Comment on Karol Szymczak’s review of „Origins of agriculture in Western Central Asia. An environmental-archaeological study”, Philadelphia 2010

Abstract

I welcome Karol Szymczak’s detailed and appreciative review of my book and thank him for describing and evaluated it so thoroughly and fairly. when writing it I had three main aims: to provide a full account of the field work, analyses and results of the research project that I and my British, Russian and Turkmen colleagues carried out in Turkmenistan between 1989 and 1998; to introduce readers unfamiliar with western Central Asia to its environments and early prehistory; and to add to our understanding of how agriculture began in alarge part of the vast Central Asian arid zone between the more comprehensively studied Southwest Asian and Chinese “fertile crescents”. The book presents and weighs the evidence now available concerning the transition from hunting-and-gathering to agriculture and sedentary village life in the region. However, many of the details of how this great socio- -economic change took place remain obscure and offer challenges for future research. The conclusions presented in the final two chapters of the book must therefore be tentativealthough – as Karol Szymczak kindly points out – I have sought in the Synthesis and Conclusions to differentiate clearly between “hard” evidence and speculation.