Praise for the previous edition

"Bellwood is not afraid to challenge the established orthodoxy. This is a stimulating and thought-provoking assessment of one of the most important questions in archaeology today."
—Peter Bogucki, Princeton University

"This wonderful book is a fascinating treasure-house of information about human history since the origins of agriculture. It deserves to be a standard reference for archaeologists, linguists, geneticists, and anthropologists interested in the formation of the modern world."
—Jared Diamond, University of California, Los Angeles

"A tour de force of historical anthropology. Rarely does one encounter a book with the sweeping historical scope of Peter Bellwood’s convincing worldwide synthesis of agricultural origins and population dispersals."
—Patrick Kirch, University of California, Berkeley

"Global in its scope, Peter Bellwood’s First Farmers boldly correlates the spreads of early farming with episodes of human population and language dispersal. It offers a powerfully coherent perspective, which challengingly sets one of the great themes of human history in a new and simplified vision."
—Colin Renfrew, University of Cambridge

In this second edition of First Farmers: The Origins of Agricultural Societies, leading scholar Peter Bellwood delivers an expert examination of the origins of food production across the globe and reconstructs the migratory expansions of agricultural populations from 12,000 years ago to the colonial era. Relying not just on the archaeological record, but also on linguistic and genomic data, especially new findings from the last ten years of research, Bellwood explores the latest evidence and theories surrounding the early development of agricultural practices in the Eurasian, African, and American continents. From the early farming dispersal hypothesis to an in-depth look at multiple foci of agricultural development, the new edition includes unprecedented information relevant to contemporary researchers and many new maps and illustrations.

First Farmers: The Origins of Agricultural Societies, Second Edition is an essential work of scholarship and an excellent introduction to multiple methods of anthropological and archaeological inquiry for the beginner students in prehistoric anthropology and archaeology, human migration, agricultural history, comparative anthropology, and more disciplines across the anthropology curriculum.

A wide-ranging and accessible introduction to the origins and histories of the first agricultural populations in many different parts of the world

This fully revised and updated second edition of First Farmers examines the origins of food production across the world and documents the expansions of agricultural populations from source regions during the past 12,000 years. It commences with the archaeological records from the multiple homelands of agriculture, and extends into discussions that draw on linguistic and genomic information about the human past, featuring new findings from the last ten years of research.

Through twelve chapters, the text examines the latest evidence and leading theories surrounding the early development of agricultural practices through data drawn from across the anthropological discipline—primarily archaeology, comparative linguistics, and biological anthropology—to present a cohesive history of early farmer migration. Founded on the author's insights from his research into the agricultural prehistory of East and Southeast Asia—one of the best focus areas for the teaching of prehistoric archaeology—this book offers an engaging account of how prehistoric humans settled new landscapes.

The second edition has been thoroughly updated with many new maps and illustrations that reflect the multidisciplinary knowledge of the present day. Authored by a leading scholar with wide-ranging experience across the fields of anthropology and archaeology, First Farmers, Second Edition includes information on:

• The early farming dispersal hypothesis in current perspective, plus operational considerations regarding the origins and dispersals of agriculture
• The archaeological evidence for the origins and spreads of agriculture in the Eurasian, African and American continents
• The histories of the language families that spread with the first farming populations, and the evidence from biological anthropology and ancient DNA that underpins our modern knowledge of these migrations

Drawing evidence from across the sub-disciplines of anthropology to present a cohesive and exciting analysis of an important subject in the study of human population history, Farmers First, Second Edition is an important work of scholarship and an excellent introduction to multiple methods of anthropological and archaeological inquiry for the beginner student in prehistoric anthropology and archaeology, human migration, archaeology of East and Southeast Asia, agricultural history, comparative anthropology, and more disciplines across the anthropology curriculum.