The Birth of the Gods and the Origins of Agriculture (New Studies in Archaeology)
Cambridge University Press, 7/27/2000
EAN 9780521651356, ISBN10: 0521651352
Hardcover, 288 pages, 26 x 18.4 x 1.9 cm
Language: English
Originally published in French, translated by Trevor Watkins
Jacques Cauvin has spent many years researching the beginnings of the Neolithic in the Near East, excavating key sites and developing new ideas to explain the hugely significant cultural, social and economic changes which transformed mobile hunter-gatherers into the first village societies and farmers in the world. In this book, first published in 2000, the synthesis of his mature understanding of the process beginning around 14,000 years ago challenges ecological and materialist interpretations, arguing for a quite different kind of understanding influenced by ideas of structuralist archaeologists and members of the French Annales school of historians. Defining the Neolithic Revolution as essentially a restructuring of the human mentality, expressed in terms of new religious ideas and symbols, the survey ends around nine thousand years ago, when the developed religious ideology, the social practice of village life and the economy of mixed farming had become established throughout the Near East and east Mediterranean, and spreading powerfully into Europe.
List of plates
List of figures
Translator's note
Foreword
Preface
Chronological table
Introduction
Part I. The Origins of Agriculture
1. Natural environment and human cultures on the eve of the Neolithic
2. The first pre-agricultural villages
the Natufian
3. The Revolution in symbols and the origins of Neolithic religion
4. The first farmers
the socio-cultural context
5. The first farmers
strategies of subsistence
6. Agriculture, population, society
an assessment
7. The Neolithic Revolution
a transformation of the mind
Part II. The Beginnings of Neolithic Diffusion
8. A geographical and chronological framework for the first stages of diffusion
9. The birth of a culture in the northern Levant and the neolithisation of Anatolia
10. Diffusion into the central and southern Levant
11. The evidence of symbolism in the southern Levant
12. The dynamics of a dominant culture
Part III. The Great Exodus
13. The problem of diffusion in the Neolithic
14. The completion of the neolithic process in the 'Levantine nucleus'
15. The arrival of farmers on the Mediterranean littoral and in Cyprus
16. The sedentary peoples push east
the eastern Jezirah and the Syrian desert
17. Pastoral nomadism
18. Hypotheses for the spread of the Neolithic
Conclusion
Postscript
Notes
Bibliography
Index.