Zeder.paleorient.2012

Paléorient, vol. 37.1, p. 39-60 © CNRS ÉDITIONS 2011 Manuscrit reçu le 2 février 2011, accepté le 10 mai 2011

RELIGION AND THE REVOLUTION: THE LEGACY OF JACQUES CAUVIN

M. A. ZEDER

Abstract: Ten years after his passing, Jacques Cauvin’s revolutionary model of Near Eastern Neolithic emergence continues to shape the debate over the causes of this major transitional period. Cauvin’s radical view of the power of symbols and the role of religion in the domestication of plants and animals and origins of agriculture was a categorical rejection of the prevailing ecological/economic theories of the day. And while not the only one to highlight the internal forces that shaped this transition, his theory was the most strongly stated case against alternative models that featured climate change or population pressure as the drivers of this revolutionary period of culture change. In the decade since the publication of the English version of his master work The Birth of the Gods and the Origins of Agriculture, there has been an exponential increase in the amount of empirical data that is yielding an increasingly fi ne-grained account of the transition from foraging to farming in the Near East. This work has shown that morphological changes in plants and animals can no longer be used as threshold markers of the transition between wild and domestic, that there is no single center from which agriculture originated and from which it spread, and that the temporal and spatial parameters of Near Eastern Neolithic emergence are much broader and more pluralistic than anyone could have imagined just ten years ago. These developments make it hard to support any of the single-level, prime-mover models proposed (and still advanced) to account for this transition. Instead, a more synthetic model is called for that acknowledges the multiple general macro-level forces (both social and economic), as well as the many more localized micro-level forces that pulled and pushed this transition along in this heartland region.

Résumé : Dix ans après son décès, le modèle révolutionnaire de Jacques Cauvin relatif à l’émergence du Néolithique au Proche-Orient continue de focaliser le débat sur les origines de cette période de transition majeure. Sa vision radicale du pouvoir des symboles et du rôle de la religion dans la domestication des plantes et des animaux et dans l’origine de l’agriculture était celle d’un rejet des théories socio-écologiques qui prévalaient à l’époque. Même s’il n’était pas seul à souligner les forces intérieures qui ont façonné cette phase de transition, il était profondément hostile aux modèles alternatifs qui représentaient le changement climatique ou la pression démographique comme les facteurs majeurs de cette période révolutionnaire de changement culturel. Dans la décennie qui a suivi la sortie de la version anglaise de son œuvre maîtresse, The Birth of the Gods and the Origins of Agriculture, des données empiriques très fi nes se sont accumulées de façon exponentielle, qui rendent compte de la transition entre cueillette et agriculture dans le Proche-Orient. Ce travail a montré que le changement morphologique des plantes et des animaux ne pouvait plus être utilisé comme marqueur de la transition entre sauvage et domestique et que l’agriculture n’est pas apparue dans un seul secteur d’où elle se serait répandue ; les paramètres spatio-temporels de l’émergence du Néolithique du Proche-Orient sont bien plus larges et multiples qu’on n’aurait pu imaginer il y a seulement dix ans. Devant ces avancées, il est diffi cile de soutenir un modèle unique avec un moteur unique pour rendre compte de cette transition. Un modèle plus synthétique est proposé, qui, au niveau général, reconnaît la pluralité des facteurs à la fois sociaux et économiques, aussi bien que les forces plus limitées qui, à un niveau local, ont accompagné la transition dans cette région centrale.

Keywords: Domestication; Agriculture; Religion; Explanatory Models.Mots-clés : Domestication ; Agriculture ; Religion ; Modèles explicatoires.

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40 M.A. ZEDER

Paléorient, vol. 37.1, p. 39-60 © CNRS ÉDITIONS 2011

INTRODUCTION

Every successful revolution needs a leader to articulate the most compelling, most extreme case for the overthrow of the existing order and the embrace of an entirely new way of looking at the world. Jacques Cauvin served this role in his categorical rejection of the prevailing paradigm of Neo-lithic emergence in the ancient Near East in favor of a dra-matically new vision of this major transitional period. Rather than a response to external environmental and economic pres-sures, Cauvin saw Neolithic emergence as the product of a profound transformation of the human psyche. In the place of climate change, population growth, and resource depres-sion, he argued that the primary engine of Near Eastern Neo-lithic emergence was a shift in humankind’s mental template from one which saw humans as part of nature to one in which humans dominate nature. Manifested as a “Revolution of Symbols” that found expression in all aspects of material cul-ture—from iconography, to ritual practice, to architecture, to lithic technology, he laid out a bold, even audacious new vision of the causes, context, and course of Neolithic emergence that continues to shape the narrative on Near Eastern agricultural origins. Cauvin was not the only one to reject dominant exter-nal stress models of the day; but his was the most revolution-ary example of a prime-mover model attributing the Neolithic Revolution to social and psychological forces located within human society and psyche.

Over the ten years since the publication of the English translation of Cauvin’s mentalist manifesto The Birth of the Gods and the Origins of Agriculture in 2000, and his death in 2001, a roiling debate has continued among those championing various different single-lever models of Near Eastern Neolithic emergence. Emerging information on the scope and power of global climate change following the end of the last Ice Age has given new life to environmentally driven models of agri-cultural origins. The embrace of human behavioral ecology has provided population based models with the mechanisms by which demographically-driven resource depression resulted in resource intensifi cation, management, and, eventually, domestication and agriculture. Ethnographic analogies with present-day complex hunter-gatherers have been marshaled to argue that social dynamics propelled ancient societies across the threshold of agricultural emergence. And while many of the particulars of Cauvin’s sweeping account of the origin and dispersal of agricultural economy in the Near East have not proven accurate in the light of emerging data, the core of his case for the primacy of symbols, religion, and ritual in agricul-

tural emergence has only gained in advocates and acceptance the decade since his death.

The last ten years has also witnessed a quieter but none-the-less steady accumulation of new empirical data that is yielding an increasingly fi ne-grained account of the transition from foraging to farming in the Near East. New excavations and the reanalysis of old data from across the entire Fertile Crescent have produced a wealth of data that has expanded the geographic focus of our understanding of this key transition. Revolutionary new archaeological, archaeobiological, and genetic analytical techniques have vastly enhanced our abil-ity to document the course and timing of plants and animal domestication and the crystallization of agricultural economies based on domesticates—the core component of the Neolithic Revolution in the Near East. The greater temporal, spatial, and developmental resolution resulting from this work makes it increasingly diffi cult to argue for any prime-mover scenario for Near Eastern agricultural origins, requiring instead a less doctrinaire (and less polarizing) approach that acknowledges the multiple factors that pulled and pushed this transition along in this heartland region.

It is useful then to review the various prime-mover models that have been developed to account for Neolithic emergence in the Near East in light of the new data on plant and animal domestication that has emerged in the last decade. It is particu-larly appropriate on this ten year anniversary Jacques Cauvin’s passing to consider the lasting legacy of his revolutionary vision of the role of religion in the Neolithic Revolution and whether this vision can be reconciled with the increasingly high resolu-tion understanding of the archaeological record in the Near East. In so doing, we begin to chart a post-revolutionary course away from the polarized views that pit one prime-mover causal force against another and toward a more synthetic approach that brings together environment, economy, demography, social relations, and religion into a more holistic account of this fundamental transition.

MODELS OF AGRICULTURAL EMERGENCE IN THE NEAR EAST

EXTERNAL PUSH MODELS

Models that attribute the emergence of agricultural econ-omies in the Near East to external pressures tend to charac-terize this transition as a response to stresses that compelled people to abandon earlier mobile foraging strategies in favor


Religion and the Revolution: The Legacy of Jacques Cauvin 41


of more sedentary adaptations supported by agriculture. This group of models trace their intellectual ancestry to V. Gordon Childe who (amplifying an earlier model proposed by Raphael Pumpelly) held that a period of desiccation following the last Ice Age forced people to congregate around water sources where, coming into contact with plants and animals similarly drawn to these environments, they began to sow and tend cere-als and other crops, and to husband animals.1 After falling out of favor in the 1950s and 60s, environmentally driven models of agricultural origins were resurrected in the later part of the twentieth century thanks to an increasingly better understand-ing of the timing and magnitude of climate change at the end of the Pleistocene and beginning of the Holocene. The Younger Dryas, a brief return to cold, dry conditions at the very end of the Pleistocene (12,800-11,600 cal. BP), is featured in many models as providing an environmental shock that motivated people of the Near East to domesticate plants and begin down the path to agricultural emergence.2 Other models credit the stabilization of climate, the rise of CO2, and the changes in pat-terns of seasonality that followed the Younger Dryas as provid-ing the needed push that made agricultural origins essentially “compulsory”.3

Binford’s marginality model combined post-Ice Age environmental factors with Malthusian population growth projections.4 He argued that a rise in sea level put a squeeze on burgeoning populations optimal coastal habitats, forcing migration to more marginal areas where the cultivation of plants, that had been abundant in optimal zones, was adopted to meet the increasing demand for food. A modifi ed version of this hypothesis, without the climate forcing element, can be found in Flannery’s early work on Near Eastern Agricul-tural origins. Flannery hypothesized that population growth alone in optimal habitats of the Zagros region of the eastern Fertile Crescent was suffi cient to motivate migration into mar-ginal habitats. Cereal cultivation and animal husbandry were adopted in these less hospitable environments, he argued, to replicate the bounty of wild plant and animal resources in their natural habitat.5

Redding has argued that local population growth in more optimal environments alone could result in resource depres-sion that, in regions where fl uctuations in resources were both severe and unpredictable, selected for the adoption of stress

1. PUMPELLY, 1908; CHILDE, 1928 and 1936.2. BAR-YOSEF and BELFER-COHEN, 2002; HARRIS, 2002 and 2003; MOORE

and HILLMAN, 1992.3. RICHERSON et al., 2001, see also MCCORRISTON and HOLE, 1991.4. BINFORD, 1968.5. FLANNERY, 1969 and 1973.

reducing behaviors including food production.6 Rosenberg put a somewhat different spin on a similar model which attributes the adoption of sedentary lifestyles and subsequent resource intensifi cation to the increasing demarcation of territorial boundaries in the face of perceived population pressure.7

More recently, demographic models have been aug-mented by tenets of human behavioral ecology grounded in both ecology and economics.8 This coupling of Malthus with microeconomics has provided a predictive road map that takes one, step-by-step down a path that begins with 1) population reaching thresholds that limit mobility and force increasing sedentism, which in turn leads to 2) depression of high return resources, that stimulates 3) a broadening of the resource base to include an expanding array of lower-return resources, caus-ing 4) an intensifi cation of subsistence strategies, including attempts at enhancing productivity that, in the case of certain receptive species, results in 5) their domestication.9

INTERNAL PULL MODELS

Another category of models of Neolithic emergence rejects external stresses like environmentally or demographically driven resource pressure as having played a primary cata-lytic role in Near Eastern agricultural origins. These models look instead to inherent capacities and characteristics within humans and human society that enabled our species to capital-ize on external conditions in the post-Pleistocene Near East by creating subsistence systems that served social and psychologi-cal ends as much, or even more, than they did more purely eco-nomic ones. Often set within a context of opportunity rather than stress, these models can trace their intellectual pedigree back to Robert Braidwood. Against the backdrop of paleo-environmental information that showed little evidence for cli-matic stress in the Early Holocene,10 Braidwood argued that over time people living within the natural habitats of future domesticates acquired a deeper knowledge of their environ-ment along with an expanding technological sophistication in manipulating that environment.11 Through this “settling in” process, people in these resource-rich areas gained both the know-how and the technological capacity to bring plants and

6. REDDING, 1988. 7. ROSENBERG, 1990 and 1998; see also PEASNALL, 2000. 8. WINTERHALDER and KENNETT, 2006. 9. BINFORD, 2001; MUNRO, 2004; STARKOVICH and STINER, 2009;

STINER and KUHN, 2006; STINER and MUNRO, 2002.10. WRIGHT, 1977.11. BRAIDWOOD, 1960; BRAIDWOOD and HOWE, 1960.


42 M.A. ZEDER


animals under control, vastly expanding the yield and the reli-ability of managed resources.

While Braidwood saw agricultural emergence as a manifes-tation of human ingenuity and our species’ inherent ability to make a better life through technology, other internally driven models look to somewhat darker motivations that inspired humans to domesticate plants and animals and create a subsis-tence economy based on agriculture. Drawing on ethnographic parallels with modern day tribal societies, Bender looked to the set of circumstances under which social relations (marriage obligations, trade alliances, ceremonies) create conditions that, she argued, promote the production of surplus that could, in turn, be appropriated by individuals in positions of authority.12 In certain contexts the accumulation and delayed redistribution of seasonally available resources promoted the development of storage, increased sedentism, and resource intensifi cation resulting in cultivation and, eventually, domestication.

Hayden’s competitive feasting model focuses on the role of these leaders, or “accumulators” as he calls them, who take advantage of times of plenty to advance their own agendas of social promotion.13 Once again drawing from modern day complex hunter-gatherer societies, Hayden argues that forag-ers in resource rich areas were freed from obligatory sharing and proscriptions against ownership required for the survival in more impoverished environments. Ambitious individu-als in such contexts were able to capitalize on the bounty of their environment by amassing surplus food resources (often r-selected species where mass-killing would not affect popula-tion levels) that could be used in feasts. Hosting feasts allowed these individuals to acquire control over the loyalty, indebted-ness, and, especially, the labor of feast participants, thereby gaining power and stature within the society. Domesticates fi t into this system as ‘delicacies’ that were either so rare or so labour intensive that their inclusion among the foods distrib-uted during a feast further augmented the host’s stature and the network of individuals obligated to him as the result of his largess. Domestication, following this model, was not an outcome of economic pressures, but of the actions of greedy accumulators seeking to enhance their social standing.

Other internal pull models look deeper into the human psyche for the driving forces behind agricultural emergence. This category includes Cauvin’s psycho-cultural model that fi nds the seeds of the Neolithic revolution buried deeply within the human mind.14 Cauvin’s work was grounded in structural

12. BENDER, 1978.13. HAYDEN, 1993, 1995, 2003 and 2009.14. CAUVIN, 1994, 2000a and b.

archaeology and, in particular, in the Annales School of histo-riography that emphasizes the role of collective psychology and its material expression as drivers of culture change. He argues that no amount of external pressure from either environmental perturbations or population packing could propel humans to domesticate plants and animals and adopt agriculture with-out there having fi rst been a change in the human mind-set that allowed them to see themselves as dominating nature, rather than as part of nature. This collective mental shift, he maintains, occurred fi rst in the northern Levant during earli-est stages of the PPNA under the increasingly more hospitable environmental conditions that followed the end of the Younger Dryas. The sudden promotion of humans to the rank of masters of the natural world found symbolic and material expression in the images of raptors and other predators, and, especially, in the elevation, and even deifi cation of a mother-goddess fi gure, emblematic of female fertility, and a bull fi gure, emblematic of male virility. It was the rise in prominence of this mother-god-dess deity that, during later phases of the PPNA, inspired the initial domestication of cereals in the Middle Euphrates valley which later spread throughout the Levantine corridor. It was the ascendency of the bull deity in the following PPNB that propelled humans to assume mastery over the animals they formerly co-existed with in a more natural predator-prey rela-tionship. The rise of this more masculine mentality also found expression in the abandonment of the semi-subterranean cir-cular house forms betokening a more natural feminine form, in favor of above-ground rectangular houses built along more masculine straight lines not found in nature. It also was respon-sible for an expansionist mind-set that spurred the spread of farmers and herders and their goddess/bull centered symbolic system out of the northern Levantine core region through all parts of the Fertile Crescent, onto the central Anatolian Pla-teau and beyond.

Operating within a similar paradigmatic framework, Ian Hodder sees Neolithic emergence as a part of a broader “trans-formation of wild into cultural”.15 This process extends not only to assuming mastery over plants and animals through their domestication, but to the domestication of all of nature, including humans both living and dead, through cultural con-trol. With its roots in the Upper Paleolithic, this process of “culturing nature” comes to a head at the waning days of the Pleistocene with the establishment of sedentary communities in the Natufi an and later, after the Younger Dryas, a return to sedentism in the PPNA. According to this model, the house—or domus—serves as a material metaphor for the human ascen-

15. HODDER, 1990 and 2003.




dency over nature—the locus where the confl icting notions of nature and culture, wild and domestic, are reconciled by a more holistic process of domestication that extends to all aspects of the human experience.

Like Cauvin, Watkins argues for greater primacy of changes in symbolic thinking in Neolithic origins in the Near East.16 Like Hodder, he sees that the built environment beginning with the Epipaleolithic base camps like Ohalo II and crystallizing in the PPNA sedentary communities serve as both a material metaphor and a nexus for changes in human cognitive abilities that lie at the core of Neolithic emergence. But Watkins also supplies the mechanism for these central cognitive shifts lack-ing in both Hodder’s and Cauvin’s models. To Watkins the new found capacity for symbolic reference acquired by anatomi-cally modern humans in the Upper Paleolithic is fully real-ized in the context of Early Holocene forager communities in the Near East. Life in the larger scale, more permanent built environment of PPNA communities provided the catalyst for a new leap in human cognitive abilities. What had previously been somewhat vague concepts of the temporal and the spiri-tual world could now be ordered into a more powerful system in which more sharply realized dichotomies between humans, nature, and the supernatural could be represented in the form of physical symbols permeating all aspects of human mate-rial culture. The capacity to convey new codes of behaviour (social, economic, and ideological) through material symbols embedded in both quotidian and ritual activities provided the glue needed for social cohesion among the fi rst large scale permanent communities. The greater permanency of these communities resulted in substantial population growth, which, according to this model, made necessary the adoption of farm-ing practices to feed these growing communities.

NEW PERSPECTIVES ON NEAR EASTERN PLANT AND ANIMAL DOMESTICATION AND AGRICULTURAL ORIGINS

All of these prime mover models use the principle of tempo-ral precedent to argue that whatever lever their model spotlights was the causative agent in Near Eastern Neolithic emergence. In each it is the demonstration that morphological domesticates appear after their favored agent (be it climate change, popula-tion pressure, social showboating, or cognitive awakening and religious conversion) that is used to argue for the primacy of

16. WATKINS, 1990, 2004, 2006 and 2010.

this agent. And yet over the past decade research on the domes-tication of plants and animals in the Near East has shown that archaeologically detectable morphological change in plants and animals undergoing domestication may only occur very late in the process, if it occurs at all, and cannot be considered a leading edge indicator that some threshold between the wild and the domestic has been crossed.17 This work has also shown that the development of agricultural economies in which the majority of the subsistence base is composed of domestic spe-cies is temporally separate from initial domestication by many hundreds, if not a thousand or more, years.

PLANT DOMESTICATION

In cereals the morphological marker traditionally used to indicate that the threshold between wild and domestic had been crossed was the appearance of a tough rachis, a change in the plants dispersal mechanisms thought to arise when humans began to sow harvested seeds. The demonstration that this tough rachis domestic morphotype is present among wild cereals raised the bar on the application of this marker.18 No longer could the mere presence of a few grains of tough rachis wheat or barley be taken as an indicator of the cultivation of domestic cereals; the new standard required that at least 10% of the grains recovered exhibited this trait.19 This higher stan-dard of proof, along with a reappraisal of the dating of contexts thought to contain early evidence of domestic cereals,20 has succeeded not only in eliminating all previous PPNA candi-dates for morphologically domestic cereals, but also in under-mining the case for the southern Levant as the region where morphologically altered cereals fi rst appear.21 Instead, the earliest securely identifi ed and dated morphologically domes-ticated emmer and einkorn wheat now appear to come from sites in the upper Euphrates valley (Nevalı Çori, Cafer Höyük, and possibly Çayönü) that date to the Early PPNB at about 10,500-10,200 cal. BP.22 Securely identifi ed and dated morpho-logically altered domestic barley is not seen until the Middle PPNB when it is found throughout the Fertile Crescent and Anatolian Plateau.23

17. See ZEDER, 2009a and b and 2011 a for summaries and extensive biblio-graphies of this research.

18. KISLEV, 1989 and 1992.19. WEISS et al., 2006; TANNO and WILLCOX, 2006a.20. E.g., STORDEUR, 2003.21. As proposed in BAR-YOSEF and MEADOW, 1995.22. NESBITT, 2002; TANNO and WILLCOX, 2006a.23. NESBITT, 2002.


44 M.A. ZEDER


And yet other indicators suggest that humans were actively tilling and tending cereals well before the appearance of this characteristic morphological manifestation of domestication. The presence of distinctive complexes of weedy species typi-cally found in fi elds under cultivation suggests that humans were cultivating stands of morphologically wild einkorn and rye at Abu Hureyra and Mureybit as early during the Late Epipaleolithic (ca 13,000-12,000 cal. BP).24 Increases in this weed complex at Qaramel and Jerf el-Ahmar signal an inten-sifi cation of plant cultivation in the Middle Euphrates in the ensuing PPNA.25 Increases in the quantities of wild einkorn recovered from Early Holocene archaeobotanical assemblages in the Middle Euphrates also points to human manipulation of this plant. Wild einkorn is not well adapted to the chalky soils of the Middle Euphrates and would not have responded well to rising temperatures of the Early Holocene. Indeed, the region today is too hot and arid for wild einkorn, which can only be found on basaltic soils 100 km north of Jerf el-Ahmar. And yet instead of declining and disappearing from the archaeobotani-cal record—as did rye, another cool climate cereal exploited (and possibly domesticated) by Late Epipaleolithic inhabitants of Middle Euphrates26—the quantity of wild einkorn in these assemblages steadily increases over the course of the PPNA and into the Early PPNB. This could only happen, Willcox et al. contend, if people were actively tending plants transplanted from preferred habitats, altering micro-habitats, removing competition, and artifi cially diverting water to tended plants.27 A subtle increase in the plumpness of wild einkorn grains is further argued to be a plastic response to cultivation.28 The pro-gressive decrease of indigenous plants of the Euphrates fl ood plain and the corresponding increase of morphologically wild representatives of founder crops (barley, emmer, lentils, chick-peas, and faba beans) are similarly offered as evidence that humans were modifying local plant communities and manag-ing morphologically wild but cultivated crop plants.29

In pulses the morphological marker commonly used to indicate domestication is an increase in seed size, a change not seen in lentils and other pulses until at least 7500 years ago.30 And yet a good case can be made for the cultivation of pulses considerably earlier. Wild lentils are not a common component of Near Eastern wild plant communities, the yield of seeds

24. COLLEDGE, 2002.25. WILLCOX et al., 2008.26. HILLMAN, 2000.27. WILLCOX et al., 2008.28. WILLCOX, 2004; WILLCOX et al., 2008.29. WILLCOX et al., 2008 and 2009.30. WEISS and ZOHARY, 2011.

per plant in wild lentils is very low (10-20 seeds per plant), and the dormancy rate of wild lentils is very high (only about 10% of wild lentil seeds germinate after sowing). Given the rarity and the low yield of these plants in the wild, the hun-dreds of wild morphotype lentils recovered from PPNA sites like Netiv Hagdud and Jerf el-Ahmar are unlikely to represent wild, unmanaged plants.31 Transplantation and tending of mor-phological wild lentils are clearly indicated. In fact it is highly likely that these crop plants had already undergone a lowering of seed dormancy rates and an increase in the number of seeds per plant by this time —initial steps toward domestication that would not be archaeologically detectable.32 The recovery of more than a million wild morphotype lentils from a bin at Late PPNB Yiftah’el (ca 8800 cal. BP) strongly indicates that another archaeologically invisible morphological change—the loss of seed pod dehiscence—had occurred at least 1000 years before archaeological detectable morphological change in seed size had occurred.33 Similar arguments have recently been made for the management of chickpeas and faba beans found in Early PPNB contexts in the Middle Euphrates.34

The delayed expression of domestication induced mor-phological change in managed cereals and pulses in the Near East may be attributable to the frequent importation of new wild plants when cultivated crops failed.35 It is also possible that early harvesting practices may not have encouraged the morphological changes in cereal dispersal mechanisms once thought to be the leading edge marker of cereal domestica-tion. Beating ripened grain heads into baskets, gleaning fi elds, or harvesting cereals before they are fully ripe (or a delay in genetic changes in cereals that orchestrate the timing of ripen-ing in early managed crops) may all have lead to the retention of the brittle rachis in cultivated cereals.36 The appearance of morphological change in these founder crops is, then, more likely an artifact of a change in management or harvesting practices in cultivated crops, not a fi rst line indicator of plant domestication that they have traditionally been taken to be.

Early experiments in plant cultivation were not limited to annuals like cereals and pulses. The presence of partheno-carpic, infertile fi gs at the southern Levantine PPNA site of Gigal (ca 11,400-11,200 cal. BP) has been interpreted as a

31. WEISS et al., 2006; TANNO and WILLCOX, 2006a; WILLCOX et al., 2008 and 2009.

32. WEISS et al., 2006.33. Ibid.34. TANNO and WILLCOX, 2006b.35. TANNO and WILLCOX, 2006a.36. HARTMANN et al., 2006; LEV-YADUN et al., 2006; TANNO and

WILLCOX, 2006a; WILLCOX and TANNO, 2006.




clear indication for human selection for this rare mutant vari-ety.37 Selective planting of cuttings from wild fi g trees that pro-duce this sweeter fruit is indicative of human manipulation of local environments and biotic communities—an activity, it is argued, that provides the context for initial domestication of a wide range of plant species across the region.38

Similar processes are evidenced in the eastern arm of the Fertile Crescent in the diverse, and geographically varied array of plant resources utilized by Early Holocene population in the Taurus/Zagros region.39 Plant remains recovered from sites in the Taurus/Zagros arc include a wide array of large and small seeded legumes, almonds and pistachios (which in wild plants are quite unpalatable), and, in more steppic parts of the region, both large and small seeded grasses, including wild barley. The quantity of large seeded legumes exploited by people in the Taurus/Zagros arc might, as has been done for the Levant, be taken as an indication of cultivation of these future crop plants. Similarly, the lack of tough rachis grains can no longer be seen as an argument against the cultivation of morphologi-cally wild cereals in this region.

Genetic evidence for Near Eastern plant domestication also argues for a more pluralistic process of plant domestication. Once thought to be confi ned to a single domestication of popu-lations located in southeastern Anatolia,40 it now appears that at least two different lineages of wild einkorn and emmer were brought under domestication in different parts of the north-ern Levant.41 And while Özkan et al. fi nd no evidence for a separate southern Levantine domestication of emmer,42 there is some support for subsequent hybridization and introgression of wild emmer from the southern Levant into domestic emmer.43 There is also some indication that wild land races from Iran and Iraq were involved in the domestication of emmer wheat.44 Genetic analyses conducted by Morrell and Clegg have con-fi rmed archaeological indications that barley underwent at least two independent domestication events—one in the south-ern Levant and another in the Zagros.45 Genetic analyses point to a northern Levantine location for both lentil and chickpea domestication.46 However, the simultaneous appearances of

37. KISLEV et al., 2006.38. ZEDER and SMITH, 2009.39. SAVARD et al., 2006.40. HEUN et al. 1997; ÖZKAN et al., 2002.41. KILIAN et al., 2007; HEUN et al., 2008; ÖZKAN et al., 2002; BROWN et

al., 2008.42. ÖZKAN et al., 2005.43. LUO et al., 2007.44. ÖZKAN et al., 2005.45. MORRELL and CLEGG, 2007; VAN ZEIST et al., 1984.46. SUDUPAK et al., 2004; LADIZINSKY, 1989.

large quantities of lentils in archaeological deposits in both the northern and the southern Levant during the PPNA sug-gest either a very rapid movement of this crop plant out of the northern Levant, or, perhaps more likely, a separate southern Levantine domestication of a variety of lentils whose genetic signature is no longer represented among modern domestic lentils. A similar possibility exists for legumes domesticated in the Taurus/Zagros region.

This broad spectrum plant exploitation strategy in the Near East now appears to stretch as far back as the Late Glacial Maximum (ca 23,000 cal. BP) as evidenced by the remarkably diverse array of plant remains recovered from waterlogged deposits at Ohalo II which includes both large and small seeded grasses and legumes.47 Middle Paleolithic exploitation of this plant complex in both the western and eastern arms of the Fertile Crescent is also indicated.48 It is still an open ques-tion when, over the course these many millennia of increas-ingly intensive utilization of plant resources, humans began to actively modify local ecosystems and their biotic communi-ties to encourage the availability of economically important plants. However, it is becoming increasingly clear that by at least 11,500 years ago humans across this entire region had brought a number of plant species under cultivation that, but for the manifestations of certain morphological traits seen in later domestic varieties, should be considered to be domesti-cated crops.

ANIMAL DOMESTICATION

Even more than in plants, morphological markers of animal domestication are increasingly recognized as late-onset mani-festations of human management. Indeed, body size reduction, which had been widely thought to be a nearly instantaneous result of initial domestication in sheep and goats,49 has been more recently shown to be an artifact of a shift in the demo-graphic composition of morphologically wild but clearly managed herds.50 In fact, with the possible exception of the neotonization51 of cranial morphology seen in animals like dogs and pigs that entered into domestication through a commensal

47. WEISS et al., 2004; PIPERNO et al., 2004.48. ALBERT et al., 2003; LEV et al., 2005; HENRY et al., 2011.49. UERPMANN, 1978 and 1979; BAR-YOSEF and MEADOW, 1995.50. ZEDER, 2001, 2005, 2006 and 2008.51. Neotonization, or juvenilization, of skull morphology is thought to be

linked changes in developmental rates that are themselves linked to the selection for reduced aggression and wariness in animals, like domesti-cates and commensals, that come into frequent contact with humans.


46 M.A. ZEDER


route,52 there may be no archaeologically detectable mor-phological change in early managed animals until, as with plants, they were isolated from free living populations and until the opportunity for introgression or restocking managed populations with wild ones was eliminated. It was only at this point that morphological characteristics, seen in bovids, like the changes in horn size and form and the decrease in the degree of sexual dimorphism, began to manifest them-selves as humans took complete control over the selection of mating pairs and eliminated, once and for all, the advantage of large horns and bigger bodies in mate competition and attraction.

It is also becoming increasingly clear that humans were managing sheep and goats within their natural habitat long before humans and their managed herds left this homeland of initial domestication. This process may only be detectable by tracing the changes in prey strategies as they shift from the return maximizing strategies of hunters focusing on large meat packages (e.g. prime adult males) to the production maximiz-ing strategies of herders who slaughter of all but a few young males and delayed culling females until they have passed their peak reproductive years.53

Computed using new high-resolution analytical techniques, sex-specifi c harvest profi les have detected this strategy of young male/older female culling in assemblages of goat remains from the Central Zagros dating to 10,000 cal. BP.54 Lower resolution demographic profi ling techniques have revealed changes in the age and sizes of caprines consistent with the harvest of herded animals at about 10,500 cal. BP at Nevalı Çori in southeastern Anatolia.55 Sheep seems to be the initial managed animal here, with managed goats introduced from elsewhere at about 10,200 cal. BP.56 Daniel Helmer’s recent reconsideration of the faunal remains from Cafer Höyük (ca 10,300-9500 cal. BP), focusing on sex ratios and harvest profi les, leads him to conclude that, though morphologically wild, sheep (and likely goats) at this site were not hunted animals as he originally thought but were instead ‘agromorphic’ animals, a term he defi nes as ‘domestic animals that are morphologically close to wild ones’.57 Simi-larly, a case has been made for the management of morpho-logically wild sheep in central Anatolia at Aşıklı Höyük at 10,200-9500 cal. BP.58 Managed goats are evident throughout

52. FLANNERY, 1983; MOREY, 1992; ZEDER in press.53. REDDING, 1981; ZEDER, 2001.54. ZEDER, 2001 and 2006.55. PETERS et al., 1999 and 2005.56. PETERS et al., 2005: 111.57. HELMER, 1991 and 2008. 58. BUITENHUIS, 1997; VIGNE et al., 1999.

the entire arc of the Fertile Crescent by 9500 cal. BP,59 while managed sheep seem to take longer to penetrate both its east-ern and western arms arriving in the Zagros about 9000 years ago60 and in the Levant at about 9200 cal. BP.61

Changes in multiple indices (tooth size, age profi les, biom-etry) among pigs at Çayönü point to a gradual process from 11,000 to about 10,000 years ago in which pigs moved from wild to commensal to full domestic status.62 As with the sheep and goats from Cafer Höyük, Helmer’s reevaluation of the demographic patterns of the pig remains from this site leads him to conclude that domestic pigs were present by 10,300 cal. BP.63 Helmer also fi nds indications of a reduction in the degree of sexual dimorphism among cattle remains from sev-eral sites in the Middle Euphrates (i.e. Dja’de and Halula) in the Early to early Middle PPNB (ca 10,500-9500), suggesting that initial management of wild cattle began somewhat earlier than this fi rst indication of domestication induced morphologi-cal change.64 Like sheep, the spread of both managed pigs and cattle into the eastern and western arms of the Fertile Crescent appears to have been relatively slow—only reaching the south-ern-most extremities of the region by 9000-8500 cal. BP.65 The spread of managed pigs and cattle to Central Anatolia also seems to have been quite slow, with domestic cattle and pigs only clearly evidenced here by 8500 cal. BP.66

Genetic evidence for animal domestication, even more so than in plants, supports the impression that animal domestica-tion was a pluralistic process that took place multiple times across a wide territory. Up to six different lineages of goats are argued to have been brought under human control in the Zagros region and Iranian Plateau;67 three lineages of sheep in eastern Turkey and western Iran;68 three or four different lineages of cattle;69 and perhaps as many as four different lin-eages of pigs.70 The degree to which these different lineages represent spatially, temporally, and culturally discrete “domes-tication events” is not entirely clear.71 But both the genetic and the archaeological data point to a wide-spread process in

59. HORWTIZ et al., 1999; PETERS et al., 1999; ZEDER, 1999.60. ZEDER, 2008.61. HORWITZ and DUCOS, 1998.62. ERVYNCK et al., 2001; HONGO et al., 2002.63. HELMER, 2008.64. HELMER, 2008; HELMER et al., 2005; HELMER and GOURICHON, 2008.65. HORWITZ et al., 1999; HOLE et al., 1969.66. MARTIN et al., 2002.67. NADERI et al., 2007 and 2008.68. BRUFORD and TOWNSEND, 2006; HIENDLEDER et al., 2002; PEDROSA et

al., 2005.69. BRADLEY and MAGEE, 2006.70. LARSON et al., 2007.71. DOBNEY and LARSON, 2006.




which people across both the Central and Eastern parts of the Fertile Crescent arc were embarking on domestic partnerships with these four founder livestock species.

Once again it is diffi cult to say how far back in time this gradual process goes. In the early 1960s Dexter Perkins made a controversial case for initial sheep domestication nearly 12,000 years ago at Zawi Chemi Shanidar.72 My recent anal-ysis of material from this and other sites in the region indi-cates that the increase in the proportion of sheep that Perkins detected at Zawi Chemi is widely seen across the region at this time. Instead of a marker of initial domestication as Perkins read it to be, this increase is more likely a response to a spread in grasslands at the beginning of the Holocene that encouraged the expansion of wild sheep populations in the region.73 With improved demographic profi ling techniques the younger age profi le he detected—and also interpreted as a sign of domes-tication—can now be seen as a specialized hunting practice. While perhaps a transitional step toward management, the focus on younger adult males between two to three years of age seen at Zawi Chemi is not consistent with the slaughter pattern for a managed herd which would focus on sub-adult males (6 months to 2 years) and older females (4 + years). A similar pattern of specialized sheep hunting has been reported by Redding at the roughly contemporary site of Hallan Çemi, though my own analysis of remains from this site indicates that this pattern is not as strongly expressed here as it is at Zawi Chemi Shanidar.74 The demographic profi le of sheep remains at near-by Körtik Tepe at about 10,900 cal. BP has similarly been interpreted as a transitional strategy somewhere on the scale between game management and herd management.75 My ongoing analysis of the pig remains from Hallan Çemi also raises questions about the case for early swine management at this site,76 suggesting once again that hunting strategies may have been evolving in the direction of management, but that active management of these animals was not yet being prac-ticed.

Although unequivocal signs of initial management of these animals has yet to be detected in sites from this region, it is becoming increasingly clear that at least three of the major livestock species—goats, sheep, and pigs—were brought under management in the context of the small sedentary com-munities that appeared across the Taurus/Zagros arc (from southeastern Anatolia to the Central Zagros) sometime during

72. PERKINS, 1964.73. ZEDER, 2008.74. REDDING, 2005; ZEDER, unpublished data.75. ARBUCKLE and ÖZKAYA, 2006.76. ROSENBERG et al., 1998; REDDING 2005; ZEDER, unpublished data.

the period from about 11,700-10,500 years ago. By 10,500 all four of the primary livestock species were taken under human management in different parts of their natural habitats: goats in the eastern Taurus and Zagros mountains, sheep in a region that stretched from Anatolia into the northwestern Zagros, pigs at the apex of the Fertile Crescent in the Upper Euphrates and Tigris, and cattle somewhere in the Middle to the Upper Euphrates Valley.

AGRICULTURAL ORIGINS

Removing morphological change as a marker of domes-tication of plants and animals makes it diffi cult to say when full-fl edged agricultural economies based primarily on the production of domesticates arose. But once again emerging evidence suggests that the coalescence of these economies was a more gradual and drawn out process than originally thought. It seems likely that the utilization of wild plant and animal resources remained high if not predominant during the PPNA/Early PPNB, making these low-level food-producing economies,77 not true agricultural economies. Not until the Middle PPNB (ca 10,000-9200 cal. BP) did the balance swing toward domesticates as the leading components of subsistence economies in the region.78 The earliest of these full-fl edged agricultural economies are likely to have evolved in the central Fertile Crescent and the full package of domestic plants and, especially, animals not reaching the farthest extremities of its eastern and western arms until about 1500-2000 years later.

RECONCILING PRIME-MOVER MODELS WITH THE ARCHAEOBIOLOGICAL RECORD

There are, then, no threshold moments in Near Eastern record of plant and animal domestication and subsequent agri-cultural emergence. Instead, multiple lines of archaeological, archaeobiological, and genetic evidence point to a longer, less punctuated progression from broad based foraging economies, to economies based on a mix of loosely to more intensively managed resources, to agricultural economies dependant on fully domesticated plant and animals. Rather than there being a single center of agricultural origins, we now see that commu-nities across the entire arc of the Fertile Crescent were engaged

77. After SMITH, 2001.78. HELMER et al., 1998; NESBITT, 2002.


48 M.A. ZEDER


in practices that in the case of certain target species resulted in their domestication, with different parts of the region follow-ing varied pathways that took them from foraging to farming. This emerging picture makes it diffi cult to argue that any of the levers featured in either external push or internal pull mod-els served as primary catalysts in this transition. Each of the prime mover forces put forward as a deus ex machina of Near Eastern agricultural origins comes up short when examined in light of this new understanding of how the process unfolded in the region.

CLIMATE MODELS

The increase in rainfall and temperature that followed the Late Glacial Maximum at about 15,000 cal. BP (and the associated spread of biotic communities previously restricted to sheltered refugia) certainly set the stage for the emergence of less mobile more territorial subsistence strategies of Early Natufi an semi-sedentary communities of the Southern Levant. The lack of plant remains from these sites makes it diffi cult to say whether humans and certain plant species began down the co-evolutionary road to domestication at this point. We do know, however, that any tentative steps toward domestication of gazelle in the southern Levant (the primary ungulate spe-cies in the region) never went very far.79 Signifi cantly, when faced with an abrupt return to Ice Age climatic conditions in the Younger Dryas, the more or less sedentary Natufi an forag-ers did not respond by domesticating promising plant or ani-mal species. Instead, people in the southern Levant reverted to more mobile adaptations that allowed for the sustained exploi-tation of the same complement of plants and animals. At the same time, groups to the north and east in the Middle Euphra-tes valley were able to establish and maintain relatively sed-entary communities within stable resource catchment zones. And yet, with the possible fl eeting appearance of domestic rye at Abu Hureyra,80 there is no compelling evidence for plant or animal domestication among Late Natufi an communities of the Northern Levant.

The amelioration of climate that followed the Younger Dryas may have proven advantageous for annual cereals and legumes, making a return and even a proliferation of seden-tary communities across the entire Fertile Crescent, western, central, and eastern, possible. However, even if one accepts the evidence for the cultivation of morphologically wild plants

79. COPE, 1991; DAVIS, 1983; HENRY, 1989; MUNRO, 2004.80. HILLMAN, 2000.

during the PPNA and the equivocal indications for the fi rst steps toward animal domestication, farming and herding did not really take hold in the region until more than a thousand years later when clearly domestic crops and livestock dominate in Middle to Late PPNB subsistence economies–periods which saw relatively stable climatic conditions. So while climate change certainly set the stage for agricultural emergence in the Near East, it did not cause these developments in the stimulus-response manner required in climate-forcing models. Instead, climate change seems to have alternatively helped push and pull societies down the pathway to agriculture, with people in different parts of this broad territory responding to these chal-lenges and opportunities in a variety of ways in a rich mosaic of alternative adaptive solutions.

POPULATION MODELS

Models that argue for population-induced resource pressure as the primary engine of Neolithic emergence also cannot be reconciled with the higher resolution picture emerging of plant and animal domestication and agricultural origins in the Near East. These models almost invariably rely on evidence of sed-entism, increased dependence on storage, and resource intensi-fi cation as proxy measures of population growth and resultant resource pressure.81 There is, however, a certain degree of cir-cularity in using evidence of sedentism, storage, and resource intensifi cation to demonstrate the existence of population pres-sure which, in turn, is claimed to cause sedentism, storage, and resource intensifi cation. And while it is possible that demo-graphic factors play a role in the adoption of more sedentary lifestyles, increased reliance on storage, and intensifi cation of subsistence practices, all of these things might also develop in the absence of population pressure.

Using more appropriate, though admittedly limited, popu-lation proxies (i.e. the number, size, and distribution of sites and the duration and density of their occupation) does not bol-ster the case for prime-mover demographic models.82 In the southern Levant, where these data are the most robust, efforts at tracking population growth from the Geometric Kebaran to the Terminal PPNB show a steady, gradual increase in population in the region, with an exponential jump in popula-tion only seen in the Late and Terminal PPNB. There is no sign of a crisis point at which population levels exceeded regional

81. BINFORD, 2001; ROSENBERG, 1998; MUNRO, 2004; STINER, 2001.82. HENRY, 1989 and 2002; KUIJT, 2000a; KUIJT and GORING-MORRIS,

2002.




carrying capacity resulting in a radical restructuring of mobil-ity, residential, and subsistence patterns. Moreover, even if an increase in the number of sites and the intensity of their occu-pation in the southern Levant during the PPNA83 is accepted as evidence of population-packing, this region no longer seems to be the center of initial plant cultivation as had been thought a decade ago. Instead, it is now clear that people in the north-ern Levant and the Taurus/Zagros were also actively involved in initial plant cultivation and animal husbandry—regions where no case can be made for any degree of population pack-ing and resultant region-wide resource depression. In fact, the small round-house communities of the Taurus/Zagros arc that served as the context for the domestication of three primary livestock species (sheep, goats, pigs), as well as for the pos-sible domestication of a number of crop plants (i.e. pulses and barley), existed in a relatively unpopulated landscape with only one small sedentary community per drainage system.84 There just doesn’t seem to have been enough people to pack in the region. Rosenberg’s argument that perceived resource pressure stemming from heightened delineations of territorial boundar-ies resulted in sedentism and resource intensifi cation is simi-larly hard to support.85 Discounting sedentism and resource intensifi cation as unreliable proxy measures of demographi-cally driven resource pressure, there is also little evidence for Rosenberg’s other pressure proxy—a projected increase in homicidal, organized violence between, and perhaps within, increasingly territorial circumscribed communities during the PPNA.86

The remarkable discovery of the waterlogged remains the Ohalo II base camp on the shores of the Sea of Galilee dating to 23,000 cal. BP further undercuts the case for population pres-sure as a primary driver of sedentism. Here we see repeated long-term (perhaps even sedentary) occupations of this site at the height of the Last Glacial Maximum,87 when popula-tion levels in the southern Levant had yet to begin their long slow climb. Rather than being compelled to settle down when options for mobility were eliminated by population packing and resource pressure, settlements like Ohalo II suggest that people were more likely drawn to sedentism whenever condi-tions permitted.

The highly diverse array of resources utilized by Early Holocene communities across the Fertile Crescent (the Broad Spectrum Revolution) has traditionally been taken as a sig-

83. BAR-YOSEF and BELFER-COHEN, 1991.84. PEASNALL, 2000: 495.85. ROSENBERG, 1998.86. Ibid.: 663, 675; BELFER-COHEN, 1998; GILBERT, 1998; ROSEN, 1998.87. NADEL, 2004.

nal of population mitigated resource pressures that played a pivotal role in later plant and animal domestication and agri-cultural origins.88 More recently this interpretation has found epistemological validation in the precepts of Human Behav-ioral Ecology.89 Following tenets of optimal foraging diet breadth models that reside in HBE rubric, the incorporation of lower-ranked resources smaller yields and higher process-ing costs (resources like cereals, pulses, small mammals, and invertebrates) can only happen when the costs of searching for declining high-ranked prey begin to outweigh the net returns of these energy-rich resources.90

Once again, however, the discoveries at Ohalo II call into question the axiomatic association of demographically driven resource pressure and diet diversifi cation. Well before there is any evidence of population induced resource pressure, Ohalo II residents relied on a diet that comprised a wide variety of plant resources (including cereals), smaller game, as well as larger ungulate species91—a diversifi ed subsistence base that would seem to contradict diet breadth dictums about resource diversifi cation in the face of resource pressure. In fact, it seems increasing likely that the inclusion of a wide array of lower-ranked resources, including wild grasses, in Near Eastern subsistence strategies stretches back to the Middle Paleolithic when population densities, and by extension resource pressure, were unarguably low.92

The early appearance of this diverse dietary adaptation sug-gests that factors other than resource pressure may have incited the Broad Spectrum Revolution that swept through the Fertile Crescent in both its eastern and western arms more than 10,000 years later. The subsistence base of residents of the Late Epi-paleolithic settlement of Hallan Çemi, for example, consisted of a diversity of both large and small game animals, along with a heavy reliance on a variety of plant resources—a classic example of the Broad Spectrum Revolution in action. And yet recent analysis of animal remains from the site failed to fi nd any evidence for of resource pressure.93 Neither the range of taxa exploited nor the intensity of carcass processing is consis-tent with predictions generated by diet-breadth models.

HBE principles further mandate that the adoption of agri-culture requires a shift from the immediate reward schedules of hunting and collecting wild resources to a delayed rewards

88. FLANNERY 1969, 1972 and 1973.89. KENNETT and WINTERHALDER, 2006.90. HAWKES and O’CONNELL, 1992.91. PIPERNO et al., 2004; RABINOVICH and NADEL, 2005; SIMMONS and

NADEL, 1998; WEISS et al., 2004.92. ALBERT et al., 2003; LEV et al., 2005; HENRY et al., 2011.93. STARKOVICH and STINER, 2009; Zeder, unpublished data.


50 M.A. ZEDER


economy based on managed domesticates94—a radical restruc-turing of priorities that, according to the HBE world view, can only come about in the context of declining returns from for-aging strategies. However, this dictate is at odds with growing evidence from the Near East that long before domesticates ever arrived on the scene, people in this region were making long-term investments in landscapes and associated plant communi-ties and engaging in hunting strategies that were designed to boost the supply of economically important wild resources.95 This kind of sustained investment in improving the productiv-ity of natural habitats and biotic communities with the goal of reaping deferred returns is, then, not unique to agriculture as HBE precepts would have it, but is, instead, a basic component of human subsistence strategies that operates entirely indepen-dently of population levels and resource pressures.96

SOCIAL PROMOTION MODELS

The higher resolution understanding of Neolithic emer-gence in the Near East also makes it hard to argue for models that attribute agricultural origins to the efforts of aggrandiz-ing individuals seeking to control surplus production and distribution to advance their own social agendas. There is no way that the earliest Near Eastern domestic crop plants—ce-reals, pulses, and even fi gs—can be characterized, following Hayden’s model, as exotic, limited-access, labor-intensive deli-cacies commandeered by “accumulators” for use in competitive feasting.97 Moreover, Hayden’s blanket assertion that meat was only consumed in the context of ritual feasting simply cannot be reconciled with the hundreds of thousands of bones found in patently quotidian midden deposits in the Near East.98

It is true that there is evidence for feasting at a growing number of Near Eastern contexts both before and after clear-cut evidence of domestication (i.e. Hilazon Tachtit cave;99 Hallan Çemi;100 Zawi Chemi Shanidar;101 Kfar HaHoresh102). But, as Hayden himself has pointed out on a number of occa-sions, not all feasts are competitive in nature.103 Instead many

94. WINTERHALDER and KENNETT, 2009; ALVARD and KUZNAR, 2001. 95. COLLEDGE, 2002; WEISS et al., 2006; WILLCOX et al., 2008; ZEDER,

2009. 96. SMITH, 2007a, 2007b and 2011. 97. HAYDEN, 1992 and 1995. 98. HAYDEN, 2003. 99. MUNRO and GROSMAN, 2010.100. ROSENBERG and REDDING, 2000.101. SOLECKI, 1981.102. GORING-MORRIS and HORWITZ, 2007.103. HAYDEN, 1996; DIETLER and HAYDEN, 2000.

feasts are aimed at creating and strengthening social bonds within egalitarian groups—vehicles for promoting the obliga-tory sharing of food that has been a central adaptive behavior of hunter-gatherers since the early origins of our species.104 This, I would argue, is a much more likely context for early feasting activities among Near Eastern societies on the thresh-old of agriculture.

Hayden’s more recent assertion that unequal access to sur-plus food resources reaches back to the Early Natufi an simi-larly fi nds no traction in the empirical record. Early Natufi an sites show no evidence of large-scale storage, the accumula-tion of surplus, or differentials in access food or other resourc-es.105 In fact, all of the various signs of social aggrandizement Hayden reads into the Near Eastern record (i.e., exotic trade goods, plastered skulls, etc.) have been convincingly argued to be material manifestations of social mechanisms geared at maintaining, rather than destabilizing, an egalitarian status quo in the face of mounting social tensions that arise when larger groups of people stay together for longer periods of time.106 Indeed, a strong case can be made that the communal and ritual activities seen in nascent food-producing societies in the Near East were not directed at creating or deepening social inequalities, but were instead aimed at counteracting tendencies toward social advancement and unequal access that the more territorially-conscripted, managed resource strategies needed to support these groups might otherwise promote.

Ian Kuijt has made a case that the social developments at the core of Neolithic emergence in the Near East happen largely independently of changes in subsistence economy, making domestication more of a parenthetical aside in the evo-lution of social complexity in the Near East rather than a core feature.107 However, even these more nuanced arguments are hard to support when the appearance of morphological domes-ticates as the temporal place-marker is removed from the equa-tion. Once we see domestication and agricultural emergence as gradual processes that unfold over thousands of years, rather than threshold moments, all the social developments Kuijt and others have chronicled can be seen as evolving along-side of efforts at manipulating productivity of important resources to provide a more stable and predictable resource base for these emergent social groups. The development of large-scale com-munally held storage in the PPNA and its increasing privatiza-

104. ISAACS, 1978.105. HAYDEN, 2009; KUIJT, 2009.106. See collected articles in KUIJT, 2000b.107. KUIJT 2000a, 2001 and 2002.




tion in the later PPNB, the changes in household architecture and, by extension, social relations within and between house-holds, the increasing focus on communal activities and burial practices aimed at minimizing the differences between house-holds and building a collective community ethos, all these developments can be seen as both a response and a stimulus for the economic developments that took people of this region from foragers to farmers.108

PSYCHO-CULTURAL MODELS

Models that look to the inner workings of the human mind as causal forces in agricultural origins present obvious chal-lenges to empirical validation. It is diffi cult enough to discern the underlying environmental, economic, or social forces behind the stones, bones, and scraps of architecture that make up the archaeological record. Reading the minds of the long dead people who left this record is essentially impossible. As a result, many of the models based on psycho-cultural causa-tion remain in a happy ethosphere of provocative yet ultimately untestable hypotheses.109

One of the remarkable features of Cauvin’s bold Revolu-tion of Symbols model for Near Eastern Neolithic emergence is the extent to which he anchored his model in his encyclope-dic knowledge of the archaeological record of Near Eastern pre-history. In the initial 1994 French language publication of Naissance des divinités, Naissance de l’agriculture, Cauvin artfully wove together the current understanding of the record of plant and animal domestication along with a fi ne-grained knowledge of the material culture of Near Eastern pre-agricul-tural communities (much of which he was responsible for pro-ducing in his pioneering excavations) with theories about the expression of the structural reordering of symbolism he held to be catalytic in agricultural origins.110 This fusion of empiri-cism and epistemology resulted in a very detailed account of how, step-by-step, the collective reordering of human’s percep-tion of their place in the cosmos found expression in a revolu-tionary new symbolic repertoire that generated a deifi cation of icons of fertility and virility, a reordering of social networks, the domination of plants and animals through domestication and their enslavement within an agricultural economy, and the sweeping evangelizing movement that carried this new world

108. BYRD, 1994, 2000 and 2005; FLANNERY, 1972, 1993 and 2002; KUIJT, 2000a and b, 2001, 2002 and 2009; KUIJT and FINLAYSON, 2010.

109. I.e., HODDER, 1990 and 2003; WATKINS, 1990, 2004, 2006 and 2010.110. CAUVIN, 1994.

order out of its northern Levantine heartland to the rest of the Fertile Crescent and beyond. In the English language transla-tion of his master work published in 2000, Cauvin sought to bring this Neolithic Revolution road-map up to date with more recent archaeological discoveries made since the original pub-lication of this work.111

As we have seen, however, in the decade since the publi-cation of this important book, and his death, there has been a radical readjustment of the picture of agricultural origins in the Near East—a picture which is now very much at odds with Cauvin’s original story line. The regional nature of the subject matter and styles of symbolic art across the Fertile Crescent, plus the clearly local reinterpretation of symbols and ritual practices that may have been introduced from elsewhere, undercuts his vision of dual deities overtaking the ideological, social, and economic life of peoples across the region.112 His focus on the Middle Euphrates as the revolutionary heartland of the birth of both divinities and agriculture is no longer ten-able given the increasing evidence against there having been a single center for plant and animal domestication. Nor is the notion that plant domestication preceded the domestication of animals by 1000 years or more consistent with either genetic or archaeobiological evidence from the Near East. The early evidence for the colonization of Cyprus also does not fi t with the timeline of his expansionist model.113

This is not to say that the developments of the last decade have seen an eclipse of theories, like Cauvin’s, that put symbols, religion, and ritual practice at the core of Near Eastern Neo-lithic Emergence. Quite the contrary, the extraordinary discov-eries at Göbekli Tepe in southeastern Anatolia have breathed new life to the hypothesis that agriculture is not rooted in envi-ronmental change, or economic necessity, or even in invidi-ous motives of social promotion, but in religion.114 Cauvin’s infl uence is very much in evidence in interpretations of this remarkable hilltop shrine with its monolithic pillars and their evocative animal carvings, echoed in symbolic art found across the northern Levant and into the Taurus/Zagros arc.115 The mid to late PPNA origins of this shrine site before the appearance of morphologically altered plant and animal domesticates at nearby Nevalı Çori116 has given rise to a model that holds that domestication, fi rst of plants and later of animals, came about

111. CAUVIN, 2000a.112. ROLLEFSON, 2001; WRIGHT, 2001.113. VIGNE et al., 2003; VIGNE, 2011; WATKINS, 2001.114. SCHMIDT, 2000 and 2005.115. PETERS and SCHMIDT, 2004.116. PETERS et al., 2005.


52 M.A. ZEDER


as a means of feeding the acolytes drawn to this Near Eastern Stonehenge to both build and worship at this ritual center.117

So while the details have changed, the basic story line is the same as Cauvin’s original model which holds that changes in symbolic systems and religion preceded domestication and agricultural emergence thereby playing a causal role in both. Once again, however, the realization that morphological change in both plants and animals comes late in the domesti-cation process invalidates this temporal precedent argument. As we have seen, it is likely that by the time this center was built in the mid to late PPNA, plant cultivation was probably well advanced and at least the initial steps toward animal hus-bandry had been taken. The more protracted process of plant and animal domestication in the region, then, forces us to adopt a more nuanced view of the relationship between religion and agriculture in the Near East.

TOWARD A SYNTHETIC MODEL OF AGRICULTURAL EMERGENCE IN THE NEAR EAST

Prime mover models of culture change fare better when the empirical record is patchy and poorly resolved making it eas-ier to construct narratives centered around single protagonist change agents that, hero-like, sweep away the old world order and usher in a new era of profound transformation. These mod-els really thrive when they can be applied, with only minor modifi cations, to multiple world areas (especially those with poorly resolved records) that have undergone the same general kinds of culture change. It becomes much harder to support such simple gloss, single lever explanatory models when the amount of empirical information increases and a much fi ner-grained picture of how events actually played out is available.118 This is clearly now the case for Near Eastern agricultural emergence, where the wealth of new archaeobiological and archaeologi-cal data generated in the last several years demands a more nuanced and more synthetic approach to explanation.119

If there are general forces that can be seen at play in agri-cultural emergence in the Near East, as well as in other world areas, I believe they are these. First, is a set of social goals ori-

117. KROMER and SCHMIDT, 1998; NESBITT, 2002; PETERS et al., 1999; SCHMIDT, 2000 and 2005.

118. ZEDER and SMITH, 2009.119. See VERHOEVEN, 2004 for an early attempt at a synthetic, holistic

approach to explaining agricultural origins in the Near East; see also ZEDER, 2009a and 2009b.

ented around binding groups of people together to create stable nodes for social interaction that allow for both the invention and transmission of learned behaviours—central adaptive attri-butes of our species. The other is a related and similarly loose set of economic goals oriented toward ensuring a predictable and secure resource base that, while not necessarily optimal, is good enough to support as large and as stable aggregations of people as environmental circumstances, subsistence technol-ogy, and social constraints will allow. These complimentary macro-level forces, however, are not unique to agricultural ori-gins but are at play throughout human history. They do not, in and of themselves, have much if any explanatory value in understanding how agriculture, or any other major cultural transition, happened in any particular world area.

Instead, there are a number of more parochial, more micro-scale forces responsible for shaping the trajectory of agricul-tural emergence in the Near East and elsewhere. The variable biotic responses to climate change of regions at different lati-tudes with different topographies and weather patterns; the differential density and diversity of different plant and animal resources in different parts of the region; the range of raw materials present; the demographic history of colonization and population growth in each region; the localized human pres-sures on landscapes; the degree to which communities engaged in a broader sphere of interaction and the ways in which they incorporated borrowed elements into their way of life; the ways in which people during times of transition negotiated their interactions with each other and with the cosmos—all of these sometimes highly localized factors helped to shape the process lending a regional fl avor to the emergence of agricul-tural economies in different parts of the Fertile Crescent.

In the Near East, this process reaches back to at least 23,000 years ago when, during the Late Glacial Maximum, people congregated in resource rich refugia at sites like Ohalo II, supported by a resource base made up of a diverse array of plant and animal species.120 The progressive amelioration of climate that followed and the associated expansion of biotic communities out of Ice Age refugia, made it possible for more people to congregate for longer periods of time. This process culminated in the sudden warming event at 14,600 years ago with the establishment of more or less sedentary communities of the Early Natufi an.121 Evidence for an elaboration of social mechanisms and ritual practice accompanied by an intensifi ca-tion of resource strategies in Early Natufi an sites speak to the growing need for social mediation in sedentary communities,

120. NADEL, 2004.121. BYRD, 2005.




as well as their interest in mitigating their the impact on local environments, that can both be traced to a commitment to the bounds of community forged in these settlements.

The strong social bonds of Early Natufi an settlements can be seen at play during the Younger Dryas climatic downturn in the southern Levant when Late Natufi an people, exploit-ing much the same range of resources in a more mobile way, engaged in elaborate secondary burial practices targeted at reinforcing social cohesion—often returning to Early Natufi an base camps to bury their dead.122 In the northern Levant, which may not have been as profoundly affected by these climatic conditions,123 sedentary communities were able to weather the impact of climate change and localized resource depression through the intensifi cation of resource strategies, which may have involved cultivation of plants.

The amelioration and stabilization of climate in the Early Holocene provided conditions that once again allowed people to settle in resource rich areas where they were able to cobble together highly diversifi ed subsistence economies drawing resources from multiple nearby environmental zones to sup-port increasingly sedentary communities. While population densities need not have been high for people to adopt more sedentary adaptations, there still had to be enough people on the landscape to allow for the development of inter-community social networks to serve as economic buffers, as well as in the acquisition of marriage partners and other social networking.

Localized impacts on the environments in which these communities settled could be dealt with either by moving—especially early on in areas like the Taurus/Zagros arc where population densities were very low—or through the intensi-fi cation of hunting and collecting activities. This process of intensifi cation involved efforts at manipulating local environ-ments and their biotic communities in ways that enhanced the off-take of economically important resources.124 In cer-tain malleable species, cereals and pulses in particular, these experiments in eco-system engineering were met with a series of genetically driven adaptive physiological and morphologi-cal responses which enhanced the species’ value as a resource target. This process may have been helped along by changes in atmospheric CO2 and seasonality of weather patterns, not present in the Early Natufi an, that made the returns of human investment in certain plants species even more predictable and profi table. Parallel efforts at modifying hunting strategies to enhance the off-take of important game species, once again

122. BELFER-COHEN, 1995; MUNRO, 2004; MUNRO and GROSMAN, 2010.123. WILLCOX, 2005.124. SMITH, 2007a, 2007b and 2011.

with behaviorally receptive species, set humans and animals on the path to the domestication of animals.125

The subsistence base that made it possible for foraging groups to adopt more sedentary lifestyles was comprised of resources produced in ways that were more amenable to own-ership, surplus, and restricted access—destabilizing forces that threatened the egalitarian ethos that drew these commu-nities together in the fi rst place. This tension, along with the heightened need to negotiate social relations when mobility was less and less an option, resulted in the amplifi cation of lev-elling mechanisms and the elaboration of ritual and ideological symbolism that helped people rationalize the new social and economic order they were creating. This, then, is the process that drove the intensifi cation of communal and ritual behaviors that can be traced throughout the Near Eastern record. The construction of the ritual center at Göbekli Tepe (along with other evidence of heightened ritual activity and manipulation of powerful symbols) can, in this light, be seen as a spectacular material manifestation of the importance of ideology, symbols, and religious practice in the trajectory of Near Eastern societ-ies on the brink of agricultural emergence. And while clearly a signifi cant factor in ushering people over the threshold from foraging to farming, religion, ritual, and symbolism must be viewed in the context of a range both macro- and increasingly micro-level forces that, working together, shaped Neolithic emergence in this core area.

CONCLUSIONS

The legacy of Cauvin’s revolutionary work on the impor-tance of symbols and ideological transformation in Near East-ern Neolithic emergence is quite clear and lasting. It is true that the detailed scenario of Neolithic origins he laid out and the primacy of the psycho-cultural shift he championed cannot be reconciled with the fi ne-grained archaeological data generated since his death. Instead of religion serving as the sole engine of Neolithic emergence, the higher resolution record of Neolithic emergence in this region makes it clear that religion was one of a number of important catalytic forces, on a par with other for-mer prime-mover mechanisms that, working together, moved this process along.

This is not an uncommon fate for bold and boldly stated manifestos directed at overturning accepted dogma and shin-ing a spotlight on a dramatically new vision. It may be that

125. ZEDER, 2009 and 2011.


54 M.A. ZEDER


a long established status quo can only be effectively called into question when a counter-case is framed in such stark and uncompromising terms. With time the revolutionary fervor of the new vision fades, replaced by an approach which fi nds a balance between elements of the old and new to create a more workable and more effective way forward. We have reached a point, in both our appreciation for the multiplicity of pro-cesses that drive Neolithic emergence and in the detail of the empirical evidence of this process, that we can now afford to back away from earlier polarized positions which call for the embrace of one or another single lever of culture change. In fact, Cauvin himself seemed to acknowledge the case for a more nuanced multi-causal model of Near Eastern agricul-tural origins that includes the interaction of population, climate, community, and belief systems—even though he insisted that a collective mental transformation was the earliest and most

important factor in this process.126 Our debt to Jacques Cauvin, then, is that his rabble-rousing declaration that a Revolution of Symbols lay at the heart of Neolithic emergence in the Near East has profoundly changed the tenor and the content of the ongoing debate about Neolithic origins. Thanks to him, religion and the power of human imagination can no longer be over-looked in our attempts to understand and explain this process, but must be recognized as signifi cant factors in any account of Neolithic emergence in the Near East and elsewhere.

Melinda A. ZEDERSmithsonian Institution

Program for Human Ecology and Archaeobiology. Dept. of Anthropology PO Box 37012, NMNH- MRC 112

Washington DC – USA [email protected]

126. CAUVIN, 2000: 63; HODDER, 2001: 109.

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