Modelling Agricultural energy at Neolithic Çatalhöyük

The Neolithic Agricultural Revolution brought new ensembles of activities, behaviours, and technologies permitting cultivation, increases in production, and changes in nutrition, workload, mobility, and population growth. The Neolithic also evoked substantial changes in energy flows associated with human communities and their wider environments. Thus, the primary concern of this thesis is to understand the energy flows accompanying agricultural actors in the past, using the case study of Neolithic Çatalhöyük, Turkey.

Many recognise the importance of an “agricultural labour trap” and that energy plays a role in population growth, yet none have understood or quantified the energetic dependencies of agriculture, its processes, and population growth within an archaeological context. All agricultural systems are constructed as energy feedback systems that aid population growth and enforce a reliance upon agriculture. This thesis analyses the development of these sparsely studied energy flows, feedbacks, and dependencies, which I have termed the agricultural energy feedback system. The methodology created and enacted here proves the existence of this system during the Neolithic and delivers a methodology to quantify and assess past energy systems.

The findings within this thesis are:
(1) Agriculture, as a system, comes with the caveat that its processes become increasingly dependent on one another’s success to produce an energetic surplus; high yielding crops are more efficient at providing this surplus.
(2) Agriculture’s efficiency and cost initially improve with population growth. However, this efficiency and cost plateau when additional land clearance is needed in a time of high population growth rate, depending on the yield and how much of the diet is dependent on agriculture. Once costs and efficiency no longer improve, agriculture’s threshold is reached and the system must be made to be more efficient to keep relying upon agriculture.
(3) Tillage, harvesting, land clearance, crop processing and storage are energetically demanding, thus, are crucial to agricultural systems' success.

These findings enhance conclusions about what encourages population growth, facilitates an increasing reliance on agriculture, why agriculture requires additional land and explains limits to growth during the Neolithic.