ABSTRACT
Between about 22,000 and 10,000 years ago in southwest Asia, the age-old fission-fusion mode of social organization of mobile hunter-gatherer bands was transformed. Groups relied increasingly on stored harvests of cereals and pulses, becoming more and more tied to the place where those resources were available, forming permanent settlements where they stored their food. They used the framework of sedentism and storage as the basis for building larger, more cohesive permanent communities that numbered hundreds, even thousands, of people. From at least 12,000 years ago, these earliest sedentary communities were cultivating selected wild species, leading toward their full domestication, and engaging in herd management strategies with the animals that later became fully domesticated. The continuing growth in size of these large, permanent communities was sustained by the artificial intensification of the food supply, that is, by farming crops and herding animals (Watkins 2012). But the process of creating and sustaining large, permanent communities required more highly developed cognitive and cultural skills (Watkins 2008; 2010). This chapter explores the novel symbolic means that created a sense of belonging and place and sustained the collective memory that was essential to a sense of community identity. Living in these new, large, permanent communities fundamentally required, among other things, that their members felt they belonged in that place, in that house, or in that community; and the sense of belonging in a place was based in community identity, collective memory, and history. Thus, the Neolithic of southwest Asia saw not only new forms of society but also new ways in which humans related to time and space.
