Neolithic

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A seed that does not scatter when it ripens is a defective plant and a useful one. In the wild, the grasses ancestral to wheat and barley shatter at the slightest touch, flinging their grain across the ground; the rare mutant whose seed-head holds fast would die out unharvested were it not for a hand that gathers it, keeps part of the harvest back, and presses it into the soil the following season. That small reversal — a plant kept alive by being eaten, spreading because people carried it — is the thread from which the Neolithic is woven. It is the period named for the moment human communities stopped only taking what the land offered and began to remake the land, and themselves, around the keeping of it.

The Neolithic, or New Stone Age, is the final phase of the Stone Age: the long transition during which communities took up farming, settled into permanent villages, made pottery, and ground and polished their stone tools rather than only chipping them. It is not a single date but a threshold crossed at different times in different places — in the Near East from roughly the tenth millennium BCE, far later in Europe, the Americas, and East Asia, and never at all among peoples who found foraging the better way of living. The hunting-and-gathering world that came before it belongs to the Paleolithic and, in its last post-glacial chapter, the Mesolithic; the Neolithic names what came after the glaciers had withdrawn and the warming land made cultivation possible — and, in a handful of regions, irresistible.

The conventional account, and its frayed edges

The standard story makes agriculture the engine. Settled food production allowed larger populations, fixed dwellings, stored surplus, and eventually the specialization of labor from which the later cities and states of Sumer and Mesopotamia eventually grew. The Australian archaeologist Vere Gordon Childe, writing in Man Makes Himself (1936), gave the change its enduring name: he called it the Neolithic Revolution, framing it by deliberate analogy with the Industrial Revolution as the first of the great transformations by which humanity remade its own conditions, with a second, later “Urban Revolution” to follow. The word revolution has stuck, and it is misleading in the way all such words are. The change was slow, often taking millennia to complete within a single region; it was uneven, with farmers and foragers living side by side for generations; and it was reversible, abandoned in places where the land or the climate turned against it.

What the material record establishes is narrow and solid: the sequence of physical facts. In the Fertile Crescent the so-called founder crops appear — einkorn and emmer wheat, barley, lentil, pea, chickpea, bitter vetch, and flax — their domesticated forms distinguished from wild ones by tough seed-heads that no longer shattered, a trait selected, generation by generation, by the act of harvesting itself. Sheep and goats were brought under management, then cattle and pigs. Granaries, querns, and the first fired pottery follow. At Jericho — Tell es-Sultan in the Jordan Valley, excavated in the 1950s by Kathleen Kenyon — a community of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic raised a massive stone wall and a tower around 8000 BCE, the earliest monumental construction known in the Levant; from its later layers came human skulls with faces modeled over them in plaster, among the earliest portrait sculpture anywhere. Grain, houses, herds, kilns, walls: these are what can be said plainly. The rest is inference, and the careful work says so.

Göbekli Tepe and the inversion of the story

For the purposes of this site the period matters most for a narrower reason: it holds the earliest surviving evidence that people built, and gathered, for something other than survival. The site that made that evidence impossible to ignore sits on a limestone ridge in southeastern Anatolia, near the modern city of Şanlıurfa. Göbekli Tepe was investigated from 1994 onward by the German archaeologist Klaus Schmidt, working with the German Archaeological Institute, and what his teams uncovered overturned an assumption that had organized the study of the deep past.

Beneath the mound lay rings of T-shaped limestone pillars, the largest more than five meters tall and weighing many tons, set into circular enclosures and carved in relief with foxes, boars, snakes, vultures, scorpions, and wild cattle. The pillars are stylized human figures — arms carved down their flanks, hands meeting at the front — though their faces are blank. Radiocarbon dating placed the earliest enclosures in the tenth millennium BCE, raised around 9500 to 9000 BCE: before settled farming was established in the region, and before writing by some six thousand years. The builders were, on the early evidence, hunter-gatherers. And when an enclosure had served its purpose it was deliberately buried, packed with rubble and bone, and another raised beside it.

The site forced a reordering of an old assumption: that monumental ritual architecture followed agriculture and the surplus it produced. Here, apparently, the order was reversed. Communal building on this scale required many hands fed for long stretches in one place — and Schmidt argued that the gathering and the feasting such building demanded may themselves have pressed the surrounding peoples toward the cultivation of grain to sustain it. First the temple, on this reading, then the field; first the cult, then the village. The function of the place remained, by his own account, beyond confident reconstruction — sanctuary, gathering ground, mortuary center, something with no name in any later vocabulary.

That early picture has since been complicated by the excavators themselves. After Schmidt’s death in 2014 the work passed to Lee Clare and colleagues, and the last decade’s findings have softened the stark “world’s first temple” image: traces of domestic structures, rock-cut cisterns and channels for harvesting water, and signs that the great enclosures were in use at the same time rather than built and buried in strict succession. The emerging view is less a pure shrine in an empty landscape than a substantial settlement that also built monumentally — which sharpens rather than dissolves the central point. Whatever else Göbekli Tepe was, the labor lavished on its carved stone exceeds anything mere shelter or storage would explain. UNESCO inscribed it on the World Heritage List in 2018. A few days’ walk away, the broadly contemporary site of Çatalhöyük on the Konya Plain — excavated by James Mellaart from 1958 and by Ian Hodder from 1993 — shows the same impulse turned domestic: a honeycomb of mudbrick houses entered through the roof, their walls hung with the horned skulls of cattle and painted with hunters, leopards, and the dead buried beneath the floors on which the living slept.

The megaliths of Atlantic Europe

Far to the northwest, and thousands of years later, the same readiness to move enormous stone for ends beyond use reappears along the Atlantic seaboard. Across the later Neolithic of Europe came the megaliths: standing stones, stone rows, stone circles, and chambered tombs, raised from Iberia through France and Britain to Ireland and Scandinavia. At Carnac in Brittany more than three thousand menhirs march in alignments across the heath, set up — recent dating suggests — from around 4600 BCE, among the oldest such works in Europe. In the Boyne Valley of Ireland the passage tomb of Newgrange, built about 3200 BCE, holds a stone box above its entrance through which, for a few minutes after sunrise on the winter solstice, a blade of light travels nineteen meters down the passage to the chamber at its heart.

Stonehenge, on Salisbury Plain, is only the most famous of these works, and one of the latest: an earthwork bank and ditch from around 3000 BCE, the great sarsen trilithons raised about 2500 BCE from stone dragged from the Marlborough Downs, the bluestones brought — astonishingly — from the Preseli hills of Wales, some 240 kilometers away. Its axis is laid to the solstices, framing the rising sun at midsummer over the outlying Heel Stone and the setting sun at midwinter through the tallest arch. The alignments at these sites are real and measurable, surveyed to the arc-minute; they make plain that the builders watched the sky and built to it. Beyond that, interpretation runs ahead of the evidence. The people who raised the stones left no texts. What drew them to the turning points of the year — calendar, festival, the dead, the returning sun, some braid of all of these — cannot be recovered with confidence, and the honest archaeology declines to fill the silence with a doctrine.

The stones and their later claimants

The monuments have never lacked for interpreters, and almost none of them have been the builders. From the seventeenth century the antiquarian John Aubrey and, more influentially, William Stukeley in the eighteenth attached Stonehenge to the Druids — the priesthood of the pre-Roman Celtic peoples — and the association has proved unkillable, though it is an error of some four thousand years: the Druids belong to the Iron Age, and the stones were ancient ruins long before any Celt set eyes on them. From that antiquarian graft grew the modern revival, and on the solstices Druidic and Pagan celebrants still gather at Stonehenge to greet the sun, a living observance that is genuinely old as a practice and entirely modern as a recovery. Around the same monuments cluster the geometries of ley-line theorists and the cosmologies of more recent esoteric movements, each reading its own meaning into makers who cannot answer.

These are matters of reception, not of recovered Neolithic belief, and the distinction is the whole discipline. The same caution governs the most seductive reading of the period’s art: the thesis, associated above all with the archaeologist Marija Gimbutas, that the figurines and symbols of Neolithic “Old Europe” record the worship of a single great Mother Goddess in a peaceful, woman-centered world later shattered by patriarchal invaders. The female figurines are real and abundant; the unified goddess-religion built from them runs far past what they can bear, and most archaeologists read the figures as diverse in date, place, and likely function rather than as the iconography of one faith. Like the Druidic Stonehenge, it is a coherent and powerful story told about silent evidence, and it tells more about its tellers than about the people who shaped the clay.

Scholarship and the textless record

The Neolithic is studied without a word from its makers, and so its scholarship is unusually exposed: every general claim rests on excavation, radiocarbon, archaeobotany, and the disputed art of inference. The framework remains Childe’s, laid out in Man Makes Himself (1936) and What Happened in History (1942), where the concepts of the Neolithic and Urban Revolutions were first set in sequence; the Encyclopaedia Britannica account of Childe sketches the arc of a career that gave prehistory its working vocabulary. The domestication evidence has its own technical literature: Daniel Zohary, Maria Hopf, and Ehud Weiss’s Domestication of Plants in the Old World is the standard reference, and the eight Fertile Crescent founder crops are surveyed in the Current Anthropology synthesis of the founder-crop package. Göbekli Tepe’s data and the shift in its interpretation can be followed in the German Archaeological Institute’s ongoing publications and in the field reporting of Archaeology magazine’s account of the site’s reinterpretation, which traces the move from “first temple” to settled village. Jericho’s monumental architecture and plastered skulls rest on Kathleen Kenyon’s Digging Up Jericho (1957); Çatalhöyük on the long sequence of reports from Mellaart through Ian Hodder’s reflexive excavations. For the contested symbolic readings, Marija Gimbutas’s The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe (1974) and The Civilization of the Goddess (1991) state the goddess thesis in full, against which the skeptical mainstream — represented by reviews such as the Bryn Mawr Classical Review of Gimbutas’s The Living Goddesses — should be read alongside. The literature on megalithic astronomy, from Alexander Thom’s controversial mid-century surveys onward, is where measurement and speculation press hardest against each other, and where the discipline learned to distinguish an alignment one can demonstrate from a meaning one can only guess.

The Neolithic, in the end, is the threshold across which the human relationship to land, to time, and to stone was permanently changed — and across which, in southeastern Anatolia and on the Atlantic shore, that relationship left its first deliberate monuments. What the Neolithic itself offers, before any of its later claimants arrived, is sparer and harder to dismiss: the first durable sign, in stone, that the sacred had become something worth the enormous effort of building.

→ Related: Mesopotamia · Paleolithic · Mesolithic · Sumer · Druidism