The Beginnings of Agriculture in the Eastern Mediterranean

Mediterranean she's excavated on the islands of Crete Cyprus and in Greece and also in Egypt she began her career at the University of Wisconsin where she received a BA in archaeology and anthropology in 1972 she and I were office mates at the University of Minnesota during the 1970s where she pursued the program in ancient studies and I pursued literary matters and also worried about our classes and our students and whether we would ever get jobs Jolie has done some very very important work on the plant remains and the history of botanical remains in the eastern Mediterranean did most of her work at the beginning of her career at frankly cave in Greece and has completed a work on the Paleo ethnobotany of Frank the cave she's now engaged in a second book project called the archeology of plants which is a larger work I think that's all I'd like to say by way of preamble except that everyone on this side of the room will probably enjoy what they see more if they move to the others again they don't want to move they want to say okay after much ado we're ready to start I don't trip over a cord no I am delighted to be here to address this diverse group of people and very grateful to Madeline and the others who have worked so hard over the past Madeline and I started talking about this about two years ago so it's been a long time in coming I'm also very delighted I have to say to be back in the Midwest where I grew up and went to school the East Coast has nothing on the Midwest as far as I'm concerned but the most important area for the origins of serial and like you agriculture Taurus Mountains here between southern Syria and along the LaMontagne coast Jordan Valley etc okay now most people when I tell them I'm a paleo ethno botanist sort of give me a blank stare and change the subject so I'd like to first of all start by telling you a little bit about what it is I do and how we study the problems like the origins of agriculture in the discipline of archaeology which is really a multidisciplinary discipline now plant remains are preserved in archaeological sites in a number of different ways the principal material that I deal with the principal kind of preservation in this part of the world is by carbonization the plant remains principally seeds wood and other very dense parts of the plants have been burned to the point where they haven't turned ash they're not completely burned but they've turned to little lumps of carbon primarily and just like little pieces of charcoal if the burning process is not too severe not too rapid the seeds will not be too badly distorted so you can identify a wheat seed as a wheat seed or a barley seed as barley seed and anybody in here who's ever looked at Wheaton and I imagine there must be some of you in here from this campus well know that there is a difference there's a morphological difference between the two they they actually do have different shapes different sizes different characteristics okay so when I collect this material from an archeological site and we do this by dumping the dirt that we excavate into water the carbonized material floats on the surface of the water and we can collect it in in large quantities it happened to be there in large quantities and once it's dried I sort through it with a microscope and I compare the seeds that I find and the wood charcoal that I find with modern comparative material modern examples of these different species that we're finding in order to identify them we can't always identify everything to the species level I should emphasize that we're getting better and better at it with more and more different kinds of techniques we're getting into chemical techniques which I will briefly mention tonight to distinguish one species from another we use scanning electron microscopes in some cases to look at my new details little tiny bumps and things on the surface of the seeds to help us identify them to the species level more often than not however there's enough distortion or enough significant parts of the plant are missing and very often plants are identified by their flowers and their leaves as opposed to their seeds that at a species level it might be very difficult or impossible to identify some of these little black blobs as I will show you tonight they're not pretty things we're not talking about gold and pretty pots we're talking about little black blobs basically to me they're beautiful and beauty is in the eye of the beholder and I hope to to instill a little bit of interest in you tonight in this kind of topic and give you a little bit of insight into how archaeologists and botanists have been working together over the years to solve one of one of the greatest events really or processes is a more appropriate word in human history and that's the origins of Agriculture so to start out could I have the lights please Mahlon to start out we have as you know I've been staring at these for five minutes you know what these are we have the the geography of the of the Near East here Turkey and the Levant the Taurus Mountains here are important mountain ranges along the LaVon teen coasts as you will see become important in the process in the ecology of these plants and if we get further south here now we get into the Negev desert the Sinai etc the slide on your left here on your right beg your pardon is a depiction of the modern vegetation Alone's in this area and I put this up here just to give you an idea of the complexity of the vegetation Alone's in this part of the world it's important obviously if we're going to study plants and the development of plants and changes in plants we need to know something of their habitats their ecology and it's a difficult problem in this part of the world first of all just because of its vastness an area but also because of the mountain ranges the large vast plains high plateaus etc it provides a very diverse kind of topography for the different plant plant life there so in order to this is the modern vegetation which we can look at today and it's there we go out there we say ok this is what it's growing here this is a step this is a desert this is a forest and identify the plants but we want to now translate this back into prehistory ok and I want to talk to you a little bit about how that is done as well tonight because it becomes important in understanding how we know about where the plants existed that we're all one other little bit of preamble here definitions it's very important to understand what I mean by domesticated versus wild plants species I'm going to be talking about tonight domesticated wheat and barley and various legumes are domesticated because they have undergone a genetic change oftentimes this is only a single point on a chromosome that mutates and causes the dispersal mechanism of the wild plant to change so that the plant can't disperse its seeds when it's ripe wild plants have this ability obviously or or they would never be able to propagate domesticated plants by definition have lost this property they need human intervention someone to take the seeds and stick them into the ground because the plants for the most part can't do that themselves and the genetic changes that plants have undergone are what the botanists have been studying for a long time now and in addition to the changes in the dispersal mechanism there are also certain morphological changes in the seeds themselves that take place which allow us to distinguish them a seed of a wild wheat for example from the seed of a hoie of a domesticated wheat okay there are other parts of the plants as well that we study I don't want to get into too much detail on that tonight what I'm mainly interested in is conveying to you the the cooperation that has been going on over the years between archaeologists and botanists in studying this this problem the whole problem of the origins of Agriculture has been discussed for about a hundred and fifty years now by by botanists primarily in the early years including de candolle from from France who published treatises back in the 1850s Nikolay Vavilov a Russian botanist did a tremendous study looking at where the wild species of plants that were ultimately domesticated exist naturally or existed during his time they still exist in some cases in these areas today and he identified in a in a treatise he he published in the early 20th century for the Near East the plants wheat barley lentils etc he identified the Near East in general this part of the Near East as a center for domestication okay this is the early 20th century we're talking about here but his studies of ecology of these plants the habitats of these wild predecessors that still can be found in these areas today led him to conclude and others to agree with him that that this was one of the centers for domestication there are other centers around the world for other plants obviously plants like corn or tomatoes domesticated in the new world rice etc domesticated Far East so domestication of plants this whole process didn't take place just once and then spread out from from a center it took place in a number of different places around the world with different plants and may have spread from those centers out you know in a smaller region so we've been studying this plant this problem of the origins of Agriculture botanists looking at what the progenitors were of these wild of these domesticated plants and where they existed since since the middle of the nineteenth century archeologists began to address this question as well early in the twenty century with people like keyboard childhood you see here teddy bear who who is best known for promoting an idea which in fact was not his own but had already been published earlier by someone else the idea that agriculture began at the end of the last ice age at the end of the Pleistocene as a result of a drought that that the the the earth the rainfall decreased to such an extent that there was a massive drought in South West Asia and this resulted in people congregating around water holes and Oasis it's it's commonly known as the Oasis theory and that the the the juxtaposition of the people the wild plants and wild animals resulted in people becoming more familiar with the way these animals and plants reproduced and ultimately tamed the animals bred the animals domesticated them and domesticated the plants as well this is the Oasis theory or propinquity theory that became quite popular in archaeology and was was sort of an accepted theory for many many years and with aggregate with archaeological research in the Near East that was taking place early on with with a number of sites like or which unfortunately honest evidence right down here and various other sites like Jericho for example of being excavated where they were finding early Neolithic occupation very early civilizations earlier than had been found before it would began to appear as if child might have been right they didn't have the environmental data to go along with this the archaeologists were were merely excavating sites and building up pictures of cultures but it appeared that there were some significant things going on here in in the Near East in in the early neolithic period about 8,000 years or so ago okay in the 1950s and 60s archaeologists from university of chicago robert Braidwood leading them went off to actually test this theory this Oasis theory to find out if in fact it was true and this really began the intensive research into the origins of agriculture in the Near East bringing together archaeology and and botany Braidwood went off to the Zagros Mountains here and excavated a number of sites the important one being here at Ali cosh a cave site that had a number of layers of occupation this is the area that he was who was digging in the Zagros Mountains here in the foothills of these mountains is where where the site of ali cosh is okay it's a but following the plane of the afraid he's in the Tigris River what raids were discovered at all in Kosh was in fact that there were domesticated tweet and barley there emmert wheat and two-row barley and domesticated animals domesticated sheep and goat fairly early on the dates he was getting from the site were about 9,000 years ago between nine thousand eighty five hundred years ago and this was a significant find but in addition to finding the plants and animals on these sites he brought along palynology steeple who study environmental change through looking at the changes in pollen sequences through time by doing cores and in lake beds etc and building up a picture of changes in vegetation through time and amongst the the palynology that went out here are various people from the Netherlands villain vans ice Tet cetera herb right from the University of Minnesota various people have done pollen studies in this area over the years and it's primarily as the direct result of of braids woods initial work here that we have as much pollen study done which one doesn't work as we as we do this is a pollen core that was done up in the Zagros Mountains and this is this is what it looks like when it's all done this is these are the data that they that they produce and each one of these columns here this very wide one here and all of these little narrow ones represent changes in the percentage of pollen of particular species of trees through times starting down here the date down here is about 21,000 years ago and the data at the top this would be the modern level the most recent pollen deposited in this particular lake bed okay and so this diagram here represents changes in the percentage of oak trees in the region from almost no oak this is at the end of the last ice age conditions being very cold very dry unfavorable for the growth of trees the end of the Ice Age right about here and warmer wetter conditions and expansion of oak forest in the Saunders Mountains okay another important part of this diagram is this one over here which represents the non-woody plants the non arboreal plants grasses and other herbaceous vegetation and we can see that in the late pleistocene here at the end of the last ice age we have predominance of herbaceous vegetation plants adapted to these very cold dry conditions and then as as the temperatures warm up as rainfall increases the these plants retreat as the forest expands okay so there's a obviously a connection between these two things and all connected with environment so it's these kinds of studies these pollen studies by botanists palynology siding with coming along with the studies by archaeologists in these areas that ultimately resulted in the kinds of answers we now have to the question of when and where and how and why did agriculture first begin in that long story short is what I want to talk to you about tonight now in in all of these power diagrams the pollen diagrams like the one that I just showed you and all of the other ones that were on the previous the previous map the palynology civ been able to put together rough and these are very rough vegetation maps of the region through time this is one dated to the very end of the Pleistocene the very end of the of the glacial period where we have predominance of what is called forest step or step along the coast and up around the Anatolian plateau this is open forest and with few trees and and mostly herbaceous vegetation in a lot of area for those areas where we have pollen data of predominantly just step or or in the south here desert or desert steppe okay so a relatively sparse vegetation in in this part especially in the Levant here we have a little bit of forested area in the southern Levant at this time but mostly it's it's very open forest at most and that would be up in the mountains where where the rainfall was greater and then for a step and in step in this area this is the area we're going to be talking about primarily for the rest of the evening we don't have many pollen diagrams any pollen diagrams for this particular area here in northern Syria except one from right over about here and it should be noted that pollen data is regional but only regional within a hundred kilometers or so around the area where the pollen was taken from so we can't expand these kind of data to say well all of the Near East look like this it's only those areas around the sites where the pollen was recovered okay what archaeologists then working continuing to work in this area have discovered is that in addition to the early Neolithic sites with early domesticated plants beneath those sites are layers that contain premia lithic occupation and studies done surveys now that have been carried out throughout the Levant have shown that that the amount of pre Neolithic occupation in this area the period covering roughly 12,000 to 11,000 years ago 12,000 to 10,000 years ago actually was a period of fairly dense habitation in this part of the world when the forests were beginning to expand at the at the end of the Pleistocene it was getting warmer and whether the deer population gazelle populations that lived in these environments were expanding and populations were expanding as well all the botanical resources these people could exploit we're expanding with the expansion of the forest amongst the sites where we see this kind of progression an expansion is the site of Jericho here here's the mound the south side of the mound of Jericho here with a big excavation trench in it this was done by Kathleen Kenyon back in there in the 50s here and Jericho of course is a site that was occupied for thousands of years which is why we have this great buildup of sediment here the lowest layers amongst the lowest layers we have this kind of deposit here these are Mesolithic layers pre Neolithic layers layers deposited living floors deposited by people who were hunters and gatherers hunting wild animals primarily gazelle in this area and collecting wild plants and Jericho in particular we don't have any wild plants preserved in these levels unfortunately but we do have other sites data to the same time period where we do have plant remains in addition to plant remains and I'll talk about those in a second we also have the tools that people used to process those plant remains which gives us a little bit of a clue as to as to what they might have been using tools like this big grinding stones appear at this time in the Mesolithic these are typically used and continued to be used right through the neolithic and and onward for grinding grain making flour or or pounding grain to make bulgor or couscous that type of thing this is a husking tray here actually a wooden one which is preserved carbonized very unusual fine scored bowl of wood and they would put the grain in there and shake it around and husk adore it or Thresh it to remove the husk the wild grains have have are tightly enclosed in the husk and in the early domesticated form are tightly closed in the husk as well so you need these kinds of processing tools other kinds of tools the most important ones here are things like this long blades especially these types of tools which are called sickle blades that were hafted on two handles not this is not a not a handle but it might have looked like this in fact with a slit down one side and these blades stuck in there being stuck in with a bitumen of some sort and those kinds of things had actually been found on some sites and used as a sickle to cut the grain okay in other cases the grain might have been beaten in two baskets with a stick because the grain the wild grain comes off the head very easily as it ripens and would have shattered into into baskets quite easily okay so these are some of the some of the trial types that we find at this premium that this is hunting and gathering period and some of the plant remains we find are things like wild pistachio this is a modern growing wild pistachio plant not to be confused with the domesticated pistachio nuts that they died pink and covered with salt these are carbonized nutlets of wild goose - oh that's what they look like these particular plants come from frankly I don't have examples from from the Near East itself but they're the same they look the same and just to give you give you an example of what what the difference is but people always ask me well what a what a wild pistachios look like there are modern pistachios you are all familiar with those these are the wild ones there they taste like turpentine and they're still used today there you can buy bags of them roasted in the markets in Cyprus and they are they are typically added to meat dishes various different kinds of sausages etc so they are still utilized today and the pistachio bush the number of different species have different uses of various kinds they produce a gummy substance one of the species does that is used as chewing gum or they use user to fill cavities various things wide variety of its all-purpose plant so those are the wild pistachios other kinds of plants that are found and remember the forest it's expanding here we're getting more trees in here wild pears these again are from frothy but the same plants are found in the near East this is a whole carbonized wild pear here and and then the seeds of the plant as well have been found and perhaps one of the more important plants along with the cereals are wild legumes and lentils are amongst the earliest legumes and the most predominant legumes that are that are utilized by these people those are some examples I told you these weren't pretty okay now this is an example of some of the cereals that have been found these actually were found on a on a Mesolithic site in the Near East the site of Abu Hurairah which I will be mentioning a number of times tonight it's probably the most important site so far excavated to talk about the origins of Agriculture in the Near East because of the quantity and quality of the plant remains preserved on this site from these Mesolithic levels and then subsequently from neolithic levels so we have in one site both the wild and the domestic plants showing up these are or at least were initially identified as wild einkorn wheat and one of the one of the primary species of wheat that was first domesticated and they're very common in Near Eastern sites where we have Mesolithic plant remains preserved they're native to the area most recently the archaeologist Gordon Hillman from the Institute of Archaeology in London who's been studying these plans has gone together with a chemists we've had botanists coming together with archaeologists we now have chemists coming together to help identify some of these seeds which he was not sure were iron corn and he thought maybe they were wild rye because he has domesticated rye in the Neolithic levels and yet he hadn't found many grains of wild rye in the Mesolithic levels so they they discovered that you could take a single grain of the of this material here one of these grains and process it and remove vestiges of the fatty acids that are preserved even a carbonized seed that's 10,000 years old there's enough remains of fatty acids in there that they could analyze those and identify the the type of fatty acid the quantity of the different types of fatty acid in it and identify that to a particular species of wheat in this case were rye okay and this is the kind of graph they would get out they did this with a technique called infrared spectroscopy you don't need to remember that it won't be a quiz but they they ended up with a graph graphs like these these are modern seeds of wild rye here and this is the graph for the water for the seeds from the site of our era and there they're virtually the same okay the graphs for the einkorn are quite different I don't have any half pictures of those take my word for it they are quite different and from a nearby site that is a slightly later site near a barrera we have domesticated not this is not domesticated but a different species of wild rye here's that species here modern craft and here's the graph from the ancient species so even even my new traces of of chemicals in these seeds can are now being analyzed and this is a process that we could use for for all of those problem seeds where we can't tell one species from another and there are many of those this is just an example here of the the wild ride plant that would have been growing in the area today and just to clue you in to what the sites I'm talking about our era is there in northern Syria right on the Euphrates River on the other side of Arabian is right there but our River it dates from about 11,000 to 10,000 BC BP in these early early levels don't worry ant you Jericho important sites during this period Mesolithic period spread throughout this whole area even down into into the south into the Negev desert in the Mesolithic period so there was intensive occupation increase in population and apparently sedentary occupation and this is very important it was an important step in the process of the origins of Agriculture that these people move from being mobile small bands of hunters and gatherers following herds of gazelle perhaps and collecting wild plants where they could find them as they must have done throughout the Pleistocene to this period when we're getting warmer wetter conditions increasing forests and areas and more lush vegetation increase in these various wild resources and an expansion of population in settled communities building houses and staying in the same place year-round that process this settling settling down eliminated to a large extent all of the different taboos that people tend to have when their mobile populations which allow them and to increase the population all the taboos that go along with keeping the population low and keeping a low birth weight birth rate were were disbanded with because they they were now in areas with good resources that they could exploit throughout the year so they didn't have to be mobile anymore so to give you an idea of the kinds of areas that these people were expanding into let me just take you down the don the levant we're moving down the Orontes valley which basically travels down here and then down the Jordan Valley down the Dead Sea and into the into the negatives into the Negev desert we have the Iraqis and it was this kind of area in the foothills of these areas where we were getting the expansion of this forest ok so we just have to imagine that there's no plants there than you actually see it's hard to imagine that in some of these pictures of course because there are no plants in some of these pictures today obviously these areas have been heavily worked over both by farmers and herders intensively cultivating and and then grazing their flocks in these areas and that along with various climatic changes etc have developed in in massive deforestation over the thousands of years since the end of the Pleistocene and and massive erosion so that Hills that once had all of the sediment you see here now our bear or nearly there all of a sediment has eroded down been carried down by the rivers and and deposited on the floodplains okay so here we are the southern Jordan Valley here the the Dead Sea the Dead Sea here at the edge of the Dead Sea and moving down south in the Jordan Valley and onto the into the Negev desert where they can with irrigation just on the edge of the desert they can cultivate but then we get into very barren sand dune wasteland scrub vegetation stepping vegetation in in some places okay now in order to trace the changes in this vegetation through time as we get into this period when we first begin to seek domesticated plants we want to know what was going on with the vegetation what where were these plants and how was the climate in the environment changing did that have an effect as child had thought did that have an effect on the process of domestication and for a long time as a result of the studies done by braid woods team in his Irish mountains and all of these other pollen diagram studies done in the near East it looked as if there wasn't a drought at the end of the Pleistocene we didn't have this whole drying up in people gathering around Oh a season and domesticating the plants and animals that were in the area so that theory was was pretty much thrown out and archaeologists went after other types of theories the whole idea of population expansion is one of those theories that they settled permanently and population expanded to the extent that they they over exploited the area that they had to exploit around their settlement than were forced because of this over-exploitation to artificially increase the plants that they had by deliberately cultivating them assuming of course that they knew how to cultivate they knew that you had to take the seed and stick it in the ground in order for you to get a new crop so a population expansion over population it has been a prominent theory in the origins of Agriculture for a long time in various spin-offs and and convolutions of that theory have been developed and disbanded over the years in in most recent study in the study that it's been published only in the last year new pollen data from Lake Ulla which is in use in northern northern Jordan Valley this is an old diagram but a new diagram covering the same time period has shown that indeed there was probably a period of about a thousand years between 11,000 and 10,000 years ago when there was a period of drought and we can just see this on this diagram right here it may not look like much to you but this is a period where we had at the end of the Pleistocene you get the expanding trees here these are deciduous oak trees for the most part expanding increasing in quantity and then we've got this little blip we got another little blip there with several little blips here this represents probably a period of drought it's difficult to say that from this diagram I admit but the other diagram which I didn't have a copy of to photograph shows us much more clearly because it has a much dieter much better dated section right there so between eleven thousand ten thousand we now have panel logical evidence for this part of the Near East that there probably was a now the effect of that is seen in the plant remains from this site of our era that I have already mentioned prior to this period the plants that they were getting more of these things like pistachios and pears and various cereals that I mentioned along with a very wide variety of plants from not only the steppe but the but the the river the river vegetation and up into the foothills where you get forests and forest steppe areas with quite a diverse number of plants with with this drought at this period and time on this site a lot of those pistachios and and pears and a lot of that woody vegetation that they had been exploiting decreases and all the steppe expecially that they were exploiting the species that grow in drier conditions begin to increase and this goes along with this kind of pollen data and in the gob the pollen diagram from up near the site of Opera is about 150 kilometers away from the site itself we have this period right in here ok here we have the end of the Pleistocene with increasing trees and then we have this sharp decrease right here ok and that represents a period of time when we have this drought ok it's right here sorry this reason entry zone Zee it's what they are equating with this period from about a thousand years eleven thousand to ten thousand years ago when we had this drought so we have we have data both from the pollen evidence and from the plant remains from the archaeological site that begin to corroborate one another and also then begin to corroborate the original idea that there was a drought at the end seeing that that might have resulted in the domestication of plants now the effect of this drought would have been an increase in this kind of vegetation not these vegetation but this vegetation stopping vegetation this is this is pretty degraded step here is almost desert but very low growing shrubby vegetation little washer than this expanded now at this period and so the the number of trees available and the resources in these forests that they have been exploiting disappeared it's it's as these step and and enforced step areas expand this drier vegetation area expands and the deciduous forest decreases that we we begin to see the change first of all remember we had sedentary populations and expanding populations at this time every site that has this Mesolithic occupation is abandoned at this period of time okay I don't we don't know where they went we're still looking for those sites that have people in them at this point in time but all of these sites were abandoned at the end of this of this period for several hundred years all right not a very long period of time and then they were reoccupied Jericho was abandoned Alvar era was abandoned several of the other big sites let me see this time period were abandoned and when there reoccupied they have domesticated plants so they went off someplace and domesticated plants and then came back with them and we're still wondering quite where where would they have gone well one way to figure out where they would have gone is to follow where the forest went and where the the ecotone between the forest steppe and the steppe went where did that move to because that's where these plants the domesticated plants or the wild progenitors of the domesticated plants would have gone okay just to run through very briefly the kinds of plants that were domesticated this is wild einkorn we hear one of the one of the primary wheat species that was domesticated this is what the domesticated einkorn wheat looks like the shape of the seed is different you can see that from where you're sitting but there's a distinct difference in the shapes of the seat so we can tell when we have domesticated species now where were those plants well this is the natural modern distribution of wild einkorn predominantly in this area here okay on the Anatolian plateau around the foothills of Azha grows and the Taurus Mountains and then vestiges of them today are represented by all these dots these may be sagittal habitats they may not be actually areas where the plant was native but as has been introduced perhaps in prehistoric times but may not be part of their natural distribution okay so this is one area where we have the wild plant existing in modern times their distribution in ancient times may have been broader than this we have to remember the amount of environmental destruction that is going on over the years so we're not looking at its maximum extent necessarily but that that art that Rob Rose toros art becomes important here's the wild rye flash einkorn from our era that I mentioned before and these are the domesticated seeds that show up in the site in the Neolithic period just to give you an idea of the difference what we see as people to botanist this is what we're looking at and the difference in these two so should have happened was that we went from sedentary foragers hunting and gathering these wild plants and animals increase in population size and then we had in conjunction with that a period of drought and a decrease not only as a result of over exploitation but a decrease as a result of a climatic change now to the abandonment of most of these sites these people probably went off following those those resources that they had been utilizing and and then resettle in sites that we have not yet found and cults began cultivating they had all the tools they knew how to do it and and began the cultivation to artificially increase the food resources that they had and this is what ultimately resulted in the domestication of the plants now there's there are a couple of different steps that they needed to go through in order to do this one can't just walk into a field and cut the cut the plants down and plant those wild plants and expect to get domesticated plants that won't work you need you need a mutation here which occurs naturally in the wild stand but you need to to select for that mutation you select those plants that already have this domesticated characteristic and in order to do that you need to cut the plants in a certain way so that you don't shake so that you don't so you're selecting for this this this domesticated type an emetic aidid type remember is the type that doesn't fall apart when it ripens it doesn't propagate its seeds the seed head remains as a whole head and one way to select for this is to one of those sickles made from those little blade tools and grabbed a bunch of the plants by the heads and cut them and this will select for those heads that remain intact when you when you do that process if you go through the through the plants and beat them to collect the seed you will merely collect all of those that naturally shatter the wild-type and if you plant those you plant wild-type you get another feeling well type and you can go on doing that forever and you'll never get a domesticated field if you take these sickles and cut them in this way and then select for those domesticate those mutant plants is what you're collecting here you're collecting a bunch of mutants or at least a proportion of your crop that you're collecting there is is mutated you then subsequently plant those in an area where the wild plants aren't growing because you don't want all those wild seeds growing in there in your field you clear a new area where those wild plants aren't growing and then you sow that field with your specially selected plants that you cut especially with your sickle you are selecting for these domesticated types and you will it is it is estimated within the space of about 20 years produce a fully domesticated field a field of fully domesticated cereals so this whole process of domestication going from a wild stand to a fully domesticated field probably took place in as little as a human generation this is something we're never going to see archaeologically that level that fine-tuning of chronology we will never be able to identify archaeologically which is one reason why we don't see these sights where we move from wild plants to domesticated plants not only were most of the big sites we've found so far and excavated and precious few of these sites have been excavated I should emphasize is that but we don't we won't see this kind of change taking place okay it's good when the change takes place it's going to be very rapid very abrupt if we ever do find a site where this happens and it might not even be recognized as as this kind of change in such short short of time so that's one of the one of the problems and I in in addressing this question but that appears to be how the process must have taken place there are certain steps that these people had to have learned or reached and we know that they had the tool types we know that they had the wild cereals and it appears that they had the other kinds of conditions including the need to increase their food resources because the population was getting too large and the food resources were decreasing because of climatic fluctuation that forced them into this into this process to artificially increase their their crops all of this took place sometime around 10,000 years ago and by ten thousand to ninety seven hundred years ago these sites like jericho like abu huraira and others that have been excavated are reoccupied now with a fully domesticated assemblage of domesticated species and and they carry on Neolithic Neolithic life and expand once again and until they reach maximum carrying capacity of the of the land and then again sometime around eighty five hundred years ago we see another collapse in the Levant possibly again a conjunction with a climatic fluctuations but it appears at this point the introduction of the sheep and goat into this area resulted in in massive devastation of some of the natural vegetation which resulted in erosion and then that combined increase in cultivation deforestation - for the purposes of building because they had all these houses to build all of these destructive processes the kinds of things that we're talking about now in the tropical forests that were that we continue to do people were doing ten thousand years ago in the Near East and we see the effects of this population expansion in sites increased site size increases complexity of site increases until about eighty five hundred years ago and then BAM everything collapses in their whole areas of the of the Near East that are totally abandoned for several hundred years again now that particular event eighty five hundred years or so ago is what probably was one of the the kicks that resulted in in in expansion of population outside of the Near East this is a one of the problems that that I have been looking at in with respect to the introduction of Agriculture into Europe okay we see first of all expansion of settlement into Cypress here this is a is a diagram of the hypothetical expansion of Agriculture out of the Near East Center it may be correct I have my doubts about this one but if that might also be possible we don't have enough data from western Turkey to say that this is this is real but we'll talk about that in a second this is most likely the sites that we have early Neolithic sites in in northern at North Africa in particular Egypt dates to about 8,000 years ago as as populations again we're expanding in this area and it's clearly a Near Eastern assemblage of sheep goat wheat barley lentils etc that come out of these areas okay and none of those plants or animals were native to Egypt so they had to have been introduced at this time we see first of all though sites expanding in in Cree and Cyprus excuse me right here okay and one of the important sites that we've has been excavated in in Cyprus is this one going up this hill here this is the site of Kuro CATIA in southern Cyprus excavated in the 50s by the Cypriot archaeologist named akio's he excavated mostly this lower part of the village here which in fact is a his a more recent part of the Neolithic village there's a large wall going up here and in more recent years a French team has been excavating up at the top of the hill and uncovering much earlier material although we don't is yet have any carbon 14 dates from this material it appears to be probably as early as as 8,500 to possibly 9,000 years ago and I think when you do get radiocarbon dates which we will within the next year or so we will find that that it does date to about that time 8500 to 8,000 years ago being the time here when we had this the second collapse of of settlement in the Neolithic Near East okay and people moving off easily accessible in Cyprus you can see Cyprus from Lebanon and settling in in this village of Kirov Katya which kept expanding through time as we now know from these earlier excavations the earliest occupation so far in covered the houses looked pretty much like this made of mud brick here you've got a number of courses of the mud brick wall preserved stones on top here are from a subsequent building that was built after this rooms a band and here's the doorway into this building and you would have and on this side a number of these of these buildings thank you pardon a number of these buildings grouped together here's another little one over here there's another one over here and all the doors facing out into what appears to be a little open area or a little courtyard between the buildings so similar to the situation you see in Africa in crawls where a family build self several structures perhaps for several wives with the open courtyard where all the lives get together and fight or make food or whatever wives do when they only have one husband and within these areas between the houses you have little installations like this this is one of these large grinding slabs a corn on which was ground wheat and barley that these people were consuming there were two of them this big one here that's still in place and another one that was sitting here that they had removed by the time this photograph was taken and several other large flat stones that might have been used to set the baskets of cereal on that they would remove the grain from it and grinded and we found massive quantities of grain all the near-eastern assemble in each wheat barley o lentils and sheep and goat on this site all introduced to the site and this is some of the earliest occupation on the island there there is only one site that has any earlier premio ethic occupation and it appears to be a single purpose hunting site where the inhabitants were we're visiting and killing off a few pygmy hippos and elephants and then going away again this is what the site then looks like in during one of these early periods all of these little round structures here this is actually a diagram of a later period with stone built structures with interior walls or benches around them in some cases interior cards some of them have interior pillars in them to hold up there's one here for example a pillar to hold up perhaps a loft where they would store things these aren't very large houses these early ones measure 2 to 3 meters in diameter some of them as small as 1 meter in diameter perhaps not all used as living quarters but some storage facilities essentially okay so that's the typical early Neolithic kind of settlement that you get in in Cyprus and if we move then to Greece further east the earliest evidence we have of occupation in Europe of Neolithic occupation in Europe domesticated plants and animals in other words comes at about 8,000 years ago none of the site's so far excavated and I have to say they've been precious few of these only a handful about five or so sites that have any kind of systematic excavation on them dates all of them the earliest levels date to Ronie thousand years ago so that this movement out of the Levant or perhaps out of Turkey at the same time and probably for the same reasons resulted in in populations settling in northern Greece the area we're looking at here is up in Cecily the large Thessalian plane right up here where you as you wander across the plane which is difficult to do because now it's all cultivated you you run across these little bumps in the landscape these are mounds or Mugu lows as they are called this is a teensy one probably a classical one some of them are very large and have occupation going from the early Neolithic from 8,000 years ago up through the Classical period and they just dot the landscape many of them now have been destroyed as a result of increasing or intensification of of Agriculture and the natural forces of erosion etc but but there are so far have been found through survey nearly 500 of these of these sites a substantial number of them well over 150 of them being having early Neolithic occupation on them we also have early Neolithic occupation in southern Greece and a few sites and one of the more important ones in in my opinion is frankly cave here this is a site I did my dissertation on and it's important primarily because it's it has a long period of occupation it's like a burr era in Syria it has pre Neolithic and Neolithic occupation with a break between the two not continuous occupation this is the cave here it's a large game that's about the size of a football field from front to back and about 50 meters wide and it's just above the modern shoreline which is just off this line down here about 50 meters away oh this is just another site in Thessaly one of these large low mow Gulas there I think this was inside the cave to give you an idea of size here there's a person sitting down inside the trench there at a table this large trench here we'll look at next it goes down 11 meters until we hit water groundwater this trench goes down 13 meters and we hit rock at the bottom not natural bedrock but roof fall the picture was taken from another roof all the huge boulders that the photographer was standing on here came from the roof that resulted in a complete collapse of part of the roof so there's a window in the cave nowadays except in the collapse separates the front 1/3 of the cave from the back 2/3 of the cave so we could only excavate this front part there's more roof fall out here it's a very unstable area wasn't was a little nerve-wracking digging in here once the geologists told us that it was a it was a very unstable cave pretty evident from all the roof fall around it now in addition to the the Neolithic Near Eastern assemblage of domesticated wheats and lentils and other legumes and sheep and goat which appear at 8,000 years ago at this site we also have this kind of material which shows up earlier this is obsidian a volcanic glass from one of the Aegean islands the island of mean loss which is about 150 kilometers away and yet as I say a courage earlier in the cave at about 10,000 years ago and the Mesolithic occupants of the cave or or someone with whom they had contact was going out to me lost in a boat probably island hopping out there and back bringing back the Obsidian in the Neolithic period by eight thousand years ago this becomes about 70% of the material that is used to make stone tools so it's gone for maybe 10% in the Mesolithic period to 70% a substantial lead which means there's there's either a lot of trade interaction or there are people from Frankie who are in the business of going back and forth or whatever but it becomes an important commodity at this time in the early Neolithic and it shows that there was a lot of movement within the Aegean Sea which is important if we're going to talk about people coming from the Near East bringing bringing their Near Eastern assembly and ship plants and animals and their lifestyle of settled village life they're going to be coming through the islands and and exploiting these kinds of resources on the way this slide here just looks down that very large 11 meter deep trench in this in the previous slide Neil if they got the patient here getting down to Mesolithic occupation layers and then down way at the bottom Paleolithic occupation layers the deepest layers go down to sometime around 30 to 35 thousand years ago and the occupation ended in the cave sometime around 3,000 years ago so it's a long not unbroken sequence there are periods of hiatus periods of abandonment of the cave certainly one of the things that shows up interestingly enough in the earliest deposits in all of these sites is pottery and there's still a question as to whether or not there's a there's an a ceramic period as we saw in Cyprus as we have in the Near East a long period of domestication of Neolithic culture but no pottery they were using stone and baskets etc for containers the earliest meal I think we have in Greece almost always shows up with pottery and there are a few sites where too little has been excavated to be certain this is the early Neolithic kind of pottery that shows up these two large baggy bowls and little little ones like this the rest of us is later Neolithic and we don't need to to that but it's relatively simple pottery but it's clearly well-developed pottery these are not experimental parts it wasn't developed here at frankly it was introduced and it was introduced at the same time that the plants and animals were which suggests that it had to have been brought in with them although it is made with local clays the technique was brought in these people weren't experimenting with how to make pots so we have the introduction into Europe at about 8,000 years ago of a fully Near Eastern assemblage of plants and animals and the full Near Eastern culture and I will just leave you with one problem we won't go into I think it's getting a little a little late at the stage in the game we won't go into the whole problem of the development of our board culture olives domestication grape domestication I'd be happy to answer questions on that but let me just finish with this one problem if if we have no a ceramic Neolithic in Greece we have a fully developed Neolithic culture with a Near Eastern assemblage of plants and animals our next problem to solve and is where exactly did these people come from we can't connect artifacts like like the pottery or other kinds of artifacts from the sites directly to any one place in the Near East we can't yet connect the plants specifically to any one place the Levant or or Turkey or anywhere else in the Near East the plant assemblage is a Near Eastern assemblage and it shows up in the Near East at the same time all over the place except for one species of plant and this is the one that we need to look for and that's the wild or the domesticated rye that I mentioned earlier on it only occurs in northern Syria and Anatolia it is native in wild form to those areas that does not occur to the south and if if populations were coming from Anatolia for example from Western Anatolia across the Aegean or up through Macedonia bringing their nearest assemblage with them we would expect to find domesticated rye in this assemblage and so that's that's my next problem is to excavate a site sufficiently and this has never been done in northern Greece yet - and systematically to collect the plant remains from the site to see if we can find some of these identifying plants the wild or the domesticated rye in particular but there may be others that we as yet don't know about so there are still more problems to be solved which will keep me employed for a while longer which is a good thing there are many more problems to solve than I can solve and there are not enough people who do this kind of work in this area so if any of you haven't been interested in this kind of study whether you're a botanist or and agriculturalists worth an archaeologist this this is one area where there's a great deal of room for development and more questions to be answered by all of the different disciplines that are involved in these kinds of studies thank you I'd be happy to answer any questions that anybody might have yes the process you describe that we believe we're entering agriculture apparently it does we're seeing China and the Southeast Asia in general excuse me is still in early stages of being explored in this respect but we're beginning to see the same kinds of processes where we have those those areas that have been well enough surveyed so that we can get a picture of settlement patterns in premia lithic times pre domestication times we're getting we're getting something of the same kind of pattern with with larger apparently settled sights or at least larger base camps that are occupied for longer periods of time prior to the domestication so that so that sedentism does seem to be something of a prerequisite here for for domestication we also see the same thing for example in South America and the sites that have been studied in Peru and to some extent in Mesoamerica as well although I'm not as familiar with that material I have to say as I am with other other areas yeah well fishing is an interesting problem in general there was a theory at one point and it is still a perfectly valid theory with some support that at this period of the cause of the points - seen as we have an expansion of these resources we have a diversification and resource exploitation so that not only were they exploiting the larger animals that they had been hunting and some of the wild plant resources but they did tend to move toward the coast we tend to find more coastal sites during this period during the Mesolithic this is certainly true in Europe it it it may be true in the near East the problem is that well it's the problem all over Europe all around the Mediterranean at least is that the coastal sites are now underwater for the most part with sea level rise we've lost much of the Mesolithic population this may have happened what it may be what happened to the population in northern Greece there's no Mesolithic population in northern Greece to be able to say whether they were coastal or not I mean there might have been coastal now they're underwater but that seems unlikely because not everybody was living on the coast certainly the coast is more exploited and with frankly material certainly the coast is more exploited at this time so in some areas yes that does seem to be the case with the Near East I wouldn't say that that that there's any direct connection between exploitation of fish and domestication of plants or animals I think fish just became another resource as sea levels rose those people who had been inland now found themselves on the beach this was over a long period of time but but see let's see levels brought with them coastal changes that made the coasts more attractive for a variety of resources not just the fish that would show up with the shellfish as well so there probably was a movement toward the sea Oh $64,000 question I think not I think that other group was not there the geologists who study the sediments in the cave has said that there's a period of at least 500 years hiatus from from the latest Mesolithic occupation we have to the appearance of the earliest Neolithic there's a there's a discontinuity in the sediments at that point which appears to to mean that there was a period of no sedimentation no deposition which means that there was no occupation I think so yeah what happened to the Mesolithic people again it one has to address this question the the Mesolithic population and frankly if if you look at the survey data from from around this region there are a couple of other Mesolithic sites in the area and there's a another one further north but there's no there's no dense occupation and they're the Mesolithic populations in northern greece well there isn't any in Thessaly there's none in macedonia there's some in in western greece that that hang on and remain Mesolithic while the rest of Greece is becoming Neolithic so they they're hangers on it and this happens in Europe as well where you get Neolithic populations coming in in one part and exploiting lowland arable areas while Mesolithic populations are living up in the mountains and continuing their Mesolithic way of life for a very short period of time only probably lasted several hundred years until the mess older population adopts agriculture excuse me but at frank the-- which is the only site that's been excellent so far in Greece that has a Mesolithic occupation followed by a Neolithic occupation there's no other site so far that we found in Greece with this kind of deposition we have this hiatus so it would appear that at least the site was abandoned and these people went off I don't know where they went they went into the water they drowned like lemmings they don't know any other questions you know it doesn't really we can make guesses based on on the kinds of tools they have these big grinding slabs which would suggest that they were grinding the grain we have no remains of anything like bread for example in the the earliest sites in the Near East we have no pottery and we had therefore have no residues in pots or anything like that my guess is and I have to say it's only a guess is that they were probably grinding some of the grain into flour and making flatbread as they have done for thousands of years and are still doing today pita bread and some of it they may well have been just cracking and boiling making bulgur and and other kinds of they could have sure they could have again we don't have any evidence for that directly but that's certainly possible yeah the original couch potatoes with their cans of beer and no television set yes they could have they could have been making beer in these these are not terribly large pots here really the the largest the largest Neolithic one is this one here is only about this big so it's it's not we're not talking about the kinds of things that you find for example in Mesoamerica these big beer boiling pots but there's nothing to say that they couldn't have made beer we don't have any direct evidence for beer until we have written evidence from Egypt and that doesn't come in until about 3000 BC well in order to make the bread rise you need a different kind of wheat than we have early on you need bread wheat that begins to show up around 6000 BC fairly early on really in periods of domestication and but it doesn't catch on until the Bronze Age really not until after 3,000 BC so we don't know when real leavened bread is made there's no mention of leavened bread in the earliest writings in the Near East as far as I know so even though they had this bread they may have fed it it may have risen just because of yeast in the area in the air I mean so might have risen naturally but there's no deliberate lebanon of bread as far as i know early on it comes in I think about the Classical period and after that manler you want to submit I'm thinking of well yeah that's a hard question to answer really I don't have an answer to that I'll make one up the data the studies that are being done now and there are a number of studies being done both in England and in southern France with experimental farms first of all to make sure how long does this take okay they've they've taken the wild plants and they've been cultivating them and harvesting them in the way with with the prehistoric tools that they find on these early sites and in the ways that they think would have been done and they're actually using a number of different methods to see which one results in the domestication so we don't know for sure that it only takes 20 years but all of the data points to this and there was at one point a computer program that a botanist in Wales developed to to test this theory on a computer and it supported it okay so we got 20 years here are we ever going to be able to see this on an archeological site well no what we're going to see if we ever find a site where we don't have this hiatus between between the Mesolithic and the Neolithic if we have a site that is continually occupied from which we have plant remains that are in good condition and abundant enough what we're going to see is all wild cereals for example and then all domesticated cereals and there's going to be an abrupt a very abrupt change which some would suggest well that's what we're seeing now for example it frankly we've got the wild cereals except we don't have wild cuida practically we do have wild barley at frankly and then when we've got domesticated barley but there we have geological evidence that says we have we have hiatus there a break in occupation but that's the kind of thing we have to see I don't think we're going to see it at any one site and then and then spreading out afterwards I think that domestication took place this whole process of cultivation harvesting replanting took place at a number of different sites throughout the Near East it took place using only one specific subspecies of these different plants that have been identified but these plants occurred in enough places that it had to have happened in in a number of places simultaneously these people were not ignorant of each other's of doing what everyone else was doing so there was enough communication that that had happened very rapidly and then it spreads to the east and to the west fairly rapidly actually probably within a within the space of a hundred years or so we're having major populations in certainly in Cyprus and then in Greece well not the islands in Crete and in mainland Greece the islands are not occupied until much later yes yes now there's an interesting question as well not enough I could tell you that some of this stuff study has been done because one of the questions that that paleo nutritionists along with archeologists have been asking is what what effect did domestication have on the population on their on their health for one thing and can we see the change from from pre domestication to domestication in human bone remains and one person who did a study on some Meza with ik individuals in the near East Margaret Shawn Inger who's at the University of Wisconsin now studied human remains from a number of Mesolithic sites and several Neolithic sites in the Near East and her conclusions were that she could see no change in diet basically in the quantity of plant foods these people ate during the Mesolithic period compared to the plant foods they ate in the Neolithic period and this isn't surprising now that we're getting more botanical material out of the Mesolithic sites we're seeing the full range of types of plants cereals legumes and a wide variety of fruits and nuts being exploited in mezzo lithic and the same kinds of things being exploited in the neolithic although not quite as wide a range in fact the quantity of plant foods that they ate or that the diversity of plant foods they ate in the only think is much less than it was in the previous period so their diet actually changes for the worse in some cases because they don't have the diversity and along with domestication the other thing the physical anthropologists are discovering is that there these people were they worked much harder in the Neolithic period the the stress on bones is much more prevalent in the Neolithic especially on women compared to the Mesolithic skeletal remains we don't have vast quantities of Mesolithic Scotland's I have to say or Neolithic ones for that matter but we have enough now that studies have shown that there is a significant change in in stress amongst these populations the same thing has been found amongst Native American populations when corn agriculture is introduced into North America the the whole quality of their their life their health decreases with the advent of Agriculture so these are different kinds of changes that are being still being studied you may need more skeletal material from the Near East to to really examine this yeah I know this is another another one of those problems that you just wonder well why not why didn't they they had some people have said well the specific domesticated plants and animals weren't available in those earlier periods certainly throughout the Pleistocene there were periods when there were interglacials when conditions got better and the resources were available and then they got worse and resources were no longer available the the major difference as at least as far as we can tell from looking at settlement patterns and estimating population science is that during these earlier periods the population was small enough and the and the social organization of these populations was such in small group small bands that when conditions got worse they simply moved to another area and where they could continue to exploit the resources that they were used to exploiting we didn't have we don't have any evidence for settlement for settled populations and that does seem to be a significant requirement for a population expansion and be ultimately domestication the earlier populations when these conditions occurred didn't hadn't been settled they hadn't they were mobile and they just remained mobile they got more of a while and just moved away and moved into into better conditions the other question nobody is asked which is the obvious one why did they do it in the first place when why well I've sort of answered that question but the classic question that everyone asks is you've got these ideal conditions in the Mesolithic with all of these abundant resources and we see this in in Europe as well the mez local populations with abundant resources that didn't where we don't see severe degradation as a result of drought we don't see severe problems with overpopulation in the Mesolithic period like we do in the Near East and yet these people who had other kinds of resources didn't take up agriculture either and yet they were settled populations and I think one of the reasons there is is because they were able to diversify their their exploitation of the environment sufficiently which goes back to the question about fishing exploitation of the coastal areas more greater areas of woodland that they could move into an exploit in some cases that they they simply didn't they didn't need to expand their their resources artificially some of these questions or questions are we just we don't have the answers to these things we need more research any more data yeah no not quite the animals were probably domesticated about the same time as plants were but the plants were apparently domesticated in the Levant where's the animals were apparently domesticated in the Zagros Mountains as nearly as we can tell at the moment from we've been able to do much excavation in Iraq and Iran in recent years so it's hard to tell and the sights that we do have were excavated fairly early on when the data collection methods were not ideal so we might never be able to answer those questions exactly but but the data we have now appears to say that some time by ten thousand ninety five hundred years ago classic were domesticated in the near in Levant and animals were domesticated than in Zagros and we can in a couple of cases show sort of a projection of animals around the soccers Taurus arc and by certainly eighty five hundred or so years ago they were in the Levant because we we have evidence for them in the Quran they don't show up as domestic it's as early in the Levant as they do as domesticated plants do