 Thank you all for being here today and for having me. My name is Rufka Chayson and today I'm gonna focus less on the raw material itself and more on the distribution and kind of patterns we see within these decorated basalt vessels. Now the calcothic period in the southern Levant, it's from approximately 45 to 3,900 calibrated BC. And the time span isn't so different from the preceding pottery and eolithic. We still have the same small-scale agro-pastoral communities, but we do start to see notable changes including economic and technological developments, social developments with new burial practices. Of course, copper and beginning of craft specialization. And intertwined with all of this, in the southern Levant as we see an increase in regionalization with clear differentiation between the north and south. And of course, these terms are always relative, but the south in this case is basically everything south of modern-day Tel Aviv. So common to the north we see some unique items including basalt pillar figurines and perforated flint discs. Well, common to the south are items like copper, ivory, cornets and micro bladelets and scrapers. And while these boundaries can sometimes blur that they aren't perfect, most researchers we're seeing as we excavate more and more that these patterns are kind of pretty clear and stable. At the same time, we notice an incredible increase in the frequency of basalt vessels. Basalt vessels usually form about 15 to 30% of a ground stone tools assemblage, but at some sites they can form 60% or even more, meaning they can outnumber utilitarian grinding tools and should therefore be considered at least equally as important. But we see them primarily at settlement sites located all across the southern Levant, even at sites over 60 kilometers away from potential basalt sources. And we also occasionally see them in burial caves. And the vessels are made in two main forms. You have the flat-based B-shaped bowl. Second, you have this fenestrated pedestal vessel which is made from a solid piece of basalt. So you have that very same V-shaped bowl sitting on top of a pedestal base that someone has gone in hollowed out and carved three or four windows into. And despite their high frequency and presence at domestic sites, I like to think and there are some people who argue against this that these are probably somewhat of a utilitarian but somewhat prestige item, parts because of the non-local nature of the raw material. Obviously, 60 kilometers isn't the most, the greatest distance to travel, but for basalt to import either the finished product or the raw material isn't so easy. These things are heavy. We're talking about a bowl with sometimes a diameter of 55 centimeters, it's big. And second, that it requires a high amount of skill and effort to produce these, especially with the fenestrated vessels that when you form these, there must be an incredible risk of just breaking the vessel. And all of this is particularly notable considering that we have pottery now so you don't actually need a stone vessel, it's completely irrelevant. And in addition, the value of these was sometimes supplemented by the application of decoration. The decoration was usually incised but we also have some formed in relief which is just technologically slightly different where you're removing the material from around decoration by incising and abrading. Now, over the course of my research, I personally studied the decorated basalt vessels from 17 calcific sites and then of course conducted an overwhelmingly extensive literature review and found hundreds more spread throughout the Southern Levant. We do see kind of concentrations here or that we have in the south, in the northern Negev region and in these kind of central coastal plain and valleys. What we see is that further north, decoration is less common and it doesn't seem to be so much of an excavation bias because in Israel, we excavate where we build and we build everywhere. Decoration is usually applied on about 11 to 36% of the fragments at a given site but of course that doesn't mean that 11 to 36% of the vessels were decorated. When I work on an assemblage, of course I try to refit them but even then the minimum number of vessels isn't necessarily the most representative that we never quite come to kind of forming even what you would call an incomplete vessels. We're dealing with something that's very highly fragmented. Well, what I do think you can see here is that there is no one site with an overwhelmingly high frequency of decorated basalt vessel fragments that could represent a decoration production center even though this is problematic because just incising basalt doesn't leave much of a trace in the production. So the only thing you could really have to identify it would be perhaps an overwhelming high frequency of decorated vessels. Now the most common decoration form are these incised triangles placed around the rim area. They're formed by two incised lines and then kind of the third line is the vessel rim. And this design has a pretty wide distribution used all the way from the northern Negev to our lower Galilee and can be applied on sometimes up to 60% of the rim fragments at a given site. What we see is that these triangles are usually placed on the interior rim which when you start to think about it more is actually a bit logical because with open form vessels it's placed like we're talking about really open form vessels that it's placed below eye level. It's actually easier to see the decoration on the interior rim. These triangles are also usually filled with the catches that have a directionality to them, the angle from the upper right corner to the lower left side. We can also see some sort of general patterns in this triangle morphology. They're usually about 100 to 400 millimeters squared, portionally wide, acute formed with three angles less than 90 degrees and they have an immense symmetry to them where that the opposite sides are more or less the same. Now the next key decoration form are these raised bands which is the only decoration form we see during this period made in relief. The bands also have the widest distribution used in basically all of modern day Israel and we see them applied to a wide variety of vessel forms but mainly on these fenestrated vessels and generally the bands are placed less than 15 millimeters above the vessel base formed with a convex cross section and it's generally one band per vessel. And to recap what we see here within the triangles and raised bands is an overwhelming sense of uniformity and because of this, if we look at vessels from Bersheva in the Northern Nega from your Tel Aviv in the Central Coastal Plain and from your Haifa in the Lower Galilee, we see that all the vessels and all the decorations look more or less the same that you can't differentiate them. Yet we don't see here a single clear production center and maybe one day we'll find it but as of yet it seems that multiple individuals or perhaps multiple smaller centers are producing these decoration forms while using the same general guidelines. But aside from triangles and raised bands on a more limited number of vessels we see the so-called elaborate decoration which isn't just one motif, it's multiple of these used in combinations and we have a couple of geometric motifs including incised parallel horizontal lines, herringbone, diamonds, cross-hatching, alternating hatched triangles and more. And there's a high degree of variability but within this we note two general patterns. First, parallel horizontal lines aren't a motif or whatever in their own right. They're almost always very clearly used to frame the other motifs and create kind of a sense of order to the vessel. And second, these elaborate motifs are often paired with the triangles on the rim area. On 90% of the rim fragments and complete vessels we see triangles on the interior rim and on 9% we also see triangles on the exterior rim. So it shows that the two motifs can be used in combination and they don't represent necessarily two different production strategies or cultural variation or chronological variation but they're really tied together. And we can see that these elaborate decorations are very clearly used to cover the entirety of flat-based vessels but with fenestrated forms it's a bit more complicated because the fenestrated vessels that we're seeing decorated are highly fragmented and all we have are the leg or ring-based fragments and it's further aggravated by the fact that it's several sites with these fenestrated forms. We don't have any even rim or wall fragments. So this could suggest that if the fenestrated forms were fully decorated, then we may be looking at some deliberate fragmentation and a separation between the bowl and the fenestrated pedestal base and then there's still the question of where's the bowl because we haven't found it yet. So far, 78 of such fragments have been published. I know of a few more but it still follows this general distribution and low frequency and we see that the vessels are used from the northern Negev and through the Jezre valley in the north and the Jordan valley in the east and the triangles and Rezvans are both used much further north. What we see is that at most sites we're usually talking about one to four of such fragments although there are a few sites with a bit more. And just to talk about frequency, elaborate decoration is usually applied on about four to 11% of the fragments at a given site. In contrast, at these various same sites that I could calculate the frequency for, triangles are used on eight to 30% of the fragments so significantly more. What we're seeing is that these elaborate decorations form a very small percentage of the decorated vessels and of course at most sites there are none. So if we're going to say that these elaborate decorations perhaps added more value to the vessels first that they just required more time and skill to produce. Put this in perspective. For me to form after some practice one triangle on a piece of basalt with the hatches and everything takes six minutes. So, and it's not even so pretty. So we're talking about here probably a full day of work to decorate a vessel with decoration you don't need for a vessel you don't even need. And in addition, while the same geometric motifs are being used on no two vessels are they arranged in the exact same way. So each one is one of a kind and this gives it immense amounts of value. And these elaborately decorated basalt vessels also share this Southern Prestige Item Distribution Network that we see very clearly for example with copper and ivory. And this suggests perhaps that there was a Southern Prestige Item Distribution Network and that the more Northern sites didn't have something of value or equal value to give an exchange or perhaps they didn't consider these decorations and these vessels valuable. And it's particularly unusual considering that some of our major basalt sources come from these Northern regions. So the vessels themselves most likely originated from there. So they were coming down undecorated and then decorated and then not redistributed further north most likely. And what we're seeing here is also that the distribution is again more limited than the more conventionally decorated and then the undecorated basalt vessels. So we're getting at is that there should be a separate production and distribution network for these. We see that these elaborately decorated basalt vessels though like almost all the other basalt vessels are primarily found at domestic sites. So far I've only seen them in one barrio cave Shoham and this shows that the elaborately decorated basalt vessels had value and probably a practical function in domestic context and that people actively chose not to bring them into mortuary context which is unusual because other prestige items are incorporated into barrio caves. And it means then that people actively chose not to bring them there maybe because that the function itself was only in utilitarian context or maybe they were too valuable to take out of circulation and incorporate into barrio caves. And finally, if we look outside of the basalt vessel industry we do see parallels to these motifs on other mediums particularly pottery and copper items. And with pottery we see these motifs incised and painted on a wide variety of vessel forms in the calcolithic period and even slightly before. So what we're looking at is probably a motif and a kind of style that was borrowed from the pottery industry and then replicated on basalt given extra value just by the sheer difficulty in incising the basalt. So to summarize, during the calcolithic period we really see an immense increase in the frequency of decoration. We look at all the preceding periods with basalt vessels maybe one to 12, a dozen, maybe a little more are decorated with various inconsistent motifs with no clear patterns. But during the calcolithic period we all of a sudden start to see hundreds of basalt vessel fragments formed with conventional decoration forms the triangles and raised bands that were formed in accordance with accepted guidelines and kind of link calcolithic communities across the Southern Levant with maybe symbolic tradition or at the very least a decoration productive tradition but the elaborate decoration is something different entirely. It speaks a different story with no clear standardization and a more limited production distribution. And these could have presented in a part in an attempt to break the rules by creating something that doesn't follow any guidelines and you go beyond the conventional formulations and in doing this you create something of immense value which again it could relate the differences here it could relate to perhaps a different function to these or perhaps a separate production but I want to reinforce that we're seeing here is not a form of a counterculture where we don't have the people using triangles on the one hand and then a separate group saying we hate the triangle people we're gonna make elaborate decoration something crazy waste a lot of our time but make something beautiful. Instead these relate to the value of the vessels themselves and the effort that goes behind creating the decoration forms. Finally I would like to thank all the researchers who allowed me to study their decorated basalt vessels and all of you for being here today. Thank you.