Graeber / Wengrow: "the fate of early farming societies often hinged less on 'ecological imperialism' than on what we might call -- to adapt a phrase from the pioneer of social ecology, Murray Bookchin -- an 'ecology of freedom.'"
"The ecology of freedom describes the proclivity of human societies to move (freely) in and out of farming; to farm without fully becoming farmers; raise crops and animals without surrendering too much of one's existence to the logistical rigors of agriculture; and retain a food web sufficiently broad as to prevent cultivation from becoming a matter of life and death"
"Bruce Smith discusses the whole phenomenon under the rubric of 'low level food production,' which he takes to describe economies that occupy 'the vast and diverse middle ground between hunting-fishing-foraging and agriculture"
271: "farming of this particular sort [...] has characterized a very wide range of Holocene societies, including the earliest cultivators of the Fertile Crescent and Mesoamerica. In Mexico, domestic forms of squash and maize existed by 7000 BC. Yet these crops only became staple foods around 5,000 years alter. Similarly, in the Eastern Woodlands of North America local seed crops were cultivated by 3000 BC, but there was no 'serious farming' until around AD 1000. China follows a similar pattern. Millet-farming began on a small scale around 8000 BC , on the northern plains, as a seasonal complement to foraging and dog-assisted hunting. It remained so for 3,000 years, until the introduction of cultivated millets into the basin of the Yellow River. Similarly, on the lower and middle reaches of the Yangtze, fully domesticated rice strains only appear fifteen centuries after the first cultivation of wild rice in paddy fields."