Neolithisation in southwest Asia – the path to modernity
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12639252 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Trevor Watkins (0000-0002-6491-9847) |
| Year | 2006 |
| Volume | 33 |
| Pages | 71-88 |
| Publication date | 2006-12-31 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Documenta Praehistorica (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1408-967X • E-ISSN: 1854-2492 |
| Publisher | University of Ljubljana (PUBLISHER • SI) |
| DOI | 10.4312/dp.33.9 |
| OpenAlex | W1964191711 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 7 |
| References cited | 27 |
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 southwest Asia early in the Neolithic, and not earlier. The second concerns the usually opposed processualist 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 of food resources coincided with the emergence of fully symbolic cognitive and cultural faculties. The former fed more mouths, and led to the adoption of farming practices that further intensified 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 expansion 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
Agriculture · Archaeology · Economic geography · Economic growth · Economy · Ethnology · Geography · Human settlement · Modernity · Political science · Productivity · Archaeology and ancient environmental studies · History · Language and cultural evolution · Law · Pacific and Southeast Asian Studies
Arquitetura do rito
On One More Concept of “Neolithic” Based on the Postmodernism Approach
‘Far and wide’
The first occupation of the mountains
Networks of Knowledge, Materials, and Practice in the Neolithic Zagros
Do We Finally Know What the Neolithic Is
Colour Symbolism in the Prehistoric Architecture of Central Anatolia and Raman Spectroscopic Investigation of Red Ochre in Chalcolithic Çatalhöyük
The Domestication of the Human Species
The Domestication of Europe
The Symbolic Construction of Community
Processing of wild cereal grains in the Upper Palaeolithic revealed by starch grain analysis
Epipalaeolithic (19,000 BP) cereal and fruit diet at Ohalo II, Sea of Galilee, Israel
The Agricultural Revolution
Les bâtiments communautaires de Jerf el Ahmar et Mureybet Horizon PPNA (Syrie).
Origins and ecological effects of early domestication in Iran and the Near East
Post-Pleistocene Adaptations
The Symbolic Construction of Community
Not By Genes Alone
Radiocarbon dating of Ohalo II
Göbekli Tepe, Southeastern Turkey. A Preliminary Report on the 1995-1999 Excavations
Houses and the Changing Residential Unit
The Prehistory of Southwestern Iran
Beyond Boundaries
Rethinking the architecture
Building houses, framing concepts, constructing worlds
Neocortex size as a constraint on group size in primates
Archaeology and Epistemology
The oldest ever brush hut plant remains from Ohalo II, Jordan Valley, Israel (19,000 BP)
The Pleistocene to Holocene Transition and Human Economy in Southwest Asia
Archaeological Narratives and Other Ways of Telling
Neocortex Size, Group Size, and the Evolution of Language
New Subsistence Data and Human Remains from the Earliest Levantine Epipalaeolithic
| Citations per year | 0.47 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2011 - 2025 (15) |
| Highly cited | No |