Neolithic Dispersals from the Levantine Corridor: a Mediterranean Perspective

Abstract

The earliest agro-pastoralists of the Near East are generally held to have emerged in a narrow Levantine Corridor. Agricultural life initially spread from this discrete core zone in the Early PrePottery Neolithic B to adjacent inland regions, only reaching the Mediterranean coast of Syria by the Late Pre-Pottery Neolithic B. Recent discoveries on Cyprus, far to the west of the core zone, prompt re-configuration of several elements of this model. They also provide evidence for characteristics of a regional variant of the PPNB and, in a broader context, fresh data for an understanding of the triggers and mechanics of precocious neolithic dispersals.In a flurry of recent reviews of evidence for the transition from foraging to agricultural societies in the N ear East, emphasis is placed on the Levantine Corridor as .the geographical focus of this seminal process (e.g.

Measuring grain size and identifying Near Eastern cereal domestication: evidence from the Euphrates valley

“…In conclusion, the indisputable diachronic increase in size of all three taxa suggests that we are dealing with a [10]. She presented plots for emmer, einkorn and barley from a large number of Near Eastern sites which also produced bimodal plots of corresponding size ranges to the results presented here.…”

“…Using both her own data and van Zeist's, Colledge presented much of the information available [1,2]. Unusually plump grains have been identified at several early Neolithic sites, for example, at Cayönü in Turkey [17], at Jerf el Ahmar [14] and Abu Hureyra [4,5] in Syria, at Zad 2 in Jordan ( [3]:143) and at Mylouthkia in Cyprus ( [10]:44) (for site locations see Fig. 1).…”

The spread of Neolithic plant economies from the Near East to northwest Europe: a phylogenetic analysis

“…The distinction between the Mediterranean and Central European Neolithic dispersal routes and associated cultures, for example, is clearly apparent in the composition of the suites of plants,, but the anomalies remain. Cyprus, for example, is culturally as well as geographically close to the Levant (Peltenburg et al, 2001), but by contrast the archaeobotanical assemblages have much less in common. Early Neolithic Bulgaria is culturally very similar to the Körös and Star cevo cultures of Hungary and former Yugoslavia (region 8) but the composition of the plant suites represented in the two regions could hardly be more different.…”

Geoarchaeological approaches to the environmental history of Cyprus: explication and critical evaluation

“…Table 1 offers a framework to organize and overview what is known about forest history, settlement expansion and contraction, and changing land use, across ten millennia of Holocene time. It is distilled from a wide range of recent archaeological studies (Croft, 1991;Fejfer and Hayes, 1995;Given, 2000;Guilaine and LeBrun, 2003;Harris, n.d.;Held, 1992;Horwitz et al, 2004;Knapp et al, 1994;McClellan and Rautman, 1995;Peltenburg et al, 2001;Rautman, 2003;Simmons et al, 1999;Steel, 2004;Stylianou and Stylianou, 2001;Toumazou et al, 1998). Historical landscape detail can be consulted in the classic 1:63,360 topographic and land use map series of Kitchener and Grant (1885), while satellite imagery is readily available through a variety of sources.…”