Barbara J. Roth

Oregon State University

BRoth@orst.edu

The transition from hunting and gathering to farming is considered to be one of the major behavioral changes that occurred in prehistory. Recently, researchers in the Southwest have recognized that the adoption of agriculture by hunter-gatherers was part of a complex decision-making process and that groups did not adopt agriculture until it was beneficial to do so. In this paper, I argue that one of the ways to get at the "how" and "why" of the adoption of agriculture is to start by looking at who did the adopting. Using ethnographic data from hunter-gatherers and farmers in arid lands and data from recent excavations at early farming villages on the floodplain of the Santa Cruz River, I explore the idea that women made the initial decision to adopt agriculture in the southern Southwest