This is a review of a recent paper by Daniella E. Bar-Yosef Mayer and Naomi Porat, who argue that the sudden appearance of green stone beads in the Late Natufian, dated in this paper as occurring between 13,000-11,500 (cal) bp, coincided with the onset of agriculture, and that the green colour of the beads was associated with fertility, symbolising the green shoots of growing crops - it is also thought that these same beads may have been thought capable of warding off evil. Here's the abstract...The use of beads and other personal ornaments is a trait of modern human behavior. During the Middle and Upper Paleolithic periods, beads were made out of shell, bone, ivory, egg shell, and occasionally of minerals. During the transition to agriculture in the Near East, stone, in particular green stone, was used for the first time to make beads and pendants. We observed that a large variety of minerals of green colors were sought, including apatite, several copper-bearing minerals, amazonite and serpentinite.
There seems to be an increase with time of distance from which the green minerals were sought. Because beads in white, red, yellow, brown, and black colors had been used previously, we suggest that the occurrence of green beads is directly related to the onset of agriculture. Green beads and bead blanks were used as amulets to ward off the evil eye and as fertility charms.
Although it might be true that the use of stone beads is a facet of modern human behaviour, researchers such as Bednarik suggest a much earlier use for shell beads, extending back to the Lower Palaeolithic, though whether their purpose was anything other than decorative is unknown.
The use of beads in the Middle and Upper Palaeolithic is known, but for the purposes of this paper, the authors focus on stone beads in the Near East, dating to the Late Natufian, and the initial stages of the Neolithic, an era before the appearance of fired pottery, and accordingly referred to as the Pre-Pottery Neolithic, further sub-divided into PPNA and PPNB. It was at this time that wheat was domesticated and then cultivated on an increasingly wide scale by Near East farmers, although it now appears from research at Göbekli Tepe in southern Turkey, and related sites, that agriculture itself was adopted as a means of feeding large numbers of people who gathered at what have been described as the world's oldest known temples, possibly dating to around 12,000 bp.
The 221 beads analysed in this study are derived from eight locations, of which Rosh Horesha, Eynan, Gilgal II and El Wad date from the Late Natufian, Hatoula, Gilgal I and Gilgal III are designated PPNA, with one PPNB site, Kefar ha-Horesh. Despite trying to write up an accurate description of the stone beads themselves, I couldn't do so in a clearer way than the original text, hence this rather long quote from the text...
Typologically, the bead shapes of these periods include a round ‘‘disk bead,’’ whereby the height of the bead is less than one-third of its diameter (Fig. 1, beads 1, 2, 4, and 5), as well as oval pendant with two holes (one at each end) (Fig. 1, pendants 6–12), long and short cylindrical beads (Fig. 1, bead 3; Fig. 2, beads 5–9), and cylindrical bead blanks (that have not been perforated; Fig. 2, items 1–4). Of special interest are the oval double-holed pendants that are found only in Late Natufian and early PPNA sites and can serve as a chronological marker. A detailed typological and technological analysis will be published elsewhere (unpublished data).
The beads’ colors were described in detail, and then divided into four main groups: white to pale yellow, black to brown, orange to red, and gray to green. White, brown, yellow, red, and black beads made of shell, bone, teeth, ivory, ostrich egg shell, and amber, all of biological origin, as well as steatite, ochre, and hematite, which are inorganic materials, have been known from the Middle and Upper Paleolithic (7, 20). However, green minerals are found for the first time in significant numbers, in the context of archaeological entities that bear evidence of being in the midst of an economic change in subsistence strategy, the beginning of cultivation.
In all of the sites studied thus far, beads of white and red limestone, quartzite, ochre, basalt, and clay, as well as shell were present. Most sites contained also beads made of apatite, fluorapatite, malachite, chrysocolla, turquoise, amazonite, and serpentinite, minerals that are in various shades of green, and appear for the first time in the archaeological record of the Near East during the periods discussed here (Fig. 3). Table 1 summarizes the green stone beads of the Late Natufian, PPNA, and PPNB sites.
We next learn that the materials required for the manufacture or production of the green stone beads came from various sources that were not in the immediate vicinity of the sites at which they were found, so it's worth pausing here to consider the nature of the raw materials involved. For the sake of quick reference I've used Wikipedia's descriptions of these materials, plus other more esoteric sites for modern interpretations of the uses to which the materials can be used.
Apatite, of which fluorapatite is a derivative, is thought to have been obtained from Jordan or Israel - interestingly, apatite is used today as a fertilizer by tobacco growers in Virginia, as it apparently restricts the flow of nitrogen to the growing plant, supposedly imparting a better flavour. In it's crystalline form, it has a distinctive green hue, and can be translucent or transparent. Fluorapatite beads were found at six of the eight sites, two of which also contained apatite beads. Apatite is today described here as the 'mind over matter stone', and is said by purveyors of crystals to relieve stress, whereas other sources suggest it can "enhance communication and increase psychic abilities".
Chrysocolla bears a strong resemblance to turquoise, and along with the remaining materials to be described, is found in association with copper, although in the context of this study, it should be borne in mind that copper wasn't mined, smelted and utilised until the Late Neolithic, sometime after 6,000 years ago. The bead makers are thought to have obtained both their chrysocolla and malachite from 'the Faynan and Timna copper mine areas', and the turquoise from what other copper mine areas in the Sinai.
Amazonite is, as its name might suggest, found in abundance in the Amazon, but for the stone bead makers, their source was likely to have been Saudi Arabia. Today, it is apparently known as 'hope stone', and is only definitely identified from one PPNB site, Kefar ha-Horesh, although it has been tentatively tagged as having been found in the Late Natufian context at Eynan/Ain Mallaha.
Turquoise was found at Gilgal II and Hatoula, and it has been noted how its colour has been compared to that of the Mediterranean Sea - this is a relevant observation, because as I perceive some of these minerals, their bluish colours certainly evoke images of sky and sea, rather than young green leaves of growing crops. In Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt, turquoise was thought to symbolise the Vault of Heaven.
The authors also draw attention to the fact that some of the pendants have two holes, and I've seen it suggested elsewhere that these might be buttons - pretty unlikely as the holes are too far apart, but of more interest is the authors' suggestion that double-holed-pendants may have represented cowrie shells, which had been in abundant use across a wide swathe of south-western Asia at the time.
And in his paper, 'Neolithisation in Southwest Asia - The Path to Modernity', (pdf) Trevor Watkins refers to the fact that people of the Natufian era ha` been living in built structures for many centuries, and that this change in the social dynamic may have been responsible for a change in the way people viewed themselves in a social context. These 'co-resident communities' as he calls them, may have lived such radically different lives from their forebears, that entirely new methods of coping in a socially organised and ordered context had to be invented; this is quite along paper, which I'll address in another post, but this gives an indication of its perspective...
I have written elsewhere (Watkins, in press (a)) about the complexity of symbolic construction of community, a subject on which the anthropologist Anthony Cohen has concentrated over a number of years of study and thought (see Cohen 1985 for a succinct account). Epi-palaeolithic, and even more so early Neolithic, co-resident communities (I hesitate to call them villages) extended beyond kin-groups and beyond the scale for which the biologically evolved human brain were capable of managing the exponentially complex social relations (Watkins in press (b)).
At a higher level, co-resident communities participated in active networks of similar communities,-or some kind of interaction sphere (Watkins in press (a)) seeks to take up and modify Renfrew’s idea of the peer polity interaction sphere – Renfrew 1986). In this kind of system of multi-layered networks, we can see how individual communities exchange items through a wider network (obsidian, marine shells, attractive stone or objects made of attractive stone), and share cultural ideas and practices.
However, each community may articulate those ideas and practices in their own way. There were no text-books in circulation that defined how houses should be designed or how dead bodies should be treated. General observations of widespread cultural phenomena, such as the “the PPNB culture” (which I have criticized at some length in Watkins, in press (a)) or “the skull cult”, break down as soon as they are examined in detail, because practices are usually not precisely replicated from site to site.
There are domestic architectural forms that are found from site to site across a region. For example, Brian Byrd and Ted Banning have written about the pier-house in the later aceramic Neolithic of'the southern Levant (Byrd & Banning 1988). And in southeast Anatolia, settlements had very large and substantially`built houses, constructed from mud brick on stone and mud mortar foundations (Schirmer 1990).
One of the points he is making is that this process of change was done pretty much on the fly, and although we can make out general patterns of activity and behaviour, it's very difficult to apply universality of cause and effect throughout this phase; additionally he deals with previous ideas that the changing climate was a driving factor in the establishment of sedentary farming - and elsewhere in the same paper, he gives us a good look at Göbekli Tepe, which I'm hoping will enable me to finish writing that up after I've reviewed that paper and written something on the Epi-Palaeolithic and Natufian eras, to establish a broader context for what seems a very sudden event as evidenced by the construction of that site, and others.
It's quite interesting to note and compare the way in which bursts of cultural innovation in the Natufian/Neolithic transition began happening at diminishing intervals - i.e. a long primary phase, followed by several phases, each occurring at a smaller interval than the previous one - tis is still echoed today by the way technological progress appears to accelerating at increasing speeds, and over the longer term, the way in which life on this planet emerged from billions of years of very simple life forms, followed by bursts of evolution which occurred at ever shorter intervals.
Watkins also mentions that there might now be a problem with the very term 'Neolithic' itself, and I'd agree - before I started reading about the Natufian and PPN, I'd been under the vague impression that nothing much was going on in the millennia immediately following the end of the Pleistocene, but it has become apparent that in Southwest Asia, change was taking place at a breathtaking pace, and witnessed some of the most profound changes in human behaviour at any time during recent prehistory.
And looking at the designs and motifs carved on the T-shaped stelae at GT and other sites, a clue is given to at least one factor that may have made a deep impact on the minds of some of those people who began a phase of what could almost be viewed as the real cultural revolution of Homo sapiens,some 11,000-12,000 years ago.
Despite their ostensible break with a tradition of beadmaking that might not have had any symbolic import, the green stone beads which are the subject of this paper shouldn't therefore be considered in isolation from the other archaeology of the period, especially that of the Natufian culture, which immediately preceded the Pre-Pottery Neolithic, and which indicates that a highly sophisticated culture-set was already in place before early farmers turned their hands to producing stone beads of green.
A green stone pendant from Shanidar in present day Iraq is also described in a paper by Andreas Hauptmann, 'Export of Ore and Copper: The Importance of Faynan in Prehistoric Palestine', of which the following is the abstract...
"With the domestication of plants and animals at the beginning of the 8th millennium BCE, the evolving husbandry became an economic basis of human societies for the first time. This change from food gathering to food production was an important cultural evolution. This ‘Neolithic revolution’ is the most obvious factor, which divides the hunter and gatherer society of the Palaeolithic from that of the early or Pre-Pottery Neolithic. The same time period witnesses new uses of color having importance and meaning throughout the entire Eastern Mediterranean.
During the Palaeolithic, the colors used in symbolic contexts such as the well-known cave paintings, were mainly red and black, made from iron and manganese (hydr)oxides. During the Pre-Pottery Neolithic, green achieves more and more importance. Individual objects made from green minerals or stones had already been found in the Epipalaeo-lithic/ Protoneolithic, for example a pendant from serpentinite with malachite in the Shanidar cave in northern Iraq (Solecki 1969) or pieces of secondary copper ore from the settlement of Hallan çemi Tepesi in Anatolia (Rosenberg 1994).
But the widely distributed use of green mineral pigments can be considered the third characteristic of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic, and here particularly for the PPNB. The use of ‘greenstone’, as these materials are collectively known in archaeology, has been observed all over Palestine and Transjordan (Garfinkel 1987) as well as in the entire Eastern Mediterranean as far as the Balkans (Glumac 1985). It continues uninterrupted through the remainder of the Neolithic up to the beginning of the Bronze Age at the turn of the 4th to the 3rd millennium.
When considering whether green stone beads would have been made with agricultural concerns in mind, it's probably important to bear in mind what prompted the onset of farming and the domestication of wheat in the first place; we have seen at Göbekli Tepe for example, that the enigmatic structures erected there, high up on a mound built on a hill overlooking the Harran Plain, went up before agriculture has been adopted, and current theory holds that people began growing wheat in order to provide food for the large numbers of people who would have been present there and other sites, like Karahan Tepe, and possibly others besides. From that it could be implied that agriculture was at first a secondary consideration at Gobekli Tepe, and that people then may have been more concerned with whatever idea it was that caused them to embark on this precocious era of monumentalism during PPNA. Here's some comment related to amuletic use of these green stone beads, and how the onset of farming could have enhanced their perceived power...
"The use of green and blue beads is encountered in all archaeological periods that follow the Neolithic, and recent ethnographic studies clarify their meanings. Ethnographic studies supply ample evidence for the significance of beads and pendants as artifacts with symbolic meaning (e.g., 23–26). The meanings of beads are far and wide and consist of beliefs intended ‘‘to prevent misfortune and danger, to counteract or divert the effects of supernatural powers, and to bring luck and.strength’’ (25).
Many of these beliefs existed well before the agricultural revolution and were expressed in symbolic behaviors as early as the Middle Paleolithic era. However, the onset of agricultural practices brings with it a special interest in fertility both of plants and animals and of humans. This interest, in turn, brought on a change in human demography caused by higher birth rates and a greater rate of deaths after child delivery, in addition to other ailments (29–31). This increase in health problems required new means of coping.
It is likely that medicinal plants were used for curing some of the conditions, but symbolic practices and the use of apotropaic artifacts undoubtedly complemented the plant treatment. It is likely that the same green beads that were ‘‘in charge’’ of improving crops were also,responsible for keeping the well being of the farmers that raised these crops."
Slightly off-topic, but maybe worth a mention; Despite some of these mineral resources being available in Neolithic and Bronze Age Britain, I can find no trace of green or blue stone beads or pendants from this time - as far as I can tell, beads in Neolithic Britain tended to be made from amber, jet and shale etc., so the custom of green stone beads associated with fertility and warding off evil doesn't appear to have taken hold there.
However it is interesting to note that a key component from the earliest days of Stonehenge was Preseli bluestone, and although it was deployed in large monolithic blocks, recent suggestions by Professors Darvill and Wainwright that its purpose may have been curative, and that Stonehenge was a kind of prehistoric Lourdes may not be accurate, but they might not be totally wide of the mark either.
It's possible that the idea of bluestone being used to ward off evil was a reason for its use at Stonehenge, though I'm not sure whether it was also considered to be of use in ensuring fertiility of people and crops as well - but if such concerns were to the forefront of the Neolithic mind, perhaps it's not unreasonable to consider such an idea.
However, an earlier suggested presence of bluestone at Boles Barrow on Salisbury plain, at a Neolithic long barrow, and presumably used in a funerary context, would suggest against its use as a healing stone, but might allow for a consideration of it being able to ward off evil spirits and the like. Such is the gloomy aspect of the Stonehenge monument and surrounding landscape, it may have been that it was thought necessary to try and alleviate the gloom by using bluestone as a potential remedy.
However, unless there had been a single, or series of events in the dim and distant past at Stonehenge, deemed so bizarre or in some way evil or threatening to humans witnessing such things, it's hard to imagine why they went to all the trouble of shipping in the bluestone from 250 miles way in South Wales, just to ward off the occasional evil spirit, or ghostly apparition of a feared ancestor.
Overall, the connection between green and blue stone beads of the earliest Neolithic, and bluestone monoliths of the Late Neolitihc, some 6,000-7,000 years later, seems tenuous to say the least, but although improbable is not conclusively impossible. There is no evidence of bluestone being used for stone beads during the Neolithic or Bronze Age, but as this stone is reputedly even harder than granite, its suitability for carving and perforating for decorative use is obviously limited.
Moreover , if the bluestones really were supposed to have had healing or strong amuletic properties, nobody from prehistory appears to have chipped off bits of the monoliths for personal use, which is something we might expect to see, certainly in later historical times - so it seems more probable that all the standing stones at Stonehenge were (at least in part) associated more with the dead than protection for the living.
Here's the concluding paragraph from the paper we began with at the top of this post....
In 1930, Budge wrote that ‘‘green stones, e.g., nephrite, the emerald, green jade, Amazon stones, etc., are connected with luxuriant vegetation and the rain that causes it, and fertility inlman and beast, and virility and strength generally’’ (37). Our study provides archaeological evidence for the emergence of these beliefs. To conclude, the occurrence of green stone beads is highly associated with the transition to agriculture and may signify the first use of this color to ward off the ‘‘evil eye’’ that is mentioned already in Mesopotamian texts (38 and references therein). This tradition may have begun in the Near East as early as 10,000 years ago.
So overall, I think the authors make a very good point in suggesting the links with green stone beads, fertility and protection from perceived evil - whether it can be conclusively proven whether early Neolithic people first spotted the raw materials and devised an application for their use, or whether they had the idea of using green and blue stone for specific symbolic reasons, and went searching for it accordingly, we'll never know. But it is worth noting that the first metal that humankind managed to extract from the ground and and subsequently shape for their own use, was copper, the metal that is found in association with most of the bluer stones that were used for bead-making.
It may well be that these humans, so desirous of green and blue stone beads inadvertently and in some small way, made the discovery and use of metals possible, thousands of years later as their descendants heated up large rocks and watched the yellow metal trickle forth - copper was born, and it appears that this may have happened at Tinma, in modern-day Israel, one of the proposed sources, along with Faynan, for the chrysocolla and malachite that was found at five out of the eight sites where various of the stone beads referred to in this paper, were found.
And although copper at the time was highly prized - even Otzi the Iceman had a splendid copper axe, when he died some 5,300 years ago, even though its usefulness as a working metal was limited, because being a very soft metal, it blunted easily, requiring continued sharpening. If blue stone minerals associated with copper were thus revered, we might ask to what extent copper may have been considered to possess any of these perceived properties; the very act of being able to extract copper from rock, smelt and shape it would have been a skill limited at first to very few people, and it would be interesting to know how their social status rose or otherwise changed as admiring people, seeing metal manufactured objects for the first time, contemplated the results of their handiwork
If we fast-forward to the present day, and specifically to our own technological and cultural worlds, both off- and online are for the most part, powered by millions of miles of soft and malleable copper wire, which we might consider to be an indirect gift from people living more than 10,000 years ago, in south western Asia.
As a final word from me, just to say many thanks to Greg Laden who very kindly forwarded me a copy of this paper, which I found not only to be very interesting in its own right, but a very useful perspective to add my fairly limited appreciation of just how complex and dynamic this part of the world was for several millennia immediately following the Pleistocene, encompassing the Younger Dryas and on into the period of stabilised climate which certainly played a part in allowing humans to experiment with new ways of living in and thinking about the rapidly changing world around them.
References:
Green Stone Beads At The Dawn of Agriculture - Daniella E. Bar Yosef Mayer and Naomi Porat
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2008 Jun 24;105(25):8548-51. Epub 2008 Jun 16.
(from which the image at top is taken)
Neolithisation in Southwest Asia - The Path to Modernity - Trevor Watkins, Documenta Praehistorica XXXIII (2006)
Export of Ore and Copper: The Importance of Faynan in Prehistoric Palestine
Andreas Hauptmann, Natural Science in Archaeology, The Archaeometallurgy of Copper, Evidence from Faynan, Jordan, 2007
Beads and the Origins of Symbolism - Robert Bednarik, 2000
