Why and how did agriculture begin? Basing his theory on data drawn from the seats of virtually all major civilizations, Richard S. MacNeish concludes that certain environmental conditions and cultural patterns led to agriculture. His theory about the origin of agriculture and settled life in the prehistoric world explains not only how it happened but why it happened - in the Andes, Mesoamerica, the Far East, Near East centres, the American Southwest, Europe, the eastern United States, tropical Asia, Africa and south and central America. This book presents a "trilinear" theory of the origin of agriculture through the combination of three models called the models of primary, secondary and tertiary development. Each type of development is categorized as having a set of necessary conditions and sufficient conditions leading, by different routes, to food production and sedentary village life. The most important factors involved appear to be environment, resource abundance and regional diversity. Climatic change, population growth, decreasing carrying capacity and interregional interactions also figure prominently. Regions where primary developments occurred shared conditions such as exploitation of scattered food resources that could not be collected from a single base and interaction with ecologically similar regions. Regions where secondary and tertiary developments occurred shared different sets of conditions. Developmental sequences are discussed for all parts of the world where food production and settled village life evolved. "Settled Life" is an interdisciplinary approach to one of the most fundamental developments in human history, bringing together all relevant sequential archaeological data from all parts of the ancient world. The trilinear hypothesis is tested in this volume by "hard" sequential archaeological data from the entire prehistoric world.