The earliest granaries
Food for thought
Storing grain predates agriculture, and may have propelled it
Jun 25th 2009
Thursday May 24th 2012
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jer, the problem with that, is nothing like that is needed or functional for dressing game, there probably were no slaughter houses at that time. Also, known silos which are even still in use in say Portugal, are very similar, and serve that same purpose.
If the buildings are still there now, then they would have been around once agriculture started, so the evidence of a barley straw at the site isn't convincing. Anyone in the previous 10,000 years could have stumbled across these buildings and decided to use them to store grain, that doesn't necessarily mean that was their intended purpose. I have to assume they have more to support this idea that grain elevators came before farming?
Sounds like it would have been a good area to dress wild game, the slanty floors would allow blood to drain. Or human sacrifice. Or a million other reasons.
Ongoing economic developments nationally as well as globally indicates that many people could secure a better living if they invested in a " back to the land agricultural paradigm" of some sort for economic growth and security in the future.
Woops, make that The Economy of Cities...
Confirmation of the hypothesis that Jane Jacobs put forth in Cities and the Wealth of Nations.
Jer_X,
The paper (which provides much less detail than I would have liked) provides dating evidence that suggests that the granaries were in use for a period of approximately 50 years. Wood charcoal found stratigraphically above the site was dated to ~9835 BC, so the granary was definitely out of use by that time. This implies that the grains found near the site are indeed from that same time block. Also, the buildings are not there now, check the paper I'm linking to for pictures of the excavation.
The paper also gives numbers to the grains found at one such site, >260,000 wild barley and 120,000 wild oat, with similar findings in at least one other site. No mention of animal bones or byproducts of butchering.
Of course a structure could be used for a million reasons, but the evidence for these points towards grain storage.
The full manuscript is online here:
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2009/06/19/0812764106.abstract
(why does the Economist not link to sources for these types of stories?)