Durham E-Theses The Neolithic Archaeology of the South west of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia AL-GHAMDI, SAUD,ABDULAZIZ How to cite: AL-GHAMDI, SAUD,ABDULAZIZ (2011) The Neolithic Archaeology of the South west of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia , Durham theses, Durham University. Available at Durham E-Theses Online: http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/3224/ Use policy The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that: • a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in Durham E-Theses • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders. Please consult the full Durham E-Theses policy for further details. Academic Support Oce, Durham University, University Oce, Old Elvet, Durham DH1 3HP e-mail: [email protected] Tel: +44 0191 334 6107 http://etheses.dur.ac.uk 2 The Neolithic Archaeology of the South west of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia S. Al-ghamdi PhD in Archaeology DEPARTMENT OF ARCHAEOLOGY DURHAM UNIVERSITY 2011 Chapter 3 CHAPTER 3: THE NEOLITHIC SEQUENCES OF THE NEAR EAST AND THE KINGDOM OF SAUDI ARABIA AND A REVIEW OF THE HISTORY OF ARCHAEOLOGICAL RESEARCH IN ARABIA 3.1 INTRODUCTION Having defined the geography of the Near East and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in Chapter 2, the aim of this chapter is to define a number of the core Neolithic sequences of the Near East and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and to critically evaluate the development of the discipline of archaeology within the Kingdom. Before commencing, however, it is first necessary to discuss some of the key models advanced to define the term Neolithic, and explain its development, within the Near East. The models range from Childe’s oasis theory of 1936 and Binford’s (1968) population expansion model based on post-Pleistocene adaptations, to Hodder’s (2000) focus on the way in which individual communities categorised plants and animals. As a Marxist, the first of these scholars was to attempt to roughly align the concept of archaeological ‘ages’ with that of the economic ‘stages’. He was also the first scholar to publically advocate the concept of a Neolithic ‘Revolution’ (Childe 1936:325), but this term has been criticised by several scholars (Helbaek, 1969), who believed that the change from food gathering to food production was largely evolutionary. Despite these criticisms, Childe was rather more flexible and held that the earliest domesticated animals and plants did not appear in one particular area, or at one point in time, but rather in different areas at different times and he warned that “The word ‘revolution’ must not be taken as denoting a sudden violent catastrophe, it is here used for the culmination of a progressive change in the economic structure and social organisation of communities that caused, or was accompanied by, a dramatic increase in the population affected – an increase that would appear as an obvious bend in the population graph were vital statistics available” (Childe 1950: 345). Accordingly, Childe suggested that a progressive desiccation in the Near East during the early Holocene led to the concentration of grasses, grass-eating animals, and humans around springs and oases and that this led to closer and closer relationship – resulting in domestication (Childe 1936: 77-78). 34 Chapter 3 This model, also known as the Propinquity theory, was subsequently criticised by a number of scholars for the lack of supporting environmental data, including Robert Braidwood (1960). Braidwood also disliked the terms ‘Mesolithic’ and ‘Neolithic’ because of the apparent confusion in differentiating between them and preferred to distinguish between an era of ‘food gathering’ and one of ‘food producing’ (1960). He advocated that the end of the food gathering phases was marked by a ‘terminal food- gathering phase’ and that the succeeding food producing stage was divisible into many eras and phases like the ‘incipient agriculture and domestication phase’ and successive eras of ‘primary village efficiency’, ‘established village efficiency’ in an era of ‘incipient urbanisation’ (Braidwood 1960). This model of cultural evolution sought to explain the emergence of highly specialised food-collecting adapted to certain highly specialised environments and, in turn, semi-permanent and permanent sedentary communities (Braidwood 1960). Being broadly descriptive in nature, however, Braidwood's model may have considered environmental data but failed in its turn to provide a clear driver or explanation for change. Such a driver was provided by Lewis Binford in 1968 when he argued that prehistoric populations developed until the food requirements of the group began to exceed the availability of unaltered standing crops in the local habitat. As no population could ever achieve a stable adaptation as it was continually expanding, its members would always be under strong selective pressure to develop new means of procuring food (Binford 1968). Binford thus suggested that the Neolithic arose through two main drivers; firstly, changes in the physical environment of a population, reducing the biotic mass of the region and thus the amounts of available food; or, secondly, the reduction of the biotic mass through population growth. In either of these events, the previous balance between population and standing unaltered crop was upset, and a more efficient extractive means would be favoured. Binford further suggested that if a population in the core zone of the natural distribution of particular crops and animals were forced into the edge zone with those species, adaptation or rather domestication would occur (Binford 1968: 331). For Binford, as with Childe before him, it was clear that such pressures would lead to the emergence of the Neolithic: “it is the context of such situations of strain in environment 35 Chapter 3 with plants and animals amenable to manipulation that we would expect to find conditions favouring the development of plant and animal domestication” (Binford 1968: 328). Further advancing these models, Colin Renfrew later adapted a model from geneticists (Cavelli Sforva 1960) in which this expanding population spread outwards from the ancient Near East through a process of adaptation and demic diffusion at a speed of 1 kilometre per year carrying with them the Neolithic and Indo-European languages (Renfrew 1987). In reaction to such processual models, Ian Hodder sought to shift the focus away from traditional studies of changes in terms of population growth, economic pressures and social competition, and attempted to focus instead on the enormous expansion of symbolic evidence from the home, settlements, and burials which had accompanied the spread of the Neolithic and began to ask why figurines, decorated ceramic, elaborate houses, and burial rituals appeared, and what their significance was (Hodder 1990)? In this way, Hodder argued that it was not just animals and plants that were domesticated, but human communities also as they adopted a collection of new concepts central to the origins of farming and the settled mode of life. In his view, these concepts related to the place of house and home, the ‘domus’, and that they provided both a metaphor and mechanism for social and economic transformation. In particular he argued that as: “economic change occurred larger Neolithic social groups were formed in order to produce more significant scales of domination and social prestige. Such arguments are facilitated by the fact that material culture is not only abstract structure, it is also practice thus the construction of major monuments involves real increases in labour input and the scale or intensity of social dependences.” (Hodder 1990: 310). Stressing that the domestication of plants and animals involved a delayed return for one’s labour, and the need for longer-term social structure and the protection of one’s interests, Hodder also anticipated this involved practical defence and warring as well as the need for social and structural change to provide everyday function (Hodder 1990). However 36 Chapter 3 disparate these models for the development of the Neolithic may appear, all appear to acknowledge that the Neolithic is a definable period within the archaeological sequences of the Near East and that this period may be recognised through key innovations such as the introduction of domesticated plants and animals, sedentary settlement and ground stone tools. 3.2 THE NEOLITHIC SEQUENCES OF THE NEAR EAST Having thus introduced a review of some of the core explanations and definitions of the Neolithic in the Near East, this section will examine the nature and character of the some of the earliest Neolithic sequences in the Near East, as this region was one of the earliest to experience these social and economic changes and is assumed to have played a key role in the transfer of such changes to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. 3.2.1 IRAQ Over fifty years of sustained archaeological exploration of northern Iraq has provided much information as to the character and nature of the people who lived in this area and the presence of humans in the Kurdistan Mountains can now be traced back before 40,000 BC. It has been suggested that farming and animal husbandry developed in this area c. 8000 BC and that at c. 7250 BC communities moved down to the plains as illustrated by Jarmo and Al-Magzaliya (Braidwood 1950). These populations spread over the next millennia and colonised large areas of Iraq, including Hassouna and Samarra (Redman 1978). By 6000 BC clay utensils and vessels were manufactured and archaeologists can distinguish the various cultures and traditions in central and northern Iraq, for example Hassouna and Samarra, Halaf, Ubaid, Al-Warka, and Ninevite 5, of which, the Ubaid of southern Iraq were to have a considerable influence on Neolithic communities of Saudi Arabia.