Agrarian society
Agrarian society were preceded by hunter and gatherer and horticultural societies and transition into industrial society. The transition to agriculture, called the Neolithic Revolution, has taken place independently multiple times. Horticulture and agriculture as types of subsistence developed among humans somewhere between 10,000 and 8,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent region of the Middle East. The reasons for the development of agriculture are debated but may have included climate change, and the accumulation of food surplus for competitive gift-giving. Most certainly there was a gradual transition from hunter-gatherer to agricultural economies after a lengthy period when some crops were deliberately planted and other foods were gathered from the wild. In addition to the emergence of farming in the Fertile Crescent, agriculture appeared in: by at least 6,800 B.C.E. in East Asia (rice) and, later, in Central and South America (maize and squash). Small-scale agriculture also likely arose independently in early Neolithic contexts in India (rice) and Southeast Asia (taro). However, full dependency on domestic crops and animals, when wild resources contributed a nutritionally insignificant component to the diet, did not occur until the Bronze Age.
Eastern Agricultural Complex
The region of this early agriculture is in the middle Mississippi valley, from Memphis north to St. Louis and extending about 300 miles east and west of the river, mostly in Missouri, Illinois, Kentucky, and Tennessee. The oldest archaeological site known in the United States in which Native Americans were growing, rather than gathering, food is Phillips Spring in Missouri. At Phillips Spring, dating from 3,000 BCE, archaeologists found abundant walnuts, hickory nuts, acorns, grapes, elderberries, ragweed, bottle gourd, and the seeds of "Cucurbita pepo", a gourd with edible seeds that is the ancestor of pumpkins and most squashes. The seeds found at Phillips Spring were larger than those of wild "C. pepo". The agency for this change was surely human manipulation. Humans were selecting, planting, and tending seeds from plants that produced larger and tastier seeds. Ultimately, they would manipulate "C. pepo" to produce edible flesh.