Food production and risk management - A Behavioural Approach to Early Neolithic Dynamics

Abstract

Risk management is a fundamental behaviour especially when there is a change in economies, such as the beginning of food production in the Holocene. The aim of this study is to augment our knowledge about risk management in human societies and to understand the role of mixed economies and the dynamics associated with the Origins of Food Production. We focus on how small-scale societies deal with a specific risk, in this case drought episodes, and we explore what mechanisms are set in place to anticipate or minimize risk associated with drought (e.g. loss of animal resources, crop failure, weakening of social ties, etc.). Our interest is in unveiling the underlying human behavioural patterns related with risk management, beyond a specific society, and if and to what extent the ecological settings conditions them. This research contributes, by exploring the behavioural dynamics of human groups, to the understanding of mechanisms behind major economic changes such as the origins of food production. We use a suite of formal methods to explore such patterns in small-scale societies through a cross-cultural analysis. Ethnographic data were retrieved from the eHRAF world cultures database and the DPlace database, which include more than one million pages of primary sources from approximately 400 different societies. We explored all entries that mention the term ‘drought’ by correspondent analysis (filtered geographically), narrowing then the results by subsistence type. As a whole, we retrieved 940 entries related to 49 societies. This data was integrated with the ecological setting and location of the selected societies