New light on Neolithic revolution in south-west Asia.

New light on Neolithic revolution in south-west Asia. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Introduction Gordon Childe's famous notion of a Neolithic revolution sawthe switch from hunting to herding and from gathering to cultivation asthe pivotal agent of change. It was a model subsequently followed bymany scholars. Today the imperative is different: not economic butcultural and cognitive. Already from about 23 000 years ago, we seegroups of hunter-gatherers in parts of south-west Asia begin totransform their settlement and subsistence strategies and develop large,permanently co-residential communities well before the beginning ofagriculture. This new form of social life implies that the cognitive andcultural faculties of Homo sapiens had become capable of managingcultural systems through external symbolic storage, or monumentality, anessential instrument of social complexity. Having rejected Childe's model of farming as an adaptationnecessitated by climate change and environmental desiccation, RobertBraidwood asked 'Why then? Why not earlier?' That question hasmostly been overlooked, but it applies to the emergence of new,permanent communities as much as to the adoption of farming practices.Braidwood's prescient hunch was that perhaps culture was not ready(Braidwood & Willey 1962: 332). The answer I propose is: (1) only ata certain point in human cognitive evolution did it become possible forHomo sapiens to transcend certain biological limitations of the humanbrain by cultural means; and (2) this increased mental facility was madenecessary by the reliance on larger and more cohesive social groups,itself a product of hominin evolution. This long story, covering the 16 millennia of the Epipalaeolithicand early Neolithic periods in south-west Asia (23 000-7000 BC; seeTable 1) can be told briefly in three parts. The first concerns thetransformation in subsistence strategies as small-scale, mobile,hunter-gatherer bands became large, permanently co-resident communities.The second part focuses on those large, permanent communities, theirextraordinary architecture and the associated symbolic representationsand practices. The third part sets those processes in the wider contextof long-term population growth and the cognitive, cultural and socialevolution of Homo sapiens. Hunting, harvesting and sedentism The early Epipalaeolithic site of Ohalo II (Figure 1) is remarkablefor its early date (around 25 000 BP, in the heart of the Last GlacialMaximum) and the conditions of organic preservation (Nadel &Hershkovitz 1991; Weiss et al. 2004). Many of the characteristics thathave generally been thought to be typical of the late Epipalaeolithic ofthe southern Levant are present from the very start of the period, morethan ten millennia earlier. Ohalo II was a structured settlement thatextended over at least 2300m2 area. It consists of a cluster of brushhuts whose interiors show signs of repeated cleaning out and renewal.Refuse and waste were dumped to the east of the huts; as well as asmall, central hearth in each hut, there were extensive open-hearthareas, perhaps for communal cooking. One burial has been found among thehuts, that of an adult male. The subsequent submergence of the site led to extraordinarypreservation of organic remains. To date, 142 botanical taxa have beenregistered, and more than 19 000 grass seeds, including wild wheat andbarley, have been identified. Heavy ground stone equipment is found atthe site, and traces of starch were found on the working surface of onestone that was examined; it was found carefully set into the floor ofHut 1 (Weiss et al. 2008). The stored seeds imply that people werecertainly there from early summer for several months. The combinedfloral and faunal data show that people were using the site all yearround, even if they may not have been in residence year in year out. Thefaunal remains are the classic profile of the broad-spectrumstrategy--plenty of gazelle and fallow deer, but also fox, hare, manyspecies of birds, lots of fish and some tortoise. [FIGURE 1 OMITTED] Whatever the changes adopted in consequence of a move to storedharvests, there were other factors that required changes in subsistencestrategy. Archaeozoologists have charted the loss of large ungulatespecies in the Upper Palaeolithic, followed in the Epipalaeolithic bythe steady reduction of the remaining ungulates and increasingconcentration on gazelle. At the end of the Epipalaeolithic and thebeginning of the early Neolithic, Simon Davis noted a more rapid shiftin the faunal spectra; more and more of the gazelle were immature--badnews for hunters and for the gazelle--and, in compensation, numbers ofbirds, small mammals, fish and amphibians increased sharply (Davis2005). From the Upper Palaeolithic through the Epipalaeolithic thenumbers of tortoise and their size decline sharply; as tortoises becomesmaller and rarer, birds and small mammals, particularly fox and hare,increase (Stiner et al. 2000). Tortoises are both slow to reproduce andeasy to catch; thus they constitute a sensitive barometer of humanpredator density. Birds and small mammals require more skill and effortto catch, but they reproduce quickly; they are much more resilient inthe face of human predation. In terms of plant foods, at the beginning of the Epipalaeolithicthe harvesters at Ohalo II gathered a surprising range of small-seededgrasses, as well as some cereals. At the other end of theEpipalaeolithic period, people were much more focused on the cereals andlarge-seeded pulses such as lentils. The view of botanists seems to haveswung away from the idea of a rapid process of domestication of cereals,towards a long period of 'predomestication agriculture', thatis, cultivation before the recognisable traits of the domesticatedspecies were manifested. George Willcox and his colleagues have shown usthe process towards domestication in progress over about 1500 years fromthe late Epipalaeolithic (Willcox et al. 2008). Another recent studyproposes that cultivation may have begun as early as the middleEpipalaeolithic (Allaby et al. 2008). The earliest morphologicallydomesticated crops are found around the boundary between the early andlater aceramic Neolithic (Colledge 2002; Willcox et al. 2008). The firstevidence of domesticated flocks of sheep and goat, and cattle and pighave been found at sites across north Syria and south-east Turkey, onlyshortly after the first fully domesticated cereals appeared. Settlementstrategies changed as reliance on the storage of harvested cropsincreased. Groups tended towards sedentism, and, as permanentsettlements developed, community size grew. There are three points to note. First, the steady changes insettlement strategy and faunal spectra through the Upper Palaeolithicand Epipalaeolithic periods as outlined above are unrelated to theswitchback of climatic change from the start of the Upper Palaeolithic,through the Last Glacial Maximum, the oscillations of the recovery, thesudden Younger Dryas and the early Holocene climatic optimum. Second, in an eco-systems approach, the pressures on availablehunted prey-species might have been expected to encourage astabilisation, or even a reduction, in human population. However, whatwe see is population growth overall, an increase in community size andpermanence of residence. We may conclude that the 'normal'forces that should have ensured that human population density stayedwithin limits were no longer operating. It seems that social andcultural imperatives over-rode the simple economic cost argument: peopleplaced a higher value on living together, and bore the costs. Simplepopulation growth strained available resources, especially large herdungulates, and required adaptations that involved greater investment oflabour and technology for hunting, trapping, fishing, harvesting andfood processing. Large, permanently co-resident communities, dependenton the resources immediately accessible from their settlements, onlymagnified those requirements for adaptation and increased investment. Third, once the suite of fully domesticated crops and herdedanimals had come into use, some of the basic parameters of the storychanged. Although a greater investment of labour was required, and therewas greater risk in dependence on a narrow spectrum of crops and herds,the productivity of the land around the settlement was increased, andeven children could contribute to the economy. In the late aceramicNeolithic and beyond, we see further acceleration in population growth,rapidly expanding community sizes, and, soon, the colonisation of newterritories by farming communities. The more productive economy allowedthe exploitation of extensive new territories, and it was portable:farming complemented rather than prompted the advent of permanentcommunities. Settlements and the building of social space It is generally thought that communities became larger and moresedentary than the typical mobile hunter-gatherer band only in the finalEpipalaeolithic Natufian. But there are examples of large sites (up to2.3ha in extent) that date to the middle of the Epipalaeolithic period,that accumulated a significant stratigraphic depth, have rich materialculture that indicates long-term residence and the full range ofactivities, have some stone-built structures, or have intramuralburials. In the Natufian, there were some long-lived settlements consistingof substantial, stonebuilt, semi-subterranean structures; somesettlements also accommodated intramural burials, on occasion formingveritable cemeteries. There is a good case for thinking that some ofthese large, open sites of the Epipalaeolithic period in the Levant,especially the late Epipalaeolithic, were permanent settlements. In theearly aceramic Neolithic period, almost all the sites that we know arestratified open settlements, and small, camp occupations are uncommon,except in marginal, semi-arid regions. From the end of the Epipalaeolithic through the aceramic Neolithicof the southern Levant (the only part of south-west Asia where there issufficient data) Ian Kuijt has charted the increase in the average sizeof settlement sites (by a factor of 10), the increase in the density ofbuildings within them (by a factor of 8), and the increasing scale andcompartmentalisation of domestic buildings (Kuijt 2000b). We may alsoobserve that the number of known sites of the later Epipalaeolithic ismuch greater than for the earlier Epipalaeolithic; and the same is truefor the greater number of later aceramic Neolithic sites in contrastwith the early aceramic Neolithic. In sum, we have evidence ofincreasing population, increasing size of population units, andincreasingly permanent occupation of settlements. We should recognise that these settlements, whose inhabitants musthave numbered many hundreds, and in some cases thousands, were notsimply small clusters of autonomous hunter-harvester or farminghouseholds; we need to make a deliberate effort to set aside the'village-farming' tag that Robert Braidwood introduced(Braidwood 1960). Some of the most spectacular and surprisingdiscoveries of the last 20 years have come from late Epipalaeolithic andearly aceramic Neolithic settlement sites, before the mixed farmingeconomy became standard. Settlements may demonstrate a structured, communal layout, as atearly Epipalaeolithic Ohalo II, early aceramic Neolithic Qermez Dere innorthern Iraq (Watkins 1990), and at WF16, an early aceramic Neolithicsettlement site in southern Jordan (Bill Finlayson and Steven Mithenpers. carom.). The design, building and maintenance of houses within asettlement could be surrounded with elaborate symbolism, as at lateEpipalaeolithic Mallaha in northern Israel (Valla 2008), or in thecareful deposition of many kinds of debris (including human body parts)at Wadi Hammeh 27, a late Epipalaeolithic settlement in Jordan(Hardy-Smith & Edwards 2004). In some parts of south-west Asia in the later aceramic Neolithicperiod (8500-6500 BC), houses took on stylised and even monumental form,for example, at Cayonu in south-east Turkey (Schirmer 1990). Theso-called pier-houses of the southern Levant were similarly stylised,and were repeatedly, and expensively, re-faced with thick lime plaster,sometimes coloured red, and burnished (Byrd & Banning 1988). At several settlements in south-east Turkey and north Syria, thereexisted communal buildings, that is, buildings that were central to thecommunity, and were not domestic in function. In an open area at thecentre of the settlement of Cayonu, the excavators found a succession ofthree special purpose buildings, of which the most spectacular is theso-called skull building (Ozdogan 1999). At Jerf el Ahmar, an earlyaceramic Neolithic settlement on the Euphrates in north Syria, there wasa succession of circular, subterranean buildings that were monumental inscale, up to 9m in diameter and 3m deep (Figure 2; Stordeur et al.2000). At Dja'de, a settlement dating to the middle of the aceramicNeolithic period a little further down the Euphrates, another circular,subterranean structure with massive internal buttresses is emerging(Figure 3; Coqueugniot 2000). [FIGURE 2 OMITTED] There are two sites, Gobekli Tepe (Schmidt 2006), near Urfa insouth-east Turkey, and Kfar HaHoresh in Israel (Goring-Morris 2000),which might appear to be settlements, but on investigation seem to beotherwise. Gobekli Tepe is an artificially mounded site on a barelimestone ridge with extraordinary, panoramic views. It is severalhundred metres in diameter and the stratigraphy is many metres thick. Itappears that people piled up thousands of tons of debris, consisting ofstone chips, soil and occupation debris including carbonised plantremains, animal bone and chipped stone tools and debitage, in order thatthey could then create huge cavities 10-30m in diameter and at least 3mdeep. The sides of the subterranean structures were retained by stonewalls; around the foot of the walls a stone-slabbed bench was built,interrupted at regular intervals by radially set T-shaped slabs. In thecentre of each circle stand a pair of larger monoliths (Figures 4 &5; also see frontispiece to this issue). All are T-shaped slabs withcreatures carved in raised relief--wild bulls, boars, foxes, cranes,snakes, spiders and scorpions. In the largest structure so farinvestigated, the central monoliths stand 5.5m tall. What isparticularly striking is the continual refashioning of the circularstructures, moving and reworking of monoliths, filling in one oldstructure and creating another alongside. [FIGURE 3 OMITTED] At Kfar HaHoresh, there is plenty of occupation debris, and thereare rectangular limeplaster floor-like surfaces and lengths of low wall,but the excavators are sure that there were no houses. The plasteredfloors cap pits and hollows in which human and animal remains, andfeasting debris, were deposited in complicated sequences of actions(Goring-Morris & Horwitz 2007; Goring-Morris et aL 2008). NigelGoring-Morris has described the site as a place where "the deadhave their own settlement'. A feature common to most settlements of the early Neolithic (andsome of the Epipalaeolithic, too) is the incorporation of human burialsamong the houses, under the floors of houses, or in the substructurebelow the living floors. At no site is the number of burials sufficientto account for the adult population; even at Catalhoyuk in centralAnatolia, where the ratio of burials to houses is greatest, theexcavators estimate that only about a half of the population wasaccorded intramural burial (Hodder 2006). At 'Ain Ghazal in Jordan,as well as the ceremonial intramural burials, the excavators foundbodies unceremoniously thrown into rubbish pits (Rollefson 2000). We donot know why a few were selected for intramural burial; perhaps the deadwere important for the ceremonies as much as the ceremonies were for thedeceased. Kathleen Kenyon's excavations in the pre-pottery Neolithicstrata at Tell es-Sultan, ancient Jericho, in the 1950s, introduced usto the deposition of detached skulls, especially those with modelledfacial features. As well as the positive evidence of the recovered andcurated skulls, there were the bodies that had been buried in shallowpits among the houses, and from which the skulls were absent. There isnow a list of sites in the Levant that have produced modelled skulls(reviewed recently in Stordeur & Khawam 2007). Variants of thepractice of recovering, curating, modelling and caching or redepositingskulls have been evidenced across south-east Turkey and northern Iraq,and at later Neolithic settlements in central Anatolia. [FIGURE 4 OMITTED] Ian Kuijt has drawn attention to the cycles of ceremony that liebehind the burials and skulls found in settlements in the southernLevant (Kuijt 2000a, 2008). The first cycle took place over the hours ordays following a death. A second cycle followed months or years later,when a grave was opened in order to retrieve the skull. After a periodof accumulation and curation, in a third cycle, groups of skulls werefinally committed to the ground, often beneath the floors of the livingsettlement. Archaeologists have tried to group these practices of burial, withthe later retrieval and curation of the skull, in a straitjacket conceptcalled 'skull cult'. Recent excavations have forcefullydemonstrated that each community followed some very general principlesthat seem to be common over a wide area, but interpreted them and putthem into practice using their own way of doing things. Usually, bodiesare found buried in a contracted position in a shallow oval pit, but atTell Halula, uniquely, bodies were buried in narrow cylindrical pits,having been wrapped in cloth bindings seated with knees drawn up; theburials were clustered in the 'front' part of the living room,close to the doorway, and their locations were marked by'plugs' in the plaster floors (Guerrero et al. 2009). [FIGURE 5 OMITTED] At Tell Aswad, near Damascus, bodies were not placed in pits, butwere laid at ground level both inside and against the outside walls ofhouses, or concealed under small earthen mounds on the house floor(Stordeur & Khawam 2009). But after several centuries, practiceschanged abruptly, and wide hollows at the edge of the settlement weredesignated for burials. Each of the burial areas was initiated with thedeposition of a clutch of human skulls, most of them with delicatelymodelled facial features (Figure 6; Stordeur & Khawam 2006, 2007).Following the inauguration of the mortuary area, a variety of burialstook place, some primary, others secondary, some single, othersmultiple. [FIGURE 6 OMITTED] What we are seeing, I believe, is an example of what Richard Wilkhas called 'common difference'. Wilk was referring to apractice or an idea that has been shared, but which is worked outdifferently within the cultural context and circumstances of particularcommunities (Wilk 2004, with thanks to Ian Kuijt (2008) for bringing theidea to my notice). Building super-networks What I have pointed to are some of the great efforts of labour andimagination that were required to build (literally) and maintain theseearliest large, permanently co-resident communities. It is easy for us,who were born and brought up in modern communities, to underestimate howwe formed our sense of community and belonging (though it is becoming amatter for confused and tortured debate, at least within Britain). Theanthropologist Anthony Cohen has given us a slim and elegant text on thesymbolic construction of community (Cohen 1985). This is a bottom-upview of how individuals use all sorts of abstract ideas, practices andthings of symbolic value in the recognition of their community withothers, rather than a top-down analysis of social organisation bycategories such as band, tribe or chiefdom. Lesley Aiello and Robin Dunbar have extrapolated from therelationship between group size and cortex of the brain among primatesto the scale and complexity of social relations among hominins (Aiello& Dunbar 1993; Dunbar 1997, 1998). They conclude that the brain ofHomo sapiens theoretically limits our ability to keep mental control ofthe relations among individuals to around 120-150 individuals; it isclear that modern humans have found ways to circumvent that limit. Clive Gamble used social network analysis to explore how the UpperPalaeolithic in Europe is different from the Middle Palaeolithic: Homosapiens had begun to use materials such as marine shells andhigh-quality flint in long-distance exchanges in the maintenance ofextended networks (Gamble 1998, 1999). But those networks still numberedaround one or two hundred individuals. For at least half of itsexistence Homo sapiens has been engaged in making signs, sharingsymbols, evolving full modern language and other systems of symbolicrepresentation. Humans were wearing pierced marine shells and paintingand carving with red ochre before 100 000 years ago. The art of theUpper Palaeolithic represents a major development in cognitive skill andcultural faculty. The construction of whole systems of symbolicrepresentation, in the form of settlement form and monumentalarchitecture marked with images and accommodating ceremonies, asdescribed above, begins only around the end of the Epipalaeolithic andbeginning of the Neolithic in parts of south-west Asia (cf. Watkins2004, 2005, 2006). But we should go further. I have recently argued (Watkins 2008)that the exchange of goods and materials (obsidian, marine shells,greenstone, black basalt, malachite and more) among communities atlocal, regional and supra-regional levels should be understood inassociation with the sharing of symbols and symbolic behaviour, such asintramural burial, skull retrieval and curation. These are evidence ofnested networks, local (within communities, among local communities),regional and supra-regional. The principles are in some ways similar toRenfrew's notion of peer polity interaction spheres (Renfrew 1986),which was framed with networks among the elites in 'early statemodules' in mind. Over time, from the later Epipalaeolithic throughthe early aceramic Neolithic, we can see these networks growing inintensity and expanding in scale, constituting an entirely new culturalphenomenon that matches in its originality and importance, the formationand maintenance of large, permanently co-resident communities. In order to build and sustain communities of many hundreds or evenseveral thousands of persons, various kinds of symbolising artefacts andpractices needed to be shared as the outward and visible signs of theabstract concepts of household, neighbourhood and social memory. Thephilosopher John Searle has called these abstracts, such as money ormarriage, 'institutional facts' (Searle 1995). But they needsymbolic material correlates. Along with Renfrew (1998), I believe thatMerlin Donald's description of systems of external symbolicstorage' is entirely persuasive (Donald 1991,2001), whether interms of written language or symbolic material culture. Donald tells us,for example, that "These elaborate devices serve an importantcognitive engineering function: they set up states in the individualmind that cannot otherwise be attained' (Donald 1998: 15). Thesewere the new capacities that made possible the symbolic cohesion of thenew, large, permanently co-resident communities. With these new cognitive and cultural faculties, people began toconstruct and inhabit dramatic built environments. Within these richcultural environments, they could maintain social memory through'commemorative ceremonies' and 'bodily acts'(Connerton 1989), in domestic rituals, in community buildings, inceremonies with the bodies and heads of the dead, affirming a communalidentity of place. These were the first 'imaginedcommunities', but, unlike modern nations, they could be formed andmaintained without social hierarchies of power. Conclusion Braidwood's hunch that the revolution could not have happenedearlier because 'culture was not ready' was right. When itcame, cognitive and cultural revolution made possible the symbolicconstruction of the first, large, permanent communities; this unleashedpopulation growth that led in turn to the adoption of farming practices.From that alliance came the rapid spread of the new imagined societies,fed by mixed farming economies; and following that came the emergence ofascribed status, social hierarchies and inequalities of power. But thoseare other stories. Received: 2 November 2009; Accepted: 31 December 2009; Revised: 11February 2010 References AIELLO, L. & R. DUNBAR. 1993. Neocortex size, group size andthe evolution of language. Current Anthropology 36: 184-93. ALLABY, R.G., D.Q. FULLER & T.A. BROWN. 2008. 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Vegetation Historyand Archaeobotany 17(3): 313-25. Trevor Watkins, School of History, Classics and Archaeology,University of Edinburgh, The Old High School, Infirmary Street,Edinburgh EH1 1LT, UK (Email: trevor.watkins@ed.ac.uk)Table 1. Periods as referred to in the text, with approximate dates. Approximate dates inPeriods absolute years agoUpper Palaeolithic 45 000-25 000 BCEarly Epipalaeolithic 23 000-15 000 BCMiddle Epipalaeolithic 15 000-13 000 BCLate Epipalaeolithic 13 000-10 200 BCEarly aceramic Neolithic 10 200-8800 BCLate aceramic Neolithic 8800-6900 BCPeriods Cultural labels in the LevantUpper PalaeolithicEarly Epipalaeolithic KerbaranMiddle Epipalaeolithic Geometric KebaranLate Epipalaeolithic NatufianEarly aceramic Neolithic PPNA (= Pre-Pottery Neolithic A)Late aceramic Neolithic Early, Middle, Late & Final PPNB