ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a classificatory model which arranges them along a continuum of people-plant interaction, against the background of a review of earlier uses of such concepts. The intellectual assumptions that underlie the model presented here are ecological and evolutionary: ecological in that the analytical target is interaction between people and plants, evolutionary in that the results of the processes involved in domestication and the emergence of agriculture. Manipulation and transformation were thus envisaged as two phases on a gradient or continuum of ecological change induced by human modification of natural ecosystems, which led, in the remote past, from hunting and gathering through domestication to agriculture. Rindos’ full discussion of his taxonomy of plant domestication represents the most comprehensive attempt to broaden and systematize the ecological–evolutionary concepts which can be applied to the study of past (and present) people–plant interactions.
