Form and function of early Neolithic bifacial stone tools reflects changes in land use practices during the Neolithization process in the Levant. (original) (raw)
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This article brings together in a comprehensive way, and for the first time, on-and off-site palaeoenvironmental data from the area of the Central European lake dwellings (a UNESCO World Cultural Heritage Site since 2011). The types of data considered are as follows: high-resolution off-site pollen cores, including micro-charcoal counts, and on-site data, including botanical macro-and micro-remains, hand-collected animal bones, remains of microfauna, and data on woodland management (dendrotypology). The period considered is the late Neolithic (c. 4300-2400 cal. BC). For this period, especially for its earlier phases, discussions of land-use patterns are contradictory. Based on off-site data, slash-and-burn -as known from tropical regions -is thought to be the only possible way to cultivate the land. On-site data however show a completely different picture: all indications point to the permanent cultivation of cereals (Triticum spp., Hordeum vulgare), pea (Pisum sativum), flax (Linum usitatissimum) and opium-poppy (Papaver somniferum). Cycles of landscape use are traceable, including coppicing and moving around the landscape with animal herds. Archaeobiological studies further indicate also that hunting and gathering were an important component and that the landscape was manipulated accordingly. Late Neolithic land-use systems also included the use of fire as a tool for opening up the landscape. Here we argue that bringing together all the types of palaeoenvironmental proxies in an integrative way allows us to draw a more comprehensive and reliable picture of the land-use systems in the late Neolithic than had been reconstructed previously largely on the basis of off-site data.
The Neolithic in transition — how to complete a paradigm shift
Levant 45(2): 149-158
As archaeologists, we are accustomed to the appearance of lots of new information that constantly requires us to adjust, or change, our understanding of the period, region or subject in which we are interested. But we are much less competent in upgrading or revising the frameworks within which we form those understandings. Here, I take terms like Neolithic, Pre-Pottery Neolithic A (PPNA) and Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (PPNB), that were formed as extensions into the southern Levant of Gordon Childe’s mid-20th-century culture-history methodology, and show that they are now outdated and unhelpful; indeed, I argue that they are obstacles to the formation of a general understanding of the complex processes in which we are interested. The culture-history framework was spatial as well as chronological; and too much of the discussion with which our learned journals are clogged derives from the pointless quest to continue the tradition of the spatial mapping of cultures. Here, I argue that we need (a) a simple, continuous chronological sequence whose blocks of time are numbered back from the late 4th millennium BC to at least the Upper Palaeolithic-Epipalaeolithic boundary around 23,000 years ago; and (b) a bottom-up, social network-based mode of investigating and discussing the different levels of socio-cultural networking in which people were engaged, the highest level of which was what we have mistakenly called the archaeological culture.
This article brings together in a comprehensive way, and for the first time, on-and off-site palaeoenvironmental data from the area of the Central European lake dwellings (a UNESCO World Cultural Heritage Site since 2011). The types of data considered are as follows: high-resolution off-site pollen cores, including micro-charcoal counts, and on-site data, including botanical macro-and micro-remains, hand-collected animal bones, remains of microfauna, and data on woodland management (dendrotypology). The period considered is the late Neolithic (c. 4300-2400 cal. BC). For this period, especially for its earlier phases, discussions of land-use patterns are contradictory. Based on off-site data, slash-and-burn-as known from tropical regions-is thought to be the only possible way to cultivate the land. On-site data however show a completely different picture: all indications point to the permanent cultivation of cereals (Triticum spp., Hordeum vulgare), pea (Pisum sativum), flax (Linum usitatissimum) and opium-poppy (Papaver somniferum). Cycles of landscape use are traceable, including coppicing and moving around the landscape with animal herds. Archaeobiological studies further indicate also that hunting and gathering were an important component and that the landscape was manipulated accordingly. Late Neolithic land-use systems also included the use of fire as a tool for opening up the landscape. Here we argue that bringing together all the types of palaeoenvironmental proxies in an integrative way allows us to draw a more comprehensive and reliable picture of the land-use systems in the late Neolithic than had been reconstructed previously largely on the basis of off-site data.
The Beginning of the Neolithic: Searching for Meaning In Material Culture Change.
Paléorient, 1992
The elaborate concern for houses in the proto-Neolithic site of Qermez Dere in north Iraq and the relatively rapid changes in material culture suggest that an important change was in progress in the community's way of life and in particular in its concept of 'home' as signified by the symbolic activities focused on the houses. These changes seem to be associated with social stress which reached to the point of inter-communal conflict and warfare. The main purpose of the essay is to attempt to relate these culturally indicated changes at the very beginning of the Neolithic period to the economic evidence and to recent anthropological work on sedentary or complex hunter-gatherer societies and their handling of 'resource stress'.
A runaway model of agricultural evolution was developed to account for patterns of development and sustainability among the Pre-Pottery Neolithic societies of the southern Levant, and to provide insights into contemporary patterns of development and sustainability. A Darwinian theory of subsistence evolution was developed from first principles, framed in terms of cultural transmission or dual-inheritance theory. An approach to sustainability was formulated in terms of niche construction theory and resilience thinking. Adaptive models from human behavioural ecology (e.g. optimal foraging theory and nutritional ecology) and cultural transmission theory (e.g. cultural group selection and tribal social instincts) were scrutinised, and shown to be inadequate for modelling the evolution of early agriculturally-dependent societies. A maladaptive model of runaway agricultural evolution was developed, and a series of preconditions and predictions were derived. These preconditions and predictions were assessed against early Holocene archaeological and palaeoenvironmental records from the southern Levant. Data from more than 50 archaeological sites spanning more than 3000 years was examined across a range of disciplines, materials and methodologies, including: archaeobotany, zooarchaeology, osteology, genomics, palaeodemography, palaeopathology, site catchment analysis, palaeoenvironmental reconstruction, mortuary practices, architecture, material culture and stone tools. A distinctive pattern of development was identified, involving: increasing agricultural investment, increasing ritual investment, demographic growth, increasing social differentiation and inequality, the accumulation of sustainability problems, the accumulation of sustainability solutions, the possible evolution of formal regulative social institutions, and the erosion of social-ecological resilience leading to ‘niche cracking’. Socio-political and economic relationships critical to the instigation and maintenance of runaway agricultural evolution could have rendered LPPNB societies particularly vulnerable to disruption, triggering a de-escalation or reverse runaway. The most plausible triggers to the LPPNB/PPNC release (Ω) and reorganisation (α) appeared to be climate change, crop disease or anthropogenic landscape alteration. The runaway model sufficiently explained numerous dimensions of the PPN archaeological and palaeoenvironmental records in the southern Levant. A number of predictions received strong support (e.g. patterns of agricultural investment, demography and ritual performance and the development of sustainability problems and solutions) and others existed at the limits of archaeological detectability (e.g. the development of LPPNB regulatory social institutions). The idea that sustainability problems elicited genetic responses from PPN populations, and that those responses generated problems of their own, received precursory support from recent genome-wide SNP and WGS data, constituting particularly auspicious areas of future research. The runaway model could plausibly be extended to explain dominant patterns of Holocene socioeconomic development – e.g. patterns of increasing socioeconomic complexity, agricultural dispersals, the ‘origins of the state’, and even present-day patterns of sustainability and development.
TRACKING THE NEOLITHIC IN THE NEAR EAST
TRACKING THE NEOLITHIC IN THE NEAR EAST, 2022
A recently excavated early Pottery Neolithic (PN) site, Tel Izhaki (Jezreel Valley, Israel) revealed clear evidence for the collecting and recycling of Pre-Pottery Neolithic B blades. This technological behavior, common during the period, occurred along with some on-site production of bidirectional blades, the latter a technological feature characteristic for an early phase of some Yarmukian sites in the central Jordan Valley, e.g. Sha‘ar Hagolan and Hamadiya. Other aspects indicating affinity between Tel Izhaki and key Yarmukian sites in central Jordan Valley constitute a rare incised decoration on a stone vessel, the plano-convex shape of mudbricks as well as some flint raw material. The variability of the material culture at Tel Izhaki, including the presence of both Yarmukian and Jericho IX traits in pottery decoration and flint technology is compared to that of other early PN sites in the area. This variability in combination with the particular location of the sites, reveal a pattern supporting the Yarmukian PN expansion from the Jordan Valley into the Jezreel Valley and subsequently into the Lower Galilee. While radiocarbon dates available from a few sites at the area, including Tel Izhaki, correlate with that scenario of PN distribution, more studies are needed to investigate chronological and spatial aspects of variability defining the early PN in the Levant.