PALÉORIENT, vol. 10/2-1984

A REASSESSMENT

OF THE NEOLITHIC REVOLUTION

F. HOLE

population, colonisation de zones nouvelles.

Introduction

Thirty-five years have elapsed since Robert Braidwood began excavations at Jarmo in northeastern Iraq to investigate the origins of agriculture in Southwest Asia(l). The shift to an agricultural economy, exemplified by sedentism, farming and the keeping of livestock, is recognized as one of the crucial turning points in human history, yet its origins have effectively defied elucidation through archaeology (2). This is so because archaeologists have been wedded to the idea that the shift must have involved both plants and animals simultaneously, and that it was largely a post-Pleistocene event. Thus, based on the modern distributions of the relevant species (3), Robert Braidwood proposed the "hilly flanks of the fertile crescent" as the place to seek the origins of agriculture. He thought it was most likely that the transition had taken place in the hilly flanks where the species co-occurred. The discovery of Jarmo and then a number of other agricultural villages appeared to solidify the case, and archaeologists turned to documenting the order of introduction of domesticates and to finding older sites in which they were manifest.

The belief that the Epipaleolithic peoples of the Near East provide the foundations out of which domestication emerged pervades our thinking, but there remain difficulties in explaining the rather sudden shift from small camps to villages, the rare precocious, large, sedentary Natufian and related sites notwithstanding. In fact, there are no good sequences, documented stratigraphically, of a transition from an Epipaleolithic hunting and gathering mode of life to one based on agriculture and animal husbandry. The reason, I argue, is that the shift took place outside these camps and caves, many of which are probably too late to be of interest because Epipaleolithic hunters (such as the Zarzian of the Zagros) there continued to live in their traditional style long after agriculture and herding were being practiced elsewhere.

Andrew Moore (4) argues that Epipaleolithic peoples in the Levant began the agricultural revolution. He speaks of the long periods of development during the Late Pleistocene that must have taken place before either the cereals or the animals show morphological signs of domestication. These ideas accord with my thesis here, but they do not distinguish between the two crucial elements in the process and thus inappropriately seek demonstration of events that are not indigenous to the sites under scrutiny.

The belief in the essential inter-dependence of cereal domestication and stock-raising continues to this day. However, I believe we should separate the

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