People may not have been farming 11,000 years ago, but they knew the importance of good grain storage.
Recent work by researchers has revealed that 1,000 years before humans began selecting and planting seeds and domesticating cereal crops, they were harvesting grain and storing it in granaries with dryer floors and hopper bottoms.
It appears that cereal grain was collected and stored in bulk by the inhabitants of Dhra’ in what is now Jordan. In this village along the Dead Sea, people built granaries and grain processing buildings between their houses to provide them with safe, year-round storage of wild barley harvested from the Jordan Valley.
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Calling them dryer bins with hopper bottoms may be over-stating the design, but the Neolithic people built suspended and sloped floors into their granaries with air circulation underneath.
Indiana researcher Ian Kuijt and Bill Finlayson of the Council for British Research in the Levant in Amman, Jordan, say the granaries, the oldest known, indicate an important social shift in the relationship between people and food. The anthropologists say that with grain storage came the ability to remain in a location outside a single food season.
The researchers propose that these hunting and gathering communities took the next step in encouraging wild harvests by sowing seed on suitable land nearby the community.
This created opportunities later for food grain selection and cultivation.
The suspended floor was designed to keep grain dry and prevent the development of fungal diseases and insects.
Walls were built of stone and mud bricks. Mud was used to waterproof the tops of the granaries.
“It appears a temper has been incorporated into the mud, highlighting the careful manufacture of the building and large scale harvesting,” said Kuijt of the University of Notre Dame.
Wild barley and wild oats was stored in later buildings at nearby Gilgal; while more round buildings of the same size and age are located at Jericho.
Lentils were also known to have been collected and domesticated here.
