A Household Perspective towards the Pre-Pottery Neolithic to Late Neolithic Cultural Transformation in the Southern Levant

Abstract

Besides the economic transition from foraging to agriculture, researchers of the southern Levantine Neolithic have investigated the issue of cultural transformation from the Pre-Pottery Neolithic (PPN) to Late Neolithic (LN) period. This archaeological phenomenon, formerly explained as hiatus palestinien, is currently understood as a structured cultural change involving reorganizations in settlement systems, subsistence activities, tool-production technology, social organization, and ritual practices. Causes for these changes have been sought in several factors, including climatic shift, environmental deterioration, increasing reliance of farming, population increase, social crowding, and the decline of communal rituals.
 This paper proposes a household perspective on this issue to effectively interlink ecological and social factors. To this end, the paper first reviews current understanding of PPNB households and then examines archaeological records indicative of household size, household activities, and the social relationship among households. In this discussion, archaeological data are interpreted by drawing on the anthropologically expected relationship between household size and the degree of economic interdependence among households, i.e., communal or autonomous performance of production and consumption activities.
 zAs a result, I suggest that the increase in household size during the Late PPNB and LN, as indicated by multicellular, two-story houses and courtyard buildings, was caused by the increasing autonomy of households in the performance of production and consumption activities since the Middle PPNB. The latter process is explicable as a response to the reduced opportunities for forming communal works due to diversified subsistence activities and conflicting labour scheduling among households. These transformations of households can be considered as a significant aspect in the reorganization of settlement systems and related cultural changes at the transition from the PPNB to LN.