Foraging and farming as niche construction: stable and unstable adaptations

All forager (or hunter–gatherer) societies construct niches, many of them actively by the concentration of wild plants into useful stands, small-scale cultivation, burning of natural vegetation to encourage useful species, and various forms of hunting, collectively termed ‘low-level food production’. Many such niches are stable and can continue indefinitely, because forager populations are usually stable. Some are unstable, but these usually transform into other foraging niches, not geographically expansive farming niches. The Epipalaeolithic (final hunter–gatherer) niche in the Near East was complex but stable, with a relatively high population density, until destabilized by an abrupt climatic change. The niche was unintentionally transformed into an agricultural one, due to chance genetic and behavioural attributes of some wild plant and animal species. The agricultural niche could be exported with modifications over much of the Old World. This was driven by massive population increase and had huge impacts on local people, animals and plants wherever the farming niche was carried. Farming niches in some areas may temporarily come close to stability, but the history of the last 11 000 years does not suggest that agriculture is an effective strategy for achieving demographic and political stability in the world's farming populations.

The Architecture and Pottery of a Late Third-Millennium Residential Quarter at Tell Hamoukar, North-Eastern Syria

The 2001 excavations in Area H on Hamoukar's lower town produced a wealth of information on a residential neighbourhood of a late third-millennium BC city. The excavations were intended to address several issues, including chronology, urban form and the final abandonment of the site. Toward these ends, a broad exposure of over 400 m2 was opened, revealing a prosperous neighbourhood that had been sacked and abruptly abandoned. This report addresses two aspects, its architecture and ceramic assemblage, in detail. The architecture demonstrates broadly shared principles in spatial patterning and planning, as well as similarities in construction, with variations connected to socioeconomic status. The ceramics represent a snapshot of the assemblage of the late or post-Akkadian period, including many whole or reconstructable forms. Contrary to the expectations of abrupt climatic change models, Hamoukar remained settled and urbanised after the proposed 2200 BC Akkadian collapse, and its abandonment was the result of a sudden and violent military event.