In the millennia following the end of the last Ice Age, farming began in many parts of the world. One of the earliest regions to adopt farming was the Near East. There, during the final millennia of the last glacial period, hunter-gatherers in some areas began to occupy sedentary settlements, exploiting storable foods such as nuts and cereals. What impelled these groups to plant cereals rather than just harvesting them is still much debated. Hunter-gatherers do not lack the knowledge to practice farming; on the contrary, they are intimately familiar with the plants and animals on which they depend and often actively promote the growth of preferred plants by planting, weeding, and using fire to clear competing vegetation. Farming is not generally an easier way of life than hunting and gathering for, although farming increases the productivity of an area from a human perspective, in general the energy input is higher than for hunting and gathering, and there are considerable risks in reducing the range of food sources exploited. There must, therefore, have been a compelling incentive that led communities to take up agriculture.
One possible explanation is that farming began as a way of supporting a growing population. Nomadic people space their children at around four-year intervals, limiting the number of infants that need to be carried around. Settled communities are not constrained in this way, so they tend to have a greater number of children, more closely spaced (although sedentism also generally increases mortality from disease), and this brings about population growth. Other triggers have been suggested to explain the shift to food production: Climatic fluctuations may have encouraged communities to sow crops to offset declining natural food sources, or social demands may have created the need for food surpluses to provide feasts that cemented social bonds.
Whatever factors provided the initial stimulus, the combination of agriculture, food storage, and sedentism promoted population growth and the accumulation of possessions. It became necessary to develop good intercommunity relationships as a buffer against the risks of agricultural failure and as a means of obtaining commodities from other regions, including such things as seashells and attractive varieties of stone, for making tools and ornaments. Once agriculture developed, it tended to spread by various means. In many cases farmers established new settlements in adjacent areas as their original settlements expanded in size. In other cases, hunter-gatherer communities acquired domestic plants and animals from their farming neighbors by trading or raiding. Hunter-gatherers might turn to farming independently or in response to influences from farming communities, and the presence of agricultural settlements in an area might create pressures on land or resources that pushed hunter-gatherers into adopting some aspects of food production.
Origins, Growth, and Decline of the Indus Civilization 57 Early Farmers in the Indo-Iranian Borderlands
By 7000 BCE, farming communities existed throughout the regions of the Near East where rain-fed agriculture was possible, including the western Iranian plateau and the southern Zagros Mountains. The farmers cultivated wheat, barley, rye, and a variety of pulses, and some were beginning to herd sheep and goats or raise pigs or cattle.
Mehrgarh. Around the same time, there was also a community practicing agriculture, as well as hunting and gathering, at Mehrgarh on the arid Kachi plain in Pakistan, a triangular extension of lowland alluvium west of the Indus plains. Excavations there uncovered a settlement going back to about 7000 BCE. The villagers lived in rectangular houses built of mud bricks, divided internally into two or four rooms, and there were also doorless, compartmented buildings for storage. They used stone blades, grindstones, bone tools, and baskets lined with bitumen, and they produced a few unfired clay figurines though they did not make pottery. The dead were interred between the houses, accompanied by grave goods, including stone tools, jewelry made of shell,
Some of the exposed remains of the long-lived settlement at Mehrgarh, occupied by farmers and pastoralists from around 7000 to 2500 BCE. The houses and other buildings here were constructed of mudbrick. (Corbis)
Steatite, lapis lazuli, turquoise, and calcite, and sometimes by young goats. One grave yielded a bead of native copper, probably produced by cold hammering. A number of the steatite beads seem to have been heated, to change their color from black to white. In the later part of period I, burials were often placed in a chamber excavated in the side of a pit, with a low wall built alongside to seal it.
Mehrgarh is still the only farming settlement of this antiquity known from the Indo-Iranian borderland region. A few other aceramic (pre-pottery) farming sites, such as Kili Ghul Mohammad near modern Quetta and Gumla on the plains of the Gomal River, may date back to the sixth millennium BCE, although their chronology is not secure. Settlements contemporary with Mehrgarh I may still lie buried beneath comparable alluvial deposits or later settlements, or they may have been destroyed by natural forces. At present, therefore, it is impossible to say whether Mehrgarh was an isolated community or part of a large network of farming settlements in this region. In addition, although by the sixth or even seventh millennium there were farming communities to the south and east of the Caspian Sea and in northern Afghanistan, almost nothing is known of the regions between the Indo-Iranian borderlands and western Iran in the seventh millennium. This makes it difficult to understand the wider context of the evidence of farming at Mehrgarh.
Excavations over eleven years by a team of many specialists have resulted in Mehrgarh's becoming one of the best studied villages in South Asia. The abundance of evidence from this site goes some way to compensate for its isolation. At the time of the earliest settlement, the people of the village hunted gazelle, blackbuck, water buffalo, various deer, onager, wild sheep, wild cattle, and other game, and they gathered plants such as dates and jujube (Zizyphus); they also raised domestic goats and grew barley and some emmer and einkorn wheat. During the summer months, when temperatures in the area were often above 38 degrees Centigrade (100 degrees Fahrenheit) during the coolest part of day, the villagers may have retreated to the cooler uplands of Baluchistan. At least some, if not all, members of the community must have moved, taking their goats into Baluchistan to find summer grazing (probably in the Quetta region where modern pastoralists from the Kachi plain take their animals during the summer) and following the wild animals that also migrated in search of summer pasture. On the other hand, the presence of dates, harvested in the summer, implies that some of the community spent part of the summer at Mehrgarh.
Agricultural Origins. It is still unclear how northwest South Asia, represented by Mehrgarh, relates to the West Asian center of agricultural development. Did farming colonists bring in wheat, barley, and goats, did indigenous Baluchi hunter-gatherers acquire these through their long-range exchange networks and gradually turn to farming or were these plants and animals domesticated by the Baluchis from local wild stock? The question has been intensively studied and many pieces of evidence have been accumulated, but a definitive answer is still not possible.
On balance, studies of the plant remains and animal bones from Mehrgarh and genetic studies of domestic plants and animals suggest that the site's first domesticates were introduced from the Near East, not locally domesticated. The wild ancestors of emmer and einkorn wheat were present in the Near East, where they were domesticated, but were not found farther east; so wheat, at least, was brought into South Asia. Barley, the main crop of Mehrgarh in period I, might have been locally domesticated: There is disagreement on whether wild barley was present in Baluchistan (though it was probably found farther north, in Afghanistan). Some recent genetic studies, however, suggest that the Near Eastern domestic plants were domesticated once only: wheat (emmer and einkorn), pea, chickpea, and lentil in southeast Anatolia and barley in the Jordan Valley.
Wild goats were part of the native fauna of Baluchistan. While a few of the goats at Mehrgarh were wild, the majority seem to have been domestic from the earliest levels onward. Recent genetic studies indicate that goats were domesticated in several places, giving rise to distinct lineages. One center was in the Near East, from which domestic goats spread at an early date, probably around 8000 BCE: This lineage is by far the most common and widespread. Another center was farther east, somewhere in South or East Asia (the regions to which the lineage is confined), with the spread through this region dating no earlier than around 2000 BCE and possibly as late as 1000 CE. These data might support either of the conflicting theories: introduction from the Near East or local domestication in Baluchistan.
One suggested scenario is that the people of Mehrgarh were settlers of West Asian ancestry, who had gradually spread east through northern Iran. However, the eminent physical anthropologist Kenneth Kennedy, who has studied both the bones from burials at Mehrgarh and other early South Asian skeletons, has found no more differences among them than one would expect within a population. This suggests that the people of Mehrgarh were probably of South Asian stock. On the other hand, recent human genetic studies show that, while mitochondrial DNA, transmitted in the female line, indicates little or no contribution to the gene pool from outside the subcontinent, South Asian Y-chromosomes cluster with those from Near Eastern and European populations, suggesting a movement, largely composed of men, from West Asia into both Europe and South Asia: This might have been associated with the spread of farming.
Alternatively, it is possible that wheat, and perhaps barley and goats, reached the village through trade across the Iranian plateau from the Near East. Other evidence demonstrates the existence of trade networks across this vast area, stretching from the Zagros Mountains in the west through the southwest regions of Central Asia, and into Baluchistan. Commodities from far afield were present at Mehrgarh: lapis and turquoise beads from Turkmenia and northern Afghanistan, and shells from the Arabian Sea, 500 kilometers to the south. The people involved in this trade would individually have travelled relatively short distances, with exchanges generally taking place between kinsfolk, for example as marriage gifts. Innumerable short steps of this kind, however, could move goods over vast distances. A mechanism, therefore, existed by which West Asian domestic plants and animals could ultimately have reached Mehrgarh and its region. In the earliest village there, agriculture and hunting and gathering were practiced side by side, agriculture becoming the main way of life only in later periods.
The evidence from a single site, however well investigated, is not enough to establish the pattern of development in a region. The question of the origin of agriculture in the Indo-Iranian borderlands, therefore, is still unanswered. The introduction of wheat through trade, along with the local domestication of goats and barley, might seem to be an attractive explanation for the presence of these domesticates at Mehrgarh, but this then focuses attention on the problem of understanding the stimuli behind the shift to agriculture in this region.
The Consolidation of Agriculture. Subsequent developments are rather better understood. Throughout period I at Mehrgarh, cattle and sheep increased in importance, and by the end of the period (around 5500 or 5000 BCE), the people of the village had come to rely mainly on domestic cattle, sheep, and goats for their meat, rather than on hunted game. Genetic studies show that the world's domestic cattle belong to two separate lineages: one including both European cattle and the African zebu, the other containing the Indian zebu (Bos indicus). The latter is probably descended from Bos namadicus, the wild cattle of Pleistocene South Asia, which may have been the variety of wild cattle being hunted at Mehrgarh. Studies of the bones of cattle from Mehrgarh show the progressive diminution in size that is a characteristic of domestication in many species. (Size diminution alone, however, is not sufficient evidence of domestication because it also occurred during the postglacial period in a number of species that were not domesticated.) As time went on, cattle became progressively important in the economy of Mehrgarh's inhabitants.
Local domestication is less certain in the case of sheep. Cytogenetic studies indicate that there was more than one focus of sheep domestication in Asia, and size diminution through time in the sheep present at Mehrgarh is consistent with the domestication of wild sheep in this region. However, studies seem to indicate that all modern sheep derive from one wild ancestor, the Asiatic moufflon (Ovis orientalis), which is not found east of the Zagros Mountains; wild sheep in Baluchistan are urial (Ovis vignei). It is therefore possible that domestic sheep were obtained from the west through the exchange networks.
Naked six-row barley was the main crop in early Mehrgarh, but hulled six-row and two-row barley and several varieties of wheat were also grown in small quantities. A wild cereal, goats-face grass (Aegilops squarrosa), hybridized with the cultivated emmer wheat, produces a free-threshing bread wheat (Triticum aestivum vulgare). Goats-face grass probably grew as a weed in the fields of Mehrgarh, so it is possible that T. aestivum evolved there, though plant studies indicate that the most likely source area for the original hybridization is the southwest Caspian region.
Traces of a cotton thread were detected inside a bracelet of copper beads from a grave dating to the end of period I, currently the earliest known evidence of cotton textile in the world.
Farming Communities of the Northwest. By the mid-sixth or early fifth millennium, a number of farming settlements are known in Baluchistan, including Kili Ghul Mohammad, Anjira, Siah Damb, and Rana Ghundai. Some, such as Anjira, were pastoral camps; others, such as Mehrgarh (period II), were larger communities also practicing cultivation. Mehrgarh continues to provide the most comprehensive information on the period. Domestic cattle there increased in importance at the expense of other animals, and sheep became more numerous than goats. A number of charred cotton seeds identified there suggest either cotton cultivation or the use of the wild cotton plant. Small-scale irrigation is apparently implied by some of the varieties of cereals under cultivation. A large number of compartmented storage buildings (granaries) indicate the increasing importance of cereal cultivation at Mehrgarh and perhaps imply some social complexity. Some of the cells contained impressions of grains, and in one two sickles were found, made of three small blades set in bitumen, originally with wooden handles. A substantial buttressing wall around earlier deposits created a terrace on which the granaries were built, and this must have required community cooperation in its construction.
An increased range of craft activities took place in the settlements of this period, notably the manufacture of the first local pottery vessels. These were made in a variety of simple ways: by coating both faces of a reed core with clay, by moulding clay in a bitumen-lined basket, or by covering the inside of an old basket with clay and firing it, destroying the basket and producing a distinctive type of pottery known as basket-marked ware. Pots were also built up from slabs and pieces of chaff-tempered clay and sometimes coated with a red slip: this ware is known also from contemporary sites across the Iranian plateau. Later in the period some of the pottery was made on the tournette (turntable or slow wheel). A number of fireplaces and working surfaces of hard clay or brick paving, used for industrial activities, were found at Mehrgarh. Objects made at the site included bone, stone, and flint tools, pots and unfired clay figurines, and beads and other ornaments of shell, steatite, and ivory, and probably leather goods, woven textiles, and baskets. Several crucibles containing copper slag bear witness to the beginning of metallurgy, though only a small ingot, a bead, and a ring in copper survive. It is possible that Mehrgarh was providing a regional focus for industry and trade, where many communities met seasonally to engage in exchange and social activities such as arranging and celebrating marriages.
Contemporary Cultures. A number of hunter-gatherer settlements are known in Baluchistan, in coastal regions, and inland along the Luni River in the Thar
Desert, as well as in the rest of the subcontinent. In the northwest, there are a few sites, such as Tharro Hill, in the coastal area from the Makran to the Indus delta, where surface-collected material suggests farming settlement and interaction between farmers and hunter-gatherers. Abundant natural resources and relatively low population densities probably meant that there were no incentives to embark on major changes in the pattern of existence. Nevertheless, in the hunter-gatherer settlement of Bagor in Rajasthan, the faunal remains include the bones of cattle, sheep, goat, and pig, which may have been domestic animals, although there is some disagreement on this. Sheep and goat together made up more than half the animals present throughout the duration of the settlement (into early historical times). If indeed they were domestic animals, which seems quite likely, they were probably acquired initially, by trading or raiding, from the farming communities in neighboring Baluchistan. Thereafter, domestic animals may have been raised by the people of Bagor, because herding fits in well with a hunter-gatherer existence, seasonal movement being a significant feature of both. Similar evidence comes from Loteshwar in northern Gujarat, a hunter-gatherer settlement with domestic sheep and goats as well as wild animals, that may be as early as the sixth millennium.
World History
