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Ancient granaries preceded the Agricultural Revolution

Submitted by coldrum on Sunday, 28 June 2009  Page Views: 2139

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A Jordanian site yields food-storage facilities from more than 11,000 years ago, indicating that a major social shift led to the rise of domesticated crops.

It apparently took a long time to get the Agricultural Revolution off the ground. Prehistoric hunter-gatherers in the Middle East cultivated the farming life over more than a millennium, largely thanks to their proficiency at building structures to store wild cereals, a new report suggests.

Excavations at Dhra' near the Dead Sea in Jordan have uncovered remnants of four sophisticated granaries built between 11,300 and 11,175 years ago, about a millennium before domesticated plants were known to have been cultivated there, say archaeologists Ian Kuijt of the University of Notre Dame and Bill Finlayson of the Council for British Research in the Levant in Amman, Jordan.

Microscopic pieces of silica from barley husks were identified in one structure. Though intact cereal grains have yet to be found, the granaries were situated between oval-shaped buildings where the researchers found stone tools for grinding wild plants.

Discoveries at Dhra' represent the oldest known evidence for systematic storage of wild grains, the researchers report in an upcoming Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

A nearby site dating to at least 12,800 years ago contains pits that may have held wild plants, but no food remains have been found there.

Ancient residents of Dhra' and several nearby settlements sowed wild cereals in fields and stored surplus food in granaries, making it possible to establish permanent communities before farming of domesticated plants began, Kuijt and Finlayson propose.

“The most important implication of our findings is that fundamental social changes occurred before plant domestication, including the establishment of fairly permanent settlements, with communal labor and storage, based on cultivated wild plants,” Kuijt says.

Researchers now generally accept that people in the Middle East and Asia must have cultivated wild plants for between 1,000 and 2,000 years, with annual harvests in the fall, before domesticated species appeared, remarks Harvard University archaeologist Ofer Bar-Yosef.

“The discovery in Dhra' provides us with one of the earliest well-built examples” of a food-storage structure from before plants were domesticated, Bar-Yosef says.

Storage structures there support the argument that the sowing of wild plants beginning as early as 14,000 to 15,000 years ago led to agriculture, comments archaeologist Mordechai Kislev of Bar-Ilan University in Ramat-Gan, Israel.

One especially well-preserved granary reveals a sophisticated design. Upright, notched stones inside the circular structure held horizontal wooden beams for a suspended floor that provided air circulation and protected food from rodents, Kuijt suggests.

A second granary was built on top of the first one, according to the researchers. Radiocarbon measurements from charred wood indicate that each structure was used to store wild plants for no more than 50 years, the first beginning around 11,300 years ago and the second starting shortly after abandonment of the first.

Investigators of other Middle Eastern sites from the same time have hypothesized that “pioneer crops” of cultivated wild cereals, including barley, lentil and oats, were eventually domesticated.

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Contributor Bio for coldrum: Based in Milkyway, contributing since 2002. Favourite site: Avebury.

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University of Toronto anthropologists discover earliest cemetery in Middle East by coldrum on Sunday, 23 October 2011
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University of Toronto anthropologists discover earliest cemetery in Middle East

Anthropologists at the University of Toronto and the University of Cambridge have discovered the oldest cemetery in the Middle East at a site in northern Jordan. The cemetery includes graves containing human remains buried alongside those of a red fox, suggesting that the animal was possibly kept as a pet by humans long before dogs ever were.

The 16,500-year-old site at 'Uyun al-Hammam was discovered in 2000 by an expedition led by University of Toronto professor Edward (Ted) Banning and Lisa Maher, an assistant professor of anthropology at U of T and research associate at the University of Cambridge. “Recent archaeological excavations have uncovered the remains of at least 11 individuals – more than known from all other sites of this kind combined,” says Banning, of U of T’s Department of Anthropology.

Previous research had identified the earliest cemeteries in the region in a somewhat later period (the Natufian, ca. 15,000-12,000 years ago). These were notable for instances of burials of humans with dogs. One such case involved a woman buried with her hand on a puppy, while another included three humans buried with two dogs along with tortoise shells. However, this new research shows that some of these practices occurred earlier.

Most of the individuals buried at the Jordan site were found with what are known as "grave goods," such as stone tools, a bone spoon, animal parts, and red ochre (an iron mineral). One grave contained the skull and right upper arm bone of a red fox, with red ochre adhered to the skull, along with bones of deer, gazelle and wild cattle. Another nearby grave contained the nearly complete skeleton of a red fox, missing its skull and right upper arm bone, suggesting that portions of a single fox had been moved from one grave to another in prehistoric times.

“What we appear to have found is a case where a fox was killed and buried with its owner,” says Maher, who directs excavations at the site. “Later, the grave was reopened for some reason and the human’s body was moved. But because the link between the fox and the human had been significant, the fox was moved as well.”

The researchers say that it could suggest that foxes were at one time treated in much the same way as dogs, in that there could have been early attempts to tame foxes, but no successful domestication. Studies have shown that foxes can be brought under human control but is not easily done given their skittish and timid nature, which may explain why dogs ultimately achieved “man’s best friend” status instead.

“However, it is also noteworthy that the graves contain other animal remains, so we can only take the fox-dog analogy so far,” says Banning. “We should remember that some more recent hunter-gatherers consider themselves to have social relationships with a wide range of wild animals, including ones they hunt, and that this sometimes led to prescribed ways to treat the remains of animals, as well as to represent relationships between particular humans and particular animals.” Banning says that the "pet" hypothesis is only one among several, which happens to fit with modern preconceptions about human-dog relationships.

Either way, because the same grave that held the fox remains also contained other bones, Banning says that the find holds important clues about burial methods of civilizations past.

“These were unusually dense and diverse concentrations of bones, and indicate very early mortuary practices that involved interring selected animal remains with humans,” says Banning. “The site has implications both for our understanding of the development of ideas about death and mortuary practice, and for our understanding of the beginnings of domestication of dog-like animals.”

Details of the find were published recently in a paper titled “A Unique Human-Fox Burial from a Pre-Natufian Cemetery in the Levant (Jordan)” in the online journal PLoS One . Fieldwork and research by Banning, Maher and colleagues was partly funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and a National Geographic Research Exploration Grant.

http://www.artsci.utoronto.ca/main/media-releases/anthropologists-discover-earliest-cemetery-in-middle-east
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World's Oldest Known Granaries Predate Agriculture by coldrum on Monday, 04 January 2010
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World's Oldest Known Granaries Predate Agriculture

A new study coauthored by Ian Kuijt, associate professor of anthropology at the University of Notre Dame, describes recent excavations in Jordan that reveal evidence of the world's oldest know granaries. The appearance of the granaries represents a critical evolutionary shift in the relationship between people and plant foods.

Anthropologists consider food storage to be a vital component in the economic and social package that comprises the Neolithic period, contributing to plant domestication, increasingly sedentary lifestyles and new social organizations. It has traditionally been assumed that people only started to store significant amounts of food when plants were domesticated.

However, in a paper appearing in the June 23 edition of the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences, Kuijt and Bill Finlayson, director, Council for British Research in the Levant, describe recent excavations at Dhra' near the Dead Sea in Jordan that provide evidence of granaries that precede the emergence of fully domesticated plants and large-scale sedentary communities by at least 1,000 years.

"These granaries reflect new forms of risk reduction, intensification and low-level food production," Kuijt said. "People in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic Age (11,500 to 10,550 B.C.) were not using new food sources, but rather, by developing new storage methods, they altered their relationship with traditionally utilized food resources and created the technological context for later development of domesticated plants and an agro-pastoralist economy.

"Building granaries may, at the same time, have been the single most important feature in increasingly sedentism that required active community participation in new life-ways."

Designed with suspended floors for air circulation and protection from rodents, the granaries are located between residential structures that contain plant-processing instillations.

The new studies are a continuation of earlier research by Kuijt. As a graduate student from 1987-1995, he worked on and directed several field projects in Jordan that focused on the world's first villages during the Neolithic Period. As part of this research, he did several days of excavation at Dhra' with a Jordanian researcher. This was followed by several other field projects and by research from 2000 to 2005 with Finlayson.

"These granaries are a critical fist step, if not the very evolutionary and technological foundation, for the development of large agricultural villages that appear by 9,500 to 9,000 years ago across the Near East," Kuijt said. "In many ways food storage is the missing link that helps us understand how so many people were able to live together. And much to our surprise, it appears that they developed this technology at least a 1,000 years before anyone thought they did."

The Dhra' research was funded by grants from Notre Dame, the National Science Foundation and the British Academy.

Kuijt, who joined the Notre Dame faculty in 2001, has worked extensively on Old and New World research projects. His research interests include the emergence of social inequality, prehistoric mortuary practices, the origins of agriculture, paleoenvironmental change and human adaptations, and lithic technology, He is the co-editor of "Complex Hunter Gathers: Evolution and Organization of Prehistoric Communities on the Plateau of Northwestern North America" and "Life in Neolithic Farming Communities: Social Organization, Identity, and Differentiation."

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/06/090623150619.htm
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