PPNA

The archaeology of PPNA sites suggests the appearance of incipient cultivating sedentary societies, which continued to rely on certain elements of hunting and gathering. These sedentary groups lived within a dynamic landscape still exploited by hunter-gatherers. As seen in the earlier periods, there are no straightforward associations between mobility, unstructured use of space and hunting and gathering on the one hand, and permanent architecture, sedentism and the symbolic or structured use of space on the other hand. There are, for example, mobile agriculturalists, mobile hunter– gatherers who cultivate plants, and sedentary hunter–gatherers (Coward & Gamble 2008:1975). None the less, these sedentary populations probably relied upon concepts of common identity and values. The regular pattern of house construction, internal structures, and unified settlement layout is taken as evidence for careful planning and organisation and, therefore, a manifestation of common identity (Bar-Yosef 2001:144). These changes in social structure through public architecture, social hierarchy, and the territorial claim will be discussed further below.

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CULTIVATION AND HUNTING

For most archaeobotanists there is a key distinction is between cultivation (which is something that people do) and domestication (which is a property of the species in question) (Fuller, Willcox & Allaby 2012:622). Specifically, the distinctions are:

 Foraging accounts for a state of collecting wild plants reflecting the hunter-gatherer lifeway

(Abbo, Lev-Yadun & Gopher 2012:242)

 Cultivation is the mechanism, the set of activities by which the active person treats plants.

This may include, but is not limited to, threshing, cleaning, sorting, selecting and stocking seeds, soil preparation, sowing, tending and harvesting (Abbo, Lev-Yadun & Gopher 2012:242)

 Domestication in biological terms refers to the major genetically based phenotypic features

that characterise the plants selected by humans and in cultural terms. It is an event/episode based on a decision and follow-up action by which the active person selects certain species and particular stocks within species for growing (Abbo, Lev-Yadun & Gopher 2012:242). This evolving mutualism is presented simply in Figure 2.6.

There is wide agreement that the cultivation of domesticated crops was preceded by a long period of what is conventionally termed ‘pre-domestication cultivation’ (Asouti 2013a:211). Hunter- gatherers had long been exploiting wild cereals when available without cultivation (as seen at Ohalo II - Fuller 2007:906), and such strategies should be perceived as a diverse array of foraging adaptations to locally fluctuating plant resources (Asouti & Fuller 2012:157). Indeed, it is likely that cultivation of domesticated plants and gathering from their wild populations co-existed for a long time (Peleg et al. 2011:5059). Even without population growth, a sedentary population will eventually deplete the densest stands of wild cereals making it necessary to engage in supplemental seed planting to ensure locally abundant and reliable harvests (Miller 1992:51).

Wild wheat stands persistently harvested with sickles, would become domesticated stands within a few decades whereas non-domestication cultivation includes harvesting by beating unripe wild stands or simply not replanting (Peleg et al. 2011:5059; Watson 1995:32). Thus, it is conceivable that the early cultivators strategically chose practices that worked against the morphological changes that are recognised in domesticated plants as they attempted to balance food needs and labour costs (Fuller 2010:10). During the PPNA, the first domesticated cereals may be attested (Vigne et al. 2011:52). One viewpoint is that that the primary domesticated crops of the Neolithic—namely, einkorn wheat, emmer wheat, barley, lentil, pea, chickpea, and flax—potentially appeared initially in a core area (see Figure 2.7) from which they spread throughout the Middle East (Matsuoka 2011; Peleg et al. 2011; Salamini et al. 2002:431; Weiss, Kislev & Hartmann 2006). However, others, in particular, Zeder (2006, 2008, 2011, 2015), provide substantial evidence that there were likely

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several domestication events. Alongside these developments in cultivation and agriculture, these early PPNA communities continued to hunt, trap and gather wild fruits, seeds and leaves (Bar-Yosef 1998b:151).

The large scale debates regarding plant exploitation, cultivation and domestication are often based on limited and scanty evidence. There is an unfounded emphasis on plants which are important agricultural crops today (Olszewski 1993:421). The vast majority of seed remains, however, were not destined for human consumption (Miller 1996:527). Other explanations such as dung use, can explain their presence and indeed, dung is commonly used for fuel in Iran to this day. If, for example, the charred-seed assemblages from Ali Kosh and Abu Hureyra are primarily remnants of dung- fuelled fires (instead of evidence of subsistence) a number of our ideas about ancient plant use and wild or domestic herd management must be revised. Equally, if other plants were used in dung fuel, then this could illustrate the greater importance of cultivars.

The implication of cultivation in my research hinges on the psychological and economic consequences of changes in food sources and allocation of resources. In particular, the consequences of change in community dynamics with increasing territoriality associated with prescribed pieces of arable land. There is also the potential impact of psychological change, of how the landscape, and peoples’ place in it, is viewed. These considerations may inform changes in symbolically elaborated material at this time, with changes in iconography potentially relating to shifts in such perceptions.

Figure 2.6 Domestication is best viewed as an evolving mutualism between humans and populations of plants and animals (Zeder 2006:107)

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Figure 2.7 Map of Early Neolithic sites in South-West Asia within the distribution of wild cereals and the hypothetical ‘core area’ (Fuller, Willcox & Allaby 2012:619)