Rivers of Change: Essays on Early Agriculture in Eastern North America

Organized into four sections, the twelve chapters of Rivers of Change are concerned with prehistoric Native American societies in eastern North America and their transition from a hunting and gathering way of life to a reliance on food production. Written at different times over a decade, the chapters vary both in length and topical focus. They are joined together, however, by a number of shared “rivers of change.”

Rivers of Change, awarded the James Henry Breasted Prize by the American Historical Association, is the first comprehensive consideration of eastern North America as an independent, primary center of plant domestication and agriculture. Focusing on data derived from the expanding discipline of archaeobotany, Bruce D. Smith presents a provocative alternative theory of how prehistoric North American societies developed from hunting and gathering systems to food-producing economies. Smith has written a new preface for this paperback edition.

Bruce D. Smith is an archaeologist at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History and is the author, coauthor, or editor of a wide range of works, including The Emergence of Agriculture.