Lancelotti, CarlaZurro, DeboraWhitehouse, Nicki J.Kramer, Karen L.Madella, MarcoGarcía Granero, Juan JoséGreaves, Russell D.2020-05-202020-05-202016Lancelotti C, Zurro D, Whitehouse NJ, Kramer KL, Madella M, García-Granero JJ et al. Resilience of small-scale societies’ livelihoods: a framework for studying the transition from food gathering to food production. Ecol Soc. 2016;24(1):8. DOI: 10.5751/ES-08757-2104081708-3087http://hdl.handle.net/10230/44610The origins of agriculture and the shift from hunting and gathering to committed agriculture is regarded as one of the major transitions in human history. Archeologists and anthropologists have invested significant efforts in explaining the origins of agriculture. A period of gathering intensification and experimentation and pursuing a mixed economic strategy seems the most plausible explanation for the transition to agriculture and provides an approach to study a process in which several nonlinear processes may have played a role. However, the mechanisms underlying the transition to full agriculture are not completely clear. This is partly due to the nature of the archeological record, which registers a practice only once it has become clearly established. Thus, points of transitions have limited visibility and the mechanisms involved in the process are difficult to untangle. The complexity of such transitions also implies that shifts can be distinctively different in particular environments and under varying historical and social conditions. In this paper we discuss some of the elements involved in the transition to food production within the framework of resilience theory. We propose a theoretical conceptual model in which the resilience of livelihood strategies lies at the intersection of three spheres: the environmental, economical, and social domains. Transitions occur when the rate of change, in one or more of these domains, is so elevated or its magnitude so large that the livelihood system is unable to bounce back to its original state. In this situation, the system moves to an alternative stable state, from one livelihood strategy to another.application/pdfengCopyright © is held by the contributing authors or, where required by law, their employers. As of 15 February 2017 articles are published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. You may share and adapt the work for non-commercial purposes provided the original author and source are credited, you indicate whether any changes were made, and you include a link to the license.info:eu-repo/semantics/articlehttp://dx.doi.org/10.5751/ES-08757-210408ABMResourcesSocial-ecological dynamicsSubsistence strategiesTransition to agricultureinfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess