The North China Nanolithic

Robert L. Bettinger , Christopher Morgan, and Loukas Barton This chapter presents a very simple argument: that technology in general, and lithic technology in particular, can shed critical light on conditions surround-ing and contributing to major behavioral innovations, in this case the origin of agriculture. There are probably as many views on the subject as papers, but there is a fairly clear divide between those who argue that agriculture evolves under conditions of scarcity – among them Binford ( 1968 ), Bar-Yosef ( 1998 ), Childe ( 1951 ), and others (e.g., Moore et al. 2000 )), and those who argue that it evolves under conditions of plenty (Braidwood and Howe 1960 ; Price and Gebauer 1995 :7–9). The “conditions of plenty” view is prominent in discussions of the emergence of millet agriculture in North China (Barton 2009 ) and specifi cally the argument that, in common with nearly all early experiments with food production , millet farming developed among complex, “affl uent” hunter-gatherers living in large, permanent settlements in highly productive riparian and lacustrine settings that off ered a rich variety of wild plants and animals (Crawford 2006 :91; Smith 1995 ). This view portrays exper-iments with millet farming as solidifying a position of strength, increasing the yield and reliability of an already important staple in an already intensive and highly successful hunting-and-gathering economy (Smith 1995 :136–137). Lu ( 2006 ), on the other hand, advocates the alternative “conditions of scar-city” view. Observing no archaeological evidence that China’s fi rst farmers were sedentary and that, in contradiction to the abundance argument, agri-culture arrived relatively late in the areas of greatest natural plant and animal