 Again, what they are land enforcement, which is that the archeological research facility is located in Leach in the ancestral and unceded territory at Trottinia speaking, Olomie people. Successors of the historic and sovereign Burruna Band of Alameda County. We acknowledge that this land remains of great importance to the Olomie people and that the art community inherits a history of archeological scholarship that has disturbed Olomie ancestors and erased living Olomie people from the present and future of this land. It is therefore our collective responsibility to critically transform archeological inheritance in support of Olomie sovereignty and to hold the University of California accountable to the needs of all American, Indians, and indigenous peoples through our actions, not just our words. Oh, we get our very own Dr. Mahar faculty here specializing in environment archeology and geo-archalogy, training students to do things even in New Mexico. She's very multifaceted and we're very glad to have a talk today that I won't read to you, because it's right there. So please join me in welcoming our Dr. Mahar. Thank you very much. It's nice to be here in person. I'm just coming back off of sabbatical with COVID absences before that. So it's nice to be in a room with people again and share my research that way. After Jen's really kind introduction, I'm actually not gonna talk at all about geo-archalogy. Instead I'm gonna talk about stone tool technology. This talk is actually, it stems from some work that I and my colleagues who are listed here did this summer. So it is a bit of a, here's what I did on my summer vacation talk, but it also culminated in a conference presentation in Jordan at the end of the summer and so it is also some highly technical lithic analysis that I'm gonna talk about today. So I have my name here, but also several of the people that contributed to various aspects of the work that I'll talk about today, including excavating some of this material in the field and some pretty intensive analysis this summer. Three, at least three names will look very familiar to you guys are recent PhD graduate Felicia de Pena. I don't know why there's an extra D there, I just noticed that. AJ White and Jordan Brown, both of whom are our current doctoral students in our program. I know AJ is with us on Zoom right now, hi AJ. And Jordan is in the field actually collecting his own data in Kurdistan, but they were all instrumental in the research that I will talk about today. If it'll advance forward. Maybe. Yeah, it just did before, I wonder, there we go. All right, I just had to touch my screen, it's all good. All right, I can't see the, I'm just gonna change my view. This is the joys of doing this the first time on Zoom. Okay, well, we won't worry about it. So the first thing that I will bring up is this issue of typology and archaeology. We've all read and had many classes on the debate between what is the relevance of typology, who creates it, who's it for. And that is actually still somewhat relevant in analyzing stone tools from the prehistory of Southwest Asia, particularly in the time period that I'm gonna talk about today. And it really means that in our case, sometimes we get a little bit too focused on the labels that we give to specific artifacts, particularly different types of stone tools, the tools as the complete, or the so-called finished object that we assume was the targeted end product of stone tool production. But the reality, of course, is a little bit more complicated than that. And that's what I'm gonna talk about or focus on a little bit here today. And it really begs the question of, how do we know what we know about stone tools? And the answer is not always in the finished products themselves. And in fact, focusing just on those finished products can often lead to a lot of confusion because you're focusing just on the way something looks in the last phase of its life as an artifact. And so this cartoon by Gary Larson is very apropos in this conundrum in dealing with typologies in Southwest Asian prehistory, but also in other parts of the world. It's my favorite Gary Larson cartoon. So what's this? I asked for a hammer, a hammer. This is a crescent wrench. Well, maybe it's a hammer. And these stone tools. Very common conversation in doing stone tool typologies in this time period. So what are we talking about when I refer to these typologies? We are talking about the Epipaleolithic period in Southwest Asia 10 to 20,000 years ago. We're talking about primarily hunter-gatherers, although there are lots of debates about the intensified use of particular resources, the possible domestication of particular resources, and the not so clear cut evidence towards just hunting and gathering as something separate than farming or domestication. But that is a conversation for another day. Perhaps I'll talk to you about that in the spring. But right now, when we talk about the Epipaleolithic, probably the best preserved artifacts that we have, and certainly the ones that we've based all of our cultural labels on, are these microlits. These small blade lits. So these small pieces of flints that have been modified into various different forms. And people spent a lot of time analyzing and labeling these different microlits. I've showed some examples here. The main idea behind these microlits is you produce these small implements that are part of larger composite tools. And you can see what some of these composite tools might look like. They're meant to be easily replaceable parts. They're actually very quick and easy to manufacture, unlike making a hand axe or a salutary in point or something like that. They're really quick and dirty to make. They don't take a lot of effort. And when you break one, you can just pop it out and put a new one in. So you might have a whole bunch of these on hand to use as easily replaceable parts in a larger tool. And the larger tool itself might have been the much more expensive, both in terms of resources and time, thing to make than each of these individual microlits. One of the kind of, one of the evidences that we see for this massive shift towards predominantly microlist stone tool production over anything else is that they offer some advantages in allowing you to have distance from your prey. They're thought to be part of largely projectiles. At least some of them others were clearly used for, for harvesting plant remains, even 20,000 years ago. And we see a probable increase in the diversity of prey. We certainly see this in the zoological record of these sites. And just to give you a sense of what some of these typologies look like, this is just a small section of microlits, the non geometric ones from the part of the world where I work from 10 to 20,000 years ago. And you can see that they're really labels that make kind of minute distinctions between different microlits, different shapes and different locations of retouch primarily. And just to give you a sense of how quickly this compounds or snowballs and why we have so many different competing typologies for such a small part of the world. Is if you take a look at numbers and read the numbers as well, but this is 13 and this is 40. So from 13 to 40 are just different types of triangle like microlits. So one of these types from the site that I work on, I did not create this typology. It was created before I started working there. And so you can build a lot into labeling the minutia of these microlits. The real question is how relevant that is. So what is this actually telling us about what they were used for a whole range of experimental and use for studies and residue analysis suggests there's actually no correlation between the shape or type of microlit and the particular activity that it is used for. So any one of those ones I showed you in the previous page is used for cutting is used for scraping is used as a projectile and so on and so forth. So something else is at play in the choice to produce particular shapes over others. Or of course the other possibility is we're placing way too much emphasis on these different shapes that were perhaps not as meaningful to people in the past. Although the question then becomes why do we have sites that have 95% only one shape and none of the other? And that certainly exists in the archaeological record. The site that I'm going to talk about today is not one of those sites. It has a wide range of different micro tool types in different phases of its occupation. So because there are some severe limitations about what just a typological analysis can tell us, that doesn't really tell us a lot about how people were using the local landscape. Where were they getting materials from? How are they making these stone tools? What particular strategies were at play? What were they using them for? And so on and so forth. How were people interacting with each other who may have come to the site that I'm going to talk about from different locations where they have a different tradition of making stone tools, i.e. they're making triangles at one place and trapezes at another. We need to look beyond just the final tools. And so this is what we've really focused on. And this is what a lot of lithic analysis in general focuses on right now is taking a technological approach to stone tools, which means looking at the cores. So the raw material that these flakes are removed from and looking at the debris from stone tool production, the stuff that isn't fashioned into final tools. And see what that can tell us about how these stone tools were made, what the thought processes were, and who it was that made them and how they might have interacted with each other. Were they really good at making these or were they really bad at making these? So these are all things that we are trying to get at in doing a technological analysis of these stone tools. And our technological analysis looks something like this. So we have a series of different categories that we use to kind of separate out this huge amount of debris. So making one of these microlith blades that I showed, that's then segmented to maybe one or two tools, can produce thousands and thousands and thousands of pieces of debris. So it's a lot to look at. You can't do an attribute analysis of each individual piece. So you're not measuring length and width and thickness of everything. Just at a site like mine where we have over four million pieces of debris. So if you look at the size of the piece, you would never get anywhere. My former student Felicia tried. And this is actually an image from some of her work. But what we did figure out where is that there's a series of very diagnostic pieces that result from a particular technological choice in manufacturing that are easy to identify amongst this debitage. And so it's picking those out and looking at those in detail, which is actually a slide that I've borrowed from Felicia. I don't, these are her animations. So I'll leave them here, which includes approaching the technology of making stone tools from three different ways. One of them you've probably heard of before pretty readily. The idea of examining stone tools or any other type of technology from a chain operatoire perspective. So basically looking at the mental template and all of the kind of processes of collecting raw materials of, you know, where you're making them, what you have around you, what other accompanying tools that you have to make them, how they're made, how they're discarded, what particular gestures and actions go into making stone tools. And this is a pretty familiar approach to anyone who studies technology. But one thing we've also been particularly interested is looking at the learning process itself and looking at it from two different perspectives. So the genetic processes perspective, I don't know if she has all three of those on the same slide. I asked for the slide from her last minute. So we'll just leave it like that. So this is looking at essentially the social or cultural context of learning. So you don't learn how to make stone tools in a vacuum. Each person who ever made a particular tool hasn't just picked up a rock and figured it out themselves, but also how to make a particular tool. So if you learn this in a particular context, you might have to cite the clan of the cave bear novels. You learn this within a particular social context. And that means you learn to make what people have taught you to make and you learn to make it in particular ways, which we refer to in particular with our work here as a tradition, a social tradition of making stone tools. But then this is also situated and fluid and dynamic within the social context of learning. So if you're someone who is a master and you're sitting there learning from them as a novice, the next day you might be the most experienced person in the group. And therefore you're the one who's teaching other people how to fit in that. It looks at how children are brought into the learning process. And so thinking about all of these different aspects together within the framework of a shared part work gives us a little bit more. So I'm not going to talk about what I won't talk about today, but what Felicia was able to identify are particular signatures of what a master flint napper looks like versus what a novice flint napper looks like and how we can use these different debitage categories to identify people who are particularly good, who made fewer errors. And when they made those errors, they knew exactly how to fix them versus people who made, you know, the common error again and again and couldn't figure out how to fix them. I'm generalizing here, but hopefully that gives you the idea. And so we actually combine this technological analysis with replication experiments, which is something Felicia did quite a lot for her dissertation and refitting, which is incredibly time consuming and basically involves putting back together kind of a reverse, I guess a reverse jigsaw puzzle in a way. Well, actually just a jigsaw puzzle, but reverse engineering the flint napping process. The process is reductive. You're always taking things away. But if you have all that debitage preserved, especially in context like we have at the site we've been working at, you can actually put it back together to get a good sense of how the process in one individual episode of flint napping was envisioned and carried out by a particular individual, or as we can discover, maybe a couple of individuals working together. And the kind of larger significance of taking this approach of understanding the technology of stone tool production within a shampoo or framework and understanding learning within its cultural and individual or situated contexts gives us a better sense of who was doing what, especially at a site like Karana, the site I'm going to talk about in a minute, that can tell us about different communities, perhaps aggregating at the sites that we're working at and bringing their own individual social traditions of how to make stone tools or what types of stone tools to make and how we might expect to find that kind of played out in one site where they've come together and are potentially flint napping together or flint napping in completely separate areas. So it can give us a good idea about community interaction, who is part of a community and who isn't both a larger community as in the site, but also a flint napping community and how these aggregations and dispersals and interaction might change over time. All right. Moving beyond the context of what I'm going to talk about today, I will give just a very brief overview because most of the people in this room have heard me talk about Harana 4 before, although perhaps not all of you. So Harana 4 is an epipylythic site in what is today Jordan in the eastern desert of Jordan. It is marked on this map here with the larger star. It fits within a larger geographical feature called the Azraq Basin, which is an extensive drainage basin in eastern Jordan that also held 20,000 years ago a number of substantial wetlands. Very different climate than today. So today there's not a tree to be seen anywhere around the site. It is a very dry desert, but 20,000 years ago, it was a very lush wet place to live. This site itself is about 21,000 square meters. It's the largest site of this timeframe that we know of in this part of the world. And it was occupied for about 1200 years. I have the calibrated dates up here relatively continuously. We can't say for sure that it was never unoccupied. I'm sure it probably was for certain periods of time, but we don't have any major gaps or hiatuses in occupation in that 1200 years that we've been able to detect. It was very densely occupied by different groups. The whole area was likely not occupied at the same time, but people would have aggregated in different parts of the site over time creating this very dense accumulation of archaeological material, very much like a paleolithic tell. For those of you who are familiar with the accumulation of tells or these large cities, probably most notably known from this part of the world. And so these really dense occupations actually continue about a meter and a half, actually two meters over two meters in some areas. So we've got 1200 years dense archaeological material in about two meters of stratigraphy, a very well preserved stratigraphy. The middle phase or it's actually the last phase of occupation of the site, but it falls into what we call the middle epipaleolithic. All of those different typologies I mentioned at the beginning have their own kind of cultural labels associated with them. I'm not going to go over all those cultural labels. They all overlap with each other. They're really difficult to talk about, especially in a brief talk and they are highly debated. So to make things easy in general, the general consensus is to talk about early, middle and late. We don't have any late phase at the site here. It's what people are probably more familiar with than the Tufian. Instead we have middle and early epipaleolithic occupations. Our middle epipaleolithic occupations date from about 18.6 to 18.8. Again, calibrated to BP. And here we actually have pretty good evidence for largely communal activity areas. So largely communal use of the site. We have these large open. So we don't have any evidence of walls or boundaries. So we have a lot of different types of materials. We have a lot of different types of materials, earthen surfaces, each of which contains parts, usually clusters of hearts and post holes surrounding them. The funnel and archeological material that we see here shows it's basically, these are surrounded by middens, very dense middens where they were making stone tools in these, in these areas and then using them both to take away hunting, hunting, hunting, hunting, hunting, hunting, hunting, hunting. This is a very important area. That's where we have the range of gazelle. So over 90% of the gazelle from these phases of occupation are, sorry, over 90% of the fauna from these phases of occupation are gazelle. So they were really, really focused on hunting gazelle, which were probably all readily available in the local area. We also suspect they were using game drives, but that's a topic for another talk. have good evidence that they were probably smoking or drying meat in these areas where we have many hearts overlapping each other, which are all surrounded by post holes. And they're pretty small post holes. They're not the type of post hole. And in fact, we don't find structures with post holes around them. So we only find these post holes around hearts like this. We have these large open spaces. We've been able to refit material from the surfaces of these large open spaces, like you can see here. Whereas we can't do that from other parts of the site, where we have really small caches of lithics that look like they should all go back together. But we've tried, or should say Felicia has tried, for hours and hours and hours. They do not go back together. But we can refit from these large open surfaces. So we've clearly got people doing things together in these communal spaces. It also tends to be where we find most of our symbolic objects, which I use in air quotes because it's always a dangerous term to use. We don't actually have any idea what they were for, except that we find most of our incised stone, our incised bone, our marine shell coming from the red and Mediterranean sea, and other aspects of bone jewelry in this area, in these communal spaces. In the earlier phase of occupation, we actually see things look a little bit differently. Instead of having these open spaces that were used, we have fairly discreet spaces. We have multiple hut structures, and I've shown two that we have fully excavated here, which actually show evidence of having been reused. They each have multiple floors. They each have material that has been laid out specifically on those floors. And I've shown some of those in the middle. So we have partially articulated animal skeletons. We have bone points, which we find almost nowhere else on site. We have collections of cores. We have collections of scrapers. We have collections of beads. We have evidences of beads that were probably strong at one point that the string is gone, and we just have them kind of laid out in a line. And we have final evidence that suggests they were probably keeping material in baskets around the edge of these hut structures. It would have been an organic superstructure. We've done some final analysis just to suggest what they were made from, which is primarily cameras, frames, and read wetland, basically resources, as well as grasses for the mats. So we clearly had wetland and grassland resources in the vicinity, which is also what the gazelle tell us. And we also see these hut structures that are destroyed in particular way. It seems intentionally. So once they are no longer of any use for whatever reason, they're burnt down and kind of sealed or covered over, often with material deposited on top of the burnt superstructure. And in the case of structure two, we have an adult woman who was buried in that structure before it was burnt down. So she was laid out carefully on the uppermost floor, and then the structure was burnt with her inside of it and then covered over. So I've presented in other places before some of the interesting associations between people and architecture at this time. And I won't belabor that here now because many of you have heard that, perhaps I'll give another talk later on about that for those who haven't. But what really came out of working this summer was to our great surprise, we had actually excavated in 2019, so before the pandemic, a new area of the site. It had been dug in 2010, but we just did it, one of my Israeli colleagues calls it a telephone booth. So we dug a one by one down very deep and you can see it right here. We found some really interesting stuff, but we didn't actually get a chance to look at the stone tools at that point. Very well preserved stratigraphy, a whole bunch of post holes that were in the very bottom of the occupation layers or what we thought was the bottom of the occupation layers. It turns out it goes down even deeper, but those post holes are dug into a marsh deposits. So we also know that this area was inundated occasionally while these early epipaleothic hunter-gatherers were occupying it. So water levels go down, build some huts, water level goes up, go somewhere else to higher ground. Inside of one of these post holes, we found this large flint nodule and I don't know how well you can see in the image here with the lighting, but there's actually five kind of long, differently sized lines that are visible that are stained in red ochre, which seemed to represent someone holding so the fingers from someone grasping that. And it was actually jammed straight into one of these post holes at the bottom here. 2019, we decided we would dig more than just a telephone booth here and we opened up several squares around that. And this is our collaborator, Ahmed Al Fahir, who we put in charge of this area and who dug a considerable amount in our field season with the help of many others and basically kind of corroborated what we had found in 2010. So we found many more post holes, many different surfaces going down, which seemed to relate to more structures, hearts, basically a lot going on in this area, including a ton of lithics. And that is what we focused, so then the pandemic hit and we didn't get to go back and analyze any of that material, which was predominantly in Jordan. So we went back this summer to, this past summer to excavate, or sorry, to analyze it. And so this is Ahmed who dug much of that material and my colleague, Teresa, analyzing some of that material from this occupation. What we discovered in analyzing it is it looks very different from everything else we have at the site. And it's actually an even earlier phase of early epipelolithic occupation. So this was us this summer doing some excavation for those of you who might recognize it. You can see Jordan in the background here, my collaborator, my co-director here. Ahmed brought his cat who liked to hang out right on the table when we were analyzing, basically right in the middle and liked to play with the Sharpies. And then we did other field work, geological field work in the area. You might recognize these people here. I threw them in because the very least, I know AJ is on Zoom. And many of you will recognize Jordan who celebrated his 30th birthday while we were in the field. So we had a little party or a half left for him. And AJ pontificating over the lack of evidence for a fault in the area around the site, which we had hoped we would find this summer. But one thing that really emerged out of looking at this new phase of occupation or discovering this new phase of occupation is that it kind of complicates the picture that we had in understanding how the site was used between early and middle phases. I'm not gonna go over this in detail. The main difference being that we have pretty good evidence for communal use of the site, for groups from the surrounding area and quite a large area congregating or aggregating at this site, especially in the middle epipelolithic. We see the movement of shells, for example. We see them in both phases, but we really see them compounding in the middle phase. And the stratigraphy and occupations that we find in this period of occupation suggests communal use of space. And the opposite is what we noticed in the early epipelolithic. We don't have complete hot structures from the earliest phase that I've just introduced, but from the cabaran phase, which where we've excavated these hot structures, we have a good sense of people doing very discrete things in different parts of the site in comparison to the middle epipelolithic phase. So in the last few minutes of the talk is where I'm gonna get highly technical talking about our stone tool analysis. So one of the ways in which we identified this phase without having clear architecture and we're digging fairly deep soundings. But I mentioned that the lithics, the stone tools look remarkably different in this phase of use of the site, not just the tools, but particularly the associated material, the cores and the debatage. When we look at the debatage, so the unretouched material, we actually do a fairly detailed analysis of it. And you can see some of the categories that we use for looking at how cores are transformed into basically material where you can remove a particular desired blank from. And we have divided, I'm not gonna go through each of these categories here, although I'm happy for the pants off of any of you talking about them in detail. But what is important is what I've highlighted as blue versus orange. So we have core preparation pieces, pieces that happen at the initial stages where you're basically shaping the core to a desired form. You're removing a specific set of pieces, including getting rid of cortex and creating a platform. This lateral quartering piece, you can see it's the largest in these orange core prep is a piece that you remove from kind of the lower sides of a core to get cortex off. So you can kind of clear the way you have a nice core face to remove a bunch of these blades, which then you make into these microlips. So most effort is actually in this core prep and less in fixing the core as you're going along. So energy invested in the initial stages and less in the maintenance of the core. And if you take a look on the right-hand side, you can see a range of different core types that we have listed and an image of the most common of those that we see, which is the narrow face core. So most of the cores from this time period are these narrow face cores. They're small little wedge-shaped pieces. You make a platform, you remove a bunch of cortex, and then because the piece is already nice and narrow, all the bladelets that you take off are gonna be nice and narrow bladelets, which is the targeted blank shape. But there's also a range of other ones that you can see there, which I'll come back to in a moment. And then if we look at what they're making with these bladelets, with the blanks, the pieces that I've highlighted are the microlets in orange. So the rest are large tools, so scrapers, burins, that sort of thing. And those actually don't vary much in relative frequency in that category of tools. So as larger tools, in any phase of occupation at the site, and in fact, in all at the epithletic sites, they all have scrapers, they all have burins, and the shifts that you see in those different large tools are pretty minor. But you do see big shifts in these microlists. And just as a reminder, the idea is that you produce a blade that is then segmented in particular ways, often in specific controlled ways, by notching a blade. So you can see these notches here. So that when you snap it, the notch is the weakest point, and it breaks along that notch. And you have the piece that you're interested in making into the final tool. And then you have the piece that was snapped off and is discarded. This is referred to as a microburin, and it's actually a very, very excellent technological indicator of how these microlets are being made, of how these blades are being produced. Because you can, of course, break these blades accidentally as you're retouching them, or you can break them without the notch. And you can accidentally break them when you're using them. So having that notch tells us, okay, this was a very intentional technological choice. And what these guys are producing, in the earliest phase, this new phase, which you can see here, is called the nasanin. One of the cultural labels, which I won't talk too much about, nasanin, cabaran, I mentioned already, is our other epipyelithic phase. And then geometric cabaran is our middle epipyelithic phase. But you can see that they are making a ton of these triangle-shaped pieces, as well as these things that we call microgravets. Triangles are what we call geometric microlets. Microgravets are what we call non-geometric microlists. They're basically elongated blades that are retouched in particular ways. Some of you may be able to see this, but a microgravet is basically a blade that might have a bit more brownness. So retouch along here, and then a little bit along here. But it's not complete. Anyways, they're a very formal tool type that we don't see in any of the other occupations on site in any numbers. But we have a ton of here. We also have a lot of fragmentary microlists because they were very intensively used. So a lot of them are broken from having been used. And you can see some examples here of these broken pieces. So they used, I should note here, that this is an index that we use by basically plugging the number of microgurns that we find in a particular layer into a formula, where we get a very high number here. 38 is actually a very high number. Usually it's about one or two. So they were really intensively using this particular notching technique to make these blades. In our other early epipyliopic phase, you can see the pattern is the same in terms of a focus on core preparation rather than on core maintenance. And narrow-faced cores are also very abundant. And in fact, they are the most dominant core shape that we find. So here, they're focusing even more on initial core shaping. And basically once they've removed a few blades off of a core, they throw it away. So there's no need to conserve raw material. There's no need to fix a core to try and get more and more and more out of it. The core is already basically the shape they want. A few preparation things at the beginning and then they're basically done with it. And the tools reflect that. We see all of these very narrow-gray-style pieces like you can see on that side. They're not segmenting these for the most part. So the microviron index is three. They're basically not using the microviron technique at all. And they're producing these kind of narrow-gray-style pieces which are not in the form of a geometric shape. So we call them non-geometrics. Most of them are obliquely truncated or straight and backed and so on and so forth. And then they're also still intensively used. So the number of fragmentary pieces is quite high. In the last phase of occupation, which is the middle epipyliothic, you see a very different pattern if you're looking at the debris from tool manufacture where there's still some focus on core correct because there just has to be. You have to start by creating a platform and by taking off the cortex, but there's much more energy invested in core maintenance. So they're basically collecting these cores and using them until they can't get anything else off of them. And they're fixing the cores as they go along. And part of that is because it doesn't really matter what comes off of it. You can fashion that into any geometric piece because the geometrics are so heavily modified and I'll come back to that point in a minute. And we can see in the cores, there's no particular focus on any one type of core. They use a lot of these broad-based cores which require a lot of maintenance to keep up, which you can see in the lower picture here. And then if we look at the tools from the middle epipyliothic, they're focused on these geometric microlists. There are some non-geometric pieces, but they're very intensively used. So most of them are broken. But if you take a look or if you remember back the last three slides, there's a very distinct difference. Even if you have a broken piece, these guys are pretty short and pretty fat. The non-geometric ones from the Kavarn are long and narrow and the nasanin ones are pretty triangular shaped because they're only making one type of geometric really. So even when you have a broken piece, you can have a good sense of which of these categories it belongs to. All right, so to sum all of this up, we can actually see that just looking at the technology and then putting that back together with what we know about the microlists themselves points out some really interesting differences between these three phases of occupation. So the fragmentary pieces, you can see, dominate each of these assemblages. But when we look at the early nasanin, we have non-geometric pieces, non in the early and then a more equal amount, but really a dominance if you include the fragmentary pieces of geometric in the middle epipyliothic. We see a major emphasis on core shaping in the two early phases and more of an emphasis on core maintenance in the later phase. However, there's definitely different choices in raw material, particularly in the shape of the raw material between the two early phases. So the Kavarn is very, very constrained. It's the same thing over and over and over again. So we see really just kind of one narrowly constrained tradition of how they're making the tools themselves. Whereas we got a lot more flexibility in both the earlier and the middle phases. And then we see the same actually with the microliths, very lightly retouched microliths in the Kavarn phase, very heavily retouched into these geometric shapes, which it doesn't matter if you have a regular standardized sized blade lid because you can just retouch it to be the shape that you want it to be, to be a lunate or to be a triangle or to be a trapeze. And so that's what they're clearly doing in this early Nazanin and the middle epipaleolithic. So we basically have a lot of flexibility, not a lot of flexibility, the emphasis is on getting things the way you want them right at the beginning. And then an emphasis on flexibility that leads to a lot of variability in the middle epipaleolithic. And just to give you a sense of what that looks like, these are some of those typological categories, these microlith types that I mentioned at the beginning. So there's actually a relatively limited number of them that we have for the two early phases, but there's a huge range of them in the middle epipaleolithic. So we see standardization to some degree, especially in the way that the blanks are produced, but variability in the latest phase of occupation. It looks a little bit different when we look at the large tool categories, and I won't go into too much detail about them here, but there's definitely more variability in the earliest and the middle. So we see a pattern of some similarities between the two early phases of occupation, but also a lot of similarities between the early and middle phase of occupation, something different from what we see in the cabaret. All right. So what are the kind of take home points in the last minute or so, that we can say about this analysis? Well, we actually have a pretty good sample size. So just from this Nazanin occupation alone that we looked at the summer, we looked at about 80,000 pieces. So we have a pretty good sense that these are real trends and we have hundreds of thousands of pieces that we've analyzed from the middle and cabaran, the other early epipaleolithic occupation. So we have a really good sense of what each of these different phases of occupation of the site looks like in terms of stone tool technology and micro lift production. And we actually see some changes in the flexibility of these technologies over time. So it starts out pretty flexible, it becomes more constrained, and then it gets flexible again. But this is not based on raw material availability, which is kind of one of the obvious, optimizing theory go-to answers. So this is not having to do with raw material availability. The same raw material is available today as was available in each of these phases of occupation. And there's a ton of material. You never have to conserve raw material in any of these phases, including today. So that suggests that these shifts in how stone tools were made, have more to do with particular choices. What those choices result from is kind of our next phase of questioning. So maybe it has to do with environmental or ecological change. So we know we have fluctuations in these marshes, in these wetland environments. So perhaps it's related to that, which then goes along with changes in vegetation and fauna, which these tools would have been used to hunt and collect and modify in some way. Perhaps it has to do with movements, with groups who are aggregating or dispersing in the landscape and who was interacting with who at different times, or has to do with other aspects of cultural choice, has to do with these napping communities, and perhaps new engagements with technology, stuff that doesn't preserve as well, like bone and stone, well, bone and shell that we see a lot of in different occupations at the site. All right, I will stop there, except the last thing I will thank is all of my collaborators, students, and the communities in which we have been doing this research for a number of years now, as well as those institutions which have supported it over the years. Thank you very much. Yeah, Tim. Yeah, that was great, amazing amount of work, too. But I had a question about the aggregation. Thanks to just before you got into the little ethics at the end, we mentioned evidence for restraining aggregation site, as well as to, I guess, just be living in our constantly. Can you just explain that a little bit, what leads you to that conclusion? Yeah, so, I mean, we know, certainly in the early phases, both the Nazanin and the Qabbaran that I talked about, that people weren't living there constantly because it's inundated by marsh deposits. So we definitely have people kind of coming and going in terms of not having continued, but we're not able to mark that very well in the stratigraphy because you get, when you have these marsh deposits, you get a lot of morals that are kind of jumped over these sediments. We have artifacts that interfere between them. And then at some point, it dries up enough that the site is no longer regularly inundated. And this happens sometime in the early epipaleolithic with the Qabbaran. We start getting no marsh deposits and just layer on layer of cultural material, very dense cultural material. We don't have good evidence for people leaving the site, but we make an assumption that they were not there continuously. We know that in individual phases of occupation, we have multi-seasonal use of the site, which we can tell by the isotope analysis that's been done on the gazelle and cement analysis. And so we have a decent sense that people were coming and going to the site exactly from how far around we don't know for these early phases because the stone tool production is so standardized. So in the middle epipale, the most recent phase of occupation, we have this huge range of variability. So they're making all of these different geometric forms, triangles, trapezes, rectangles, lunates, and they make a whole variety, like atypical versions of these. But those atypical versions are not unique to Harana. So for example, it's really common to find, let me go back for this typology, there we go. Nope, this one. So we have, for example, these all come from the middle epipale phase at Harana. And the original excavator made 14 different types of these particular trapezes. But what's interesting is when you look at them in detail, some of them are trapezes that have no vacuum. So just the ends are retouched and they're not back here. Well, you find those at other sites in the Negev. And in fact, these ventilated and pointed pieces, number 12, you find those at particular sites in the Negev, in Southern Jordan, in the Jordan Valley, where at those sites, that is the one type that dominates over everything else. So there's almost no other type of trapeze, for example. And so you have these kind of geographic clusters of different forms of micro-lists. It's really cumbersome to say, but so you have the area that produces these triangles, this area that produces the hooked trapezes, this area that produces the ventilated trapezes, this area that produces the trapezes that are not backed, but they have both ends modified. But we find all of those at Harana. And as far as we know, it's the only site where we have all of these in the same stratigraphic layer. So not in different stratigraphic layers, but in the same stratigraphic layers. So, and we find a lot of marine shell, which is also coming from these other areas. The raw material is all relatively local. So people aren't just bringing stone tools from somewhere else, they're actually making them at the site or in the immediate area. And so what we've made the case for is that this represents people bringing some things with them, but really bringing the knowledge about how to make stone tools in their particular way. So bringing that tradition of making this predominant type of stone tool and doing it at the site. And so you have this kind of fluid community or communities of foot mappers who are, you know, it's a different composition each time. It depends on who is there at that particular moment that lead us to believe that we have these aggregations. It's also where we see communal activity, not all of these discrete deposits. So we don't have caches in the Middle Epipelolithic. We have a lot of inscribed bone and stone. We have tons more of these marine shells coming from the Mediterranean and the Red Sea than we do in other contexts. And it looks very different from the type of deposits that we find in the early Epipelolithic. And the other thing I should mention is that we don't assume that the entire site was occupied each time people were there. So we have different occupations that would have been there, different numbers of people that would have been aggregating at different times. We have been very hesitant to suggest that it's any more concentrated than that. Like that people were sedentary there or their year round because we don't really have evidence for that at any other site. So yeah. But determining year-roundedness, sedentism at these sites is, I would hazard to say virtually impossible at this point with any degree of certainty. Said answer your question, it was very long when you've been answered. Yeah, let's see. I asked you about how they spent their time on these places. You're treated by the top of hearts, at least 30 locations to have that one with up to a little tiny bit of drying and a little bit of smoothing, smoking thing. And then you had a picture of the reconstruction. That's the other thing that I thought of you know sort of an artist reconstruction of one of your faces. Oh, that wasn't from our site. Nope. In your discrete time period or if it's your extended moment, how would you all right now see how people of the living VW force in these places are there for some of these times? Yeah. And how to make tools and hang out and bring food back, blah, blah. So still, so what can you say about the sequence of these three phases? I know you're probably having a hard time. It does. For you? Yeah, but it's difficult to, I mean, the same layer has hearts and post-holes but with such a limited area open, it's difficult to say what the relationship between those is. But in the other phases, we have no indoor hearts. So no hearts are actually inside structures that we've found so far. Well, we don't know that they're indoor. We just know we have post-holes and we have hearts but they could be similar to what we see in the middle epipelulithic where the post-holes surround. And we have heart on top of heart until longer than, yeah. We do. At this point, you don't know if they're in the only outdoors. They're only outdoors, yeah. So for example, in the, so this is actually a, you'll just tell a reconstruction. It's not Harana at all. It's just to use an example of activity areas in space. It's very lovely. I know. I love it very much. I love all these constructions, actually. Oh, I must have passed it away. This one, sorry. So if you, maybe in this light, thank you. So here we have structure one, structure two. There's actually a third structure. We haven't fully excavated. That is partially superimposed on structure one. And so it might represent a different timeframe. Right now our radiocarbon dates, at least to the best that we can do with radiocarbon dates at this time. So that structure one and structure two could be contemporary. They overlap pretty much 100% in the radiocarbon dates. In between them is actually a pretty large hearth in that space. There's four caches of lithics. And there's, so this is our only hearth that is actually stone lined as well. There's complete tortoise shells and there's a whole series of gazelle horn cores that are burnt, but that are still articulated and attached to the frontal bone of the gazelle that are placed around that hearth, sticking straight up. Yeah. And it was clearly very intensively used. It's absolutely full of bits of charcoal and burnt bone, but so are a lot of our deposits on site. Most of our post holes, in fact, are filled with burnt material, both burnt bone and charcoal. So they're doing really interesting things with these features when they're done with them, whether they're post holes, like putting a big flint nodule into them or whether they're hearths or whether they're structures, what all that means, I don't know. But it's interesting. I'll ask you about plants and other types. Yeah. Great to see your question about what you mentioned in the past, where you talked about how the team might have been looking for the presence of a cult, something very new to site. Oh, I see. I was wondering if there was a message between that and the source of the cult? Why were you looking for that cult? The stone pool with all this material and it was completely wrong. The raw material and the faulting are completely separate things. The reason that we were looking for evidence of faultings to bad AJ wasn't here in person, he could talk about that at length. But essentially we were looking for some kind of explanatory mechanism for why these marshes seem to suddenly disappear. So we have wetlands around, we have no idea predating what, but we know the site was pretty wet, like the immediate vicinity of the site and occasionally the site itself at about 20,000 years ago during the Nizan and occupation. We have done OSL dates of marsh deposits just offsite that are 21 to 22,000 years ago. And we know that it starts drying out in the Kabaran phase of occupation, at least enough that people could stay at the site without it regularly inundating. And then the site is abandoned in the middle Epipaleolithic around eight and a half thousand years ago, which doesn't correlate particularly well with any major environmental change. It's as things are trending towards drier and hotter with an increase in seasonality, which changes. So most of the rest of this part of the world experiences this climatic optimum, this amelioration at about this time where things get generally warmer and wetter, but it seems like the impact of that in the Eastern desert is the opposite. It gets warmer, but it doesn't get wetter. Evapotranspiration increases and it dries out. And that's when we start to see the beginnings of the desert-like environment that we see now. But the last phases of occupation of Harana during the middle Epipaleolithic predate that, but it's clear that things were getting drier and people were leaving and didn't come back. So we have no evidence of later phases of use of the site at all, except for the Bedouin who come and walk over the site and have little campfires, but that's it. And so we were looking for a potential explanatory mechanism for why these wetlands would disappear. So, and a change in tectonics would suggest a major change in groundwater drainage that would potentially cause that. But we didn't find any faults. That's not the reason. Raw material readily available. Yeah. So we've actually done extensive geological survey around the area mapping out the different sources of Flint. And basically everything we find at the site is available within 15 to 25 kilometers from the site. So they definitely focused on the more local stuff in the Cabaran when they were making these highly standardized, narrow-faced cores, very small, gray-siled bladelets. But in the Nazanin and the middle Epipaleolithic, and you can see that in some of these images. So this is actually my favorite piece. That's why you see it repeatedly in this presentation. My favorite piece that we saw this summer and this lighting on the screen does not do it justice. It's basically like looking at a sunset in Flint. And it comes from the Nazanin phase of occupation. This is that early phase. You can see a wide range of material, including Chal Sydney. So they're, and it's not unusual to find that in the local environment. And this is all kind of this brownish grayish material that comes mostly from the local area. And then in the middle Epipaleolithic, it's hugely variable again. So those are very specific choices in raw material use and also represent how far away from the immediate vicinity of the site they're willing to go and travel, which makes sense if we're talking about episodes of aggregation where people are coming and maybe not gonna carry their Flint the whole way there, but maybe you stop at some outcrops that you know that has material you really like and you just carry it, you know, the rest of the way to Heronophore for short distance rather than lug big rocks a long distance. So the, both of the early phases are really focused on core shaping, not on core maintenance. Whereas the middle Epipale phases really focused on core maintenance. I'm basically fixing the core as you're going along and spending less effort in its initial shaping, but they're also using a wide range of core of core shapes rather than just these narrow-faced. Yeah, yeah, which you would absolutely expect if, you know, we're talking about groups who are bringing raw material to the site using it, leaving the debris around, you could just pick up a core. It's also what you see a lot in Flintnapping learning contexts where you're not gonna waste good raw material on teaching someone or on a kid who wants to learn how to Flintnap. You give them this stuff that is either poor quality or that's already been, you know, used as far as you're concerned and let them play around with that. So. And then the napping tools where they really were thinking of, yeah, the maritime resources from the drone, like Shell was there. No, it's in every level. Yeah. They had access to it, yeah. But it's a lot more abundant in the middle Epipale than it is in the earlier ones. Yeah, because I wonder if they used in the fed bone or something, I guess, if they would use some, you know, maritime stuff at the pressure point. Yeah, we don't have any evidence of that and we have pretty excellent bone preservation, but they're using a lot of gazelle antler as percussors and pressure flakers. Yeah. Do we have any other ground models for those small post-coals around the fire, kind of smoke and action going on that you kind of trying for? Yeah, I'm trying to think. So the student who, well, she's not a student now, the collaborator Anna Speeru who published the paper on this, this meat drying paper, I think she used ethnographic examples from Tully groups actually, as our collaborator who did the hut reconstructions has done for some of these early huts here and at other sites that you find 20,000 years ago in this part of the world, these kind of rebundled structures. But otherwise, not that I'm aware of. Yeah. I remember something like that in the roof frame box site at Chathall. I remember one of these parts has obviously no, it's not post-history, but you know, almost like the, like it was, but there was this ground in the very beginning of the year. So I mean, that's, you know, X, 10,000 years. Yeah, I mean, you can find lots of examples of small post-coals around huts to dry meat, but I'm not sure how relevant they are to this material. Yeah. They were pretty, wind-brake. Yeah. And so wind-brake, the smaller, but the key is, you know, interesting, I think you're going to have a comment. It's something, yeah. It provides, you know, such a sense of pain. But even hanging filets, like, but we do have really good evidence of, amongst the woodtree patterns from the gazelle is that they were flaying them. I mean, there was, there's more gazelle than you care to deal with. So they're not concerned, in any time phase at this site, they're not conserving gazelle. They're clearly hunting large numbers of them. They seem to be a little bit more targeted in their early phase, but it's basically whole herd calls in the middle epipaleolithic. And they're not, you know, spending a lot of energy, getting every bit of meat off of them. There's some evidence for getting at the marrow, you know, for breaking them open to get at the marrow, but that is not what we find in this particular area around the hearths and the post holes. They're basically getting at big cuts of meat. And that's it. Like you can find partially articulated carcasses still in the middens. Yeah, so it's a gazelle, gazelle pelusa. Yeah, so gazelle, I mean, gazelle are grassland animals. There's two different types of gazelle that we have at the site and that are known from the area, which are sedentary and migratory gazelle. And we have both of them at the site. There was clearly grasslands in the surrounding area. We have it both in the plant remains. We have it in the faunal material, but we also have wetland, or yeah, wet, water dependent animals. So we have like a huge range of species that are actually represented at the site. However, when you do like simple tallies of a minimum number of individuals and then NISPs, it's gazelle that are 85 to 95% of the faunal assemblage, but there's wild ass, there's wild equids, there's auric, there's ostrich, there is wolf, jackal, fox, tons of fox, there's hare, there's tortoise, there's a whole range. We have a lot of waterfowl. So there's both wetland and grassland animals here. They were clearly hunting a lot of gazelle, but they didn't have to go far to get it. So we're probably talking, especially in the later phases, like in the middle phase when the wetland is drying up, we've probably very close to that interface between the wetlands and these grassland areas. Yeah, and we have evidence of them being at the site year round in some layers, but only seasonally in other areas. Thank you.