Reconsidering domestication from a process archaeology perspective

Process philosophy offers a metaphysical foundation for domestication studies. This grounding is especially important given the European colonialist origin of ‘domestication’ as a term and 19th century cultural project. We explore the potential of process archaeology for deep-time investigation of domestication relationships, drawing attention to the variable pace of domestication as an ongoing process within and across taxa; the nature of domestication ‘syndromes’ and ‘pathways’ as general hypotheses about process; the importance of cooperation as well as competition among humans and other organisms; the significance of non-human agency; and the ubiquity of hybrid communities that resist the simple wild/domestic dichotomy

Arable weeds as a case study in plant-human relationships beyond domestication

Arable weeds are plants that invade habitats created by people for the cultivation of other species. Though they are not the target of human cultivation, their growth in arable habitats means that they, like crops, are under human selection. Genetic studies of weedy crop relatives have documented traits (shattering/dehiscence, asynchronous flowering, seed dormancy etc.) that allow weeds to escape detection and eradication by farmers, and give them a competitive advantage over crops (Thurber et al. 2010, 2011; Qi et al. 2015). Selection of these traits in weedy crop relatives thus constitutes a (partial) reversal of the domestication syndrome (Hammer 1984), sometimes called ‘de-domestication’ (Ellstrand et al. 2010). But weeds can also adapt by taking on domestic traits (Hammer 1984); Harlan (1992: 66, 94) reports non-shattering populations of the weed Bromus secalinus and of weedy oats, for example. Moreover, genetic study of wild crop relatives and their domesticated counterparts has confirmed the importance of allele introgression from proximate wild populations (Song et al. 2014; Gutaker et al. 2017). The history of crops and weeds is thus deeply intertwined, the selection of traits in one shaping (directly and indirectly) the evolution of the other, in a particularly clear instance of mutual evolution through niche construction