New light on Neolithic revolution in south-west Asia

Abstract

Shortly after his retirement from a distinguished career in the Department of Archaeology at Edinburgh, the author gave the Rhind Lectures for 2009, bringing together his thoughts about the Neolithic revolution, and comparing Childe's ideas with today's. These lectures, summarised here, announced the modern vision to a wide audience. It is a reversal of the old: Epipalaeolithic people came together in the first large, permanent communities, to form extensive settlements which only later needed to be fed by farming.

Cultivation of Perception and the Emergence of the Neolithic World

“…Important cultural changes clearly took place at the beginning of the Neolithic although various phenomena associated with the Neolithic world, such as domestication, had started to develop somewhat earlier in south-west Asia (Verhoeven 2004, Watkins 2010. Different parts of Eurasia manifest different sets of Neolithic traits and different dynamics of Neolithization but some broad similarities can be identified.…”

“…The agency of things is often considered in terms of how material culture contributed to the creation of social identities and manipulation of social relations (Sofaer Derevenski 2000, Bailey 2005), but things also mediated more fundamental relations between people and the world. Watkins (2004aWatkins ( , 2004bWatkins ( , 2010, for example, has argued that villages as a new form of built and cognitive environments contributed to, and indeed played a key role in, the broader economic, cultural and other developments associated with the Neolithic in south-west Asia. At the Neolithic transition, people began to use their built environment as a frame of symbolic reference, imbued with meaning and significance.…”

Adapting to Population Growth: The Evolutionary Alternative to Malthus

“…Göbekli Tepe is right in the middle of a region that may have been the first to develop farming (Watkins 2010;Wilcox 2005). But this only happened around 9,000 BCE whereas the monuments date to the 10 th millennium BCE.…”

“…Where there is a concentration of rich natural resources this sometimes happens but around this time the Near East was probably the place in the world where sedentary hunter-gatherers were most common by far. Some even think sedentism more important than agriculture or discuss such hunter-gatherers as 'complex' or 'domesticated' (see Byrd 2005;Hayden 1995: 277-8;Watkins 2006Watkins , 2010. Permanent settlements over a large area, restricting traditional hunter-gatherer nomadic movements, would seem to indicate an unusually dense population.…”

Timing the Neolithic transition: the application of fluoride dating at Tell Halula, Syria

“…1). The site was occupied from circa 7600 to 5500 calibrated BC, that is, from the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (PPNB) to the Late Pottery Neolithic period (for further details of the chronology of the Neolithic of the Near East, we refer the reader to Akkermans and Schwartz, 2003;Cauvin, 2000;Kuijt and Goring-Morris, 2002;Watkins, 2010). In this paper, however, we are only addressing the PPNB occupations, from 7560 to 7320 calibrated BC.…”