ABSTRACT
Anthropologists have long sought to explain increases in the use of storage, sedentism and an apparent expansion in population density that suggest widespread changes in land use and social organization immediately preceding transitions to food production in the Near East. Artifact assemblages that indicate increasing dependence on ‘sessile,’ storable and sometimes abundant small-package resources have led to generalizations about the dietary contribution of these foods during the Natufian-Neolithic transition. These very attributes are often proposed to both account for their inclusion in prehistoric economies, and to explain the widespread changes in assemblage composition, site structure and settlement patterns that accompany their use, in spite of potentially significant processing costs (Harlan 1967, 1992; Binford 1968; Flannery 1969; Rindos 1984; Henry 1989; McCorriston and Hole 1991; Winterhalder and Goland 1993). In this chapter, we argue that it is precisely these costs that should have structured the timing, locations and relative intensity of use (O’Connell and Hawkes 1981; Simms 1987; Russell 1988; Hawkes and O’Connell 1992; Wright 1994; Barlow 1994, 1997).
