cattle are in the corral. There is a waist-tall wooden mortar and long pestle pole for milling grain. An assortment of storage, serving, and winnowing baskets. Pottery water jugs and cooking pots. A tea kettle and cups. Frying pans. Empty tin cans used as drinking cups. The Getu family also has a radio, but the battery is dead.
Each image in Material World is a fascinating glimpse of global domestic life, an intimate perspective on the objects that make up home. And although there are marked and obvious disparities in the range and variety of each family’s possessions, there is a basic truth common to them all.
No one could carry all their stuff.
This is not a trivial point. After about 15,000 years ago, human societies in different portions of the world increasingly relied on stored food—foodstuffs initially collected, then cultivated, and eventually farmed. With those changes, the configurations of our material culture diversified and our stuff weighed more. When that happened, our homes changed from principally places of temporary shelter into refuges for ourselves and our possessions.
Which is what also happened in the deserts and mountains of the ancient Near East.
. . .
The Near East has been the focus of archaeological excavations—amateurish, piratical, and professional—for more than a century.24 The first permanent archaeological research group ever established, the Palestine Expedition Fund, was founded in 1865 with the goal of sponsoring sustained programs of excavations. Despite being modeled on the outstanding successes of Austen Henry Layard’s multiyear investigations of Nineveh, the Palestine Expedition Fund was not an immediate success. Only after World War I came to its bloody end were sustained archaeological projects developed.
Dorothy Garrod (1892–1968) was an amazing archaeologist whose extensive fieldwork transformed knowledge of the ancient Near East and the Zagros Mountains of eastern Iraq and western Iran.25 From a distinguished British family of scientists and doctors, Garrod was trained as a Paleolithic archaeologist by the eminent French prehistorian, Abbé Breuil. Garrod excavated Upper Paleolithic deposits in then-lawless Kurdistan, her team accompanied by armed guards. Later, in northern Israel, Gar-rod directed a multiyear excavation that richly documenting the existence of non-European Neanderthals in the caves surrounding Mt. Car-mel—one of the most important excavations in the Near East. Garrod’s outstanding accomplishments were recognized in 1939 with her appointment as the Disney Professor of Archaeology at Cambridge University. Garrod was the first female professor at Cambridge (or Oxford, for that matter), a barrier-breaking appointment which was made without significant resistance. She was, as her former student recalled, “a valued member of a valued class.”26
Garrod’s excavations in the Mt. Carmel vicinity began as a salvage archaeology project when the caves were slated to be quarried. Garrod had originally planned to continue excavations at the Cave of Shukbah on the Wadi-en-Natuf in the Judean Desert, where Garrod had found, as she remarks in her clear and understated prose, “a microlithic culture that would not fit exactly into any of the pigeon-holes already existing, and I therefore decided to give it a label of its own.”27 She called it “Natufian” after the Wadi-en-Natuf.
More Natufian materials were uncovered during the Mt. Carmel excavations, including adult skeletons who still wore delicate ringlets of shells around their skulls. The most distinctive Natufian tools were the microlithic blades used on stone sickles. The chipped flints were serrated on one edge, dulled and blunt on their back side, and snapped off at each end into roughly rectangular flakes. The microliths were hafted on bone handles, creating a nearly continuous edge to form sickles. There was other evidence for processing plant foods: heavy mortars, basalt bowls, and other grinding stones. It was an assemblage that could have been used by early farmers.
Yet, all the animal remains were from wild game. None of the Natufian levels had pottery, which prehistorians expected to be associated with agriculture. Garrod concluded, “In the circumstances it may seem surprising that we get evidence of the practice of agriculture at such an early date among a people who possess no pottery and do not appear to have domesticated animals.”28 Garrod’s basic assumption was flawed: the Natufians intensively collected wild plants, but they did not farm.
The Natufian tradition is now recognized as a transformative moment in the past. The Natufian strategy of complex hunting and gathering was, in a sense, a conceptual and adaptive bridge between the mobile hunters and gatherers of the late Paleolithic and the early farmers of the Neolithic. Of course, to the Natufians, their “strategy” was a mix of calculated actions, unforeseen consequences, and human responses—a combination of planning and accident that usually characterizes human life.
Since the 1970s, increasingly precise radiocarbon dates and high-resolution data about ancient climate have resulted in a remarkably detailed understanding of the changing post-Pleistocene world of the western portion of the Near East known as the Levant.29
In the Levant, rain falls in the winter months between October and May, but annual variations result in frequent droughts. At a longer time scale, the Levant underwent several long-term shifts in climate and vegetation over the last 25,000 years.
As Paleolithic Europeans shivered through the Last Glacial Maximum at approximately 24,050 years ago, climate in the western Near East was cold and dry, although the coastal mountains near the Mediterranean were well watered and forested. After 17,450 years ago, rainfall gradually increased throughout the region, and then precipitation increased dramatically between 16,000 and 13,300 years ago. These damp millennia were followed by a thousand years of drier conditions between 13,000 and 12,000 years ago. After 12,200 years ago, there was a general increase in rainfall in the northern Levant and Anatolia, while the southern Levant remained dry.
It is an oversimplification to summarize 12,000 years of paleoclimate in the language of a weekend forecast from the Weather Channel. Yet, this synopsis captures some of the generous opportunities and stark challenges to which people adapted in the Near East.
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