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.

The post Decoding Late Neolithic Tools and Technology in the Black Desert of Jordan appeared first on ACOR Jordan.

Material culture provides a glimpse into the important objects that people created, exchanged, and carried with them for functional and symbolic purposes. The study of archaeology requires a suite of specializations and perspectives, but material culture remains a fundamental source of information. In his pioneering volume In Small Things Forgotten (1977), James Deetz argued that seemingly small and insignificant objects capture a fundamental part of our existence. Although primarily interested in North American historical archaeology, Deetz emphasized the need to understand artifacts as more than just typological entries. For the people living and visiting the landscape of the Black Desert in Jordan, the rich material culture was not solely for the functional purposes of survival but evoked connections with other people, places, and meanings. 

Climatic conditions in the southern Levant during the 9^th and 8^th millennia BCE created environments in which increased cereal and pulse farming, and animal husbandry, fostered population growth and higher-density settlements. By the Late Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (c. 7500–7000 BCE), larger settlements emerged in the region from southern Jordan to southern Syria. Some of these villages were abandoned around 7000 BCE while others suffered a depleted population. In contrast to the well-known fundamental changes that occurred across southwestern Asia during the early Neolithic, the subsequent Late Neolithic (LN) is poorly documented and was once considered a “hiatus” in the southern Levant. Even less well understood, the marginal steppes and deserts outside the “Fertile Crescent” were often viewed as underpopulated and of little significance to the larger neolithization process. Until recently, few structures were known in the steppes and desert to the east dating to the 8^th to 6^th millennium BCE. These “small things remembered” provide another glimpse into what was once thought to be a hiatus. 

Since 2009, the Eastern Badia Archaeological Project (EBAP) has examined two areas, Wisad Pools and the mesas along Wadi al-Qattafi (Fig. 1). Both are located on the margins of the harra, the volcanic Black Desert of Jordan. These sites were used intensively by prehistoric hunters and herders from the early 7^th to mid-6^th millennium BCE. Based on the many substantial, well-built Late Neolithic structures and the botanical evidence for trees (oak, willow, acacia) and marshy plants, mounting lines of evidence paint a picture very different from that of the bleak and desolate desert we see today. Rather than brief, temporary visits of small groups of people passing through, we now believe that people built and occupied substantial structures organized into hamlets, spending much of the year hunting and herding. Many questions remain, of course: where did these people come from? We know that they were hunting gazelle, onager (wild donkey), hare, and a few other animals, but to what degree did herding of domesticated animals play a role? Did the escalation in gazelle hunting with animal traps (“desert kites”) increase the role of hunting in exchange across the region? 

Wadi al-Qattafi is a major drainage basin about 60 kilometers east of Azraq where a series of about 30 basalt-capped mesas loom 40–60 meters over the desert floor. Various collapsed structures found atop the mesas and along their lower slopes include animal pens, tower tombs, desert kites, and cells. The EBAP team excavated four structures along Wadi al-Qattafi; two are small huts atop Maitland’s Mesa (Mesa 4; Fig. 2) that provided no artifacts or carbonized remains. In the other two structures were found arrowheads, beads, animal bones, and various small finds dating to the Late Neolithic, although these finds were possibly separated by as much seven to eight centuries. Sixty kilometers farther to the east, the extensive site of Wisad Pools includes over 500 ancient structures concentrated around a series of about nine pools. Three structures excavated over the past decade date to the Late Neolithic, with some structures built in the earliest stages of the this period. In addition to the variety of structures around the pools, over 400 petroglyphs are pecked into the basalt, primarily depicting horned animals (such as ibex, kudu, and cattle), camels, and desert kites (Hill et al. 2020). 

In the decade since the EBAP was established, our understanding of the recently defined Black Desert Late Neolithic (Wasse et al. 2020) has been transformed. The multi-faceted and far-reaching changes documented at Wisad Pools and Wadi al-Qattafi during the later 7^th and earlier 6^th millennia cal. BCE seem to be part of wider, regional transformative processes playing out concurrently along the arc of the upper Mesopotamian and Levantine desert line. Emerging evidence suggests that sites such as Wisad Pools and Wadi al-Qattafi, as crossroads on the steppe, played important roles as hubs of cultural exchange between disparate regions during the Late Neolithic period. Long-distance contacts may have formed an essential component in interregional networks that are largely unexamined for the later prehistoric periods in the southern Levant, particularly during the Late Neolithic period. 

To study this potential nexus of interconnected spheres, a critical component is the analysis of the small finds collected from the excavations of these five Late Neolithic structures. Chipped stone and animal bone constitute most finds, but the stone and shell beads, palettes, rings or bracelets, ochre, shells, and other small objects signify important elements of personal identity, status, and connectivity. By identifying the material type, potential origins of material, documentation of form and metrics, and parallel types from roughly contemporaneous sites, a database for comparative study with the wider Neolithic world will be established. Most non-flint small finds are beads manufactured from a variety of materials such as limestone (Fig. 3), bone, Dabba marble (Fig. 4), and carnelian. While limestone and bone probably originated locally, Dabba marble derives from farther away, perhaps to the southwest, near Wadi Jilat. Carnelian sources are not well known and be in the south, in Saudi Arabia, or even farther away. 

Other unusual objects hint at connections with more distant lands, such as the incised cone (Fig. 5) and the large mother-of-pearl plaque (Fig. 6). The shape of the incomplete incised cone is reminiscent of Mesopotamian tokens, commonly made of ceramic, the function of which continues to be debated. Secreted inside of a reconfigured doorway, the mother of pearl originates far from the Black Desert and must have been a prized possession. Another intriguing artifact is the labret, made of hard gray stone, an item thought to decorate either the lower lip or the ear (Fig. 7). Known from Mesopotamian contexts, the labret hints at connections to the east or northeast. The study of small things remembered contributes to a reconsideration of the putative lacuna of occupation in the region.

References

Deez, J. 1977. In Small Things Forgotten: The Archaeology of Early American Life. Garden City: Anchor Press/Doubleday.

Hill, A. C., and Y. M. Rowan. 2022. “The Black Desert Drone Survey: New Perspectives on an Ancient Landscape.” Remote Sensing 14(3) [special issue: Jesse Casana and Elise Jakoby Laugier (eds.), Remote Sensing of Past Human Land Use]: 18 pp. DOI: 10.3390/rs14030702.

Wasse, A., G. O. Rollefson, and Y. M. Rowan. 2020. “Flamingos in the Desert: How a Chance Encounter Shed Light on the ‘Burin Neolithic’ of Eastern Jordan.” In P. M. M. G. Akkermans (ed.), Landscapes of Survival: Pastoralist Societies, Rock Art and Literacy in Jordan’s Black Desert, 79–101. Leiden: Sidestone Press. 

Yorke Rowan, ACOR NEH Postdoctoral Research Fellow 2022–2023, is an anthropological archaeologist and research associate professor at the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures Museum (formerly the Oriental Institute) of the University of Chicago. He focuses on later prehistory (Late Neolithic, Chalcolithic, and Early Bronze), with thematic research interests in death, prehistoric ritual performance, and material objects mediating these human actions. His most recent publications include The Social Archaeology of the Levant: From Prehistory to Present (2019, Cambridge University Press, co-edited with A. Yasur-Landau and E. Cline) and “The Black Desert Drone Survey: New Perspectives on an Ancient Landscape” in the journal Remote Sensing (2022) with A. C. Hill. He co-directs the Kites in Context Project and the Eastern Badia Archaeological Project, both in the Black Desert of Jordan.

The post In Small Things Remembered: Late Neolithic Material Culture of the Black Desert, Jordan appeared first on ACOR Jordan.

ACOR Proudly Presents:
“An Invocation to Jesus in a Safaitic Inscription?”
An ACOR online lecture by Dr. Ahmad Al-Jallad (Ohio State University) on February 16, 2021

About the Lecture:

Safaitic inscriptions constitute the largest epigraphic corpus in Jordan. “Safaitic” refers to the northernmost branch of the South Semitic alphabet, a sister of the Ancient South Arabian script (musnad). The inscriptions, concentrated in the Syro-Jordanian Basalt Desert (the Ḥarrah), record the lifeways of the region’s inhabitants some 2,000 years ago. While the exact chronological limits of Safaitic are not known, scholars have assumed that the documentation ends around the 4th century CE, as there are no mentions of Christianity. This lecture will present a new inscription, discovered during the 2019 summer campaign of the Badia Epigraphic Surveys. It records an invocation to a new divinity, attested for the first time in Safaitic, that should likely be identified as Jesus. After the discussion of its reading and interpretation, Dr. Al-Jallad will explain the ramifications of this discovery on the history of Christianity in the region and the background of Quranic ʿysy.

We hope to see you again soon for future ACOR lectures!

Related Links:

Further reading (Ahmad Al-Jallad)

Online Corpus of the Inscriptions of Ancient North Arabia (OCIANA)

Digital Archive for the Study of Pre-Islamic Arabian Inscriptions (DASI)

Past ACOR content about the Black Desert

Badia Epigraphic Survey 2018–2019 field report. Archaeology in Jordan (ACOR, 2020).

The post “An Invocation to Jesus in a Safaitic Inscription?” appeared first on ACOR Jordan.

In 1980, Alison Betts, a doctoral student at the time, invited me to Jordan’s Black Desert to see what her research area looked like. After climbing to the summit of Maitland’s Mesa in the Wadi al-Qattafi, I was witness to the broad gloom—a consequence of divine punishment on the people who had dared to build the structures that now lay in utter ruin. I carried that image of desolation with me through the next three decades, certain that attempts to tame the lava-covered territory had been a fool’s dream that rightfully failed. How wrong that impression was!

Since 2008, the work of the Eastern Badia Archaeological Project has been investigating the surprisingly compact distribution of more than 500 stone buildings around the basalt-capped mesas of the Wadi al-Qattafi at the southwestern edge of the Black Desert (Fig.1) and the dense spread of hundreds of tombs, houses, and animal pens at Wisad Pools, 60 kilometers away at the southeastern margin of the Black Desert (Fig. 2).

Our excavation sample is small so far, but it appears that most of the residential structures might date to the middle and late 7th millennium BC, although many might also date from even 500 years earlier. Radiocarbon dates from the four structures we’ve excavated span the period from 6,600 to 5,400 BC. The houses are built of basalt slabs in an oval or circular form and appear to represent a major investment of labor (some stones weigh more than a ton), indicating that while the inhabitants may not have occupied the buildings all year long, they intended to return on a seasonal basis for extended periods of time. Four or five major occupational phases characterize most of the houses (at least, of the 7th millennium), each phase perhaps separated by periods of extended drought. The single structure dating to 5400 BC was relatively small (3 x 1.8 m) and witnessed only two occupational phases, perhaps just before or just after a prolonged period of low rainfall.

The number of structures in the Wadi al-Qattafi and at Wisad Pools (and at several other locations in the Black Desert) indicates that these particular locales offered predictably stable resources. The residents of these areas herded flocks of domesticated sheep and goats, probably as much for the dairy products they provided as for anything else. Meat was easily obtainable by hunting wild species in the area, especially gazelle; it now seems likely that large hunting traps called “kites” (Fig. 3) were used in mass slaughters, producing not only a valuable source of food, but also the hides that may have been used for trade with farming communities in the Jordanian highlands to the west.

The identity of the hunter-herding groups in the Black Desert remains undetermined, but the predominance of information points to a large immigration into the area near the beginning of the 7th millennium BC, when the “megasites” such as ‘Ain Ghazal and Basta suffered collapses due to climate change and accumulated environmental degradation that made it impossible to support the thousands of people living in them.

But the migrants didn’t enter the Stygian terrain that we see today. Rainfall was much higher during the 9th, 8th, 7th, and early 6th millennia (with occasional intervals of extended drought), so what is hyperarid desert today was then an extensive expanse of abundant vegetation and water. Excavations at Wisad Pools have shown that the mid-7th millennium houses were built atop a red permeable soil that absorbed the seasonal rainfall, preserving the moisture to enable very dense plant cover. Pollen from that soil has shown a marshy environment at Wisad Pools; pollen also indicated nearby stands of oak, supported by the presence of oak charcoal in fireplaces. Pollen of cattails/bulrushes also show that the people could have made baskets, mats, and perhaps woven roofing for the houses; reeds were probably also present, and the plants provided hollow shafts for arrows and darts as well as possible “timber” for roofing construction. The roots of cattails would have provided “bulrush flour” when dried and ground, and acorns could have added an important nutritional source after being ground and leached of the tannins in the nut (Fig. 4).

There appears to have been some cultural differentiation among the Black Desert Neolithic residents. At Wisad Pools, hunting relied on small transverse arrowheads, aptly called “flying razors,” whereas in the Wadi al-Qattafi this type was virtually absent; instead, local hunters used elaborately and intricately formed arrowheads such as Haparsa and Nizzanim points. Another point popular at Qattafi was a large and relatively heavy form known as a “Badia point”, which was probably used as a dart and cast using a spear thrower; a single Badia point was recovered from Wisad Pools (Fig. 5).

We have no pollen evidence from the Wadi al-Qattafi, and the charcoal in the fireplaces is almost all from local shrubs and bushes. Another indication that the landscape around Qattafi was different than at Wisad can be seen in a couple of tools types that may have been useful in woodworking. “Denticulate” flint tools have a series of adjacent “teeth” on their lateral edges that resemble saws in appearance and probable function; at Wisad they account for one-seventh of the tools, more than twice as important as in at Qattafi. “Wedges” (or “splintered pieces”) were flint flakes and blades probably used for splitting bone, but especially wood and reeds; 10% of the tools at Wisad are wedges, five times the amount in the Wadi al-Qattafi (Fig. 6).

In terms of architecture, there are significant differences in size and arrangement. At Wisad, buildings are nearly circular and 4-6 m in diameter (Fig. 7). At Qattafi, there seems to be a single large circular structure surrounded by 4 to 7 smaller (c. 2.5 x 1.5 m) elliptical chambers that might be “sleeping quarters” (Fig. 8).

How different were these two populations? Did they speak the same language? Did they practice the same rituals and hold the same beliefs about the supernatural? Differences in stone tool techniques and types won’t answer questions like these, for exploiting the available resources in different environmental zones are more likely to explain differences in tool kits than some more fundamental cultural influences. The differences in buildings, on the other hand, are stronger indications of some differing traditions unrelated to environmental factors.

Dr. Gary Rollefson is an anthropologist, an archaeologist, and a scholar of the Neolithic Period in the Levant. He was the 2017 NEH Fellow at ACOR. His long academic career began in Jordan with ACOR almost 40 years ago. Gary Rollefson is an emeritus professor of Anthropology at Whitman College. He received his Ph.D. (1978) as well as his M.A. (1972) in Anthropology from the University of Arizona, Tucson and his B.A. (1965) in Anthropology from the University of California, Berkley. He has held many teaching and lecturing positions and boasts a long list of publications and fieldwork related to the archaeology of Jordan. Read more about Dr. Gary Rollefson.

The post Light from the East appeared first on ACOR Jordan.

About the lecture

Before 7,000 BC, the people of the Black Desert lived as hunters and gatherers, following herds of gazelle and moving from camp to camp on a frequent basis. By 6,600 BC, it is clear that the population of the area grew suddenly to perhaps ten to twenty times what it was a few hundred years earlier, and the people lived for the first time in sturdy, permanent houses made of stone, staying in them for months at a time. The lecture will look at what caused the change in the populations living in the Black Desert.

About the lecturer

Dr. Gary Rollefson has received numerous NEH and CAORC fellowships over his long academic career that began in Jordan with ACOR almost 40 years ago. He is currently an emeritus professor of Anthropology at Whitman College. He received his Ph.D. (1978) as well as his M.A. (1972) in Anthropology from the University of Arizona, Tucson and he received his B.A. (1965) in Anthropology from the University of California, Berkley. He has held many teaching and lecturing positions and boasts a long list of publications and fieldwork related to the archaeology of Jordan. Read more about Dr. Gary Rollefson.

Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this video lecture do not necessarily reflect those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

The post Who Were the People in the Neolithic Black Desert? — An ACOR Video Lecture appeared first on ACOR Jordan.

Who Were the People in the Neolithic Black Desert?

Wednesday 18 October 2017 at 6:00 pm

Dr. Gary Rollefson

ACOR National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow &
Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at Whitman College

Wednesday 18 October 2017 at 6:00 pm

To be followed by a reception

About the lecture

Before 7,000 BC, the people of the Black Desert lived as hunters and gatherers, following herds of gazelle and moving from camp to camp on a frequent basis. By 6,600 BC, it is clear that the population of the area grew suddenly to perhaps ten to twenty times what it was a few hundred years earlier, and the people lived for the first time in sturdy, permanent houses made of stone, staying in them for months at a time. The lecture will look at what caused the change in the populations living in the Black Desert.

About the lecturer

Dr. Gary Rollefson has received numerous NEH and CAORC fellowships over his long academic career that began in Jordan with ACOR almost 40 years ago. He is currently an emeritus professor of Anthropology at Whitman College. He received his Ph.D. (1978) as well as his M.A. (1972) in Anthropology from the University of Arizona, Tucson and he received his B.A. (1965) in Anthropology from the University of California, Berkley. He has held many teaching and lecturing positions and boasts a long list of publications and fieldwork related to the archaeology of Jordan.

To learn more about Dr. Gary Rollefson you can listen to a 2016 lecture by Gary Rollefson about his research in the Black Desert  and read Rollefson’s 2016 blogpost about his research or visit his faculty page at Whitman College.

The post Who Were the People in the Neolithic Black Desert? appeared first on ACOR Jordan.

Dr. Gary Rollefson

Dr. Rollefson’s NEH Fellowship project, titled “Lithic Technologies and Social Identities: A Comparative Analysis of Chipped Stone Tool Production in Jordan’s Badia,” examines the stone tools associated with the remains of Neolithic houses located in the Black Desert. The remains of hundreds of houses found in the barren Black Desert suggest that the nature of the desert has drastically changed since 6000 B.C. His current project follows six years of excavations of the Eastern Desert and continues a research project which began 9 years ago.

Basalt rock outcrops created hospitable microenvironments and the rainfall that was present in the period from 7000 to 2000 B.C. left enough vegetation to sustain wild animals as well as the sheep and goats that Dr. Rollefson believes were herded there as well. Dr. Rollefson’s theory for those houses, which he is working on further through his research at ACOR, suggests that the 90% decrease in the population at ‘Ain Ghazal after its collapse in 7000 B.C. was due to a population shift into the Black Desert. He believes those that were farmers and herders turned into hunters and herders upon moving into the Black Desert — hunting the wild gazelle for food and returning to ‘Ain Ghazal to trade herd animals and other goods, such as hides for textiles, tools and barley.

Skeptics might claim that the hunters in the Black Desert were present before the collapse of ‘Ain Ghazal, but Dr. Rollefson’s research seeks to prove that the Black Desert housebuilders are derived from ‘Ain Ghazal “original population” that subsequently relocated to the Black Desert.  He is testing the techniques used for making the stone tools found in the Black Desert and comparing them to stone tools and tool making remains found in ‘Ain Ghazal and other communities. If similar stone traditions are found, this will suggest that the communities that lived in the Black Desert were indeed derived from the communities that lived in ‘Ain Ghazal.

Dr. Gary Rollefson has received numerous NEH and CAORC fellowships over his long academic career that began in Jordan with ACOR almost 40 years ago. He is currently an emeritus professor of Anthropology at Whitman College. He received his Ph.D. (1978) as well as his M.A. (1972) in Anthropology from the University of Arizona, Tucson with a dissertation entitled “A Quantitative and Qualitative Typological Analysis of Bifaces from the Tabun Excavations, 1967-1972” and he received his B.A. (1965) in Anthropology from the University of California, Berkley. He has held many teaching and lecturing positions and boasts a long list of publications and fieldwork related to the archaeology of Jordan.

To learn more about Dr. Gary Rollefson you can listen to a 2016 lecture by Gary Rollefson about his research in the Black Desert  and read Rollefson’s 2016 blogpost about his research or visit his faculty page at Whitman College.

This article was written by Tara Matalka, an undergraduate student at Columbia University and ACOR intern during the summer of 2017.

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Catherine Maier is an undergraduate in Anthropology at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington. Her passion for geology and archaeology led her to apply for the Groot Fellowship to join excavations at Wadi Qattafi and work with Dr. Gary Rollefson as part of the Eastern Badia Archaeological project.

The summer 2016 dig aimed to uncover two Neolithic houses where dozens of tools, bones, and ancient plant material paint a picture of a life in the late Neolithic. Catherine studied the basalt mesas and the way in which ancient people lived in the Jordanian desert landscape, as well as how the landscape changed over many thousands of years.

The Groot Fellowship gave Catherine her very first experience with Middle Eastern Archaeology. She found it “exhilarating- the geology, the ancient tools we found, and the dramatic experience of being in the Badia all made this adventure very fulfilling.”

Catherine hopes to visit ACOR again, as she had a wonderful experience. She is grateful to ACOR and the Groot Fellowship for their support to fuel her academic interests.

-Written by Whitman College student Emma Massie (June 2016).

The Groot Fellowship is named for Jennifer C. Groot (1951-1987), a field archaeologist who worked on many excavations in Jordan between 1974 and 1987.  The Jennifer C. Groot Memorial Fellowship enables an undergraduate or graduate student from either the US or Canada to participate in an archaeological excavation or survey in Jordan. More information about Jennifer Groot’s legacy and this fellowship is available here.

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His ACOR-CAORC fellowship supported him in the spring and summer of 2016  to make a high resolution aerial survey of extant archaeological features in the Eastern Badia of Jordan, an area of approximately 32 km².  His work builds on and continues earlier research in this region by Dr. Yorke Rowan of the University of Chicago and Dr. Gary Rollefson of Whitman College in Washington.  His research produces a great deal of data and he proposes an innovative method to analyze the images resulting from the drone survey.  His data will be placed on a crowd-source platform called “Micromappers” that will be hosted by the Qatar Computing Research Institute, and volunteers with an interest in archaeology will be able to explore the data set and identify archaeological structures.  The results will eventually by collated, reviewed and checked by Dr. Hill and Dr. Rowan.

Austin (Chad) Hill is co-director of the Landscapes of the Dead Project. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Connecticut.

Read more about Dr. Hill and another ongoing research project with drone mapping in Jordan at https://experiment.com/projects/archaeology-drones-mapping-neolithic-structures-in-the-black-desert-jordan.

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The ACOR Video Lecture Series provides stimulating and accessible discussions of new research into Jordan’s past and present, as presented by leading scholars and researchers working in Jordan and neighboring countries. This first lecture in the series, adapted from the October 2015 ACOR public lecture of senior archaeologist and prehistorian Gary Rollefson, highlights new discoveries that are changing our view of Jordan’s forbidding Black Desert in the deep past.

About the Lecture

Passing through the Black Desert in northeastern Jordan, one is struck by the lifeless and forbidding character of the landscape. The rainfall in the winter is sporadic and miserly, amounting to less than 50 mm on average per annum, although there may be many years in a row when a particular locality receives none at all. Bedouin herders have managed to eke out a living with their flocks, yet the population density of people and animals is among the lowest of the habitable regions of the planet. Archaeological investigations in the early and late 20th century indicated that this harsh region was inhabited for periods ranging certainly into the Neolithic and earlier periods, 7,000 to 10,000 years ago, and older.

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Archaeological surveys and excavations undertaken since 2008 by the Eastern Badia Archaeological Project have changed our understanding of what was considered the dismal nature of the Neolithic landscape into one that was much more inviting than what we can see today. Instead of timid migrations of a few families into the Badia, hundreds of kinship groups made the move about 7,000 BC from the damaged farmland of western Jordan into a region that, although it could not sustain agriculture, for thousands of years was probably a relatively lush grassland providing abundant pasturage for sheep and goats, even as far east as Ruwayshid. Veritable villages of families could live in permanent housing for five to six months of the year, tending their flocks and hunting teeming herds of gazelle and other animals. Charcoal from oak trees and preserved topsoil under Neolithic houses reveal that rainfall was probably considerably higher then, and that moisture penetrated the soil, providing extended growth capabilities for grasses and other plant life.

About Gary Rollefson

Gary Rollefson is Professor of Anthropology at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington. With nearly 40 years of archaeological experience in Jordan, Rollefson is a specialist in the archaeology and peoples of the prehistoric Near East. He is well known for the excavation, together with Jordanian archaeologist Zeidan Kafafi, of the important Neolithic site of Ain Ghazal, where some of the world’s oldest statues were discovered. Rollefson studied anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley (BA, 1965) and then at the University of Arizona (MA, 1972; Ph.D., 1978).[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]

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