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2018
Knowledge of the origin and spread of farming has been revolutionised in recent years by the application of new scientific techniques, especially the analysis of ancient DNA from human genomes. In this book, Stephen Shennan presents the latest research on the spread of farming by archaeologists, geneticists and other archaeological scientists. He shows that it resulted from a population expansion from present-day Turkey. Using ideas from the disciplines of human behavioural ecology and cultural evolution, he explains how this process took place. The expansion was not the result of 'population pressure' but of the opportunities for increased fertility by colonising new regions that farming offered. The knowledge and resources for the farming 'niche' were passed on from parents to their children. However, Shennan demonstrates that the demographic patterns associated with the spread of farming resulted in population booms and busts, not continuous expansion.
The Demographic Development of the First Farmers in Anatolia
The archaeological documentation of the development of sedentary farming societies in Anatolia is not yet mirrored by a genetic understanding of the human populations involved, in contrast to the spread of farming in Europe . Sedentary farming communities emerged in parts of the Fertile Crescent during the tenth millennium and early ninth millennium calibrated (cal) BC and had appeared in central Anatolia by 8300 cal BC . Farming spread into west Anatolia by the early seventh millennium cal BC and quasi-synchronously into Europe, although the timing and process of this movement remain unclear. Using genome sequence data that we generated from nine central Anatolian Neolithic individuals, we studied the transition period from early Aceramic (Pre-Pottery) to the later Pottery Neolithic, when farming expanded west of the Fertile Crescent. We find that genetic diversity in the earliest farmers was conspicuously low, on a par with European foraging groups. With the advent of the Pottery Neolithic, genetic variation within societies reached levels later found in early European farmers. Our results confirm that the earliest Neolithic central Anatolians belonged to the same gene pool as the first Neolithic migrants spreading into Europe. Further, genetic affinities between later Anatolian farmers and fourth to third millennium BC Chalcolithic south Europeans suggest an additional wave of Anatolian migrants, after the initial Neolithic spread but before the Yamnaya-related migrations. We propose that the earliest farming societies demographically resembled foragers and that only after regional gene flow and rising heterogeneity did the farming population expansions into Europe occur.
Early Farmers in Northwestern Turkey: What is New?
Northwestern Turkey, the borderland of Anatolia, provides an optimal opportunity for detecting changing modalities in the social and cultural setup of Late Neolithic communities that had just moved in to that region. In this respect it is worth noting that the number of excavated Neolithic sites is sufficient for defining interregional differences and for drawing a generalized picture of the cultural era. Moreover, the region in the Late Neolithic had just been settled by Neolithic communities, thus the material assemblages were all new to the region, having evidently originated in an area further away, somewhere in the core area of primary neolithization. With this in mind, here we shall present an unconventional, reversed approach to the Late Neolithic era by looking back towards the core area from the periphery, also noting the spatial distribution of various Neolithic groups by highlighting the distinctive features of their assemblages. Among other issues discussed are the modalities of Neolithic expansion from the core area to regions beyond the initial area of neolithization. The Neolithic Package will be scrutinized to answer what went and what remained during the dispersal of the Neolithic way of life. Most evident is the distinctness of the Neolithic package in the eastern parts of the Marmara region from those of the Aegean and the Balkans, strongly suggestive of having origins in the different sectors of the core area.
Issues in Ethnology and Anthropology, 2012
In order to better understand how plants were procured and consumed at Neolithic Çatalhöyük, the site’s archaeobotany team examined some of the existing ethnographic examples of “traditional” (non-mechanised) farming in Turkey. The Kastamonu region of north Turkey is an area where some ’ancient’ wheats (einkorn and emmer) are cultivated in a more or less traditional way and on a small-scale. Fieldwork in this part of Turkey provided first-hand knowledge of some off- and on-site agricultural activities which could have been part of prehistoric village life, but also of ways in which modern technologies challenge non-mechanised farming*. Of particular interest were a) information gathered from field-owners on traditional techniques used to grow crops, b) observation of storage facilities and other ways of storing food in einkorn/emmer-growing villages, and c) observations of mills and other buildings/constructions/items relating to crop processing and food preparation (e.g. oil production); the paper presents obtained information relevant to these three key objectives.
2022
We combine stable isotope analysis of crop remains with functional ecological analysis of their associated weeds to investigate arable farming strategies at Late Chalcolithic Bakla Tepe and Liman Tepe, western Anatolia. Our results reveal 'low-input' cultivation practices at both sites, with cereals grown on plots with low soil fertility that received low to moderate levels of manuring. In contrast, water supply was unlikely to have been a limiting factor to crop cultivation. Land management strategies were adapted to the tolerances of different crops, with pulses more intensively manured than cereals at Liman Tepe and barley cultivated on drier soils than glume wheats at both sites. This attests to a spatial differentiation in crop cultivation that resembles the practices of recent farmers in the Aegean engaged in extensive systems of land use. Expanded forms of these agricultural systems were used to amass agrarian wealth by elites occupying the citadels of later Early Bronze Age (EB/EBA) western Anatolia, suggesting that the agroecological foundations of this phenomenon were already in place by the late fourth millennium BC. In contrast to the pronounced wealth inequality visible in EBA citadels, however, we suggest that extensive land use fostered productive equality through cooperation between small-scale households in the Late Chalcolithic. It was only with the emergence of more extended domestic units in the EBA, capable of greater autonomy in arable farming, that disparities in production could be maintained over the long-term. This shift may have contributed to the emergence of social structures designed to dampen arable wealth inequality in the EBA.
The Evolution of Neolithic Farming from SW Asian Origins to NW European Limits
European Journal of Archaeology, 2005
social and economic changes associated with the transition to food production are well documented, what remain poorly understood are the variables influencing the evolution of farming (i.e. changes in the types of crops grown and the cultivation and processing technologies) during its early history. We have documented and investigated these changes and we show here that the difference between central European agriculture and its ancestral form in SE Europe and SW Asia is not determined entirely by climatic factors (e.g. that would restrict the growth of some species and not others). Although climate was a barrier for certain elements of the crop package, we suggest that the disparity between the two regions is best explained by a combination of cultural preferences for certain domestic species and a cultural transmission system that inhibited the diffusion of new or altemative crop types during the earliest phases of the spread of farming in Europe. In addition to which, we propose there was a reluctance to innovate with alternative crops, even as they became available.