Culture Hearth

Though the overarching concept of culture hearth did not originate in geography per se, it has come to occupy a central place in traditional cultural geography's reconstructions of cultural origins and diffusions. Carl Sauer (1889–1975) seems to have introduced the term culture hearth in his 1952 Bowman Lecture, “Agricultural Origins and Dispersals.” Hearth, with its ancient Indo-European cognates meaning charcoal and fire, well evokes Sauer's theory that agriculture's origins are to be found in contexts of leisured sedentary folk with sufficient diversity of sustenance and resources to explore natural processes imaginatively. Sauer also posited that control of fire was humanity's first great cultural acquisition and prepared the way for agriculture's inceptions many millennia later. Once kindled and tended, cultural traits such as plant domestication were then dispersed along avenues of adoption. The principles of cultural diffusion, and the notion of centers of innovation, can be traced back to earlier cultural and agricultural historians. Swiss botantist Alphonse de Candolle (1806–1893), in his Origins of Domesticated Plants, posed the question of global centers of plant domestication. During the 1920s and 1930s, Russian botantist Nikolai Vavilov (1887–1943) mounted dozens of plant-collecting expeditions to places that he believed were the original centers of plant domestication. He identified eight original centers in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Botanists, archaeologists, and geographers all contributed to a vigorous research trajectory that continues the debate on agricultural origins and dispersals.

Friedrich Ratzel (1844–1904) can be credited with implanting the implicit idea of the culture hearth within[Page 83] the geographer's domain. Best remembered for laying the foundations for political geography and advancing environmental determinism in geography, Ratzel, in the second volume of Anthropogeographie, less conspicuously put locating culture centers (hearths in Sauer's poetic prose) and identifying culture traits and tracing their dispersals at the core of human geography. Ratzel also helped to make the delimitation of culture areas a major concern of anthropologists for the next half century. Ratzel inspired the development of the Kulturkreise (or culture circles) approach within anthropology. The object of Kulturkreise research was to reconstruct the diffusion of cultural traits from a few originating nodes or clusters and to map areas or regions of cultural cohesion. German anthropologists Leo Frobenius (1873– 1938) and R. Fritz Graebner (1877–1934) were leading figures in this movement. American anthropologists found the culture area concept useful in their efforts to synthesize what was known about North American indigenous cultures. Anthropologist Clark Wissler (1870–1947) produced continental scale maps of native culture areas based on culture trait similarities and differences. Sauer's Berkeley School colleagues Alfred Kroeber (1876–1960) and Robert Lowie (1883–1957) were among the anthropologists who contributed to the debates and demonstrations of the concept. Sauer's interactions with Kroeber and Lowie, along with his own contributions to the culture area concept (especially his early work on plant domestication in Mexico), led to his formulation of the culture hearth idea. Sauer later proposed that plant domestication probably first occurred in tropical riverine contexts with root crops rather than seed crops. His favored hearth candidates were Southeast Asia and Northwest South America.

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