than about the archeological traces of prehistoric men themselves.
But the antiquities of the incipient era of cultivation and animal
domestication will not be spectacular, even when we do have them
excavated in quantity. Few museums will be interested in these
antiquities for exhibition purposes. The charred bits or impressions
of plants, the fragments of animal bone and shell, and the varied
clues to climate and environment will be as important as the artifacts
themselves. It will be the ideas to which these traces lead us that
will be important. I am sure that this unspectacular material--when we
have much more of it, and learn how to understand what it says--will
lead us to how and why answers about the first great change in human
history.
We know the earliest village-farming communities appeared in western
Asia, in a nuclear area. We do not yet know why the Near Eastern
experiment came first, or why it didn’t happen earlier in some other
nuclear area. Apparently, the level of culture and the promise of the
natural environment were ready first in western Asia. The next sites
we look at will show a simple but effective food-production already
in existence. Without effective food-production and the settled
village-farming communities, civilization never could have followed.
How effective food-production came into being by the end of the
incipient era, is, I believe, one of the most fascinating questions any
archeologist could face.
It now seems probable--from possibly two of the Palestinian sites with
varieties of the Natufian (Jericho and Nahal Oren)--that there were
one or more local Palestinian developments out of the Natufian into
later times. In the same way, what followed after the Karim Shahir type
of assemblage in northeastern Iraq was in some ways a reflection of
beginnings made at Karim Shahir and Zawi Chemi.
THE First Revolution
[Illustration]
As the incipient era of cultivation and animal domestication passed
onward into the era of the primary village-farming community, the first
basic change in human economy was fully achieved. In southwestern Asia,
this seems to have taken place about nine thousand years ago. I am
going to restrict my description to this earliest Near Eastern case--I
do not know enough about the later comparable experiments in the Far
East and in the New World. Let us first, once again, think of the
contrast between food-collecting and food-producing as ways of life.
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN FOOD-COLLECTORS AND FOOD-PRODUCERS
Childe used the word “revolution” because of the radical change that
took place in the habits and customs of man. Food-collectors--that is,
hunters, fishers, berry- and nut-gatherers--had to live in small groups
or bands, for they had to be ready to move wherever their food supply
moved. Not many people can be fed in this way in one area, and small
children and old folks are a burden. There is not enough food to store,
and it is not the kind that can be stored for long.
Do you see how this all fits into a picture? Small groups of people
living now in this cave, now in that--or out in the open--as they moved
after the animals they hunted; no permanent villages, a few half-buried
huts at best; no breakable utensils; no pottery; no signs of anything
for clothing beyond the tools that were probably used to dress the
skins of animals; no time to think of much of anything but food and
protection and disposal of the dead when death did come: an existence
which takes nature as it finds it, which does little or nothing to
modify nature--all in all, a savage’s existence, and a very tough one.
A man who spends his whole life following animals just to kill them to
eat, or moving from one berry patch to another, is really living just
like an animal himself.
THE FOOD-PRODUCING ECONOMY
Against this picture let me try to draw another--that of man’s life
after food-production had begun. His meat was stored “on the hoof,”
his grain in silos or great pottery jars. He lived in a house: it was
worth his while to build one, because he couldn’t move far from his
fields and flocks. In his neighborhood enough food could be grown
and enough animals bred so that many people were kept busy. They all
lived close to their flocks and fields, in a village. The village was
already of a fair size, and it was growing, too. Everybody had more to
eat; they were presumably all stronger, and there were more children.
Children and old men could shepherd the animals by day or help with
the lighter work in the fields. After the crops had been harvested the
younger men might go hunting and some of them would fish, but the food
they brought in was only an addition to the food in the village; the
villagers wouldn’t starve, even if the hunters and fishermen came home
empty-handed.
There was more time to do different things, too. They began to modify
nature. They made pottery out of raw clay, and textiles out of hair
or fiber. People who became good at pottery-making traded their pots
for food and spent all of their time on pottery alone. Other people
were learning to weave cloth or to make new tools. There were already
people in the village who were becoming full-time craftsmen.
Other things were changing, too. The villagers must have had
to agree on new rules for living together. The head man of the
village had problems different from those of the chief of the small
food-collectors’ band. If somebody’s flock of sheep spoiled a wheat
field, the owner wanted payment for the grain he lost. The chief of
the hunters was never bothered with such questions. Even the gods
had changed. The spirits and the magic that had been used by hunters
weren’t of any use to the villagers. They needed gods who would watch
over the fields and the flocks, and they eventually began to erect
buildings where their gods might dwell, and where the men who knew most
about the gods might live.
WAS FOOD-PRODUCTION A “REVOLUTION”?
If you can see the difference between these two pictures--between
life in the food-collecting stage and life after food-production
had begun--you’ll see why Professor Childe speaks of a revolution.
By revolution, he doesn’t mean that it happened over night or that
it happened only once. We don’t know exactly how long it took. Some
people think that all these changes may have occurred in less than
500 years, but I doubt that. The incipient era was probably an affair
of some duration. Once the level of the village-farming community had
been established, however, things did begin to move very fast. By
six thousand years ago, the descendants of the first villagers had
developed irrigation and plow agriculture in the relatively rainless
Mesopotamian alluvium and were living in towns with temples. Relative
to the half million years of food-gathering which lay behind, this had
been achieved with truly revolutionary suddenness.
GAPS IN OUR KNOWLEDGE OF THE NEAR EAST
If you’ll look again at the chart (p. 111) you’ll see that I have
very few sites and assemblages to name in the incipient era of
cultivation and domestication, and not many in the earlier part of
the primary village-farming level either. Thanks in no small part
to the intelligent co-operation given foreign excavators by the
Iraq Directorate General of Antiquities, our understanding of the
sequence in Iraq is growing more complete. I shall use Iraq as my main
yard-stick here. But I am far from being able to show you a series of
Sears Roebuck catalogues, even century by century, for any part of
the nuclear area. There is still a great deal of earth to move, and a
great mass of material to recover and interpret before we even begin to
understand “how” and “why.”
Perhaps here, because this kind of archeology is really my specialty,
you’ll excuse it if I become personal for a moment. I very much look
forward to having further part in closing some of the gaps in knowledge
of the Near East. This is not, as I’ve told you, the spectacular
range of Near Eastern archeology. There are no royal tombs, no gold,
no great buildings or sculpture, no writing, in fact nothing to
excite the normal museum at all. Nevertheless it is a range which,
idea-wise, gives the archeologist tremendous satisfaction. The country
of the hilly flanks is an exciting combination of green grasslands
and mountainous ridges. The Kurds, who inhabit the part of the area
in which I’ve worked most recently, are an extremely interesting and
hospitable people. Archeologists don’t become rich, but I’ll forego
the Cadillac for any bright spring morning in the Kurdish hills, on a
good site with a happy crew of workmen and an interested and efficient
staff. It is probably impossible to convey the full feeling which life
on such a dig holds--halcyon days for the body and acute pleasurable
stimulation for the mind. Old things coming newly out of the good dirt,
and the pieces of the human puzzle fitting into place! I think I am
an honest man; I cannot tell you that I am sorry the job is not yet
finished and that there are still gaps in this part of the Near Eastern
archeological sequence.
EARLIEST SITES OF THE VILLAGE FARMERS
So far, the Karim Shahir type of assemblage, which we looked at in the
last chapter, is the earliest material available in what I take to
be the nuclear area. We do not believe that Karim Shahir was a village
site proper: it looks more like the traces of a temporary encampment.
Two caves, called Belt and Hotu, which are outside the nuclear area
and down on the foreshore of the Caspian Sea, have been excavated
by Professor Coon. These probably belong in the later extension of
the terminal era of food-gathering; in their upper layers are traits
like the use of pottery borrowed from the more developed era of the
same time in the nuclear area. The same general explanation doubtless
holds true for certain materials in Egypt, along the upper Nile and in
the Kharga oasis: these materials, called Sebilian III, the Khartoum
“neolithic,” and the Khargan microlithic, are from surface sites,
not from caves. The chart (p. 111) shows where I would place these
materials in era and time.
[Illustration: THE HILLY FLANKS OF THE CRESCENT AND EARLY SITES OF THE
NEAR EAST]
Both M’lefaat and Dr. Solecki’s Zawi Chemi Shanidar site appear to have
been slightly more “settled in” than was Karim Shahir itself. But I do
not think they belong to the era of farming-villages proper. The first
site of this era, in the hills of Iraqi Kurdistan, is Jarmo, on which
we have spent three seasons of work. Following Jarmo comes a variety of
sites and assemblages which lie along the hilly flanks of the crescent
and just below it. I am going to describe and illustrate some of these
for you.
Since not very much archeological excavation has yet been done on sites
of this range of time, I shall have to mention the names of certain
single sites which now alone stand for an assemblage. This does not
mean that I think the individual sites I mention were unique. In the
times when their various cultures flourished, there must have been
many little villages which shared the same general assemblage. We are
only now beginning to locate them again. Thus, if I speak of Jarmo,
or Jericho, or Sialk as single examples of their particular kinds of
assemblages, I don’t mean that they were unique at all. I think I could
take you to the sites of at least three more Jarmos, within twenty
miles of the original one. They are there, but they simply haven’t yet
been excavated. In 1956, a Danish expedition discovered material of
Jarmo type at Shimshara, only two dozen miles northeast of Jarmo, and
below an assemblage of Hassunan type (which I shall describe presently).
THE GAP BETWEEN KARIM SHAHIR AND JARMO
As we see the matter now, there is probably still a gap in the
available archeological record between the Karim Shahir-M’lefaat-Zawi
Chemi group (of the incipient era) and that of Jarmo (of the
village-farming era). Although some items of the Jarmo type materials
do reflect the beginnings of traditions set in the Karim Shahir group
(see p. 120), there is not a clear continuity. Moreover--to the
degree that we may trust a few radiocarbon dates--there would appear
to be around two thousand years of difference in time. The single
available Zawi Chemi “date” is 8900 ± 300 B.C.; the most reasonable
group of “dates” from Jarmo average to about 6750 ± 200 B.C. I am
uncertain about this two thousand years--I do not think it can have
been so long.
This suggests that we still have much work to do in Iraq. You can
imagine how earnestly we await the return of political stability in the
Republic of Iraq.
JARMO, IN THE KURDISH HILLS, IRAQ
The site of Jarmo has a depth of deposit of about twenty-seven feet,
and approximately a dozen layers of architectural renovation and
change. Nevertheless it is a “one period” site: its assemblage remains
essentially the same throughout, although one or two new items are
added in later levels. It covers about four acres of the top of a
bluff, below which runs a small stream. Jarmo lies in the hill country
east of the modern oil town of Kirkuk. The Iraq Directorate General of
Antiquities suggested that we look at it in 1948, and we have had three
seasons of digging on it since.
The people of Jarmo grew the barley plant and two different kinds of
wheat. They made flint sickles with which to reap their grain, mortars
or querns on which to crack it, ovens in which it might be parched, and
stone bowls out of which they might eat their porridge. We are sure
that they had the domesticated goat, but Professor Reed (the staff
zoologist) is not convinced that the bones of the other potentially
domesticable animals of Jarmo--sheep, cattle, pig, horse, dog--show
sure signs of domestication. We had first thought that all of these
animals were domesticated ones, but Reed feels he must find out much
more before he can be sure. As well as their grain and the meat from
their animals, the people of Jarmo consumed great quantities of land
snails. Botanically, the Jarmo wheat stands about half way between
fully bred wheat and the wild forms.
ARCHITECTURE: HALL-MARK OF THE VILLAGE
The sure sign of the village proper is in its traces of architectural
permanence. The houses of Jarmo were only the size of a small cottage
by our standards, but each was provided with several rectangular rooms.
The walls of the houses were made of puddled mud, often set on crude
foundations of stone. (The puddled mud wall, which the Arabs call
_touf_, is built by laying a three to six inch course of soft mud,
letting this sun-dry for a day or two, then adding the next course,
etc.) The village probably looked much like the simple Kurdish farming
village of today, with its mud-walled houses and low mud-on-brush
roofs. I doubt that the Jarmo village had more than twenty houses at
any one moment of its existence. Today, an average of about seven
people live in a comparable Kurdish house; probably the population of
Jarmo was about 150 people.
[Illustration: SKETCH OF JARMO ASSEMBLAGE
CHIPPED STONE
UNBAKED CLAY
GROUND STONE
POTTERY _UPPER THIRD OF SITE ONLY._
REED MATTING
BONE
ARCHITECTURE]
It is interesting that portable pottery does not appear until the
last third of the life of the Jarmo village. Throughout the duration
of the village, however, its people had experimented with the plastic
qualities of clay. They modeled little figurines of animals and of
human beings in clay; one type of human figurine they favored was that
of a markedly pregnant woman, probably the expression of some sort of
fertility spirit. They provided their house floors with baked-in-place
depressions, either as basins or hearths, and later with domed ovens of
clay. As we’ve noted, the houses themselves were of clay or mud; one
could almost say they were built up like a house-sized pot. Then,
finally, the idea of making portable pottery itself appeared, although
I very much doubt that the people of the Jarmo village discovered the
art.
On the other hand, the old tradition of making flint blades and
microlithic tools was still very strong at Jarmo. The sickle-blade was
made in quantities, but so also were many of the much older tool types.
Strangely enough, it is within this age-old category of chipped stone
tools that we see one of the clearest pointers to a newer age. Many of
the Jarmo chipped stone tools--microliths--were made of obsidian, a
black volcanic natural glass. The obsidian beds nearest to Jarmo are
over three hundred miles to the north. Already a bulk carrying trade
had been established--the forerunner of commerce--and the routes were
set by which, in later times, the metal trade was to move.
There are now twelve radioactive carbon “dates” from Jarmo. The most
reasonable cluster of determinations averages to about 6750 ± 200
B.C., although there is a completely unreasonable range of “dates”
running from 3250 to 9250 B.C.! _If_ I am right in what I take to be
“reasonable,” the first flush of the food-producing revolution had been
achieved almost nine thousand years ago.
HASSUNA, IN UPPER MESOPOTAMIAN IRAQ
We are not sure just how soon after Jarmo the next assemblage of Iraqi
material is to be placed. I do not think the time was long, and there
are a few hints that detailed habits in the making of pottery and
ground stone tools were actually continued from Jarmo times into the
time of the next full assemblage. This is called after a site named
Hassuna, a few miles to the south and west of modern Mosul. We also
have Hassunan type materials from several other sites in the same
general region. It is probably too soon to make generalizations about
it, but the Hassunan sites seem to cluster at slightly lower elevations
than those we have been talking about so far.
The catalogue of the Hassuna assemblage is of course more full and
elaborate than that of Jarmo. The Iraqi government’s archeologists
who dug Hassuna itself, exposed evidence of increasing architectural
know-how. The walls of houses were still formed of puddled mud;
sun-dried bricks appear only in later periods. There were now several
different ways of making and decorating pottery vessels. One style of
pottery painting, called the Samarran style, is an extremely handsome
one and must have required a great deal of concentration and excellence
of draftsmanship. On the other hand, the old habits for the preparation
of good chipped stone tools--still apparent at Jarmo--seem to have
largely disappeared by Hassunan times. The flint work of the Hassunan
catalogue is, by and large, a wretched affair. We might guess that the
kinaesthetic concentration of the Hassuna craftsmen now went into other
categories; that is, they suddenly discovered they might have more fun
working with the newer materials. It’s a shame, for example, that none
of their weaving is preserved for us.
The two available radiocarbon determinations from Hassunan contexts
stand at about 5100 and 5600 B.C. ± 250 years.
OTHER EARLY VILLAGE SITES IN THE NUCLEAR AREA
I’ll now name and very briefly describe a few of the other early
village assemblages either in or adjacent to the hilly flanks of the
crescent. Unfortunately, we do not have radioactive carbon dates for
many of these materials. We may guess that some particular assemblage,
roughly comparable to that of Hassuna, for example, must reflect a
culture which lived at just about the same time as that of Hassuna. We
do this guessing on the basis of the general similarity and degree of
complexity of the Sears Roebuck catalogues of the particular assemblage
and that of Hassuna. We suppose that for sites near at hand and of a
comparable cultural level, as indicated by their generally similar
assemblages, the dating must be about the same. We may also know that
in a general stratigraphic sense, the sites in question may both appear
at the bottom of the ascending village sequence in their respective
areas. Without a number of consistent radioactive carbon dates, we
cannot be precise about priorities.
[Illustration: SKETCH OF HASSUNA ASSEMBLAGE
POTTERY
POTTERY OBJECTS
CHIPPED STONE
BONE
GROUND STONE
ARCHITECTURE
REED MATTING
BURIAL]
The ancient mound at Jericho, in the Dead Sea valley in Palestine,
yields some very interesting material. Its catalogue somewhat resembles
that of Jarmo, especially in the sense that there is a fair depth
of deposit without portable pottery vessels. On the other hand, the
architecture of Jericho is surprisingly complex, with traces of massive
stone fortification walls and the general use of formed sun-dried
mud brick. Jericho lies in a somewhat strange and tropically lush
ecological niche, some seven hundred feet below sea level; it is
geographically within the hilly-flanks zone but environmentally not
part of it.
Several radiocarbon “dates” for Jericho fall within the range of those
I find reasonable for Jarmo, and their internal statistical consistency
is far better than that for the Jarmo determinations. It is not yet
clear exactly what this means.
The mound at Jericho (Tell es-Sultan) contains a remarkably
fine sequence, which perhaps does not have the gap we noted in
Iraqi-Kurdistan between the Karim Shahir group and Jarmo. While I am
not sure that the Jericho sequence will prove valid for those parts
of Palestine outside the special Dead Sea environmental niche, the
sequence does appear to proceed from the local variety of Natufian into
that of a very well settled community. So far, we have little direct
evidence for the food-production basis upon which the Jericho people
subsisted.
There is an early village assemblage with strong characteristics of its
own in the land bordering the northeast corner of the Mediterranean
Sea, where Syria and the Cilician province of Turkey join. This early
Syro-Cilician assemblage must represent a general cultural pattern
which was at least in part contemporary with that of the Hassuna
assemblage. These materials from the bases of the mounds at Mersin, and
from Judaidah in the Amouq plain, as well as from a few other sites,
represent the remains of true villages. The walls of their houses were
built of puddled mud, but some of the house foundations were of stone.
Several different kinds of pottery were made by the people of these
villages. None of it resembles the pottery from Hassuna or from the
upper levels of Jarmo or Jericho. The Syro-Cilician people had not
lost their touch at working flint. An important southern variation of
the Syro-Cilician assemblage has been cleared recently at Byblos, a
port town famous in later Phoenician times. There are three radiocarbon
determinations which suggest that the time range for these developments
was in the sixth or early fifth millennium B.C.
It would be fascinating to search for traces of even earlier
village-farming communities and for the remains of the incipient
cultivation era, in the Syro-Cilician region.
THE IRANIAN PLATEAU AND THE NILE VALLEY
The map on page 125 shows some sites which lie either outside or in
an extension of the hilly-flanks zone proper. From the base of the
great mound at Sialk on the Iranian plateau came an assemblage of
early village material, generally similar, in the kinds of things it
contained, to the catalogues of Hassuna and Judaidah. The details of
how things were made are different; the Sialk assemblage represents
still another cultural pattern. I suspect it appeared a bit later
in time than did that of Hassuna. There is an important new item in
the Sialk catalogue. The Sialk people made small drills or pins of
hammered copper. Thus the metallurgist’s specialized craft had made its
appearance.
There is at least one very early Iranian site on the inward slopes
of the hilly-flanks zone. It is the earlier of two mounds at a place
called Bakun, in southwestern Iran; the results of the excavations
there are not yet published and we only know of its coarse and
primitive pottery. I only mention Bakun because it helps us to plot the
extent of the hilly-flanks zone villages on the map.