UDK 903I12/I15(5-011.5) "633/634": 31417
Documenta PraehistoricaXXXIII (2006)
Neolithisation in southwest Asia -
the path to modernity
Trevor Watkins
University of Edinburgh, UK
T.Watkins@ed.ac.uk
ABSTRACT - Two questions are discussed that turn out to be related. The first was posed originally
by Robert Braidwood more than fifty years ago, and concerns why farming was adopted in south-
west Asia early in the Neolithic, and not earlier. The second concerns the usually opposed processua-
list and post-processualist approaches to the Neolithic. The paper seeks to model the processes at work
through the Epi-palaeolithic and early Neolithic, showing how the trend towards sedentism and
storage offood resources coincided with the emergence offully symbolic cognitive and cultural facul-
ties. The former fed more mouths, and led to the adoption of farming practices that further intensi-
fied food productivity. The latter made possible and desirable the symbolic construction of large,
permanently co-resident communities. The spread of farming may then be understood as the expan-
sion of a complex way of life that involved communities living together in larger groups, with denser,
richer cultural environments, controlling not only the built environment of their own settlements, but
also the productivity of the agricultural environments that surrounded them.
IZVLEČEK - Razpravljamo o dveh vprašanjih, za kateri se je izkazalo, da sta povezani. Prvo je zasta-
vil Robert Braidwood pred več kot petdesetimi leti in se ukvarja s tem, zakaj je bilo poljedelstvo spre-
jeto v jugozahodni Aziji v zgodnjem neolitiku in ne prej. Drugo pa se nanaša na nasprotujoče se pro-
cesualne in post-procesualne pristope v neolitiku. V članku skušam modelirati proces, ki je deloval
v času epi-paleolitika in zgodnjega neolitika. Pokažem, kako je trend v smeri sedentizma in shranje-
vanja hrane sovpadal s pojavom čisto simbolnih, kognitivnih in kulturnih zmožnosti. Prvo je nasi-
tilo več ust in je pripeljalo do sprejema kmetijskih praks, ki so pospešile proizvodnjo hrane. Drugo
pa je oblikovalo takrat mogočo in željeno simbolno strukturo velikih, sobivajočih in stalno naselje-
nih skupnosti. Širitev kmetovanja lahko tako razumemo kot ekspanzijo kompleksnega načina življe-
nja, ki je vključevalo življenje velikih skupnosti druge ob drugi, bogato kulturno okolje in nadzor vasi
in polj ter pašnikov, ki so jih obkrožali.
KEY WORDS - Epi-palaeolithic; Neolithic; cognitive archaeology; cultural evolution; origins of farming
Introduction
There are two problems in the Neolithic of south-
west Asia that have proved resistant, and neither
have been the central concern of those working on
the Neolithic. One of them has persisted since the
middle of the twentieth century, while the other ap-
peared more recently. I shall attempt solutions to
those problems. The process of Neolithisation as I
will model it in a sketchy outline leads to the con-
clusion that the early Neolithic societies had evolved
minds and symbolic cultures that were for the first
time in human history recognisably like those that
we enjoy. In that sense, the Neolithisation process in
southwest Asia was the path to modernity. At the end
of the period with which this essay is concerned,
around 7000-6500 BC, there are archaeological in-
dications of increases in the form, extent and den-
sity of settlement around the southwest Asian core
area. These indications may suggest that there was
demographic growth (together with other factors)
within the region that required expansion of the set-
tied area. However, the rest of southwest Asia was
by no means an empty quarter. I suggest that expan-
sion from the core area produced a ripple effect as
societies in other parts of the region began to feel
demographic pressure expanding from the core area,
and were themselves also adopting the new, dyna-
mic symbolic cultural package that included mixed
farming, and beginning to experience population
growth. The pressures within southwest Asia thus
expanded in whichever directions were possible, and
may have provided the initial pulse of Neolithic cul-
tural forms and farming economies into southeast
Europe.
The persistent question that has hovered over us
since the middle of the twentieth century was that
posed by Robert Braidwood when he sought to un-
ravel and understand what we would now call the
process of Neolithisation on the basis of his multi-
disciplinary research programme in northeast Iraq
(Braidwood 1960 is a simple, direct and accessible
statement of his views). Following the conclusions
of the early work by his environmentalist collabora-
tors, Braidwood dismissed climate and environmen-
tal change at the end of the Pleistocene period (Gor-
don Childe's hypothesised driver) as the pressure that
prompted early Neolithic societies to adopt crop cul-
tivation and animal herding. His collaborators found
no evidence of significant climatic or environmental
change in the final Pleistocene and earliest Holocene.
In any case, Braidwood reasoned, similar sequences
of cold phases followed by warming had occurred
frequently during the Pleistocene without prompt-
ing human societies in southwest Asia to adopt far-
ming. If the context of the initial adoption of farming
was not one of environmental pressure, then there
must be some cultural reason; the vulnerability of
Braidwood's proposals were his inability to suggest
in what way culture might have been 'ready' 12 000
years ago, at the end of the Pleistocene, and unready
at earlier times.
The second question is how to integrate two views
of the Neolithic that have been completely opposed
to one another, each claiming to be the only proper
way to approach the problems to the exclusion of
the other. The first view, the processualist, ecological
view, was first articulated in the later 1960s. Two
American scholars, Lewis Binford and Kent Flannery,
took quite a different view from that of Braidwood
(Binford 1968; Flannery 1969). Lacking evidence of
a driving force in climatic and environmental change,
they opted for an ecological process in which an in-
crease in population growth became the environ-
mental pressure that pushed certain groups of hun-
ter-gatherers. For our purposes, the processualist
view may be characterised by Ofer Bar-Yosef, who
has great authority within the field and internatio-
nal respect, and who has co-authored a more sophi-
sticated synthesis in the light of the great volume of
recently available data (Bar-Yosef & Meadow 1995).
The other view may be characterised by the figure
of Jacques Cauvin, who would shudder at the idea
that he might be thought a post-processualist, but
whose dismissal of processualist explanations puts
him in the same camp (Cauvin 1994; 2000). Cauvin's
account stresses the priority of the emergence of
symbolic culture in a psycho-cultural transformation
of the human mind.
I am attempting to relate these two approaches to
Neolithic phenomena, the adoption of farming eco-
nomies, and what I call the facility for the symbolic
construction of complex, multi-layered concepts of
community, by relating them back to a single prior
cause. In the terms used by Bruce Trigger in his essay
on the rival epistemologies underlying schools of ar-
chaeological explanation, there is an epistemologi-
cally based opposition between the processualist
Jerf el-Ahmar. A vertical view of the subterranean
communal building 1 at the centre of the early set-
tlement, among houses of various shapes.
Jerf el-Ahmar. Communal building 1 was more than two metres deep and about 9 metres across. At least
part of it had been roofed, presumably the cells, symmetrically arranged about an axis. At the end of the
structure's use, a body was placed face down on the floor of the open area to the left, and the empty buil-
ding was set on fire before the void was filled with soil.
(positivist) and the post-processualist and other idea-
lists' camp (Trigger 1998). And I am perhaps attemp-
ting a realist synthesis that follows Trigger's pro-
posed solution. In that regard, I find that I am fol-
lowing a similar path to that recently outlined by
Marc Verhoeven in his essay proposing 'a holistic
approach to domestication' (Verhoeven 2004), and
I shall return to this major paper when I have pro-
posed my own synthesis. The prior cause to which I
refer above will be described as a complex of inter-
acting cognitive, social and economic factors. Key as-
pects of the complex are the emergence of larger so-
cial groups resident in permanent village communi-
ties, and the emergence of fully symbolic culture and
cognitive faculties in human minds to match. It will
be apparent that this complex of factors includes one
that is universal (the co-evolutionary process of mind
and culture) with others that are regional (how so-
cieties in southwest Asia constituted themselves and
how they operated at the level of strategies of sub-
sistence economics within the resources of the nat-
ural environment).
Braidwood's killer question
We can go right back to Robert Braidwood's work in
the 1950s and early 1960s. Based on his multi-dis-
ciplinary research, he rejected the idea that Neolithic
farming was a response to environmental pressures
brought about by climatic change. Similar climatic
and environmental changes had occurred repeatedly
in the Pleistocene without bringing about the human
response of adopting farming. He concluded that
there must have been some cultural factor involved.
Jacques Cauvin labelled that factor psycho-cultural,
but was still unable to explain why such a psycholo-
gical revolution in the use of symbols occurred at the
end of the Pleistocene and the beginning of the Ho-
locene. Finally, he published his proposed explana-
tion as a hypothesis that would need to be debated
and, discussed, and for which further evidence would
need to be sought (Cauvin 1994; 2004).
Lewis Binford's essay on Post-Pleistocene adapta-
tions (Binford 1968) modelled a process that was
not grounded in the archaeology of southwest Asia.
But Kent Flannery drew upon his field research ex-
perience in southwest Iran, when he developed a
closely comparable processualist model which he
called the broad spectrum revolution (Flannery
1969). His ideas about the importance of the change
to a broad spectrum hunting strategy and his neglect
of the significance of stored plant foods mean that
the model needs some modification, but it can be
made strong in the context of our current knowl-
edge, mostly derived from Epi-palaeolithic sites in
the southern Levant. For Flannery, the revolutionary
moment occurred when hunter-gatherers began to
focus on broad spectrum hunting and gathering
(which we can redefine somewhat as harvesting and
storing nutritious, hard seed plant species together
with broad spectrum hunting), which implied the
adoption of a more sedentary life. I prefer to call
them hunter-harvesters. From that time in the Epi-
palaeolithic, it only required pressure on finite wild
food resources, and both Binford and Flannery argue
for population growth as the force exerting pressure
to adapt.
Both Bar-Yosef, and Gordon Hillman with Andrew
Moore depend upon the Younger Dryas reversal in
the last millennium of the Epi-palaeolithic as the
environmental force pushing communities to adopt
cultivation and thus to initiate plant domestication
(Bar-Yosef & Belfer-Cohen 1989; Bar-Yosef & Mea-
dow 1995; Hillman 1996; Moore & Hillman 1992;
Moore, Hillman & Legge 2000). Moore and Hillman
are concerned essentially with the final Epi-palaeo-
lithic period and the impact of the Younger Dryas,
whereas Bar-Yosef, taking a deeper perspective star-
ting from the end of the LGM, employs a push-and-
pull model, in which there were alternating environ-
mental phases that encouraged expansion or offered
opportunities, followed by phases that exerted pres-
sures requiring urgent adaptation. Bar-Yosefs model
adds a social factor to the economic-ecological and
environmental factors. Thus, the recovery from the
LGM encouraged groups to focus on the increasingly
available plant foods such as cereals and pulses. But
then the Younger Dryas reversal pressed on final Epi-
palaeolithic communities which had become larger
sedentary groups, unable to opt for the flexibility of
small-group mobility because the environment was
Jerf el-Ahmar. A hand of the human body that was
laid face down on the floor of communal building
1 before the structure was set on fire and filled.
Jerf el-Ahmar. When the first communal building
was destroyed, posts were removed and in one of
the post-sockets a human skull was buried.
too packed with other groups. But once again, sim-
ilar climatic and environmental oscillations had hap-
pened earlier in the Pleistocene, and Braidwood's
killer question still applies. Processualists like Bar-
Yosef would probably respond that an inevitable
process was set in motion when Epi-palaeolithic hun-
ter-harvesters adopted the trend towards sedentism;
at least in Bar-Yosef's view, the hunter-gatherer po-
pulation had tended to concentrate at a higher den-
sity in the Levant in consequence of the LGM, and
there was a trend among Epi-palaeolithic hunter-har-
vesters to live in larger, more permanent groups.
Although the hypothetical concentration of hunter-
gatherer populations in the Levant in the LGM re-
mains speculative, the size and number of Epi-palaeo-
lithic open sites and the expansion of the occupied
area around the mouths of caves and rock-shelters
in the Levant seems real. But this only pushes Braid-
wood's question back to an earlier stage. Instead of
asking why some groups began to engage in cultiva-
tion when they did, we now ask why they began to
engage in harvesting and storing nutritious, hard-
seeded crops, or why they sought to exchange their
traditional mobility and fluidity of group member-
ship for a trend towards sedentary life in permanent
village communities. Once again, the opportunities
offered by the recovery from the LGM (greater avai-
lability of wild cereals and pulses) would have oc-
curred several times earlier in the Pleistocene, with-
out the consequences that we observe in the Epi-
palaeolithic.
As far as concerns the adoption of cultivation lead-
ing to plant domestication, the force that exerted
pressure to invest in the added labour of clearing
the ground, digging and planting is contested. Some
appeal to population growth leading to population
pressure, while others believe that the Younger
Dryas exerted a climatic-environmental pressure. In
truth it is practically impossible to decide between
them, and one could add another hypothetical force
in the shape of environmental degradation brought
about by over-exploitation by intensive hunter-har-
vesters who were (semi-) sedentary. Whatever the
source of the pressure for societies that had been
practising the hunter-harvester way of life for mil-
lennia, living in relatively large and socially coher-
ent communities, there was no way back to small-
group mobility. The response of further intensifica-
tion (cultivation) in the production of their food re-
sources sooner or later resulted in domestication.
The adoption of agriculture was the end of a process,
not the beginning, as Flannery emphasised almost
forty years ago. The questions of why and how Epi-
palaeolithic communities were drawn or pushed to
develop a way of life that was so different from that
of their Palaeolithic predecessors remains.
The nexus of Epi-palaeolithic social and subsi-
stence strategies and the inevitability of farm-
ing
We can agree that the Epi-palaeolithic was a critical
period, and we should note that it was a long period.
Many who write with a central concern for the be-
ginnings of farming use the final Epi-palaeolithic of
the Levant (the Natufians) as a prelude to their main
period of interest. In the Epi-palaeolithic period, new
kinds of social group emerged, and new subsistence
strategies were adopted. We should not under-esti-
Jerf el-Ahmar. General view of communal building 2, which succe-
eded the earlier communal building in another part of the village.
It was also subterranean, and the cavities where wooden posts that
supported the roof have decayed can be seen behind the mud pla-
ster of the wall. The interior had six large timber posts in a circle,
and a series of large kerb-stones between the posts.
mate the significance of the new, permanently se-
dentary communities that were an order of magni-
tude (approximately ten times) larger than earlier
Palaeolithic groups. The new subsistence strategies
involved storage of food resources, and the manage-
ment and allocation of those resources required ma-
jor changes in society and the development and
adoption of new concepts.
Ohalo II illustrates the Epi-palaeolithic process par-
ticularly well, and shows how early it began (Kislev,
Nadel & Carmi 1992; Nadel, Carmi & Segal 1995;
Nadel & Hershkovitz 1991; Nadel & Werker 1999;
Piperno et al. 2004). It is a very early Epi-palaeoli-
thic site, dating to the boundary between the Upper
Palaeolithic and the Epi-palaeolithic (around 20 000
years ago in uncalibrated radiocarbon terms). It may
represent a precocious group, but there is no reason
to think that they or the ecological niche that they
chose were unique. The site emphasises that the cha-
racteristics that are frequently associated with the
final Epi-palaeolithic (Natufian) of the Levant were
already effectively present or presaged at the very
beginning of the Epi-palaeolithic period, many mil-
lennia earlier. The site of Ohalo II is usually sub-
merged in shallow water at the southern side of the
Sea of Galilee, but is partly exposed at times when
water levels drop. There has been little or no subse-
quent erosion or disturbance, and there are extraor-
dinary conditions of organic preservation.
Ohalo II was a cluster of brush huts
and hearths. There were also occa-
sional burials among the huts. There
is heavy stone equipment for grind-
ing and pounding plant foods, and
120 species of plants, including ce-
reals, large-seeded grasses, lentils,
and vetches are evidenced. Traces of
starch recovered from the surface of
a grinding slab set in the floor of
one of the huts have been identified
as derived from the grinding of ce-
real (Piperno et al. 2004). The evi-
dence of seasonality from the plant
and animal and bird remains indi-
cates year-round occupation. By the
middle of the Epi-palaeolithic in the
Levant there are examples of large,
semi-sedentary or sedentary groups.
In the last phase of the Epi-palaeo-
lithic in the Levant (the Natufian)
there were sedentary village commu-
nities numbering around 250 living
in the same place for many centuries, for example
Abu Hureyra in north Syria (Moore, Hillman & Legge
2000), and Eynan ('Ain Mallaha) in north Israel (Val-
la 1991). Some of the phenomena that are so dra-
matic in the early Neolithic can be seen developing
in the last phase of the Epi-palaeolithic period, and
to a lesser extent in the earlier millennia.
Situating the process in the context of cogni-
tive and cultural evolution
In response to what I called Braidwood's killer ques-
tion - why then, why not earlier? - I want to situate
these developments in new forms of social organiza-
tion and new subsistence strategies in the context
of the longer term evolution of human cognitive fa-
culties. In particular, I am sure that the critical fac-
tor in long-term human cognitive evolution has been
- and still is - the co-evolution of mind and culture.
What I shall go on to argue here is that a particular
stage in the co-evolution of mind and culture was es-
sential if human social groups were to grow in size
and permanence beyond the scale of earlier Palaeo-
Jerf elAhmar. (a) and (b) Two grooved stone ob-
jects (known as shaft-straighteners). (c) and (d)
Two small limestone plaques. All four objects are
decorated with incised motifs, but the left sides of
(a), (c) and (d) are arguably groups of signs, ra-
ther than mere decoration.
Jerf el-Ahmar. One of the carved kerb-stones in
communal building 2.
lithic mobile, flexible hunter-gatherer groups. That
stage was marked by the emergence of human minds
fully capable of managing systems of symbolic repre-
sentation beyond language, using symbolic material
culture as a mode of 'external symbolic storage' (a
key phrase from Merlin Donald, see below). That
stage having been reached, over the last ten thou-
sand years or so, the rich cultural environment has
become the essential environment within which fur-
ther (increasingly rapid) cultural evolution has taken
place, rather than the physical environment, or much
slower biological evolution. Before developing that
case, I will very briefly outline some of the back-
ground in cognitive and evolutionary psychology
and its application in archaeology and prehistory.
Ahead of and separate from the recent explosion of
publication on cognitive and evolutionary psychol-
ogy and neuro-science, we should note the remark-
able work of Peter Wilson on what he calls the do-
mestication of society (Wilson 1988). Wilson, an an-
thropologist with a seemingly encyclopaedic acqua-
intance with the ethnographic literature, has written
about hunter-gatherer settlement without apparently
recognizing the relevance of his ideas for the prehi-
storic sedentary hunter-gatherers in southwest Asia.
He differentiates between open and domestic soci-
eties. He argues that the adoption of a built environ-
ment had a profound effect on people's evolved so-
cial psychology. People's perception of their social
selves was challenged. Buildings introduced privacy
for interior space, as distinct from life in the public
space. While challenging the evolved social psycho-
logy, living in what Wilson calls domesticated cir-
cumstances also offered exciting opportunities to use
the built environment for symbolic representation
(see Watkins 2004 or 2005 for a fuller discussion of
Wilson's ideas, and a general survey of anthropolo-
gists, architects and social theorists on the symbolic
potential of architecture).
Lesley Aiello (anthropologist at UCL) and Robin Dun-
bar (psychologist at Liverpool University) have been
interested in the long-term evolution of the hominid
mind, and the emergence of language (Aiello & Whe-
eler 1995; Aiello & Dunbar 1993; Dunbar 1992).
They point to the unique trajectory of hominid evo-
lution in developing a brain that supports larger so-
cial groups of inter-dependent individuals. Their stu-
dies conclude that the evolved human brain is bio-
logically adapted for operating with social groups of
a maximum number of 120 people. Dunbar has de-
veloped the theory that language evolved to facilitate
gossip as a more efficient mode of communal gro-
oming than the one-to-one grooming that serves in
other sociable primate species (Dunbar 1996; 2004).
Larger group sizes require advanced cognitive and
cultural symbolising skills in order to frame the con-
cepts that make large human societies work. Dun-
bar is one of a number of biologists, ethologists and
psychologists who have worked on the question of
how human societies overcome this biological bar-
rier by using cognitive and cultural symbolising skills
to formulate the powerful abstract concepts that un-
derpin all modern social life (see, for example, Dun-
bar 1999).
Boyd and Richerson, another anthropologist-psycho-
logist team, have been working and writing on the
theme of the co-evolution of mind and culture for a
number of years (Boyd & Richerson 1982; Richer-
son & Boyd 2005). They are just one example of
those who work on the principle of mind-culture co-
evolution. By means of culture, humans have learned
how to build up, communicate and share huge bod-
ies of information. By means of language and symbo-
lic culture in general, human minds have developed
extraordinarily and quite uniquely complex modes
of storing abstract information. Merlin Donald is a
Canadian psychologist, whose first major book, Ori-
gins of the Human Mind, has had a major impact
on the thinking of a number of archaeologists (Do-
nald 1991). Donald argues that humans evolved new
modes of cultural communication, each of which has
changed the way that human minds work. The emer-
gence of a full, modern language faculty, in Donald's
view, was the second stage in that evolution. The
third and most recent stage was the emergence of
what he calls 'external symbolic storage', by which
he means the ability to read and write, to store and
communicate accumulated knowledge, information,
stories, music, or mathematics. In his more recent
book, Donald has developed his theories much fur-
ther, elaborating the argument that the very consci-
ousness that we contemporary (western) humans
enjoy depends completely on the cultural environ-
ment within which we have grown up from infancy
(Donald 2001).
Homo sapiens symbolic representation and the
emergence of external symbolic storage
Let us recapitulate the situation then. Homo sapiens
emerged in Africa 160k years ago. Before 100k years
ago, some Homo sapiens were present in modern-
day Israel, and by 60k they had spread as far as SE
Asia, colonising Australia by 50k. Some time around
100-50k years ago, a full modern language faculty
evolved. Homo sapiens had therefore evolved the
capacity for conceptualising systems of symbolic re-
presentation. And by 70k years ago the first building-
blocks of emergent symbolic material culture, such
as incised pieces of red ochre, were present at Blom-
bos and other sites in South Africa.
A fully modern language capability is the second of
Merlin Donald's three stages in 'the evolution of cul-
Nevali fori. One of the T-shaped monoliths from
the "shrine" at the centre of the village. Some of
these monoliths show that they were anthropomor-
phic, having arms, bent at the elbows, and hands
with clearly indicated fingers.
ture and cognition' (Donald
1991). It is important to re-
cognize that our modern lan-
guages - and their predeces-
sors for the last few tens of
thousands of years - are com-
plex systems of symbolic re-
presentation (Deacon 1997).
The definition of words as ar-
bitrary signifiers for things
signified is only a small part
of the story, and the addition
of grammar and syntax takes
us only a certain distance fur-
ther towards understanding
the extraordinary cognitive
complexity of symbolic repre-
sentation that underpins the
actual linguistic skills of all
modern humans. Language
does more than make indexi-
cal links between signifiers
and signified. In a system of
symbolic representation, the
tokens take their meaning in
relation to one another. A sen-
tence makes sense because
statements take their mean-
ing from the way that words
are combined and interrelat-
ed. Language is a complex
system of symbolic represen-
tation, but it is only one such
system. Symbolic material cul-
ture offered people further
opportunities for communica-
tion and storage.
Now it is time to relate cogni-
tive and cultural evolutionary
theory to the prehistory of
southwest Asia. In the Upper
Palaeolithic, which is the sole territory of Homo sa-
piens, there are distinct changes from the Middle
Palaeolithic. We can note that cultural phases that
have been distinguished by archaeologists studying
chipped stone industries follow one another at a
very much more rapid rate than in the almost static
Middle Palaeololithic. Now that radiocarbon dating
is available, and sufficient dates assembled, it has
become clear there were parallel and different cul-
tural traditions within the Levant that were for the
most part synchronous. In the Epi-palaeolithic period
in the Levant, the pace of cultural change, and the
Göbekli Tepe. The site is an artificial mound 300 m in diameter set on a
bare mountain ridge. Each of the large structures was excavated into the
mound and equipped with a pair of stones in the open centre, and more
stones set into a "bench" around the sides. The oldest structures are the
large, circular structures in the lower part of the plan, and they have each
been rebuilt once or twice, each time on a smaller diameter.
extent to which material culture was used to diffe-
rentiate contemporary cultural groups, increases fur-
ther. The early Epi-palaeolithic, for example, lasted
a few thousand years, while the late Epi-palaeolithic
was only two thousand years in duration, and three
sub-phases have been distinguished by those specia-
lising in the study of Natufian lithics. In short, we
can begin to see how Homo sapiens was learning to
use material culture to construct and maintain social
identity. Indeed, the cognitive and cultural environ-
ment was becoming the evolutionary environment
rather than the biological environment.
When we reach the early Neolithic, I have argued
elsewhere that architecture became the means that
communities used to make concrete their concepts
of their village societies, their structure and their cen-
tral focus on corporate rituals and shared ideology
and iconography (Watkins 2004a; 2004b; 2006). In
addition to its structural representation of a commu-
nity, architecture can provide the arena within which
people play out the dramas of social life, as well as
the enactment of rituals that are concerned with the
community's relationship with higher powers. In
communities that numbered several hundreds and
even several thousands, shared religious beliefs and
practices were essential because what Susan Black-
more (Blackmore 1999) calls religious 'memeplex-
es', developing the idea of memes and meme-plexes
as the cognitive equivalents of genes and gene-com-
plexes that was first articulated by Richard Dawkins
(Dawkins 1976; 1986), incidentally provide the ju-
stification for altruistic behaviours (Watkins 2003).
We do not need to be concerned with the contro-
versy over whether memes constitute another form
of replicator in another evolutionary process of se-
lection, as that is simply a vocabulary for articulating
the results of Blackmore's social psychology research.
The important point is that shared religious ideas go
beyond shared beliefs and communal rituals, because
they promote norms of behaviour and commend al-
truism. In communities that numbered several hun-
dred and even several thousand individuals, the cog-
nitive and cultural capacity to create and reproduce
Göbekli Tepe. View down into structure D, the largest and earliest so far
investigated. The two main monoliths remain embedded in the fill of the
enclosure, but it is clear that they must be at least 5 m tall. Around the
sides of the structure, T-shaped monoliths are set radially in the retaining
wall. At the far side, the excavations have reached a stone "bench". Traces
of the walls of earlier, larger forms of the enclosure can be seen at the far
side.
such abstract concepts as 'community' and 'neigh-
bourliness' were essential.
I have written elsewhere (Watkins, in press (a))
about the complexity of symbolic construction of
community, a subject on which the anthropologist
Anthony Cohen has concentrated over a number of
years of study and thought (see Cohen 1985 for a
succinct account). Epi-palaeolithic, and even more so
early Neolithic, co-resident communities (I hesitate
to call them villages) extended beyond kin-groups
and beyond the scale for which the biologically
evolved human brain were capable of managing the
exponentially complex social relations (Watkins in
press (b)). At a higher level, co-resident communities
participated in active networks of similar commu-
nities, or some kind of interaction sphere (Watkins
in press (a)) seeks to take up and modify Renfrew's
idea of the peer polity interaction sphere - Renfrew
1986). In this kind of system of multi-layered net-
works, we can see how individual communities ex-
change items through a wider network (obsidian,
marine shells, attractive stone or objects made of at-
tractive stone), and share cultural ideas and prac-
tices. However, each community may articulate those
ideas and practices in their own way. There were no
text-books in circulation that defined how houses
should be designed or how dead bodies should be
treated. General observations of widespread cultural
phenomena, such as the "the PPNB culture" (which
I have criticized at some length in Watkins, in press
(a)) or "the skull cult", break
down as soon as they are
examined in detail, because
practices are usually not pre-
cisely replicated from site to
site. There are domestic archi-
tectural forms that are found
from site to site across a re-
gion. For example, Brian Byrd
and Ted Banning have writ-
ten about the pier-house in
the later aceramic Neolithic of
the southern Levant (Byrd &
Banning 1988). And in south-
east Anatolia, settlements had
very large and substantially
built houses, constructed from
mud brick on stone and mud
mortar foundations (Schir-
mer 1990). At one time, the
foundations may consist of a
series of square cells; at ano-
ther time, they consist of clo-
sely set parallel walls. It appears that the sequence
of architectural changes - from grids to sleeper walls
- is replicated at different sites across the region.
Intramural burials of bodies are found at many sites
among or under the houses, in a special purpose
building (as at ^ayönü Tepesi), or in clusters closely
associated with the settlement. It was a practice that
began with the first open village settlements of the
Epi-palaeolithic period, but in the early Neolithic it
became widespread and common. There was a par-
allel practice, especially in the Levant, of secondary
removal of skulls, which were then curated, some
with facial features modelled in clay or plaster, be-
fore being re-buried in caches. But there is a lack of
systematic regularity; what has been found at one
site is not quite the same as has been found at oth-
ers. Across the Levant the intramural burial of cer-
tain people, and the removal and curation of skulls
took place within the architecture and design of the
settlement. The ceremonies and rituals and symbo-
lism were designed to find their place within the
already rich symbolism of the architecture, the bur-
ial ceremonies perhaps being played out within kin-
groups, while secondary ceremonies with retrieved
skulls may have involved the wider co-resident com-
munity (Kuijt 2000a; 2000b).
There is now good evidence that settlements and
their constituent buildings were laid out in accor-
dance with some overall design. And there is now
a series of settlements of the early Neolithic period
that possessed monumental, non-domestic, special-
purpose, communal buildings, especially in south-
east Anatolia and the north of the Syrian Euphrates
valley (see Watkins 2004a or 2005 for a fuller dis-
cussion with extensive references). The first to be re-
cognized was at a salvage archaeology site, Nevali
^ori, close to the Euphrates (Hauptmann 1988;
1999). In the centre of a quite small village of hou-
ses very similar to those of contemporary ^ayönü
Tepesi (Özdogan 1999) there was a sub-rectangular,
sub-terranean structure (Hauptmann 1993; 1999).
It had a stone "bench" around its walls, a lime plas-
ter floor, and, in the centre of the floor area, a pair
of tall stone pillars, only one of which was preserved.
Similar stone pillars were set all around the peri-
meter in the bench. Through their lightly carved
arms, bent at the elbows, and clasped hands the pil-
lars reveal themselves as highly schematised anthro-
pomorphs. With hindsight, it is now clear that there
was a similar, subterranean building at ^ayönü,
which also had a pair of tall, stone pillars. In south-
east Anatolia we are beginning to see a regional in-
Göbekli Tepe. One of the carved T-shaped mono-
liths from the earliest structure so far investigated.
Here one edge is viewed, showing the heads of
many snakes whose bodies are interwoven like
nets on the larger, flat surfaces. There is also a spi-
der and other creatures.
teraction sphere, or cultural network, of villages that
are strongly constituted as communities, but which
at the same time are strong participants sharing va-
rious symbolic elements of household and commu-
nity life with other communities.
Equally dramatic is the succession of communal, spe-
cial purpose structures in the heart of the village at
Jerf el Ahmar, on the Euphrates in north Syria, close
to the border with Turkey. The settlement belongs
to the earliest aceramic Neolithic period. In an open
space at the centre of the community, there existed
large-scale, fully subterranean buildings, which the
excavator, Danielle Stordeur, calls 'communautaire',
communal or public buildings (Stordeur et al. 2000,
and see Watkins 2004a or 2005 for fuller referen-
ces). The first in the series was by far the largest
construction in the village, and it was certainly not
a house. Stordeur believes that it was a communal
food storage facility that also accommodated ritual
activities. At the end of its life, it was emptied, its
roof was removed, a human head was placed in an
empty post-socket, and a decapitated body was placed
face down in the central area. Finally, the structure
was destroyed by fire, and the void that it left was
obliterated. The village shifted its topographic focus,
and that first structure was succeeded by a second
large, circular, subterranean building. This one had
a bench all around its interior, and the bench had a
decorated stone kerb in which the horizontal stones
were articulated with large juniper posts, sheathed
with elaborate plaster cylinders, supporting the roof.
Even more remarkable is the site of Göbekli Tepe,
near Urfa in southeast Turkey (Schmidt 2000; 2002;
2005 and see Watkins 2004a; 2004b for fuller refe-
rences). It is a man-made mound of cultural debris
mixed with stones and earth, constructed over many
centuries on top of a bare limestone ridge. Large cir-
cular or sub-rectangular structures were built in ca-
vities excavated in the mound. Each structure con-
tained an axial pair of huge limestone pillars, exactly
like those at Nevali Cori. The largest structure so far
investigated has the tallest pillars, which are at least
5 m tall. Around the perimeter of each structure is a
stone-built "bench", and more pillars are set at right
angles into the bench. Some of the pillars, like those
at Nevali Cori, have details that make clear that they
are anthropomorphic. On their surfaces there are
carvings in raised relief of a range of mammals, birds,
reptiles, scorpions. Because of the lack of normal do-
mestic settlement at the site or in its immediate vi-
cinity, and because of the common features in the
iconography at Göbekli Tepe and a number of other
contemporary settlements, Schmidt has begun to
discuss the idea that Göbekli Tepe was a ceremonial
"central place" for communities living over a very
wide area, an idea quite similar in general terms to
that of Colin Renfrew in relation to the great Neoli-
thic ceremonial structures of southern England (Ren-
frew 1973).
What we are seeing in all sorts of forms, but parti-
cularly in the form of the architecture of buildings
and the design of settlements, is external symbolic
storage. Like language, it is a complex system of sym-
bolic representation, but in material form. As re-
marked earlier, Donald originally defined the full
emergence of external symbolic storage, the third
and latest stage in the evolution of the human mind
and culture, as being achieved with the development
of alphabetic writing in the hands of the Greeks of
the eighth and seventh centuries BC (Donald 1991).
If he thought that the adoption of alphabetic writing
in Greek constituted a significant point in the evo-
lution of culture and cognition, it is not clear why
other and earlier alphabetic writers (the Phrygians,
the Phoenicians, or those who used alphabetic cunei-
form at Ugarit, or other Semitic speakers using alpha-
bets ancestral to the Phoenician in the second half
of the second millennium BC) are passed over. For
that matter, it is not at all clear what users of alpha-
betic scripts could write that those using hierogly-
phic or hieratic scripts in Egypt, or the many peoples
who used the cuneiform writing system developed in
Mesopotamia, could not. The answer probably lies in
what uses Greek writers soon began to find for their
new writing system. But that is beside the point, for
the real issue is whether non-language based systems
of symbolic representation can be classed as external
symbolic storage in Donald's definition of the term.
Göbekli Tepe. Two of the monoliths. The stone on the left stood in
a rectangular enclosure, the latest so far investigated.
At a conference held in Cambridge,
where Merlin Donald's ideas on the
evolution of culture and cognition
were tried and tested by invited ar-
chaeologists, Donald opened with a
succinct account of the theme of his
book (Donald 1998a). In his contri-
bution Colin Renfrew proposed that
Donald's third stage involving ex-
ternal symbolic storage was achieved
in terms of systems of symbolic rep-
resentation involving material cul-
ture among the early farmers of the
Neolithic, some millennia before the
earliest known effective writing sys-
tems (Renfrew 1998). At the end of
the conference Donald responded to
what he had heard, and significantly modified his
view on external symbolic storage in the light of Ren-
frew's contribution (Donald 1998b). Renfrew has
developed his ideas about 'materiality' and 'the en-
gagement of mind with the material world' (for
example, Renfrew 2005). My own recent work has
been concerned with the symbolising role of archi-
tecture in providing an arena for rich and complex
multi-mode symbolic representation in communities
of the early Neolithic in southwest Asia (Watkins
2004a; 2004b; 2006). Our modern academic pre-
occupation with books, journals, publications, and
text should not blind us to the enormous signifi-
cance of (non-verbal, non-literate) visuo-symbolic re-
presentation. In recent years, anthropologists, philo-
sophers, social theorists, semiologists, and, of course,
architects have all written enthusiastically about the
capacity of architecture in particular to embody ideas,
and to inspire, suggest and constrain human beha-
viour. It is easy to add to the cursory survey of the
widespread recognition of the importance of archi-
tecture as symbolic representation in Watkins 2004a.
For example, the distinguished architect Renzo Piano,
in a recent interview in The Guardian newspaper
(21 November 2005), said, "Architecture in some
way has the duty to suggest behaviour. Places are
the portraits of communities..." For those who wish
to see how many twentieth-century philosophers,
cultural theorists and semiologists have written
about the cognitive importance of architecture, Neil
Leach has collected pieces by twenty-three (Leach
1997).
Building the Neolithic synthesis
In the preceding sections I have argued that in the
Epi-palaeolithic period the adoption of sedentary life
in permanently co-resident communities coincided
with and depended upon the development of a hu-
man cognitive and cultural facility with material
systems of symbolic representation. For the first time
in human history there emerged communities that
were conspicuously larger than the biological human
brain could cope with. Their size and stability depen-
ded on their ability to construct and maintain a va-
riety of entirely novel, abstract concepts, and to con-
cretize these in terms of the structure and architec-
ture of their settlements. These communities were
the first to realize the potential of the built environ-
ment to act as a complex system of material repre-
sentation of symbolic information. Unlike books on
the library shelf, the built environment is not a work
of reference, but a world that we inhabit. It provides
arenas for the rich symbolic representation of com-
munity in all sorts of cultural modes. People had
learned to create 'theatres of memory', cultural
means of proclaiming continuity and memorialising
the past that had formed them.
Domestication had proceeded in other ways than
that referred to by Peter Wilson (1988). I am sure
that the major innovations to which Christian Jeu-
nesse draws attention in his contribution to this vol-
ume, all consisting of the transformation of mate-
rials such as ceramics, lime plaster and heat-treated
copper, are a part of the control and manipulation
of the world in which early Neolithic communities
delighted to explore and live. As Jeunesse says, these
were further means of demonstrating control in a
"technical system of domestication". And, as Hodder
(1990) seems to intend, plant cultivation in fields
and animal husbandry were further extensions of
domestication, the bringing of elements (food plants
and animals) of the natural world within the orbit
and control of the domus. An expert survey of the
most recent evidence (Nesbitt 2002) indicates that
plant cultivation and intensive harvesting, leading
to the recognizable domestication of several cereal
species and a suite of pulses was practised in central
parts of the hilly flanks of the Fertile Crescent by
about 8500 BC (at the transition from the early ace-
ramic Neolithic to the later aceramic Neolithic). We
are now learning that, at almost the same time, ani-
mal husbandry was producing morphological signs
of domestication in sheep, goat and cattle (Helmer
et al. 2005). In short, the classic mixed farming eco-
nomy, based on a suite of cereals and pulses and at
least three ruminants, whether in response to some
external pressure or as part of the assumption of
control and management of their world, came into
being in short order, and was embraced throughout
the hilly flanks zone and beyond, into central Ana-
tolia, in the following centuries. The combination of
fully symbolic culture, permanent, large, sedentary
communities, networking maintaining complex,
multi-layered communities at different levels and
scales, the control and transformation of natural ma-
terials, and the mixed farming economy were the
foundations of a way of life that we can recognize as
so like our own that we can call it 'modern'.
The spread of the full Neolithic
The term Neolithic has become problematic. It was
associated with the appearance of people who lived
in village-communities dependent on a farming eco-
nomy. But in the Levant the Neolithic was also given
specific material culture markers, in particular chip-
ped stone traditions that were different from those
of the previous Epi-palaeolithic period. As we have
seen here, the various components of society, econ-
omy, technology and culture that characterize the la-
ter aceramic Neolithic appeared at different times.
And it deserves to be mentioned that the timing of
the various components remains contentious. For
our purposes, 'the full Neolithic' is the whole pack-
age that comes together in the later aceramic Neoli-
thic period. After a relatively slow start over the se-
veral millennia of the Epi-palaeolithic period, when
larger, sedentary hunter-harvester communities came
into existence, the revolution in symbolic culture, the
growth in co-resident community size, and the adop-
tion of a number of transformative technologies, in-
cluding the domestication of plants and animals, ga-
thered pace in the early Neolithic period. The climax
in the Levant is what is called the MPPNB (Middle
PPNB) phase, about 8500-7600 BC. By that time,
there was a human population that had colonised
the island of Cyprus (Peltenburg & Wasse 2004;
Swiny 2001), and they had introduced from the
mainland the full suite of cultivated cereals and pul-
ses, and sheep, goat, cattle, pig and fallow deer. These
are the first signs of the expansive capacity of the
Neolithic.
In the final phase of the later aceramic Neolithic, be-
tween 7600 and 6900 BC, there began a major cul-
tural and settlement dislocation that took different
forms in different regions within southwest Asia. In
the eastern part of the arc of the hilly flanks zone,
settlement continued in the intermontane valleys of
the Zagros, between Iraq and Iran, but remained on
a relatively small scale. In the piedmont of eastern
Iraq, and particularly on the alluvium in southwest
Iran, the few early agricultural villages spawned a
greater and greater number of settlements through
the ceramic Neolithic and on through the Chalcoli-
thic and Bronze Ages. The alluvium of southwest
Iran has been fairly intensively surveyed, and Hole
and Flannery chart the expansion of settlement in
the Deh Luran plain, starting from the unique small
village of Ali Kosh (Hole & Flannery 1968; Hole,
Flannery & Neely 1969). Aceramic Neolithic settle-
ments in the northeast segment of the arc of the hilly
flanks zone (N Iraq) were confined to the hill coun-
try of the Jebel Sinjar (e.g. Qermez Dere or Maghza-
liyeh - Watkins 1992) or the piedmont (e.g. M'lefaat
- Kozlowski 1998). From the beginning of the cera-
mic Neolithic, however, farming villages sprang up
in great numbers across the rain-fed plains of the Je-
zirah, between the Euphrates in north Syria and the
Tigris in north Iraq.
The process in the north Levant is unclear, beyond
stating the obvious - the aceramic Neolithic settle-
ments in the Euphrates valley in north Syria were
abandoned, and their immediate successors have
not yet been identified. At least we can be reasonably
sure that people moved away from the valley, be-
cause the accidents of salvage archaeology that lo-
cated the aceramic Neolithic sites did not produce
ceramic Neolithic settlements. In the southern Levant,
the classic PPNB settlements of the Mediterranean
woodland zone of inner Israel, the west bank and
Jordan valley, and its southern extension beyond
the Dead Sea into the Wadi Arabah, all failed during
the late phase of the PPNB period. For a while, in
that late PPNB phase and for a couple of centuries
beyond, there was what has been labelled the 'mega-
site' phenomenon (Bienert, Gebel & Neef 2004).
Certain settlements in highland Jordan (the best do-
cumented is 'Ain Ghazal) saw rapid expansion to 10
or even 15 hectares of dense domestic occupation.
Rollefson has argued that the rate of expansion was
too fast to be accounted for by natural population
growth, and he therefore inferred inward migration
from abandoned settlements in the Jordan valley
and further west {Rollefson 1989; 1997; 2004). At
the end of the late PPNB period and beyond, there
was a trend towards small settlements, with quite
ephemeral archaeological signatures, in the margins
of the semi-arid interior. At the same time, the 'mega-
sites' imploded and were abandoned, or, as at 'Ain
Ghazal, continued only as a very small settlement of
a quite different character. These new settlements are
interpreted as small communities dependent more
on herding than on cultivation, where a part of the
population remained resident, while another part
spent part of the year as nomads, pasturing large
flocks of goats and sheep over extensive ranges.
The picture in Anatolia (other than southeast Turkey,
which is part of the central arc of the hilly flanks
zone) is still unclear due to a lack of information
across such a wide and environmentally varied re-
gion. In central Anatolia, there is the beginning of a
cultural sequence covering the later aceramic Neoli-
thic, pivoting about the famous site of ^atalhöyük in
the early ceramic Neolithic, and continuing on into
the Chalcolithic. But there is a gap, both geographi-
cally and culturally, between the Konya plain and
Cappadocian sequence and the next known sites to
the southeast. Some have tried to claim the central
Anatolian Neolithic as part of the expansion of the
Levantine PPNB culture (e.g. Bar-Yosef & Meadow
1995 or Cauvin 1994, though somewhat modified
in Cauvin 2000), but it is a case that does not stand
up to scrutiny. It is at least as likely that there was
a parallel cultural tradition in central Anatolia that
came more and more within the orbit of an intensely
active Levantine and southeast Turkish interaction
sphere as time progressed. The extent to which local
domestication took place, or domesticated plants or
animals were introduced from the Euphrates zone
in southeast Turkey or north Syria remains unclear
at present. The same problems beset the relationship
between central and western Anatolia. There is no
case for supposing that there was a spread of people
practising farming from central to western Anatolia,
since cultural traditions seem to be quite strongly
regional. The Neolithic package of village-sized com-
munities, with shared systems of symbolic represen-
tation, shared transformative technologies, and es-
tablished mixed farming seems to spring into exis-
tence fully formed, only shortly after a different-
looking cultural package had been put together in
central Anatolia.
In conclusion, there is evidence from various parts
of southwest Asia of the spread of pastoralist/part-
time farmers, or the rapid expansion of village socie-
ties across lands that were suited to mixed farming.
But, if Anatolia is considered as the land-bridge be-
tween the heartlands of the southwest Asian early
Neolithic and the Aegean islands, Greece and the Bal-
kans, there is no plausible evidence of either demic
expansion or cultural diffusion into central Anatolia,
or from there to its western shores. The spread of
the Neolithic to western Anatolia and into southeast
Europe has a time-dimension in relation to the as-
semblage of the Neolithic package in the heartland
of southwest Asia, but the mechanisms and proces-
ses involved in that apparent spread are likely to be
quite complex. It seems possible that people in early
Holocene communities (I am seeking a term that
avoids the Mesolithic-Neolithic divide) were rapidly
evolving the same cognitive and cultural facility with
fully symbolic material culture that their neighbours
in the heartland of southwest Asia had developed
only a few centuries earlier. In some parts of south-
west Asia, particularly in Anatolia, it is going to be
difficult to disentangle exactly which elements of the
Neolithic package were home-made, which were
acquired by cultural borrowing and emulation, and
which may have been carried by demic expansion.
As far as the (Indo-European) language-and-farming
hypothesis, or the 'wave of advance' model of demic
diffusion are concerned, the lack of a simple, homo-
geneous pattern of spread from the Levant across
Anatolia towards southeast Europe gives them a
poor starting-point.
Concluding discussion
The main purpose of this contribution was to see if
it was possible to bring together into a single account
two components of the Neolithic that have tended to
be viewed as exclusive of each other. The classic
component of the beginning of the Neolithic has
long been thought to be the adoption of mixed far-
ming, and a large body of research over half a cen-
tury has been devoted to identifying the domestica-
tion of plants and animals. In recent years, a very
different approach has been proposed by archaeolo-
gists who argue for the Neolithic as a 'revolution des
symboles', or a cognitive-cultural phenomenon invol-
ving the domus.
I have argued that the trend towards sedentary vil-
lage-communities and the trend towards dependence
on stored plant food resources in the Epi-palaeolithic
are two sides of a single coin. While these new stra-
tegies of settlement and subsistence may have been
very well suited to the ameliorating environmental
conditions after the Last Glacial Maximum, I made
a point of showing that the trend had begun at the
transition from the Upper Palaeolithic to the Epi-pa-
laeolithic in the Levant. Thus, environmental oppor-
tunity cannot have been the driver of the trend. Ra-
ther, I have suggested that we should view the re-
markable changes that mark the Epi-palaeolithic pe-
riod as evidence of the way in which the cultural en-
vironment was becoming the ecological arena within
which human cognitive evolution was developing.
Throughout hominid evolution, the predecessors of
Homo sapiens had tended towards larger social
group size and greater social coherence and inter-de-
pendence as adaptations to their biological environ-
ment. Once Homo sapiens had begun to master the
cultural use of systems of symbolic representation
(starting with language), they had the potential to
construct and articulate the abstract concepts es-
sential to the formation and maintenance of larger,
more permanent and richer communities. In seden-
tism, they found a fortunate conjunction between
the symbolic construction of communities, and archi-
tecture and the built environment as the means to
concretize their novel concepts. Sooner or later, as
permanently co-resident communities grew in size
and density in the landscape, for any of a variety of
reasons, a greater investment of labour and inten-
sification of food production became necessary.
The growth in size of aceramic Neolithic communi-
ties contradicts the ergonomic view of the most ef-
ficient and economic use of labour when set against
the resources gained. If ergonomics and efficiency
were setting the parameters of co-resident commu-
nity size, we would not find settlements of several
hectares, representing populations counted in thou-
sands. Rather, we would find small clusters of houses
representing communities of minimal size scattered
across the landscape. There were large settlements
even before intensive cultivation and animal herding
were adopted. But towards the end of the aceramic
Neolithic, the very large settlements emphasise that
it was the rich and intensive cultural environment
that constituted their raison d'etre and the engine of
their further growth. Efforts to define some kind of
settlement hierarchy have failed, and attempts to
identify any kind of social hierarchy within settle-
ments have remained at a purely hypothetical level.
Finally, the end of small-group, hunter-gatherer mo-
bility required a replacement for the social role of
seasonal congregations and the occasional exchange
of members and information; no small community is
an island, whether it is a hunter-gatherer band of 25
or a sedentary community of 250. The formation of
peer community interaction spheres allowed commu-
nities of whatever size to create higher-level commu-
nities. Within southwest Asia the developed acera-
mic Neolithic landscape consists of autonomous com-
munities, the larger of which presumably had forms
of internal social organization that were segmentary
and non-hierarchical. And these communities partici-
pated in wide-ranging networks of cultural, social
and economic interaction in which the non-compe-
titive emulation of symbolic practices and symbolic
entrainment tended to promote the intensification of
exchange and convergence in systems of symbolic
reference (cf. Renfrew 1986, and see Watkins in
press (a)).
In the last section of this paper, something of the
complexity of the processes involved in the spread of
the Neolithic package within southwest Asia was out-
lined. There is no room for a simple hypothesis of
demic diffusion from the heartland of southwest Asia
across Anatolia towards southeast Europe. Rather, it
appears that indigenous communities with their own
regional cultural traditions acquired the various ele-
ments of the Neolithic package partly on their own
initiative and partly through their becoming increa-
singly engaged with already existing and very attrac-
tive peer community interaction spheres.
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