Emergence and Dispersal of Neolithic Lifeways

During the past decades, there have been several new field projects taking place in the southeastern and western parts of Anatolia, regions where until then our knowledge of the Neolithic Period was extremely limited. The almost sudden inflow of new information derived from these previously poorly investigated regions has been drawing a picture different from all conventional views, even necessitating to reconsider what is implied by the term Neolithic. In this respect, now it seems timely to reconsider cultural processes on the emergence, development and dispersal of Neolithic way of living. Most ground-breaking results have come from the upper Euphrates-Tigris basin that now features many cultural attributes that were previously conceived as the markers of later societies, such as rigid and seemingly stratified social structuring, imposing sanctuaries, phallic symbolism, elite competitiveness and innovativeness. In spite of all previous assumptions, subsistence pattern of earliest communities of this region is now understood to be primarily based on food gathering and hunting with low-level experimenting with wild cereals, who became real farmers only by the end of Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (PPNB). It is of interest that end of PPNB also marks the collapse of the social system, through time triggering the dispersal of Neolithic culture from the core area of its origin to other geographies. This collapse should also be considered the setting for new cultural transformation, the farming village communities of Anatolia. The Neolithic dispersal is now clearly understood to be a multifarious event lasting more than a millennium in a diversity of modalities ranging from endemic migration to segregated movements, also at times taking place as cultural interactions and/or transfer of commodities and of knowledge. The chapter will be mainly a conspectus of what is pictured by the recent evidence

Archaeology · Biological dispersal · Biology · Geography · Sociology · Archaeology and ancient environmental studies · Demography · Ecology · Pleistocene-Era Hominins and Archaeology

• Shifting foodways in Central Anatolia

  Open Access•Jaroslav Řídký, Daniel Pilař et al.•Journal of Archaeological Science…•2026

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