Creation, Maintenance, and Mobility of Neolithic Communities

Board Of Regents, Nshe, Obo University Of Nevada, Reno, Reno NV

Investigators

Abstract

The Neolithic marks the shift from a mobile hunting and gathering lifestyle to one centered on production and consumption of domesticated plants and animals and life in sedentary villages. Central Anatolia is a key location in the development and spread of the domestication of plants and animals. However, little is known about the genetic and social structure of this region during the Neolithic. The goal of the project is to fill this gap through bioarchaeological and genetic studies of these Neolithic communities. This study marks a new approach to exploring archaeological questions through a robust integration of genetics, archaeology, and osteology. The project will support student training, international research collaborations, and public science outreach. The research team will investigate human skeletal remains to explore the creation, maintenance, and mobility of Neolithic communities in central Anatolia. Specifically, data on ancient DNA (aDNA) and dental morphology and metrics will be integrated from multiple archaeological sites that span the Epipaleolithic (~12,500 to 11,500 cal BCE) to the late Neolithic (5550 cal BCE). These localities cover a large span of time within a defined geographic area, contain excellent contextual information, and have produced a large set of human remains that are amenable to dental and genetic analyses. These biological data will then be used to test regional questions and hypotheses about population development and movement as well as social structure to understand this process of "Neolithization." This study moves the emphasis from grand-scale analyses to regional questions about the Neolithic, to include population interaction, social structure, and regional development. Finally, this work will provide state-of-the art results on the use of aDNA in studying kinship and local social structures in conjunction with skeletal data to augment sample sizes. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.