First Farmers: the Origins of Agricultural Societies offers readers an understanding of the origins and histories of early agricultural populations in all parts of the world.

• Uses data from archaeology, comparative linguistics, and biological anthropology to cover developments over the past 12,000 years
• Examines the reasons for the multiple primary origins of agriculture
• Focuses on agricultural origins in and dispersals out of the Middle East, central Africa, China, New Guinea, Mesoamerica and the northern Andes
• Covers the origins and dispersals of major language families such as Indo-European, Austronesian, Sino-Tibetan, Niger-Congo and Uto-Aztecan

Peter Bellwood is Professor of Archaeology at the Australian National University. He is the author of Examining the Farming/Language Dispersal Hypothesis (co-edited with Colin Renfrew, 2003), Prehistory of the Indo-Malaysian Archipelago (2nd edition 1997), The Polynesians: Prehistory of an Island People (1987), and Man’s Conquest of the Pacific: The Prehistory of Southeast Asia and Oceania (1986).