Anthropology 2100 Lecture : Early Food Production

• School: Western University
• Department: Anthropology
• Course: Anthropology 2100
• Professor: Peter Timmins

Document Summary

Intensive harvesters of wild wheat and barley and intensive hunters of gazelles using communal drive techniques. Their tool kit included mortars and pestles, grinding stones, and bone sickles with flint blades (sickle gloss on blades) and they later became sedentary and built substantial houses. Sites were located in ecotonal situations like the mediterranean hill zone /coastal plains/grassland valleys. There is some evidence for social ranking in burial practices from grave goods like seashells, and stone bowls. During the younger dryas interval (12,950-11,600 bp) temperatures became much colder and there was reduced area available for settlement and may have forced domestication of plants to increase productivity. Pre-pottery neolithic a (ppna: 12,000 10,800 years ago) Pre-pottery neolithic b (ppnb: 10,800 8,500 years ago) 12-11,000 ya ppna) spans 1. 5 ha on tributary of the jordan river and the site has oval mud brick houses housing 20-30 families (100-200 people) who were becoming sedentary.