Neolithic
The
Neolithic, (Greek
neos=new,
lithos=stone, or "New Stone Age") is traditionally the last part of the
stone age. The term was invented by
John Lubbock in 1865 as a refinement of the
three-age system. It followed
Pleistocene epipalaeolithic and early
Holocene Mesolithic cultures with the start of
farming and ended when
metal tools came into widespread use in the Copper Age (
chalcolithic),
Bronze Age or
Iron Age, depending on geographical region.
The term "Neolithic" is associated with a suite of specific behavioural characteristics including the growing of crops and the use of domesticated animals. From ca.
9000 to
7000 BC this was limited to keeping
sheep and
goats, but by ca. 7000 BC it included
cattle,
cultivation of domesticated plants, permanently or semi-permanently inhabited settlements and the use of
pottery and ground-
stone tools rather than flaked ones. Again, the adoption of these technologies was not uniform and varied from region to region. Japanese societies used pottery in the Mesolithic for example.
In Southwest
Asia and
Europe, Neolithic
cultures appear at ca.
10000 BC in
Mesopotamia and the
Levant and from there spread to southeast Europe by 7,000 BC, Central Europe by 5.500 BC cal (
Linearbandkeramic) and from there through a combination of diffusion of
ideas and
migration of peoples, spreads westward to northwest Europe by
4500 BC. There is little
evidence for developed
hierarchies in the Neolithic, which is a cultural development more closely associated with the
Bronze Age. In some areas of the world not all of these characteristics are present in cultures defined as Neolithic -- e.g. the earliest
farming societies in the
Near East do not use pottery -- and in
Britain it remains unclear what the contribution of domestic plants was in the earliest Neolithic, or even whether permanently settled communities existed.
The advent of farming caused great change in people's lives. Instead of living as
nomads and wandering from place to place in search of food, people increasingly stayed in one place, giving rise to
towns, and later
cities and
states. Because of the profound differences in the way humans interacted once agriculture began, this element of the New Stone Age is sometimes called the
Neolithic Revolution, a term coined by the Australian archaeologist
Vere Gordon Childe.
The Neolithic people of Northwestern Europe built
long housess and elaborate
tombs for their dead. These tombs are particularly numerous in
Ireland, where there are many thousand still in existence. Neolithic people in the British Isles built long barrows and chamber tombs for their dead and constructed
causewayed campss, henges flint mines and
cursus monuments.
With very minor exceptions (a few copper hatchets and
spear heads in the
Great Lakes region) the peoples of the
Americas and the
Pacific remained at the neolithic level of
technology up until the time of the European contacts. Technological complexity does not correlate with social complexity. A glance at such cultures as the
Iroquois,
Pueblo people,
Maya civilization and the
Maori shows that a culture may be highly socially and
politically sophisticated in many ways without knowledge of the use of metals.
Neolithic
settlements include:\n:
Jericho in the
Levant, Neolithic from around 8350 BC, arising from the earlier
Epipaleolithic Natufian culture.\n:Çatalhöyük in
Turkey, 7500 BC\n:
Mehrgarh in
South Asia, 7000 BC\n:
Göbekli Tepe in Turkey, ca. 9000 BC.\n:
Nevali Cori in Turkey, ca. 8000 BC.\n:
Knap of Howar and
Skara Brae, the
Orkney Islands,
Scotland, from 3500 BC.
Neolithic individuals included
Ötzi the Iceman.
\nCategory: Archaeology\n\n\n\n\nzh-cn:新石器时代
