January 27, 2025
Associate Professor Matthew Pailes received notice of an NSF award for $102,340 to conduct three years of field work in Sonora, Mexico exploring the spread of agriculture. Below is the public abstract.
Dr. Pailes, of the University of Oklahoma, along with collaborators at the Instituto Nacional de Antropologia e Historia of Sonora Mexico, will investigate the motivations for adopting farming. The development of lifeways centered on farming represent the most important economic transition in human history. For over a century, scholars have debated the relative costs and benefits of this transition with ramifications that include gendered divisions of labor, the advent of private property, and the scale and structure of human communities. One view holds that groups were pushed into farming with its higher labor demands due to environmental downturns or demographic pressure. An alternative view is that groups were drawn to farming due to its overall greater productive potential, more predictable yields, and increased potential for producers to control surplus production.
These discussions are clouded by assumptions about the level of intentionality and foresight held by the earliest adopters of farming. This project will address this issue by focusing on a context in which the spread of agriculture paused for an extended period of time before rapidly accelerating across much of North America coincident with climatic changes. The adopters responsible for the further spread of agriculture had ample opportunity to observe long term ramifications. Reconstructing the ecological contexts of this spread will thus clarify whether adoption occurred under duress or by choice at the first ecologically viable moment.
