Watching Ian Kuijt and his excavation team delicately trowel
and sift rock and relics from dust on a lifeless parched plateau
next to the Dead Sea, you'd never guess what the archaeologist
thinks went on there 11,500 years ago.
Farming.
In fact, the Notre Dame associate professor of anthropology
theorizes that this desolate desert locale in eastern Jordan was
one of the places where mankind first traded in the hunter-gatherer
lifestyle for year-round housing and the food security of cultivated
plants. He calls this transition "the most important social and
economic event in the history of the world."
Key to Kuijt's belief is a discovery made at the site, known
as Dhra', in summer 2001. About two feet beneath the surface,
the dig team, which included seven Notre Dame undergraduates,
uncovered what appears to be the foundation of a 9-by-9-foot structure.
Dating to about 9500 B.C., the building was smaller than other
structures whose foundations had been unearthed nearby at the
same depth. These appear to have been dwellings. The smaller structure
also had at least two levels, an architectural feature never before
seen in ruins this old, says Kuijt, whose name is pronounced "kite."
The archaeologist and project co-director Bill Finlayson of
the Council for British Research in the Levant (a part of the
Near East that includes Jordan and Palestine) are eagerly awaiting
analysis of materials sifted from the interior of the smaller
structure's foundation. They expect to find traces of barley or
wheat because they strongly suspect the building was used to dry
and store grain. In other words, a granary.
If so, the ancient village would represent not only the earliest
known farming community but one of the earliest sites where people
lived year-round instead of wandering from place to place collecting
berries and other edible vegetation as they came into season.
Kuijt says mankind's transition from foraging to farming fundamentally
reshaped our relationship with nature. Instead of being at the
mercy of weather, people could now store food from bountiful years
for future lean times. This led to population growth, which in
turn spurred technological advances in food production, transportation
and storage.
The downside was that this new close living arrangement encouraged
the development and spread of diseases. And because the first
farmers concentrated on a reduced variety of crops, their diets
were badly unbalanced and much less nutritious than the unavoidably
diverse fare on which their foraging ancestors subsisted.
"Farmer" is actually a generous title to apply to the ancient
inhabitants of the Jordan Valley plateau, as their manipulation
of plants probably involved no more than weeding and watering
what was already growing there, Kuijt says. Of greater interest
is how these early crop-tenders encouraged anything to grow in
a place where rain is scarce and summer heat sometimes exceeds
120 degrees.
The answer is that like North America, which was substantially
covered in glaciers 11,500 years ago, the Jordan Valley site's
climate was also much different when people lived there. Kuijt
says the region used to be a lush temperate zone with open forests
of oak and pistachio trees (the archaeologists have found shells
among the ruins). There's even evidence of wetlands, as more than
half the animal bones uncovered belong to water fowl like ducks
and birds that live along ponds. Other bones indicate the past
presence of gazelles, foxes, hedgehogs and rabbits. Arrowheads
and stone tools indicate these farmers did not live by wheat,
barley and pistachio nuts alone.
As was the case with the retreat of North America's glaciers,
Kuijt says, Jordan's climate didn't change to desert-like overnight
but over thousands of years. "In the Bronze Age, 5,000 years ago
people were still living there happily."
The dig team has yet to uncover any human remains. If other
excavations in the region are any indication, these probably lie
beneath the floors of the dwellings, a depth to which the team
has not yet probed. Kuijt says it was a common mortuary practice
during the period, termed the Pre-Pottery Neolithic, to inter
the dead in separate pits beneath a residence and then plaster
over the opening. Interestingly, the pit would often be reopened
later, after the deceased's flesh had decomposed, so that the
skull could be removed and deposited in a village cache. The skull
cache became the focus of community rituals.
Kuijt plans to return to the excavation site three more summers
under funding from the National Science Foundation and the University's
Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts.
