Extent of foraging, hunting and gathering

The authors present a global assessment of archaeological expert knowledge on land use from 10,000 years before the present (yr B.P.) to 1850 CE.

To assess and integrate archaeological knowledge toward synthesis at a global scale, the ArchaeoGLOBE Project used a crowdsourcing approach. Archaeologists with land-use expertise were invited to contribute to a detailed questionnaire describing levels of land-use knowledge at 10 time intervals across 146 regional analytical units covering all continents except Antarctica. Contributors selected individual regions where they had expertise; 255 individual archaeologists completed a total of 711 regional questionnaires, resulting in complete, though uneven, global coverage. The result is an expert-based meta-analysis that uses semi-subjective (ranked) survey data to generate regional assessments of land use over time.

They map the dating and extent of four 'agricultural' regimes across the world:

1. Foraging: Foraging/hunting/gathering/fishing - subsistence based on hunting wild animals, gathering wild plants, and fishing, without deliberately modifying the reproduction of plants and animals that people exploit.
2. Pastoralism: the exploitation of pasturelands for animal husbandry - including the breeding, care, and use of domesticated herd animals (e.g., sheep, goats, camels, cattle, horses, llamas, reindeer, and yaks).
3. Extensive agriculture: swidden/shifting cultivation and other forms of noncontinuous cultivation.
4. Intensive agriculture: all other forms of continuous cultivation (including irrigated and nonirrigated annual cropping, tropical agroforestry, flooded field farming, and industrial monocrop/plantation agriculture).