The Hunter-Gatherer Background in the Levant, 19,000 to 9500 ac (Figure 3.3)
The archaeological course toward domestication in the Levant can be traced from around 19,000 BC, at the peak of the last glaciation. At that time, people camped at a locality called Ohalo II, on the shoreline of the Sea of Galilee, were exploiting local wild stands of emmer, barley, pistachio, grape, and olive (Nadel and Herschkovitz 1991; Herschkovitz et al. 1995; Nadel and Werker 1999). The Sea of Galilee formed the northern part of the much larger Pleistocene Lake Lisan, which filled the Jordan Valley for a continuous 220 kilometers. The Ohalo II camp covered 1,500 square meters, a surprisingly large area for a site of this period. The inhabitants constructed at least three oval pole and thatch huts, stored their food supplies in pits, buried their dead in flexed postures in shallow pits covered by large stones (like the Natufians much later), and utilized a toolkit of Upper Paleolithic blade type, together with basalt bowls and pestles. At this time, available data suggest a very low population density for Southwest Asia, with most regions having a cold climate with perennial shrubby vegetation. Ohalo was an environmental "refuge" zone, possibly a fairly ephemeral one, and cereals would not have flourished outside warm sheltered areas such as this.
After 15,000 Bc, an archaeological complex known as the Geometric Kebaran developed in the southern Levant ("geometric" here refers to the shapes of the characteristic microlithic stone tools). These people lived in caves or small campsites mostly under 300 square meters in area, reaching about 1,000 square meters maximum. They are assumed to have been seasonally mobile and possibly to have moved between winter lowland camps in valleys and summer camps at higher altitudes. They also used stone mortars and pestles, and at Ein Gev III near the Sea of Galilee they built small circular huts with stone foundations. One presumes they harvested wild cereals like their Ohalo predecessors, but, unlike their Natufian successors, they apparently still did not use stone sickles. The Atlas des Sites du Proche Orient (Hours et al. 1994) lists 51 archaeologically investigated locations occupied during the Geometric Kebaran period in the Levant, and only three contemporary locations for all other regions of Southwest Asia. But this may, of course, be telling us more about current foci of archaeological research rather than any absolute patterning.
By 12,500 BC, the Geometric Kebaran microlithic industry was evolving into its Natufian descendant.' In an overall sense, sites increased markedly in number and area during the Natufian; the Atlas des Sites du Proche Orient shows 74 locations of this period for the Levant, and 26 contemporary nonNatufian locations in Anatolia and the Zagros. But numbers are not all, for site areas through the whole Natufian region are estimated to have ranged up to five times larger on average than those of the Geometric Kebaran. This suggests that the human population was increasing rapidly, especially during the early Natufian, before the commencement of the Younger Dryas cold phase (11,000 to 9500 Bc). Belfer-Cohen and Hovers (1992) give a total of 417 excavated Natufian burials as opposed to only three from the preceding Upper Paleolithic - also an apparent indication of increasing human numbers at this time.
Unfortunately, soil conditions in most Natufian sites mean that few plant remains survive, but there are some hints that wild cereals, especially barley, were being exploited, in the drier regions at least. As in the Geometric Kebaran, many sites have basalt mortars and pestles. The early Natufian site of Wadi Hammeh 27 (11,500 Bc) has remains of wild barley, together with bone sickle handles with microlithic stone blade inserts (Edwards 1991). The stone-bladed sickle, indeed, seems to have come into common use in the central Levant
during the Natufian, although as Patricia Anderson (1994) points out, such tools could have been used for cutting reeds as well as cereals. The Natufian-related site of Mureybet IA in northern Syria also has remains of wild barley, einkorn, and lentils at about 10,500 BC (van Zeist 1988).
Newly published observations from the site of Abu Hureyra, near Mureybit on the Middle Euphrates, bring the Natufian (or a close cousin - here perhaps better termed Epipaleolithic) right into the forefront of the debate about early domestication. According to Gordon Hillman and his colleagues (Hillman 1989; Hillman et al. 2001; Moore et al. 2000), the inhabitants of this site were impacted upon quite heavily by the Younger Dryas cold dry phase, after 11,000 BC. This caused a disappearance of woodland and encouraged the inhabitants to harvest wild wheat and rye. The rye, quite surprisingly, shows domesticated characteristics as early 10,700 BC, three grains being dated by AMS radiocarbon. At the same time in the site record there is an appearance of the seeds of weed species known to favor arable land. However, it is likely that the extreme levels of climatic variability made the experiment a relatively shortlived one at Abu Hureyra, because the site was almost abandoned for a millennium immediately after the Younger Dryas. Yet the situation indicates that cereal domestication was perhaps imminent in many terminal Pleistocene contexts in Southwestern Asia.
Full and continuing domestication as a basis of village life was not to occur at Abu Hureyra for another two thousand years or so, when the site was reoccupied at about 8500 BC, after an apparent abandonment. The arrival of domesticated cereals can clearly be seen in the paleobotanical record from the site, as well as from the population estimates offered by the excavators. In the Epipaleolithic Phase (Abu Hureyra 1) the population was perhaps 100 to 200 people, living in an apparently sedentary small village mainly by hunting and gathering, plus a minor amount of rye cultivation. In the Neolithic phase (Abu Hureyra 2) at about 8000 BC, by which time domesticated crops were absolutely dominant in the economy, the population had risen dramatically to between 4,000 and 6,000 people (see Figure 3.4).
The Natufian also reveals some intriguing cultural developments in the direction of increasing "social complexity." Some sites have large cemeteries - about 60 burials, for instance, in the cave of Mugharet-el-Wad and 50 in Nahal Oren, both in Israel. Some settlements were quite large; the early Natufian site
of Ain Mallaha, on the ancient shoreline of Lake Huleh in northern Israel, covered about 2000 square meters and is estimated to have contained up to 12 circular huts with sunken stone-lined floors at any one time. Ain Mallaha and Abu Hureyra both produced small amounts of imported Anatolian obsidian. All such indications, not to mention the bone-carving art, the edge-ground axes, and the sickle blades, make the Natufian and its Middle Euphrates cousins look something akin to an "affluent forager" expression, complete with a significant degree of settlement sedentism, some degree of social differentiation, and a high population density. What better background for a trajectory toward planting and cultivation, given the instability of such a forager adaptation in the risky and changeable environment imposed on the Levant by the Younger Dryas? The choice for village-dwelling plant collectors, faced by shrinking supplies in circumstances of increasing cold and dryness, would have been either to fall back on increasing nomadism and population shrinkage, or to move toward deliberate planting and cultivation of food supplies and further population growth. The post-Natufian archaeological record leaves no doubt as to which option was the more successful.
There is a strong attraction in this viewpoint of cultural change driven by a Younger Dryas engine of stress, a viewpoint favored by many current authorities,' albeit recently challenged by Tchernov (1997) and Cauvin (2000). However, it should be pointed out that the actual archaeological evidence for Natufian sedentism (based on settlement complexity, presence of commensal animals, etc.) is by no means perfect, and neither is that for social differentiation.9 Neither, as we will see later, is there any precise correlation, outside the single example of the few grains of morphologically domesticated rye at Abu Hureyra, between the Younger Dryas and the widespread appearance of domesticated plants in the archaeological record. The latter, on present indications, only appeared in quantity perhaps 500-1,000 years after the Younger Dryas and the Natufian had both ended. So if the Younger Dryas was a trigger, the gun took quite a while to go off.
The Pre-Pottery Neolithic and the Increasing
Dominance of
Domesticated Crops
The initial millennium after the Natufian in the Levant was termed by Kathleen Kenyon the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A (PPNA, ca. 9500 to 8500 Bc), in her reports on the 1950s excavations in Jericho. Not surprisingly, the PPNA was followed in Kenyon's terminology by the PPNB (ca. 8500-7000 Bc) (Figure 3.3). Then followed a period of agricultural and environmental decline in the central Levant, currently termed the PPNC, although Kenyon herself did not use this term since it reflects the results of more recent research. Apart from the rather ephemeral rye at Abu Hureyra, domesticated cereals and legumes first appeared in the later part of the PPNA or early PPNB, after 9000 Bc (Garrard 1999; Colledge 2001).
There are a number of cultural aspects which either first appeared or became more emphasized in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic as a whole, emphasizing that society was changing from a hunter-gatherer to an agriculturalist mode. Such aspects include:
Very major increases in maximum settlement sizes, with some PPNA settlements reaching 3 hectares and some late PPNB ones reaching an almost-urban 16 hectares (Figure 3.4), sizes which leave no doubt that the settlements were permanently occupied by essentially food-producing populations by the end of the PPNA (Bar-Yosef and Belfer-Cohen 1991; Kuijt 1994, 2000a).
2. Architectural innovations, expressed in the common use of sun-dried mud bricks, use of lime plaster on walls and floors, and a gradual shift from the prevailing Natufian and PPNA circular house forms into the PPNB subdivided rectilinear forms which have dominated Old World domestic architecture ever since (Flannery 1972).
3.The appearance of "monuments" and communal structures in many of the larger sites, for instance the PPNA round tower and walls at Jericho, and many other examples of shrine-like buildings excavated recently in sites from southern Jordan to southeastern Anatolia. Associated with some of these are monumental stone carvings, the most celebrated being the T- shaped pillars carved with relief animals and humans from the sites ofGobekli Tepe and Nevali Cori in southeastern Anatolia.
4.Widespread modeled clay figurines of human females (the famed and muchdiscussed "Mother Goddesses"), often emphasizing aspects of sexuality and fertility, together with the architectural display of cattle skulls, as in Jerf el Ahmar and Mureybet in Syria, ca. 9000-8500 BC, and later in the shrines of catalhoyiik in Anatolia. Jacques Cauvin has recently identified this "revolution of symbols" as one of the major underlying driving forces behind the evolution of the Southwest Asian Neolithic.
5.The removal of the skulls from human burials and apparent veneration of them as ancestors by placing them inside houses, even in the PPNB modeling their faces in clay with painted features and shell eyes (Kuijt 1996; Garfinkel 1994). Associated with this interesting phenomenon there appear, in the PPNB especially, large communal burial facilities, with bones placed either in pits or in constructed charnel houses. Flexed headless burials were commonly placed under house floors.
6.An early decline in the frequency of microliths, and their replacement by fully polished axes and some widespread and very uniform categories of sickles and "projectile points" or awls made on large blades (Figure 3.5).
7.A trend, according to examination of use-wear and gloss on sickle-blade edges, toward increased harvesting of ripe grain during the course of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic (Unger-Hamilton 1989, 1991; Quintero et al. 1997). Successful harvesting of large quantities of ripe grain, using flint sickles, could only occur if the grain had already developed a non-shattering habit through domestication.
Most importantly, the economic record of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic period as a whole indicates increasing reliance on domesticated crops, matched by an
appearance of the first domesticated animals, especially sheep and goats. By soon after 7000 Bc we witness a common and widespread use of pottery, an item of great significance in allowing the preparation of soft cereal-based foods such as gruels and porridges - foods which seem rather minor to us today but which, for a population consuming mainly gritty bread beforehand, could have opened a door toward early weaning, more rapid population growth, and much less toothache (Molleson 1994; de Moulins 1997).10 Pottery-making also required an appreciation of pyrotechnics, and this undoubtedly led eventually to the discovery of metallurgy. PPN sites do not have smelted metal, but they often contain small items of hammered copper such as beads and awls, a sure sign that technological innovation was well on its way.
Of course, not all these changes appeared de novo in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic. Female figurines played a profound role in Upper Paleolithic art in Eurasia, and skull removal is also known from the Natufian. But head- (or skull-) veneration certainly indicates an increasing interest in "ancestors," as does communal burial. The ethnographic record leaves no doubt that ancestors often correlate with the existence of lineages. In turn, lineages often correlate with concepts of ownership of defined pieces of food-producing land - the "corporate land-holding descent group" has long been a major attraction for anthropological research. Many hunters and gatherers, and cultivators who live at low population densities where land is a free good, have bilateral social structures without clearly defined lineages. But when populations become more packed, when access to land becomes worthy of some formal recognition, when "ownership" has to be demonstrated by something tangible, then we see the existence of rights of access to land expressed through genealogy or descent. And a genealogy requires an ancestor, from whom descent needs to be traceable to the satisfaction of one's peers (perhaps by having the skull of such a person on display!).
Figure 3.5 Stone tools of the PPNA and PPNB phases from Jerf el Ahmar and Tell Halula, Middle Euphrates. 1) Helwan point; 2) Jerf el-Ahmar point; 3 and 4) lustred sickle blades; 5) El-Khiam point; 6) Hagdud truncation; 7) semi-circular scraper; 8) endscraper; 9) awl; 10) piercer; 11) flaked adze of Euphrates Valley type (Erminette de Mureybet). Drawn by Mandy Mottram.
Indeed, the archaeological record reveals that early agriculture in Southwest Asia first appeared in areas where small parcels of fertile and doubtless valuable (and inherited?) land were located close to good water resources. This was the main attraction of those late PPNA sites in the Levant which have the oldest potentially domesticated cereal remains; all were located near springs, lakes, or riverine water sources. Such sites include Jericho, Netiv Hagdud, Gilgal, Tell Aswad, Abu Hureyra, and Mureybet. Early agricultural sites elsewhere, such as Ali Kosh in Khusistan, had similar advantages. Some of these sites were also located outside the regions where wild cereals would have grown naturally, thus requiring purposeful importation and planting by the human populations resident there.
It may be little more than common sense to observe that early cultivation required water, and given rainfall unreliability in the Fertile Crescent the obvious place to grow plants would be close to a reliable water source from which simple "irrigation" techniques (filling an animal skin with water, for instance) could be applied when necessary. For instance, carbon isotope discrimination research suggests that some form of irrigation was practiced at PPNB Tell Halula in Syria (Araus et al. 1999). But the main point, of course, is that such land was relatively scarce and valuable. This in itself could have stimulated a growth in the size of individual settlements such as Jericho with its remarkable perennial spring, for reasons of its access to well-watered farmland. Such growth doubtless stimulated in time a parallel growth in the ranking of the population into those with more and those with less - the roots of institutionalized inequality. But that is another story.
How Did Cereal Domestication Begin in
Southwest Asia?
Experiments by Gordon Hillman and Stuart Davies have revealed that nonshattering genomes in wheat and barley could be selected for very quickly if people consistently sickle-harvested their grain fairly ripe, and replanted it. They suggest (1990:189) that "domestication could be achieved within 20-30 years if the crop is harvested nearripe by sickle-reaping or uprooting, and if it is sown on virgin land every year [with seed] taken from last year's new plots." George Willcox (1999), however, notes that wild and domesticated cereals occurred together for over a millennium before the latter became fully dominant, so it is likely that the domestication process in reality was not quite so single-minded, despite its ultimate ascent to glory.
One key to domestication seems to have been presented to those ancient harvesters who used stone sickles to cut non-domesticated and ripe cereal ears (ripeness is an important feature here). They would have shaken each plant during the cutting process, with the result that grain from those ripe ears with a genetic predisposition to non-shattering would have been collected more successfully than normal freeshattering grain. The latter would have been lost into the ground in fairly large quantities. Uprooting of the plant would have had a similar effect, but beating or shaking of grain into a basket or bag would have been selective in the opposite direction. If the non-shattering grains selected by sickle harvesting or uprooting were later planted, especially in a new plot away from existing wild stands, it is easy to understand how an extremely powerful selective process toward non-shattering forms could have commenced, leading rapidly to the appearance of visibly domesticated plants (Wilke et al. 1972; Heiser 1988).
Yet, the first widespread occurrence of morphologically domesticated cereal remains, as determined from rachis segments and glume structures, only appears in the archaeological record at the end of the PPNA or in the Early PPNB, at about 8500 BC, and several centuries after the end of both the Younger Dryas and the Natufian." The Natufians, it seems, did not domesticate
their cereals on a permanent basis. It is of great interest in this regard that studies of the glossed edges of Natufian sickle blades suggest that people were frequently harvesting moist unripe grain, a practice that would have avoided the shattering problem in order to maximize yields from wild cereals (UngerHamilton 1989, 1991; Anderson 1994). Unripe stalks are also easier to cut than fully ripe ones, although unripe wild grain can be more time-consuming than ripe grain to dehusk if it needs to be dried or roasted beforehand (Wright 1994). However, any Natufian combination of an unripe harvest plus consumption of all the grains harvested, rather than storing some for replanting next season, could never have led to domestication. Something else had to occur to encourage the process.
We may never know exactly how the process finally occurred in such an irreversible way, but three activities would certainly have helped it along. One was surely the adoption of sickle harvesting and thus selection for nonshattering, as noted above. Another would have been the planting of sickleharvested grain in new areas away from wild stands. A third would have been delaying the harvest until the plants were partly or fully ripe, increasing the representation of grains from non-shattering ears.
Thus, Gordon Hillman (2000) has recently suggested that the Epipaleolithic inhabitants of Abu Hureyra at about 11,500 BC, prior to the Younger Dryas and in conditions of relatively high warmth and humidity, chose to harvest by beating wild cereals into baskets. Such would have led to no selection toward domestication. Then, during the Younger Dryas, the shrinkage of wild stands of cereals prompted the inhabitants to plant their wild rye. At the same time, some form of sickling or uprooting method of harvesting must have been adopted, at least by some families. Did they also at some point, perhaps deliberately, begin to cut off ripe ears for storage and replanting and leave any remaining unripe ears for later processing as food? We do not know. But somehow, the result at Abu Hureyra was a development of plump-grained domesticated rye by soon after 11,000 BC, strangely ephemeral at this time and seemingly unconnected directly with the much more massive appearance of domesticated cereals after 8500 BC. Many mysteries remain.
The Archaeological Record in Southwest Asia in
Broader
Perspective
Where did systematic agriculture and associated villages originate? From a small area such as the central or northern Levant followed by expansion, or in several different early-cultivator environments linked by cultural contacts right through the Fertile Crescent, all at much the same time? What were the ultimate consequences of "fullon" Neolithic agriculture, particularly when linked to animal domestication, with truly massive settlement agglomerations eventually attaining up to 16 hectares in extent? We have, in the PPNB in particular, a manifestly unstable combination of powerfully developing human economies in fragile environments. There were consequences at that remote time, just as there are consequences (unpleasant ones) for the similar situation humanity finds itself in today.
To approach the questions asked above we need to examine the distributions of contemporary cultural variation within the Natufian and Pre-Pottery Neolithic cultural complexes in the Levant. We need also to expand the debate into nearby areas, such as Anatolia and western Iran, where related developments occurred.
Firstly, for the Natufian and its contemporaries, the archaeological record reveals a dense cluster of "Classic" Natufian sites in the southern and central Levant, concentrated in the Jordan Valley and the Mediterranean coastal hinterland (Figure 3.1). Related sites such as Mureybit and Abu Hureyra were located on the Middle Euphrates. These sites share sufficient material culture for us to suggest that their inhabitants shared a similar lifestyle, and similar stylistic traditions in their art, burial methods, architecture, and so forth. There are regional differences in the proportions of different classes of stone tools, but these are no more than one would expect given that the Natufian was spread over a range of both wooded and open environments, even into the desert fringes in the south and east. In archaeological terms, the Classic Natufian in