ABSTRACT
The definition of agriculture adopted here is wider than some people would accept, including what many would regard as horticulture rather than agriculture per se. The reason for this relates to the theories concerning the origins of agriculture in the region, of which the most influential, although they have been severely criticized, are those of Sauer (1952). He thought that agriculture, widely defined, had its origins in Southeast Asia with the cultivation of root crops and fruit trees by fisherfolk and that it diffused out from there. This single-centre origin is no longer popular today: most western archaeologists favour independent origins in different parts of the world. There are exceptions, however. Johannessen (1987) has supported many of Sauer’s ideas, particularly those of diffusion from a single centre with use of plants which reproduce vegetatively preceding the utilization of seed plants. He may be a voice in the wilderness, but some of what he has to say is interesting and of relevance to the discussion to follow. For instance (Johannessen 1987, p. 178), he states that a change due to domestication will only alter a few of a plant’s features in a marked way while the rest will remain relatively constant. This would explain why the pollen of rice, unlike that of other cultivated cereals, has no tendency towards gigantism. However, he dismisses Gorman’s (1977) theory that the dramatic rise of sealevel in response to world climatic change at the end of the Pleistocene was the trigger for domestication, pointing out that earlier climatic changes did not stimulate such responses. Here he is on weak ground because humans in Southeast Asia had probably not evolved to the status of Homo sapiens ssp. sapiens at these earlier times and might not have been capable of agriculture.
