The Birth of the Gods and the Origins of Agriculture (New Studies in Archaeology)

This innovative study analyzes the great cultural and economic changes occurring in the Near East between 10,000 and 7,000 BC as Palaeolithic societies of hunter-gatherers gave way to village communities of Neolithic food-producers. Challenging the orthodox, materialist interpretations, and drawing on French theories of mentalities, Jacques Cauvin argues that the Neolithic revolution must be understood as an intellectual transformation, revealing itself above all in symbolic activities. He describes the emergence of the first agricultural villages, pastoralism and nomadism, and the diffusion of Neolithic ideas and practice to the region's periphery. Defining the Neolithic Revolution as a re-structuring of the human mentality, this survey ends around 9000 years ago, when the developed religious ideology, the social practice of village life and the economy of mixed farming had become established When people seek to explain the precociousness of the Neolithic Revolution in the Near East in relation to other regions of the world, it is the remarkably favourable environmental conditions that are most often invoked.