G02 - Early Productive Behaviour, or the Regional and Global Problems with the Terms Neolithic/ Neolithisation

Session Organisers: Hans Georg K. Gebel

Category: Conceptual - Theory

Session Abstract: The session invites us to test the term Neolithic and conventional understandings and models of Neolithisation processes from regional and global perspectives by reflecting on new findings (such as productive foraging) and confronting them with evidence not fitting. We always come up against the applicability limits of these terms when they inappropriately reflect the complexity and intricacy of phenomena or evoke misleading generalisations for their local, regional, supra-regional and global variabilities. "Neolithic" phenomena and processes also occurred before or after Neolithic "core periods", were polycentric and polycyclic in various ways and geographically shifting, reversible, failing, behaved acyclic/asynchronous. The tendency of research to prioritise individual stimuli and/or to negate multidisciplinary holistic approaches reinforces the conceptual problems with the terms. The session aims to open a global academic discourse to highlight the potential pitfalls of "reductionism" in Neolithic research and to discuss if the world's Neolithics share basic traits and a common nature in creating the new social phenotype characteristic for productive lifeways (as opposed to foraging lifeways). The productive use of natural and human resources - including the cognitive territories with their skills and dispositions created to serve these purposes – was aimed at control towards security, growth/reproducibility, and defence. Do these characterise all Neolithics to varying degrees, without foraging elements ever disappearing completely? Each contribution should attempt to give a brief outline of the relevant traits of the regional/ supra-regional Neolithic trajectories (Subsistence modes, Environmental technologies and adaptations, Built territories, Technologies and consumption, Social organisation, Belief/ Cognitive systems, Exchange networks) and outline which research approaches shaped these results. This is in order to approach the question of which interacting systems enabled the sustainable establishment and adaptation of productive environments, impaired them or caused them to fail. Was productive behaviour the common denominator and momentum of these processes, or do the globally different permanent transitions from foraging to producing - from taking to making - include substantially different human dispositions and ontologies? All these questions are intended to depict the polycentric and asynchronous panorama of early productive humans.

Room: A

04/11/2024

Start Time - End Time	Authors	Title
13:00 - 13:20	Hans Georg K. Gebel	Introduction to the Session: Early Productive Behaviour, or the Regional and Global Problems with the Terms Neolithic/ Neolithisation
13:20 - 13:40	Julian Thomas	The Neolithic as an Assemblage
13:40 - 14:00	Felipe Criado-Boado, Luís Martínez, Jadranka Verdonkschot	Cognitive and neurological bases of the domestication of Mind
14:00 - 14:20	Bill Finlayson	Searching for a beginning

Coffee Break

Start Time - End Time	Authors	Title
14:45 - 15:05	Maxime Brami	Childe’s ‘neolithic revolution’ and its relevance to the archaeology of Southwest Asia
15:05 - 15:25	Gary Rollefson	Neolithic Food Production Hunting Technology in Arid Landscapes Across the World
15:25 - 15:45	Alison Betts	Neolithic Foundations and Neolithic Dispersals Across Asia: Some Comparative Considerations
15:45 - 16:05	Andrey Tabarev, Alexander Popov	""Neolithic Eve"": Personal view on the local and global perspective

Coffee Break

Start Time - End Time	Authors	Title
16:30 - 16:50	Tanja Schreiber	Neolithic Hunter-Gatherers? Rethinking “Neolithic trajectories” through a Siberian case study
16:50 - 17:10	Chao Zhao	When Neolithic began in North China: A Debate on Divergent Interpretations of Early Neolithic
17:10 - 17:30	Cédric Bodet	Production and Reproduction: the mingled infrastructures of the Neolithic Social (R)evolution
17:30 - 17:50	Frédérique Brunet	Long-Term Neolithisation Processes in Central Asia: The Key Role of Mobility, Territories and Interactions

05/11/2024

Start Time - End Time	Authors	Title
10:00 - 10:20	Alexander Wasse, Joanne Clarke	Choice in the Face of Change. How 'Neolithic' Were Cyprus and the Greater Syrian Desert in the 7th and 6th Millennia BC?
10:20 - 10:40	Hamil Samira	The Neolithic in north-west Algeria
10:40 - 11:00	Arkadiusz Marciniak	The Central Anatolia Neolithic – a globalization perspective
11:00 - 11:20	Xiaoran Wang	Reassessing Regional Economy During the Neolithization: Nevali Cori and Yumin from the Fertile Arcs of Western and Eastern Asia

Lunch Break

Start Time - End Time	Authors	Title
13:00 - 13:20	Mingjian Guo	The Neolithisation in Northwestern Hebei Area, China
13:20 - 13:40	Yoshihiro Nishiaki	Is the Jomon culture “Neolithic”?
13:40 - 14:00	Jian-Ye Han	New Discoveries at Nanzuo Site and the Dawn of Early State in the Loess Plateau, China
14:00 - 14:20	Claudia Speciale, Domenico Lo Vetro, Carmine Collina, Vincenza Forgia, Maria Rosa Iovino, Domenica Gullì, Giuseppe Bazan, Enrico Giannitrapani	New insights on the cultural, social, and economic domestication of Sicily

Coffee Break

Start Time - End Time	Authors	Title
14:45 - 16:15	All Participants (Peer-Moderated)	Final Session Discussion: Lessons for Future Regional and Global Neolithic Research