“Deep-level Reconstructions” of Linguistic Prehistory and the Return to the Nuclear Area
语言学史前史及核心区还原的“深度重构”“Deep-level Reconstructions” of Linguistic Prehistory and the Return to the Nuclear Area
William Meacham

Abstract 摘要

INTRODUCTION
Ever since Gordon Childe, prehistorians have rightly focused on the rise of agriculture as the principal transformation of human subsistence patterns and the most important single event in prehistory. However, many have questioned the nature of this event, particularly whether it should be viewed as the “Neolithic Revolution” Childe had written of or whether it should be more properly described as a process. In a paper at the multi-disciplinary conference on “The Origins of Chinese Civilization” at Berkeley, California in 1978, the respected botanist Huilin Li (1983:21) wrote:

The idea of a Neolithic Revolution, implying a sudden and dramatic change in human history, is misleading. Evidence has been accumulated to show that the transition from food gathering to food producing was very gradual…A single point of origin, a zone including Anatolia, Iran and Syria was once believed to have given rise to plant domestication…From there, agriculture was supposed to have spread to other parts of the world. Now, however, independent origins in many different parts of the world are considered probable.

The issues of suddenness or gradualism, of one or many centers, and of why and how agriculture spread, are still of course open and subject to much debate. As will become evident below, the view one takes on these issues will to some extent determine the receptivity that one might have to the grand linguistic scenarios currently being generated for prehistory.

My own view is one of concurrence with Li that the process was gradual and that it involved many different independent origins and small incremental advances, at least in the first stages. Further, it seems likely to me that although the cultivation of plants was certainly a highly attractive proposition in the incipient phase, the rise of agriculture was not an immediate “success story” but a long and frequently arduous struggle to find and maintain a system that would reliably produce the means for survival and population growth in each ecological, topographic and climatological niche where plant cultivation was attempted. Perhaps it was an irony of nature, or a trick played upon us by the earth gods, but hunting-gathering by small bands was probably more reliable and required less labour than food-production (Sahlins 1974). But once the path to food production had been well and truly taken it was increasingly difficult to give it up. A more sedentary lifestyle and more mouths to feed were undoubtedly among the factors that led to advances in agricultural technology, which in turn led to population increase and further specialization within the econiche, etc. The process of agricultural development must often have been precarious; in the Early Neolithic and at the continuing sometimes amorphous interface between animal husbandry/plant cultivation and hunting-gathering there must have been many faltering steps and failures.

Some of the processes of agricultural development and especially the diffusion of agriculture to adjacent peoples will be briefly examined below for the East Asian context. These issues are crucial to the various hypotheses of early language spread and replacement linked to agriculture dispersal.

THE NUCLEAR AREA – AGAIN!
THE DEEP RECONSTRUCTIONS
AN EARLY AGRICULTURAL TRANSITION IN NEW GUINEA
AGRICULTURE AND LANGUAGE – LINKED IN DISPERSAL?"