The Early Holocene in Near East was a pivotal transitional period that witnessed dramatic changes in climate and environment, human settlement, major changes in subsistence strategies focusing on a broad range of different plant and animal resources, and a radical restructuring of social relations. The remarkable corpus of avifauna from the Early Holocene site of Hallan Çemi in southeastern Turkey sheds new light on key issues about this dynamic period that has been termed the “Broad Spectrum Revolution”. The avifauna from this important site demonstrate how Hallan Çemi occupants took advantage of the site's strategic location at the junction of multiple environmental zones by extracting a diverse range of seasonally available resources from both near-by and more distant eco-zones to cobble together a stable subsistence economy capable of supporting this small community throughout the year. They give testimony to the impacts of resource utilization over time, especially on species unable to rebound from sustained human hunting. At the same time, they show how Hallan Çemi residents mitigated these impacts by replacing depleted resources with alternative, more resilient ones that could be more sustainably harvested. They open a window onto the growing investment in feasting and ritual activity that helped bind this community together. In so doing they provide a means of empirically evaluating the efficacy of contrasting explanatory frameworks for the Broad Spectrum Revolution that gave rise to the subsequent domestication of plant and animals in the Near East. Contrary to frameworks that cast these developments as responses to resource depression, lessons learned from the Hallan Çemi avifauna lend support to frameworks that emphasize the human capacity to strategically target, capitalize, and improve upon circumscribed resource rich environments in a way that permits more permanent occupation of these niches. And they underscore the degree to which social and ritual activities work together with ecological and economic facets of the lives of these people to both perpetuate and reshape these communities on the threshold of domestication and the emergence of agriculture.
