Trevor Watkins

University of Edinburgh | UoE · School of History, Classics and Archaeology

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 change...

Permanent settlement began in southwest Asia across the end of the Pleistocene (the Epipalaeolithic) and the beginning of the Holocene (the Neolithic). Aggregation represents a transformation of the cultural niche, involving major social and cultural innovations and profound developments of the strategies of subsistence. At first, the scalar stress...

Archaeologists have continually added new techniques of scientific analysis and interpretation, but the processualist archaeology of Binford and Flannery in the 1960s proposed that the central task was to set prehistoric archaeology within an ecosystems (i.e., ecological, and evolutionary) context. Evolutionary theory has expanded and developed sig...

Is it possible to go beyond Jacques Cauvin’s attractive idea that the Neolithic saw ‘the birth of the gods’ and Klaus Schmidt’s suggestion that the great enclosures at Göbekli Tepe were built as temples to house the gods? Are the pairs of central monoliths in the early aceramic Neolithic circular enclosures at Göbekli Tepe representations of supern...

Ian Hodder. Religion, history, and place in the origin of settled life. 2018. Boulder: University Press of Colorado; 978-1-60732-736-3 $75. - Volume 93 Issue 367 - Trevor Watkins

The objective of this paper is to set the Epipalaeolithic-Neolithic transformation (ENT) within the truly long-term of human evolutionary history. The Epipalaeolithic-Neolithic transformation take us out of the world of Palaeolithic mobile foraging into a new world, in which the scale and organisation of the social group and the tempo of socio-cult...

The objective of this paper is to set the Epipalaeolithic-Neolithic transformation (ENT) within the truly long-term of human evolutionary history. The Epipalaeolithic-Neolithic transformation takes us out of the world of Palaeolithic mobile foraging into a new world, in which the scale and organisation of the social group and the tempo of socio-cul...

The objective of this paper is to set the Epipalaeolithic-Neolithic transformation (ENT) within the truly long-term of human evolutionary history. The Epipalaeolithic-Neolithic transformation takes us out of the world of Palaeolithic mobile foraging into a new world, in which the scale and organisation of the social group and the tempo of socio-cul...

There is a widespread tendency to ascribe a causal role to environmental change in the explanation of the major processes in human prehistory, but no modern historians explain major events in recent history in terms of global or regional climatic change. Our expe- rience is that we operate almost entirely within the constraints and facilities of...

In this paper I seek to show how cultural niche construction theory offers the potential to extend the human evolutionary story beyond the Pleistocene, through the Neolithic, towards the kind of very large-scale societies in which we live today. The study of the human past has been compartmentalised, each compartment using different analytical voca...

In the first section of this book, issues concerning ritual and play have been discussed from different theoretical perspectives. It should be clear at the outset that the present author comes from a quite different direction, entering this field as a questioning prehistoric archaeologist, fascinated by extraordinary phenomena emerging from current...

Anatolia now begins to provide us with a perspective on the Neolithic transformation that encapsulates the essentials of the story. We can see the transformation process from its inception, in which communities in both southeast and central Anatolia played leading roles, through its consolidation, to its resolution in the further adaptations of the...

The term 'neolithization' as it is generally used in relation to southwest Asia narrows the focus of research, and works against our efforts to envision explanations of the process in terms of the long-term evolution of human societies. Here, we re-frame the neolithization process, setting it within the framework of niche construction theory. We ar...

Bonacossi Daniele Morandi (ed.). Urban and natural landscapes of an ancient Syrian capital: settlement and environment at Tell Mishrifeh/Qatna and in central-western Syria (Studi Archeologici su Qatna 1). 350 pages, 172 illustrations, 31 tables & 3 colour fold-out plates. 2007. Udine: Forum; 978-88-8420-418-9 paperback €70 & $105. - Volume 83 Issue...

Flannery Kent & Marcus Joyce . The creation of inequality: how our prehistoric ancestors set the stage for monarchy, slavery, and empire. xiv+631 pages, 72 illustrations. 2012. Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press; 978-0-674-06469-0 hardback $39.95 & £ 29.95. - Volume 87 Issue 336 - Trevor Watkins

Around the transition from the Pleistocene to the Holocene in southwest Asia, human skills in cultural niche construction were qualitatively upgraded in order to support the formation of large, permanently co-resident communities and regional interaction networks with new and sophisticated forms of symbolic action and representation. The transition...

As archaeologists, we are accustomed to the appearance of lots of new information that constantly requires us to adjust, or change, our understanding of the period, region or subject in which we are interested. But we are much less competent in upgrading or revising the frameworks within which we form those understandings. Here, I take terms like N...

Naissance des divinites, Naissance de l’agriculture (1994) a reflete la pensee orignale et aboutie de Jacques Cauvin sur la nature premiere de la neolithisation. Cet ouvrage influence toujours la pensee et les travaux d’un grand nombre, mais son impact a ete limite parce qu’il a laisse deux questions majeures en suspens. Mes propres recherches se s...

Maria Grazia Masetti-Rouault. Cultures locales du moyen-Euphrate: modèles et événements, Ilè-Ier mill. dv. J.-C (Subartu 8). iii+200 pages, 14 figures. 2001. Turnhout: BREPOLS; 2-503-99116-5 paperback €55. - Volume 78 Issue 302 - Trevor Watkins

The thesis proposed here is that architecture exploded in the early Neolithic of southwest Asia as a novel and powerful system of symbolic representation, the scaffolding of a pre-literate mode of external symbolic storage. The ability to construct settlements, houses and public buildings that represented constructs of the world that they inhabited...

Reports on investigations undertaken between 1978 and 1982 which revealed a penannular ring-ditch, ring-groove houses and a polygonal enclosure with antennae ditches. Evidence suggests that this enclosure was later replaced by a more substantial ditch and bank which then became levelled when a series of stone-paved houses were constructed. There ar...

Cet article se propose de mettre en evidence la diversite des regimes climatiques et de l'environnement et son impact sur l'homme, du Dernier maximum glaciaire a l'Holocene ancien. L'A s'appuie sur l'exemple du Moyen-Orient afin de realiser une reconstruction paleoenvironnementale. Apres quelques remarques d'ordre generale, il etudie les changement...

A series of chance discoveries and salvage excavations in north Mesopotamia revealed many sites that belonged to the early neolithic period between 8000 and 6000 B.C.E. These produced intriguing information on the processes of change that culminated in the wide establishment of villages based on a mixed farming economy, providing new insights on th...

L'interet porte aux maisons sur le site proto-neolithique de Qermez Dere — Nord de l'Iraq — ainsi que les changements survenus relativement rapidement dans la culture materielle semblent indiquer une evolution importante du mode de vie de la communaute, particulierement vis-a-vis du «foyer», les activites symboliques etant centrees sur les maisons....

Qermez Dere is an early economic neolithic settlement site in the Iraqi Jezirah. Together with Nemrik, reported elsewhere in this volume, Qermez Dere forms the basis of a culture sequence from the end of the epi-palaeolithic to the middle of the 7th millennium B.C. The new site's culture can be seen to relate to the known archaeology of both the N....

The early chalcolithic Halaf culture is pivotal to the culture history and chronology of Mesopotamia. Neither the relative stratigraphic method nor the radiocarbon data currently available enables us to resolve the essential chronological questions which must be answered if we are to tackle the problems of cultural succession, process and interacti...

extraction. The general circumstances of the excavation, the acknowledgments and the site location map may be found elsewhere in this volume (pp 165-208 & figs 1 & 12). The excavation of the burial site was directed by Trevor Watkins, who has contributed the first part of this report. I A G Shepherd wrote the sections entitled 'The Finds' and 'Disc...

The site of Tell Aqab lies six kilometres south of the town of Amuda, in the Jezirah province of north-east Syria. It is one of a large number of early mounds which cluster along the northern edge of the Khabur triangle, an extensive and fertile plain drained by the Khabur River and its eastern tributaries. The rich well-watered soil of the Khabur...