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Preferred term

culture hearth  

Definition

  • 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. [Source: Encyclopedia of Human Geography; Culture Hearth]

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https://concepts.sagepub.com/social-science/concept/culture_hearth

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