UCLA

The development and spread of agricultural economies fundamentally changed the scale and scope of organizational forms evident in diverse human societies worldwide. In the past, many researchers adopted simple causal models to understand relationships among domesticated plants, population pressure, mobility, the formation of population aggregates, and burgeoning inequality. Early agricultural societies across the Americas, however, were culturally and economically diverse. The papers that compose this dissertation contribute to an ongoing re-evaluation of foodways, mobility, sociopolitical change, and village formation in early agricultural societies across the Americas and the world more broadly. Drawing on theoretical frameworks and models developed in anthropology, and the social and ecological sciences, each chapter presents theoretically rich, data-driven interpretations of themes central to the transformation of early farming societies–mobility, foodways, sociopolitical change, factors influencing the formation and trajectories of early population aggregates, and the resilience of early food production systems. Site-specific analyses of paleoethnobotanical data, food processing tools, and agricultural soils provide a foundation to explore the foodways and mobility strategies of 1700-1300 BC villagers in Mesoamerica, and 1250-750 BC farmers in the Sonoran Desert. The development and widespread adoption of a shared cuisine at Paso de la Amada, one the earliest sedentary villages and ceremonial centers in Mesoamerica, helped forge collective identities amongst households with diverse histories and mobility practices. Millennial-scale reconstructions of precipitation and temperature from tree-ring chronologies, and regional demographic reconstructions informed by settlement, dendrochronological, and radiocarbon data provide insight into the timing and tempo of social change when diverse Ancestral Pueblo communities across the Colorado Plateau of the northern US Southwest adopted a shared set of social, political, culinary, and landscape practices that provided a foundation for early villages and the rise of regional systems. Comparing and contrasting factors involved in the formation of first-wave and second-wave population aggregates within specific regions of the northern US Southwest highlights that early farming societies were diverse and dynamic. In the aggregate, the papers in this dissertation underscore that the development and spread of novel food production strategies and sociopolitical arrangements in early agricultural societies was not mechanistic or strictly economic–the foodways and culinary choices of early farmers were deeply intertwined with the identities of individuals and communities more broadly.