Figure 4. Catchment area (large circle) around a campsite, projected onto (a) a narrow mountain valley, and (b) a larger river plain. Author’s original.
As already mentioned, our knowledge of the phase covering the beginnings of permanent settlements and of the production of food is so much better because we know of hundreds of sites in the Near East from this period. By “phase covering the beginnings of permanent settlements,” we understand the long period during which the first attempts to obtain plant and animal food by cultivation and animal husbandry led to a diminution in the proportion of food acquired by hunting, fishing, and gathering. However, such sustenance still remained the main source of food for a very long time because food production practices were still too unreliable.
The beginnings of food production are hard to pinpoint. People certainly had some knowledge of the basic principles of the development and growth of plants by the Palaeolithic age. We may surely continue to picture early humans carelessly dropping grains or berries they had gathered, failing to pick them all up again, and then after a while noticing that new plants were shooting out of the earth at the very place where they had dropped them.
It is, however, a mistake to believe that such observations marked the beginning of plant cultivation, which was linked not only to what people knew about plants but also to their needs. It is precisely here that the problem arises, because it is hardly possible to discover why there was a need for plant cultivation, let alone to fix the exact point in time when it first occurred. Perhaps we should seek the reason for this purposeful cultivation of plants, and the time frame in which it began, in the constant endeavor of early humans—who, as noted, chose their settlement sites with such great care—to extend their stay beyond the maximum length of time permitted by the ripening period of the plants that occurred naturally near their campsites.
It is clear, from the fact that evidence of both phenomena appears at about the same time that there was a direct connection between the beginnings of permanent settlements and the production of food. However, this connection does not go so far as to imply that no permanent settlement would have been possible without food production. We have too much evidence showing that subsistence could provide more than the mere satisfaction of everyday needs. In fact, it also offered possibilities of piling up supplies without which a whole year’s stay on one site would have been impossible.
In remote areas of the Near East it is, for example, still possible to harvest crops of wild grain even today, and 2 to 2.5 liters of grain can be gathered per man per hour. Improved storage techniques were, however, even more crucial than the creation of grain reserves, and we may assume that it was progress in this technology that made more extensive cultivation a sensible proposition.
Whereas simple pits dug into the ground, such as have been found in several prepottery settlements, indicate the beginnings of stationary storage, arrangements more suited to the purpose very soon began to be made. One of the most important aims, protection of the grain from small rodents, was achieved by plastering these pits with a solid layer of clay, occasionally hardened by firing. Optimal protection was provided by keeping food, and above all grains, in large fired vessels, which in the Neolithic settlement of Hajji Firuz in northwestern Iran, for example, were half buried in the floors of special storerooms (fig. 5). Round or square storage containers, or small storerooms constructed on the spot out of clay, have been found either inside houses or in courtyards, but also outside.
However, before the cultivation of plants, and more especially of grains, could become the main source of plant food, it was necessary to make changes in two respects. For one thing, the uncultivated forms of edible grains have two unwelcome properties, which though they promote natural reproduction, and are the results of natural selection, proved an obstacle to their use by human beings. The stem of the ear of barley on which the grains hang grows in such a way that it very easily breaks apart after the grains have ripened, thus allowing them to fall to the ground separately. This was obviously highly inconvenient for the process of gathering. Even the slightest shaking causes the ear of barley to disintegrate, so that some of the yield was, at least at first, very easily lost. The second drawback was that the individual grains are coated with hard husks, necessary to protect the grains from premature germination if they fall onto the ground, so that early humans had to devise elaborate procedures to separate the grains from the husks.
Figure 5. Storage jars at Hajji Firuz (Iran). From M. M. Voigt, Hajji Firuz Tepe, Iran: The Neolithic Settlement (1983), pl. 22. Courtesy, University Museum, University of Pennsylvania.
It was only after a long time that improvements in both these respects facilitated optimal use of these grains by people. Only through long-term selection could mutants that had a firm stem and a husk that was easily removed be made into the main cultivated species. At first, this selection obviously did not take place consciously, but occurred quite naturally, although now the main aim was definitely better exploitation by man, as opposed to nature’s main aim of creating optimum conditions for reproduction. Because, for example, the percentage of ears of barley with a firm stem that actually fell into the hands of the harvesters was greater than the percentage of such plants in the whole crop, grain from such ears was, as time went on, present as an ever-growing percentage of the seed corn set aside from the grain that had been harvested.
However, we cannot rule out the possibility that, at a later point in this development, these connections were recognized, and that after this the seed corn began to be sorted out more purposefully, especially since seed corn had in any case to be treated differently from other grain earmarked for storage. A longer period of storage was only possible if the grain’s capacity to germinate was restricted—that is, if the sort of change was brought about that was naturally not desirable for seed corn.
It happened—once again probably only after a long time—that one single measure could deal with two of the above mentioned difficulties. The husks could most easily be removed if the grain was first roasted, after which the husks came away relatively easily during pounding or grinding. But roasting also had the effect of limiting or destroying the grain’s capacity to germinate, so that the grain could be stored for much longer. Our findings do, in fact, show that this process—roasting the grain—was the norm.
Again, in the case of the second aspect—the technique of cultivation—we are faced with a less than ideal point of departure. Apart from the great uncertainty about whether enough rain would fall, if it fell at all, there was a whole series of reasons for failures—sowing at the wrong time, wrong choice of soil type, the wrong quantity of seed—that could only be ironed out by long years of experience and tradition.
How long this process of evolution lasted is not clear. At some time, however, the point was obviously reached where techniques of cultivation and the types of grain available had reached a high level of dependability as far as production levels and ways of exploiting the grain were concerned. Nevertheless, for climatic reasons the cultivation of plants remained on the whole a rather precarious business and was therefore inadequate as the sole source of basic subsistence. All the known settlements from this period were in areas where, nowadays at least, it is highly likely that enough rain will fall every year to guarantee the growth of plants, but even in these regions dry years cannot entirely be ruled out. The uncertainties governing the procurement of food through plant cultivation alone had to be taken into account. Hence, during the whole time in which the processes described above were taking place, but also even after there had been a certain amount of consolidation, the various forms of food gathering had to be continued. It was only when opportunities for gathering food continued to exist and to be exploited that it was possible to compensate for the unavoidable mistakes made during plant cultivation. The other branch of food production, animal husbandry, was also in no position to provide any security and was even more subject to failure than plant cultivation.
Maint
aining herds of wild animals may well have been practised very early on. The fact that among the bones found during excavations of the prepottery Neolithic period there are cases of definite concentration as regards the sex and age of the slaughtered animals of a particular type indicates that early humans had the sort of exact control of the animals’ age and sex that it is impossible for hunters to have. After these early examples of keeping herds of wild animals, it probably took a much longer time to arrive at some sort of planned breeding that aimed at more strongly reproducing characteristics of the animals useful to people.
An example is the development of the wool sheep, which differs in one important aspect from the wild sheep, namely in the type of coat. The wild sheep has a coat like a goat’s, made up chiefly of long hairs, between which a light, woolly undercoat can be found. There are two different types of hair root that are responsible for this. Under normal conditions there are more roots for long hair, so that a thick coat of hair prevents the further development of the lighter covering of wool. But there is also a variant in which the relationship of the two different hair roots is reversed, enabling a thick pile of wool to develop unhindered by the hair. After a long interval, planned breeding of this variant finally produced the prototype of our present-day wool sheep.
Keeping herds of animals that will reproduce while they are in captivity requires great experience if the herd is to develop uniformly once the animals taken for human consumption have been removed, since a complex balance must be maintained between the sexes and age groups in any herd. There was also a great danger of things going wrong on another level. Apparently, the process of domestication led to animals becoming less resistant, and, to make matters worse, when they were being cared for by man in a herd, it was possible for more animals to live together in the open country than ever before. Epidemics could therefore spread much more quickly among the animals and have much more serious consequences, so that long years of work could be wiped out in a very short space of time. This must have had a critical impact on people who would have depended on animal husbandry as their only means of livelihood.
For a very long period of time, therefore, it was essential to have multiple means of ensuring subsistence, and this brought in its train a mixed economy in which the shares of food production—whether by cultivation or animal husbandry—and of the procurement of food through hunting and gathering could shift according to the external circumstances prevailing. If worse came to worse, they could always go back to hunting, fishing, or gathering.
Figure 6. Wild sheep (Ovis ammon anatolica). Photographed in 1983 near Konya, Turkey. Photo by S. M. Tarhan. Courtesy, Dr. G. Heidemann, Institut für Haustierkunde, Universität Kiel.
However, this did mean that in spite of the new ways of securing an existence through food production, humans were still tied to those camp or settlement sites from which food gathering could be carried out with as few problems as possible. In this phase, too, where man gradually began to free himself from total dependence on nature, sites located in highly differentiated terrain, from which as many ecological units as possible could be reached, were therefore much preferred, as the material we have found shows.
One of the best-known prepottery settlements, Beidha, situated southeast of the Dead Sea in Jordan, is to be found in just such a differentiated landscape (fig. 7a). Between a ridge of hills that ends in the Arabian Desert and the line of fault in the Wadi Araba, there is a high plateau about four to six kilometers wide, which is intersected by channels and wadis. The prepottery settlement lay in the center of this segmented area and therefore had easy access to the different animals and plants of this plateau, as well as to the higher mountain ridges to the east, and to the land of the rift valley of Wadi Araba, almost a thousand meters lower down to the west.
The part of the settlement that has been excavated shows the remains of buildings whose walls were built of layers of thin stone slabs plastered in white, on which it was still possible to discern some traces of a decoration made up of red bands. In addition to a building of relatively generous size, there were a series of units, all of the same type, consisting of an irregular-shaped long room with chambers on both sides (fig. 7b). The remains of grain and implements for processing grain—such as grinding stones or pestles—reveal the great part played by food production, while the remains of other plants and the bones of hunted animals bear witness to the fact that subsistence was secured by hunting and gathering.
The settlement of Çayönü, near Diyarbakir in southeastern Turkey, belongs on the same chronological horizon. It is situated on the high bank of a tributary of the Tigris. The river terrace is only a few kilometers wide until the slopes of the foothills of the Taurus are reached. The site is especially interesting insofar as the animal bones found in the different levels of this settlement allow us to perceive a demonstrable shift in the main emphasis from the use of wild animals to the use of domesticated ones. For the time being, developments as far as plants were concerned remain less clear. In addition to the gathering of a great number of plants, emmer and one-grained spelt do seem to have been cultivated there, whereas barley, which is indigenous to this area, is inexplicably missing in both its wild and cultivated forms.
Figure 7. Surroundings and plan of the Neolithic settlement of Beidha (Jordan). After D. Kirkbride, “Five Seasons at Beidha,” Palest. Explor. Quarterly (1966), figs. 2 and 21.
The phenomenon of permanent settlements without pottery was originally encountered for the first time during the excavations of the small settlement of Qalʾat Jarmo, where, beneath five layers that contained a limited amount of simple pottery, a series of eleven layers was found that contained no pottery, in spite of indisputable evidence pointing to the existence of a permanent settlement and to a high percentage of produced food. As far as can be seen, this settlement does belong to a rather more highly developed phase than the places already mentioned, because the proportion of animal and plant food produced was very high as opposed to what was gathered. This site, too, situated on a sloping bank above an eastern tributary of the Tigris on the roughly segmented high plateau of Chemchemal in the Zagros Mountains, has access to a richly differentiated hinterland.
The appearance of the first pottery does not seem to have been accompanied by changes in architecture, means of subsistence, or the other areas for which we have finds. What was said above about the relative importance of the first appearance of writing as a pseudoindicator for a division into “prehistoric” and “historic” phases of the history of mankind holds good as well, if in a different way, for the introduction of pottery vessels.
Although these vessels have great significance for us today because we try to use them as points of reference for the reconstruction of earlier developments, and pottery is used to a large extent to provide us with chronological subdivisions, they must in no way be taken to be an indicator of far-reaching fundamental changes. The form of pottery vessels developed, on the one hand, from a long tradition of the production of containers of every sort and, on the other hand, from experience in working with clay as a medium that could be shaped and moulded. It probably also developed out of many different attempts to create durable, fireproof, transportable containers.
Even if it is true that this innovation also brought with it changes in (household) economy (for example, by making available cooking and storage vessels), the overestimation of the importance of the appearance of pottery rests more on the fact that this event has had a decisive influence on our chances of gaining access to the civilization of these early periods of time, a fact that emerges from a short comparison with the way we use another type of find.
Before the emergence of pottery, stone implements are almost the only excavated objects from which we can draw conclusions about the civilizations that produced them. The ways in which stone can be worked are, however, limited. With the available techniques, which depend very much on the extent to which the different types of stone can be split, any individual shapi
ng is as good as ruled out, so that the type of chipped stone tools manufactured seems to be largely independent of external influences. Any changes that occurred on the basis of changes in technique and use seem to have taken a long time to come about. The potential for refining our classification and assessment of those periods from which we have scarcely any other findings but stone implements is correspondingly small, and we are limited in our interpretation of these finds. We are seldom able to make anything more than very general statements, restricted to technical differences.
In contrast to stone, clay is a material that permits countless variations and ways of shaping. In addition, it can be transformed into a hard, very resistant material through firing. Through special preparation of the clay, and also through the use of different types of additives, the material can be endowed with all the properties necessary for each individual process, and we can also, within certain limits, exert some influence on the color of the end product. Moreover, the possibilities for molding and shaping clay are almost unlimited, as are the opportunities for decoration through engraving, cutting, and/or the use of colored slip or painting.
In the category of painting alone there are countless ways in which a work can be individualized, through the use of different types of paints or different styles of painting and patterns. Because the abundance of possibilities for shaping pottery is so varied—ranging from the insignificant to the comprehensive—and because they rely so little upon a preformulation by external pressures, ceramics belong to the most “sensitive” of the genres of human products. They are sensitive because tendencies to individualization, to fashionable and artistic structuring, can establish themselves visibly in pottery more rapidly than in other genres.
This breadth of opportunity for forming and molding clay is accompanied by what is, on the average, a rather short “life span” for objects made out of clay, when measured, for example, against those made out of stone or, later, out of metal. The fact that they were comparatively more fragile, coupled with the cheaper and simpler production of pottery vessels, considerably increased the number of vessels produced, and therefore the numbers available at any one period, so that finally not only did the “generations” follow one another in quicker succession, but total numbers were also very high, as was the potential for exploiting the wide range of possibilities that this medium offered the designer.
The Early History of the Ancient Near East (9000-2000 BC) Page 4