ABSTRACT
Archaeology demonstrates that agriculture is a complex web of relationships between humans, the natural world, and socio-economic structure. Modern industrial farming pushes the economic side of the equation, favoring the development of methods and structures of food production that maximize dependability and output. These factors are unquestionably important but there is a sense in which people are neglecting the centrality of food to our cultural life. Part of the cost of the emergence of industrial agriculture is that it cuts the lines connecting past and present. Much of the discussion around food today focuses on the need to recover a lost relationship with nature. When people study the origins of agriculture they are studying societies trying to find a sense of balance during times of fundamental change. Archaeology allows people an opportunity to understand that while people cannot turn back to an earlier time it is very much in the power as a society and as individuals.
