http://SaturnianCosmology.Org/ mirrored file For complete access to all the files of this collection see http://SaturnianCosmology.org/search.php ========================================================== < Main Page Chapter 7 Effective Farming The earliest phase of effective farming is now known from sites throughout the Middle East including both the Karim Shahir region and the western area where the Natufian sites are found. But as earlier peoples were processing wild grain and hunting wild animals that were later to be domesticated, it is sometimes difficult for the excavator to be sure whether the inhabitants of a particular site had passed from that stage to one of effective farming because the same plants and animals are characteristic of both stages. There seem, also, to have been were several intermediate stages in which people were experimenting with techniques of producing their own food. So archaeologists have to lay down certain criteria which they can use to determine whether the stage of effective farming has been reached and these are, in the case of grain farming, the survival of the domesticated grain itself or casts of the grain in pottery that are distinct enough to be recognized by the palaeobotanist as a domesticated species. Usually the survival requires the grain to be carbonized. In the case of the casts, the people of course must have been producing pottery or some other artefacts in baked clay. Grain in its wild state has a fruiting head which becomes fragile as it ripens so that the wind is able to dislodge the grains and allow them to fall to the ground as next year's seed. But every year in the annual populations mutations appear that lack the fragility necessary to allow their seeds to fall off the ear and be distributed naturally. These mutations can never reproduce naturally but they are the plants which are best suited for gathering by hand as they do not shatter when picked. If some of the gathered crop is replanted by the gatherer, the proportion of the mutation increases with each annual harvest until the cultivator notices these plants and selects for them. He is helped in this by the mutations being larger than the normal wild fruiting body. When the mutations become the majority in a crop population then it can be described as a domesticated one and be recognized as such by the palaeobotanist. In the case of domesticated animals, there is little change from the wild form in the skeletal evidence which the excavator finds in his/her sites. But it is well-known that stock-breeders when producing animals for meat have an optimum age for slaughter. Keeping an animal beyond that time is not cost-effective for it will not grow any bigger. Therefore, if the excavator finds a bone assemblage of a particular species in which the individual ages of death are more or less the same, he or she can be pretty sure that these are domesticated meat animals for it is unlikely that hunters would choose as prey animals of a particular age only. Jarmo, on the inward slopes of the Zagros Mountains in Iraq (6500-6000BC), was a permanent all-the year-round settlement with about two dozen mud-walled houses that were repaired and rebuilt frequently thus creating twelve distinct levels of occupancy over a period of about 250 years. It has been calculated that the population averaged about 150 for most of the time. Remains of barley and two forms of early domesticated wheat together with goats and dogs and possibly sheep have been excavated there. The bones of wild animals, quantities of snail-shells and acorns and pistachio nuts indicate that people still hunted and collected a substantial amount of food which was prepared with querns and pestles and mortars. The villagers enjoyed a varied, adequate and well-balanced diet which is demonstrated by the good condition of their teeth. Their flint industry derived from the ancestral Karim Shahir tradition and included both full-sized and microlithic tools while for domestic tasks the women used stone vessels for the greater part of their occupancy of the site. It is only in the later levels that pottery appears. Large numbers of little figurines of animals and pregnant women were carved perhaps with tools of obsidian (volcanic glass) probably brought from Lake Van in Turkey, some 320 kilometres away to the north. Mureybet is in the Euphrates valley in Syria where about 200 round houses were built on low-lying land. The wild wheat and barley seeds which are not native to the area must have been brought from the highlands to the east where Jarmo is situated around 8500-8000BC. At Abu Hureya (9500-8500BC) a short distance downstream wild einkorn wheat was grown. Seeds of weeds found in this crop, however, are of the area around the site rather than the area of the highlands. On the western side of the Fertile Crescent is the tell-site of Jericho which was first settled by Natufian people around 9000BC. Tell-sites are ancient settlement sites that have grown into artificial hills through the accumulation of debris from mud-brick houses which were simply demolished and flattened when they were not worth repairing and new houses built on the same spot. Together with accumulated domestic rubbish this detritus can build up into mounds over 30 metres high. The words 'tepe' in Iraq and 'huyuk' in Turkey have the same meaning as 'tell' so these sites can easily be identified on a modern map of the region. The earliest unequivocal evidence for agriculture in Jericho occurs in later levels of the tell but in an earlier (c8000BC) phase the ten-acre settlement was surrounded with a wall over 2 metres high with at least one circular, drystone tower, almost 10 metres tall containing an internal staircase. Some 2000 people are estimated to have lived in the settlement at the time. It is tempting to believe that the wall-builders were already successful farmers, but there is no conclusive evidence for it. By the time the archaeological levels show undisputed evidence of agriculture around 7000Bc, the Natufian style of flintworking had been replaced by another and the one-roomed huts by large rectangular houses of several rooms often set around a courtyard and built of mud-bricks with plaster floors. Dogs, goats and cereal grains were domesticated but no pottery was made. Stone bowls were used instead. One building was interpreted by the excavator as a shrine and was associated with a number of what were probably ancestral skulls with the features modelled in clay and the eyes made from cowrie-shells. These sea-shells from the Mediterranean were popular in prehistoric times perhaps as a sexual icon because the slit in the shell was thought to resemble the female vulva. This pre-pottery neolithic phase was succeeded by a later phase in which pottery was made in a walled settlement with radiocarbon dates around 6750BC. Cayonii Tepesi, in S.E Turkey, is another site that in its lowest levels was aceramic. Evidence of a primitive form of wheat and remains of domesticated dogs, pigs, sheep and probably goats demonstrate that agriculture had been developed. The inhabitants worked in stone, producing decorated bowls, ornaments and tools chipped from flint and obsidian. Clay figurines were found in these lower levels. One of the special characteristics of the site was the architecture that included stone-paved areas, thick walls still standing a metre high and bases for large stone slabs that could have been used as roof supports. Another feature was the discovery of artefacts of copper, made from copper ore (native copper) that had been simply hammered into shape. This cannot be described as metallurgy for the copper had not been smelted but it shows that at this early stage, sometime before 7000BC, people were already cold-working metal. Also in Turkey and the most striking site of the period is Çatel Hüyük, a tell-site containing material that belongs almost entirely to the early Neolithic period from c7200 to 6500BC. It is certain that the lowest levels of the site when excavated will be found to date back well before 7200BC. In the earliest levels so far investigated plant evidence shows that barley, wheat, peas, lentils, bitter vetch, nuts, fruits and berries were being eaten. Sheep. goats and dogs were domesticated with cattle appearing at a later stage. Hunting was still being practised as the bones of wild cattle, deer, wild asses, wild sheep, boars and leopards prove. This ample diet was the reason for the good health of the inhabitants which has been demonstrated by a study of the skeletons. Burials inside the houses were mainly of women and children. Bone disease was rare and their teeth were good: the average height of males was between 1.65m and 1.75m; with the females 1.50m to 1.70m. Isolated graves were scarce, some buildings contained several generations of a family with thirty or more burials. It appears that the bodies were exposed and then buried in a flexed position on mats of cloth, skin or fur. Male dress consisted of a loin-cloth or leopard-skin fastened by a belt with a bone hook-and-eye; men also appeared to have worn cloaks fastened with antler toggles in the winter. Women wore sleeveless bodices and jerkins of leopard skin with fringed skirts or string skirts - the ends of the strings being encased in copper tubes as weights. They used bone pins for fastening garments. Jewellery at Çatel Hüyük was mainly for the women and children. They wore necklaces, armlets, bracelets and anklets of beads, pendants in a variety of stone, shell, chalk, clay, mother-of-pearl, copper and lead. Cosmetics were popular to judge by the palettes and grinders used to prepare them: baskets or freshwater mussel shells contained the paint and delicate bone pins were employed in its application. Polished obsidian was made into mirrors for admiring the results. Weapons buried with the men included polished stone mace-heads, obsidian arrowheads, javelin heads and sometimes an obsidian spearhead. Obsidian, a volcanic glass, is very suitable for chipping or flaking into objects. Quarried around Lake Van in Anatolia, in Hungary, on the island of Melos in the Aegean and other places, it is now possible to pin down artifacts made of it to their place of origin by spectrographic analysis. During prehistoric times it was widely traded in Europe and the eastern Mediterranean area. Obsidian of the sort found at Çatel Huyuk has been identified at Jericho, Beidha in Palestine and in sites in Cyprus. A suggestion has been put forward that Catel Hüyük owed its prosperity to the control of a trade in the obsidian that was mined in its vicinity. Food remains accompanied the dead. Berries, peas, lentils, eggs have been found in baskets. Pottery forms were strongly influenced by the basketry and the woodworking traditions. Pottery was first made around 7000BC but was abandoned for a period until good-quality ware started to appear a few hundred years later. This pottery was not painted but produced in various coloured clays. All was handmade, highly burnished and well-fired. Another handicraft at which the people of Çatel Hüyük excelled was the manufacture of textiles. The wool was made into clothes, woven in three different weaves. Buildings in Çatel Hüyük were composed of shaped mud-bricks of standard sizes dried in the sun. The houses were rectangular, usually with a small storeroom attached, one-storied and perhaps with a wooden veranda. They show a remarkable consistency of interior plan. Along the eastern walls there were two raised platforms with a higher bench at the southern ends. This arrangement constituted a 'divan' for sitting, working and sleeping. The smaller corner platform evidently belonged to the head of the household and the larger central platform to the women and children. Invariably the hearth was at the southern end of the room, sometimes accompanied by an oven and less often by a kiln. At this end of the house was a hole in the roof which served both as a smokehole and an entrance reached by a moveable ladder. Communication between dwellings was over the roof-tops - there was little evidence for lanes and the spaces that existed between the houses appear to have been used only for dumping rubbish and excreta. The system of roof entrances meant that the exterior of the settlement presented a blank brick wall to the world as a check to enemies and perhaps as a barrier to floods. Some of the structures were shrines containing plaster representations of bulls' and rams' heads, women's breasts and wall-paintings in black, red, orange, mauve, grey, pink, lemon, yellow, purple and blue on white or cream backgrounds. Figurines of gods, goddesses, humans and animals found in these shrines were either made of clay or stone. The later discovery of a 10,000 year-old village some 25 kilometres to the east, which appears to have housed settled hunter-gatherers, may help to shed some light on the antecedents of the people of Çatel Hüyük. This site, at Pinarbasi, also had dwellings built of mud-brick, and contained tools made of obsidian and ornaments of seashells from the Mediterranean, 200 km to the south beyond the Taurus Mountains. Alluvial fans where middle-eastern streams brought down mineral-rich soil to lake-shores or river valleys were the locations where many of these new farming communities settled. Their domesticated grain was safe from contamination by the wild grain on the hill-slopes above and there was an adequate supply of water. In course of time elaborate irrigation schemes in the Tigris and Euphrates valleys and in the valley of the Nile brought enormous wealth to some communities and resulted in the first civilisations of Mesopotamia and Egypt. Wild cereals also grew on the island of Cyprus and apparently were being exploited by the Mesolithic inhabitants and might suggest that here was another cradle of early farming. Knowledge of agriculture spread from Anatolia across the Aegean Sea to Greece and thence across Europe via the Danube, central Europe, Germany, Italy, Spain and France to Britain by diffusion. Diffusion nowadays is sometimes a dirty word in archaeology because of its association with the Old Archaeology of the period before the 1960s when almost anything of any note in the development of Europe and Britain was thought to have spread thence from the eastern Mediterranean. However, despite the demonstration, inspired by Professor Colin Renfrew over the last forty years, of the indigenous development in Europe of such things as megalithic tombs and copper metallurgy, it is still true that the major shaper of the traditional European life-style of the last five thousand years was the type of farming that originated in the Middle East so one can still apply the term to the spread of the knowledge of farming and also of the alphabet from western Asia into Europe. With the advent of agriculture, momentous changes were put in train. At the time it has been estimated that the world population was between 5 and 15 million but this rapidly began to increase. With the exploitation of vegetable crops, humankind roamed the world looking for areas suitable for their propagation, cleared the land and destroyed areas of natural flora and fauna. More people crowded together and brought disease which resulted in changes in molecular structures of specific human groups. The Approach to Farming [LINK] main page [LINK] The First Farmers in Europe [LINK]