Search

Club-rush (Bolboschoenus spp. (Asch.) Palla) is one of the most common edible wild plant taxa found at Epipaleolithic and Neolithic sites in southwest Asia. At the Early Natufian site of Shubayqa 1 (Black Desert, Jordan) thousands of club-rush rhizome-tuber remains and hundreds of fragments of prepared meals were found. The evidence indicated that the underground storage organs of this plant were recurrently used as a source of food 14,600 years ago. To determine how Early Natufian communities gathered, processed and transformed club-rush tubers into food, we designed an interdisciplinary study that combined experimental archaeology, archaeobotany, and ground and chipped stone tool analyses. We conducted more than 50 specific experiments over three years, and based on the experimental materials produced we inferred that 1) the best season for club-rush rhizome-tuber collection in the region was spring-summer time; 2) that the primary method to harvest the plant would have been uprooting; and 3) that the most efficient approaches to obtain perfectly peeled and clean rhizome-tubers could have entailed drying, roasting and gentle grinding of the tubers. Overall, our work provides important information to reconstruct the chaîne opératoire for club-rush tuber exploitation in the past. The experimental data and modern reference datasets allow us to interpret the archaeological material found at Shubayqa 1, and start identifying some of the activities that Natufian communities in the Black Desert undertook in relation to the exploitation of this particular source of food.

Zohary and Hopf coined the term ‘founder crops’ to refer to a specific group of eight plants, namely three cereals (einkorn, emmer and barley), four legumes (lentil, pea, bitter vetch and chickpea), and a fibre/oil crop (flax), that founded early Neolithic agriculture in southwest Asia. Zohary considered these taxa as the first cultivated and domesticated species, as well as those that agricultural communities exploited and eventually spread to Europe and other regions. As a result, these eight species soon become the hallmark of the Neolithic plant-based subsistence. However, the ‘founder crops’ concept was defined at the end of the 1980s, when the development of agriculture was considered a rapid event, and therefore, terms like domestication, agriculture and plant cultivation were used interchangeably in the literature. The aim of this paper is thus to revisit concept of the ‘Neolithic founder crops’. Through a critical review of the archaeobotanical evidence gathered in the last 40 years, we evaluate the relative contribution of the ‘eight founder crop’ species to the plant-based subsistence across different periods of the southwest Asian Neolithic. We conclude that multiple groups of ‘founder’ species could be defined depending on whether one seeks to represent the most exploited plants of the Neolithic period, the first cultivated and domesticated crops, or the species that agricultural communities cultivated and eventually spread to Europe. Improved understanding of Neolithic plant-based subsistence in general, and agriculture in particular, will be attained by moving beyond conventional narratives and exploring the evolutionary history of plants other than the original ‘founder’ species.

Club-rush (Bolboschoenus spp. (Asch.) Palla) is one of the most common edible wild plant taxa found at Epipaleolithic and Neolithic sites in southwest Asia. At the Early Natufian site of Shubayqa 1 (Black Desert, Jordan) thousands of club-rush rhizome-tuber remains and hundreds of fragments of prepared meals were found. The evidence indicated that the underground storage organs of this plant were recurrently used as a source of food 14,600 years ago. To determine how Early Natufian communities gathered, processed and transformed club-rush tubers into food, we designed an interdisciplinary study that combined experimental archaeology, archaeobotany, and ground and chipped stone tool analyses. We conducted more than 50 specific experiments over three years, and based on the experimental materials produced we inferred that 1) the best season for club-rush rhizome-tuber collection in the region was spring-summer time; 2) that the primary method to harvest the plant would have been uprooting; and 3) that the most efficient approaches to obtain perfectly peeled and clean rhizome-tubers could have entailed drying, roasting and gentle grinding of the tubers. Overall, our work provides important information to reconstruct the chaîne opératoire for club-rush tuber exploitation in the past. The experimental data and modern reference datasets allow us to interpret the archaeological material found at Shubayqa 1, and start identifying some of the activities that Natufian communities in the Black Desert undertook in relation to the exploitation of this particular source of food.

This paper presents a summary of work undertaken by the authors and their teams on a series of Qe’an (plural of Qa’), in the Badia of eastern Jordan. These basins are a foci for settlement in the region, with the sites described here (Shubayqa, Wisad and the Qa’ Qattafi) edged by archaeological sites dating from the late Epipalaeolithic (ca. 14,500 - 11,600 cal BP) and the Neolithic (ca. 11,700 - 6,100 cal BP), and in areas still used by people today as seasonal wetlands for watering animals and growing cereal. We assess here the potential for the Qe’an sediments to provide what would be rare continuous palaeoenvironmental records for this part of SW Asia. The paper presents the first dates from the Qe’an of this region and the outline sedimentology. Much of the fill is of Holocene age, which leads to discussion of climate and landscape change over the last 15,000 years, particularly due to the close geographical relationship between these basins and archaeology. Our optically stimulated luminescence and radiocarbon dating of the basin fill suggests that there was significantly more space in the landscape for water storage in the early Holocene, which may have therefore provided this resource for people and their livestock or game for a longer duration each year than that seen today. Linked to this are hypotheses of a more vegetated landscape during this time period. Given the environmentally marginal nature of our study area subtle changes in landscape and/or climate, and human exploitation of these resources, could have led to significant, and likely detrimental for its inhabitants, environmental impacts for the region, such as desertification. Our data are suggestive of desertification occurring, and sets up a clear hypothesis for testing by future work in the region.

Communal buildings have been reported from a number of early Neolithic sites from the Levant and Anatolia, but none were known from the central Zagros. Here we report on the recent excavations at Asiab, Kermanshah province, Iran, and argue that the principle feature found during Robert Braidwood’s excavation at the site in 1960 should be interpreted as an example of a communal building. We discuss the results of the previous and recent excavations, highlight the key features of this building, and the implications for our understanding of the early Neolithic in the ‘eastern wing’ of the Fertile Crescent.

On December 31, 2005, Louise Martin, Lisa Usman, and Joy McCorriston settled on a hard floor in a sparse hotel in Mukalla to watch Pakistan ring in the New Year a few hours to the east. Toddler Jojo slept a cherubic sleep propped up by all the available pillows, having exhausted all episodes of Balamory. During the day, Louise and Lisa unwrapped 6,000-year-old cattle skulls and cleaned them for photographs, measurements, and curation. To say the conservation lab was improvised would overly gloss a battered room with rigged lighting and peeling floors. But the onshore breeze fills the Mukalla Museum, there’s a five-star overlook of the brilliant sea, and you could get a rock lobster dinner for two dollars in those days. ʿAbdalʿazīz Bin ʿAqīl left us only for the morning of Eid al-Fitr, working through his holiday and the final Ramadan vigil. He and Joy kept Jojo busy so that his mother, Louise, could measure the frontal bones and wear patterns on cattle molars. This chapter is the outcome of her analysis, supported by Lisa’s clever conservation solutions and Joe Roe’s statistical skills in the comparison with East African cattle.

The Fertile Crescent, its hilly flanks and surrounding drylands has been a critical region for studying how climate has influenced societal change, and this review focuses on the region over the last 20,000 years. The complex social, economic and environmental landscapes in the region today are not new phenomena and understanding their interactions requires a nuanced, multidisciplinary understanding of the past. This review builds on a history of collaboration between the social and natural palaeoscience disciplines. We provide a multidisciplinary, multi-scalar perspective on the relevance of past climate, environmental and archaeological research in assessing present day vulnerabilities and risks for the populations of SW Asia. We discuss the complexity of palaeoclimatic data interpretation, particularly in relation to hydrology, and provide an overview of key time periods of palaeoclimatic interest. We discuss the critical role vegetation plays in the humanclimate-environment nexus and discuss the implications of the available palaeoclimate and archaeological data, and their interpretation, for palaeonarratives of the region, both climatically and socially. We also provide an overview of how modelling can improve our understanding of past climate impacts and associated change in risk to societies. We conclude by looking to future work, and identify themes of ‘scale’ and ‘seasonality’ as still requiring further focus. We suggest that by appreciating a given locale’s place in the regional hydroscape, be it an archaeological site or palaeoenvironmental archive, more robust links to climate can be made where appropriate and, interpretations drawn will demand the resolution of factors acting across multiple scales.

Recent zooarchaeological analyses of game exploitation in the Epipalaeolithic of the Southern Levant identify a decline in large game in the Natufian, with corresponding increase in small prey, interpreted as hunting pressure driven by population expansion. To date, studies focus on the Mediterranean zone. This paper adopts similar approaches to examine Epipalaeolithic to Neolithic faunal data from 16 sites in the steppic Jordanian Azraq Basin. Results here reveal very different trends. Large game, mainly equids, fluctuate throughout the Epipalaeolithic, due to climatic conditions and available water/vegetation. Cattle thrive in the Azraq oasis, showing no decline in the Late Epipalaeolithic. Gazelle exploitation is predominant and sustainable throughout the Epipalaeolithic, even at Kharaneh IV and Wadi Jilat 6 'megasites'. However, PPNB assemblages from the limestone steppe show intensive game exploitation resulting from longer-stay settlement. The focused gazelle-hunting camp at Dhuweila in the basalt desert also shows pressure from indiscriminate culling impacting herd demography, interpreted as providing meat for onwards exchange. Human impacts on steppe fauna appear both local and in many cases short-term, unlike the large-game suppression reported from west of the Rift Valley. Resource pressures and game over-kill, whether population-driven or otherwise, are not currently apparent east of the Jordan River.