The origin of food production is an important issue for archaeologists working in southwest Asia. For various reasons, most of the models used to explain the economic shift from foraging to food production have relied heavily on data from the Levant. The result of this has been to give primacy to the Levant as the region where this shift first took place and the perception of southeastern Anatolia and northern Iraq as cultural backwaters. Thus, the development of agriculture and subsequent changes in technology, social organization and demographics along the flanks of the Taurus and Zagros Mountains was thought to be the result of diffusion from the Levant. However, a survey of recent archaeological work in southeastern Anatolia and northern Iraq provides new data that adds significantly to our understanding of these changes. It is now clear that the eastern part of southwest Asia was an independent center of development. This region constitutes a unique cultural entity rooted in local late Upper Paleolithic/Epipaleolithic cultures, the most notable of which is the Zarzian. These data also challenge several long held assumptions concerning the nature of this economic shift and the development of sedentary society. It is now evident that the exploitation of dense stands of wild cereal grasses was not a necessary precondition for the development of sedentism. Additionally, although food production had a tremendous impact on later social and cultural developments, the shift to food production was not at all dramatic. For more than two millennia, food production constituted only a minor component of the larger subsistence system. It appears to have been one of several strategies used to mitigate risks incurred by decreased mobility. Thus, these recent excavations force us to rethink the questions we have been asking as well as our explanations for the changes which took place at the end of the Pleistocene and the beginning of the Holocene.
