Agricultural origins on the Anatolian plateau.

Abstract

This paper explores explanations for, and consequences of, the early appearance of food production outside the Fertile Crescent of Southwest Asia, where it had originated in the 10th/9th millennium cal BC. We present evidence that cultivation appeared in Central Anatolia through adoption by indigenous foragers in the mid 9th millennium cal BC, but also demonstrate that uptake was not uniform, and that some communities chose to actively disregard cultivation. Adoption of cultivation seems to have promoted experimentation with the herding of probably local caprines in the Konya Plain. Those sedentary communities that adopted cultivation integrated small-scale food production into forager lifeways, though rather than being a transitional state, this adaptation was successful and stable for several centuries. That innovation had significant social consequences for the adopting community represented by the site of Boncuklu. Continuities with evidence at Çatalhöyük East suggest that those communities in the SW Konya basin that adopted low level food production, including that at Boncuklu, were transformed in the later 8th millennium cal BC into settlements with a major commitment to mixed farming, and grew to considerable size, as exemplified by Çatalhöyük East. The polarized positions for the spread of farming, opposing indigenous adoption to farmer colonization represent simplistic models that are unsuited to understanding local sequences of subsistence change. We go beyond identifying the mechanisms for the spread of farming by investigating the shorter and longer-term implications of rejecting or adopting farming practices.