Changes [Dec 03, 2007]
Bibliography
Göbekli Tepe and Nevali Cori:
Geodätisches Institut, Universität Karlsruhe
Schmidt, Klaus; 2000. “Göbekli Tepe and the rock art of the Near East,” TÜBA-AR 3: 1-14.
Schmidt, K.; 2000. "Göbekli Tepe, southeastern Turkey. A preliminary report on the 1995-1999 excavations," Paleorient 26(1): 45-54.
Hauptmann, Harald; 1999. “Urfa Region” in Neolithic in Turkey. Mehmet Özdogan and Nezih Basgelen (eds.). Istanbul: Arkeoloji ve Sanat Yayinlari, 65-86.
Watkins, Trevor; 2004. “Architecture and theaters of memory in the Neolithic of Southwest Asia,” in Rethinking materiality: the engagement of mind with the material world. E. Demarrais et al. (eds.). University of Cambridge: Cambridge UK, 97-106.
Ain Ghazal:
Ain Ghazal Statue Project: Pre-Pottery Neolithic lime plaster statues from the site.
Preserving ancient statues from Jordan: Smithsonian site.
Grissom, C.A. 2000. "Neolithic statues from 'Ain Ghazal: construction and form" American Journal of Archaeology 104: 25-45.
Rollefson, G.O.; 1983. "Ritual and ceremony at Neolithic 'Ain Ghazal (Jordan)" Paleorient 9: 29-38.
Rollefson, G.O.; 1986. "Neolithic 'Ain Ghazal (Jordan)- Ritual and ceremony II" Paleorient 12: 45-51.
Rollefson, G.O.; 1984. "Early Neolithic statuary from 'Ain Ghazal (Jordan)" Mitteilungen der Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft 116: 185-192.
Rollefson, G.O. A. Simmons and Z. Kafafi; 1992. "Neolithic cultures at Ain Ghazal, Jordan" Journal of Field Archaeology 19/4: 443-70.
Akkermans, Peter M.M.G. and Glenn M. Schwartz; 2003. The archaeology of Syria: from complex hunter-gatherers to early urban societies (ca. 16,000-300 BC). Cambridge World Archaeology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 83ff.
You can download above the powerpoint presentation on Ain Ghazal and the lime plaster
WEEK 3 : LECTURE 1 : SEPT 18, 2006. FROM HUNTER-GATHERERS TO AGRICULTURALISTS: EARLY SETTLED COMMUNITIES
From hunter-gatherers to farming: The Agricultural revolution.
The question of the transition to settled life: understood as one of the milestones of human prehistory. Settled life (in contrast to the nomadic way of life earlier) came with: • domestication of plants, especially grains wheat, barley, rye as well as pulses such as peas and lentils from their wild species, * Fields: palaeoethnobotany/archaeobotany
• the domestication of animals, especially sheep and goat in the Near East, as well as pigs and cattle slightly later * Zooarchaeology,
• construction of more substantial buildings, some of which are identified with cultic/ritual functions,
• socialized way of life, • slow emergence of interregional trade, • gradual transition to pottery production.
(Gordon Childe’s 1936 coined “Neolithic Revolution”) A substantial transformation indeed. But this transition did not take place overnight, it took several millennia.
Anthony Giddens wrote that if the overall history of human existence on the face of the world is taken as a day, agriculture would have come at 11:56 pm and civilizations 11:57 pm. Archaeologists are now aware of the fact that small hunter-gatherer communities existed since the Upper Palaeolithic (35,000 BP), they had a very mobile lifestyle, campsites have been identified. Small human communities before agriculture are known from various parts of the world and are studied, especially through their remains of bone, shell, micro-lithic industry: stone tools, flints and especially drawings/paintings on the faces of rocks inside caves.
The study of these cave paintings especially from prehistoric Europe and Africa, dating back around 30,000 BC is a large field of study, but since the Near East lacks the spectacular examples of this rock art, we won’t go into discussion of this. We can relate to this perhaps with the wall paintings from Neolithic sites. What is fascinating is that we now know that these caves were not necessarily where the Palaeolithic communities lived, they were probably special sites of convergation related to ritual.
As we talked about the environment in the Near East, we mentioned that about 12,000 years ago, that is ca 10,000 BC, Mediterranean climate was much drier and cooler. Around this time, there was a global warming of the climate, while the sea level was rising at the end of the last ice age, and this amelioration of the weather, expansion and intensification of the plant and animal resources and living conditions have allowed human communities develop agriculture: cultivation and subsequent domestication of plants and animals. This is however nowadays understood as too easy and too simplistic an explanation: a rather complex set of factors must have led human societies develop agriculture, animal husbandry, settled life. Our earliest evidence for these early farming communities were in the Near East and this later rapidly spread to Asia, Europe and Africa.
The earliest agricultural villages are known from the foothill zones around Mesopotamia and especially in the Levant. This really is what is known as the fertile crescent where the indigenious species of wild grains were existent.
The pre-Neolithic and the pre-pottery Neolithic periods, we see that the earliest settled communities developed some elaborate flint-making techniques, which allowed them to adopt later the agricultural way of life. Obsidian, a shiny black volcanic flint-type stone, a volcanic glass, was the first item of trade perhaps, and probably circulated in place of money. It was extensively used to make objects extremely sharp. Its distribution in archaeological contexts in the Near Eastern sites for this period shows that they were widely traded.
What these communities were doing was just exploiting what the environment could offer them readily. In the early attempts for agricultural production, human beings cultivated wild species of both plants and animals, through selective harvesting and sowing of plants, and selective breeding of animals. Soon, they were going to realize that they can actually take better control of the environment, and cultivate plants that would serve their subsistence needs better. The Near East witnessed the domestication of the famous 4: barley and wheet, sheep and goat. But then soon with the agricultural revolution pig and cattle also became domesticated and became important components of settled life: while rye and pulses such as lentils, peas, chickpeas, vetch were added to the list.
Depending on the microregional character of where the early agriculturalists were living, a variety of strategies of agriculture and animal husbandry were developed, as illustrated by Roger Matthews’s examples from Abu Hureyra (Syria), Hallen Cemi (Turkey) and Umm Dabagiyah (Iraq).
The agricultural revolution had important consequences for our purposes: first permanent settlemens began to appear where early domestic architecture flourished. The settled life brought a range of new technologies: building, metalworking, pottery and stone carving.
From the first agricultural villages in the Neolithic period all the way to the appearance of urbanization and writing, human societies had a very basic material to work with: clay. And throughout several millennia, clay was always with these early farming societies, making pottery, building buildings, making figurines and eventually even writing on them as tablets. They used lumps of clay to seal their goods in their containers and they marked them with their seals. Clay mould were used in the earliest metal technologies. Throughout the early Mesopotamian history, clay had a significant role as the basic material for all everyday technologies and therefore always loaded with symbolisms of the earth’s fertility. Also basket-making, textile weaving..
I will not give you a detailed survey of all the pre-Neolithic sites that have been excavated, I will just show you a few slides to illustrate the fact that this transition from the hunter-gatherer, cave-dwelling communities to the agriculturalist village settlements was a rather slow and gradual one, but an important one.
On the other hand, there are three very important Neolithic sites in the Near East, of considerable interest for our purposes: Jericho in the Jordan valley. Khirokitea in Southern Cyprus, and Catalhoyuk in the Konya plain in Central Anatolian plateau. Because of our limited time I chose to talk about Catalhoyuk in detail as the most important Neolithic site, most extensively excavated, and a site that revealed perhaps the most interesting evidence for the Neolithic period architecture (this we will do on Wednesday and Friday). There are two interesting sites that are currently being excavated in Southeastern Turkey: Göbeklitepe and Nevalı Çori I will touch upon since they provide some recent and fascinating evidence for stone monuments and ceremonial architecture.
Göbeklitepe
Now I want to direct your attention to the two newly excavated sites just published in the last ten years or so: and I want to talk about them because of the spectacular results of monumental megalithic architecture they have, as evidence of intensive artisanal labour, what David Wengrow calls “aesthetic labor”. The first is Göbeklitepe in Southeastern Turkey, a German Archaeological Institute in Istanbul project since 1995. The site dates from ca. 9000 BC, in the time period that is termed Pre-Pottery Neolithic B.
It is located on a very high elevation, built on a rocky limestone plateau above the famous Harran plain grasslands that spread out to the south of it, and the forested Taurus range to the North.The limestone bedrock was used as a quarry in the Neolithic settlement. Production site of stone flint tools.
The archaeologists excavated a series of monumental megalithic buildings, leaving the people studying the Neolithic period in the Near East in astonishment. On the southern slope of the mound they excavated a building complex, which they called Schlangenpfeliergebäude, the Snake-pillar-building. The walls are well preserved up to 1 or sometimes 2 m. in height built completely of stone, and in the middle of the space a series of T-shaped megalithic pillars with images carved on them. These pillars would then probably support either stone slabs or more likely timber beams. The floors of these buildings were terazzo-like pavements. This particular building was filled up with earth, i.e. perhaps ritually buried in the Neolithic period and from the debris several pieces of sculpture and relief fragments were found. The building is called Snake-pillar-building because in one of the most impressive reliefs on the pillars, 17 snakes in an intervowen state and a quadroped, probably a ram are depicted. On Pillar 2, we see a bucranium and the row of a bull, a fox and a crane. On Pillar 9, a fox. Pillar 12 very peculiar composition with a series of birds, a boar, and a fox which remained buried by a later floor.
The other building that was excavated so far is the Löwenpfeilergebäude, the Lion-pillar-building, built on top of the SE peak of the mound. Slightly later than the previous complex. A rectangular construction of 6.5 m by 4.4. m. Preserved up to 2 m. (ca 6 feet), also ith pillars. 4 pillars were attested especially with representations of lions.
Settlers of Göbeklitepe were understood as hunter-gatherers, and among the organic remains from the site so far only wild grains were attested, no evidence of agriculture yet. The animals that were attested as being hunted are especially gazelle, aurochs (an extinct long-large horned wild ox that is believed to be the ancestor of domesticated cattle), boar, wild goat, onager, red deer and fox.
The excavators argue that no serious domestic activities were found in these buildings, and that it is clear that it was not simple a Neolithic settlement with a series of ritual buildings, but the whole site served as a ritual function. It was probably a mountain sanctuary, as its excavator referred to it, housing frequernt communal gatherings. Now this has to be tested since not all of the site has been investigated. But it perfectly makes sense to think of this megalithic ceremonial space in terms of a regional assembly place for the hunter-gatherer communities of fairly large area around Göbekli tepe. On the western plateau a round structure was sunk into the bedrock, with a polished floor, podiums with recesses for pillars. The overall layout of the architecture suggests cultic use.
The impressive animal-centered iconography of the monuments, suggest a cultic symbolism geared towards hunting. Perhaps comparable to megalithic monuments of Malta, also considered Neolithic but several millennia later (4500-3300 BC).
Archaeologists suggest that such a ritual and feasting site may be seen as a pulling factor to bring together human groups and collaborate in agriculture and animal domestication, the ritual site acting as a site of social cooperation, socio-economic competition, a site where early social hierarchies may have started to form.
Nevali Çori
Göbeklitepe is not unique in the area, another very interesting site nearby to the Northwest. This site gives us a better sense of the Neolithic architecture. Five early Neolithic Levels are excavated here, there is stratigraphy Nevalı Çori I-V. Dated radiocarbon dates around 8400-8100 BC. University of Heidelberg excavations since 1983, the site was flooded under Ataturk Dam waters in 1992.
Two large monumental structures understood as cult buildings were excavated and in addition to those 29 houses. The houses are essentially freestanding rectangular structures in plan and divided inside. The walls are also of limestone but covered with thick mortar of mud. The houses were rebuilt with same plan over an over again in Levels I-IV using the building material from the debris of the earlier structure. The houses were built on carefully built foundation platforms for which large rectangular stone blocks were used.
The cult buildings, monumentality, square dimesions and elaborate architectural technologies. The interior of the cult buildings were plastered and coated with a layer of white-washed clay which had traces of painting in black and red. A bench of quarry stone bonded with clay encircled the space. It was 1 m. deep. 13 monolithic T-shaped pillars like the ones we know from Göbeklitepe were lined along the walls also supporting the bench. Probably 2 more pillars in the middle. Terazzo floors. On a later phase a rectangular podium was set on the stone bench to the East side between the T pillars. A large sculpture of a bird was buried under the podium. A series of monumental sculpture was found in the cult building from its two different phases, including a human head and various animals, some probably serving as anthropomorphic architectonic elements.
About 700 anthropomorphic and zoomorphic small figurines in stone, prominently from the houses not the cult buildings.
Head with snake-limestone/Pillar with female head and bird perched on her head-limestone-height of head 29 cm./Hybrid creature-limestone, height 23 cm. /Composite figure –limestone- height approx 1 m.
The organic remains from the site suggets that the inhabitants of Nevalı Çori has already developed agriculture with cereals and legumes, especially lentils, peas. A variety of gathering and hunting also an important component of the diet, pistacious, grapes, almonds. Hunting gazelles, aurochs, wild boar, wild sheep, red deer, goats, wild donkey. Also a lot of birds especially gray crane in the watery lake environments in the vicinity.
AinGhazal2.pps