Bruce Winterhalder: UC Davis Department of Anthropology

Archaeological research shows that many human populations continued to hunt-and-gather for thousands of years after beginning the use of plant domesticates. This kind of mixed economy is rare in the ethnographic literature on foragers and horticulturalists; its persistence for millennia in the early stages of agricultural origins is inexplicable under much current theory. In this paper I describe models and concepts from evolutionary anthropology which may help us to explain this novel,persistent, prehistoric mode of production. The more important ones include (a) the population ecology of the domesticates themselves, (b) environmental fluctuation, (c) temporal discounting of subsistence options, (d) maintenance of technological knowledge in low-density populations, and (e) institutional mechanisms of risk-manage under changing economic regimes. Collectively these ideas are meant to demonstrate, contra Sahlins and substantivism, the utility of a selective set of micro-economic concepts in the study of pre-market economies.