More archaeological and biological research devoted to the study of early domestication has been conducted in the Near East than anywhere else in the world (see Asia, West: Archaeology of the Near East: The Levant). Although far from complete, the sequences and conditions pertaining to initial domestication in the Near East are the best that are currently available. Thus, it is worth examining the archaeology of this area to illustrate some of the points presented in the preceding section.
While there are a few indications of special burials and prestige items in the Upper Paleolithic sites of the Near East, it is not until the Mesolithic Natufian cultures that very clear indications of complex hunter-gatherers emerge in the area. The Natufian culture emerged about 13 000 years ago and lasted until 10 500 years ago. It exhibited a wide range of complex hunter-gatherer characteristics, including:
• settlements in unusually rich environments encompassing ‘‘endless vistas’’ of ‘‘vast supplies’’ with 250 riparian and other plant food species, and ‘‘meat in whatever amounts were needed’’ (Hillman 2000, 366, 370-371, 384; Moore et al., 2000, 480);
• relatively high population densities;
• large settlements of several hundred people;
• permanent architecture and indications of high levels of sedentism;
• many prestige objects including shells, carved basalt objects, obsidian, raptor bird wings and claws,
And other exotic stone materials (some transported
Over hundreds of kilometers);
• corporate kin groups and burial areas;
• heterarchical organization;
• socioeconomic inequalities; and
• elaborate feasting.
Settlements in the ‘core’ Natufian area constitute some of the best examples of transegalitarian hunter-gatherers that have been archaeologically documented. It is especially significant that there are good indications of relatively large-scale feasting by corporate kin groups (especially in funeral contexts), and considerable sociopolitical competition, all before any significant occurrence of domestication. On the other hand, several authors have argued that cultivation (without domestication) and the ownership of prime cultivation plots probably characterized these Natufian communities.
The Natufian cultures develop into Pre-Pottery Neolithic A cultures with more substantial plastered architecture but no perceptible change in practical technological tools. Unfortunately, there are no plant remains from this period to assess the status of domestication in these societies.
In the succeeding (and derivative) early Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (PPNB) sites (from 10 500 to 8500 years ago), domestication is clearly attested in many sites. However, domesticates were of only very minor significance in most of these early PPNB sites and appear to be completely absent from some of them (Gobekli, Jerf el-Ahmar, Asikli, Nativ Hagdud). By the end of the PPNB, domesticated goats, sheep, pigs, and cattle appear at many sites. Clearly they were being kept, herded, and bred by this time, and we might expect that the raising of wild animals (arguably for feasting) predated their domestication by several centuries, if not more. The change in settlement patterns, at or before this time, to site locations associated with fertile soils suitable for growing crops is a strong indication that some cultivation was taking place and that the products were of considerable importance, at least in terms of their values if not in terms of the quantities of food produced. The basic PPNB economy appears to have been similar to earlier complex hunter-gatherer subsistence regimes, emphasizing intensified techniques for collecting plants, including, in some cases, their cultivation. These aspects are consonant with interpretations mentioned previously concerning surplus production and the role of feasting, prestige economies, and competition between aggrandizers or corporate kin groups.
By the end of the PPNB, there was a veritable explosion of sites together with a major increase in the importance of domesticated plant forms in the subsistence economy. I suggest that genetic selection of the previous centuries and millenniums culminated at this time in new varieties that were much more productive than their wild counterparts. As a result, growing domesticated crops could finally compete with (or outcompete) the gathering of wild foods in terms of returns for effort invested. Thus, domesticates began to be grown as the major staples, since they provided the greatest return, whereas previously they were more labor intensive to produce and thus used only for special occasions like feasts.
The increased productivity of domesticated varieties eventually provided a decisive turning point in making possible larger political organizations and more complex societies. The major forces of change had been established in the Mesolithic, and the development of genetically modified cultivation and breeding varieties whose productivity could be ever increased, provided the means to catapult social and political complexity to new levels. With each increase in social and political complexity, a concomitant but geometrical increase in surplus production was required to fund the ever-augmenting needs of the political apparatus which continued to be based on feasting, prestige items, and status.
At first, few important changes occurred in the Near East, even after the adoption of domesticates which probably only provided marginally better returns than wild resources. At this time, the pottery-using Hassunan culture (5800-5000 BC) emerged in the north Mesopotamian Plain in the Baghdad region. Evidence for domestication comes from the charred remains of several basic plants which may have become staples such as barley, einkorn and emmer wheat, linseed, as well as goats and sheep (probably always used for feasts). Hassunan settlements were restricted to areas where dry farming could be practiced, although some evidence of very simple irrigation occurs at a few sites. As with the preceding PPNB and Natufian cultures, there were significant prestige objects. At Hassunan sites, these included jewelry of turquoise and shells, the earliest true seals, and quantities of obsidian. However, there were no pronounced differences in house sizes or grave goods in the communities or any significant monumental architecture such as fortifications or large temples. All these characteristics fit the models of transegalitarian horticultural societies at their simple or intermediate levels (despot or reciprocator forms) with no fixed leadership, monumental architecture, or entrenched stable economic inequalities. In terms of general levels of complexity and organization, they might be compared to traditional communities in New Guinea or the Amazon.
The following Halaf culture (5000-4300 BC) provides a number of significant indications of increasing complexity, albeit still in the realm of transegalitarian types of cultures, perhaps at the more complex, entrepreneur level. The subsistence base does not seem to change dramatically, although one might expect some genetic improvements in crop yields over time. What clearly does change is the quantity and diversity of prestige items as well as the appearance of monumental architecture. The prestige items take the form of increased amounts of jewelry, obsidian, seals, stone bowls, as well as the appearance of native copper jewelry, and fine pottery manufactured by full-time specialists. Monumental architecture occurs in the form of rock-cut fortification ditches and apparent ritual structures (tholloi) up to 6 m in diameter. Fortifications might be expected to reflect an increase in conflict and competition due to the increased production of surpluses, wealth items, trade, and the advantages to be gleaned from controlling such commodities.
However, it was not until the succeeding Ubaid period (4300-3500 BC) that the first good indications of socially and politically stratified societies appeared in favorable locations, especially where this culture spread into the south. Wherever water could be brought to the soils of the southern plains, the land was transformed into the most productive among any in Western Asia. These areas are composed of fertile silts laid down by the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, much in the way that the Nile annually deposited fertile silts in its lower reaches. In lower Mesopotamia, when combined with irrigation technology and crops capable of high yields, unparalleled surpluses could be produced. These conditions produced chief-doms that rapidly developed into the first civilizations of the Old World, the Sumerians. Indications of chief-doms can be detected during the Ubaid period in terms of the enhanced prestige items (including the first true smelted copper items with axes as well as jewelry), substantial use of irrigation (although still at a basic technological level), much more significant monumental standing architecture (at Tepe Gawra, 20 buildings surround a central sanctuary and courtyard 20 m on a side), rich burials for some families in plastered tombs, numerous seals, and sites up to 25 ac in size. In neighboring Khuzistan, separate clusters of sites occur, each containing a somewhat larger central site indicating the existence of separate polities (each displaying a political hierarchy such as typifies chief-doms). This is a pattern that became much more pronounced at the end of the period and became much more elaborated in the Sumerian period with the formation of city-states.
With the move into the very productive niche of the lower floodplains of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, surpluses based on domesticated food production rapidly escalated and cultural changes occurred so fast that that some scholars even question whether a chiefdom phase of development really preceded state formation in Mesopotamia. In the author’s opinion, this is an extreme and unwarranted interpretation of the archaeological record. Whether one wishes to term the aggrandizers who were pushing their selfinterested proposals for changes, ‘big men’, ‘great men’, ‘entrepreneurs’, ‘chiefs’, or some other epithets, is irrelevant to the argument that it was these individuals who were responsible for creating the cultural changes that emerged before, during, and after food production based on domesticates. These individuals created the strategies that took advantage of surplus production and created the intense pressures for ever more intensified surplus production.
It seems clear that over the millenniums, food production based on domestication did eventually create a much more productive subsistence base than food production based on wild species could ever achieve. When combined with favorable environments and technology, domesticates made it possible to produce food surpluses on a scale unprecedented among complex hunter-gatherers. These food surpluses in turn could be used to produce ever more prestige goods, sponsor ever more lavish feasts, and support ever greater political complexity. The upshot was the creation of the first state-level polities: the Sumerian city-states that Samuel Noah Kramer has likened so eloquently to contemporary industrial societies. While it may be true that Sumerian states provide our first glimpse of modern types of societies replete with high degrees of social and economic complexity, specialization, writing, law codes, commerce, and social ills, at a more basic level, the values and practices that laid the foundation for these kinds of features really appeared first among complex hunter-gatherers. It was domestication that permitted the full development of the potential of this new type of culture. However, the basic logic of private ownership, surplus production, investment, and use of prestige goods, has not changed since complex hunter-gatherers first pioneered these developments.
As we emerge today from the industrial period and enter a new nuclear/cybernetic period, we have yet to realize the full potential of the type of cultural and ecological system that began with complex hunter-gatherers. The forms of surplus energy that we now use have expanded from food production to combustible fuels, wind, water, solar, and nuclear fuels, but the fundamental strategy of producing surplus energy and devising strategies to convert that energy into desirable commodities and relationships has not changed. Today, it is impossible for growth and change to continue at the present pace. Our cultures must create a more stable equilibrium in the coming centuries. Exactly what form culture will take at that future time is difficult to predict, but it will ultimately owe its existence to the expanded production of surplus energy that domestication initially made possible.
The increase in the level of complexity beyond transegalitarian communities is the real legacy of food production and domestication. It opened a Pandora’s box of productive potential that continuously stretched the system established by complex hunter-gatherers to ever more complex limits. We are still expanding that same basic system and its limits in our own society. It is worth reflecting on the pervasive role prestige goods play in our own social system today and how this system will develop in the foreseeable future. The author’s argument here is that in the last 30 000 years, especially the last 10 000 years, we have created a new type of ecological system without parallel in the natural world around us. There is no other species that can readily convert available surplus production into other survival and reproductive benefits. Other species may be able to adapt genetically in order to convert extra resources into bodily appendages or displays that confer selective advantages, but none can convert extra resources to benefit themselves in an immediate fashion. Only humans can do this.
See also: Animal Domestication; Asia, East: Japanese Archipelago, Prehistoric Hunter-Fisher-Gatherers; Asia, West: Archaeology of the Near East: The Levant; Mesolithic Cultures; Mesopotamia, Sumer, and Akkad Europe: Neolithic; Europe, Northern and Western Mesolithic Cultures; Food and Feasting, Social and
Political Aspects; Paleoethnobotany; Plant Domestication; Social Inequality, Development of.
World History
