Syllabus
* Lectures: 1 Archaeology of Domestication: An introduction 2 Near East - Beginning of the Neolithic 3 Near East - Pre-Pottery & Early Neolithic 4 Neolitisation of the Balkan Peninsula 5 Mesolithic/Neolithic Fire Landscape Management 6 Neolithisation of Continental Europe 7 Life, Death and Symbolism in Neolithic Europe 8 Linear pottery Culture: People, Society, Symbols & Settlement 9 Domestication of North Africa and Sahel 10 Domestication of South Africa 11 Domestication of Indian Subcontinent 12 Domestication of East & Southeast Asia 13 Domestication of Australia and Polynesia 14 Domestication of America
Annotation
The emergence of the Neolithic introduced one of the most fundamental turning points in the history of humankind. People left this imaginary Eden of symbiosis with animal species to start their new role of stewards and destroyers of the nature. In this way humans completed their departure from nature into the world of their own culture and civilization. With a sedentary life and a newly acquired knowledge of the production and reproduction of their food sources, people set off to the path to their overpopulation and ruling over the entire planet and after more than 12,000 years to continue beyond its gravity. However, not everything was positive on this departure from the paradise, and soon people also tasted the bitter taste of the forbidden fruit that the first farmers seized. Along with the change of diet a general deterioration in the health of the Neolithic population occurred and we can even talk about the first civilisation diseases.
The course is suitable for students of archaeology, social and cultural anthropology, human ecology, history and other social sciences. It includes an outline of the current discussion on the conditions, methods and evidence of the emergence of cereal agriculture in the Western Asia. In addition to archaeological evidence of changes in the subsistence strategy, changes in the symbolic systems, cosmology and religion of the first agricultural civilizations, as well as demographic and social aspects of neolithisation, will be taken into account. The process of domestication will be investigated in various climatic-ecological contexts with emphasis on explanation of local variability in diversification of agricultural strategies. The topic also includes the spread of the Neolithic way of life outside the Neolithic epicentre, i.e. to the northwest of Asia Minor, the Balkans, Europe and North Africa.
Subsequent cultural development and population cultural variability of newly domesticated areas will also be discussed. Finally, we compare the development in Western Asia and Europe to the domestication processes in other parts of the world, such as East/Southeast Asia, Indian Subcontinent, Australia and Polynesia, Americas,
Sahel and South Africa. This worldwide review of early sedentary populations and variability of domestication strategies provides a basic reference of current research in the field of archaeology, anthropology and prehistoric human ecology.