Neolithic Goes West: The Environmental Context of Late Neolithic Agriculture in Western and Central Anatolia

Key Words: Archaeology, Near Eastern Archaeology, Neolithic, Neolithic Anatolia, Early Agriculture, Human Impacts, Archaeobotany, Anthracology, Environmental Archaeology, Archaeological Science.

Starting from approximately 9000-years ago, archaeological evidence indicates that the lifeways of the first cultivators and herders in Southwest Asia underwent significant transformations in habitation practices, domestic farming economies, and material culture and technologies. These shifts marked the start of the geographical expansion and dispersal (via population movements and acculturation) of the Near Eastern Neolithic from its core areas in inland Southwest Asia westwards into new environments.

This process presented new opportunities and challenges for the region's first food-producing societies that emerged in the semiarid foothills and river valleys of northern Mesopotamia and the Levant some 2000-years earlier. Some scholars have hypothesised that increasing climatic aridity and human landscape impacts led to societal upheaval, group fission, and settlement abandonment, which motivated early farmers to migrate to the more temperate regions of Western Anatolia.

Palaeoclimatic data from the Greenland ice cores indicate that the collapse of the Laurentine ice sheet at ~8200cal BP led to a rapid shift from the warm and humid Climatic Optimum, to extremely cold and arid conditions globally. In Central Anatolia, the 8.2k event has been linked to the final abandonment of large, nucleated settlements such as Çatalhöyuk East, and the beginning of dense Neolithic settlement in Western Anatolia by communities practising fully developed agropastoral economies.

However, direct evidence for significant deterioration of vegetation and other landscape resources that could have caused economic decline and societal unrest, is lacking. Furthermore, there is very little data with which to reconstruct the ecological footprint of denser Neolithic settlement in Western Anatolia, and how agropastoral economies were integrated in these more humid and densely wooded environments, including interactions and/or hybridization with pre-existing local forager lifeways.

This project aims to fill this knowledge gap by collecting palaeobotanical (wood charcoal) data from select Neolithic sites in Central and Western Anatolia, covering the critical timespan between the mid-7th and late-6th millennia cal BC. The key aim of this research project is to investigate the nature of vegetation changes, people-environment interactions, and anthropogenic impacts, during this period.

This will be achieved by reconstructing woodland vegetation before, during, and after the 8.2k event using quantified charcoal data to address changes in woodland composition, cover, and diversity that may be linked to climatic and/or anthropogenic impacts on the local environments (e.g., changes in woodland composition/cover due to deforestation caused by browsing, grazing and/or clearance for cultivation).