 We're very pleased to have Lisa Maher here at the Anthropology Department talking about her ongoing research. This is a longer project that she has been working on with people from the University of Tulsa, as you can see here on the front page. And I know we're going to get a lot of good imagery from what she's been engaged with and what she's finding. So I'm good to let her speak. She obviously is an assistant professor here and been here for five years. And came from the University of Tulsa, but got her degree from the University of Toronto. Working in paleolithic scholarship link to settlements. So that's a good thing. And you can see that a little bit in her title. Persistent places or occupying wide slash wild open spaces. Alternative pathways to neolithicization. In the prehistory of the Neury. So please welcome Professor Maher. Thank you very much. I also have an idea if that's the correct way to say that word. It's a term I hate very much. Which is why I kind of want to talk about some issues around neolithicization in the Near East. As Christine mentioned, this is a project I've been working on for a number of years with colleagues at Tulsa. My co-director at the excavation site I'm going to talk about today is at the University of Tulsa. But it includes people from many, many other institutions. So I certainly don't want to give the impression that this is a one or even a two person show. It certainly involves many different people. So what I thought I would talk about today, since I realized that I think it's been three years, two years anyway, since I gave a brown bag talk, kinds of bigger pictures, bigger picture questions that we've been looking at, as well as some of the newer field research and analyses that we've been conducting. So some of you have heard some of this in one form or another. And then there'll be some new information added here and there. So I will go very briefly over some aspects of what I will show and talk about and then take a little bit more time and some of the newer stuff that we've been working on. So some of the kind of key themes of this research project, which is, if I go back for a moment, the little logo in the top center, EFAP, the Epipaleolithic Foragers in Azrak Project. Epipaleolithic is a horribly cumbersome word to say again and again and again in a talk. So I may inadvertently short form it to Epipale or EP, which you'll probably see throughout the text of the presentation. But this is a large project that's based around a number of research themes, which I have listed up here, which include trying to understand human environment relationships. So trying to put together a reconstruction of what the landscape in eastern Jordan, so this project is based in eastern Jordan, look like and how it's changed over the last 20,000 years, but focusing in on kind of the first 10,000 years of the last 20,000 years. So from about 20,000 to 10,000 years ago, to say simply. It includes a lot of geomorphological, hydrological, and micromorphological work, the latter of which is my specialty. In particular, we're trying to relate these past landscapes to issues of hunter-gatherer activities in that 10,000 year span of time in eastern Jordan. So thinking about things like aggregation and mobility, interaction networks between this particular site that I'm going to talk about, and surrounding contemporary sites in the region. And then thinking a little bit more specifically about particular aspects of material culture. I will talk a little bit more about stone tools because it's what I happen to work on most. But there are other related aspects of the analysis of archaeobotanical material, faunal material, marine shell, which we find a lot of at the site, that I'll touch on a little bit that revolve around these same themes, which include trying to understand various aspects of prehistoric technology. And when it comes to the chips down, thinking about things like communities of practice and the role of different napping traditions and the way in which those traditions are taught or learned by members of the site itself, the one I'm going to talk about today, but also the larger region. I also just came from three hours of lecturing before this, so we'll see how my voice lasts. So one of the key themes that I've been working on, and working on quite a bit in the last couple of years with our dear colleague, Meg Konke, is thinking about some issues of hunter-gatherer landscapes and particularly hunter-gatherer house and home. Or whether or not, and we would argue yes, these terms can be applied to hunter-gatherer groups in the same way that we very comfortably apply them to later Neolithic farmers, particularly in the Near East. So talking about hunter-gatherers as having homes and built environments on sites but also thinking about those more broadly in terms of regional communities and interacting communities. So we've actually borrowed some ideas from other researchers working on similar things in other parts of the world, including Michelle Langley's work talking about understanding both social landscapes, so the interaction between people across a very large geographical space, but also thinking about how people react and interact with particular aspects of the physical landscape itself and how entangled those things are. So this is actually an illustration, a reconstruction of trying to think about those things at Harana that was done by a previous student of mine here a couple of years ago. One of the really key aspects of this work that Meg and I have been thinking about and particularly and are trying desperately to finish a paper on is thinking about the use of the terms houses versus huts. In particular how they are used in the Near East as well as for Meg's case the Upper Paleolithic in Europe. In particular in the Near East, we very comfortably call Neolithic villages communities. People build houses, these houses are aggregated together into these rather large settlements and communities, whereas we tend to be much more conservative in the use of these terms in the Epipaleolithic. Even when we have sites that have clear built structures, we shy away from imbuing these with anything more than simply kind of being a shelter from the elements. And so this has kind of caused us to think more particularly about this idea of house and home and community at a particular site. In my case at Herana 4, the site I'm going to talk about today, but also thinking about these concepts more broadly in the landscape. So whether or not we can use these terms to think about hunter-gatherer communities not just at one site, but over a larger area where we see clear evidence for the movement of people in the trade and exchange of goods between sites. So thinking about questions on a site such as do activities in public versus private spaces reflect changes in the way people are interacting with each other, particularly at the aggregation site I'm going to talk about today where we think we have hunter-gatherer groups coming from a large area, not just immediately around the site, but a much larger area, aggregating of the site and interacting with people that they are probably not regularly interacting with in other times when they're not at the site. And then thinking about whether or not we can track some of the social interaction in the broader landscape. So the goal is what we have called people in the Neolithic. So thinking about how we understand communities, who is coming to the site Herana 4 that I'm going to talk about, are these communities changing over time, and then how does this fit with what's going on in a pretty dramatically changing landscape at the end of the Pleistocene and into the beginning of the Holocene. So to give you some geographical context here, I am focusing in on Southwest Asia, which is actually a quite broad area, includes a number of countries, but in particular I am zooming into eastern Jordan, this area over here. So this is the Mediterranean Sea, this is the island of Cyprus, here we have the Red Sea, this is the Dead Sea, this is the Sea of Galilee, and we're actually working in what is today a very dry desert environment in eastern Jordan. And if we zoom in here, this dashed area is the Azraq Basin. So the larger regional project looks at a number of sites from about a 10,000 year span of prehistory in this Azraq Basin. But the site I'm going to talk about in detail today is located right here in the western portion of this basin, and it is marked here by the star. One note that I want to make, which is of relevance for the map I just showed, but also for trying to understand hunter-gatherers or really any groups in the past on a landscape, which is that our contemporary archaeological practices are very much colored and molded in various directions because of the geopolitical situation in the Middle East, which we're all very aware of in the news today. So we have countries like Jordan, which itself has very, very bizarre borders, things that were entirely created by Winston Churchill, actually, in negotiations of carving up much of this part of the world, and research has very much stuck to these borders. So, for example, we know a lot about Jordan, Israel, West Bank. We knew a lot until 2010 about what was going on in Syria, particularly southern Syria. Work in Iraq has been halted for quite a long time. It now seems to be picking up again. And so what we can understand at any given point in time is kind of piecemeal depending on where it's possible to do research. But it's important to keep in mind because these are modern geopolitical borders, of course, and have little bearing on our reconstructions in the past. However, even archaeologists tend to extend borders or create borders back into the past. So this is a map that a very recently published map I should add. I won't name the colleague who published it. But it shows that this idea of kind of carving out borders or boundaries as kind of confined spaces that people would have moved within is very much apparent in the archaeological record here. And so frames a lot of how we think about things. The epipaleolithic is, as I mentioned, a 10,000-year span of prehistory. It runs roughly from about 23,000 years ago, where we have the upper paleolithic beforehand, to about 11,500 years ago, the end of the Pleistocene. We very broadly divide up the 10,000 years of the epipaleolithic here, abbreviated EP, I think throughout the rest of the presentation, it's probably mostly abbreviated into early, middle, and late phases. And we make a distinction between these three phases based on a whole variety of types of material culture differences. But primarily, even still, changes in stone tool technologies, where early epipaleolithic groups make these very kind of narrow, graysile microlifts, so very small stone tools. That's the kind of characteristic feature of the epipaleolithic period. So making stone tools that are five centimeters or smaller in size, halting a whole bunch of them together to make one larger composite tool. The middle epipaleolithic with somewhat larger geometrically shaped microlifts, usually in the form of trapezes or rectangles or triangles or something like that. And then the late epipaleolithic with these very small characteristic crescent shaped pieces. So those are very broad, very basic definitions to distinguish between these three phases. However, if you're an epipale researcher, particularly a lithics person, we can get into a whole another conversation about how each of these has been subdivided into a whole series of local and geographically distinct entities and chronologically different industries, entities, faces that are based primarily on stone tool differences. The site that I'm going to talk about, Horana 4, fits in this time period right here, predominantly early epipaleolithic but also into the middle epipaleolithic. And in fact, this background diagram is a little bit old and out of date, this boundary should actually be shifted earlier in time. So we have both an early and a middle epipale component. We, in this project, were particularly interested in the early and the middle epipaleolithic because this is the time period when we are supposed to have, according to conventional frameworks, very mobile hunter-gatherer groups, what we would call in very traditional hunter-gatherer terminology, simple mobile hunter-gatherers, in comparison to the late epipaleolithic, which are often, however, inappropriately compared to hunter-gatherer, complex hunter-gatherer groups, for example, of the northwest coast of North America, where they show increases in sedentism and a whole variety of other apparent changes in material culture, which I've just shown here in a number of diagrams. However, the more we excavate these earlier sites, the more we see that a lot of these features we can find much earlier in time. I've already given you a little bit of background in the project, so I'm not going to go into any real detail here, except to say that the excavations that I'm going to talk about today are part of a larger epipaleolithic and forager, epipaleolithic, see, it's very difficult to say, it's a larger and as-raq project, which includes not just the site of Herana 4, but a whole variety of sites focused on a couple of key issues that have to do with hunter-gatherers and changing landscapes in those interrelationships. The larger area that's covered by the project is the as-raq basin. It is a 12,000 and a half square kilometer area in eastern Jordan, so actually here's a better image of the boundaries of the basin itself, which are basically mapped onto the as-raq drainage basin, which is a series of, and you can see them in the satellite imagery here, a series of seasonal rivers and channels and streams that flow centrally towards the as-raq oasis, which is located in this area right here. The site that I'm talking about is located further to the west. The as-raq oasis used to look like this. It was a very lush area, lots of water available year-round, and it was a big focus for migratory terrestrial and waterfowl that would travel through the area. Nowadays, it does not look like that at all. This is the little bit of water that is left. Instead, and we don't have to worry about this top illustration, this is the wetlands today, a much smaller area than it once was. Basically, the basin all drains toward this oasis, the kind of central lowest point in the larger basin, particularly rainwater and shallow moving groundwater that comes from the Jabal Druze, the mountainous area to the south, which is in northern Jordan, but particularly in southern Syria. So it's supposed to feed the wetland, but it's actually now diverted both before it gets to the wetland and at the wetland itself to supply fresh water to urban areas, including Jordan's capital, Amman, as well as a number of agricultural fields. Here is the area around the site. Well, this is actually the site here, and this is what the landscape looks like today. This is one of the seasonal rivers that I was mentioning that flows towards the Azaracoasis. Believe it or not, it actually does fill with the winter rains. It's just those rains are not coming as often and as in abundance as they used to. And in fact, this water no longer flows all the way to the Azaracoasis because the Department of Agriculture built a large reservoir, water reservoir to capture all this water, just about 200 meters in this direction. We had to convince them to move it not to destroy the site. This water is for migratory... Well, Bedouin, who are moving their camel and sheep herds between eastern Jordan and areas in the highlands further to the west. This is Zooming Out, taken from a helicopter. So an aerial image of the site of Hurana, which is this darkened area right here. You can see some of our trucks as we're driving towards the site here. So to give you an idea of what the landscape looks like today. And this is an image that was stitched together from some aerial drone photography we did over the site in 2015. You can see very clearly this river, this is the Wadi Hurana, Wadi is Arabic for a seasonal river, that flows towards the Azaracoasis, or used to, until it now gets caught in a reservoir that's right about there. The area of the site is really quite notable. It's really a huge site for this time period. It's 21,000 square meters in size. It's also incredibly dense in material. So it has this dark color because the surface looks like this. So it's just paved and flint, an animal bone. And in fact, their images, we took these drone images, and you can actually zoom in and see individual artifacts on the surface, covering this entire surface, and also a similar density of material at depth. So we have about a meter and a half to two meters in some areas of equally dense material below the surface. So the reason this site still exists in this environment is because deflation has eroded an unknown portion of the upper most levels of the site, at least a few centimeters if not more, created this really dense pavement of material and then protected everything below from further wind erosion. Our big questions are why such a huge hunter-gatherer site here in what is a very desert environment today and what types of occupations would have created such an archaeologically rich site? So, and I'll go relatively briefly over this, some of our work to address the first question, why here have been to try and understand and reconstruct the changing paleo environment. We suspect not any great leap of logic to think that the environment today was nothing like it was in the past, and it was very, very different in order to be able to support such a large site. And so we've gone about work on site and off site to try and document these environmental changes. And you can see some of the areas, this is the site right here, so a topographic map showing the mound which rises very gently, although it's actually the highest thing in the surrounding landscape, but it rises only about a meter and a half to two meters above the surrounding terraces. We've been working also at many of these terraces to try and understand both how the site has both formed during occupation, how it's been preserved, but also how it relates to how the landscape has been changing in these surrounding terraces. So we've done a lot of mapping and a lot of coring and trenching of areas on site including right here, as well as off site to try and get a sense of how these areas relate to each other and what we can document of the paleo landscape. One thing that was immediately apparent both on site and off site are these very, very distinctive deposits which you can see right here, marked by this whitish area which is calcium carbonate, which is precipitated out of standing water. So these are actually ancient lake deposits that have now dried up and we find them both off site, so this one comes from right here, as well as on site. So the very base, the earliest levels of occupation at the site are actually found in these lake deposits. At periods when the lake levels were low, people were occupying this area. When lake levels rose, they were not and then when they would dry out again, people would come back until the lakes had receded enough that people stayed put on site and they were adjacent to the kind of new, slightly receded shoreline of the lake. And you can see there are actually several post holes that are dug into these lake deposits. We've done a lot of sedimentological and georcheological work on these deposits, on site and off site, to try and track what conditions would have been like. I won't go through all of these in detail. What I can say is our particle size analysis here is showing area A is on site, area B is off site, or sorry, area B is also on site, and then this lighter color here is off site. So our deposits very generally on site are a little bit coarser, which is no surprise it reflects the anthropogenic input into the sediment. It also changes things like magnetic susceptibility. They were building a lot of fires on site, burning a lot of things, and we see that reflected in the very higher, much, much higher magnetic susceptibility readings that we get in our on site areas compared to our off site areas. We also see notable differences in other types of, in other elements from the site versus off site, which include primarily evidence that the lake deposits were freshwater deposits and contain a really high content of freshwater ostracods, which can give us some information about environmental conditions and the type of water, whether it was standing water or flowing water, and we actually see both in our on site deposits. We can put together this information from on site and off site and kind of map out these sections. These are the site deposits here, these three dark bars, and then our off site stratigraphic sections. We have water and elevation decreasing, basically downstream heading eastwards towards the Azraq basin, or sorry, the Azraq Oasis, and we have dates, I haven't put all of them on here, but you can see our dates line up relatively nicely, so our sections surrounding this site where we get these lake deposits because they're mostly what we've been able to date through OSL dating, give us dates of around 20, 21, 22,000 years ago, and then we have occupation of the site dating about 20,000 years ago, but slightly more recently as this lake is drying out, people are basically living on its edge. Oh, and so we have the site right here. You can see it sits as a slight mound in the surrounding landscape and evidence both underneath the occupation deposits but also in the surrounding terraces for the presence of these lakes, but we use the term lake very loosely. Probably more like wetlands actually, and I'll talk a little bit more about how we know that as we go through. Our excavations onsite have focused in two areas mainly, although we've done test trenches in various other areas, including a long geological trench to try and match onsite and offsite deposits. We focused in these two areas because it's where the previous excavator, the site was excavated with two very small test trenches in the 80s, had found some interesting things that we wanted to continue to explore. So we've opened up a much, much larger area just to give you an idea of what it's like working there today. We now have a lot of Bedouin who bring their camel and sheep herds by the site going to visit this new reservoir. We work in the hot sun with lots of sand. It's usually very windy when we go in the spring. It's a little bit too hot to go later on. We start, this is actually about seven in the morning, so by about seven it starts getting really, really, really hot. And in the spring the wind picks up, so try as we might to have shade tents over our excavations. It just does not work. We have lost a lot of money trying to buy shade tents. The one very fortuitous or fortunate thing for us in this now dry desert landscape is that it has been like that for about the last 17,000 years. And in fact the drawing out of this part of the Azarak Basin is one of the reasons why this site was abandoned about 18,000 years ago, a little bit more. So this very nice dry desert environment has been great for charcoal preservation, which means we have a really good chronological record of occupation of the site. So from our earliest deposits going through, this is actually two sections put together, our early epipaleolithic deposits here and our middle epipaleolithic deposits here, which has this very lovely sequence of the lowest ones are the oldest and the uppermost ones are the youngest, something that doesn't usually always work out so nicely. And you can get an idea, this is one of the sections that we collected all of these dates from actually. And charcoal is so abundant at the site that in order to get dates from this section we really just have to pick them out of individual contexts. We have hundreds and hundreds of samples more than we will ever, ever be able to afford to process unless a lab decides to do everything for free. So here's what some of the early epipaleolithic deposits look like. So we have this really high resolution stratigraphy, another fortunate thing of rapid burial in a dry desert environment is that we have really good well-preserved stratigraphy, including individual hearths, ash dumps, occupation services, even alternations between these. I'm not sure how well you can see it in the lighting, but we have several alternating layers of orange kind of compact earthen occupation surfaces. These gray lenses of ash dumps and then orange compact surface ash dump and so on and so forth. As well as this dark stain here, which we uncovered while re-excavating the original trench that the earlier excavator dug. And we're very interested to figure out what it was because it's the only really massive thick black deposit we have in the entire site. It's really, really organic rich. It's absolutely full of burnt organic matter, particularly charcoal. When we then exposed that area, what we discovered was a trace. We caught the corner of it right here. So this is the original excavator's very small trench, which the borders of which we are mostly sure about, but not entirely. All we can say is that we found a Mountain Dew bottle at the very bottom, which he very kindly tossed in. And there was also a human burial that came from his trench, although we don't know exactly where. The best we can reconstruct from his notes is that it came from this corner of the bottom of this trench. So it's only a one by one trench. It wasn't a massive thing. And it came from somewhere below that dark layer that I mentioned, which is actually the superstructure, the burnt down superstructure of hut one that we've labeled here. Further, we've now fully excavated hut structure one and discovered that there's actually another hut structure here, partially superimposed on top of it. And most recently, including this past summer, we excavated parts of structure two, which you can see is about a meter to a meter and 20 away. There we go. I'll just go do that. So what's been really interesting with this hut structure is not just the fact that we have multiple hut structures preserved. There's only one other site in this part of the world from the Epipale that documents this. They also have three hut structures. We, I think, have a fourth one, but we haven't excavated there yet fully, so I'm not sure it's where those post holes were really down deeply that I showed earlier. What's really interesting about this hut structure, as well as the ones that were found at the other sites that I mentioned, Ohalo too, is that they show a really interesting sequence of activities associated with their construction, their use, their reuse, and then their eventual abandonment, and in fact intentional destruction. So this structure right here, we excavated in 2013 primarily. Coming down on this structure, we excavated very clearly by an orange, a very bright orange sand, and it was the only deposit in the entire site that did not contain any artifacts. So it was a very intentionally placed deposit. It follows exactly the boundaries of the black layer that was underneath, which represents the burnt superstructure of the hut. It's basically nothing but charcoal and really burnt organic matter. It's a kind of partially wood branch twig superstructure and reed superstructure, which I'll talk about in a moment. However, underneath that sand, before that sealed over the burnt superstructure, we had placed on top of that black layer a large anvil stone, which you can see here, and then several caches of marine shell and red ochre. Three distinct caches in particular, each of which had about 500 or so pierced marine shell, and each one of which had a large, you can see one large chunk here, one large chunk here, and one large chunk here of red ochre, and each chunk is kind of about that size. So it's not ochre that's forming naturally in the soil. Isn't enough water to do that anyways. Something that was brought into the site and placed on this superstructure. I should also mention, in case you didn't gather from the maps earlier, that we're about 200 kilometers away from... God, I've been here for five years and I can't make that transition to miles. I'll just go a kilometers, 200 kilometers away from the Mediterranean Sea and almost 300 kilometers away from the Red Sea, which is where most of the shell is coming from. Below that superstructure, which again only follows the boundaries of the floors below it, so not an accidental fire that kind of spread through the area, but something very deliberate and circumscribed to the hut itself, we found three superimposed floors. Each one had a little bit of kind of loose fill in between, but more importantly or more interestingly, I guess, each of these floors had a lot of material that seems to have been intentionally placed on it and very specific material, things like bone tools, caches of flint cores or caches of just blades or fire-cracked rocks. We don't actually have any evidence for hearths inside. Instead, we have a hearth outside of the hut. And marine shell, and I'll show some of those images in a second. So if we kind of look at a cross-section of the structure, it's kind of dug slightly into existing occupational deposits. We have... I think I did this. There we go. So we have our kind of orange ceiling deposit on top, which had some pieces of natural burnt flint that were probably placed on the organic superstructure that was burnt down and then the sand placed on top. We have our caches of marine shell, which were definitely intentionally placed on the superstructure. And then we have things like articulated vertebrae, five of them of a wild cow, a wild cattle, which you can see right here. Large pieces of ground stone and bone tools that were placed on the first floor. And then second floor and third floor, which look very similar and also have equally interesting things placed on them, which I have images of in a moment. And we've actually pieceplotted all of this out to try and look at differences between not just stone tools, but everything that we find on these floors. And I'm going to go relatively quickly through this part. My colleague at the University of Tulsa, who is a youth wear specialist, has looked in detail at the stone tools in particular, to understand if we have any differences either between floors or between what's going on inside and outside of the huts in terms of the types of stone tools that we find, but also what they may have been used for. So she's been looking at things like edge damage, striations, polish, that sort of thing, to try and identify them to particular activities or materials that they were used on. So as projectiles, cutting, scraping, drilling, and of course there's always a large category of unknown, particularly when it comes to youth wear analysis. So you can see a lot of pieces used as projectiles, so have these very characteristic impact fractures along their edges, as well as cutting and scraping. What is particularly interesting when we map out, so I've taken out all the objects and you can just see them represented by what they've been used for, is that we have almost no microlifts inside of the structures. And if you remember what I said earlier, these are like the tool for the epipelulithic. So over 60% of every tool assemblage for any epipal site, it's kind of the criteria, is microlifts. And we have none of them inside of the structures. Instead we have huge numbers of them outside of the structures. What we do have inside are butchery and hide processing tools. But obviously no clear indication of kind of spatial segregation in the use of those tools. So still a lot more to do on that, but some really interesting patterns that are coming up in the way that these structures are being used in comparison to the spaces outside of the structures, and even on a floor-by-floor basis. In 2016 we excavated a second hut structure, which you can see here as we were uncovering this kind of dark, burnt, organic superstructure part. Which we didn't get very far in excavating, because what we did find is a human burial. So an adult individual here, which was placed on top of that burnt superstructure, or sorry, underneath that burnt superstructure. So the burnt layer actually covered this individual, and they sit on a very compact floor deposit. Well, I say floor, but we actually haven't excavated the floor yet. So obviously floor deposit underneath. So it seems very clear, and the bones are also quite extensively burnt. So it seems as though this person was placed on the last floor of the structure, which was then burnt down and sealed over with this person still there. So a very intentional marking of the end of the life of this structure as well as the other one. I mentioned we were finding really interesting things inside of the structures. We are finding on some of the floors things like marine shell, not only in the caches that I mentioned, but we also find them isolated in caches with other things, like red ochre and flint. So these are all little flints right here, which is actually a core and all of the blades that came off of that core that were all put together in one of the floors. And then we even find kind of linear arrangements of shell, which obviously the string isn't preserved, but we suspect represents shells that would have originally been strung together. We find a lot of bone tools, which is really interesting, because we almost never find bone tools outside of the hut structures. But we have from each floor, we have 10 or 15 bone tools, which is per floor more than we have for all of our contexts in this area outside of the structures. And then we find that they're doing really interesting things with animals, not just inside but outside as well. In particular, inside of the structures, we find things like burnt gazelle horn cores, tortoise shell, tortoise carapace is still articulated together here. And in multiple instances, sometimes several of them on one floor, we find still articulated fox paws. In some cases heavily burnt, but in some cases not at all. I would love to be able to tell you what that means, but I have absolutely no idea whatsoever. So it's ritual. If I come back to this very briefly, what I want to add is something that I've been working on recently, which is looking in detail at the sediments, so micro-scale analysis of the deposits from each of these floors in the hut structures. And what we can say very comfortably, even if we don't know what it means, is that the placement of these things on each of these floors is not just they have been abandoned and moved on. So they're very intentionally placed. There's some fill placed on top of them and then a new floor is placed on top of that. And we have that at least three times in hut structure one. When we look at the floor deposits and the fill, there's basically nothing of the same size as the stuff that is sitting right on top of the floors. So it's not just digging up occupational deposits from elsewhere to use as fill. So it's a very intentional placement with then material that has basically nothing in it as the fill in between. And we can see it's the only slide I have that has artifacts of any notable size from one of these floor deposits because usually we try not to sample where there's lots of artifacts because it means you're not really looking at much soil. But you can see here four circular bone beads which have been broken that sit on. So this is the kind of burnt layer here. There's a large piece of flint right here as well that are sitting on the uppermost floor deposit. We also do find interesting things but in a slightly different context in the spaces outside of the structures. In particular in that meter or so space in between hut structure one and two that I talked about, which include this very large hearth. This is my collaborator at the University of Tulsa and this is another collaborator who's at Copenhagen excavating one of these hearths where again we find tortoise shell and around the hearth and in other areas in between we now have four examples of these burnt gazelle horn cores which are still attached to the frontal bone of the gazelle and they're standing straight up in the deposits. So you can see other examples of that here and in fact also a large cache of ibex and gazelle horn core this time not standing up. We also have a lot of caching of other things including in this case the four articulated paws of a fox, a red fox which had a large partially reduced core inside which our final specialist Louis Martin who's at UCL is reconstructing as being the handles for a fox pelt bag so the pelt is obviously decayed away but the bones would have provided easy carrying handles and would have carried things like a couple of these flint cores and we also find caches of cores with all of the associated debris including the tools that have been removed from them sometimes also with the inclusion of bone tools. So really interesting things going on of which we're still working on what to make of it. The other main excavation area where we've worked is a little bit more recent in time and I'm going to mention it only very briefly what we find here is a very different scenario so in the early epipel levels we have a lot of discrete activities we have these caches, discrete spaces and circumscribed spaces like these hut structures whereas we don't have any of that in the middle epipel levels we have kind of bigger open spaces we have a lot of hearths and a lot of post holes that are dug into these kind of large open compact probably earthen surfaces which we think actually represent outdoor activity spaces they would have been more communal spaces so there's no clear separation of who would have been moving through these spaces and we find ridiculous amounts of gazelle so partially articulated, heavily processed in some cases so our final analyst and our student have been working on the material particularly in these spaces and are interpreting these as being kind of outdoor areas for large-scale food processing more than could ever possibly be consumed in anyone sitting so we have these layers that are basically nothing but bone particularly gazelle bone other things as well but particularly gazelle and then all these post holes are usually aligned around hearths so probably representing either roasting or smoking or something to perhaps preserve these gazelle remains our most recent work in this area has also been able to locate an early epipelolithic layer below the middle epipelolithic so at first we thought occupation was kind of segregated into two areas over time obviously so early in one area, middle in the other but we can now see that in the early epipel and the middle they were occupying most of this 21,000 square meters of site so it's not that we just have some partially overlapping occupations but we have this large area that would have been occupied we have a lot of marine shell from our middle epipel areas as well even more so than in our early epipel areas we have marine shell now in the thousands so we have probably close to 10,000 shells which is by orders of magnitude more than the marine shell from every other contemporary site put together even those right on the coast so we have really a lot of marine shell and a lot of things like worked bone, worked stone and bone pendants that you can see here in the last few minutes I'm going to just go through I'll probably skip over a lot of this this is the part I'm not going to talk too much about go over some of the analyses that we've been doing including looking at the marine shell which I mentioned is coming from the Mediterranean and the Red Sea so from pretty vast distances to the site we're doing some work right now on looking at obviously the identification but also some isotopic work to see if we can get any information some of these shells are found today in both the Red and the Mediterranean Sea but obviously these two bodies of water have very different isotopic compositions so we should be able to track that out when we do that work that's being done by a colleague at Tulsa but if we very broadly with the understanding that we have a lot of material coming from both of these seas so some we can definitely say come from the Mediterranean some definitely come from the Red some come from either or both but it's clear that they were using multiple sources for this marine shell and so our question is thinking about whether or not people are either coming from Harana going to the coast and back again or people from the coast are coming to Harana or you have some kind of down the line trade but it's very clear that huge numbers of shell are making it to the site and so we could think about this idea this is borrowed again from well me directly from Meg but Meg from idea from the Upper Paleolithic of Europe this idea of all the social activities that might come along with aggregating in one place and bringing things like marine shell that you can trade for other things so a shell fair, shell bead fair such as this we've looked a lot at the stone tools it's our most abundant artifact type it's what both me and my colleague at Tulsa work primarily on there's ridiculous amounts of stone tools from the site I think we're well over four million at the moment so we are in the process of gathering slews of graduate and undergraduate students including Felicia to look at some of this material there are clear differences between what's going on in the early and the middle Epipale I'm not going to go through all of this what I just want to point out is that this differences are not just in the final tools that I showed you at the beginning of the presentation but in the whole process the technological knowledge and traditions that are used to produce these stone tools and in fact there are not just differences between the early and the middle but there are clear differences within each of those time periods as well so whether or not they're putting a lot more effort into preparing their core or maintaining it along the way gives us some pretty important information as to kind of the learning process of making stone tools and how that may be tracked in space as well as the final tools that are produced so we've looked at some differences between the early and the middle Epipaleolithic what I want to point out for relevance here is what we find in the middle Epipaleolithic so in this time period we usually think of the entire area of the southern Levant of this part of southwest Asia as being occupied by different hunter-gatherer groups who each made their own kind of type of stone tools so you find the people who made the triangles in the Jordan Valley and the people who made the trapezes in the south and the people who made the rectangles along the coastal plain but what's interesting about the tools that we find at Harana is that we find all of that variation at one site including some others that are only found at a few sites in the Negev for example or up in what is now Lebanon but we find that whole huge range of materials at Harana we've done a lot of raw material survey around the site itself and we know that the wide variety of raw material that they're using to make those stone tools is all local so we can source it all to within about 20 kilometers of the site but all of these kind of regional variations come from much greater distances so what we think is happening is that people are rather than big nodules of flint with them to come to Harana are just bringing the knowledge so there are flint nappers who are coming to the site and they're actually collecting the material from around the site and flint napping on site and you know probably interacting with each other and you know these kind of fluid and changing nap-ins we would call them today to produce this wide variety so it looks like a kind of unique site it often gets called a very unique site because of the very different assemblage of stone tools we find at the site but it's actually probably because it's a blending together of many different local traditions as people are aggregating there and then I just kind of map this out to give you an idea so you know all our particular trapeze-like pieces come from sites near here these very distinct, articulated pieces come from the western Ngev and so on and so forth I'm not going to spend much time talking about the other types of analyses it's all still ongoing it's basically all gazelle at the site in terms of the fauna it's well over 85% of our faunal assemblage in any context sometimes as high as 95% in others like these large kind of communal gazelle processing areas but the other key thing to keep in mind is there's a huge variety of other species as well including very water dependent species gazelle are not water dependent but wild boar which we have quite a lot of wild cattle tortoise to some respect and a lot of water fowl that we have at the site also give us a good indication that it was a quite well watered environment the gazelle are both sedentary and migratory so there were always gazelle around the site but at particular times in the year there would have been obscene numbers of gazelle around the site and people clearly took advantage of that so that might have been one of the reasons I won't go through all that stuff we're now doing isotope work on the gazelle and we just had a paper come out in the Journal of Archaeological Science which demonstrates that they were hunting gazelle year-round so it doesn't mean they were occupying the site year-round but there was at least some part of the population that was hunting at the site and hunting gazelle on a year-round basis and in most cases within one stratigraphic context over multiple seasons a lot of archaeobotanical material the charcoal and other seeds and macro-botanical material gives us a good indication of there being at least some stands of things like wild almond around which again also require water but very much a kind of brush-like landscape not a lot of trees but our phytolith work again we just had a paper come out a few weeks ago in plus one we did very detailed mapping out and collecting of phytolith samples from within the hut structures and then deposits outside of the hut structures and so we know that they were using a lot of things that haven't really preserved very well organically but preserved in terms of their phytoliths like grasses and reeds so we have a combination and I can scoop to here so we have a combination of wetland which is this blue bar here with some small amounts of wooded areas and heavily grassland areas so there was a wide range of ecologies available to the people but they were certainly heavily exploiting particularly for the construction of these huts these wetland resources and so rather than the way it looks today it would have looked probably something a lot more like this I mentioned human burials this we found one in 2016 there was one excavated I mentioned probably from below our first hut structure so interesting that people are burying individuals on site particularly in association with these hut structures something that we don't normally mark until much later in the Neolithic period where people are very frequently buried underneath house floors so we're kind of arguing with all of this combined evidence that we have a pretty clear aggregation site that we could actually call a community and even a community in the very kind of flexible Anderson sense of the word where people would have been interacting directly but probably would have also been connected to maybe not directly through personal contact but through trade and exchange or even just kind of down the line knowledge to other people from a larger surrounding landscape so rather than having all these individual sites as dots on a map and this is something Meg and I have both talked about in this context before we can actually map out different artifact distributions and start to track paths along the landscape we can put things like fauna that people would have also been attracted to and probably tracked on the landscape themselves but of course people never move in straight lines and in fact you can't possibly move in straight lines in this landscape so we probably had something that looks totally crazy like this which much better reflects the reality of what hunter-gatherers were doing on the landscape and it's not just Harana that shows evidence of this even within the Azraq basin there's another huge aggregation site only 20 kilometers away that was occupied at the same time so Harana is not unique in many many ways there's clearly very interesting things going on in that bigger hunter-gatherer landscape but rather than being this kind of eastern periphery desert area which it often gets relegated to at the moment it was a very busy place in the Epipaleolithic and just to prove my point a few years ago they put up this very nice welcome to Azraq sign and so we have evidence now for these kinds of things kind of substantive investment in the site, reoccupation of the site and use of this kind of wide open space because it probably was not nearly as wide or as open as it looks today and I'm going to skip over that because it's time to go and do the very important acknowledgement slide which is to say thank you to not only all of our funding bodies but in particular all of the people that we have worked with in the field including especially the local communities in Azraq that we work with quite a bit and to many of my colleagues here thank you yeah yeah one of the questions I had you talked about the huts and the excavation and the early Epipaleolithic and basically you're talking about how the Olympics are very different from those outside we were talking about you didn't find micro-olythics so you did find them outside so what's the difference and what were they doing outside with the micro-olythics that made it so different we can't really say for sure at the moment in part because a lot of this analysis is still ongoing especially the material outside of the hut structures but we can suppose or think about if part of the idea is that we have people coming to the site from a kind of larger geographic space who are doing different things in terms of making stone tools you know making a scraper is kind of making a scraper just end scrapers on blades all kind of look the same and we see that through I mean Meg and I could compare end scrapers between Europe and the Near East and they'll look mostly the same but there's kind of some style in making these micro-olyths and whether or not those relate to function is a whole other debate that's been rampant and it seems that they don't so our useware analysis doesn't show that any particular type of micro-olyth is used for any particular type of task in fact most of them have over printed so we don't have to be aware of many different types of tasks so it seems like and Ofer Bar-Yosef would be jumping for joy to hear me say he was right but I think he was right the style actually means something socially at least to some degree so I think if this idea of people aggregating there is true then you can process hides in your own structure and the privacy of a particular place or do whatever kind of domestic things you need to do but if you're making stone tools particularly actually really sharp pointy micro-olyths A. it's probably better to do that outside for practical reasons but B. if you know part of the thing that happens when you get together with these people is you share that knowledge then you would do that in a more open space but again I can't prove that at the moment yeah sorry at the back first and then David we well we have tree and branches represented in the charcoal so they're getting access to it somehow you know it's not well preserved enough to see if they're you know getting was already dead and fallen down or whether they're harvesting it themselves but we do have large tools that could do the job I just haven't talked about them very much but they're there they're not abundant but they're there yeah but again use where isn't showing evidence of them being used to cut down trees so it's more work is needed yeah David so we think we might be seeing a little bit of that in the middle epipyel deposits we don't in the early at all so far but we actually just put in a grant application to try and address that exact question kind of going the next step in figuring out whether or not we can actually track different social groups and where they would have been in one particular occupation part of the site in the middle epipyel areas we do see some things that you know a articulated piece that has a hook on the end where you don't usually find those at other sites but we don't find them in great numbers so we we and we haven't excavated a huge amount we have a lot of material but we honestly haven't excavated a lot of the site we've excavated I think we calculated 0.005% of the site so it could still be there so we have a lot more work to do on whether or not we can identify this idea of kind of blended traditions because that's kind of a logical thought is if you're sharing knowledge of how to make stone tools then you would expect to see you know hybrids people used to call this site really unique because they said it had these variants and in fact there was a book published recently by a person who worked on the lithic collections in the 80s from the original excavations and he actually named an entire lithic industry based on what's at the site but you can find everything that's at the site with the exception of two or three pieces that look like some mixing of a couple of different traditions from different geographical areas you can find everything else in different areas of the region so aside from a few instances there's nothing really new at Harana which is not probably the thing you're supposed to do when you start working at a site it's not unique it's not particularly this is just what people were doing sorry Christine you showed the plants at the end and you have the wild moment was there any hackberry or any evidence of mountainous with all those wood so much wood it's all shrubby shrub local and there's no evidence that they were bringing stuff from mountains not so far it would be really far to bring you have to go to the Jebel Druze there's nothing even remotely mountainous anywhere closer than that so well I think a lot of it is small branches it's very much like the reconstruction they have at Ohalo so it's really not big pieces of wood at all they're really kind of brush structures and reeds so I think a lot of the actual covering is reeds that's by and large the phytoliths from the structures are houses houses I know I do it by default but they're houses well I would say when I'm describing the morphology of the structure of it then I would call it a hut but in terms of what people were doing socially it was a house it was a home my turn yes your turn I know you haven't excavated many houses or homes or whatever you want to call them yet but it seems to me that you're kind of moving towards thinking of these houses in terms of an approach that is like the use life or life history very much yeah and you're bringing in that whole concept of some sort of ritualized or end or specific event at the end life of the use life I'm wondering how you're going to fit that into this whole idea of aggregation because it looks to me you know these could be quite short term short term houses do you have any kind of thinking yet to imagine? yeah well in part so our next step in terms of understanding the relationship between the hut structures and then thinking about people coming and going is to try and sort out whether or not at least the best that we possibly can, whether or not they're contemporary and looking at so getting good dates from each of the floors so in fact your visitor Chris has been looking at some of the charcoal remains from inside the structure so we can try and submit those and get good dates of the deposits within the structure so what time span do we have between our three floors or between the top floor and the burnt layer above it and see if that might help us address some of those issues the length of time exactly and you know I've said we have three we have probably a fourth I suspect there are a whole lot more that we just may never even in my lifetime get to excavate so where does that help us with your idea about this aggregated site well it I think leaves us better evidence for this in the middle epipal deposits than it does in the early epipal deposits in the early epipal deposits where we have the huts we still have pretty clear segregation of activities and you know what people are doing and where they're doing it but in the middle epipal deposits where we have really thicker deposits we try and use things like sedimentation rates although there's all kinds of issues with that and good programs of radiocarbon dating to get nice sequences that might tell us the duration of any of these individual contexts so I think we're going to be able to first make a better case for that in terms of relating site formation processes to occupation but you know duration of occupation is so without duration are you going to make any just pushing you to say something that's not quite anchored in the empirical data I think with the arguments that we have on particularly the isotope work we're starting to do with the fauna which actually gives us good indications of seasonality and putting that together with the stone tool work that we're doing once we can get a lot more of the middle epipal stuff done we've hardly touched that material at all we've analyzed 150,000 pieces but we've hardly touched that material at all you know once we have a little bit more of that analyzed then I think we can say a lot more about ideas of aggregation by breaking them down in these small contexts that we do have preserved at the site so we're talking very broadly and what I've talked very broadly here because it's what we've done so far is what we see in the middle epipal area and what we see in the early epipal area what we're doing now is breaking down what's in each of these individual contexts in all of those areas because it's the only way that I can foresee we can address that issue so back to my work Jin, did you have a question? Well I kind of tapped into Ruth was pushing on and I guess one of the first slides I shot was about aggregation and then in the south those we talked about accretional constructions or settlement structures and so those words accretional aggregation as you just worked out potentially empirically in the future sedimentation rates might tell you something about that potentially better But I'm the geoarcheologist and I'm very skeptical about the possibility of sedimentation rates for addressing this issue That's what I really wanted to talk to you about I was on a wadi phone right by the right I was like hey this thing's going to sometimes jump its banks it's going to change cores that beautiful oasis picture you have in there like where you're going to fit in you've got these cast and carbonate layers so I'm going well wait but if you're saying the sedimentation rates are right you're highly skeptical just because there's so much unknowns with such an eroded landscape yeah we got nothing no vegetation anchoring anything down and water itself is containing like this the silk rates don't contain any sort of colobites that would then bind or crack yeah it's a big battle so I think you know looking at the on-site deposits where they are kind of anchored down and preserved and trying to pick apart every bit of information we can from the very well-preserved that we have is going to be our best our best bet it's going to be total speculation but it's still only you had posts you had burning you had bone beds how bad are the flies when the water levels are higher on there oh they're bad even when the water levels are low okay so and then how much like water cracked rock and like heat altered shirt is there at those post holes with the bone beds the post holes are usually filled with charcoal but highly fragmented and burnt lithics one of them which is actually really interesting I will go back to just to say as a total sidebar and then I'll come back to your question so in one of the post holes we found a large nodule of flint oh there we go right here which I know you can't see very well I will do this because it's totally relevant to what I want to say so this nodule of flint right here which is you can see this is a 5 centimeter scale so it's kind of that size it was jammed into vertically into a post hole one of our post holes that was dug into the lake sediments and if you can see here it actually has red ochre staining all along one edge and a little dip down here a little dip down there a little dip down there so I think it was held with someone who had red ochre all over their hands and they left their handprint on it so what you can't see on the other side is that there's a large area where a palm would go and then a smaller stained area which might be where a thumb goes so in some instances the post holes are clearly also being cleaned out and other things are being being stuck into them oh yeah it would have been terrible smoking would actually be super clutch not just for the butcher but also for when she's later or he's later working out how to preserve the meat like you were saying and we have these bone beds but they're more like pits so they were digging into occupational deposits dumping all of the carcass debris and bones in some cases they're not even very heavily processing I mean they were probably swimming in gazelle they were bringing the entire carcasses back gazelle you just sling over your shoulder you don't have to process them in the field on the fly and in fact another thing that we since I'll go into the realm of speculation here another thing that we have been talking to our final analyst about that we suspect is this area is known for these stone made desert kites which are these massive features in the shape that were used to corral gazelle so the gazelle just kind of follow them naturally well there's some speculation as to whether or not they were used for gazelle that early they were certainly used for things like onager but the idea was that they kind of funnel a herd of gazelle and then at the end they have blinds so these stone lined areas where they're captured and then killed we don't have and that's in the basalt desert we're just outside of the basalt desert so we don't have the limestone rocks resources just on the ground surface to make that kind of structure but there's tons of grasses and twigs and branches so you could make a brush version of that so I think where we have communal processing we probably also had communal hunting and the mortality and sex profiles of the gazelle actually suggest that in the middle epipal levels so it's all adult males in the early epipal all predominantly in the middle epipal it's everything you know young juveniles infants males females adults young it's just everything so I think they were doing communal hunting and communal processing particularly smoking they were digging these big pits dumping the carcasses that are not even extensively processed covering those up probably so they don't stink they're very wasteful people unless they're just cutting off the meat and smoking strips of meat which is probably what they're doing for gazelle yeah so you know the cut marks which are everywhere on the carcasses but not as extensive as you would expect so they're not heavily processing they're not snapping stuff open for marrow they're cutting off meat and strips of meat drawing and smoking those and then and that's why we get still partially articulated carcasses in the pits because they're not pulling everything apart and they're not smoking stuff on the bone we don't have good evidence of that we don't have any kind of massive pits of burnt bone but they're using the horn cores they slice off the end of the horn cores and they use them as soft timer percussors yeah you're taking the change in climate about 17,000 years ago exactly coincided with when some discussions say that the ice age essentially ended because the rotational north pole shifted in the direction of Siberia from the direction of Greenland, that area and the whole planet changed and what melted was north pole ice was no longer within the rotational Arctic and that's toward the Americas whereas in Siberia they find mammoths with fresh grass to the teeth so did it all really happen really fast well I mean yes and no so that process started about 25,000 years ago that's the last glacial maximum and then things are pretty cold and dry as they are here they warm up a little bit around 16,000, 17,000 years ago with something that we globally call the Bowling Allerad there's a whole bunch of smaller phases of cold arid periods in that but we don't track them all in the Near East because we're not a glacial environment but you can track very well in Europe and then around 12,000 years ago 11,500 years ago massive meltwater input from North America like Agassiz has created it changes the whole global circulation of ocean currents yeah so that's the younger driest that input so that's a really rapid cold and dry period about 11,500 years ago and that we definitely track in this part of the world where people have argued and continue to argue about whether or not that was a push towards epipal groups becoming farmers and so on and so forth yeah so that's one of these warming periods which so what's really interesting and I didn't have a lot of time to talk about it because I always talk too much about this stuff at this area in the Azarac Basin in Eastern Jordan the local climate record so the microclimate here is very very different than the rest of the southern Levant so our models that we make which are really regional models don't apply to every different part of that region and they don't apply to the Azarac Basin so things are getting warm and wet elsewhere in the southern Levant which is where you start to see an expansion of hunter gatherer groups more sites expanding into new areas but in the Azarac Basin things are getting warmer but it increases evaporation rates of any standing bodies of water so it's just drying out those lakes around the site dries them out almost completely actually really completely by about probably 16 and a half, 17,000 years ago even the oasis starts to shrink and we can track that in the work we've done the geological work we've done in the oasis so water is just shrinking it's warm but dry in the Azarac Basin my point is that the effects of that are very very different when you go to different localities yes I was going to ask about the other large sites nearby, are people doing comfortable work do you have gelat mentioned? gelat 6, yes no, they excavated a 2x2 meter trench in 1988 and no one's done any work there before or after, sorry we think it's exactly the same so I worked very closely with the person who worked in gelat before we started to work on this project and the reason people don't dig them is because they're take up your entire career to dig so it's no small investment to dig one of these big sites as we are discovering so, yeah there's another one that is kind of ready for the picking if someone wants to work there but very little has been done so they've really extensively looked at the material that was dug up in the original trench but no new work has been done there and I think the excavator would be very happy if a new project started there are they around the same water body? no, so they're completely different well they're 20 kilometers away and separated by a small upland area which is really not much at all you drive over it comfortably in your truck so they're in different watersheds within the same basin and gelat still has water actually yeah we're thinking because of our cultural biases that we could call those a home but basically these cut structures are not like what we often think of as a home that is a secure place where everybody gets inside and sleeps because those cuts are small so really when you want to talk about sort of a home idea it's really not a focus on the structure but it's actually structured more on the site and what is going on around it and that has the persistency of use, visitation, symbolic looting and all those other things but it makes people very if you tell them oh those cuts are so small how many people do you think could get inside them? oh I think probably it depends on what you're doing inside but you know well we can fit five people in them to dig but no sitting down but no not lying down maybe three people lying down cozy so they're not sleeping inside we don't sleep inside our house when we're in the field so I certainly wouldn't presume they were sleeping inside theirs either well they're not just storing things either they're not cooking in there I think you know for the activities where you might want some kind of shelter like when it's windy exactly well they I don't know how they would stand up if they didn't have it's possible I mean they're in circles they're in circle but it's entirely possible they don't have roofs so I have no investment in what they would have looked like I don't think we know enough information about that yet or they had some kind of hide that might have been just spread over the only thing I can say is if they were just walls we can't keep metal structures up in the wind there and again very different environment 20,000 years ago so it may not have been the same type of windy environment in the spring but yeah or you know it gets really rainy at certain times of the year so even something that you could kind of duck into or you want to do something private you don't want other people to see yeah yeah yeah absolutely then just reeds although woven together tightly they're quite waterproof those microliths are good for scraping inside well the microliths very rarely show evidence for scraping but we do have scrapers that they clearly used things we typologically call scrapers that were clearly used for scraping activities yeah thank you guys