Farmers, gatherers or horticulturalists? Reconstructing landscapes of practice in the Early Neolithic

Eleni Asouti (University of Liverpool) and Andrew S. Fairbairn (University of Queensland)

Research of subsistence practices focusing on the question of the "Origins of Agriculture" has been a staple of archaeobotanical investigations in the Early Neolithic of the Near East since the first formulation of the concept of "Neolithic Revolution" by V. Gordon Childe. This paper will offer a critical review of the historical background of research praxis with regard to early Neolithic plant-based subsistence practices in this part of the world. It will also sketch an alternative theoretical approach, one that takes issue with the dependence on ethnographic and ethnoarchaeological accounts of historically documented peasant communities, and the uncritical use of traditional categories such as "agriculture", "cultivation", "gathering", "village" and their variants.We will argue instead in favour of adopting approaches which aim at reconstructing the range and gradients of the different practices and social realities associated with early Neolithic plant food procurement. Drawing from examples of recent research, we will outline an agenda for archaeobotany and landscape archaeology that emphasises the data-informed reconstruction of the dynamic ecological relationships between communities as socio-economic agents and targeted resources, and the reconstruction of the social practices associated with food production and consumption.

From Big Beat to Bebop: Settlement between 6000 - 3000 BC in the Fenland Basin (UK)

Fraser Sturt (University of Southampton)

At the heart of this paper is a very simple point: that contra to current practice we should not seek to break space, time and spatial activity into constituent parts. Thus, if we wish to understand something of settlement in the past, we must be prepared to examine it within a much broader physical, social, spatial and historical context. Whilst this attitude echoes recent definitions of what we mean by ‘landscape’ in archaeology, I would like to argue here that it is an approach that we very rarely put into practice. In an effort to move beyond the current fragmented approach to the record, this paper adopts a rhythmanalytical approach. Here a deliberate attempt is made to incorporate as wide a body of data on past spatial conditions and activity as possible, in order to facilitate explanation of human action. In a (perhaps unwise) effort to continue this musical metaphor throughout this paper, a further comparison will be drawn between two distinct attitudes to the record, characterised here as Big Beat and Bebop. Big Beat will refer to low resolution, large scale fragmented accounts of the Mesolithic and Neolithic with Britain. These overarching narratives are not held up as being incorrect, but as potentially missing out on a more interesting and dynamic understanding of the record. This can be achieved through closer reading of multiple data sources and a particular attention to a rhythm that is not predicated on a logical uniform structure (Bebop). Importantly these two styles of approach are not seen as being mutually exclusive, and this paper concludes through considering how we can tie these two scales of analysis together through rhythm.

People And Their Places At The End Of The Pleistocene: Evaluating Perspectives On Physical And Cultural Landscape Change

Lisa Maher (University of Cambridge)

Our use of the term landscape in Near Eastern prehistory is problematic because researchers often dichotomize the landscape into physical and cultural aspects. Epipalaeolithic research, in particular, tends to a) characterise cultural development as occurring within the Mediterranean core versus the arid peripheries and, b) focus on the latest phase, the Natufian, as precursor to the Neolithic, such that the cultural landscape is further dichotomized into simple pre-Natufian and complex Natufian groups. Simplistic perspectives of landscape that see the physical environment as controlling human behaviour and the cultural landscape as dominated by the Natufian should be abandoned. We need to refocus our field of view to adopt an approach to landscape that recognizes human’s knowledgeable engagement with their surroundings.

The temporality of materials: occupation practices in Eastern England during the 5th and 4th millennia BC

Duncan Garrow (Oxford University)

… In this paper, I will be focusing on the relationship between three main elements of the Neolithic ‘package’ – settlement, cereals and pottery – in order to understand better the temporality of landscape occupation in Britain over the period of the transition, c.5000-3000 BC. It is important to point out from the beginning that I have worked predominantly in the Neolithic. This fact, in combination with the character of the archaeological evidence – or at least that evidence which has received most of our attention – leads me to focus primarily on the period immediately after the transition. It is hoped, however, that the results of this primarily Neolithic focus nevertheless allow us to think harder about the similarities and differences between both ‘periods’, and thus also about the reality of this ‘transition’. In recent years, within Mesolithic archaeology there have been calls for interpretations which move beyond small-scale, detailed, empirical studies towards an archaeology which addresses interpretive issues at a much broader scale. What I want to suggest is that the opposite might be said for the Neolithic. Discussions of the temporality of occupation on that side of ‘the transition’, I would argue, require rather fewer studies conducted at a broad interpretive scale, and rather more detailed, nuanced and specific considerations of the evidence.

Taskscapes and the Transition

Chantal Conneller (University of Manchester)

In this contribution I would like to explore the place of the ‘taskscape’ in British Mesolithic studies and the implications this has for thinking about the Mesolithic/Neolithic transition. Ingold’s concept of the ‘taskscape’ has been influential in Mesolithic studies since its introduction in 1993. The approach has been extremely useful in providing a way for archaeologists to move beyond the simple equation of lithic scatters with sitesor as marking economically productive areas of the landscape or even referencing particular natural features. Ingold’s idea of the landscape as the ‘congealed taskscape’ has also been attractive in that Mesolithic people are seen to be actively producing the landscape, rather than simply responding to a set of environmental conditions. This lessens the previous contrasts between the ‘natural’ landscapes of the Mesolithic and the ‘cultural’ landscapes of the Neolithic. The taskscape has seen less use in the Neolithic with a few notable exceptions, such as Edmonds’ work on the transition. In this paper I would like to outline in greater depths the ways in which Ingold’s work has enhanced our understanding of Mesolithic landscapes. However I would also like to highlight some aspects that I find problematic, particularly when thinking about the Mesolithic/Neolithic transition.

Changing landscapes – changing society? An anthropological perspective

Marion Benz (Albert-Ludwigs-Universität, Freiburg)

The differences between foragers and farmers in the perception of landscapes have been stressed by several authors. Ideological, religious and cognitive changes have been proposed to explain these differences. With the discovery of impressive cult centers and communal buildings at sites such as Göbekli Tepe, Jerf el Ahmar, Abr’ 3, Sefer Tepe and Karahan Tepe, religious and social factors were even more emphasized than before. I would like to classify these models as “socio-ideological” models: Socio-ideological changes, including changes in the perception of landscape are thought to be the reason or at least the trigger for the way to sedentary life, agriculture and domestication. But these socio-ideological changes sometimes appear like a “deus ex machina” to find a reason for the the beginnings of domestication, that otherwise may not be explained. In these models changes in the landscape, caused by climatic changes and perceptible as changes in vegetation, temperatures and water supply have been regarded as catalysts or have been ignored completely as no positive correlation of ecological changes and the development of agriculture could be observed. In the following chapters I will show that the neolithisation in the Near East cannot be explained by such a simple correlation or lack of correlation between changing landscape and cultural changes. Archaeological data for the process of neolithisation are still not precisely enough dated to decide whether there was or was not a short period of climatic or ecological stress. For hunters-gatherers one severe drought can lead to resource stress, and the consequences of two or three consecutive years of severe climatic conditions often are hunger, death and migration. However, the level of stress and estimated deprivation not only depends on the objective changes in food supply but also on the culturally determined perception these changes.

Recreating the magic green mountain: landscapes of the mind in Early Neolithic Britain & Ireland

Alison Sheridan (National Museums Scotland)

This presentation starts from a perspective that views the changes observed in the centuries around 4000 BC in Britain and Ireland as resulting from colonisation by farming groups from different parts of France. A justification of this position will be presented, and I shall sketch the main strands of Neolithisation … The dynamics of social, economic and ideological change within the areas of origin will be discussed briefly, as it is vital to understand what was going on in the near Continent in order to understand why these ‘dispora’-like emigrations should have taken place.

My discussion goes on to explore how our hypothetical immigrants created their own landscape – both physically, through altering the natural environment and building various structures, and socially/mentally/ideologically. Two aspects of the latter will be discussed, namely:

The importation of a world view in which stone axeheads – and, in particular, ceremonial jadeite axeheads – played a key symbolic role. …. I see them as the precious treasures of the incoming farming communities; and I believe they can explain why people sought out sources of greenish rock for making axeheads, and in particular (in highland areas) why they went for MOUNTAIN sources – such as the hard-to-access Great Langdale, and the visually striking Tievebulliagh. There may well have been a mythology, preserved in the Neolithic oral tradition, that focused on the sacred stone (jadeite), obtained from liminal places (the Italian Piemonte, at the foot of the Alps) through heroic and dangerous journeys. … I shall argue that this fetishistic interest in stone axeheads and their source was a novel feature, not a facet of pre-Neolithic indigenous communities

The very early forging of a network of links between the immigrant communities, over which various materials, resources, ideas and (no doubt) people travelled. I shall give examples of these, and will also explore their evolution in the centuries following the initial introduction of ‘the Neolithic’, looking, for instance, at the inter-area connections linking parts of the Irish Sea.

‘Islanding’ the Mesolithic-Neolithic transition: approaches to landscapes of contact and transformation in Northwest Europe

Gordon Noble (University of Glasgow)

Reading the current literature on the adoption of agriculture in Northwest Europe many would leave with the impression that change at this time occurred in uniform ways across large swathes of divergent landscapes in this part of Europe. While this issue is the subject of intense debate, often this remains at a coarse scale of analysis examining change within a modern national or even international context. Debate is also often polarised between the extremes of indigenous adoption and external introduction, resulting in explanations of change that are applied across the board to different contexts and different landscape situations. In order to begin to explore change at a more regional or local level I suggest that we should begin to ‘island’ our approaches to the Mesolithic-Neolithic transition. I propose that we can do this in at least three ways. Firstly, taking our cue from the discipline of island archaeology, we can begin to more fully explore the possibility that change occurred in different ways and at different times in different regions, treating regions on an equal basis, aware of how modern political conditions affect our concepts of what is either central or marginal. Secondly, we can adopt some of the actual methodologies of island archaeology to examine the ways in change occurred in island centred geographies like Britain and Ireland by more fully considering maritime traditions in a region where new lifestyles and ideas were communicated through sea travel. Finally, we can also use the concept of an island as a metaphor as a means of conceptualising localised sequences of agricultural adoption. I outline two ‘islanded’ case studies, one that considers a group of literal islands- those to the west of Mainland Britain, and another that examines ‘islands of agriculture’ in the forested landscapes of Jutland, Denmark. The paper explores ways in which our concepts of Neolithization can become more complex and theoretically informed through a more detailed understanding of regional and localised trajectories of change.

New Perspectives on the Early Holocene Landscape in Cyprus

Carole McCartney, Sturt W. Manning, David Sewell, and Sarah T. Stewart

Recent research in Cyprus has dramatically altered our perception of the Early Holocene occupation of the island. Previously the Khirokitia culture was seen as an ‘original culture’ (beginning c. 6,000 BC) distinct from the Pre-Pottery Neolithic (PPN) of the Levant. The dominant perspective defined islands as closed systems that were idealized as isolated, pristine entities. Similarities between sites were emphasized using a Childean culture concept that relied on the type site of Khirokitia. Differences between Cyprus and the Levant were explained by reference to bio-geograhic models, employing the ‘founder effect’ to explain the absence of diagnostic PPN elements, while attention was drawn to differences between the Cypriot Neolithic economy and that of the mainland. Even then, however, a few researchers promoted the ‘antecedent hypothesis’, wherein a culture preceding the Khirokitia culture was inferred, and it is this hypothesis that has been proven correct. Foragers camped at Aetokremnos c. 10,000 and the Cypriot Aceramic or Cypro-PPNB now begins some two millennia prior to the Khirokitian.
Currently definitions of Neolithic development on Cyprus focus on a strict forager/farmer dichotomy based on concepts of Neolithic island colonization in the Mediterranean. The poor bio-mass attributed to Mediterranean islands is viewed as an impediment to permanent island settlement prior to the introduction of farming. Thus, Aetokremnos is viewed as a brief visitation that provided background knowledge of the island for later colonizing farmers. This interpretation privileges food-production over foraging and equates farming with sedentism, with the latter seen as requirements for permanent island settlement. Corollaries attached to this interpretation are that the PPN colonizing farmers arrived into an empty landscape, requiring a demic diffusion of farming, and second that Cyprus became increasingly isolated after this colonization contact. New evidence has begun to demonstrate that Cyprus was not an empty landscape prior to the Cypro-PPNB. …. These studies require that we consider possible forager/farmer interaction and the potential of stimulus diffusion of farming ideas and technologies. Several scenarios could apply ranging from the idea that mainland hunter/foragers marginalized by rising sea levels and/or pressure from emerging farmers were pushed into colonizing Cyprus, through to choices made by coastal groups because of perceived opportunities on Cyprus already consistent with their way of life, values, and social systems. Thus, the interpretation of early Holocene settlement in Cyprus moves beyond a strict demic model to include a ‘frontier model’, where it is necessary to consider evidence of acculturation.

Different Ways of Being, Different Ways of Seeing - Changing Worldviews in the Near East

Nigel Goring-Morris and Anna Belfer-Cohen (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel)

The paper outlines the fluid nature of cultural dynamics during the terminal Pleistocene and early Holocene in the Levant against the backdrop of the mosaic of different environments and climatic changes in the area. Regional differences in the pace of changes in settlement patterns, site densities and sizes together with subsistence are described.
Major changes are demonstrated with the beginning of sedentism during the Natufian, as reflected in augmented social interactions, at which time the material evidence for symbolic and ritual activities increased markedly. The longevity of such worldviews is reflected in both the smaller archaic villages of the PPNA and the large village communities of the PPNB and even later. Stll, these large PPNB communities should not be viewed simply as early versions of the later Near Eastern village, for these communities represent but an initial, 'first-time' attempt at living in proximity for prolonged periods, with subsistence based on domesticates. In such a context the elaboration and intensification of previous ritual activities should be viewed as means of alleviating the accompanying scalar stresses.

Formalising the sacred ? The monumental landscapes of Britain and Ireland

Vicki Cummings (University of Central Lancashire)

In this paper I want to consider one of the key questions raised by the conference brief: did (Mesolithic) hunter-gatherers have a radically different view of the landscape than that of (Neolithic) farmers ? Or is it the nature of the evidence that creates the contrast ? I will be considering this issue in relation to the Mesolithic-Neolithic transition in Britain and Ireland, with a particular focus on the monumental evidence from western Britain and eastern Ireland. After considering the nature of the evidence, along with briefly presenting the results of fieldwork conducted in this area, I want to raise some areas and points for discussion and debate regarding the importance of the landscape in the transition period. This paper is offered up as a discussion piece, and does not seek to ‘answer’ the questions posed.

Changing people, changing environments - how Epi-palaeolithic hunter-gatherers in southwest Asia became communities and changed the world

Trevor Watkins (University of Edinburgh)

We are accustomed to an orthodox view of hunter-gatherers being required to adjust to reduction in food resources due to climatic change. An alternative scenario has been that of hunter-gatherers being able to adopt new economic elements when climatic amelioration brought about increased bio-diversity, greater bio-mass, or different and richer resources. However valid such a simple ecological model may be for earlier periods of pre-Homo sapiens prehistory, for the period in which we are interested – in southwest Asia, the Epi-palaeolithic period and into the Neolithic – there were two critically important changes in the ways that hunter-gatherer groups began to operate that were more important than climatic and environmental change in the final Pleistocene.
In the first place, hunter-gatherer groups of the Epi-palaeolithic period increasingly focused on harvesting, storing and processing cereals, grasses and legumes; correspondingly, they tended towards sedentism. …
Secondly, hunter-gatherer groups changed their nature. … Communities in the hundreds began to appear in the late Epi-palaeolithic period, and permanently co-resident communities of thousands became increasingly common through the early Neolithic period. These changes in permanence of residence and community size were not simply numerical. The process of producing and maintaining permanent communities that were ten times larger in the Epi-palaeolithic, and one hundred times larger in the early Neolithic required cultural and symbolizing skills that drove the development of the relevant cognitive skills and symbolic cultural faculties (or, alternately, the development of the capacity for fully symbolic culture opened the way for hunter-gatherer groups to concentrate in larger and larger numbers). Allied with the emergence of larger, permanently co-resident communities, there was a trend to more and more extensive and intensive networks of social exchange that bound the new communities into powerful interaction spheres.

Rituals in the Landscape

Douglas Baird (University of Liverpool)

This paper examines interrelationships between communities’ engagements with their landscapes, the evidence of ritual in the landscape and characterisations of generalised belief systems and world views in the early Holocene of SW Asia. It questions the validity of ‘homogenizing’ approaches to 3 areas of interpretation 1) the understanding of Neolithic belief systems, 2) of inter-relationships between belief and landscape engagements, and 3) of other forms of interaction with and within the landscape. It also offers an opportunity thereby to reflect albeit briefly on putative contrasts between late Pleistocene/early Holocene foragers and farmers, and more sedentary and more mobile communities in these regards.

The last of the old: a homogeneous later mesolithic Ireland?

Thomas Kador (University College Dublin)

Much is being made of the unusual position Ireland occupies in early European prehistory. There are the peculiar later mesolithic lithic assemblages – out of step with the ‘rest of Europe’. Then there is the ever increasing evidence for substantial, timber post built structures, serving as possible dwelling places, and evidence for large scale land enclosure that appears to reflect a degree of permanency of settlement, both appearing to have been a feature of neolithic life in Ireland from early on in that period. Yet again these two aspects seem to stand in disagreement with the currently dominant views of neolithic daily life in northwest Europe and especially (southern) Britain, which focus on a degree of continuation of an essentially ‘hunter-gatherer lifestyle’ and a marked transience of settlement. Hence, clearly, Ireland is the odd one out in early prehistory, or is it? In this paper I will discuss the issue of Irelands ‘special’ status in terms of it’s later mesolithic artefact assemblages and what this perceived ‘isolated’ but internally ‘homogeneous’ material culture means to our understanding of the mesolithic-neolithic transition here and elsewhere.

A geological perspective on climatic and environmental change in the Levant and Eastern Mediterranean from 25,000 to 5000 years BP

Stuart A. Robinson (University College London), Stuart Black (University of Reading), Bruce W. Sellwood (University of Reading), Claire M.C. Rambeau (University of Reading), Paul J. Valdes (University of Bristol)

We recently published an extensive review of terrestrial and marine climatic conditions in the Levant and Eastern Mediterranean from 25,000 to 5,000 years BP (Robinson et al. 2006, Quaternary Science Reviews, 25, 1517-1541). The aim of our review was to provide a climatic and environmental backdrop against which future studies of climatic, environmental and archaeological change could be compared. Here we provide a brief synopsis of our review, highlighting the major conclusions and including, where appropriate more recent studies published since our work.

The Case For Climatic Stress Forcing Choice In The Adoption Of Agriculture

Richard Tipping, Stirling University

“I have been criticized by fellow-historians for writing economic history largely in terms of food – but to most people, for most of the time, nothing matters more.” (Fernandez-Armesto 2000, 15).

Fernandez-Armesto’s heavy-weight work tried to relocate global history within its ecological context: all history is ecological history. In similar but more modest vein Schulting tried to shout above the clamour of post-processual analyses that “subsistence matters”. This is also the position of this paper: people worry about food more, and more often, than about other things, whilst acknowledging that we cannot live by bread alone.
A new and, quite simply, unavoidable factor in the relation between humans and their landscapes is large-scale rapid climate change. The astonishing growth of data on Holocene climate change since the 1980s has led to a new paradigm with three key properties. First, some climatic changes were very major events, global in extent though regional in effect. Secondly, some were rapid, even abrupt, meaning that they occurred over decades. Third, climate extremes exceeded anything within normal human experience. These last two properties have inevitably led to new speculations on the impacts of climate on human societies because there is a temporal association between periods of climatic and cultural chang. Some analyses are ‘catastrophist’ in postulating that some climate changes were either so rapid, so large or so extreme that adaptation to them was impossible. There have in turn been pleas for caution in interpretation because the more catastrophist claims are undoubtedly over-simplistic and unremittingly deterministic. Some are more thoughtful in their exploration of human adaptation. These are generally concerned to stress that people always had choices, and that there is no inevitability in how societies deal with climatic stress. What archaeologists see is the choice made at the time, and this was always only one of a range of options.

From Megasites to Farmsteads: community size, ideology and the nature of early farming landscapes in western Asia and Europe

Amy Bogaard (University of Oxford) & Valasia Isaakidou (University of Nottingham)

Early farming landscapes, as taskscapes, harbour fundamental insights into the nature and significance of the agricultural transition. Near Eastern ’megasites’ , Greek ‘villages’ and central European ‘farmsteads’ present obvious contrasts in settlement form, despite common agricultural ingredients. In this papers we bring together relevant bioarchaeological and settlement data, interpreted in the light of ethnographic analogy, to infer the nature of early farming landscapes in different regions and to consider their social and ideological context.’

Landscape and subsistence change at the Mesolithic Neolithic transition in Britain?

Nicky Milner (University of York)

For this paper, I have been asked to consider landscape change and subsistence at the Mesolithic Neolithic transition in Britain and I am taking subsistence to mean the resources people used for food consumption. The subsistence changes which occurred at this time obviously play a major role in debates about the transition, because they revolve around a transformation from hunting, gathering and fishing to farming practices. However, these debates have resulted in polarised views. Broadly speaking, we can say that in the early fourth millennium BC domesticated cattle, sheep, pig and some cereals (emmer, einkorn, bread wheat, hulled and six-row barley) appear in the archaeological record for the first time. Beyond this, there is no consensus about the rapidity, nature and reasons for these changes to the economy.
There are a number of issues which will be useful to discuss: oppositions between ideology and economy, and rapid and slow are unhelpful; most treatments of subsistence are problematic because they are homogeneous, especially for the Mesolithic; there is evidence for variability in subsistence in both the Mesolithic and Neolithic. In order to explore these more fully, it is perhaps necessary to first outline the current dominant theories in some more detail.