First Farmers: the Origins of Agricultural Societies by Peter Bellwood - Book Report/Review Example

Download file to see previous pages Students usually study the history of agriculture in the course of the history of a separate country without any comparative analysis. Peter Bellwood in his book “First farmers: the origins of agricultural societies” managed to provide a reliable collection of the investigations in this field. A serious work was implemented by the author to present the comparative analysis of farming development in different parts of the world. The book is easy to read as it offers an understandable interpretation, thus it may be used not only by experts but also by general readers. The research is focused on the places, where farming was born: Asia Mexico, China, South America etc. Therefore, the book represents one of the rare global researches of farming history. Bellwood compared the development of farming in different countries and this makes his research outstanding as only separate regions were analyzed before. It seemed that the author took the knowledge of encyclopedia and explained it in a new way of analyzing farming in each country both independently and in connection. The author states: “the early farming dispersal hypothesis postulates that the spreads of early farming lifestyles were often correlated with prehistoric episodes of human population and language dispersal from agricultural homelands” (Bellwood 2005: 2). ...
The relations between those people who dealt with agriculture with those who were engaged in hunter-gathering in order to explain the spread and adoption of agriculture. The book is distinguished by the complex approach made by the author and the conclusions made after summarizing the data received from the research in several fields. The author calls it “early farming dispersal hypothesis” (Bellwood 2005). Being an archeologist, the professor also involved linguistic and biological aspects of his study. According to Bellwood, “this book suggests that major episodes of human movement occurred from time to time, in various parts of the world, as different populations developed or adopted agriculture and then spread farming, languages, and genes, in some cases across vast differences” (Bellwood 2005: 1). The information from different fields of science helped to make the book multidisciplinary. Bellwood compared different countries and their agricultural history with the help of knowledge in the field of anthropology, archaeology, and linguistics. In the book “First farmers: the origins of agricultural societies” the author also provides the data received by other researches to support or doubt his own conclusions. Thus the readers are able to get acquainted with plenty of information on the topic. The author makes a statement about genetic modification. He explains its existence by the fact that modern people can’t be satisfied only with gathering and hunting, thus genetic modification is applied to plants and animals. The author emphasizes the difference between farming and hunter-gathering, he explains: “particular groups of prehistoric foragers crossed the Rubicon into systematic agriculture” (Bellwood 2005: 25).   ...Download file to see next pagesRead More