Zeder Paleorient 2012

Palorient, vol. 37.1, p.
39-60 CNRS DITIONS 2011 Manuscrit reu le 2 fvrier 2011, accept le 10 mai 2011
RELIGION AND THE REVOLUTION:
THE LEGACY OF JACQUES CAUVIN
M. A. ZEDER
Abstract: Ten years after his passing, Jacques Cauvins revolutionary model of Near Eastern Neolithic emergence continues to shape
the debate over the causes of this major transitional period. Cauvins radical view of the power of symbols and the role of religion in
the domestication of plants and animals and origins of agriculture was a categorical rejection of the prevailing ecological/economic
theories of the day. And while not the only one to highlight the internal forces that shaped this transition, his theory was the most
strongly stated case against alternative models that featured climate change or population pressure as the drivers of this revolutionary
period of culture change. In the decade since the publication of the English version of his master work The Birth of the Gods and the
Origins of Agriculture, there has been an exponential increase in the amount of empirical data that is yielding an increasingly ne-
grained account of the transition from foraging to farming in the Near East. This work has shown that morphological changes in plants
and animals can no longer be used as threshold markers of the transition between wild and domestic, that there is no single center
from which agriculture originated and from which it spread, and that the temporal and spatial parameters of Near Eastern Neolithic
emergence are much broader and more pluralistic than anyone could have imagined just ten years ago. These developments make it
hard to support any of the single-level, prime-mover models proposed (and still advanced) to account for this transition. Instead, a
more synthetic model is called for that acknowledges the multiple general macro-level forces (both social and economic), as well as
the many more localized micro-level forces that pulled and pushed this transition along in this heartland region.
Rsum : Dix ans aprs son dcs, le modle rvolutionnaire de Jacques Cauvin relatif lmergence du Nolithique au Proche-
Orient continue de focaliser le dbat sur les origines de cette priode de transition majeure. Sa vision radicale du pouvoir des
symboles et du rle de la religion dans la domestication des plantes et des animaux et dans lorigine de lagriculture tait celle dun
rejet des thories socio-cologiques qui prvalaient lpoque. Mme sil ntait pas seul souligner les forces intrieures qui ont
faonn cette phase de transition, il tait profondment hostile aux modles alternatifs qui reprsentaient le changement climatique
ou la pression dmographique comme les facteurs majeurs de cette priode rvolutionnaire de changement culturel. Dans la dcennie
qui a suivi la sortie de la version anglaise de son uvre matresse, The Birth of the Gods and the Origins of Agriculture, des donnes
empiriques trs nes se sont accumules de faon exponentielle, qui rendent compte de la transition entre cueillette et agriculture dans
le Proche-Orient. Ce travail a montr que le changement morphologique des plantes et des animaux ne pouvait plus tre utilis comme
marqueur de la transition entre sauvage et domestique et que lagriculture nest pas apparue dans un seul secteur do elle se serait
rpandue ; les paramtres spatio-temporels de lmergence du Nolithique du Proche-Orient sont bien plus larges et multiples quon
naurait pu imaginer il y a seulement dix ans. Devant ces avances, il est difcile de soutenir un modle unique avec un moteur unique
pour rendre compte de cette transition. Un modle plus synthtique est propos, qui, au niveau gnral, reconnat la pluralit des
facteurs la fois sociaux et conomiques, aussi bien que les forces plus limites qui, un niveau local, ont accompagn la transition
dans cette rgion centrale.
Keywords: Domestication; Agriculture; Religion; Explanatory Models.
Mots-cls : Domestication ; Agriculture ; Religion ; Modles explicatoires.
paleorient-37-1.indb 39 21/12/11 12:53:14
40 M.A. ZEDER
Palorient, vol. 37.1, p. 39-60 CNRS DITIONS 2011
INTRODUCTION
Every successful revolution needs a leader to articulate
the most compelling, most extreme case for the overthrow of
the existing order and the embrace of an entirely new way
of looking at the world. Jacques Cauvin served this role in
his categorical rejection of the prevailing paradigm of Neo-
lithic emergence in the ancient Near East in favor of a dra-
matically new vision of this major transitional period. Rather
than a response to external environmental and economic pres-
sures, Cauvin saw Neolithic emergence as the product of a
profound transformation of the human psyche. In the place
of climate change, population growth, and resource depres-
sion, he argued that the primary engine of Near Eastern Neo-
lithic emergence was a shift in humankinds mental template
from one which saw humans as part of nature to one in which
humans dominate nature. Manifested as a Revolution of
Symbols that found expression in all aspects of material cul-
turefrom iconography, to ritual practice, to architecture, to
lithic technology, he laid out a bold, even audacious new vision
of the causes, context, and course of Neolithic emergence that
continues to shape the narrative on Near Eastern agricultural
origins. Cauvin was not the only one to reject dominant exter-
nal stress models of the day; but his was the most revolution-
ary example of a prime-mover model attributing the Neolithic
Revolution to social and psychological forces located within
human society and psyche.
Over the ten years since the publication of the English
translation of Cauvins mentalist manifesto The Birth of the
Gods and the Origins of Agriculture in 2000, and his death in
2001, a roiling debate has continued among those championing
various different single-lever models of Near Eastern Neolithic
emergence. Emerging information on the scope and power of
global climate change following the end of the last Ice Age
has given new life to environmentally driven models of agri-
cultural origins. The embrace of human behavioral ecology
has provided population based models with the mechanisms
by which demographically-driven resource depression resulted
in resource intensication, management, and, eventually,
domestication and agriculture. Ethnographic analogies with
present-day complex hunter-gatherers have been marshaled to
argue that social dynamics propelled ancient societies across
the threshold of agricultural emergence. And while many of
the particulars of Cauvins sweeping account of the origin and
dispersal of agricultural economy in the Near East have not
proven accurate in the light of emerging data, the core of his
case for the primacy of symbols, religion, and ritual in agricul-
tural emergence has only gained in advocates and acceptance
the decade since his death.
The last ten years has also witnessed a quieter but none-
the-less steady accumulation of new empirical data that is
yielding an increasingly ne-grained account of the transition
from foraging to farming in the Near East. New excavations
and the reanalysis of old data from across the entire Fertile
Crescent have produced a wealth of data that has expanded the
geographic focus of our understanding of this key transition.
Revolutionary new archaeological, archaeobiological, and
genetic analytical techniques have vastly enhanced our abil-
ity to document the course and timing of plants and animal
domestication and the crystallization of agricultural economies
based on domesticatesthe core component of the Neolithic
Revolution in the Near East. The greater temporal, spatial, and
developmental resolution resulting from this work makes it
increasingly difcult to argue for any prime-mover scenario
for Near Eastern agricultural origins, requiring instead a less
doctrinaire (and less polarizing) approach that acknowledges
the multiple factors that pulled and pushed this transition along
in this heartland region.
It is useful then to review the various prime-mover models
that have been developed to account for Neolithic emergence
in the Near East in light of the new data on plant and animal
domestication that has emerged in the last decade. It is particu-
larly appropriate on this ten year anniversary Jacques Cauvins
passing to consider the lasting legacy of his revolutionary vision
of the role of religion in the Neolithic Revolution and whether
this vision can be reconciled with the increasingly high resolu-
tion understanding of the archaeological record in the Near
East. In so doing, we begin to chart a post-revolutionary course
away from the polarized views that pit one prime-mover causal
force against another and toward a more synthetic approach
that brings together environment, economy, demography,
social relations, and religion into a more holistic account of
this fundamental transition.
MODELS OF AGRICULTURAL
EMERGENCE IN THE NEAR EAST
EXTERNAL PUSH MODELS
Models that attribute the emergence of agricultural econ-
omies in the Near East to external pressures tend to charac-
terize this transition as a response to stresses that compelled
people to abandon earlier mobile foraging strategies in favor
paleorient-37-1.indb 40 21/12/11 12:53:14
Religion and the Revolution: The Legacy of Jacques Cauvin 41
of more sedentary adaptations supported by agriculture. This
group of models trace their intellectual ancestry to V. Gordon
Childe who (amplifying an earlier model proposed by Raphael
Pumpelly) held that a period of desiccation following the last
Ice Age forced people to congregate around water sources
where, coming into contact with plants and animals similarly
drawn to these environments, they began to sow and tend cere-
als and other crops, and to husband animals.
1
After falling out
of favor in the 1950s and 60s, environmentally driven models
of agricultural origins were resurrected in the later part of the
twentieth century thanks to an increasingly better understand-
ing of the timing and magnitude of climate change at the end
of the Pleistocene and beginning of the Holocene. The Younger
Dryas, a brief return to cold, dry conditions at the very end of
the Pleistocene (12,800-11,600 cal. BP), is featured in many
models as providing an environmental shock that motivated
people of the Near East to domesticate plants and begin down
the path to agricultural emergence.
2
Other models credit the
stabilization of climate, the rise of CO
2
, and the changes in pat-
terns of seasonality that followed the Younger Dryas as provid-
ing the needed push that made agricultural origins essentially
compulsory.
3

Binfords marginality model combined post-Ice Age
environmental factors with Malthusian population growth
projections.
4
He argued that a rise in sea level put a squeeze
on burgeoning populations optimal coastal habitats, forcing
migration to more marginal areas where the cultivation of
plants, that had been abundant in optimal zones, was adopted
to meet the increasing demand for food. A modied version
of this hypothesis, without the climate forcing element, can
be found in Flannerys early work on Near Eastern Agricul-
tural origins. Flannery hypothesized that population growth
alone in optimal habitats of the Zagros region of the eastern
Fertile Crescent was sufcient to motivate migration into mar-
ginal habitats. Cereal cultivation and animal husbandry were
adopted in these less hospitable environments, he argued, to
replicate the bounty of wild plant and animal resources in their
natural habitat.
5
Redding has argued that local population growth in more
optimal environments alone could result in resource depres-
sion that, in regions where uctuations in resources were both
severe and unpredictable, selected for the adoption of stress
1. PUMPELLY, 1908; CHILDE, 1928 and 1936.
2. BAR-YOSEF and BELFER-COHEN, 2002; HARRIS, 2002 and 2003; MOORE
and HILLMAN, 1992.
3. RICHERSON et al., 2001, see also MCCORRISTON and HOLE, 1991.
4. BINFORD, 1968.
5. FLANNERY, 1969 and 1973.
reducing behaviors including food production.
6
Rosenberg put
a somewhat different spin on a similar model which attributes
the adoption of sedentary lifestyles and subsequent resource
intensication to the increasing demarcation of territorial
boundaries in the face of perceived population pressure.
7

More recently, demographic models have been aug-
mented by tenets of human behavioral ecology grounded in
both ecology and economics.
8
This coupling of Malthus with
microeconomics has provided a predictive road map that takes
one, step-by-step down a path that begins with 1) population
reaching thresholds that limit mobility and force increasing
sedentism, which in turn leads to 2) depression of high return
resources, that stimulates 3) a broadening of the resource base
to include an expanding array of lower-return resources, caus-
ing 4) an intensication of subsistence strategies, including
attempts at enhancing productivity that, in the case of certain
receptive species, results in 5) their domestication.
9

INTERNAL PULL MODELS
Another category of models of Neolithic emergence rejects
external stresses like environmentally or demographically
driven resource pressure as having played a primary cata-
lytic role in Near Eastern agricultural origins. These models
look instead to inherent capacities and characteristics within
humans and human society that enabled our species to capital-
ize on external conditions in the post-Pleistocene Near East by
creating subsistence systems that served social and psychologi-
cal ends as much, or even more, than they did more purely eco-
nomic ones. Often set within a context of opportunity rather
than stress, these models can trace their intellectual pedigree
back to Robert Braidwood. Against the backdrop of paleo-
environmental information that showed little evidence for cli-
matic stress in the Early Holocene,
10
Braidwood argued that
over time people living within the natural habitats of future
domesticates acquired a deeper knowledge of their environ-
ment along with an expanding technological sophistication in
manipulating that environment.
11
Through this settling in
process, people in these resource-rich areas gained both the
know-how and the technological capacity to bring plants and
6. REDDING, 1988.
7. ROSENBERG, 1990 and 1998; see also PEASNALL, 2000.
8. WINTERHALDER and KENNETT, 2006.
9. BINFORD, 2001; MUNRO, 2004; STARKOVICH and STINER, 2009;
STINER and KUHN, 2006; STINER and MUNRO, 2002.
10. WRIGHT, 1977.
11. BRAIDWOOD, 1960; BRAIDWOOD and HOWE, 1960.
paleorient-37-1.indb 41 21/12/11 12:53:14
42 M.A. ZEDER
animals under control, vastly expanding the yield and the reli-
ability of managed resources.
While Braidwood saw agricultural emergence as a manifes-
tation of human ingenuity and our species inherent ability to
make a better life through technology, other internally driven
models look to somewhat darker motivations that inspired
humans to domesticate plants and animals and create a subsis-
tence economy based on agriculture. Drawing on ethnographic
parallels with modern day tribal societies, Bender looked to the
set of circumstances under which social relations (marriage
obligations, trade alliances, ceremonies) create conditions that,
she argued, promote the production of surplus that could, in
turn, be appropriated by individuals in positions of authority.
12

In certain contexts the accumulation and delayed redistribution
of seasonally available resources promoted the development
of storage, increased sedentism, and resource intensication
resulting in cultivation and, eventually, domestication.
Haydens competitive feasting model focuses on the role of
these leaders, or accumulators as he calls them, who take
advantage of times of plenty to advance their own agendas
of social promotion.
13
Once again drawing from modern day
complex hunter-gatherer societies, Hayden argues that forag-
ers in resource rich areas were freed from obligatory sharing
and proscriptions against ownership required for the survival
in more impoverished environments. Ambitious individu-
als in such contexts were able to capitalize on the bounty of
their environment by amassing surplus food resources (often
r-selected species where mass-killing would not affect popula-
tion levels) that could be used in feasts. Hosting feasts allowed
these individuals to acquire control over the loyalty, indebted-
ness, and, especially, the labor of feast participants, thereby
gaining power and stature within the society. Domesticates t
into this system as delicacies that were either so rare or so
labour intensive that their inclusion among the foods distrib-
uted during a feast further augmented the hosts stature and
the network of individuals obligated to him as the result of
his largess. Domestication, following this model, was not an
outcome of economic pressures, but of the actions of greedy
accumulators seeking to enhance their social standing.
Other internal pull models look deeper into the human
psyche for the driving forces behind agricultural emergence.
This category includes Cauvins psycho-cultural model that
nds the seeds of the Neolithic revolution buried deeply within
the human mind.
14
Cauvins work was grounded in structural
12. BENDER, 1978.
13. HAYDEN, 1993, 1995, 2003 and 2009.
14. CAUVIN, 1994, 2000a and b.
archaeology and, in particular, in the Annales School of histo-
riography that emphasizes the role of collective psychology and
its material expression as drivers of culture change. He argues
that no amount of external pressure from either environmental
perturbations or population packing could propel humans to
domesticate plants and animals and adopt agriculture with-
out there having rst been a change in the human mind-set
that allowed them to see themselves as dominating nature,
rather than as part of nature. This collective mental shift, he
maintains, occurred rst in the northern Levant during earli-
est stages of the PPNA under the increasingly more hospitable
environmental conditions that followed the end of the Younger
Dryas. The sudden promotion of humans to the rank of masters
of the natural world found symbolic and material expression in
the images of raptors and other predators, and, especially, in
the elevation, and even deication of a mother-goddess gure,
emblematic of female fertility, and a bull gure, emblematic of
male virility. It was the rise in prominence of this mother-god-
dess deity that, during later phases of the PPNA, inspired the
initial domestication of cereals in the Middle Euphrates valley
which later spread throughout the Levantine corridor. It was
the ascendency of the bull deity in the following PPNB that
propelled humans to assume mastery over the animals they
formerly co-existed with in a more natural predator-prey rela-
tionship. The rise of this more masculine mentality also found
expression in the abandonment of the semi-subterranean cir-
cular house forms betokening a more natural feminine form,
in favor of above-ground rectangular houses built along more
masculine straight lines not found in nature. It also was respon-
sible for an expansionist mind-set that spurred the spread of
farmers and herders and their goddess/bull centered symbolic
system out of the northern Levantine core region through all
parts of the Fertile Crescent, onto the central Anatolian Pla-
teau and beyond.
Operating within a similar paradigmatic framework, Ian
Hodder sees Neolithic emergence as a part of a broader trans-
formation of wild into cultural.
15
This process extends not
only to assuming mastery over plants and animals through
their domestication, but to the domestication of all of nature,
including humans both living and dead, through cultural con-
trol. With its roots in the Upper Paleolithic, this process of
culturing nature comes to a head at the waning days of the
Pleistocene with the establishment of sedentary communities
in the Natuan and later, after the Younger Dryas, a return to
sedentism in the PPNA. According to this model, the houseor
domusserves as a material metaphor for the human ascen-
15. HODDER, 1990 and 2003.
paleorient-37-1.indb 42 21/12/11 12:53:15
dency over naturethe locus where the conicting notions of
nature and culture, wild and domestic, are reconciled by a more
holistic process of domestication that extends to all aspects of
the human experience.
Like Cauvin, Watkins argues for greater primacy of changes
in symbolic thinking in Neolithic origins in the Near East.
16

Like Hodder, he sees that the built environment beginning with
the Epipaleolithic base camps like Ohalo II and crystallizing
in the PPNA sedentary communities serve as both a material
metaphor and a nexus for changes in human cognitive abilities
that lie at the core of Neolithic emergence. But Watkins also
supplies the mechanism for these central cognitive shifts lack-
ing in both Hodders and Cauvins models. To Watkins the new
found capacity for symbolic reference acquired by anatomi-
cally modern humans in the Upper Paleolithic is fully real-
ized in the context of Early Holocene forager communities in
the Near East. Life in the larger scale, more permanent built
environment of PPNA communities provided the catalyst for
a new leap in human cognitive abilities. What had previously
been somewhat vague concepts of the temporal and the spiri-
tual world could now be ordered into a more powerful system
in which more sharply realized dichotomies between humans,
nature, and the supernatural could be represented in the form
of physical symbols permeating all aspects of human mate-
rial culture. The capacity to convey new codes of behaviour
(social, economic, and ideological) through material symbols
embedded in both quotidian and ritual activities provided the
glue needed for social cohesion among the rst large scale
permanent communities. The greater permanency of these
communities resulted in substantial population growth, which,
according to this model, made necessary the adoption of farm-
ing practices to feed these growing communities.
NEW PERSPECTIVES ON NEAR EASTERN
PLANT AND ANIMAL DOMESTICATION
AND AGRICULTURAL ORIGINS
All of these prime mover models use the principle of tempo-
ral precedent to argue that whatever lever their model spotlights
was the causative agent in Near Eastern Neolithic emergence.
In each it is the demonstration that morphological domesticates
appear after their favored agent (be it climate change, popula-
tion pressure, social showboating, or cognitive awakening and
religious conversion) that is used to argue for the primacy of
16. WATKINS, 1990, 2004, 2006 and 2010.
this agent. And yet over the past decade research on the domes-
tication of plants and animals in the Near East has shown that
archaeologically detectable morphological change in plants
and animals undergoing domestication may only occur very
late in the process, if it occurs at all, and cannot be considered
a leading edge indicator that some threshold between the wild
and the domestic has been crossed.
17
This work has also shown
that the development of agricultural economies in which the
majority of the subsistence base is composed of domestic spe-
cies is temporally separate from initial domestication by many
hundreds, if not a thousand or more, years.
PLANT DOMESTICATION
In cereals the morphological marker traditionally used to
indicate that the threshold between wild and domestic had
been crossed was the appearance of a tough rachis, a change
in the plants dispersal mechanisms thought to arise when
humans began to sow harvested seeds. The demonstration that
this tough rachis domestic morphotype is present among wild
cereals raised the bar on the application of this marker.
18
No
longer could the mere presence of a few grains of tough rachis
wheat or barley be taken as an indicator of the cultivation of
domestic cereals; the new standard required that at least 10%
of the grains recovered exhibited this trait.
19
This higher stan-
dard of proof, along with a reappraisal of the dating of contexts
thought to contain early evidence of domestic cereals,
20
has
succeeded not only in eliminating all previous PPNA candi-
dates for morphologically domestic cereals, but also in under-
mining the case for the southern Levant as the region where
morphologically altered cereals rst appear.
21
Instead, the
earliest securely identied and dated morphologically domes-
ticated emmer and einkorn wheat now appear to come from
sites in the upper Euphrates valley (Neval ori, Cafer Hyk,
and possibly ayn) that date to the Early PPNB at about
10,500-10,200 cal. BP.
22
Securely identied and dated morpho-
logically altered domestic barley is not seen until the Middle
PPNB when it is found throughout the Fertile Crescent and
Anatolian Plateau.
23

17. See ZEDER, 2009a and b and 2011 a for summaries and extensive biblio-
graphies of this research.
18. KISLEV, 1989 and 1992.
19. WEISS et al., 2006; TANNO and WILLCOX, 2006a.
20. E.g., STORDEUR, 2003.
21. As proposed in BAR-YOSEF and MEADOW, 1995.
22. NESBITT, 2002; TANNO and WILLCOX, 2006a.
23. NESBITT, 2002.
paleorient-37-1.indb 43 21/12/11 12:53:15
44 M.A. ZEDER
And yet other indicators suggest that humans were actively
tilling and tending cereals well before the appearance of this
characteristic morphological manifestation of domestication.
The presence of distinctive complexes of weedy species typi-
cally found in elds under cultivation suggests that humans
were cultivating stands of morphologically wild einkorn and
rye at Abu Hureyra and Mureybit as early during the Late
Epipaleolithic (ca 13,000-12,000 cal. BP).
24
Increases in this
weed complex at Qaramel and Jerf el-Ahmar signal an inten-
sication of plant cultivation in the Middle Euphrates in the
ensuing PPNA.
25
Increases in the quantities of wild einkorn
recovered from Early Holocene archaeobotanical assemblages
in the Middle Euphrates also points to human manipulation of
this plant. Wild einkorn is not well adapted to the chalky soils
of the Middle Euphrates and would not have responded well to
rising temperatures of the Early Holocene. Indeed, the region
today is too hot and arid for wild einkorn, which can only be
found on basaltic soils 100 km north of Jerf el-Ahmar. And yet
instead of declining and disappearing from the archaeobotani-
cal recordas did rye, another cool climate cereal exploited
(and possibly domesticated) by Late Epipaleolithic inhabitants
of Middle Euphrates
26
the quantity of wild einkorn in these
assemblages steadily increases over the course of the PPNA
and into the Early PPNB. This could only happen, Willcox et
al. contend, if people were actively tending plants transplanted
from preferred habitats, altering micro-habitats, removing
competition, and articially diverting water to tended plants.
27

A subtle increase in the plumpness of wild einkorn grains is
further argued to be a plastic response to cultivation.
28
The pro-
gressive decrease of indigenous plants of the Euphrates ood
plain and the corresponding increase of morphologically wild
representatives of founder crops (barley, emmer, lentils, chick-
peas, and faba beans) are similarly offered as evidence that
humans were modifying local plant communities and manag-
ing morphologically wild but cultivated crop plants.
29

In pulses the morphological marker commonly used to
indicate domestication is an increase in seed size, a change not
seen in lentils and other pulses until at least 7500 years ago.
30

And yet a good case can be made for the cultivation of pulses
considerably earlier. Wild lentils are not a common component
of Near Eastern wild plant communities, the yield of seeds
24. COLLEDGE, 2002.
25. WILLCOX et al., 2008.
26. HILLMAN, 2000.
27. WILLCOX et al., 2008.
28. WILLCOX, 2004; WILLCOX et al., 2008.
29. WILLCOX et al., 2008 and 2009.
30. WEISS and ZOHARY, 2011.
per plant in wild lentils is very low (10-20 seeds per plant),
and the dormancy rate of wild lentils is very high (only about
10% of wild lentil seeds germinate after sowing). Given the
rarity and the low yield of these plants in the wild, the hun-
dreds of wild morphotype lentils recovered from PPNA sites
like Netiv Hagdud and Jerf el-Ahmar are unlikely to represent
wild, unmanaged plants.
31
Transplantation and tending of mor-
phological wild lentils are clearly indicated. In fact it is highly
likely that these crop plants had already undergone a lowering
of seed dormancy rates and an increase in the number of seeds
per plant by this time initial steps toward domestication
that would not be archaeologically detectable.
32
The recovery
of more than a million wild morphotype lentils from a bin at
Late PPNB Yiftahel (ca 8800 cal. BP) strongly indicates that
another archaeologically invisible morphological change
the loss of seed pod dehiscencehad occurred at least 1000
years before archaeological detectable morphological change
in seed size had occurred.
33
Similar arguments have recently
been made for the management of chickpeas and faba beans
found in Early PPNB contexts in the Middle Euphrates.
34

The delayed expression of domestication induced mor-
phological change in managed cereals and pulses in the Near
East may be attributable to the frequent importation of new
wild plants when cultivated crops failed.
35
It is also possible
that early harvesting practices may not have encouraged the
morphological changes in cereal dispersal mechanisms once
thought to be the leading edge marker of cereal domestica-
tion. Beating ripened grain heads into baskets, gleaning elds,
or harvesting cereals before they are fully ripe (or a delay in
genetic changes in cereals that orchestrate the timing of ripen-
ing in early managed crops) may all have lead to the retention
of the brittle rachis in cultivated cereals.
36
The appearance of
morphological change in these founder crops is, then, more
likely an artifact of a change in management or harvesting
practices in cultivated crops, not a rst line indicator of plant
domestication that they have traditionally been taken to be.
Early experiments in plant cultivation were not limited to
annuals like cereals and pulses. The presence of partheno-
carpic, infertile gs at the southern Levantine PPNA site of
Gigal (ca 11,400-11,200 cal. BP) has been interpreted as a
31. WEISS et al., 2006; TANNO and WILLCOX, 2006a; WILLCOX et al., 2008
and 2009.
32. WEISS et al., 2006.
33. Ibid.
34. TANNO and WILLCOX, 2006b.
35. TANNO and WILLCOX, 2006a.
36. HARTMANN et al., 2006; LEV-YADUN et al., 2006; TANNO and
WILLCOX, 2006a; WILLCOX and TANNO, 2006.
paleorient-37-1.indb 44 21/12/11 12:53:15
clear indication for human selection for this rare mutant vari-
ety.
37
Selective planting of cuttings from wild g trees that pro-
duce this sweeter fruit is indicative of human manipulation of
local environments and biotic communitiesan activity, it is
argued, that provides the context for initial domestication of a
wide range of plant species across the region.
38

Similar processes are evidenced in the eastern arm of the
Fertile Crescent in the diverse, and geographically varied array
of plant resources utilized by Early Holocene population in the
Taurus/Zagros region.
39
Plant remains recovered from sites in
the Taurus/Zagros arc include a wide array of large and small
seeded legumes, almonds and pistachios (which in wild plants
are quite unpalatable), and, in more steppic parts of the region,
both large and small seeded grasses, including wild barley.
The quantity of large seeded legumes exploited by people in
the Taurus/Zagros arc might, as has been done for the Levant,
be taken as an indication of cultivation of these future crop
plants. Similarly, the lack of tough rachis grains can no longer
be seen as an argument against the cultivation of morphologi-
cally wild cereals in this region.
Genetic evidence for Near Eastern plant domestication also
argues for a more pluralistic process of plant domestication.
Once thought to be conned to a single domestication of popu-
lations located in southeastern Anatolia,
40
it now appears that
at least two different lineages of wild einkorn and emmer were
brought under domestication in different parts of the north-
ern Levant.
41
And while zkan et al. nd no evidence for a
separate southern Levantine domestication of emmer,
42
there is
some support for subsequent hybridization and introgression of
wild emmer from the southern Levant into domestic emmer.
43

There is also some indication that wild land races from Iran
and Iraq were involved in the domestication of emmer wheat.
44

Genetic analyses conducted by Morrell and Clegg have con-
rmed archaeological indications that barley underwent at
least two independent domestication eventsone in the south-
ern Levant and another in the Zagros.
45
Genetic analyses point
to a northern Levantine location for both lentil and chickpea
domestication.
46
However, the simultaneous appearances of
37. KISLEV et al., 2006.
38. ZEDER and SMITH, 2009.
39. SAVARD et al., 2006.
40. HEUN et al. 1997; ZKAN et al., 2002.
41. KILIAN et al., 2007; HEUN et al., 2008; ZKAN et al., 2002; BROWN et
al., 2008.
42. ZKAN et al., 2005.
43. LUO et al., 2007.
44. ZKAN et al., 2005.
45. MORRELL and CLEGG, 2007; VAN ZEIST et al., 1984.
46. SUDUPAK et al., 2004; LADIZINSKY, 1989.
large quantities of lentils in archaeological deposits in both
the northern and the southern Levant during the PPNA sug-
gest either a very rapid movement of this crop plant out of the
northern Levant, or, perhaps more likely, a separate southern
Levantine domestication of a variety of lentils whose genetic
signature is no longer represented among modern domestic
lentils. A similar possibility exists for legumes domesticated
in the Taurus/Zagros region.
This broad spectrum plant exploitation strategy in the Near
East now appears to stretch as far back as the Late Glacial
Maximum (ca 23,000 cal. BP) as evidenced by the remarkably
diverse array of plant remains recovered from waterlogged
deposits at Ohalo II which includes both large and small
seeded grasses and legumes.
47
Middle Paleolithic exploitation
of this plant complex in both the western and eastern arms of
the Fertile Crescent is also indicated.
48
It is still an open ques-
tion when, over the course these many millennia of increas-
ingly intensive utilization of plant resources, humans began to
actively modify local ecosystems and their biotic communi-
ties to encourage the availability of economically important
plants. However, it is becoming increasingly clear that by at
least 11,500 years ago humans across this entire region had
brought a number of plant species under cultivation that, but
for the manifestations of certain morphological traits seen in
later domestic varieties, should be considered to be domesti-
cated crops.
ANIMAL DOMESTICATION
Even more than in plants, morphological markers of animal
domestication are increasingly recognized as late-onset mani-
festations of human management. Indeed, body size reduction,
which had been widely thought to be a nearly instantaneous
result of initial domestication in sheep and goats,
49
has been
more recently shown to be an artifact of a shift in the demo-
graphic composition of morphologically wild but clearly
managed herds.
50
In fact, with the possible exception of the
neotonization
51
of cranial morphology seen in animals like dogs
and pigs that entered into domestication through a commensal
47. WEISS et al., 2004; PIPERNO et al., 2004.
48. ALBERT et al., 2003; LEV et al., 2005; HENRY et al., 2011.
49. UERPMANN, 1978 and 1979; BAR-YOSEF and MEADOW, 1995.
50. ZEDER, 2001, 2005, 2006 and 2008.
51. Neotonization, or juvenilization, of skull morphology is thought to be
linked changes in developmental rates that are themselves linked to the
selection for reduced aggression and wariness in animals, like domesti-
cates and commensals, that come into frequent contact with humans.
paleorient-37-1.indb 45 21/12/11 12:53:15
46 M.A. ZEDER
route,
52
there may be no archaeologically detectable mor-
phological change in early managed animals until, as with
plants, they were isolated from free living populations and
until the opportunity for introgression or restocking managed
populations with wild ones was eliminated. It was only at
this point that morphological characteristics, seen in bovids,
like the changes in horn size and form and the decrease in
the degree of sexual dimorphism, began to manifest them-
selves as humans took complete control over the selection of
mating pairs and eliminated, once and for all, the advantage
of large horns and bigger bodies in mate competition and
attraction.
It is also becoming increasingly clear that humans were
managing sheep and goats within their natural habitat long
before humans and their managed herds left this homeland of
initial domestication. This process may only be detectable by
tracing the changes in prey strategies as they shift from the
return maximizing strategies of hunters focusing on large meat
packages (e.g. prime adult males) to the production maximiz-
ing strategies of herders who slaughter of all but a few young
males and delayed culling females until they have passed their
peak reproductive years.
53

Computed using new high-resolution analytical techniques,
sex-specic harvest proles have detected this strategy of young
male/older female culling in assemblages of goat remains from
the Central Zagros dating to 10,000 cal. BP.
54
Lower resolution
demographic proling techniques have revealed changes in the
age and sizes of caprines consistent with the harvest of herded
animals at about 10,500 cal. BP at Neval ori in southeastern
Anatolia.
55
Sheep seems to be the initial managed animal here,
with managed goats introduced from elsewhere at about 10,200
cal. BP.
56
Daniel Helmers recent reconsideration of the faunal
remains from Cafer Hyk (ca 10,300-9500 cal. BP), focusing
on sex ratios and harvest proles, leads him to conclude that,
though morphologically wild, sheep (and likely goats) at this
site were not hunted animals as he originally thought but were
instead agromorphic animals, a term he denes as domestic
animals that are morphologically close to wild ones.
57
Simi-
larly, a case has been made for the management of morpho-
logically wild sheep in central Anatolia at Akl Hyk at
10,200-9500 cal. BP.
58
Managed goats are evident throughout
52. FLANNERY, 1983; MOREY, 1992; ZEDER in press.
53. REDDING, 1981; ZEDER, 2001.
54. ZEDER, 2001 and 2006.
55. PETERS et al., 1999 and 2005.
56. PETERS et al., 2005: 111.
57. HELMER, 1991 and 2008.
58. BUITENHUIS, 1997; VIGNE et al., 1999.
the entire arc of the Fertile Crescent by 9500 cal. BP,
59
while
managed sheep seem to take longer to penetrate both its east-
ern and western arms arriving in the Zagros about 9000 years
ago
60
and in the Levant at about 9200 cal. BP.
61
Changes in multiple indices (tooth size, age proles, biom-
etry) among pigs at ayn point to a gradual process from
11,000 to about 10,000 years ago in which pigs moved from
wild to commensal to full domestic status.
62
As with the sheep
and goats from Cafer Hyk, Helmers reevaluation of the
demographic patterns of the pig remains from this site leads
him to conclude that domestic pigs were present by 10,300
cal. BP.
63
Helmer also nds indications of a reduction in the
degree of sexual dimorphism among cattle remains from sev-
eral sites in the Middle Euphrates (i.e. Djade and Halula) in
the Early to early Middle PPNB (ca 10,500-9500), suggesting
that initial management of wild cattle began somewhat earlier
than this rst indication of domestication induced morphologi-
cal change.
64
Like sheep, the spread of both managed pigs and
cattle into the eastern and western arms of the Fertile Crescent
appears to have been relatively slowonly reaching the south-
ern-most extremities of the region by 9000-8500 cal. BP.
65
The
spread of managed pigs and cattle to Central Anatolia also
seems to have been quite slow, with domestic cattle and pigs
only clearly evidenced here by 8500 cal. BP.
66

Genetic evidence for animal domestication, even more so
than in plants, supports the impression that animal domestica-
tion was a pluralistic process that took place multiple times
across a wide territory. Up to six different lineages of goats
are argued to have been brought under human control in the
Zagros region and Iranian Plateau;
67
three lineages of sheep
in eastern Turkey and western Iran;
68
three or four different
lineages of cattle;
69
and perhaps as many as four different lin-
eages of pigs.
70
The degree to which these different lineages
represent spatially, temporally, and culturally discrete domes-
tication events is not entirely clear.
71
But both the genetic
and the archaeological data point to a wide-spread process in
59. HORWTIZ et al., 1999; PETERS et al., 1999; ZEDER, 1999.
60. ZEDER, 2008.
61. HORWITZ and DUCOS, 1998.
62. ERVYNCK et al., 2001; HONGO et al., 2002.
63. HELMER, 2008.
64. HELMER, 2008; HELMER et al., 2005; HELMER and GOURICHON, 2008.
65. HORWITZ et al., 1999; HOLE et al., 1969.
66. MARTIN et al., 2002.
67. NADERI et al., 2007 and 2008.
68. BRUFORD and TOWNSEND, 2006; HIENDLEDER et al., 2002; PEDROSA et
al., 2005.
69. BRADLEY and MAGEE, 2006.
70. LARSON et al., 2007.
71. DOBNEY and LARSON, 2006.
paleorient-37-1.indb 46 21/12/11 12:53:15
which people across both the Central and Eastern parts of the
Fertile Crescent arc were embarking on domestic partnerships
with these four founder livestock species.
Once again it is difcult to say how far back in time this
gradual process goes. In the early 1960s Dexter Perkins made
a controversial case for initial sheep domestication nearly
12,000 years ago at Zawi Chemi Shanidar.
72
My recent anal-
ysis of material from this and other sites in the region indi-
cates that the increase in the proportion of sheep that Perkins
detected at Zawi Chemi is widely seen across the region at this
time. Instead of a marker of initial domestication as Perkins
read it to be, this increase is more likely a response to a spread
in grasslands at the beginning of the Holocene that encouraged
the expansion of wild sheep populations in the region.
73
With
improved demographic proling techniques the younger age
prole he detectedand also interpreted as a sign of domes-
ticationcan now be seen as a specialized hunting practice.
While perhaps a transitional step toward management, the
focus on younger adult males between two to three years of
age seen at Zawi Chemi is not consistent with the slaughter
pattern for a managed herd which would focus on sub-adult
males (6 months to 2 years) and older females (4 + years). A
similar pattern of specialized sheep hunting has been reported
by Redding at the roughly contemporary site of Hallan emi,
though my own analysis of remains from this site indicates that
this pattern is not as strongly expressed here as it is at Zawi
Chemi Shanidar.
74
The demographic prole of sheep remains
at near-by Krtik Tepe at about 10,900 cal. BP has similarly
been interpreted as a transitional strategy somewhere on the
scale between game management and herd management.
75
My
ongoing analysis of the pig remains from Hallan emi also
raises questions about the case for early swine management at
this site,
76
suggesting once again that hunting strategies may
have been evolving in the direction of management, but that
active management of these animals was not yet being prac-
ticed.
Although unequivocal signs of initial management of these
animals has yet to be detected in sites from this region, it is
becoming increasingly clear that at least three of the major
livestock speciesgoats, sheep, and pigswere brought
under management in the context of the small sedentary com-
munities that appeared across the Taurus/Zagros arc (from
southeastern Anatolia to the Central Zagros) sometime during
72. PERKINS, 1964.
73. ZEDER, 2008.
74. REDDING, 2005; ZEDER, unpublished data.
75. ARBUCKLE and ZKAYA, 2006.
76. ROSENBERG et al., 1998; REDDING 2005; ZEDER, unpublished data.
the period from about 11,700-10,500 years ago. By 10,500 all
four of the primary livestock species were taken under human
management in different parts of their natural habitats: goats
in the eastern Taurus and Zagros mountains, sheep in a region
that stretched from Anatolia into the northwestern Zagros,
pigs at the apex of the Fertile Crescent in the Upper Euphrates
and Tigris, and cattle somewhere in the Middle to the Upper
Euphrates Valley.
AGRICULTURAL ORIGINS
Removing morphological change as a marker of domes-
tication of plants and animals makes it difcult to say when
full-edged agricultural economies based primarily on the
production of domesticates arose. But once again emerging
evidence suggests that the coalescence of these economies
was a more gradual and drawn out process than originally
thought. It seems likely that the utilization of wild plant and
animal resources remained high if not predominant during the
PPNA/Early PPNB, making these low-level food-producing
economies,
77
not true agricultural economies. Not until the
Middle PPNB (ca 10,000-9200 cal. BP) did the balance swing
toward domesticates as the leading components of subsistence
economies in the region.
78
The earliest of these full-edged
agricultural economies are likely to have evolved in the central
Fertile Crescent and the full package of domestic plants and,
especially, animals not reaching the farthest extremities of its
eastern and western arms until about 1500-2000 years later.
RECONCILING PRIME-MOVER MODELS
WITH THE ARCHAEOBIOLOGICAL RECORD
There are, then, no threshold moments in Near Eastern
record of plant and animal domestication and subsequent agri-
cultural emergence. Instead, multiple lines of archaeological,
archaeobiological, and genetic evidence point to a longer, less
punctuated progression from broad based foraging economies,
to economies based on a mix of loosely to more intensively
managed resources, to agricultural economies dependant on
fully domesticated plant and animals. Rather than there being
a single center of agricultural origins, we now see that commu-
nities across the entire arc of the Fertile Crescent were engaged
77. After SMITH, 2001.
78. HELMER et al., 1998; NESBITT, 2002.
paleorient-37-1.indb 47 21/12/11 12:53:16
48 M.A. ZEDER
in practices that in the case of certain target species resulted in
their domestication, with different parts of the region follow-
ing varied pathways that took them from foraging to farming.
This emerging picture makes it difcult to argue that any of
the levers featured in either external push or internal pull mod-
els served as primary catalysts in this transition. Each of the
prime mover forces put forward as a deus ex machina of Near
Eastern agricultural origins comes up short when examined in
light of this new understanding of how the process unfolded in
the region.
CLIMATE MODELS
The increase in rainfall and temperature that followed
the Late Glacial Maximum at about 15,000 cal. BP (and the
associated spread of biotic communities previously restricted
to sheltered refugia) certainly set the stage for the emergence
of less mobile more territorial subsistence strategies of Early
Natuan semi-sedentary communities of the Southern Levant.
The lack of plant remains from these sites makes it difcult
to say whether humans and certain plant species began down
the co-evolutionary road to domestication at this point. We do
know, however, that any tentative steps toward domestication
of gazelle in the southern Levant (the primary ungulate spe-
cies in the region) never went very far.
79
Signicantly, when
faced with an abrupt return to Ice Age climatic conditions in
the Younger Dryas, the more or less sedentary Natuan forag-
ers did not respond by domesticating promising plant or ani-
mal species. Instead, people in the southern Levant reverted to
more mobile adaptations that allowed for the sustained exploi-
tation of the same complement of plants and animals. At the
same time, groups to the north and east in the Middle Euphra-
tes valley were able to establish and maintain relatively sed-
entary communities within stable resource catchment zones.
And yet, with the possible eeting appearance of domestic rye
at Abu Hureyra,
80
there is no compelling evidence for plant
or animal domestication among Late Natuan communities of
the Northern Levant.
The amelioration of climate that followed the Younger
Dryas may have proven advantageous for annual cereals and
legumes, making a return and even a proliferation of seden-
tary communities across the entire Fertile Crescent, western,
central, and eastern, possible. However, even if one accepts
the evidence for the cultivation of morphologically wild plants
79. COPE, 1991; DAVIS, 1983; HENRY, 1989; MUNRO, 2004.
80. HILLMAN, 2000.
during the PPNA and the equivocal indications for the rst
steps toward animal domestication, farming and herding did
not really take hold in the region until more than a thousand
years later when clearly domestic crops and livestock dominate
in Middle to Late PPNB subsistence economiesperiods which
saw relatively stable climatic conditions. So while climate
change certainly set the stage for agricultural emergence in the
Near East, it did not cause these developments in the stimulus-
response manner required in climate-forcing models. Instead,
climate change seems to have alternatively helped push and
pull societies down the pathway to agriculture, with people in
different parts of this broad territory responding to these chal-
lenges and opportunities in a variety of ways in a rich mosaic
of alternative adaptive solutions.
POPULATION MODELS
Models that argue for population-induced resource pressure
as the primary engine of Neolithic emergence also cannot be
reconciled with the higher resolution picture emerging of plant
and animal domestication and agricultural origins in the Near
East. These models almost invariably rely on evidence of sed-
entism, increased dependence on storage, and resource intensi-
cation as proxy measures of population growth and resultant
resource pressure.
81
There is, however, a certain degree of cir-
cularity in using evidence of sedentism, storage, and resource
intensication to demonstrate the existence of population pres-
sure which, in turn, is claimed to cause sedentism, storage, and
resource intensication. And while it is possible that demo-
graphic factors play a role in the adoption of more sedentary
lifestyles, increased reliance on storage, and intensication of
subsistence practices, all of these things might also develop in
the absence of population pressure.
Using more appropriate, though admittedly limited, popu-
lation proxies (i.e. the number, size, and distribution of sites
and the duration and density of their occupation) does not bol-
ster the case for prime-mover demographic models.
82
In the
southern Levant, where these data are the most robust, efforts
at tracking population growth from the Geometric Kebaran
to the Terminal PPNB show a steady, gradual increase in
population in the region, with an exponential jump in popula-
tion only seen in the Late and Terminal PPNB. There is no sign
of a crisis point at which population levels exceeded regional
81. BINFORD, 2001; ROSENBERG, 1998; MUNRO, 2004; STINER, 2001.
82. HENRY, 1989 and 2002; KUIJT, 2000a; KUIJT and GORING-MORRIS,
2002.
paleorient-37-1.indb 48 21/12/11 12:53:16
carrying capacity resulting in a radical restructuring of mobil-
ity, residential, and subsistence patterns. Moreover, even if an
increase in the number of sites and the intensity of their occu-
pation in the southern Levant during the PPNA
83
is accepted
as evidence of population-packing, this region no longer seems
to be the center of initial plant cultivation as had been thought
a decade ago. Instead, it is now clear that people in the north-
ern Levant and the Taurus/Zagros were also actively involved
in initial plant cultivation and animal husbandryregions
where no case can be made for any degree of population pack-
ing and resultant region-wide resource depression. In fact, the
small round-house communities of the Taurus/Zagros arc that
served as the context for the domestication of three primary
livestock species (sheep, goats, pigs), as well as for the pos-
sible domestication of a number of crop plants (i.e. pulses and
barley), existed in a relatively unpopulated landscape with only
one small sedentary community per drainage system.
84
There
just doesnt seem to have been enough people to pack in the
region. Rosenbergs argument that perceived resource pressure
stemming from heightened delineations of territorial boundar-
ies resulted in sedentism and resource intensication is simi-
larly hard to support.
85
Discounting sedentism and resource
intensication as unreliable proxy measures of demographi-
cally driven resource pressure, there is also little evidence for
Rosenbergs other pressure proxya projected increase in
homicidal, organized violence between, and perhaps within,
increasingly territorial circumscribed communities during the
PPNA.
86

The remarkable discovery of the waterlogged remains the
Ohalo II base camp on the shores of the Sea of Galilee dating to
23,000 cal. BP further undercuts the case for population pres-
sure as a primary driver of sedentism. Here we see repeated
long-term (perhaps even sedentary) occupations of this site
at the height of the Last Glacial Maximum,
87
when popula-
tion levels in the southern Levant had yet to begin their long
slow climb. Rather than being compelled to settle down when
options for mobility were eliminated by population packing
and resource pressure, settlements like Ohalo II suggest that
people were more likely drawn to sedentism whenever condi-
tions permitted.
The highly diverse array of resources utilized by Early
Holocene communities across the Fertile Crescent (the Broad
Spectrum Revolution) has traditionally been taken as a sig-
83. BAR-YOSEF and BELFER-COHEN, 1991.
84. PEASNALL, 2000: 495.
85. ROSENBERG, 1998.
86. Ibid.: 663, 675; BELFER-COHEN, 1998; GILBERT, 1998; ROSEN, 1998.
87. NADEL, 2004.
nal of population mitigated resource pressures that played a
pivotal role in later plant and animal domestication and agri-
cultural origins.
88
More recently this interpretation has found
epistemological validation in the precepts of Human Behav-
ioral Ecology.
89
Following tenets of optimal foraging diet
breadth models that reside in HBE rubric, the incorporation
of lower-ranked resources smaller yields and higher process-
ing costs (resources like cereals, pulses, small mammals, and
invertebrates) can only happen when the costs of searching for
declining high-ranked prey begin to outweigh the net returns
of these energy-rich resources.
90

Once again, however, the discoveries at Ohalo II call into
question the axiomatic association of demographically driven
resource pressure and diet diversication. Well before there is
any evidence of population induced resource pressure, Ohalo
II residents relied on a diet that comprised a wide variety of
plant resources (including cereals), smaller game, as well as
larger ungulate species
91
a diversied subsistence base that
would seem to contradict diet breadth dictums about resource
diversication in the face of resource pressure. In fact, it seems
increasing likely that the inclusion of a wide array of lower-
ranked resources, including wild grasses, in Near Eastern
subsistence strategies stretches back to the Middle Paleolithic
when population densities, and by extension resource pressure,
were unarguably low.
92

The early appearance of this diverse dietary adaptation sug-
gests that factors other than resource pressure may have incited
the Broad Spectrum Revolution that swept through the Fertile
Crescent in both its eastern and western arms more than 10,000
years later. The subsistence base of residents of the Late Epi-
paleolithic settlement of Hallan emi, for example, consisted
of a diversity of both large and small game animals, along
with a heavy reliance on a variety of plant resourcesa classic
example of the Broad Spectrum Revolution in action. And yet
recent analysis of animal remains from the site failed to nd
any evidence for of resource pressure.
93
Neither the range of
taxa exploited nor the intensity of carcass processing is consis-
tent with predictions generated by diet-breadth models.
HBE principles further mandate that the adoption of agri-
culture requires a shift from the immediate reward schedules
of hunting and collecting wild resources to a delayed rewards
88. FLANNERY 1969, 1972 and 1973.
89. KENNETT and WINTERHALDER, 2006.
90. HAWKES and OCONNELL, 1992.
91. PIPERNO et al., 2004; RABINOVICH and NADEL, 2005; SIMMONS and
NADEL, 1998; WEISS et al., 2004.
92. ALBERT et al., 2003; LEV et al., 2005; HENRY et al., 2011.
93. STARKOVICH and STINER, 2009; Zeder, unpublished data.
paleorient-37-1.indb 49 21/12/11 12:53:16
50 M.A. ZEDER
economy based on managed domesticates
94
a radical restruc-
turing of priorities that, according to the HBE world view, can
only come about in the context of declining returns from for-
aging strategies. However, this dictate is at odds with growing
evidence from the Near East that long before domesticates ever
arrived on the scene, people in this region were making long-
term investments in landscapes and associated plant communi-
ties and engaging in hunting strategies that were designed to
boost the supply of economically important wild resources.
95

This kind of sustained investment in improving the productiv-
ity of natural habitats and biotic communities with the goal of
reaping deferred returns is, then, not unique to agriculture as
HBE precepts would have it, but is, instead, a basic component
of human subsistence strategies that operates entirely indepen-
dently of population levels and resource pressures.
96

SOCIAL PROMOTION MODELS
The higher resolution understanding of Neolithic emer-
gence in the Near East also makes it hard to argue for models
that attribute agricultural origins to the efforts of aggrandiz-
ing individuals seeking to control surplus production and
distribution to advance their own social agendas. There is no
way that the earliest Near Eastern domestic crop plantsce-
reals, pulses, and even gscan be characterized, following
Haydens model, as exotic, limited-access, labor-intensive deli-
cacies commandeered by accumulators for use in competitive
feasting.
97
Moreover, Haydens blanket assertion that meat was
only consumed in the context of ritual feasting simply cannot
be reconciled with the hundreds of thousands of bones found
in patently quotidian midden deposits in the Near East.
98

It is true that there is evidence for feasting at a growing
number of Near Eastern contexts both before and after clear-
cut evidence of domestication (i.e. Hilazon Tachtit cave;
99

Hallan emi;
100
Zawi Chemi Shanidar;
101
Kfar HaHoresh
102
).
But, as Hayden himself has pointed out on a number of occa-
sions, not all feasts are competitive in nature.
103
Instead many
94. WINTERHALDER and KENNETT, 2009; ALVARD and KUZNAR, 2001.
95. COLLEDGE, 2002; WEISS et al., 2006; WILLCOX et al., 2008; ZEDER,
2009.
96. SMITH, 2007a, 2007b and 2011.
97. HAYDEN, 1992 and 1995.
98. HAYDEN, 2003.
99. MUNRO and GROSMAN, 2010.
100. ROSENBERG and REDDING, 2000.
101. SOLECKI, 1981.
102. GORING-MORRIS and HORWITZ, 2007.
103. HAYDEN, 1996; DIETLER and HAYDEN, 2000.
feasts are aimed at creating and strengthening social bonds
within egalitarian groupsvehicles for promoting the obliga-
tory sharing of food that has been a central adaptive behavior
of hunter-gatherers since the early origins of our species.
104

This, I would argue, is a much more likely context for early
feasting activities among Near Eastern societies on the thresh-
old of agriculture.
Haydens more recent assertion that unequal access to sur-
plus food resources reaches back to the Early Natuan simi-
larly nds no traction in the empirical record. Early Natuan
sites show no evidence of large-scale storage, the accumula-
tion of surplus, or differentials in access food or other resourc-
es.
105
In fact, all of the various signs of social aggrandizement
Hayden reads into the Near Eastern record (i.e., exotic trade
goods, plastered skulls, etc.) have been convincingly argued
to be material manifestations of social mechanisms geared at
maintaining, rather than destabilizing, an egalitarian status
quo in the face of mounting social tensions that arise when
larger groups of people stay together for longer periods of
time.
106
Indeed, a strong case can be made that the communal
and ritual activities seen in nascent food-producing societies
in the Near East were not directed at creating or deepening
social inequalities, but were instead aimed at counteracting
tendencies toward social advancement and unequal access
that the more territorially-conscripted, managed resource
strategies needed to support these groups might otherwise
promote.
Ian Kuijt has made a case that the social developments
at the core of Neolithic emergence in the Near East happen
largely independently of changes in subsistence economy,
making domestication more of a parenthetical aside in the evo-
lution of social complexity in the Near East rather than a core
feature.
107
However, even these more nuanced arguments are
hard to support when the appearance of morphological domes-
ticates as the temporal place-marker is removed from the equa-
tion. Once we see domestication and agricultural emergence as
gradual processes that unfold over thousands of years, rather
than threshold moments, all the social developments Kuijt and
others have chronicled can be seen as evolving along-side of
efforts at manipulating productivity of important resources to
provide a more stable and predictable resource base for these
emergent social groups. The development of large-scale com-
munally held storage in the PPNA and its increasing privatiza-
104. ISAACS, 1978.
105. HAYDEN, 2009; KUIJT, 2009.
106. See collected articles in KUIJT, 2000b.
107. KUIJT 2000a, 2001 and 2002.
paleorient-37-1.indb 50 21/12/11 12:53:16
tion in the later PPNB, the changes in household architecture
and, by extension, social relations within and between house-
holds, the increasing focus on communal activities and burial
practices aimed at minimizing the differences between house-
holds and building a collective community ethos, all these
developments can be seen as both a response and a stimulus
for the economic developments that took people of this region
from foragers to farmers.
108

PSYCHO-CULTURAL MODELS
Models that look to the inner workings of the human mind
as causal forces in agricultural origins present obvious chal-
lenges to empirical validation. It is difcult enough to discern
the underlying environmental, economic, or social forces
behind the stones, bones, and scraps of architecture that make
up the archaeological record. Reading the minds of the long
dead people who left this record is essentially impossible. As
a result, many of the models based on psycho-cultural causa-
tion remain in a happy ethosphere of provocative yet ultimately
untestable hypotheses.
109

One of the remarkable features of Cauvins bold Revolu-
tion of Symbols model for Near Eastern Neolithic emergence
is the extent to which he anchored his model in his encyclope-
dic knowledge of the archaeological record of Near Eastern
pre-history. In the initial 1994 French language publication of
Naissance des divinits, Naissance de lagriculture, Cauvin
artfully wove together the current understanding of the record
of plant and animal domestication along with a ne-grained
knowledge of the material culture of Near Eastern pre-agricul-
tural communities (much of which he was responsible for pro-
ducing in his pioneering excavations) with theories about the
expression of the structural reordering of symbolism he held
to be catalytic in agricultural origins.
110
This fusion of empiri-
cism and epistemology resulted in a very detailed account of
how, step-by-step, the collective reordering of humans percep-
tion of their place in the cosmos found expression in a revolu-
tionary new symbolic repertoire that generated a deication of
icons of fertility and virility, a reordering of social networks,
the domination of plants and animals through domestication
and their enslavement within an agricultural economy, and the
sweeping evangelizing movement that carried this new world
108. BYRD, 1994, 2000 and 2005; FLANNERY, 1972, 1993 and 2002; KUIJT,
2000a and b, 2001, 2002 and 2009; KUIJT and FINLAYSON, 2010.
109. I.e., HODDER, 1990 and 2003; WATKINS, 1990, 2004, 2006 and 2010.
110. CAUVIN, 1994.
order out of its northern Levantine heartland to the rest of the
Fertile Crescent and beyond. In the English language transla-
tion of his master work published in 2000, Cauvin sought to
bring this Neolithic Revolution road-map up to date with more
recent archaeological discoveries made since the original pub-
lication of this work.
111

As we have seen, however, in the decade since the publi-
cation of this important book, and his death, there has been
a radical readjustment of the picture of agricultural origins
in the Near Easta picture which is now very much at odds
with Cauvins original story line. The regional nature of the
subject matter and styles of symbolic art across the Fertile
Crescent, plus the clearly local reinterpretation of symbols and
ritual practices that may have been introduced from elsewhere,
undercuts his vision of dual deities overtaking the ideological,
social, and economic life of peoples across the region.
112
His
focus on the Middle Euphrates as the revolutionary heartland
of the birth of both divinities and agriculture is no longer ten-
able given the increasing evidence against there having been
a single center for plant and animal domestication. Nor is the
notion that plant domestication preceded the domestication of
animals by 1000 years or more consistent with either genetic
or archaeobiological evidence from the Near East. The early
evidence for the colonization of Cyprus also does not t with
the timeline of his expansionist model.
113

This is not to say that the developments of the last decade
have seen an eclipse of theories, like Cauvins, that put symbols,
religion, and ritual practice at the core of Near Eastern Neo-
lithic Emergence. Quite the contrary, the extraordinary discov-
eries at Gbekli Tepe in southeastern Anatolia have breathed
new life to the hypothesis that agriculture is not rooted in envi-
ronmental change, or economic necessity, or even in invidi-
ous motives of social promotion, but in religion.
114
Cauvins
inuence is very much in evidence in interpretations of this
remarkable hilltop shrine with its monolithic pillars and their
evocative animal carvings, echoed in symbolic art found across
the northern Levant and into the Taurus/Zagros arc.
115
The mid
to late PPNA origins of this shrine site before the appearance
of morphologically altered plant and animal domesticates at
nearby Neval ori
116
has given rise to a model that holds that
domestication, rst of plants and later of animals, came about
111. CAUVIN, 2000a.
112. ROLLEFSON, 2001; WRIGHT, 2001.
113. VIGNE et al., 2003; VIGNE, 2011; WATKINS, 2001.
114. SCHMIDT, 2000 and 2005.
115. PETERS and SCHMIDT, 2004.
116. PETERS et al., 2005.
paleorient-37-1.indb 51 21/12/11 12:53:16
52 M.A. ZEDER
as a means of feeding the acolytes drawn to this Near Eastern
Stonehenge to both build and worship at this ritual center.
117

So while the details have changed, the basic story line is
the same as Cauvins original model which holds that changes
in symbolic systems and religion preceded domestication
and agricultural emergence thereby playing a causal role in
both. Once again, however, the realization that morphological
change in both plants and animals comes late in the domesti-
cation process invalidates this temporal precedent argument.
As we have seen, it is likely that by the time this center was
built in the mid to late PPNA, plant cultivation was probably
well advanced and at least the initial steps toward animal hus-
bandry had been taken. The more protracted process of plant
and animal domestication in the region, then, forces us to adopt
a more nuanced view of the relationship between religion and
agriculture in the Near East.
TOWARD A SYNTHETIC MODEL
OF AGRICULTURAL EMERGENCE
IN THE NEAR EAST
Prime mover models of culture change fare better when the
empirical record is patchy and poorly resolved making it eas-
ier to construct narratives centered around single protagonist
change agents that, hero-like, sweep away the old world order
and usher in a new era of profound transformation. These mod-
els really thrive when they can be applied, with only minor
modications, to multiple world areas (especially those with
poorly resolved records) that have undergone the same general
kinds of culture change. It becomes much harder to support such
simple gloss, single lever explanatory models when the amount
of empirical information increases and a much ner-grained
picture of how events actually played out is available.
118
This is
clearly now the case for Near Eastern agricultural emergence,
where the wealth of new archaeobiological and archaeologi-
cal data generated in the last several years demands a more
nuanced and more synthetic approach to explanation.
119
If there are general forces that can be seen at play in agri-
cultural emergence in the Near East, as well as in other world
areas, I believe they are these. First, is a set of social goals ori-
117. KROMER and SCHMIDT, 1998; NESBITT, 2002; PETERS et al., 1999;
SCHMIDT, 2000 and 2005.
118. ZEDER and SMITH, 2009.
119. See VERHOEVEN, 2004 for an early attempt at a synthetic, holistic
approach to explaining agricultural origins in the Near East; see also
ZEDER, 2009a and 2009b.
ented around binding groups of people together to create stable
nodes for social interaction that allow for both the invention
and transmission of learned behaviourscentral adaptive attri-
butes of our species. The other is a related and similarly loose
set of economic goals oriented toward ensuring a predictable
and secure resource base that, while not necessarily optimal, is
good enough to support as large and as stable aggregations of
people as environmental circumstances, subsistence technol-
ogy, and social constraints will allow. These complimentary
macro-level forces, however, are not unique to agricultural ori-
gins but are at play throughout human history. They do not,
in and of themselves, have much if any explanatory value in
understanding how agriculture, or any other major cultural
transition, happened in any particular world area.
Instead, there are a number of more parochial, more micro-
scale forces responsible for shaping the trajectory of agricul-
tural emergence in the Near East and elsewhere. The variable
biotic responses to climate change of regions at different lati-
tudes with different topographies and weather patterns; the
differential density and diversity of different plant and animal
resources in different parts of the region; the range of raw
materials present; the demographic history of colonization and
population growth in each region; the localized human pres-
sures on landscapes; the degree to which communities engaged
in a broader sphere of interaction and the ways in which they
incorporated borrowed elements into their way of life; the
ways in which people during times of transition negotiated
their interactions with each other and with the cosmosall of
these sometimes highly localized factors helped to shape the
process lending a regional avor to the emergence of agricul-
tural economies in different parts of the Fertile Crescent.
In the Near East, this process reaches back to at least
23,000 years ago when, during the Late Glacial Maximum,
people congregated in resource rich refugia at sites like Ohalo
II, supported by a resource base made up of a diverse array of
plant and animal species.
120
The progressive amelioration of
climate that followed and the associated expansion of biotic
communities out of Ice Age refugia, made it possible for more
people to congregate for longer periods of time. This process
culminated in the sudden warming event at 14,600 years ago
with the establishment of more or less sedentary communities
of the Early Natuan.
121
Evidence for an elaboration of social
mechanisms and ritual practice accompanied by an intensica-
tion of resource strategies in Early Natuan sites speak to the
growing need for social mediation in sedentary communities,
120. NADEL, 2004.
121. BYRD, 2005.
paleorient-37-1.indb 52 21/12/11 12:53:17
as well as their interest in mitigating their the impact on local
environments, that can both be traced to a commitment to the
bounds of community forged in these settlements.
The strong social bonds of Early Natuan settlements can
be seen at play during the Younger Dryas climatic downturn
in the southern Levant when Late Natuan people, exploit-
ing much the same range of resources in a more mobile way,
engaged in elaborate secondary burial practices targeted at
reinforcing social cohesionoften returning to Early Natuan
base camps to bury their dead.
122
In the northern Levant, which
may not have been as profoundly affected by these climatic
conditions,
123
sedentary communities were able to weather the
impact of climate change and localized resource depression
through the intensication of resource strategies, which may
have involved cultivation of plants.
The amelioration and stabilization of climate in the Early
Holocene provided conditions that once again allowed people
to settle in resource rich areas where they were able to cobble
together highly diversied subsistence economies drawing
resources from multiple nearby environmental zones to sup-
port increasingly sedentary communities. While population
densities need not have been high for people to adopt more
sedentary adaptations, there still had to be enough people on
the landscape to allow for the development of inter-community
social networks to serve as economic buffers, as well as in the
acquisition of marriage partners and other social networking.
Localized impacts on the environments in which these
communities settled could be dealt with either by moving
especially early on in areas like the Taurus/Zagros arc where
population densities were very lowor through the intensi-
cation of hunting and collecting activities. This process of
intensication involved efforts at manipulating local environ-
ments and their biotic communities in ways that enhanced
the off-take of economically important resources.
124
In cer-
tain malleable species, cereals and pulses in particular, these
experiments in eco-system engineering were met with a series
of genetically driven adaptive physiological and morphologi-
cal responses which enhanced the species value as a resource
target. This process may have been helped along by changes
in atmospheric CO
2
and seasonality of weather patterns, not
present in the Early Natuan, that made the returns of human
investment in certain plants species even more predictable and
protable. Parallel efforts at modifying hunting strategies to
enhance the off-take of important game species, once again
122. BELFER-COHEN, 1995; MUNRO, 2004; MUNRO and GROSMAN, 2010.
123. WILLCOX, 2005.
124. SMITH, 2007a, 2007b and 2011.
with behaviorally receptive species, set humans and animals
on the path to the domestication of animals.
125
The subsistence base that made it possible for foraging
groups to adopt more sedentary lifestyles was comprised of
resources produced in ways that were more amenable to own-
ership, surplus, and restricted accessdestabilizing forces
that threatened the egalitarian ethos that drew these commu-
nities together in the rst place. This tension, along with the
heightened need to negotiate social relations when mobility
was less and less an option, resulted in the amplication of lev-
elling mechanisms and the elaboration of ritual and ideological
symbolism that helped people rationalize the new social and
economic order they were creating. This, then, is the process
that drove the intensication of communal and ritual behaviors
that can be traced throughout the Near Eastern record. The
construction of the ritual center at Gbekli Tepe (along with
other evidence of heightened ritual activity and manipulation
of powerful symbols) can, in this light, be seen as a spectacular
material manifestation of the importance of ideology, symbols,
and religious practice in the trajectory of Near Eastern societ-
ies on the brink of agricultural emergence. And while clearly
a signicant factor in ushering people over the threshold from
foraging to farming, religion, ritual, and symbolism must be
viewed in the context of a range both macro- and increasingly
micro-level forces that, working together, shaped Neolithic
emergence in this core area.
CONCLUSIONS
The legacy of Cauvins revolutionary work on the impor-
tance of symbols and ideological transformation in Near East-
ern Neolithic emergence is quite clear and lasting. It is true that
the detailed scenario of Neolithic origins he laid out and the
primacy of the psycho-cultural shift he championed cannot be
reconciled with the ne-grained archaeological data generated
since his death. Instead of religion serving as the sole engine of
Neolithic emergence, the higher resolution record of Neolithic
emergence in this region makes it clear that religion was one of
a number of important catalytic forces, on a par with other for-
mer prime-mover mechanisms that, working together, moved
this process along.
This is not an uncommon fate for bold and boldly stated
manifestos directed at overturning accepted dogma and shin-
ing a spotlight on a dramatically new vision. It may be that
125. ZEDER, 2009 and 2011.
paleorient-37-1.indb 53 21/12/11 12:53:17
54 M.A. ZEDER
a long established status quo can only be effectively called
into question when a counter-case is framed in such stark and
uncompromising terms. With time the revolutionary fervor of
the new vision fades, replaced by an approach which nds a
balance between elements of the old and new to create a more
workable and more effective way forward. We have reached
a point, in both our appreciation for the multiplicity of pro-
cesses that drive Neolithic emergence and in the detail of the
empirical evidence of this process, that we can now afford
to back away from earlier polarized positions which call for
the embrace of one or another single lever of culture change.
In fact, Cauvin himself seemed to acknowledge the case for
a more nuanced multi-causal model of Near Eastern agricul-
tural origins that includes the interaction of population, climate,
community, and belief systemseven though he insisted that
a collective mental transformation was the earliest and most
important factor in this process.
126
Our debt to Jacques Cauvin,
then, is that his rabble-rousing declaration that a Revolution of
Symbols lay at the heart of Neolithic emergence in the Near
East has profoundly changed the tenor and the content of the
ongoing debate about Neolithic origins. Thanks to him, religion
and the power of human imagination can no longer be over-
looked in our attempts to understand and explain this process,
but must be recognized as signicant factors in any account of
Neolithic emergence in the Near East and elsewhere.
Melinda A. ZEDER
Smithsonian Institution
Program for Human Ecology and Archaeobiology. Dept. of Anthropology
PO Box 37012, NMNH- MRC 112
Washington DC USA
zederm@si.edu
126. CAUVIN, 2000: 63; HODDER, 2001: 109.
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