The Road More Traveled: ‘Ain Ghazal and the Peopling of the Black Desert

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.

The late Pleistocene and early Holocene Neolithic connections over the maritime routes from the eastern Mediterranean shores to Cyprus have been fruitfully investigated, and those links clearly involved more than the simple movement of ideas. Another development in the transfer of people and ideas occurred during the 7th millennium, but in the other direction. From ca. 11,500 to 7,000 BC population grew rapidly throughout the southern Levant. In the highlands of western Jordan, "megasites" of eight to 25 hectares and with up to 4,000 inhabitants. By c. 7,000 BC there appears to have been a tipping point in the pressure put on local environmental resources. Some 15,000-20,000 people from at least eight megasites left their settlements, raising the question of "Where did they go?" In the first half of the 7th millennium, there was a population explosion in Jordan’s Black Desert. Large clusters of permanent dwellings spread along prominent local drainages and seasonal pools. Most of this sudden eruption of population is attributed to the collapse of the megasites, among them ‘Ain Ghazal. The redistribution of population set up an exchange network between the hunter-herders of the Black Desert that would last until the end of the Early Bronze Age.

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): 23292