Did people start farming because of religion? That’s the claim being made by Klaus Schmidt, the excavator of the beautiful, 12,000-year-old, T-shaped megaliths of Gobekli Tepe in Turkey. He calls the site “a temple in Eden” and suggests that the hunter-gatherers that congregated to build it in order to venerate the dead with shamanistic rituals then
…found that they couldn’t feed so many people with regular hunting and gathering. So I think they began cultivating the wild grasses on the hills. Religion motivated people to take up farming.
There was a popular, somewhat sensationalist account of the excavations in the Daily Mail a few days ago. And somewhat more measured pieces in the Smithsonian Magazine and Archaeology last year. But the gist is the same:
Gobekli Tepe is, indeed, a ‘temple in Eden’, built by our leisured and fortunate ancestors — people who had time to cultivate art, architecture and complex ritual, before the traumas of agriculture ruined their lifestyle, and devastated their paradise.
There would certainly have been lots of wild relatives around:
The world’s first farmyard pigs were domesticated at Cayonu, just 60 miles away. Sheep, cattle and goats were also first domesticated in eastern Turkey. Worldwide wheat species descend from einkorn wheat – first cultivated on the hills near Gobekli. Other domestic cereals — such as rye and oats — also started here.
The idea of farming originating to feed the otherwise nomadic people building a temple to the dead may be a little far-fetched, but I suppose weirder hypotheses have been put forward for the origin of agriculture. In any case, it seems to me the biggest mystery is why people buried the whole shebang under tons of soil 8,000 years ago.
The idea that religion played a role in animal domestication is an older one of course (Isaac, 1970, Geography of Domestication). I hadn’t heard about it for plants. This is the reverse of the Wittfogel / Harriss material view of agriculture and society.
Jack Harlan’s view was that there were multiple causal factors behind plant domestication and farming. (What is it about us that makes us so attracted to a single cause for the domestication of so many plants in so many different places around the world?)
Harlan thought that one factor among many could have been religious/ceremonial and cited some possible examples. This makes some sense, as he argued, because in the early days of agriculture increasing food supplies, for instance, might not have been a sufficient incentive. For some crops at least, one can imagine that it would have been important to secure a benefit or value in excess of that supplied by something that was only a food. Religion could have created such a value for certain crops and thus encouraged the practices that led to domestication and then more formal cultivation.
Luigi:
World wide wheat species do not descend from einkorn wheat Triticum monococcum (AmAm), first cultivated close by Gobekli. The source of the AuAu genome in BBAuAu tetraploid and BBAuAuDD hexaploid wheats is a wild diploid species, Triticum urartu, that was never cultivated as far as we know, nor domesticated. It does grow in the vacinity of Urfa, Turkey, and is more drought tolerant than einkorn.. The source of the BB genome that provided the egg of the initial hybrid, and hence the extra genes for mitochondria and chloroplasts is thought to be an ancestor of present day Aegilops speltoides, which also grows near Urfa and Harran.
@Cary – I agree.
But I don’t think Harlan denied that a specific species could have originated from a certain area or domesticated for a single main reason?
@Jacob –
That’s correct. He certainly recognized that particular and sometimes identifiable reasons were connected with individual crops. In commenting about a possible role of religion/rituals, etc., he was responding to various single-cause theories about the origin of agriculture, and his point was that when one looked across the world and across crops, there could be multiple causes for domestication and early cultivation.