The Consequences of Early Food Production: Three Recent Contributions

This essay reviews three books on food production, including the emergence, spread, and strategies of agriculture. As a group, the books draw on ethnographic, linguistic, archaeological, and biological anthropological approaches and sources of evidence. Combining multiple sources of evidence and theoretical approaches—even when these compete with one another or appear to conflict—provides the safest answers to anthropological questions on the consequences of the shift from foraging to agriculture.