NEWS STORY UPLOAD DATE: March 23, 2009

Dr. David Cohen of ICEAACH was one of twenty-two scholars from around the globe invited to participate in the 140th Wenner-Gren International Symposium, held at Hacienda Temozon in Merida, Mexico, March 6-March 13th, 2009. The theme of this year's symposium was "The Beginnings of Agriculture: New Data, New Ideas." The goal of the intensive symposium is to produce a state-of-the-art study of the origins of agriculture. This study will provide a baseline for the next generation of research on this topic. The symposium featured over six hours of discussions each day for five days, with a one day break for a trip to the Maya site of Uxmal. Discussions were organized around issues crosscutting and emerging from individual papers, which were distributed in advance of the meeting. Participants included leading archaeologists, palaeoethnobotanists, zooarchaeologists, geographers, and genetics specialists. One noticeable shift in the discussions at this symposium, as compared to previous studies on the origins of agriculture from a global perspective, was the prominence given to East Asia, with individual papers on China, Korea, Japan, and Southeast Asia. As East Asian archaeology continues to grow, it will play an ever greater role in comparative world archaeological discussions. Dr. Cohen's contribution centered on the archaeological evidence from North and South China on the transition to farming and drew on his excavations at Upper Paleolithic and Neolithic sites in the Yangzi and Yellow River regions. Papers resulting from the symposium will be published in a special issue of Current Anthropology in 2010.