Agricultural Origins and Dispersals

Book Reviews Agricultural Origins and Dispersals: The Domestication of Animals and Foodstuffs. By Carl O. Sauer. 2d ed. Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1969. Pp. xi+175; 4 maps; index. $7.50 (clothbound); $2.95 (paperbound ). The title of this volume, Agricultural Origins and Dispersals, is that of the Isaiah Bowman Memorial lecture given in 1952 at Columbia University before the American Geographical Society. To this reprinted lecture, three others have been appended, all dealing with human ac­ tivity in the keeping and breeding of plants and animals. The thesis developed throughout is that the “Neolithic agricultural revolution,” brought about by population explosion with its attendant diminution of the food supply, marked a cultural advance among peoples of leisure who could devote time to the propagation of plants and animals. The question of whether the two systems developed independently or were derived from one another is considered in the original lecture and two of the three other lectures—“Age and Area of American Cultivated Plants,” first published in Actas del XXXIII Congreso Internacional de Americanistas (Costa Rica, 1959), and “Cultural Factors in Plant Do­ mestication in the New World,” published in Euphytica (1965). Sauer’s theory that the inventors of agriculture were sedentary folk with the leisure to experiment differs from the old theory that mankind developed agricultural methods through a series of progressive steps. He believes that agriculture was not the result of food shortages but was developed on wooded land by a people who had special skills for agricultural research. Sauer points out only cursorily that the various tools used in agri­ culture had been used in earlier periods for different purposes, as, for example, the digging stick of one generation became the planting stick of a later generation. Since the main interest of the lectures is geo­ graphic distribution of plant and animal life, technological development is merely suggested and not defined. Interspersed through the lectures are suggestions for research work, but here again Sauer does not go into detail about research along technological lines. The Bowman lecture—divided into five chapters: “Man—Ecologic Dominant,” “Planters of the Old World and Their Household Ani­ mals,” “The Planters of the New World,” “Seed and Harvest,” and “Herdsman and Husbandman”—is accompanied by notes, a bibliog­ raphy of general references, and four black-and-white maps depicting centers of domestication and the routes by which ideas and objects 94 TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 95 spread. The second edition of this lecture differs from the first only in the maps—at least in the paperback, where they have been reduced in size and are monochromatic. In addition, this volume has a second fore­ word, a supplement of three lectures, and an index. The first of the supplementary lectures deals with the plants to be found in the Americas and Mexico, the staples which were found by the colonizers of these areas, the nutrient value of the crops, the prop­ agation of seed and root planting, and the spread of the art of cultiva­ tion. In the second of the supplements, as its title indicates, Sauer investi­ gates the cultural factors which affected the New World domestication of plants and animals. He devotes considerable space to the develop­ ment of differences between the “seed minded” and the “root minded” systems of cultivation, and attempts to show the dispersal of these systems. The third lecture, “Maize into Europe,” originally published in Akten des 34. internationalen Amerikanistenkongresses (Vienna 1960), takes up the dispersal of maize, the Indian corn, into the Old World. It dis­ cusses the development of a plant science which called for direct ob­ servation, which took the form of collecting, describing, and classifying, and which turned from considering plants only for their medicinal prop­ erties to identifying and locating them. That movement, which followed the Reformation, began in southern Germany where the study of maize was initiated. The theory that maize, known as “Turkish corn,” did not originate in the New World but rather from the pre-Columbian Near East is developed through liberal quotes from documents of the time of the Great Discoveries and a discussion of linguistic terms. Sauer points out that there was no dramatic

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