A Growing Investment in "Place": Exploring Late Pleistocene Perceptions of "Nature" in the Southern Levant

Summary

The concept of ‘place’ is given structure and meaning by human experience and can be viewed in several forms, including art, monuments and architecture. However, the by-products and material remains associated with the impacts of daily hunter-gatherer place-making, including food and material production as well as processing waste, are also important expressions of human experience and the construction of ‘place’. These material remains provide critical archaeological insight into how people in the past organized their world and perhaps, how they perceived their relationship with ‘nature’. This paper uses microbotanical evidence from dwelling structures, food-ways and broader landscape impacts at Kharaneh IV and Ayn Qasiyya in the Azraq Basin, building upon previously published environmental, mortuary and material assemblage evidence from the broader region, to explore Late Pleistocene (ca. 23 -14.5 ka cal. BP) hunter-gatherer perceptions of ‘place’ and ‘nature’ in the Southern Levant. There is mounting evidence during this period for symbolic behaviors and territoriality. Moreover, increasingly settled lifestyles and the expansion of anthropogenic landscapes reflect a growing investment in ‘place’. Significantly, this suggests social pressures as much as environmental ones, progressively impacted hunter-gatherer life-ways.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)   •
• Exploring Prehistoric Perceptions of "Nature": Can We Go Beyond Economic Human-Environment Interactions?

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 15857