Concluding the Neolithic: The Near East in the Second Half of the Seventh Millennium BCE

The second half of the seventh millennium BC brings about the demise of the previously affluent and dynamic Neolithic way of life. The period marks significant social and economic transformations of local communities, as manifested in a new spatial organization, patterns of architecture, burial practices as well as in chipped stone and pottery manufacture. This volume has three foci. The first concerns the character of these changes in different parts of the Near East in order to put up the developments in major areas of the Neolithic occupation in a broader comparative perspective. While large mega-cities were central settlements in the Early Neolithic, did they manage to preserve this position in the Late Neolithic? Is it possible that some of the large settlements did not share in the many developments taking place in the Near East at that time and found themselves behind the regional pace of development? The second focus for the book concerns social and ideological changes taking place at the end of Neolithic and the beginning of the Chalcolithic. This makes it possible to explain the disintegration of constitutive principles binding the large centers, the emergence of a new social system, as well as consequences of this process for the development of full-fledged farming communities in the region and beyond. Third, it concerns the changes in lifeways, subsistence strategies, exploitation of the environment, and, in particular, modes of procurement, consumption, and distribution of different resources. Did the Late Neolithic farmers start to exploit different sets of resources originating from the previously unexplored areas? Did the end of the seventh millennium cal BCE involve changes in farming strategies and shifts in the consumption patterns?