Chapter IV: Part 4

It is going to take years of co-operative field work by both archeologists and the natural scientists who are most helpful to them before the _how_ and _why_ answers begin to appear. Anthropologically trained archeologists are fascinated with the cultures of men in times of great change. About ten or twelve thousand years ago, the general level of culture in many parts of the world seems to have been ready for change. In northwestern Europe, we saw that cultures “changed just enough so that they would not have to change.” We linked this to environmental changes with the coming of post-glacial times.

In western Asia, we archeologists can prove that the food-producing revolution actually took place. We can see _the_ important consequence of effective domestication of plants and animals in the appearance of the settled village-farming community. And within the village-farming community was the seed of civilization. The way in which effective domestication of plants and animals came about, however, must also be linked closely with the natural environment. Thus the archeologists will not solve the _how_ and _why_ questions alone--they will need the help of interested natural scientists in the field itself.

PRECONDITIONS FOR THE REVOLUTION

Especially at this point in our story, we must remember how culture and environment go hand in hand. Neither plants nor animals domesticate themselves; men domesticate them. Furthermore, men usually domesticate only those plants and animals which are useful. There is a good question here: What is cultural usefulness? But I shall side-step it to save time. Men cannot domesticate plants and animals that do not exist in the environment where the men live. Also, there are certainly some animals and probably some plants that resist domestication, although they might be useful.

This brings me back again to the point that _both_ the level of culture and the natural condition of the environment--with the proper plants and animals in it--must have been ready before domestication could have happened. But this is precondition, not cause. Why did effective food-production happen first in the Near East? Why did it happen independently in the New World slightly later? Why also in the Far East? Why did it happen at all? Why are all human beings not still living as the Maglemosians did? These are the questions we still have to face.

CULTURAL “RECEPTIVENESS” AND PROMISING ENVIRONMENTS

Until the archeologists and the natural scientists--botanists, geologists, zoologists, and general ecologists--have spent many more years on the problem, we shall not have full _how_ and _why_ answers. I do think, however, that we are beginning to understand what to look for.

We shall have to learn much more of what makes the cultures of men “receptive” and experimental. Did change in the environment alone force it? Was it simply a case of Professor Toynbee’s “challenge and response?” I cannot believe the answer is quite that simple. Were it so simple, we should want to know why the change hadn’t come earlier, along with earlier environmental changes. We shall not know the answer, however, until we have excavated the traces of many more cultures of the time in question. We shall doubtless also have to learn more about, and think imaginatively about, the simpler cultures still left today. The “mechanics” of culture in general will be bound to interest us.

It will also be necessary to learn much more of the environments of 10,000 to 12,000 years ago. In which regions of the world were the natural conditions most promising? Did this promise include plants and animals which could be domesticated, or did it only offer new ways of food-collecting? There is much work to do on this problem, but we are beginning to get some general hints.

Before I begin to detail the hints we now have from western Asia, I want to do two things. First, I shall tell you of an old theory as to how food-production might have appeared. Second, I will bother you with some definitions which should help us in our thinking as the story goes on.

AN OLD THEORY AS TO THE CAUSE OF THE REVOLUTION

The idea that change would result, if the balance between nature and culture became upset, is of course not a new one. For at least twenty-five years, there has been a general theory as to _how_ the food-producing revolution happened. This theory depends directly on the idea of natural change in the environment.

The five thousand years following about 10,000 B.C. must have been very difficult ones, the theory begins. These were the years when the most marked melting of the last glaciers was going on. While the glaciers were in place, the climate to the south of them must have been different from the climate in those areas today. You have no doubt read that people once lived in regions now covered by the Sahara Desert. This is true; just when is not entirely clear. The theory is that during the time of the glaciers, there was a broad belt of rain winds south of the glaciers. These rain winds would have kept north Africa, the Nile Valley, and the Middle East green and fertile. But when the glaciers melted back to the north, the belt of rain winds is supposed to have moved north too. Then the people living south and east of the Mediterranean would have found that their water supply was drying up, that the animals they hunted were dying or moving away, and that the plant foods they collected were dried up and scarce.

According to the theory, all this would have been true except in the valleys of rivers and in oases in the growing deserts. Here, in the only places where water was left, the men and animals and plants would have clustered. They would have been forced to live close to one another, in order to live at all. Presently the men would have seen that some animals were more useful or made better food than others, and so they would have begun to protect these animals from their natural enemies. The men would also have been forced to try new plant foods--foods which possibly had to be prepared before they could be eaten. Thus, with trials and errors, but by being forced to live close to plants and animals, men would have learned to domesticate them.

THE OLD THEORY TOO SIMPLE FOR THE FACTS

This theory was set up before we really knew anything in detail about the later prehistory of the Near and Middle East. We now know that the facts which have been found don’t fit the old theory at all well. Also, I have yet to find an American meteorologist who feels that we know enough about the changes in the weather pattern to say that it can have been so simple and direct. And, of course, the glacial ice which began melting after 12,000 years ago was merely the last sub-phase of the last great glaciation. There had also been three earlier periods of great alpine glaciers, and long periods of warm weather in between. If the rain belt moved north as the glaciers melted for the last time, it must have moved in the same direction in earlier times. Thus, the forced neighborliness of men, plants, and animals in river valleys and oases must also have happened earlier. Why didn’t domestication happen earlier, then?

Furthermore, it does not seem to be in the oases and river valleys that we have our first or only traces of either food-production or the earliest farming villages. These traces are also in the hill-flanks of the mountains of western Asia. Our earliest sites of the village-farmers do not seem to indicate a greatly different climate from that which the same region now shows. In fact, everything we now know suggests that the old theory was just too simple an explanation to have been the true one. The only reason I mention it--beyond correcting the ideas you may get in the general texts--is that it illustrates the kind of thinking we shall have to do, even if it is doubtless wrong in detail.

We archeologists shall have to depend much more than we ever have on the natural scientists who can really help us. I can tell you this from experience. I had the great good fortune to have on my expedition staff in Iraq in 1954-55, a geologist, a botanist, and a zoologist. Their studies added whole new bands of color to my spectrum of thinking about _how_ and _why_ the revolution took place and how the village-farming community began. But it was only a beginning; as I said earlier, we are just now learning to ask the proper questions.

ABOUT STAGES AND ERAS

Now come some definitions, so I may describe my material more easily. Archeologists have always loved to make divisions and subdivisions within the long range of materials which they have found. They often disagree violently about which particular assemblage of material goes into which subdivision, about what the subdivisions should be named, about what the subdivisions really mean culturally. Some archeologists, probably through habit, favor an old scheme of Grecized names for the subdivisions: paleolithic, mesolithic, neolithic. I refuse to use these words myself. They have meant too many different things to too many different people and have tended to hide some pretty fuzzy thinking. Probably you haven’t even noticed my own scheme of subdivision up to now, but I’d better tell you in general what it is.

I think of the earliest great group of archeological materials, from which we can deduce only a food-gathering way of culture, as the _food-gathering stage_. I say “stage” rather than “age,” because it is not quite over yet; there are still a few primitive people in out-of-the-way parts of the world who remain in the _food-gathering stage_. In fact, Professor Julian Steward would probably prefer to call it a food-gathering _level_ of existence, rather than a stage. This would be perfectly acceptable to me. I also tend to find myself using _collecting_, rather than _gathering_, for the more recent aspects or era of the stage, as the word “collecting” appears to have more sense of purposefulness and specialization than does “gathering” (see p. 91).

Now, while I think we could make several possible subdivisions of the food-gathering stage--I call my subdivisions of stages _eras_[5]--I believe the only one which means much to us here is the last or _terminal sub-era of food-collecting_ of the whole food-gathering stage. The microliths seem to mark its approach in the northwestern part of the Old World. It is really shown best in the Old World by the materials of the “Forest folk,” the cultural adaptation to the post-glacial environment in northwestern Europe. We talked about the “Forest folk” at the beginning of this chapter, and I used the Maglemosian assemblage of Denmark as an example.

[5] It is difficult to find words which have a sequence or gradation
of meaning with respect to both development and a range of time
in the past, or with a range of time from somewhere in the past
which is perhaps not yet ended. One standard Webster definition
of _stage_ is: “One of the steps into which the material
development of man ... is divided.” I cannot find any dictionary
definition that suggests which of the words, _stage_ or _era_,
has the meaning of a longer span of time. Therefore, I have
chosen to let my eras be shorter, and to subdivide my stages
into eras. Webster gives _era_ as: “A signal stage of history,
an epoch.” When I want to subdivide my eras, I find myself using
_sub-eras_. Thus I speak of the _eras_ within a _stage_ and of
the _sub-eras_ within an _era_; that is, I do so when I feel
that I really have to, and when the evidence is clear enough to
allow it.

The food-producing revolution ushers in the _food-producing stage_. This stage began to be replaced by the _industrial stage_ only about two hundred years ago. Now notice that my stage divisions are in terms of technology and economics. We must think sharply to be sure that the subdivisions of the stages, the eras, are in the same terms. This does not mean that I think technology and economics are the only important realms of culture. It is rather that for most of prehistoric time the materials left to the archeologists tend to limit our deductions to technology and economics.

I’m so soon out of my competence, as conventional ancient history begins, that I shall only suggest the earlier eras of the food-producing stage to you. This book is about prehistory, and I’m not a universal historian.

THE TWO EARLIEST ERAS OF THE FOOD-PRODUCING STAGE

The food-producing stage seems to appear in western Asia with really revolutionary suddenness. It is seen by the relative speed with which the traces of new crafts appear in the earliest village-farming community sites we’ve dug. It is seen by the spread and multiplication of these sites themselves, and the remarkable growth in human population we deduce from this increase in sites. We’ll look at some of these sites and the archeological traces they yield in the next chapter. When such village sites begin to appear, I believe we are in the _era of the primary village-farming community_. I also believe this is the second era of the food-producing stage.

The first era of the food-producing stage, I believe, was an _era of incipient cultivation and animal domestication_. I keep saying “I believe” because the actual evidence for this earlier era is so slight that one has to set it up mainly by playing a hunch for it. The reason for playing the hunch goes about as follows.

One thing we seem to be able to see, in the food-collecting era in general, is a tendency for people to begin to settle down. This settling down seemed to become further intensified in the terminal era. How this is connected with Professor Mathiassen’s “receptiveness” and the tendency to be experimental, we do not exactly know. The evidence from the New World comes into play here as well as that from the Old World. With this settling down in one place, the people of the terminal era--especially the “Forest folk” whom we know best--began making a great variety of new things. I remarked about this earlier in the chapter. Dr. Robert M. Adams is of the opinion that this atmosphere of experimentation with new tools--with new ways of collecting food--is the kind of atmosphere in which one might expect trials at planting and at animal domestication to have been made. We first begin to find traces of more permanent life in outdoor camp sites, although caves were still inhabited at the beginning of the terminal era. It is not surprising at all that the “Forest folk” had already domesticated the dog. In this sense, the whole era of food-collecting was becoming ready and almost “incipient” for cultivation and animal domestication.

Northwestern Europe was not the place for really effective beginnings in agriculture and animal domestication. These would have had to take place in one of those natural environments of promise, where a variety of plants and animals, each possible of domestication, was available in the wild state. Let me spell this out. Really effective food-production must include a variety of items to make up a reasonably well-rounded diet. The food-supply so produced must be trustworthy, even though the food-producing peoples themselves might be happy to supplement it with fish and wild strawberries, just as we do when such things are available. So, as we said earlier, part of our problem is that of finding a region with a natural environment which includes--and did include, some ten thousand years ago--a variety of possibly domesticable wild plants and animals.

NUCLEAR AREAS

Now comes the last of my definitions. A region with a natural environment which included a variety of wild plants and animals, both possible and ready for domestication, would be a central or core or _nuclear area_, that is, it would be when and _if_ food-production took place within it. It is pretty hard for me to imagine food-production having ever made an independent start outside such a nuclear area, although there may be some possible nuclear areas in which food-production never took place (possibly in parts of Africa, for example).

We know of several such nuclear areas. In the New World, Middle America and the Andean highlands make up one or two; it is my understanding that the evidence is not yet clear as to which. There seems to have been a nuclear area somewhere in southeastern Asia, in the Malay peninsula or Burma perhaps, connected with the early cultivation of taro, breadfruit, the banana and the mango. Possibly the cultivation of rice and the domestication of the chicken and of zebu cattle and the water buffalo belong to this southeast Asiatic nuclear area. We know relatively little about it archeologically, as yet. The nuclear area which was the scene of the earliest experiment in effective food-production was in western Asia. Since I know it best, I shall use it as my example.

THE NUCLEAR NEAR EAST

The nuclear area of western Asia is naturally the one of greatest interest to people of the western cultural tradition. Our cultural heritage began within it. The area itself is the region of the hilly flanks of rain-watered grass-land which build up to the high mountain ridges of Iran, Iraq, Turkey, Syria, and Palestine. The map on page 125 indicates the region. If you have a good atlas, try to locate the zone which surrounds the drainage basin of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers at elevations of from approximately 2,000 to 5,000 feet. The lower alluvial land of the Tigris-Euphrates basin itself has very little rainfall. Some years ago Professor James Henry Breasted called the alluvial lands of the Tigris-Euphrates a part of the “fertile crescent.” These alluvial lands are very fertile if irrigated. Breasted was most interested in the oriental civilizations of conventional ancient history, and irrigation had been discovered before they appeared.

The country of hilly flanks above Breasted’s crescent receives from 10 to 20 or more inches of winter rainfall each year, which is about what Kansas has. Above the hilly-flanks zone tower the peaks and ridges of the Lebanon-Amanus chain bordering the coast-line from Palestine to Turkey, the Taurus Mountains of southern Turkey, and the Zagros range of the Iraq-Iran borderland. This rugged mountain frame for our hilly-flanks zone rises to some magnificent alpine scenery, with peaks of from ten to fifteen thousand feet in elevation. There are several gaps in the Mediterranean coastal portion of the frame, through which the winter’s rain-bearing winds from the sea may break so as to carry rain to the foothills of the Taurus and the Zagros.

The picture I hope you will have from this description is that of an intermediate hilly-flanks zone lying between two regions of extremes. The lower Tigris-Euphrates basin land is low and far too dry and hot for agriculture based on rainfall alone; to the south and southwest, it merges directly into the great desert of Arabia. The mountains which lie above the hilly-flanks zone are much too high and rugged to have encouraged farmers.

THE NATURAL ENVIRONMENT OF THE NUCLEAR NEAR EAST

The more we learn of this hilly-flanks zone that I describe, the more it seems surely to have been a nuclear area. This is where we archeologists need, and are beginning to get, the help of natural scientists. They are coming to the conclusion that the natural environment of the hilly-flanks zone today is much as it was some eight to ten thousand years ago. There are still two kinds of wild wheat and a wild barley, and the wild sheep, goat, and pig. We have discovered traces of each of these at about nine thousand years ago, also traces of wild ox, horse, and dog, each of which appears to be the probable ancestor of the domesticated form. In fact, at about nine thousand years ago, the two wheats, the barley, and at least the goat, were already well on the road to domestication.

The wild wheats give us an interesting clue. They are only available together with the wild barley within the hilly-flanks zone. While the wild barley grows in a variety of elevations and beyond the zone, at least one of the wild wheats does not seem to grow below the hill country. As things look at the moment, the domestication of both the wheats together could _only_ have taken place within the hilly-flanks zone. Barley seems to have first come into cultivation due to its presence as a weed in already cultivated wheat fields. There is also a suggestion--there is still much more to learn in the matter--that the animals which were first domesticated were most at home up in the hilly-flanks zone in their wild state.

With a single exception--that of the dog--the earliest positive evidence of domestication includes the two forms of wheat, the barley, and the goat. The evidence comes from within the hilly-flanks zone. However, it comes from a settled village proper, Jarmo (which I’ll describe in the next chapter), and is thus from the era of the primary village-farming community. We are still without positive evidence of domesticated grain and animals in the first era of the food-producing stage, that of incipient cultivation and animal domestication.

THE ERA OF INCIPIENT CULTIVATION AND ANIMAL DOMESTICATION

I said above (p. 105) that my era of incipient cultivation and animal domestication is mainly set up by playing a hunch. Although we cannot really demonstrate it--and certainly not in the Near East--it would be very strange for food-collectors not to have known a great deal about the plants and animals most useful to them. They do seem to have domesticated the dog. We can easily imagine them remembering to go back, season after season, to a particular patch of ground where seeds or acorns or berries grew particularly well. Most human beings, unless they are extremely hungry, are attracted to baby animals, and many wild pups or fawns or piglets must have been brought back alive by hunting parties.

In this last sense, man has probably always been an incipient cultivator and domesticator. But I believe that Adams is right in suggesting that this would be doubly true with the experimenters of the terminal era of food-collecting. We noticed that they also seem to have had a tendency to settle down. Now my hunch goes that _when_ this experimentation and settling down took place within a potential nuclear area--where a whole constellation of plants and animals possible of domestication was available--the change was easily made. Professor Charles A. Reed, our field colleague in zoology, agrees that year-round settlement with plant domestication probably came before there were important animal domestications.

INCIPIENT ERAS AND NUCLEAR AREAS

I have put this scheme into a simple chart (p. 111) with the names of a few of the sites we are going to talk about. You will see that my hunch means that there are eras of incipient cultivation _only_ within nuclear areas. In a nuclear area, the terminal era of food-collecting would probably have been quite short. I do not know for how long a time the era of incipient cultivation and domestication would have lasted, but perhaps for several thousand years. Then it passed on into the era of the primary village-farming community.

Outside a nuclear area, the terminal era of food-collecting would last for a long time; in a few out-of-the-way parts of the world, it still hangs on. It would end in any particular place through contact with and the spread of ideas of people who had passed on into one of the more developed eras. In many cases, the terminal era of food-collecting was ended by the incoming of the food-producing peoples themselves. For example, the practices of food-production were carried into Europe by the actual movement of some numbers of peoples (we don’t know how many) who had reached at least the level of the primary village-farming community. The “Forest folk” learned food-production from them. There was never an era of incipient cultivation and domestication proper in Europe, if my hunch is right.

ARCHEOLOGICAL DIFFICULTIES IN SEEING THE INCIPIENT ERA

The way I see it, two things were required in order that an era of incipient cultivation and domestication could begin. First, there had to be the natural environment of a nuclear area, with its whole group of plants and animals capable of domestication. This is the aspect of the matter which we’ve said is directly given by nature. But it is quite possible that such an environment with such a group of plants and animals in it may have existed well before ten thousand years ago in the Near East. It is also quite possible that the same promising condition may have existed in regions which never developed into nuclear areas proper. Here, again, we come back to the cultural factor. I think it was that “atmosphere of experimentation” we’ve talked about once or twice before. I can’t define it for you, other than to say that by the end of the Ice Age, the general level of many cultures was ready for change. Ask me how and why this was so, and I’ll tell you we don’t know yet, and that if we did understand this kind of question, there would be no need for me to go on being a prehistorian!

Now since this was an era of incipience, of the birth of new ideas, and of experimentation, it is very difficult to see its traces archeologically. New tools having to do with the new ways of getting and, in fact, producing food would have taken some time to develop. It need not surprise us too much if we cannot find hoes for planting and sickles for reaping grain at the very beginning. We might expect a time of making-do with some of the older tools, or with make-shift tools, for some of the new jobs. The present-day wild cousin of the domesticated sheep still lives in the mountains of western Asia. It has no wool, only a fine down under hair like that of a deer, so it need not surprise us to find neither the whorls used for spinning nor traces of woolen cloth. It must have taken some time for a wool-bearing sheep to develop and also time for the invention of the new tools which go with weaving. It would have been the same with other kinds of tools for the new way of life.

It is difficult even for an experienced comparative zoologist to tell which are the bones of domesticated animals and which are those of their wild cousins. This is especially so because the animal bones the archeologists find are usually fragmentary. Furthermore, we do not have a sort of library collection of the skeletons of the animals or an herbarium of the plants of those times, against which the traces which the archeologists find may be checked. We are only beginning to get such collections for the modern wild forms of animals and plants from some of our nuclear areas. In the nuclear area in the Near East, some of the wild animals, at least, have already become extinct. There are no longer wild cattle or wild horses in western Asia. We know they were there from the finds we’ve made in caves of late Ice Age times, and from some slightly later sites.

SITES WITH ANTIQUITIES OF THE INCIPIENT ERA

So far, we know only a very few sites which would suit my notion of the incipient era of cultivation and animal domestication. I am closing this chapter with descriptions of two of the best Near Eastern examples I know of. You may not be satisfied that what I am able to describe makes a full-bodied era of development at all. Remember, however, that I’ve told you I’m largely playing a kind of a hunch, and also that the archeological materials of this era will always be extremely difficult to interpret. At the beginning of any new way of life, there will be a great tendency for people to make-do, at first, with tools and habits they are already used to. I would suspect that a great deal of this making-do went on almost to the end of this era.

THE NATUFIAN, AN ASSEMBLAGE OF THE INCIPIENT ERA

The assemblage called the Natufian comes from the upper layers of a number of caves in Palestine. Traces of its flint industry have also turned up in Syria and Lebanon. We don’t know just how old it is. I guess that it probably falls within five hundred years either way of about 5000 B.C.

Until recently, the people who produced the Natufian assemblage were thought to have been only cave dwellers, but now at least three open air Natufian sites have been briefly described. In their best-known dwelling place, on Mount Carmel, the Natufian folk lived in the open mouth of a large rock-shelter and on the terrace in front of it. On the terrace, they had set at least two short curving lines of stones; but these were hardly architecture; they seem more like benches or perhaps the low walls of open pens. There were also one or two small clusters of stones laid like paving, and a ring of stones around a hearth or fireplace. One very round and regular basin-shaped depression had been cut into the rocky floor of the terrace, and there were other less regular basin-like depressions. In the newly reported open air sites, there seem to have been huts with rounded corners.

Most of the finds in the Natufian layer of the Mount Carmel cave were flints. About 80 per cent of these flint tools were microliths made by the regular working of tiny blades into various tools, some having geometric forms. The larger flint tools included backed blades, burins, scrapers, a few arrow points, some larger hacking or picking tools, and one special type. This last was the sickle blade.

We know a sickle blade of flint when we see one, because of a strange polish or sheen which seems to develop on the cutting edge when the blade has been used to cut grasses or grain, or--perhaps--reeds. In the Natufian, we have even found the straight bone handles in which a number of flint sickle blades were set in a line.

There was a small industry in ground or pecked stone (that is, abraded not chipped) in the Natufian. This included some pestle and mortar fragments. The mortars are said to have a deep and narrow hole, and some of the pestles show traces of red ochre. We are not sure that these mortars and pestles were also used for grinding food. In addition, there were one or two bits of carving in stone.

NATUFIAN ANTIQUITIES IN OTHER MATERIALS; BURIALS AND PEOPLE

The Natufian industry in bone was quite rich. It included, beside the sickle hafts mentioned above, points and harpoons, straight and curved types of fish-hooks, awls, pins and needles, and a variety of beads and pendants. There were also beads and pendants of pierced teeth and shell.

A number of Natufian burials have been found in the caves; some burials were grouped together in one grave. The people who were buried within the Mount Carmel cave were laid on their backs in an extended position, while those on the terrace seem to have been “flexed” (placed in their graves in a curled-up position). This may mean no more than that it was easier to dig a long hole in cave dirt than in the hard-packed dirt of the terrace. The people often had some kind of object buried with them, and several of the best collections of beads come from the burials. On two of the skulls there were traces of elaborate head-dresses of shell beads.

MICROLITHS
ARCHITECTURE?
BURIAL
CHIPPED STONE
GROUND STONE
BONE]

The animal bones of the Natufian layers show beasts of a “modern” type, but with some differences from those of present-day Palestine. The bones of the gazelle far outnumber those of the deer; since gazelles like a much drier climate than deer, Palestine must then have had much the same climate that it has today. Some of the animal bones were those of large or dangerous beasts: the hyena, the bear, the wild boar, and the leopard. But the Natufian people may have had the help of a large domesticated dog. If our guess at a date for the Natufian is right (about 7750 B.C.), this is an earlier dog than was that in the Maglemosian of northern Europe. More recently, it has been reported that a domesticated goat is also part of the Natufian finds.

The study of the human bones from the Natufian burials is not yet complete. Until Professor McCown’s study becomes available, we may note Professor Coon’s assessment that these people were of a “basically Mediterranean type.”

THE KARIM SHAHIR ASSEMBLAGE

Karim Shahir differs from the Natufian sites in that it shows traces of a temporary open site or encampment. It lies on the top of a bluff in the Kurdish hill-country of northeastern Iraq. It was dug by Dr. Bruce Howe of the expedition I directed in 1950-51 for the Oriental Institute and the American Schools of Oriental Research. In 1954-55, our expedition located another site, M’lefaat, with general resemblance to Karim Shahir, but about a hundred miles north of it. In 1956, Dr. Ralph Solecki located still another Karim Shahir type of site called Zawi Chemi Shanidar. The Zawi Chemi site has a radiocarbon date of 8900 ± 300 B.C.

Karim Shahir has evidence of only one very shallow level of occupation. It was probably not lived on very long, although the people who lived on it spread out over about three acres of area. In spots, the single layer yielded great numbers of fist-sized cracked pieces of limestone, which had been carried up from the bed of a stream at the bottom of the bluff. We think these cracked stones had something to do with a kind of architecture, but we were unable to find positive traces of hut plans. At M’lefaat and Zawi Chemi, there were traces of rounded hut plans.

As in the Natufian, the great bulk of small objects of the Karim Shahir assemblage was in chipped flint. A large proportion of the flint tools were microlithic bladelets and geometric forms. The flint sickle blade was almost non-existent, being far scarcer than in the Natufian. The people of Karim Shahir did a modest amount of work in the grinding of stone; there were milling stone fragments of both the mortar and the quern type, and stone hoes or axes with polished bits. Beads, pendants, rings, and bracelets were made of finer quality stone. We found a few simple points and needles of bone, and even two rather formless unbaked clay figurines which seemed to be of animal form.

CHIPPED STONE
GROUND STONE
UNBAKED CLAY
SHELL
BONE
“ARCHITECTURE”]

Karim Shahir did not yield direct evidence of the kind of vegetable food its people ate. The animal bones showed a considerable increase in the proportion of the bones of the species capable of domestication--sheep, goat, cattle, horse, dog--as compared with animal bones from the earlier cave sites of the area, which have a high proportion of bones of wild forms like deer and gazelle. But we do not know that any of the Karim Shahir animals were actually domesticated. Some of them may have been, in an “incipient” way, but we have no means at the moment that will tell us from the bones alone.

WERE THE NATUFIAN AND KARIM SHAHIR PEOPLES FOOD-PRODUCERS?

It is clear that a great part of the food of the Natufian people must have been hunted or collected. Shells of land, fresh-water, and sea animals occur in their cave layers. The same is true as regards Karim Shahir, save for sea shells. But on the other hand, we have the sickles, the milling stones, the possible Natufian dog, and the goat, and the general animal situation at Karim Shahir to hint at an incipient approach to food-production. At Karim Shahir, there was the tendency to settle down out in the open; this is echoed by the new reports of open air Natufian sites. The large number of cracked stones certainly indicates that it was worth the peoples’ while to have some kind of structure, even if the site as a whole was short-lived.

It is a part of my hunch that these things all point toward food-production--that the hints we seek are there. But in the sense that the peoples of the era of the primary village-farming community, which we shall look at next, are fully food-producing, the Natufian and Karim Shahir folk had not yet arrived. I think they were part of a general build-up to full scale food-production. They were possibly controlling a few animals of several kinds and perhaps one or two plants, without realizing the full possibilities of this “control” as a new way of life.

This is why I think of the Karim Shahir and Natufian folk as being at a level, or in an era, of incipient cultivation and domestication. But we shall have to do a great deal more excavation in this range of time before we’ll get the kind of positive information we need.

SUMMARY

I am sorry that this chapter has had to be so much more about ideas than about the archeological traces of prehistoric men themselves. But the antiquities of the incipient era of cultivation and animal domestication will not be spectacular, even when we do have them excavated in quantity. Few museums will be interested in these antiquities for exhibition purposes. The charred bits or impressions of plants, the fragments of animal bone and shell, and the varied clues to climate and environment will be as important as the artifacts themselves. It will be the ideas to which these traces lead us that will be important. I am sure that this unspectacular material--when we have much more of it, and learn how to understand what it says--will lead us to how and why answers about the first great change in human history.

We know the earliest village-farming communities appeared in western Asia, in a nuclear area. We do not yet know why the Near Eastern experiment came first, or why it didn’t happen earlier in some other nuclear area. Apparently, the level of culture and the promise of the natural environment were ready first in western Asia. The next sites we look at will show a simple but effective food-production already in existence. Without effective food-production and the settled village-farming communities, civilization never could have followed. How effective food-production came into being by the end of the incipient era, is, I believe, one of the most fascinating questions any archeologist could face.

It now seems probable--from possibly two of the Palestinian sites with varieties of the Natufian (Jericho and Nahal Oren)--that there were one or more local Palestinian developments out of the Natufian into later times. In the same way, what followed after the Karim Shahir type of assemblage in northeastern Iraq was in some ways a reflection of beginnings made at Karim Shahir and Zawi Chemi.

THE First Revolution

As the incipient era of cultivation and animal domestication passed onward into the era of the primary village-farming community, the first basic change in human economy was fully achieved. In southwestern Asia, this seems to have taken place about nine thousand years ago. I am going to restrict my description to this earliest Near Eastern case--I do not know enough about the later comparable experiments in the Far East and in the New World. Let us first, once again, think of the contrast between food-collecting and food-producing as ways of life.

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN FOOD-COLLECTORS AND FOOD-PRODUCERS

Childe used the word “revolution” because of the radical change that took place in the habits and customs of man. Food-collectors--that is, hunters, fishers, berry- and nut-gatherers--had to live in small groups or bands, for they had to be ready to move wherever their food supply moved. Not many people can be fed in this way in one area, and small children and old folks are a burden. There is not enough food to store, and it is not the kind that can be stored for long.

Do you see how this all fits into a picture? Small groups of people living now in this cave, now in that--or out in the open--as they moved after the animals they hunted; no permanent villages, a few half-buried huts at best; no breakable utensils; no pottery; no signs of anything for clothing beyond the tools that were probably used to dress the skins of animals; no time to think of much of anything but food and protection and disposal of the dead when death did come: an existence which takes nature as it finds it, which does little or nothing to modify nature--all in all, a savage’s existence, and a very tough one. A man who spends his whole life following animals just to kill them to eat, or moving from one berry patch to another, is really living just like an animal himself.

THE FOOD-PRODUCING ECONOMY

Against this picture let me try to draw another--that of man’s life after food-production had begun. His meat was stored “on the hoof,” his grain in silos or great pottery jars. He lived in a house: it was worth his while to build one, because he couldn’t move far from his fields and flocks. In his neighborhood enough food could be grown and enough animals bred so that many people were kept busy. They all lived close to their flocks and fields, in a village. The village was already of a fair size, and it was growing, too. Everybody had more to eat; they were presumably all stronger, and there were more children. Children and old men could shepherd the animals by day or help with the lighter work in the fields. After the crops had been harvested the younger men might go hunting and some of them would fish, but the food they brought in was only an addition to the food in the village; the villagers wouldn’t starve, even if the hunters and fishermen came home empty-handed.

There was more time to do different things, too. They began to modify nature. They made pottery out of raw clay, and textiles out of hair or fiber. People who became good at pottery-making traded their pots for food and spent all of their time on pottery alone. Other people were learning to weave cloth or to make new tools. There were already people in the village who were becoming full-time craftsmen.

Other things were changing, too. The villagers must have had to agree on new rules for living together. The head man of the village had problems different from those of the chief of the small food-collectors’ band. If somebody’s flock of sheep spoiled a wheat field, the owner wanted payment for the grain he lost. The chief of the hunters was never bothered with such questions. Even the gods had changed. The spirits and the magic that had been used by hunters weren’t of any use to the villagers. They needed gods who would watch over the fields and the flocks, and they eventually began to erect buildings where their gods might dwell, and where the men who knew most about the gods might live.

WAS FOOD-PRODUCTION A “REVOLUTION”?

If you can see the difference between these two pictures--between life in the food-collecting stage and life after food-production had begun--you’ll see why Professor Childe speaks of a revolution. By revolution, he doesn’t mean that it happened over night or that it happened only once. We don’t know exactly how long it took. Some people think that all these changes may have occurred in less than 500 years, but I doubt that. The incipient era was probably an affair of some duration. Once the level of the village-farming community had been established, however, things did begin to move very fast. By six thousand years ago, the descendants of the first villagers had developed irrigation and plow agriculture in the relatively rainless Mesopotamian alluvium and were living in towns with temples. Relative to the half million years of food-gathering which lay behind, this had been achieved with truly revolutionary suddenness.

GAPS IN OUR KNOWLEDGE OF THE NEAR EAST

If you’ll look again at the chart (p. 111) you’ll see that I have very few sites and assemblages to name in the incipient era of cultivation and domestication, and not many in the earlier part of the primary village-farming level either. Thanks in no small part to the intelligent co-operation given foreign excavators by the Iraq Directorate General of Antiquities, our understanding of the sequence in Iraq is growing more complete. I shall use Iraq as my main yard-stick here. But I am far from being able to show you a series of Sears Roebuck catalogues, even century by century, for any part of the nuclear area. There is still a great deal of earth to move, and a great mass of material to recover and interpret before we even begin to understand “how” and “why.”

Perhaps here, because this kind of archeology is really my specialty, you’ll excuse it if I become personal for a moment. I very much look forward to having further part in closing some of the gaps in knowledge of the Near East. This is not, as I’ve told you, the spectacular range of Near Eastern archeology. There are no royal tombs, no gold, no great buildings or sculpture, no writing, in fact nothing to excite the normal museum at all. Nevertheless it is a range which, idea-wise, gives the archeologist tremendous satisfaction. The country of the hilly flanks is an exciting combination of green grasslands and mountainous ridges. The Kurds, who inhabit the part of the area in which I’ve worked most recently, are an extremely interesting and hospitable people. Archeologists don’t become rich, but I’ll forego the Cadillac for any bright spring morning in the Kurdish hills, on a good site with a happy crew of workmen and an interested and efficient staff. It is probably impossible to convey the full feeling which life on such a dig holds--halcyon days for the body and acute pleasurable stimulation for the mind. Old things coming newly out of the good dirt, and the pieces of the human puzzle fitting into place! I think I am an honest man; I cannot tell you that I am sorry the job is not yet finished and that there are still gaps in this part of the Near Eastern archeological sequence.

EARLIEST SITES OF THE VILLAGE FARMERS

So far, the Karim Shahir type of assemblage, which we looked at in the last chapter, is the earliest material available in what I take to be the nuclear area. We do not believe that Karim Shahir was a village site proper: it looks more like the traces of a temporary encampment. Two caves, called Belt and Hotu, which are outside the nuclear area and down on the foreshore of the Caspian Sea, have been excavated by Professor Coon. These probably belong in the later extension of the terminal era of food-gathering; in their upper layers are traits like the use of pottery borrowed from the more developed era of the same time in the nuclear area. The same general explanation doubtless holds true for certain materials in Egypt, along the upper Nile and in the Kharga oasis: these materials, called Sebilian III, the Khartoum “neolithic,” and the Khargan microlithic, are from surface sites, not from caves. The chart (p. 111) shows where I would place these materials in era and time.

Both M’lefaat and Dr. Solecki’s Zawi Chemi Shanidar site appear to have been slightly more “settled in” than was Karim Shahir itself. But I do not think they belong to the era of farming-villages proper. The first site of this era, in the hills of Iraqi Kurdistan, is Jarmo, on which we have spent three seasons of work. Following Jarmo comes a variety of sites and assemblages which lie along the hilly flanks of the crescent and just below it. I am going to describe and illustrate some of these for you.

Since not very much archeological excavation has yet been done on sites of this range of time, I shall have to mention the names of certain single sites which now alone stand for an assemblage. This does not mean that I think the individual sites I mention were unique. In the times when their various cultures flourished, there must have been many little villages which shared the same general assemblage. We are only now beginning to locate them again. Thus, if I speak of Jarmo, or Jericho, or Sialk as single examples of their particular kinds of assemblages, I don’t mean that they were unique at all. I think I could take you to the sites of at least three more Jarmos, within twenty miles of the original one. They are there, but they simply haven’t yet been excavated. In 1956, a Danish expedition discovered material of Jarmo type at Shimshara, only two dozen miles northeast of Jarmo, and below an assemblage of Hassunan type (which I shall describe presently).

THE GAP BETWEEN KARIM SHAHIR AND JARMO

As we see the matter now, there is probably still a gap in the available archeological record between the Karim Shahir-M’lefaat-Zawi Chemi group (of the incipient era) and that of Jarmo (of the village-farming era). Although some items of the Jarmo type materials do reflect the beginnings of traditions set in the Karim Shahir group (see p. 120), there is not a clear continuity. Moreover--to the degree that we may trust a few radiocarbon dates--there would appear to be around two thousand years of difference in time. The single available Zawi Chemi “date” is 8900 ± 300 B.C.; the most reasonable group of “dates” from Jarmo average to about 6750 ± 200 B.C. I am uncertain about this two thousand years--I do not think it can have been so long.

This suggests that we still have much work to do in Iraq. You can imagine how earnestly we await the return of political stability in the Republic of Iraq.

JARMO, IN THE KURDISH HILLS, IRAQ

The site of Jarmo has a depth of deposit of about twenty-seven feet, and approximately a dozen layers of architectural renovation and change. Nevertheless it is a “one period” site: its assemblage remains essentially the same throughout, although one or two new items are added in later levels. It covers about four acres of the top of a bluff, below which runs a small stream. Jarmo lies in the hill country east of the modern oil town of Kirkuk. The Iraq Directorate General of Antiquities suggested that we look at it in 1948, and we have had three seasons of digging on it since.

The people of Jarmo grew the barley plant and two different kinds of wheat. They made flint sickles with which to reap their grain, mortars or querns on which to crack it, ovens in which it might be parched, and stone bowls out of which they might eat their porridge. We are sure that they had the domesticated goat, but Professor Reed (the staff zoologist) is not convinced that the bones of the other potentially domesticable animals of Jarmo--sheep, cattle, pig, horse, dog--show sure signs of domestication. We had first thought that all of these animals were domesticated ones, but Reed feels he must find out much more before he can be sure. As well as their grain and the meat from their animals, the people of Jarmo consumed great quantities of land snails. Botanically, the Jarmo wheat stands about half way between fully bred wheat and the wild forms.

ARCHITECTURE: HALL-MARK OF THE VILLAGE

The sure sign of the village proper is in its traces of architectural permanence. The houses of Jarmo were only the size of a small cottage by our standards, but each was provided with several rectangular rooms. The walls of the houses were made of puddled mud, often set on crude foundations of stone. (The puddled mud wall, which the Arabs call _touf_, is built by laying a three to six inch course of soft mud, letting this sun-dry for a day or two, then adding the next course, etc.) The village probably looked much like the simple Kurdish farming village of today, with its mud-walled houses and low mud-on-brush roofs. I doubt that the Jarmo village had more than twenty houses at any one moment of its existence. Today, an average of about seven people live in a comparable Kurdish house; probably the population of Jarmo was about 150 people.

CHIPPED STONE
UNBAKED CLAY
GROUND STONE
POTTERY _UPPER THIRD OF SITE ONLY._
REED MATTING
BONE
ARCHITECTURE]