THE NEOLITHIC
The transition from the Palaeolithic to the Neolithic - from a hunter-gatherer nomadic life-style with no possessions, to a settled life-style, based on farming, villages, storage and possessions - is a recurrent theme in archaeological debate.
Discussions centre around the causes and nature of the transition which consisted, economically seen, in exchanging a life-style based on little luxury and little effort to a way of life based on hard work with an uncertain outcome. These changes marked the beginning of the world as we know it today, not only changing the surface of the earth (with the construction of houses, and the opening of forests for roads and fields), but by filling the resulting villages with what Hodder calls “endless stuff’ and “material entanglement”.Until a few decades ago, the transition was primarily seen as being a matter of changing from a hunter-gatherer way of life and economy to a farmer way of life and economy. The question was therefore seen as being about what made people voluntarily work harder, and answers were sought in models of climatic change, overpopulation and technological transformation. Various tendencies in the last two decades have, however, shown that the transition between the Palaeolithic and the Neolithic was probably more social and cognitive than economic.
Whereas some still use V. Gordon Childe’s expression “Neolithic Revolution”, the archaeological evidence is that if “revolutionary”, this “revolution” was agonizingly slow. In the Near East, three millennia (ca. 11,000 BCE to 8000 BCE) passed before the concept of villages and agricultural production really set in, and it would still be further millennia before the idea caught on in Europe. But even at this stage it was still not Neolithic in the sense of having pottery and polished stone axes, for this only became usual a couple of millennia later.
However, by 6000 BCE, in the Near East, the whole programme was finished. And, once established, it spread relatively quickly in Europe. And thus “Neolithic invasion” might be more appropriate for Europe and “Neolithic trauma” might be more appropriate for the Near East.Thus, in the Near East, the earliest Neolithic (11,000 BCE to 6000 BCE) moved through the earliest subdivided round architecture and incipient domestication of plants and animals, to rectangular architecture and the extensive use of farming and storage in villages - but still no widespread use of pottery. It was in the following millennia that farming, the use of pottery and polished stone tools and so on spread into the plains of the Near East and Europe. This was the first period in human history when more than a couple of tens of people lived together. The largest settlements of the era were the size of small towns, but they had no “administrative” buildings or the like. Organized society - in terms of rules and families and physical symbols - was emerging, and complex social organization would only follow in the Bronze Age which began around 3000 BCE in the Near East.
Yet recent archaeological work in the Near East and the Mediterranean has revealed that the situation was far more complicated than had been hitherto assumed. First, it emerged that monumental architecture accompanied the earliest sedentary Neolithic in Anatolia and Palestine; secondly, from the evidence of the earliest settlement at Shillurokambos in Cyprus, it became clear that the earliest cults is one reasonable route to follow. Another is obviously the observation of the movements of the planets in the night sky. The concept of ancestors could allow one to project the gods further back. But the systematic observation of the stars and planets only started in the third millennium BCE, and thus places the birth of the gods closer to the dawn of history. Yet the traditions of burials and care for the dead go much further back.
Thus, there is a major problem in studying just when religion began to take form. To take the extremes, one can argue that religion can be traced back to before the human species (as d’Errico does) or one can argue that it can be dated to the Near Eastern Bronze Age (as we do). In general, there is a growing convergence of opinion that it probably started in the Upper Palaeolithic (as Anati argues), or during the Neolithic (as Hodder [1990] seemed to imply, although in Hodder [2010a] it seems religion was already there but only saw radical changes in the Neolithic). In any case, the origins must be sought in prehistory.
SUGGESTED READING
Bredholt Christensen, L. 2010. “From ‘Spirituality’ to ‘Religion’: Ways of Sharing Knowledge of the ‘Other World’”. In The Principle of Sharing: Segregation and Construction of Social Identities at the Transition from Foraging to Farming (Studies in Early Near Eastern Production, Subsistence and Environment 14), M. Benz (ed.), 81-90. Berlin.
Warburton, D. A. [2004] 2008. “Psychoanalyzing Prehistory: Struggling with the Unrecorded Past”. In New Approaches to the Study of Religion, vol. II, P. Antes, A. W. Geertz & R. R. Warne (eds), 419-55. Berlin.
Warburton, D. A. 2010. “Warfare in the Neolithic? Methodological Considerations”. Neo-Lithics 1(10): 68-70.