Stop the Press!!!: Settlement Hierarchies in the Early Pre-Pottery Neolithic? Not…

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Pushing the Envelope, Chasing Stone Age Sailors and Early Agriculture: Papers in Honor of the Career of Alan H. Simmons" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Archaeologists, as with historians, search for patterning, commonalities and order as we seek to explain past human settlement systems. As landscape archaeologists our attempt to reconstruct settlement systems involves connecting the remains of human behavior, consider regional patterns, and then interpreting these remains on the basis of ethnographically derived models. With varied preservation differences within and between settlements, and poor understanding of the linkages between past human action and the resulting contemporary material footprint, as researchers we are challenged in our attempts to understand the broader picture, and run the risk of imposing, rather than revealing, patterning of the past. In this presentation I return to early arguments (Kuijt 1994) for the existence of socio-political developments and differences in Levant Pre-Pottery Neolithic A period (PPNA) period. There is no doubt that the hamlets of the Southern Levant Pre-Pottery Neolithic A period (PPNA) period serve as an evolutionary transitional moment between small forager camps of the Epipaleolithic and large villages of the later stages of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic. What is now clear is that variation in PPNA settlements, counter to Kuijt (1994), was not linked to socio-political developments and manifest within a regional settlement system.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)   •
• Pushing the Envelope, Chasing Stone Age Sailors and Early Agriculture: Papers in Honor of the Career of Alan H. Simmons

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 24611