Supra-Regional Networks in the Neolithic of Southwest Asia |
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Authors: | Trevor Watkins |
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Institution: | (1) Archaeology, School of History, Classics and Archaeology, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK |
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Abstract: | When prehistoric archaeologists write accounts of the Epi-palaeolithic or Neolithic of southwest Asia, they resort to an archaic
narrative style of culture-history that was formulated by Gordon Childe in the first half of the last century. These narratives
frame their account of events within the format of a succession of archaeological cultures. In addition, the received form
of the narrative is founded within a core-area of the Levant, the Mediterranean corridor zone; it is assumed that all the
important social and economic innovations of the Epi-palaeolithic and early Neolithic occurred within that corridor, from
where the cultures and their innovations spread through diffusionary processes to dominate wider parts of the region. The
first part of this paper is a critique of the unwarranted assumption of the existence of archaeological cultures, and of the
Levantine primacy hypothesis. The second part proposes an alternative to the notion of the archaeological culture. First,
we review the evidence for wide-area cultural networking through the exchange of goods and materials and the sharing of cultural
behaviours that characterises the Neolithic. We can view the Epi-palaeolithic and early Neolithic periods as a time when new
cultural processes were being employed to build and maintain novel sedentary, permanently co-resident communities of unprecedented
scale. At a higher level, we see communities engaged in the construction and maintenance of more and more extensive networks
of communities, in a form similar to, but not identical with, the peer polity interaction sphere model first described by
Colin Renfrew in a different context.
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Keywords: | Epi-palaeolithic Neolithic Western Asia Culture-history Network theory |
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