Neolithic Cultures

The term Neolithic is frequently used to refer to that stage in humanity's history when people became sedentary and started farming. The Neolithic is normally conceptualized as a package that includes farming, sedentism, the making and use of stone tools, and crafts such as pottery and weaving. It is thus viewed as a new food-producing economy that, following Andrew Sherratt, eventually led to the Secondary Products Revolution, when people intensified production and labor and made use of secondary products, such as milk, traction, and wool. The Neolithic is also viewed in terms of what Service termed tribes and chiefdoms.

Although this general view sometimes captures the spirit of the Neolithic, it presents a homogenized picture of a time frame that is as varied geographically as it is materially. The concepts of Neolithic and Secondary Products revolutions imply a definite break with the preceding period, the Mesolithic, and a universal, homogeneous change in lifestyle. Moreover, the long-standing emphasis on tribes and chiefdoms has led to Neolithic tribes being defined by what they lack, rather than by what they have.

The idea of economic revolution was mostly articulated by Vere Gordon-Childe, who was influenced by both culture-history and Marxism. Childe saw the Near East as the starting point for the Neolithic, with the Natufians branded as the first farmers. In his view, plant domestication preceded animal domestication.

It was Robert and Linda Braidwood who, in 1948, launched the Iraq-Jarmo project to recover primary evidence for the earliest food-producing economies in the Near East, long considered the cradle of civilization. The work at Jarmo, coupled with Willard Libby's new C14 lab at the University of Chicago, indicated that, contra Childe, the earliest food-producing economies had been in the hilly flanks of the Fertile Crescent rather than lowland oases and riverine areas.

However, Lewis Binford and Kent Flannery came up with the marginality hypothesis, arguing that food production deliberately started around optimal-zone margins. On the other hand, Ofer Bar-Yosef and his colleagues put forward the Levantine primacy view, arguing that drier conditions between 13,000 and 12,800 BP forced hunter-gatherers westward. The consequent population increase resulted in reduced mobility; a broad-based economy; and the establishment of large, aggregated sites. What distinguishes this work is that Bar-Yosef and his colleagues consider complex social organization together with environmental change and population growth as reasons for the start of sedentism.

The New Archaeology also saw the Neolithic in terms of chiefdoms and ritual sodality, and there was [Page 1734]substantial focus on the origins of inequality within the Neolithic. The postprocessual movement, by contrast, focused on people (rather than the system behind them) and applied poststructuralism to the study of meaning and symbolism. The Neolithic thus came to be viewed as a world full of rich, symbolic meanings that are manipulated and renegotiated by social actors.

What makes the Neolithic difficult to conceptualize as a whole is the diversity within cultures. The transition from Mesolithic to Neolithic is by no means clear-cut. Moreover, the Neolithic did not spread and appear everywhere at once. In many areas (Britain being a case in point), the Mesolithic lifestyle survived far longer than conventionally thought, and for a while, it existed side by side with farming. Ethnō graphically, it is known that foragers are often very resistant to farming, and this seems to be the case archaeologically as well.

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