ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a model to explain the "diffusion" of farming. Rather than viewing it as merely the addition of plant cultivation onto a foraging base. It suggests that the spread of horticulture is best understood as a complex set of cultural-ecological alterations which occurred in local systems of exploitation. The chapter focuses on changes in regional exploitation systems and the underlying economic and environmental alterations. Such an approach is based on the assumption that modifications of the local ecosystems must have occurred both in association with, and as a result of, the introduction of farming. Paleoclintatic research indicates that the climate in the Southwest and Great Basin has undergone substantial changes in the past 10,000 years, and that the beginnings of farming coincided with environmental change. Manipulating, moreover, was restricted to maize farming, since a subsistence complex of grass collecting, weed encouragement, weed semi-cultivation, and the cultivation of domesticates was introduced from Mexico.
