Early Village Social Organization and Food Production in the Near East

FAIN: FA-51646-05

Ian Kuijt
University of Notre Dame (Notre Dame, IN 46556-4635)

This fellowship will support the publication of a book manuscript that examines the Near Eastern forager-farmer transition as a social phenomenon. This project develops a complementary social perspective on the process of domestication and the transition to food production by exploring how early architecture and mortuary practices reflect community social organization. This project adds to anthropological literature that seeks to reexamine some of the traditional models of the foraging-farming transition within early small-scale communities, and forces us to rethink the relationships between demography, food production and the emergence of social differentiation.