Climate instability and the origin of farming in Southwest Asia

Summary

Prevailing theories concerning the role of climate change in the transition from foraging to farming in SW Asia view socioeconomic change as a response to climate deterioration (push theories) or improvement (pull theories) which caused resource depression or abundance respectively. With this paper I propose that periods of socioeconomic and cultural innovation correlate with periods of climatic instability, which occurred at the timescales of direct human experience of the landscape (i.e., at the individual, generational and inter-generational scale).

Climate instability generated suitable contexts for the development of inter- and intra-group information exchange and community interaction networks coinciding with the development of elaborate symbolism, laden with landscape themes and motifs that were widespread across the

geographical and socio-cultural divides of early Holocene Southwest Asia.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• New Perspectives on Agricultural Origins

Keywords

Spatial Coverage