The Neolithic in transition — how to complete a paradigm shift (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.
Neolithic economic and social change in the Fertile Crescent: these are forces and mechanisms of permanent adaptation within spatially re -stricted and ecologically sensitive habitats altered by human impact. Those form diversified sets of regionally distinct natural systems, each providing different conditions to share or reject ingredients of Neolithic subsistence modes, includin g pressures for reversible foraging lifestyles. In the Fertile Crescent the Neolithic evolved under the threat of a latent overexploitation of biotic resources, on the one hand, and the growth allowed and forced by human adaptation and innovation in reaction to avoid regional collapses of Neolithization on the other hand. Neolithic evolution also means the exchange of economic, social and ideological / religious paradigms from one temporarily or permanently favourable region to another along their net of geographical corridors, but it can include in addition the reactions from "deficit" regions to such develop-ments. We may continue to understand the Near Eastern Neolithic as a general trend of four major economic "pushes" over 6 millennia: * Hans J. Nissen encouraged me in 1977 to devote my academic life to the study of early sedentism and its ecology in the Near East, and since then we have discussed and sometimes even fought over our understanding of these most fascinating stages of human development. Thank you, Professor Nissen, for more than 20 years of advice and exchange, both inside and outside the field. Concerning this paper, however, teachers are not responsible or in control of what their students finally make out of such advice and exchange, especially if freedom and variety of research is their basic academic value, as we all experienced from him. One of the outstanding merits of Hans J. Nissen is that he laid the foundation pavement for a track to be completed: to understand the Neolithic as the cultural, social and ecological rooting of ancient Near Eastern societies in the Vorderasiatische Altertumskunde. -This essay contains conclusions written in the theoretical framework currently followed by the author. I thank Gary O. Rollefson warmly for the language editing of this contribution.
Supra-Regional Networks in the Neolithic of Southwest Asia
When prehistoric archaeologists write accounts of the Epi-palaeolithic or Neolithic of southwest Asia, they resort to an archaic narrative style of culture-history that was formulated by Gordon Childe in the first half of the last century. These narratives frame their account of events within the format of a succession of archaeological cultures. In addition, the received form of the narrative is founded within a core-area of the Levant, the Mediterranean corridor zone; it is assumed that all the important social and economic innovations of the Epi-palaeolithic and early Neolithic occurred within that corridor, from where the cultures and their innovations spread through diffusionary processes to dominate wider parts of the region. The first part of this paper is a critique of the unwarranted assumption of the existence of archaeological cultures, and of the Levantine primacy hypothesis. The second part proposes an alternative to the notion of the archaeological culture. First, we review the evidence for wide-area cultural networking through the exchange of goods and materials and the sharing of cultural behaviours that characterises the Neolithic. We can view the Epi-palaeolithic and early Neolithic periods as a time when new cultural processes were being employed to build and maintain novel sedentary, permanently co-resident communities of unprecedented scale. At a higher level, we see communities engaged in the construction and maintenance of more and more extensive networks of communities, in a form similar to, but not identical with, the peer polity interaction sphere model first described by Colin Renfrew in a different context.
Late Neolithic society and village life: the view from the southern Levant (Gibbs and Banning 2013)
As in more northerly parts of the Fertile Crescent, archaeologists have largely neglected the Late Neolithic of the southern Levant relative to the preceding Pre-Pottery Neolithic and succeeding Chalcolithic periods. Even its basic chronology and cultural typology remain contested. Our understanding of social, economic, and symbolic dimensions of the Late Neolithic is even poorer. However, there have been some recent strides toward gleaning a preliminary understanding of social organization, settlement pattern, economy and even ritual and symbolism, albeit with heavy dependence upon a rather small database. There are hints at important changes in economic and social strategies, including a shift to increasingly trexible social relationships, which possibly correspond to the entrenchment of full dependence on mixed farming.
TIME AND TRADITION IN THE TRANSITION FROM LATE NEOLITHIC TO CHALCOLITHIC: SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS
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
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.