Review: [untitled] Author(s): George L. Cowgill Reviewed work(s): The Food Crisis in Prehistory: Overpopulation and the Origins of Agriculture by Mark N. Cohen Source: American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 81, No. 3 (Sep., 1979), pp. 658-660 Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of the American Anthropological Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/675791 Accessed: 11/11/2010 17:46 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=black. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

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have more of a cookbook flavor, distinguish this collection; the papers also appeal to those concerned more with the rationale, logic, and philosophy of scientific pursuits than with quantitative methods. Borillo sets the theoretical scene, and Whallon, as in some of his U.S. published papers, argues for the utility of hierarchic or taxonomic typology. Unsolved transdisciplinaryand translinguistic problems become obvious when Whallon's application of formal mathematical methods to justify the semiintuitive "traditional" Ritchie-McNeish scheme for Owasco pottery is castigated as "new archaeology" exceeding the bounds of its own theory. In truth, to understand Whallon's paper fully, one must read both the initial English-language paper and the French addendum in response to his critics. Among other cautions, hazard = random here, and Doran uses explanation = interpretation and sometimes even hypothesis. He continues his exposition of the computer generation of explanations although more lucidly and convincingly than in some previously published papers. The analog for his recommended procedure is the meta-DENDRAL program used for mass spectrometryin chemistry. This system deserves serious consideration, but Doran, like Babbage with calculators, is perhaps well before his time. This procedure does require for success a much better understanding of the relationships between material culture and other aspects of sociocultural systems than that available at present. These contemplative authors, especially Moberg, add further the persisting necessity of identifying the groups with whose remains one is working, and the special problems that nomads present in this regard. Moberg and Borillo anticipate (although at that moment they could not answer) as is partially done in Markotic's Ancient Europe and the Mediterranean (1978), the question of articulating the research of those who have access to computers with the work of those who do not. The general drift of these articles suggests that, at present, archaeology has a developed macrotheory and a plentitudinous supply of powerful quantitative techniques but lacks the middlerange theory enabling application of these methods for solving research problems generated by the macrotheory. Such thoughts strongly imply that the imperative growth topics of archaeology in the next decades will be in ethnoarchaeology, historic sites archaeology, as of American Indian tribes and Migration Period

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and Viking Europe, and perception of the individual in the archaeological record. These are the studies that should help provide the controls necessary for understanding the relationships of sociocultural processes and material archaeological residues.

The Food Crisis in Prehistory: Overpopulation and the Origins of Agriculture. Mark N. Cohen. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1977. x + 341 pp. $15.00 (cloth). George L. Cowgill Brandeis University Cohen's central thesis is that food production is primarily a response to inexorable population growth rather than the fruit of ingenious discoveries. The required knowledge was available to hunter-gatherers for many millennia before much use was made of it. Cohen argues that a shift to major reliance on cultivated crops usually involves more work, less-desired work, and a less-well-balanced diet, and does not reduce the risk of famines. Following Flannery and others, Cohen sees just one clear advantage to food production: it often enables people to obtain more food per unit area. We do not need to explain how or why people thought of food production. Instead, we need to explain why it was thought worthwhile to work harder in order to produce more food per unit area. Cohen explains both the acceptance of agriculture and its acceptance at nearly the same time in both hemispheres by arguing that throughout the Pleistocene, there were irresistible pressures for slow population growth. Even if some societies halted their growth, they were at a competitive disadvantage relative to societies that exercised no such restraint--and were overwhelmed by them. Cohen argues that "equilibrium"models of hunter-gatherer populations are wrong. In effect, he takes population growth as a "given." He further claims that hunter-gatherers have highly effective mechanisms for equalizing perceived population pressure among neighboring groups. He argues, in a Paleolithic version of the domino theory, that they respond to population pressure by exogamy or other transfers of individuals that shift people into neighboring regions of lower pressure. Buildup of pressurein these regions leads to further transfers to more distant regions. The result is a strong coupling between density fluctuations over continental

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distancesso thatsharplocalpopulationchanges individualsbeyondlocal bandclustersin recent are quicklysmoothedout. hunter-gatherers.But Cohen does nothing to Cohenarguesthat, for a long time, popula- establish that such movementsare quantitation growthwasmainlyabsorbedby expanding tivelysufficientto level local populationflucthe portionof the worldoccupiedby humanbe- tuations.CohenalsointerpretsBirdsell'sfinding ings. Eventuallyno unoccupiedhabitableplaces of a highcorrelationbetweenrainfallandpopuwere left. Peoplecould adjustto some further lation densityin aboriginalAustraliaas sugincreasein populationby acceptinglowerstan- gestingthat peopleweremovingfromregionto dardsof subsistence,but the onlylong-termop- regionto equalizepopulationpressure(p. 63). tions were to halt growthor to intensifysub- Possiblyso, but Birdsell'sown differentintersistence extraction per unit area. The first pretationhas not been refuted. choicewasnot possible,and peoplewereforced But the centralweaknessin Cohen'sthesisis to adopt the secondalternative.They did this that there is no shred of conclusivedata and first by shiftingfromprimaryrelianceon large no convincingtheoreticalargumentto support land mammalsto a "broad-spectrum" strategy, the claim that population growth among makingmuch more use of smallermammals, hunter-gathererscan be taken as a given. I fish, shellfish,and plants.Whenthat no longer agree with Cohen that there is also no comsufficed,agriculturewassimplyan obviousfur- pellingsupportfor staticequilibriummodels.I ther step. The tendencyof hunter-gatherers to suspect that hunter-gathererpopulationdenequalizepopulationpressureoverlongdistances sitieshaveoften fluctuatedrapidlyin both time of and space, without much coupling between largely explains the near-contemporaneity agriculturein the Old and New Worlds. regionsmore than a few hundredmiles apart. Thereis no doubtthat, in the verylong run, Cohen'sbias showsparticularlyin two passages the trendof worldpopulationin the Pleistocene (pp. 54-55, 283) where he suggeststhat the was upward. Quite possibly,local population populationof a group will grow unlesspeople densitieswere increasingin the precedingmil- exercisestrictand perfectcontrol.This assumes lennia in the placeswhereagriculturewas first that the problemis analogousto preventingany acceptedalthoughby Cohen'sownaccount,the waterat all fromleakingthroughan orifice-a evidencefor populationincreaseis often equiv- "Dutch boy at the dike" situation. Instead, ocal and the evidencefor perceivedshortagesis populationchange is analogousto water runweakerstill. Cohenhimselfurgesthat we badly ning at a variablerateinto a basinthat alsohas need moreworkaddressedto those questions. a variableoutlet. Populationchangeis the net Meanwhile,evenif one acceptsCohen'sread- difference between births plus in-migration, ing of presentevidence,whatdoesit add up to? minus deaths and out-migration. There can be I see four seriousdifficulties.First, as Bennet many individual contraception failures, violaBronsonhas especiallystressed,it may not be tions of sex taboos, etc., and yet the overall true that food productioneverywhereis always balance between births and deaths may perfectharderor lessattractivethanhunting-gathering. ly well lead to zero or even negative population hunt- change. Second,I doubtwhetherbroad-spectrum ing-gatheringis markedlyless attractivethan Finally, what do competing explanations ofconcentration on large mammals. At any fer? Other writers, notably Bennet Bronson and rate, theiKungBushmen,Cohen'sprimeexam- Fekri Hassan in the 1975 volume on Population, ple of the hunting-gatheringdolce vita, are Ecology and Social Evolution edited by Steven hardlylarge-mammalconcentrators.They are Polgar, provide a far more balanced and useful reportedto use 23 plant species (of some 85 examination of the relations between populaavailable) and to concentrateon 17 animal tion and the origins of agriculture. Demographspecieswithsomerelianceon another37. Surely ic factors were doubtlessly relevant, but they I suspect were probably less significant than a number of that makesthem "broad-spectrum." that, whateverthe casewithagriculture,broad- social and cultural variables, especially changes spectrum (i.e., Mesolithic) innovations de- that encouraged concentrations of manpower pended on ingeniousinventionsas much as or and expansions in scales of organized activity. morethan on harderwork. The most seriousshortcoming of Cohen's book is Third, the evidenceis exceedinglyflimsythat not the weakness of the case for population local Paleolithicpopulationfluctuationswere pressure, but his underestimation of other incloselycoupledoverthousandsof miles. There centives for increasing food obtained per unit is good evidencefor appreciablemovementsof area.

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In spite of my belief that Cohen's argument is thoroughly wrong, I finished the book with considerable respect for its author. His diligence is impressive;he writes well and with clarity, and I think he is intelligent about nearly everything except the main thing. If he were merely clever or merely doctrinaire, he might have written a much shorter book and claimed much more. But he seems too thoughtful and too honest to overlook the weakness of his evidence (if not always his theory), and he seems ultimately ambivalent about his own thesis. In the preface he claims only that his hypothesis fits the data "reasonablywell" and he justifies it primarily as a heuristic teaching tool and spur to further research. I think it is of limited value as a "straw man" for teaching, and that research will be best stimulated by considering alternative hypotheses besides Cohen's.

Time and Traditions: Essays in Archaeological Interpretation. Bruce Trigger. New York: Columbia University Press, 1978. xii + 273 pp. $12.50 (cloth). W. James Judge University of New Mexico This book seems to reflect the uneasy role of an archaeologistwho, although trained intellectually on both sides of the Atlantic, does not sit comfortably in either camp. The author's theoretical and methodological positions, as well as how he arrived at them, are clearly specified in the Introduction. Unfortunately, the views espoused are neither fully developed nor supported by the thought-provoking original analyses one might expect to find in the essays that follow. The book is permeated by a dependence on the theoretical and interpretive works of others, primarily European archaeologists. Of the 13 essays presented, over half are at least 8 years old. Four are new in the sense that they have not been published elsewhere, but only one was written expressly for this book. In general, the older essaysdo not complement the newer ones; instead, they seem directed at a different audience. Although Trigger initiates a challenge to the New Archaeology in the Introduction, he never fully completes it. Instead, we are presented with timely reminders that others, such as Childe, Grahame Clark, Taylor, and Steward, have also offered alternatives to those concepts currently espoused by the New Archaeologists. Thus, the challenge comes less

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from Trigger himself than from the British and American schools that broke from traditional concepts long before the New Archaeology. The book is divided into three parts, and both new and old essays are found in each. Part One, entitled "Archaeology; Science or History?" presents Trigger's concepts of what American archaeology is today and how it contrasts with that practiced in Europe. He critically examines the tenets of the New Archaeology, including such things as the search for general laws, the deductive approach, cultural ecology, the systemsconcept, and evolutionism. Trigger laments any redefinition of the scope of archaeology to include the study of contemporary societies. He questions archaeology as a nomothetic science of material culture. He cautions against the dangers of misuse of the deductive approach by untrained archaeologists, who, in searching for the solution to a narrowly defined problem, might destroy a variety of other potentially useful data. He notes a "mechanical" rather than an "organic" unity among New Archaeologists and a consequent lack of interest in each others' work. Thus, interesting questions are raised in the first essay, questions that, unfortunately, are not pursued to any degree either in this chapter or in the remainder of the book. Elsewhere in Part One, Trigger presents his views of the dichotomy between European and American archaeology. He notes the merits of historical research in which the purpose is to explain events "in all their complexity" rather than to seek general laws. He feels the nomothetic (law-seeking) objectives can be best integrated with a particularizing (idiographic) approach, as they have been in the biological sciences. "Using archaeological data to repeat the work of the nomothetic social sciences reflects a simplistic view of the social utility of scholarship which unhappily is all too common these days" (p. 35). In emphasizing the social utility of scholarship, Trigger isolates an important dichotomy between American and European archaeologists. The latter, perhaps because of a long tradition of intellectualism, justify their profession in terms of its being a legitimate quest for knowledge in its own right. In contrast, American archaeologistsseem dominated by a pervasivequest for relevancyof their discipline and need to justify it in terms of its contribution to codifying laws of human behavior. Again, we find an intriguing concept is not introduced that, unfortunately, developed further.