Farmers' Bounty

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Abstract
This book defines the dimensions of crop diversity and questions surrounding it. Understanding the nature of crop diversity and its fate in the modern world is an international scientific enterprise that draws scientists from many different disciplines—archaeology, geography, botany, genetics, anthropology, and economics. Since the mid-nineteenth century, many investigators have dealt with this topic and have defined an array of scientific, industrial, and political issues that reach far beyond the original investigations of botanists and natural historians. Geneticists and social scientists study diversity in agriculture for different reasons—for instance, to understand gene flow or the effect of the industrial seed industry. This book explains how human ecology came to the study of crop diversity, and describes the ways it has been used to address larger issues about human and agricultural evolution. It examines various ways of defining and measuring crop diversity, and introduces the three crops and farming regions: potatoes in the Peruvian Andes, maize in Mexico, and wheat in Turkey. The book describes the ethnobiology of Andean potatoes as an example of how anthropological research can contribute to an overall understanding of the ecology and evolution of a crop in its center of origin, and also examines the nature of farmer selection, using material from research on wheat diversity in Turkey.

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