Andrew M.T. Moore has done much to advance our understanding of the origins and spread of agriculture in the eastern Mediterranean. His greatest and best-known contribution is his work at Abu Hureyra (Syria), with all the studies and theorizing that it has stimulated. The Abu Hureyra site report volume, Village on the Euphrates (Moore et al., Reference Moore, Hillman and Legge2000), is a model of the genre as well as a compendium of vital information about an important site. This substantial site report has been complemented by a steady stream of articles by Moore and others based on the materials from Abu Hureyra through the decades since it was excavated in the early 1970s as a rescue project ahead of dam construction (a recent example: Ridout-Sharpe, Reference Ridout-Sharpe2015), including two chapters in the volume reviewed here. In addition to being well-excavated, well-studied, and well-published, Abu Hureyra is critical to the study of agricultural origins because it is located in the seminal area of Upper Mesopotamia, and especially because it has both Epipaleolithic and Pre-Pottery Neolithic (PPN) levels, offering a rare window on the process of the transformation from forager to farmer.
Moore has spent most of his career exploring this transition and how it happened. An early advocate of the increasingly popular view that plant and animal domestication were gradual and drawn-out processes (e.g. Moore, Reference Moore1982), Moore has always sought a detailed understanding of subsistence practices and human interactions with their landscapes. To this end, he has consistently applied the latest methods of environmental archaeology and dating to his projects.
After Abu Hureyra, Moore remained active in the field with a series of surveys in the Levant, and more recently survey and excavations in Dalmatia (coastal Croatia) in collaboration with Marko Menđušić. He also has a distinguished record of service in academic and professional administration, currently finishing a term as president of the Archaeological Institute of America. Additionally, he has contributed to the discipline by training graduate students who have gone on to establish their own distinguished careers.
Two of these former students have assembled this festschrift volume with ten chapters by Moore's students and colleagues. Apart from a biographical sketch by Katina Lillios (Ch. 1), the scope is defined in terms of the areas where Moore has worked: the Near East (five chapters on the Levant and one on Cyprus) and Dalmatia (three chapters). Most focus on the main periods of Moore's work, the Epipaleolithic and Neolithic, but a couple range back into the Paleolithic. Themes of land use, settlement, movement, and connections weave through many of the chapters; the history of research in the two areas is also a recurring theme. Several provide valuable information on sites not yet fully published, while a few are more synthetic. I cannot make much sense of the order of the chapters after the opening biography: not alphabetical, not by area (although the Dalmatian set are grouped together in the middle), not by period, nor discernibly by topic. I will discuss them in temporal order.
Liora Horwitz and Michael Chazan (Ch. 9) explore mobility and land use in late Lower Paleolithic Israel, primarily at Holon and Qesem Cave. They frame this in terms of Isaac's (Reference Isaac1978) famous model putting the sharing of food at home bases at the center of human evolution, based on three site types: A (stone tools only), B (stone tools with remains of one animal), and C (stone tools with bones of multiple animals; the home base where sharing occurred). Perhaps it is not surprising that Horwitz and Chazan find this does not adequately describe sites in the Levant occupied ca. 300,000‒200,000 years ago, since Isaac's model pertained to sites created by Homo habilis in East Africa c. 2 mya. In late Lower Paleolithic Israel the site types are open palimpsest sites near water with a variety of tools and animal remains but little or no use of fire (exemplified by Holon); and cave sites, also with many stone tools and animal bones (although with much less from very large animals) and clear use of fire (as Qesem Cave). The cave sites seem more like base camps and the open ones more like butchery and scavenging areas, but both appear to be bases for short excursions. The authors propose that it may be more useful to think in terms of a spectrum of hubs at varying scales rather than clearly distinct base and logistical camps.
Deborah Olszewski (Ch. 3) discusses the late Upper Paleolithic and Initial Epipaleolithic Tor Sageer rock shelter in the Wadi al-Hasa, Jordan, focusing on the stone tools. While the large and varied assemblages of stones and bones here suggest a base camp, Olszewski's careful lithic analysis shows that it is unlikely to be a permanent settlement. Rather, the material is apparently a palimpsest produced by frequent short visits from small groups to exploit local wetland resources.
Also in eastern Jordan, Lisa Maher (Ch. 4) considers another location of frequent visits, the Early-Middle Epipaleolithic aggregation site of Kharaneh IV. The artefact assemblage, accompanied by abundant animal remains, indicates that distinct groups with differing technologies congregated here in seasons of plenty (again due to local wetlands), bringing marine shell and other items from up to 200 km away. Such gatherings were surely important social events, opportunities for exchange and romance, among other things. As Maher notes, although such aggregation sites were not occupied year-round, their repeated use and social centrality would have given them permanence and significance in the landscape, not unlike permanent Neolithic settlements.
Brian Boyd (Ch. 2) re-situates Epipaleolithic Abu Hureyra I from its position ‘on the imagined periphery of an imagined homeland constructed over almost a century of archaeological research’ (p. 21). That is, the site has too often been regarded as peripheral to the Natufian center, in large part because the Natufian was first defined to the south, and because the term has taken on a quasi-tribal meaning that renders Natufians as an ethnic group with a homeland. This distorts our understanding of Abu Hureyra I, a complex, permanent settlement occupied for 1500 years, by equating it to the seasonal camps peripheral to permanent Natufian settlements.
Theya Molleson's ground-breaking work on gendered changes in labour patterns with the shift to reliance on cereals at Abu Hureyra has long been well-known (e.g. Molleson, Reference Molleson1994). Here (Ch. 10) she reviews what the bones tell us about the lives of the inhabitants of PPN Abu Hureyra, focusing on burials from trenches that were not included in her earlier report on the site (Molleson, Reference Molleson, Moore, Hillman and Legge2000). I hope she will soon be able to publish a longer account of the entire assemblage; this chapter seemed a little too compact, without enough space fully to build her arguments about this rich osteological record.
Heading west to Cyprus, Sarah Stewart (Ch. 5) offers a different approach to mobility through an ethnoarchaeological study of farming practices, particularly in relation to fragmented fields. Present-day farmers will walk many hours to their further fields and may sleep there in small huts. They also move across the landscape with their livestock, but the social landscape is as important as the natural resources: shepherds can only graze their flocks on the fallow fields owned by their extended family. These insights are meant to inform the site catchment analysis of Aceramic Neolithic sites located by the Idalion Survey Project, but in fact I can see little impact on the interpretations offered here.
Continuing westward to Dalmatia, Marko Menđušić (Ch. 6) frames the discussion with a thorough history of Neolithic research in the Šibenik region, starting in the eighteenth century. As in many places, it is a tale of variable documentation by early amateurs, professional interest at some points directed to other periods, and interruptions by war, as well as the discovery and study of what remain key sites such as Danilo, Smilčić, and—inland in Herzegovina—Lisičići. After a visit in 2000, Moore joined Menđušić to excavate at Danilo and Pokrovnik; it remains the case that foreign funding is needed for full-scale excavations.
Sarah McClure and Emil Podrug (Ch. 7) then discuss preliminary results from these two excavations, as well as comparisons with a number of other Neolithic sites, with the emphasis on faunal and floral remains. Domestic plants and animals predominate throughout the Neolithic, but Crno Vrilo, a small Early Neolithic village, has high levels of wild resources. Overall, though, they find that while pottery and other artefact styles change through time, subsistence practices are largely stable throughout the Neolithic.
Tim Kaiser and Stašo Forenbaher (Ch. 8) take a different approach, examining the practicalities of the spread of farming communities along the Dalmatian coast and across the Adriatic. Combining an analysis of winds and currents with a consideration of the nature and timing of the first Neolithic sites along the Adriatic, they show that farmers spread south to north. Caves are occupied before open sites (although I wonder if early open sites have been concealed by rising sea levels), and pottery and livestock appear before the other parts of the proverbial Neolithic package. Shepherds, then, seem to be the pioneers here. Sailors, and their knowledge of navigation, were also crucial to the spread of farming through this coastal region.
Andrew Moore and I are not the only prehistorians with interests that include both the Near East and southeast Europe. For people like us, this volume is a treasure trove of data. Others may dip into it more selectively. Beyond area interests, these papers in aggregate have much to say about land use, settlement, and mobility. In particular, the nature of ‘base camps’ or places where people gathered periodically to interact, is traced through time across several chapters. With this kind of book, it isn't really fair to complain about what doesn't appear in it; it is not intended as a comprehensive overview. But I would have welcomed a contribution that set Abu Hureyra in the context of the important Neolithic sites that have been revealed in the middle and upper Euphrates valley and vicinity since (often also as rescue excavations in the face of further dam projects), such as Jerf el Ahmar (Stordeur-Yedid, Reference Stordeur-Yedid2015) and Göbekli Tepe (Schmidt, Reference Schmidt2012). Niggling aside, this slim volume packs a lot of information and insights. It is a fitting tribute to the work of Andrew Moore.
