The Origins of Agriculture and Settled Life.

The past few years have seen the publication of numerous books and articles on the origins of agriculture, but this work by MacNeish surely ranks as the most idiosyncratic of the bunch. In The Origins of Agriculture and Settled Life, MacNeish carries on in the style of his The Science of Archaeology? These two books are largely autobiographical, the former documenting the evolution of his research, this one attempting to fit global agricultural origins into the developmental rubric he began to develop in Tehuacan. Both recount his lifelong personal quest to reconstruct the texture of the past from the shreds of prehistory, but his indomitable will and seemingly boundless energy and endless excavations have not sufficed to finally lay to rest the question of how and why agriculture started. As he says at the end, we have reached no final conclusions.