TIME AND TRADITION IN THE TRANSITION FROM LATE NEOLITHIC TO CHALCOLITHIC: SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS (original) (raw)

This part of Paléorient is devoted to debate over and recent new evidence concerning the basic chronology of the transition from the Neolithic to the Chalcolithic (6th and 5th millennia cal. BC), mainly in the southern Levant, but also in those parts of " greater Mesopotamia " where Halafian and Halaf-related assemblages are thought to occur. Much of the discussion centres on the fairly recent accumulation of new radiocarbon evidence but the basic frameworks, built from relative chronology and comparison of assemblages, that have structured our thinking about what it is we are dating have also become subject to debate. PERIODS, CULTURES, ENTITIES, AND PROCESSES As S. Manning 1 points out in the preface, most of the papers adhere to various degrees to traditional frameworks of periods, " cultures " , or similar phenomena that we have largely inherited from archaeologists of the mid-20th century. However , that does not mean that they are using identical paradigms , and some of the differences of interpretation appear to stem from the way the authors conceptualize their basic units. First, and again to varying extents, papers here and elsewhere that deal with this interval of time at least occasionally conflate periods with cultures (or whatever one might like to call groups of excavated assemblages with similar material culture attributes), or betray a somewhat unexpected commitment to the most general and arguably most arbitrary level of systematics: the level with periods labeled, for example, " Late Neolithic " , " Early Chalcolithic " , and " Middle Chalcolithic ". Turning first to the latter problem, some of the authors—I'd include myself in this group—consider labels such as " Late Neolithic " to be rather arbitrary and much less important than the detailed chronology and correlation of events at individual sites. Lovell et al., for example, cite E. Braun's 2 observation that " horizons " are arbitrary and at best heuristic concepts that archaeologists impose on the record. However, S.J. Bourke and I. Gilead argue for meaningful differences between Neolithic and Chalcolithic society that make the distinction more than a semantic one. Bourke, for example, argues that real differences in economy and probably social organization distinguish the lowermost levels at Ghassul from the overlying Chalcolithic ones 3. By such criteria, it is difficult to disagree that many of the entities discussed in these papers should be grouped with preceding early agricultural societies, rather than with the metal-using and more politically complex societies that arose in, for example, the Ghassulian. If the distinction is more than heuristic, it also underscores the need to understand this transition much better. Given that the various authors here and elsewhere use such terms as " Late Neolithic " and " Middle Chalcolithic " quite differently, however, some of the debate over the classification of certain assemblages is quite sterile. For example, the fact that S.J. Bourke and J.L. Lovell classify the lowest levels at