ABSTRACT
The ecological approach to early agriculture in Africa has clearly been more successful than previous approaches, but in some aspects it still falls short of properly conceptualizing farming in west Africa, either as event or as process. An advantage of the ecological approach is that it correctly perceives farming as much more than the techniques involved in the cultivation of non-African cereals, or the farming of vegetables, root crops, fruit and tree crops, or the technology of the herding or the rearing of a variety of animals. However, ecological analysis still seems to define farming or herding predominantly in technological or techno-economic terms and is largely concerned with the biological phenomenon of domestication. By concentrating on these subjects, ecology excludes from analysis other significant aspects of cultural behaviour, such as diet and the social context of agricultural activity, and wrongly regards the end process of cultivation, which results in some (but not all) instances in morphological change, as marking the beginnings of farming and herding.
