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Revising the Broad Spectrum Revolution: and its role in the origins of Southwest Asian food production

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2015

Phillip C. Edwards
Phillip C. Edwards*
Affiliation:
Department of Archaeology, MacCallum Building A17, University of Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia
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Extract

During the last two decades the Broad Spectrum Revolution, a proposed food-getting adaptation of the terminal Pleistocene, has been generally accepted as an explanatory factor in the accomplishment of food production in Early Holocene Southwest Asia. A survey of faunal and other prehistoric data from the Levant is employed here to argue that wide-ranging exploitation of plants and animals had been persistent in the region from at least the Middle Palaeolithic, and that the issue of taxonomic diversity is unrelated to trends toward food production at the end of the Pleistocene.

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Antiquity , Volume 63 , Issue 239 , June 1989 , pp. 225 - 246
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Copyright © Antiquity Publications Ltd 1989

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