Maria Bruno is a professor of Anthropology and Archaeology at Dickinson College.

Bruno, Maria C. Practice and History in the Transition to Food Production. Current Anthropology 50, no.5 (2009): 703-706. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/605625.

This published version is made available on Dickinson Scholar with the permission of the publisher. For more information on the published version, visit The University of Chicago Press's Website. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/605625 © 2009 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved.

The papers presented in “State University of New York Conversation in the Discipline: The Origins of Agriculture” present important contributions to our understanding of the transition to agriculture. In comparison with other volumes about this theme (e.g., Cowan and Watson 1992; Denham et al. 2007; Price and Gebauer 1994; Zeder et al. 2006), these papers focus on theoretical issues rather than case studies of specific crops, animals, or regions. To date, my own research has focused on a particular crop and region, chenopods in the south-central Andes (Bruno 2006), but I believe that such theoretical discussions are essential. They not only permit us to consider the threads that link individual cases but also serve to improve the questions and methods used to examine our particular data sets.