On the Origins and Spread of Agriculture

by GAETANO FORNI via Keplero 33, 20124 Milano, Italy. 3 VI 80 Rindos's article (CA 21:751-65) certainly represents the most organic, multivalued, and global hypothesis of the process of the origins and development of agriculture. It has the further advantage of bringing to light the instability of agricultural systems, an aspect not previously considered by researchers. Keeping in mind that the author is still developing the argument, the following observations may be useful: 1. A glance at works published in languages other than English would have allowed the author to see other aspects of the process and other approaches. The contrast between rational and irrational orientations has been analyzed by Lanternari (1954-55, 1959). I have examined the relation between the religious and the technoeconomic aspects of the process (Forni 1961, 1962, 1975, 1976) and have pointed out its affective (1964), esthetic (1976), psychoanalytic (1971), and ethological (1971, 1977) aspects. The most significant result of these researches is the evidence they provide of the close interaction froms their beginnings between cultivation and animal husbandry (Forni 1976). Furthermore, through detailed analysis of the pre-Semitic and pre-Indo-European linguistic substratum using the techniques of linguistic paleontology, I have shown (1979a, b, c) how words such as "grass," "prairie," "seedling," "bud," "spring," "herbivorous animal," "to burn," "to cultivate," "to harrow," and "to plow" can be assigned to a common stem, or at least a closely interrelated group of stems, that goes back at least to the Epipaleolithic-Mesolithic (18,000-12,000 B.C. in the Near East). It is apparent from this work that the ancient and widespread hunting technique of raising game by fire and the development of pyrophilous plants, documented ethnographically by Bartlett (1955-61) and archaeobotanically by Lewis (1972), underlies both animal husbandry and cultivation, even if at the unconscious level, and that there is a historical genetic dependency between burning, harrowing, plowing, and cultivation (Forni 1979a, b, c). 2. The results of the above-mentioned research show how, in naturalistic terms, agriculture belongs to the field of symbiotic relationships in a broad sense, but the plants (and the animals) that have entered into symbiosis with man are of the "colonizing" type, that is, they belong to the category of plants (and animals) that rapidly and massively invade areas in which the former vegetation has suddenly been eliminated by destructive vents such as fire, flood, and landslide. This means that the above studies documenting the coincidence of burning and cultivation show that the invasion precedes the symbiosis. Pyrophilous colonizing plants such as the spontaneous cereals and, following them, herbivorous animals spread rapidly in the environment created, perhaps unconsciously, by man through the use of specific techniques. Thus agriculture begins with the use of fire as an instrument of hunting and gathering, and with it is born, through coevolution, the symbiosis of the hunter-gatherer with colonizing plants and herbivorous animals. In Rindos's article, the relationship between the colonizing process and symbiosis, both in a typological and in a chronological sense, is not clear, and neither is the relationship between animal husbandry and plant cultivation. 3. The author's emphasis seems to present a picture of