Neolithic dispersals from the Levantine Corridor: a Mediterranean perspective (original) (raw)
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The Aceramic Neolithic (PPN) in the Near East corresponds to revolutionary transformations in the human condition, setting the stage for later developments prior to the emergence of urban life. Theoretical constructs to explicate these processes vary from climatic determinism, through human vitalism, to demographic and social triggers, co-evolutionary symbiotic human-plant relationships, linguistic, psychological and multi-factor models. Yet, such models frequently preceded the hard data available. In recent decades the situation has improved markedly with numerous field projects conducted throughout the Near East including the southern Levant, an area characterised by a mosaic of ecological zones often located in close proximity to one another. The nature and intensity of climatic change during the course of the terminal Pleistocene and early Holocene throughout the region and their effects on socio-cultural developments including shifts in settlement patterns remains ambiguous. Locally, the period witnessed significant demographic growth. It is possible that in part this reflects changes in lifeways and population movements, when small settled PPNA village communities were established, subsisting initially on cultivation and foraging, and then on agriculture and herding in large 'megasite' villages during the course of the PPNB; and finally on dispersed agro-pastoralism during the Late Neolithic. Yet, in order to understand the nature of transformations associated with 'Neolithisation' processes, it is crucial to note that many seminal ideological and other developments first commenced earlier during the course of the Epipalaeolithic Natufian. Furthermore, in addition to plant and animal domestication, these Neolithisation processes also involved such technological innovations as the management of fire, water and plastic materials, as well as the intensification of ritual and social interactions. Still, it is important to note that these 'first time' processes were neither linear nor directed. Wide-ranging cultural interaction spheres emerged throughout the Near East, of which the southern Levant formed but one component of broader systems. Subsistence shifted unevenly in time and space to domesticates, with foraging commonly still being important in some areas. Indeed, in recent years debates arose concerning the presence of polycentric developments as opposed to a single centre for plant and animal domestication within the Near East. The 'desert and the sown' dichotomy, already present earlier, continued, whether in the marginal zones of eastern Transjordan or in the Negev and Sinai. The innate social tensions deriving from the emergence of larger sedentary communities were further exacerbated by discrepancies in the accumulation of material, social and ritual wealth within and between communities. Prestige and other items were exchanged, often over considerable distances, and there is some evidence for the emergence of incipient craft specialisation. Certain localities may have served as hubs for redistribution networks. Mechanisms for dissipating resulting 'scalar' stress involved the emergence and intensification of increasing social and ritual complexity. This is reflected in the proliferation of communal cultic installations and paraphernalia, whether in dedicated areas of settlements or as separate localities. This is also expressed in the variability of mortuary practices during the course of the PPN, ranging from single articulated burials to multiple secondary burials, the latter seemingly more common later in the period. While post-mortem skull removal, often interpreted as some form of ancestor veneration, was common it was by no means ubiquitous, having been initiated already during the Natufian. The role and intensity of inter-personal and even inter-community violence remains unclear. Furthermore, the effects of long-term sedentism and the introduction of domestic animals into villages raise issues concerning the emergence of contagious, including zoonotic diseases. The presentation summarises the results of various recent investigations within the southern Levant during the course of the Aceramic Neolithic (PPNA and PPNB), and examine their significance concerning the nature and tempo of Neolithisation processes in the broader context of the Near East.
Science Reports, 2021
Human mobility and migration are thought to have played essential roles in the consolidation and expansion of sedentary villages, long-distance exchanges and transmission of ideas and practices during the Neolithic transition of the Near East. Few isotopic studies of human remains dating to this early complex transition offer direct evidence of mobility and migration. The aim of this study is to identify first-generation non-local individuals from Natufian to Pre-Pottery Neolithic C periods to explore the scope of human mobility and migration during the Neolithic transition in the Southern Levant, an area that is central to this historical process. The study adopted a multi-approach resorting to strontium (87 Sr/ 86 Sr), oxygen (δ18O VSMOW) and carbon (δ 13 C) isotope ratio analyses of tooth enamel of 67 human individuals from five sites in Jordan, Syria, and Israel. The isotope ratios point both to a significant level of human migration and/or mobility in the Final Natufian which is compatible with early sedentarism and seasonal mobility and with population aggregation in early sedentary hamlets. The current findings, in turn, offer evidence that most individuals dating to the Pre-Pottery Neolithic were local to their respective settlements despite certain evidence of non-locals. Interestingly, isotopic data suggest that two possible non-local individuals benefitted from particular burial practices. The results underscore a decrease in human mobility and migration as farming became increasingly dominant among the subsistence strategies throughout the Neolithic transition of the Southern Levant. The emergence of the Neolithic in the Near East was accompanied by economic, demographic, social and ideological changes which culminated in the development of new ways of life marked by a progressive intensification of food production 1-5. The Southern Levant was central to this historical process as it offers early evidence of sedentarism and an intensification of the exploitation and control of wild plants and animals 6-8. The main characteristic of this region is the change from sedentary or semi-sedentary settlements represented by hamlets in the Natufian Period to later extensive mega-sites that emerged in the Middle/Late Pre-Pottery Neolithic B 9,10 (Fig. 1). This later timeframe saw a consolidation of sedentarism characterised by vast permanent villages with populations in the hundreds 11-13. Human migration and population aggregation could have played an important role in the development of these sedentary villages 13,14. A hypothesis suggests that the emergence of Middle/Late
Belfer-Cohen, A., & A.N. Goring-Morris 2014. North and South - Variable trajectories of the Neolithic in the Levant. In Settlement, Survey, and Stone: Essays on Near Eastern Prehistory in Honour of Gary Rollefson, edited by B. Finlayson & C. Makarewicz, pp.61-71. Levant Supplementary Series & CBRL, 2014
For years, there has been an ongoing debate about which region played a more pivotal role during the various stages of the Neolithization processes, the southern or the northern Levant. As more data accumulate through the larger region of West Asia it becomes clear that evolutionary developments coexisted, portraying individual local rhythms and varying interactions with neighbouring societies throughout the Levant (and beyond). Examples are provided through selected material culture features of the Early Neolithic entities generally accepted as markers of the various stages within the Neolithic sequence.
The Northwestern Levant within the formative zone of the farming social system
Cyprus is settled by several groups of farmers at a time when the Near Eastern agricultural economic model is still in its infancy in the mainland (LPPNA/EPPNB). These migrations have a wide-ranging impact on our perception of the early Neolithic of the Northern Levantine coastal area, long thought to be a no man's land. Quite on the opposite, the data from the island allows to reconstruct, from an archaeo-ethnological perspective, a primary and thriving neolithisation process for this territory. Consequently, though traditionally confined to the Middle Euphrates, the birthplace of farming (conceived here as a social system, and not as a mere technical innovation) deserves to be enlarged to the NW and the Central Levant, not only to make sense of otherwise incoherent archaeological data, but also to enlighten specific aspects of the social restructuration brought about by this new mode of production.
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.
Modeling initial Neolithic dispersal. The first agricultural groups in West Mediterranean
In previous research, the SE-NW time-trend in the age of the earliest Neolithic sites across Europe has been treated as a signal of a global-scale process that brought farming/herding economies to the continent. Residual variation from this global time-trend is generally treated as ‘noise’. A Com- plex Adaptive Systems perspective views this empirical record differently. The apparent time-trend is treated as an emergent consequence of the interactions of individuals and groups of different scale. Here, we examine the dynamics of agricultural dispersals, using the rich body evidence available from the Iberian Peninsula as a case study. We integrate two complementary approaches: (1) creating a high resolution Agent Based Modeling environment to simulate different processes that may have driven the spread of farming; (2) collecting and synthesizing empirical archeological data for the earliest Neolithic settlements that we use to evaluate our models results. Our results suggest that, (a) the source of radiocarbon data used to evaluate alternative hypotheses play an important role in the results; and (b) the model scenario that produces de best fit with archeological data implies a dispersal via northwestern and southern routes; a preference for leap-frog movement; an influence of ecological conditions (selecting most favorable agricultural land) and demographic factors (avoiding settled regions). This work represents a first attempt at high-resolution bottom-up modeling of this important dynamic in human prehistory. While we recognize that other social and environmental drivers could have also affected the dispersal of agropastoral systems, those considered here include many that have been widely considered important in prior research and so warrant inclusion.