The development of agriculture has often been described as the most important change in all of human history. Volume 2 of the Cambridge World History series explores the origins and impact of agriculture and agricultural communities, and also discusses issues associated with pastoralism and hunter-fisher-gatherer economies. To capture the patterns of this key change across the globe, the volume uses an expanded timeframe from 12,000 BCE–500 CE, beginning with the Neolithic and continuing into later periods. Scholars from a range of disciplines, including archaeology, historical linguistics, biology, anthropology, and history, trace common developments in the more complex social structures and cultural forms that agriculture enabled, such as sedentary villages and more elaborate foodways, and then present a series of regional overviews accompanied by detailed case studies from many different parts of the world, including Southwest Asia, South Asia, China, Japan, Southeast Asia and the Pacific, sub-Saharan Africa, the Americas, and Europe. 农业的发展常常被描述为人类历史上最重要的变化。剑桥世界历史丛书的第2卷探讨了农业和农业社区的起源和影响,还讨论了与放牧和猎人-渔民-捕捞者经济有关的问题。为了捕捉全球这一主要变化的模式,本书使用了从公元前12,000年至公元500年的扩展时间框架,从新石器时代开始一直延续到以后。来自考古学,历史语言学,生物学,人类学和历史学等众多学科的学者追溯了农业带来的更复杂的社会结构和文化形式的共同发展,例如久坐的村庄和更精致的美食之路,然后介绍了一系列区域概述以及来自世界许多不同地区的详细案例研究,包括西南亚,南亚,中国,日本,东南亚和太平洋,撒哈拉以南非洲,美洲和欧洲。