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Emergence of Civilizations / Anthro 341: Class 5
_
Examples of the first towns on earth: Jericho and Çatal Hüyük
_
ã Copyright Bruce Owen 2003
* You will notice that the dates I give you today differ from those
in the text and reader

* Recall that radiocarbon dates do not correspond exactly to
calendar years unless they are adjusted according to tree-ring
measurements
* It has become customary to use raw, uncalibrated radiocarbon dates
for the early Neolithic
* Mostly because some early, important excavations were published
before people understood the need to calibrate dates
* for the Neolithic, calibrated dates are up to 1000 years older
than raw dates

* (the older the site, the greater the correction required)

in order to make all the dates in this class fit on the same scale,
I have calibrated the dates

I try to give you only calibrated dates in this class
* try to use the dates presented here, rather than the ones in Wenke
* but don't worry; I won't ask test questions that hold you
responsible for knowing which dates to trust.

As we saw last time, farming makes it possible for people to live in
settlements that range from just a few families to sizable towns: an
important step towards civilization
* From roughly 8500 BC to 3500 BC, and even later in many places,
most people in Southwest Asia lived in modest farming villages
like the one at Tell Abu Hureyra or 'Ain Ghazal

* Most villages ranged from several extended families to a few
hundred people
* A tremendously stable, successful lifestyle of small-scale,
traditional farmers
* Lasted at least 5000 years with only relatively minor changes in
most places
* That is, agriculture did _not_ lead directly to cities or
civilization
* instead, it led to a village farming lifestyle that worked fine
for thousands of years, and in some places still does

We have evidence of several larger towns of many hundreds or even
several thousand people
* It is almost certain that we don't know of all of them

* some probably remain to be found
* others probably existed but have been buried, eroded away, or
destroyed by later people living in the same place

That is, large towns probably developed in a number of places, at
various times during those 5000 years of relatively stable Neolithic
farming life

Today we will look at two very early large towns that happen to have
survived and been excavated, as examples of the first towns on earth:
Jericho and Çatal Hüyük.

Jericho
* First, let's go to the "Fertile Crescent", about 11,000 - 8500 BC:

* throughout the "fertile crescent", there were many small,
semi-permanent or seasonal settlements of specialized foragers.
* As we saw last time, some of these people are now referred to as
"Natufians"
* they lived in areas with unusually rich plant food resources

* especially wild emmer wheat, barley, and various nuts such as
almond, pistachio, acorn
* the Natufians were foragers who specialized on these particular
highly productive plants, rather than having a wider range of
foods like the !Kung and many other foragers

these resources were so rich in some places that the Natufians could
settle in semi-permanent or permanent small hamlets without giving up
their foraging lifestyle
* these hamlets were made up of circular houses with stone
foundations
* they stored the cereals and nuts in pits
* these storage pits were associated with individual houses

* rather than serving multiple houses or the whole settlement
* and each house also had its own grinding stones and other tools
* suggesting that each family harvested, stored, and processed its
own grain and looked after its own needs
* rather than working together in larger groups where more people
would depend on each other
* so economically, the Natufians were not organized much differently
than are most foragers

One of these Natufian settlements is now called Jericho.
* Jericho is located on the western edge of the Jordan valley in the
Levant (Palestine)
* the area now called the "West Bank" (of the Jordan river), which
you hear mentioned often in the news.
* The archaeological site and modern town of Jericho is located next
to a spring that waters a moderate-sized oasis
* Excavated in the 1950s by Kathleen Kenyon

The first people to live by this spring were a typical band of
Natufians
* Jericho was a large but not unusual Natufian settlement

* probably 150 to 250 people

they left a lot of grinding stones ("querns")
* grinding stones indicate heavy use of grains

stone blades set in bone handles have "sickle gloss" from silica
particles in grass stalks
* indicates cutting lots of grass stalks, presumably for harvesting
grain, or thatch roofing, or both

animal bones indicate gazelle hunting seasonally
* taking advantage of herds that would migrate past them every year

burials show considerable variability in richness
* some have no grave goods, others have stone bowls and dentalium
shells
* suggesting some social ranking
* some of the rich burials are of children

* suggesting that social rank may have been acquired by birth,
rather than achieved
* that is, that certain family lineages were richer or more
prestigious than others

this development of economic differences is to be expected when
people settle and can begin accumulating wealth

one structure was unlike the other houses
* it was smaller, lacked storage bins and firepits, and had a
plastered floor
* it was probably for some special function that served multiple
households, maybe rituals?

this was already a pretty complex society to be based on foraging
* thanks to the especially favorable environment

Around 8500 BC, the Natufians at Jericho, like others in the region,
began to cultivate their own food
* this begins the period called the Pre-Pottery Neolithic "A", or
PPNA

* "Neolithic" means that they were early farmers
* "Pre-pottery" means that they did not make ceramics yet
* "A" labels this early part of the pre-pottery Neolithic, versus a
later part, called "B"
* By the way, you may read other descriptions of Jericho that differ
in various ways from what I present here

* such as giving a much larger size of the site
* this is largely because some authors do not clearly distinguish
between PPNA remains and the later, bigger occupations of the same
site

As we saw last time,
* there is some debatable evidence that the climate went into a long
dry spell around 9000 BC
* the Natufians were already focussed on grains, and were already
using the technology needed to harvest, store, and process these
cereals in great quantities
* So they maintained their existing lifestyle by

* encouraging more wild grain to grow in areas close to their
settlements
* harvesting more and storing it for the longer lean season

in the process, they domesticated wheat, barley, and lentils
* and became partially dependent on them
* although they also continued to depend on a lot of wild plant
foods

this process of domesticating the grains and becoming dependent on
them for a significant part of the diet apparently took a few
centuries
* very rapid compared to the duration of foraging
* but probably imperceptible to the people who were doing it

There was also a similarly "rapid" shift from gazelle hunting to
heavy (but not total) reliance on sheep and goats for meat, presumably
kept in controlled herds

PPNA at Jericho: 8500 - 7300 BC
* The early farming village at Jericho was one of many similar ones
in the PPNA, but it grew rapidly and became unusually large

* Estimates range from 400 to 2000 inhabitants in the PPNA - more on
this later

it was a dense cluster of houses with no streets or organized plan

the houses were circular or oval, 4-5 m (13-16 feet) across
* slightly inward-leaning walls built of mud bricks on stone
foundations

* to protect the mud bricks from moisture in the ground

sunken floors plastered with mud

wooden doorjambs and a few steps with wooden treads leading down to
the floor

probably domed roof of interlaced branches plastered with mud
(wattle and daub), probably supported by some wooden beams

Some divided into up to 3 rooms

Grain storage bins associated with individual houses
* each household still seems to have supplied most or all of its own
needs
* one family was pretty much like the next
* that is, no families that specialized in making certain goods,
trading, etc., unless it was very small scale and very part time.
* so there was not much interdependence between families

After around 500 years of settled farming life, the people at
Jericho did something that was absolutely unprecedented: they built a
wall around part or all of the town (roughly 8000 BC)
* as far as we know, no people on earth had ever built anything like
this before
* the first wall was at least 4 m (13 feet) high, 1.8 m (6 feet)
thick at the base, built of stacked stones

* it was actually higher than this, since the top had been eroded
away, but we don't know how much is missing

just inside the wall, they built a circular stone tower, 9 m (30
feet) diameter, 8.2 m (27 feet) high (plus an unknown amount not
preserved)
* a doorway at the base leads to an internal corridor and a stairway
of 20 steps that led towards the top of the tower (the top is no
longer there)
* the step stones and roof stones of the passage are up to a meter
long (about 3 feet) and almost as wide, hammered to shape
* the interior was roughly plastered with mud; the outside might
originally have been plastered, too

later, a large ditch or moat was cut into the bedrock outside the
wall, 9 m (30 feet) wide, 3 m (almost 10 feet) deep
* maybe to make the wall next to it effectively higher?
* maybe to channel floodwater?

Purpose of the walls and tower
* probably defense
* tower may have had some ceremonial/religious function?
* possibly flood control

* but then, why so tall? why the tower?
* flooding _was_ a problem, though

* one excavation trench that was not near the wall found a 1.5 m
deep gully from a stream that had flowed through the site
* this channel silted up, later eroded down again, then silted up
and eroded down a third time: at least three flooding events

Implications of the walls
* This construction was absolutely unprecedented

* there could be earlier examples, but nothing similar has ever been
found
* as far as we know, no humans had ever built such a thing before,
ever, anywhere
* why did they do it? what does it mean?

if the wall was for defense, it implies a serious fear of attack by
a large, powerful force
* implies serious warfare and probably war leaders with considerable
powers

regardless of the purpose, it implies the power to mobilize a great
deal of labor
* and implies project managers/directors/designers with power over
others, even if that power was based only on charisma or
persuasiveness
* that is, implies some social status hierarchy

also implies a lot of surplus wealth to support all the labor to
build the walls
* suggesting that some people may have had control of this surplus,
while others did not, i.e. wealth and power differences

but the PPNA burials all contain relatively few, simple goods; no
burials of people with lots of wealth have been found
* so were there higher-status leaders, or not?
* maybe they just haven't been found yet?
* maybe burials in this culture did not reflect a person's wealth or
power?
* or maybe this early leadership did not fit our assumptions about
social status

As the mudbrick houses inside were abandoned, leveled, and rebuilt
with new bricks, the inside surface rose
* so the freestanding wall eventually came to be a retaining wall
around an artificial mound
* at various times in the PPNA, they added on to the wall and tower

This continued for about seven hundred years, until the site was
abandoned around 7300 BC.
* no known reason for abandonment

* no evidence of destruction or other catastrophe
* suspected that the climate dried a bit and made the region
unattractive to live in

So there was a PPNA town at Jericho for some 1200 years, walled for
half that time
* That is a long time, but London has been occupied twice as long
* Jericho was reoccupied a few centuries later by people of a
different culture, called PPNB, and people lived there at many
other times after that, but we won't follow the rest of that
history here

* The plastered head illustrated in Wenke is from the PPNB
occupation of Jericho

"Fall of the walls of Jericho"?
* the biblical story refers to the town of Jericho around 1200 BC,
over 6000 years (!) after the PPNA wall was abandoned
* the story might be based on an earthquake; the region is
tectonically active
* but the known parts of the PPNA wall and tower show no signs of
earthquake damage
* and they were probably completely underground and long forgotten
by biblical times

The total area within the PPNA walls is not known exactly, since
they were only exposed in a few places and one side of the mound had
been destroyed by a road cut
* but the PPNA wall probably enclosed between 0.8 and 1.6 hectares
(2.0 to 4.0 acres)
* ballpark comparison: about half the size of the open area of the
SSU main quad

Population estimates range from 400 to over 2000 people
* don't know the exact size of the site
* don't know if entire area was occupied, or if some spaces were
open for public use, animals, etc., or if some people lived
outside the walls
* don't know if entire area was occupied at the same time
* towns in that region in the 1950s of that size range held about
750 to 1500 people

Some hints of religious ritual and complex ideas about the dead
* greenstone amulets (or charms, or votive offerings, or ??)
* special treatment of heads of some dead

* bodies buried in pits below the floors of houses

* sometimes with the head removed

skulls were collected and left in carefully arranged groups placed
in holes in walls, buried below house floors, or buried below
structures that might be storage bins
* one example has several skulls in a circle, all looking inward
* another has three groups of three, all looking in the same
direction
* below one possible storage bin was the burial of a complete
infant, plus several infant skulls with the neck vertebrae

* the neck vertebrae indicate that the heads were removed while
there was still soft tissue on the body, rather than being taken
from old burials where the bones would no longer be attached to
each other.

What led to the precocious development of the PPNA?
* Jericho was probably not the only town of its kind at this time
* Jericho's early development was not due to special farming
potential; although it is a good spot, it is nothing extraordinary
* Maybe trade?

* since some minerals and shells from distant sources are found
there, possibly imported for use in Jericho, or for trade to other
places

* obsidian and various green stones from Anatolia
* turquoise from Sinai
* cowry shells from Red Sea
* but not in great quantities, nor as manufactured goods

and since Jericho is near Dead Sea sources of special resources that
could have been traded for products from distant places
* salt
* bitumen (a tar-like material useful for sticking things together
like small stone blades in their handles, and for waterproofing
things like basketry)
* sulfur (a bright yellow mineral useful as a pigment and possibly
for medicinal or ritual purposes)

but others argue that these materials are available in many places,
so Jericho was not particularly favored in this regard, either

Is this civilization?
* When we define civilization more explicitly, we will come back to
this question

Çatal Hüyük
* located in Anatolia, where a river breaks up into branches in an
inland delta, forming a marsh

* notice that Çatal Hüyük is far, far away from Jericho

First settled some time before 7400 BC (usually given as 6500 bc,
the lower case "bc" indicating an uncalibrated radiocarbon date)
* Notice that this is more or less when PPNA Jericho was being
abandoned; Çatal Hüyük is later than the first walled town of
Jericho
* there was no direct connection, although both shared some of the
same general cultural traits that were widespread throughout
Anatolia and Southwest Asia

First excavated in early 1960s (1961-1963, 1965) by James Mellaart

More is being excavated now (the current excavation project has an
interesting web page; you can get there from a link on the class web
page)

Incredible preservation (not clear why)

much of the neolithic site is not covered by later occupations

Remarkably stable, relatively unchanging culture during 1000 years
of occupation (to about 6400 BC, calibrated)

Rectangular flat-roofed houses stuck together with back-to-back
walls, something like a southwestern pueblo, stepping up the side of
the mound.
* one story tall, some possibly with light structure on roof
* Walls made of mud bricks filling spaces between massive squared
oak posts
* Generous-sized rooms average 6 by 5 m (20 by 15 feet)
* Small windows high in the walls
* No ground-level doorways

* Entrance from roof only, by climbing down a ladder

Possibly arranged for defense (why else have no doors and only high,
small windows?)

Some small side rooms entered only from main room through small
doorways, contained storage bins possibly for grain

Raised bench around 3 sides of room (all but south), apparently for
sleeping and activities (burials underneath, too)

Hearths and raised, plastered "ovens"

Traces of plant fiber mats on floors

Walls plastered in cream color, often with paintings in red, yellow,
brown, blue, green, purple, and gray; mica included may have added
glitter

Some walls have low reliefs modeled on them in mud plaster

Some paintings seem to imitate complex geometric designs similar to
modern Anatolian kilims (Turkish rugs)

Rooms were kept clean, trash dumped outside in abandoned houses and
spaces in between

Formation of site:
* rooms built and used
* replastered and repainted repeatedly
* eventually abandoned and allowed to partially fill with trash, or
rebuilt immediately
* walls knocked down to partially fill room, new walls built using
stubs of old ones as foundations

Religion
* forty rooms (over 1/4 of all rooms excavated) were sufficiently
decorated that Mellaart called them "shrines"

* although others suggest that many were just decorated rooms

repeated repaintings of wall designs; Mellaart suggests maybe
annually

aurochs (wild ox) imagery
* "bucranea" (the horns and top of skull of a cow or similar animal)
on walls, pillars, and in rows on benches

reliefs on walls

stone and clay female "statues", showing young woman; woman giving
birth to child, ram, or bull; older woman; possibly variants of a
single deity

a few male "statues" as well

in many burials, the condition and positions of the bones indicate
that the body was exposed to the elements until little flesh was left,
often without its head, and then the bones were buried in a room or
shrine
* this is probably what the wall paintings of birds and headless
bodies represents

human heads or crania were set up in shrines, in baskets beneath ox
heads, etc.
* one with cowry shells placed in eye sockets, like the roughly
contemporary PPNB ones at Jericho

much has been written about what all this symbolism might mean
* for our purposes, the important point is not the content of the
beliefs, but rather that:

* a lot of effort and space was devoted to some kinds of rites
* these efforts were scattered among many separate, modest rooms not
very different from living spaces
* as opposed to just one or a few temples where many people would
have gathered and a few would have presided
* so this religion would have been practiced by families or many
individual specialists, probably part-time, rather than a single,
powerful institution

Your basic SW Asian neolithic subsistence:
* wheat (emmer, einkorn, and bread varieties), barley, pea
* almonds, acorns, pistachios
* probably herds of sheep and cattle (but possibly hunted)
* hunting of wild oxen, red deer, wild ass, etc.

Trade
* lots of obsidian, often said to have been the source from which
came much of the obsidian used in western Anatolia, Cyprus, and
the Levant

* except that the source is about 180 km (about 110 miles, maybe 5
days on foot) away; "control" cannot have been very tight
* Caches of up to 23 obsidian spear points buried in bags below
floors: storage of wealth?

What they got in exchange:
* flint from Syria
* Shells, esp. dentalia, from Mediterranean
* possibly copper?

Many craft items and lots of waste from craft production found (cut
bone fragments, stone flakes, etc.)
* stone beads, figurines, and vessels
* grinding equipment
* greenstone axes and adzes
* bone rings, hooks, etc.
* native copper and lead beads ("native" metals are rare finds of
natural metal flakes or chunks ready to be hammered, versus ores
from which metal can be extracted by heating under special
conditions)
* ochres and other pigments
* wooden cups, platters, boxes
* seals made of pottery, possibly for applying paint to textiles, or
for body painting (not used on clay, like later seals)
* exceptional flaked stonework that could only have been made by
skilled specialists
* ground obsidian mirrors
* woven wool textiles, maybe as complex as modern Turkish rugs, if
the wall paintings are representations of them
* pottery, but rare and simple; plain cooking pots; minimal painted
lines, no plastic decoration
* i.e. clearly at least part-time craft specialists, probably some
degree of interdependence and exchange for products made by others

* this is much more marked at Çatal Hüyük than at Jericho

Calendar, math, etc: Your reading by Fairservis goes overboard here
* Fairservis refers to a calendrical system suggested by Marshak,
but few still believe this
* You might notice several weaknesses with his argument about
mathematics based on the bricks used for house building - it
really isn't convincing

Social status differentiation
* by sex

* burials of both sexes contained textiles, wooden vessels and boxes
* female burials: jewelry, bone spatulae and spoons, obsidian
mirrors, baskets with red pigment powder

* but also adzes, which are heavy woodworking tools, for tasks like
squaring up beams

male burials: maceheads, flint daggers, obsidian points, bone hooks
and eyes, belt fasteners
* suggesting hunting, maybe fighting; fasteners suggest more warm
clothing, possibly needed for hunting in winter
* but also clay seals... why?

wall painting of bearded figures hunting suggests that hunting was
done by men

by religious role?
* burials outside shrine rooms tend to have only a few personal
ornaments
* burials in shrine rooms often have more goods, including tools,
utensils, etc. -- things beyond what the deceased probably carried
on them in life
* suggests that ritual activities were associated with access to
more goods, that is, higher status

* did ritual activities bring people high status, or did high-status
people do rituals?
* or were high-status people just more likely to be buried in the
ritual places?

the burials with the most goods are of females in "shrine" rooms
* combined with all the female imagery in the shrines, this suggests
that some women may have had the preeminent roles in religious
life
* and a high material status to go with it
* many people see this as evidence of a matriarchal society (one in
which women hold most political power)

* does it necessarily mean that?

Total area of mound is 13 ha (32 acres)
* roughly ten times the size of PPNA Jericho
* over 6 times the open area of SSU's main quad

Population estimates vary widely, from 1,650 to 10,000
* Unknown whether excavated area is representative of whole site
* Unknown what portion of the whole mound was occupied at any given
time
* Unknown how much space might have been open, for gatherings,
ceremonies, market, animals, etc.
* Unknown what fraction of rooms might have been abandoned at any
give time
* Some shrines were probably not living spaces (Mellaart includes
them in his population estimate of 10,000)
* Fairservis reading suggests "something less than 3,000", which I
find reasonable
* The recent project at Çatal Hüyük estimates around 5,000

* based on estimates of density of houses across the site, made by
scraping the surface to find walls
* and a guess of 4 people per house, with full occupation

Adult burials average 34 years old for men, 30 for women, but some
individuals lived past 60

several sites contemporary with Çatal Hüyük are known
* all considerably smaller
* could Çatal Hüyük have been a special-purpose site that served
others, maybe specializing in religious, craft, or other
activities?

Were the people at Çatal Hüyük living in a civilization? or a city?
* Again, we will look at this carefully when we have defined
"civilization"
* but most anthropologists would say "no"
* you might think about why...

The overall pattern:
* Small farming villages were common in Southwest Asia from about
8500 BC on
* around 8000 to 5000 BC, in various places, some of these villages
grew larger
* with more complex social, economic, and religious arrangements
* these were widely scattered in both space and time, and relatively
independent of each other
* these were isolated flashes of complexity, or social experiments
* some lasted a long time, but none developed into "civilization"
* Our examples of Jericho and Çatal Hüyük represent early steps in
the direction of civilization, but they reached stable
configurations and did not get larger or more complex after that
* it wasn't until around 5000 BC that one of these societies
developed a kind of organization that continued to get bigger and
more complex, eventually producing cities and civilization: the
Sumerians in Mesopotamia