Early Neolithic Southern Levant
In the Southern Levant's Pre-Pottery Neolithic period from around 10,500-6000 BCE, there appears to be an absence of gender hierarchy and class stratification. Grave goods are rare and, when present, do not signify different ritual treatment of men's and women's bodies. Skeletal remains suggest that men and women had similar amounts of work and similar levels of overall health. Figurines mostly portray women, consistent with other known Neolithic egalitarian societies.
Jane Peterson writes in Near Eastern Archaeology: "Altogether, the multiple lines of data here do not offer evidence of gender hierarchy among Pre-Pottery Neolithic societies in the southern Levant. Men and women jointly participated in physically demanding activities. There is no evidence indicative of one sex dominating or controlling production. Neither is there evidence of increasing spatial segregation of the sexes in either domestic or mortuary contexts. Examinations of grave goods and mortuary treatments indicate that men and women shared access to ritual realms critical to status and prestige."[1]
During the Pre-Pottery period, residents stored food and other goods in communal buildings, and this would have helped prevent private wealth disparities. "There is no clear evidence of private property," according to archeologist Bill Finlayson. Given the unequal grave goods in the preceding Epipaleolithic period, Finlayson proposes that the Neolithic residents consciously created a new system of equality rather than merely trying to preserve an existing egalitarianism.[2]
In the following Pottery period, goods were stored by household rather than communally. Finlayson comments: "Such social organization does not necessarily equate to simple hierarchy, heterarchical organization may allow multiple means of ranking or recognizing power and influence while influence in ritual may not affect other domains or interaction."[3]
Archeologist R. Brian Ferguson observes a consistent absence of war in the Southern Levant for a 10,000-year period from the Epipaleolithic period up until the early Brozne Age when intervention by the Egyptian empire turned the Southern Levant into a tribally divided zone. Ferguson points to certain mechanisms that Southern Levant communities used to maintain the peace. There was:
a ritually reinforced system of maintaining peace between local communities. Besides Tell 'Abu-Hamid and Tuleilat Ghassul and other open-air sites between settlements, Gilat, located at the border of the agricultural coastal plain and pastoralist hills, was a major ritual center and a center of a local exchange in coastal objects.[citations removed][4]
- ↑ Jane Peterson, "Woman’s share in Neolithic society: a view from the Southern Levant," Near Eastern Archaeology 79, no. 3 (2016): 132– 9.
- ↑ Bill Finlayson, "Egalitarian societies and the earliest Neolithic of Southwest Asia," Prehistoric Archaeology, no. 1 (2020): 27-43.
- ↑ Finlayson, "Egalitarian societies."
- ↑ R. Brian Ferguson, "The Prehistory of War and Peace in Europe and the Middle East" in ed. Douglas Fry War, Peace, and Human Nature: The Convergence of Evolutionary and Cultural Views (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
