9. Human Behavioral Ecology, Domestic Animals, and Land Use during the Transition to Agriculture in Valencia, Eastern Spain

Most applications of Human Behavioral Ecology (HBE) to questions of agricultural origins have focused on plant domestication in archaeological contexts in the New World, where domestic animals were generally less important in early agricultural societies . In contrast, domestic animals play an important part in subsistence strategies and land use in Old World early agricultural societies. In this chapter, we examine the role of domestic animals in changes of land use during the transition to, and consolidation of, food producing economies in Valencia, Spain. Using the behavioral ecological model of ideal free distribution as a heuristic concept, we show the tight linkage between agricultural subsistence strategies, herd management, and long-term dynamics of human land use. Two broadly different herd management strategies were stable for long periods of time and the shift from one to the other was tightly linked with socioecological changes during the Neolithic. In recent years, ecological approaches to the origin of and transition to agriculture have been popular, especially in research conducted outside of Europe (e.g., Cowan and Watson 1992; Harris and Hillman 1989; Price and Gebauer 1995a; Smith 2002). These include studies founded in Human Behavioral Ecology (HBE), focusing on coevolutionary processes, risk minimization strategies, resource selection or a combination of these as explanatory or exploratory models for understanding the adoption of domesticates into prehistoric subsistence practices (e.g., Barlow 2002, Blumler et al. 1991; Gremillion 1996a; Hawkes and O'Connell 1992; Layton et al. 1991; Piperno and Pearsall 1998; Rindos 1980, 1984; Winterhalder 1993; Winterhalder and Goland 1997). Risk minimization is often called upon to explain the move from foraging to farming-based subsistence economies (see Winterhalder and Goland 1997; Redding 1981). In these models, domesticates, usually plants, are regarded as risk minimizers; initially adopted to diversify the existing resource base. Through co-evolutionary processes (Rindos 1980, 1984) or simple intensification, the efficiency of the resource as a food source rises. In this view, domesticates gradually became the dominant subsistence resources and risk minimization strategies shifted to a focus on