First Sentence

"While previous research on the Near Eastern Neolithic has addressed many dimensions of food production and environmental change, relatively few studies have explored the social context of these processes, the nature of political, economic, and religious practices in Neolithic communities, and how these specific patterns aid archaeologists and anthropologists in understanding some of the material and symbolic ways in which people were identified, how these are reflected through archaeological data sets, and the process by which social differentiation emerged in our earliest prehistoric agricultural contexts."