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Jacques Cauvin has spent many years researching the beginnings of
the Neolithic in the Near East, excavating key sites and developing
new ideas to explain the hugely significant cultural, social and
economic changes which transformed mobile hunter-gatherers into the
first village societies and farmers in the world. In this book,
first published in 2000, the synthesis of his mature understanding
of the process beginning around 14,000 years ago challenges
ecological and materialist interpretations, arguing for a quite
different kind of understanding influenced by ideas of
structuralist archaeologists and members of the French Annales
school of historians. Defining the Neolithic Revolution as
essentially a restructuring of the human mentality, expressed in
terms of new religious ideas and symbols, the survey ends around
nine thousand years ago, when the developed religious ideology, the
social practice of village life and the economy of mixed farming
had become established throughout the Near East and east
Mediterranean, and spreading powerfully into Europe.
This innovative study analyzes the great cultural and economic changes occurring in the Near East between 10,000 and 7,000 BC as Palaeolithic societies of hunter-gatherers gave way to village communities of Neolithic food-producers. Challenging the orthodox, materialist interpretations, and drawing on French theories of mentalities, Jacques Cauvin argues that the Neolithic revolution must be understood as an intellectual transformation, revealing itself above all in symbolic activities. He describes the emergence of the first agricultural villages, pastoralism and nomadism, and the diffusion of Neolithic ideas and practice to the region's periphery.
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