Chapter 6 Outline

Introduction: The First Farmers

     At the end of the Pleistocene, some human groups began to produce food rather than collect it.

The transition to farming is much more than simple herding and cultivation.
It entails major, long-term changes in the structure and organization of society.
Farmers intensively utilize a portion of their landscape and create a milieu that suits their needs.

The domestication process involves both the inherent characteristics of the plant or animal species and the intensity and nature of human manipulation.
Agriculture requires several major practices for long-term success, including propagation, husbandry, harvesting, storage, and maintenance.
Plant propagation and husbandry involve cultivation.

Cereals are the best-known early domesticates.
Cereals are grasses that produce large, hard-shelled seeds, with nutritious kernels of carbohydrates that can be stored for long periods.
The hard cereal grains were often burned during preparation or cooking and thereby have been preserved to the present.

Since they reproduce asexually, it is difficult to distinguish domesticated varieties from their wild ancestors.
Root crops, such as potatoes, yams, manioc, and taro may have been domesticated quite early.

Dogs were tamed from wolves very early, perhaps 14,000 years ago.
Several other animal species were domesticated and herded for food and/or kept as beasts of burden.
The earliest animals domesticated were pigs, goats, sheep, and cattle.

The earliest known domesticates include wheat, barley, peas, lentils, pigs, goats, sheep, and cattle.
These appeared in the Old World, in Southwest Asia, and between the eastern Mediterranean Sea and Afghanistan at the end of the Pleistocene.

Early domesticates in China included millet, rice, and root crops.
Plants such as African rice, sorghum, and pearl millet were domesticated in sub-Saharan Africa.

In Mexico, early domesticates included gourds and squash, with avocados, chili peppers, beans, and possibly corn added later.
Sites in the highlands of Peru contain evidence for the early domestication of gourds, tomatoes, beans, and potatoes.
In South America, guinea pig and llama were domesticated.
In eastern North America, several local plants such as marsh elder and goosefoot were domesticated.

'Ain Mallaha
Abu Hureyra
Jericho
Çatalhöyük
Mehrgarh
Ban-po-ts'un
Khok Phanom Di
Guilá Naquitz Cave
Tehuacán
Guitarrero Cave

This raises the question as to why the transition to agriculture happened within such a brief period of time, given the long history of our species.
Such an important and dramatic shift in the trajectory of cultural evolution demands explanation.

This hypothesis was developed during the first half of the twentieth century.
Areas such as Southwest Asia would have witnessed a period of aridity at the end of the Pleistocene when vegetation grew only around limited water sources.
The only successful solution to the competition for food in these situations would be for humans to domesticate and control the animals and plants.
In the 1940s and 1950s, new evidence indicated that there had not been a major climate change in Southwest Asia at the close of the Pleistocene.

Robert Braidwood, who proposed the hypothesis, excavated the "hilly flanks" of the Fertile Crescent in Southwest Asia.
Evidence from the early farming village of Jarmo in northern Iraq supported the hypothesis.
Braidwood did not offer a specific reason as to why domestication occurred, other than to point out that technology and culture were ready by the end of the Pleistocene.

Relying on evidence of the successful adaptation of food collecting, Binford argued that human groups would not become farmers unless they had no other choice.
Increasing populations required people to get more food.
The best solution was domestication.

The effects of population pressure would be felt most strongly at the margins of a natural habitat zone where wild foods were less abundant.
There is an inherent tendency for growth in human population.
After 10,000 B.C., all the habitable areas of the planet were occupied, and population continued to grow.
The only way for humans to cope was to begin to cultivate the land and domesticate animals.

The success of food production may lie more in the ability of certain individuals to accumulate a surplus of food and to transform that surplus into more valued items.
Therefore, agriculture was the means by which social inequality emerged.

In Southwest Asia, for example, the earliest farming villages are located at the margins of the natural habitat, but the same plants in other areas were not domesticated.
Human populations were not large just prior to agriculture, and there were no climatic crises that led people, plants, and animals to concentrate near water.
Some theories may seem reasonable in one of the primary centers of domestication, but not in another.
Any adequate explanation of the agricultural transformation should deal not only with how it all began, but also why it happened rather suddenly.

The earliest evidence for plant domestication from anywhere in the world is found there.
There is a reasonable amount of information available from excavations and other studies.
Southwest Asia is often considered the "cradle of Western civilization."

Most of the evidence for this period comes from the Levant, a mountainous region paralleling the eastern shore of the Mediterranean.
The period was characterized by an increase in the number of sites.
The natural habitat was rich in wild plants and animals.

'Ain Mallaha is one of the earliest villages in the world, dating to 11,000 – 9,000 B.C.
The settlement covers half an acre, with a population estimated at 200-300 people.
Remains of permanent villages with a number of round houses were excavated.

Stone and bone tools were found.
Many species of wild mammals, fish, and other animals were found.
Wild plant foods were recovered.
Two different kinds of burials were found at 'Ain Mallaha.

The area is about the size of the contiguous United States.
The environment of Southwest Asia is highly variable in terms of climate, rainfall, and altitude.

This region is the natural habitat for many of the wild ancestors of the species of plants and animals that were first domesticated at the end of the Pleistocene.
Mesopotamia, the region between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, has nothing to do with the origins of agriculture.

Plant foods were not common in sites from this period.
In the period just preceding the Neolithic, there was more intense utilization of plant foods.
Particularly noticeable is the range of equipment for processing plant foods. Settlements depended on wild cereals.

The earliest known domesticated cereal, rye, has been dated to 10,000 B.C.
Eight or nine "founder" plants were domesticated during the period 9,000–7,000 B.C.
The first evidence for domestication of these founder plants comes from the same areas in which their wild ancestral stock is common.
The transition to the Neolithic is not marked by abrupt changes, but by increasing emphasis on patterns that appeared during the Natufian.

The first towns appeared.
Major changes in human diet, and probably in the organization of society, began to take place.

Evidence for the domestication of these pigs is seen in the sex and age of death of the animals.
By 7,500 B.C., other domesticated animals made their first appearance in the Levant.

The tell (Arabic for hill) covered 30 acres, with deposits from Natufian and early Neolithic periods.
The primary component of the tell was the decayed mud walls of the generations of houses that were built there, along with the artifacts and food remains left behind.
The layers contained an uninterrupted occupation of the mound from 10,500 – 6,000 B.C.

The Mesolithic occupation of the site may have been placed along the migration route of gazelle herds.
Animals were killed in great numbers during the spring migration.
The population of the site is estimated between 200 and 300 inhabitants.

The plant remains indicate a year-round occupation in both the Mesolithic and the Neolithic periods.
The Natufian levels had remains of wild wheat, barley, and rye.

The nearby stands of wild cereals and other plants retreated more than 60 miles to the higher elevations.
Wild wheats continued to be consumed at the site in spite of the fact that their habitat in the area had been eliminated.
The earliest known domesticated plant, rye, appeared at this time.

By 8,500 B.C., the range of domesticated plants included rye, lentils and large-seeded legumes, and domesticated wheats.
Plant domestication began in the Natufian, perhaps in response to the disappearance of the wild strands of these important foods.

Inhabitants of Abu Hureyra obtained food from the Euphrates River as well as from the surrounding hills.
Gazelle bones dominate the lower layers of the site.
By the beginning of the Neolithic, sheep and goats had been domesticated and were being herded.
Cattle and pigs were later added.

The population was 2,000 to 3,000 people, covering an area of about 38 acres.
Trade and exchange took place.

Increasingly arid conditions likely reduced agricultural productivity and made herding more viable.
Nomadic herding may have become the dominant mode of life.

Analysis can include the contribution of plants to the diet, medicinal uses, and domestication.
Preserved plants are rare in archaeological sites, unless the remains have been carbonized.

Several varieties of plants were originally cultivated in the area.
The wild forms of many of these species are still common today, as they were in the past.
Experimental research had shown that a family could collect enough wild wheat in three weeks to provide food for an entire year.
Domestication may have occurred, since wild varieties do not grow in all areas of Southwest Asia.

Simple harvesting had no major impact on the genetic structure of einkorn wheat.
Only when specifically selective harvesting and other cultivation techniques were applied could changes in the morphology of seeds be noted.
Studies suggest that the change from wild to domesticated wheat may have occurred in a brief period, perhaps 200 years or less.

The plant comes to depend on human intervention in order to reproduce.
Another major change is the human removal of plants form their natural habitat and adaptation to new environmental zones.

Jericho is a tell, accumulated to a height of 70 feet during its long period of occupation.
Since at least 10,000 B.C., Elisha's Fountain, the spring at Jericho, has flooded the area beneath it and supports an oasis in the hot, arid Jordan Valley.

Residential structures and artifacts are similar to those from other Near Eastern sites from this period.
The presence of equipment for processing grain and storage suggests that cereals were important in the lowest levels of the site.
In the slightly higher early Neolithic layers, these cereals were domesticated and probably cultivated in the fertile soil of the Jericho oasis.

The reasons for such exchange probably lie in the importance of contacts with neighboring communities and in the accumulation of status items for some portion of the community.
Long-distance exchange and expansion appear to be hallmarks of the early Neolithic.

These structures were built at the beginning of the eighth millennium B.C.
The wall was six feet thick at the base.
The tower was built inside the wall and has a diameter of thirty feet at the base.
Such construction would have been a major undertaking by a small community.
Comparable fortifications are not seen at other early Neolithic sites in Southwest Asia, and a massive defensive structure seems out of place.

The design of houses changed.
Domesticated animals became important at this time.

Archaeozoologists attempt to answer questions about whether animals were hunted or scavenged, how animals were butchered, how much meat contributed to the diet, and the process of domestication.
They are trained to identify animals from small fragments of bone, as well as other information.
The study of animal domestication is also an important part of archaeozoology.

Domesticated species are generally smaller than their wild ancestors.
The shape of horns often changes in the domestic form.

Herded animals are slaughtered when the herder decides.
This means that the average age of death for domesticated animals is younger than for wild animals.
The ages of animals are most frequently determined by an assessment of tooth eruption and wear.
In the Zagros Mountains, a number of sites contain assemblages that are dominated by the bones of younger animals from about 10,000 years ago.

Hunters were probably taking entire herds of gazelles as the animals migrated north during early summer.
The hunters were so effective that the number of gazelles dropped to less than 20% of all animals at the site by 7,500 B.C.
Goat and sheep domestication may have been a solution to the problem of decreasing numbers of gazelle.
After 7,500 B.C., goats and sheep rapidly became the predominant component of faunal assemblages.

By 8,000 B.C. 'Ain Ghazal and Jericho had populations in the hundreds.
By 7,250 B.C., the first "city" had appeared at the site of Çatalhöyük in central Turkey.

The mound accumulated within a period of a little more than 1,000 years.
The site was abandoned around 6,000 B.C.
The site was a large settlement of perhaps as many as 2,000 families.

The houses were similar, with rectangular floor plans.
The houses were divided into a living and a smaller storage area.
They had no doors and were probably accessed through roofs.
A number of burials were also found in the houses.

The walls of the shrines were elaborately decorated, painted, and sculpted.
Later excavations suggest that households used their space for both domestic and ritual purposes.

First burials were infants and young children, while later burials were older adults.
This pattern suggests a family life cycle represented in the burials.

The inhabitants depended heavily on wild flora and fauna.
Important plant foods included both wild and domesticated varieties.
Cattle were an important part of the diet, but it is not yet certain if they were domesticated.
Domesticated sheep and other species were eaten.

In the past, obsidian was often traded or exchanged over long distances, hundreds of kilometers or more.
Most of the obsidian in Southwest Asia comes from sources either in the mountains of Turkey or in northern Iran.
Çatalhöyük is located about 125 miles from the major obsidian sources in Turkey.
It appears that obsidian was moved in massive quantities to Çatalhöyük.

The site is interesting because of its location immediately below the Bolan Pass, which cuts through the mountains that connect the Indus River Valley with Southwest Asia.
Large-scale excavations have yielded a sequence of deposits dating to the seventh millennium B.C.

Barley was the most abundant cultigen in the earliest occupation levels.
This barley had several distinctive local characteristics and may not have been completely domesticated.
Other cereals grown at the time included different types of wheat, which appear to have been imports from the west.
Gazelle was the most abundant of the wild animal species.
Some goats have been identified as domesticated.

The relative abundance of wild species decreased.
Between 6,000 and 4,000 B.C., domesticated barley was the predominant cultigen.
Cotton seeds were found with wheat and barley grains after 5,000 B.C., the earliest date for cotton in the world.

Some areas may have been used for large-scale food processing or cooking, or some other kind of communal activity.
Specialized craft production and extensive long-distance trade were present.

No longer can the Indus River drainage area be considered as a simple recipient of inventions from the west.
The rise of Indus civilization after 2,600 B.C. cannot be attributed to the diffusion of ideas from Mesopotamia.

Since pottery has many purposes, a single household can use many different pieces at the same time.
Pottery vessels are fragile and often have to be replaced.
Pottery fragments, or potsherds, are very durable and normally preserve better than many other ancient materials.

Pottery vessels have a series of distinctive technical, formal, and decorative attributes that can tell archaeologists many different things about the lives of the people who made, traded, and used them.
The increasing importance of pottery has in many cases roughly coincided with the greater reliance on domesticated foods.
The earliest pottery vessels are 10,000 – 12,000 years old.

Baked clay figurines were made at Paleolithic sites as early as 30,000 – 20,000 years ago.

In both areas, local cultigens have been found to be more abundant and earlier than exotic domesticates.
The best-known Chinese Neolithic site, Ban-po-ts'un, is not the oldest, but, rather, the first to have been excavated extensively.
Located near the city of Xian, Ban-po-ts'un covers 12.5 – 17.5 acres.

Occupation at Ban-po-ts'un was long and continuous. Storage pits and animal pens were interspersed among the houses at the center of the settlement.

Chestnuts, hazelnuts, and pinenuts supplemented the grain diet.
Hemp was grown, probably for use as a fiber.
Pigs and dogs were the principal domesticated animals.
Cattle, sheep, and goats were also present.
Hunting and fishing contributed to the diet.

Six pottery kilns were recovered outside the residential zone.
Cord marking is the most common surface decoration.

Infants and small children were placed in large redware pottery jars and interred near the houses.
The cemetery for adults was located outside the enclosing ditch.
Ceramic vessels were included with the body in most of the graves.

The structure was plastered with a white limy substance that had been hardened by baking.
This structure may have been an indicator of emergent social inequalities, or may have been simply a communal assembly hall or clan house.

Rice provides half the diet for 1.6 billion people and at least 25% of the food for 400 million.
Despite its significance, archaeologists know relatively little about where or how rice was domesticated.
East Asia seems to have been the focus for early experimentation and cultivation of the Asian variety of rice.
Rice cultivation may have occurred as early as the eighth or ninth millennium B.C.

During the 1950s, the most relevant archaeological materials for tropical Southeast Asia belonged to the Hoabinhian complex.
The presence of cord-marked pottery in the upper deposits of several Hoabinhian sites was presumed to signal the introduction of agriculture from North China.

A great variety of seeds, shells, husks, and other plant parts were found.
None of the plant species differs from their wild prototypes, indicating that they were not domesticated.
The remains of rice were absent at Spirit Cave.
Yet rice has been recovered at other sites broadly contemporaneous with the later occupation at Spirit Cave.

Cultivated rice has been recovered at the site.
The site was occupied between 2,000 and 1,500 B.C.
Most of the artifacts recovered from the earliest layers relate to fishing and the manufacture of ceramic vessels.
Recovered bones of animals reveal hunting activities.
The earliest rice at the site was obtained from inland farming communities by exchange.

Over 150 graves were excavated.
Many of the bodies were covered with red ochre, wrapped in shrouds, or placed on wooden biers, and grave offerings were present.
A special rich grave was accompanied by thousands of small shell beads, richly ornamented black pottery vessels, and other items.
The burials reveal significant social differences.

The region's staple grain, rice, was probably introduced into the region from South China.

Metallurgy requires a greater understanding and manipulation of raw materials than work in clay, bone, wood, or stone.
More than 800 metal ornaments and weapons were uncovered at Ban Chiang, and many more were found at Non Nok Tha.

Preceramic occupations date between 8,750 – 6,670 B.C.
The cave was occupied seasonally between August and December by small groups.

Acorns and the roasted heart of maguey plants were eaten, along with other wild foods.
A small part of the diet, one that increased slightly over time, came from squash and bean plants.
These may have been tended or cultivated in the disturbed terrain around the site.
Use of wild squash may have been a first step toward eventual domestication, which occurred just after 8,000 B.C.

Stone for making tools was taken from quarries up to 30 miles away.

Botanists and archaeologists have puzzled over the ancestry of maize.
The most recognizable feature of domesticated maize, the massive husked ear, is not present even in wild grasses most closely related to corn.
The most common view is that the ancestor to maize was a variety of teosinte, a giant wild grass so closely related to Zea mays that some botanists place it in the same species as corn.

Early studies of Tehuacán maize suggested that the earliest domesticated corn remains appeared in cave deposits dating to the end of the sixth millennium B.C.
More recent analysis dates the early Tehuacán maize to the mid-third millennium B.C.
Pieces of maize cob from strata at Guilá Naquitz have been dated to approximately 4,200 B.C., indicating that maize domestication may well have occurred to the west of Tehuacán.

Some camps accommodated only a single nuclear family, while others sheltered much larger groups.
Seasonality of resource availability and the scheduling of resource extraction were critically important in determining the annual regime.

Although this way of life persisted for about 6,500 years, from roughly 8,000 to 1,600 B.C., several important dietary changes did take place.
Domesticated squash and maize appeared but did not immediately provide a large portion of the diet.
These initial experiments toward plant domestication occurred among a population that was largely mobile and remained so for thousands of years.

There was a gradual increase in the overall proportion of both wild and domesticated plant foods.
The earliest sedentary villages in Tehuacán did not occur until 4,000 – 3,000 years ago.

After 6,000 B.C., morphologically wild plants and animals from the rain forest and mountains were present at sites established along the Pacific.

First occupied more than 10,000 years ago, Guitarrero Cave served as a campsite for thousands of years.
Evidence from the cave suggests that Andean utilization of fibers and textiles had very early origins.
Organic remains also revealed the importance of communication and exchange between different environmental areas.

The presence of the beans reveals the antiquity of pan-Andean connections and the origins of cultivation in South America.
Ten thousand years ago, Andean tubers and rhizomes were prime sources of carbohydrates for the occupants of Guitarrero Cave.
These plants may have been wild and collected from higher elevations.

Maize reached the Southwest by 1,200 B.C.
From there, it apparently was carried across the Great Plains and arrived in the Eastern Woodlands by approximately A.D. 1 – 200.

In eastern North America, from Ohio to Arkansas, findings from a series of cave sites indicate that native North American seed plants were domesticated in riverine floodplain settings as early as 2,500 – 1,500 B.C.
Based upon recent findings, squash found in eastern North America was probably from a native plant.
Consequently, agriculture appears to have occurred indigenously in this North American region, well before the diffusion of the concept or any plant from Mexico.