Israel and Jordan rates as a fairly genuine "culture" (Bar-Yosef 1998b). Ofer Bar-Yosef and Anna Belfer-Cohen (1992:39) regard "the emergence of the Natufian from a background of Epi-Paleolithic hunter-gatherers as a revolutionary event which took place in a geographical, well-delineated Levantine `homeland'."

Contemporary sites of this period in Anatolia and Iran are not classifiable as Natufian in terms of microlithic technology, indeed those in Iran are separately classified as Zarzian in lithic terms. Few of these Anatolian or Iranian sites have yielded evidence for cereal or legume exploitation, and at present there is little evidence that their inhabitants were involved directly in the origins of agriculture.

The Pre-Pottery Neolithic A (ca. 9500 to 8500 Bc)

In the PPNA we find a wider spread of cultural relationships than occurred in the Natufian. Expansion occurred into northern Iraq and Anatolia, but it is very difficult to determine if this expansion originated in one region or if it developed contemporaneously over a much larger area.'Z The available C14 dates, with their inherent error ranges, overlap greatly in the 10,000 to 9000 BC time period, and there is also a radiocarbon calibration "plateau" in this time span which makes chronological precision currently impossible. But, however the PPNA evolved, it did so quickly.

The extent of the PPNA, as defined by the varying presences of certain marker stone tools (Figure 3.5) such as "projectile points" (El Khiam, Salibiya, Helwan, and Jordan valley variants), the small "Hagdud truncations," ground stone axes, and unretouched sickle blades, is considerably greater than that of the Natufian. It incorporates sites such as Mureybet, Abu Hureyra, and Jerf el Ahmar in northern Syria, and, with less certainty, Qermez Dere in northern Iraq." Jerf el Ahmar (9600 to 8500 Bc) has yielded some of the most interesting architecture recovered from the PPNA, comprising a sunken-floored circular community house surrounded by both circular and rectangular buildings. Circular houses, lime plastered floors, headless burials, female figurines, flint sickles, querns and hand stones, central Turkish obsidian, ground stone axes, notched projectile points, and a Natufian-derived flint industry all combine

within the PPNA to produce a fairly tight unity, albeit with minor differences in expression if one compares sites as far apart as Jericho and Mureybet.

But where do the sites and complexes of Anatolia and the Zagros fit when compared to the PPNA pattern? The northern Iraqi site of Nemrik 9 (Kozlowski 1992, 1994) has many Levantine PPNA features (circular houses of cigarshaped bricks, El Khiam points, for instance), but on the other hand it has aspects of lithic and ground stone technology claimed to relate to the Zarzian of the Zagros and to Hallan semi in eastern Anatolia. Interestingly, the presence of embedded projectile points in some Nemrik 9 burials suggests that ethnic coexistence in this region left something to be desired - perhaps this site lay in or close to a border zone between Levantine and Zagros spheres of influence. Sites located in the Zagros foothills in northeastern Iraq and western Iran at this time, such as M'lefaat, Karim Shahir, Zawi Chemi, Asiab, and Ganj Dareh level E, still remain poorly understood, but there seems to be unanimous agreement that they cannot be incorporated within the Levantine PPNA. Neither do any of these sites have unequivocal evidence for domesticated plants or animals during the PPNA or early PPNB time span. Current indications are that agriculture was introduced into these Zagros regions from the Levant (Hole 1998; Dollfus 1989; Kozlowski 1999).

It is uncertain if the same conclusion applies to southeastern Anatolia since einkorn might have been domesticated in this region, as discussed above. But during PPNA times, positive Levantine cultural links are few. Presumedsedentary circular house settlements are reported from Hallan semi (ca. 10,000 Bc) and the basal level of cayonu (both in the Upper Tigris basin), in neither instance with positive evidence for agriculture (the former site has no cereal remains at all). Recent reports suggest that Hallan semi might have witnessed management of pigs during the Younger Dryas, contemporary with the later Natufian and the experiments in rye domestication at Abu Hureyra. If this conclusion is substantiated it could alter our perspectives on the course of animal domestication, at least in regions around the peripheries of the Levant.14

My inclination from present evidence is to regard the PPNA, with Susan Colledge et al. (2004), as a marker of the origins of agricultural communities within the Levant. There is no strong evidence to extend it beyond the boundaries shown in Figure 3.1. This implies that the contemporary sites in Iran and Anatolia were mainly "complex forager" settlements, possibly with some

animal management,15 continuing alongside the PPNA with a lifestyle similar to that of the Natufian. The inhabitants of some of these sites might well have been harvesting wild cereals, but with the possible exception of einkorn there is no good evidence that they domesticated these cereals independently. As suggested by Jacques Cauvin, the full incorporation of the Turkish and Iranian wild cereal regions into the agricultural lifestyle seems to have occurred as a result of later PPNB expansion, again from a heartland located somewhere in the Levant.

The Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (ca. 8500 to 7000 Bc)

We need first to bear in mind an important observation. The Southwest Asian environment is a fragile one, particularly when assaulted by human populations intent on population growth, woodland clearance, soil tillage, animal pasturing, and many other activities which can, in combination, lead toward land degradation, vegetation loss, salinization, soil erosion, and general resource decline.16 Southwest Asian PPN sites were rarely occupied continuously into historical times; even the largest such as Jericho and Abu Hureyra were abandoned. A major phase of environmental decline is attested for the later phases of the PPN in the Levant, fueled by both human activity and by a climatic trend toward aridity, and to this we return in due course. Common sense and history dictate that such episodes would always have given an impetus for a human population to seek new land. The alternative is intensification, or "agricultural involution" in the terminology of Clifford Geertz (1963), a course of action obviously taken many times in world history by civilizations and small-scale cultivators alike. But not all societies will automatically seek to intensify production locally to feed a growing population or avoid a resources shortfall, particularly if new land, previously undamaged by heavy-handed cultivators, is available within reach. This observation brings us to the PPNB and its expansive history.

Brian Hayden (1995) estimates that the PPNB population in the Levant was 16 times that of the Natufian, yet the actual number of reported sites is much fewer than during the Natufian. This is because many PPNB sites are now virtually towns - some site areas cover up to 16 hectares (Figure 3.4), or about four times the size of the largest PPNA sites. Ian Kuijt (2000a) notes a 50-times increase in the sizes of the largest sites from late Natufian to late PPNB, over a period of about 2,500 years. Two-storey houses are attested from a number of PPNB sites in Jordan (Ain Ghazal, Basta, Baja), with stone walls in Baja surviving to a remarkable height of over 4 meters (Gebel and Hermanson 1999). Some of the smaller sites were also fortified, at least in part, like late PPNB Tell Magzaliyah in northern Iraq (Bader 1993). Large town-like settlements, of course, mean that the inhabitants can afford to be settlement-endogamous if they wish - mates are not hard to find when a population of several thousand

people live cheek by jowl. People can also be forced into defensive postures by high population densities and environmental instability, and this can lead to an efflorescence of tribalism and ethnicity. Thus we have two opposing trends in the PPNB, as in all successful Neolithic cultures - one toward expansion, the other toward regional differentiation. It is essential to remember this, otherwise we are forced toward choosing between two ridiculous polar hypotheses, one seeing the PPNB as totally monolithic, the other seeing it as a coincidental appearance of independently generated traits in many different areas. It was neither.

Like the PPNA, the PPNB of "classical" form existed only in the Levant. But the signs of an extension of some of its basic elements across larger parts of Southwest Asia are very compelling, especially in the typical late PPNB agglutinative rectangular house architecture and the powerful mixed farming economy, improved by the addition of hexaploid bread wheat. Certainly by the end of the PPNB, and probably well before, the full complement of major domestic animals - goat, sheep, cattle, and pig - had been added to the domesticated repertoire as wild species declined in numbers owing to intensive hunting (Legge and Rowley-Conwy 1987, 2000).

In terms of extent, the classic PPNB of the middle and late phases covers a larger area than the PPNA, probably much larger if one allows for future discoveries in the unsurveyed regions in Syria and Anatolia between the main distributions shown in Figure 3.1. It spread throughout the Levant, described as one cultural sphere" for the PPNB by Bar-Yosef and Belfer-Cohen (1989b, 1991:192), onward into northern Iraq, and with more local cultural input into southeastern and central Anatolia. The core origin region of the PPNB, if indeed there was a circumscribed origin, remains uncertain, although some scholars favor the northern Levant." Bar-Yosef and BelferCohen point out that many cultural traits typical of the PPNB seem to have a northto-south momentum in their chronological and geographical distributions. These include obsidian (all from Turkish sources), einkorn wheat and chickpeas (both of northern Levant/ Anatolian origin), domestic animals (especially sheep and goat, perhaps of northern Levant or Zagros origin), rectilinear architecture (marginally dated oldest by C14 in the northern Levant, in sites such as Mureybet and Jerf el Ahmar), and the gypsum-plaster antecedents of pottery termed "white wares." On the other hand, many outstanding aspects of PPNB

culture are best known from the southern Levant, including the remarkable plastered and painted portrait skulls from Jericho and the slaked lime plaster "ancestor" figures built around frames of reeds and sticks found at Ain Ghazal in Jordan.

In terms of PPNB regionality, the picture differs slightly in terms of the artifact class being considered. For instance, PPNB sites in the Levant and southeastern Anatolia have fairly homogenous lithic technologies, focused on the production of large percussion blades from naviform cores to serve as blanks for tanged projectile points. Of these, the basally tanged "Byblos Point" seems to have been the most widespread and typical. Beyond the Levant, pressure-flaked blade cores are dominant, particularly in the Zagros and across northern Iran into Pakistan (Inizan and Lechevallier 1994; Quintero and Wilke 1995). The distributional boundary between the naviform and pressure-flaked cores seems to correlate with the division between the earlier Levantine PPNA cultures and those of the Zagros region, suggesting that the regionality observed for the PPNA time span was still continuing into the PPNB. Apart from the naviform cores and Byblos Points, the Turkish and middle Euphrates sites (caferhoyiik, Cayonii, A~iklihoyiik, Mureybit, and Jerf el Ahmar) also have similar types of incised stone pebbles or "plaques," suggesting an overall pattern of close cultural relationship. Plastered skulls and skull veneration derived from the PPNA tradition also occur from the southern Levant to as far away as Hacilar in central Anatolia, and various kinds of artificial cranial deformation seem to be present all over Southwest Asia (including Cyprus and the Zagros) in the PPN and Early Ceramic periods (Meiklejohn et al. 1992).

In terms of house plans there is much regional variation, with single-roomed houses at Ramad and Byblos, porched "megaron"-style houses in Jericho and Ain Ghazal, and, during the later PPNB, complex structures of small seemingly doorless cubicles in many sites around the edges of the distribution (e.g., Beidha and Basta in Jordan, Bouqras in Syria, at cayonti and Nevali Cori in Anatolia, and in early ceramic sites such as Umm Dabaghiyah and Yarim Tepe I in northern Iraq). It is this "doorless cubicle" architectural style that characterizes some of the earliest agricultural communities in regions far beyond the Levant, for instance in Ganj Dareh level D in Iran, Mehrgarh in Pakistan, and catalhoyuk in central Anatolia." Related "grill-plan" layouts of close-set parallel foundation walls, possibly to support floors within reed and

post houses, are also reported from cayonu, Nevali Cori, and Basta, at opposite ends of the PPNB distribution (Ozdogan 1999). I believe these later PPNB architectural similarities to be important in indicating widespread cultural linkages. It is interesting also that Nissen et al. (1987) note that the gracile skulls of flexed burials excavated from Basta resemble skulls from cayoni.i. These two sites are close to the furthest north-south extremities of the PPNB distribution, 1,000 kilometers apart.

Potential community structures seem to illustrate aspects of local identity and style even more than ordinary houses since they would, of course, have been more popular vehicles for "heraldic" statements about group identity, affiliation, and ritual (Verhoeven 2002). Large numbers of such structures have been excavated in recent years, and all have their idiosyncrasies. As examples we have the large circular sunken "community houses" at Jerf el Ahmar and Mureybit (some of PPNA date); the mud brick rectangular "shrine" with an end niche at Jericho; circular and apsidal "shrines" at Ain Ghazal; the stone-walled rectangular "cult building" at Nevali Cori in Anatolia; and the large mud brick platform 10 by 7 meters in size and 60 centimeters high at PPNB Sabi Abyad II in northern Syria.

Most remarkably, a 9-hectare mountain sanctuary at Gobekli Tepe in eastern Anatolia (ca. 8300-7200 Bc) has a possible total of 20 (4 have been excavated) stonewalled circular enclosures 10 to 30 meters in diameter, with sunken floors, and inner wall surfaces set with radial arrangements of 10 massive T-shaped pillars up to 3 meters high. Some of these pillars are decorated with relief carvings of animals. Each enclosure also had two high central T-shaped pillars, and one unfinished pillar found on the site would have stood over 6 meters high. These enclosures contain no primary habitation debris and were presumably used for community ceremonial activities of some kind - the whole complex was eventually deliberately buried under a transported layer of occupation soil 3 to 5 meters thick. Similar T-shaped pillars, in this case with carvings of humans, occur at Nevali Cori.

Communal burial in charnel houses was also a marked feature of the PPNB: we have the remarkable "skull building" or charnel house at cayonu, containing the jumbled remains of about 400 deceased members of the community placed in slabcovered stone cists across one end of the building; also a painted and plastered chamber with secondary burials at Baja in Jordan; a charnel room and

other examples of collective burial at Abu Hureyra; and a remarkable series of human and wild cattle burials in pits sealed with lime plaster layers up to 3 tonnes in weight at Kfar HaHoresh near the Sea of Galilee. In the case of one pit at this last site, 50 human long bones appear to have been arranged in the shape of an aurochs or wild boar.'°

Intercommunity contact within the PPNB is highlighted by the developing obsidian trade, with obsidian from sources in both central and eastern Anatolia now very widespread. During the PPNA, only central Turkish obsidian appears to have reached the central and southern Levant, but eastern Turkish sources were added in the PPNB. Obsidian appears to have been generally absent in the Levant during the Natufian, or at least extremely rare.

As noted already for the PPNA, if we take present evidence at face value there is really no good evidence to suggest a spread of agricultural communities into the Zagros region of Iran much before 8000 BC, during the period of the PPNB in the Levant (Kozlowski 1999; Hole 2000; Dollfus 1989). By this time, sites such as Ganj Dareh, Tepe Guran, and Ali Kosh all have PPNB-like architecture and economies, although Ganj Dareh apparently lacked emmer wheat. All three sites have evidence for goat herding, and Ali Kosh has claimed evidence for sheep domestication. Ali Kosh is also located in the dry Deh Luran Plain of Khusistan where none of the major wild cereals would originally have grown. Agriculture clearly had to be introduced to this region, just as it had to be introduced to other regions beyond the agricultural homeland, such as Europe and Egypt.

Without going into more detail, we can see from the above that the PPNB has a general appearance of overall homogeneity in the Levant and adjacent regions of Anatolia and northern Iraq, but it also has many clear expressions of regionalism in style, especially in its later phases (the period, after all, lasted for over 1,500 years). The Zagros sites presumably belonged to other cultural configurations, despite the obvious existence of contact. Many authorities regard the PPNB as an "interaction sphere," without committing themselves too strongly on whether the interaction did or did not involve spreading populations."' Mehmet Ozdogan (1998:35), for instance, suggests: "What is most striking in the Near Eastern Neolithic is that it is a period of experimentation, carried out in the most orderly and organized way, as if experimenting in a lab; any change or innovation was, almost instantly, shared

through all of the Near Eastern Neolithic region." We might argue for ever about how many ethnic groups constituted the PPNB, but one thing is clear - they communicated efficiently. Likewise, Jacques Cauvin regarded the PPNB as a unified spreading phenomenon with a northern Levant origin and a powerful religion based on the veneration of human and animal fertility. As it spread, so it replaced or incorporated the regional late hunter-gatherer and PPNA cultures into a relatively homogeneous whole, albeit with continuing foci of regional diversity.

We move now to some of the consequences of PPNB population growth, consequences that might give some insight into how the processes of farming spread beyond the Levant might have occurred.

The Real Turning Point in the Neolithic

Revolution

For most people, the concept of the Neolithic Revolution refers to the actual origin of agriculture with domesticated plants, this occurring in Southwest Asia in the late PPNA or early PPNB at around 9000-8500 BC. True, there was an economic revolution here, without which later civilizations could never have existed. But there is also another aspect to this revolution, and that concerns the spread of the agricultural lifestyle far beyond its homeland. After 8000 BC, a concatenation of events came together, literally to "lift the lid" off the PPN pressure cooker. Two of these event categories are of absolutely fundamental importance, these being regional episodes of resource shortfall caused by land degradation, and the increasing importance of animal domestication combined with an increasing dependence on legumes to serve as fodder (Miller 1992:5 1). Both trends reflected the results of inexorable human and animal population growth. This period witnessed the origins of specialized sheep and goat pastoralism, and it witnessed the laying down of the immediate proto-urban groundwork for the impressive Mesopotamian cultural sequence still to come; successive cultures such as Ubaid, Uruk, Susa, and the ultimate magnificence of third millennium BC Sumerian, Akkadian, and Elamite civilization. The Mesopotamian lowlands where these later civilizations developed were colonized by Early Ubaid irrigation farmers at about 6000 BC, with an economic and cultural tradition that owed a great deal to the PPNB.

All this growth in the size of the PPNB human population and in the complexity of the economy required to support such growth had, of course, a downside. This becomes apparent in considering developments between about 7000 and 6500 BC in the Levant. It is worth noting here that very few large PPNB sites in the Levant show continuous long-term occupation into the succeeding pottery-using Neolithic phase. Many were abandoned or shrank (sometimes only temporarily) at about the time that pottery was putting in a widespread appearance, during the seventh millennium BC. We see this clearly in the cases of Bouqras, Jericho, Beidha, and Abu Hureyra. The circumstances behind this seeming downturn of fortune have been researched in detail at the

site of Ain Ghazal in the Jordan Valley (Kohler-Rollefson 1988; Rollefson and Kohl e r- Rollefson 1993). Here, there is evidence at about 6500 BC of cultural degradation of a fragile ecosystem, a trend perhaps exacerbated by a drying climate (Bar-Yosef 1996; Hassan 2000).21 Ain Ghazal grew from 5 to 10 hectares during the PPNB to reach a massive 13 hectares during the "PPNC" at around 6750 Bc. This development of peak size occurred as other sites in the region were also being abandoned (Ain Ghazal itself continued to be occupied into the Yarmukian Pottery Neolithic phase), suggesting that the site was briefly "booming," as many cities do today when the surrounding countryside loses some of its ability to support a large population. Large numbers of shaped clay tokens were in use in Ain Ghazal at this time - these are believed to be early precursors of accounting systems and even writing, so the complexities of managing the affairs of a large population may be evident, more than 3,000 years before writing was actually invented in Sumer.

However, during this phase of phenomenal growth at Ain Ghazal, the houses became further apart, room sizes became smaller, post-hole diameters decreased, and sickle blades and mortars decreased in numbers. Trees were cut for housing, cooking, and the firing of limestone to make plaster for covering floors and walls - the PPNB site of Yiftahel has a house measuring 7.5 by 4 meters, with a lime plastered floor estimated to weigh 7 tonnes (Garfinkel 1987). At Ain Ghazal, increases occurred in infant mortality, and in the importance of domesticated goats and the legume species which they probably liked as fodder. Many authorities see this trajectory as recording the local collapse of a cereal-based agricultural economy due to environmental degradation and extensive deforestation, with a consequent shift toward an increasingly pastoral economy and consequent human population decline or dispersal. Zarins (1990) has suggested that a major phase of dispersal by pastoralists occurred from the PPN Levant in the seventh millennium BC, extending into desert/oasis regions such as the Palmyra Basin and northern Arabia.

Similar hints of stress are reported from other sites. Beidha in southern Jordan was occupied into the PPNC and then abandoned, possibly to be replaced by the onehectare and very densely inhabited terraced pueblo-like settlement of Baja, a site which gives the impression of being a short-lived last-ditch attempt to keep settled life going in a region where its future was limited (Gebel and Bienert

1997; Gebel and Hermansen 1999). Abu Hureyra rose to an impressive 16 hectares in the Middle PPNB, then shrank back again to about half this size, with much less dense housing, by 7300 ac. Peter Akkermans records widespread site abandonment in the Balikh Valley in northern Syria during the seventh millennium BC, in the early pottery Neolithic, especially in drier regions. Even though Akkermans, like Ofer Bar-Yosef and Alan Simmons, favors a climate-change rather than a human-impact explanation in this regard, the results for human societies in general would have been similar (Akkermans 1993; Bar-Yosef 1996; Simmons 1997). On the other hand, abandonment was never universal and seems at present to be less marked in the northern Levant than elsewhere. The site of Tell Halula, for instance, seems not to have been abandoned at all between the PPNB and the subsequent Pottery Neolithic, despite some temporary shrinkage (Mandy Mottram, pers. comm.).

A combination of site abandonment in some regions, and a development of pastoral mobility around the edges of the continuing settled areas, would probably have encouraged two developments. These can be succinctly described as regional interaction and population dispersal, the two seemingly opposed factors which together led to the second, and major, stage of the Agricultural Revolution. After about 2,000 years of gestation amongst the early farming communities of southwestern Asia, the process of agricultural dispersal into northeastern Africa, Europe, central Asia, and the Indus region was about to take off, in earnest.

Chapter 4

Tracking the Spreads of Farming beyond the Fertile Crescent: Europe and Asia

We move in this chapter to our first examination of the "full steam ahead" mode of agricultural dispersal. Focused within the two and a half millennia from 6500 to 4000 BC, the farming system that developed in Southwest Asia spread over vast areas of the Old World - to Britain and Iberia in one direction; to Turkmenistan, the Altai Mountains, and Pakistan in the other; as well as to Egypt and North Africa. At the other end of Asia, East Asian agricultural systems were also on the move by this time, reaching toward Southeast Asia and eastern India.

For most regions of farming spread in both the Old and New Worlds, there has been much contentious debate about whether or not the archaeological record reveals some kind of cultural continuity from pre-farming into farming (Mesolithic to Neolithic in the Old World, Archaic to Formative in the Americas). Europe plays a very central role in these debates. In actuality, there are very few archaeological sites anywhere in the world, including Europe, that show unarguable, on-the-spot, continuity from a hunter-gatherer subsistence into farming, with no outside influence being present in material form. The main exceptions to this generalization, as we might expect, occur in regions believed to be independent homelands of agriculture (Figure 1.3). In most other areas, agricultural systems were variously acquired or imposed, sometimes by a combination of both processes.

Nevertheless, however the people of an area came to be agriculturalists, there would always have remained hunting-gathering populations who would have continued to exist, if allowed, for centuries or perhaps even millennia after

agriculture began. The histories of European colonization in the Americas and Australia make this crystal clear, even through in these cases the hunters and gatherers were decimated by lethal diseases and territorial dispossession at rates many times greater than any which could conceivably have occurred during the early Neolithic. Agriculturalist dispersal does not automatically mean instant hunter-gatherer demise, and any hints of in situ cultural continuity in archaeological site records during transitions to agriculture need not automatically mean that indigenous adoption was the only, or even the major, process behind the change on a regional basis. Hunting/ gathering and agriculture can exist side by side very successfully for as long as stable relations exist between the foragers and the farmers, separately but in interaction.

Chapter 3 plotted the spread of early agricultural economies from the northern Levant into adjacent regions of Anatolia and Iran. It described the growth of the agricultural economy, the addition of domesticated animals, and the resulting, seemingly rather unhappy, human impact on some regions with fragile resources. It examined periods, especially the PPNB, during which archaeological cultures seem to have had a coherence beyond the merely parochial and to have been associated with high levels of geographical expansion. But the PPNB was only the beginning of a continent-wide process of farming dispersal in four major directions - to Europe, central Asia, the Indian subcontinent, and North Africa.