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10 Breaking the Rain Barrier and the Tropical Spread of Near Eastern Agriculture into Southern Arabia Joy McCorriston 217 Farming came late to Arabia, about 5000 years ago, long after the beginnings of agriculture in the Levant 10,000 years ago. The adoption of domesticates in Arabia occurred piecemeal as Arabian foragers and herders adopted specific animal and crop components over a period perhaps as long as four millennia, beginning well after a Levantine agrohusbandry package was in place. Despite the relative proximity to and contacts with domestication “centers” in Africa and South Asia, non-Levantine domesticates, except African cattle, were unavailable to Arabian foragers in early prehistory. Levantine crop domesticates faced a rainfall barrier across most of Arabia with high heat and summer precipitation, making herd animals the most likely domesticates to spread. With the middle Holocene recession of the Southwest Asian monsoon, peoples facing aridity also experimented with water management technologies, an essential pre-requisite for the adoption of Southwest Asian cereals and legumes. Climate change provided an important catalyst for adopting crop domesticates after cultivation began in areas where cattle herds anchored pastoralists to diminishing water sources. Greeks and Romans called southern Arabia “Arabia Felix” for its plant life and great wealth in plant products, yet Yemen’s prehistoric peoples adopted food production late and incrementally between the middle sixth and third millennium BC. Why did foraging persist through the first half of the Holocene in a land that, thereafter, gave rise to great civilizations built upon agricultural surpluses and a far-flung trade in spices, incense, and plant balms? Were early South Arabians simply unaware of plant domesticates from adjacent regions, or did the continued pursuit of wild resources outweigh the benefits of food production? The juxtaposition of southern Arabia to the Levant, East Africa, and South Asia suggests that foragers could have selected domesticates from distinct packages of plants and animals originating in these three independent centers of domestication (e.g., Garrard 1999; Harlan 1992b, 67–68; Meadow 1996). Yet paleoecological analysis in southern Arabia indicates that there were almost no opportunities to grow crops without irrigation, leaving domesticated animals as the most highly valued and probable first domesticated resource. The initial adoption of domesticated animals allowed a growing population of foragers to continue foraging in a mixed foraging -pastoral economy that was stable and viable for a long time rather than switch to food-production -based economies. The question of how and when farming and husbandry entered southern Arabia has wider implications for the development and spread of early agricultural systems from primary domestication centers. Egypt, Europe, South Asia, and Central Asia all offer archaeological cases of a spread of domesticates and agricultural techniques from the Levant (e.g., Wetterstrom 1993; Halstead 1996; Price et al. 1995; Dennell 1992; Meadow 1996; Harris et al. 1993; Harris and Gosden 1996; Diamond and Bellwood 2003). In many cases, the Levantine domesticates spread together as an agro-husbandry package that included sheep, goats, cattle, pig, cereals, pulses, and a sedentary lifestyle. Yet southern Arabia’s incorporation into the expanding periphery of farming systems was likely different, for current evidence suggests that southern Arabian foragers acquired just a few of the domesticates from each of the three source regions and recombined these domesticates in a staggered and innovative process. For nearly 4000 years from the middle sixth to the early third millennium BC, South Arabia’s population , like many other societies worldwide, continued a predominantly foraging lifestyle akin to low-level food production (Smith 2001a). Low-level food production may take many forms, but its salient characteristics are the cultivation of wild or domesticated plants and the herding of animals often as minor components of long-term and stable economies. Several factors explain the Arabian transition to agriculture, in which only a few domesticates were incorporated into foraging systems at different times and in different cultural contexts (Cleuziou and Tosi 1997). One important aspect is the availability (or lack thereof) of domesticates through contacts with domestication centers outside Arabia. Changes in foraging strategies brought about by Arabian environmental change in the middle Holocene also played an important role. Regional climate records indicate that summer rainfall was reduced across the peninsula during much of the middle Holocene. Local environmental effects of this climate change varied dramatically, offering new opportunities and constraints to foragers living along the coast, in the highlands , and in the inland deserts. Highland foragers and later forager-pastoralists are of particular interest, for influences from eastern...

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