Pre-Pottery Neolithic

The Neolithic
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farming, animal husbandry pottery, metallurgy, wheel circular ditches, henges, megaliths Neolithic religion
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The Pre-Pottery Neolithic (PPN, around 8,500-5,500 BCE) represents the early Neolithic in the Levantine and upper Mesopotamian region of the Fertile Crescent. It succeeds the Natufian culture of the Epipaleolithic (Mesolithic) as the domestication of plants and animals was in its beginnings and triggered by the Younger Dryas. The Pre-Pottery Neolithic culture came to an end around the time of the 8.2 kiloyear event, a cool spell lasting several hundred years centred around 6200 BCE.

Pre-Pottery Neolithic A

Main article: Pre-Pottery Neolithic A

The Pre-Pottery Neolithic is divided into Pre-Pottery Neolithic A (PPNA 8,500 BCE - 7,600 BCE) and the following Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (PPNB 7,600 BCE - 6,000 BCE). These were originally defined by Kathleen Kenyon in the type site of Jericho (Palestine). The Pre-Pottery Neolithic precedes the ceramic Neolithic (Yarmukian). At 'Ain Ghazal in Jordan the culture continued a few more centuries as the so-called Pre-Pottery Neolithic C culture.

Around 8,000 BCE during the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A (PPNA) the world's first town Jericho appeared in the Levant.

Pre-Pottery Neolithic B

Main article: Pre-Pottery Neolithic B

PPNB differed from PPNA in showing greater use of domesticated animals, a different set of tools, and new architectural styles. See the articles on PPNA and PPNB for more information.

Pre-Pottery Neolithic C

Work at the site of 'Ain Ghazal in Jordan has indicated a later Pre-Pottery Neolithic C period. Juris Zarins has proposed that a Circum Arabian Nomadic Pastoral Complex developed in the period from the climatic crisis of 6,200 BCE, partly as a result of an increasing emphasis in PPNB cultures upon animal domesticates, and a fusion with Harifian hunter gatherers in Southern Palestine, with affiliate connections with the cultures of Fayyum and the Eastern Desert of Egypt. Cultures practicing this lifestyle spread down the Red Sea shoreline and moved east from Syria into Southern Iraq.

See also

• Pre-history of the Southern Levant
• History of pottery in the Southern Levant
• Pre-Pottery Neolithic A
• Pre-Pottery Neolithic B

Further reading

• Ofer Bar-Yosef, The PPNA in the Levant – an overview. Paléorient 15/1, 1989, 57-63.
• J. Cauvin, Naissance des divinités, Naissance de l’agriculture. La révolution des symboles au Néolithique (CNRS 1994). Translation (T. Watkins) The birth of the gods and the origins of agriculture (Cambridge 2000).