A Week in the Life of the Mousterian Cows Hunter A Mousterian Hunting Location on the Banks of the Paleo-Hula Lake

Summary

Eight excavation seasons (2007-2014) at the Mousterian site of Nahal ‎Mahanyeem Outlet (NMO) on the banks of the Upper Jordan River offer a ‎glimpse into the life ways of MP people during a hunting expedition in the ‎Upper Galilee. This open-air site, OSL dated to ca. 60ky BP, is interpreted as ‎recording a series of short-term hunting events. The NMO horizons, with ‎their small number of lithic artifacts, unique typological composition and ‎evidence for task specific hunting and butchering activity fit within Binford's ‎‎(1980) definition of a "task location." The NMO findings include excellently ‎preserved organic material, including animal bones, both micro and macro-‎fauna and botanic remains. We have now acquired information and data that ‎enable us to suggest models that reconstruct the nature of the site and human ‎behavior reflected in its layers and finds. Issues of cognitive abilities, ‎hunting praxis and subsistence strategies, site function and group mobility all ‎are in need of new, high resolution data that NMO can provide. Moreover, ‎the high resolution stratigraphy and, above all, the excellent preservation of ‎botanic and pollen remains can achieve a comprehensive picture of the Late ‎Pleistocene environment and its impact on human diet, subsistence and ‎survival. ‎

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)   •
• Short-Term Occupations in Paleolithic Archaeology

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 14534