Research traditions
By the middle of the nineteenth century archaeologists were classifying the hunter-gatherer societies of the Ice Ages, the makers of cave art in western Europe, as Palaeolithic or Old Stone Age, and the first farming societies as Neolithic or New Stone Age.
The latter were defined in particular by the first appearance (as then believed) of polished stone tools and pottery along with domestic plants and animals. The British archaeologist Hodder Westropp first coined the term Mesolithic or Middle Stone Age in 1872 (in his Prehistoric Phases) to describe the hunter-gatherers in Europe who were living after the Ice Ages, in our own climatic era, but before the development of farming. He described the Mesolithic as the Age of Barbarism when ‘man lived as the tiger lives, catching his prey by his superior cunning, strength and pluck' and the Neolithic as the Age of Pastoralism when ‘the cow yields him milk and the goat yields him cloth; yet he wins these requisites from them not by murderous cunning but by tender love'.[2] He was one of those who thought that plant husbandry came later, in the Bronze Age, but by the 1880s it was recognized that the beginnings of plant and animal husbandry generally went together, and the Neolithic was defined in these terms. Although the Mesolithic/Neolithic nomenclature was first developed for Europe, the terms were commonly being applied in many other parts of the world in the opening decades of the twentieth century as the frameworks of prehistory were established.The terminology is widely accepted as unsatisfactory, in particular the term Neolithic, though as with most unsatisfactory terminologies no better alternatives have been proposed. The latter may sometimes be used in the literature as a period descriptor (the ‘Neolithic period'), its use in this sense implying that everybody at that time in a particular region practised farming, while the evidence now shows that many people in fact lived by a mixture of farming, hunting, and gathering, or just by hunting and gathering; it may be used sometimes as an economic descriptor, as in the Neolithic Revolution, for example ‘Neolithic people' (i.e.
farmers) ‘lived alongside Mesolithic people' (i.e. hunter-gatherers); it may sometimes be used as a descriptor of a ‘package' of material culture, i.e. artefacts such as pottery and polished stone axes but also forms of settlement, houses, burials, etc., as well as domestic plants and animals, leading to descriptions of hunter-gatherers ‘adopting part of the Neolithic package'. Clearly it is essential for scholars writing about the beginnings of farming to explain what they mean by Neolithic and how they will use the term, as it is all too easy to slip from one use of the term to another, often unconsciously and sometimes in the same sentence!Although he wrote mainly about Southwest Asia (the ‘Near East') and Europe, the Australian (but UK-based) prehistorian Gordon Childe remains hugely influential for archaeologists interested in the origins of agriculture. In books such as Man Makes Himself (1936) and What Happened in History (1942) he proposed that farming probably began as a response by hunter-gatherers to the end of the Ice Ages and beginning of the modern climatic era.[3] Though he was mistaken about the course of climate change in Southwest Asia (he thought that the beginning of the Holocene would have been characterized by the development of aridity, whereas we now know that it got wetter, not drier), the overall argument that hunter-gatherers turned to farming in the context of the changes to the world's climate with the transition from the Pleistocene to the Holocene remains the dominant view for most scholars today. He famously proposed the term ‘Neolithic Revolution' to encapsulate the process of changing from foraging to farming, on a par with later revolutions like the Industrial Revolution in its transformational character (even if it took millennia rather than centuries or decades like later socioeconomic revolutions): farming gave people a reliable food supply, in contrast with hunting and gathering, that allowed them to settle down (‘sedentism'), build stable communities, and create food surpluses that allowed population numbers to rise and set the stage for the development of cities and states (his ‘Urban Revolution').
Childe's ideas about a Neolithic Revolution were in many respects borne out by the explosion of archaeological fieldwork in regions such as Southwest Asia, Central America, and Peru in the 1950s and 1960s. Most of these expeditions represented the beginnings of a new kind of interdisciplinary archaeology involving specialists in archaeological science and ancillary disciplines who collected data sets from the excavated sites such as animal bones and carbonized seeds and other fragments of plants to track the beginnings of, respectively, animal and plant domestication, and to investigate (from sediment cores in the vicinity) fossil pollen and sedimentary indicators of the climatic and environmental contexts in which early farming was practised. Underpinning this work was the collection of organic material such as charcoal for the new dating method of radiocarbon or carbon 14 (1[4]C) dating: this allowed archaeologists for the first time to date the sites they were excavating independently of other means, whereas Childe had only been able to date Neolithic sites in Europe, for example, by trying to show direct or indirect links in their material culture with pharaonic Egypt, which had dated historical records going back to around 3000 bce. (The scale of the revolution represented by 14C dating can be conveyed by the fact that the first dates for the beginnings of the Neolithic in Europe, in Greece, placed the sites at around 6000 bce, not 3000 bce!) In Southwest Asia excavations of sites such as Jericho in Israel (by Kathleen Kenyon), Jarmo in Iraq (by Robert and Ann Braidwood), and Ali Kosh in Iran (by Frank Hole and Kent Flannery) showed that by around 8000 bce, a thousand or so years into the Holocene, people were living in villages of small houses made of packed mud, using polished stone tools (the first Neolithic pottery here was not made until a few thousand years later), growing crops such as wheat, barley, and legumes, and keeping domestic animals such as sheep and goats, pigs, and cattle.[5]
Rather similar ‘village farming communities' were revealed by parallel work in other parts of the world, using different mixes of domesticated plants and animals, such as maize and other vegetables in parts of the Americas and rice and pigs in China. In combination, this phase of research indicated that the Neolithic Revolution began in a few ‘hearths of domestication', in particular Southwest Asia, China, eastern North America, Central America, Peru, and the African Sahel, and that farming then spread to neighbouring regions, most commonly as a result of a migration by farmers, though in some cases as a result of the adoption of farming by hunter-gatherers coming into contact with farmers.