The transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture is arguably the most important event in human prehistory, representing a shift from foraging to farming, from food collection to food production, from wild to domestic, that sets the stage for most of the significant subsequent developments in human society. For this reason, the beginnings of agriculture have been the subject of scholarly interest since at least the middle of the last century, as evidenced by Charles Darwin's 1868 treatise on The Variation of Plants and Animals under Domestication, and subsequent works by various other authors (e.g., de Candolle 1882, Roth 1887).

The search for causality began early as well. Raphael Pumpelly in 1908 first suggested the oasis as the context of domestication in the ancient Near East during the time of desiccation thought to have characterized the end of the Pleistocene, invoking climatic change as a primary cause. The 1920s brought two important concepts to the study of the first farmers (Harris 1996b, Watson 1995). In 1926, the botanist N. I. Vavilov defined “centers of origin” for the domestication of plants and two years later the archaeologist V. Gordon Childe described the origins of agriculture in terms of a “Neolithic Revolution.” Employing this new concept of centers, Childe argued that agriculture, along with a number of other innovations, had moved to Europe from its place of origin in the Near East.

Large multidisciplinary projects of archaeological investigation characterized research on agricultural origins after the Second World War (e.g., Braidwood 1960, Byers 1967, Hole et al. 1969, Kenyon 1981, MacNeish 1992). The 1960s and early 1970s saw an intensified search for causality (e.g., Binford 1968, Cohen 1977, Flannery 1973).