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This paper explores explanations for, and consequences of, the early appearance of food production outside the Fertile Crescent of Southwest Asia, where it had originated in the 10th/9th millennium cal BC. We present evidence that cultivation appeared in Central Anatolia through adoption by indigenous foragers in the mid 9th millennium cal BC, but also demonstrate that uptake was not uniform, and that some communities chose to actively disregard cultivation. Adoption of cultivation seems to have promoted experimentation with the herding of probably local caprines in the Konya Plain. Those sedentary communities that adopted cultivation integrated small-scale food production into forager lifeways, though rather than being a transitional state, this adaptation was successful and stable for several centuries. That innovation had significant social consequences for the adopting community represented by the site of Boncuklu. Continuities with evidence at Çatalhöyük East suggest that those communities in the SW Konya basin that adopted low level food production, including that at Boncuklu, were transformed in the later 8th millennium cal BC into settlements with a major commitment to mixed farming, and grew to considerable size, as exemplified by Çatalhöyük East. The polarized positions for the spread of farming, opposing indigenous adoption to farmer colonization represent simplistic models that are unsuited to understanding local sequences of subsistence change. We go beyond identifying the mechanisms for the spread of farming by investigating the shorter and longer-term implications of rejecting or adopting farming practices.

This study aims to contribute to the interpretation of ephemeral sites by exploring the efficacy of geochemistry and phytolith analysis to identify activity areas in seasonally occupied ethnographic sites. The application of a portable X ray fluorescence (XRF) instrument and phytolith analysis to soil samples from six Bedouin campsites at Wadi Faynan, Jordan, provided insights about anthropogenic enrichment patterns and the effects of short periods of abandonment on these. The compatibility of the two analysis techniques and means to combine the results of both are addressed. The results of this study suggest that soil signatures can be found in ephemeral sites following abandonment, even in dynamic and harsh environments. The efficacy of the geochemical analysis to indicate variance within the data was found to be greater than that of the phytolith analysis in these case studies, while certain trends within the phytolith results were more useful in identifying specific activities. Due to the compatibility of the geochemical and phytolith data, it is proposed that a serial or parallel approach should be taken for their statistical analysis.

Water management was critical to the development of complex societies but such systems are often difficult, if not impossible, to recognise in the archaeological record, particularly in prehistoric communities when water management began. This is because early irrigation systems are likely to have been ephemeral and as such would no longer be visible in the archaeological record. We conducted a three year crop growing experiment in Jordan to test the hypothesis that phytoliths (opaline silica bodies formed in plants) can be used to detect the level of past water availability and hence be used as a source of information for inferring past water management. Over a three year period we grew native land races of six-row barley (Hordeum vulgare) and durum wheat (Triticum durum) at three crop growing stations in Jordan with the crops being subjected to different irrigation regimes. Seeds were sown in the autumn and the crops harvested in the spring. The plants were then exported to the University of Reading for phytolith processing. Our results show that while there were unknown factors that influenced phytolith production between years, at the higher levels, the ratio of ‘fixed’ form phytoliths (those formed as a result of genetically determined Silicon uptake) to ‘sensitive’ form phytoliths (those whose Silicon uptake is environmentally controlled) can be used to assess past water availability. Our study is the first large scale experimental project to test this method and take into account multiple variables that can affect phytolith production such as soil composition and chemistry, location, climate and evapotranspiration rates. Results from the cereals grown at two of the crop growing stations, Deir ‘Alla and Ramtha, which received between 100 millimetres and 250 millimetres rainfall per annum, demonstrate that if the ratio of fixed to sensitive phytolith forms is >1, the level of past water availability can be predicted with 80% confidence. Results from the crops g

Reconstructing past water availability, both as rainfall and irrigation, is important to answer questions about the way society reacts to climate and its changes and the role of irrigation in the development of social complexity. Carbon stable isotope analysis of archaeobotanical remains is a potentially valuable method for reconstructing water availability. To further define the relationship between water availability and plant carbon isotope composition and to set up baseline values for the Southern Levant, grains of experimentally grown barley and sorghum were studied. The cereal crops were grown at three stations under five different irrigation regimes in Jordan. Results indicate that a positive but weak relationship exists between irrigation regime and total water input of barley grains, but no relationship was found for sorghum. The relationship for barley is site-specific and inter-annual variation was present at Deir ‘Alla, but not at Ramtha and Khirbet as-Samra.

Carbon stable isotope analysis of charred cereal remains is a relatively new method employed by archaeological scientists to investigate ancient climate and irrigation regimes. The aim of this study was to assess the effect of environmental variables on carbon isotope discrimination (D) in multiple environments to develop the technique and its archaeological application, using crops grown at three experimental stations in Jordan. There are two key results: (1) as expected, there was a strong positive relationship between water availability and D; (2) site, not water input, was the most important factor in determining D. Future work should concentrate on establishing ways of correcting D for the influence of site specific environmental variables and on assessing how well carbon isotope discrimination values are preserved within the archaeological record.

The authors present a new type of communal and monumental structure from the earliest Neolithic in western Asia. A complement to the decorated stone pillars erected at G¨obekli Tepe in the north, ‘Wadi Faynan 16 Structure O75’ in the southern Levant is a ritualised gathering place of a different kind. It serves to define wider western Asia as an arena of social experiment in the tenth millennium BC, one in which community seems to take precedence over economy.

The archaeological rockshelter of Baaz in the Damascus region of Syria provided a variety of botanical remains from the Late Pleistocene to Early Holocene period. These remains provide new information about the vegetation evolution in that area. The earliest occupational levels correspond with a moisture peak during the Late Pleistocene, between ca. 39–36 kyr B.P., when pine expanded. The next occupations took place during extreme arid conditions, ca. 27.5–25.5 kyr B.P., and probably during the Last Glacial Maximum when a steppe vegetation was established. The occupation level of the Younger Dryas, represented by Natufian remains, suggests that the area had been covered by almond-pistachio steppe, similar to later periods of the Early Holocene, and was probably located just outside the range of dense wild cereal stands. There is no drastic impact of the Younger Dryas visible on the vegetation in the botanical remains. The lack of fruits and seeds at Baaz indicates that the site was more likely to have been a temporary hunting post rather than a plant processing site for much of its history. It is ideally suited to this purpose because of its location over the Jaba ′deen Pass and the associated springs. However, archaeological remains from the Natufian period, suggest that the site was more permanently occupied during this time.

This study investigates changes in climate, vegetation, wildfire and human activity in Southwest Asia during the transition to Neolithic agriculture between ca. 16 and ca. 9 ka. In order to trace the fire history of this region, we use microscopic charcoal from lake sediment sequences, and present two new records: one from south central Turkey (Akgo¨ l) and the other from the southern Levant (Hula). These are interpreted primarily as the result of regional-scale fire events, with the exception of a single large event ca. 13 ka at Akgo¨ l, which phytolith analysis shows was the result of burning of the local marsh vegetation. Comparison between these and other regional micro-charcoal, stable isotope and pollen records shows that wildfires were least frequent when the climate was cold and dry (glacial, Lateglacial Stadial) and the vegetation dominated by chenopod–Artemisia steppe, and that they became more frequent and/or bigger at times of warmer, wetter but seasonally dry climate (Lateglacial Interstadial, early Holocene). Warmer and wetter climates caused an increase in biomass availability, with woody matter appearing to provide the main fuel source in sites from the Levant, while grass fires predominated in the interior uplands of Anatolia. Southwest Asia’s grasslands reached their greatest extent during the early Holocene, and they were maintained by dry-season burning that helped to delay the spread of woodland by up to 3 ka, at the same time as Neolithic settlement became established across this grass parkland landscape. Although climatic changes appear to have acted as the principal ‘pacemaker’ for fire activity through the last glacial–interglacial climatic transition (LGIT), human actions may have amplified shifts in biomass burning. Fire regimes therefore changed markedly during this time period, and both influenced, and were influenced by, the cultural-economic transition from hunter-foraging to agriculture and village life

The Neolithic of southwest Asia is a critical time in human history; it saw the emergence of agriculture, the beginning of prolonged sedentism, a change in cultural and ritual practices and the advent of complex societies. With this came not only a practical change in resource management but also an ideological shift in how these resources were viewed. By comparing microfaunal assemblages from two very different sites in Anatolia, Çatalhöyük and P¿narba¿¿, Emma Jenkins explores how microfauna can be used to provide information about the palaeoenvironment, the effects of sedentism on microfaunal communities and past ritual and cultural beliefs. The results show that while the Çatalhöyük assemblage consists predominantly of house mice, no commensal species were found at P¿narba¿¿, indicating that sedentism does lead to commensalism. The discovery of dense concentrations of microfauna derived from carnivore scats, and incorporated into human burials at Çatalhöyük, suggests that small mammals or their predators had a role in the ritual life at the site. These findings are useful to other researchers studying the Neolithic and to those interested in the field of microfaunal analysis.

Crop irrigation has long been recognised as having been important for the evolution of social complexity in several parts of the world. Structural evidence for water management, such as wells, ditches and dams are often difficult to interpret and may be a poor indicator of past irrigation that may have had no need for such constructions. It would be of considerable value, therefore, to be able to infer past irrigation directly from archaeo-botanical remains, and especially the type of archaeo-botanical remains that are relatively abundant in the archaeological record, such as phytoliths. Building on the pioneering work of Rosen & Wiener (1994), this paper describes a crop growing experiment designed to explore the impact of irrigation on the formation of phytoliths within cereals. If it can be shown that a systemic and consistent relationship exists between phytolith size, structure and the intensity of irrigation, and if various taphonomic and palaeoenvironmental processes can be controlled for, then the presence of past irrigation can feasibly be inferred from the phytoliths recovered from the archaeological record.

Durum wheat plants grown under optimum irrigation conditions in Jordan were processed in three different ways: 1) using a dry ashing method, 2) using acid extraction and 3) using both these methods, first dry ashing and then acid extraction. The aim was to determine if the laboratory processing method employed has an impact on the number of conjoined phytoliths recovered. This is important because it has been proposed that the number of conjoined phytoliths, or multi cells, can be an indication of water availability in arid and semi-arid regions (Rosen and Weiner 1994). The results showed that the processing method does have an impact on the resulting assemblage with dry ashing producing a greater number of multi-cells than acid extraction. It is proposed that either the more violent oxidation of organic matter during acid extraction causes the breakup of conjoined phytoliths or that the silica dehydrates during dry ashing resulting in a slight fusion between the individual phytoliths and hence more conjoined forms.

Three human burials were found at Çatalhöyük that contained large microfaunal assemblages. Taphonomic analysis demonstrated that many of these elements had passed through the digestive tract of a small carnivore, indicating that the microfauna entered the burials in carnivore scats rather than as carcasses. One of the burials in particular (F. 513) contained an enormous quantity of microfauna which was concentrated over the torso of the body. It is concluded that the scats were deliberately placed in the burials by the human inhabitants of the site as part of ritualistic practice. Furthermore, it is suggested that small carnivores were encouraged to enter Çatalhöyük in order to control house mice, and other small mammal, numbers.