British Academy: The UK's National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences
The first steps in the spread of farming; migrations of people and ideas, and cultural ‘revolutions’ 10,000 years ago in Anatolia.
Dr Douglas Baird (University of Liverpool) on behalf of the British Institute at Ankara
The spread of farming was a heterogeneous migration of individuals and communities of people, plants and animals, practices, beliefs, and ideas that transformed social and cultural worlds across Eurasia between 10 and 6000 years ago; the complexity of this ‘migration’ process and the human response is instructive and is here viewed from central Anatolia between 15000 and 8000 years ago.
The British Institute at Ankara’s involvement in sponsoring, facilitating and partially funding excavations at Pinarbas, Boncuklu and Çatalhöyük in central Anatolia is enabling the study of the long-term development of Neolithic economies, culture and society through a unique focus on a local sequence and employing a rich battery of the latest archaeological and scientific techniques.
For further information, visit: www.biaa.ac.uk; www.catalhoyuk.com, www.liv.ac.uk/sace/research/projects/pinarbasi/index.html
Summary
The beginnings of settled farming life were a profound development in human behaviour that has provided a specific psychological milieu of dense sedentary human communities with complex social and political behaviours for the past 10,000 years. It had long been assumed that as farming spread from the Middle East into Europe via Anatolia, people migrated bringing their language and culture with them. Our perspectives have moved on substantially in recent years as a result of the links between archaeology, gene distributions and new studies of language dispersal. At the same time, the archaeological evidence is increasingly suggesting a complex model of multiple locales for the adoption of sedentary behaviour, development of the first plant cultivation and animal herding, and multiple mechanisms for the spread of farming packages, transforming human culture in the process. Indeed, the development of village farming communities is now seen as much as a cultural ‘revolution’ as an economic one, a revolution in ‘world views’ and their associated symbolism.
The results from these research projects are transforming our understanding of the complex ways in which a specific form of society emerged in central Anatolia, absorbing and transforming the innovations in farming, but sustaining a particular way of life and culture that in turn influenced the nature of the spread of village farming societies into Europe.
Other contributors
Professor Ian Hodder
Acknowledgements
British Academy, Wainwright Fund Oxford, University of Liverpool, University of Stanford, YapiKredi, Boeing.