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Contents:
Agriculture was not a dramatic overnight explosion that appeared all at once, fully-fledged, in one place. It took place over several hundred years, against a background of ecological and environmental changes, and social innovations. Understanding how agriculture evolved in the Near East, and how it spread into neighboring areas, or was adopted independently, has been one of the enduring investigations of archaeology in the Near East and nearby areas. This objective of this paper is to provide an introduction to the origins, development and spread of agriculture, with a view to providing a foundation for understanding the evolution of the world after the Neolithic – a world which saw the establishment of “civilization” with all that the word implies in terms of internal, local and long-distance relationships and complexities. 1.2 The Nature of the Evidence The origins and spread of agriculture date back thousands of years, and are therefore observed through the surviving remains of the human occupation throughout these periods. These remains are recovered and analyzed by archaeologists working in tandem with numerous specialists. They consist mainly of settlement and other structures (or the post holes and pits that mark their former location), artefacts, animal and plant remains and environmental data. Early archaeologists rarely employed methods which would have enabled the collection of plant seeds and small animal bones, and were therefore unable to collect environmental data, like that required for pollen analysis. This means that data from important sites has been lost to archaeologists interpreting these sites today – data like the full assemblage of plants that were grown, what the environmental conditions were like, and what types of small animal breeds supplemented a diet of larger breeds. Modern excavations hopefully collect this data as a standard procedure, and the more sites that are excavated, the better our understanding of early agriculture will become. Dennell (1977) makes some good points about problems in the way in which early agriculture, particularly cultivation, has been studied in both southwest Asia and Europe, and these become quite conspicuous in what follows, so it makes sense to highlight them here. Three points are particularly relevant to this paper. First, Dennell points out that there are two types of climatic/environmental/archaeological study: those looking at large areas like countries and those focusing on small bodies of evidence in small regions. These often result in very different conclusions due to the differences in scale and the quantity/type of data that can be successfully employed in each case. Second, he discusses “presence analysis” – the normative approach that assigns a percentage value to the amounts of crops in a conclusion and is used to draw conclusions about an economy. The advantages to this method are that it is simple and can be used on published material, but there are a number of problems with it: This is not behavioural data, so abundance may not equate to usage, just to the fact that it has survived or was being preserved
With respect to dispersal from southwest Asia, Dennell (1977) says that it is important to take into account the fact that there are 1000s of pollen diagrams for northwest Europe and very few indeed (less than 100 in the mid 70’s when he was writing) for southeast Europe. Second, differential survival may have a serious effect on our understanding of plant populations at different sites in different area, partly due to high carbonization occurrences in the Near East and southeast Europe as opposed to northwest Europe.
The second section begins with a description of the physical geography and environmental conditions of the Near East during the periods concerned. Climatic change and geomorphological differences within the area both had a considerable and inevitable impact on the nature of economic activity and social complexity that evolved. This is followed in Section 3 by a description of the Epipalaeolithic background. Archaeological divisions are inherently artificial. What happened at the beginning of the Neolithic is simply a continuation of the processes that were occurring during the end of the Epipalaeolithic, which were in turn the outcome of processes that took place in the early phases of the period. An understanding of the Epipalaeolithic is therefore an essential starting point for considering the origins of agriculture. The description of the Epipalaeolithic is followed by a consideration of why sedentism would have occurred (Section 4) and then how full agriculture could have been established (Section 5). A description of the Earlier Neolithic of the Near East follows, mainly focusing on the Levant, Turkey and northern Iran is then discussed in Section 6.0. The Earlier Neolithic consists of the “Pre-Pottery Neolithic” (phases A and B), and the Early Neolithic. This is in turn followed by a description of the Late Neolithic, the Pottery Neolithic A and the Pottery Neolithic B in Section 7. These Neolithic phases are unique to discussions about the Near East. These descriptions of the establishment of agricultural processes in the Near East are followed by a discussion about the spread of agriculture from the Near East into neighbouring areas, and how this spread happened. This paper is completed by a summary of the chronologies involved, and a conclusion. 1.4.1 Agricultural and Pre-Agricultural Terminology Throughout this paper I have referred to “core” or “nuclear” versus “marginal” areas. This somewhat simplified way of looking at the archaeology of the area, and agricultural adaptation and expansion is based on different environmental conditions. The term food resource management (FRM) refers both to hunter gatherer and agricultural communities and is simply used to express the idea that human populations with successful subsistence strategies have the capability to, and often employ, methods of determining outcomes by treating environments, plants and animals in specific ways which are designed to improve and maximize food resources. The term agriculture is used here to refer to the adoption of deliberate cultivation and animal herding/tending leading to the biologically identifiable domestication of plant and animal species. The adoption of an agricultural way of life is therefore seen as a precondition of domestication. The term domestication refers to the way in which animals and plants change due to human intervention, becoming biologically distinct from wild forms, and often dependent as a result of these changes on human maintenance and management. It is a biological, not a cultural process, although it may be the result of human selection. Ingold describes it as the isolation of “a breeding population within which individuals are selected for reproduction according to the degree to which they conform to an ideal type”. Clutton-Brock also provides a useful and broader definition: “a domesticated animal is one that has been bred in captivity, for purposes of subsistence or profit, in a human community that controls its breeding, its organization of territory and its food supply. . . . The end product of domestication is the breed: a group of animals bred by humans to possess a uniform appearance that is inherited and which distinguishes it from other animals of the same species” (Clutton-Brock 1992, p. 41). The process of domestication will be discussed later. The term cultivation refers to deliberate planting or sowing, harvesting, processing, storing and replanting of specific types of plant. It involves the deliberate management of plant growth in specific dedicated areas on a cyclical basis. Unlike domestication, it is a cultural process which involves regular and necessary activities, including the preparation of land, sowing of seeds, harvesting of grain and its storage. Changes in technology, subsistence strategy and social relationships would have been necessary in order to achieve a lifestyle based on cultivation. The term pastoralism refers to the human practice of raising and tending animals as a primary component of the economy. Pastoralism may occur with cultivation, but only where animal maintenance is the main activity, and it may equally take place on its own. Some exclusively pastoral groups are nomadic, meaning that they are mobile, shifting from settlement to settlement in order to find food and water for livestock. Pastoral nomads quite often occupy desert and marginal environments and only attempt to manage a small range of domestic animals. They are characterized by low population numbers, portable items, and extensive trade with cultivators. The term herding refers to the management of groups of animals – either in a settled or mobile context, usually in a secondary role to plant cultivation, where plant cultivation occurs. It represents an intentional relationship established by humans over animals which were suitable for domestication. The term ranching refers to the confinement of animals within fenced areas, pens or fields. The terms environment and ecology are easily confused. Environment refers to the surroundings in which an organism or organisms operate/s – which might include climate, water, land, natural resources, and/or vegetation. Ecology refers to the study of the relationships between living organisms and their environment.
1.4.2 Archaeological Terminology This site has been put together mainly for archaeologists looking for information about early agricultural developments and practices. However, on the off-chance that it receives non-archaeological visitors, the following provides some very brief, basic and fundamentally necessary archaeological terminology. The term Palaeolithic means “Old Stone” and spans several million years of human tool usage, and several different types of human of the genus Homo, of which we are simply the most recent. The Palaeolithic is characterized by groups of individuals who made and used tools of stone, bone, ivory, antler and wood, and hunted animals, gathered plant foods and fished. They are usually referred to simply as Hunter-Gatherers. They lived in caves, rock shelters and in man-made settlements in open locations, usually near a water source. The term Epipalaeolithic refers to the final Palaeolithic stage and is sometimes also referred to as the Terminal Palaeolithic. It is characterized by use of a specific stone tool kit, which included smaller more specialized tools, and is often associated with a move to more organized and intensive plant exploitation, with stone pestles and mortars for processing wild cereals. The term Neolithic, meaning “New Stone” refers to the period when agriculture was fully adopted and sedentary communities were established over wide areas. It is also associated with a different tool kit, and the more formalized establishment of large permanent settlement structures, as well as ritual and mortuary sites. The term “lithic” simply means stone. A lithic assemblage is a group of associated stone tools. For a description of individual types of stone tools, visit http://www.hf.uio.no/iakk/roger/lithic/sarc.html. “Primary” or “Pristine” adoption of agriculture refers to the very first development of agricultural practices. “Secondary” adoption of agriculture refers to existing hunter-gatherer communities who are introduced to agriculture by agricultural communities – either by migration of agricultural communities into hunter-gatherer territories, or by diffusion of the idea of agricultural life, together with the traded components of that idea. The term expansion refers to existing groups who grow and whose splinter groups expand into new areas while the existing population remains where it is. This is different from migration, which involves the abandonment by a population of one area in favour of another. The terms “hunter-gatherer” and “sedentary farmers” are two terms which have served to oversimplify the entire discussion about different ways of life. It implies that there are only two possible ways of living when in fact different adaptations may be diverse and complex, with different degrees of mobility and sedentism, and interplay between the two. I refer to the Near East as follows:
The Fertile Crescent refers to the northern Levant, Anatolia, northwestern Iran and eastern Iraq.
Chronological Terms NB: this document uses the following convention for dates – upper case is used for calibrated dates and lower case is used for uncalibrated dates.
As a baseline, the uncalibrated dates listed by Rosen (1997) are used throughout for each period, as follows, but please be aware that other schemes exist and these are quoted when relevant: (see below for a different scheme based on calibrated dates).
Calibrated Dates BC (Horwitz et al 1999):
Hole (1996) suggests that there may have been a significant time-gap between the Epipalaeolithic and Proto-Neolithic. Sites show a temporal distribution in terms of height above sea level (Hole 1996, p.264):
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Copyright (text and images) Andie Byrnes 2005, unless otherwise stated
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