With National Science Foundation support, Drs. Katheryn Twiss and Amy Bogaard and an international team of colleagues will spend three years investigating the integration of small-scale crop and livestock husbandry and its effects on cultural stability in an early agricultural society. The team brings together U.S., British and Turkish archaeologists specializing in faunal, botanical, and isotopic analyses to study the social and economic uses of plant and animal domesticates at the large and long-lived Neolithic site of Catalhoyuk, central Anatolia. These domesticates sustained occupation of the site through a turbulent period (the seventh millennium BC), when major settlements across southwest Asia suffered collapse. The project will test two hypotheses: 1. close household-level integration of small-scale crop and livestock husbandry was fundamental to Catalhoyuk's continued success; 2. strong social pressures against household differentiation prevented site fissioning.
The southwestern Asian Neolithic (c. 9,700/9,000-5,850/5,500 BC) marked a major turning point in human evolution and set the stage for the development of far more complex urbanized and state societies. The Neolithic is characterized by the world's earliest plant and animal agriculture as well as by the regional advent of large permanent villages, substantial architecture, marked increases in population density, and technological advances such as the introduction of pottery. These material innovations are associated with such profoundly significant cultural developments as social and economic stratification, occupational specialization, and the domestic mode of production. However, the Neolithic combination of crop and livestock husbandry has been associated not only with these positive developments but also with environmental degradation leading to cultural instability, as reflected in episodes of regional 'collapse'. The rich plant and animal assemblages from Catalho yuk provide a rare opportunity to investigate the relationship between agricultural strategy and site stability from a different angle, focusing on the socioeconomic causes of success rather than failure. The goal is to develop a general understanding of the relationship between the site's mode of production and its long-term viability.
The intellectual merit of the research is theoretical, methodological, and substantive. The project will interdigitate faunal and botanical evidence as a combined research strategy to address the degree of integration in the Neolithic farming 'package'. While it is widely acknowledged that the success and spread of early farming in the Near East coincided with the dual establishment of cultivation and herding, site-specific studies based on primary scientific evidence are urgently needed to clarify the role of closely intertwined crop and livestock management practices for the spread of the agricultural 'package' both within and beyond southwest Asia.
The broader impacts of the study are that it will contribute significant information about the socioeconomic factors underlying economic and cultural robusticity in small-scale farming societies. The information gathered will be relevant not only to Asian and European prehistory but to present-day crises in food production related to large-scale land ownership, overspecialization, and a lack of economic integration at the household level. Turkish, British and U.S. students will participate in the project to enhance their training and increase their knowledge of Near Eastern prehistory.
