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This is the second in a series of symposia the object of which is to expedite scholarly intercommunication. Robert Braidwood's query was referred to several colleagues for comments which were sent to Braidwood for rejoinder; then the series was edited as a whole. Similar queries in any field of anthropology, or at the margins, are invited, and the author may suggest names of persons whose comments he would value. QUERY by ROBERT J. BRAIDWOOD

INCREASINGLY DURING the past decade or two, archeologists, prehistorians, anthropologists, and practitioners of related disciplines have grappled with the problems involved in deducing population statistics from various types of merely indicative data. The results have seldom been satisfactory even to the authors themselves. The comment in a recent archeology text (Hole and Heizer 1969:306) seems to be typical of the current mood: Probably few kinds of archeological interpretation have more systematically built-in sources of potential error than have estimates of population, yet such figures are commonly given and used for making further inferences. It is safe to say that, because our concert:s in archeology turn more and more toward reconstructing social systems, we shall have to devise methods of obtaining better demographic data. The way to proceed, I suggest, may be to make fuller use of some of the techniques that demographers have devised to analyze populations in other contexts. 1 The content of this paper was first presented as several lectures in an experimental interdisciplinary course, cross-listed in anthropology and geology-mineralogy, organized by Ernest G. Ehlers at Ohio State University. Its purpose was to present techniques derived from several disciplines that are useful in classifying and interpreting archeological data. In preparing the article, I received welcome guidance from colleagues at Ohio State University: Emilio Casetti in the Geography Department and William M. Sumner,

Many indications point toward the hill flanks of the Fertile Crescent in southwestern Asia as the scene of the earliest development of effective food production and a village-farming-community way of life, some 10,000 years ago or less. In its 1959-60 field season, with a staff made up of both cultural and natural historians, the Iranian Prehistoric Project reclaimed further evidence of this important transitional step in human history. This is a short interim report, based entirely on an in-the-field assessment of the materials.

Since the end of World War II, much evidence has accrued of the primary phase of village-farming community life in Southwestern Asia, which began about 7000 B.C. The remains of (usually) several of the positively domesticated animals (dog, sheep, goat, pig) and plants (wheat, barley, legumes such as peas and lentils) assure us that these settlements were based on effective food production, although collected wild foods also remained a significant portion of the human diet. Evidence of a transitional phase (or phases) that must have immediately preceded the primary phase of effective food production has, however, remained very elusive. Part of a breakthrough appears to have been made in the autumn 1970 field campaign at Çaÿonü Tepesi in southeastern Turkey, where the expansion and deepening of earlier exposures has yielded evidence that may span a significant portion of the transition.