Find challenges our understanding of the Epipalaeolithic

Ten thousand years before Neolithic farmers settled into permanent villages, hunter-gatherer groups of the Epipalaeolithic period (c. 22–11,600 cal BP) shifted towards life in aggregated semi-permanent communities in the Levant.

This period of Levantine prehistory is known as the Epipalaeolithic is recognised archaeologically by the abrupt appearance of small stone tool elements (microliths), which were hafted into composite hunting and harvesting tools. Also appearing for the first time were new developments in technology, economy, artistic expression, semi-permanent architecture, settlement and social organisation – necessary pre-conditions for agricultural life in the Neolithic. These changes and the impetuses for these changes and why only some groups adopted them are poorly understood.
Longer term camps

The last Epipalaeolithic phase (Natufian) is well-known for the appearance of stone-built houses with complex site organisation, a fully sedentary lifestyle and social complexity that becomes a precursors for a Neolithic way of life. In contrast, pre-Natufian sites are much less well known and generally considered as campsites for small groups of seasonally-mobile hunter-gatherers. Work at the Early and Middle Epipalaeolithic aggregation site of Kharaneh IV in eastern Jordan highlighted that some of these earlier sites were larger aggregation base camps not unlike those of the Natufian and contributes to ongoing debates on their duration of occupation.
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People lived here for considerable periods of time when these huts were built. They exchanged objects with other groups in the region and even buried their dead at the site
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The research was published 15 February, 2012 in PLoS One by a joint British, Danish, American and Jordanian team, describing huts that hunter-gatherers used as long-term residences. This suggest behaviours previously associated with later cultures and communities – such as an attachment to a specific location and a long range social network – existed up to 10,000 years earlier.

Excavations at the site of Kharaneh IV are providing archaeologists with a new perspective on how humans lived 20,000 years ago when the deserts of Jordan were in bloom, with rivers, streams, and seasonal lakes providing a rich environment for hunter-gatherers to settle in.

“What we witness at the site of Kharaneh IV in the Jordanian desert is an enormous concentration of people in one place,” explained Dr Jay Stock from the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Cambridge and co-author of the article.

“People lived here for considerable periods of time when these huts were built. They exchanged objects with other groups in the region and even buried their dead at the site. These activities precede the settlements associated with the emergence of agriculture, which replaced hunting and gathering later on.”
The archaeologists recovered hundreds of thousands of stone tools, animal bones and other finds over three seasons of excavation at the large open-air site covering two hectares which today appears as little more than a mound 3 m high rising above the desert landscape. Based on the size and density of the site, the researchers had long suspected that Kharaneh IV was frequented by large numbers of people for long periods of time; these latest findings now confirm their theory.

“It may not look very impressive to the untrained eye, but it is one of the densest and largest Palaeolithic open-air sites in the region,” said Dr Lisa Maher, from the University of California, Berkeley, who leads the excavations. “The stone tools and animal bone vastly exceed the amounts recovered from most other sites of this time period in southwest Asia.” In addition, the team also recovered rarer items, such as shell beads, bones with regularly incised lines and a fragment of limestone with geometric carved patterns
Evidence for extensive social networks
So far, the team has fully excavated two huts; but there may be several more hidden beneath the desert’s sands. They measure about 2–3 m in length and were dug into the ground. The walls and roof were made of brush wood, which then burnt and collapsed leaving dark coloured stains in the excavation layers. Radiocarbon dating suggests that the hut is between 19,300 and 18,600 years old (the region’s oldest hut structures, which date from 23,000 years ago were found by a team of archaeologists working at Ohalo II on the shore of the Sea of Galilee in 1989).

Inside these structures the team found intentionally burnt piles of gazelle horn cores, clumps of red ochre pigment and a cache of hundreds of pierced marine shells. These shell beads were brought to the site from the Mediterranean and Red Sea over 250 km away showing that people were linked into a large regional social network and items would be exchanged across considerable distances. Among these remarkable finds there is also four articulated fox paws surrounding a worked flint bladelet core, which may represent a pouch and contents.
The nature and types of occupation at Kharaneh IV helps shed light onto how we understand the development of sedentism and architecture in the Late Epipalaeolithic Natufian. It is clear that the scope of these transitions is larger than previously thought and the mobility and interaction between Early and Middle Epipalaeolithic groups was widespread and intensive.
Source: University of Cambridge Research News
http://www.pasthorizonspr.com/index.php/archives/02/2012/find-challenges-our-understanding-of-the-epipalaeolithic