FIRST FARMERS IN THE FERTILE CRESCENT
SOME SITES MAKE HEADLINES AROUND THE WORLD WHEN THEY are discovered. Some sites attract outlandish theories like flies to honey. And some sites do both. In 2007 excavations began at a site in modern Turkey named Göbekli Tepe that dates back more than eleven thousand years ago. By 2010, it was featured on an episode of Ancient Aliens.
According to various accounts, a farmer discovered Göbekli Tepe in 1983. He found a carved stone in his field and took it to the local museum. University of Chicago archaeologists had previously conducted an archaeological survey of the site in the 1960s and had already dismissed it as a probable medieval cemetery because of all the broken slabs of stone that they saw, which they identified as possible tombstones. As a result, not much was made of the farmer’s discovery, at least initially.
In 1993 Klaus Schmidt, a German archaeologist, saw the carved stone that the farmer had found and reinvestigated the site a year or so later. It took more than a decade to get everything lined up, and excavations at the site did not begin until 2007. Within a short period of time, it became clear that Göbekli Tepe is one of the oldest prepottery Neolithic sites with evidence for religious beliefs that has ever been found, dating to about 9600 BCE. Schmidt led the excavations for seven years, until his unexpected and untimely death from a heart attack while swimming in July 2014.
The Neolithic period, or New Stone Age (from the Greek neos meaning “new” and lithos meaning “stone”), started about twelve thousand years ago, in about 10,000 BCE in the ancient Near East. During the first part of this period, which lasted for about four thousand years, pottery as we know it hadn’t yet been invented, and so it is called the prepottery Neolithic period.
We usually talk about the Neolithic Revolution when we are discussing this period, because it sees the beginning of a whole new way of life. Not only do stone tools change, which is why we call this the New Stone Age in the first place, but this is when we see the first domestication of plants and animals, including wheat and barley, sheep and goats, in an arc of sites running from the top of the Persian Gulf up across to where Turkey meets Syria and then down the Mediterranean coast all the way to modern-day Israel—the Fertile Crescent.
This revolution, in turn, changed everything. Imagine having enough food to be able to settle down and become sedentary, rather than having to be nomadic. Imagine having enough food all year round so that you weren’t afraid to have more children and could let your population grow. Imagine having your cluster of huts grow to be a village, then a town, and then a city, and your society to grow more and more complex, so that eventually you needed laws, accounting, writing. All this and more came about because of the domestication of plants and animals, but some claim that other things did as well, including the origins of violence, social inequality, and other injustices.
There are a wide variety of theories about why agriculture and domestication of plants and animals began in this region in the Neolithic period, some of which have been suggested by very well-known scholars such as the Australian archaeologist V. Gordon Childe, the University of Chicago archaeologist Robert Braidwood, the University of Michigan anthropologist Henry Wright, and a Danish agricultural economist named Ester Boserup. Their suggestions involve possible climate change between ten thousand and nine thousand BCE, which may have led to people settling down in oases; finding the right types of plants and animals that could be domesticated; overpopulation and overuse of natural resources; and other events and occurrences that may have made domestication both necessary and possible.
Göbekli Tepe has the oldest known examples of monumental architecture in the ancient Near East. So far archaeologists have uncovered at least five stone circles of various sizes—one of them is sixty-five feet across. They are impressive—even the beautiful photographs that have appeared in various publications so far do not do complete justice to them.
Most of the standing stones have figures or scenes carved on them, including pictures of animals. They have excited the interest of a lot of people, whether professional archaeologists, the general public, or those with far-out theories. The animals include lizards, scorpions, bulls, lions, vultures, and possible dogs or wolves, in addition to other species. Some of them may even be pictographs—that is, images that tell a story five thousand years before the invention of writing—which is a novel suggestion made during summer 2015.
According to Schmidt, there are at least sixteen other stone circles still buried, which he detected using remote-sensing techniques such as ground-penetrating radar. Each of the circles that have been excavated so far contains a number of standing stones, including two large T-shaped stones in the middle, with smaller standing stones around them. The larger stones can be up to sixteen or eighteen feet tall.
It is not at all clear what the inhabitants of Göbekli Tepe were trying to do here, but Schmidt was convinced that it was a holy place, perhaps the earliest with architecture deliberately built by humans. In 2008, Smithsonian magazine published an article wondering whether it is the world’s first known temple, and in 2011, National Geographic published an article that suggested “the urge to worship sparked civilization.”
In that National Geographic article, the author pointed out that the builders of Göbekli Tepe were able “to cut, shape, and transport 16-ton stones hundreds of feet despite having no wheels or beasts of burden.” He also pointed out that they were living in a world that did not yet have writing, metal, or pottery.
What’s important for us is that Göbekli Tepe is located on the northern edge of the Fertile Crescent and seems to be one of the earliest sites from this time period. In fact, it seems to have been inhabited just before the inhabitants learned the art of domestication, because the thousands of animal bones that have now been recovered and studied indicate that the inhabitants were hunting and eating wild game, primarily gazelles and birds.
It has long been thought that humans were able to settle down because of the invention of the domestication of plants and animals, as described above, but sites like Göbekli Tepe might indicate the opposite. Because so many people were gathered at a site like this, creating the stone rings, carving the standing stones, and so on, they might have needed to figure out a way to feed them all, if the usual hunting and gathering methods couldn’t sustain them. So, Göbekli Tepe is an extremely important site, but the archaeological investigations have really only just begun. We’ll see more from this site in the coming years, as the excavations continue under the direction of a new chief archaeologist.
But we should also mention what Göbekli Tepe isn’t. It’s not the Garden of Eden, and Schmidt never claimed that it was, despite some newspaper accounts that said he did. It also probably isn’t an ancient site related to Watchers or ancient Nephilim from the Bible, or to a global catastrophe that some think took place after the end of the last Ice Age, as was claimed in a book published in 2014.
It is, plain and simple, one of the most interesting Neolithic sites currently being investigated by archaeologists. It may shed light on the earliest practice of religion and it will definitely shed light on the period when humans began to settle down and domesticate plants and animals. In that regard, it joins two other sites that are extremely fascinating in both regards, which we shall now take a look at: Çatalhöyük, in modern-day Turkey, and Jericho, located in the West Bank near the Dead Sea.
Jericho is a site familiar to many because of the story of Joshua and the Israelites, who invaded Canaan at the end of the Exodus from Egypt, according to the biblical account. There’s a whole kettle of fish involved with the archaeology of that story, but in fact, interest in confirming the biblical story led to the discovery of Neolithic Jericho.
Jericho lies in an oasis in the middle of what is otherwise forlorn desert. The water supply is adequate for plentiful drinking as well as irrigation, allowing people to survive and even flourish here. From 1930 to 1936, a well-known British archaeologist named John Garstang conducted excavations at Jericho. As part of his interpretation of what he found, he identified one of the layers within the mound as the city captured by Joshua and the Israelites. His hypothesis came under fire, however, and it was suggested that he had misdated the pottery in the level and therefore had misinterpreted everything.
He eventually invited Kathleen Kenyon, a young archaeologist who had studied with Mortimer Wheeler and had dug at the site of Samaria a bit to the north of Jericho, to reexamine the pottery that he had found. She eventually decided that there was not enough evidence to reach a definitive answer and that she needed to do more excavating at the site, which is a very common decision for archaeologists to make.
And so, she went back to Jericho in 1952 and began her own series of excavations. The stratigraphy at the site, documenting four levels and periods of occupation, turned out to be more complicated than expected. Her drawings of the sections that she made, after she had excavated through an entire part of the mound, show a tangled mess of walls, floors, destructions, and other archaeological remains.
We should mention here that the concept of stratigraphy, which had been adopted from geology, was introduced into Near Eastern archaeology by William Matthew Flinders Petrie and Frederick Jones Bliss when they were excavating at a site called Tell el-Hesi, to the west of Jericho, several decades earlier. They correctly argued that earlier things are usually found lower down than more recent things, especially in the manmade mounds that we call tells and that can be seen throughout the Middle East, including Jericho. They also noted, as Kenyon found to be the case at Jericho, that the stratigraphy of a site can be incredibly complicated.
Kenyon found evidence, particularly more pottery, that indicated to her, and to much of the scholarly world, that the destruction layer found by Garstang actually dated to a thousand years before the time of Joshua—the remains of that city were from the Early Bronze Age, not the Late Bronze Age. Moreover, it looked to her as if the city had already been abandoned by the middle of the second millennium BCE and would have been deserted and empty, if not completely in ruins, by the time that Joshua and Israelites invaded the region.
In any case, while Kenyon was digging at Jericho, she also found Neolithic levels that included walls, buildings, and tombs, and it is on these that we will focus here. At that time, about 7500 BCE, Jericho probably had a population of about two or three thousand people at most. This is about two thousand years after the Göbekli Tepe remains that we just looked at but is still in the prepottery Neolithic period. It was protected by a thick stone wall, giving rise to the notion found in much archaeological literature that Jericho is the first known walled town.
In this same level, Kenyon also uncovered the so-called Jericho Tower. The tower is about twenty-six feet high and thirty feet across at the base. Constructed of unworked medium-sized stones, it is hollow, with an internal staircase leading from top to bottom (and vice versa). It quite possibly served as a storage unit, or ancient grain elevator, to hold their harvested food until needed, but it probably also doubled as a defensive structure to protect the town. Some scholars also have suggested that it could have served a more social function or even an astronomical purpose.
The inhabitants of Jericho buried their dead under the floors of their houses during this period. Kenyon found almost three hundred burials, but what was especially strange was what the inhabitants of Jericho did with the skulls of their dead during the second half of this period, in the prepottery Neolithic B phase, which lasted for another thousand years, down to about 6000 BCE.
During this time at Jericho, and at about a dozen other sites elsewhere in the Near East as well, the inhabitants would remove the skull from the rest of the skeleton, presumably after the body had decayed enough to allow the removal of the skull easily, rather than trying to cut it off. They also removed the lower jaw and then plastered the rest of the skull with clay. In essence, they were basically restoring the flesh of the face. They also put seashells, especially cowrie shells, where the eyes had once been, thereby creating a lifelike appearance. And then they frequently placed the skulls in a prominent place, such as in the living room of their house.
Plastered skull, Jericho
It is generally thought that this reflects some sort of ancestor worship, but we cannot know for certain, since they didn’t leave any records telling us why they did it. It is a bit weird, and creepy, at least in my opinion, to think of the head of Uncle Fred, or even a deceased parent, sitting in the corner of the living room, watching everything that is going on. And yet, I have a painting of my late mother in our dining room, which isn’t so far removed, is it?
Even today we still have a fascination with skulls, though some people go further than others. When the artist Damien Hirst produced his own version of such a skull, I showed the images side by side to my students—a skull from Jericho and the Damien Hirst skull that he created in 2007. We agreed that they were somewhat similar, but the one that Damien Hirst made was probably a bit more costly, because he created it by using eighty-six hundred flawless diamonds and platinum. The materials alone cost 14 million British pounds (almost 22 million US dollars); it was offered for sale at the bargain price of 50 million British pounds.
Most recently, a joint Italian and Palestinian team of archaeologists excavated at Jericho from 1997 to 2000. They found additional interesting information, including evidence for a large lower city dating to the Middle Bronze Age. Their work temporarily came to a halt when tensions in the region made it unsafe to continue, but they returned to the site in 2008 and have been conducting excavations ever since.
The last site that we will discuss in this chapter also has produced two plaster skulls of the sort found at Jericho, but it is better known for other things. Dating slightly later than Jericho, and flourishing between 6500 and 5600 BCE, during the prepottery Neolithic B period, this is the site of Çatalhöyük in modern-day Turkey.
Excavations at the site began in the early 1960s, under the direction of James Mellaart, a British archaeologist. He uncovered about 160 houses belonging to an amazing village or small town, which had a population that was anywhere from about three thousand to eight thousand people at any one time.
The single-story houses were all interconnected, with party walls serving two houses at a time. All the walls are made of mud brick, but the very strange thing is that none of them has either doors or windows. There are also no streets or alleyways between the houses, since they are all connected.
If there are no windows and no doors and no access from streets or alleyways, then how on earth did they get into their houses? The answer, we think, is ladders. Ladders to get up onto the roof of the house and then ladders to get down into the interior of the house. This has to be the explanation, since it’s clear that the people did have access to the interior of their houses. But this is a rather unusual living arrangement. What could possibly have prompted them to build the houses in this way?
The answer is made clear by the discovery of a wall painting that decorated one of the houses. The painting depicts a scene of a very large animal, possibly with horns, that is being hunted by a group of much smaller humans together with a few horses. The artist seems to have had a little bit of a problem with perspective, because otherwise this animal, which looks a lot like a wild pig or—more likely—a bull, would have been incredibly huge. Even if it wasn’t as big in reality as it looks in this picture, it still is an indication that there were probably large wild animals roaming around in the area outside this village. It would not be surprising if the villagers were afraid of these wild animals and tried to protect themselves from them, which would also explain why they had no doors or windows in their houses, so the animals could not get in that way. By using ladders, which the animals could not climb, the inhabitants were able to ensure their survival, at least from unwanted predators at night. No other explanation works as well.
Mellaart found this painting during his excavations in the 1960s, but unfortunately he left it unprotected from the elements, so it is not in very good shape now. He found a lot of other wall paintings as well, including one with large-scale men shown running, clad only in loincloths. Another has a rather pleasing geometric pattern above and a number of white hands on a red background below. The hands are reminiscent of paintings that children do in kindergarten, when they trace around their own hand on a piece of paper and then color it in. They’ve done somewhat the same thing here, in white on red.
Other paintings seem to show other hunting scenes, including one in which lots of little men are surrounding a rather large deer or antelope or some other similar animal with large horns. These hunting scenes, many of which are in the same room within a single house, all have in common that the animals are depicted much larger than the human beings who are apparently hunting them. Again, this may simply be an indication of the importance of the animals that they are hunting, rather than the fact that they were really huge.
On the other hand, the inhabitants do seem to have had a bit of a fixation with bulls. In addition to the paintings showing bulls, there are also what we call plastic, or three-dimensional, sculptures found in some of the rooms. These are primarily clay bulls’ heads, complete with horns, or often just the horns themselves.
We’ve got no clue why they were so fascinated by these bulls. As we shall see, the later Minoans, who lived on the island of Crete in the Aegean about four thousand years later, during the Bronze Age, also had a fixation with bulls. There are some theories that the original settlers of Crete came from ancient Anatolia, but the time span is just too great to try to link the Neolithic bulls of Çatalhöyük with the Bronze Age bulls of Knossos, even if it is tempting.
There is another wall painting that seems to depict a landscape. In fact, it seems to be the view that one sees when gazing out from the village in the direction of a large mountain that rises in the distance. This large mountain—called Hasan Dagi—is actually a volcano, which was the source of much, if not all, of the obsidian fashioned into tools that is found at Çatalhöyük. Lots of little squares are depicted in front of the mountain in the wall painting. This may be the artist trying to depict his or her own village in the foreground; in other words, Çatalhöyük itself. It also may be the case that the volcano is supposed to be erupting in the picture; at least, that is what one team of scholars has recently suggested.
There is yet another scene in which large winged birds that look like vultures seem to be attacking a human figure who is lying prone. This has led some scholars to hypothesize that dead bodies may have occasionally been left out in the open rather deliberately, so that the flesh would be consumed by scavengers before the skeletal remains were buried.
In fact, Mellaart, and now his successor at the site, Ian Hodder of Stanford University, found a number of burials underneath the floor of the houses, just like those Kathleen Kenyon found at Jericho. It is difficult to tell whether they were defleshed before burial here, though the articulated skeletons in at least some of the burials indicate that they were still fully intact when placed in the grave.
Hodder brought all sorts of new ideas with him when he began the renewed excavations at the site in 1993, including basic ones like putting a huge roof over the excavation area, to protect what they were finding rather than leaving everything exposed to the elements as Mellaart had done. He also implemented new creative approaches to raising funds for the excavations, including affiliation with a large local bank, much like the naming of a football or baseball stadium in the United States, and support from major corporate sponsors such as IBM, Pepsi, British Airways, and Shell, which is virtually unheard of at other sites. He also was involved in the staging of a fashion show in Istanbul in 1997 and again at the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai, which involved building a large replica of Çatalhöyük, so that models could emerge from the replica before proceeding to strut along a catwalk in their Neolithic-inspired outfits.
Hodder had previously been known more for his theoretical archaeological proposals. Before coming to Stanford, he had been a professor at Cambridge University in England. There, he had initiated, along with Michael Shanks and Christopher Tilley, what we call postprocessual archaeology, which can be briefly explained as follows.
Starting in the 1960s, a US archaeologist named Lewis Binford developed what’s called processual archaeology—frequently just called New Archaeology. Up to that point, archaeology and archaeological publications had been primarily descriptive; that is, describing discoveries, sites, and peoples in terms of what time period they came from, where they were found, what culture they should be assigned to, what the objects looked like, and so on. Binford wanted to make archaeology into more of a science—more anthropological, as it were. In this, he was continuing the trend started by other US archaeologists in the late 1950s, who became famous for saying “archaeology is anthropology or it is nothing.”
Binford wanted archaeology to try to explain things, not just to describe them. He wanted archaeologists to come up with universal laws or generalizations of human behavior, as Einstein had done for physics. He also wanted them to use scientific processes and be absolutely neutral and objective in their discussions, which was quite different from what previous archaeologists had been doing.
Binford was extremely influential, especially in the 1960s and 1970s, and he and his students spread the message far and wide. It was mostly US scholars who took to it, however. The Europeans were not quite so enthralled, and by the 1980s they launched a movement reacting to it.
The countermovement is known as postprocessual archaeology, or postprocessualism. Among the leaders was, and still is, Ian Hodder. Hodder and others rejected, at least to some extent, Binford’s reliance on science. The postprocessualists said that there simply aren’t any universal laws governing human behavior and that it was ridiculous to try to search for them. They also argued that there shouldn’t be as much use of explicit scientific methods, because archaeology is not a “hard science.” Hodder and his followers said that trying to pretend to be objective and neutral in our discussions and interpretations was, basically, absurd. Humans are biased animals and it is impossible to remove that bias from our interpretations.
They also said that New Archaeology had essentially “dehumanized” archaeology—and that it wasn’t possible to understand the past unless one tried to understand the people and their possible motivations, including the fact that there are multiple voices from the past, such as women and minorities, in addition to the famous dead men like Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar. Hodder is well known for having stated, essentially as a reply to Binford, something like “Archaeology is archaeology and archaeology is history—but archaeology is not anthropology.” Ironically, Hodder is now in the anthropology department at Stanford.
Postprocessualism is still very much around today, but its stances have led to some problems, including perhaps being a little too receptive to amateurs, since it holds that everything is relative and open to interpretation, even possibly by nonexperts. In fact, the involvement of nonexperts has led to some interesting activities at Çatalhöyük itself, especially when New Age and Mother Goddess devotees visit the site because of some figurines that have been found there.
These particular figurines at Çatalhöyük are of women. They are usually seated and have rather voluptuous proportions. They fit into a category of female figurines that also are found at many sites in Europe but only during this particular time period. Marija Gimbutas, who was a professor at UCLA from 1963 to 1989, saw them as Mother Goddess figurines, meant to symbolize fertility, motherhood, and the rule of the Mother Goddess over the earth.
It is not clear, however, what these figurines represent at all. Some probably do represent some aspect of fertility or motherhood, but it is not certain whether it is the goddess who is being depicted and for what reason. Would the owner of the figurine have been a woman who wanted to get pregnant or one who was giving thanks for having been pregnant? Or was it neither? Some of the figurines show the woman seated on what looks very much like a throne, including one where she appears to have an animal skin tied around her shoulders. This may indicate that it could be a depiction of a queen or a priestess, rather than the goddess herself. Gimbutas’s theories are by no means universally accepted, but Çatalhöyük is nevertheless on the itinerary of many Mother Goddess tours.
In any event, the Neolithic is an extremely interesting period, even if one judges it just on the basis of the three sites that we have discussed in this chapter. It was clearly an amazing time of transformation, but it is also clear that we are still very much in the process of learning about it. The finds at Göbekli Tepe from the mid-1990s until today, as well as those at Çatalhöyük and at Jericho, indicate that there is much more still to be found. Future discoveries will undoubtedly change our knowledge and understanding of the Neolithic period, including perhaps a more definitive answer about exactly why it was that agriculture and domestication of plants and animals first began in this particular region known as the Fertile Crescent during that time.
