Over the past fifty years or so early pottery complexes in the wider region of West Asia have hardly ever been investigated in their own right. Early ceramics have often been unexpected by-products of projects focussing upon much earlier aceramic or later prehistoric periods. In recent years, however, there has been a tremendous increase in research in various parts of West Asia focusing explicitly on this theme. It had generally become accepted that the adoption of pottery in West Asia happened relatively late in the history of ceramics. Several regions are now believed to have developed pottery significantly earlier. Thus, pottery occurs in Eastern Russia, in China and Japan by 16,500 cal. BC and in north Africa it is known in the 10th millennium. However, while the East Asian examples in particular do mark chronologically earlier instances, the picture in West Asia is actually rather more complex, in part because of the tyranny of the Aceramic/Ceramic Neolithic chronology. For the first time, The Emergence of Pottery in West Asia examines in detail the when, where, how and why pottery first arrived in the region? A key insight that emerges is that we must not confuse the reasons for pottery adoption with the long-term consequences. Neolithic peoples in West Asia did not adopt pottery because of the many uses and functions it would gain many centuries later and the development of ceramic technology needs to be examined in the context of its original cultural and social milieu.

This volume brings together the latest results and discussions from research carried out in the eastern Fertile Crescent, the so-called hilly flanks, and adjacent regions, as well as providing key historical perspectives on earlier fieldwork in the region. The emergence of sedentary food producing societies in southwest Asia ca. 10,000 years ago has been a key research focus for archaeologists since the 1930s. This book provides a balance to the weight of work undertaken in the western Fertile Crescent, namely the Levant and southern Anatolia. This preference has led to a heavy emphasis on these regions in discussions about where, when and how the transition from hunting and gathering to plant cultivation and animal domestication occurred. Chapters assess the role of the eastern Fertile Crescent as a key region in the Neolithization process in southwest Asia, highlighting the key and important contributions people in this region made to the emergence of sedentary farming societies. This book is primarily aimed at academics researching the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture in southwest Asia. It will also be of interest to archaeologists working on this transition in other parts of Eurasia.

The history of science is a story of human discovery--intertwined with religion, philosophy, economics and technology. The fourth in a series, this book covers the beginnings of the modern world, when 16th-century Europeans began to realize that their scientific achievements surpassed those of the Greeks and Romans. Western Civilization organized itself around the idea that human technological and moral progress was achievable and desirable. Science emerged in 17th-century Europe as scholars subordinated reason to empiricism. Inspired by the example of physics, men like Robert Boyle began the process of changing alchemy into the exact science of chemistry. During the 18th century, European society became more secular and tolerant. Philosophers and economists developed many of the ideas underpinning modern social theories and economic policies. As the Industrial Revolution fundamentally transformed the world by increasing productivity, people became more affluent, better educated and urbanized, and the world entered an era of unprecedented prosperity and progress.

The second half of the seventh millennium BC saw the demise of the previously affluent and dynamic Neolithic way of life. The period is marked by significant social and economic transformations of local communities, as manifested in a new spatial organization, patterns of architecture, burial practices, and in chipped stone and pottery manufacture. This volume has three foci. The first concerns the character of these changes in different parts of the Near East with a view to placing them in a broader comparative perspective. The second concerns the social and ideological changes that took place at the end of Neolithic and the beginning of the Chalcolithic that help to explain the disintegration of constitutive principles binding the large centers, the emergence of a new social system, as well as the consequences of this process for the development of full-fledged farming communities in the region and beyond. The third concerns changes in lifeways: subsistence strategies, exploitation of the environment, and, in particular, modes of procurement, consumption, and distribution of different resources.

This groundbreaking, five-volume series offers a comprehensive, fully illustrated history of Egypt and Western Asia (the Levant, Anatolia, Mesopotamia, and Iran), from the emergence of complex states to the conquest of Alexander the Great. Written by a highly diverse, international team of leading scholars, whose expertise brings to life the people, places, and times of the remote past, the volumes in this series focus firmly on the political and social histories of the states and communities of the ancient Near East. Individual chapters present the key textual and material sources underpinning the historical reconstruction, paying particular attention to the most recent archaeological finds and their impact on our historical understanding of the periods surveyed. Commencing with the domestication of plants and animals, and the foundation of the first permanent settlements in the region, Volume I contains ten chapters that provide a masterful survey of the earliest dynasties and territorial states in the ancient Near East, concluding with the rise of the Old Kingdom in Egypt and the Dynasty of Akkad in Mesopotamia. Politics, ideology, religion, art, crafts, economy, military developments, and the built environment are all examined. Uniquely, emphasis is placed upon elucidating both the internal dynamics of these states and communities, as well as their external relationships with their neighbors in the wider region. The result is a thoughtful, critical, and robust survey of the populations that laid the foundation for all future developments in the ancient Near East.

Over recent years, a number of scholars have argued that the human mind underwent a cognitive revolution in the Neolithic. This volume seeks to test these claims at the Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük in Turkey and in other Neolithic contexts in the Middle East. It brings together cognitive scientists who have developed theoretical frameworks for the study of cognitive change, archaeologists who have conducted research into cognitive change in the Neolithic of the Middle East, and the excavators of the Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük who have over recent years been exploring changes in consciousness, creativity and self in the context of the rich data from the site. Collectively, the authors argue that when detailed data are examined, theoretical evolutionary expectations are not found for these three characteristics. The Neolithic was a time of long, slow and diverse change in which there is little evidence for an internal cognitive revolution.

Presents new insights into the evolution, technology, painting techniques, distribution and consumption of ceramics in Neolithic of the Near East