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not escape Vere Gordon Childe, who, some 70 years ago, summed them up in the enduring metaphor—the Neolithic Revolution.2 While today few would disagree that these events were indeed momentous, providing as they did the circumstances in which civilizations could appear a few millennia later, there is far less talk of a “revolution.” There are, in fact, no clear-cut divisions between gathering food and complete dependence on cultivated plants. Radical though the innovations were, the change was not abrupt. Nonetheless, a mosaic of regional events presents us with a clear and convincing overall pattern—farming totally transformed the conditions of human existence.
THE NEOLITHIC: A SYNERGY OF PLANTS, ANIMALS, AND PEOPLE
Archaeological terminology can potentially mislead, so we will attempt to review, however summarily, certain key definitions and concepts. When it was first coined, in the 19th century, Neolithic emphasized technological change. It was part of a model based on northern European archaeological remains that distinguished cultural transformations solely on the basis of development of tool technology, first of stone, and, subsequently, of bronze and iron. Although Neolithic assemblages do indeed indicate changes in stone industry, some of the implements such as mortars and pestles, and other polished stone tools, once thought to be Neolithic in origin can now be attributed to the older Epipalaeolithic period. Equally, the criterion of permanent settlement need not be exclusive to agricultural societies. In the Near East, the notion of “sedentary hunter-gatherers,” first attributed to the Epipalaeolithic Natufian communities of the Levant, who exercised considerable control over the rich and varied resources for subsistence around their settlements, has been well accepted.3 The term Neolithic, then, is one of convenience, more than it is of precision.
The long period of the Neolithic in Anatolia (and the Near East) is divided into two broad phases on the basis of ceramic technology. The Anatolian pre-pottery (or aceramic) phase extends from about 9600 to 7000 BC and is further subdivided, largely on the basis of stratigraphy and the evolution of artefacts, into a Pre-Pottery Neolithic A (PPNA), Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (PPNB), and Pre-Pottery Neolithic C (PPNC). This is followed by the Pottery Neolithic (PN), which is also refined down into an early and late phase.4 In recent years, the distinguishing traits of the “Neolithic package” have had to be redefined too, from one that focused almost exclusively on crops and food processing tools to clusters that include domestic space (or mode of living), sacred space (or cult), symbolism, farming, human genetics and the spread of language, which varied according to region and period.
Early agriculture is a daunting subject.5 Even a sketch of the story can easily burst its banks, but Anatolia’s crucial role in this process demands some comment. The predisposing conditions of the Fertile Crescent towards agriculture have been known for some time. An impressive arc of land, broadly defined, it stretches from the southern Levant through the plains of Syria and across the foothills of southern Anatolia to the mountains of Iran and all the way down to the tip
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of the Persian Gulf. Embracing a diversity of ecosystems that enclose the river valleys of Mesopotamia, the Fertile Crescent was a cornucopia in the climatic optimum. The significance of these “hilly flanks,” as opposed to the lowland plains, was recognized early on by Robert Braidwood, who maintained that farming originated in those regions where the progenitor of the principal domesticates grow naturally.6 In the 1940s, he led a team from the Oriental Institute in Chicago to investigate the site of Jarmo in northern Iraq, and, in the 1960s, he initiated a collaborative project with Halet Çambel of Istanbul University extending across the southeastern provinces of Siirt, Diyarbakır and Urfa, focusing on the site at Çayönü.
Regardless of this abundance of plants and animals suitable for domestication, the crucial role that wheat and barley played in the development of the human circumstance in the Near East cannot be overemphasized. Just as civilization in East Asia was based on the cultivation of millet and rice, and the New World was dependent on maize and potatoes, so too wheat and barley fuelled the engines of Near East. Domesticated animals—mostly sheep, goats, and cattle—did, to be sure, supplement the kitchen, but wheat and barley remained the staples. As we shall see later, however, the very beginnings of sedentary life were not based on the intensive exploitation of cereals, but on a subsistence strategy that drew on a range of food resources. Even so, the significance of wheat and barley in shaping the trajectory and character of Near Eastern society will become very apparent when we examine the emergence of complex societies. In essence, the ability to produce food surpluses from the fertile lands of Greater Mesopotamia and its neighbors provided elite groups with both wealth and power.
Within the Fertile Crescent, three zones have attracted particular attention: Southeastern Anatolia, the Levantine Corridor (extending north from the Dead Sea along the Jordan Rift to Damascus, and then following the Middle Euphrates in the Syrian desert), and the Zagros Mountains. The essentials of agriculture are the cultivation of crops and the raising of animals. How these practices came about and at what places and times is not a simple task to explain, but most opinions advance three basic factors: Climatic change, an increase in population densities, and improving technologies. The view that farming was adopted because hunting-gathering pushed communities into a marginal existence, threatened with starvation and little leisure time, a perspective that has its roots in 19th-century thinking, has long been abandoned. Indeed, it is well known that farming requires a large investment of energy and resources. The more intensive the farming practice—ploughing, weeding, irrigating—the greater the productivity, but greater too is the labor input per person.7 A combination of environmental changes, sedentism, and population pressure might well have stimulated attempts to increase food resources as hunting-gathering areas became overcrowded.8
While the abundance of seasonal resources would have allowed communities to abandon their mobile existence, it would also have enabled them to relax their birth control mechanisms, a necessary constraint on nomadic groups.9 So the transition from gathering wild cereals to planting and harvesting them might have been prompted by the greater number of mouths to feed. But for others the need to cultivate plants arose as a means of coping with the stresses of the Younger Dryas, a period of climatic instability, which would have reduced the wild food sources
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and prompted the storage of grain for lean times.10 The need to store food would have encouraged sedentism, which in time led to the depletion of wild food resources around settlements. According to this reckoning, then, the genesis of plant domestication could be viewed as a type of risk management brought on by Younger Dryas.
Whatever prompted change, the process was gradual, as Eric Higgs and Michael Jarman noted many years ago.11 According to them the apparent binary opposites of “wild” and “domestic” and “hunter-gatherer” and “farmer” obscure the continuum between ranges of related subsistence patterns. The difference between a “crop” and a “weed,” for instance, is largely a cultural construct that reflects the economic value a plant may have to humans. Likewise, selective hunting patterns could be interpreted as a form of animal management, although less focused and intensive than herding. What interested Higgs and Jarman was the changing relationship between human communities and the plants and animals they exploited.12 Thus, they preferred to speak of the relationship between humans and their environment as one of mutual dependence, in which the change from Mesolithic to Neolithic was essentially one of degree rather than one of kind.
Following this line of thought, the notion of agriculture, broadly defined, involves human efforts to modify the environments of plants and animals to increase their productivity and usefulness. What distinguished early farmers was their systematic and purposeful alteration of the environment, which resulted in fundamental genetic changes. We shall look at the archaeological record of the earliest stages of domestication in Anatolia a little later.
This focus on subsistence strategies has been a consuming passion for many archaeologists and scientists involved in the Neolithic. The discourse of animal and plant husbandry, and the logic of formalist economics, have given way to a range of other interpretations. The notion that material culture must be understood as sets of symbols embedded with meaning now looms large in Neolithic studies. In this new mode of thinking, social factors have garnered the most exciting new insights. Barbara Bender and Brian Hayden, for example, have emphasized that feasting and the consumption of food may underlie the adoption of farming.13 The argument is straightforward, namely that members of a community in which the practice of reciprocity was esteemed achieved status and dominance by throwing feasts. The larger the banquet, the more likely guests could not respond on equal terms, leading to indebtedness. The limited wild resources available to hunter-gatherers would have precluded such occasions, but agriculture enabled determined individuals to till the fields and amass food surpluses that could be used in social competition, which, in turn, may have led to an increase in interpersonal conflict.
Jacques Cauvin, however, would have us believe otherwise. He proposes that a fundamental change in belief systems and ritual propelled communities towards agriculture and a sedentary way of life.14 The exuberant symbolism of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic is seen as the positive human response to explaining how the world is structured and their relationship with the numinous. For Cauvin, then, the Neolithic revolution was a symbolic one that involved a profound leap in human cognition. This view is not one that is shared by Jean Perrot, who would prefer us to believe in long-term processes that draw on memory and the capacity human ingenuity, as much
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as the circumstances of the time.15 This long-term perspective (longue durée) that views Neolithic achievements as part of broader structural history not only follows others who have applied the approach of the Annales School to the study of ancient societies, but more specifically it also echoes the sentiments expressed by Higgs and Jarman.16 Some of the latest ideas on the Neolithic have responded to the question of whether language moved with the first farmers.17 This is an issue that has engaged not just archaeologists, but linguists and geneticists too. With regard to Anatolia and Europe it specifically concerns the matter of whether the Indo-European family of languages spread with the first farmers.18 Despite some earlier strident views, there appears to be no consensus.
What is clear from this necessarily brief review is that the transition from hunting and foodgathering ways of life to agricultural communities and systems of food production was not a straightforward process. It was both a long-term occurrence and an involved one. Like the Neolithic period itself, it is best understood as the synergy of a number of causes and consequences: Climate change compounded by alterations of the environment by humans, food resource stress, population growth, technological developments, human ingenuity and adaptability, and a new social organization that prompted innovation.
NEW PERSPECTIVES ON THE NEOLITHIC FROM TURKEY
Despite the intense interest that post-Pleistocene adaptations have generated over the last few decades, Anatolia was seen until recently as the “Cinderella” region of the Neolithic Near East, suffering from undeserved neglect at the expense of the Levantine corridor, which is deemed by some to be the core area of development and innovation. Without denying the significance of Levantine developments, Mehmet Özdog˘ an quite correctly argues that this imbalance is reflective of research trajectories that have accorded the Levant, implicitly at the very least, with primacy in economic innovation.19 Even when the irrefutable and indeed dazzling evidence of an
Anatolian Neolithic began to appear in the 1960s at Çayönü, Çatalhöyük, and Hacılar, researchers were reluctant to promote these sites to the front line in the “Neolithization” process, attempting instead to explain their existence as outliers involved in the highland trade of obsidian. In many ways, the Taurus Mountains were seen as a cultural frontier as much as geographical limit. As sites emerged in southeastern Turkey, they were described as secondary or marginal to the Levant, whereas those located further north, in the highlands, were simply too far removed from the action to be considered seriously.
Not only has the Neolithic been associated above all with the study of economic subsistence strategies, its way of life has been essentially perceived as a struggle—farmers scratching a living in semiarid environments—that was often contrasted with the idyllic existence of hunters and gatherers. According to the views of the day, the stimulus behind development in the Neolithic was environmental stress, a concept that could be comfortably accommodated in the Levant, but not in resource rich Anatolia. These two issues—economics and ecology—dictated the
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nature of research design. Consequently, animal bones and carbonized seeds were seen as more relevant subjects of study than cult centers and crafts, just as catchment analyses overshadowed religious ideology and social organization. This focus on economics was linked to another influential assumption, namely that the earliest sedentary peoples must have been cultivators. With the notion of “sedentary hunter-gatherers” still a distant concept, artefacts were ascribed functions within a farmer’s toolkit, rather than part of forager’s equipment.20 Mortars and pestles were used, it was said, to process domesticate grains rather than wild nuts and seeds.
Current attitudes towards the Anatolian Neolithic have changed quite dramatically. Since the early 1980s, investigations at sites south of the Taurus Mountains like Nevalı Çori and Göbekli
Tepe, continuing the narrative from Epipalaeolithic Hallan Çemi and Körtik Tepe, have opened a new chapter in the history of humanity. Indeed, for some, the remarkable cult buildings in this region form the very roots from which the later practices of Mesopotamian temple societies emerged.21 Discoveries further north are no less significant. Pre-pottery sites like Cafer Höyük, in the Euphrates Valley, As¸ıklı Höyük, in central Anatolia, and many ceramic Neolithic sites leave no doubt about the achievements of early agrarian communities in Anatolia. Just how far Neolithic studies in Anatolia have advanced is amply demonstrated with the recent publication of Türkiye’de Neolitik Dönem (Neolithic Settlements in Turkey), a handsome production that surveys some 30 key sites and regions.22 This is a far cry from the mid-1950s when no archaeologist was prepared even to contemplate a Neolithic period for the peninsula.
The rethinking of Neolithic has spilled over into other issues. One of these concerns the notions of core and periphery. Whereas some still reckon that the Neolithic did have a core area, a good number are persuaded by the arguments that the earliest Neolithic communities of the Near East belonged to a cultural formation zone.23 This notion of a “supra region” maintains that communities within it shared ideas and technologies irrespective of social organization and variations in subsistence patterns. These zones do not imply homogeneity, neither do they raise the scepter of diffusionism. Rather, they refer to cognate geographical areas that develop along a similar and broadly defined cultural trajectory, although at the same time displaying internal diversity in material culture. Most importantly, the dynamics within these formation zones were defined by cultural contact—through emulation, exchange, or migration—which Renfrew has called “peer polity interaction.”24 Some have qualified this notion and pointed out that there is no evidence to indicate that development in this formative period was triggered by stress or competition, but instead that prosperity was gained by a sharing of knowledge, others see a direct link to warfare.25 Although the exact boundaries of the earliest formative zone are still vague, broadly speaking, it covered a vast area that stretched from the Zagros Mountains across the Taurus range to the Turkish Upper Euphrates, and down to the southern Levant. Equally important is the environmental diversity of this zone. From high plains and thickly forested mountains, it descends in altitude through riverine locations to alluvial plains and semiarid lands. Interestingly, the boundaries of this zone lasted for some 4000 years from the 11th millennium BC to the early centuries of the sixth, during which time no communities appear to have made any attempt to colonize other regions.
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In Anatolia, Neolithic settlement has been identified in three broad regions (Figure 3.1):26
1Southeastern Anatolia. The regions south of the Taurus Mountains, especially Urfa and Diyarbakır, but including the Upper Euphrates, have evidence for the earliest developments. These run parallel with those in the Zagros Mountains and the Levantine corridor with which they share considerable similarities.
2Another locality is north of the Taurus, on the plateau, encompassing Aksaray, Konya, and the Lake District. It is distinctly different in character and more deeply rooted in “Anatolian” tradition. Cultural connections extended beyond these areas to Greece, where aspects of
Thessalian material culture, ceramics in particular, links it to southwestern Anatolia.
3Western Anatolia. Most information on this area is less than two decades old and derives from the Marmara region, but includes the newly emerging evidence around Izmir. Situated at the gateway to Europe, northwestern Anatolia felt the greatest influence from the Balkans, and it is no surprise that the coastal regions of the west have connections with the Aegean.
North-central and northeastern Anatolia, by contradistinction, remained curiously devoid of Neolithic settlement.27 Whether these regions were subjected to geomorphological processes
Figure 3.1 Map of Anatolia showing the three cultural formation zones of the Anatolian Neolithic and neighbouring Balkan Neolithic (adapted from Özdog˘ an 1999a)
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