Paléorient, vol. 37.1, p. 29-38 © CNRS ÉDITIONS 2011 Manuscrit reçu le 7 février 2011, accepté le 10 mai 2011 OPENING THE DOOR, POINTING THE WAY

T. WATKINS

I can only give my personal perspective on how we have been infl uenced by Jacques Cauvin, and continued to develop our understanding of the processes of neolithisation in southwest Asia. I draw from Cauvin’s last, great book, Naissance des divinités, Naissance de l’agriculture, 1 two points that

have been fundamentally important in guiding the direction of my own work: Cauvin described his revolution as ‘ psychocultural’, and he also drew attention to the fact that none of the accounts proposed for the neolithisation process could answer Robert Braidwood’s old question of why things happened as they did at that particular time, around the beginning of the Holocene period, and why not earlier. My conclusion is that