ABSTRACT
Human exploitation of plants has traditionally been seen as a global evolutionary process, with the beginnings of cultivation and crop domestication being incorporated into different regions at varying times in the past. This perspective has reduced the classification of groups to a dichotomy between two main categories: ‘hunter-gatherers’ and ‘agriculturalists’. Orthodox concepts of plant domestication have recently changed in the context of people-plant interaction (Hecht and Posey 1989:185-6; Harris 1989:18). The distinction between domesticated and undomesticated is no longer clear. Between these two categories exists a wide spectrum of plants which, without having been domesticated in the classic use of the term, are manipulated by human intervention (Posey 1984a, 1984b; Rindos 1984; Harris 1989). Clement (in Dufour and Wilson 1994:115) proposed the terms ‘semi-domesticated’, ‘cultivated’ and ‘managed’ as three main intermediate stages. Other authors include concepts such as ‘tolerated’, ‘protected’ (see Dufour and Wilson 1994), ‘tamed’ (Groube 1989) or ‘plant husbandry’ (Higgs and Jarman 1972; Shipek 1989). Harris (1989) uses the concepts of manipulation and transformation to examine two aspects of human intervention between the extremes of wild and domesticated. The confusion and overlap in the use of these terms reflects the difficulties of distinguishing the different degrees of mutual interaction between human societies and their environment.
