Part 9

The animal bones of the Natufian layers show beasts of a “modern” type, but with some differences from those of present-day Palestine. The bones of the gazelle far outnumber those of the deer; since gazelles like a much drier climate than deer, Palestine must then have had much the same climate that it has today. Some of the animal bones were those of large or dangerous beasts: the hyena, the bear, the wild boar, and the leopard. But the Natufian people may have had the help of a large domesticated dog. If our guess at a date for the Natufian is right (about 7750 B.C.), this is an earlier dog than was that in the Maglemosian of northern Europe. More recently, it has been reported that a domesticated goat is also part of the Natufian finds.

The study of the human bones from the Natufian burials is not yet complete. Until Professor McCown’s study becomes available, we may note Professor Coon’s assessment that these people were of a “basically Mediterranean type.”

THE KARIM SHAHIR ASSEMBLAGE

Karim Shahir differs from the Natufian sites in that it shows traces of a temporary open site or encampment. It lies on the top of a bluff in the Kurdish hill-country of northeastern Iraq. It was dug by Dr. Bruce Howe of the expedition I directed in 1950-51 for the Oriental Institute and the American Schools of Oriental Research. In 1954-55, our expedition located another site, M’lefaat, with general resemblance to Karim Shahir, but about a hundred miles north of it. In 1956, Dr. Ralph Solecki located still another Karim Shahir type of site called Zawi Chemi Shanidar. The Zawi Chemi site has a radiocarbon date of 8900 ± 300 B.C.

Karim Shahir has evidence of only one very shallow level of occupation. It was probably not lived on very long, although the people who lived on it spread out over about three acres of area. In spots, the single layer yielded great numbers of fist-sized cracked pieces of limestone, which had been carried up from the bed of a stream at the bottom of the bluff. We think these cracked stones had something to do with a kind of architecture, but we were unable to find positive traces of hut plans. At M’lefaat and Zawi Chemi, there were traces of rounded hut plans.

As in the Natufian, the great bulk of small objects of the Karim Shahir assemblage was in chipped flint. A large proportion of the flint tools were microlithic bladelets and geometric forms. The flint sickle blade was almost non-existent, being far scarcer than in the Natufian. The people of Karim Shahir did a modest amount of work in the grinding of stone; there were milling stone fragments of both the mortar and the quern type, and stone hoes or axes with polished bits. Beads, pendants, rings, and bracelets were made of finer quality stone. We found a few simple points and needles of bone, and even two rather formless unbaked clay figurines which seemed to be of animal form.

Karim Shahir did not yield direct evidence of the kind of vegetable food its people ate. The animal bones showed a considerable increase in the proportion of the bones of the species capable of domestication--sheep, goat, cattle, horse, dog--as compared with animal bones from the earlier cave sites of the area, which have a high proportion of bones of wild forms like deer and gazelle. But we do not know that any of the Karim Shahir animals were actually domesticated. Some of them may have been, in an “incipient” way, but we have no means at the moment that will tell us from the bones alone.

WERE THE NATUFIAN AND KARIM SHAHIR PEOPLES FOOD-PRODUCERS?

It is clear that a great part of the food of the Natufian people must have been hunted or collected. Shells of land, fresh-water, and sea animals occur in their cave layers. The same is true as regards Karim Shahir, save for sea shells. But on the other hand, we have the sickles, the milling stones, the possible Natufian dog, and the goat, and the general animal situation at Karim Shahir to hint at an incipient approach to food-production. At Karim Shahir, there was the tendency to settle down out in the open; this is echoed by the new reports of open air Natufian sites. The large number of cracked stones certainly indicates that it was worth the peoples’ while to have some kind of structure, even if the site as a whole was short-lived.

It is a part of my hunch that these things all point toward food-production--that the hints we seek are there. But in the sense that the peoples of the era of the primary village-farming community, which we shall look at next, are fully food-producing, the Natufian and Karim Shahir folk had not yet arrived. I think they were part of a general build-up to full scale food-production. They were possibly controlling a few animals of several kinds and perhaps one or two plants, without realizing the full possibilities of this “control” as a new way of life.

This is why I think of the Karim Shahir and Natufian folk as being at a level, or in an era, of incipient cultivation and domestication. But we shall have to do a great deal more excavation in this range of time before we’ll get the kind of positive information we need.

SUMMARY

I am sorry that this chapter has had to be so much more about ideas than about the archeological traces of prehistoric men themselves. But the antiquities of the incipient era of cultivation and animal domestication will not be spectacular, even when we do have them excavated in quantity. Few museums will be interested in these antiquities for exhibition purposes. The charred bits or impressions of plants, the fragments of animal bone and shell, and the varied clues to climate and environment will be as important as the artifacts themselves. It will be the ideas to which these traces lead us that will be important. I am sure that this unspectacular material--when we have much more of it, and learn how to understand what it says--will lead us to how and why answers about the first great change in human history.

We know the earliest village-farming communities appeared in western Asia, in a nuclear area. We do not yet know why the Near Eastern experiment came first, or why it didn’t happen earlier in some other nuclear area. Apparently, the level of culture and the promise of the natural environment were ready first in western Asia. The next sites we look at will show a simple but effective food-production already in existence. Without effective food-production and the settled village-farming communities, civilization never could have followed. How effective food-production came into being by the end of the incipient era, is, I believe, one of the most fascinating questions any archeologist could face.

It now seems probable--from possibly two of the Palestinian sites with varieties of the Natufian (Jericho and Nahal Oren)--that there were one or more local Palestinian developments out of the Natufian into later times. In the same way, what followed after the Karim Shahir type of assemblage in northeastern Iraq was in some ways a reflection of beginnings made at Karim Shahir and Zawi Chemi.

THE First Revolution

As the incipient era of cultivation and animal domestication passed onward into the era of the primary village-farming community, the first basic change in human economy was fully achieved. In southwestern Asia, this seems to have taken place about nine thousand years ago. I am going to restrict my description to this earliest Near Eastern case--I do not know enough about the later comparable experiments in the Far East and in the New World. Let us first, once again, think of the contrast between food-collecting and food-producing as ways of life.

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN FOOD-COLLECTORS AND FOOD-PRODUCERS

Childe used the word “revolution” because of the radical change that took place in the habits and customs of man. Food-collectors--that is, hunters, fishers, berry- and nut-gatherers--had to live in small groups or bands, for they had to be ready to move wherever their food supply moved. Not many people can be fed in this way in one area, and small children and old folks are a burden. There is not enough food to store, and it is not the kind that can be stored for long.

Do you see how this all fits into a picture? Small groups of people living now in this cave, now in that--or out in the open--as they moved after the animals they hunted; no permanent villages, a few half-buried huts at best; no breakable utensils; no pottery; no signs of anything for clothing beyond the tools that were probably used to dress the skins of animals; no time to think of much of anything but food and protection and disposal of the dead when death did come: an existence which takes nature as it finds it, which does little or nothing to modify nature--all in all, a savage’s existence, and a very tough one. A man who spends his whole life following animals just to kill them to eat, or moving from one berry patch to another, is really living just like an animal himself.

THE FOOD-PRODUCING ECONOMY

Against this picture let me try to draw another--that of man’s life after food-production had begun. His meat was stored “on the hoof,” his grain in silos or great pottery jars. He lived in a house: it was worth his while to build one, because he couldn’t move far from his fields and flocks. In his neighborhood enough food could be grown and enough animals bred so that many people were kept busy. They all lived close to their flocks and fields, in a village. The village was already of a fair size, and it was growing, too. Everybody had more to eat; they were presumably all stronger, and there were more children. Children and old men could shepherd the animals by day or help with the lighter work in the fields. After the crops had been harvested the younger men might go hunting and some of them would fish, but the food they brought in was only an addition to the food in the village; the villagers wouldn’t starve, even if the hunters and fishermen came home empty-handed.

There was more time to do different things, too. They began to modify nature. They made pottery out of raw clay, and textiles out of hair or fiber. People who became good at pottery-making traded their pots for food and spent all of their time on pottery alone. Other people were learning to weave cloth or to make new tools. There were already people in the village who were becoming full-time craftsmen.

Other things were changing, too. The villagers must have had to agree on new rules for living together. The head man of the village had problems different from those of the chief of the small food-collectors’ band. If somebody’s flock of sheep spoiled a wheat field, the owner wanted payment for the grain he lost. The chief of the hunters was never bothered with such questions. Even the gods had changed. The spirits and the magic that had been used by hunters weren’t of any use to the villagers. They needed gods who would watch over the fields and the flocks, and they eventually began to erect buildings where their gods might dwell, and where the men who knew most about the gods might live.

WAS FOOD-PRODUCTION A “REVOLUTION”?

If you can see the difference between these two pictures--between life in the food-collecting stage and life after food-production had begun--you’ll see why Professor Childe speaks of a revolution. By revolution, he doesn’t mean that it happened over night or that it happened only once. We don’t know exactly how long it took. Some people think that all these changes may have occurred in less than 500 years, but I doubt that. The incipient era was probably an affair of some duration. Once the level of the village-farming community had been established, however, things did begin to move very fast. By six thousand years ago, the descendants of the first villagers had developed irrigation and plow agriculture in the relatively rainless Mesopotamian alluvium and were living in towns with temples. Relative to the half million years of food-gathering which lay behind, this had been achieved with truly revolutionary suddenness.

GAPS IN OUR KNOWLEDGE OF THE NEAR EAST

If you’ll look again at the chart (p. 111) you’ll see that I have very few sites and assemblages to name in the incipient era of cultivation and domestication, and not many in the earlier part of the primary village-farming level either. Thanks in no small part to the intelligent co-operation given foreign excavators by the Iraq Directorate General of Antiquities, our understanding of the sequence in Iraq is growing more complete. I shall use Iraq as my main yard-stick here. But I am far from being able to show you a series of Sears Roebuck catalogues, even century by century, for any part of the nuclear area. There is still a great deal of earth to move, and a great mass of material to recover and interpret before we even begin to understand “how” and “why.”

Perhaps here, because this kind of archeology is really my specialty, you’ll excuse it if I become personal for a moment. I very much look forward to having further part in closing some of the gaps in knowledge of the Near East. This is not, as I’ve told you, the spectacular range of Near Eastern archeology. There are no royal tombs, no gold, no great buildings or sculpture, no writing, in fact nothing to excite the normal museum at all. Nevertheless it is a range which, idea-wise, gives the archeologist tremendous satisfaction. The country of the hilly flanks is an exciting combination of green grasslands and mountainous ridges. The Kurds, who inhabit the part of the area in which I’ve worked most recently, are an extremely interesting and hospitable people. Archeologists don’t become rich, but I’ll forego the Cadillac for any bright spring morning in the Kurdish hills, on a good site with a happy crew of workmen and an interested and efficient staff. It is probably impossible to convey the full feeling which life on such a dig holds--halcyon days for the body and acute pleasurable stimulation for the mind. Old things coming newly out of the good dirt, and the pieces of the human puzzle fitting into place! I think I am an honest man; I cannot tell you that I am sorry the job is not yet finished and that there are still gaps in this part of the Near Eastern archeological sequence.

EARLIEST SITES OF THE VILLAGE FARMERS

So far, the Karim Shahir type of assemblage, which we looked at in the last chapter, is the earliest material available in what I take to be the nuclear area. We do not believe that Karim Shahir was a village site proper: it looks more like the traces of a temporary encampment. Two caves, called Belt and Hotu, which are outside the nuclear area and down on the foreshore of the Caspian Sea, have been excavated by Professor Coon. These probably belong in the later extension of the terminal era of food-gathering; in their upper layers are traits like the use of pottery borrowed from the more developed era of the same time in the nuclear area. The same general explanation doubtless holds true for certain materials in Egypt, along the upper Nile and in the Kharga oasis: these materials, called Sebilian III, the Khartoum “neolithic,” and the Khargan microlithic, are from surface sites, not from caves. The chart (p. 111) shows where I would place these materials in era and time.

Both M’lefaat and Dr. Solecki’s Zawi Chemi Shanidar site appear to have been slightly more “settled in” than was Karim Shahir itself. But I do not think they belong to the era of farming-villages proper. The first site of this era, in the hills of Iraqi Kurdistan, is Jarmo, on which we have spent three seasons of work. Following Jarmo comes a variety of sites and assemblages which lie along the hilly flanks of the crescent and just below it. I am going to describe and illustrate some of these for you.

Since not very much archeological excavation has yet been done on sites of this range of time, I shall have to mention the names of certain single sites which now alone stand for an assemblage. This does not mean that I think the individual sites I mention were unique. In the times when their various cultures flourished, there must have been many little villages which shared the same general assemblage. We are only now beginning to locate them again. Thus, if I speak of Jarmo, or Jericho, or Sialk as single examples of their particular kinds of assemblages, I don’t mean that they were unique at all. I think I could take you to the sites of at least three more Jarmos, within twenty miles of the original one. They are there, but they simply haven’t yet been excavated. In 1956, a Danish expedition discovered material of Jarmo type at Shimshara, only two dozen miles northeast of Jarmo, and below an assemblage of Hassunan type (which I shall describe presently).

THE GAP BETWEEN KARIM SHAHIR AND JARMO

As we see the matter now, there is probably still a gap in the available archeological record between the Karim Shahir-M’lefaat-Zawi Chemi group (of the incipient era) and that of Jarmo (of the village-farming era). Although some items of the Jarmo type materials do reflect the beginnings of traditions set in the Karim Shahir group (see p. 120), there is not a clear continuity. Moreover--to the degree that we may trust a few radiocarbon dates--there would appear to be around two thousand years of difference in time. The single available Zawi Chemi “date” is 8900 ± 300 B.C.; the most reasonable group of “dates” from Jarmo average to about 6750 ± 200 B.C. I am uncertain about this two thousand years--I do not think it can have been so long.

This suggests that we still have much work to do in Iraq. You can imagine how earnestly we await the return of political stability in the Republic of Iraq.

JARMO, IN THE KURDISH HILLS, IRAQ

The site of Jarmo has a depth of deposit of about twenty-seven feet, and approximately a dozen layers of architectural renovation and change. Nevertheless it is a “one period” site: its assemblage remains essentially the same throughout, although one or two new items are added in later levels. It covers about four acres of the top of a bluff, below which runs a small stream. Jarmo lies in the hill country east of the modern oil town of Kirkuk. The Iraq Directorate General of Antiquities suggested that we look at it in 1948, and we have had three seasons of digging on it since.

The people of Jarmo grew the barley plant and two different kinds of wheat. They made flint sickles with which to reap their grain, mortars or querns on which to crack it, ovens in which it might be parched, and stone bowls out of which they might eat their porridge. We are sure that they had the domesticated goat, but Professor Reed (the staff zoologist) is not convinced that the bones of the other potentially domesticable animals of Jarmo--sheep, cattle, pig, horse, dog--show sure signs of domestication. We had first thought that all of these animals were domesticated ones, but Reed feels he must find out much more before he can be sure. As well as their grain and the meat from their animals, the people of Jarmo consumed great quantities of land snails. Botanically, the Jarmo wheat stands about half way between fully bred wheat and the wild forms.

ARCHITECTURE: HALL-MARK OF THE VILLAGE

The sure sign of the village proper is in its traces of architectural permanence. The houses of Jarmo were only the size of a small cottage by our standards, but each was provided with several rectangular rooms. The walls of the houses were made of puddled mud, often set on crude foundations of stone. (The puddled mud wall, which the Arabs call _touf_, is built by laying a three to six inch course of soft mud, letting this sun-dry for a day or two, then adding the next course, etc.) The village probably looked much like the simple Kurdish farming village of today, with its mud-walled houses and low mud-on-brush roofs. I doubt that the Jarmo village had more than twenty houses at any one moment of its existence. Today, an average of about seven people live in a comparable Kurdish house; probably the population of Jarmo was about 150 people.

It is interesting that portable pottery does not appear until the last third of the life of the Jarmo village. Throughout the duration of the village, however, its people had experimented with the plastic qualities of clay. They modeled little figurines of animals and of human beings in clay; one type of human figurine they favored was that of a markedly pregnant woman, probably the expression of some sort of fertility spirit. They provided their house floors with baked-in-place depressions, either as basins or hearths, and later with domed ovens of clay. As we’ve noted, the houses themselves were of clay or mud; one could almost say they were built up like a house-sized pot. Then, finally, the idea of making portable pottery itself appeared, although I very much doubt that the people of the Jarmo village discovered the art.

On the other hand, the old tradition of making flint blades and microlithic tools was still very strong at Jarmo. The sickle-blade was made in quantities, but so also were many of the much older tool types. Strangely enough, it is within this age-old category of chipped stone tools that we see one of the clearest pointers to a newer age. Many of the Jarmo chipped stone tools--microliths--were made of obsidian, a black volcanic natural glass. The obsidian beds nearest to Jarmo are over three hundred miles to the north. Already a bulk carrying trade had been established--the forerunner of commerce--and the routes were set by which, in later times, the metal trade was to move.

There are now twelve radioactive carbon “dates” from Jarmo. The most reasonable cluster of determinations averages to about 6750 ± 200 B.C., although there is a completely unreasonable range of “dates” running from 3250 to 9250 B.C.! _If_ I am right in what I take to be “reasonable,” the first flush of the food-producing revolution had been achieved almost nine thousand years ago.

HASSUNA, IN UPPER MESOPOTAMIAN IRAQ

We are not sure just how soon after Jarmo the next assemblage of Iraqi material is to be placed. I do not think the time was long, and there are a few hints that detailed habits in the making of pottery and ground stone tools were actually continued from Jarmo times into the time of the next full assemblage. This is called after a site named Hassuna, a few miles to the south and west of modern Mosul. We also have Hassunan type materials from several other sites in the same general region. It is probably too soon to make generalizations about it, but the Hassunan sites seem to cluster at slightly lower elevations than those we have been talking about so far.