A Probabilistic Approach to Study Diachronic Patterns in Human Behavior: A Case Study from the Paleolithic Sequence at Jebel Faya, UAE

Summary

Jebel Faya is a key Paleolithic site in Arabia. The site provides important data on the history of human occupation of desert environments during the Late Pleistocene. One central question is if the observed diachronic pattern of occupation is largely driven by climatic change, as often assumed, or if other factors such as adaptation processes play significant roles. Based on the assumption that survival in the often unpredictable environments of SE Arabia requires increased behavioral flexibility and risk minimizing strategies this paper examines Jebel Faya’s Paleolithic stone artifact assemblages with regard to economization of lithic raw material and the intensification of social relations. Attributes such as production efficiency and re-use potential represent raw material economization, while technological complexity, occupation intensity and raw material provisioning are used to deduce an indirect estimate for the intensity of social relations. To assess the degree of economization and social relation, the archaeological assemblages are compared to data modeled under optimality assumption using a probabilistic approach based on Naïve Bayes classifier. These results were used to track changes in social relations and raw material economy through the archaeological sequence from Jebel Faya to see if these data provide meaningful information on differences in social learning.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 20776