Accommodating agriculture at al-Khayran: Economic relations and settlement practices in the earliest agricultural communities of the southern Levant

Abstract

Early agricultural practices are often viewed as such a radical transformation that they not only structured and drove the long-term development of subsistence economies, but also required a dramatic reorganization of how community-wide economic relations were reckoned and enacted. This article examines how data derived from loci of economic production can inform us about the structure of economic relations in early agricultural communities, so as to better test such claims of political-economic disruption against the archaeological record. It does so by analyzing the site of al-Khayran in the west-central Jordan. Al-Khayran dates to the southern Levantine Middle Pre-Pottery Neolithic B, the time period when predominantly agricultural economies first emerge in the region. Results show that a typical village-based residential group temporarily and repeatedly inhabited a substantially-built in-field structure while practicing intensive agricultural production. These results indicate that the site’s inhabitants carried out a form of dual residence mobility with heavy investment on-site in perimetrics via landesque capital. Such behavior suggests that at least some residential groups in this time period were indeed corporate groups that agentively intervened in economic systems to actively assert and enact the private holding of the means of production during the emergence of agricultural economies.