Roots of Agriculture in Southern Arabia: Reconstructing Human Economic Choices and Landscape Management in Changing Mid-Holocene Paleonvironments

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With National Science Foundation support Dr. Joy McCorriston and her colleagues will conduct two months of archaeological fieldwork to reconstruct cultural and paleoenvironmental sequences in Wadi Shumylya, a highland drainage in Southern Arabia. Building upon NSF funded exploratory research which in 1998 established that necessary data are present, the work will examine the transition in the region from hunting and gathering to food projection. Archaeological survey, test excavations and geophysical prospecting will be complemented with paleoenvironmental approaches such as hyrax midden studies and sedimentological profile description to recover a complete paleo-record of human activities and environmental dynamics in a small drainage system. By recording all archaeological features, recovering economic indicators such as faunal and floral remains, building a paleoenvironmental record and reconstructing a sequence of human activities through time, the investigators will develop a model for human-environment interaction during the early to mid Holocene. Dr. McCorriston and colleagues wish to determine why prehistoric peoples adopted agriculture after millennia as hunters and gatherers. Some scientists believe that environment and climate change have a major effect on group decisions and major subsistence transformations can best be understood in this context. Others argue that history and culture contact play a more important role. Southern Arabia offers an excellent venue for examination of this question. The region lies at the crux of the Indian Ocean, a crossroads for traffic and trade throughout prehistory. Domesticates and technologies from three distinct geographic regions were available to Arabian foragers. Archaeologists know that Arabian peoples had access to goods and ideas from the Levant, Africa and the Indian subcontinent yet they have still to establish the earliest dates for farming and herding in Arabia. It is not known from which complex the earliest domesticates were chosen. The research will not only answer this question but also link the time of adoption with potential climatic change. It will be possible to determine whether the cultivated species were the most appropriate to the climatic regime. Because the domesticates and technologies from the Levant, Africa and India vary widely in climatic-environmental adaptations, this diversity offers a rare potential for understanding the choices people made to adapt farming and herding and the mixes and matches of crops, animals and technologies available.This research will shed new light on human environmental interactions and provide valuable data for a poorly known region. It will be of interest to a wide range of archaeologists.