I am sorry that this chapter has had to be so much more about ideas than about the archeological traces of prehistoric men themselves. But the antiquities of the incipient era of cultivation and animal domestication will not be spectacular, even when we do have them excavated in quantity. Few museums will be interested in these antiquities for exhibition purposes. The charred bits or impressions of plants, the fragments of animal bone and shell, and the varied clues to climate and environment will be as important as the artifacts themselves. It will be the ideas to which these traces lead us that will be important. I am sure that this unspectacular material—when we have much more of it, and learn how to understand what it says—will lead us to how and why answers about the first great change in human history.
We know the earliest village-farming communities appeared in western Asia, in a nuclear area. We do not yet know why the Near Eastern experiment came first, or why it didn’t happen earlier in some other nuclear area. Apparently, the level of culture and the promise of the natural environment were ready first in western Asia. The next sites we look at will show a simple but effective food-production already in existence. Without effective food-production and the settled village-farming communities, civilization never could have followed. How effective food-production came into being by the end of the incipient era, is, I believe, one of the most fascinating questions any archeologist could face.
It now seems probable—from possibly two of the Palestinian sites with varieties of the Natufian (Jericho and Nahal Oren)—that there were one or more local Palestinian developments out of the Natufian into later times. In the same way, what followed after the Karim Shahir type of assemblage in northeastern Iraq was in some ways a reflection of beginnings made at Karim Shahir and Zawi Chemi.
THE First Revolution
As the incipient era of cultivation and animal domestication passed onward into the era of the primary village-farming community, the first basic change in human economy was fully achieved. In southwestern Asia, this seems to have taken place about nine thousand years ago. I am going to restrict my description to this earliest Near Eastern case—I do not know enough about the later comparable experiments in the Far East and in the New World. Let us first, once again, think of the contrast between food-collecting and food-producing as ways of life.
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN FOOD-COLLECTORS AND FOOD-PRODUCERS
Childe used the word “revolution” because of the radical change that took place in the habits and customs of man. Food-collectors—that is, hunters, fishers, berry- and nut-gatherers—had to live in small groups or bands, for they had to be ready to move wherever their food supply moved. Not many people can be fed in this way in one area, and small children and old folks are a burden. There is not enough food to store, and it is not the kind that can be stored for long.