The Old Stone Age in the Shammakh-to-Ayl Archaeological Survey Area, west-central Jordan

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.

Chipped stone artifacts are nearly ubiquitous throughout the Middle East, and Jordan is no exception. Virtually indestructible, they testify to a human presence that extends back as far as 1.5 million years. They are commonly found on the deflated uplands of the west-central Jordan horst, an up-thrust block where ancient sediments and soils have been stripped away by millennia of aeolian erosion. Difficult to date and to determine site compositional integrity, a quasi-Bayesian methodology is deployed here to survey data from which 108 250 x 250 m squares were selected randomly with an overall sampling fraction of 1.2%. The total area surveyed (c. 590 km2) was divided into three zones corresponding to natural phytogeographic, altitudinal and precipitation boundaries. Ten analytical units were defined and artifacts collected were cross-classified by zone and by weathering, density and retouch indices. The work showed that, on average, there was relatively good correspondence between the three indices and fair-to-good segregation amongst the analytical units by zone. Lower Paleolithic collections were confined to the northern part of Zone 3. Middle Paleolithic collections dominated overall while Epipaleolithic collections were virtually non-existent. Implications for forager mobility and factors related to sampling error are discussed.

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): 23216