The Exploitation of Plant Resources in Ancient Africa
This volume presents a completely new and very substantial body of information about the origin of agriculture and plant use in Africa. All the evidence is very recent and for the first time all this archaeobotanical evidence is brought together in one vo
- PDF / 36,291,832 Bytes
- 284 Pages / 482.744 x 692.976 pts Page_size
- 5 Downloads / 183 Views
The Exploitation of Plant Resources in Ancient Africa Edited by
Marijke van der Veen School of Archaeological Studies University of Leicester Leicester, England
Springer Science+Business Media, LLC
Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Archaeobotany in Northem Africa, held June 23-25, 1997, in Leicester, United Kingdom ISBN 978-1-4419-3316-4 ISBN 978-1-4757-6730-8 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-4757-6730-8
© 1999 Springer Science+Business Media New York Originally published by Kluwer Acadernic/Plenum Publishers in 1999 10987654321 A C.I.P. record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Ali rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, rnicrofilming, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher
Jack R. Harlan
Dr. Jack R. Harlan, retired professor of agronomy at the University of Illinois, died on August 26, 1998, of cancer in New Orleans after a long and very distinguished career. He was 81. Dr. Harlan was born in Washington, D.C. He graduated from George Washington University in Washington and received his Ph.D. in genetics from the University of California, Berkeley. He worked as a geneticist for the United States Department of Agriculture from 1942 to 1961 and also taught agronomy at Oklahoma State University from 1951 to 1966. In 1966, he moved on to teach plant genetics at the University of Illinois until 1984. After his retirement, he worked as an adjunct professor at Tulane University, where he spent his remaining years. Dr. Harlan published 275 scientific articles and book chapters and wrote three books: Crops and Man ( 1975, with a 2nd edition in 1992), Origins ofAfrican Plant Domestication ( 1976, edited together with J. M. J. de Wet and A. B. L. Stemler) and The Living Fields: Our Agricultural Heritage (1995). Many of these publications are referred to repeatedly in the chapters in this volume, especially his 1971 paper in Science titled: "Agricultural origins: centers and noncenters." Dr. Harlan played a key role in our understanding of sorghum taxonomy and many of his articles dealt specifically with the domestication of sorghum and v
vi
Dedication
other African cereals. His extensive fieldwork in Africa has produced a vital record of gene centers or centers of diversity, which are rapidly disappearing. A theme running through most of his work is the role crops have played in the evolution of human societies. His interest in archaeology is apparent in all his publications and many archaeologists and archaeobotanists have benefited from his experience and knowledge of African plants, as well as his expertise in the fields of agronomy and genetics. He was a Guggenheim Fellow and had received the Meyer Medal for plant exploration and a Merit Award from the American Grassland Council. He was also an honorary participant in the first Workshop on the Archaeobotany of North Africa (Krakow, Poland 1994). Dr. Harlan will be remembe
