lmost forty years ago the British Academy funded a major project into the origin of agriculture following a proposal by Professor Grahame Clark.This project had profound consequences for our understanding of the past. The idea of an ‘origin’ for agriculture, epitomised in Gordon Childe’s notion of a ‘Neolithic Revolution’ as proposed in his 1936 book Man Makes Himself, was replaced by that of gradual economic transformation during which most communities were neither pristine ‘hunter-gatherers’ nor fully-fledged farmers. Such findings still hold today and underlie a great deal of teaching and research – not surprisingly as many of the PhD students associated with Clark’s project now hold chairs of archaeology around the world.This view of economic evolution rather than cultural revolution remains particularly applicable to Western Asia, the region where the first fully agricultural communities arose at sometime between 10,000–8,000 BC. Indeed recent research has shown that the early Neolithic communities of this region, people who were hunter-gatherer-cultivators, were more widespread and complex than previously supposed (figure 1). When Kathleen Kenyon excavated Tell-el Sultan at Jericho in the 1950s she found that the first settlement had been made at around 9500 BC, just after the marked increase in temperature and rainfall that started the Holocene period ( figure 2).This had been a village of mud-brick circular dwellings. Their occupants had cultivated wheat and barley on the alluvial soils of the Jordan Valley,made no use of ceramics,and often exhumed the skulls of their dead for secondary burial, perhaps after a period of display. Kenyon defined this initial phase of settlement as the ‘Pre-Pottery Neolithic A’ (PPNA), the ‘A’, differentiating it from the following ‘PPNB’ during which two-storey, multi-roomed, rectangular buildings were constructed. Some of the cereal grains recovered from the PPNA deposits were from domesticated wheat and barley and the economy at Jericho appears to have been a classic example of one that combined hunting and gathering with the cultivation of crops. Following Kenyon’s work, further PPNA settlements were discovered in the vicinity of Jericho, in the region of the West Bank.Archaeological sites such as Netiv Hagdud and Gilgal were excavated and confirmed many of Kenyon’s findings as to the nature of early Neolithic domestic architecture, economy and burial customs. Nevertheless, in spite of the many similarities, Jericho remained unique with regard to its size and the presence of monumental architecture – Kenyon had discovered an encircling wall and a tower that ‘in conception and construction … would not disgrace one of the more grandiose medieval castles’ (Kenyon (1957, 68). RESEARCH AWARDS 45 Neolithic Beginnings in Western Asia and Beyond Professor Steven Mithen, University of Reading, reports on recent developments in our understanding of agricultural origins in Western Asia and his work in Wadi Faynan. Figure 1.Western Asia showing the location of sites referred to in the text. Figure 2.Tell-el Sultan, Jericho, in September 1999. A