From collecting to cultivation: transitions to a production economy in the Near East

George Willcox 0 1 2 Mark Nesbitt 0 1 2 Felix Bittmann 0 1 2 0 F. Bittmann Lower Saxony Institute for Historical Coastal Research , Viktoriastr. 26/28, 26382 Wilhelmshaven, Germany 1 M. Nesbitt Herbarium, Royal Botanic Gardens , Kew, Richmond , Surrey TW9 3AB, UK 2 G. Willcox (&) Archeorient, UMR 5133, CNRS Jale`s, 07460 St-Paul-le-Jeune, France The selected articles in the current issue throw new light on our understanding of how Homo sapiens became caught in the agriculture trap in the Near East. They are the outcome of the session entitled 'Origins of agriculture in the Near East' held at the 15th IWGP conference in Wilhelmshaven 2010. The subject is constantly being revised as new information and more refined analyses become available, so these papers provide a state of the art in 2010/2011. Each major discovery adds complexity to what has become a multi-faceted puzzle with data being drawn from disciplines as wide apart as archaeology and genetics, plant biology and palaeo-climatology. In this issue papers concentrate on results obtained from charred plant remains and their interpretation. During the last half of the 20th century ground-breaking scholars like Hans Helbaek, Daniel Zohary, Maria Hopf, Willem van Zeist and Gordon Hillman made major contributions (Zohary and Hopf 1973; Helbaek 1959; Hillman 1984; Van Zeist and Bakker-Heeres 1982). Daniel Zohary combined genetics and information from living progenitors with Maria Hopf's archaeobotanical knowledge to help explain the domestication of plants in the Near East. Willem van Zeist pioneered the - identification and sampling of charred seeds from early Neolithic sites while Gordon Hillman developed interpretive tools for the subject. Their findings opened up avenues for hypothesizing as to how, when and why, in south west Asia, humans started systematically cultivating a selection of grain crops. In the 1980s and 1990s the puzzle appeared quite simple because it was composed of few elements and so scholars hypothesized using straightforward deterministic scenarios and models citing climate change, or population growth, or over-exploitation as possible factors which encouraged humans to adopt cultivation. Today the central elements of these hypotheses are still valid, but with hindsight simple hypotheses are no longer plausible given the archaeological and environmental diversity within the Fertile Crescent. This complex diversity is exemplified by the vast geographical area where transition sites are located, which spans different climate and vegetation zones. Thus, sites in the north of the Fertile Crescent are 1,000 km from those in the south and likewise in the eastwest direction. Archaeological diversity is exemplified by the extended chronological range of transition sites. We can trace the use of wild cereals back to about 23,000 years ago when habitations consisted of simple brush huts to villages with sophisticated architecture associated with the earliest domesticated cereals 12,500 years later. The transition to a production based economy was acted out on a vast stage of multi-dimensional cultural developments. Archaeological and archaeobotanical discoveries represent only narrow windows providing unconnected fleeting glimpses of human subsistence economies. Gaps in the archaeological record may result from lack of survey work but also because early Neolithic sites are often buried beneath large Bronze Age mounds, for example at Tell el Kerkh, Motza, Tell Qaramel and Cheik Hassan. Others may be covered by post occupation alluvial sediments. Despite these limitations our understanding of this vital period of human history is improving as the seven papers presented in this volume demonstrate. Over the past 20 years a great deal of new archaeobotanical and archaeological information has been collected concerning this key development for the history of humanity. Here, we highlight just a few of these discoveries in relation to papers presented. For example the exceptional discoveries and detailed analyses of charred remains by Mordechai Kislev from sites such as Ohalo II and Netiv Hagdud (Kislev 1997) in the southern Levant, or finds which show that some crops were abandoned (Melamed et al. 2008). In this volume Chantel White and Cheryl Makarewicz add new information from southern Jordan with their results from the site of el-Hemmeh, while Eleni Asouti and Dorian Fuller have provided a much needed regional review for the area. Whereas the southern Levant is the location of key sites excavated in the 1960s and 1970s, such as Jericho and Tell Aswad, most of the major new datasets of the last two decades, with the notable exceptions of Ohalo II and Netiv Hagdud, have come from the northern Fertile Crescent. In large part this is because of dam-building and associated salvage archaeology along the Euphrates, leading to more sites being excavated in the north. Large-scale flotation of comparable, relatively large sites, would be highly desirable in the southern Levant, particularly in the light of increasing evidence for diverse pathways to agriculture within different zones of the Fertile Crescent (Fuller et al. 2011, see also Kuijt and Finlayson 2009). In the northern Fertile Crescent the unearthing of the monumental sculptured monoliths at Go bekli Tepe and complex food processing rooms provided a glimpse into the cultural sophistication associated with early cereal use (Neef 2003; Willcox 2002). New information from this area is provided by Simone Riehl et al. with results from their analyses at Kortik Tepe. In northern Syria sites dated to the beginning of the Holocene such as Tell Qaramel, and Euphrates sites such as Jerf el Ahmar, Djade and Tell Abr show a surprisingly dense concentration with the possibility of pre-domestic cultivation (Willcox et al. 2008). The recognition of sites where morphologically wild cereals were cultivated was first proposed by Willem van Zeist and Gordon Hillman. Sue Colledge pioneered work on arable weeds as indicators of cultivation of wild pulses and cereals (Hillman et al. 2001; Colledge et al. 2004; Colledge and Conolly 2010). Now there are at least 10 sites where archaeobotanical evidence suggests pre-domestic cultivation. In this volume George Willcox develops this theme by comparing a restricted number of weed taxa from a wide chronological range of sites. The question of When and where did domesticated cereals first occur in southwest Asia?, the title of Mark Nesbitts much-cited 2002 paper is still a hot subject. Then, Tanno and Willcox attempt to provide better criteria for identifying morphological domestication which they apply to a number of sites. Their first paper on the subject published in 2006 provided new data for the debate on How fast was wild wheat domesticated?. The archaeobotanical data, including Van Zeists early work, demonstrates that mixtures of wild and domestic crops were used together, suggesting slow rates of domestication. Genetics (...truncated)