Agriculture From Caves to Waves

ByMr. Allah Dad khan

Cave Men Cave men were the first farmers, and anthropology professor Kent

Flannery will give insights into their ingenuity at his upcoming Henry Russel Lecture, titled "The Creation of Agriculture: So Easy a Caveman Could Do It."

"The first plant and animal domestication was carried out 10,000 years ago, in the Stone Age," by people who were, in fact, cave men and women, says Flannery, the James B. Griffin Distinguished University Professor of Anthropological Archaeology.

Flannery will discuss and compare the origins of plant and animal domestication in the Old and New Worlds during his honorary talk at 4 p.m. March 11 in the Rackham Amphitheatre. The Henry Russel lectureship is the highest honor the University gives to a senior faculty member.

Cassidy Graham saved to Monsters and Myth In Basque mythology, Basajaun (plural: basajaunak) is a huge, hairy

hominid dwelling in the woods. They were thought to build megaliths, protect flocks of livestock, and teach skills such as agriculture and ironworking to humans. Some theories have arisen as to whether the Basajuanak stories originated out of proto-Basque interaction with the Neanderthals.

Excavation

Flannery, who also is curator of environmental archaeology in the Museum of Anthropology, has excavated sites of early agriculture in Iran, Mexico and Peru. In a cave in southern Mexico in the 1960s, he uncovered the oldest corn, beans, squash and gourds ever found. In the '70s, he investigated the origins of llama and alpaca domestication in the high Andes of Peru.

In his talk, Flannery will discuss the important role the Museum of Anthropology has played in this field.

Institution

"No institution has trained more students to work on the origins of plant and animal domestication," Flannery says. "For some topics, such as Near Eastern animal domestication, our collections at U-M are second-to-none, and people from all over the world come to use them."

In recent years, the focus of early domestication research has shifted to studying plant and animal DNA. Flannery stresses that this should redirect archaeologists to do what DNA researchers cannot do: investigate the social and political consequences of the agricultural revolution for human cultures. That is what Flannery himself is working on today.

Archaeology

The Ocampo region of Tamaulipas, Mexico is well known for archaeological evidence of early domesticated plants and the development of prehistoric food production, documented in the 1950s in three cave sites. Because these early investigations emphasized only one facet of the local settlement system (cave use), the wider spectrum of land use remained ambiguous. Our research addresses the broader context of the Ocampo caves through archaeological survey and geospatial analysis of the surrounding landscape.

Field Survey

Field survey revealed additional caves sites as well as open-air settlements in a wide range of topographic settings. A suitability raster produced using a geographic information system weighted overlay analysis identified suitable farming locations, as well as least cost distance zones and travel pathways between sites and from sites to water sources. This predictive tool can facilitate detection of additional early agricultural sites in Ocampo by concentrating future fieldwork on high probability settings.

Information and communication technology Information and communication technology in agriculture (ICT in

agriculture), also known as e-agriculture, is developing and applying innovative ways to use ICTs in the rural domain, with a primary focus on agriculture. ICT in agriculture offers a wide range of solutions to some agricultural challenges.

Agricultural Value Chains and ICT

ICTs play an important role in agricultural value chains, with different types of ICT having different strengths and weaknesses when applied to particular interventions. The impacts of ICT are diverse, and they influence market competitiveness in different ways. However, technology should not overshadow the people and institutions involved. While the positive impacts of ICT are being catalogued and discussed, many rural farmers still do not have access to or the capacity to use ICT.

It is clear the impact of ICT in Agriculture Value Chains is diverse, and influences the market competitiveness in different ways. Given the importance of context and the rapid development technology, it can be difficult to determine whether the appropriate tool now will persist in being the appropriate tool in the future.

In this section, you can find a wide range of materials that look at key opportunities and challenges of ICT interventions in the agricultural value chain with a special focus on the most beneficial interventions in rural areas.