Contrasting pathways to domestication and agriculture around Southwest Asia

Abstract

It has become increasingly apparent that the origins of agriculture in Southwest Asia were an emergent and extended process that resulted from local evolutionary processes and social networks of interaction and exchange that extended across the region. Although the end of the process of domestication and economic transformation shows general regional similarities, sub-regional trajectories differ when evidence of economy and domestication processes are examined independently. This research evaluates the presumed linear trajectory, from hunting and gathering to pre-domestication cultivation to domestication with agriculture and explores the mosaic of subsistence practices leading to agricultural reliance. This paper compiles quantitative data on the proportion of crops in archaeobotanical sites over time and across the Near East. Foraging-focused, mixed subsistence and agricultural economies are compared alongside non-shattering data from cereals with the results suggestive of sites with higher levels of food production (agriculture) without domesticated crops, low-levels of food production with domesticated crops, and variability of economic systems when crops were under pre-domestication cultivation. Results show a dominance of mixed-subsistence economic systems and the persistence of “middle ground societies” for nearly 4,000 years, contradicting ethnographic inferences that intermediate or mixed-subsistence economies are unstable. The potential correlation between reliance on cultivation and domestication, as quantified from morphological evidence for non-shattering or grain size change, indicates that there is not a single directional trend in economy and domestication. There also appears to be some evidence for intensification of the reliance on cultivation as domesticated sheep/goat become widespread. These data highlight the need to consider economic trajectories on different sites and regions independently from the evidence for morphological change.