The time, place, and reasons for thejrst domestication of cereals and legumes in the Near East can now be securely identzjed using combined evidence from paleoenvironmental studies, models of ecosystem dynamics, and regional archeology. The heartland of domestication was the Jordan Val19 and surrounding region in the Southern Levant. Approximately 10,000 years ago, people began planting crops where the wild ancestral species had proliferated over two millenia. Impetus for domestication camejom the synergistic effects of climatic change, anthropogenic environmental change, technological change, and social innovation. A t the end of the Pleistocene, after a long period of climatic instabilio, a mediterranean climate more strongly seasonal than any today emerged with hyper-arid summers that selected f o r annual species of cereals and legumes. This occurred long after people had invented tools suitable for grinding hard seeds, but the new, lengthy dry season and consequent need to use storedfoods encouraged sedentism among human groups who subsequently depleted their immediate environments of wild resources. These preconditions facilitated the development of agriculture. The scenario developed here is speczjic to the Near East, for such case studies of spec@ factors in independent regions of domestication are essential before we attempt to explain cases all over the world with reference to global causes. ESPITE 50 YEARS OF ARCHEOLOGICAL ATTENTION to the earliest village sites and D traces of domesticated plants and animals in the Near East, doubts remain about whether the origins of agriculture (a) constituted a rapid shift or slow change (Bar-Yosef and Kislev 1989; Moore 1982; Perrot 1968), (b) lie earlier in time than heretofore documented (Braidwood and Braidwood 1986; Garrod 1957;Moore 1982Moore , 1985 Moore , 1989, (c) occurred across the broad arc of the Fertile Crescent (Braidwood and Howe 1960; Flannery 1969; Maisels 1987;Moore 1982 Moore , 1989, or (d) occurred in regions as yet little explored (Hole 1984). Now for the first time, patterns of data in the context of ecological models allow us to place the origins of domestication in a specific geographic region and in a time frame of no more than a few hundred radiocarbon years. The location of plant domestication was the Southern Levant, specifically around the margins of evaporating lakes in the Jordan Valley.' The time of this event was the end of the Natufian cultural period, around 10,000 years ago.Several lines of evidence support these assertions. Most prehistorians agree that there had to be opportunity (that is, sufficient populations of the prerequisite plants), technology to use the plants effectively, a social organization that could cope with "delayed return" economies (Hole 1984), and need before people would alter their habits of acquiring food. Available evidence and theories indicate that these conditions were simultaneously present in the Jordan River basin earlier during the early Holocene, while the absence of any one of these critical ...
Dans une haute région désertique hyper-aride de la péninsule arabe, le projet « RASA » a conduit dans le Wadi Sana, une prospection systématique permettant de reconnaître tout vestige archéologique. Il fut fait appel aux méthodes de la géologie et de la paléoécologie pour développer et enregistrer la séquence Holocène aussi bien des paléo-environnements que des activités humaines des hautes terres du Yémen Sud. La phase humide reconnue au début de l 'Holocène (ca. 10 000-6 000 cal. BP) témoigne d'une végétation plus dense, d'une population plus importante et d'une meilleure exploitation des terres qu 'à l'Holocène récent. Les chasseurs-cueilleurs du début de l 'Holocène ont fait appel à des stratégies qui leur permettent de développer leurs ressources telles que les brûlis et le contrôle des inondations. De telles stratégies permirent de passer à l'élevage et à l'agriculture lorsque, à l 'Holocène moyen, on constate des changements de l 'environnement. Nos recherches suggèrent que dans la péninsule arabique, les pratiques de l 'agriculture purent commencer dès le Ve millénaire ВС, très probablement dans des conditions environnementales fort différentes de celles d'aujourd'hui. Nous laissons ouvertes les questions relatives à la nature des cultures et, par ailleurs, au devenir des premiers agriculteurs lorsque l'environnement devint aride.
At the cusp of food production, Near Eastern societies adopted new territorial practices, including archaeologically visible sedentism and nonsedentary social defenses more challenging to identify archaeologically. New archaeological and paleoenvironmental evidence for Arabia's earliest‐known sacrifices points to territorial maintenance in arid highland southern Yemen. Here sedentism was not an option prior to agriculture. Seasonally mobile pastoralists developed alternate practices to reify cohesive identities, maintain alliances, and defend territories. Archaeological and paleoenvironmental evidence implies cattle sacrifices were commemorated with a ring of more than 42 cattle skulls and a stone platform buried by 6,400‐year‐old floodplain sediments. Associated with numerous hearths, these cattle rites suggest feasting by a large gathering, with important sociopolitical ramifications for territories. A GIS analysis of the early Holocene landscape indicates constrained pasturage supporting small resident human populations. Cattle sacrifice in southern Arabia suggests a model of mid‐Holocene Neolithic territorial pastoralism under environmental and cultural conditions that made sedentism unsustainable. [prehistory, Arabia, sacrifice, territoriality, Neolithic]
This paper provides a new, interpretive gazetteer and chronology of Hadramawt’s highland monuments based on results from archaeological survey and test excavations by the RASA‐AHSD (Roots of Agriculture in southern Arabia‐Arabian Human Social Dynamics) Project. With the exception of a few incidental sightings and an unpublished pipeline survey, the prehistoric record of southern Yemen’s highland plateau has been largely unknown. There are few settlements, so that understanding human landscape history must begin with the numerous small‐scale stone monuments left by mobile people. With examples representing monuments from the fifth, fourth, third and first millennia BC, the corpus of small excavations and radiocarbon dates reported here provides the first guide to the monument types of South Arabian highlands. Monument building began under more moist conditions and appears to have commemorated animal sacrifices long before commemorating mortuary rites and interment. There appears to be a temporal break of 1000 years before the widespread and varied practices of Bronze Age tomb construction, which lasted through the third millennium BC. After another break in monument construction, tombs were reused in the first millennium BC, sometimes with successive ritual visits. The data presented offer new material for the interpretation of the lives and activities of prehistoric pastoralists throughout the Holocene.
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