Agricultural origins in the Near East: A model for the 1980s

Abstract

A model for the development of agriculture and sedentary life in the Near East was proposed a decade ago which has since won general acceptance. It was based on archaeological and other evidence acquired mainly during the 1960s. The model has become enshrined in the textbooks and remains the basis of discussion among archaeologists interested in the question of agricultural origins in the Near East. Ten more years of research have followed, the results of which suggest that the now traditional picture should be substantially modified. The purpose of this article is to show how this fresh evidence has rendered the old model inadequate and to propose a new one which better fits the evidence we now have. This model, in its turn, indicates some new directions of enquiry for future research on the formation of agricultural societies in the Near East.An earlier generation of archaeologists believed that agriculture was first adopted by groups we now describe as Epipalaeolithic. This was the conclusion of Garrod when she summarized her views on the Natufian in 1957. She believed that the elaborate cultural remains and, in particular, the reaping equipment found on Natufian sites indicated that agriculture had already begun (1957:216). She went on to describe the Natufian as a 'Mesolithic with agriculture ' (1957:226).The hypothesis that the people of the Natufian were the first farmers in the Near East was subsequently challenged by others, in particular Perrot. He interpreted the cultural achievement of the Natufian not as a manifestation of early agriculture but, rather, as a late flowering of a Palaeolithic hunter-gatherer way of life (1968: col. 383). He argued that the environment of sites such as Am Mallaha (Fig. 1) would have been rich in game, lacustrine resources and perhaps even wild cereals. There was nothing in the faunal remains from Mallaha or any other Natufian site to suggest that their inhabitants were other than hunters and gatherers. Their sickles, mortars, pestles and other grinding equipment were probably used to harvest and process wild cereals. For Perrot the inhabitants of Ain Mallaha were intensive gatherers and hunters who maintained a sedentary existence based on the abundance of wild food resources in the vicinity of their site (1968: col. 389).

The Natufian in the Levant

“…Since the mid-19th century it had been well established that about 10,000 years ago agriculture became the main subsistence strategy in Southwestem Asia. Several models were advanced to explain the emergence of farming communities in the "Fertile Crescent," starting with Childe's "propinquity theory," through various ecological-demographic models and different versions of the "climatic trigger" approach (7,16,37,48,61,72,73,74,91), and still the debate goes on.…”

“…Since the early discoveries, sites identified as Natufian have been reported both from the core area (12,49,65,67,78,88) and from regions further away, some within different phytogeographic zones: northem Syria (26,27,60), north and south Lebanon (19), the Jordan Rift Valley (9,33,38), southem Jordan (46,55,56), the Syrian-Arabian Desert (20), and the Negev (43,58,61) (Figure 1). The abundant data accumulated over the years 167 0084-6570/91/1015-0167$02.00 necessitate a reexamination of several assumptions conceming the Natufian that until recently were taken for granted.…”

Migration, adaptation, innovation: The spread of Neolithic harvesting technologies in the Mediterranean

“…At the time Neolithic populations started to spread in the Mediterranean they had already faced important changes in all aspects of society. Whereas the first wave of cultivators spread to Cyprus during the 10 th -9 th millennia BCE [33], the Neolithic expanded further across the Mediterranean Basin between 4,000 and 2,000 years after the emergence of the first cereal cultivation in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A [22,[34][35][36][37][38]. During this long period, harvesting technologies passed through several transformations, concerning both the methods of production of the stone inserts used to form the cutting edge of the harvesting tools [39][40][41][42] and the shape and mode of usage of the harvesting tools themselves [43][44][45][46][47][48].…”

An essay on the ‘emergence of civilization’ in the Aegean world

“…Notwithstanding its isolation, however, the settlement was stable and prosperous (Jacobsen 1976;, and during the Neolithic it expanded beyond the cave on to the small, adjacent coastal plain (Gifford 1983). From the early 7th millennium its subsistence base was agricultural: the site has yielded some of the earliest evidence in Greece for the cultivation of domesticated wheat, barley, and pulses (Hansen 1980), and for the husbandry of sheep and goats (Payne 1975 (Henry 1985;Hopf 1969;Moore 1982), farmed springwatered meadows on the now-submerged coastal plain outside the cave. Other Neolithic sites in the Peloponnese, e.g.…”