Abstract/Summary

The transition from hunter-gatherer to farming lifestyles involved changes in all aspects of human lifeways: how food was acquired, technology, patterns of mobility, settlement size and architecture; demography and social relations; ideas of ownership, property, and ideology. With such all-encompassing change, a gradual emergence of farming is more likely than a short-term Neolithic revolution within each centre of origin. Similarly, the transition is likely to have been a spatially diffuse process: plant cultivation, animal herding, sedentism, and so forth, developing independently in different localities. New ideas, tools, cultivated seed and other items would have flowed through spatially extensive social networks, coalescing in favourable environmental and cultural circumstances to create a diversity of farming lifestyles. We provide further evidence for the social networks that underpinned the emergence of farming in SW Asia by describing previously unrecognised symbolic connections between the northern and southern Levant.