The Birth of the Gods and the Origins of Agriculture

by Jacques Cauvin , Translated by Trevor Watkins

• ISBN13: 9780521039086
• ISBN10: 0521039088
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2007-08-20
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

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. This 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.

Table of Contents

List of plates

List of figures

Translator's note

Foreword

Preface

Chronological table

Introduction

The Origins of Agriculture

Natural environment and human cultures on the eve of the Neolithic

The first pre-agricultural villages: the Natufian

The Revolution in symbols and the origins of Neolithic religion

The first farmers: the socio-cultural context

The first farmers: strategies of subsistence

Agriculture, population, society: an assessment

The Neolithic Revolution: a transformation of the mind

The Beginnings of Neolithic Diffusion

A geographical and chronological framework for the first stages of diffusion

The birth of a culture in the northern Levant and the neolithisation of Anatolia

Diffusion into the central and southern Levant

The evidence of symbolism in the southern Levant

The dynamics of a dominant culture

The Great Exodus

The problem of diffusion in the Neolithic

The completion of the neolithic process in the 'Levantine nucleus'

The arrival of farmers on the Mediterranean littoral and in Cyprus

The sedentary peoples push east: the eastern Jezirah and the Syrian desert

Pastoral nomadism

Hypotheses for the spread of the Neolithic

Conclusion

Postscript

Notes

Bibliography

Index

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