by Gary Rollefson
In the 1920s pilots flying over the Harrat ash-Sham volcanic fields (also known as the Black Desert) were struck by a landscape that was “rugged and desolate” (Maitland 1927: 198), “like a dead fire — nothing but cold ashes” (Rees 1929: 389), whose “odious flat-topped slag heaps” instilled a “sinister foreboding” and the “epitome of loneliness” (Hill 1929: 3). It is likely that most people who fly above the Black Desert today would agree with these observations. Yet 9,500 years ago the situation was far removed from the conditions of today. Whereas the number of transhumant Bedouin herders in the 1920s may have numbered several thousand in the Black Desert (including its extensions into Syria and Saudi Arabia), a very different climate regime that included up to 60% more annual rainfall created a more luxuriant countryside, where water remained available for many months — perhaps all year — and grasslands that fed larger populations of domesticated and wild animals; in such a scenario, groups of people and their herds of sheep, goats, and perhaps cattle, enjoyed a more sedentary life.
The Eastern Badia Archaeological Project (EBAP), co-directed by Yorke Rowan, Alexander Wasse, Morag Kersel, and me, began surveys and excavations of six structures at Wisad Pools and the in Wadi al-Qattafi in 2008. At Wisad, where it is estimated that there are at least 300 structures (Fig. 1), one (W400) was occupied from ca. 7,000 to 6,500 BCE; W110 habitation lasted a perhaps a couple of centuries around 6700 BCE; W66 was occupied with interruptions from about 6400 to 5500 BCE; and W80 (the largest) from possibly 7200 (radiocarbon date pending) to 5600 BCE, again with two or three periods of abandonment. Some 30 km west of Wisad, as many as 800 buildings lie on the lower slopes of the basalt-capped mesas in the Wadi al-Qattafi, of which two were investigated. Mesa 7 structure SS-1 is approximately the same size as W80 and lasted from ca. 6500 to 6000 BCE. Building SS-11 on the southern slope of nearby Mesa 4 is rather small, just over 6 m2 in floor area, and is attached to an animal enclosure.
In the twelve field seasons of the project, more than 24,000 chipped-stone artifacts, including 11,621 tools, 3,380 cores, and 9,124 pieces of debitage and fragments, spanning 1,600 years of the Late Neolithic Period (and a few artifacts from the last 200 years of the 8th millennium), were found. This inventory offers a database produced by a single analyst using five metric and twenty-seven qualitative variables sorted to phases of local habitation in a series of stratified deposits that can trace changes in what tools were made and by what techniques and styles. The results of the global analysis reflect strong conformity in many aspects of lithic production, but the data also show remarkable local singularity in some of the categories, which raises some intriguing questions of what might account for widespread matching behavior patterns and what may have caused distinctive local deviations from otherwise “normal” or “expected” practices. The following discussion will look at differences in what types of tools were manufactured, how some of those types changed over that length of time, how the quantities of specific tool types varied and what this might mean in terms of subsistence economy, and the role of specialization.
Arrowheads: Numbers and Forms
Investigations of the faunal remains from the excavations at Wisad (on the eastern edge of the basalt) and in the Wadi al-Qattafi (at the western edge) indicate that there was a strong similarity in terms of the importance of hunting wild mammals (especially gazelle) and caprine herding (Martin et al. 2022). It might be expected that the focus on gazelle in both Wisad and Qattafi would use the same kind of hunting equipment, but this was not the case. At Wisad W80, arrowhead styles that were prevalent before 6600 BCE rapidly switched from Haparsa/Nizzanim/Herzliya points to a predominance (80%) of relatively tiny transverse arrowheads that, instead of being pointed, bore a broad razor edge at the tip (Fig. 2). At Qattafi only three transverse arrowheads were recovered, and they are clearly produced by someone who had heard of the type but had had no experience in making them. But one point type — the Badia point, long and relatively heavy — made up 16% of the arrowheads, and no Badia points were found at W80.
Drills
Drills (Fig. 3) were made at all the excavated buildings, and nominally they were for the production of beads of stone, bone, and shell. Bead drills were very numerous at Qattafi SS-1 (11%), more than any other building except for Wisad W400, which was clearly a “drill factory,” with a stunning number of 919 pieces (58% of the tool kit). Beyond the amazing popularity of drills, the number of beads is only a handful, in addition to which there were no stored materials to be made into beads and no tools to shape the blanks into beads. Even so, W400 is certainly an example of specialization by one or several people, and there are other examples of specialization, as at Jilat 13 and Jilat 25 (Wright et al. 2008) and Bawwabat al-Ghazal. (Rollefson et al. 1999).
In addition to hand drills and rotary, there are considerable numbers of burin spalls retouched to extremely acuminated piercing tools; a better name for the tools might be “needles,” with tips at 1 mm diameter. The thinness at the tip suggests a vulnerability to snapping if used against a hard surface such as shell, bone, or stone, and a function other than bead drill is much more likely. A possible reason for fashioning the delicate needles might be for tattooing skin (human or leather), although evidence for such a function has not been recovered.
Denticulates
As became immediately clear while clearing a small patch of Phragmites reeds on the western edge of the southern pool at Azraq, one does not simply pull the reeds out of the ground. That may explain the strong presence of denticulates at the buildings at Qattafi and Wisad. This type comes in two versions: regular denticulates and microdenticulates (Fig. 4). The saw-like edge on the former tool is relatively long with wide adjacent notches and strong, sharp points between them. The second type uses much smaller adjacent notches and would probably have been selected for finer work.
The basalt walls of the structures at Wisad and Qattafi were built to a height of about a meter, but they did not support a roof. Wilfred Thesiger (2000) demonstrated how versatile and effective cane reeds could be used for roofing, and with permanent or nearly permanent water in the mudflats in the Black Desert during the Late Neolithic, there would have been an abundance of roofing material to construct a dome over the structures. The vicious-looking regular denticulates would have been used to harvest the larger reeds, and the microdenticulates used for cutting arrow shafts.
Wedges
Wedges (or “splintered pieces”) (Fig. 5) have long been known and are usually characterized as “debitage” (Betts and Kafafi 1992: 157), but we consider them to be an important component of the tool kit of the Late Neolithic industry of the Black Desert. They range from only 2% in M7 SS-1 at Qattafi to 9% at Wisad W80, 10% at W66, and 14% at W400. The tool is distinguished by heavy severe bifacial battering on opposed ends, or lateral edges, or on all opposed edges. The apparent manner of use can be described as fragments of blades or flakes, held between thumb and forefinger, and hammered with a stone. The intent of wedges is to split longitudinally objects such as reeds or animal bone; the first use is to provide slats for weaving mats used as roofing and flooring, as well as baskets and other containers, and the second to split animal bone to extract marrow.
Polyhedrons
Polyhedrons are not tools; they are geometric objects shaped by percussion into cuboid, spherical, and pyramidal forms, ranging in mean dimensions of 14 mm high to 10 by 11 mm basal width (Fig. 6). They normally are made from fine-quality translucent flint of clear quartz, brown, tan, and white. They have absolutely no visible utilitarian function except, perhaps, as tokens in games, something also suggested by Fujii (2006) and D. Cropper (2011); such games are indicated by fifty-three game boards from the Late PPNB (Pre-Pottery Neolithic B) period into the Late Neolithic and appear to be antecedents of such games as those found at Mesopotamian cities in the 4th through 1st millennia BCE (Rollefson forthcoming).
References
Betts, A. and Kafafi, Z. 1992. “Aspects of the Neolithic Periods in Jordan.” Paléorient 18(2): 156–158.
Cropper, D. 2011. Lithic Technology and Regional Variation in Late Neolithic Jordan. BAR International Series 2291. Oxford: Archaeopress.
Fujii, S. 2006. “Wadi Abu Tulayha: A Preliminary Report of the 2005 Spring and Summer Excavation Seasons of the al-Jafr Basin Prehistoric Project, Phase 2.” Annual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan 50: 9–31.
Hill, R. 1929. The Baghdad Air Mail. London: Edward Arnold & Co.
Maitland, P. 1927. “The ‘Works of the Old Men’ of Arabia.” Antiquity 1: 196–203.
Martin, L. and Saritas, Ö., with Rollefson, G. Rowan, Y. and Wasse, A. 2022. “New Insights into Late Neolithic Herding in the Jordanian Harra: Zooarchaeological Results from Wisad Pools and Wadi al-Qattafi.” Paper presented at The Archaeozoology of Southwest Asia and Adjacent Areas International Meeting, Tokyo, 28 November 28–2 December 2022.
Rees, L. 1929. “The Transjordan Desert.” Antiquity 3: 389–407.
Rollefson, G. Forthcoming. “What Are the Odds? Neolithic Game Boards from the Levant.” In Desert Journeys: Papers on the Prehistory and Protohistory of the Arid Southern Levant. Journal of Arid Land Environments.
Rollefson, G., Quintero, L. and Wilke, P. 1999. “Bawwab al-Ghazal: Preliminary Report on the 1998 Testing Season.” Neo-Lithics 1/99: 2–4.
Thesiger, W. 2000. The Marsh Arabs. London: HarperCollins.
Wright, K., Critchley, P. and Garrard, A. 2008. S”tone Bead Technologies and Early Craft
Specialization: Insights from Two Neolithic Sites in Eastern Jordan.” Levant 40(2): 131–165.
Gary Rollefson, a 2023–2024 ACOR-CAORC Postdoctoral Fellow, is professor emeritus of anthropology at Whitman College in Washington State and at San Diego State University. He began prehistoric research at Lower and Middle Paleolithic sites in the Azraq Wetlands in 1978, but in 1982 became the principal investigator at ‘Ain Ghazal. Since 2008 he has been co-director of the Eastern Badia Archaeological Project in the basalt region of eastern Jordan. His publications number more than 380 and include three co-edited books on prehistoric Jordan.