Agricultural origins on the Anatolian plateau

Abstract

A key region for testing our understanding of the economic, social, and cultural history of food production, as it spread, is the high-altitude Central Anatolian plateau, which has some of the earliest evidence for the development of sedentary and agricultural societies beyond the Fertile Crescent. Often attributed to demic diffusion, an understanding of how agriculture spread into Central Anatolia, as in many regions, has been obscured by a lack of detailed local-scale archaeological and paleoenvironmental histories in which the relationships between social and economic change can be closely investigated through time. This paper presents an analysis of a wide range of evidence, from the sites of Pınarbaşı and Boncuklu, for the first appearance of agriculture in the second half of the ninth millennium cal BC in the Konya Plain of Central Anatolia. As a result of the work of our projects reported herein, the settlement record of Central Anatolia now stretches from the Epipaleolithic into the early Holocene and is thus contemporary with the Levantine Natufian and earlier Aceramic Neolithic [Prepottery Neolithic A (PPNA), early and middle PPNB]. Recent work has shown there is evidence for a significant degree of cultivation and caprine herding before 8000 cal BC at Aşıklı Höyük in Cappadocia (8, 9), and large-scale mixed farming—that is, the integrated cultivation and herding of fully domestic cereals, legumes, and caprines—by at Significance We demonstrate that the initial spread of farming outside of the area of its first appearance in the Fertile Crescent of Southwest Asia, into Central Anatolia, involved adoption of cultivars by indigenous foragers and contemporary experimentation in animal herding of local species. This represents a rare clear-cut instance of forager adoption and sustained lowlevel food production. We have also demonstrated that farming uptake was not uniform, with some forager communities rejecting it despite proximity to early farming communities. We also show that adoption of small-scale cultivation could still have significant social consequences for the communities concerned. The evidence suggests forager adoption of cultivation and initiation of herding was not necessarily motivated by simple economic concerns of increasing levels of food production and security.