The Origins of Agriculture in the Near East
2011; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 52; Issue: S4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1086/659307
ISSN1537-5382
Autores Tópico(s)Archaeology and Historical Studies
ResumoPrevious articleNext article FreeThe Origins of Agriculture in the Near EastMelinda A. ZederMelinda A. ZederPDFPDF PLUSAbstractFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreAbstractThe emerging picture of plant and animal domestication and agricultural origins in the Near East is dramatically different from that drawn 16 years ago in a landmark article by Bar-Yosef and Meadow. While in 1995 there appeared to have been at least a 1,500-year gap between plant and animal domestication, it now seems that both occurred at roughly the same time, with initial management of morphologically wild future plant and animal domesticates reaching back to at least 11,500 cal BP, if not earlier. A focus on the southern Levant as the core area for crop domestication and diffusion has been replaced by a more pluralistic view that sees domestication of various crops and livestock occurring, sometimes multiple times in the same species, across the entire region. Morphological change can no longer be held to be a leading-edge indicator of domestication. Instead, it appears that a long period of increasingly intensive human management preceded the manifestation of archaeologically detectable morphological change in managed crops and livestock. Agriculture in the Near East arose in the context of broad-based systematic human efforts at modifying local environments and biotic communities to encourage plant and animal resources of economic interest. This process took place across the entire Fertile Crescent during a period of dramatic post-Pleistocene climate and environmental change with considerable regional variation in the scope and intensity of these activities as well as in the range of resources being manipulated.IntroductionEighteen years ago, a week-long seminar was held in Santa Fe, New Mexico, that, much like the Wenner-Gren Mérida conference featured in this special issue of Current Anthropology, focused on the context, timing, and possible causes of the emergence of agriculture in different world areas. Sponsored by the School of American Research, this seminar resulted in the publication of an influential edited volume, Last Hunters, First Farmers: New Perspectives on the Prehistoric Transition to Agriculture (Price and Gebauer 1995), a comprehensive global overview of agricultural origins. The contribution by Ofer Bar-Yosef and Richard Meadow, in particular, provided a richly detailed account of the transition from foraging to farming in the Near East (Bar-Yosef and Meadow 1995). The scope and breadth of the Bar-Yosef and Meadow article likely explains why it has been the most authoritative and most widely cited synthesis of Near Eastern agricultural origins. This work, then, serves as an ideal benchmark against which to measure advances in our understanding of Near Eastern plant and animal domestication and agricultural emergence in the years between the Santa Fe and Mérida conferences.Near Eastern Agricultural Origins: 1995While comprehensive in its geographic scope, Bar-Yosef and Meadow (1995) had a special emphasis on the Levant, especially on the southern Levant (figs. 1, 2). Decades of survey and excavation, especially in the parts of the Levant that fell within the borders of modern Israel, had yielded a remarkably detailed and well-controlled archaeological record of the transition from foraging to farming in this part of the Near East. Similar coverage had not yet been accomplished in other parts of the Fertile Crescent. When the Bar-Yosef and Meadow article was published, documenting domestication in plants and animals required the detection of morphological modifications caused by domestication. In cereals, the marker of choice was the development of a tough rachis, a change in the plant's dispersal mechanism thought to arise when humans sowed harvested cereal grains. In pulses, the primary domestication marker was an increase in seed size, a response to seedbed pressures that allowed sown seeds to germinate more quickly and shade out competing seedlings. In animals, archaeozoologists relied primarily on the demonstration of overall body-size reduction, held to be a rapid response to herd management.Figure 1. Distribution of main Late Epipaleolithic and Neolithic sites in the Near East. 1, Ohalo II; 2, Ein Gev IV; 3, Neve David; 4, Kharaheh IV; 5, Beidha; 6, Hayonim; 7, Wadi al-Hammeh 27; 8, Ain Mallaha; 9, Jericho; 10, Iraq ed Dubb; 11, Hatoula; 12, Dhra; 13, Netiv Hagdud; 14, Gigal I; 15, Aswad; 16, Ghoraife; 17, Wadi el-Jilat 7; 18, Yiftah'el; 19, Ain Ghazal; 20, Basta; 21, Ramad; 22, Khirbet Hammam; 23, Abu Hureyra; 24, Mureybit; 25, Dja'de; 26, Jerf el Ahmar; 27, Kosak Shamali; 28, Halula; 29, Qaramel; 30, Tel el-Kerkh; 31, Ras Shamra; 32, Bouqras; 33, Hallan Çemi; 34, Demirköy; 35, Körtik; 36, Göbekli Tepe; 37, Nevali Çori; 38, Çayönü; 39, Cafer Höyük; 40, Grittle; 41, Palegawra; 42, Shanidar cave; 43, Zawi Chemi Shanidar; 44, Qermez Dere; 45, Nemrik; 46, M'lefaat; 47, Asiab; 48, Ganj Dareh; 49, Ali Kosh; 50, Jarmo; 51, Guran; 52, Sarab; 53, Pinarbassi A; 54, Aşikli Höyük; 55, Suberde; 56, Can Hasan III; 57, Çatal Höyük; 58, Erbaba; 59, Aetokremnos; 60, Mylouthikia; 61, Shillourokambos.View Large ImageDownload PowerPointFigure 2. Time line of Near Eastern sites, Levantine chronology, and climatic conditions compiled using information from Aurenche et al. (2001); Bar-Yosef and Meadow (1995); Byrd (2005); Kuijt and Goring-Morris (2002); Nesbitt (2002); and Willcox (2005). PPNA, PPNB= Pre-Pottery Neolithic A and B, respectively.View Large ImageDownload PowerPointBased on these criteria, crop domestication was thought to have originated in the southern Levant during the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A (PPNA) period, around 11,500–11,000 cal BP (fig. 2). Animal domestication seemed to have been a delayed development, with different livestock species brought under domestication in different parts of the region (from the Levant to the Zagros), beginning with goats sometime during the Middle Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (PPNB), around 10,000 cal BP, followed by sheep, with cattle and pigs domesticated later still. While livestock and some crop plants may have been domesticated in other parts of the Fertile Crescent, the southern Levant was thought to be the home of initial cultivation from which domesticates and domestic technology spread quickly into the rest of the Fertile Crescent through an "uneven series of movements affecting different areas at different times" (Bar-Yosef and Meadow 1995:41). The coalescence of disparate elements of this subsistence system into an agricultural economy was thought to have occurred over a 2,000-year period, from about 10,000 to 8000 cal BP, during which time it gradually became the dominant subsistence economy throughout the region.Near Eastern Agricultural Origins: 2010In the 16 years since publication of Bar-Yosef and Meadow (1995), there has been an exponential increase in information on this transition not only from the southern Levant but also from other parts of the Fertile Crescent that had not been as thoroughly explored in 1995. A number of new archaeobiological approaches to documenting domestication have been developed that are providing powerful new insights into the initial phases of domestication in both plants and animals. Also contributing to the emerging picture of Near Eastern agricultural origins are genetic analyses that have identified the progenitors of Near Eastern domestic crops and livestock species and defined the likely geographic regions of their domestication. More widespread use of small-sample accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) radiocarbon dating has made it possible to directly and precisely date the remains of domestic plants and animals, greatly enhancing the temporal control of our understanding of this transition. The result is a vastly changed picture of the origins of agriculture in the Near East.New Archaeological Insights into Plant DomesticationCerealsWhen Bar-Yosef and Meadow (1995) was written, the presence of a few large domestic grains of einkorn (Triticum monococcum cf. monococcum) and rye (Secale cf. cereale) from Epipaleolithic levels at Abu Hureyra I had raised the possibility that initial cereal domestication occurred in the northern Levant during the Younger Dryas climatic downturn (Hillman, Colledge, and Harris 1989). Subsequent AMS dating of these grains found that, as suspected, most were intrusive from Middle PPNB levels. However, three grains of domestic-morphotype rye were found to date to between 13,000 and 12,000 cal BP, and on the basis of this early date, Hillman argued that these grains represented the earliest morphologically altered domestic cereals in the Near East (Hillman 2000; but see Nesbitt 2002:118–119). Hillman acknowledged that grains consistent in size with domestic varieties are known to occur in low numbers in wild cereals but argued that the probability of finding these rare mutant forms within archaeological assemblages of collected wild rye was essentially zero (Hillman 2000:382). If rye was domesticated at this early date, however, it does not seem to have made much of a mark on Near Eastern subsistence economies. With the onset of warmer and wetter climatic conditions in the Early Holocene, the utilization of this cool-climate cereal first declined and then ceased altogether in the Middle Euphrates (Willcox, Fornite, and Herveux 2008). Domesticated rye is not seen again for another 2,000 years, when it is found in low numbers in central Anatolia at Can Hasan III (ca. 9400 cal BP; Hillman 1978). Never a prominent component of Near Eastern cereal crops, modern domestic rye traces its heritage to European wild rye (Weiss, Kislev, and Hartmann 2006).Arguments advanced in 1995 for the appearance of morphologically altered domestic barley and emmer during the PPNA in the southern Levant have been largely overturned in the intervening years (Weiss and Zohary 2011). When Bar-Yosef and Meadow (1995) went to press, the handful of tough-rachis barley Hordeum vulgare ssp. distictum found among the thousands of brittle-rachis wild barley grains H. vulgare ssp. spontaneum recovered at Gigal and Netiv Hagdud in the southern Levant seemed likely candidates for the earliest domesticated cereal crop. Although this evidence was questioned at the time by Kislev (1989, 1992), who maintained that the low proportion of tough-rachis barley in the Netiv Hagdud assemblage was consistent with the representation of this morphotype in wild stands, others seemed more comfortable with the attribution of these cereal remains as domestic (i.e., Bar-Yosef and Meadow 1995:66–67; Hillman and Davies 1992; Zohary 1992). There is now a more general consensus that tough-rachis grains must constitute at least 10% of a cereal assemblage before it can be considered domestic (Tanno and Willcox 2006a; Weiss, Kislev, and Hartmann 2006). This means that the barley recovered from these early sites (where tough-rachis varieties constitute about 4% of the total barley recovered) more likely represent intensively collected and possibly cultivated morphologically wild cereals (Kislev 1997; Weiss, Kislev, and Hartmann 2006). The application of AMS dating to carbonized material recovered from new excavations at Tell Aswad has moved up the dates of the more securely identified domesticated emmer and barley from this site. Originally thought to date to the PPNA (ca. 11,500 cal BP), the levels that yielded these domestic cereals are now known to date to the end of the Early and beginning of the Middle PPNB (ca. 10,300–10,000 cal BP; Stordeur 2003; Willcox 2005).Nesbitt's comprehensive evaluation of the evidence for the appearance of domesticated cereals in the Near East concludes that the evidence for morphologically altered cereal domesticates before about 10,500 cal BP is either too poorly documented or too poorly dated to be accepted as marking the initial threshold of cereal domestication (Nesbitt 2002). The earliest securely identified and dated domestic emmer (Triticum turgidum ssp. dicoccum) and einkorn (T. monococcum ssp. monococcum) grains and chaff, according to Nesbitt, come from sites in the Upper Euphrates valley (Nevali Çori, Cafer Höyük, and possibly Çayönü) that date to the Early PPNB, at about 10,500–10,200 cal BP. Nesbitt contends that securely identified and dated domestic barley is not seen until the Middle PPNB, when it is found throughout the Fertile Crescent and Anatolian Plateau.Additional evidence for the late or at least delayed appearance of morphologically domestic cereals in the Near East is provided by Tanno and Willcox (2006a), who document the gradual increase in the proportion of tough-rachis domestic morphotypes among wheat and barley recovered from sites in the Middle and Upper Euphrates valley. Domestic morphotypes constitute only 10% of the single-grained einkorn recovered from Nevali Çori (ca. 10,200 cal BP), barely meeting the threshold for demonstrating the presence of domestic cereals. Only 35% of the barley recovered from somewhat later levels at Aswad (10,200–9500 cal BP) and a little over 50% of the barley recovered from Ramad (9500–8500 cal BP) are nonshattering varieties. Even as late as 7500 cal BP, domestic morphotypes constitute only around 60% of the two-grained einkorn recovered from Kosak Shamali, a variety that Willcox postulates represents a second domestication of diploid wheats (Willcox 2005:537).PulsesAlthough substantial quantities of lentils had been recovered from PPNA sites in both the southern and the northern Levant by 1995, the absence of clear morphological markers of domestication (i.e., larger seed sizes) precluded Bar-Yosef and Meadow from drawing any conclusions about their domestic status. However, Weiss, Kislev, and Hartmann (2006; also Weiss and Zohary 2011) and Tanno and Willcox (2006b; also Willcox, Buxó, and Herveux 2009; Willcox, Fornite, and Herveux 2008) have subsequently concluded that the hundreds of lentils found in storage bins at Netiv Hagdud and Jerf el Ahmar are unlikely to represent wild, unmanaged plants. Wild lentils, they argue, are not a common component of Near Eastern plant communities, and the yield of seeds per plant, at about 10–20, is very low. Moreover, wild lentils have an exceptionally high rate of seed dormancy; only about 10% of wild lentil seeds germinate after sowing. Thus, the quantity of lentils recovered from these of PPNA sites suggests that lentils were likely being transplanted from wild patches, aggregated in new environments, and tended by humans. Weiss, Kislev, and Hartmann (2006) also argue that these early lentils had undergone a lowering in the rate of seed dormancy and an increase in the number of seeds per plant, initial steps toward domestication that would not be archaeologically detectable.Similarly, Tanno and Willcox (2006b) maintain that the chickpeas (Cicer sp.) recovered from Tel el-Kerkh (ca. 10,200 cal BP) in northwestern Syria represent an early stage in the cultivation of this well-known Near Eastern crop plant. While these are not definitively domestic morphotypes, the high degree of morphological variability of the chickpeas from this site, together with the rarity and sparseness of wild chickpea stands (which do not grow in the region today), is again suggestive of intentional transplanting and cultivation. A similar case is made for the faba beans (Vicia faba) recovered from this site (Tanno and Willcox 2006b). Although not as large as modern faba beans, they are very similar to the faba beans recovered in large numbers from the Late PPNB (ca. 8800 cal BP) at Yiftah'el (Garfinkel, Kislev, and Zohary 1988), which are almost certainly cultivated varieties. In fact, the large-seeded modern variety of faba bean is not seen in the Near East until about AD 1000 (Tanno and Willcox 2006b).FigsRecently, Kislev, Hartmann, and Bar-Yosef (2006a) have argued that the earliest morphologically altered plant domesticate in the Near East was neither a cereal nor a pulse but a tree crop. The presence of parthenocarpic figs at the PPNA site of Gigal in the southern Levant (ca. 11,400–11,200 cal BP) has been interpreted as a clear indication of human selection for this mutant infertile fig variety that remains on the tree longer and develops sweeter, softer fruit. Other researchers have noted, however, that parthenocarpy is known among wild female fig trees (Denham 2007; Lev-Yadun et al. 2006) and therefore, as with the presence of tough-rachis varieties or larger cereal grains in low quantities, their occurrence in an archaeobotanical assemblage cannot be considered definitive proof of domestication. Kislev, Hartmann, and Bar-Yosef (2006b) have responded that if, as their critics contend, these figs represent the selective harvest of mutant figs from wild fig trees, at least some seeded varieties would be expected to have been collected along with these rare, naturally occurring parthenocarpic figs. Instead, all of the nine carbonized fruits and 313 single druplets recovered from Gigal represent this infertile variety. Domestication of this shrubby pioneer plant, they maintain, could be accomplished by replanting cut branches of trees that naturally produce these sweeter fruits. Such an activity underscores the degree to which people were likely modifying local environments and biotic communities as well as their willingness to invest in nurturing resources, such as slowly maturing trees, with delayed rewards.Plant managementThere is, in fact, increasing evidence that humans were actively modifying local ecosystems and manipulating biotic communities to increase the availability of certain economically important plant resources for hundreds of years before the manifestation of morphological indicators of plant domestication (Weiss, Kislev, and Hartmann 2006; Willcox, Buxó, and Herveux 2009; Willcox, Fornite, and Herveux 2008). First, the presence of distinctive complexes of weedy species characteristic of fields under human cultivation suggests that humans were actively tilling and tending wild stands of einkorn and rye at both Abu Hureyra and nearby Mureybit during the Late Epipaleolithic (ca. 13,000–12,000 cal BP; Colledge 1998, 2002; Hillman 2000:378). Increases in this weed complex at Qaramel (ca. 11,500 cal BP) and Jerf el Ahmar (ca. 11,000 cal BP) signals an intensification of plant cultivation in the Middle Euphrates during the ensuing PPNA period (Willcox, Fornite, and Herveux 2008). Willcox, Fornite, and Herveux (2008; also Willcox, Buxó, and Herveux 2009) also interpret the increase in the quantity of wild einkorn in Early Holocene assemblages from the Middle Euphrates sites as additional evidence of human management of this plant. Wild einkorn T. monococcum ssp. baeoticum is not well adapted to the chalky soils of the Middle Euphrates, and it would not have responded well to the rising temperatures of the Early Holocene. Today the region is too hot and arid for wild einkorn, which can be found only on basalt lava flows 100 km north of Jerf el Ahmar. The dramatic increase in the representation of wild einkorn in Middle Euphrates assemblages over the course of the PPNA to Early PPNB could happen, these authors argue, only if people were actively tending plants transplanted from preferred habitats, altering local microhabitats, removing competition, and artificially diverting water to tended plants (Willcox, Fornite, and Herveux 2008:321). A subtle increase in the thickness and breadth of barley and einkorn grains from these sites without a corresponding increase in grain length is interpreted as a plastic response to cultivation (Willcox 2004). The progressive decrease in indigenous plants of the Euphrates floodplain and the concurrent adoption of and increase in morphologically wild representatives of founder crops such as barley, emmer, lentils, chickpeas, and faba beans have also been used to argue that humans were modifying local plant communities and managing morphologically wild but cultivated cereals and pulses (Willcox, Buxó, and Herveux 2009; Willcox, Fornite, and Herveux 2008). In addition to the quantities of lentils recovered from PPNA sites such as Netiv Hagdud and Gigal, the large number of morphologically wild barley and wild oats (Avena sterilis) recovered from these sites (e.g., 260,000 grains of wild barley and 120,000 of wild oats from a single granary at Gigal) suggests that people in the southern Levant were also cultivating plants of economic interest (Weiss, Kislev, and Hartmann 2006).A study of plant assemblages from the northern Fertile Crescent by Savard, Nesbitt, and Jones (2006) demonstrates that people in the more eastern parts of the Fertile Crescent were also intensively utilizing a wide variety of plant resources, with considerable regional variation in the plant species exploited. Late Epipaleolithic residents of Hallan Çemi, for example, utilized a diverse range of plant species with a special focus on valley-bottom plants such as sea club-rush (Bolboschoenus maritimus) as well as dock/knotgrass, large-seeded legumes, and, to a lesser extent, almonds (Amygdalus sp.) and pistachio (Pistacia sp.). A similar assemblage was found at Demirköy, a nearby site occupied shortly after Hallan Çemi, where a number of as yet unidentified small-seeded grasses, small-seeded barleys (Hordeum murinum), and some wild barley (H. vulgare cf. spontaneum) were also recovered. The plant assemblages from roughly contemporary sites in steppic environments of northern Iraq (Qermez Dere and M'lefaat) are dominated by large-seeded legumes, followed by small-seeded grasses, with small-seeded legumes and wild cereals (barleys and einkorn/rye) also represented.The antiquity of this broad-spectrum plant-exploitation strategy stretches back at least to the Late Glacial Maximum (ca. 23,000 cal BP), as evidenced by the remarkably well-preserved plant assemblage recovered from the waterlogged Levantine site of Ohalo II, which contained a diverse array of large- and small-seeded grasses and legumes (Piperno et al. 2004; Weiss et al. 2004). There is some indication that the intensive exploitation of this complex of small- and large-seeded cereals, legumes, and other locally available plant resources may reach as far back as the Middle Paleolithic (Albert et al. 2003; Lev, Kislev, and Bar-Yosef 2005). It is still an open question when, over the course of this long period of increasingly intense utilization of plant resources, humans began to actively modify local ecosystems and biotic communities to encourage the availability of economically important plants. But it is clear that by at least 11,500 years ago, humans had brought a number of plant species under cultivation and that except for the manifestation of certain morphological traits seen in later-domesticated varieties, these plants might arguably be considered domesticated crops.The delayed expression of domestication-induced morphological changes in managed plants (at 10,500–10,000 cal BP in cereals and later still in pulses) may be attributable to the frequent importation of new wild plants when cultivated crops failed (Tanno and Willcox 2006a). It is also possible that early harvesting practices may not have encouraged the morphological changes to cereal dispersal mechanisms once thought to be a first-line marker of cereal domestication. Beating ripened grain heads into baskets, for example, or harvesting cereals before they were fully ripe or even gleaning shattered heads of grain from the ground might have led to the retention of the brittle rachis in cultivated cereals (Hartmann, Kislev, and Weiss 2006; Lev-Yadun, Gopher, and Abbo 2006; Tanno and Willcox 2006a; Willcox and Tanno 2006). The appearance of morphological change in these founder crops is, then, most likely an artifact of a change in management or harvesting practices of cultivated crops and not a leading-edge indicator of plants being brought under human control.New Archaeological Insights into Animal DomesticationCaprinesThe utility of morphological markers as leading-edge indicators of livestock domestication is even more problematic. This is especially true of body-size reduction, the primary marker used to document animal domestication for the past 30 years. Recent analysis of modern and archaeological skeletal assemblages from the Zagros region has shown that sex and, to a lesser extent, temperature are the most important factors affecting body size in both sheep (Ovis aries) and goats (Capra hircus). Domestic status, on the other hand, has no effect on the size of female caprines and only a limited effect on males, manifested as a decrease in the degree of sexual dimorphism (Zeder 2001, 2005). This work has also shown that apparent evidence of domestication-induced body-size reduction in Near Eastern archaeological assemblages is not, as had been assumed, the result of a morphological response to human management. Instead, the apparent shift toward smaller animals is an artifact of the different culling strategies employed by hunters, whose interest in maximizing the return of the hunt often results in an archaeological assemblage dominated by large prime-age males (Stiner 1990), and herders, who seek to maximize the long-term growth of a herd by culling young males and delaying the slaughter of females until they have passed peak reproductive years (Redding 1981). Because of various taphonomic factors and methodological practices, the herder's harvest strategy produces an archaeological assemblage dominated by smaller adult females (Zeder 2001, 2008). Comparing assemblages of hunted prey animals primarily made up of large adult males with those of harvested managed animals dominated by smaller females led to the erroneous conclusion that domestication-induced body-size reduction had taken place.The consistent size difference between the skeletal elements of male and female caprines, however, makes it possible to compute sex-specific harvest profiles for sheep and goats that are capable of distinguishing the herding harvest signature from the hunter's prey strategy. In the central Zagros, the herding signature of young-male harvest and delayed female slaughter is first detected within the highland natural habitat of wild goats among the goat remains from the site of Ganj Dareh, directly dated to 9900 cal BP (Zeder 1999, 2005). The same signal was also detected in the goats from the site of Ali Kosh, located outside the natural habitat of wild goats on the lowland piedmont of southwestern Iran and first occupied at about 9500 cal BP. Progressive changes in the size and shape of goat horns has been noted over the 1,000-year occupation of this site (Hole, Flannery, and Neely 1969). These changes were a direct response to human management that arose when humans assumed control over breeding and eliminated the selective pressure for large horns used in mate competition. The unequivocal signatures of goat management documented in the central Zagros are not, however, the earliest evidence of caprine management in the Near East. As with plants, it now seems that the leading edge of animal management stretches back at least 1,000 years before the manifestation of archaeologically detectable morphological change in managed animals.Perkins (1964) interpreted the younger age profile of the sheep from the site of Zawi Chemi Shanidar in the northwestern Zagros as evidence of sheep domestication in the Late Epipaleolithic (ca. 12,000–11,500 cal BP). A new analysis of this assemblage finds a prey profile focused on 2–3-year-old male sheep that is, as Perkins noted, a departure from the prime-adult-male strategy detected for goats in Mousterian and Upper Paleolithic levels at nearby Shanidar cave (Zeder 2008). But this demographic profile is also not consistent with the herd-management signature of young-male and delayed female harvest detected for goats at Ganj Dareh and Ali Kosh. A similar focus on 2–3-year-old males has been reported at the roughly contemporary site of Hallan Çemi, 300 km to the northwest of Zawi Chemi and part of the same Taurus/Zagros "round-house tradition" (Redding 2005; Rosenberg et al. 1998). Redding interprets this demographic pattern as a prime-male hunting strategy practiced under conditions of intensive pressure on local wild herds. The eradication of local males by sedentary hunters, he argues, created a vacuum that attracted younger males with less-established home territories from outside regions. This "male sink" effectively assured a continuous supply of preferred prey while preserving a local population of females and young. Although this strategy does not entail the same degree of intentional control over herd demographics found in managed herds, it certainly signals an attempt at increasing the availability of prey by setting a precedent for the slaughter of young males and the preservation of female breeding stock characteristic of herd management. The demographic profile of the sheep remains from Körtik Tepe, a somewhat later (ca. 10,900 cal BP) site located 50 km to the south of Hallan Çemi, has also been interpreted as a transitional strategy between game management and herd management (Arbuckle and Özkaya 2006).The transition from hunting to herding appears to have been complete by about 10,500 cal BP at Nevali Çori, where, using lower-resolution demographic profiling methods, Peters and collaborators have detected changes in the age and sizes of caprines consistent with the harvest of herded caprines (Peters, von den Driesch, and Helmer 2005; Peters et al. 1999). Sheep seem to have been the initial early focus of herd management here, with managed goats introduced from elsewhere at about 10,200 cal BP (Peters, von den Driesch, and Helmer 2005:111). Helmer's (2008) recent reconsideration of the faunal r
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