Journal
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Volume 106, Issue 27, Pages 10966-10970Publisher
NATL ACAD SCIENCES
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0812764106
Keywords
Near East; Neolithic; forager-farmer transition
Categories
Funding
- British Academy
- Council for British Research in the Levant
- National Science Foundation [NSF BCS 02-07662]
- Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts at the University of Notre Dame
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Food storage is a vital component in the economic and social package that comprises the Neolithic, contributing to plant domestication, increasingly sedentary lifestyles, and new social organizations. Recent excavations at Dhra' near the Dead Sea in Jordan provide strong evidence for sophisticated, purpose-built granaries in a predomestication context approximate to 11,300-11,175 cal B. P., which support recent arguments for the deliberate cultivation of wild cereals at this time. Designed with suspended floors for air circulation and protection from rodents, they are located between residential structures that contain plant-processing instillations. The granaries represent a critical evolutionary shift in the relationship between people and plant foods, which precedes the emergence of domestication and large-scale sedentary communities by at least 1,000 years.
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