SOUTHWEST ASIA: THE

“NEAR EAST”

The “Cradle of Civilization”

Driscoll C A et al. PNAS 2009;106:9971-9978
(years before present, BP)
Anatolia

Zagros Mountains
Levant
(Jarmo)
(Jericho)
V. Gordon Childe’s Neolithic Revolution:
The Oasis Theory (1928, 1936)
• As Pleistocene glaciers melted,
world’s climate became hotter and
drier
• In desert areas, the few well
watered areas became oases
• People, animals, and plants
became more densely
concentrated near oases and
desert streams
• Forced association led to greater
Jericho, Isreal intimacy, even symbiotic
relationships, between humans
and plants/animals, and then
domestication (domestic or “tame”)
 Kathleen Kenyon excavated at Jericho (1952-58)
to test Childe’s Oasis Theory. She discovered
pre-Neolithic occupations (Natufian hunter-gatherers)
and two early Aceramic Neolithic occupations
(Pre-Pottery Neolithic A, or PPNA, and PPNB).
 Aceramic Neolithic tower Ancient Jericho (Tell es-Sultan)

On top of small Natufian occupation, the long-lived Neolithic settlement rivaled

the later Bronze-Age settlement in size (2.5 ha) and had a wall and ditch, like the
later occupations. Early Neolithic occupations lacked ceramics, hence PPNA, PPNB.
 Braidwood’s Hilly Flanks Theory
• Hilly flanks of Zagros Mountains, Iraq: rich natural
habitat for wild grasses (natural habitat zone
hypothesis; Peake-Fleur, 1927)
• Argued that there was little evidence of dramatic post-
Pleistocene desiccation (now known to be an
important factor in Pleistocene-Holocene transition in
the Younger Dryas cooling period)
• Agriculture was logical outcome of cultural
experimentation and elaboration as hunters-gatherers
settled-in in those areas where wild grasses were
present
• Like Childe’s model, assumes agriculture is logical
outcome of humanity seeking to improve its condition
 Robert Braidwood excavated at
Jarmo, Iraq (1948-1955) to test
the “hilly flanks hypothesis”
Jarmo: A Village of Early Farmers
Robert Braidwood in Antiquity Volume 24:189 (1950)
Farming Towns
• Food production and
more sedentary ways of
life resulted in growth in
settlement size and
provided foundation for
numerous cultural
innovations outside of
subsistence
• Domestication and
settled village life were
traditionally seen as
happening more or less
simultaneously, although
more recent research
shows a more
complicated story
Thomas Malthus
• An essay on the principle of population as
it affects the future improvement of
society (1798)

• Population naturally grows until

something dramatic occurs
• Population growth kept in check through
mortality (misery, war, famine, epidemics)
• Neo-Malthusian premise: population
growth is dependent variable, determined
by preceding changes in subsistence
potential
• as population reaches critical threshold,
or “carrying capacity,” population growth
is checked (held in place) by some
cultural or natural factor (contraception,
infanticide, disease, famine)
Neo-Malthusian View: Revolutionary Change
Population growth dependent on technology

Intensive agriculture

Horticulture

Food Foraging
 Ester Boserup
• Made population growth the
independent variable
• Technology will respond when
population growth approaches
critical threshold (carrying capacity)
creating demographic stress
• Agriculture emerges due to
population pressure (demographic
stress) and the need to
technologically increase carrying
capacity

The Conditions of Agricultural Growth: The Economics of

Agrarian Change under Population Pressure (1965)
Carrying capacity

Mathusian = Black
(population = dependent variable)
Boserupian = Red
(population = independent variable)
 Lewis Binford’s (1968) Marginal
Zone Model
• Environmental changes in late Pleistocene encouraged
development of early sedentary villages in areas of rich
resources;
• Inevitable population growth forced some groups to move to
more marginal areas;
• We should expect to find the earliest evidence of agriculture not
in prime areas but in marginal areas where people had to
expand their “diet breadth” – in prime areas existing
technology/diet were adequate;
• Kent Flannery attempted to test this theory at Ali Kosh and later
work by Flannery in Mesoamerica supported Boserup’s idea
(domesticated crops long before sedentism): broad-spectrum
revolution (1969), decreased mobility, increased fertility, and
population growth, and the increased reliance on large-seed
grasses
 Haplotype frequency among geographic regions at multiple loci infer at least two domestications of
barley; one within the Fertile Crescent and a second 1,500–3,000 km farther east. The Fertile
Crescent domestication contributed the majority of diversity in European and American cultivars,
whereas the second domestication contributed most of the diversity in barley from Central Asia to the
Far East. (Morell and Clegg, PNAS, 2/07)
 Netiv Hagdud, Israel

• Very early evidence of domesticated plants (c. 9500-8,500 BC) in

Pre-Pottery Neolithic A (PPNA)
• Hunting gazelle, fish, waterfowl, 50 species of wild plants, especially
wild cereal grasses harvested with sickles (included a semi-tough
rachis, two-row domesticated barley)
• Mud-houses, cereals stored in bins
• Cereal seeds– supplementary food
• during the colder Younger Dryas (12.8-11.6 k) early cultivation :
emerged as environment stress forced people to rely more heavily
on cultivated species. Natufians (late Epipaleolithic, 12,000 to 9,600
BC; 14-11.6 k) shifted to management and early cultivation of
grasses as natural stands depleted
• (Bar-Yosef and Goffer 1997)
 • Early Epipaleolithic (ca.
20,000 – 13,000 BC)
• Late Glacial maximum
• Cluster of small oval (3-4
m) huts; more settled
• Organics survived from
being waterlogged
Ohalo II
• Grinding stones, gazelle,
remains from a diversity
of ecological zones
Netiv Hagdud
Jericho
Small, round, semi-subterranean houses,
lined with grasses
(PNAS, Nadel et al. 2004)
• The beginning of agriculture is one of the most important developments in human
history, with enormous consequences that paved the way for settled life and
complex society.

• Much of the research on the origins of agriculture over the last 40 years has been
guided by Flannery’s (1969, in The Domestication and Exploitation of Plants and
Animals) ‘‘broad spectrum revolution’’ (BSR) hypothesis, which posits that the
transition to farming in southwest Asia entailed a period during which foragers
broadened their resource base to encompass a wide array of foods that were
previously ignored in an attempt to overcome food shortages.

• A collection of >90,000 plant remains, recently recovered from the Stone Age site
Ohalo II (23,000 B.P.), Israel, offers insights into the plant foods of the late Upper
Paleolithic.

• The staple foods of this assemblage were wild grasses, pushing back the dietary
shift to grains some 10,000 years earlier than previously recognized. Besides the
cereals (wild wheat and barley), small-grained grasses made up a large component
of the assemblage, indicating that the BSR in the Levant was even broader than
originally conceived, encompassing what would have been low-ranked plant foods.

• Over the next 15,000 years small-grained grasses were gradually replaced by the
larger-grained cereals (wheats and barley)

• From PNAS, Weiss et al. 2004

 Domestication was a very long-term process that involved changes in
human behaviors and changes in plant and animal communities, as well as climate

• Wheat and barley refined into cereals 23,000 years ago, suggesting that humans
were processing grains long before hunter-gatherer societies developed agriculture.
Earliest known oven, evidence of baking.
• Routine processing of a selected group of wild cereals, combined with effective
methods of cooking ground seeds, were practiced at least 12,000 years before their
domestication in southwest Asia.

Piperno et al. (2004), Nature

 Natufian
Eynan (Ain Mellaha),
Israel
12,000- 9,600 BC
Earliest “true village” in
the world
- Long-term settlement
- Over 70 structures
- Population estimated 300

Wild Barley and Almonds

Found in Hearths
Wild Cereals - Important
Resource
 Abu Hureyra, Syria
• Small village (11,000-9,600 BC),
focused on hunted and gathered foods
in this marginal location (situated in
transition area between ecological
zones). Living in small, round, semi-
subterranean houses
• Clear evidence of fairly intensive
cultivation of cereal grains, notably
rye, which was soon domesticated
(earliest domesticated species, by
9,600 BC, at end of Younger Dryas
cold phase)
• At this time hunted gazelles, wild
cattle, pigs, goats, and other species
• Abandoned and later reoccupied by
Neolithic (PPNA) group and grew to
large community (>1,000) living in
rectangular, mud-brick structures with
storage compartments and upper story
living areas
• By Neolithic times, ca. 7500-6500 BC,
gazelles depleted and domesticated
sheep were dominant

9500-9000 BC
• New evidence from the site of Abu Hureyra suggests that systematic cultivation
of cereals in fact started well before the end of the Pleistocene by at least 13000
years ago [11,000 BC], and that rye was among the first crops. The evidence
also indicates that hunter-gatherers at Abu Hureyra first started cultivating crops
in response to a steep decline in wild plants that had served as staple foods for
at least the preceding four centuries.

• The decline in these wild staples is attributable to a sudden, dry, cold, climatic
reversal (Younger Dryas). At Abu Hureyra, therefore, it appears that the primary
trigger for the occupants to start cultivating caloric staples was climate change. It
is these beginnings of cultivation in the late Pleistocene that gave rise to the
integrated grain-livestock Neolithic farming systems of the early Holocene.

• “What they did was to take seed of the wild cereals from higher areas to the
West, and sowed it close to Abu Hureyra in areas such as breaks in slope,
where soil moisture was greatly enhanced naturally.”

• “Wild stands of these cereals could not have continued to grow unaided in such
locations because they would have been out-competed by dryland scrub.
Therefore, these first cultivators had to clear the competing vegetation.”

• Hillman et al. The Holocene, Vol. 11, No. 4, 383-393 (2001).

 Abu Hureya

Aceramic Neolithic Settlement

 Jerf el Ahmar, Syria
• (9600-8800 BC), filling gap
at Abu Hureyra (PPNA),
with wild game and cereals
• Houses of diverse plans,
core of small rectangular
houses, around large
circular communal structure
(storage), with small round
mud-brick structures at
edges
• Later circular communal
structure for ritual/public
functions (?)
Implications of Food Production
• Increased carrying capacity, Greater number of people can be supported
on given unit of land
• Requires more intensive land use, which, in most cases, is cost-deficient
(I.e., higher cost-benefit ratio)
• Sedentary settlement is a must for intensive agriculture (delayed return
on labor);
• Accumulation of material culture and infrastructure
• Decreased mobility does seem to be linked with increased population
growth - increased fertility and capacity for child rearing
• Increased potential for infectious disease
• Decline in overall health; Nutritional deficiencies from diminished diversity
in diet; work related pathologies
• Less free time, at least for producers
• Increase in social complexity, emergence of segmentary groups in larger
communities (lineages/clans), and, later, more hierarchical groups, class
of non-producers, greater differences in wealth
• Trade, interaction, diffusion, and migration
Zeder (2008) PNAS, years before present
 Çayönü

Çatalhöyük

Fertile Crescent

Expansion of Near East

Farming Complex
Zeder (2008), PNAS, years before present (BP)

Red = Colonist groups

Blue = Integration of colonists and indigenous groups
Green = Diffusion
 Göbekli Tepe, SE Turkey
Religious Center Before Agriculture

- 9000-8000 BC
- 300 m diameter mound, 15 m high
- Served as a central place, with no traces
of domestic buildings or village life
-Semi-subterranean circular structure with
T-shaped stone monuments (five mapped,
20 more based on geophysical survey)
 Çatalhöyük, Turkey
• Great mound (13 ha, 32 acres), rebuilt many times
between ca. 7,300-6,200 BC, several thousand
people, tightly packed houses
• agglomerated settlement of connected
rectangular-roomed houses with flat roofs and
room entrances
• remarkable for its artistic tradition and trade,
including carefully constructed shrines with
painted walls and sophisticated figurine and
plastic art
• Prospered through trade – obsidian, shell,
turquoise, jadite, other exotics –
Çatalhöyük, southern Turkey (Anatolia), 7300-6200 BC
13 ha (32 acres) and over 21 m of
stratified occupation debris;
Aggregated houses divided into
family living compartments
 Sub-floor burials in houses
(some with none, some with many)
We return to SW
Asia later, with
the rise of state Next, the rise
civilizations of farming in the
East Asia