Becoming Neolithic : the pivot of human history /

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Bibliographic Details
Author / Creator:	Watkins, Trevor, 1938- author.
Imprint:	Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2024. ©2024
Description:	x, 234 pages : illustrations, maps ; 25 cm
Language:	English
Subject:	Neolithic period -- Middle East. Excavations (Archaeology) -- Middle East. Excavations (Archaeology) Neolithic period Middle East
Format:	Print Book
URL for this record:	http://pi.lib.uchicago.edu/1001/cat/bib/13469698

Hidden Bibliographic Details
ISBN:	9780415221511 041522151X 9780415221528 0415221528 9781351069281
Notes:	Includes bibliographical references and index.
Summary:	"Becoming Neolithic examines the revolutionary transformation of human life that was taking place around 12,000 years ago in parts of southwest Asia. Hunter-gatherer communities were building the first permanent settlements, creating public monuments and symbolic imagery, and beginning to cultivate crops and manage animals. These communities changed the tempo of cultural, social, technological and economic inno-vation. Trevor Watkins sets the story of becoming Neolithic in the context of contemporary cultural evolutionary theory. There have been 70 years of international inter-disciplinary re-search in the field and in the laboratory. Stage by stage, he unfolds an up-to-date understand-ing of the archaeology, the environmental and climatic evidence and the research on the slow domestication of plants and animals. Turning to the latest theoretical work on cultural evolu-tion and cultural niche construction, he shows why the transformation accomplished in the Neolithic began to accelerate the scale and tempo of human history. Everything that followed the Neolithic, up to our own times, has happened in a different way from the tens of thousands of years of human evolution that preceded it. This well-documented account offers a useful synthesis for students of prehistoric archaeol-ogy, and anyone with an interest in our prehistoric roots. This new narrative of the first rapid transformation in human evolution is also informative to those interested in cultural evolutionary theory"--
Other form:	Online version: Watkins, Trevor, 1938- Becoming Neolithic Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2024 9781351069281

Table of Contents:

Environment, resources, population : a concentration of opportunity
Changing subsistence strategies : foraging to farming
Changing subsistence strategies : hunting and herding
Early Epipalaeolithic : the transformation begins
Complex hunter-harvesters in the Levant and beyond
Early pre-pottery Neolithic : transforming their world
Late pre-pottery Neolithic : climax
Further transformation : dispersal and expansion
The evolutionary framework for the story
The Epipalaeolithic-Neolithic transformation : the pivot of cultural evolution
The problem of Neolithic religion
The triple A : aggregation, acceleration, anthropocene.

Becoming Neolithic : the pivot of human history /

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