The introduction of agriculture generally is thought to signal one of those epic cultural transformations in the history of civilization.
Traditionally referred to as the Neolithic Revolution, it represents the shift from a nomadic way of life based on hunting and gathering many wild foods to a more settled way of life based on the cultivation of one or a few kinds of plants.
Settling down in villages led, in turn, to the rise of social inequality as chiefs, priests, warriors, artisans and peasants took up their duties.
This tidy picture of seemingly inevitable social “progress” following the appearance of domesticated plants is challenged by a study of human remains from the Krieger site in southwestern Ontario published in the journal American Antiquity in July.
The Krieger site was occupied by people of the Western Basin Tradition, a group that lived along the western margins of Lake Erie, including northwestern Ohio, eastern Michigan and southwestern Ontario, from A.D. 900 to 1600.
The archaeological evidence indicates that the people of the Western Basin Tradition did not live in large villages and ate a wide variety of wild foods as well as some maize.
The Royal Ontario Museum archaeologists who excavated the Krieger site in 1949, for example, did not find any substantial house structures, and garbage pits were filled with the bones of deer, black bear, dog, turtle, turkey and several species of fish.
Therefore, most archaeologists assumed that agriculture couldn’t have been all that important to these people, since they still seemed to be living basically as hunters and gatherers.
Christopher Watts, an archaeologist with the Royal Ontario Museum, along with Christine White and Fred Longstaffe of the University of Western Ontario, have made a discovery that challenges this assumption.
They examined the carbon, nitrogen and oxygen isotopes present in the enamel of teeth from 10 individuals from the Krieger site. The differing amounts of the various isotopes indicate the kinds of food they ate during their lives.
In stark contrast to what the archaeological evidence appears to show, Watts and his colleagues determined that the carbon isotopes present in the Kreiger site teeth indicated “a very high level of maize consumption.”
In fact, the levels were “equivalent to that in many agricultural societies dependent on maize both in North America and in Mesoamerica.”
Watts and his co-researchers offer a number of possible explanations for this anomaly.
For example, it is possible that the Western Basin people were hunter-gatherers who traded with neighboring agricultural groups for their maize, but there is little or no other evidence for trade between these groups, which makes this explanation implausible.
Instead, it appears that Western Basin people somehow incorporated intensive maize agriculture into their lives without substantively altering their traditional way of life. This upends the conventional model that the adoption of agriculture inexorably leads to social transformation.
The Neolithic Revolution, it appears, was not an inevitable consequence of the adoption of agriculture. People had a choice in how they would accommodate technological innovations such as agriculture.
Bradley T. Lepper is curator of archaeology at the Ohio Historical Society.