Cult and the rise of desert pastoralism: a case study from the Negev
Background to the Revolution
The Neolithic revolution was initially conceived by V. G. Childe (e.g. Childe 1936, 59ff.) as the set of social and economic transformations engendered by the domestication of animals and plants and the transition from hunting-gathering to food production. For Childe, adopting the standard Marxist perspectives of his time, formal cult practices arose consequent to this economic revolution, a tool for grappling with social and economic transformation.
If in the decades following Childe’s early synthesis his conclusions concerning the mechanisms behind the origins of agriculture were disputed, and indeed disproven (Braidwood 1948, 86ff.), the basic paradigm that the revolution was based on the rise of domesticate economies remained the foundation for the next generation of studies of the Neolithic and research continued to focus on the explanation of that transition (e.g. Binford 1968; Coe and Flannery 1971; Struever 1971; Cohen 1977).
Recent decades have seen a major revision of the Childean perspective on both the origins of Neolithic society and the rise of religion. Most especially Cauvin (2000; also e.g. Hodder 2006; Mithen 2007) have suggested that the economic revolution was necessarily preceded by a cognitive revolution, a change in perceptions and ideologies that was in fact the basis for the new economic behaviors. Research emphasis shifted from the Neolithic as revolution to the Neolithic as process, that is neolithisation, the complex set of processes which brought about the transformation from Paleolithic to Neolithic society (also Simmons 2007). Research foci expanded beyond emphasis on the origins of agriculture to focus on the social transformations evident in the transition to Neolithic societies. To be fair, earlier studies of the origins of the Neolithic also addressed social transformation. Such factors as population growth, sedentarisation, competition, and changes in social organisation are well evident in most analyses of the origins of agriculture from an earlier generation of scholarship, including the work of Childe himself. Nevertheless, research focused on factors perceived as initiating the revolution, rather than the continuing transformation itself. The emphasis on cognitive changes, ideology, cult and religion in recent scholarship is well evident, and is something new. Without attempting rigorous analysis, this apparent paradigm shift (cf. Kuhn 1962) can probably be attributed to a combination of reaction to the perceived strictures of the New Archaeology (e.g. Hodder 1991), and not less important, to a literal explosion in data reflecting the rise of cult, religion and ideology in the Near Eastern Neolithic in recent years.
Revolution in the desert
If the rise of agricultural societies and the processes implicit in their evolution comprise the Neolithic revolution and neolithisation in the fertile regions of the Near East, a conceptually (if not chronologically) parallel set of processes can be traced in the adjacent arid zones in the rise of desert herding societies. The penetration of domestic goats from the Mediterranean zone into the deserts of the southern Levant (Fig. 4.1) was a patchwork affair (Rosen 1988), occurring at different times in different areas, presumably depending on the specifics of the donor and recipient groups, and geographical parameters such as proximity to water, grazing, and other resources. Thus, in eastern Jordan, domestic goats are evident as early as the PPNC (c. 6700 cal BC), in contexts suggesting mixed farming and herding adjacent to seasonal lakes (Martin 1999; Garrard et al. 1996). Notably, claims for PPNB goats in the eastern desert of Jordan (Kohler-Rollefson 1992) have been effectively refuted (Martin 1999). Similarly, in the Negev and Sinai, there is no evidence for the presence of domestic goats in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B horizon (e.g. Dayan et al. 1986; Horwitz et al. 1999), and the earliest direct evidence for goats is to be found in a well preserved goat dung horizon in the Ramon I rock shelter in the central Negev, c. 6000–6200 cal BC (Rosen et al. 2005). In hyperarid southern Jordan, at the site of Abu Nukhayla, Henry and his coworkers (Henry et al. 2003; Albert and Henry 2005) have made a case for the presence of domestic goats in the late PPNB, but the case is based at best on circumstantial evidence (e.g. the presence of spherulites, phytolith analyses suggesting the possibility of dung accumulations) which may have alternative interpretations. However, the evidence for agriculture based on wadi run-off, and the intensive construction evident at the site, also suggest that it be seen as an extension of the PPNB sites of the Jordanian Plateau removed south, rather than some expression of an autonomous mobile pastoral society in the desert.
Fig. 4.1: Location map of sites in the southern Levant mentioned in the text.
In terms of process, a key point for understanding the introduction of goats into the desert is the lag time between the transition from gazelle to goat in the Mediterranean zone, c. 7600 cal BC at the latest (mid-late PPNB), and perhaps a couple of hundred years earlier, and minimally 500 years later in eastern Jordan, in the PPNC, and perhaps a millennium later in the Negev, in the early Pottery Neolithic. In this context, the relative rapidity of the spread of goat herding as an adaptation attached to village pastoralism throughout the Near East is notable. For the sake of the argument, if the earliest evidence for goat herding, at Tepe Ganj Dareh (Zeder and Hesse 2000) indeed indicates an origin for the phenomenon in the Zagros, then within a few hundred years village pastoralism spread throughout the village matrix of the Near Eastern Pre-Pottery Neolithic, distances on the order of 500–1000 km, depending on where one places the origin point. Of course, one cannot rule out local autonomous domestication processes (Horwitz et al. 1999; Martin 1999), although the scarcity of goats in faunal assemblages in the early phases of the PPN in the Levant, suggests that hunting did not evolve into herding there as it did in the Zagros. Regardless, once village pastoralism is established, it then took from 500 to 1000 years to move the domestic goats the 100–300 km from the Mediterranean zone into the desert. That is, the adoption of domestic herds into hunter-gatherer societies is very different from their adoption into farmer-herder societies, was not a simple nor direct outcome of the proximity of domesticates, and seems to have demanded an entirely new social and human ecological configuration (cf. Ingold 1980).
In this context, the mechanism of the adoption also demands explication and three basic alternatives offer themselves (Bar-Yosef and Khazanov 1992):
1) The expansion of village herders, specialists, into the desert and the ultimate fission of herding societies from their parent village societies,
2) The adoption of domestic animals by hunter-gatherer groups, and
3) Some combination of the two.
The absence of any evidence for specialized herding camps in the PPNB, and the great contrast in material culture and associated symbols between the desert societies and their sedentary cousins (e.g. the absence of ceramics, the absence of art, contrasts in ritual structure, architecture) in the PPNB and later Neolithic cultures (Rosen 2011), argues against fission as the primary source for desert pastoral societies. The diverging material and symbolic cultural trajectories, beginning prior to the advent of domesticates, are evidence for adoption of herds into hunter-gatherer society. As for option 3, ethnography demonstrates constant shifting between the sedentary and mobile (e.g. Barth 1961; Marx 1992), and interaction between the groups can be demonstrated at many levels (Rosen 2011), perhaps even at the level of movements of individuals and small groups.
The implications of this revolution also parallel those of the sedentary zone, and the evolution of new cult practices appears to be one of those implications.
Cult sites in the desert
As reviewed above, the Neolithic, with Natufian precursors, saw an explosion of material correlates (e.g. art, special architecture, elaborate mortuary remains) and inferred behaviors (e.g. feasting, pilgrimage) indicating the increasingly large role of material and monumental ritual behavior in social life (Hodder 2012; Dietrich et al. 2012). In spite of clear linkages between desert hunter-gatherers and their sedentary neighbors, in form of the trinket trade, diffusion of lithic paradigms, and even movement of raw materials such as obsidian, in all the period preceding the 6th millennium BC (the Natufian, the PPN, and early stages of the Pottery Neolithic in northern terminology), evidence for similar public or group ritual behaviors in the desert, paralleling those found in the contemporary sedentary societies, is virtually absent.
In pioneering work in the southern Negev and Sinai, Avner (1984; 1990; 2003; Avner et al. 1994) has documented dozens of shrines and tumulus fields reflecting elaborate desert cult systems. Chronologically, virtually all of the shrines and most of the tumuli can be dated to the 6th millennium BC, none earlier. A few shrines may date somewhat later, and tumuli continue several millennia forward in time. Dates from other sites and areas (Porat et al. 2006; Eddy and Wendorf 1999) confirm these trends. There was an explosion in the number of cult sites in the desert in the 6th millennium BC.
Few of these sites have been systematically excavated or published. The shrines generally consist of an open courtyard, rectangular or quadrilateral in shape (Fig. 4.2), demarcated by small stones or slabs. The rectangular shrines show a larger, more massive back (western) wall. Often some kind of central installation was set in the center of the back wall. Avner (1984) noted generally consistent alignments among the shrines, and Rosen and Rosen (2003) demonstrated the solstice orientation of the shrines at Ramat Saharonim, and by extension, the typologically similar shrines surveyed by Avner. Most of the shrines surveyed by Avner (2002) as well as those excavated by Rothenberg (1979, 125, fig. 28, misattributed to the PPNB), Eddy and Wendorf (1999), and Rosen et al. (2007), are variants of this type.
Excavations at the shrine site of ‘Uvda Valley 6 (Yogev 1983) revealed somewhat different features. Instead of a central installation along the back wall, a small filled platform was constructed in the northwest corner of the quadrilateral courtyard. Within the platform, a small cist with small upright stone stelae was uncovered. Several meters south of the shrine, animal figure outlines apparently representing leopards and one gazelle. Constructed of small stones placed one against the other, each about a meter long, were uncovered (Yogev 1983). Similar stone figure outlines have also been found associated with the rectangular shrines at Hashem el-Tarif in Sinai (Avner 2002).
The shrines are marked by a scarcity and even absence of material culture, in marked contrast to the abundance of material culture remains, especially lithics, found at desert Neolithic occupation sites (e.g. Goring-Morris and Gopher 1983; Gopher et al. 1995; Bar-Yosef 1984; Rosen 1984). The rare associated finds have been primarily tabular scrapers, for example the single such piece at ‘Uvda Valley 6.
Systematic survey and excavations of the shrines and tumulus field at Ramat Saharonim, in the Makhtesh Ramon, in the central Negev, offer the most detailed look at one of these complexes (Rosen and Rosen 2003; Porat and et al. 2005; Rosen et al. 2007). A review of this site, as an example of the phenomenon, suggests more detailed conclusions concerning the origins and nature of early desert cult.
The shrine complex at Ramat Saharonim consists of a set of four rectangular shrines set at the western end of a cuesta valley and 30 large round burial cairns (tumuli) aligned along the two cuesta cliffs (Fig. 4.3). The shrines are rectangular, consisting of a massive western wall and an enclosure of smaller slabs on the eastern side (Fig. 4.2). The massive western walls are 20–22 m long, half a meter wide, preserved to a height of c. 0.75 m (mostly covered by post-abandonment accumulation of aeolian sediments) and were probably originally on the order of 1.5 m high to judge by the in situ fallen slabs and other stone fall (Fig. 4.4). These walls were constructed of two parallel rows of massive limestone blocks, weighing up to 450 kg, with an intentional fill of smaller stones between the rows. The total mass of each structure is estimated to be well over 30 tons. Evidence for quarrying from exposed limestone strata is present 200–400 m distant.
Fig. 4.2: Plan of Ramat Saharonim Shrine 4 (upper) after excavation and reconstruction (lower). Note that shaded areas were unexcavated, to allow for section documentation.
The adjacent rectangular enclosures or courtyards, about 8 meters wide, are demarcated by fallen stone slabs, probably originally upright. The state of preservation varies, but in the preserved (and unexcavated) Shrine 1, a portal into the courtyard is evident in two still upright slabs embedded in the eastern wall of the courtyard, but perpendicular to it. In at least two cases a platform or other kind of installation is attached to the massive wall, jutting into the courtyard.
Fig. 4.3: Plan of the Ramat Saharonim shrine and tumulus complex. The white lines are modern roads. Note the location of the quarry for the construction of the shrines.
Fig. 4.4: Views of a central segment wall of Shrine 4 after excavation, looking south (left) and east (right). Scale is two meters in length.
All four shrines are oriented to align with the setting sun of the summer solstice. Minor deviations seem to have been introduced to integrate natural landscape features into the orientations. Thus, the view of the summer solstice sunset from Shrines 2, 3 and 4 lies between two small hills and is directed toward a large black extinct volcano as well as toward the setting sun. All shrines are set to view the solstice sun impressively setting over the northern cliff of the Makhtesh Ramon. The geographical attributes indicate clearly that the intended alignment was to the setting sun of the summer solstice, to the west, and not to the rising sun of the winter solstice (as at Stonehenge, for example) in the east. Microlocation of the shrines seems to have integrated small scale watersheds and geological formations such that the shrines were situated on color cusps in the land surface (Rosen et al. 2007, fig. 4). No clearly associated artifacts were found either during survey or excavation of the shrines, and no habitation structures or sites from this period were found in the vicinity.
Subsidiary square structures, built of a single course and single row of wadi cobbles (Rosen et al. 2007, figs 4, 7), are located 2–3 m north of three of the four shrines (and Shrine 3 shows evidence of some kind of poorly preserved undefinable feature). Although these structures were clearly intentionally associated with the rectangular shrines and were undoubtedly also ritual in function, stratigraphic excavation of shrine 4 demonstrates that these structures considerably post-date the massive shrines, probably on the order of millennia, and are not relevant to the discussion at hand.
The cairn field at Ramat Saharonim was constructed along two parallel cuesta cliffs, diverging in the west such that ‘corridor’ between the cairn lines is closed by the four shrines. The cairns themselves are located on the cliff edges, silhouetted and visible from some distance (Fig. 4.5). The cairns themselves were constructed around a central cist built on exposed bedrock or excavated no more than 10 cm into a shallow loess accumulation. Cairn circumference was demarcated by large margin stones placed in a circle 4–8 m in diameter. A crude corbel superstructure was built around the cist, leaving access at the top, and more haphazard fill set between the margin stones and the cist structure. Interment was essentially a form of exposure since no real burial occurred. The loess fill present today in the cairns is clearly the accumulation of millennia.
Three cairns were excavated and remains of seven individuals were recovered, including one attributable to a classical period (c. 200 BC) secondary use of Tumulus 29. The Neolithic remains were in a poor state of preservation; nevertheless, three interment states could be reconstructed, primary interments, secondary interments, and interments showing deliberate bone re-organization and manipulation (especially evident in the placement of a skull between long bones). The cairns were clearly occasionally re-accessed. A single metacarpal of Equus sp. was also found in Tumulus 29, perhaps a burial offering (Horwitz et al. 2011). Beyond the Equus bone, the only artifacts associated with the early interments were four Conus beads, probably an anklet, found in tumulus 30.
Fig. 4.5: Tumulus 30 and interior, with skull arranged between long bones.
With the exception of the classical period interment, stratigraphically later and dated by radiocarbon, OSL dates indicate rough contemporaneity between the cairns and the shrine system.
The significance of desert cult
It should be clear that the complex at Ramat Saharonim and other similar complexes are indeed cultic. The absence of domestic debris, the architectural contrasts with known habitation sites, the special alignments, and the clear mortuary contexts all point to ritual function. However, beyond merely establishing ritual function, two basic approaches can be adopted in interpretation. The emic attempts to enter the symbolic world of the shrine culture, offering meaning from within the culture itself. The etic views the shrines from the outside, attempting to understand the sociological implications of different aspects and features of the shrines.
Adopting first an emic perspective, it is clear that in the absence of texts and informants, interpretations are limited to those derived from specific ethnographic or historical analogies, or cultural universals, and the specific contexts of the cultural features themselves. The farther removed in time, space, and social and cultural proximity, the less reliable the interpretation based on analogy (cf. Ascher 1961; Wylie 1985; Wason 1994, 26–30). The setting sun of the summer solstice, marking the beginning of summer, is a powerful symbol in ancient Near Eastern mythology (e.g. Yamauchu 1965, also for the death of Dumuzi at the beginning of the summer see Nemat-Nejat 1998, 143–44; Wiggerman 2011, 678), and summer is the season of death in the ancient Near East (in contrast to Europe, where winter takes that role). It thus is unlikely to be an accident that shrines aligned with the summer solstice are associated with mortuary practices. The west, in Egypt, denotes the land of death (e.g. Erman 1894, 310; Műller 2001; Montet 1958, 321). The color contrasts associated with the east and west sides of some of the shrines may also link up to this seasonal transition, and the absence of habitation sites in the vicinity of the shrines also suggests a distinction between sacred and profane, the shrine precinct functional as some kind of liminal zone, between seasons and between states. Of course, the corridor between the two cliffs, leading to the shrines, would also seem to indicate passage. It is tempting to link these symbols to later Near Eastern mythologies, for example the dying Tammuz (Yamauchi 1965; Nemat-Nejat 1998, 143–44; Wiggerman 2011, 678) or Osiris (Műller 2001), but without more specific iconography, the details of the mythologies behind the desert solstice shrines are not knowable.
An etic perspective on these sites offers interpretations based on external analytic frameworks.
1) The construction of large structures, really megalithic in conception (again, a single shrine is estimated to weigh greater than c. 30 tons, and single blocks have been estimated to weight as much as 450 kg), suggests power and hierarchy, and the presence of corporate structures of a scale larger than the nuclear family or band (cf. Kristiansen 1984). These structures are both a reflection of power and of the need to demonstrate power (cf. Wason 1994, 146–149). In their very construction they reflect a new trophic level in human organisation and management, one which did not exist earlier in the desert; they also reflect the need to legitimise that power through public works. In addition, the mere size of the complex indicates a larger corporate group size than previously evident in the archaeological record in these regions.
2) The solstice alignment, and the symbolism evoked in the special utilisation of the landscape (e.g. Tilley 1994), indicates a complex cosmology specifically connected to the social hierarchy and structure reflected in the cult complex. That is, ethnographically even the smallest scale societies have complex mythologies and cosmologies, but they are not linked directly to the symbols of power, structure or hierarchy. Thus, beyond the physical demonstration of power and structure evident in the megaliths (cf. Fritz 1978), the system is also legitimised and maintained in the linkage to myth, even if we lack access to the specific content of the myth itself.
3) The linkage between mortuary behaviour and megaliths suggests corporate territorial signing and territorial anchors (e.g. Renfrew 1984; Kinnes 1982; Kristiansen 1984; also see Marx 1977 for relationship between tribal organisation and territoriality). Monumental burials connect ancestors with burial grounds, and tumuli can be seen for great distances, especially when placed on cliffs and ridges, thus acting as territorial indicators. It is not especially important here whether they reflect edges or centers. Cemeteries are clear markers of territory amongst modern Bedouin groups in the region (e.g. Meriaot 2011; Bailey 1990, map 11.3).
Given the absence of shrines and elaborate mortuary complexes in the preceding stages of the Neolithic in the region, together these features reflect a new concept of social organisation (cf. Parker Pearson 1984), which for all practical purposes can be called tribal society – a new level of social hierarchy coming equipped with territoriality, and with social accoutrements necessary for maintaining and legitimising the new structure. This shift in basic structure is reflected in other features of desert societies in this period, for example in the rise of collective hunting, architectural changes, and ultimately major changes in population and external relations.
The pastoral revolution and the rise of desert cult
If the transition from hunting to herding in the desert comprises an arid zone equivalent to the Neolithic Revolution, then an expected concomitant is some kind of associated ideological or symbolic revolution in the desert. As is clearly evident in the archaeological record, that ideological revolution did indeed occur, but on the order of 500–1000 years after the earliest adoption of domesticates. That is, if these two revolutions are at some level structurally equivalent, they nevertheless seem to contrast significantly in the role played by ideology and conceptual systems1 which seems to have been integral to the neolithisation process in the settled zone, but is evident only very later in the process in the desert.
Two chronological issues are key. First, as above, there is a clear lag time between the adoption or evolution of domestic goats in the settled zone, in the mid/late PPNB, and their adoption into the hunting-gathering societies of the desert, on the order of a millennium later. This diffusion of domestic herd animals into the desert is not an obvious or trivial process, as much as it may appear so in hindsight. We actually know little about herding practices in the farming villages of the PPNB (e.g. Effenberger 2012), and the unwritten assumption that these societies maintained large herds, external to the villages, in some prehistoric precursor to modern Bedouin societies (e.g. Kohler-Rollefson 1992), is unwarranted. In this context it is perhaps telling that the rock shelters of the Mediterranean Levant, so well-known for their prehistoric remains, sometimes including PPNB strata, do NOT contain thick dung layers reflecting early Neolithic pastoral exploitation, a phenomenon ubiquitous in later periods. The adoption of goats by desert hunter-gatherer societies required an adaptation differing tremendously from that of the contemporary village pastoralism; thus, the lag time derives from the need to develop the technologies and social tools and structures requisite for desert pastoralism, an adaptation fundamentally different from village herding, let alone hunting (Ingold 1980).
Second, the lag time, on the order of 500–1000 years, between the earliest evidence for herding in the desert and the earliest evidence for central cult, that is, the corporate rites expressed in the shrines, mortuary structures, and associated practices as reflected in the archaeology requires discussion. Comparing revolutions, the Neolithic or Agricultural Revolution in the settled zone can be characterized as a primary revolution, in reality a long and gradual evolution integrating interacting social, ideological, and technological changes linked at one level or another to the gradual processes of domestication, defined both in terms of the human behaviors manipulating the different plant and animals species, and the biological processes. The interactive nature of these processes and the range of plants and animals involved entail a complex set of systems, virtually by definition ensuring that the different social, economic and ideological concomitants would be locked in step one with the other. Lag times in such a continuous system may be impossible to discern, if they even exist.
The desert revolution was a secondary revolution, a revolution based on the introduction of the product of a long evolution which occurred elsewhere. The goat (and perhaps sheep, although this has not been demonstrated and is less likely environmentally) could be adopted into the desert system only with some difficulty (to judge from the lag time between appearance in the Mediterranean zone the appearance in the desert). The system which co-evolved with the goat in the settled zone, that is the process dubbed neolithisation, could not penetrate into the arid zone, for reasons which seem self-evident, deriving from the environmental constraints under which desert societies operated. That is, the goat was culled from its much larger social and cultural assemblage, divorced from the contexts of its original domestication, and relocated to a new social and physical geography. Its meaning in desert hunter-gatherer society, in the larger social sense as well as the economic sense, had to be reinvented. Thus, the goat in its relationship to desert society had to begin from scratch; hence the lag time between that incipient adoption of herding in the 7th millennium BC and the social ramifications of that adoption perhaps a millennium later.
The causality implied in the herding-to-cult succession cannot be ignored, but it would be inappropriate to infer a simple linear cause-effect system. The rise of desert cult is not merely a reaction to the rise of herding, but integral to it, one to the other in a set of reinforcing relationships. These are worth further explication.
As above, the evolution of herding societies demands significant social, cultural, economic, and technological realignment relative to hunting-gathering societies (Ingold 1980; 1987). Although in some senses this shift is analogous to the rise of village farming societies, the set of changes inherent in the transition to farming is, in fact, not congruent to that from hunting-gathering to herding gathering, the shared idea of food production and potential intensification notwithstanding. Thus, the shift from hunting herds to having them entails major changes in mobility and economic strategies, but in detail these differ greatly in concept and in detail from the agricultural parallel.
In detail, the adoption of domestic animals into a hunting-gathering society (and the material culture continuities in the desert strongly suggest the adoption of domestic animals and not the large scale penetration of new human populations) entails various nested ramifications:
1) A shift in resource importance so that grazing resources, formerly of little significance to hunter-gatherers except insofar as they might attract grazing prey, are now of high value. The growth of herds and the need to provide constant access to grazing while maintaining human control, suggest increasing levels of environmental exploitation in the senses of expanse and intensity.
2) Herding, as food production, implies potential intensification beyond the capacity of hunting-gathering. Notably, dairying can be expected to increase productive potentials even more (e.g. Russell 1988). If on one hand, population growth need not spurt with the adoption of herding, as happens with the sedentarisation of hunter-gatherers, on the other, increased resource potential in the long term can nevertheless be expected to loosen constraints on population growth. In a bounded environment, social tools would need to evolve to address issues of larger groups.
3) The combination of increased intensity of exploitation and population growth ultimately will entail resource competition, increased territoriality and conflict. Consequentially, the development of social tools, read ranking, hierarchy, and institutions, with all the tools for maintaining, legitimising, and enhancing this new order, would be expected to evolve concomitantly with herding.
This dynamic, which can be characterised as the rise of desert tribal societies, of course accords nicely with the etic meanings attributed to the shrine and cairn systems. That is, the rise of desert cult should be seen as part and parcel of the evolution of desert tribal societies, in the southern Levantine deserts triggered by the adoption of domestic goats and the transition from hunting-gathering to herding.
Note
1 One hesitates to use the term ‘cognitive system’ since cognition usually implies biological change.
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