The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire (22 page)

One young man buried at Abu Hureyra had an arrow point in his chest cavity. Given the raiding we have seen in societies of this type, our only surprise is that this young man was shot once rather than pincushioned. His untimely death makes us wonder why palisades or other defensive works have not been more often discovered at early Near Eastern villages. One answer is that archaeologists do not always excavate the outskirts of the village, where such defensive works were usually built. When they do investigate the village periphery, they sometimes find ditches or walls.

Consider, for example, the village of Tell Maghzaliyah in northern Iraq. Some 8,500 years ago its occupants were planting wheat and barley on a rolling plain west of the Tigris River. Archaeologist Nikolai Bader discovered that Maghzaliyah had once been surrounded by a defensive wall, which he was able to trace for roughly 200 feet. The lower part of the wall was made of upright blocks of stone, standing five feet tall in places, while the upper wall was built of hard-packed earth.

Equally impressive defenses have been found at the site of Tell es-Sultan, known to the Israelis as Jericho. This large village lay in a hot, arid region, 900 feet below sea level, near the point where the Jordan River enters the Dead Sea. The source of its water, both for drinking and irrigation, was an oasis created by the spring of Ain es-Sultan.

FIGURE 16.
   Some early Near Eastern ritual houses had apse-shaped rooms where the ancestors’ skeletal remains were curated. Above we see an apsidal building from Abu Hureyra, Syria, where the remains of more than 30 people were kept. Below we see the apsidal Skull Building from Çayönü, Turkey, where the remains of more than 400 individuals were kept. The Skull Building featured sitting benches and a rectangular stone altar, on whose surface was found hemoglobin from both human and cattle blood. Owing to later damage, the full dimensions of these buildings are not known.

Roughly 8,000 years ago, Jericho was defended by a ditch and a 14-foot-high stone masonry wall. It also seems to have had a lookout tower, in this case preserved more than 25 feet high. The tower was flanked by storage facilities, a few still holding charred cereals.

Some archaeologists, reluctant to accept the fact that village societies often engaged in raiding, have offered nondefensive explanations for Jericho’s wall. Such attempts to pacify prehistory underestimate the worldwide evidence for raiding in achievement-based societies, as well as the fact that contemporaneous sites such as Maghzaliyah had clear defensive works.

Jericho, then a village of mud-brick houses, had a multistage burial program similar to that of some Australian Aborigines. People were buried first as individuals. At a later date their graves were reopened so that their skulls, and perhaps some limb bones, could be reburied in a charnel room. Archaeologist Kathleen Kenyon found many partly decayed bodies that had, in her words, been “searched through for the particular purpose of removing the skulls.”

One cluster of seven skulls stood out from the others. Their facial features had been reconstructed by coating the skull with lime plaster and placing seashells in the orbits to represent eyes (
Figure 17, left
). According to the biological anthropologists who have examined them, all these plastered skulls came from adult men. This should not surprise us, given the tendency of Near Eastern societies to reckon descent through male ancestors.

Archaeologists have found similar skulls at Ain Ghazal, an early village on the outskirts of the Jordanian city of Amman. Ain Ghazal was founded 9,000 years ago on an embayment of the Wadi Zarqa, a spring-fed river traversing the arid region. Some 1,500 years later the site had grown to cover more than 30 acres, making it one of the largest villages of its time. The villagers of Ain Ghazal lived in extended families whose houses averaged 18 by 26 feet. They grew barley, wheat, peas, chickpeas, and lentils; raised goats, cattle, and pigs; and hunted gazelles with bow and arrow.

One ritual building at Ain Ghazal, partially destroyed by the growth of Amman, was almost 50 feet long. It had four rooms of differing sizes, and its walls bore unusually thick lime plaster, painted red with ocher. This building was as large as the dormitory-style arichu of the Ao Naga, but owing to its destruction we cannot confirm what kind of building it was.

Archaeologist Gary Rollefson found that Ain Ghazal had a multistage burial program similar to that of Jericho. Many people were buried originally below the floor of a residence, only to be exhumed later so that their skulls could be removed. Groups of skulls were then buried elsewhere. One pit at Ain Ghazal contained four skulls whose features had been reconstructed with lime plaster.

FIGURE 17.
   In the early agricultural villages of the Near East, the ancestors were a major focus of ritual. On the left we see the skull of a presumed male ancestor from Jericho, near the Dead Sea; his facial features have been reconstructed in lime plaster, and his eyes have been replaced with seashells. On the right we see a three-foot-tall plaster statue of an ancestor from Ain Ghazal, Jordan. This statue should be compared to the wooden ancestor figures made by the Nootka (
Figure 6
).

Ain Ghazal had kilns for converting limestone into plaster, much of which was undoubtedly used to cover walls. At least some of it, however, was used to make plaster busts and statues of the ancestors, some as tall as three feet. The statues were given a pink coating (perhaps diluted ocher), and the black pupils of their eyes were drawn in tar from an asphalt seep (
Figure 17, right
). Gaunt and spooky-looking, the statues of Ain Ghazal remind us of the Nootka ancestor statues shown in
Figure 6
.

Finally, let us travel east to the Boğazçay River, a tributary of the Tigris, where it flows out of the Taurus Mountains near the city of Ergani, Turkey. Nine thousand years ago the Ergani region was a savanna-woodland with oak, pistachio, almond, and tamarisk trees overlooking a grassy valley floor. Here, some 2,700 feet above sea level, lay the ancient village of Çayönü, which has produced one of the most detailed series of ritual buildings in the early Near East. These buildings have been investigated by several generations of archaeologists, including Robert J. Braidwood, Halet Çambel, and Mehmet Özdoğan.

The earliest houses at Çayönü, built nearly 10,000 years ago, were oval and semi-subterranean. The lower walls were made of stone slabs and the domed roofs were made from reeds daubed with clay. Çayönü at that time subsisted on a combination of wild and domestic wheats, field peas, chickpeas, and lentils; its meat came from hunting wild pigs, sheep, goats, cattle, and other animals. Çayönü later went over to large rectangular houses with mud or mud-brick walls, set on grill-like foundations that kept the houses dry by allowing air to circulate beneath them.

The oldest identifiable ritual house at Çayönü, nicknamed the Bench Building, resembles a typical men’s house: a single room 14 to 16 feet on a side, with a floor of clean sand and massive stone benches running along three of its four walls. The second ritual structure, called the Flagstone Building, was reminiscent of the men’s houses at Nevali Çori. Its floor was paved with flagstones, except where two large stone monoliths rose vertically to support the flat roof. Instead of a series of pillars around the periphery, however, the builders of the Flagstone Building had added buttresses to its dry-laid stone masonry walls. This allowed the 35-by-18-foot building to be spanned by wooden roof beams.

The third ritual building at Çayönü resembled the apsidal men’s house from Abu Hureyra: a rectangular building with a crescent-shaped room at one end, serving as a charnel room (
Figure 16, bottom
). Stored in a pit in the apse were the skulls of 70 people, giving the structure its nickname, the Skull Building.

The rectangular part of the building had a large central room with sitting benches on two sides. In front of one bench a large stone table or altar rested on the lime-plastered floor. Between this room and the apse were three small rooms described as “cellars,” some of which were stacked high with additional skulls and human bones. In all, the remains of some 400 deceased individuals had been curated in the Skull Building.

Two other details of the Skull Building are noteworthy. First, a forensic analysis of residue on the surface of the stone table/altar revealed crystals of both human and cattle hemoglobin. This suggests rituals involving the shedding of human and cattle blood. The second noteworthy detail is that this ritual building shows signs of massive burning. We have already noted that in many societies, men’s houses were the prime targets of enemy raids.

Perhaps 8,700 years ago Çayönü underwent a number of transformations. Its economy now included both cereal cultivation and the herding of sheep and goats. Archaeologists suspect that the occupants had added second stories to their residences, requiring a sturdy foundation of stones set in clay mortar. The lower floor was often divided into eight to 12 small storage rooms. These storage units were connected to each other by crawl holes, and to the upper story by hatches. An extended family could live in the upper story and produce as much surplus grain as it chose to, secure in the knowledge that its neighbors could not see how much was being stored in the cells of the lower floor. The stage was set, in other words, for an ambitious household to outstrip its fellow farmers. Then, like the high achievers of Assam and New Guinea, the household head could use his surplus (and that of his relatives) to build renown.

There are signs that such differences in surplus and renown were indeed emerging at this point in Çayönü’s history. The village now had a cleared plaza, 165 by 83 feet in extent, not far from its ritual house. The residences north of the plaza were among the largest in the village and contained the most prestigious valuables. The residences to the west of the plaza were smaller and showed little evidence of luxury items.

During this period the leaders of Çayönü directed the building of a new structure called the Terrazzo Building, roughly 40 feet long and 30 feet wide (
Figure 18
). Its corners were aimed at the cardinal points. The thick stone walls were given decorative buttresses. The floor that gave the building its name was made of thousands of red stone chips, set in clay and polished. Forensic analysis once again revealed crystals of human hemoglobin, this time on the rim of a heavy circular basin.

The Terrazzo Building had no sitting bench, no charnel room, and no curated remains of ancestors. In our opinion it may signal an important transition in the development of Near Eastern society: the shift from societies with men’s houses to societies with actual temples. The implications of this transition require so much discussion that we must defer them to a later chapter.

FROM FORAGING TO ACHIEVEMENT-BASED SOCIETY IN THE MEXICAN HIGHLANDS

During the late Ice Age the climate of the central Mexican highlands was cooler and drier than today’s. Temperatures began to rise 10,000 years ago, covering many mountain valleys with a thorny forest of organ cactus, acacia, and mesquite trees. The understory of this forest was a wonderland of edible plants.