), the northern of the two continents of the Western Hemisphere. through their tending of wildtaxa in the daily rounds of food and medicine gathering. In theirapproach, domestication was initiated without overt political leanings,with women as plant nurturers instigating the morphological and geneticchanges in plants we associate with domestication. They suggest that theart of domestication was not an economic behaviour. Plants at the root of the family and its social identity Daily plant and child tending and growth turn into longer cycles ofmaturation and family development. Reciprocal exchange relationshipsform and reform society on a daily basis. For example, in small-scaleexogamous ex��og��a��my?n.1. The custom of marrying outside the tribe, family, clan, or other social unit.2. Biology The fusion of two gametes that are not closely related. societies, if women changed communities or even just kingroups when they married, plants that accompanied them would enter thediet of the new families. If certain plants reminded them of their ownfamilies, ritual-events and lineage-places, women may have wanted tohave these plants with them to maintain those bonds symbolically as wellas physically through nurturing and consumption of the specific plants.With such plant movement, we can begin to envisage how some plants mighthave moved across the landscape in social ways. To pursue further this idea of the key participation of plants insocial relations and the formation of group identity, I would like todiscuss some ethnographic information on the social relations ofhorticultural practices. Women and men foragers are constantlycollecting and experimenting with plants for future consumption, forspicing foods, for tools and for medicine. These plants are used notonly to nurture a family but also as potential gifts in exchange withneighbours and kin. Women are the primary experimenters and collectorsof plants in the Barasana of northwest Columbia, a foraging, swidden swid��den?n.An area cleared for temporary cultivation by cutting and burning the vegetation.[Dialectal alteration of obsolete swithen, from Old Norse svidhna, to be burned.] farming group (Hugh-Jones n.d.). Women constantly bring back cuttingsduring foraging trips as well as exchanging plants with friends and kin,thus adding to the local kitchen gardens that surround their houses(Hugh-Jones pers. comm.). These plants are not all domesticated, butthey are all nurtured. Such plants are not only for food, but are alsofor medicines, contraceptives, drugs (especially tobacco), as exotics,and used for containers (gourds). Gardens evolve through time, withspecies added from near and far. Each new plant comes with a personalstory and a social relation. Besides their own collected plants, Barasana women are involved intending specific varieties that they inherit. These plants embody thefamily. Gourds, with their long vines of fruit, represent a lineage,with its sequence of daughters and sons. In addition, and especiallyprovocative given the archaeological evidence for early peppers on thecoast of Peru (Hastorf 1998), Hugh-Jones notes that certain chillipepper varieties are inherited within female lineages; certain shapesand flavours are associated with certain families. Chilli peppers,representing individual kin lineages, are a symbol of a family. Peppersare also the binding agent of male (fish) and female (manioc) meals(Hugh-Jones 1995: 231). Further, with explicit sexual connotationsattributed to their procreative pro��cre��a��tiveadj.1. Capable of reproducing; generative.2. Of or directed to procreation. shape and their spicy nature within themeal, they have multiple levels of meaning. Today, in the northwestern Amazon, special crops, along with theirassociate-symbolic meanings linked to the origin myths of theirancestors, are passed down through each woman's family line(Hugh-Jones pers. comm.). When the women cook and feed peppers to theirfamilies, every consumer is brought into association with the lineage.Specific varieties are associated with specific female lines, and it isthe stock of the plant that embodies the lineage. Neighbours recognizeeach specific variety as a specific family's plant, with all of itsconnotations. To walk through a woman's garden is to view her dailylife, her ancestral lineage and a history of her family's socialrelations. This same type of intimate ownership, tending and identity is alsodescribed by Shipek (1989) for indigenous southern California residents.Certain nut-producing pine groves belonged to specific bands andfamilies. The Torrey pine, for example, belonged to a lineage group whotended and guarded it (Shipek 1989: 163). This particular band wascalled Istaguay 'trees are there', as their identity anduniqueness from their neighbours was tied to that tree and its location(Shipek 1989: 163). Many trees, cacti, and other perennials in that areaare selectively located near late prehistoric sites. While we do notthink of these taxa as being domesticated, in part because of their longlife-spans, often longer than a human life, they were planted nearsettlements and nurtured. The evidence for these activities is stillpresent on the landscape. These 'foragers' in Californiaplanted a number of tree species: oak, mesquite, plum and palms, acrossthe landscape. The trees participated in identifying their territory aswell as nurturing their families with food and supplies (Shipek 1989:163). Domestication Hodder (1991) has addressed the question of how domesticationdeveloped in Europe by suggesting that people first had to create theconcept of domestication before domesticating activities could takeplace, or at least before people recognized domestication. The physicaland social development of the family and kin-line were activeingredients in initiating the concept of both domestication andterritoriality. An association with a plant, a tree or a place on astream probably developed through using the plant or place regularly orin special ritual time (Ingold 1996: 21). Involvement linking things,actions and beliefs would incorporate them into a family'scollective memory and lineage; in other words Adv. 1. in other words - otherwise stated; "in other words, we are broke"put differently these things were'becoming domesticated' in a family and its memory. Suchinteraction could include clay, springs, annual or perennial plants andwhere they grow, animals, trees as well as landscapes. Not all actors would have wanted to alter the world in which theylived, but instead to maintain the it. But just through use, changesoccur, and some of these left visible traces in the ecology andartefacts that are seen today. The timing of these changes has been mostoften tied to the visibility of certain things, such as architecture,long-distance trade items or morphological changes in plants. Thisproblem of visibility in the archaeological record may have created amisguided view of domestication when looking at the initial roles ofplants in agriculture and horticulture. One important aspect ofdomestication is territoriality. How did people increase their involvement with the landscape suchthat they began to see it as a territory, and why did it happen when itdid? Areas of increased interaction with plants perhaps became initialterritories within the landscape, like the tree groves of the Kumeyaay(Shipek 1989). Plants and their locales would have been associated, likethe Barasana lineage plants, with specifically meaningful interactions.By nurturing certain plants in an area, a location could becomeassociated with certain people and groups. In this case, it is mostlikely the slower-growing, 'undomesticatable' plants thatlinked to territoriality, rather than the faster-growing, flexibleannuals. Such a view of prennial plants involved in the concept ofdomestication is the opposite to what is often suggested indomestication models, but not unreasonable when linked to territoriality(Rival 1993; Ingold 1996). The social meanings and accompanying uses of plants in theirlocales, perhaps even more so than animals which are mobile, would havecreated the conditions for named territories, and thus would have beenactive in domesticating space. Accompanying this sense of place andterritory is its opposite, the creation of a sense of those notparticipating, as with neighbours who are not part of the lineage. Inter-group relations Current evidence from Amazonian forager-farmers suggests thatinter-group relations are wide-ranging, due to exogamous marriagepatterns. Plants are brought back following periodic visits to kin orwhile on hunting and gathering journeys away from home-base villages(Hugh-Jones pers. comm.; Posey pers. comm.). Planted near houses, alonglocal paths and in kitchen gardens, such plants include, medicinal,magical, industrial, mind-altering, sweet and spicy food spicy foodNutrition Any comestible marinated in and/or which contains chili peppers, mustard with horseradish, curry or other spices that evoke a desired intraoral sensation that crosses pain with pleasure; SFs may elicit an autonomic nervous system plants.Amazonian communities have specific plant varieties (like pineapples ormanioc) that are associated with this specific group identity(Hugh-Jones pers. comm.). Such plants are processed specially andconsumed at feasts. When feasts occur, such lineage plants aretransformed into fermented beverages to reflect the special worth of theplant as well as to represent the essence of the group. As groupmarkers, close neighbours use different plants that are also elaboratelyprocessed for their own feasts. Thus lineage and community plantssignify specific groups across a region (Hugh-Jones pers. comm.). Plantstherefore move with the people, and help them to create their rituals,renew their social ties both past and present, as well as differentiatethemselves from their neighbours. People who live with plants use plantsin their identity. Social identity also can be associated with individual plants,foods and food preparations. As individuals and families begin toidentify with a group, they also begin to identify with certainfood-stuffs and cuisine dishes they eat together (Appadurai 1981;Douglas 1984). The meanings of these food presentations becomeassociated with people, events, places and the times they are consumed.From this we learn that foods and their associated activities can besocial markers used in group affiliation. Food use can separate one group from another, not only in foodsthat are feasted but also in fasting and taboo patterns (Kahn 1986).This is most commonly done through self-identification with a food itemand its preparation; one Amazonian group has maize beer at their feast,while their neighbours feast with manioc (Hugh-Jones pers. comm.). Oncecertain foods become established as special ceremonial or elite foods,cultural and political differences can be negotiated and accentuatedthrough this 'special' food preparation, presentation andaccess (Hastorf & Johannessen 1993; Welch & Scarry 1995). Anexample of this is how the Inka state used maize and its preparations asthe symbolic food of the empire, linking the plant to the state deity,and presented at every political and religious gathering. The adoption rate of plants in early archaological sequences shouldshed light upon how groups were interacting with nature, as well asamongst themselves. Rates of plant uptake also reflect local identitydevelopment and the social and political changes involved in the desiresof a group to associate with or to differentiate from their neighbours.Tracking this interaction should help us begin to understand why plantdomestication became visible when it did, and thus opens up the ideathat such processes were going on for a much longer time than wenormally attribute to plant domestication. In this process of foodcollection, production, lineage creation and group identity formation,some groups remained balanced in their sharing and exchanging withlittle change over many years, while other groups became expansive,initiating more regular and delayed exchanges of people and gifts. Someplants did not shift morphologically nor did they become staples, whileothers changed noticeably. Such more complex use patterns might bevisible in the archaeological record if looked for on a smaller scale ofanalysis or from a different approach. In sum By focusing on the cultural events and the social reasons involvedin the process of becoming cultivators, we are dealing with somearchaeologically invisible actions, motives and ways of being in forest,shrub and grass land. As is noted here, it is hoped that there would besome windows into these invisible transformations through a new look atplants and their distributions. Cultivation occurred in many places andat many times in the same place. In some situations, such asMesoamerica, this activity remained steady for long periods of time,continuing up into the present. There are also situations whereagriculture increased and then decreased as in the American Southwest(Hohokam) or the Amazon Basin “Amazonian” redirects here. For other uses, see Amazonian (disambiguation).The Amazon Basin is the part of South America drained by the Amazon River and its tributaries. . In some settings agricultural uptakefocused on several intensive crops, as in the Near East, where annualgrass cultivation became a very dominant practice as the grains weremorphologically altered (Hillman & Davies 1990). In other locations,such as the coast of Peru, agriculture was present for a long timewithout becoming the dominant subsistence base. Each of thesetrajectories, while influenced by local environmental conditions, wasalso channeled by the structures and intensities of socio-politicalrelations within and between kin and community. The shape and tempo offoreign plant uptake relate to the character of the society being viewedin each case. It is up to us to look at these patterns in new ways andthen perhaps we can make new knowledge about the past more visible. The ethnographic examples discussed here illustrate the essentialways food plants (and animals, though their part in the equation is notdiscussed here) participate in creating the female self and the familylineage, in addition to group identity. These social concepts aredefined through repeated use of plants with their associated meanings,remembered in each use. The act of caring for plants is not unusual, butthe actual plants that are brought in and integrated with human livesshould give us clues as to their roles in creating social entities. Bythinking about the meanings of archaeological plants in the waysuggested here, we should be able to get a closer view of past dailypractices, social relations and the causes for the spread ofagriculture. The earliest plant characteristics were flavourful, spicy,sweet, industrial, hallucinatory or medicinal; but equally important wastheir participation in the routines of defining society in daily life. While my main entry into this discussion has been with SouthAmerican information, I hope that some of these ideas can be helpful inother settings. The Amazonian and Californian material suggests thatactive plant adoption or nurturing might be associated with increasedinterest in defining cultural groups and their extra communityrelations 1. The relationship between military and civilian communities.2. Those public affairs programs that address issues of interest to the general public, business, academia, veterans, Service organizations, military-related associations, and other non-news media entities. . On the coast of Peru, after local plant cultivation began andthe concepts of domestication and lineage were initiated, groupsincorporated foreign plants selectively over a long time. These plantsprovided only a small portion of the diet. Plants that were adopted byearly groups surely had special meanings or identities through theirlinks with places, events or people. We now must look for informationthat will help us to 'see' the earliest cultivated plants andwork towards a better understanding of the special meanings theyembodied with their uptake. It might be helpful to ask how some plants,along with their cosmologies, accompanied new members into certaincommunities, while other plants remained in their neighbours'worlds. It is up to us now to search for and incorporate what theseassociations and meanings might have been in the groups we study. These ideas about identity and female nurture have implications forour understanding about the domestication processes and the early spreadof plants. Studying plants in this way might bring us closer tounderstanding the archaeological past. Acknowledgements. I thank Stephen Hugh-Jones who, through ourdiscussions and his articles, has given me many wonderful ideas andexamples to think about. Ian Hodder Ian Hodder (born 23 November, 1948 in Bristol) is a British archaeologist and pioneer of postprocessualist theory in archaeology that first took root among his students and in his own work between 1980-1990. and two anonymous reviewers read thepaper and provided helpful advice. 1 The term 'plant husbandry', brought into the literatureby Higgs & Jarman (1972), means the act of manipulating theecosystem so that species desired by humans were more common. Husbandrymeans the act of taking care of, using to the best advantage. A'husband' is one who does this. A point to be made in thispaper, however, is that it is and was often the women who are involvedin this as much as, if not more than, the men, so perhaps a better termcould be plant mothering, nurturing or midwifery midwifery(mĭd`wī'fərē), art of assisting at childbirth. The term midwife for centuries referred to a woman who was an overseer during the process of delivery. In ancient Greece and Rome, these women had some formal training. rather than planthusbandry (thanks to Charles Miksicek for the term midwifery). 2 Although both plants and animals were domesticated and becameimportant, I focus on plants not only because of my interest in plantuse, but also because I want to focus on women's roles in plantdomestication. Excellent and provocative writings about human relations human relationsnpl → relaciones fpl humanasto animals, meat, and death can be seen in Hugh-Jones (1996), Fiddes(1991), Kensinger (1981) and Willis (1989). 3 I am using the term horticulture for planting and tending plantsthat may or may not be technically domesticated (domestication beingplants showing morphological or genetic changes). I use the termcultivation for tending and overseeing a plant's life-cycle. Thisis perhaps what plant husbandry means, but I prefer not to use thatterm. 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