Некоторые доисторические вещи
Apr. 1st, 2024 06:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bouzyges"...Until recently, researchers of the ancient Near East considered the presence of pottery to be an essential divide, distinguishing the early from the late Neolithic lifeways. However, current lines of research see this transition as much less profound than was earlier believed. To a very large extent, settlement continued at sites that were previously in existence, with no significant breaks in their often lengthy sequences...
...While there is no single chronological framework for the later prehistory of the Near East, it is helpful to divide the period into four main stages: an early phase, ca. 9500–8500 BC, associated with the first sedentary communities; a second phase, ca. 8500–7000 BC, concurring with changes in the structure of settlements and the appearance of agriculture; a third phase, ca. 7000–5500 BC, associated with increasing regionalism and the development of pastoralist communities; and a fourth, final phase, around 5500–4000 BC, which marks the transition between villages and the early cities...
...Significant climate change took place in the Early Holocene at about 9600 BC, when the Younger Dryas ended just as abruptly as it had started, within a mere forty to fifty years...
...The melting of the ice sheets in the highlands and the increase in runoff water led to the rise of the Mediterranean Sea level by at least 30 m, causing the gradual inundation (over several thousand years) of the littoral plains over a width of 2–40 km. This also submerged coastal prehistoric settlements, such as Atlit-Yam off the coastline of Israel. Similar flooding took place between Arabia and Iran in what is now the Persian Gulf, where the transgression was at times dramatic, especially in gentle terrain. The shoreline, with its brackish or saline estuaries, marshes, and lagoons, continually changed, until the sea level stabilized after the mid-fourth millennium BC...
...While the warm and wet phase of the Early Holocene showed many small fluctuations, there was a significant climatic anomaly at the global level around 6200 BC, which lasted for about 160–200 years: the “8.2 kiloyear climate event.” Climatic proxy data and simulation studies both indicate that the event was characterized by cold and dry conditions, which evoked changes in hydrology and vegetation. The climate change was abrupt, and both its onset and termination seem to have taken place with startling speed on the decadal timescale — within fifty years and probably even within five to ten years. It has been suggested that the event initiated dramatic social disruption, culture collapse, population migrations, warfare, and various other sorts of mayhem in the Near East, but there is little clear evidence for this...
...While sheep, goats, cattle, and pigs were the primary species for animal husbandry, the latter two require more water and therefore their presence may reflect greater humidity. Significantly, the distribution of pig bones in the fifth-millennium Levantine settlements matches present patterns; pig bones are entirely absent at modern sites that receive less than 200 mm of average precipitation...
...Sedentism is a matter of degree, the intensity of which is often difficult to demonstrate from one habitation to another. Although sites sometimes had long occupation sequences, it is doubtful that this occupation was always continuous. The level of sedentary behavior in its initial stage may well have been overstated by earlier studies...
...Many Neolithic communities preferred mobility over permanent settlements until the eighth millennium BC, when there was a proliferation of village life on an unprecedented scale. Although the period between 8000 and 7000 BC is often associated with significant population growth in most parts of the Near East, it is perhaps better understood in terms of a transformation of small forager groups with little archaeological visibility into larger, sedentary farming communities with high archaeological visibility...
...It is now evident that the origins of sedentary lifeways had little or nothing to do with agriculture and stock rearing, despite their common conflation. Sedentary village life in substantial circular dwellings at places ranging from Eynan in Israel, to Tell Abu Hureyra in Syria, to Hallan Çemi in Turkey began several thousand years before the adoption of farming and relied upon an intense use of wild resources...
...A striking development in settlement organization was the large sites that came into existence throughout the Near East at about 7500 BC, from Aşıklı Höyük in Turkey to Tell Abu Hureyra in Syria and ‘Ain Ghazal in Jordan ... Excavations make clear that some sites were, indeed, densely populated, such as Çatalhöyük ca. 7000 BC with 13 ha, which was packed tight with housing inhabited by probably several thousand people...
...Simultaneous settlement all over a site is often just assumed rather than proven. It is important to realize that site size is not the same as settlement size or population size. The issue is relevant here because regional dominance and political power often are attributed to these sites based simply on their size. Due to the tendency to associate them with hierarchy and centrality, they are often positioned as cornerstones in the emergence of societal complexity. Yet it may be telling that there are no consistent signs of elites, social hierarchy, differentiated wealth distribution, and other forms of explicit ranking at either the large sites or any of the small sites...
...In the southern Levant, some sites continued to build clusters of round houses, such as at Beidha (ca. 8000 BC), where small dwellings formed groups suggesting that a single family may have used several of them. However, houses across the region at this time were more typically rectangular in shape. Rectangular features in many different arrangements and sizes replaced the earlier circular architecture; this change began in Syria and the Levant around 8700 BC, whereas the central Anatolian plateau followed suit 800–900 years later (ethnographic data actually suggest that the change from round to rectangular architecture can be implemented within the course of a single generation)...
...The food that people were eating, whether as roasted grains, biscuits, unleavened bread, porridge, or gruel, was often hard and coarse. At Tell Abu Hureyra, the teeth of many adults were severely worn down to the roots from chewing gritty food and were lost prematurely. In the seventh millennium BC, wear on teeth was substantially reduced by the introduction of pottery and the cooking of food in ceramic vessels...
...Relying heavily on root or cereal crops, farming communities also had less balanced and less varied diets and generally were less healthy. Malnutrition and the heavy workload seem to have caused a decline in average life expectancy; in the Neolithic this was about twenty-five to thirty-five years, and only about half of infants reached adulthood...
...The earliest metalworking was in the form of native copper shaped into beads. It is attested at places like Aşıklı Höyük and Çayönü in Anatolia from about 8200 BC onward and was introduced much later in Mesopotamia and the Levant. The quantities of metal used were everywhere very low, and the skills of the metalworkers remained at the same initial level for several thousand years. Metal was neither vital for subsistence nor yet fully valued as a prestige commodity. This picture began to change by the late fifth millennium, first in Turkey and Iran and then elsewhere, with the onset of smelting or casting and the recognition of the significant advantages of copper-based alloys over pure copper...
...In the early seventh millennium, Tell Sabi Abyad in northern Syria was characterized by houses that were perfectly symmetrical and tripartite in plan; each structure comprised a relatively wide central hall flanked by parallel rows of narrow rooms along each of the long sides, usually with a smaller cubicle at the rear end. The houses stood upon large rectangular platforms about 10×7 m in area and up to 1 m in height, sometimes provided with low staircases. Halfway through the seventh millennium an architectural innovation occurred at the site: circular buildings up to 5 m across. Initially only a handful of such round structures were employed, but their use as ordinary dwellings for living and shelter increased significantly in the occupation layers dated to 6200–5500 BC. Excavations at a range of sixth-millennium sites in Mesopotamia showed that this architectural change was radical, in the sense that it entailed an almost complete replacement of rectilinear edifices by round structures. It has been suggested that an entirely new architectural rationale came into existence; it was likely not only utilitarian but also societal and ideological, although the incentives remain poorly understood...
...As pointed out in section 1.2, the “8.2 ka climate event” is often associated with societal catastrophe and culture collapse, although the evidence remains highly controversial. Drought and other impacts of the event are said to have led to the abandonment of many of the larger settlements in the southern Levant and elsewhere. Others, however, have suggested that the Neolithic socioeconomic fabric was basically unsustainable and that its collapse was inevitable in the long run. This perspective explains the widespread abandonment in terms of overpopulation and social stress, related to landscape destruction, overexploitation, and resource depletion (e.g., deforestation for fuel and building materials and overgrazing by sheep and goats). The climate change ca. 6200 BC may have been the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back. Yet we need to be aware of the ever-present danger of climatic determinism, in which synchronicity of climate and culture change is often taken as self-evident proof for causality. Chronological correlations are not always as clear or as consistent as some authors would have us believe ... The long-lived settlement upon the east mound of Çatalhöyük came to an end at about 6200 BC, but occupation continued for another thousand years at the neighboring western mound. An abundance of sites is attested across Anatolia ca. 6400–6000 BC, suggesting that the 8.2 ka climate event did not affect settlement patterns...
...Although there is material evidence for ritual in the sixth-millennium settlements (burials, figurines), there is a remarkable (and still poorly understood) lack of special cult architecture. Ritual took place mainly within the intimate confines of the private house, rather than at the public level as was characteristic of earlier periods. This observation is consistent with the contemporary preference for small and dispersed groups in short-lived settlements. Many sites in Upper Mesopotamia were probably never occupied by more than two to three families, while breaks in their sequences argue for interruptions and frequent shifts of occupation. Mobility across the landscape and a continually fluctuating settlement pattern were important to sixth-millennium populations in Mesopotamia...
...Significantly, many large sites were in locales that do not match our preconceptions of what might be optimal for agriculture. For example, much of the area around Çatalhöyük and Domuztepe in Turkey was uncultivable. Clearly the selection of places for settlement was not a purely economic matter but equally had to fit other social and ideological values...
...The expansion of settlement beyond well-watered river valleys probably required some degree of sustained water control in the form of waterholes and wells that could access deeper water tables. It comes as no surprise that wells were a frequent feature of early village sites in many parts of the Near East. Cylindrical, stone-lined shaft wells about 2 m in diameter and at least 8 m deep were uncovered at Mylouthkia and Shillourokambos on Cyprus, ca. 8000 BC. Similar installations were found at the seventh- to sixth-millennium sites of Atlit Yam and Sha’ar Hagolan in Israel, and at Khirbet Garsour and Arpachiyah in northern Iraq...
...From roughly 6200 BC onward, sheep and goats were kept increasingly for renewable secondary products, in particular milk and wool...
...Early attempts at making ceramics occurred sporadically in much earlier habitations dated to the late ninth and early eighth millennia BC, such as at Boncuklu in Anatolia, Kfar HaHoresh in Israel and, probably, Ganj Dareh in Iran. However, their use and distribution was intermittent and short-lived, perhaps for specific occasions only. The distribution of pottery manufacturing did not occur everywhere at the same time but happened in the form of (repeated) invention, imitation, and emulation. While there was a proliferation of pottery along the northern and northwestern fringes of the Fertile Crescent ca. 7000–6700 BC, it appeared in the southern Levant only several centuries later. Significantly, the earliest ceramics in Upper Mesopotamia comprised limited quantities of handmade, often painted pots, which were exchanged over hundreds of kilometers...
...The sixth-millennium Halaf ceramics have recently been discussed as an early example of “globalizing tendencies” in the prehistoric Near East with regard to their extraordinary spatial range (over an area of more than 1,000 sq km)...
...While many continuities in settlement and other cultural traits were occurring in the later sixth millennium BC, archaeological research has emphasized the importance of the fifth millennium as a time of change in sociopolitical organization and craft production. The earlier emphasis on mobility weakened in favor of a growing attachment to place and the creation of new networks of regional and local identities and alliances...
...In the southern Levant, extensive “courtyard houses” continued to be built, broadly similar from the Golan to the Negev. At Tell Tsaf (ca. 5200–4600 BC), the compounds were over 250 sq m, consisting of rectangular one- or two-roomed dwellings, circular animal corrals, and many circular grain silos 1–4 m across, all grouped within walled yards...
...The settling of the Mesopotamian Plain is associated with a culture horizon known as “Ubaid” after the eponymous site in southern Iraq. At first, sites of Ubaid type were confined to the region south of Baghdad, but between roughly 5000 and 4200 BC Ubaid material culture spread through exchange and, perhaps, migrations over an area of unprecedented scope, extending from southwestern Iran to Syria and southeastern Anatolia. The typical pottery has also been identified at scores of predominantly coastal sites in the eastern regions of Saudi Arabia, in Bahrain, and in Qatar. Recent evidence, including boat remains and representations of boats, indicates an extensive maritime exchange between the communities of southern Mesopotamia and those of eastern Arabia. While many sites of the preceding period existed for only a short duration, even the smallest settlements of the Ubaid period often remained in use for several centuries...
...Another regional cult and pilgrimage center, associated with death and burial, is Gilat, with its 12 ha complex of large buildings around a plaza, located on the edge of the Negev and the coastal plain. In contrast to typical settlement sites, Gilat (ca. 4800–4300 BC) had a very high burial density, including a dog grave with a unique ceramic vessel as a mortuary good; steles; pits with both fenestrated pottery and burned animal bone; and extensive assemblages of, presumably, ritually charged objects. The latter group of objects comprised ceramic and basalt fenestrated stands as well as zoomorphic and anthropomorphic statuettes; the most famous of these is the “Lady of Gilat,” a ceramic seated female with a butter churn on her head and another object under her arm, often taken as the embodiment of a goddess...
...Olives were collected in the wild in the sixth millennium, but their intense, domestic exploitation for oil probably began in the Levant ca. 4800–4400 BC. Evidence of other fruits and nuts in this period includes fig, date, peach, pomegranate, almond, walnut, and pistachio. In addition, Nahal Mishmar yielded garlic and onion traces...
...Bone pathologies on cattle may indicate that they had begun to serve as draft animals as well. The use of pack animals is also suggested by pottery statuary from Ein Gedi and Gilat, in the form of animals laden with churns...
...Both paleobotanical evidence and channels in the form of shallow, broad depressions imply that irrigation was employed in the lowlands as early as 6000 BC. The sixth-millennium mound of Chogha Mami in eastern Iraq yielded traces of channels for irrigation both in archaeological sections and on the ground surface. The earlier channels were some 2 m in width and 50 cm deep, but later, fifth-millennium irrigation was also evident in the form of channels 4–6 m wide...
...The Ubaid-type settlements of Mesopotamia used delicately painted pottery in great abundance for hundreds of years, but the emphasis shifted to undecorated pots by the close of the fifth millennium. Economic considerations were probably relevant to this change, aimed at cheap and efficient, large-scale production, including the use of a slow turning device...
...By the onset of the fourth millennium at the latest, pottery production had shifted from an intermittent activity to a continuous enterprise in the hands of professionals...
...While Anatolian and Mesopotamian sites have provided very little evidence for the use of metals until the fourth millennium, there is an astounding wealth of data for metallurgy in the southern Levant from ca. 4200 BC onward...
...In the Levant, the first ranked social hierarchies are said to occur in the (late) fifth millennium BC, with reference to, for example, the presence of sophisticated metallurgy, craft specialization (stoneworking, ivory), and wealthy tombs in caves ... However, evidence for these indicators of status and prestige is primarily restricted to ritual contexts and is not found across all regions of the southern Levant. The formation of explicit elites was still weakly developed, although an intensification of economic activity (including an increase in household storage) and an uneven accumulation of surplus and wealth by at least some households is unmistakable. Evidence for social differentiation in Anatolia and Mesopotamia is also meager..."
from The Oxford History of the Ancient Near East (5 volumes, 2020-2023)
...While there is no single chronological framework for the later prehistory of the Near East, it is helpful to divide the period into four main stages: an early phase, ca. 9500–8500 BC, associated with the first sedentary communities; a second phase, ca. 8500–7000 BC, concurring with changes in the structure of settlements and the appearance of agriculture; a third phase, ca. 7000–5500 BC, associated with increasing regionalism and the development of pastoralist communities; and a fourth, final phase, around 5500–4000 BC, which marks the transition between villages and the early cities...
...Significant climate change took place in the Early Holocene at about 9600 BC, when the Younger Dryas ended just as abruptly as it had started, within a mere forty to fifty years...
...The melting of the ice sheets in the highlands and the increase in runoff water led to the rise of the Mediterranean Sea level by at least 30 m, causing the gradual inundation (over several thousand years) of the littoral plains over a width of 2–40 km. This also submerged coastal prehistoric settlements, such as Atlit-Yam off the coastline of Israel. Similar flooding took place between Arabia and Iran in what is now the Persian Gulf, where the transgression was at times dramatic, especially in gentle terrain. The shoreline, with its brackish or saline estuaries, marshes, and lagoons, continually changed, until the sea level stabilized after the mid-fourth millennium BC...
...While the warm and wet phase of the Early Holocene showed many small fluctuations, there was a significant climatic anomaly at the global level around 6200 BC, which lasted for about 160–200 years: the “8.2 kiloyear climate event.” Climatic proxy data and simulation studies both indicate that the event was characterized by cold and dry conditions, which evoked changes in hydrology and vegetation. The climate change was abrupt, and both its onset and termination seem to have taken place with startling speed on the decadal timescale — within fifty years and probably even within five to ten years. It has been suggested that the event initiated dramatic social disruption, culture collapse, population migrations, warfare, and various other sorts of mayhem in the Near East, but there is little clear evidence for this...
...While sheep, goats, cattle, and pigs were the primary species for animal husbandry, the latter two require more water and therefore their presence may reflect greater humidity. Significantly, the distribution of pig bones in the fifth-millennium Levantine settlements matches present patterns; pig bones are entirely absent at modern sites that receive less than 200 mm of average precipitation...
...Sedentism is a matter of degree, the intensity of which is often difficult to demonstrate from one habitation to another. Although sites sometimes had long occupation sequences, it is doubtful that this occupation was always continuous. The level of sedentary behavior in its initial stage may well have been overstated by earlier studies...
...Many Neolithic communities preferred mobility over permanent settlements until the eighth millennium BC, when there was a proliferation of village life on an unprecedented scale. Although the period between 8000 and 7000 BC is often associated with significant population growth in most parts of the Near East, it is perhaps better understood in terms of a transformation of small forager groups with little archaeological visibility into larger, sedentary farming communities with high archaeological visibility...
...It is now evident that the origins of sedentary lifeways had little or nothing to do with agriculture and stock rearing, despite their common conflation. Sedentary village life in substantial circular dwellings at places ranging from Eynan in Israel, to Tell Abu Hureyra in Syria, to Hallan Çemi in Turkey began several thousand years before the adoption of farming and relied upon an intense use of wild resources...
...A striking development in settlement organization was the large sites that came into existence throughout the Near East at about 7500 BC, from Aşıklı Höyük in Turkey to Tell Abu Hureyra in Syria and ‘Ain Ghazal in Jordan ... Excavations make clear that some sites were, indeed, densely populated, such as Çatalhöyük ca. 7000 BC with 13 ha, which was packed tight with housing inhabited by probably several thousand people...
...Simultaneous settlement all over a site is often just assumed rather than proven. It is important to realize that site size is not the same as settlement size or population size. The issue is relevant here because regional dominance and political power often are attributed to these sites based simply on their size. Due to the tendency to associate them with hierarchy and centrality, they are often positioned as cornerstones in the emergence of societal complexity. Yet it may be telling that there are no consistent signs of elites, social hierarchy, differentiated wealth distribution, and other forms of explicit ranking at either the large sites or any of the small sites...
...In the southern Levant, some sites continued to build clusters of round houses, such as at Beidha (ca. 8000 BC), where small dwellings formed groups suggesting that a single family may have used several of them. However, houses across the region at this time were more typically rectangular in shape. Rectangular features in many different arrangements and sizes replaced the earlier circular architecture; this change began in Syria and the Levant around 8700 BC, whereas the central Anatolian plateau followed suit 800–900 years later (ethnographic data actually suggest that the change from round to rectangular architecture can be implemented within the course of a single generation)...
...The food that people were eating, whether as roasted grains, biscuits, unleavened bread, porridge, or gruel, was often hard and coarse. At Tell Abu Hureyra, the teeth of many adults were severely worn down to the roots from chewing gritty food and were lost prematurely. In the seventh millennium BC, wear on teeth was substantially reduced by the introduction of pottery and the cooking of food in ceramic vessels...
...Relying heavily on root or cereal crops, farming communities also had less balanced and less varied diets and generally were less healthy. Malnutrition and the heavy workload seem to have caused a decline in average life expectancy; in the Neolithic this was about twenty-five to thirty-five years, and only about half of infants reached adulthood...
...The earliest metalworking was in the form of native copper shaped into beads. It is attested at places like Aşıklı Höyük and Çayönü in Anatolia from about 8200 BC onward and was introduced much later in Mesopotamia and the Levant. The quantities of metal used were everywhere very low, and the skills of the metalworkers remained at the same initial level for several thousand years. Metal was neither vital for subsistence nor yet fully valued as a prestige commodity. This picture began to change by the late fifth millennium, first in Turkey and Iran and then elsewhere, with the onset of smelting or casting and the recognition of the significant advantages of copper-based alloys over pure copper...
...In the early seventh millennium, Tell Sabi Abyad in northern Syria was characterized by houses that were perfectly symmetrical and tripartite in plan; each structure comprised a relatively wide central hall flanked by parallel rows of narrow rooms along each of the long sides, usually with a smaller cubicle at the rear end. The houses stood upon large rectangular platforms about 10×7 m in area and up to 1 m in height, sometimes provided with low staircases. Halfway through the seventh millennium an architectural innovation occurred at the site: circular buildings up to 5 m across. Initially only a handful of such round structures were employed, but their use as ordinary dwellings for living and shelter increased significantly in the occupation layers dated to 6200–5500 BC. Excavations at a range of sixth-millennium sites in Mesopotamia showed that this architectural change was radical, in the sense that it entailed an almost complete replacement of rectilinear edifices by round structures. It has been suggested that an entirely new architectural rationale came into existence; it was likely not only utilitarian but also societal and ideological, although the incentives remain poorly understood...
...As pointed out in section 1.2, the “8.2 ka climate event” is often associated with societal catastrophe and culture collapse, although the evidence remains highly controversial. Drought and other impacts of the event are said to have led to the abandonment of many of the larger settlements in the southern Levant and elsewhere. Others, however, have suggested that the Neolithic socioeconomic fabric was basically unsustainable and that its collapse was inevitable in the long run. This perspective explains the widespread abandonment in terms of overpopulation and social stress, related to landscape destruction, overexploitation, and resource depletion (e.g., deforestation for fuel and building materials and overgrazing by sheep and goats). The climate change ca. 6200 BC may have been the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back. Yet we need to be aware of the ever-present danger of climatic determinism, in which synchronicity of climate and culture change is often taken as self-evident proof for causality. Chronological correlations are not always as clear or as consistent as some authors would have us believe ... The long-lived settlement upon the east mound of Çatalhöyük came to an end at about 6200 BC, but occupation continued for another thousand years at the neighboring western mound. An abundance of sites is attested across Anatolia ca. 6400–6000 BC, suggesting that the 8.2 ka climate event did not affect settlement patterns...
...Although there is material evidence for ritual in the sixth-millennium settlements (burials, figurines), there is a remarkable (and still poorly understood) lack of special cult architecture. Ritual took place mainly within the intimate confines of the private house, rather than at the public level as was characteristic of earlier periods. This observation is consistent with the contemporary preference for small and dispersed groups in short-lived settlements. Many sites in Upper Mesopotamia were probably never occupied by more than two to three families, while breaks in their sequences argue for interruptions and frequent shifts of occupation. Mobility across the landscape and a continually fluctuating settlement pattern were important to sixth-millennium populations in Mesopotamia...
...Significantly, many large sites were in locales that do not match our preconceptions of what might be optimal for agriculture. For example, much of the area around Çatalhöyük and Domuztepe in Turkey was uncultivable. Clearly the selection of places for settlement was not a purely economic matter but equally had to fit other social and ideological values...
...The expansion of settlement beyond well-watered river valleys probably required some degree of sustained water control in the form of waterholes and wells that could access deeper water tables. It comes as no surprise that wells were a frequent feature of early village sites in many parts of the Near East. Cylindrical, stone-lined shaft wells about 2 m in diameter and at least 8 m deep were uncovered at Mylouthkia and Shillourokambos on Cyprus, ca. 8000 BC. Similar installations were found at the seventh- to sixth-millennium sites of Atlit Yam and Sha’ar Hagolan in Israel, and at Khirbet Garsour and Arpachiyah in northern Iraq...
...From roughly 6200 BC onward, sheep and goats were kept increasingly for renewable secondary products, in particular milk and wool...
...Early attempts at making ceramics occurred sporadically in much earlier habitations dated to the late ninth and early eighth millennia BC, such as at Boncuklu in Anatolia, Kfar HaHoresh in Israel and, probably, Ganj Dareh in Iran. However, their use and distribution was intermittent and short-lived, perhaps for specific occasions only. The distribution of pottery manufacturing did not occur everywhere at the same time but happened in the form of (repeated) invention, imitation, and emulation. While there was a proliferation of pottery along the northern and northwestern fringes of the Fertile Crescent ca. 7000–6700 BC, it appeared in the southern Levant only several centuries later. Significantly, the earliest ceramics in Upper Mesopotamia comprised limited quantities of handmade, often painted pots, which were exchanged over hundreds of kilometers...
...The sixth-millennium Halaf ceramics have recently been discussed as an early example of “globalizing tendencies” in the prehistoric Near East with regard to their extraordinary spatial range (over an area of more than 1,000 sq km)...
...While many continuities in settlement and other cultural traits were occurring in the later sixth millennium BC, archaeological research has emphasized the importance of the fifth millennium as a time of change in sociopolitical organization and craft production. The earlier emphasis on mobility weakened in favor of a growing attachment to place and the creation of new networks of regional and local identities and alliances...
...In the southern Levant, extensive “courtyard houses” continued to be built, broadly similar from the Golan to the Negev. At Tell Tsaf (ca. 5200–4600 BC), the compounds were over 250 sq m, consisting of rectangular one- or two-roomed dwellings, circular animal corrals, and many circular grain silos 1–4 m across, all grouped within walled yards...
...The settling of the Mesopotamian Plain is associated with a culture horizon known as “Ubaid” after the eponymous site in southern Iraq. At first, sites of Ubaid type were confined to the region south of Baghdad, but between roughly 5000 and 4200 BC Ubaid material culture spread through exchange and, perhaps, migrations over an area of unprecedented scope, extending from southwestern Iran to Syria and southeastern Anatolia. The typical pottery has also been identified at scores of predominantly coastal sites in the eastern regions of Saudi Arabia, in Bahrain, and in Qatar. Recent evidence, including boat remains and representations of boats, indicates an extensive maritime exchange between the communities of southern Mesopotamia and those of eastern Arabia. While many sites of the preceding period existed for only a short duration, even the smallest settlements of the Ubaid period often remained in use for several centuries...
...Another regional cult and pilgrimage center, associated with death and burial, is Gilat, with its 12 ha complex of large buildings around a plaza, located on the edge of the Negev and the coastal plain. In contrast to typical settlement sites, Gilat (ca. 4800–4300 BC) had a very high burial density, including a dog grave with a unique ceramic vessel as a mortuary good; steles; pits with both fenestrated pottery and burned animal bone; and extensive assemblages of, presumably, ritually charged objects. The latter group of objects comprised ceramic and basalt fenestrated stands as well as zoomorphic and anthropomorphic statuettes; the most famous of these is the “Lady of Gilat,” a ceramic seated female with a butter churn on her head and another object under her arm, often taken as the embodiment of a goddess...
...Olives were collected in the wild in the sixth millennium, but their intense, domestic exploitation for oil probably began in the Levant ca. 4800–4400 BC. Evidence of other fruits and nuts in this period includes fig, date, peach, pomegranate, almond, walnut, and pistachio. In addition, Nahal Mishmar yielded garlic and onion traces...
...Bone pathologies on cattle may indicate that they had begun to serve as draft animals as well. The use of pack animals is also suggested by pottery statuary from Ein Gedi and Gilat, in the form of animals laden with churns...
...Both paleobotanical evidence and channels in the form of shallow, broad depressions imply that irrigation was employed in the lowlands as early as 6000 BC. The sixth-millennium mound of Chogha Mami in eastern Iraq yielded traces of channels for irrigation both in archaeological sections and on the ground surface. The earlier channels were some 2 m in width and 50 cm deep, but later, fifth-millennium irrigation was also evident in the form of channels 4–6 m wide...
...The Ubaid-type settlements of Mesopotamia used delicately painted pottery in great abundance for hundreds of years, but the emphasis shifted to undecorated pots by the close of the fifth millennium. Economic considerations were probably relevant to this change, aimed at cheap and efficient, large-scale production, including the use of a slow turning device...
...By the onset of the fourth millennium at the latest, pottery production had shifted from an intermittent activity to a continuous enterprise in the hands of professionals...
...While Anatolian and Mesopotamian sites have provided very little evidence for the use of metals until the fourth millennium, there is an astounding wealth of data for metallurgy in the southern Levant from ca. 4200 BC onward...
...In the Levant, the first ranked social hierarchies are said to occur in the (late) fifth millennium BC, with reference to, for example, the presence of sophisticated metallurgy, craft specialization (stoneworking, ivory), and wealthy tombs in caves ... However, evidence for these indicators of status and prestige is primarily restricted to ritual contexts and is not found across all regions of the southern Levant. The formation of explicit elites was still weakly developed, although an intensification of economic activity (including an increase in household storage) and an uneven accumulation of surplus and wealth by at least some households is unmistakable. Evidence for social differentiation in Anatolia and Mesopotamia is also meager..."
from The Oxford History of the Ancient Near East (5 volumes, 2020-2023)