Space making and home making in the world’s first villages: Reconsidering the circular to rectangular architectural transition in the Central Anatolian Neolithic

Towards a Socio-Economic Model for Southwest Asian Cereal Domestication

“…This approach is applicable to archaeological data, focusing on residential buildings and the associated structures and artefacts. However, it is well recognised that household membership is variable and not fully reflected in the architectural and artefactual record [37,38,[40][41][42][43]. A major concern in household archaeology, therefore, is to understand the size and social organisation of households.…”

“…This reconstruction is mainly based on the standardised size and layout of buildings at many middle PPNB sites, which contain individual food storage, processing, and consumption installations. Other researchers were more cautious in associating households with specific kinship groups such as nuclear families, as household membership during the PPN may have been constructed symbolically [36,38,42,43]. Yaka et al [47] recently showed that genetic relationships between individuals buried in the same buildings at central Anatolian Neolithic sites varied geographically and changed through time, which reinforces that PPN households were also symbolically constructed and crosscut kinship lines.…”

“…This indicates that selection rates at Aşiklı Höyük were not strong or stable enough to establish higher proportions of non-shattering spikelets but maintained what Fuller et al [25] called a 'meta-stable equilibrium'. In a careful analysis of architectural developments and the use of space throughout the sequence, Duru et al [42] recently showed how households reconfigured their economic organisation during the occupation period. During the lower levels 5-4 (ca.…”

“…The storage bins, which now also indicate larger volumes of stored grains, are only found in the buildings without a hearth, implying food storage and preparation facilities were shared between co-residential units. This means that the inhabitants of individual buildings at Aşiklı Höyük were not economically independent but formed extended households that shared economic facilities and pooled resources with neighbours [42,124]. As other stages in the agricultural cycle, including the allocation of arable plots, are often subject to cooperation among much more autonomous households [50], we may assume that these extended households also cooperated in crop cultivation and subsequent labour-intensive tasks such as post-harvest processing.…”

“…For Tell Qarassa, there is evidence that dehusking was also performed by these households in front of residential units, a sign that post-harvest and pre-storage processing was not collectively performed [50]. These patterns together imply that these early households gradually gained control over the cultivation and food distribution process, which is traditionally interpreted as reflecting the development of 'private' or household-centred property rights over cultivated foods [31,34], but see [42,52,91]. Independently from the potential ideas of ownership and private property, however, this practically means that food sharing between households became restricted.…”